the literary beachcomber

Last Voyages

2011-12-18T15:36:00.005-05:00

Robert Louis Stevenson was a sickly man, probably owing to a bronchial malady that confounded nineteenth-century doctors. But in spite of his illness he was a cheerful man, well liked by all who new him. And of course he was a skillful and hard-working writer, who had published Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped before his fortieth birthday,

Stevenson, a native of Scotland, thought his homeland’s cold, damp climate was partly to blame for his poor health, and he dreamed of finding relief in the islands of the South Pacific. And why not? Royalties from his writing were substantial, and the world was waiting. So, in mid-1888, he set sail from San Francisco on a chartered 93-foot sailboat, complete with hired captain and crew. He first destination: the Marquesas Islands, more than 3000 miles southwest. Remember, this was 1888, when there was no radio, radar, sonar, or GPS. The sailboat, named the Casco, eventually made it, and Stevenson spent some time on the islands before sailing farther southwest, to the Tuamotus and Tahiti. Then, after spending months at a Tahitian village, the party headed north to Hawaii.

If “the party” consisted of a wealthy author, captain, and crew, this would be just another story of the sea. But Stevenson took along his wife Fanny, his mother Maggie, and his stepson. (His wife was married before.) His mother was barely 10 years older than his wife, who was 10 years older than RLS. With such a cast of characters, you can well imagine the chemistry on board the Casco.

Eventually, and after chartering two more ships, Stevenson explored the western Pacific, finally settling in Samoa, where he built a fine house – and died, at age 44. So Stevenson’s expedition was in fact a last voyage.

The tale is told in an interesting book called Treasured Islands, written a few years ago by Lowell Holmes, a Professor of Anthropology and an accomplished sailor.

Another “last voyage” is a 1960 movie of the same name, starring Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. What makes this film notable is the fact that the producers, hearing that the famed liner Ile de France was headed for the scrap yard, decided to film the story of a sinking ocean liner aboard a sinking ocean liner. No mock-up, no computer graphics, no model ship in a Hollywood tank. This was the real deal. When the ocean bursts through the liner’s dining-room wall, it looks real because it is real. (Actually, fireboats were hired to shoot water through the walls.) Stack and Malone are a couple of vacationing passengers, George Sanders is the ship’s captain, and Edmond O’Brien is an engine- room chief. The movie is in color, which is only right, and among the shipboard extras you’ll see more than a few Asian faces, as the filming location was in the Sea of Japan.

The cast, by the way, really earned their pay on this shoot. O’Brien and Stack in particular had to slosh their way through sea water repeatedly, and the attractive Dorothy Malone was forced to play her role mostly submerged up to her chin. I doubt that these three ever had a more arduous assignment than The Last Voyage.

The Ile de France had achieved notoriety before, rescuing passengers of the Andrea Doria when she sank off Nantucket in 1956. But her movie debut was uncredited. The French Line understandably insisted that all references to the liner’s real name be deleted. The ship is called the Claridon in The Last Voyage.

The third "last voyage" I happened upon is that of the RMS Republic, which collided with the steamer SS Florida south of Nantucket in 1909. Most people associate the dawn of radio, or at least of its notoriety, with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, but three years earlier, thanks to the use of the new Marconi radio on board the Republic, 1600 lives were saved. Exactly 100 years later, an amateur radio station in Britain (GB5CQD) celebrated the centennial by contacting other amateurs, among them this one. I received the postcard confirming the contact and bearing a beautiful photograph of the Republic in happier times.

Television Discovers the Fifties

2011-12-17T22:46:00.002-05:00

The fifties are hot. They are far enough away to be covered in gauzy nostalgia, and few of us really remember that much about them. I do, and they were great years, maybe the best decade of the twentieth century, for folks in the United States. Yes, the Cold War was on, and houses were being built with bomb shelters, but most of Europe and Asia had been severely ravaged by the war, and it seemed as if nothing could stop the USA. We had a bonafide hero as president. On television, still a novelty, we had Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, and the Bell Telephone Hour. And everybody smoked.

At least that’s how it looks on Mad Men, and that’s how I remember it. I was working on the periphery of advertising in the fifties, and the look of the fifties on Mad Men is exactly as I remember it. The dress, the hairdos, the music, the expressions all ring true. Mad Men is a well crafted show, at its best in the agency-client meetings at Sterling Cooper, at its most hackneyed in the bedrooms of the ubiquitous philanderers. (But hey, they have to have something for the 18-to-35 crowd.)

Mad Men isn’t the only program to mine the fifties. The BBC recently gave us The Hour, which was lavishly praised in the press. The Hour takes place in and around the Beeb’s studios in the 50s, the time of the Suez crisis. Egypt seized the Canal, and Britain and France threatened war, but Eisenhower, wasn’t buying. (I remember it as Ike’s finest hour.) Against this backdrop, the BBC is featuring soft news about London society, infuriating a young journalist whose priorities are more serious. Throw in rumors of a Russian mole at the BBC and an affair between the producer and the anchor of a new current-affairs program (called The Hour), and you have the ingredients of a juicy miniseries. It’s good entertainment, so good that BBC is planning a second installment, but it doesn’t have the period as well nailed as Mad Men does.

In the fifties I graduated from college, went into the Army, got married, bought my first house, had my first child. It all came out well, so if they want to celebrate the period on television, I’m buying.

Give My Regards to Buxton

2011-12-12T20:42:00.004-05:00

Buxton, Maine is a small town on the Saco River, about 20 miles northwest of here. There is nothing especially noteworthy about Buxton, if you don’t count the fact that Tim Robbins goes there after being released from prison in The Shawshank Redemption. And if you don’t count Jennifer Porter.

Jennifer is the principal actress, singer, writer, composer, jazz pianist, and all-round impresario at Buxton’s little theater, a century-old Grange Hall that sits precariously on the east bank of the often-raging Saco. The little theater group that holds forth at the Grange Hall is led by Jennifer and her husband, Dana Packard. Dana’s mother collects the tickets, and the whole enterprise is more or less a family affair. Jennifer and Dana are both the kind of talent that attracts other talent found in the towns around Buxton, and, surprisingly, there is a lot of talent to be found.

If this calls to mind Mickey Rooney saying, “Hey, why can’t us kids put on a show at the old Grange Hall?” that’s not far off. The old Grange Hall is a second cousin to the barns that Mickey and Judy played, with minimal facilities. But the talent is there, and the good burghers of Buxton are smart enough to know talent when they see it, and Porter, Packard and Company always play to a full house. (Surveying the Grange Hall audience is almost as much fun as watching the performers on stage.)

The theater group calls itself The Originals, and they stage two or three plays a year. These are supplemented by concerts by classical pianists, operatic singers, and country musicians. The other night I attended a concert by Jennifer Porter, backed by four instrumentalists. Jennifer has a good voice, but it comes out better than that because she uses it so wisely. She sang, pre-intermission, songs by Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, etc. My kind of music. In the second act she broadened the program by adding country (Patsy Cline). Then it was on to a few operatic arias – the kind that she could handle, even with a cold lurking.

The quartet of instrumentalists were topnotch, especially Matt Langely on sax. Joe Arsenault. Jim Lyden and Dana Packard handled the keyboard, bass, and drums as if they have been playing together forever (which they may have been). Jennifer had her own keyboard, but a good piano would have given her more latitude to show off her skill.

As if the Grange Hall weren’t enough. Jennifer has just wrapped up a movie, a thriller called 40 West. It was written by Jennifer Porter, stars Jennifer Porter (and Wayne Newton), and it was directed by Dana Packard. It was filmed in (where else?) Buxton, Maine.

Let the Games Begin

2011-11-23T19:41:00.001-05:00

The Christmas shopping season is about to begin, and the executives at Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, Best Buy, J.C. Penny, Sears, Macy’s, and hundreds of other big retailers are ready to offer us all bargains that are absolutely irresistible, even in these tough times. You won’t see this, or anything like it, in Moscow or Beijing or anywhere else. It’s the magic of free-market capitalism. Yes, it has its flaws, but no one in all recorded history has ever found a better system for distributing wealth. You offer customers a better deal, you win; you don’t, you lose. Over the next month, we’ll see a lot of deals, and we’ll vote with our wallets.

This year there’s a different spin: The customers are hurting, but the retailers are hurting, too. In a nearby mall (see my blog “Overmalled”) the latest casualty is Lowe’s. That closure follows the shuttering of Old Navy, Chili’s, TGI Friday’s, and Linens and Things. It’s only a matter of time before other stores in that unneeded mall throw in the towel. So there will be signs of desperation in the sale prices. Sony and Panasonic have already cut back TV production under withering competition from Korea, and the pressure will be on to slash TV inventories.

Some say the national sport is baseball; some say it’s football. I say it’s shopping, and my guess is that, recession or no, this will be a barnburner of a Christmas season. The retailers’ bottom lines may not look pretty (free shipping costs money), but their top lines will look fabulous.

Will a robust Christmas season kick-start the economy? It’s possible. Pessimism about the economic outlook is sky-high right now, and a jolt of good news might be just the tonic we need.

They're B-a-a-a-ck!

2011-11-12T10:20:00.002-05:00

After Vietnam, Americans thought that if there were any silver lining in that awful cloud, it was the fact that this country had learned a lesson, that never again would we be snookered into a foreign war where national defense was not an issue. North Vietnam was obviously never going to attack our homeland, so the hawks had to invent a domino theory that they sold to the public and three presidents. Well, we hoped, never again!

But the hawks, now rechristened as the neocons, never gave up, and after 9-11, the ducks were in a row for them. All they had to do was sell the public a story about weapons of mass destruction, and once again we went to war against a far-away country that posed no credible threat to the United States. Over a hundred thousand lives and a trillion dollars later, we are skulking out of Baghdad and Kabul. Some of us were hoping that this time we had truly learned our lesson.

But no. The neocons are at it again. This time they have seized on an ambiguous UN report to make their case for an attack on Iran or at least to green-light an Israeli attack. In this political season, the Republican presidential candidates are all peddling a muscular response to Iran’s nuclear program. All except Ron Paul, who doesn’t see why we should start a new war with any country that doesn’t credibly threaten the U.S., especially after the experience of the past decade. But Ron Paul isn’t going anywhere politically, so the question on this voter’s mind, as I survey the Republican field, is this: Which candidate is most likely to initiate a new war? Who is the least likely?

It isn’t as easy as it sounds. The American psyche doesn’t automatically embrace peaceniks. Few politicians will call the Iraq War a mistake, because to do so would dishonor the brave soldiers who were killed in that remote land. Politicians like Chuck Schumer grandstands by verbally attacking the Chinese. And the anti-Iran hysteria is phrased, not as a call to arms, but as a noble defense of little Israel, surrounded by hostile neighbors. The politicians of both parties know that Americans want their leaders to sound heroic in matters of national security. Of course, it all depends on how one defines national security.

Last night I watched, once again, The Americanization of Emily, a terrific movie scripted by Paddy Chayefsky. As you probably know, the hero (or anti-hero) is a Navy officer in WW2, played by James Garner. Garner’s objective is to skate through D-Day without getting killed, and in the course of the film he delivers a powerful argument for survival, a case for not celebrating heroism, because that only feeds the pro-war propagandists. Garner’s apologia for survivalism might have come right from Ron Paul, if Paul were as skilled as Paddy Chayefsky.

Anyway, the Republican primaries are worth watching as a gauge of the national pro- or anti-war fervor. To measure the temperature, watch the neocons. Watch for op-ed pieces by John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and of course Dick Cheney. Do not sell them short. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan are already fading.

Democracy and Catch-22

2011-11-02T09:46:00.002-04:00

Europe has now captured the attention of the entire financial world. Here, the stock market soars one day, plummets the next, depending on the news from Greece or Spain or Italy. At the moment, the market is in plummet mode, as Italy’s 10-year bond yields have run up to over 6 percent.

The central problem in Europe is that the strong, mostly northern economies are unwilling to bail out the weaker, mostly southern members of the Eurozone unless these countries swallow some hard medicine, much of it involving tax-collection procedures and the size of their public sectors. In Greece, Prime Minister Papendreou said okay at first, then decided to put the question to the voters in a referendum. Most people expect the public to defeat austerity resoundingly, and that is the current crisis du jour.

Now, it is clear that Papendreou is putting austerity to the vote, not because he has an abiding love of democracy, but because he knows he is not strong enough to force his people to swallow the castor oil. Neither is Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister of Italy. So all a weak leader has to do is call for a referendum. Vox populi, right? The problem is, the public will vote, not for what is necessary to save the Eurozone, but for a continuation of what some call a Club Med culture.

That brings us to the Occupy Wall Street protests, in which the self-styled 99 percent want the other 1 percent to pay higher taxes. Well, of course they do, especially when half of them pay no income tax at all. If you put the issue to a vote, 80 percent would vote to raise taxes on 20 percent. President Obama knows this ("it's not politics, it's math") and is campaigning accordingly.

Democracy is a two-edged sword. That’s why the founders of our country designed a constitutional democracy, framed to prevent the 99 percent from ganging up on the 1 percent. But Thomas Jefferson and George Washington did not have to contend with polls, in which CNN and the New York Times and CBS tell us daily that 78 percent of the public believe such and such. With such precision, who needs elections?

The Occupy crowds, like the Greek voters, may not have the specialized knowledge needed to design a solution to a frustratingly complex problem. But they are loud, and in this political season their voices will be amplified by vote-hungry politicians. One hopes that there are enough sensible people out there to keep the world from sliding into a de facto pure democracy, because that way lies Catch-22 and chaos.

The Lady Running IBM

2011-10-28T00:21:00.002-04:00

This week IBM named a new CEO to succeed Samuel Palmisano, who transformed the old “business machines” maker into the world’s preeminent supplier of business solutions. The new chief executive is Virginia Rometty, who sounds like exactly the right person for the job.

You’ll remember that about 10 years ago IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo, a Chinese firm. You may also remember that when Sam Palmisano decided to build a services company, he used an acquisition – PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consultants – as his platform. At the time the acquisition was roundly criticized, but he made it work, thanks to the executive he charged with bringing the consultants on board. That person was Ms Rometty. “She did the deal, and she made it work,” Palmisano said.

Compare this smooth-as-silk transition to the recent fiasco at Hewlett-Packard. At IBM, the new CEO is a 30-year Company veteran who has proved herself and won the respect of the workforce, the Board of Directors, and her predecessor. H-P reached outside the Company for its last three CEOs. Of the tens of thousands of employees, none was deemed CEO material - not once, but three times. What does that say about succession planning at this iconic technology Company?

(Today, it was reported that H-P has decided to scrap its planned divestiture of its computer business. Its recently fired CEO had planned to follow the IBM paradigm, exiting the computer business and concentrating on services and software. What H-P lacked, apparently, was a Virginia Rometty.)

Virginia Rometty’s well deserved promotion raises another point: A good woman as CEO is a wonderful corporate asset. I was reminded of that this morning, when listening to Ellen Kullman, the CEO of DuPont, as she was interviewed on TV. Ms Kullman displayed a comprehensive knowledge of DuPont’s strategy, a razor-sharp ability to discuss the Company’s various businesses, and – most tellingly – the personality to stream all the DuPontiana enthusiastically and without once sounding brittle.

My late wife would have made a great CEO. Instead, she was a great stay-at-home Mom. I have two very bright daughters, either of whom would be a terrific company president. Some women, like some men, should never run companies. But I have a hunch that corporate America is discovering the formidable potential that is there for the taking in its female workforce.

Moneyball

2011-10-23T16:01:00.002-04:00

Along with the trash that Hollywood shovels at us these days, there is the rare gem, the movie written and directed for thinking adults. Such a film is Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, written by Steven Zaillian and Andrew Sorkin, and directed by Bennett Miller. They deserve all the awards they can pick up. So does the supporting cast, especially including Jonah Miller and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Moneyball tells the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics, a small-market baseball team that must find a way to be competitive against the American League goliaths, New York and Boston. General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) decides that the key lies in statistics, as massaged by a young Yale economics graduate (Jonah Hill). And the new system that Beane crafts works. The Athletics have a fine season, along the way breaking the baseball record for consecutive wins. Of course, there is always resistance to change, especially in a tradition-bound game like baseball, and the tension between the old guard and the young rebels gives the film its edge. But the film is notable, not only for what it includes, but for what it does not. There is not a single sex scene. Robin Wright, as Beane’s ex-wife, shows up for a few milliseconds and appears on the posters, but anyone who is drawn to the movie by her presence is going to be disappointed, for her character could as easily have been played by the check-out girl at your Wal-Mart. And there is no violence, save for a few of Billy Beane’s temper tantrums, which don’t count.

What gives Moneyball its flavor is the honest portrayal of the characters in the front office, the back office, and all the offices in between. And “characters” is the word. It gives us a picture of the machinery of baseball that is lacking in any other baseball movie, including my ex-favorite, Bull Durham. Sorry, Crash Davis, but as of now you’re second best.

Moneyball is a feel-good movie. Well, maybe feel-better, since the Oakland team didn’t win the World Series or even the pennant in 2002. But that, in an odd way, is one of film’s strengths. If Billy Beane’s bunch of misfits had won it all, that would have been too Hollywood. Life is imperfect.

Inside baseball: Paul DePodesta, the young nerd played (under a different name) by Jonah Hill, is now VP for Player Development with the Mets. He also looks more like a movie star than a nerd, but the producer must have thought that one handsome guy was quite enough. (The producer was Brad Pitt,) Anyway, Jonah Hill is perfect in the role, providing a nice roly-poly contrast with the trim Pitt. Columbia, which had first dibs on the film, bowed out in protest over script revisions. (The script is one of the film’s major strengths.)

I don’t know how many Oscars Moneyball will win. Maybe none. Maybe, like the 2002 Athletics, it will have to be satisfied with having a good run. That counts in my book.

Stock Talk

2011-10-10T11:12:00.002-04:00

In the years since I began writing this blog, I have refrained from commenting on the stock market. Some friends wonder at this, since I spent a quarter century as an intermediary between a fair-sized company and Wall Street, watching market behavior on a minute-by-minute basis. I have been silent on the subject for one reason: The more you know about the market, the less you know.

Still, certain principles must be respected, and they are these:

1. Day trading is idiocy. If you make money doing it, you have been lucky, not smart. The chances are you’ll eventually lose your shirt.

2. The same applies to short sales. I didn’t always feel that way, and I used to “pair trade” – balancing a long position with a short in the same industry. But now I realize that rule 2 is a corollary of rule 1.

3. If you believe that the dollar is overvalued because of investor nervousness (as I do), owning stock in a good company is wiser than owning dollars. Take Apple as a proxy for “good company,” an unarguable proposition. There are about a billion shares in Apple. So if you buy one share, at about $380, you own one billionth of the Company. No matter what happens to the dollar or to the stock market, your share will always be one billionth of the Company. (Dilution is a non-factor, since Apple has tons of cash.) Which would you rather own, a slice of Apple (or any other profitable, growing company) or dollars, euros, or bars of gold, given almost any political or economic scenario? (Full disclosure: I own Apple.)

4. Dividends matter. Why would any sane person accept 0.25 percent on a T bill or 0.75 percent on a bank CD when one can get 4 or 5 percent from a solid utility stock? Bonus: Dividend-paying stocks tend to behave better than growth stocks at times when the market craters.

5. Irrespective of the above, it makes sense to limit one’s exposure to equities. The older you are, the lower this limit will be. One expert suggests subtracting your age from 90, and setting that as your maximum exposure to the stock market, but I think the right number is whatever lets you sleep at night.

6. Never, ever buy stocks on margin.

7. Never buy a stock on a takeover rumor. Whoever is spreading the rumor owns the stock and is “talking his book.” The same warning applies to anything you hear from a CNBC talking head. I watch the channel, but often with the audio muted.

8. Buy what you know. This is the old Peter Lynch rule, and it makes sense. If you food-shop, be aware of what’s moving off the shelves. If you buy clothes, know what’s hot and what’s not. If you are a techie, buy technology. And don’t buy stocks in a business you know nothing about.

9. “Occupy Wall Street” makes a nice sign or headline, but it shouldn’t affect your investment decisions. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it’s impossible to rationalize.

There. I put my oar in the water, and now I will pull it out again and return to matters I know more about, like books, movies, music, and plays.

The Magic of Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T21:46:00.004-04:00

Poll question: Which of the following luminaries has made the biggest positive change in the quality of your life?

George W. Bush
Barack Obama
Warren Buffett
Steve Zuckerberg
Nancy Pelosi
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs
Timothy Geithner

Most people would name Steve Jobs. That’s not the real surprise, though. The shocker is that no one else comes close. Do we have only one game-changer? I guess we do.

I am typing this on a MacBook Pro. My office computer is a Mac Mini. My music is stored in an iPod. It is only a matter of time before I buy an iPad and an iPhone. I, like hundreds of millions of others, live in a universe that was created by Steve Jobs. They are calling him a visionary, but that grossly understates his achievement. Any dreamer with a good imagination can have a vision; the hard part is translating a vision to reality, and Steve Jobs did that better than anyone in at least a century.

The talking heads are dissecting the magic of Steve Jobs. Some say it was his quest for perfection, some say it was his ability to sense the public’s taste, some say it was his passionate attention to detail. I have a different read. I never met Jobs, but Apple’s success speaks volumes about its CEO. It says that he had an uncanny ability to identify, attract, and inspire talent. You can’t build a Company like Apple without recruiting and motivating good people, people like Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive and dozens of others behind the headlines. Steve Jobs had a nose for talent, and he could tell the real McCoy from the many pretenders that inhabit Silicon Valley. And that’s how Apple became the most exciting technology company of the digital era.

There is a message here for our politicians. No politician, not even the President, has the knowledge or the skill to improve our lives except at the margin. The best thing a politician can do is make sure the entrepreneurs, the future Steve Jobses, have the freedom to follow their instincts.

A little encouragement wouldn’t hurt, either.

Reflections on the Baseball Playoffs

2011-10-01T23:57:00.001-04:00

I’ve been a baseball fan ever since the days when Boston had two major league teams, the Braves and the Red Sox. As a matter of fact, I hustled peanuts and Cokes and ushered at both Fenway Park and Braves Field, and I still have an autograph book with the signatures of Boo Ferris and Tex Hughson and Whitey Wietelman. You never heard of them? Ah, well.

I was watching TV the Night of the Great Comebacks. By now everybody knows that the Tampa Bay Rays were down to the Yankees 7-0 with only six outs separating them from extinction, and, the Red Sox had the champagne ready, with closer Papelbon sitting on a 3-2 lead over Baltimore with two outs in the ninth inning.

You know what happened next, but you may not know that someone has calculated the odds of the Rays and the Orioles pulling both games out at 1 in 278 million. In the only game where “it ain’t over till it’s over,” the only game without a clock to end the contest, a miracle happened – twice, less than an hour apart.

The broadcasters and the sportswriters had a field day. But no one, not even the best of them, could capture the drama of last Wednesday night. It was one of those moments that you can appreciate only from a distance. They’ll still be talking about that night 20, 30 years from now.

So now it’s on with the playoffs, which seem destined to end just before the Super Bowl. There are eight teams still alive, which seems six too many to me. Finishing atop the league standings after 162 games ought to qualify a team for the World Series. But of course baseball is not the only offender here. All sports extend their playoffs, some to the point where it is possible for a team with a losing record to qualify for the post-season.

But we watch the games, so we can’t complain too much. And there is, occasionally, a brilliant double play or an exciting suicide squeeze or a sensational catch in the outfield. Baseball played by the best professionals is a beautiful sport to behold.

The extras are another matter. Heading the list of my pet peeves are the renditions of the national anthem. “Oh say, can you see,” the singer begins, splitting the word “see” into three notes. “See” is not a three-syllable word. God Bless America is more of the same, with the “love” in “land that I love” embellished beyond recognition. Three syllables seems to be standard, but I have heard four.

At one recent sporting event, management decided to replace the live singer with the Kate Smith recording of God Bless America. I wanted to stand up and cheer.

Let us not leave the subject of baseball without a moment’s silence in honor of the just-deposed Red Sox manager, Terry Francona. Life is unfair. Francona wasn’t the one who decided to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for the non-performers, but he will take the blame, because that’s the way the system works.

Now Red Sox Nation is all abuzz with speculation about the new manager. The possibilties include all unemployed managers, but I have my own candidate. He has never been a Big League manager, but I think he has the perfect temperament for the job, and he has obvious public relations skills. My choice for Manager of the Red Sox: Brad Pitt.

Hewlett-Packard

2011-09-23T18:36:00.005-04:00

I’ve been reading the stories about the continuing saga at Hewlett-Packard with a great deal of sadness. That this once-proud Company has been reduced to a joke is nothing to cheer about, even if you’re a competitor, because the moral is that if it can happen to H-P, it can happen to anyone.

Back in the 50s, I worked for General Radio, once the world leader in electronic test and measurement and then engaged in a vigorous competition with a fast-moving upstart in Palo Alto. In a broader sense, the competition was between Route 128 and Silicon Valley, between MIT and Stanford, between private offices and cubicles. General Radio had a vast catalog of instruments, much larger than its size could justify, and HP would pick off one product line after another, first frequency meters, then impedance bridges, then microwave instruments. And they were usually very successful.

“Hewlett-Packard has just passed us in sales," I remember saying to one of our officers in the 50s.

“They’ll pass us again on the way down,” he answered.

But of course they never did, and eventually they became a test and measurement juggernaut. But Dave Packard, in reflecting on his career, gave full credit to General Radio, founded in 1915, for having blazed the trail. I am sure that Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett had a twinge of regret when GR foundered, just as I do today as I read about the debacle at Hewlett-Packard.

What is the lesson to be learned from H-P’s collapse? It is this: Being bigger is not the same as being better. The technology graveyard is filled with companies whose undoing was wrong-headed acquisitions. Owning the test and measurement market was not enough for H-P, so the Company jettisoned its heritage and became, via acquisition, a computer company, a leader in a business it has now decided to exit.

It is hard to resist the siren song of acquisitions. If you are the CEO of a large company, you are constantly serenaded by the M&A specialists from Wall Street, singing the anthem of synergism. By eliminating redundancy you will increase profits. Your company will move up in the Fortune 500 list. We are all taught that size equals power, and the larger your company is, the more powerful it is.

The old Hewlett-Packard and the old General Radio were all for growth, but it had to be organic, not the result of buying other companies. Both companies eventually succumbed to the siren song, only to find out it was a dirge.

__________________________

For an account of the early days of the test-equipment industry, read The General Radio Story, available from lulu.com.

Seven Days in ?

2011-09-09T20:59:00.003-04:00

Do you remember the movie Seven Days in May? If you saw it, either on its release in 1964 or on TV since, you probably have not forgotten the story. Four-star General James Matoon Scott (Burt Lancaster) attempts a coup d’etat, believing that the President (Frederic March) has been mortally wounded by his advocacy of a treaty with the Soviets. It is a good, suspenseful film, but most of us thought the plot was just this side of science fiction.

Well, maybe not. JFK believed that the plot described in Seven Days in May was plausible, and he encouraged Hollywood to produce the film. (The Pentagon is reported to have been opposed.)

I have long thought that, especially in the YouTube/Facebook era, presidents are weaker than the press makes them out to be. Let us suppose that Barack Obama decided to pull every last troop out of Afghanistan. And, for good measure, out of Iraq. Clean break, saving billions if not trillions of dollars and untold lives.

The scene: The Oval Office. General Blackstone enters, salutes his Commander-in-Chief. The President motions for him to be seated, but the General remains standing.

Blackstone: I understand you have decided to cut and run from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama: That’s correct, General.

Blackstone: It’s my duty to advise you that that would be a grave error.

Obama: I’ve discussed it with my team, and my mind is made up, General. As the head of our armed forces in that area, you would be expected to support my decision.

Blackstone. I will not, Mr. President. And I must remind you that, if it comes to a confrontation, the American people will not support you. Your poll numbers are terrible, while I have the overwhelming support of the United States Congress and, I believe, of the American public.

Now, I hasten to say that, as far as I know, all our top generals are staunch defenders of the constitution and would have none of such dialogue. But self-styled patriots are legion in Congress and the Pentagon. They were in power before 2008, and they are poised for a comeback. And they know from experience that what matters is not who sits in the Oval Office, but who has his ear. They have found out that most presidents are not like Frederic March, who in the final climactic scene faced down Burt Lancaster.

It doesn’t have to come down to a shoot-out, as it did in Seven Days in May. The pressure is exerted more subtly: Do you know, Mr. President, that if you close Guantanamo, three retired Generals will condemn your action on Fox News tomorrow? Or: Mr. President, the CIA has information that suggests that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are not secure. Talks with the Pakistani government have been unproductive, and they recommend a quick invasion. The Joint Chiefs concur, and the CIA says it’s a slam dunk. What’s your decision, Mr. President?

It’s a setup. The whole conversation will eventually be revealed in a Bob Woodward book or in Wikileaks, and the safest course for the President is to go with the flow.

Once in a great while, the President decides to hang tough, as Truman did in his historic confrontation with General MacArthur in 1951. MacArthur was ousted by Truman, and MacArthur chose not to raise the stakes, although he was a bonafide hero and adored by the public. That was then. Now, with access to an ocean of digital media and cable TV, the General might have weighed other options.

The Hour

2011-09-01T22:49:00.003-04:00

I remember the so-called Suez Crisis as Dwight Eisenhower’s finest hour. I am sure that England, France, and especially Israel didn’t see it that way, but that’s how I saw it, as world affairs began to intrude on my young consciousness. The parallels to the Libya situation are obvious. Qadaffi is not Nasser, but in 1956 the flow of oil through the Suez Canal was to many Europeans a causus belli and today, for all the talk about human rights, Libyan oil is more than a trivial consideration. In the Suez affair, England and France expected the U.S. to join their anti-Egyptian outrage, but Ike was not buying.

What brings this to mind is the BBC’s six-part drama called "The Hour," now running on BBC-America. If you can tolerate the channel’s commercial breaks (hard to do), this is a good miniseries, revolving around Freddy Lyons, a young BBC firebrand who wants the Beeb to spend less time on celebrity gossip and more on the storm brewing in Egypt. The drama’s title is also the name of a new current affairs program, with an anchorman who has looks and connections but not much substance (sort of like the William Hurt character in Broadcast News).

Freddy Lyons is played convincingly by Ben Whishaw, and the equally credible anchor is Dominic West. The obligatory romantic triangle is rounded out by Romola Garai, as the producer of The Hour

I have seen only three of the six episodes, so my comments are subject to revision, but here they are: There is real irony here: In the play, Freddy Lyons is understandably frustrated by the BBC’s preference for the trivial over the consequential. Check. Then why on earth does The Hour spend so much time on the weakest story line, the aforementioned triangle, and so little on the main thread? Probably because the writers were afraid that the audience would not grasp the gravity of the Suez crisis. So they turned instead to the old “will she or won’t she?” formula.

Still, there’s more than enough grist to keep one interested, and the acting is topnotch, as it usually is in BBC productions. You can pick it up Wednesday nights at 10 on BBC-America, but at this point you will be hopelessly confused if you try to catch up, and you would be better off waiting for the DVD.

Besides, the DVD will spare you all those terrible commercials.

Wanted: Leadership by Example

2011-08-25T22:10:00.002-04:00

Our political leaders keep encouraging young people to study math and science, as indeed they should, because the national prosperity depends largely on the ability of its engineers and scientists to convert ideas into the products that keep the economic engine humming.

The business news of the week was the decision of Steve Jobs to relinquish the presidency of Apple, the company he founded. No one has done more to keep the engine humming than Steve Jobs. Some analysts have suggested that his name will in time be enshrined with those of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and they are right. Even if you are not a Macophile like me, you must be in awe of his ability to conjure up one game-changing product after another.

But the cheerleading of the politicians rings hollow because they exhort by words, not by example. “Do as I say, not as I do,” is the message from the President, who might with more conviction have urged students to become community organizers. For that matter, if students followed the career paths of most of our presidents, they would all be entering law school.

That’s not fair, you may say; we need engineers but we also need politicians, and the two pursuits require different skill sets. Not necessarily. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, majored in physics and has a doctorate in quantum chemistry. Wen Jiabao, Prime Minister of China, is a geologist who studied rare earths in graduate school. Germany and China are the most vibrant economies on their respective continents, while we have mostly lawyers running our government. (George W. Bush held an MBA, which is even worse.)

Maybe Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, or Andy Grove would have made a lousy president. Maybe none of them would even want the job. But just once, I would like to hear the President say to the nation’s young people, “I would like to see more of you studying science and engineering, just as I did.”

A Visit to Leningrad

2011-08-19T19:56:00.004-04:00

Twenty years ago today a failed coup d’etat marked the collapse of the Soviet Union. On that very day – my wife’s birthday, as it turned out – Jill and I boarded a plane at Logan, bound for Heathrow, thence to board a cruise ship for Leningrad. Little did we dream when we left that we would be witnesses to history.

When we embarked our ship at Tilbury, a note was waiting for us. Here is what it said:

Dear Passenger,

Welcome aboard the Royal Princess.

I wanted to take this opportunity to assure you that the Company is closely monitoring the political situation in Russia with the U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office. It appears likely that we will be required to revise our itinerary unless the situation rapidly improves. For your information, our revised itinerary substitutes Oslo for Leningrad.

Captain D.H. Brown

It was a grave disappointment to everyone on board. Oslo would be nice, but it wasn’t Leningrad. The next day, as we rounded the Jutland peninsula, we kept watching TV news bulletins, hoping for a miracle.

And it happened. On August 24, we found the following note in our cabin:

Dear Passenger

I am pleased to inform you that the situation in the Soviet Union has stabilized to the point where the Royal Princess can proceed with her call at Leningrad.

As of August 23, 1991, both the U.S. State Department and the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued new travel advisories, which indicate that the situation in the Soviet Union is rapidly returning to normal. If you do choose to go ashore, please exercise caution and avoid any areas of crowds or unrest.

Captain David H. Brown

On Sunday morning, August 25, we walked down the gangway and into Leningrad. We would be in the city for two days, giving us time for four tours. Dour-faced Russian policemen took our passports and gave us temporary papers, and then we boarded a tour bus.

“Welcome to Russia,” said the pert Intourist guide. “We are given these booklets, which contain the approved answers to your questions. I am going to throw it away and give you my own answers."

And she did. At the end of the afternoon tour, as we entered the naval base where our ship was docked, the bus stopped at the gate, a man climbed aboard, spoke briefly with the guide, and exited.

“That was KGB,” the guide said. “He says that no one should take pictures in the docking area. But I say you can take all the pictures you want.”

This feeling of giddiness (“Look at us, we’re free!!”) was palpable throughout our visit, which included tours of the Summer Palace, the Winter Palace (the Hermitage), a ride on the subway, and a visit to a department store. We chatted with some young boys who were peddling leather belts. (See my blog entitled Sasha.)

A fitting finale to the drama occurred as we sailed out of the channel to the Baltic at sunset. We passed the huge Soviet Naval base at Kronstadt, and Royal Princess tooted a salute because, our Captain explained, the Kronstadt Commander was invited to join the attempted coup a week ago and said "Nyet." Good call.

Two weeks after we left Leningrad, the City was renamed St. Petersburg.

Shared Sacrifice (except Congress)

2011-07-25T22:01:00.002-04:00

”We should be doing, not what’s right for the party or for the next election, but what’s right for the American people.” So says President Obama. So say Congressmen of both parties today, stalwarts by the names of Schumer and Boehner and McConnell and Reid.

What a flock of phonies! They are all posturing for the cameras, hoping that a few voters will believe they are sincerely fretting about our national debt. The debt, as if you didn’t know, stands at more than 14 trillion dollars. How big is 14 trillion? If you counted one dollar every second, you would still be counting when the only living things on earth were fish. But 14 trillion isn’t enough money, so they are looking for ways of authorizing a higher limit.

Pundits laugh at the bailout of Greece, because everyone knows that Greece doesn’t have a chance of repaying the new loans. Does anyone think the U.S. will ever be able to pay back 14 or 15 trillion dollars? Only when a Big Mac costs $1000.

Speaking of Congress, do you think we really need 435 representatives and 100 senators? That’s 535 highly paid public servants, each with a staff (which does all the heavy lifting), travel allowance, expense account, medical insurance, pension, and God knows what else. One wouldn’t mind if these were the cream of the crop, men and women of obvious intelligence and talent, the kind of people who could run companies in the private sector. But for most of them, politics is their only hope of making a living. If the size of the House of Representatives were cut from 435 members to, say, 200, would we notice? I don’t think so.

It is fashionable for politicians to talk of “shared sacrifice” these days. The poster boys for sacrifice-sharing are hedge-fund managers and people who fly on private jets. But have you heard one syllable about Congressional sacrifice? It would only be a token, of course, but what a token! A member of Congress is entitled to a full pension at age 62 if he or she has five years (!) of service. Who’ll be the first to file a bill dealing with Congressional Pork? Barney Frank? Chuck Schumer?

(Congressman Ron Paul of Texas has always refused to participate in the Congressional pension system, calling it “immoral.”)

The Separate States of Europe

2011-07-01T22:13:00.002-04:00

What have we learned from the recent collapse of Greece’s economy? That the economic integration of Europe was doomed from the beginning. To think otherwise is to ignore centuries of history, centuries of turmoil, almost always because of economic frictions among countries of widely divergent national tendencies. It doesn’t help that the 700-plus people who live in Europe speak about two dozen different languages.

Greece, in area and population, is roughly the size of Illinois. Let’s suppose that Illinois people spoke their own language, a language that the folks in Indiana and Wisconsin and Michigan couldn’t understand. Would you say that the Illinois economy might have a problem?

Let us thank God for the British, who erased the Dutch language from New Amsterdam and the French from Louisiana and the Spanish from California. (I know, I know, they’re coming back.) Today, Illinois and the other 49 states share a common language. We take that for granted, but it’s a huge advantage.

Then there’s the matter of culture. Yes, there are cultural differences between Maine and Texas and California, but they are nothing compared with the cultural divides across Europe. Once Jill and I were on a tour bus in Portugal, and we were discussing an incident that morning, when someone robbed some fellow tour passengers on a trolley in Lisbon.

“It happens often in Southern Europe,” our tour guide said, “but hardly ever in Northern Europe.”

He was right. We had never encountered such incidents in Oslo, or Helsinki, or Stockholm or Copenhagen. I thought of that the other day when I watched the mobs of protesters laying waste to downtown Athens, while the police ducked under the flying bottles and backed away from the advancing hooligans. Could that scene have been replicated in Oslo?

Greece is bankrupt because, unlike Illinois, it doesn’t have an industrial base. It exports olives and olive oil. It has a shipping base. It attracts tourists, or used to until the tourists saw law and order, Athens-style, on CNN.

The Euro-zone countries, seeing no alternative, have loaned Greece enough money to cover their current expenses – money that Greece will never be able to repay. And so it goes. The dominoes are lined up, and investors are looking anxiously at Spain.

Europe is a continent, nothing more. Poles consider themselves Poles, and Italians consider themselves Italians. Europe has no national anthem, no ruling parliament or monarch. It has a wobbly currency, but the British must be breathing a sigh of relief that they voted to keep the pound and not embrace the euro.

With all our economic woes, the U.S. looks very healthy compared with Europe.

Two Cheers

2011-06-23T20:45:00.002-04:00

In the field of investor relations (mine for a number of years), the key to success can be summed up in two words: manage expectations. Of course, everybody in the game – securities analysts, company executives, financial journalists – knows this, so a calibration goes on, and then a counter-calibration, and so on. Among today’s high-tech companies, it seems to me that Apple is the master. Everyone knows by now that Apple sets expectations low, so they inflate their estimates, yet Apple manages to beat most of the optimistic estimates. That takes real talent.

President Obama has caught on to the trick. So before last night’s speech on the Afghanistan troop draw-down, he allowed (some might say encouraged) the pundits to set expectations low – 5000 troops now, another 5000 next year, a rate his military chiefs were promoting.

Surprise! President Obama exceeded expectations by announcing a draw-down of 10,000 this year, 25,000 next. He thus cheered the rising tide of war-weary voters by appearing to side with them, even though by the end of 2012 there will be 68,000 American troops on the ground in Afghanistan, compared with 32,000 when he took office, after a campaign in which he trounced the ghost of George Bush by promising disengagement from foreign adventures.

Meanwhile, some members of Congress are demanding that President Obama honor the War Powers Act by asking Congress to authorize our actions in or over Libya. No, said President Obama and his lawyers; the War Powers Act doesn’t apply because the United States isn’t involved in hostilities (try telling that to the bombing victims in Tripoli), and the President as Commander-in-Chief has the power to act without Congressional permission. Does that sound faintly like “I’m the Decider”?

The reactions today were mostly favorable (save for the usual hawks), proving once again that managing expectations is the key to success, whether in investor relations or in politics. The most impressive commentary came from Robert Gates, in a PBS interview. Gates supported the President’s call, but he did it so thoughtfully, so intelligently, that I found myself again in awe of this man who has served as Defense Secretary under both Presidents Bush and Obama, in one of the trickiest situations in our military’s history. His soft-spoken manner, his knowledge of his subjects, his deft handling of the most challenging questions made me wonder why somebody hasn’t mentioned his name as a possible presidential candidate. We could do a lot worse – and probably will.

The War That Never Ends

2011-06-09T11:26:00.004-04:00

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Jill and I used to ask ourselves why anyone would want the job, given the mess the country was in. Turns out we were right; the job is not one you would wish on your worst enemy. The economy is in shambles, and our relations overseas deteriorate with every passing day (or with every drone attack).

What’s a right-minded President to do? If he were strong enough, he might say, “enough, already,” and pull our military out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen (yes, we’re in Yemen). His liberal base would cheer, but the hawks would howl. General Petraeus, whose approval ratings are sky-high, would appear on the Sunday talk shows to lament our lack of will. So it will not happen. Barack Obama is not strong enough, or confident enough, to do what he knows is right.

Here’s the math: We are spending $10 billion a month in Afghanistan. That’s about $230,000 a minute. It’s money we don’t have, money we have to borrow. But to do that, we have to raise the debt limit, already $14 trillion. How big a number is 14 trillion? There are about 31.5 million seconds in a year, so 14 trillion seconds ago puts you back at the dawn of time (31,746 BC).

Yet those who favor a “robust” foreign policy will not quit. Senators Chambliss and McCain, among others, are pushing back against any attempt to disengage. (Can you imagine what our foreign policy would be like under a President McCain?) And their point of view resonates with many, for fighting is popular among a certain segment of the population, just as brawling is the attraction for many who attend professional hockey games.

More than half a century after World War II and the Korean War, we still have thousands of troops in Germany, Japan, and Korea. Our military footprint is on every continent, and it is expanding. And it is expanding under a President who campaigned and was elected as the anti-Bush. Meanwhile, China, on track to become the world’s largest economy, keeps its troops at home. What’s wrong with this picture?

But there is hope. Republican Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina has broken with his party in cosponsoring an amendment to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan – an amendment that drew the support of 26 Republicans, including three freshmen elected with Tea Party Support. Then there is Ron Paul, the presidential
wannabe who sensibly favors trimming our overseas military commitments.

After 10 years in Afghanistan, it is time to cut our losses and withdraw. Failure to do so is lunacy.

In the musical Miss Saigon, the Engineer (Jonathan Pryce in the original) sings about the seeds of the Vietnam War:

“Then it all changed with Dien Bien Phu. The Frogs went home. Who came? Guess Who?”

If there is ever a Miss Kabul, the lyrics might go like this:

“Then it all changed with Helmond Province. The Russians went home. Who came? Guess who?”

Where Have All the Ballads Gone?

2011-06-06T11:55:00.002-04:00

The other day, while driving, I kept punching the SEEK button on my radio, looking for a station that played pop ballads. No luck. Just yelling, against a heavy-metal beat, plus talk, plus one classical music station.
Where have all the ballads gone? Where is Jerry Vale, now that we need him?

Musical tastes have changed dramatically, and not for the better, say I. The long, flowing melody lines, the cleverly drawn lyrics are out of style. They say that such things move in cycles, that ballads will come back into favor. Until that day, I will rely on my CD collection and on the iPod jack in my Hyundai to keep me entertained.

What kind of music am I talking about? Here is a representative list of some of the great ballads of yore.

All the Things You Are (Kern, Hammerstein)

A treasure, for its harmony and its lyrics. Every quality singer seems to have “covered” it.

If I Loved You (Rodgers, Hammerstein)

Should be heard as part of the famous bench scene from Carousel.

I Got Lost in His Arms (Berlin)

Berlin’s magic: Keep it simple. Almost every word in this gem is one-syllable long.

Moonlight Becomes You (Van Heusen, Burke)

A beautiful, underrated ballad, by two old pros. The “although” near the end is sheer artistry.

Dear Friend (Bock, Harnick)

From She Loves Me, this one is justly celebrated as lyric-writing of the finest order. Get this:

Couples go past me
I see how they look
So discretely sympathethic when they see
The rose and the book.
I make believe nothing is wrong
How long can I pretend?
Please make it right
Don’t break my heart
Don’t let it end
Dear friend.

And I Was Beautiful (Herman)

Not in quantity, certainly, but in style composer/lyricist Jerry Herman most approaches Berlin. This one, from Dear World, was well sung by Angela Lansbury. (“….and then he walked away, and took my smile with him.”)

This Heart of Mine (Warren, Freed)

Harry Warren it is said, is the most successful composer no one has ever heard of. He wrote a zillion singable tunes that were often undercut by pedestrian lyrics by Al Dubin and Mack Gordon. (Check the weak last line of “The More I See You.”) But this one, given an over-the-top treatment in the film The Ziegfeld Follies, is one of Warren’s best.

There are so many others, hundreds of them, now pushed off the airwaves by rock and rap. If you’re over 50, you probably have your own list of favorites. I know we’re not part of the demographic advertisers are looking for, but we do spend money. And fellows, we’re not listening to your radio stations these days.

When Rapture is Not Enough

2011-05-26T17:03:00.002-04:00

Front-page headline in today’s Financial Times: “Obama’s Speech in Westminster Affirms the Special Relationship, but Fails to Raise the Roof.”

Now, as we all know, Barack Obama is the very best orator we Americans have. If he can’t raise the roof, who can?

Benjamin Netanyahu can. Here’s yesterday’s New York Times, reporting on the Israeli Prime Minister’s speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress: “Mr. Netanyahu received so many standing ovations that at times it seemed that the lawmakers were listening to his speech standing up.” It was, according to the Financial Times, “a rapturously received address.”

Talk about raising the roof! Mr. Netanyahu obviously is even a better speechifier that Mr. Obama, whose State of the Union address was received politely, at times even enthusiastically, but the adverb “rapturously” does not spring to mind.

How does Israel’s Prime Minister elicit the kind of rapture that no American politician, no business leader, no religious leader, not even the “American Idol” winner, can hope for? In fact, it is a good bet that Mr. Netanyahu himself would not encounter such an adoring audience in Israel. But Washington and Mr. Netanyahu were made for each other. The Times lets us in on his secret: “The lawmakers appeared eager to demonstrate their support for Israel as part of an effort to receive backing from one of the country’s most powerful constituencies, American Jews.”

So politicians will trade rapture for dollars; there is nothing new about that. We will survive the sight of members of Congress pandering to the Israeli lobby, or to any lobby that has enough power and money.

The real loser in all this is Israel. The take-away from this week’s events is that the U.S. has such a special relationship with Israel (much deeper that our special relationship with Britain, for instance) that we can no longer act as a credibly honest broker between Israel and Palestine. The peace talks, insofar as America is concerned, are dead. That much must be obvious to the entire Arab world, as it was to George Mitchell, who threw in the towel recently. Israel’s success in Washington comes at a price, and the price is increasing isolation on the world stage. A rapturous U.S. Congress is not enough.

The Americanization of Emily

2011-05-22T17:16:00.005-04:00

Julie Andrews says that of all the movies she’s made, The Americanization of Emily is her favorite. So says James Garner, her co-star. So says Arthur Hiller, who directed. Why has this movie, released in 1964, captivated so many people who know so much about movies?

There are many reasons, but at the top of the list must be the literary, highly pungent script of Paddy Chayefsky. Producer Martin Ransohoff spotted the William Bradford Huie novel in 1959. The book tells of a romance between an Admiral’s aide (the dust cover says it’s “the further adventures of Lieutenant-Commander James Monroe Madison of The Revolt of Mamie Stover”) and a British young woman in WW2 London, and Ransohoff optioned it, thinking it might make a pleasant enough romantic comedy. In time, William Holden was penciled in as the hero, and James Garner was slated to play Bus, Madison’s sidekick. Ransohoff’s choice to direct was William Wyler.

Then Wyler and Holden pulled out, Arthur Hiller was named director, Garner was given the lead, and, most importantly, Paddy Chayefsky was asked to write the screenplay. And what a screenplay he created! The book is a fairly routine love story, with the climactic D-Day invasion the only memorable action. Commander Madison is a writer whose skills as a procurer (of booze and broads, mostly) for Navy brass have landed him in the lap of luxury in London. Emily Barham is a volunteer driver attached to Madison’s unit. Madison and Barham fall in love and, after he makes a movie of the D-Day landing, live happily ever after. End of story.

Enter Paddy Chayefsky. He is not interested in telling a typical Doris Day/Rock Hudson love story. In his hands, Commander (now Charles) Madison is a practicing coward, whose overriding ambition is not to get killed in the war, and whose service as a valued “dog-robber” seems to guarantee survival. Emily Barham, who has lost a father, a husband, and a brother to war, is a Yank-hating moralist, who buys into the nobility of a hero’s death.

This is all Chayefsky. In the book, Madison is as patriotic as the next man, and when the Admiral orders him to film the invasion, he gets a camera crew and obediently joins the invasion fleet.

In the movie, Chayefsky writes a sparkling scene in which Madison and Emily’s mother spar over the reality of war and the folly of glamorizing it. In that one scene, Madison expresses his entire philosophy of life, sacrifice, and honor, and he makes his entire pursuit of survival sound sensible and almost noble. It is an absolutely indispensable scene – and yet, in the book, Ms. Barham never appears, and there is not an iota of dialogue about these subjects.

One shouldn’t be too hard on the book’s author. He was simply writing a different story, a much simpler story. Yet if the screenplay followed the book’s outline, the movie would have been forgotten long ago.

Arthur Hiller was a rookie Hollywood director in 1963, when he began shooting Emily. He would later direct some good movies, like The In-Laws, The Hospital, and Plaza Suite, but nothing, in his mind, to compare with Emily. Julie Andrews, of course, is everybody’s sweetheart no matter what she does, but she, too, singles out this movie as her best. And James Garner is an absolutely perfect Charlie Madison. The rest of the cast is solid: Joyce Grenfell as the dotty mother, Melvyn Douglas as the Admiral, and James Coburn as Bus. There is practically no music in the film other than the song Emily, which was ineligible for an Oscar because the lyrics were never sung.

Hard as it is to believe, The Americanization of Emily was made almost a half century ago. But it is still immensely enjoyable, and Paddy Chayefsky’s message still makes sense today.

__________________________
Three collections of these blogs are available at lulu.com. They are, in chronological order, Searching for Joan Leslie, Lines from the Beachcomber, and Tides in the Affairs of Men.

Dancing on Graves

2011-05-02T21:17:00.001-04:00

There was widespread jubilation in the U.S. at news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. One can certainly understand satisfaction, especially on the part of relatives of those killed in the 9-11 attack. But jubilation? One would have hoped that Americans would temper their celebration with the realization that a martyr has been created and vengeance is in the air. Satisfaction, certainly. Dancing on the graves? I don’t think so.

The day before, it was announced that NATO air strikes on Tripoli had killed Col. Qadaffi’s youngest son. While NATO people denied that “protecting civilians” has expanded to “regime change,” Senator McCain, said that if Col Qadaffi were to be killed, “that would be fine.”

The taste of blood is spreading, and it is no time to be a leader of a country in NATO’s gunsights. I am reading The Tourist, a novel about a CIA unit (the Tourists) that exists to eliminate people deemed worthy of elimination. The book was written by Olen Steinhauer, who lives in Budapest (ex-Virginia) and obviously knows the intelligence world inside out. As described by Steinhauer, it is a world totally devoid of morality, sentiment, or what we think of as human instincts. It is easy to imagine a tourist making his way through the streets of Tripoli or Islamabad or Damascus or Tangier, a Glock and a fake passport in his pocket, no expression on his face, intent on offing a head of government or a minister or just someone who knows too much. The book is chilling in light of recent events, as you will probably see on the big screen. (George Clooney has optioned the book.)

I suppose someone has to do the dirty work, and you don’t want to see how sausages are made, but neither do you want to take the inspiring principles that embellish President Obama’s rhetoric too literally, because Washington is one big sausage factory.

The Last Station

2011-04-17T18:32:00.002-04:00

The Last Station is a little-known movie about the last year or so of Tolstoy’s life, starring Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as his wife Sonya. It is also a clinic in the acting art by two of the finest professionals in the field.

The conflict that animates the drama is the question of who will own the rights to Tolstoy’s work when he dies. Tolstoy and his legions of followers do not believe in private property. As they see it, the public at large is the rightful inheritor of his creative output. His wife Sonya just as strongly believes that Tolstoy’s primary obligation is to provide for the welfare of his family. A stand-off? No, because of the powerful influence of Chertkov, a leader of the Tolstoy movement and a friend and confidante of the master, played brilliantly by Paul Giamatti. The title of the film refers to the station at the end of the railroad line where Tolstoy spends his last days.

The facts as portrayed by the film are as accurate as one should expect of a movie (I checked it against Henri Troyat’s biography). But the grabber here is not verisimilitude but the power of the acting. Plummer is Tolstoy. Mirren is Sonya. (Did you know that Helen Mirren was born Ilyena Lydia Vasilevna Mironov?) I have not seen an acting tour de force of this magnitude in a long, long time.

As so often happens in this house, my enthusiasm for the film led me to seek out Christopher Plummer’s memoir, In Spite of Myself. It is a long book, 648 pages in hard cover, and there is no evidence that anyone collaborated with him in the writing. Now, Plummer, Canadian by birth, is 81 years old, and the book was published in 2008, so one must be impressed by his energy if nothing else. But the writing quality is excellent, revealing an impressive memory and real wit.

The title of the book, I guess, refers to the fact that he has lived a successful life in his chosen career in spite of the fact that he was generally irresponsible, a drinker, a womanizer, and an ingrate. He rather cheerfully admits all this, and the gallery of the rich and famous whose lives intersect with his makes the book endlessly fascinating – in spite of himself.

I recommend the movie and the book, unreservedly. And now I will start Helen Mirren’s memoir, In the Frame.

In for a Penny......

2011-03-30T13:34:00.003-04:00

Like millions of Americans, I watched the President’s speech on Libya the other night. As usual, it was an oratorical gem, logically written and delivered with conviction and poise.

But I didn’t believe a word of it.

That’s the curse of a great speech-maker. You listen so often to the mastery of the language and the style, and then you start wondering whether those tools are being used to seduce you. In this case, the speech was fine, but the arguments were specious.

We were involved in Libya, he said, because we were unwilling to stand by and let civilians be killed. But isn’t that what happens in a civil war? People get killed on both sides, and not all the casualties are combatants. Historians tell us that our bloodiest war was neither of the world wars, but the American Civil War. We are intervening in a civil war, and the fact that the government is a dictatorship is beside the point. As many have pointed out, the world is full of dictators, and civilians are being killed in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Ivory Coast. Yet only the dictator in Libya is worth our intervention.

The Great Orator was careful to set limits: “No boots on the ground.” Yet today’s papers tell us of a debate raging in Washington whether to supply arms to the Libyan rebels, with Hillary the Hawk leading the charge. The UN resolution to protect civilians could be broadly interpreted to encompass arms shipments, she says. By that reasoning, bombing Tripoli could also be sanctioned. Some people also wonder if arms shipped to Libyans will come back to haunt us, as it has in Afghanistan, where we armed the locals who fought the Russians.

The other night I watched a movie called The Special Relationship. in which Tony Blair pressured Bill Clinton to intervene in the Balkans. As the film ends, George W. Bush has just been elected President and Blair is about to apply his charm in a new cause. “You’re ready to fight for what you believe in,” says a Washington insider to Blair in the movie, “right down to the last American soldier.”

What’s an American President to do, when a British or French leader says that a civilian slaughter is imminent and only American action can save the day? A strong President might say, “You do it; it’s not in our national interest to intervene.” Weak presidents, unsure of themselves, often stumble into war; it sometimes takes nerves of steel to resist the passions of the moment. Barack Obama's stern rhetoric is a sham, and the odds are that his latest adventure will end badly.

George W. Obama

2011-03-19T16:46:00.002-04:00

Thousands of people stay indoors in their battered houses, because it isn’t safe to go outside. They don’t have electricity, and they’re running out of food and water. Many of them are old and infirm. The fuel to heat their houses is exhausted. That’s the way it is in Yamagata and other towns in the earthquake zone.

Meanwhile, President Obama, doing his best impersonation of George W. Bush, is on television, threatening Colonel Qaddafi of Libya with “consequences” if he continues battling the rebels in his country. It all sounds eerily like what preceded the invasion of Iraq. First it was Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Then, when the WMD proved to be a mirage, the story changed to “the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.' How long will it be before we hear how much better off we are without Muammar Qaddafi?

It’s easy to sound tough, and, when you’re the strongest military power on earth, it’s easy to drop bombs on people you don’t like. But it’s much, much harder to unscramble the eggs you have messed up. We invaded Iraq and Afghanistan ages ago, and we’re still there. Barack Obama was elected president as the anti-Bush candidate, but he has morphed into George W. Obama. The war rages in Afghanistan, the CIA still runs drones in Pakistan, we can’t seem to leave Iraq, and Guantanamo is still open for business.

And the starving and homeless in Japan? President Obama has pledged support, but little is visible in the coastal communities around the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Station. President Obama has other fish to fry in northern Africa. Today he is in Brazil. Next stop: Chile. Presidents like to globe-hop on Air Force One when Washington reporters might ask embarrassing questions.

The Japanese people are doing their best, helped by government agencies and private companies. They huddle together in their homes or in the crowded emergency shelters, waiting for assistance to come.

In my dreams I see hundreds of U.S. helicopters dropping thousands of cartons of food and bottles of water for those unfortunate people, but it’s just a dream, because our government’s attention is focused, not on Yamagata, but on Tripoli.

Japan: What Must be Done?

2011-03-16T20:05:00.002-04:00

The video clips have been horrific. The sea sweeping everything in its path, the automobiles and trucks and ships just so many toys bulldozed by the onslaught, the survivors standing in shock, wondering what’s to become of them.

I have been to Japan many times, and I’ll confess to a deep admiration for the Japanese people – proud, polite, principled people. On one of my visits, I joined a farewell party for a manager who was being transferred to Europe. There wasn’t a dry eye in the restaurant as the assembly, about 50 people, sang “Auld Lang Syne.” The Japanese love to sing; karaoke is something of a national sport. Never have I felt so much kinship with a group as I did that night.

Here’s what I think: The world, and particularly the United States, should mount an all-out effort to help the Japanese rebuild. Money now spent killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq should be redirected to saving people in Japan. It would be an ironic twist if the only country ever to use an atomic bomb in anger now led an international campaign to help minimize the fallout from the nuclear power plant at Fukushima.

Two-thirds of the American people, according to a recent poll, no longer think the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting. How many of us would think a worldwide effort to help the Japanese people is worth the cost?

President Obama, tossed this way and that by events in Libya, Bahrain, Pakistan, and Iraq, must be longing for a cause that he can embrace without talking out of both sides of his mouth. Here it is, Mr. President. But the time to act is now. Next week, China or Russia or Germany may step up to the plate, and then our moment will have passed.

Les Miz

2011-03-10T21:39:00.005-05:00

There are those who believe that Les Miz is the greatest of all musical plays, and I am not going to argue with them. “The greatest” is by definition a subjective category, but people vote by buying tickets at the box office, and by that standard Les Miz certainly measures up.

Last night I watched the 25th anniversary concert version of Les Miz, staged at the cavernous O2 arena in Greenwich, with an audience that resembled what you might see at the Super Bowl, and a company seemingly almost as large. The previous night I had watched the 10th anniversary concert (I had taped it in 1995), so I had a fine opportunity to compare the two productions.

The similarities: A boyish-looking maestro conducted the orchestra in 1995, and the same man, still looking boyish 15 years later, held the baton in the 2010 production. Lea Salonga played Eponine, the waif, in the 1995 concert, but of course Lea is no longer a waif and played Fantine this time. And Jenny Galloway played Madame Thenardier in both productions. Otherwise, the two casts were different.

Alfie Boe, an operatic tenor, played Jean Valjean in the new concert, and I preferred his performance to that of the widely acclaimed Colm Williamson. Williamson was on hand for the reunion festivities at the end, but his voice is a bit frail now. Even in his prime, though, Colm did not have the horsepower of Alfie Boe, who is still relatively unknown but not likely to remain so.

For my money, the best role in Les Miz is that of Javert, the inspector who stalks Valjean mercilessly throughout the play. The material is so good that it is hard to misplay, and both Javerts were excellent, but the new Javert, an actor named Norm Lewis, was more than that; he was brilliant. He looked like a man you wouldn’t want on your case, and he sang powerfully and threateningly, as is demanded of the character.

Fantine, as mentioned, was played in the 25th anniversary concert by Lea Salonga, a good actress with a fine voice. Her daughter Cosette was played adequately by Katie Hall, but 1995’s Judy Kuhn had a much better voice.

The weakest member of the 25th anniversary cast was Nick Jonas, who with his brothers sets teen-age girls' heart aflutter in England and the U.S. He looked the part of the adolescent Marius, but his singing was marginal and his acting was, well, I am reminded of the critic who said of some actress that she expressed the whole gamut of emotions from A to B – in Nick Jonas’s case, unbearable pain. Michael Ball, the 10th anniversary Marius, is clearly too old for the role today, but he joined in the post-concert nostalgia, along with many other performers “from days gone by.”

The important character of Thenardier was taken by comedian Matt Lucas, who tried unsuccessfully to fill the shoes of Alun Armstrong, the master of the house in the ”dream cast” of 1995.

All in all, I thought the principal characters (Valjean and Javert) were stronger in the 25th anniversary production, and the secondary characters were better in 1995. Since Valjean and Javert really carry the play, the newer concert was on balance a stronger production.

But Les Miz is a must-see, whatever the production. It is a towering creative achievement, based on one of the great novels of all time. It’s a good bet that people will still be enthralled by the music of Claude-Michel Schonberg in the 23d century, when the 200th anniversary concert of Les Miz will be shown to the world on holographic video.

They Came to Play

2011-03-05T18:05:00.002-05:00

If you play the piano – even poorly, as I do – and you are looking for a good DVD to watch, I have a dandy for you. Actually, it’s a dandy even if you don’t play at all, because it’s a feel-good film about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

It’s called They Came to Play, and it lets you look in on a most unusual piano competition held every few years in Fort Worth and sponsored by the Van Cliburn Foundation. Now, you may have heard about the Cliburn Competition, which is the world’s series of piano playing. It is held every four years, and it is for young prodigies who have given their lives to the piano. At least two of these competitions have been the subjects of films, which are very good.

But They Came to Play is not about the Cliburn, although it borrows the name and the venue. This competition is strictly for amateurs, people who have “day jobs” and are over (in some cases, well over) 35 years of age.

One of the contestants is a doctor at a New York hospital. One is a lawyer from Phoenix. Another is a Systems VP at Lockheed-Martin. Another is a tennis coach (and former rated player) in France. Another is a German physicist retired from Siemens. Another is a jewelry trader, another runs a glass business. Some of them learned the piano as children, then quit for years to raise a family or go to medical school. You get to know the “back stories” of many of these people, and you can’t help but like them and admire them for the dedication that they bring to the game.

Van Cliburn himself is present, and he is a God-like figure. One Russian contestant says, “If you ask anyone on the street in Moscow today who Van Cliburn is, he will know.” Then he shakes his head and adds, “I am not so sure whether people in New York know.” There are other ties to the Cliburn competition, including several judges, among them Olga Kern, a winner in 2001 and now a successful concert pianist. (Her 2001 performance is captured on the DVD The Cliburn: Playing on the Edge). The amateur event lacks the budget of the more prestigious competition, and there are no piano concertos cum symphony orchestra. Still, for sheer enjoyment, you can’t beat the spirit and enthusiasm that fills every minute of this film. I’d tell you more, but I have to quit now to practice the piano.

Pixar 2, Facebook 0

2011-02-11T23:57:00.002-05:00

I watched three movies last week: Toy Story 3, Up, and The Social Network. The first two were from the Pixar gang, which rolls out one fantastic film after another, with a hit ratio matched by no company other than Apple. The third film labored under a severe handicap: It had to deal with real people in real-life situations. Here are my takes on the three.

Toy Story 3 was easily the best of the lot. Written by Pixar’s plotmeister John Lasseter, it continues the saga of Woody the toy cowboy, Buzz Lightyear, the toy astronaut, and the entire menagerie of toys owned by Andy, a teen-ager now preparing to leave home for college. What to do with the toys? Andy decides to store them in the attic, but owing to a mixup they are carted off to a day-care center from hell. Woody eventually leads the Great Escape, but not before Lasseter has fashioned a variety of adventures, including a budding romance between two dolls named Barbie and Ken. As usual, Tom Hanks voices Woody, and Randy Newman composes the bouncy music. The Toy Story trilogy (there would seem to be no room for a fourth, but with Pixar you never know) is solid gold, and number 3 is the best yet.

Up is a bittersweet story that begins when a young boy meets an adventuresome young girl named Ellie, who dreams of traveling to exotic places like Paradise Falls in South America. (I was hooked when the little girl, rhapsodizing about the attractions of South America, said, “It’s just like America. Only it’s south!”) Eventually the couple marry and enjoy a long and happy life together – and then Ellie dies. The man, Carl Fredricksen, is now a 78-year-old curmudgeon, living in the same old house, an island of yesterday surrounded by skyscrapers and legions of lawyers offering to buy him out. Finally he has had enough, and he attaches a zillion balloons to his house and flies off toward South America. But he finds that he has a stowaway: a young boy scout eager to earn a merit badge for helping an old person, even an unwilling old person. The balloon-tethered house eventually makes it to Paradise Falls, where our duo encounter a series of hazards, notably including a storied explorer named Charles Muntz, who was the inspiration for Ellie’s odyssey of long ago. Muntz is now a madman with an entourage of vicious dogs (the Pixar animators do vicious dogs very well). All ends well, as you knew it would. The voices of Carl Fredricksen and Charles Muntz are supplied by Ed Asner and Christopher Plummer.

Now to The Social Network, about which I have mixed feelings. First, the good news: The screenplay, by Aaron Sorkin, is brilliant. Its machine-gun dialogue is just right coming from the mouths of computer whizzes, and the structure – a legal hearing, with flashbacks telling the main story – builds the tension neatly. The acting is terrific throughout. Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg, the creator (or was he?) of Facebook and is a valid Best Actor nominee. Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake also give memorable performances in supporting roles.

What’s not to like? The story. These are, for the most part, unprincipled people treating each other like dirt (or worse, if you include the few women in the cast). The ethical and legal questions at the center of the plot center on who shares how much credit for Facebook. If you take the characterizations as authentic – and one assumes that the producers had a regiment of lawyers vet the book and the script – you have to wonder why these young men are (1) worth wrapping a $40 million film around and (2) worth spending two hours of anyone’s viewing time. Facebook and its ilk are social phenomena, I will grant, and that’s a reasonable subject for a documentary. But a movie without any sympathetic characters is hard to classify as entertainment.

The Super Bowl

2011-02-07T19:24:00.001-05:00

Sunday night a good football game competed for the attention of the viewers with commercials and the halftime show. The football game lost, not because the other stuff was better, but because the other stuff was so bad. You knew it was going to be a rough night when Christina Aguelera destroyed the national anthem, first by shrieking the song as if she were in pain, second by departing repeatedly from the tune the composer had in mind, and third, by forgetting the lyrics midway through. That’s right; this poor excuse for a singer found “O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming” too much to handle, so repeated an earlier line (but she even botched that).

As for the much-hyped commercials, with very few exceptions, they were just awful. The worst of the sorry lot was an incomprehensible promotion for Doritos. The best were the car commercials; at least they focused on the product instead of computer graphics.

But back to Christina. Why, oh why are singers of the national anthem at sporting events so determined to avoid the melody as written? Is the song that bad? Or are they afraid that an as-written rendition would expose the inadequacy of their voices? One look at the faces of the Packers and Steelers during Christina’s solo told it all. “This is painful,” they seemed to be thinking, or “Let’s play football – please.”

I was rooting for the Packers ever since the Patriots were eliminated. It’s a matter of fairness. Pittsburgh has the Pirates and the Penguins. It is the City of Andrew Carnegie and U.S. Steel. It was Gene Kelly’s home town. Green Bay has the Packers. Period. And now they are the Super Bowl champs. Justice has been served.

Graham Greene's Movies

2011-01-29T21:23:00.003-05:00

Graham Greene was a wonderful storyteller. More than that, his stories made wonderful movies, especially when he also wrote the screenplays. The Third Man is one of the most memorable films ever made – who can forget the long closing shot of Valli walking along the cemetery road, or the fat-faced little Austrian boy shouting “Murther!”? The Comedians is another of my favorites. How could it miss, with Alec Guinness and Richard Burton? Our Man in Havana, The Fallen Idol, The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter – so many good stories, so well told.

Now a new Graham Greene picture is about to open: Brighton Rock, with Helen Mirren, Sam Riley, and Andrea Riseborough. This is a remake of a 1947 film noir starring Richard Attenborough. The original was good, but this promises to be better (at least the trailers look promising). Greene’s novels are the kind of stuff that film studios can’t stay away from. The End of the Affair was made in 1955 (with a strong performance by Deborah Kerr), but Hollywood, no doubt hooked by the title, remade the movie in 1999, with Ralph Fiennes. I have mixed feelings about the two versions. Ralph Fiennes was a much better Bendrix than was his predecessor, Van Johnson, but screenwriter Neil Jordan (1999) mangled the story as told by Greene. But sometimes the remake is far superior to the original. The Quiet American with Michael Caine was infinitely better than the 1958 version with Audie Murphy.

One of Graham Greene’s best spy thrillers, The Human Factor, was filmed in 1979. Directed By Otto Preminger, it starred Richard Attenborough, Nicol Williamson, Derek Jacobi, Robert Morley, and John Gielgud. Despite all this starpower (plus a screenplay by Tom Stoppard), the movie ran afoul of cold-war politics, and to this day no DVD is available.

Anyone interested in learning more about Graham Greene’s films can do no better than Graham Greene: The Films of his Fiction, by Gene Phillips S.J. Published in 1974, it does not cover the remakes, but it is good reading nonetheless.

The President's Speech

2011-01-26T19:19:00.004-05:00

Having been bowled over by the President's Tucson speech earlier this month, I was eagerly awaiting his State of the Union address. He had loaded the bases in Tucson; now all he had to do was hit the ball out of the park. A grand slam, with all the world watching!

It didn't happen. What we got was standard political boilerplate. We're going to attack the deficit (nod to the right), but not by cutting investments in education (nod to the left). And so it went, with the President endlessly talking about investment, without ever acknowledging that investment presupposes the availability of money to invest. The United States is in hock to China alone to the tune of $900 billion and is currently spending a trillion dollars more than it takes in each year. The word "investment" has a nice ring to it, politically, and that's where the President headed last night, and the result was a sad misuse of his rhetorical power.

Today the President flew to Wisconsin, where he commended a manufacturer of solar shingles. The company was unable to get bank loans, it turns out, so Uncle Sam came through. The banks apparently thought the company a poor risk, but the Government knew better.

Cynics might say that a Presidential visit to Green Bay two weeks before the Super Bowl had a political component. How could anyone think that?

The trouble with being a great orator is that your failures as well as your successes are magnified. The State of the Union address was a monumental failure, because so much was expected, and so little was delivered. If the speaker had been George Bush, it wouldn't have been so bad.

Of Builders and Traders

2011-01-19T12:19:00.004-05:00

Andy Grove, ex-CEO of Intel and a recognized technology guru, was asked to comment on Steve Jobs the other day. “There are builders and there are traders,” he said, “and Steve is a builder.”

The builder/trader dichotomy has been with us for ages. In the last half of the twentieth century, the traders were ascendant. We didn’t call them traders, we called them venture capitalists, and they and the builders coexisted well. I worked for a bonafide builder, Alex d’Arbeloff, for many years. Alex was a good friend (and fellow Francophone) of General Doriot of American Research & Development, an iconic venture capital firm and an early investor in Digital Equipment and many other successful companies. General Doriot, a long-term holder, would never have thought of himself as a trader, but all venture-capital firms, including ARD, had exit strategies. Alex had no exit strategy; all his thoughts were on building the Company he cofounded.

Steve Jobs, when he was first told he had a serious medical problem, could have checked out and spent the rest of his years on Bora Bora. But that wasn’t in his DNA. Instead, he spent the next five years turning his Company into the most phenomenally successful story in the history of high tech. Today he could probably buy Bora Bora, but when his medical leave of absence ends, he will return to Apple, for he is a builder.

The American dream is based on creating a society that cultivates a steady supply of builders, people like Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, and of course Steve Jobs. If we have an edge on our global competitors, it is our capacity to produce and motivate builders. No other country approaches us when it comes to that. And the curious thing is, very few in our society object to the great wealth amassed by successful builders. “Americans aspire up and resent down,” The Economist editorialized once. When we start resenting up, that will be an ominous signal.

The Orator Returns

2011-01-12T22:13:00.003-05:00

January 12, 2011: On this day, in Tucson, Arizona, Barack Obama, the master orator who inspired so many of us on election night in Grant Park and then disappeared as he was overtaken by the hurly-burly of politics, reemerged to give what may have been his greatest speech yet. It was eloquent in language and tone, and entirely appropriate to the occasion. This, I remember thinking as I listened, is what oratory is all about.

The setting added to the drama. Arizona is hardly a blue state and certainly not in the President’s comfort zone. Boston or Chicago would have been more simpatico. Also adding to the drama was the President’s revelation that Congresswoman Giffords had opened her eyes that very day, for the first time since she was shot But a dramatic setting can take one only so far. The President could have milked the emotional points but did not. He walked the fine line between bathos and passivity with skill that cannot be rehearsed; it’s in his DNA.

Barack Obama has made some terrible blunders in policy and in politics. He has lashed out at fat-cat bankers and rallied his colleagues to "keep the drug companies honest.” He promoted his health-care program as a cost saver, admitting after passage that no one should have thought that 30 million Americans could be added to the insured rolls at no cost. So President Obama has much to answer for.

But give him his due: He is a giant among the orators of our time. This talent must not be underestimated or undervalued. The country is dangerously divided, and oratory ranks high among the leadership qualities the nation so desperately needs. On January 12 the President found his voice again, in a speech that will reverberate for a long time. One hopes that among those who take its message seriously is Barack Obama himself.

The Death of Debate

2011-01-10T20:03:00.004-05:00

Much has been written about the killings in Arizona, much of it centered on the overheated political climate in this country and the effect of so much vitriol on minds that are already unhinged. Convince a nutcake that a politician is guilty of treason, add a chorus of encouragement on the Internet, and throw in ready access to guns (even for the nutcakes), and you have a recipe for disaster.

All that is true enough, but there is another element worth mentioning: the death of rational debate.

People shoot their perceived adversaries because they don’t know how to debate them. It calls to mind the frustration of Billy Bigelow in Carousel, when asked by the heavenly star-keeper why he hit his wife. “We’d argue about something,” says Billy, “and she’d be right. So I hit her.”

A young man in Arizona thought of Gabrielle Giffords as an enemy. Maybe it was her stand on immigration, maybe health care, but he wasn’t capable of organizing his arguments into a rational discourse in that Tucson parking lot. So he shot her.

Rational discourse is not the stuff of FaceBook pages or 40-character tweets. It demands logical argument and a command of language. As a civilization, we're losing that, for a variety of reasons, including the coarsening of language. In so-called action movies, the heroes shoot four-letter words as fast as they shoot bullets. The same four-letter words, because they don’t know any other adjectives. Sad.

In my high-school days, debating was a big deal, and my best friend was the President of the Debating Society. We called him our golden-voiced orator, and not just because of the way he spoke. It was what he said for or against the proposition. He didn’t have to use four-letter words, because he had a rich vocabulary.

And he didn’t have to shoot people he disagreed with. He could mow them down with words.

Christmas Eve on Sand Point

2010-12-24T23:43:00.002-05:00

It is late on Christmas Eve on Sand Point, and all is quiet. Of the 20-odd houses on the point, only two are lit, mine and my neighbor’s. The other owners are in Florida and Texas and Connecticut and other places in the lower latitudes. It is 24 degrees here now, and the ground is snow-covered, just enough to make it a white Christmas.

Across the tidal river to the north one house has Christmas lights in the windows, and their reflection on the water is picturesque. I have two white stars in my windows, and the lights are on at the front entrance, so that those people across the river have something to look at. To the south lies the Atlantic. You can hear the surf, because it is almost high tide, but beyond the windows there is only blackness.

Earlier, I went to Mass at St. Martha’s, in Kennebunk. I arrived at least 15 minutes before Mass was supposed to start, but I was still too late. The large parking lot was filled, so that I had to park a few blocks from the church. Inside, it was jam-packed, not just in the church proper, but in the adjoining spaces as well. Father Tom Murphy said the Mass, and a red-and-black-robed choir, about 15 voices strong, sang Christmas hymns. Somehow I found a few square feet to inhabit, amid a sea of people, many in wheelchairs. Father Tom’s brief but eloquent sermon, the choir’s note-perfect singing, and the sensation of being present at an Event were all very moving.

Tonight I have been watching the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s Christmas Eve concert. I have seen it before, about a week ago, but it was good enough for a reprise. There is something about a large, well-trained chorus that raises goosebumps on me - but only if there are both male and female voices. I have heard good ladies’ choruses and good male choruses, but only a mixed chorus sounds complete to these ears. And the Mormon Choir is as good as it gets. A highlight of tonight’s concert was a recitation by historian David McCullough, who recounted Churchill’s visit to Washington on Christmas 1941, only weeks after Pearl Harbor. McCullough claimed that Churchill, hearing O Little Town of Bethlehem sung on Christmas Eve, said that he had never the hymn before. I thought that unlikely, so I raced to my library and quickly found the episode in Churchill’s history of WWII, and – as I should have known – McCullough was right. Another of McCullough’s stories illuminated the origins of I’ll Be Home for Christmas, surely one of the best of the Christmas ballads.

Now Christmas Day is only minutes away, so I will wish everyone who takes the trouble to read these scribblings a blessed Christmas and a happy new year.

Postcards from the Edge

2010-12-19T19:27:00.002-05:00

To judge by its subject matter, Postcards from the Edge is a movie I would not under any circumstances watch. But there it was on the telly, and before I could change the channel I caught a bit of dialogue that sounded clever. And then another bit of bright dialogue, and then a whole scene, and I was hooked. That was about 10 years ago. The other night I watched it again to see if my first impressions deceived me. They did not. It’s a good movie, a little sloppy in the editing, but otherwise a film with one standout scene after another.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s a story about a mother-daughter relationship, written by Carrie Fisher, an authority on the subject. The mother, played by Shirley Maclaine, is an alcoholic. The daughter, played by Meryl Streep, is a junkie. (Now you see why it’s not my type of movie.) Three things elevate the film above its story line: (1) Meryl Streep, (2) Shirley Maclaine, and (3) the sharpness of Carrie Fisher’s writing.

The movie takes place in Hollywood, for the mother is an over-the-hill movie actress and the daughter is trying to climb the hill. Say, doesn’t that sound like Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher? No, but close. Carrie carries around lots of bittersweet memories about Mom and Eddie Fisher, her dad, who left Debbie for Elizabeth Taylor, who left Eddie for Richard Burton, who left…… Some of the memories undoubtedly “informed” Postcards, but Carrie was saving the best stuff for her one-woman show, Wishful Drinking, which was just shown on HBO.

In Postcards, Mom advises daughter that she should give up acting in third-rate movies and focus instead on a singing career. The advice is sound, but the daughter is wary: Mom sings, and she doesn’t want to compete with Mom, because Mom always wins. Interesting sidelight: A review of Wishful Drinking notes that Carrie Fisher is a talented singer, though Mom is of course the “name” singer. (Personal note: As an emcee at an industry conference, I once shared a stage with Debbie Reynolds and found her great fun to work with. It is hard for me to believe that Shirley was channeling Debbie in the movie.)

The scenes between Streep and Maclaine are the core of this movie. They are duels dripping with bitterness, and they are terrific. Others flit around the edges of the story: Gene Hackman is just right as a film director, and Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Reiner, and Dennis Quaid help out in roles that are inconsequential at best.

It was no surprise to find Meryl Streep delivering another memorable performance; all her performances are memorable. But Maclaine outdid herself. She is best known as a talented singer and dancer, but here was a dramatic turn that was very demanding, and she scored a bull’s eye. At least some of the credit for her bitchy performance must go to Director Mike Nichols, who also directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with Elizabeth Taylor as the bitchy Martha.

Hollywood is a very small world.

Needed: A Coalition Government

2010-12-15T22:21:00.004-05:00

Great Britain has it right: They are tackling the hard times by entrusting their fate to a coalition government. David Cameron is the conservative half, Nick Clegg the liberal half. And they seem to be making a go of it, despite student riots over tuition hikes and assorted other squabbles. The point is, while we’re on the brink of at least two years of deadlock, Britain cannot have deadlock, because both sides are running the country.

It can’t happen here, you say? Don’t be too sure. Erskine Bowles, a credentialed Democrat, and Alan Simpson, a staunch Republican, head a task force studying the mother of all problems, the deficit, and they have just submitted their report spelling out the harsh medicine that is needed. Outgoing Senators Evan Bayh (D-Ind) and Judd Gregg (R-NH) are regulars on television, displaying uncommon civility, respect for each other, and great common sense. Either of these pairings would make a dream team in the White House. And why not? It is not constitutionally ordained that the President and Vice-President must be of the same party, and all you would need is a pre-election promise that the two would govern as a coalition. Given the pickle we’re in, it is time to think outside the box.

The political difficulty of tackling the deficit is huge, but that is not the only problem that cries out for a coalition. Here’s another: The politicians whose conservative economic policies we tend to favor are also the politicians most hawkish in matters of foreign policy. In the voting both, we are always forced to choose either someone who will bankrupt the country or someone who is willing to risk World War 3.

It is easy to start a war (just ask George Bush), but it can be devilishly hard to end one (just ask Barack Obama). It’s a much smaller world than it was in 1941, so that in any war involving the major powers, the continental U.S. would certainly be attacked. As General Turgidson said in Dr Strangelove, we would have “10, maybe 20 million killed – tops – depending on the breaks.”

We certainly want to have a first-class military to defend our homeland, but we don’t, or shouldn’t, put China or Russia in a position where they feel threatened. There’s a balance to be struck in foreign relations, and the political chemistry these days makes balance in anything nearly impossible.

The leaders of the coalition that is needed obviously cannot be from the extreme left or right. A coalition teaming, say, Sarah Palin with Nancy Pelosi would never get beyond the first round (but would have high entertainment value). We need grown-ups to put their heads together and plot a course out of this mess. Unfortunately, grown-ups are in short supply in today’s Washington.

The Big Bang and Other Noteworthy Incidents

2010-12-12T11:38:00.004-05:00

Perceived wisdom has it that the universe began with the Big Bang, which occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, when a cosmic speck inflated to a zillionth times its size in a zillionth of a second. The Big Bang then slowed down and became a small bang, which keeps the universe expanding to this very day. To me, that was never very convincing, as it still left unexplained where the speck came from or what preceded it. Now an astronomer, Roger Penrose of Oxford, says that the Bang was just another in a series of bangs that go on forever. Each universe expands to a point where all the matter is sucked into black holes, becomes infinitely small, and a new Big Bang is generated. Moreover, these bangs leave imprints in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and – this is the best part – Dr Penrose claims to have found such imprints in data from a US satellite dedicated to studying the CMB. Infinity is hard for us humans to understand, but I find Penrose’s story more believable than a single Big Bang that came out of nowhere.

Stephen Sondheim’s new book, Finishing the Hat, is a very satisfying trip through the first half of the composer/lyricist’s career on Broadway. (A sequel is in the works.) The book contains the complete lyrics of a number of Sondheim’s shows, but the grabber is what the book’s subtitle calls “attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines and anecdotes.” Among the heresies is the author’s trenchant criticism of the lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein (who, as is widely known, was Sondheim’s surrogate father and mentor). Sondheim dismisses the lyrics to “All the Things You Are” as just pretty words, devoid of meaning. Which just means that Sondheim, no romantic he, doesn’t get “the promised kiss of springtime that makes the lonely winter seem long.” That sort of thing seems tone-deaf and ungrateful, but it doesn’t diminish the reader’s appreciation of the book. For one thing, he reserves his barbs for lyricists who are dead (and therefore unlikely to be offended). For another, he is equally harsh on some of his own lyrics, as he should be. The lyrics for “I Feel Pretty,” from West Side Story, are Sondheim at his worst. But Sondheim at his best is very good indeed, and his explanations of the art and craft of lyric-writing are worth reading.

While we’re on Sondheim, his 80th birthday concert, held at Avery Fisher Hall, is a must-see. I particularly liked the inclusion of so many relatively unknown songs and the finale, with six divas dressed in red each giving a tour de force rendition of one of Sondheim’s classics, the high points being Marin Maizzie’s “It Never Entered My Mind” and Elaine Stritch’s “I’m Still Here.”

The acting troop at the Saco River Grange Hall can be counted on to serve up an entertaining evening of drama, and this fall’s presentation, Shivaree, by William Mastrosimone, was no exception. Jennifer Porter, SRGH’s perennial leading lady, took the title role and was good as always. But the group tends to choose plays (and movies) with downbeat subject matter, and I personally enjoy its musical outings (Always Patsy Cline, And the World Goes ‘Round, An Evening with Jennifer Porter and Friends) much more.

The Tone-Deaf President

2010-11-04T20:33:00.002-04:00

For someone who thinks of himself as (and at times is) a great communicator, Barack Obama has rather badly botched communications the one audience he needs to mend the economy: the business community. Let us count the ways.

First, he instinctively talks using terms that he thinks will register with his base. That was fine when he was in campaign mode, but once he was elected President, he should have changed his default manner of speech. Calling bankers “fat cats” may have brought knowing nods to his community-organizer public, but business people began to wonder what business he would target next.

They soon found out. He sold his health-care plan by demonizing the insurance industry. If the American people didn’t watch out, he warned, the larcenous insurance industry would steal their socks without removing their shoes.

Next came the pharmaceutical industry, or “big pharma,” as he liked to think of them. (Little pharma is apparently okay, as are little banks and little insurance companies. It is only when a business dares to become big that it invites attack.)

Two weeks ago, on the campaign trail, the President visited a small steel company in the rustbelt to “show and tell” how much he was doing for business. “Without these programs,” he boasted, “Stromberg’s workers wouldn’t have been able to compete with foreign companies or non-union firms.”

How’s that again, Mr. President? Don’t you realize that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, and most of the fastest-growing companies in America are non-union? Are you tone-deaf? Don’t you understand that your comment, televised on CNBC, was a loud message to business that your heart is still with your base, and your base doesn’t include the most dynamic part of the American economy?

A business-savvy communications adviser could have warned Obama that he was sending all the wrong signals, but there is no such person on the White House staff. There will be cosmetic changes, but the President will have to work much harder to convince business leaders that he really understands the machinery of free-enterprise and entrepreneurism, and that he has been converted to Cheerleader-in-Chief.

The Wisdom of the Masses

2010-10-31T09:35:00.001-04:00

A very long time ago, I put in a month on jury duty. The law was since changed to limit tours to a day or a trial, but back then, jury duty meant getting your employer to give you a month’s leave of absence. This was rarely a problem; in fact, most employers supplemented your court per diem to make you whole.

The most memorable thing about my month’s tour in the jury pool was my discovery that my fellow man, though not always reliable as an individual, was completely trustworthy as a group of twelve. There was something about the gravity of the situation (my tour included a case of homicide) that brought out the very best in man. You come to know your fellow jurors pretty well after weeks of chatting, having lunch together, and swapping stories, and, inevitably, you find that some of them are a bit rough around the edges. But put twelve of them on a jury, and a miraculous thing happens: Everyone assumes a higher dignity, a refined sense of responsibility, a rationality that would have been impossible without the special chemistry of the jury.

That experience informed my attitude about the American electorate. I believe that, no matter how many attacks one hears and how many whackos among the candidates, the American public as a group can be relied on to deliver the goods. The larger the voter turnout, the better the odds. A five- or six-man jury is not as trustworthy as a dozen.

Much is made of voter polarization these days, and many people will indeed vote emotionally rather than logically. But the sum total will, like a jury verdict, be a true expression of the public's best reading of the situation at hand. As a compass, you just can’t beat it.

So let’s not hear any Wednesday morning quarterbacking about how voters were deceived by lies or mountains of evil money. The voters en masse will have done a good job.

The Elections

2010-10-30T09:54:00.002-04:00

The political campaigns are as poisonous in Maine as they are elsewhere. Some television ads don’t even bother to tell you whom to vote for; they just tell you whom not to vote for. Paul LePage is a candidate for Governor who came out of nowhere to win the Republican primary. He is the mayor of Waterville, and a general manager of a discount retail store. And he is apparently a monster, in the opinion of a woman who pleaded, at the end of a TV ad, “Please, don’t vote for Paul LePage.” She didn’t say who her preferred candidate was; it apparently was beside the point.

This sort of thing is going on all over the country, candidates trashing each other with half-truths, out-of-context sound bites, and the like. Their advertising gurus must tell them negative ads work, but I spent a lot of years running advertising for a fair-sized company, and I don’t know. At some point I think the attackee starts getting a sympathy vote. I don’t know much about Paul LePage, but I know less about the lady begging me not to vote for him.

The robocalls come all day and all evening. I thank God for caller ID, which catches most of them, but every now and then one sneaks through because the number is local and looks innocent enough. “I just want to ask you to vote for….” the voice says before I can hang up. Political campaign are exempt from the “do not call” restrictions, because our politicians have thoughtfully legislated themselves beyond the law.

For Congress, Representative Chellee Pingree is battling Republican Dean Scontras. Chellee is the Congressman who vented against fat-cat Wall Streeters flying around in private jets – until she was seen exiting a private jet in Portland. That doesn’t count, she said, because jets owned by family members are okay. What family member owns a jet? Her fiance, who runs a hedge fund. Oh.

The Maine landscape is now littered with political signs – not just for candidates, but for ballot questions as well. One of the more contentious battles is being waged in nearby Biddeford, an old mill city that has seen better days. Some investors want to site a trotters’ race track and casino (slot machines) in Biddeford, and the City fathers, impressed by the scale and architecture of the proposal and by the money behind it, are all for it. But any major new enterprise in Maine will trigger loud opposition, especially if gambling is involved. Those urging a yes vote emphasize JOBS, while the antis warn that slot machines spell degradation right here in River City.

Since the radio station I depend on for news and weather is WBZ in Boston, I hear the political ads for the Massachusetts candidates, too. Same thing: attack, attack. Governor Patrick, the Democrat incumbent, bad-mouths Charlie Baker, the Republican challenger, and Baker attacks Patrick. In one of the most bizarre examples of the art, Suzanne Bump, Democrat running for Auditor, cites a Boston Globe article in attacking her opponent, Mary Connaughton – although the Globe has endorsed Connaughton! Another Bay State contest to watch is Sean Bileat’s crusade to unseat Barney Frank. If he succeeds, it will be an earthquake to rival Scott Brown’s miraculous upset in the Bay State senatorial contest last year. Needless to say, Barney Frank, patron saint of Fannie Mae, is a favorite target of Republicans across the country.

The polls suggest that an enraged public is ready to make a huge change next Tuesday. (An e-mail titled “A Friendly Reminder” says “Tuesday: Throw the trash out.”) The rage has developed its own momentum, so that many voters will want to be part of a revolution whose nature they’re only dimly aware of. After the celebrating, many voters, and probably many winning candidates, will ask themselves, “What happens now?”

And two years from now, if the economy hasn’t improved, we’ll have more rage, more attack ads, more robocalls. It’s the price of democracy.

Miss Baghdad? Not.

2010-10-27T10:17:00.002-04:00

The Vietnam War killed more than 3 million people, uniformed and civilian. The US lost 58 thousand soldiers in a war that almost tore this country apart. Why did we fight? The idea, the politicians (Democrat and Republican) told us, was to keep the country from falling under Communist rule.

Fast forward to 2010, 37 years after the last US personnel were airlifted off the embassy roof in Saigon. This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will visit Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to cozy up to the (Communist) government in a transparent attempt to buy the friendship of China’s neighbors. The Vietnam government, presumably, have short memories. Napalm? What’s that?

There is a moral here, which is not lost on President Karzai of Afghanistan. Three decades from now, a future Secretary of State may be in Kabul, making nice with the Taliban leadership hoping to lure them away from Iran. If you were Karzai, you would be looking for all the friends you can get – in the Middle East, not in Washington.

The Vietnam tragedy was dramatized stingingly in Miss Saigon, a musical that opened on Broadway in 1991. It is an achingly poignant musical, underappreciated despite its long run (over 4000 performances), perhaps because it lies in the shadow of Les Miserables, created by the same team, Schönberg and Boubill. The essence of the play is stated in the second-act song, Bui-Doi, which is an elegy for the Vietnamese children born during the war and destined to be the dust of life. “They are the living reminder,” the lyric groans, “of all the good we failed to do.”

The parallels with Iraq and Afghanistan are haunting. We are trying to withdraw from Iraq, now a fractious state with sectarian violence still a fact of life. Saddam Hussein’s pistol is mounted as a trophy in the new George W. Bush exhibit in Dallas. Tariq Aziz, a spokesman for the old government, has just been sentenced to hang, despite an appeal for clemency from the Pope. Anbar Province is aboil over control of a natural-gas field. There is still no functioning government in Baghdad.

There will be no musical called Miss Baghdad. Miss Saigon had the advantage of a template (Madam Butterfly) against which Alan Boubill could create a love story about a Saigon bar girl and a GI. There is no template for Miss Baghdad. No one wants to see Abu Ghraib played out on stage.

But rest assured, the mess in Afghanistan and Iraq will be all right in the end. That is the real lesson of the sight of Hillary Clinton clinking cocktails with the politicians and business leaders in Ho Chi Minh City, only blocks from where the last helicopter lifted off, leaving panicked crowds of civilians behind, in 1973.

Thoughts While Looking at the Moon

2010-10-16T21:22:00.005-04:00

I was looking at the moon tonight, high in the sky over the ocean, and it occurred to me that what I was seeing was exactly what a Roman citizen saw at the time of Christ. Now, if I were able to communicate with that Roman, as we both looked up at the moon, and I told him that in my time man traveled to the moon, landed on it, walked around a bit, and then returned to earth, he would not have believed me. “No way,” he would say (or “nulla via”). In fact, I find it hard to believe, too. Jill had serious doubts and suspected that the whole “one giant step for mankind” scene took place on a huge sound stage in Hollywood.

Now, if we could communicate with a person living in 4000 AD, what would he or she tell us that we would find impossible to believe? That genomic science extended the average life span to 200 years? That we would regularly communicate with beings on other planets? That we would use intelligent holographic “friends” as servants and entertainers? That the dominant transportation vehicle would be personal airmobiles powered by rechargeable hydrogen modules?

Of course, The Time Machine told a different story, in which the eloi were bred as food sources for the morlocks, long after the world as we know it had been destroyed by nuclear war. In the book, the time traveler (George in the 1960 movie) lands in the year 802,701, by which time we in 2010 would be regarded as the equivalent of cavemen. The movie is fascinating, and at the fifth or tenth viewing we still root for George to find his way back to Weena. Unfortunately, the grim future that H.G. Wells paints is at least as plausible as the tomorrow described in the previous paragraph. Mankind does have a way of botching things, even while he pushes technology ahead.

There is no record of Roman or Greek literature speculating on life 2000 years in the future. That’s too bad, because it would be interesting to read where Plato or Aristotle imagined mankind was heading. In their wildest dreams did they ever envision flying machines carrying hundreds of people across the oceans? In the night sky I see their flashing lights, just as I see the far off moon, and it all seems hard to believe, even today.

Thank You, Readers

2010-10-13T21:37:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, this blog recorded its 10,000th "hit." That's a small number, compared with many blogs by celebrities. but its a big number in my league. I'm also floored by the number of countries represented by the total - evidence, I guess, of the world-wide popularity of search engines. Anyway, to all who have clicked their way through the literary beachcomber, thank you.

Cogito Ergo Sum

2010-10-10T22:33:00.002-04:00

Philosophy joke: René Descartes entered a restaurant in Brussels, was seated, and after a while a waiter approached and asked him if he would like an aperitif. “I think not,” said Descartes.
And disappeared.

Does the fact that we think really mean we exist? It’s a good question, and I wish we were spending our time arguing about existential matters instead of quantitative easing or politics. The political discourse is getting heated, if you haven’t noticed, and it often centers on philosophical niceties worthy of a Descartes. In Massachusetts, a candidate for auditor, of all offices, tries to explain away her claim of two Massachusetts homes on tax returns by saying one was her principal home and the other was her primary home. In Maine, a Democratic congresswoman known for lashing out at Wall Street fat cats who fly around on private jets is seen exiting a private jet on a local runway. The jet is owned by a hedge-fund operator to whom she is engaged, the Congresswoman explained, flying on a private jet is okay if the plane is owned by a family member, and fiancés are family members, sort of.

The Barney Frank who was such a rabid cheerleader for Fannie Mae when the lender was making crazy loans doesn’t exist. The Barney Frank who now exists says that mortgages should be given only to buyers who can afford them. So in January, this January, Fannie launched a program that allows first-time home buyers to put down $1,000 or 1% of the purchase price, whichever is greater.

Or how about this return to insanity: In the first half of this year, credit card companies sent out 84.8 million offers to American subprime borrowers, up from 43.7 million a year ago.

I think, therefore I qualify for a mortgage or a credit card.

All About Eve

2010-09-23T21:33:00.002-04:00

I watched All About Eve the other night, and I was just as fascinated by it as I was when I first saw it, at least a dozen watchings ago. Joe Mankiewicz’s script is still music to the ear, and the performances are all legendary. It is the best acting Bette Davis has done, and the same is true right across the cast, from Anne Baxter to Gary Merrill to George Sanders to Celeste Holm to Hugh Marlowe. None of them ever equaled what they left behind in Eve. It is hard to believe that there is any film-lover who has never seen All About Eve, but of course there are, and to them I say: Get a copy by hook or crook, and be prepared to see just how good a movie can be.

Eve is Eve Harrington, a fiercely ambitious young would-be actress. Margo Channing is the reigning queen of the footlights, and Eve is a Margo wannabe. Bill Sampson is a successful director and Margo’s boyfriend. Lloyd Richards is a playwright, and he and his wife Karen are among Margo’s small circle of friends. Addison Dewitt is the most powerful drama critic in town. Minor characters flit around these luminaries, among them Miss Caswell, played by Marilyn Monroe before she was Marilyn Monroe.

The plot traces Eve Harrington’s devious journey to the pinnacle of Broadway stardom. The script sparkles with such lines as “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night” and “It’s time to tell the piano it hasn’t written the concerto.”

Sam Staggs’s excellent book, All About “All About Eve” correctly notes that half the cast would be forgotten today were it not for their roles in the movie. Bette Davis, 42 at the time, was considered washed up until she played Margo – a role she seized when an injury sidelined Claudette Colbert, the studio’s first choice. Bette had already logged a string of hits that would ensure her lasting fame, but the same was not true of Anne Baxter (Frank Lloyd Wright’s granddaughter), who won the title role. Gary Merrill, today remembered (if at all) for his role in 12 O’Clock High, had an undistinguished film career until Eve, as did Anne Baxter, Hugh Marlowe, and Celeste Holm. George Sanders, who perennially played British upper-class gentlemen (though he was actually born in Russia), deservedly walked off with an Academy Award for his portrayal of the venomous Addison Dewitt. Margo and Addison are in fact the juiciest roles in the movie, with one commanding every scene she’s in and the other providing the emotional climax of the story and the resolution of the plot. Gary Merrill and Bette Davis were an item during the shooting, and the two married as soon as they could shed their spouses. This was life imitating art, and the on/off-screen romance adds another dimension to one’s appreciation of the film.

But the real star of All About Eve was its writer and director, Joe Mankiewicz. His script attracted and motivated an excellent cast, and his directorial style drew from each a once-in-a-career performance. This in spite of the fact that tempers were often raw. Bette Davis and Celeste Holm managed to play best friends on screen even though they detested each other and never spoke to each other away from the set. It was Mankiewicz who kept them all pushing to achieve the great film they all knew they were part of. For this was no surprise hit; each week, when the rushes were viewed, everybody was surer than ever that All About Eve was a special film.

And it was, and is.

Our $90 Billion Salesman

2010-09-18T20:24:00.002-04:00

From “The World This Week” in the current issue of The Economist:

“The Obama administration has announced plans to sell Saudi Arabia arms worth as much as $90 billion over the coming decade, in what would be America biggest-ever weapons sale.”

Did you notice something strange about that news release? The seller is identified as “the Obama administration.” We have come to the point where the Government can make a sale (or not make a sale) for $90 billion dollars’ worth of hardware. That’s a lot of hardware and a lot of paychecks and a lot of commissions for someone. Come to think of it, the aerospace companies don’t even need salesmen any more. The sale is closed when the President says “okay.”

Here’s what Dwight Eisenhower said as he was leaving the presidency in 1960.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Arms manufactured in the United States may be found in every corner of the earth. Some of these arms, if past experience is any guide, will one day be used to kill Americans. We are in fact the world’s largest supplier of weapons of mass destruction. And as other countries cut their arms budgets, our role will get even larger. The military can’t stop it. When it tried to kill a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Congress overruled it; too many jobs were at stake.

Increasingly, the U.S. is the go-to enforcer, because erstwhile allies are quitting the game. Great Britain proposes defense cuts of 10 to 20 percent. Germany plans to drop its draft and cut its armed forces by a third. Today’s “coalition of the willing” is shrinking fast. Meanwhile, as if Afghanistan and Iraq aren’t enough, hawks in Washington press for greater U.S. military involvement in Yemen and Somalia. It is hard to see how this lunacy will play out. President Obama, who probably wishes he could disengage, can’t, any more than he can close Guantanamo. The military is trapped in wars it cannot win. Congress, which deserves the public scorn it gets, keeps funding weapons systems the military doesn’t need.

Eisenhower saw in the military-industrial complex “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” And Dwight Eisenhower was no pacifist. He led the Allies to victory in Europe and was regarded as a bona-fide military hero. One can only wonder what he would have thought on reading a press release for a $90 billion-dollar arms sale – issued, not by Boeing or Northrup or Lockheed, but by the President of the United States.

Our Vicious Economic Circle

2010-08-15T11:39:00.004-04:00

My favorite economist, A. Gary Shilling, has been recommending the long Treasury bond for so long that some gurus have dismissed him as a Johnny One-Note. But the results, had you followed his advice, would have been spectacular. If you had invested $100 in a 25-year zero-coupon Treasury bond in October 1981 and kept rolling it over each year to maintain the 25-year maturity, your $100 would have grown to $16,695 in June 2010. Meanwhile, had you invested $100 in the S&P500 at its low in July 1982, you would now have $1997 (including dividend reinvestment). So much for financial advisers who tell you that stocks always outperform bonds.

Okay, the doubters say, so Shilling has been right for the last three decades, but now interest rates are so low that they can’t go any lower. Not so. The long bond is still yielding about 4%, and if it drops to 3% it will generate a healthy capital gain – even healthier if you buy a zero coupon bond, as he suggests, and roll it over. Gary has been forecasting deflation for years, even writing a book or two on the subject, and he is not changing his tune a whit.

What does all this mean for the U.S. economy? Here’s the problem: Our economy was, as everyone now sees, a house of sand, built on too-easy credit. People bought houses they could not afford, ran up credit-card debt they could not service, and lived a life style impossible to sustain. Meanwhile, a huge retail infrastructure was built to service that easy-credit lifestyle (see my blog post “Overmalled,” dated October 29, 2007). Everyone now realizes that, but what does it mean for the future?

The only way to resuscitate the U.S. economy quickly and painlessly is to restore the very easy-credit environment that brought us down. Some members of Congress are in fact advocating that approach (they would not admit that, of course), and the President and his economic team have come perilously close to the line, maintaining that a “cold turkey” approach would trigger catastrophe. But once you start pushing banks and others to relax loan standards, it’s a very slippery slope – greased, moreover, with the politics of mid-term elections.

Levering was great fun; delevering is no fun, but it must be done. So people will not rush to the malls but will build their savings, because they are, understandably, worried about their futures. Investors will increasingly avoid most stocks and look for dividend-paying securities, the safer the better.

And underlying these realities is another, more serious problem: We have a President who has made clear his distaste for the business of business, especially big business. Bankers are fat cats, the drug companies are dishonest, insurance companies are crooks. Notwithstanding all the Presidential rhetoric glorifying the small machine shop or the corner hamburger joint, it is companies who hire people by the thousands that make the difference. And this President doesn’t inspire their confidence.

Shilling was right; deflation is here.

Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

2010-07-23T09:39:00.006-04:00

One day in 1934, Joseph Shadgen asked his 12-year-old daughter Jacqueline what she had learned in school that day.

“We learned that the United States is 158 years old this year.”

“How do you figure that?” her father asked.

“Because the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776,” Jacqueline answered.

“That is not right,” Joseph said. Joseph, an immigrant from Luxembourg, knew his American history. “The Declaration of Independence was just that – a declaration of an intention. Nothing happened in 1776 to create a country. The United States was born the day it elected its first president, George Washington, in 1789.”

Jacqueline was unconvinced, but later that year Joseph’s arithmetic led him to conclude that the United States would celebrate its 150th birthday in 1939, five years hence, just enough time to plan Joseph Shadgen’s big idea: A New York World’s Fair.

The 1939 World’s Fair, remembered, if at all, for its iconic trylon and perisphere, drew 45 million people to its Flushing Meadows site in 1939 and 1940. When it was conceived in 1934, its theme was The World of Tomorrow, but by the time it opened, World War 2 had already begun. Thus the title of James Mauro’s excellent new book on the Fair is Twilight at the World of Tomorrow.

Joseph Shadgen’s big idea was taken over by New York’s banking and political movers and shakers, and especially by a larger-than-life promoter named Grover Whalen. The World’s Fair turns out to be a metaphor for life in the United States in the 1930s, and all the headline-makers are on hand: Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Franklin Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, Superman, Batman, and even Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.

Pavilions showcased the visions of tomorrow as promised by GE, GM (“Futurama”), DuPont, Con Edison, RCA (television) and other industrial giants. Country pavilions included some, like Czechoslovakia and Poland, whose homelands were swallowed up while the Fair was in progress. Noteworthy factoid: When Grover Whalen’s initial sales campaign was sputtering, the two countries that gave him his breakthrough sales were the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy!

Another nugget: The Flushing Meadows site chosen for the Fair was a huge ash heap known as the Corona Dumps, and its proximity to the more posh neighborhoods on Long Island led F. Scott Fitzgerald to call his new novel Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires until an editor persuaded him to change the title to The Great Gatsby.

The book is well written, meticulously researched, and fascinating to read, especially if you are old enough to remember flying into LaGuardia and seeing the skeleton of the old perisphere, stripped of its gypsum, decades after all the other traces of the World’s Fair had disappeared, looking eerily like the Statue of Liberty in the last scene of Planet of the Apes.

________________________________________
Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World’s Fair on the Brink of War, by James Mauro. Ballantine Books, $28.

Unintended Consequences

2010-07-17T19:59:00.001-04:00

When President Obama returns to his office from Maine, he will sign an 800-page financial reform bill, which will be proclaimed (by him) as the most far-reaching and beneficial financial legislation in at least 50 years. You have to give the man credit. He has tackled some of the most pressing issues of our times, boldly and full of self-confidence, without much help from the Republicans. They are his bills.

But 800 pages is a lot to read – bigger by far than Gone With the Wind – so we have to assume that the President hasn’t read it, but has left that to staff, and therein lies the rub. It would be nice to believe that the economic gurus have vetted the document and were satisfied that at least it would do no harm. But, grading the bill for the Wall Street Journal, Henry Paulson says “there are too many unknowns as to how the regulations will be applied.” Harvey Pitt, an accounting heavyweight and a former SEC chief, grades it an F. Pimco’s Bill Gross, who manages more money than almost anyone, gives the bill a D+. Nouriel Roubini, an economics superstar these days, gives it a C+. A few are more generous, but among experts who may be assumed to have read all or most the bill, the reviews are poor. If it were a Broadway play, the closing notices would have been posted.

Okay, so whom did the President rely on to go through the 800 pages, subparagraph by subparagraph? Let me guess. Not Rahm Emmanuel, certainly. And probably not Tim Geithner, whose plate is full. How about Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, or rather their staffs? Frank and Dodd are hard workers, and we assume their staffs work even harder. It’s a political deal, after all, sewed up (barely) with the help of Scott Brown and the two senators from Maine (now we know why Obama flew to Bar Harbor rather than the Gulf Coast for a quick vacation). Let’s acknowledge that the President knows how to pull the right political levers. But does that guarantee that the legislation is sound? No.

To begin with, who told the President about the possible unintended consequences of this bill? Who laid out a scenario under which the legislation would not prevent another financial collapse but would in fact precipitate one? President George W. Bush relied on the neocons surrounding him to draw up a plan to invade Iraq. The case for invasion was a “slam dunk,” they said, but where was the voice telling him all the things that might go wrong – no WMD, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, civil war – and the far-reaching consequences. (One assumes that Colin Powell was such a voice, before he was sacked.)

The finreg bill is not as bloody as Iraq, but Afghanistan is getting there, and one can see a coming collision between the President’s deep desire to pull out and the militarists’ demands for victory. Whichever way he leans, there will be unintended consequences, and they won’t be pretty.

Nor will the unintended consequences of financial regulation. The hordes of new committees and their lawyers and a tidal wave of new regulations could strangle the economy just when the first faint flickers of a recovery are on the horizon. I hope that President Obama has put his new bill through a stress test, but I doubt it.

Schumer the Almighty

2010-07-16T10:12:00.002-04:00

From a story in today’s New York Times on the antenna problems experienced by some users of Apple’s new iPhone 4:

“Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, wrote an open letter to Mr. Jobs on Thursday demanding that Apple give customers a ‘permanent fix’ for the problem at no cost.”

Chuck Schumer’s power knows no bounds. Private companies, sovereign countries, all are under his thumb. He doesn’t ask; he demands. His latest domain is the business and technology of telecommunications technology.

What next?

“Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, commenting on the quality of Raisin Bran, demanded that Kellogg’s increase the number of raisins in each package of the cereal at no cost to the customer.”

“Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, charging that some orange juice cartons labeled “Lots of Pulp” did not in fact contain lots of pulp, demanded that a Government commission be established to set pulp standards for orange juice.”

“Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York demanded that the Miami Heat immediately trade LeBron James to the New York Knicks.”

“Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York demanded that Japanese and Korean auto manufacturers close their Southern U.S. plants and move them to Buffalo.”

“Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York demanded that polling organizations revise their data to reflect what he maintained was the American public’s overwhelmingly positive opinion of the U.S. Congress.”

Blogs Available in Book Form

2010-06-27T17:09:00.002-04:00

Tides in the Affairs of Men, a new collection of these blog postings, is now available for sale at www.lulu.com. (Search under book title.) The new book contains material published over the past 2-1/2 years, including most of the essays from Sand Point Chronicles, which will no longer be sold. The first two collections, Searching for Joan Leslie and Lines from the Beachcomber, will still be available.

Inside Information

2010-06-07T10:12:00.003-04:00

We are in the late innings of a Congressional push to enact financial reform, based on the notion that the game has been rigged and that we need to change the rules. That’s no doubt true, but I wonder about the process. Reform is needed, but who’s watching the reformers?

Let me explain. The courts are clogged these days with insider-trading cases, the assumption being that those who buy or sell stock with the advantage of material information about the company are illegally profiting by these actions. The alleged profiteers are usually securities analysts, hedge-fund managers, or others working for financial institutions or publicly owned companies.

The cases are rarely open and shut. On Wall Street, rumors are thick as flies at a garbage dump. Harry passes a story along to Joe, who passes it along to Steve, who buys 10,000 shares and scores a direct hit. Or maybe not; the story may be spurious, so he loses his shirt. Of course, if the story comes from the company’s chief financial officer, that’s another kettle of fish, but that’s very, very rare; most CFOs are too smart to act so foolishly.

Inside information flows through subterranean channels. The financial press is one such channel. Reporters have access to many insiders at trade shows, press conferences, etc. A fragment here, a fragment there, and the cat’s out of the bag.

But the biggest conduit for inside information may not be the financial world or the press, but the thousands of bureaucrats who regularly have knowledge of information that’s worth millions to any stock trader. The stories with the biggest impact on stock prices often originate at some government agency. Think of the opportunities. You work at the Food and Drug Administration, and you know that in a day or two the FDA will report that a new drug, potentially a blockbuster, has failed a phase 3 test. Or you work at the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission, and you know that the Government will file suit against such and such a company for illegal trade practices. Or you work at the FCC, and you know that a pending sale of TV stations will or will not be approved.

For that matter, members of Congressional committees regularly sound off on CNBC and have a built-in opportunity to attack a company in the course of a televised hearing. Most of what they say is just political grandstanding, but they have the power to move the market, and only they and their aides know in advance what they will say.

I don’t know of any such malfeasance, but that’s the point. Is it possible, in this era of rampant corruption by elected officials, that the entire federal regulatory apparatus and our Congressional watchdogs are squeaky clean? Or is it possible that a torrent of inside information flows from the corridors of federal power to trading accounts in the names of girlfriends, brothers-in law, friends of friends, and others outside the monitoring zone?

If there had been one or two front-page stories about such leakage, I would not be so suspicious. But if there have been such stories, I missed them. And so we are left with the politically correct conclusion: Wall Street is filled with crooks, and the Government is filled with honest people who work hard to protect us from the crooks.

Maybe.

What Price Privacy?

2010-06-01T22:07:00.002-04:00

No better illustration of the confused state of public discourse these days is this: At a time when everyone is worried about identity theft and loss of personal privacy, the same everyone is also using social networking sites like Facebook to tell everyone everything about themselves. “Look at me” or “Listen to me” seems to be the new universal mantra.

There was a time, not too long ago, when privacy was a mark of decorum. There were certain things you just didn’t tell others unless you knew them very well. Women were especially discreet, in dress as well as in conversation, and a gentleman would never betray a confidence. I am not talking about characters in Masterpiece Theater. Ordinary people like my parents valued privacy in the 50s and 60s.

Then something happened. Candidates for office were expected to disclose their income tax returns, and peccadillos were fair game for reporters. All this was in the name of fair disclosure. A senator who cheated on his wife would cheat on his constituents, the story went, and those 1040s would enable us to know whether someone was a crook. Suddenly we felt entitled to know everything about office-holders and candidates, whether or not the alleged facts were relevant.

Now the revelations have hit the digital fan, and there is no turning back. Worst of all, the public is getting in on the action, in its search for 10 minutes of fame. Anybody can be an American Idol or put his or her face and voice on YouTube. Tonight’s news told of young girls who were lured to meetings (and, in some cases, to their deaths) by on-line pedophiles. Identity thefts are rampant. Did you know that copying machines have hard drives? How many tax returns and other documents are waiting for someone to mine that data? Do you really believe your credit card and social security numbers are secure?

Last night I placed about 15 books in an on-line basket. Then I read the privacy policy of the merchant, who ran a network of bookstores, each of whom would have access to my credit card number. I didn’t buy the books.

I don’t care about Governor Spitzer’s hookers or about Barack Obama’s tax return. If the hookers meant Spitzer was malfeasant, well, there are people whose job it is to find that out, and Barack Obama is entitled to the same privacy as I am with respect to his tax returns. (One of the Kennedys – Ted’s son Joe, I believe- once suggested that everyone’s tax return should be a matter of the public record, but we’re not there yet, thank God.)

I am not on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or any of the others, and I stonewall the many invitations I receive to join the crowd. Of course I do have a blog, and that inevitably causes some loss of privacy. I will have to think about that one.

Snow Cake

2010-05-13T23:30:00.003-04:00

Alex Hughes had a fling with a girl named Rebecca a long time ago. A son was born of that fling, a son Alex never knew. Then, years later, he found out, and he arranged to meet his son for dinner at a restaurant in London Alex had never married, and there would probably be no other children, so he waited for his only offspring with great anticipation. But his son never came. He had been killed by a motorist while crossing the street. An enraged Alex found the errant driver, hit him, and knocked him down. The motorist died, and Alex was sentenced to several years in prison for manslaughter. He serves his time and is released, but the totality of the experience leaves him a desolate man, with little to live for.

Desperate for some kind of closure, Alex searches for Rebecca and finds that she is living in Winnipeg. So he sets out for Winnipeg, not by the most direct route, but by flying from London to Toronto, renting a car, and setting out overland for Manitoba.

All this takes place before the movie opens. You will find it out, piecemeal, but I am not spoiling the story by telling you that much. The movie is called Snow Cake. It was made in 2006. It was written by Angela Pell and directed by Marc Evans. And almost nobody has ever heard of it.

Which is a shame, because it’s an engrossing, well written, brilliantly acted story about what happens to Alex Hughes on the way to Manitoba. To tell you more would be wrong, because it is a story best appreciated when you don’t know what’s coming next.

The leading roles are played by Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver. Emily Hampshire is memorable in a key supporting role. The movie cost petty cash to make and was filmed in about a month. In the era of mega-movies, Snow Cake reminds us that a good story, well acted and well written, need not cost a fortune. The corollary is that a $100 million movie without a good story well told can be a turkey. Some years ago, as we left the theater after seeing Titanic, Jill summed it up thus: “There were 1500 people on that ship, and they couldn’t find a story better than that?”

Strange Times

2010-05-12T23:15:00.004-04:00

Here’s the deal: You buy a one-year Treasury bill that will pay you $100,000 at maturity. It costs you $99,952 (T bills are prediscounted). Your broker charges you $60 to execute the transaction. Since the fee exceeds the interest, you have actually lost money for your trouble.

Or try this: You invest $100,000 in one of Fidelity’s government money market funds. After a month goes by, you check your account and find that in return for the use of your $100,000 you have earned the grand sum of one dollar.

Now you see why, despite the dreadful economic numbers, the stock market keeps climbing. There are, for most people, only three reservoirs available for storing wealth: stocks, bonds, and real estate. Real estate, long regarded as a sure-fire investment, is now poison. Bonds pay next to nothing unless you accept high risk or go long-term. So it’s back to the stock-market casino. The CNBC anchors tell you that the economic numbers are not dreadful at all, ignoring (1) the unemployment rate, (2) the national debt, (3) the budget deficit, and (4) the balance of trade.

There is another reason for the Dow’s ascent: If you are a wealthy European, do you really want your money sitting in pounds or francs or lira? No, so you buy dollar-denominated assets. You tell yourself that your wealth is safe in the U.S. because the U.S. is too big to fail. (Where have we heard that before?)

Buying stocks of good companies is not stupid. If you are worried that eventually runaway inflation will eat you alive, consider this: If you buy one share of Apple stock, you own one 910-millionth of the Company. Now, assuming that Apple doesn’t have to sell more stock ($23 billion in the bank says they won’t) you will still own one 910-millionth of the Company no matter what happens to the dollar. So, in a sense, Apple is an inflation hedge. The same can be said of other companies that have strong balance sheets and good growth prospects. Alas, there aren’t many companies that make it through that filter. And remember, some respected economists say that deflation, not inflation, is the more likely danger.

These are strange times, the strangest I’ve seen in a half century of market-watching. The federal government is selling zillions of short-term bills and notes at zero cost. Banks can get almost as good a deal, thanks to the Fed. Borrowing at less than 1 percent and lending at, say, 6 percent is nice work if you can get it.

It reminds me of an old joke about the fellow who shows up at his school’s reunion in a private helicopter, much to the surprise of his classmates who remember him as the dumbest kid in school, especially in mathematics.

“How on earth did you amass such wealth?” one classmate asks him.

“It was easy,” he answered. “I make these gadgets for 1 cent and I sell them for 5 cents, and you’d be amazed at how that 4 percent adds up.”

Clarence and Melissa

2010-05-11T22:59:00.002-04:00

a short short story

Clarence looked up from his New York Times and asked, “Melissa, must you sing during breakfast? It’s really quite annoying.”

“Sorry, father,” Melissa said. Melissa was 19 and a sophomore in college, home for the Christmas holidays. She had been singing a popular song unknown to her father (or to most people of his generation). In fact, Melissa’s knowledge of the lyrics was spotty, so that at key parts of the narrative (if there was one), she drifted into “la la di dum dum.” Clarence’s objections could be summarized thus: first, her voice was flat or sharp (he couldn’t tell which, but he suspected it was both, if such a thing were possible); second, she sang everything fortissimo, if not fortississimo, which was like getting a generous helping of bad food; third, her repertoire was limited to songs written in the last six months. no Kern, no Rodgers, no Gershwin. If he asked her who wrote a song she was singing, she would say something like The Bad Boys or Crazy Red Poles or The Hairy Grape.

One should add that Melissa was very serious about her singing. At college, while she had the good sense not to enlist in the glee club or one of the many a capella groups on campus, she did join the Dramatic Club, where she had small parts in their undertakings. In The Importance of Being Earnest, for instance, she played Algernon’s manservant Lane, a role recrafted as a female for this production. In these efforts Melissa was quite adequate, because she was given no opportunity to sing. But she enjoyed singing, more than she enjoyed anything else in life.

Clarence was a patient man, and his outburst at breakfast was unusual. Clarence’s wife had died the year before, and he had not yet learned how to be both parents. Clarence was still in his forties, an age that invited thoughts of exploring new social frontiers, but there was no hurry. His work as a lawyer kept him busy, and then there was Melissa, an only child. Beautiful Melissa, with her mother’s eyes.

“I’m sorry to be sharp with you, Melissa,” he said. “I know you like your music.”

“Maybe we could do something musical together,” she said. “You know, go to a concert, maybe.”

The word “concert” struck terror into his heart. He knew what young people meant by concerts, and it was not Rachmaninoff. Still, it was an opening he could not resist,

“Sure,” he said. “Pick something out and we’ll go.”

And so it was that father and daughter went to a concert give by a touring group of Irish singers, 20 in all, young men and young women, singing Celtic and contemporary pop songs. Clarence was greatly impressed by their musicianship, and Melissa was so taken with the concert that she sang two or three songs over and over as they drove home.

“That was a very good show,” father said to daughter. “Didn’t you think so?”

“Oh, yes, Dad. I’d love to join a group like that.”

“Well,” he said doubtfully, it probably takes a lot of time, which is something you don’t have much of these days.”

“Not during the school year,” she said earnestly, “but summers I could find time. This summer I’ll look for some job where I can sing. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Clarence said guardedly. Maybe you could try out for something in summer stock. On the Cape, maybe.” It wouldn’t do to discourage her from singing, but he might encourage her to study acting. Or set design or costumes or props. Anything but singing.

And so, after Clarence talked to a friend who summered at Chatham, he found a friend of that friend who knew the man who ran a summer theater on the Cape, and Melissa was taken on as an acting apprentice. She was ecstatic about her good fortune and above ecstatic when she was given a nonspeaking part in The Most Happy Fella, the first production on the summer’s schedule. Actually, she told her father on the phone, she was a member of a crowd, but they all were to join in a chorus of “Abbondanza!” She was going to SING! Hearing this, Clarence hoped the chorus was a large one.

Clarence drove down to the Cape for opening night, and noted that Melissa’s singing was not only drowned out but that she was positively aglow on the stage. Was it fatherly pride, or was Melissa the most involved person in every scene, reacting with intelligence and energy? Maybe, he chuckled to himself, she was born to be the greatest actress-in-a-crowd-scene who ever lived.

The next summer, the summer after her junior year, she returned to the Playhouse, and was given small parts in all five productions - two musicals and three straight plays. The leads were all taken by members of Actor’s Equity, and one of them gave Melissa the name of a voice coach who summered in Hyannis, and soon thereafter Melissa was singing scales at the home of the coach, a woman of Wagnerian proportions and an intimidating demeanor.

“You want to sing for a living?” the woman asked incredulously.

“Yes, I do, very much,” said Melissa.

“Mmmmm.” the woman said. “Your voice is strong. But it is also flat.”

“Flat?” Melissa said, as if her questioner were speaking Swahili.

“Flat. It is, to be blunt, painfully flat.”

“Can you teach me to sing?” Melissa asked urgently, so urgently that the coach was moved.

“I will give you two lessons. Then we will decide.”

In the life of every success there is a moment that serves as a hinge of fate. If it swings one way, opportunity follows opportunity. If it swings the other way, there is nothing but failure and frustration. Melissa’s hinge swung providentially when Madam Domine said, “I will give you two lessons.”

At the first lesson, Madame Domine taught Melissa to sing softly. Her normal voice was loud, and her natural flatness was amplified a thousandfold. “When we eliminate the flatness – if we can – then you will learn to modulate. And then, and only then, can you open up again."

Melissa worked – hard – all the next week, on exercises she had been given, and at the second lesson, Madame Domine was startled to hear the flatness all but gone. She was witnessing the triumph of determination over nature. The girl’s ears and vocal chords were the same as they were the week before, but where there had been noise, now there was music. The coach was intrigued – no, challenged, just as Henry Higgins was challenged by Eliza Doolittle. The lessons would continue.

By now you must have guessed the ending of our little story. Melissa graduated from college and then moved to New York to start her assault of Broadway. While at home, she rarely sang, and she did not mention her voice lessons to Clarence, who attended several plays at the Playhouse, mostly straight plays in which Melissa had small parts.
He realized that her ambition burned as ardently as ever, and he bankrolled one summer’s expenses in New York. By the end of the summer, he was sure, she would return to Boston, a sadder but wiser Broadway Baby.

But Melissa’s voice had lost its flatness and was now strong and true and ready for prime time. There were auditions, but not many before the word got around: Here was a comer. First, she was an understudy to the second lead. Then she won the lead in a road company of She Loves Me, scheduled to open in Boston. By this time she had told Clarence about her voice lessons, and he was mildly interested. Now she phoned him to say there would be two tickets at the Colonial box office in his name on opening night, and that she was playing THE LEAD!

Clarence brought along a woman who was an attorney at his law office, and they settled into their fourth-row seats. On stage, Melissa was dazzling, and by the time Amalia Balash (her character) sang “Dear Friend,” tears were rolling down his cheeks. Later, when her unmiked voice filled the theater with “Ice Cream,” he was dumbfounded. Where did she get that voice?

After the show, in her dressing room, he repeated the question. “Where did you ever get that voice?”

“Is that your way of saying I was pretty bad before?”

“Well----“

That’s okay, Dad, I know I was awful. But I had two things that made all the difference. I must have gotten them from you and Mom.”

“And they were?”

“Determination and persistence, Dad. Without them, talent isn’t enough. With them, a little talent can take you a long way in this business,”

The Day the Dow Dropped 1000

2010-05-06T20:45:00.005-04:00

At one time today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 1000 points. Then it rallied and finished the day down 300-plus. Several factors were listed by the evening pundits: the situation in Greece, a couple of glitches (including a trader’s entering an order for a billion dollars when he meant a million!), and general market nervousness. The three Gs, we'll call them: Greece, Glitches, and Gloom.

First, Greece: The TV screens were filled all day with scenes of phalanxes of Athens policemen facing off against mobs, made up mostly of public-sector union members. When a government is threatened with bankruptcy (as Greece surely is) and must resort to an austerity program, public-sector employees are high on the cut list, because their unions have demanded and won outsized pay and benefit packages over the years.

In this country it is no different, and when the federal government and the states bite the bullet and declare their own austerity programs, the public-sector employees will take to the streets. (The private sector, presumably, will be at work.) The new governor of New Jersey, squeezed by his State’s miserable finances, spells out the stakes: A 49-year-old public-sector retiree in New Jersey will get $3.8 million in pension and health benefits despite having paid only $124,000 for them. “Is that fair?” he asks. The unions no doubt would answer with a resounding “Yes!”

General Motors illustrates where such largesse leads you, but if you don’t sell cars, you don’t have a job, whereas you will always need teachers, policemen, firemen, and social workers. Only maybe not so many of them, as Greece will now find out.

Glitches: Computers are a wonderful thing, but is the power to buy or sell a million shares at a click of a mouse a good thing? Trading regulations have not caught up to technology, and until it does, we need circuit breakers. Remember them? It used to be that whenever the Dow fell by 250 points, all trading was stopped for some period of time (10 minutes, I think). We are in an era where speed is all. Today's Times has a long article bemoaning the fact that a Red Sox – Yankees game averages about 3-1/2 hours. So what? The game starts at 7, and 10:30 is hardly an ungodly hour to head home, especially if the game is exciting, as most Sox – Yanks games are. Similarly, would the world end if it took 10 seconds to trade a stock, rather than a microsecond?

Gloom: It is true that most stock-market traders are worried. They are worried about their jobs, about the chance of terrorist attacks, about the national debt. But underlying everything they are mindful that their government is not on their side. The President rails against “fat-cat” bankers, dishonest insurance companies, and Wall Street bonuses. Watching Congress questioning the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, etc. is like watching the lions devouring Christians. The starting assumption in most public debate these days is this: The people managing your money are a bunch of crooks, and we’re going to get them, by gum.

If you have money to invest and believe this, you will not invest it in the stock market. You will put it under your mattress.

Life is still comfortable for most people in the United States because of the flywheel effect. For decades – from the Second World War to about 1990 – we had the most productive, enterprising, dynamic economic engine in human history. That engine is still spinning, but it is slowing down, like a flywheel deprived of its power. Unless we quickly resuscitate the risk-taking spirit and start cheering for those who create wealth instead of beating them up, the flywheel will stop, and Washington will resemble Athens.

Rally 'Round the Beach, Boys

2010-04-25T09:31:00.001-04:00

An epidemic of paranoia has broken out at Goose Rocks Beach. The disease is familiar to everyone who owns oceanfront property and everyone who does not but wants to share in the pleasures of the seashore. “The beach belongs to everyone” goes the chant, and it is taken up one year in Long Island, another year in Nantucket, and another in New Jersey. This year it is Maine’s turn.

It began when about two dozen beach-front owners, noting that their deeds defined their property as extending to the low-water mark, claimed the right to eject trespassers from that part of the beach they owned. “Nonsense,” said the Town of Kennebunkport, “people have been walking Goose Rocks Beach from end to end for many decades, and the beach is now public by prescriptive easement.”

In olden times, when Maine was part of Massachusetts, the public was said to enjoy the right to walk, fish, fowl, and whatever else passed for recreation in the seventeenth century – in the area between the high and low water marks. The Town dismisses any such constraints, holding that modern beachgoers should be free to indulge in such twenty-first century pursuits as Frisbee throwing, picnicking, and volleyball.

Wherever the War of the Beaches is waged, the press stands ready to frame it as a holy war, a battle between the privileged few and the deserving masses. For law firms, of course, the few and the masses are just so many billable hours.

The paranoia is especially virulent in these contentious times. What at core is a rather prosaic legal point – whether deeds trump long-standing usage or vice versa – has turned into a crusade, with the crusaders marching under a banner emblazoned with SAVE OUR BEACHES. One side paints pictures of fences sprouting up and down the beach and KEEP OFF signs on the beautiful sands of Goose Rocks. The other side warns that if the beach is surrendered, hordes of drunken teen-agers will converge on Goose Rocks at spring break, with dune buggies not far behind.

A crucial battle will be fought in June, when the Town will vote to approve (or not) a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees to flight the 25 property owners. This is a considerable sum in a Town whose population is about 3500. With appeals, it could become more considerable.

It all reminds me of a 50s novel, Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys, by Max Shulman. The fictional town of Putnam’s Landing is chosen as a missile launch site, splitting the community into the hawks and doves of the day, and ending with an accidental (and hilarious) launch of an ICBM. The book was very funny, the movie (with Paul Newman) less so, but the idiocy of extremism is as ridiculous at Goose Rocks today as it was at Putnam’s Landing a half century ago.

__________________________________________
For the record, I live at Goose Rocks, but not on the beach front. As I see it, both sides have reasonable arguments. And when the smoke clears and the lawyers have been paid, nothing will have changed.

American Political Idol

2010-04-06T21:36:00.005-04:00

At the prodding of my children, I recently watched American Idol and Dancing With the Stars, and I can report that both are (1) not as good as the younger generation claims and (2) not as bad as I had feared. Much is made of mediocrity on these shows, and the occasional talented performer is treated like The Second Coming. Most of the judges understand that they are there to feed the audience frenzy, either by overhyping the singer or dancer or by delivering a deserved panning (boos and hisses from the performer’s claque).

The shows are enormously popular, and, since they are relatively cheap to produce, ring the cash registers at Fox and ABC. So mine is a minority opinion, but that’s okay; I am often out of sync with popular taste. Some say it’s a generational thing, and that could be true.

I will have to admit that the format of American Idol and Dancing With the Stars is interesting and may be applicable to weightier subjects.

Like, for instance, politics.

Consider the possibilities. The Republican Party, wishing to field the strongest presidential candidate in 2012, has each candidate deliver his or her best stump speech before a panel of judges, all eminent political consultants.

First, ladies and gentlemen, we will hear from that bombshell from Alaska, Sarah…..PALIN!!! (enthusiastic applause)

Palin does her best frontierswoman speech, punctuated liberally with homey touches and unflattering references to Harvard.

Judge 1: I knew you had it in you, Sarah, but you really hit it out of the park that time. A big YES! (ecstatic screams from the audience)

Judge 2. I think you need to work more on that accent, Sarah. You sounded too much like a Midwesterner. I’m afraid it’s a no. (loud boos)

Judge 3. Well, Sarah, you got my vote. That story about looking across the Bering Strait at Russia did it. A big big big YES! (hysterical cheering)

Now let’s hear our second contestant, Senator John McCain.

McCain: My friends, this country is in trouble. The country is bankrupt my friends, and yet our President has been saddling our children and grandchildren and their friends with a huge new entitlement. My friends, it’s time for a change. (and on and on in this vein)

Judge 1: (is caught by the camera, snoring)

Judge 2. Senator, that was the best I’ve ever heard you, and it was still terrible.

Judge 3. I think you need to liven it up, Senator. Maybe you could do a soft shoe, or do some rope tricks, like Will Rogers.

Now our final candidate for tonight, Mike Huckabee!

Huckabee: I’m going to sing a little tune I wrote on the way over tonight, and I hope y’all like it. (sits on a stool, plucks guitar)

(singing) You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You’ll make me happy by choosing me
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you
Oh please give your vote to Mike Huckabee.

(wild, uncontrolled cheering from the audience)

Judge 1: Well, that says it all, Mike. A huge, huge YES!!! (more cheering)

Judge 2: I thought your singing was awesome, and you sure could play that guitar. And that song was the catchiest tune I’ve ever heard! (crowd yells “yes!”)

Judge 3: You just blew me away, man. I got all choked up when you sang that song. Mike, you are the greatest. (audience erupts, singing chorus of “You are my sunshine”)

Is that a show, or is that a show?

The Politician

2010-04-01T23:32:00.002-04:00

The President touched down in Maine today, presumably as a “let’s be friends” gesture to Senators Collins and Snowe, two Republicans seen as possible allies in future political battles. Then it was off to Massachusetts, to share a “video op” with Governor Patrick (up for reelection this year) and to raise funds for the Bay State Dems. Officially, it was a swing north to survey the wreckage from the recent rainstorms, but Rhode Island, the hardest hit State, was not on the itinerary.

Does all that sound cynical? Well, I’m sorry, but there is no other way to put it. Barack Obama, whom I once praised as a latter-day Cicero, has shown himself to be just another pol. “I don’t believe the American people want to put the insurance industry back in the driver’s seat,” the President said today in Portland. Okay, Mr. President, we get it, we get it: The insurance companies are crooks. This follows the following stump statement: “I didn’t come down on the side of the banks and financial institutions; I came down on the side of the people.” We get that, too: Bankers are not to be trusted, because they are conniving “fat cats.”

Since the President is too smart to believe all that, a cynical reading is the only possible explanation. He demonizes banks and insurance companies because his pollsters tell him that’s the best line these days and it is much, much safer than talk about the deficit or Afghanistan or Netanyahu or the unemployment rate.

The thing he is missing, I think, is that when a businessman hears the President attacking banks and insurance companies (with gusto!), he takes it as an attack on all business. The President just doesn’t know that he sounds as if he has it in for the entire private sector – the sector he needs on his side if we are to mend our economy. He doesn’t get it, because, alas, this President has never run a business. Or even worked for a business.

Or take his speech the other day on reforming student loans. He bemoaned the fact that students too often graduate from college handicapped by a heavy debt load. So, said the President, he is riding to the rescue, capping a graduate’s annual repayment to 15 percent of his or her income. But, he added, if the graduate goes into public service - if he becomes, say, a politician or a community organizer - the cap will be set at only 10 percent. What kind of message does that send to the private sector?

But, to return to the point, this is a political animal, pure and simple. The timing, the self-deprecating humor, the over-all level of oratory is pure music, and you have to admire it. But when you listen to the lyrics, you understand that this is a committed leftist, dedicated to shifting as much power as possible from the private to the public sector. One hopes that the economy survives the assault, but the issue is in doubt

The Centrist President

2010-03-21T20:50:00.003-04:00

“I don’t trust him.”

Those were the last words I heard from my wife on the subject of Barack Obama. They were not the words of a woman who was politically naïve. They did not derive from the distance between his eyes, much less the color of his skin. They were the words of a serious student of the political process, a woman who kept a copy of the Constitution by her side for ready access.

She had made the point before. As she saw it, he was a masterful actor, playing the part of a centrist, because it was the only way he could be elected President. But she heard enough tip-offs to convince her it was all an act. Being much less politically savvy than Jill, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I was bowled over by his oratorical skill, which, I thought, would enable him to lead a divided nation. Jill, on the other hand, held that once he was in the White House, we would see the real Obama. She was, as usual, right as rain.

Barack Obama’s historic victory convinced him and his team that the country had declared itself ready for a leftward swing. It was a watershed event, he reasoned, signaling that people were fed up with the excesses of capitalism and ready to yield more control to Washington. But the election was not about that at all. Barack Obama won because he was not George W. Bush. And George W. Bush wound up a pariah, not because he was a capitalist, but because he allowed himself to be maneuvered into invading Iraq, and all the terrible baggage that came with it. The people who orchestrated the election of Barack Obama were the neocons behind the WMD fiction. Without them (and a pliable President), the White House and Congress would still be in Republican hands, because we are still a center-right nation. Nice going, Dick Cheney.

Now it is the evening of President Obama’s great victory on health care. No one is talking much about the centrist President now, about the great healer who will unite a fractured country. The atmosphere is poisonous tonight, and people are angry. The President may well feel that by November the acrimony will be forgotten. He may be right, especially if the economy improves. But if it doesn’t, he will confront a Republican Congress with one thing on its mind: payback.

One thing is sure: Jill saw right through Obama the Great Centrist, Obama the Great Orator. He fooled a lot of people, including me, but he couldn’t fool Jill.

Chess, the Musical

2010-03-08T23:06:00.005-05:00

One night in early 1986 I found myself in London’s West End, looking for good theater. A marquee announced a musical called Chess, and I, a musical theater fan and a chess player, was hooked. A review posted in the ticket lobby gushed that one of the show’s songs, “I Know Him So Well,” was one of the finest book songs the reviewer had ever heard. That reeled me in.

The show was – I strain to be kind here – passable. The setting was a world chess championship, the protagonists the current title holder, an obnoxious American, and the challenger, a Russian. You have to bear in mind (1) that the Cold War was in full flower in the 80s and (2) that the memory of the famous championship match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer was still fresh. The political overtones heightened the drama of that match (which Fischer won) and cried out for a theatrical treatment.

Tim Rice, who had collaborated with Andrew Lloyd-Webber to give the world Evita, tried to talk the composer into a project based on a chess championship match between an American and a Russian, but Lloyd-Webber was deep into other projects at the time, and passed. Rice then (in 1981) joined with half of the (then dissolving) Abba team, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, and a musical called Chess started taking shape.

The problem, as I remember it, was a clumsy book and an inadequate score. (“Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln….”) The staging was another minus. The stage was dominated by a large chessboard, tilted at an angle, which managed to upstage the actors. Only two songs were memorable: “One Night in Bangkok” and “I Know Him So Well.” Rice should have waited until Lloyd-Webber’s calendar was free.

The show ran in London for three years, but was still a financial and critical failure. Still, the basic idea was good, and Rice sat down to rewrite in preparation for taking Chess to Broadway. One good song (“Someone Else’s Story”) was added, and the character of the American was softened. The massively rewritten Chess opened in New York in April 1988 – and died 68 performances later, losing millions.

So why am I telling you about such an all-out floperoo? Because it has resurfaced again, this time as a so-called concert version, staged at London’s Royal Albert Hall and available to Americans on DVD. And it is very, very good.

First, don’t let the words “concert version” fool you. This is a huge production, with a philharmonic orchestra, a large chorus, dancers, and rear projections to suggest Italy (Act 1) and Thailand (Act 2). The cast is topnotch, notably Josh Groban as the Russian and Adam Pascal as the American. The music has been greatly improved over the years, or maybe the original was better than it sounded; that orchestra and chorus may have made the difference.

Rice hasn’t forgotten the touches that made Evita so riveting. Who can forget the tableau of the Buenos Aires upper class, gliding en masse from one side of the stage to the other while denouncing Peron’s mistress? In Chess, a group of “old boys” at the British embassy cluck their displeasure at all the asylum-seekers cluttering up their offices. And a character called “The Arbiter” serves much the same purpose as does Che in Evita.

Some plotting weaknesses still show, especially in Act 2, and the song “Someone Else’s Story” is inexplicably given to the Russian’s wife rather than to his girlfriend. But these flaws are outweighed by the effect of what is, over-all, a dazzling production.

Rice is rumored to be planning another go at Broadway, but a Chess on the scale of the Royal Albert concert would be financially impossible in New York. My suggestion is to grab the DVD, because Chess will never be this good again.

China's Great Leap Forward

2010-02-27T21:19:00.003-05:00

Barack Obama is confronting the same problem that all his predecessors confronted: He knows too well what the long-term solvency of the country demands, but he can’t act, because our political system won’t allow it. The majority rules, and the majority wants to live on the cuff, because that’s the way it has always worked, and if President Obama told us the hard facts – that we’re broke – the voters wouldn’t stand for it. So we are treated to the same old “the richest country on earth ought to be able to give everyone___________.” You fill in the blanks.

Some people in other countries have grown up wanting a system like ours, but now they are not so sure. Maybe, they are thinking, China has got it right. They have the fastest growing economy on earth, but....their government is COMMUNIST! You know, the system that says the state owns all the land and the means of production. The system that says “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Well, not quite. The new breed of Chinese communist is shopping for Mercedes and BMWs in Beijing showrooms, while America is giving “cash for clunkers” to prod people to buy new cars with money that comes from the U.S. government, which borrows it from…..China!! What’s wrong with this picture?

For a quarter century, from roughly 1960 through 1985, we had it made: The transistor (Bell Labs) begat the semiconductor industry (Fairchild, Intel, TI, Motorola), which begat the computer industry (IBM, DEC, H-P), which begat the personal computer industry (Apple, Compaq, Dell). I was there, and it was a wild ride, a once-in-a-lifetime high.

The chief perceived threat in 1980 was Japan, and there was widespread anxiety here about the Japanese obsession with quality. They took what American quality gurus had taught them and then raised the bar. If anybody was looking for other threats, there was Korea, and possibly Taiwan. Nobody, but nobody, was thinking about China. China? You’ve gotta be kidding!

I’m sure a lot of books will be written about China’s leap into high-tech, but here’s my take: Like many others, I had visited our sales offices in Singapore, Taiwan, and pre-1997 Hong Kong often, offices that were staffed by expatriate Chinese, and in my dealings with them one distinguishing characteristic stood out: They were all capitalists down to their bone marrow! The Chinese were deal-makers, whatever government was in control. And it occurred to anyone who thought about it that if the government in Beijing ever decided to adopt a market-based economy, it would need a very short runway, because they had a billion born capitalists ready to roll, The decision was made around 1980, and within a relatively short time the Chinese machine was airborne.

It remains to be seen whether Chinese capitalism can coexist with centralized control. But I believe (and have heard this echoed by Chinese in Beijing) that there is no turning back. Economic liberalism breeds political liberalism, especially now that the Chinese people have a taste of market success. Only two outcomes are possible: (1) The Chinese authoritarian government will soften and eventually be indistinguishable from our government (which has been drifting leftward, in case you haven’t noticed) and (2) The Chinese leadership, feeling threatened by an increasingly assertive, increasingly acquisitive middle class, will try to force the genie back into the bottle, leading to widespread instability. I don’t know which option will prevail, but I would probably bet on (1). Things are going well in China today, and Hu Jintao doesn’t need to rock the boat.

And he doesn’t have to worry about getting this or that bill through Congress. He doesn’t have to fret about filibusters and blue states and red states. When he decides that something makes sense for China, he just does it, making a few phone calls to get his ministers on board.

Meanwhile, when Barack Obama decides that something makes sense for the United States, he has to deep-six it because it won’t play in Chicago or on CNN, and he could never get it through Congress anyway,

Democracy is messy, but people will put up with the mess – as long as they are winning.

Too Many Papers, Too Little Time

2010-02-17T22:54:00.007-05:00

For a span measured not in years but in decades, I have been a subscriber to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. Good newspapers all, each deserving of more time than there is in my day. (I know, when you’re retired you’re supposed to have oodles of free time, but I don’t.) And they’re getting pricey, because their business model, based mostly on advertiser revenue, has broken down. I don’t mind paying for value received, but paying for newspapers that I don’t read is just plain stupid. So something has to go. But which one?

The New York Times is still a fine newspaper, though it no longer deserves its “All the news that’s fit to print” mantra. “All the trends that are fit to print” would be more like it. The Times sponsors or co-sponsors polls, and this leads them to tell us endlessly about – us. It is as if the Times newsboy is shouting, “Wuxtry, wuxtry, read all about rising discrimination against women!!” Or middle-aged mid-western factory workers. Or the plight of the uneducated or the poor or the needy.

And the Times is becoming more provincial. Today, while most of page 1 told us that New York’s Governor has an aide with a shadowy past, news about a political assassination in Dubai was given one column on page 4.

The Times still has a good crossword, especially toward the end of the week, and it has by far the best sports coverage of the three publications under review here. Its Arts section is very good, reflecting the fact that New York is still the cultural capital of this country. Its financial pages are so-so and can’t compare with the Journal’s. The decision to drop TV listings, made years ago, was a mistake,

The editorial page features some very good writing, notably the columns by David Brooks, surely one of the best political writers around. Of the op-ed crowd, Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins write more for entertainment than for enlightenment, Tom Friedman has taken up a cause (energy), and this is his blessing and his curse. As for Paul Krugman, the less said the better. He does have a Nobel Prize, but unless you are as ardently liberal as he is, you will skip his columns, for the writing is tendentious.

The paper’s main editorials are strongly, often passionately, a mirror of the Democratic Party’s platforms, but their extreme positions are no more fanatical than those of the Journal. Most of the times I just hurry by the editorials of both papers without reading them.

The Wall Street Journal has improved dramatically since Rupert Murdoch took it over. It now covers world news even better than the Times. Having feet on the ground in Yemen and Beirut and China and Venezuela costs money, and the Journal is ready to spend it. Indeed, you will find out more news from more places on the planet in the Journal than you will in the Times. Ten years ago, such a statement would have been impossible.

The Journal, however, does have its problems. The biggest one is the three-page editorial section, called “Opinion.” Except for a token moderate, the franchise seems to belong entirely to the American Enterprise Institute, whose members apparently have total access to the pages. They – John Bolton, Frederick Kagan and other neocon exiles – beat the war drums as hard as they can, but no one in Washington, I devoutly hope, is listening.

The Journal’s drama and movie critics are excellent, and the weekend paper is a particular treat, with Peggy Noonan and the not-to-be-missed de gustibus column.

The paper is trying gamely to mount a sports section, but so far it is a waste of space.

Carps: The Journal’s Friday edition contains a good crossword puzzle, but it is not designed for the eyes of mere mortals. The same editor who is responsible for those teeny squares must be the culprit who reduces the excellent Pepper and Salt cartoons to microscopic size.

The Economist is by far the most literate and the most insightful of the three newspapers. Yes, it has a week to prepare each issue, but it is still impressive. From the often witty cover to the in-depth stories from all over the world to the technology quarterly surveys, there is too much to feast on, but I leave the accumulating back issues on the coffee table with promises to myself that I will return to this or that story.

The Economist is of course a British publication, so it devotes a fair amount of space to Old Blighty, but I’m probably more interested in this material than I am in Governor Patterson’s cronies.

The newspaper (as it calls itself) is organized by geographic sections
(Middle East and Africa, The Americas, Europe, etc) and by subject matter (Science and Technology, Finance and Economics, etc). The constant is the quality of the writing. In this, it leaves the Times and the Journal in the dust.

What the Economist offers is information of value, presented by masters of exposition. That, and not crosswords or fiery editorials or lifestyle columns, is what I look for in a newspaper. So I will drop the Times and the Journal and give each week’s Economist the time it deserves. As for the rest – sports, movie reviews, stock-market news – I’ll pick that up on television or the internet, thank you.

John McGlinn and The Song

2010-01-24T16:17:00.004-05:00

John McGlinn was an orchestra conductor and musical archivist. His lifelong passion was a quest for the original orchestrations of musicals, some well known, others long forgotten. He was, in fact, a musical archaeologist, rummaging through old warehouses and attics in search of history. In 1982, McGlinn made his biggest find, in an abandoned warehouse in Seacaucus, NJ - the original orchestrations for Showboat, the 1927 Kern-Hammerstein production that arguably was the most significant musical of the twentieth century. “It was like finding Tut’s tomb,” he said at the time.

McGlinn’s special mission was to find the original versions of songs written by Jerome Kern, regarded by many as the inventor of the American popular song. Many of Kern’s songs were written in collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II (best known today for his later collaboration with Richard Rodgers). The Kern-Hammerstein partnership produced, in addition to Showboat, two other hit shows, Sunny and Music in the Air. Then, in 1939, the masters gave us Very Warm for May, which featured what I believe is the best love song ever written, “All the Things You Are.” The original orchestrations for this song were among the treasures that John McGlinn saved from obscurity.

The melody line is harmonically inspired. If you are in the mood for a dissertation on the song’s chord progression, you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Things_You_Are with a piano within reach. The bare-bones melody line doesn’t begin to explain the song’s appeal; it’s the harmony that raises the goose bumps, and that is why McGlinn’s discovery was so important.

The lyrics are Hammerstein at his best. “You are the promised kiss of springtime that makes the lonely winter seem long” may not seem special if you have never spent a lonely winter in Maine, but trust me, it rings the bell, as does “the breathless hush of evening that trembles on the brink of a lovely song.” That’s the kind of writing that drives would-be writers like me to desperation.

In 1990, the Boston Pops Orchestra devoted an hour to recreating songs from old Broadway shows, and they put that “Evening at the Pops” in the hands of guest conductor John McGlinn, proving that there is justice in the world after all. Luckily, I taped the program, so I can report that the beatific smile on McGlinn’s face as he conducted spoke volumes about his love for these orchestrations, especially the grand finale, the original Russell Bennett orchestration of “All the Things You Are” - just as the opening night audience heard it 50 years before, said hostess Kitty Carlisle-Hart.

The song is a double duet, with one couple singing the verse (rarely heard today), expressing frustration at their inability to “let my heart find its voice,” followed by the other couple’s all-out declaration of love. In the show, the hit song was sung by the foursome early in the first act, then reprised twice in the second act, suggesting that the producers knew where the gold lay. In the Pops concert, the two couples were joined by the Tanglewood Chorus. Talk about giving a great song its due!

Very Warm for May, despite a huge cast, lots of talent (June Allyson, Eve Arden, Vera Ellen), and the creative energies of Kern and Hammerstein, lasted only 59 performances. But it did leave behind a song that will live forever.

And John McGlinn must still be smiling – from above. A heart attack took him last year, at age 55.

Cinderella Squared

2009-12-21T21:49:00.003-05:00

Back in the 30s, a popular radio show called The Major Bowes Amateur Hour lifted a lot of entertainers from obscurity to fame. Among the shooting stars were opera singers Lili Pons and Beverly Sills, comedian Jack Carter, pop singer Teresa Brewer, and a young singer named Frank Sinatra. The Major Bowes show was enormously popular, because the public always had an insatiable appetite for Cinderella stories. It was even better when they could help choose Cinderella (“call Murray Hill 8-9933”).

Major Bowes died in 1946, and one of his assistants, Ted Mack, carried on the tradition and brought it to television. Ted Mack’s show was also a big hit, proving that it was the concept, and not the moderator or the talent, that registered with the public.

That brings us to the “Idol” series, American and British, that so many viewers are hooked on, and its latest mega-star, Susan Boyle. This middle-aged Scotswoman was launched, as if you didn’t know, by her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Miss Saigon. It was a good, but not a great performance, musically speaking. But the whole package was a blockbuster, the kind of thing that PR people dream about.

The package, you see, includes the fact that Susan is a rather plain-looking woman, the kind you might find next to you in the checkout line at Wal-Mart (if not doing the checking out). One doesn’t expect to find that kind of voice in that kind of package. So you have Cinderella squared. Be honest, now: If Susan Boyle looked like, say, Nicole Kidman, would you be that excited about the fact that she sings well? (As a matter of fact, Nicole sings in the forthcoming film musical Nine, and it is a safe bet that as a singer she is no Susan Boyle.)

Susan, admirable though she is, is not a trained singer of theatrical songs like “I Dreamed a Dream.” Lea Salonga, who introduced the song in Miss Saigon, is a professional, with both the voice and the emotional range required for such a dramatic song. The same might be said of Bernadette Peters, Sarah Brightman, Elaine Paige, and Audra McDonald – but not Susan Boyle. I know that millions of records say that I am wrong, but that’s my story and I am sticking with it.

But, of the several songs I have heard Susan sing, one stands out as perfect for her: “Cry Me a River,” a torchy blues song that she absolutely nails. If I were her manager I would be scouring the music files looking for other torch songs for Susan. She can handle them vocally, and she is a believable victim.

Major Bowes would love her.

Tides in the Affairs of Men

2009-12-08T23:31:00.002-05:00

When I was in college, I dated a girl who was a free spirit, the kind you find in tales of Celtic fairies who live in places like Brigadoon and Glocca Morra. She would dance barefoot on the green in her home town and start singing "Honey Bun" while walking along the street (it was the season of South Pacific), and this, of course, added to her appeal. After graduation she took a job teaching in Texas, and I lost track of her for a few years. Then a mutual friend told me she was in New York, a sometimes actress. Since I went to New York often at the time, I called her and asked if she’d like to have dinner. Yes, she would very much like to have dinner.

The free spirit was still there, but now she had become serious about it. She was, some religious authority had convinced her, a true mystic with vast metaphysical powers, which waxed and waned with the positions of the stars and planets.

At first I thought she was pulling my leg. But as we talked on during dinner, it was clear that we occupied different planets.

“You don’t really believe in astrology, do you?” I asked.

“Yes. And it’s pretty obvious you don’t,” she said.

“No, not a bit of it.”

“Look, do you believe that the position of the moon is responsible for pulling whole oceans of water around?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But if the moon can do all that, then why can’t the positions of the planets affect the fluids in your body – in millions of bodies, for that matter?”

The rest of the conversation was centered on her acting career, such as it was. She had brought along a scrapbook, which told of her parts in a few off-off-off Broadway plays. But our evening effectively ended with her moon-talk. I cabbed her back to the Barbizon for Women, and promised to keep in touch. I still remember how, in my bed that night, I couldn’t sleep, thinking of billions of tons of water being sloshed around by one little moon, so far away.

I never saw her again, and I heard that she died a few years ago. But I have never forgotten her earnest profession of faith in the power of planetary alignment to influence human behavior. I think of it often, now that I have a front-row seat to the comings and goings of the Atlantic. It seems preposterous that the moon can move enough water to change the depth of the ocean by 10 feet every six hours, but it does.

It seems that mankind goes berserk at certain times in history. The American Revolution and the French Revolution occurred at roughly the same time, though there is no causal connection. In our own time, there were public upheavals here and in Europe in 1968. Younger readers may not remember it, but take my word for it, 1968 was a nasty time, when the fabric of society was badly torn.

Today’s news tells of a horrific bombing in Iraq, student riots
in Iran, bombings in Pakistan, a military coup in Honduras, a war without end in Afghanistan, the bombing of a Moscow - St. Petersburg train, the Philippine Army at war with thugs empowered by the Philippine government, anarchy in Somalia, genocide in Sudan. Some of these events are connected, most not. The world seems to be lurching out of control, and it is a much smaller world than ever, a world charted by Google maps, spanned by Skype, and circumnavigated by hundreds of satellites, all looking down at every one of us.

And it is a world influenced by forces not yet understood. Tides in the affairs of men, Shakespeare calls them.

That's Entertainment?

2009-11-19T22:44:00.002-05:00

The Times tells us that a new Kander-Ebb musical is in the works. Ordinarily this would be a cause for celebration, and not just because Fred Ebb died a couple of years ago and anything in his trunk is worth preserving. This will be the second Fred Ebb musical to be staged posthumously, the first being Curtains, a clever play-in-a-play having to do with a stage-struck police detective called in to investigate a murder committed during a musical’s Boston tryout run. John Kander’s music was, as usual, very good, and the Ebb lyrics stylish. I didn’t see the show, but I have listened to the CD often enough to remain convinced that Kander and Ebb belong right up there with the other great collaborators of Broadway’s Golden Age.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noted the “ordinarily” in the second sentence, a word that suggests that a celebration may not be in order. You see, the new Kander and Ebb show is called The Scottsboro Boys, after the defendants in a gang-rape trial that took place in Alabama in 1931. Let us pause a second to recognize that Kander and Ebb’s two blockbuster hits, Chicago and Cabaret, dealt with offbeat subjects, though in a definitely musical-comedy format. And let us acknowledge that great musicals like Les Miz and Miss Saigon can deal artistically with profound subjects. Ragtime dealt squarely with racial tensions, and No Strings and Kwamina had black-white romances. Still – a musical with gang rape at its core?

You may offer Sweeney Todd as a successful (sort of) example of depravity glorified, but Sondheim deserves to be placed in his own category. Sondheim plays are unhappy plays, maybe because Sondheim thinks that life is unhappy, and he is simply being true to life. Even when the composer gives us a good, look-on-the-bright-side song, it is presented as pastiche (see Follies). But the real Sondheim comes through in his Assassins, which invites us to listen to Lee Harvey Oswald and other assassins explain themselves. Sondheim is an enigma. The man was “adopted” as a youth by Oscar Hammerstein, whose musicals are filled to the brim with hope (walk on, walk on), June bustin’ out all over, a hundred and one pounds of fun, and a hundred million miracles – none of which seems to have influenced young Stevie.

Forget all that, some people say. Hammerstein was a realist, who wrote about miscegenation (Showboat), racial prejudice (South Pacific), and other themes that were ground-breaking in their day. Granted. But Hammerstein the ground-breaker was a man not capable of writing a Sweeney Todd. Hammerstein had exquisite taste, which his protégé lacks. One guesses that Sondheim would throw up at the mere mention of taste.

The problem I have with the whole ground-breaking theology is that it treats what came before as too silly for words. We hear, endlessly, that no show before Oklahoma! ever began with a lone cowboy on a stage, singing about a beautiful morning. Before that, we are told, musicals began with (if you can believe it) a chorus line of beautiful girls. And the plots were not credible. The shows of the 30s, shows like Anything Goes and Girl Crazy and The Boys From Syracuse, had one thing on their producers’ minds – entertaining the audiences. How lowbrow can you get?

Look, I loved Les Miz and Evita. But I also loved 42d Street and Do Re Mi and Little Me and She Loves Me, none of which had a message but all of which gave their audiences a wonderful two and a half hours.

One of my favorite movies is Preston Sturgis’s Sullivan’s Travels. In it Sullivan is a successful Hollywood director of slapstick comedies who now wants to move beyond all that to direct an Important Film, which will be called O Brother Where Art Thou? So he takes off on an odyssey to sample the life of the oppressed masses, about which he will then write. But on his voyage he discovers that the best thing he can do for the masses is to keep making the kind of silly movies that make people laugh.

“There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh in this cockamamie world,” Sullivan says at the end. And, I might add, for musicals that lift your heart and set your toes tapping - and that leave the messages for Western Union and gang rape for Fox News.

2000 Acres of Sky

2009-10-25T18:42:00.008-04:00

The British are the masters of the miniseries. The Americans may be the masters of musical theater and fast food, but when it comes to miniseries we aren’t even close. The Masterpiece Theater franchise alone gives them the cup, but then there are also the likes of Brideshead Revisited and Monarch of the Glen and Traffik and Ballykissangel and countless others. The British seem to have an unlimited supply of good writers (many of them long dead) and an unlimited supply of (live) leading men, leading women, and character actors, all of whom seem to have flawless diction and experience with the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Old Vic.

Every viewer seems to have his or her favorite in the miniseries treasure chest. One believes there will never be another Upstairs, Downstairs, another prefers Tinker,Taylor, while a third votes for Foyle’s War. My own favorites are all the aforementioned, plus one newcomer, whose praises I now wish to sing.

The series is called 2000 Acres of Sky, and if this produces a sea of blank stares it is not surprising. The series, produced in Scotland, has never made it across the Atlantic. Never, in any form. No DVD formatted for U.S. television, no Netflix, no PBS airing. That’s a crime, because this is one compelling drama, with intelligent writing and some of the most fascinating characters and plot turns you’ll ever see, all played against that awesome Hebridean scenery.

Here’s the situation that launches the series: On the fictional island of Ronansay (near Skye) the small community faces a crisis, as the school population has dropped to three – two fewer than the minimum required by the Scottish school authority. If the school closes, as seems likely, the three remaining students face a long ferry ride to and from Skye. Worse, their parents will probably leave the island, driving one more stake into the heart of the island as it fights for survival.

The solution, Ronansay’s people decide, lies in attracting a family with at least two children. What the island can offer the family is an abandoned B&B and help in making a livelihood on an island that is quite beautiful and attracts a fair number of tourists. So they run an ad in the British papers.

To Abby Wallace, a mother of two small children, living in noisy, crime-ridden East London, the ad’s prospect of a Better Life for her and her children seems irresistible. The catch: Abby’s husband abandoned her and her children years before. The ad says Ronansay is looking for a married couple with children, and Abby is a single Mom. But living down the corridor in the tenement is Kenny, a buddy of Abby’s – nothing more – whose ambition, to the extent he has any, is to be a rock star. Kenny will never make it, because he doesn’t have the talent, but he is a close enough pal (who loves to tell Abby’s children outrageous bedtime stories) so that Abby asks him to join her in answering the ad (and sending a staged photo of “the family”).

What happens if Ronansay chooses them from all the applicants? We can sort that out later, says Abby, implying that once the children are installed in the school, Kenny can safely return to London and his gigs.

The starting premise is obviously promising, and before long we meet and come to know the characters that make life on Ronansay miniseries-worthy. But it is the development of the character Kenny that makes this series so worth watching. Writer Timothy Prager (who wrote 21 out of the 22 episodes) transforms Kenny the born loser, with his freaky face and crucifix earring, into Kenny the magnetic centerpiece of the drama. Kenny, played to perfection by Paul Kaye, is forever wondering what his purpose in life is, and we wonder too, while we become captivated by his essential goodness. To tell you more would be unforgivable.

The series played in the U.K from 2001 through 2003, and it won its share of critical praise and awards. Its failure (so far) to find an American outlet may have something to do with those Scottish accents, though captions are available. (Monarch of the Glen was also filmed in Scotland, but most of its principal actors spoke BBC English.)

You could write a book about the cultural differences that assign most British miniseries to PBS, while commercial TV gives us The Sopranos and Desperate Housewives. De gustibus, non est disputandum.

P.S. You can buy Region 2 DVDs of this series from dealers in the UK, and you can play these on “multi-region” DVD players. (Ask at the store.)

Talk is Cheap

2009-10-06T21:02:00.003-04:00

Before television (BT), you had to have talent to command the public’s attention. And you had to work for years to develop that talent. Comedians like Jack Benny, George Burns, and Bob Hope, singers like Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, and Jimmy Durante, dancers like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Eleanor Powell had to spend a long apprenticeship practicing their craft, sharpening their timing, learning how to play to an audience.

Then came television, and a new kind of “talent” appeared: For want of a better word, we’ll call it personality. People with no discernible talent in the traditional sense sought to make it by talking to an audience. In the earliest days of television, when the networks were desperate for something to fill time, there was a late-night show called “Broadway Open House,” with a comedian, sort of, named Jerry Lester. Steve Allen (who actually had talent), Dave Garroway, and Jack Paar followed, building a following, not by singing or dancing or playing an instrument, but by talking. Arthur Godfrey was cut from the same cloth, and of course Ed Sullivan was the embodiment of the no-talent star. He had less talent than your third-grade teacher or your plumber, but he became a sensation simply by attracting and introducing talented people like the Beatles.

Years before television, a talker named Will Rogers was immensely popular for his humor and, yes, personality. Rogers had a talent – rope-twirling – but that was beside the point, and he was the first to prove that one could parlay wit and political commentary into national fame and fortune. But Rogers was a one-off phenomenon in the BT era. All the others needed to be able to do something to achieve stardom.

Johnny Carson occupies a special category: the talented comedian who channels that talent into a late-night variety show, in which a singer or comedian or pianist performs, then sits and banters with the host. No one could do that like Carson.

Another special category is reserved for Oprah Winfrey. I shouldn’t even comment on Oprah, since hers is not a prime-time program, and since I haven’t watched her enough to comment intelligently. But if she has any performing talent I’m unaware of it. She obviously connects with her audience, as Arthur Godfrey connected with his audience.

That brings us to Jay Leno and David Letterman, each of whom has a skosh more talent than Ed Sullivan but not enough for you to notice. NBC has just moved Leno to the 10 PM slot to revolutionize evening television, they say, but in fact to save money. Talk is cheap. A talker like Leno costs a fraction of the money it takes to produce a drama, with all those actors, writers, cameramen, special effects, etc. No one really expects viewers’ habits to change much, except that more people may decide to see what’s on PBS or the cable channels at 10 o’clock. More likely, they’ll log onto the internet.

Letterman, once he finishes his opening monologue (that others write for him) is no Will Rogers. He is not even a Jack Paar and he is not remotely a Johnny Carson. He is in the news today for his admitted dalliance with female subordinates, but whatever credit he claimed for “fessing up” was wiped out when he used his embarrassment as the basis of a one-liner. No talent, no class.

But the fade-out of late-night talk was bound to happen, just as the decline of newspapers and magazines had to happen. A digital earthquake has hit the media world, and the aftershocks keep coming. I keep getting magazines even though my subscriptions expired long ago, and the publishers try to lure me back with $10 “special” subscription rates. I don’t bite.

When Leno and Letterman are gone (which, happily, may be soon), it would be nice if television rediscovered the value of talent. The kind of talent you used to see on The Bell Telephone Hour, Your Show of Shows, The Jackie Gleason Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. A show like any of those would cost money, but I’ll bet it would wipe out the prime-time competition. If I’m wrong – if most people would rather watch Jay Leno or “Reality TV” or American Idol, then our collective taste has sunk so far that it is beyond salvation.

September Song

2009-09-01T17:36:00.003-04:00

The summer is almost gone now. The sun's arc is a little lower, and a few formations of geese are winging south, ahead of the crowd. The beach isn’t as crowded, possibly because the temperature has been in the 60s lately. But the cool weather heralds what are in fact the most beautiful months of all in Maine, glorious September and October, when the sky is a bright, clear blue, and reds and yellows light up the maples and the birches. Tonight the weatherman is talking about frost warnings; the gardening season is short in Maine.

“Oh it’s a long, long while
From May to December
But the days grow short
When you reach September”

So wrote Maxwell Anderson in 1938, for a Kurt Weill melody. The song has been recorded by dozens of pop singers, from Frank Sinatra to Jimmy Durante, usually as a lament sung in the twilight of one’s life. I am old enough to appreciate the metaphor, but I am also hopeful enough to look forward to another spring.

Soon most of the people who live on the Point will pack up and head for lower latitudes. I used to look upon that as a sign of frailty; now I see that it’s a sign of sanity. So eventually I will join the snowbirds, but first there is that beautiful New England autumn to savor. The days may be dwindling down, but they are indeed precious.

The Passion Play

2009-08-19T21:16:00.005-04:00

Today is Jill’s birthday, and one cannot let the day pass without notice.

I first met the girl who would become my wife in 1953. We met in a passion play, a fact that usually produced gales of laughter in the years that followed. The priest who wrote it (with help from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) was a born impresario, who hired a professional director and staged it in downtown Boston. The play, called The Christus, had a cast of 125, which offered a part to virtually anyone who could breathe. Fresh out of the Army, I played the title role, and Jill was a member of the mob, credited as Julia in the program. Years later, Jill and I would howl as we recalled the fractured ad libs from that mob – things like “If He is the Son of God, why don’t He come down from the cross?”

There were bacchanalian scenes with Herod (with Ketelbey’s “In a Persian Market” setting the mood), a nativity scene (the infant Jesus was the winner of a widely publicized contest run by the impresario to promote the play), and a climactic ascension scene, with the Christus hoisted by cables to the sky as the curtain fell (the scene was played behind a scrim to obscure the cables).

About two months of rehearsals were needed to pull this epic together, and during that period I was careful to avoid any conduct unbecoming a Deity. In other words, no dating. But with the show behind us, we all gathered in the church hall for a mammoth cast party. I decided to ask the best-looking girl there to dance, and it was the best idea I ever had.

We were married on February 22, 1955. It was a good year, as all the Eisenhower years were, and we cheerfully began married life in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment. A year later we bought our first house, a tidy Cape Cod south of Boston. We moved north of Boston a few years later, and in 1965 we (now a family of five) settled into a big, 100-year-old converted schoolhouse in the center of historic Concord. That was our home for the next 30 years. Then, with retirement, a final move to the coast of Maine, where we had summered since 1968.

The last dozen years were probably the best of all, with nothing to do but watch the tides come and go, the seasons change, and our grandchildren grow. And consider how far we traveled since that anonymous member of the cast shouted, “Why don’t He come down from the cross?”

Random Thoughts on August

2009-08-09T17:33:00.002-04:00

The weather has improved lately, which the weather gods owed us after a miserable winter, spring, and July. When I say “improved,” that should be qualified. The temperature has topped out in the 70s on most days, though they say it will reach the 80s tomorrow. So you can’t call it a heat wave, but the vacationers are flocking to the beach before the window closes and the weather gets wretched again. Yesterday was sunny and crisp, a beauty, and today started out well, but there is now a dark grey sheet from horizon to horizon. More rain is coming, they say.

A local fence company has just installed a cedar post and rail fence along the south side of my lot. This replaces one that had seen better days. One problem was rot, the other was the sightseers who drive down my dead-end street, then use my driveway as a turnaround, occasionally clonking the end post. The clonker, a few weeks ago, was a Mercedes with New York plates, and the driver, after destroying the post, attempted to sneak off, but a neighbor hailed the miscreant. A sort of justice was thus served.

The new fence, a new upper deck made of composition material (no painting!), and a refurbished lower deck have smartened up the place considerably. Jill just missed it, more’s the pity, but I know she would have approved. And there’s plenty still to be done, especially to the grounds, which were Jill’s particular obsession. I am whatever the opposite of a green thumb is called (a black thumb?), so I will hire the work done.

Although I scan the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal every day, I depended on Jill to fill in the blanks, to keep me posted on the gossip she picked up on cable while I watched a movie, read a book, or listened to music. So now I am missing the wifely commentary that added spice to the daily news. She had strong opinions on politics, but she was also very smart, and her strong opinions were always worth listening to.

We are already well into August, and I have mixed feelings about that. It is always sad to see our short summer slipping away so swiftly, but this has been a rotten year, all things considered, and I will not be sad to see the end of it. As the months fly by, I know that by January I must escape this wintry Siberia to preserve my sanity. Someplace where it never snows, the only ice is in your drink, and the weather reports are always boring.

The Health -Care Debate

2009-07-24T10:54:00.002-04:00

Give President Obama credit. In tackling health-care reform, he is opening a can of worms that he doesn’t need. With Afghanistan going badly, with the economy on life support, with political sniping from all sides, why stir up the health-care hornets’ nest?

On the other hand, maybe his crusade isn’t as courageous as it seems. Although he claims that we can pay for reform mostly by eliminating waste, he refuses to touch one of the biggest waste-makers of all: defensive medicine undertaken to avoid lawsuits. This deference to the power of the lawyers’ lobby can’t be explained by anything other than political expediency. It smells bad.

The waste argument is flimsy on other counts. It is said that the insurance system creates an incentive for needless tests, and that is undoubtedly true - in hindsight. But if you have a medical problem and the doctor prescribes four tests, and two are said to be unnecessary, how does the doctor know – in advance – which two are valid? By studying outcomes, they say. So your doctor suggests four tests, runs them by a computer, and tells you that you qualify for only two of them. There. You feel a whole lot better, don’t you?

A modern jetliner has two sets of avionics. One set is almost never used. Yet we pay for the redundancy – the inefficiency – because human lives are at stake. So it is with the health-care system. You want it to be efficient, but if it’s your life we’re talking about, you want all the tests your doctor thinks you need. Period.

The health-care debate boils down to a couple of issues. First, most people in the U.S. are satisfied with the health care they receive. They are being asked to pay for the addition of 30 or 40 million people to a government-run insurance system. Because we are a generous nation, we think it’s a good idea – if the quality of our own health care doesn’t suffer in the process. There’s the rub. The idea that my primary-care physician can increase his patient load by 15 percent by working more efficiently is nonsense. He already works hard and makes full use of his computer. And we can’t magically increase the number of medical professionals by 15 percent. The math is inescapable: Universal health care will mean longer waits to see one’s doctor. Maybe we are willing to tolerate the inconvenience in order to do the right thing. Maybe we’re not. No one is raising the question.

The strongest case for health reform is the financial case. Medicare and Medicaid are in big trouble, and something must be done. Delaying retirement till 67 or 68 makes sense, given increasing longevity (itself an argument for the quality of our health care). Reducing the incidence of malpractice suits makes sense, too. And yes, there is some waste, though almost certainly not as much as the President claims. The financial argument is bulletproof, but it applies only to Medicare and Medicaid. There is no financial case for universal health care, only the moral case. And that, given the state of today’s economy, is a hard sell. So the President is trying to package it as a financial imperative, and that’s disingenuous or dishonest, depending on your politics

The Rain in Maine

2009-07-20T20:50:00.003-04:00

The rain started in early June and stopped a few days ago. At least that’s how it seems. And it has been much colder than normal, with temperatures touching 80 only a few times, even though we’re through most of July. The water table is high, and the Saco River looks like the Mississippi. The sump pumps are working overtime to keep cellars dry, and for some cellars it’s a losing battle.

Maine’s economy depends – far too much, I fear - on tourism, and the tourists don’t like rain. A smarter state would work hard to attract manufacturing, but Maine people are ambivalent about manufacturing, especially when it means big plants owned by big companies. We are all for small business, so that’s the only kind we have. We have thousands of small businesses catering to tourists. If a big company threatens to build a plant that might employ two or three thousand workers, there will be a referendum, a mighty battle between good and evil. A greedy out-of-state company presumes to come into our beloved state and upset all that we hold dear. Yes, there will be jobs, but there will also be more traffic, more crime, and the first thing you know we will be on the road to – I say, on the road to depravation. Our River City is Augusta.

That’s the way it is in Maine, which is almost defiantly proud of its poverty. The politicians will tell you that we are disadvantaged by geography, being at the end of the distribution chain. That might have been true a century ago, but in the age of the internet, no one is at the end because there is no end. No, Maine’s economic distress is self-inflicted. We have high taxes, a business-unfriendly legislature, and an apathetic electorate. Our brightest graduates emigrate because they are bright enough to know the score.

The people up north, in “the County” (Aroostook) know the score, too, but there aren’t enough of them. So their attempts to develop some of their abundant land are stymied by the passionate preservationists in Portland, who may never visit the north woods but say they want to save them “for our children and grandchildren.” But their children and grandchildren will be living in Austin or Atlanta, because there weren’t enough good jobs in Maine.

Maine is a beautiful state, and I am very happy to live here (except in winter). And I would not like our coastline to resemble the stretch around Fort Lauderdale or Miami. So I tip my hat to past preservationists who kept growth rational. But things are tough right now, and it is time to put out the welcome mat. Small business is nice, but big business – the kind that can hire people by the thousands – is better. The only kind of small business worth having is one that aspires to be a big business. What would Maine be like today if Bob Noyce or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates had decided to pitch his tent in Portland? It would be different, and to many Mainers it would be worse. But they are wrong. It would be better, with or without all that rain.

A Letter

2009-07-16T22:53:00.002-04:00

Dear Jill,

I know that you never had any use for e-mail, because you thought that only paper and ink constituted a real letter (and you wrote at least one letter a day to someone or other, it seemed), but I don’t know the zip code for Heaven, so I’ll have to communicate through cyberspace.

The weather at the beach has been abominable – a soggy summer following a dreary spring following a beastly winter. They say that in June we had a period in which it rained 23 out of 27 days, but I don’t remember even four rainless days. On the fourth of July, a Saturday, the beach population was the smallest I’ve ever seen on that holiday. The merchants are ready to commit mass suicide.

Our children and their children have been here every weekend. One weekend there were nine of them, which is one more than the place sleeps, but we managed. And they leave the house in immaculate condition, because you taught them the importance of keeping the guest rooms tidy, since they are the first thing a visitor sees, the “windows on the house” you called them.

That’s not all you taught them. As a matter of fact, you taught us all the entire book of virtues. You left us a moral compass, and whenever we come across a dilemma, we know a simple way forward: WWJD. What would Jill do?

Cathy still comes every month to give the house a top-to-bottom cleaning. The new upper deck is complete, the lower decks have been painted, a new post-and-rail fence has been ordered, the gardens have been weeded. You’d be proud.

Food. Well, I still can’t cook at all, but I am not starving. The neighbors have been kind (what’s that line about “depending on the kindness of strangers”?), the TV dinners aren’t bad, and once in a while I rustle up franks and beans or spaghetti. The freezer has been emptied of all the old food and defrosted. I really don’t need a freezer, any more than I need the new car I bought while you were in the hospital. That was to have been your car, but now this house has more cars than people. In fact, it has more of everything than people, and if this were the Russia of Dr. Zhivago, some commissar would force me to share the space with the masses.

I went with Lucy and her gang to see a play at the Grange Hall the other night. It was essentially a solo performance, based on the music of Patsy Cline, and it was excellent. You’d have loved it, because the lead’s voice was good and the notes were all true.

You still get a lot of mail. Magazines like Real Simple, solicitations from politicians, surveys (which are really solicitations), catalogs, etc. In fact, you get more mail than I do, which is pretty funny when you think about it. I throw most of it in the trash unopened.

Your desk and sewing machine and all those bobbins and spools and yarn are as they were when you left. They will probably stay that way for a long time. The same goes for your pictures on the walls and the knick-knacks on the shelves and all those crossword-puzzle books. I don’t dare touch any of it, because I know you are watching.

The days pass quickly – and silently, when I am alone. I talk to you often, out of habit and because, well, just because.

It’s time to turn in now. I think of you all the time, and I wish you were here.

Fred

Franks and Beans Frederick

2009-07-01T18:48:00.002-04:00

Here’s a great recipe for all you food fans. You might think I don’t know much about cooking, seeing as I’ve been at it for only a few weeks, but I have always been a quick study. Anyhow, the results are what count, and this is really a meal fit for a king.

Here’s what you do: First, get a pot and put it on the stove. I use a small green pot with a black inside. Then you open a can of baked beans. I use the smallest size can, since I want only one serving, and if I opened a large can the unused beans would be a problem. I use Bush beans, because I like the design on the can.

Then you take two Kayem frankfurters out of a package you’ll find in the freezer. The package will have six or eight frankfurters in it, and if it’s been in the freezer a while, you may find that they’re all stuck together. If a knife won’t pry them apart, I find that a chisel and hammer work fine.

Find a small frying pan and put it on the stove. Then put a piece of butter in the pan so that it will melt when it heats. Then put two frankfurters in the pan. As you see, this is a fairly simple recipe, which I personally prefer.

The next part is slightly tricky. You want the frankfurters and the beans to be ready at about the same time, but the beans will cook faster than the frankfurters, which are frozen. So you turn the burner under the frankfurters to LOW, and wait 10 minutes before turning the beans on to, oh, 4 or 5.

I almost forgot the brown bread. If you have two pieces of brown bread in the fridge, put them in the microwave for about 30 seconds. Mine were wrapped in tinfoil, which MUST be removed before you put the brown bread in the microwave.

After another 5 or 10 minutes, you will have a delicious dinner. Garnish to taste, with ketchup, mustard, and relish. A good cabernet sauvignon will complement this entrée nicely.

Bon appetit!

The Music of My Life

2009-06-16T09:07:00.004-04:00

If there is anyone out there who has been reading these posts for the past few years, he or she knows that my wife was an exceptional person. You have read about the way she befriended a Russian youngster on the streets of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), how she shrugged off being attacked and bitten by a 700-pound sea lion in Argentina, how she concocted the most delicious crab bisque known to man (this man, anyway). But what you don’t know about was her musical talent, because that’s not the kind of thing that translates well into a blog. Well, let me now try.

Jill had an unworldly knack of picking out the right notes and the right chords for anything that anyone could hum. She read music, of course, but at a family get-together she never needed to. She would just sit at the piano (after being coaxed, usually) and noodle around songs like “Crazy,” “Edelweiss,” “A Small World After All,” seamlessly segueing from one to the next. The arrangements were her own, with flights of fanciful fingerwork that defy description. And that touch! Her fingers didn’t maul the keys, they strummed them.

She had perfect pitch, verified by an audio engineer long ago, and, more impressively, a unerring knowledge of chord structure that left me (a klutzy piano player) speechless. “How did you know,” I would ask her, “that an E seventh chord belonged there?”

“I don’t know,” she would answer, “it just had an E seventhness about it.”

If it all sounds ad lib, it wasn’t. Underneath it all was a solid musical foundation that enabled her to direct college productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, arrange music for the Crocodillos, a Harvard singing group, and work with the Handel and Haydn Society. “She was the most talented person I ever knew,” says a classmate of hers through high school and college. But she kept that talent well hidden, because she saw her mission in life to be, not a musical whiz, but the best wife and mother possible. In this she succeeded brilliantly.

Jill died on May 24.

Pilot Error

2009-05-13T23:03:00.002-04:00

A few months ago, we were all thrilled by the incredible airmanship of Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, who put an Airbus down on the frigid Hudson River so skillfully, so professionally, that not a single life was lost.

Compare that heroic feat with the emerging story of a commuter jet that crashed in February in Buffalo. The jet was apparently being flown by two pilots who had never experienced severe icing in flight. Now, you might think the chances of severe icing in Buffalo are pretty good, especially in February, and you might think that only an ice-savvy pilot would be assigned that route. I remember flying into the old Hong Kong airport, the one where a normal glide path was impossible because of an inconveniently placed mountain, so you had to bank sharply to make your final approach. A 747 pilot landing at that airport had to be not only 747-qualified, but Kai-Tak qualified. The problem with Buffalo is not its airport, but its weather. A pilot who has landed 50 or 60 times in severe icing will not be spooked. He or she will not try to fight a stall by raising the nose, as the pilot of the commuter jet allegedly did, sealing the fate of 49 people on the aircraft.

I thought of that tragedy while listening to analysts debating the merits of President Obama’s plan to fight a stalled economy. The President has decided to raise taxes directly on the high earners and indirectly (through “cap and trade” energy costs) on everyone else. He also wants to implement universal health insurance, rescue the banks and the automobile industry (and any other domestic industry with a large, unionized work force), and ramp up the war in Afghanistan.

I don’t think he can pull it off, any more than a pilot can correct a stall by pulling up on the nose. He has to lower the nose to increase airspeed, just as President Obama has to lower taxes to increase consumer spending. Because the deficit is huge, that will mean deferring the health plan. (That’s not a bad idea anyway. Adding 50 million people to the insurance rolls sounds like a noble idea until you try to figure out where we’re going to get all those extra doctors, nurses, hospital beds, etc.)

I have admired the President’s oratory, his political skills, and his natural leadership ability. Most of all, I liked his boast that he would subordinate ideology to “what works.” But attacks on Chrysler bondholders, executive salaries, and corporate jets are all born of ideology, not pragmatism. Alas, he is sounding more like a politician and less like a pilot every day. But now we are in a terrible ice storm, and his other gifts aren’t much help. Experience does count. The worst of it is, we are all passengers in the plane Captain Obama is flying.

The Day That Changed History

2009-05-03T09:53:00.002-04:00

Few days can be said to have changed history. Most of the really important shifts have come over a period of years and decades or even centuries. But every so often, there comes along one solitary day that, in retrospect, is a total game-changer. Such a day was September 11, 2001.

Think of it: If Mohammed Atta and his friends hadn’t embarked on their mission of death that morning, there would have been no invasion of Iraq, no Abu Ghraib, no Guantanamo. The President of the United States, who had been solidly reelected less than a year before, would not have become so despised that his party’s ouster in 2008 was all but guaranteed. Secret wiretaps, waterboarding, Blackwater, the Mission Accomplished banner – none of it would have happened.

It is true that the neo-cons in government – Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle – were looking for any excuse to defang Iraq, a potential threat to Israel, but without the attack on the World Trade Center they would have lacked the casus belli. Even with Bush and Cheney rattling sabers, there were enough Congressional skeptics to hold them off. And Secretary of State Colin Powell, a grown-up among children, would certainly have been a voice for reason.

It is hard to imagine what the United States would be like today had not 9-11 happened. The Republicans would probably have held Congress, because the polls show that the nation leans to the right. Would the stock market have crashed? Probably, for that’s what stock markets do from time to time. House prices would have tumbled, because too many people were living beyond their means. The ensuing recession would have been painful, but without the trillion-dollar war tab we might have handled it. President Bush, without the poisonous publicity from Iraq, might have held the support of the American people.

Today we would probably have in the White House a President Giuliani, or a President Huckabee, or even a President McCain. Barack Obama would be known as an interesting senator and a politician with a future. Instead, he rode the tide of public’s revulsion that all stemmed from the event of September 11, 2001.

FDR called December 7, 1941 “a day that will live in infamy.” And so it was, because it turned a European war into the world war that decisively altered history. The assassinations of Julius Caesar (15 March 44), Abraham Lincoln (April 15, 1865), John F. Kennedy (November 23, 1963) are remembered because the men involved were icons, not because their deaths changed history.

One wonders whether Osama Bin Laden appreciated what he was unleashing on that unforgettable morning. To him, the United States was the Evil Empire. Today, if he is still alive, he must know that the Empire has been roundly discredited. Capitalism is in tatters. The nation’s biggest banks and its biggest industries are now wards of the State. Most depressingly, our military adventures in the wake of 9-11 have made things worse, not better, with the Middle East still in turmoil, nuclear Pakistan out of control, and no end in sight.

Now we are all caught up in the whirlwind, like scraps of debris soaring aimlessly in the sky after a tornado has blown through. People are worried, not just because they have lost their houses or their jobs, but because they fear the country has lost its way. They feel that Barack Obama is a good man, but they know he’s a rookie. They hope he’s a messiah, but it’s possible he’s just another scrap of debris, caught in the vortex of 9-11.

Plovergate

2009-04-28T12:08:00.003-04:00

For the past few years a section of Goose Rocks Beach, where I live, has been roped off as a preserve for piping plovers, small birds whose population has dwindled down to numbers that have set off extinction alarms among preservationists. The ropes have been accompanied by stern signs warning people (and any of their pets that can read) to stay away from the birds. Thus we and the plovers have settled into an uneasy truce: You stay on your side of the ropes, we’ll stay on our side, and we’ll all get along.

This year the truce was broken. The birds’ advocates, seeing that the plover count continues to wane, declared war on animals they deemed predators. Raccoons, foxes, and skunks were among those targeted. We have to act quickly, said a fish and wildlife biologist, because “once a predation act occurs, it is too late.” The overseers of the nearby Rachel Carson Wildlife Preserve, having declared raccoons, foxes, and skunks an Axis of Predation, were stymied by their lack of weaponry, so they subcontracted the job to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and soon a USDA truck was seen roaming Goose Rocks, loaded with traps. “What happens to the animals you trap?” asked one local. The USDA hired gun answered that they “euthanize” them. He also acknowledged that they sometimes shoot them.

The story was front-page news in the local paper, and Plovergate was born. Many Goose Rocks residents were outraged that their tax dollars were being used to kill animals whose only sin was trying to feed their young. I was one of the outraged. A few weeks ago a family of foxes took up residence in sand dunes near my house. Papa fox, mama fox, and three tiny kits. Foxes lived in the same foxhole last year, and my children and grandchildren loved to watch them. (The photo above was taken by one of my daughters.) We looked forward to having the new family as neighbors this year. But then, one night a week or two ago, a volley of shots rang out, and the foxes haven’t been seen since.

The piping plover, as even its supporters admit, is not a genius among birds, and it is easy prey for all manner of predators that roam this area. In time the bird will probably become extinct, a prospect that appalls the fish and wildlife folks. But species do become extinct, because that is the way things are in nature. If the fish and wildlife crowd wants to prolong the plovers’ existence, then they should build a plover preserve (Ploverville?) somewhere far away from humans, their pets, and all the other animals that somehow get along without Government assistance.

A Tale of Two Pension Funds

2009-04-22T16:32:00.004-04:00

New York State’s pension fund manages $122 billion, which, in the world’s center of creative financing, offers lots of opportunities for wheeling and dealing. According to the New York Times, this pension fund, controlled not by a board or a committee but by a single individual, awarded some of that pension money to an investment firm known as Quadrangle Group, which then arranged to help finance a low-budget movie called “Chooch.”

The trail is just now starting to unwind, and various threads of the story involve the State Comptroller, a former comptroller, the Chairman of the State’s Liberal Party, and the man who now heads the President’s automobile industry task force. Most of these people have not been charged with anything more than bad judgment, but the point is: How in the world did even a dollar of the New York State pension money wind up financing a movie named “Chooch”?

Now let’s cross the pond to the Netherlands. There we find a huge pension fund called ABP making another investment in the entertainment business. For an undisclosed price (rumored to be less than $200 million), the Dutch pensioners acquired the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, which gives them licensing rights to Oklahoma, South Pacific, Carousel, The Sound of Music, The King and I, and the rest of the R&H canon. But that’s not all. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization also controls the rights to 100 musicals, including those written by Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and Jerome Kern, 500 concert works, and 12,000 songs. So, with a stroke of the pen and the writing of a check that seems very modest, the Dutch pension fund has walked off with much of the American songbook, arguably one of this country’s most valuable artistic treasures. They also acquired the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization itself, one of the world’s leading entertainment powerhouses. Give them credit; the Netherlands pension fund was very canny indeed, and, since the music they own is as close to immortal as you can get, its clients will reap the benefits of that investment long after we are all dead and gone.

And New York, the place where all that music was born? Its pensioners got a movie called “Chooch.”

Allegro - The New Recording

2009-03-26T22:31:00.004-04:00

…..But enough about politics. Let’s turn our attention to weightier matters, like the thrilling new recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ALLEGRO. This musical, following on the heels of OKLAHOMA and CAROUSEL, was so eagerly awaited (it had the largest advance sale in history) it just had to disappoint. And disappoint it did, for reasons that people still argue about today. In my opinion it was by far the best of the R&H flops and the one most deserving of another chance. If you would like to learn more about my thoughts on the original ALLEGRO (which I saw, incidentally, back in 1947), you’ll find it in a blog posting dated April 28, 2006.

But today I would like to rave about the new, “first complete recording” of ALLEGRO. It is wonderful, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Ted Chapin of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, R&H Music Director Bruce Pohamac, conductor Larry Blank, David Lai of Sony, and a few other colleagues. And a dream cast, including Audra McDonald, Laura Benanti, Nathan Gunn, and Liz Callaway. And a talented group of musicians in Bratislava.

Bratislava? Well, yes, because a Slovakian orchestra was looking for work, schooled in the romantic tradition, and available. So off Chapin and buddies went to Bratislava, where they gave the orchestra the magnificent Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations, rehearsed, and recorded – just the orchestra. Then, the audio tracks safely stowed, they flew back to the U.S., recorded the chorus, then the soloists, then a final recording session to add some neat touches, like the voice of Oscar Hammerstein. When you hear the final product, you will think all 70 cast members and the Istropolis Philharmonic Orchestra were gathered together in a huge recording hall, but you will be wrong, because we are living in the age where little children have learned to ask “Is it real, daddy?”

But all the audio razzle-dazzle would have been wasted without sure-fire casting and without one of Rodgers’s most melodic scores to work with. Whatever the faults of ALLEGRO, the score is not among them. If you are old enough, you may remember A Fellow Needs a Girl or So Far. If you are also tuned in to show music, you may even recall You Are Never Away or The Gentleman is a Dope. But my own favorites are I Know It Can Happen Again, Winters Go By, Wish Them Well, and Come Home, Joe, sung by Audra McDonald. Hearing Audra wrap her glorious voice around that one song is worth the cost of the entire two-disc set.

The play tells the story of Joseph Taylor, Jr., son of a country doctor and destined to become a doctor himself. It begins with Junior’s birth, follows him through school, medical school, romance, marriage, and his fateful encounter with the decision of his life: whether to climb the medical escalator in the big Chicago hospital or return to join his dad in his home town. This being a Hammerstein book, you’d expect Joe to chuck the high life in favor of the honest labors of the country doctor, and you’d be right. But, in a most un-Hammersteinly twist, the girl he married, his childhood sweetheart, turns out to be seduced by the glitter (and by a wealthy hospital benefactor), and Joe goes home without her – but with nurse Emily, who, it is assumed, will marry him once the legalities are sorted out.

In the original, Emily was played by Lisa Kirk, and a highlight was her The Gentleman is a Dope. Lisa came off as a sadder but wiser nurse, who knows the score, even though the gentleman doesn’t. In the new recording, Emily is sung by Liz Callaway, a much sweeter proposition with a less torchy reading of the lyric. The casting apparently surprised a few people, but the producers asked themselves who would be more likely to leave the big city and follow her fellow back to the sticks – Elaine Stritch or Julie Andrews?

There is a lot of music on these two discs, and it is not, I must say, all gold. A few songs – Yatata Yatata, Money Isn’t Everything, and the title song – are clunkers, because their irony places them more in Sondheimland than in the world of R&H. In fact, it is worth noting that Stephen Sondheim was a gofer for the original ALLEGRO, just as Ted Chapin was a gofer, much later, for Sondheim’s FOLLIES.

These few shortcomings aside, the new recording of ALLEGRO deserves a place in the collection of anyone who loves Broadway music and musicals. I also have the original cast recording of the show, but I doubt that I’ll listen to it any more; the new one seems destined to be, for the foreseeable future, the definitive recording of this fine, underrated musical.

Is There a Statesman in the House?

2009-03-19T19:42:00.004-04:00

A lot of people are very angry about the bonuses paid to AIG employees, as they should be. But should that fact serve as a signal for members of Congress to form a lynch mob? Should we expect better of our representatives, or must we accept the fact that a politician will never pass up the chance to play the demagogue, especially when the TV cameras are present?

The most shameful exhibitionist of them all was Senator Grassley of Iowa, who said that the AIG people should contemplate suicide, Japanese style. In interviews later, he passed that off as "rhetoric." I pass it off as despicable.

Today a Massachusetts congressman had his turn to vent. Badgering the AIG CEO (who just came on the scene, had no culpability whatsoever, and works for a dollar a year), the Congressman lashed out at the hapless executive, and when the victim said he "took offense" at the Congressman's remarks, the Bay State politician shouted that the offense was intended. That exchange, the Congressman no doubt figured, was worth at least 1000 votes in the next election.

As bad as George Bush's poll numbers were, Congress's were worse, deservedly. Yes, there are venal businesspeople, but there are venal Congressmen, too. The difference is that the businesspeople never get the chance to call Congressional crooks crooks, at least not while the cameras are running.

Then there is the matter of a new tax, narrowly configured to snare only the high-income employees of firms accepting TARP money over a certain, Congressionally mandated, threshold. No matter how much we dislike the much publicized AIG bonuses, it is monstrous for Congress to retaliate in this way. Once we cede Congress the power to impose confiscatory tax rates on any group of people the public hates, we are not much better than the good Massachusetts folks in 17th century Salem.

All this Congressional foaming at the mouth gives President Obama a wonderful opportunity to rise above it and act the statesman, vetoing the most outrageously vindictive bills. Just as Candidate Obama made a wonderful, historic speech about race during the campaign, President Obama now has the chance to remind everyone that class warfare is just as insidious and just as destructive as race warfare. Do we have a statesman or a politician in the White House? We will see.

The Rhetoric Trap

2009-02-28T12:00:00.004-05:00

The problem is our rhetoric. Our politicians constantly tell us that our workers are the smartest, most innovative, most creative, and hardest-working in the world. It follows, then, that we deserve the most comfortable lifestyle, ensured by entitlement programs that have expanded beyond reason (and beyond our ability to pay for them). We are told by advertisers that every American deserves the good life ("You deserve the very best” or "You owe it yourself..."). American exceptionalism has been proclaimed for so long and so emphatically that we have come to believe it. If other countries are starting to creep up on us economically, it must be because they cheat, manipulating their currencies, subsidizing their industries, and free-loading off our world-wide defense forces.

There’s an ounce of truth in all this. The American brand of free-market capitalism has proved itself superior to centralized planning, and for the past century we have achieved amazing things. But the jingoism is wearing thin these days. After all, we can’t very well bash China while we’re borrowing more a billion dollars a day from them, can we? If we’re so much smarter than they are, shouldn’t they be borrowing from us?

The rhetoric trap brings me to President Obama and his national budget. I don’t quite know what to make of it or of the bellicose rhetoric that accompanied its unveiling. If the President really believes that we can mend our broken economy by redistributing wealth, that’s one thing. But if his budget is based not on pragmatism but on political theater, that’s another.

It is easy to characterize the big Wall Street bonuses and the private jets and the parties at Las Vegas as excesses. And it’s not fair, as Warren Buffett says, for a top executive to be taxed at the same rate as his secretary. But then, Lenin and others have attacked capitalism on fairness grounds, too. Capitalism is arguably unfair. Life is unfair. You can’t win a logic contest judged on fairness. So if you hold the reins of power, you try to find a system that works for most people, and screw the fairness or unfairness.

My faith in Barack Obama has been based on my belief that he is, ultimately, a pragmatist. Indeed he has said as much, repeatedly using the term “what works” as a mantra. But now I fear that he is giving in to other principles. The “buy America” provision in pending legislation is suspect under “what works” thinking, as any Wal-Mart shopper can tell you.

The promise to arrange the tax code so that “the affluent” are defined as those making more than $250,000 is equally spurious. In a different era, I remember House Speaker Tip O’Neill being asked where he drew the dividing line between haves and have-nots. “$50,000 a year,” he answered. Later, the Alternative Minimum Tax was packaged and sold as a means of catching the idle rich. Alas, neither Tip O’Neill’s dividing line nor the AMT was indexed for inflation, and President Obama has not mentioned a word about indexing his proposed tax plan. Given the outlook for the dollar, it is quite possible that most members of the middle class will soon be earning $250,000 a year – and be taxed accordingly. That’s how governments from time immemorial have solved their financial problems.

John McCain and Barack Obama, in the presidential campaign, both championed “straight talk,” while both were giving us, not straight talk, but political talk. No wonder folks are so cynical. And I am afraid President Obama has not lost the appetite for political talk. He is acting and talking as if his victory was a mandate for a lurch to the left, when in fact it was simply a repudiation of George Bush and the Republicans. There’s a difference.

So let’s please have an end to the political talk, Mister President, and the beginning of some real straight talk. Something like this:

My fellow Americans. Globalism is neither bad nor good, but it is a fact, and we must accept that. Americans are good workers, but so are the Chinese and the Indians and the Japanese and the Brazilians. We are smart, but so are they. We can’t build fences around the United States, and we can no longer dictate how other people live. Once we start believing that we are entitled to more just because we are Americans, we are in for a hard time, because the other 95 percent of the world’s population won’t accept that.

And we cannot succeed by attacking each other. Just as we have fought battles against discrimination on the basis of race and creed, we must be careful not to hate people because they have more money or a bigger house or a newer car. Any economic system produces winners, and our job is to see that we have more winners, not fewer. The more winners we have, the fewer losers there will be.

I wish I could promise you all a satisfying career and a comfortable retirement, based simply on the fact that you were born in this country. I can’t. No President can, although many have tried. In the final analysis, you must rely on your own skills and enterprise and work ethic, fortified by the love and compassion of your family and friends. Your country can create a helpful environment, but you must do the heavy lifting.

Thoughts on Stimulating the Economy

2009-02-19T22:01:00.004-05:00

Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson

Abraham Lincoln serves as an inspiration for our new president, as he does for millions of people who credit him with saving the Republic and freeing the slaves. Lincoln was indeed a great man, who left enough of a paper trail to document his greatness. But our founding fathers – Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton – were arguably even greater, for it was they who created a republic worth saving.

Rick Santelli, a CNBC regular at the Chicago trading pit, takes a straw poll on the justice of bailing out people who added a new bathroom in a house they couldn’t afford in the first place. In the pit, the response is unanimously negative. The chorus of raspberries reflects a growing sentiment among people who play by the rules that they should not be forced to rescue those who knowingly took on more debt than their income could handle.

Those who think it is right to bail out borrowers who are over their heads say that the borrowers were victimized by villainous banks, that they didn’t fully understand adjustable-rate mortgages, that they were simply chasing the American dream, home ownership.

They have a point. Many if not most mortgagees didn’t understand the terms they agree to. Their parents never told them, as mine did, that you shouldn’t pay more than a week's wages for a month's rent. More’s the pity, they never learned that in school, either, because you never learn even rudimentary economics in school.

We are a nation of economic illiterates. What’s worse, most of our Congressional representatives, judging by their televised comments during recent hearings, don’t know a thing about derivatives, CDOs, LIBOR, option spreads, ETFs, etc. So, instead of asking intelligent questions of the witnesses, they rail against private jets, golden parachutes, and bonuses. There’s nothing like righteous indignation to show the folks back home how tough you are on the fat cats.

If you’ve been reading these blogs for a while, you know that I have been a stock-market bear for the last two years. Alas, today I am just as bearish as ever. There is no bottom in sight, despite the cheer-leading from the CNBC die-hards. Their arguments are all based on history: Recessions and bear markets last x months on average, the stock market always turns up six months before the economy turns, if you wait until you see the economy pick up you’ll miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime, blah, blah, blah.

Much as I appreciate history, in this case it is of no value. In previous recessions we were not in hock to China. In previous recessions we were not being impoverished by runaway entitlements. In previous recessions we had a world-class manufacturing base. In previous recessions we weren’t fighting an expensive war that had no end in sight.

President Obama, who deserves more support than he is getting these days, will soon start getting blamed, unjustly, for the spreading misery. He began his presidency with the nation in a sharp red-blue divide, and whatever he does to address the economic collapse is sure to enrage either the reds or the blues. Enraging the left is probably a safer course, because he has a deep reservoir of support there, but that would go against his instincts.

What should he do? Despite the popular shibboleth that “Main Street is more important than Wall Street,” the stock market is our best barometer of the national confidence in the economy. Consumer confidence has been destroyed, and as the consumer goes, so goes 70 percent of our economy. And the consumer is now seeing his or her 401-K and the dream of a comfortable retirement go down the drain with the stock market.
Like it or not, Main Street cannot recover unless Wall Street recovers.

Here’s an idea: Declare a moratorium on capital-gains taxes. Maybe a year, maybe two. There aren’t any gains anyway, so it won’t cost the Treasury much unless the stock market takes off. And if it does take off, it will be because risk capital has begun flowing again, and the risks have started paying off. As it is, the risk capital is all in Treasury bonds and mattresses, and that doesn’t help.

Cutting the capital-gains tax rate to zero, even for one year, would be controversial, but it would in keeping with Obama’s stated appetite for thinking outside the box. As for Congress, he could charm the Democrats, and the Republicans wouldn’t dare complain.

While the stock market would be a primary target of such a move, the elimination of capital-gains taxes might also invigorate the real estate market.

There’s a risk that the moratorium would ignite the stock market for a short-term rally with no economic follow-through. But I think the risk-taking current runs deep in this country, and that, once the flow is restarted, the economy would heal itself.

It won’t happen. For this president, eliminating the capital gains tax would be, not just outside the box, but outside the galaxy. Thus the economy and the stock market will continue south. I remain a bear.

The Obama Presidency - Chapter Two

2009-02-10T21:21:00.001-05:00

Dice are rolling, the knives are out
Would be presidents are all around
I don’t say they mean harm, but they’d each give an arm
To see us six feet under ground.
- from “Evita” lyric by Tim Rice

So it must seem to President Obama this week. The nightly television talk, especially that carried by cable, is filled with carping. The editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which are given over to Karl Rove, John Bolton, and the neocons in exile, tell us daily how badly the new President is screwing up on foreign policy, on the financial rescue programs, and on just about everything on his plate. And the man has been in office barely a month! It doesn’t seem fair.

All right, some criticism is justified, especially on errant cabinet appointments. But that’s not the loudest beef. What really ticks off the hard right is his promise to talk with Iran, his determination to close Gitmo, and his obvious preference for diplomacy over confrontation. Real men choose confrontation, the hawks seem to be saying. Pie-in-the-sky Obama just doesn’t get it.

The most dangerous situation facing us is what’s brewing in Pakistan. As someone said, Afghanistan is irrelevant; the real game is in Pakistan, a big country, a poor country, and a country filled with weapons, including the nuclear kind. As is so often the case these days, we get along (barely) with the leaders but the people don’t like us. What should the President do about Pakistan? The neocons would say “get tough.” The doves would say, “pull out.” Neither approach makes sense. It’s not that simple. The problem calls for patient, thoughtful diplomacy. Above all, it calls for working the global room, schmoozing with China, Russia, and other Asian neighbors. Obama seems to recognize this, and the critics should at least give him credit for his recent overtures to Russia, whose help would be invaluable in Asia. But they won’t, because some of them are still fighting the cold war.

The polls suggest that the natterers are having little effect on public opinion, as Obama’s honeymoon continues. Of course, the kind of decisions he will have to make soon, especially on the financial front, are sure to cost a lot of people a lot of money, and that will take points off his approval rating. Will the public blame the President, or will it blame the forces that created the problem? Reason says the latter, but I am not so sure. A wild card in all this is Congress, which seems intent on pulling Obama to the left, a chancy move in a country that is still somewhat to the right of center politically.

This week the President took the gloves off, so to speak, in addressing the Republican opposition to his financial bailout, reminding them pointedly that it was the Democrats, after all, who won the election. Fine; there is nothing wrong with showing a little spine in politics. But one hopes he will be equally tough on the Congressional Democrats who try to yank him off the reservation, because it seems to me that they will turn out to be his real problem in Washington. The Republicans, for all their bluster, are, like Afghanistan, irrelevant. If you want to know where the dice are rolling and the knives are out, look in the direction of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Einstein's Dreams

2009-02-06T22:50:00.002-05:00

Have you ever wondered about the nature of time? Of course you have. I have. We all have, including Einstein, who wondered about time a great deal and finally came to grips with it in 1905, when he published four remarkable treatises, including one setting out his theory of relativity.

The possibility of time travel has excited fiction-writers for many years, and even though I have seen The Time Machine often, I never tire of watching Weena and her simple-minded Eloi friends escape the Morlocks. Countless other time-travel tales engage us, even though we know the basic premise is impossible.

Or is it?

Last night I read a little book called Einstein’s Dreams. It was written in 1993 by an MIT professor named Alan Lightman, and it is one of those books you can’t put down. The subject matter is the hook, but the fact that Lightman is a world-class writer is the grabber.

The book, which runs a mere 179 pages, explores the possibilities attached to various theories about the nature of time, some well known, some not so. Maybe time is a repetitive phenomenon. Maybe time does not exist outside our perception. Maybe, since time is related to mass, it passes more slowly the farther you are from the earth’s core. Maybe there are two kinds of time: mechanical time and body time. Maybe, because time passes more slowly for people in motion, those who travel at high speed gain time.

The book is organized as a series of vignettes, dated throughout 1905 and separated by “interludes” in which Einstein chats with his friend Besso in Berne. But Einstein’s fantasies of various time-altered “worlds” are the attraction here, along with the metaphysical points they make. Take this picture of a world in which everyone travels at high velocity to gain time:

"A man or a woman suddenly thrust into this world would have to dodge houses and buildings. For all is in motion. Houses and apartments, mounted on wheels, go careening through Bahnhofplatz and race through the narrows of Marktgasse, their occupants shouting from second-floor windows. The post office doesn’t remain on Postgasse, but flies through the city on rails, like a train. ….Everywhere the air whines and roars with the sound of motors and locomotion. When a person comes out of his front door at sunrise, he hits the ground running, catches up with his office building, hurries up and down flights of stairs, works at a desk propelled in circles, gallops home at the end of the day…..No one is still.”

The book was widely praised when it was first published, but it took me a while to discover the small volume, which has been sitting in my library, unnoticed, for at least 10 years. What made me decide to pick it up last night? Why did Einstein have his “annus mirabilis” the same year my mother was born, the year her father died? Why did I choose to quote the paragraph above, only noting afterward that it was dated May 29, my birthday?

Tonight, still in my own private time warp, I read the short story “Germelshausen,” by Friedrich Gerstäcker, which takes place in a small German village that comes to life for one day every hundred years. I remember reading it in German when I was in high school, but then I knew it as “Das Geheimnisvollen Dorf” (the full-of-mystery village). It’s a lovely tale, used as the basis for Brigadoon. And further proof that, no matter how surely we are prisoners of mechanical time, the idea of breaking free of those chains is endlessly fascinating.

Brideshead Regurgitated

2009-01-31T15:22:00.002-05:00

In 1947 MGM invited Evelyn Waugh to Hollywood to discuss the sale of the film rights to Brideshead Revisited. Soon after talks began, it was clear to Waugh that MGM wanted, not his masterpiece, but a Hollywood version of the story. So the talks broke down. But Waugh made the most of his trip, visiting Forest Lawn Cemetery, which inspired him to write the satirical The Loved One. This one was sold to MGM, many years later, with sorry results. Waugh hated it and probably felt relieved that he had at least kept Brideshead out of MGM’s clutches. Coincidentally, Waugh died shortly after The Loved One was released.

(Actually, Waugh didn’t sell the film rights to The Loved One to Hollywood. His agent sold them to a Mexican on the assurance that it would never be produced but would allow Waugh and Alec Guinness to enjoy a Mexican holiday together. The Mexican later sold the rights to Hollywood, infuriating Waugh.)

As a matter of fact, Waugh’s stylish prose does not translate well to film, the towering exception being the 1981 television production of Brideshead Revisited, about which more later. Sword of Honor, based on Waugh’s wartime trilogy, was made into a passable TV film, and A Handful of Dust was more than passable, but Scoop, Vile Bodies (Bright Young Things), and The Loved One were dreadful. Once the screenwriter decides to “improve” or “modernize” Waugh, the die is cast: After you remove Waugh’s brilliant prose, there is nothing left, because Evelyn Waugh wrote novels, not film treatments. (Graham Greene, on the other hand, wrote with the camera in mind, which is why The Third Man, The Heart of the Matter, Our Man in Havana, and other Greene titles were as successful as movies as they were as books.)

Writer John Mortimer, who wrote the screenplay for the widely and justly praised Brideshead Revisited miniseries (and who died only a few weeks ago) was rigorously faithful to Waugh’s novel, and this fact, plus a solid gold cast, made that production what is, in the minds of many (including me), the best piece of dramatic fiction ever put on film. Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom were Lord and Lady Marchmain, Jeremy Irons (in his breakthrough role) was Charles Ryder, John Gielgud played his father, and Anthony Andrews was Sebastian Flyte. The supporting actors, notably Simon Jones as Brideshead and Phoebe Nicholls as Cordelia Flyte, were all excellent. But the lion’s share of the credit is due John Mortimer for capturing not only the language but the spirit of the novel.

That brings me to the 2008 movie version of Brideshead Revisited. I was not expecting a production to rival the 1981 TV classic; that would be asking too much. But the lead screenwriter was Andrew Davies, well known and respected for his many Masterpiece Theater scripts, so I was not expecting a total disaster either. But that is what I got. If I had viewed the “Making Of” featurette in the bonus material, I would have been warned. “We wanted to do a contemporary reading of the novel,” said someone. Oh-oh. Translation: The producers said to the writers, “Look, Waugh leaves the relationship between Charles and Sebastian ambiguous. Let’s make them conspicuously gay, maybe have them kiss. And Waugh’s Lady Marchmain is a sympathetic if over-zealous matriarch. Bo-ring. Let’s make her a sort of a Catholic dragon lady, with a hint of Lady Macbeth."

The movie is constrained by its length (a little over two hours), so Anthony Blanche, Cordelia, Samgrass, and Boy Mulcaster are reduced to walk-ons. That’s forgivable, but not the jettisoning of the spiritual story at the heart of the novel.

For the miniseries, Mortimer was wise enough to have Charles Ryder deliver voice-overs, with the distinctive voice of Jeremy Irons intoning the elegant sentences of Waugh. Thus, when Ryder, a wartime soldier, returns to the majestic Brideshead mansion he recalls:

“I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the beauty of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.”

Matthew Goode, who plays Charles in the new film, looks and sounds a bit like Irons, and several other members of the cast look eerily like their earlier counterparts, with similar hairdos and costumes. And Castle Howard in Yorkshire, which became a tourist magnet a quarter century ago after it gained word-wide fame as Brideshead, is again pressed into service for the film. But these surface similarities only remind viewers who have seen the miniseries what a gulf in quality separates the two versions.

The real losers are those whose first exposure to Brideshead Revisited is the 2008 film – those who have never read the novel or seen the 1981 television production. They are to be pitied, for they will have seen a movie that is pretty lame, and they will wonder, “Why has so much been made of this very ordinary story about very unhappy people?”

In fact, the new film is probably the very film that MGM moguls wanted to make when they welcomed Evelyn Waugh to Hollywood in 1947. They might have cast Cary Grant as Charles, Jimmy Stewart as Sebastian, and Vivien Leigh as Julia. The 1947 movie would have been chaste, of course, but it would have been as soul-less as the newest version. Waugh saw it coming and fled. Too bad his estate didn’t have his good taste.

Oh, well. At least it hasn’t been made into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

The Obama Presidency - Chapter One

2009-01-25T23:14:00.002-05:00

We are scarcely one week into the Obama presidency, and the carping has begun, from both the right and the left. From the right, the beef is that he is socializing the country. The left is sore that he is not moving faster to socialize the country. With a sky-high approval rating, the President can afford to ignore the snipers on the fringes, but it is harder to ignore the extremists in Congress.

Meanwhile, “W” has gone back to the ranch, to the accompaniment of a stirring “Ave Atque Vale” from Karl Rove, who says that Bush’s unforgivable sin, in the eyes of his detractors, is that he won in Iraq. I must have missed that news bulletin. The fact is that the country is worse off, by a mile, than it was eight years ago, and, though not all of the problems were of his making, too many were. To those who quibble about the WMD deception, the hawks shift gears, insisting that “the world is a safer place with Saddam Hussein gone.” But the world, in the eyes of many, is a safer place with Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle et al gone. As for Bush 43, he will lie low for a while, remembered by the public much as Bill Buckner was remembered in Boston.

Obama’s problem is not the sniping, but the economy. The country will have to deleverage big time, and the process will take years and be painful. Although deflation is the immediate threat, eventually Government will react the way Governments always react to economic collapses: They debase the currency. China, holding a ton of our IOUs, watches anxiously, and one wonders what on earth possessed Timothy Geithner to yank China’s chain by accusing it of currency manipulation. One expects Senator Schumer to bash the Chinese, as demagogues are wont to do, but the incoming Treasury Secretary?

Of course, when you publicly insist that the yuan is too cheap and should appreciate, what you are really saying is that the dollar is too high and should depreciate. But you can’t say that, so instead, if you are the Secretary of the Treasury, you keep blathering that a strong dollar is in the national interest.

President Obama is a smart man who no doubt is going down the presidential learning curve very fast. Here is what I suspect he has already learned:

Much as the public is fed up with bank bail-outs, there is no way to avoid more of them. Like it or not, the banking system is the ship carrying the economy, and if the ship sinks, we all sink.

China and the U.S. are now joined at the hip. Their economy needs our markets, and our economy needs their financial support. But we need them more than they need us, because their people can endure hardship better than we can. Put another way, the last thing Obama needs on his plate is a flare-up in U.S. – China tensions. (BO to TG: Cool it.)

Much of the Arab world is aghast at what Israel has done to Gaza, but that was to be expected. The reaction in Europe is another matter. The fact is that Israel has only one real supporter of substance in the world: us. None of the other major players on the world scene – not China, nor Japan, nor Europe, nor India – is interested in cosponsoring Israel. So in the community of nations, not only is Israel isolated, but on this matter we are, too. Even more dangerous, Israel may believe that it can count on our support if it strikes Iran preemptively. The chances of such a strike will increase after February 10, when the hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu will likely become Israel’s Prime Minister. “Peace is purchased from strength,” writes Netanyahu in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, overlooking the fact that Israel has enjoyed overwhelming military superiority for decades, with no peace to show for it.

Obama has already made it abundantly clear that, whatever the truculent instincts of other countries and tribes, his preference is to cool off the hot spots with diplomacy. That is a hopeful sign. Besides, what’s the alternative? Shock and awe?

Our new President also faces tough choices in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and even neighboring Mexico, where drug wars infest the streets of Tijuana and Juarez. England’s economy is crumbling, and continental Europe is rethinking the wisdom of a common currency. In fact, few parts of the world do not have major problems. Why would anyone in his right mind want to be President at a time like this?

It’s the audacity of hope. The whole world is looking to the U.S. cavalry to ride to the rescue. Foreigners don’t like to admit it, but they really believe we are their only hope. That is why billions watched the inauguration on TV so hopefully. They saw more than 2 million Americans on the mall in Washington, being civil, no, friendly to each other. The week before, they saw more than 100 people standing on the wings of a half-submerged airplane in the Hudson River, as calmly as if they were waiting for a taxi at Grand Central. No pushing and shoving, no climbing over each other to get a seat on the ferry. Only in America, the world thought.

And the world was right.

Inauguration

2009-01-17T22:17:00.001-05:00

It is time, the always readable Peggy Noonan writes, to suspend disbelief. Barack Obama is really happening. What’s more, this unbelievable event gives us all a chance, a sliver of a chance, to reshape our country, to put aside the rancor, the meanness that has infected our dialogue for too long. Yes, coming together is the bromide of every political campaign, but Barack Obama really believes it. He is the most sincere, most genuine, most persuasive president-elect I have ever seen. He is either the real McCoy or the greatest con artist this country has ever seen. I vote for McCoy, because it is also time to suspend cynicism.

It is also time to pray. The country is in great trouble. It doesn’t look that way at first glance. Bread lines or soup kitchens are hardly a common sight, as they were in the Great Depression. But Wall Street has seen a few suicides, and millions of people are out of work. Mortgage foreclosures are epidemic, and other shoes (commercial real estate, credit cards, car loans) have yet to fall. The patient’s condition is serious, and we need a seriously capable leader, and I think we may have one starting Tuesday.

Much is made of Franklin Roosevelt’s heroics in the 1930s, and he does deserve full credit for making people think they were better off while the unemployment rate kept climbing. My parents, life-long Democrats, believed in FDR and bought into the New Deal and the WPA and all the rest. Today it’s easy to be cynical about Roosevelt, but consider this: Let’s say that nothing he could have done would have pulled us out of the Depression in the 30s (my view, as it happens). Now, would the public have been any happier without all those fireside chats and soaring speeches? Or would revolution have been in the air? There is much to be said for an inspirational leader. If the leader is also wise (like, say, Washington or Lincoln or Churchill), so much the better.

There is also much to be said for a leader who is unflappable in a crisis. We need a president who will deal with a global financial meltdown the way Captain Sullenberger dealt with losing both engines of his A320 – calmly, professionally. Barack Obama is one cool cat, as they used to say ages ago, and it is impossible to imagine him losing his composure when it is most needed.

I am also naturally drawn to Obama because he is a man of words, a gifted writer and orator. When was the last time we had a president who treated the language with respect, who delivered sentences and phrases and whole paragraphs as if they were music? Yes, he has a speechwriter, but Obama will be the master of the Oval Office rhetoric, and he will craft the structure and vocabulary and cadence of what he delivers.

So, Peggy, I will gladly suspend disbelief Tuesday. More than that, I will watch the pageantry with a sense of awe and a prayer that, no matter how high the expectations surrounding Barack Obama, he will exceed them.

Ding-Ding

2009-01-14T13:43:00.003-05:00

Sitting on my night table is a remote digital thermometer, which receives signals from an outside sensor and converts them into temperature readings so that each morning when I wake up I can see what I am store for (this time of year in Maine, the news is usually bad). As far as I can tell, it is accurate, and the digits are big enough so that I don’t need my glasses, so I am generally a happy customer. But the thermometer also includes an alarm function, so that every day at noon it chimes for two minutes. Or, to quote my wife, “it goes ding-ding. Fred, it is going ding-ding. Why is it going ding-ding?”

I have read every word of the instruction sheet, and I have concluded that there is no way to turn off the ding-ding. It is a software bug. Either that or Taylor Instrument has forgotten to tell users how to shut the damn thing up.

If this were an isolated instance of digital mischief, I could understand. But I am afraid it is worse than that. All the digital devices in the house have mounted a mutiny, which has grown worse since the protracted power outage caused by an ice storm a few weeks ago. The microwave oven goes berserk almost every day. One minute it works fine, the next minute it quits, and no amount of poking the controls will produce any response. Then, an hour or two later, it comes back to life. Unplugging it, as the manual suggests, doesn’t cure the problem. Nor does the addition of a surge protector. It works when it jolly well feels like working.

A digital picture frame also has a mind of its own, firing up at odd times without human intervention. A possible explanation, according to the manufacturer’s on-line service technician, is that it speaks PC, and I speak Mac when I load pictures from iPhoto. Then there is my wife’s computer-controlled sewing machine, which, after years of faithful service, decided that buttonholing was something it just didn’t want to do any more.

My wife talked darkly of mischievous “little men” inside these digital devices. I used to laugh at this; now I am not so sure.

Next month, we are all forewarned, analog television signals will go the way of 45-rpm records, and a new day of digital bliss will dawn. Digital signals, the FCC and the consumer electronics industry tell us, will give us better picture quality and open up lots of ancillary services. (Most of all, they don’t tell us, they will resuscitate sagging sales at Best Buy and Radio Shack.)

The other day I played an old tape cassette on a good tape deck into a very good analog amplifier, which fed a pair of very good old speakers. It was a tape of Melissa Manchester singing old classics, starting with “Over The Rainbow.” And I heard sound I have never heard from my CD collection or my iHome player or any of the digital wonders that bedeck my entertainment center. The timber, the bass, the color were beyond anything the digital equipment could emulate. It was beautiful.

I will go along with the digital revolution, because I have to. Analog computers lost the battle a long time ago, and if we want all the benefits of the computer age we must be willing to put up with the occasional mutiny and the ding-dings. But I will keep my old analog gear, my old tape cassettes, and my old original cast albums on LP records, so that every so often I can listen to full-bodied music and not just digital slices.

Wanted: 10,000 Entrepreneurs

2009-01-12T13:01:00.002-05:00

Barack Obama, who will become our President next week, puts his economic philosophy this way: “It depends on whether you want to reward wealth or reward the workers who create wealth.” That’s a standard Democratic mantra, for which he can be forgiven. But there is another subset of the population that is overlooked in both the Democratic and Republican catechisms. It is a tiny subset, but it is the subset we must depend on if we are to extract ourselves from a recession that could become a depression.

I am talking about the people who have the vision, knowledge, and leadership skills to create dynamic new companies.

Vision: Some people have a sixth sense that tells them where the markets are headed and what responses will best exploit the coming trends. These people are not infallible, and sometimes they get it wrong, but when they do they cut their losses and start again, because it’s in their DNA. Of course, to act on their vision they need

Knowledge: If the vision involves electronics, they must know electronics. If it involves pharmaceuticals, they must know medicine. Because we are talking about business opportunities, they must know the nuts and bolts of business, including finance and sales and, probably, manufacturing. Then, to give their new company critical mass, they need

Leadership skills. All the vision and knowledge in the world are useless without the ability to find, engage, motivate, and retain a work force that understands the dream and is inspired by it. We are talking now about communication skills, plus the indefinable quality that a platoon leader shows when he tells his troops “Follow me!” – and they do.

It is clear that we are talking about a rare combination of qualities. In many cases the visionary lacks one of the essentials, so a partner is found. Thus Dave Packard joined Bill Hewlett to found H-P, Larry Page joined Sergey Brin to found Google, Bob Noyce joined Gordon Moore to found Intel. Exceptional people all, and it is often impossible to know exactly which qualities were contributed by each member of the team.

Such people are a rare breed, much rarer than most people realize. (I worked for such a person for 27 years, so I know whereof I speak.) My guess is that in the whole United States there are no more than 10,000 people (and that's a generous estimate) who have the potential to create (or co-create) companies of substance. A few can create industries, and these are the rarest of the rare.

So, President-Elect Obama, don’t worry about rewarding capital or labor. That’s yesterday’s story. Concentrate on finding and motivating the 10,000 people who have the magic touch that can create a Google or an Intel or a Microsoft (or, for that matter, a Wal-Mart). You may say that education is the key, so we must have better schools. But that process takes years, and we need solutions now. The 10,000 are out there. Some have founded small companies and failed. Their next venture may be the next “new thing.” Some may be looking for the right partner. Some may need funding, just when the venture capitalists have gone missing. You can help, maybe. You could, for a start, sit down with someone like Steve Jobs or Larry Page for a brainstorming session on the subject of entrepreneurism. You need – we need - those 10,000 people in a hurry.

The Greatest Blog of the Year!!

2008-12-29T10:03:00.004-05:00

The New York Times is hard up these days. It is selling its Manhattan building and trying to offload its interest in the Red Sox and its cable TV network. Circulation is down, and advertising revenues are getting killed by the internet and by the recession. What’s a newspaper to do?

Well, to start with, the Times should drastically hike its advertising rates. Huh? I thought you just said the recession is murdering advertising revenue. How can you possibly suggest raising rates?

I can because of the apparently inexhaustible supply of movie ads in the Times. Full pages and junior pages, telling us that Benjamin Button “sweeps you away,” Yes Man is “the best comedy of the year,” Valkyrie is “spine-tingling,” Last Chance Harvey is “too good to resist,” Slumdog Millionaire is “movie heaven,” Doubt is “the best picture of the year,” Bedtime Stories is “hysterically funny,” The Reader is “a masterpiece!” Seven Pounds is “a gift for moviegoers,” Milk is “an American classic,” Bolt is “the perfect holiday movie,” and Gran Torino is “a movie event.”

Then there are the message ads, full-page essays telling us that Israel must be defended, that the Arab Peace Initiative must be endorsed, that unions threaten the secret ballot. The Times lets all sorts of organizations use its pages as a megaphone. Nothing wrong in that; open discourse should be encouraged. But it is obvious (to me, at least) that the Times is renting that megaphone on the cheap.

Competition? Get real. Where else are these people going to go? The Times is the national newspaper. Movies need the Times. So does any group that wants to vent about any real or perceived injustice. The Times is Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park, the paper of record that legitimizes everything. The Dolphins didn’t beat the Jets until the Times said so.

The list price for a full-page in the Times is about $142,000. There is an “advocacy” rate of about $64,000, and there was a flap over which rate the Times should have charged MoveOn for its tasteless ad in which Petraeus was headlined as “Betray Us.” But the point is, even $142,000 is laughably low for a page in the Times, which says it will hold rates steady in 2009. In my opinion, those who want that megaphone would want it just as badly at $250,000 or more.

As for the movies, even the most marginal of them seem to be eager to pony up for a full page. Maybe they’re not talking to us, but to those who give out the awards. Whatever, my hunch is that the Times could double its movie ad rates without losing a single customer. After all, how much is too much to advertise the greatest, most spine-tingling, most unforgettable, most astounding, most spellbinding masterpiece of the year?

Olio

2008-12-17T11:08:00.001-05:00

It’s snowing hard here today, with another storm predicted for the weekend, and still another a couple of days later. And winter hasn’t even begun yet. Last weekend we were without power, thanks to a vicious ice storm that hit Thursday night, and my son in New Hampshire still has no electricity. Most of the year, New England is a fine place to live, but from December through March the smart folks fly south with the geese. ……….The newspapers have been filled with stories about the discredited Governor of Illinois, who has become a bit of a joke. Alan Abelson of Barron’s notes that he “wore his hair in the fashion of Mamie Eisenhower or Laurence Olivier playing Henry V,” and the Economist says he “has the hair of a Kennedy and the tongue of a Soprano.”. ………On Broadway, theaters are going dark because of the recession. Gypsy, despite raves for Patti LuPone, played to 59 percent of the house last week and will close seven weeks early. Other shows (Grease, Hairspray) will close right after Christmas. Says a producer of Gypsy: “Psychologically, people feel it’s really frivolous to go to the theater at $200 a pop.” Well, of course. But it’s equally frivolous to go to a Patriots game or on a Caribbean cruise. The recession will teach people the difference between the necessities of life and the frivolities. Those unreal Goldman bonuses have disappeared from Wall Street, and it’s just a matter of time before people start asking whether a utility infielder is worth two million a year. ………Barack Obama’s first team looks pretty good so far, though I was rocked when his choice for Secretary of Education, the much-praised Arne Duncan, used his press conference to thank some benefactors “who gave my children and I” so much. Bad grammar is epidemic in Washington, but from the Secretary of Education?………… On the other hand, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sounds like my kind of guy. On the wall of his home in Washington, Admiral Mullen has, not military citations, but framed playbills from the Broadway shows he and his wife have seen. Mullen is an Annapolis man, but unlike, say, Senator McCain, he does not come from a military tradition. His Dad was a Hollywood press agent for, among others, Julie Andrews, Ann-Margret, and Dyan Canon…………The stock market continues to dive, and the talking heads on CNBC continue to advise – nay, plead – that now is the time to buy stocks. Never mind that the same people gave you the same advice six months ago. Some day they will be right, as a broken clock is eventually right, but by then all those who have taken their advice will be broke…………. A recent trip to the Maine Mall found almost all stores deserted. The Maine Mall is one of some 200 malls owned by General Growth Properties, which is trying desperately to stave off bankruptcy. Worth re-reading is my blog post “Overmalled,” dated October 29, 2007.

Twenty-Four Redux

2008-12-01T13:01:00.000-05:00

I am not a devotee of the television series “24,” but I have seen enough episodes to know that the plot that animates the time line is based on the following premise: that there exist, in every corridor of power in the U.S. government, evil people who are spending every moment of every day trying to subvert the Constitution. Some of these people are rogue elements of the CIA or the FBI or the Secret Service. Some are holders of high offices, even the highest in the land. They will stop at nothing, not even assassination, to promote their agenda. If you buy into that theme, you will enjoy “24,” for of its type it is well done.

I never bought into it, and that is why my appreciation for its technical excellence was limited. A stray rogue organization might be credible, but to believe that our Government was so thoroughly riddled with corruption was just too much for me. The creators of The West Wing and the Bourne trilogy plowed similar ground, but “24” wanted you to believe that the bad guys in Washington outnumbered the good guys. I understood that the producers of the show needed a continuous stream of Judases within the Government to provide the drama, but I didn’t have to watch it.

Having declared my belief that the U.S. Government cannot be so radically infected as the “24” producers would have us believe, I also believe that the imminent transition from a hard-right to a leftish administration will not occur without residual rancor and, perhaps, the kinds of mischief that will give “24” another shot at credibility. The hawks and neocons will not disappear. They will retreat to save havens at the American Enterprise Institute, and they will snipe from the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. (John Bolton seems to have a long-term lease.) They will leave behind moles at Defense and State and the CIA who will feed them inside information.

Of course, sniping in the Wall Street Journal is not the same as sniping at Jack Bauer with a rifle. President Bush had his enemies, and Barack Obama will have his, and thank God for political criticism. But exiles on the left seem harmless. The louder they whine, the less effective they are (think Paul Krugman), but the zealots on the far right make much more credible villains.

Not that I’m worried about the integrity of the White House. Secretary of Defense Gates and National Security Advisor to-be Jones didn’t just drop off the turnip truck. But I do think that the scriptwriters for “24” must be licking their chops.