Bad Show, Great Review

I sat through an episode of Bravo's NYC Prep reality show last week and was rewarded by the review on Gawker.com, to wit:

There was a moment on NYC Prep last night that was just so brutal, so true-to-life, that I feel I just have to get it out of my system and talk about it right now. Camille and her teeth.

Hopefully you remember the moment to which I'm referring. Glass-eyed Camille is sitting at the fancy club birthday party and chatting up the rumply Russ troll that is Sebastian. See, she was trying to get information out of him so she could run and tell poor pointy-faced Kelli, but she's also a teenage girl and he's a teenage boy that everyone's in lurve with so she was also trying to flirt with him, just a little bit, just a little sad, aching bit. So she asked him some dumb question and gave him a big smile and a little coy head tilt and he just said to her: "You have something in your teeth." And there in the still glass of her eyes, something exploded or crumbled. She laughed and said "Wait, are you being serious?" and he nodded and she covered her mouth and ohhhh holy Anything in heaven, it was just so... We've been there. We've all been there as someone is just so flippant and casual about mortifying you. That she'd been leaning in close, trying to act cool (See, I can talk to boys...) and then there it went, up in smoke like flash paper. Oh man. It just hurt my soul and tickled my funny bone and then poor Camille just sat there, deflated and quiet, while the rest of the party raged on. Agh. A primal scream to you, poor Camille.

. . . .

Over in richtown, little PC was feeling blue. PC was feeling lost and strange. Something was changing in him, something he couldn't quite explain. He went to see an old girlfriend of his, a wise girl of 19 who said that he just needed a change of scenery. Needed to get out of that cliched Upper East crowd, needed to shake things up, to open himself up like windows in a shuttered summer house. Let the clean air in. The 19-year-old looked as though she had something else perched delicately on the tip of her tongue, a small sparrow of knowledge, and she almost let it flutter out but PC just looked so sad and so worried just then, on that little black couch, and she decided now wasn't the time. But PC still didn't feel better so he went to see a therapist. You know, the kind of therapist who holds her sessions in the I Dream of Jeannie bottle house and lets the session be taped. PC said that he was very hard on himself, that he didn't let himself show feelings, and the therapist too felt that little sparrow alight on her tongue but she swallowed, gulped it down like so many other people in poor PC's life, and he just stared off at nothing in particular and felt the gears of his feelings grind on in their lonely way.

There are times when bad TV is the best TV.

Puddle of Evil

DW and I watched the first two seasons of Damages in marathon sessions stretching over one week. Glenn Close stars as Patty Hewes, New York's most celebrated plaintiffs' lawyer. Hewes is openly ruthless, but few know just how ruthless she really is. The show opens with a seemingly naive new lawyer, Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), taking a job with Patty, in order to help common men and women fight for justice against big, evil corporations. In S1, those evil corporations are personified in the character of Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson). Frobisher has a jolly exterior, but he is utterly ruthless and amoral on the interior, just like Patty. Frobisher's lawyer (played by Zejlko Ivanek) is Patty's nominal adversary, but Frobisher is the real adversary of S1. Patty sues Frobisher on behalf of his former employees after his company collapses in an accounting scandal, a la Enron. As the suit progresses, the main characters drag themselves down deeper and deeper in a puddle of evil. Ellen is compromised with surprising ease, but she rationalizes her actions as a necessary evil in Patty's crusade for the common folks. Patty and Frobisher, meanwhile, will stop at absolutely nothing to come out ahead. Murder and official corruption are not above these two eeeeevil people. Everybody, it seems, has a hidden agenda, and most of the characters are thoroughly rotten.

Damages plays like a kind of 24 for s-m-r-t people, in that there are unexpected plot twists galore. Also, there are three or four storylines moving along simultaneously--some present, some past, some future. The storylines merge nicely towards the end of each season. The production values of this show are first-rate; the tinting and texture of the past and future scenes distinguish them from the present ones, though the producers added temporal subtitles in S2 (e.g., "6 months later"). Some scenes were filmed with handheld cameras, giving them a jumpy, neurotic quality matching the characters' mental state. The writing is excellent, but the quality of the acting really holds the show together, IMHO. Glenn Close and Ted Danson are over-the-top mean and evil, though both appear to be reasonable professionals to those who don't know them. Close and Ivanek took home Emmys for Season 1, and Rose Byrne, Ted Danson, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, and Timothy Olyphant all managed to hold their own.

Puddle of Crazy

One must wonder how Sarah Palin's mind actually works.

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Now, Sarah’s Folly
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 4, 2009
WASHINGTON

Sarah Palin showed on Friday that in one respect at least, she is qualified to be president.

Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.

Usually we don’t find that exquisite battiness in our leaders until they’ve been battered by sordid scandals like Watergate (Nixon), gnawing problems like Vietnam (L.B.J.), or scary threats like biological terrorism (Cheney).

. . . .

As Alaskans settled in to enjoy holiday salmon bakes and the post-solstice thaw, their governor had a solipsistic meltdown so strange it made Sparky Sanford look like a model of stability.

. . . .

Even some conservative analysts admitted that the governor’s move seemed ga-ga before venturing the spin that Palin might be “crazy like a fox,” as Sarah’s original cheerleader, Bill Kristol, put it.

. . . .

Why not? Palin/Sanford in 2012, with the slogan: “Save time — we’re already in Crazy Town.”

I like the phone

I didn't realize there was a person on the other end until I watched the video.

The Good, the Bad, and the Classic

I've had a few first viewings of movies recently, and I've had recent repeat vieweings of what, IMHO, were the best films of 2007 and 2008 respectively. Rather than write them all up separately, I'm going to take them all in one post.

Slumdog Millionaire is, at its heart, a romantic drama. This made me shy away from it at first; I'm usually not keen on romantic pictures (though one could argue that Casablanca falls into that category, and I certainly dig that one). Also, I wondered whether the movie would ignore the reality of the slums from which the slumdog protagonist came. I'm not one to have my nose rubbed in injustice and inequality, but sugarcoating offends me.

My initial wariness about this film turned out to be unwarranted. Slumdog Millionaire brilliantly and boldly walks a fine line between pathos and fantasy as it tells the story of a boy and a girl who fell in love as children, lost each other, then found each other again after the boy found himself on India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The protagonists (Jamal Malik, his brother Salim, and their friend Latika) are Indian Muslims who are orphaned after a Hindu mob kills their mothers. Jamal (Dev Patel) falls for Latika (Frida Pinto), who is taken by a local gangster. Jamal rescues Latika, only to have her taken away and, presumably, raped by Salim, who murdered the gangster, and went to work for a second gangster. Jamal gets Latika's attention years later by getting himself on TV. He becomes a national hero as he answers questions correctly and Indians of all stripes make him the vehicle of their individual aspirations. In the end, boy gets girl and there's a fabulous production number at the main Mumbai train station.

The movie does not minimize poverty, violence, or injustice--or, for that matter, enhanced interrogation techniques--nor does it emphasize them to the point of preachiness. Kids grow up in slums all over the world; some get bitter and cynical and go outlaw (Salim); some work legally and hang on to their dreams (Jamal). And everybody roots for the underdog.

Slumdog Millionaire is a nice film to watch on BluRay. It is very colorful and vibrant, and some of the actors are attractive enough to want to see them in hi-def.

My DW is a big Dan Brown fan, so, as a matter of public record, I liked Angels and Demons a whole hell of a lot. That out of the way, it was a pretty average movie, and, like the film version of The Da Vinci Code, shows that some visual images that work in the imagination on the written page do not work particularly well on the silver screen.


IMHO, There Will be Blood was the best film of 2007 and The Dark Knight was the best of 2008. I recently viewed both films for the first time since the Panic of Fall 2008. The last couple of scenes of There Will be Blood, in which a crazed, wealthy oilman self-destructs, now seems an apt metaphor for the end of an era of dangerously self-indulgent, unregulated market capitalism. The Joker's wild anarchy in The Dark Knight, driving the citizens of Gotham into a state of utter panic, doesn't really seem so far-fetched in light of the near-collapse of the financial markets and the the near-panic of the pig flu--and this after the movie raised provocative questions about privacy rights and the lengths to which a civilized society can go against malefactors before we become malefactors ourselves. One point that Hurricane Katrina, the Panic, Al Qaeda's insanity, and some elements of our reaction to terrorism have driven home to me is that the veneer of our open, law-bound, refined, wealthy civilization that we've spent centuries pasting on top of the Hobbesian state of nature is thinner than many of us would like to think. The Dark Knight makes this point without being didactic or obnoxious about it.

Barbarians? On Wall Street?

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I've been on a tear reading about smart people who do stupid things with other peoples' money, so I downloaded this classic to the Kindle and read it very quickly. RJR/Nabisco's President Ross Johnson was obsessed with his company's undervalued stock and with living the high life, and he hit on the idea of arranging a leveraged buyout. He evidently figured that a lowball bid would let him continue running the company as he saw fit. After he announced the idea to RJR's board, all hell broke loose. Johnson's team ended up losing out to Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts--in part because the company's board wanted to be rid of Johnson--and Johnson pretty much had run out of enthusiasm for the deal anyway (paying $112/share would mean a lot more cutting back than $75/share would). This book reads like a novel, with egos, ulterior motives, deceipt, grudges, broken friendships, and greed galore. The final sentence of the new edition of the book sums it up nicely: "you couldn't make this stuff up."


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Yet another kid picture post

I got so bored at a recent school fundraiser at which DW and I were in charge of arranging bowls and mugs that I spelled out the honoree's last name (Greco) with coffee cups.

A loves the penny arcade at the mall.

T is over his fear of the zoo train. Maybe we'll get him to ride it next time we go.

I'm still decompressing from T's recent move crisis. He was moved from his mini-group home "pod" onto a regular dormitory with no advance notice to us. I was furious and immediately went into lawyer mode. It took a couple of weeks to get everybody together and straighten out everything. T's behavior warranted a move, based on the information I got after the fact, but it would have been easier on him had we been able to go up there and help transition him from one place to another. T still sees A on a regular basis, and the direct care workers on the dorm are being trained in Applied Behavior Analysis techniques for working with T (somthing that will help other kids who are not yet in the Autism Center program). Hopefully T's behavior will improve enough that he can move from the dorm into a group home when a new one opens up.

Waterboarding--all the cool kids are doing it!

Does Shepard Smith think he's on MSNBC now?

I've paroused the John Yoo torture memo--the most important one of the lot--and it's hilariously bad. No wonder the Bushies wouldn't let it be seen by skeptical lawyers in Bush's own administration.

And I thought bridge was an old ladies' game

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I began reading financial journalism on a semi-regular basis during the Enron collapse, and began watching CNBC after the panic last fall. I have absolutely no background in business or finance, but the ups-and-downs of the markets fascinate me. Given my lack of any background, I know whether a particular book or article is well-written based on whether I can actually understand it.



William D. Cohan's "House of Cards: A Tale of Wretched Excess on Wall Street" ranks with Bethany McLean's "The Smartest Guys in the Room" as an accessible work of business writing that is so well put-together one doesn't want to put it down. Cohan's book is the tale of the late Bear Stearns & Co., which went from being the fifth largest brokerage house in the U.S. to being flat broke in ten days during March 2008.



The book takes its title from a peculiar aspect of Bear's corporate culture--its long-time CEO Jimmy Cayne was a championship level player of the card game bridge, and Bear entered teams in high-level bridge tournaments. Indeed, Cayne was off at bridge tournaments during key crises in the collapse of his firm and couldn't be bothered to return to New York.



Cohan's book opens with a riveting blow-by-blow account of the ten-day collapse of Bear and its ultimate forced absorbsion by JPMorgan Chase at the behest of Treas. Sec'y Henry Paulson, Fed. Chmn. Ben Bernanke, and N.Y. Fed. Pres. Timothy Geithner. Cohan then provides a history of Bear and its overbearing, colorful leaders, most importantly Cayne and his predecessor Ace Greenberg. Bear was unlike its rival firms in its contempt for family pedigrees, MBAs, and strategic planning. It was the street urchin with a huge chip on its shoulder, and the firm's strategy was simply to make lots of money. Bear's corporate culture was very much like a mens' locker room, and the firm had clients that other Wall Street firms viewed as unsavory. Bear's employees were loyal to a fault, and its leadership team rarely changed, with the dictatorial Greenberg and/or Cayne running the show. Greenberg and Cayne lacked formal educations in finance themselfves and they tended to hire based on instinct rather than credentials. All of these factors led to a firm full of very specialized moneymakers, with nobody really understanding the full scope of the business or the risks inherent in some of Bear's operations.



Bear pretty much originated the infamous mortgage-backed securities, and the firm went heavy into debt obligations backed by subprime loans. Once those became near difficult to value, they could not be sold. Cayne did not understand much of anything about these securities, and he fired the one person in the firm who really did shortly after two of Bear's hedge funds collapsed due to plunging values and outright fraud.



Rumors about Bear having too many illiquid assets and not enough capital began spreading on the Internet in early March 2008. Cayne was off playing cards, and then-CEO Alan Schwartz was off in Florida at Bear's annual media event. Neither understood the gravity of the firm's situation or the likely effect of the rumors in an already jittery market. The rumors turned out to be largely true--although the firm had a large cash cushion, it was nowhere near enough to take a massively leveraged firm (Bear's leverage was usually around 50:1) through any crisis of confidence, which is exactly what followed. Redemption calls were fast and furious; short sellers (some perfectly legit) drove down the company's stock value; other firms (notably Goldman Sachs) refused to stand as counterparties for their own clients against Bear; and the overnight lenders who financed Bear's day-to-day operations stopped lending to the company. A loan from the Fed to Chase (a regular bank with access to Fed funds) to be loaned to Bear (an investiment bank with no access to Fed funds) had exactly the opposite effect it was supposed to have ("oh my God, they're worse off than I thought!" instead of "well, now they've got the money and time to sort things out"), and, one day later, forced negotiations began with JPMorgan Chase.



Cayne and other Bear muckety mucks were interveiwed extensively for the book, as was current Treasury Sec'y Tim Geithner. The book is well-sourced and well-written, and Cohan doesn't pull punches even as to the major contributors to his work.



"House of Cards" shows how thin was America's veneer of hyper-prosperity, much as Hurricane Katrina showed how thin is the veneer of the infrastructure of our advanced society, and much as the release of the torture memos showed how thin is the veneer of our supposedly evolving standards of decency. I seeem to like veneer today; anybody for a patina instead? When it comes down to it, we're never far away from a Hobbesian state of nature, where life is nasty, brutish, and short.


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Boilerplate Husband

DW saw a number on her caller ID this morning that she thinks is the local LDS bishop's cell number. The LDS Church has policy requiring the permission of a husband for his wife to accept any significant church assignment. IIRC, this is set out in the Church Handbook of Instructions, but it's been a while since I had a copy of that publication, so I could be wrong. Anyhow, I drafted this to take care of any possible consent issues in advance:

I, R, do not accept the premise that my consent or permission is necessary for my spouse, C, to accept any calling or assignment, or to do any action that is not illegal or, though perhaps technically legal, is an action that would shock the conscience of a reasonable citizen of those states of the United States whose public policies are in agreement with my own policy preferences. In the event of any action that is illegal or that would shock the conscience of a reasonable citizen of those states of the United States chosen by me, I disclaim in advance any knowledge of, or consent to, any such action, unless such action would further my own personal interests.

However, in accordance with the policies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I hereby declare that I agree to C holding any calling in the Slidell Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that she chooses to accept. Should C does not wish to accept a calling but does not wish to declare this wish, then I do not agree to her accepting any such calling. I hereby consent to C invoking this species of non-agreement at her discretion.

I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that the foregoing is true and correct. Executed on 29 March 2009.

She laughed, then folded it up and put it in her purse. Of course she won't use this document, but maybe she'll show it to some of the women of the ward who possess a sense of humor.