It’s been a busy week of culture here in New York. On Monday, Wendy took me to the Lincoln Center to see La Traviata:
The opera was great, although I must admit I was exhausted at the end. I think it may have had something to do with the fact that Wendy had dragged me to The Duchess the night before. Two period pieces in a row is quite exhausting. Next time I’ll go for Wagner.
Fortunately, it as the Knicks home opener against Miami on Wednesday night. Scott and I went; here’s the opening tip-off:
Remarkably good game; New York was up by over 15 but Miami closed it and almost took the game in the final minute. Of note: this is the only town that boos its own players. Both Eddie Curry and Stephon Marbury were booed during introductions. Ironically, later on the crowd was cheering “We want Steph” (neither Curry or Marbury played; the coach has benched them both).
I was going through an old German magazine the other day and came across this ad, which I thought worth sharing:
At first it doesn’t look like much. I mean after all, it’s just a train set, right? Actually, it’s a little more subtle than that. It’s called the “Stop-den-castor-start-set” which would translate as “Stop the nuclear train beginner’s set”. The ‘castor’ refers to a canister holding nuclear waste that was sent to Germany for reprocessing. Every couple of years these are sent from France and there are inevitable riots and then more riots. Here’s a photo from the 2006 installment:
If you look closely at the ad, you can see the following:
A protester has tied himself to the tracks (top)
In the middle are farm equipment (used to block the tracks) and protesters (carrying placards saying “We’re against this”)
In the bottom is a sample of what the actual ‘castor’ looks like: a massive container mounted on a flatbed
I thought it a great ad and worth sharing. The paper also gets a bonus for their slogan: “The traditional paper for the new philistines.”
I recently got a credit card from Capital One and shortly after it arrived I received a brochure from them that contained the following:
These are three stickers that I’m supposed to put on my calendar to remind myself to pay my credit card bill. Am I the only one who finds this a little weird?
Think about it. You’re a credit card company. You are basically lending people money with the trust that they will pay it back. If you want to avoid losing money you try and find the one’s most likely to pay their bills. Those folks don’t need stickers for their calendars.
But then you get greedy. You decide that you can make a lot more money if you can find people who will actually pay their bills, but do so late-because then you make money on interests charges and late fees. These people are a lot riskier-how can you accurately model who is going to pay their bill late versus never pay at all? In order to appear as a good corporate citizen who helps people become financially responsible, you give them stickers. And if it all blows up, at least this way you can tell shareholders and Congress that you were trying to help people become financially responsible, right?
So here’s my suggestion. The next time you sign up for anything that has a monthly payment plan and you receive sticker, short that company’s stock. And get your money out of the stock market. For evidence with a sample size of one, here’s Capital One’s ticker; down 60% from it’s peak and has gone nowhere for five years:
If you live in NYC, chances are that you’re voting for Obama (as a non-American I’m one of the lucky few who don’t have to choose sides). Yahoo’s Political Dashboard has him leading here 60 to 35. What’s amazing me is how he’s become a cult of personality.
You may have seen the Shepard Fairey Obama paintings, but what really struck me was the window display the other day when I walked past Brooklyn Industries on 8th. They make inexpensive, trendy clothes sold overwhelmingly to young, white New Yorkers. And they’ve placed a Barack Obama mask over each of their mannequins (even the female ones).
Obama is really resonating with a block of Americans in ways I’ve never seen before. As a corollary, I can’t imagine Brooks Brothers doing this for John McCain.
I’ve always had a perverse interest in how humans simply abandon things. We’re definitely the only species that covet objects and then abandon them as soon as our internal calculus judges them to be no longer valuable. I’m not talking about no longer wanting your old plates or bicycle, rather the fact that we construct massive edifices and then leave them to rust.
A few years ago this was hammered home to me on a trip to the Yukon. Here’s an old mine near Whitehorse:
Later we were hiking the Chilkoot Trail and when we hit Canyon City we found the detritus of a civilization that lasted at most two years:
As we continued on to Dawson, we came across a set of dredges that are now landlocked. They were built on-site in a pond and literally moved a creek with them as they crunched through the mud looking for gold. The creek is long gone and the dredges (there are two) sit as a testament to, amongst other things, what humans will do for a dollar:
To me, the Yukon was the most personal and poignant example of both how relentless and feckless humans can be.
That is until tonight, when I heard of Hashima Island, off the coast of Japan.
This place almost defies description. Starting in 1890, a small island was built up to contain exactly two things: a coal mine and a city that existed solely to serve it. By the 1950’s, it was the most densely populated place on earth (over 10x as dense as Tokyo). And then in 1973, the coal ran out and it was abandoned in weeks. It’s still there, rusting away and waiting to fall into the sea:
It sounds-and looks-unbelievable but it really exists. For more, check out this and this. Also, watch this video:
I just finished reading John McPhee’s Oranges. It’s a fascinating book (and an easy read at 149 pages). One of the interesting passages concerns Indian River, Florida.
Indian River is where the best oranges in Florida come from (they commanded a $1/box premium in the Northeast – and that was in the 1960s). It’s also quite resilient to freezing as it is on a tidal bay. What’s interesting about the area is how it has changed over time. Here’s how McPhee describes the life of the original post-Civil War orange farmers:
The plantation society of the St. Johns was fairly metropolitan in contrast to life on the Indian River. Families had settled all along the Indian River, but even twenty years after the Civil War they were few enough so that when they saw a sail miles away they could usually tell by the cut of it who was approaching. At night, a family would go out in a small boat, light a lantern, talk, drift, and in thirty minutes catch enough fish to feed them for a week. On trips for supplies in sailboats, they would sometimes see ahead of them a darkness formed on the water’s surface by five hundred acres of ducks. As a boat approached, the ducks would rise with a sound of rolling thunder, leaving on the water five hundred acres of down. Everyone slept on down pillows and down mattresses. The river was full of oysters. The shores were full of cabbage palms, whose hears, boiled, were delicious. Currency was almost unknown. The nearest bank was in Jacksonville. When families put up Northerners who came for part of the winter, payment was often made by check at the end of a visit. For months, these checks would go up and down the Indian River as currency, until they had so many endorsements on them that they looked like petitions. In Titusville, near Merritt Island at the north end of the river, there wa a group called The Sons of Rest. Any member who was seen with perspiration on his face was fined twenty-five cents. At the end of each month, the money was used to buy a pair of overalls for the member who had worked the least. A man named Cuddybuck won four pairs of overalls in a row and the organization disbanded. there was one lawyer on the river. He raised oranges because the practice was so small.
However, the good times didn’t last as first the railroad came and then land promotion led to speculation. By the time McPhee was visiting in the early 1960’s, things had changed substantially:
…Aerospace [NASA - it's right near Cape Canaveral] industries, residential housing, and places like Ramon’s [a bar] are taking over so rapidly that in a few years there will be no citrus trees on the island, with the exception of those owned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Hill’s son has built a new house next to his father’s, and he will probably stay there even if the family grove is cut down. He works for R.C.A. No space-age Chekov is going to write a play called The Orange Grove about the Hill family of Merritt Island.
McPhee was largely prescient. Take a look at what the place looks like today:
The orange grows have been plowed under and replaced with communities engineered so that everyone gets a space on the sea:
Wen and I just got back from watching Beck at the United Palace Theater (a unique venue if ever there was one). I hadn’t seen him for over ten years [insert cheesy quote about how we've both aged, but the music hasn't] and the sound’s a bit different now. A lot more rocking (my ears will be ringing for a few days) and a bit less hip-hop.
He still has the ability to surprise. Halfway through the show the whole band ditched their instruments and beatboxed a few songs on stage. After that it was some folk and a bit of country. Other than that, it was pretty rocking with a lot of rock-ey remixes of the popular faves.
Here’s a photo for those of you who won’t be making it:
With all the news recently about the global financial crisis, some of you may be wondering, what happens when a bank fails? I mean, not all of us are lucky enough to be in towns with failing banks so that we can witness it with our own eyes. Fortunately, I live in New York and the banks here are dropping like flies, so I can give you an update.
If you’re JP Morgan Chase and you’ve bought Washington Mutual, you haven’t done too much. There’s a branch in my building at work and there’s nary a sign that it’s now part of JPM. Similarly, their website doesn’t really mention it either.
On the other hand, if you bought an investment bank that collapsed in ignominy, it’s a different story. Barclays is making sure that there are no doubts that there’s no more Lehman Brothers and it’s now Barclays:
For those of you who don’t live in the City of Disappearing Financial Institutions a.k.a. New York, you may be wondering what happens when, say, Washington Mutual or Lehman Brothers go bankrupt and get bought
So the other weekend I cashed in all my loose change. I had three coffee containers full – which ended up working out to be a little over $300! I used a coin sorting machine that gave me an Amazon gift certificate, and that’s now led to the following:
That’s 17 books so I think I’m good from now to the end of the year (if only because I’ll be trying to figure out how any publisher can make money when I can get this many books delivered to me via UPS for so little).
In case you’re looking for a book to read, here’s what’s on the list (from top to bottom):
On a related note, this shopping experience completely confirmed why Amazon is the platform for buying things. Every single one of these books was part of my wishlist (some for a few years). Amazon never asked me to update my wishlist, rather just kept it there for the day when I was finally ready.
Also, now that I’ve bought the books they don’t appear in my wishlist and if I go to the page for any of the books there’s a gentle reminder that I’ve already bought it:
If that’s not the ultimate retail experience, then I don’t know what is.
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