BlueFoodBlog

Meet the new Boss?

2010-11-09T20:00:00.000-08:00

Today's news of the departure of Joel Klein from his position as New York City Schools Chancellor has sparked a lot of discussion, much of it expressing the sentiment "good riddance." News that the his replacement Cathleen Black is even more of a charter-school ideologue than Klein and even less of an educator is already stirring concern. As a new parent in the system, I don't really have enough direct experience to judge Klein, but I do find the subject quite interesting. Now that I have a substantial stake in Black's success, I plan on keeping a close eye on her.

Klein has been an odd mix of controversial and disliked among people with a lot of direct contact with the system (teachers, parents, students) and lionized by the movers and shakers around town. I think it's very tough to say what his net impact was.

His obsession with testing has demoralized teachers, student's and parents alike, and has proven to be a fraud both in concept and execution. School choice has created opportunities, and made many parents happy, but has also sucked energy and money away from the core mission of making plain old public schools better, and injected a very counterproductive level of complexity into the process of figuring out where to send your kid to school. His relationship with teachers is basically completely poisoned, and he is as hated among teachers and principals as any of his predecessors.

At the same time, though, I think the system is actually better (even if not measurably so) than it was before in some important ways. There's more middle class buy-in, a much stronger sense that this is our school system and we're going to do what it takes to make it work for our kids. It's in better physical shape than in many many years. The sense that public schools are dangerous places you wouldn't dare send your kids is pretty much gone. It may be very complicated to navigate the system, but there is a general sense that you'll be able to find a place for your kid. Despite the demoralizing nature of being forced to teach to the test, there seem to be a lot of dedicated, capable teachers and principals. This is all quite different from a decade ago.

Trying to figure out how much credit to give Klein for this reminds me of the debates over how much of a difference Giuliani really made in the resurgence of New York. To people who worked in government, Giuliani was an unqualified disaster -- incompetent, surrounded by sycophants, thieves, and psychos, the source of an endless stream of bad ideas that only failed to cripple New York because city workers did their best to ignore them. Yet people believed he turned the city around in the same way that so many people believe Klein did. This belief has a bit of the character of a self fulfilling prophecy.

People believe he's good and support him. This support leads to some good things happening (maybe even despite his incompetence and wrongheadedness). Maybe as a matter of cause, or maybe by coincidence, the middle class trickles back into the system from the burbs and the private schools, and we reach a tipping point. It's now OK to send your kid to the plain old public school, or there's a G&T program, or a "school of choice" that works for you. Then schools are more widely perceived as being good because they now have more good kids in them. After all, more than teachers, or facilities, or curricula, or even funding, what makes a school perform is having students who come from backgrounds that prepare them to perform.

So while some people express pessimism (or optimism) about the fate of the system because a particular leader is coming/going/staying, I tend to view the system as more dependent on grass roots. In the end, the schools have gotten "better" because we have decided to stick with them, in a way many or our parents didn't, in much the same way the City as a whole got better. Based on what I've read of Cathleen Black, I think it highly unlikely that she has any gifts that will make a real positive difference in managing the schools. It then becomes a matter of whether she can do no harm, and hold onto the middle class loyalty that has been building over the last decade or so.

It takes two to tangle up the schools

2010-10-29T17:52:00.000-07:00

The current New York Review of Books has a polemic by Diane Ravitch that provides an interesting counterpoint to the "Waiting for Superman" craze. I have no great love for any particular variant of schools, but I find the arguments Ravitch makes here about the flaws of charter schools, the virtues of regular public schools, and the importance of investing in traditional public education pretty compelling.

Ravitch lays out convincing evidence and arguments against the trope of poverty not being the reason kids fail and money not being the reason schools fail. The single data point I can draw on (my son's local public school) seems to support Ravitch's contentions. It's a pretty good place. The parents are involved, the principal runs a tight ship, the teachers teach, and the kids learn. There are no major discipline problems, the building is in pretty good shape, and the parents raise a fair amount of money to support the school. The basic reason it's a good school is that it is in a school zone that (by luck) is coterminous with a stable middle class neighborhood (that is in the process of turning into an upper middle class neighborhood).

The only thing stopping this school from becoming every bit as impressive as a wealthy suburban school or a fancy Manhattan private school is lack of money. If the school had (I'm guessing), 30% more money, we'd have enriched curricula, activities, supplies, recess. Instead, we get the basics, reasonably capably presented, a bit of sadness about how spartan our kids' school experience is, and relentless parental fundraising.

I also agree with what Ravitch has to say about the demonization of teachers and their unions. I've been on both sides of the union/management divide (and oddly enough am currently in a management union that is a subsidiary of the teachers' union), and have no particular love of unions. They suck up a big piece of my paycheck in exchange for a pretty low rate of return in benefits and raises. But: 1) every contract has two sides; you can't blame unions for the terms of contracts that management signs. 2) Unions may sometimes impede firing, but they don't hire, grant tenure, or stop management from giving merit raises. 3) It's a myth that "union work rules" stifle public sector productivity; civil service rules and crappy management are much more to blame for the shoddiness of the public sector business culture.

This not to say the unions have no role in any of this, but see point 1). Politicians negotiate and sign public sector labor agreements and appoint the people who manage public sector agencies. If you want better public sector workers (including teachers), you need politicians who look out for something other than their own electoral and personal interests, actually know something about the operations they ostensibly manage, and stop accepting political support from unions (as well as other special interests, but that's another rant). In New York there are the added complications of the City's limited home rule and subordinate status to the State on labor and civil service matters. This creates opportunities for our corrupt state legislators to accept campaign donations from public sector unions in exchange for writing counterproductive employment terms and conditions into State laws. You can blame the unions for pushing these agendas, but as with politicians caving in to corporate special interests against the public interest, the bulk of the blame falls squarely on the politicians.

They way I see it, "saving our schools" is a matter of money, managerial/educational competence, and politics. To get this, we need an involved citizenry with a stake in the game. In New York City, we have had the twin problems of the middle and upper classes opting out in favor of private schools and the lower classes either being too dysfunctional to contribute, or opting out in favor of parochial or charter schools. If there's a silver lining, it's that private schools have become absurdly expensive, parochial schools are disappearing, and so many of us have dropped out of the classes that could afford these options in the past, that there is now a growing cohort of involved and informed parents militating for improvements in the core public schools system. Bloomberg and Klein have probably lost the confidence of this cohort because of the testing fiascoes, which leaves a huge opportunity for the next generation of politicians. I don't know who (if anybody) will fill that void, but I'm interested in seeing who does. And for now, sending my kid to a plain old public school.

Open letter to the President on enforcement of Marijuana laws

2010-10-16T07:08:00.000-07:00

I just submitted the letter below to President Obama at the White House's website. I encourage others to do something similar

Dear President Obama,

Let me start this letter just by saying hello. You and I were contemporaries at Columbia (I'm '84), and I have discovered that we were once next door neighbors on West 109th St. Someday, perhaps we will swap stories about how we coped with the experience of cold-water slum living.

I'm disappointed to read that your administration intends to enforce marijuana prohibitions in California. Given your personal background as someone who experimented with drugs, and came through the experience unharmed, I can't help but think that you are doing this for cynical political reasons rather than because you truly believe there is a clear moral basis for imprisoning people for marijuana posession. Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and that you really believe in the merits of this course of action. In order to clear this up for me, I'd appreciate your answer to these questions:

When you were in college experimenting with marijuana and cocaine, do you think you should have been arrested?

If there were no statute of limitations, and you were still potentially in legal jeopardy for these actions, do you think you should be arrested now?

To be fair, I'll give you some relevant personal history and answer the same questions. I was a regular pot smoker roughly between the ages of 16 and 20. I also experimented occasionally with cocaine and psychedelics. I stopped on my own when I found I no longer enjoyed the effects. I suffered no ill effects from any of this. As to the questions, no I do not think that you or I should have been arrested for this, now or ever. Nor do I think anyone else should be.
....

FYI: The contact form at the white house seems buggy, and I'm not sure if this all got through, so I will probably re-submit. If anyone else submits something, watch out for this.

Origin of the species

2010-10-13T12:55:00.000-07:00

The Setting: Downtown A train this morning
The Players: Myself, Charlotte (a friend/parent from the neighborhood), Charlotte's two daughters (aged 3 1/2 and 4 1/2), who are occasional playmates of my son (5).

Charlotte distributes pretzels to the cast. Daughter1 looks at the pretzel and asks if this is how small she was when she was in her mommy's stomach. A discussion ensues involving breaking the pretzel into ever smaller pieces and comparing the pieces to foetus/embryo/blastocyst/egg-sized daughters in mommy's tummy. Charlotte then asks me whether I have had similar conversations with my son. I say that I have. Indeed, he has gone so far as to ask not only where he came from, but where the first people came from. Charlotte laughs, and daughter 2 then asks where the first people came from. Charlotte, thinking she's got me on the ropes, suggests that I answer. So, to the curious, this is where the first people came from (with help from the class).

The first people were fish.
No they weren't!
Yes they were.
No they weren't! You're kidding aren't you?
No, really the first people were fish. Some of the fish got tired of being fish, so they crawled out of the water and became alligators.
No they didn't! Mommy, is he telling the truth?
Well, um, kind of
Yes, I'm telling the truth, the first people were fish who got tired of being fish, so they crawled out of the water and became alligators. But some of the alligators got tired of being alligators so they decided to become dinosaurs.
NO THEY DIDN'T!!
Yes, really they did. And then some of them got tired of being dinosaurs, so they became squirrels.
They did not!! Mom, did the dinosaurs become squirrels?
Um, well in a way ...
OK, so then the some of the squirrels got tired of being squirrels, so they decided to become monkeys, which are a lot like people.
They did not. Monkeys aren't like people.
Monkeys look kind of like people don't they?
Um ... yeah ...
Well, they have hands like people don't they? And two eyes in the fronts of their faces don't they?
Yeah. But they have feet for hands, and hands for feet, so they're not people.
I know. They also have tails. Some of the monkeys decided they didn't want tails anymore so they got rid of their tails and became chimpanzees.
NO THEY DIDN'T! Mom, did they really do that? Did the monkeys become chimpanzees?
Um, sort of ...
Chimpanzees look a lot like people, don't they?
Yeah, they do (at this point, the daughters have stopped objecting and are looking at me like this is starting to make some sense)
OK, the chimpanzees got tired of being chimpanzees, so they decided to become people, and that's where the first people came from.
Really? Did all of them do that?
No, not all of them. Some of the chimpanzees decided to become people, but some of them decided to still be chimpanzees. We call those Republicans.

Oh, here's my stop. Gotta go.

This is Kindergarten. This is Big.

2010-10-03T19:13:00.000-07:00

My son started kindergarten a month ago, which is big, much bigger than I ever could have imagined. I went to kindergarten, and I don't really recall it being particularly important or rigorous. In my day, there was a lot of smearing of colors and mushing of stuff. There were many, many choruses of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, a bit of duck duck goose, and if I recall correctly, passing mention of the alphabet. Times have changed, though. In New York City, kindergarten is the new first grade. Kids are now expected to learn to read, do homework, and say the Pledge of Allegiance. In the first month.

They are also expected to be good citizens of the educational community. I know this, because the New York City Department of Education just told me, via a fascinating document called "Citywide Standards of Intervention and Discipline Measures: The Discipline Code and Bill of Student Rights and Responsibilities, K-12" that just arrived via my son's backpack. It is 28 pages of small-font, landscape-printed gobbledygook that is supposed to tell parents what kids are and are not supposed to do in school, and what will happen to them if they run afoul of the rules.

Or at least that is what I think it is. I have tried three times to get all the way through this thing, and I am so frustrated by its turgid, ungrammatical, passive-voiced bureaucratic incomprehensibility, that I cannot be sure. For, example the section entitled "Promoting Positive Student Behavior" begins with:

"Each School is expected to promote a positive school climate and culture that provides students with a supportive environment in which to grow both academically and socially." Okay, a little stilted, but I have no problem with the sentiment. Schools should be pleasant places that help children learn and grow up.

Next comes "Schools are expected to take a proactive role in nurturing students' pro-social behavior by providing them with a range of positive behavioral supports as well as meaningful opportunities of social emotional learning."

Huh?

I have spent the last 22 years working in government and higher education bureaucracies. Before that, I spent three years in the educational publishing business. That is not the worst sentence I have ever seen. For instance, it's nowhere near as bad as this one:

"Effective social emotional learning helps students develop fundamental skills for life effectiveness, including: recognizing and managing emotions; developing caring and concern for others; establishing positive relationships; making responsible decisions; and handling challenging situations constructively and ethically."

We're still on page two. There are five more pages to go before we get to the actual code of conduct that our kids are supposed to follow. Five more pages like this. Jargon, wordiness, too many ideas running together -- everything your freshman composition teacher told you not to do occurs in every sentence of every paragraph of this document.

I suppose I could google "pro-social behavior," swallow my distaste for "proactive," break that sentence up into more manageable chunks, and figure out what it's about. I could do that with the rest of the sentences in that paragraph. I could do that for the whole 28 pages of this thing, and after a couple of hours boil it down to the 10 things I need to know about discipline in kindergarten. After all, I do that sort of thing all the time with laws, regulations, directives, proposals, contracts, and all the other artifacts of my trade. But could an uneducated immigrant parent struggling to find his way and hoping that his child's first month in kindergarten will be the beginning of a better life?

Well, you say, what do you expect? The schools are run by a bunch of bureaucrats with no connection to kids or the classroom. They sling this kind of drivel around at each other all the time. What does it matter? But this isn't some intra-office policy exercise. This is a document that was printed up and distributed to every parent of every public school child in New York, sent home in the kids' backpacks so that the parents will read it and understand it. I know this because it says so right on page one: "All members of the school community -- students staff and parents -- must know and understand the standards of behavior which all students are expected to live up to and the consequences if these standards are not met."

This is also a classic CYA warning -- some day, we're gonna boot your kid out of school, and you'll have no excuse for not knowing that could happen because we told you so in black and white in your kid's backpack.

It should not be done this way. This stuff is important. Both the substance and the form. We should be told what is expected of us and our kids, and what can happen if we don't live up to the those expectations. But we should be told in a way that all of us can understand, in the language of the parents, not the administrators. The great irony of this is that the DOE has got thousands of people trained in exactly how to construct a clear readable document that can be easily understood by parents and children. They're called teachers, and every school is full of them.

For many years, I have followed the story of Mayor Bloomberg wrestling control of the schools away from the monstrosity that was the old board of education. I have paid particular attention to the dialectic between Chancellor Joel Klein and the teachers. Klein has been portrayed by some as a lone voice for integrity and merit, and by others (especially teachers) as someone who knows nothing about education. As someone who worked in the Bloomberg administration for eight years and saw first hand how much of a real reformer he is, I have tended to take Klein's side in this debate. Now I'm not so sure. Now, it's my kid, my kid's backpack, and my job to read what's in it.

This is kindergarten. This is big.

Follow the money?

2010-09-24T10:07:00.000-07:00

Today, Paul Krugman wrote an article destroying the arithmetic and logic of the Republicans' latest propaganda piece. He focused mainly on the impossibility of the GOP's budget proposal and drew the connection between this exercise in wishful thinking and the longtime GOP strategy of deception.

"The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape. "

OK, so Republicans will say anything (no matter how improbable) in order to gain and maintain power. The logical inference, therefore, is that Republicans want power for reasons almost entirely other than those they state*. So the question is, why do they want power?

Krugman walks a little way down this path. He notes that the logical and arithmetic implication of the GOP pledge to balance the budget while cutting taxes by 2020 is that we would have to eliminate the entire Federal government aside from Medicare, social security and the military (including Congress) and privatize Medicare and Social Security in the bargain. But then he steps back from the implication of this (that Republicans want to hand over as much dough as possible to the capitalists and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves) by noting that this agenda doesn't stand a chance, even among the Republicans themselves. Instead, what is going to happen is that we'll get the tax cuts and little if any in the way of spending cuts (or more likely, increases in spending in ways that won't do much good), and we will drive the government even deeper into debt and dysfunction.

Krugman's analysis boils down to calling them a bunch of idiots who won't get what they really want and will destroy us all in the process. But there's a contradiction at the heart of this. They're smart enough to understand that their numbers don't add up. They're smart enough to craft propaganda that gets people to join in their wish-fulfillment fantasies. They can't be so so dumb that they've miscalculated the political impossibility of what they're proposing. OK, so I will admit that my motto in life is "don't assume conspiracy when incompetence suffices to explain." I am predisposed to accepting exactly this assessment of the Republicans. However, I don't really buy that they are pushing us toward banana republic status out of sheer ineptitude. There's something else going on.

I have a partial explanation. First, it mostly boils down to the fact the Republican party is controlled by the most nakedly ruthless forces within capitalism. These forces want to grab as much of our society's wealth for themselves as possible. Increasing public debt (especially debt spent in their interest) is a great way to do this, since they wind up holding most of that debt, and can tax the rest of us to pay it off. At the same time, they recognize the limitations of this worldview (default on that debt would be a bad thing for them). They realize that if they manipulate things just right, they can make Democrats take much of the blame, and be forced to do the heavy lifting of trying to clean up public finances (as Carter and Clinton had to do). This is a crude analysis, no doubt full of gaps, but I think it fits the facts better than sheer incompetence.

There's also the deeper question of why people seek power in the service of this kind of agenda. While many politicians are part of the uber-wealthy class pulling the strings, many aren't. What's the payoff for them? Some are actually true believers in the cause and think they are doing society some good. But given that the "cause" makes no objective sense in this instance, it seems unlikely that greed and stupidity alone are sufficient to explain the behavior of all Republican politicians. The missing element would seem to be the desire for itself. This is the part that I will admit I simply do not grasp. I have exercised small amounts of power in my day (in the workplace, at home, over an audience), and have mostly been left cold by it. Though I have certainly witnessed it over and over again, I have never come to any understanding of why some people seek power and use it in ways that harm others without necessarily serving their own material welfare.

To me this should be one of the central questions of the social sciences, yet it seems not to hold such a place. Perhaps Krugman could turn his Nobel-wattage abilities to dissecting this

*In all fairness, Democrats (who may be better but aren't saints) will also of substantial improbability in order to gain and maintain power, also for reasons left unsaid, but I generally find these to be less frequent and less astonishing. But that's a subject for another day

Next time, Danielle Steele ...

2010-08-13T05:49:00.001-07:00

This summer vacation's selection for light reading has been Bob Woodward's "State of Denial," a pastiche of insider accounts of the war in Iraq, from its pre 9/11 stirrings through 2006. I realize I'm way too late to this party (given the age of the book), but better than late than never I suppose when it comes to recognizing ugly truths.

This is just about the most depressing thing I have ever read. A consistent thread through the book is people with doubts about the validity (or certainty about the invalidity) of the case for the war and management of post-Saddam Iraq keeping silent about their reservations. As Woodward describes things, it's as if no one who knew anything about the subjects of WMD, Saddam, al Qaeda, 9/11, Iraq, or the Mideast thought that any of Cheney's, Bush's, or Rumsfeld's utterances on these subjects had any basis in fact or evidence. Rumsfeld (in his own words and in descriptions by others) comes off as a truly pathological figure. Cheney comes off as, well, Cheney. And Bush comes off as even more of a disengaged idiot frat boy than we all thought he was. The "brains" behind the whole thing, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz are ivory tower hallucinators.

But the worst thing about all this is that Woodward makes it seem as if there were possibilities to do things differently. He presents a series of episodes where people who knew that facts were not as Rumsfeld presented them, that the post-war plans were insane, that the premises underlying transformation to a unified democratic Iraq were utter fiction, had an opportunity to speak the truth to Bush and failed to do so. Tenet, Rice, Powell, Garner, Bremer, myriad generals, even David Kay (the great debunker of the WMD myth) all had opportunities to be alone with Bush, and none of them spoke his or her mind. None of them told him that there were no WMD, that there was no al Qaeda-Saddam links, that transforming Iraq into a west-loving democracy couldn't happen. The best that could be expected in a "free" Iraq was more social, religious and political chaos than under Saddam, at a lower standard of living. And this was only possible with two or three times as many U.S. troops as Rumsfeld said were needed, staying in Iraq for years longer than anyone could stomach.

They all knew this, and they all said it to each other. But no one said it to Bush. Even worse, none of these figures said it in public. They stayed on through the 2004 elections protecting Bush's political butt by keeping their mouths shut. Then they resigned and moved on to their think tanks and consultancies, and still kept their mouths shut. Or even worse, like Tenet, accepted medals for keeping their mouths shut.

Perhaps the worst thing about the book, though, is that Woodward himself was privy to all of these doubts from the very beginning. He references conversations he had with all of these figures going back to the very beginning of Bush's first term. While he was busy embedding himself in the Bush administration writing two other books that told tales of the resolve and political smarts of the Bush team, he was listening to the same warning bells and doing the same thing that Powell, Tenet and Rice did. He kept his mouth shut. This is the man who toppled Nixon and exposed Iran-contra in mid-scandal. He is perhaps the one journalist who could have said "this is a house of cards" and on reputation alone forced doubts into the open and allowed dissent to be treated as something other than treason.

But he didn't. Alas. I can't say that any of these revelations changed my views about the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I was opposed from the beginning. I saw the case for war as transparently implausible, and saw further that even if the worst of Bush's accusations were true it was a terrible idea that could only lead to decades of military involvement and make the world less safe for all of us. But after a while, I gave up thinking about it and talking about it. Perhaps it's time to reconsider this strategy. The only positive I can draw from this is that I now plan to make a conscious effort to pay a little more attention to Iraq and Afghanistan news and talk about it a little more. Maybe even in public.

Other voices, other shoes

2010-08-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

Hmmm. It seem I haven't written anything in quite a while. Must be because nothing has happened anywhere in the world in the last, oh 12 or 13 months, that is worthy of comment. Either that, or I have no comments worthy of ... Well you get the picture. So, I am now into week two of the first real vacation I have had in something like five years.

By "real vacation" I do not mean "time off from work characterized by no basic change in level of obligation, anxiety, or lack of pleasing diversion." This time around, the adults number the child by 4 to 1 (using the conventional, age-derived definitions, of course, not the behavioral ones) which seems to be sufficient. The weather is nice. I brought a guitar (and a battery powered amp), plenty to read, and my thoughts are pleasingly free from of the leaden nostalgia of past beach forays. I even got the wax flushed out of my ears, so I'm ready to jump back in the ocean. Or, sit here in a shaded, breezy room, with 6 more days of vacation to go.

Things could be worse.

It's a dirty job ...

2010-01-15T08:08:00.000-08:00

... But somebody's gotta do it, so let me be the jaded native New Yorker who shrugs and says "good riddance" to Tavern on the Parking Lot. It was shoved into the park by Robert Moses to spite a bunch of sheep, and that was more or less its high point. Real New Yorkers only went there for someone else's bar mitzvah. The one time I went there on purpose, I was a little disappointed that the food was actually somewhat north of ptomaine, but at least it was overpriced and the service stank.

News of the demise of Tavern on the Green (and the auctioning off of its gaudy fixtures) has spawned a wave of cyber garment rending, but really, it was just one of those things spoken of as quintessentially New York that was almost completely divorced from the reality of New York, even for New Yorkers who like to splurge on kitsch. It was no more than a confection for tourists, like carriage rides (or nowadays pedicab rides) in the park. Which is not to say that there aren't touristy things in New York that aren't really great, and which the natives enjoy without embarrassment, but this wasn't one of 'em. Bring back the sheep I say.

Raise a Ruckus for the Public Option

2009-10-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

To anyone following the healthcare reform debate, it's obvious that there's a big difference between what the House, the White House, and the people want and what the Senate is willing to legislate voluntarily. Witness the bill that just passed committee, with the miraculous bi-partisan army of one, that lacks what most people who have looked at the issue carefully conclude is a sine qua non of any real improvement in the way health care in this country is adminstered, namely the public option. Or whatever else you want to call it. I like "medicare for all," but I'm not in the advertising business.

Historically, the Senate's role as the more inherently "conservative" (in the literal, not current political sense of the term) chamber has been to put the brakes on overly radical ideas, to keep the irrational exuberance of democracy and the dark power of empire in check. Some might argue that that's what is going right now. Good old altruistic Senator Baucus and his 99 friends in pinstripes are saving us from our worst instincts by ensuring that we will all have our choice of indistinguishable, crappy, unaccoutantable, private-sector bureaucrats denying us coverage. I hate to say this, but I think something else may be going on. I think it's possible, just possible, that the Senator, plutocrats who listen more and more to other plutocrats and less and less to ideas from outside the echo chamber, have lost perspective.

I think it may not be a bad idea to help them get some other perspectives. In light of this, I've written the letter below to one of my Senators (Schumer). I wrote a variation on this theme to my other one (Gillebrand) as well. I think it would be useful for others to do this as well, focusing efforts ont he Senate, as that is the place where it seems good ideas need the most help.

Dear Senator Schumer,
My name is John Albin, I am a lifelong fourth generation native New Yorker. Among other things, I worked for 21 years in the New York City Dept. of Transportation [NB, where his wife was the boss for 8 years] and now work in CUNY [where she's now a big shot], so I am well aware of all you have done to help Washington help New York, and I share your commitment to helping my fellow New Yorkers. I am writing today to urge you to keep fighting for a robust public health insurance option. It has been disheartening to me to see the scope of healtcare reform grow narrower and narrower within the Senate. I am hopeful that a better bill than what has come from Senator Baucus' committee can emerge, especially if people with your progressive pedigree and legislative savvy keep fighting for it.

My family has been through several major health crises, and we have experienced the full gamut of options -- from "none" to "cadillac" to Medicare. I have to say that on balance Medicare has provided the best level of coverage, with the least difficulty. I think it is essential, from the perspectives of cost containment, quality, and access, that something like this be available for all. I know that in your heart you agree with this. I would be happy to share some of my thoughts and experiences with your staff if that would help you frame issues as the debate continues in Congress. It is my sincere hope that Senator Baucus' flawed and limited vision of what health care reform should be does not win the day.

What's in your wallet, Mr. Gingrich?

2009-08-21T20:04:00.000-07:00

Various news outlets reported recently that Mexico has decriminalized possession of small amounts of various drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and methamphetamine. This is a good thing, though not as good a thing as a much broader legalization both there and here would be, but that's not really my topic today. Two of my pet political peeves are health care reform (which I commented on here), and drug policy. Apart from the obvious connection between the two issues (drugs are medicine), something else joins the two topics that I find interesting: Many politicians' views on these subjects are bizarrely disconnected from their own life experiences.

Most of the elite political and business leaders of our society (the people who control the debate and outcome for almost everything important) came of age in the sixties and seventies, which means that most of them a) got high when they were young, and b) are now over the hill and starting to fall apart. One would think that people in this cohort would be able connect those two facts of their existence to the policy questions they face, yet somehow many of them don't, and as a consequence fight for rules that they wouldn't live by if push came to shove.

Here's why I say this:

On the question of drugs, there is virtually no politician anywhere on the mainstream spectrum of left to right even willing to entertain the notion of legalizing drugs. Case in point: Barack Obama. By his own admission, the president regularly smoked pot and snorted cocaine. In his memoir, he placed front and center his realization that he was on the road to self destruction and needed to sober up and grow up, which he did (except for the cigarette thing). Yet when faced with the question of whether marijuana should be legalized (via an electronic town hall in which three million people voted for him to be asked this question), he firmly said that he was against it, and made a joke about the preferences of his questioners. In other words, for him learning how to control himself is OK. Other people should go to jail.

It's become a bit of a ritual that politicians of a certain age get asked about past drug use. Most of them have given up on denying the undeniable. Instead, the politician gets a serious look on his face, talks about how much he regrets having done so, offers the excuse that he was young and stupid, and says that it is wrong to do such things. But the young and stupid thing the politician did was a crime. Can you imagine a seeker of of high public office getting away with the same dance about, say, having sex with a girl he met at a party who was too drunk to give consent? Of course not. The politician gets away with it because neither he nor his interlocutor really believes the conduct to have been wrong, but neither wants to admit it. Whenever the "did you inhale" question gets asked, this is done with the intention of giving the pol an easy out and staying away from the real implications of the admission.

So this is what I'd like to see asked: Given your stance on enforcement of drug laws, is it OK that you got away with using illegal drugs in your youth? Should you have been arrested for this? If there were no statute of limitations on marijuana possession, would you turn yourself in? I would love to see, say, Norm Coleman wriggle his way around that.

So what does this have to do with health care? Well, the thing is, all these aging boomers are, well, aging. They're either already medicare eligible, or damn close. I would love to know how those who oppose universal access to affordable health care square their positions with their actual or impending membership in a publicly-funded, universal (for those of a certain age), affordable health insurance program.

Take, for instance, Tom Coburn, senator from Oklahoma and licensed physician who opposes health care reform of any stripe and wants to throw us all into the free market. He was also born in 1948, which means he's four years away from being medicare eligible (or may already be under certain circumstances). Or Newt Gingrich. He's over 65 already, regularly disses medicare and other government health programs and lobbies for "choice".

Coburn is a special case because he was a practicing physician before he became a politician. I'd like to see him asked: "You are a staunch opponent of government run or funded health programs, and you are on the record opposing both Obama's 'public option' and the idea of 'medicare for all.' Why did you accept both medicare and medicaid patients in your medical practice? Why did you accept fees from government programs you condemn?"

But Gingrich (and any other pundit over or in the vicinity of 65) should be asked one simple question: "Are you enrolled in medicare (or do you intend to enroll when you become eligible)?"

I'd be willing to bet that all of them would have to say 'yes,' because medicare is such a valuable and useful benefit that only an idiot (or that mythical creature known as the consistent ideologue) would turn it down. For reasons that I cannot grasp, media types never ask this. They do ask congress people why they wouldn't want everyone to have access to the same type of employer-provided health benefits they get, but that's really too much of a softball. It's too easy to for them to say that they do in fact want to bring that about, but it's a matter of how and how much it'll cost (which they all say). The question doesn't really expose the, I don't know, cognitive dissonance? hypocrisy? involved.

Looking at it in these terms brushes up against argumentum ad hominem, the fallacy for which I have the most scorn. So I'm reluctant to say that one should disagree with Gingrich, or Baucus, or Boehner, or Ensign or Coburn because they don't even agree with themselves. Still, I can't help but think that in the domain of political discourse on matters of inherently personal import, that the personal is in fact political. So, with that thought in mind, I can't help but wonder whether Newt et al are card carrying FICA members. What's in your wallet Mr. Gingrich? Indeed ...

They're all a buncha HIPAAcrites

2009-08-06T20:26:00.000-07:00

As the right-wing rhetoric on healthcare reform heats up, I really have to wonder whether some of these propagandists have ever actually encountered our so-called system. I could spend time swatting away the falsehoods, like the one about how Obama is going to require old people to kill themselves. I could also copy and paste the same statistics that every other commentator cites about how the "greatest medical system in the world" leaves us 39th in health outcomes, but that's all a bit too impersonal.

For me, it comes down to this. You've got some symptoms, so you go to the doctor. The receptionist asks you for your insurance information and makes you sign a form that says you promise to pay any charges not covered by insurance, no matter how large. You fill out a bunch of other forms authorizing your doctor to share your sensitive medical information with insurance people, who offer you no guarantees of privacy. You wait, sometimes for a couple of hours. You see the doctor. The doctor takes tests (sends samples to a lab not covered by your insurance; you get a bill). The doctor spends five minutes with you because he can't afford to dawdle, unless he can work a procedure into it, which he gets paid for separately from the office visit.

Days or weeks later, you get the results back. It's something serious. He refers you to a specialist. You go to the specialist. Same insurance drill. You see the specialist. He's a putz. He doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. He picks his nose and chews his boogers. All he tells you is that some people die from this, some people get better. We'll cut the top of your head off and take it from there. You want a second opinion.

You go to another specialist. What insurance do you have? Sorry, we don't take that. Do you have out of network coverage? I think so. What's your maximum out of pocket? What's the deductible? What are the co-pays. If you need surgery, you have to work out a deal with the anesthesiologist yourself because they don't take insurance. Now you get to see the new guy. He's great. He knows exactly what's wrong with you. He's treated 5000 people with the same thing, and they all live to be 95. He's gonna save your life, make you feel like you're 25 all over again. Thank god. How much is this gonna cost me? We don't know, could be a few hundred, could be a few thousand. Could be more.

All through this, you get "explanations of benefits" that explain absolutely nothing, and bills from people you never even heard of for stuff that was never done to you, but you're getting sicker, and something has to be done. So now you have a choice: Let the angel in the white coat save your life and wipe out your savings, or let the putz sew boogers into your cranium for free.

OK, so maybe this is a bit of a caricature, but not that much of one. No matter how good any of these doctors is, the first thing you talk about is insurance and money. While you're getting diagnosed, you talk about insurance and money. All of your choices are influenced by insurance and financial concerns. You spend more time on the financial implications of your illness than you do on the medical concerns. Once you're cured, you spend months, maybe years, filing and re-filing the same claims that have been inexplicably rejected, and all this is with "good" insurance. The administrative and financial burden, under the best of circumstances, infuriates you and distracts you from the task of getting better, or taking care of a sick loved one. Moreover, none of this actually about making good health care decisions. Rather, it is about clawing the right quantity of the right kind of care out of the P&L statement of an insurance company that for completely arbitrary and impenetrable reasons has contracts with some doctors but not with others.

Even in a market dominated, capitalist society, it does not have to be this way. Despite the right-wing rhetoric, France, Germany, and Holland are not communist countries. Switzerland is not a communist country. England is not a communist country. All of these countries have simpler systems that provide high levels of care and better outcomes overall at lower costs, without forcing people to do the insurance dance and worry about bankruptcy. Some are single payer; some have a mix of private and public insurance. However, they all have strong, central government bureaucracies that impose universal coverage and consistency without requiring patients to go nuts with paperwork. They all have compromises, but not the ones we're stuck with.

It's also not this way in the United States, if you're over 65 (or at one time, 62). My father had a massive stroke when he was 56 that left him permanently, severely disabled and forced him to retire, at greatly reduced pension. To get to that level, he had to spend four months in hospitals and inpatient rehab, and a year in outpatient physical and occupational therapy, while seeing multiple medical specialists. Managing the insurance and bills became such a huge task that my mother had to cut back on her teaching courseload and hire someone to help her.

Magically, when my father turned 62 (and became eligible for Medicare), all this went away. No more secretary at home. Doctors who wouldn't see my father welcomed him with open arms. Hospital admissions took minutes instead of hours or days. Out of pocket medical expenses were virtually nil. All at a lower overall cost (according to those pesky EOB's) than with private insurance.

No one who has ever been sick and had to deal with the nightmare of our insurance system could spout the nonsense that passes for debate in Congress. Not that I would wish any ill will on, say, Mitch McConnell or Jim Boehner, but maybe these guys might learn something from, say, a heart attack or a brain tumor. Then again, maybe they've already been sick and went to see Dr. Putz, who sewed so much snot into their craniums that the drivel they've been spouting is the best they can do.

What are you Kant's Nephew?

2009-07-21T17:56:00.000-07:00

The McCourt thing has got me thinking about education, teachers and such. That, and I'm a little health-updated out, so pardon the interruption

I've had the pleasure of studying with two singular educator/raconteurs: Frank McCourt, and Sidney Morgenbesser. Though better known these days for his second act as a best-selling author, McCourt's first act as a teacher of lord knows how many thousands of budding writers no doubt built the fan base for his future success. Morgenbesser was a philosophy professor at Columbia who despite very thin publishing credits, was revered as one of the great wiseacres and skewerers of pomposity in the western world. Mention to any philosopher, economist or political scientist that you studied with Sidney, and you will be greeted with a smile and a story about something Sidney said at a conference that broke up the room in laughter, while completely changing the way everybody thought about the subject at hand.

I have two vivid memories of something each of them said in class that have stayed with me all these years. I've come to realize that these very brief interludes informed nearly everything I've done in my working and intellectual life. It's kind of hard to process the notion that one sentence each by a philosopher and a creative writing teacher would matter to someone who has spent very little time at either of those endeavors, but facts is facts.

One day in creative writing class, McCourt began reading an assignment of mine aloud (I don't remember exactly what it was) that started off with the word "basically," as in "basically, what I mean to say is blah blah blah." He proceeded to tell me exactly why it was a bad idea to start a sentence with an modifier, or dangle one in any other fashion, and extended this to a mini lesson in applied sentence parsing. Never before had grammar or the mechanics of writing made any sense to me. Forever after, I understood that if you want someone to understand what you are trying to say, you have to say it clearly, succinctly, with a minimum of distraction from your point, and without ambiguity. That insight has enabled me to get my meager ideas across with enough success that I am reasonably frequently told that I am a good writer (which I am not, but mainly because of the meagerness of my ideas).

My great Sidney moment happened in a seminar on philosophy, economics, and Marxism he team taught with a fascinating figure named Alexander Ehrlich. Actually, the moment I'm going to tell you about was my second great Sidney moment. The first happened on the first day of class when he explained what the seminar was going to cover and how it was going to work, making liberal use of such technical philosophical terminology as "mishegas" "megillah" "famisht" "shmegegge" and "farblunget". In the middle of this, he stopped and announced to the class "by the way, a working knowledge of Yiddish is a requirement for this course". The next week (in time for the drop deadline) the herd had been culled of every blonde head.

OK actually, that was my second great Sidney moment. My first great Sidney moment came after in my first semester of CC (Columbia's core survey of western thought course) when I started giving serious thought to majoring in philosophy. I was talking about this with my father (an economist with Sidney stories), who simply told me "go talk to Sidney." I managed to find Sidney in his office, introduced myself as Peter Albin's son, and told him that I wanted to study philosophy. He asked me why, and I told him that I liked CC, had started reading some philosophy in high school and was interested in getting into the questions I had encountered more deeply. He asked me what I had read in high school and I said "oh you know, Carlos Casteneda, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the Dancing Wu li Masters ..." Sidney smiled and said "so how's your dad?"

OK so my third great Sidney moment came when Sidney started talking about how Marx's only real important works were those that dealt with practical critiques and analyses of politics, society, and economies; that the early stuff was all fuzzy headed noodling; that as a grand scheme theorist there wasn't really that much to talk about. This was circa 1983, when there still was such a thing as communism, critical theory and post structuralism were at something of a zenith, everybody walked around with a copy of the Marx-Engels Reader, and the 1848 Manuscripts were being viewed as his Marx's deepest work.

So I said to Sidney, "what about alienation? Isn't that a deep idea? Doesn't it all hang off that?" Sidney said "Alienation schmalienation. What the hell is that? Can you define it?" And I couldn't (at least not in non-circular, non-mish-mosh terms), despite having read thousands of pages on the subject and written a number of A papers that claimed to talk about it. At that moment, I realized that it was possible to regurgitate jargon that either meant nothing or which you absolutely didn't understand without anyone being the wiser. Philosophy became pretty much a dead subject to me after that, which was a bit of a problem because I was maybe 20 credits into a 30 credit major. However, I have discovered that there is perhaps no better management tool than asking people to define their terms and explain in plain English why what they are saying is important.

Now if I could only figure out what the meshuganah Derrida was talking about ...

Can you verify?

2009-03-31T18:09:00.000-07:00

All dialog guaranteed verbatim.

Hapless Call-center Lady: Welcome to the card-member service line. Can you verify the last four digits of your social?

Literal Minded Bugger of a Customer: My social? I wasn't aware that this involved socials, or that dances had digits.

HCL: That would be your social security number.

LMC: Ah, why didn't you say so? Yes, I can verify the last four digits of my social security number.

[several seconds of silence]

HCL: Sir? Are you there?

LMBoaC: Yes, I'm still here.

HCL: Sir, can you verify the last four digits of your social security number?

LMBoaC: I said yes, I can. If you tell me the information you have, I'll verify it for you.

HCL: No sir, I need you to tell me the last four digits of your social security number.

LMBoaC: You want to verify what I tell you, is that it?

HCL: Yes.

LMBoaC: Ah, I see. You seem to have this a bit backwards. Why didn't you say so? The digits are XXXX [Those are not the real digits, by the way, or "BTW" for the youngsters in the audience. If I told all of you the real ones, you might be able to verify them, which would not be a good thing for me, I gather.]

HCL: Yes, and how can I help you this evening?

LMBoaC: Well, I've had an account with you for many years, and have always paid my bills on time, but for some reason, you have increased the interest rate on my card to 29 percent, and reduced the credit limit to $390. This would seem to indicate that you don't want my account anymore, so I would like to oblige you by closing my account.

HCL: Yes, I see from your account that you are a very good customer, is there anything I can do to change your mind?

LMBoaC: Can you restore my credit limit to $10,000 and the interest rate to 8.9%, which were the terms last month?

HCL: No, I can't, but I can give you a free gift.

LMBoaC: What would that be?

HCL: A credit card holder.

LMBoaC: Uh, no, that's OK. Just close the account please.

HCL: I'm sorry I can't do that. I will have to transfer you to someone else who can.

LMBoaC: Please do.

HCL: Before I transfer you, may I please have your daytime phone number?

LMBoaC: May I ask why?

HCL: For account maintenance purposes.

LMBoaC: Account maintenance purposes?

HCL: Yes, so that we can maintain your account.

LmBoaC: You mean the account that I am closing and will no longer be maintaining with your company?

HCL: Yes.

LMBoaC: Do you see the irony in that?

HCL: I'm sorry sir?

LMBoaC: Never mind. No you may not have my daytime phone number. Please transfer me to the person who can close my account now.

[Beep beep. Hold music.]

HCL#2: To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking

LMBoaC: Define pleasure. Oh never mind. John Albin, that's A-l-b-i-n [I always spell it because for some reason despite only two simple syllables, no one ever gets it.]

HCL#2: Yes Mr. [sounds like "elbow"], how may I help you this evening?

LmBoaC: I would like to close my account?

HCL#2: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, may I ask why?

LmBoaC: Well you've changed the terms so as to make it unusable, and I have other cards that are better, so I don't see the point in keeping an account that you clearly don't want.

HCL#2: I'm sorry to hear that, is there anything I can do to change your mind?

LMBoaC: No thank you.

HCL#2: I'm sorry for the inconvenience, I'm sure you understand the reasons.

LMBoaC: It's no inconvenience to me. You're the ones losing my business.

HCL#2: Yes, but you understand that with the financial situation we have to change the terms.

LMBoaC: What financial situation? My account is in good standing. I pay my bills on time and rarely have a balance.

HCL#2: Yes, but the bank has been losing a lot of money.

LMBoaC: Not from me.

HCL#2: No sir, you are a very good customer.

LMBoaC: It's nice of you to say so. Please close the account now.

HCL#2: Yes sir. Is there anything else I can help you with?

LMBoaC: No thank you. Just close the account.

HCL#2: Just to let you know sir, after you close the account, you will not be able to use it.

LMBoaC: Yes, that's the point.

HCL#2: Your account is now closed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

LMBoaC: No inconvenience at all. Good night.

[Click]

The financial system is doomed.

Wake up and smell the coffee

2009-03-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

Proust had his madeleine, and I have my burger, doughnut and coffee, one whiff of which is capable of launching me into an almost hypnotic state of nostalgia. It all goes back to an afternoon in the Village when I was maybe three or four years old. On the corner of Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue, there's a coffee shop. There has always been a coffee shop on the corner of Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue. These days, it's called the Waverly Diner, or something similarly logical. I think of it as the new place, even though it has probably been called that for 30 years.

Back in the day, though, it was called Twin Brothers, and it was a little more on the doughnut shop end of the continuum. Back in the day, most diners were, and most were called something like that -- Twin Brothers, Four Guys, Three Joes. They all had the same neon and chrome motif, white Formica counter, soda fountain, round stools that a little kid can spin around on, and the smell of burgers, doughnuts, and coffee.

At the time my family was living a few blocks away on the corner of Houston and Sixth, and we had some interesting neighbors, as people in the Village tended to have back then. Next door to us was a divorced mom named Cathy Phelps, with two kids about the same age as my sister and me named Peter and Susie. It's not a given in New York that two families with kids the same age living next door to each other will become friends, because nothing interpersonal is a given in New York, but we did in fact all become friends.

Elsewhere in the building, there was a guy named Bob Gibson. He had three daughters who were quite a bit older than us, and baby sat from time to time. Bob was a famous folk singer, a prominent member of the generation that immediately preceded and mentored Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, and the like. My parents were sort of beatnik-ish, and deeply involved in the anti-war movement, civil rights, and lefty causes, which made "folk singer" a respected profession in our household.

At the age of three or four I was only very dimly aware of any of this sociology, but it was part of the background of life, and I was aware that Bob was somebody. I was also dimly aware that there was something dark and wrong about him, that made others wary. I have learned (through family reminiscence and reading up on the folk scene) that what was wrong was drug addiction. Bob also had a brother named Jim, who wound up moving in with and marrying Cathy next door and become a presence in our lives thereafter (and who may also have shared some of his brother's troubles, though I'm not clear on this).

So anyway, there we all were, folk singers, junkies, college professors, divorcees, lovers, teenage daughters, and little kids in and out of each others apartments doing what ever it is that such people do. [I can't speak for anyone else, but I had a serious Tinkertoy jones] Though they were little more than kids themselves, my parents tended to be the most adult and level headed figures around. My father was often the only male possessed of basic urban family preservation instincts and common sense, and my mother was often the only female who knew how to keep people fed and clothed, acting as a den mother to all manner of strays throughout the sixties.

Anyway, where were we? Ah yes burgers, doughnuts and coffee. One thing that was definitely not a regular feature of daily life in the level-headed beatnik home was greasy spoon food. My mother was a relatively serious cook and homemaker, and my parents were relatively broke in those days, so we didn't routinely go out for snacks, and when we did, they tended to be wholesome. So one day, one of the Gibson girls (I don't remember any of their names) invited me on an adventure in search of snacks, and she took me in hand to Twin Brothers. Immediately upon entering, I was greeted by the combined aroma of burgers on the griddle, coffee, and fresh doughnuts. I spun around in circles on the stool and cautiously accepted the Gibson girl's offer of a bite of burger, a jelly doughnut and a glass of chocolate milk, sensing somehow that all this was contraband.

Soon, the snack was over, and it was time to head back down Sixth to Beatnik Towers. We arrived home to furor and panic, my father searching the streets, my mother ready to call the cops, and Gibson adults in high dudgeon. It seems that not only was the snack itself contraband, but conveying me to said snack without proper notice and authorization was a rather serious transgression. After that incident, to the best of my recollection I was no longer entrusted to any Gibson girls, and I believe that very shortly after Bob's family imploded and disappeared from Beatnik Towers.

Ever since then, any time I have walked into or past a greasy spoon or doughnut shop and encountered that combination of aromas, this narrative plays out in my mind, with a vibrancy and certainty as strong as anything else in my memory. Literally, every time for my entire life, a jelly doughnut can serve up near total recall of an event that happened at the edge of memory and experience. It also triggers a flood of memories about Cathy, Jim Peter and Susie, and the ways we would exit and re-enter each other's lives over the following decade or so, which is a story for another day. Perhaps I'll head down to the coffee shop for a jelly doughnut and a glass of chocolate milk, find a Bob Gibson record on iTunes and see what happens.

Do I know you?

2009-01-30T23:59:00.000-08:00

The fall of 1981 marked the beginning of my sophomore year at Columbia University, and what I thought would be a year full of positive changes. My freshman year and the summer after had been kind of tough. As a native New Yorker, at a time when Columbia had a housing shortage, I was unable to get a dorm room. I spent the first semester living at home in the Village and commuting uptown, and had a hard time making friends and working my way into college life.

For my second semester, I lived in a fraternity that made animal house look like a chapter of the John Birch society. I started making friends on campus and and fitting in a bit better (living in what was easily the largest warehouse of illicit substances west of Lenox Avenue certainly helped), but it was all so drug addled and bizarre that rather than spending spring break attending the frat's week-long acid test, I retreated home and let my parents nurse me back to health and sanity. In the last month or so of the term, I had started a dating a senior girl who moved away after graduation. We traded visits over the summer, but it didn't really work out, and we wound up going our separate ways.

By the time the summer came to a close, I was ready for a bit of renewal and redemption. I still hadn't gotten housing from the college, so I wound up throwing my lot in with a colorful character named Michael Offen. Michael was a bit of a hustler in those days (and for all know, still is -- last I heard, he worked for Bear Stearns). He was the spitting image of Marty Feldman, with wild bulging eyes, curly hair, pointy features, and an amazing ability to charm people into whatever schemes he had going with girls, jobs, or school.

His father and uncle were involved in some sort of agribusiness, which led Michael to tell people that his father jerked off bulls for a living. His uncle (who visited us a couple of times), bore a striking resemblance to George C. Scott in his Patton days, and had been an intelligence officer before he turned to romancing livestock. The family had houses full of extra furniture, which was part of Michael's sales pitch for the tiny hovel he found for us at 142 West 109th Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, a region the student guides warned us to avoid. [I still remember the address because I've been around that neighborhood for one reason or another enough times over the years that it has stuck.]

The first time we went to the building to check things out, there was an elderly disheveled hispanic woman cleaning the hallways. In a mix of hand gestures, and Spanish (she seemed not to speak English), she conveyed the notion that she was the super and would show us to our prospective new digs. We walked up to the third floor and arrived at a knobless, lockless door. We pushed it inward, and it fell off its hinges, revealing only gloom. The super made gestures suggesting it would be fixed, so we wrestled it to some sort of stability and proceeded.

The apartment consisted two small bedrooms, one of which had no door, a small living room, a large kitchen, and a bathroom. The bathroom had a tub without a shower, and no sink or mirror. The apartment had no closets, though there were hooks on the walls. The floors were rough unfinished wood, and the entire apartment was painted in high-gloss red enamel. Dead cockroaches littered the floor and a vague odor of decay filled the air. The apartment faced airshafts on all sides. As I stuck my head out the kitchen window to see if there was anything to see, a chicken carcass whizzed by and crashed into the debris-strewn courtyard below.

Despite missing the opportunity to read the entrails of the chicken, we interpreted all the omens to be good and decided to take the place. Sure it needed a little work, but we were young, school didn't start for another couple of weeks, we'd get the lease in our own names, and the price was right -- 350 bucks a month. Besides, it was the only apartment available that had real rooms. The others were all "railroads," and neither of us liked the idea of having to traipse through the other's bedroom. We made arrangements to return to the real estate office that had sent us there, eager to hand over our first and last month's rent and sign on the dotted line.

Later that day, we got our semoleans in order, and headed to an office on the upper west side to meet our landlord and close the deal. When we arrived, the "super" was there waiting for us, now well dressed, coiffed, and made up. The real estate agent introduced her to us as Mrs. Parada, the owner of the building. She greeted us in lightly accented, fluent English. I don't remember whether I was just to too stupid to see the mess we were getting ourselves into, or whether Michael pulled a Michael and convinced me that it was all copacetic, but no matter. We paid our money, took our chances, and spent the next week or so schlepping in our belongings, and getting the place as livable as possible.

The months that followed (surprise surprise) were absolute hell. We had an unexplained power outage that took days to resolve, a fire in one of the next door apartments, noisy neighbors, flocks of chickens and other detritus streaming past the airshaft windows, and a front door that continued to fall off its hinges. More importantly, as one of the coldest winters in recent memory descended upon us, Mrs. Parada showed her true colors, providing neither heat nor hot water for weeks at a time. We stalked Mrs. Parada and complained to every public official we could, but none of it helped. We took cold baths, and froze. The only solution was to spend as little time as possible in the place, shuttling between the library, the Hungarian Pastry Shop, the Marlin Cafe, and friends' apartments. Given the unfavorable male:female ratio in pre-co-ed Columbia, romance was rarely a refuge.

As we soon discovered, our surroundings also had some interesting, uh, economic activities. Car stripping was one of the main industries in the neighborhood. Every week or so, a new car would appear on the block. Men would emerge from adjacent buildings, plug power tools into the streetlight bases, and gradually reduce it to little more than a few bits and pieces sitting in a puddle of oil. Other cars would sprout new fenders, bumpers , and trim, which were, miraculously, the same color as the car that had shed its skin. There was a curious specialization to this. Our block was the Toyota-stripping block. One block west was strictly Datsuns.

The other big business in the neighborhood was, ahem, distribution of chemically active horticultural products. Liberally sprinkled around the neighborhoods to the east and north of Columbia were pot stores. Literally, these were stores that sold pot, either openly over a counter, or through a bank-teller like cage. The one I remember best was on Amsterdam Avenue, just below 110th Street. It had two signs, one above the door that said "Joe's Meat Market," and another painted on the window reading "Right-On Variety." I soon discovered, though, that there was more to the neighborhood than just retail outlets.

Not too long after I moved in, I went down to my parents' place for dinner, and my father drove me home. My father, who grew up on the upper west side, and knew every inch of Manhattan like the back of his hand, was very concerned about where I was living. He had been trying to talk me into moving back home. Hoping to convince him that everything was OK, on the drive uptown I told him not to worry. The neighborhood was poor, but the people were nice and it wasn't dangerous.

At the height of my spiel, we turned the corner onto my block and were stopped from proceeding by a police detachment. The street was full cops wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying rifles. There were snipers visible on the roof of one building. Learning that I lived on the block and was heading home, the cops let us through. As we reached my building, a couple was dragged out of a building a few doors down from mine in handcuffs. It was a major heroin bust that made all papers.

Fast forward to the end of the year, and I had had it. I sublet my share of the apartment to my buddy Tom Meltzer (sorry Tom), and moved back down to the Village to lick my wounds, and devote myself to earning enough money to stake myself to slightly better digs. As vivid as my memories of that apartment are, it strikes me that I remember almost nothing of any of my neighbors, except for another pair of friends (Gavin and Phil) suffering through a year of Parada-hell in the building next door. This is somewhat out of character, because in every other place I've lived, I've usually gotten to know or at least taken notice of my neighbors, many of whom I can still easily recall.

Fast forward another 27 years, and the subject of forgetting or failing to notice people has become current. Doing the math, my sophomore year beginning in 1981 puts me in the Columbia College class of 1984. A certain fellow named Barry-something-or-other (who has subsequently found a nice place to live) was class of '83, as were a number of my closest friends, including several with whom I am still in regular contact. So far, I've only come across one college friend who has any recollection of him. Still, he's obviously a hot topic of conversation, and every issue of every Columbia publication has had at least one item about alma mater's most illustrious alum over the past year or so.

Recently, while catching up via email with a high school friend who went to grad school there, we of course got on the subject of Obama's days at Columbia, and did you know him, and funny how no one seems to have, and all that, and he called my attention to a couple of items. One was an essay entitled "Barack Obama '83, My Columbia College Roommate" in the most recent alumni magazine. The author talks about how as junior transfer students from Occidental College in the fall of 1981, neither he nor Obama could get housing from CU, so they wound up sharing an unheated dump of a railroad flat on 109th between Amsterdam and Columbus. Hmm. It seems the president of the United States of America and I lived on the same block, under similar circumstances.

The other item was an article in something called WikiCU (a Wikipedia-like site devoted to Columbia trivia) about Obama's days at Columbia. Most of it is lifted straight from the roommate piece (or vice versa), but it also includes some additional detail, namely pictures of said dump and (a drum roll please) its address.

"#3E, 142 West 109th St"

Upon reading this, your faithful correspondent picks his jaw off the floor, and runs around his office shouting "holy shit! Barack Obama was my frickin' next door neighbor! Barack Obama was my frickin' next door neighbor! Barack Obama was my frickin' next door neighbor!" Now I suppose it's entirely possible that Barry is reading this and now running around his (significantly rounder) office and shouting "Holy shit! that guy who played at the Postcrypt all the time was my frickin' next door neighbor!" Then again ...

But even now, I must sheepishly admit that I still don't remember him. However, Barry, if you were the guy throwing chickens out the window, I've got a bone to pick with you.

White, You Huckleberry

2009-01-13T09:14:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up, there were two kinds of people: Yankee fans and Mets fans. Red Sox fans didn't count as human, so the didn't fit into either category. Given this conceptual framework, I get some satisfaction out of the big news on the sports pages that feared Sox slugger Jim Rice finally made it into the Hall of fame, on the 800th ballot, or something like that, and Rickey Henderson (the most exciting Yankee of one of the team's most frustratingly underperforming incarnations) it in on the first try.

The less said about any Red Sock the better, except that by the numbers Rice was as deserving as anybody of election to the hall. That it took so long is probably not because he played for the Red Sox (unfortunately, the HoF voters do not understand the proper categorization of humanity). Rather, it was because the HoF is run by a bunch of sportswriters (i.e., over-aged nerds), who hold grudges against athletes who don't kiss their butts enough.

Speaking of butts, let's talk about Phil Rizzuto. Some years ago, I was watching a ball game on TV with my dad. Scooter and Bill White were calling the game, with the usual mix of Oh Holy Cowisms and disagreements, with White playing his usual role of straightman/huckleberry. Rickey Henderson was on first, taking a long lead, jabbering, twitching, and doing everything he could to drive the pitcher and catcher to distraction. He takes a big lead, and White says "there's Rickey taking that big lead." All of a sudden he's off. Before you can say, um, Jack Robinson, Henderson slides in safely, beating the throw by a mile.

White continues:

"That Rickey Henderson, he always gets that good jump"

"Yeah, he's so fast, too," adds scooter.

"Well, you know, he's got those powerful legs," says White.

"Yeah, and he's got cute buns, too," concludes Scooter. We all, dad, me, and White, fall off our chairs.

That's why there's a hall of fame.

Are you Jewish?

2009-01-07T22:30:00.000-08:00

As many of you many know, Judaism is divided into four main streams of practice: orthodox, conservative, reform, and ambivalent. Most people would assume that the order in which these were just written reflects the gradual passage of the Jewish people into coexistence with the gentile world. Certainly the folks in black hats would have us believe that the most authentic form of the Jew is the most "traditionally" religiously observant and that relaxation of practice puts one on the slippery slope toward loss of one's very identity.

Interestingly, archaeology suggests that the opposite may be true. To vastly oversimplify, the historical portions of the bible say that god offered the descendants of Abraham a deal: worship me, and you get the promised land. On the way down through Moses, the deal got a bit more complicated and specific -- worship me, follow the laws, and wipe out the infidels who are living there despite the fact that I gave it to you, and you get the promised land. Along come David and Solomon, and a few more details get fleshed out as to the where's and how's of practice, and the Jews get the promised land, plus this really cool kingdom, a nice temple, yadda yadda. Fast forward lots of centuries, and we have a culture built around the idea of a covenant, liberation from slavery in Egypt, and the carrot of the promised land being dangled in front of us.

However, since the rise of modern archaeological techniques, and especially since Israel's expansion following the six-day war, there has been lots of opportunity to dig up the holy land. Lots of old cities have been found, lots of worship sites have been found. Evidence that many of the kings mentioned in the bible were real has been found. The problem is, most of this evidence suggests that the kingdom of David was relatively modest, and that the Israelites were consistently polytheistic (rather then errantly monotheistic), until hundreds of years later than traditional readings of the bible suggest. More importantly, no evidence of the exodus has been found, and other finds filling in the context of the ancient world make it extremely unlikely that it occurred on anything like the temporal or physical scale described in the bible, if it occurred at all.

Or so argues a book I've recently read called "The Bible Unearthed" by archaeologists Israel Finklestein and Neil Asher Silberman. Assuming that the narrative F&S lay out is accurate (and a even a cursory survey of the literature on biblical archaeology threatens the certainty of such an assumption, which never stopped me before ...), the greatest significance of this story is that traditional orthodoxy is actually the most recent, and least historically grounded of the forms of practice. Ambivalence about god and monotheism, ambiguity of identity, intermingling with other peoples, and picking and choosing which religious laws and practices to follow or ignore is the most traditional path of all.

As a fourth generation, smart-assed New York atheist Jew, this is a combination of comforting and disturbing. On the one hand, I no longer have any reason to feel even the slightest bit sheepish around the nudnicks in the mitzvah tanks. Which reminds me of a story ... One fine spring afternoon some years ago, I was riding my bike near Washington Square Park, when a guy with a black hat and a long beard standing in front of a Winnebago accosted me. "Are you Jewish?" he asked. Why, I don't know, but I answered "yes," then swerved away from the liturgy he proferred. "It's no reason to get he killed," he lamented, with a shrug. About that, he was certainly correct.

On the other hand, finding out that ambivalence and doubt are the oldest forms of piety undercuts whatever hipster cred attaches to ambivalence and doubt. Which leads to more ambivalence and doubt about ambivalence and doubt about ... Infinite regress is so, I don't know, regressive ... Of course ambivalence and doubt about identity and god have their own implications that go far beyond my navel gazing. If you lack absolute certainty in your beliefs, and you doubt the story that places your ethnicity in a special place in the universe, membership in the tribe is not only a reason not to get killed. It is also a reason not to kill (or condone the killing of) others just because they are not one of you and aren't happy about your asserting a shaky birthright.

So picking and choosing which laws to honor in a fashion consistent with the ancient traditions of my people, I eat the occasional cheeseburger or rasher of bacon (don't tell my doctor, oy my cholesterol), and worship a false idol or two (Clapton is god). However I strictly honor the one about "thou shall not murder," and think this applies to dropping bombs on schoolhouses in Gaza.

On yet another hand, I am a non-practicing ethnic Jew, married to a non-practicing ethnic Serbian Orthodox Christian, which makes our son an Orthodox Jew. This used to be a joke, but in light of recent archaeological findings, not so much so.

Always a bridesmaid ...

2008-11-18T22:45:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I mentioned some minor misgivings about Barack Obama -- something about him being a politician not immune to a touch of calculation, and not not quite the saint some would have him believe him to be. This led me to support another candidate, who, sadly, did not win. I'm speaking of course of Eugene V. Debs, a man who would not have shrunk away from accusations of socialism.

There were of course a number of practical and legal obstacles to Debs winning this year's presidential election. As a permanently disenfranchised convicted felon, it's unclear whether he would qualify for the ballot in all the states. That, and being dead, though I've been unable to find anything in the constitution specifically listing vitality as a requirement for the office, a loophole exploited for several years by Ronald Reagan.

Still, it's worth considering the merits of Debs' character, policies, and qualifications. Debs was a brilliant union organizer and labor leader, driven by a deep hatred of suffering and injustice -- the sort of person we might call a community organizer these days. This brought him into the world of (Socialist) party politics. Radicalized by the brutality of government and robber-baron response to strikes, Debs turned to socialism, and ran unsuccessfully for president four times. Debs' socialism wasn't about mere wealth re-distribution. Nor was it the party and state sponsored terror that the totalitarian movements that usurped the name convinced Americans socialism means.

Debs' credo was one of sacrifice and humility in the service of improving the lives of poor people and opposing war. He saw capitalism, not as the engine of universal prosperity and political democratic freedom (as it is so often seen today), but as a source of suffering, stratification, and militarism, the true enemies of freedom and democracy. His pacifism led to his greatest sacrifice. As World War I ground on, and Woodrow Wilson brought America closer to the fields of Flanders, Debs agitated against the draft and was arrested for espionage. Though convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, he remained unbroken. At his sentencing hearing, Debs uttered what became the rallying cry for his final presidential campaign from behind bars:

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Next time someone tells you Barack Obama is a socialist, throw that back at 'em and ask 'em when Barack ever said anything like that. As much as the right might want to tar Obama with the brush of radicalism and class warfare, it's worth remembering what the real thing looks like. So far as I know, Obama has never claimed that his rightful place is in prison alongside the other outcasts from American prosperity.

It's been clear since he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention that Obama thinks his rightful place is at the apex of the U.S. political system. It's also clear from the way he has campaigned, and most recently from the people he seems to be selecting to that we shouldn't expect a commune to break out any time soon in Washington. But it's also worth remembering that Obama did promise change. Much of this came in the form of Yoda-like platitudes ("change we must"). But he also said some specific things about what he would do (and how he would do them) that he should be held to.

One of the areas where he promised change fairly specifically was environmental policy, and today he made good. He announced that he would put in place a "cap and trade" system this year to begin addressing pollutants causing climate change. Put that one in the plus column.

He also said that he would work to re-professionalize foreign service and diplomacy, and move us away from a fear-based national security policy. Not such good news on this one. The two big items were his behind-the-scenes support for keeping Joe Lieberman on as head of the senate homeland security committee and his offering the secretary of state slot to Hillary Clinton. Neither of these moves is about the merits, because on the merits neither is a good candidate. This is pure naked politics. Lieberman means one more vote for the Democrats (assuming he's back on the reservation for good), and nothing more. Putting Hillary in the cabinet takes a potential voice of criticism out of the senate (with no risk of losing a safe Democratic seat), and more importantly, out of the running in 2012.

Obama is entitled to be political about certain things. Though a bit disappointed, I'm not yet heartbroken about these moves. Still, that makes him only one for three on big decisions this week, and I'd like to see him do better. Now what would Eugene do?

Bluefood Endorses ...

2008-10-28T23:00:00.000-07:00

You practically can’t open up an editorial page or blog without coming across some pundit scratching his head over John McCain “suddenly” going negative. Some wonder how John McCain had this horrible campaign thrust on him against his better nature and maverick spirit. Others express sorrow at seeing the man they once admired transformed into yet another victory-at-all-costs Republican willing to transfer from the Straight Talk Express to the Turd Blossom Special, as long as it stops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue along the way. Some, such as William Kristol, cry for the campaign to let McCain be McCain. Others, like a Time magazine doofus named Ana Marie Cox (who is well dissected here) wonder “wha happen?” to the guy they thought was so honorable and cool, and wait for him to be a maverick again. This article hits all the typical notes.

I am amazed that anyone who has spent even a moment studying the presidency and/or observing politicians could have such thoughts. It seems obvious to me that anybody running for the office of president is on some level a defective human being. To say to the world "I deserve more than anyone else to hold the most powerful political office in the world" requires an astounding degree of narcissism. Campaigning requires a comparable degree of mono-mania. I find this confirmed (at least in hindsight) by the performance of the people who actually reached the office. I can think of no examples of presidents since the U.S. became a major power who didn't exhibit some disturbing personality traits and who didn't commit at least some frightening abuses of their power (except perhaps those who died in office before they got to do anything).

Given this, I think it behooves journalists to work from the assumption that any serious candidate is in fact dishonest and dangerous, and that any image he presents of himself is to be questioned. Ultimately, it's a matter of the scale of the deceit and danger, not its presence or absence. On that continuum, as a human being, McCain is not Bush or Nixon, but he sure as hell ain't Jimmy Carter either (who was probably the closest we've ever come to having a president actually be what he professes to be).

In this light, it has been obvious from the get-go that the mainstream media has completely failed to report on John McCain as it should have. I mean come on, the man has actually called himself a maverick for years, without winking. In and of itself that should be a clue that he's trying to mask his conformity. Real mavericks don't call attention to their differences. They just keep doing whatever they do, and to hell with everyone else's opinions. Gandhi was a maverick. Oskar Schindler was a maverick. Ted Kazcynski was a maverick. William S. Burroughs was a maverick. John McCain is about as much of a maverick as the Fonz.

Throughout McCain's career, there have been well established (but under-reported) instances of the gaps between what he says about his character and values and his actual behavior, in both his personal and public lives. His treatment of his first wife. His behavior in the Keating five scandal. His notorious ill-treatment of people in his inner circle and foul temper. His less than complete grasp of most of the facts and issues he confronts. His campaign finance practices. His earmarks and log-rolls. He's not the worst hypocrite ever. He actually has on occasion gone with his conscience in spite of his self or party interest. However, this has been nothing like the matter of course that so many are convinced it is.

Maybe at least in this small way he is better than the most craven of his peers. But, realistically, he does not stand apart from them. He is one of them, in spirit and action.

Actually, I take that back. He is in at least one dimension worse than any of his peers that I can think of. He is the only current member of congress to have spent years in captivity as a prisoner of war under horrible conditions and frequent torture. He knows better than any of his peers how terrible it is for those in Camp X-Ray, or the ratholes of extraordinary rendition. He also knows the galvanizing effect torture, (and endurance), have on soldiers who believe in their cause. Yet when presented with an opportunity to take a stand against the Bush/Cheney torture regime, he did so only briefly. He then turned about face to legislate a policy that specifically allowed heinous torture of POW's and others in the Bush/Cheney Gulag, in an obvious quid pro quo for support of his presidential bid.

So if all serious presidential aspirants are to be treated as sociopaths, what are we to make of Barack Obama? The worst anyone seems to be able to dredge up against him is that he maintained personal ties to an impolitic preacher and an erstwhile Weatherman. He seems to be the apotheosis of decency and sophistication. Annointed "the one" by the Matrix generation, he is seen as a morally pure, prophetic liberator from the yoke of Republican tyranny. Yet here he is, on the threshold of the presidency, so there must be something, or else the defective human being theory of political success must be abandoned.

Hmm. What could it be? Among friends, I have joked that I have profound reservations over Obama's honesty because of his confessions in his first memoir that he was a dope fiend in his college days. I have my doubts. He was class of '83 at Columbia. I was class of '84. I lived in Sigma Nu for a semester. I played in bands. Barry who? I never saw the guy once. Not at the pot store on Amsterdam Ave, not in the back room at Cannon's, not at tequila night at the West End. Not drinking the Quaalude and grain alcohol punch at the parties in Furnald Hall. If he can lie about being a degenerate, what else is he lying about?

But seriously, a recent event makes it clear that the DHBTPS is safe for another election cycle. On October 20, Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama. Wow, you say. The leading African American Republican switches sides for our guy. That's terrific. Cynically, yes, it probably is terrific, if endorsements mean anything. And how did Obama respond? He called him "a great soldier, a great statesman, and a great American." He then went on to say: "I have been honored to have the benefit of his wisdom and counsel from time to time over the last few years, but today, I am beyond honored and deeply humbled to have the support of General Colin Powell." Wow, you say, what a gracious acceptance, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. Again, cynically, nice touch, Barry.

But wait a second, what's Obama's position on the war in Iraq? Right, he was against it in 2003, and has been ever since. He says it's one of the worst mistakes in the history of U.S. foreign policy and has had dreadful consequences at home and abroad. And what does he think of his colleagues who support the war? He says the biggest thing wrong with John McCain is his judgement about the war. It completely overshadows whatever positives there are in the rest of his resume. And remind me again, who was it who actually made the public case for the war in Iraq, turned American opinion in favor of it, and crafted the "coalition of the willing" by telling a bunch of lies and half truths to the United Nations? Right, Colin Powell. And when did Colin Powell express regret for having done this and come out in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq ASAP? Uh, not yet. In fact, as near as I can tell from his recent utterances, he still supports the war and thinks the surge was terrific.

Yet Obama welcomes the support and advice of this man whom I doubt he really respects. I can only guess why, but I think it is because he has made a calculation that the American public is blind to what Powell really is (a consummate Pentagon bureaucrat, with a mixed command record, and a disastrous civilian one), and is still drawn to his personal magnetism and prominence. If Obama really had the courage of his convictions, he would reject the endorsement and tell the American public what fools they have been for allowing themselves to be duped again and again by this fraud. The reality, though, is that he wants to be elected more than he wants to be right. In accepting Powell's endorsement and saying nothing about Powell's role in getting us to where we are now in Iraq, he allows Powell once again to abuse his status as a touchstone for black pride and white guilt. In effect, he absolves and endorses Powell in a cynical bid for the votes that he thinks this might bring him.

This is not the worst thing a politician could do, but is undoubtedly something a politician would do. I often joke that no man alive deserves to be president, therefore I'm voting for a dead guy, Eugene V. Debs. I thought I might have to shelve that line this year, but it looks like old Eugene is on the ballot again. Now if I can only figure out how to do a write-in ...

I've seen the future and it is ...

2008-10-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

As readers of my novel in (slow) progress may have gathered, I am a bureaucrat. My current role in the leviathan of municipal government has me dealing with a great many consultants who have been hired to decipher and improve the bureaucracy. For those not familiar with the sweet science of consulting, it consists of paying a bunch of guys who used to work for you upwards of $250 an hour each to ask people who work for you now what they do, writing down their answers in a report that's more nicely copied and bound than what your own graphics department can produce, and doing a bunch of Powerpoint presentations that state the obvious in obscure ways.

OK, not the consultants I manage (ahem), because I know how to extract real value out of these guys. But pretty much any consultant project parachuted from enough levels above where the work gets done to scare people into cooperating does tend to play out this way. The best part, of course, is the Powerpoint. There's a recent trend poo-pooing Powerpoint as everything George Orwell told us to watch out for (google "powerpoint crashed the space shuttle" or "powerpoint makes you stupid" to see what I mean). I think this is mostly wrong, or rather confusing correlation with cause. The ascendency of Powerpoint doesn't so much make people stupid as it reflects the inexorable ascendency of stupidity.

For those not familiar with this product, Powerpoint is a Microsoft software package that empowers one stupid person to convince a group of other stupid people that he knows what he's doing. Per Bill Gates' plan to take over the universe by bewitching worldwide upper management with shiny objects and paralyzing the able-minded by not telling them how to turn off Mr. Paperclip, if there's a smart person in the room when a Powerpoint presentation is on display, he's so busy rolling his eyes and having his ironic comments go over everyone else's heads that he fails to notice that he has been assigned all the "action items" and "touch points" for the follow-up session until the end of the meeting.

It all kind of reminds me of "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley's novel about a totalitarian future in which introspection is treated as a crime, cosmetically perfect people at the top of the food chain carry out simulated fornication endlessly without consequences, and people speak almost exclusively in what sounds a lot like leetspeak. BNW is usually described as "dystopian", because it presents a vision of a future stripped of all nuance, complexity and irony. But unlike "1984," which depicts a totalitarian world in which suffering is redefined as pleasure, BNW shows shows most people enjoying themselves, which leaves some room for some people to view it more as a how-to manual than a cautionary tale.

Powerpoint is evidence of this. But it is also a reflection of something much deeper in the human psyche. Bear with me now, because I'm about to lay out a theory of everything for the perfection of the human experience. It's all about shape and it's all about the future. For instance, in BNW, a book about the future, human beauty is idealized with the adjective "pneumatic", i.e., inflated, plumped up, no longer angular, but ... what's the word I'm looking for? Round.

Another example (and the one that inspired this vitally important cross-cultural, highly scientific examination of human nature during a long layover) is Charles DeGaulle airport outside Paris. CDG was planned in the early 1960s, at the apogee of futurist idealism. It is round.

Extravagantly so. Terminals, passageways, flight information screens, water towers, taxi-ways -- it's one futuristic curving swoop after another. The plan of the whole place is round. Other examples abound. From the eastern bloc, we have the embodiment of communism's triumphant future, Sputnik.

In contrast, we have many examples of non-round visions of the future ending in failure or obsolescence, most notably the wedge-shaped angularity of rusted, underpowered 1970s automobiles

and post-war public housing projects.

So what does all this have to do with bureaucracy and management consulting? Everything. Bureaucrats toil in misery in square, dimly lit cubicles. They drown in reports full of lists, tables, and bar chars, all square, defined, and limited. The quintessential artifact of the bureaucratic craft is the organization chart -- people in boxes tethered to the hierarchy, defined by their function, not their essence or aspirations. But bureaucrats dream, and when they do, they dream of the future. A future where things go smoothly, processes flow unimpeded by insecurity, ineptitude, or turpitude. A future that is ... Well I'll let you guess.

To illustrate, let me first tell you the true, inner secret of Powerpoint presentations: They are all the same. They come in many colors, jargons, and templates, but they all follow the same story arc. They foretell two futures. One is the path you are on today, and where it will lead you without the guidance of the presenter. It is full of loss, disharmony, and suffering. The other offers the possibility of redemption, renewal, and remuneration and can only be reached through the wisdom of the elders and their knowledge of best practices. Something like this:

Now a cynic might say that this what you get in a society ruled by marketers schooled in conformism. But no, I say it is something else. It is a yearning, for a voluptuous, pneumatic, curved ideal, rejecting the piercing angularity of the past, embedded deeply in all of us. Without knowing it, when we speak of revitalization and change in the corporation, we express ourselves in the visual language of visions of the future. Heck, it might even be genetic, a sort of transformational grammar of the visual. Somebody get me Chomsky, stat! Anyway, I have seen the future, perfected, and it is round.

R.I.P. Peter S. Albin 12/20/1934-2/20/2008

2008-02-23T14:53:00.000-08:00

My father Peter Steigman Albin died on Wednesday February 20, 2008 after a long illness. Below is the text of my Eulogy to him.

.........

Before I move on to what I have to say about Dad, I’d like to acknowledge a few people who made an enormous difference in the quality of his life in the years since his stroke.

First, his friend and colleague Duncan Foley, who continued to see light in Dad when so many of us could only see darkness. Duncan has also asked me to read a few words he wrote: Pete Albin had a big effect on my life both as my collaborator in scientific work and as a human being. I will leave the scientific issues for another time. What Pete lived through remains astonishing to me. His experience in the small way I was able to understand it, was uniquely cruel and powerful. I cannot miss his suffering, but I will miss him. As the Quakers say, let us hold Pete in the light.

To Gerard Trebot, who provided camaraderie under extraordinary circumstances and showed us all how to see not only what Dad needed from us, but what he could still give us.

To Doctor James Robilotti for his wisdom, compassion and friendship.

To Doctor Gary Inwald who saw hope where others saw futility.

To Doctor Chris Fabian, for his calm counsel

And most of all to my mother, Pat Albin. Those closest to our family know the heroic sacrifices she made. I can only marvel at her strength and kindness.

To all of you, I offer you my deepest thanks and express my admiration for the examples you have set as human beings. Many others helped, but without you, Dad would have died many years ago and would have had many fewer moments worth living.

….

It’s tempting to talk about Dad from a particular perspective – colleague, family member, friend, teacher, but choosing any one of those seems not merely insufficient to me, but wide of the mark. As is true of anyone, Dad was of course more than the sum of his parts, but I think one of the things that set him apart from the rest of us with multiple interests is that in essence, there weren’t any parts, only the whole. Whether he we was delving into the most abstract of mathematical constructs, raising children, telling a joke, becoming a master go player, carrying on an ordinary conversation, or just staring out the window, he brought to bear the same combination of attention, rigor, eclecticism, humor, and Rabelaisian gusto.

Staring out the window is a particularly illustrative example, because it’s something he did a lot, and it was for him an exceptionally fruitful activity. For many years, he would look out the picture windows of our 22^nd floor living room and watch the landscape below him be transformed by construction. This culminated in the site excavation and then construction of the NYU gymnasium in the late 70s. As he watched the work unfold, he became more and more fascinated, eventually bluffing his way onto the jobsite and getting to know both the labor and management sides of the operation. This led to a series of papers on the differences between the way engineers and workers approach problems of optimization and queuing.

His conclusion was that the traditional management-science approach of traveling salesmen and linear programs didn’t capture the richness of what was going on and wasn’t any more effective than letting the front-end loader operator decide by himself how many trucks were needed on-site. He laid this out with his characteristically idiosyncratic symbology. All while sitting around in his speedo-style underwear, drinking pots of coffee, puffing away on pipes of varying contents, while listening to WBAI on the radio and bullshitting with his teenaged son. There was no incongruity to this multi-tasking across the spectrum from sublime to ridiculous, though. No contradiction in any of his dimensions, habits, virtues, or vices. It was all simply Pete.

I think this captures the essence of how he approached his more theoretical and intellectually challenging work, too: First, he liked real-world examples. Second, he thought that cognitive and information sciences that try to model how people actually think have a better shot at representing the way people solve problems and interact than the “incomplete” formalisms of traditional models of rationality. Third, standard economics terminology never quite worked for him; he always needed his own. Fourth, he couldn’t just sit in an office and crank things out. He needed coffee and conversation to develop an idea. He needed distraction, hustle, and bustle, before he could settle into his night-owl productivity.

The other thing, which is very hard to recognize if you didn’t really know him in more than one context, is that there is an earthiness and whimsy in the way he presented his ideas. His writing is full of neologisms, circumlocutions, and odd constructs. In someone else, this might just be jargon, but in him it was a form of wordplay and a source of amusement. Dad punned and kenned on paper and in person with abandon, regardless of context. I often sat with him as he worked, and watched a smile play across his face, or even heard him chuckle as he scrawled away in felt tip. Looking at these sentences after the fact, I can’t say that I get the jokes, but I know they’re in there. The verbiage in his later work is drier, but the whimsy comes out in the illustrations. The meaning of the images generated by his simulations was almost secondary to him. He got a big kick out of the idea that his equations could produce such pretty pictures, and he often just showed people screen shots without trying to explain what they meant.

My thoughts about Dad as an intellectual often center around a conversation we had about the word “discipline,” in the sense of an academic discipline. This word represented everything he found most frustrating about academia. Working within a discipline meant restricting yourself, punishing your own mind when it strayed outside the boundaries set by the arbiters of the field. Deep down he was very ambivalent about the label “economist.” He was proud of the field’s intellectual rigor and admired many of its practitioners. He wanted to be known as someone who worked in the same tradition as, Keynes, Arrow, Galbraith. However, he kept being told (in reviews, grant applications, and job interviews) that he wasn’t working within the discipline. Maybe it was good mathematics, or linguistics, or computer science, but it wasn’t economics. He didn’t really understand why academics put themselves in bins like this. And though he craved the validation of his peers, he grew weary of the chase. Because of these frustrations, it never bothered him that his children didn’t follow in his footsteps.

I think I’ve said enough about the serious side of Dad, though, and I’d like to return to what I started to say about gusto. Here are some of the things Dad loved to do:

Swing a tennis racquet
Swing an axe
Eat haute French cuisine
Make Chinatown waiters bring him the dishes written on the walls in Chinese
Eat in greasy spoons, and declare that there is no such thing as enough bacon
Give talks on highly technical subjects
Consult with captains of industry and finance
Tell shaggy dog stories
Play absolutely any game
Listen to Bach, Wagner, and Beethoven
Sing “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”
Go to foreign movies
Go to plays
Go to the opera
Hang in out pool halls
Listen to Phil Rizzuto call a Yankee game
Read the great books
Read mathematics and physics texts
Read Linguistics journals
Read Gargantua and Pantagruel
Live like Gargantua
Organize anti-war protests
Read the Nation
Listen to WBAI
Listen to right-wing talk radio
Hang out in cafes
Hang out in museums and art galleries
Explore the wonders of cities
Sleep out under the stars in the country.

Come to think of it, he really liked to do almost anything, go almost anywhere, and talk to almost anyone because all knowledge was good, and to him, accessible. Any activity offered new skills to be mastered, new people to meet, and new places to explore. Growing up with someone so filled with wonder and fascination at the world around him, who was also equipped with such astounding powers of understanding and communication was an extraordinary privilege. It was also an extraordinary to privilege to feel my esteem being reciprocated, a feeling I’m sure many of you share.

I’m not going to say that he was a saint, or that there was never friction between us, or that he wasn’t at times enormously frustrating to deal with. But I knew from very early in life that he had rare gifts as a parent and human being. As I grew into adulthood I recognized more in the way of feet of clay, but I never really lost the sense that he was sui generis, and above all, fun. He remained the person I most enjoyed spending time with, up until the moment in August of 1991, when so much of that was taken away, not just from him, but from all of us.

It has been very hard to find perspective on Dad’s long and brutal illness. It is hard to imagine a crueler fate than to be a polymath and athlete who retains only enough of his mind and body to know what he has lost and be unable to do anything about it. The last 16 years have been a punctuated equilibrium of decline, with each crisis bringing lower baselines of health and function and erasing more of what Dad once was. In this context I have struggled to maintain my best memories of him, but this is a struggle that has to be taken on. I believe in a sort of life after death. By this, I don’t mean that I believe in god, or the spirit world, or any metaphysical sense of “soul.” Trust me, it is impossible to imagine that the grandchildren of Joe Albin or the children of Pete Albin would.

What I mean is that the influences of the people in our lives are not simply winds or waves that knock us one way or another as they pass. As much as a child carries the DNA of his parents, we all carry the words and deeds of those who shape us physically, emotionally, and intellectually. These can be a burden, or they can be a blessing. Dad’s influence was overwhelmingly the latter for me. I have a mind that he in large measure taught me how to use. I have a love of the intellectual, the physical, the aesthetic and the comical. Most of all I have memories of his shaggy grin as he picked me up from school, joined me on climbs in the four corners, or walked up to me after a gig and said “now I know how Keith Richards’ mother feels!” I would like now to leave you all with a simple request. Keep the best of Dad alive inside you, the whole thing.

Oh No!Not Another Mac vs. PC Blog Entry!

2008-02-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

Given how I'm old and all, I've been using computers for a long time, strictly PC's, going back to the days of MS-DOS. I can't say that I've ever been religious about it, but PC's have been the logical choice. I used to do a lot of development (mostly in MS Access, which is highly platform dependent), and to the extent that I sometimes brought work home from the office, strict compatibility, without having to think about it was a virtue. I used other people's Mac's occasionally, but failed to see what all the fuss about (and really didn't like one-button mice).

Recently, my wife has significantly ramped up her level of computer usage, and for the first time, we really needed a second machine. My own requirements have changed. I really don't do any development anymore, and am most interested in doing more writing and more music production. Time constraints aside, I had largely given up on music on the computer. Multi-track audio on a PC that has to run a lot of other software and be shared by multiple users really is a pain in the ass, and I have completely lost whatever capacity I once had to fight with the assininity that is the way Windows configures stuff. I also wanted a laptop rather than another desktop machine.

Putting all these thoughts together, it became clear to me that it was time for a Mac, a specifically, a MacBook. Even though at first blush

Part of me really resists this because I absolutely despise cult marketing, Apple's in particular, and don't want to reward it with my business. Mac's also appear to be (significantly) more expensive at first blush. But after doing a bit of due dilligence, it became clear to me that a PC laptop comparably configured to a MacBook is really not much cheaper. It used to be impossible to figure out what "comparably configured" really meant, but now that Macs use Intel CPUs (and only the high-end ones), um, apples to apples comparisons are much more straight forward.

The other real kicker is software. Mac comes bundled with a multi-media suite called iLife that achieves a level of integration and interoperability that's comparable to what MS Office achieves with "productivity" software. iLife includes something called GarageBand, which for me turned out to be the coup de grace. GarageBand is what's called a "digital audio workstation" -- basically, a recording studio in a (virtual) box. In its first few releases, it was basically a toy, dumbed down version of a DAW, but the latest release is a whole 'nother story. It has all the functionality I will ever need, is free, and requires no configuration because it comes pre-installed and guaranteed to work. There is nothing comparable out of the box in PC land. OK Mr. Jobs, you can have my credit card number now, but please, no more of those stupid PC drone in a suit vs. Mac hipster in jeans commercials ...

The other big seller with GarageBand is that it includes it's own collection of synthesizer sounds, and "loops" that are tightly integrate with the rest of its functionality, as opposed to DAWs that treat these things more as ancillary "plug-ins" that require more in the way of getting the pieces to talk to each other. In practical terms, this means that for someone like me who is neither a competent keyboardist nor drummer, I can build tracks that have fairly convincing fake drums and keyboards much more easily than I could in the DAW packages I had used previously. At some point I may actually detail some of this, but for now, evidence of my first efforts with GaragBand is below. Several other generations of audio production technology are represented here.

Guns or butter?

2008-01-16T20:57:00.000-08:00

Pardon the political intrusion, but every once in while one of my more deeply buried multiple personalities, which cares about these things, manages to seize the conn ...

Prior to the election of 2000, one of the bits of conventional wisdom was that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Gore and Bush. One of the bits of conventional wisdom that came to replace this (as the Bush regime plunged us into war abroad, alienated us from our allies, ravaged freedom at home, and put a hurting on the polar icecaps) was that there was in fact a huge difference between the two. As someone who voted for Ralph Nader, I've done penance for this for many years. I'm willing to concede that there was indeed a larger denomination of difference, and I think the world is a worse place for having been subjected to going on eight years of shrubbery. Still, as a new silly season bears down upon us, I'm once again left to ponder how much difference there really is between one side and another.

For instance, Giuliani has anointed himself the heir to Bush's militarism, authoritarianism, contempt for dissent, and rejection of the sovereignty of other nations. He seems to like fetuses a whole lot more than he used to, and is looking forward to owning beach front property in Dutchess County. In contrast, we have the populism of Edwards, whose positions can best be summarized by writing down a list of Bush's policies and inserting the word "not" before every verb. Then there's Huckabee, the absurd holy roller, and Hillary the soulless technocrat. It's easy to find dipole pairs of elephants and donkeys, (or elephants and elephants or donkeys and donkeys) and compare and contrast until the cows come home.

Ultimately, though, this is a fool's errand because the terms of debate are so constricted. On the environment, the battle lines are drawn over which pseudo-alternative energy technologies will be subsidized. On issues of "security", the question is which restrictions of the Patriot Act will be retained. On health care, it's a matter of nibbling at the edges of the absurdity of a system built on the inherent conflict of interest between for-profit insurance paid for by employers and sick people.

But perhaps greatest lost opportunity is the war because no candidate or other significant figure in the mainstream has taken the matter beyond the questions of "what were Bush's reasons for going to war?" and "how long should we stay in Iraq?" None of them asks "why militarism at all?" In this domain, I really think they're all minor variants on the same theme.

Suppose any of the three big lies of the war (WMD, Saddam hearts Al Qaeda, democracy flowering in the desert) had a shred of legitimacy, and the cases for any were not manufactured entirely out of whole cloth. Would any of the candidates of either party (except maybe Kucinich, who doesn't really count) oppose the war, even as currently prosecuted? Frankly I doubt it. I think some of them were and/or are troubled by Bush's deception and with the way he actually did things on the ground. But to say that you're against the war now because it turns out Bush was bullshitting (or to say that you were against it at the outset because of concerns about the particulars) is really to say that you accept that there is a case for invasion other than pure self defense and that aggression is an appropriate tool in our international relations kit.

A true opponent of the war would say that even if everything Bush had said Iraq in 2003 had been true, he would have voted against invasion, and taken personal risks to make his opposition known. Of the big three Dems, only Obama can get away with saying he opposed it from the beginning, but if you read his published positions more closely, you can see that he's hedging his bets. He says he was against the war because he didn't think it would work as conceived by Bush, and because it drew resources away from the more important conflict in Afghanistan. Those are certainly valid positions, but they strike me as entirely inside the Beltway.

Looking at how he proposes to end the war, I see more of the same. He says he'll immediately begin withdrawing "combat" troops and not build "permanent" U.S. military bases (good), but it's clear that he intends to maintain a sizable American military presence. More importantly, there's nothing in his budget positions about reducing the level of military spending in Iraq or anywhere else. Edwards and Clinton have very similar positions (though it took both of them quite a bit longer to arrive at theirs).

Each of the big three (and even in some ways a couple of the Republicans) also makes populist noises about making the country a better place by tinkering with the welfare state. They even all offer "plans" to fund these changes. In reality, though, all they really do is spout a bunch of platitudes about taking back the Bush tax cuts and cutting pork barrel spending. None of them really talks about the kind of fundamental restructuring of national taxation and spending policy that would be needed to make us a bit more like Canada or (heaven forfend) France.

So let me just say up front that in some ways I would like this country to be a bit more like France. I say this out of pure selfishness. I have elderly, infirm parents, a young child, I'm not rich, and my prospects for financial reversal (absent winning lotto) are dim. I would like my parents' modest estate to live as long as they do, and maybe even a bit more. I would like my son to be able to go to a good College and enter a career without debt. I would like to be reasonably sure that if I keep working more or less as I do now, I can stay more or less in the middle class. I would like the air we breathe and the pace of the lives we lead to be a bit gentler. None of these is even close to a certainty within the means at my disposal, and I am well above the median household income. If I lived in France, it would be. One option would be to move to France, but there are reasons not to, not the least of which is that I actually like this country.

There are five things that I think could bring these meager dreams a bit closer to reality, and I don't think any of them should require us to stop pronouncing the last letters of words:

High-quality, free education from infant daycare all the way through university
"Single payer" comprehensive, universal health insurance, not linked to employment
True medical coverage for the elderly (without all the gaps in medicare, and including coverage nursing homes),
A national plan for improving mass transit and reducing car usage
An energy policy centered around reductions in consumption rather than exploitation of new resources.

In other words, your basic left- liberal agenda. None of this is actually all that radical in light of the things that large numbers of Americans actually say they want. Some might require us to rethink ideas about freedom of economic choice. Some might challenge commonly held ideas about moral hazard and entrepreneurship. All of them would require vast changes in spending at all levels of government.

Okay, so now go ahead and call me a tax and spend liberal. The thing is, though, I don't think that tax increases are the answer to any of this. Another bit of conventional wisdom is that France (and Germany, and Sweden, and Holland ...) can all afford generous welfare states because they have much higher tax rates than we do. Trouble is, this isn't true. Various studies show that if you factor in the total tax bite (including taxes on real estate, sales, state and local income etc.), America falls somewhere in the middle. Tax havens like Switzerland pay a lot less than we do, but on average, it turns out that Americans' total tax rate is about the same as Germans' and Frenchmen's.

The big difference is that the typical middle-class German or Frenchman actually receives some direct services that have a real bearing on quality of life from the national government. In contrast, non-retired middle-class Americans basically get nothing from the feds. So what do we get that Europeans don't? We get a military. A really big one. Big enough to fight major wars on multiple fronts without resorting to conscription.

We have been trained to believe that this is something that we need and can afford. The truth neither is the case. As our rising national debt makes clear, we definitely can't afford it. The rhetoric about the irresponsible Bush tax cuts are a bit of red herring. Sure, they've made a difference (especially in out-year projections), but the real hit to the Federal budget has been Iraq. Pretty much nobody but Bush disputes this.

But what about the need part? We need a strong defense don't we? Okay, we do, but not this strong for two reasons. First, the level of "preparedness" is wildly disproportionate to the threat. The cold war is over. The greatest threat to our survival is no longer military. It is economic (i.e., China, and soon India). We need enough military to make anybody think twice about fucking with us or our most important or favored allies. We'd have that if we spent a quarter of what we spend now.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, having a huge military tempts us to use it. Our national mythology is that we fight on the right side and enter wars to rescue the downtrodden from tyranny. Truth is, we've done that relatively few times, and during the eras when we've had growing standing armies we've tended to use them to overthrow governments and install dictatorships. Sweden used to do this to, 300 years ago, when they had an empire. Now they have Ikea, and life is good.

To tie this all together, what I would like to see in the campaigns is a real discussion of how our government should set priorities. Do we want to fill the hole in the medicare donut, leave no child's be ... uh leave no child behind, improve our transportation infrastructure, put our country back at the top of the basic research charts, land on Mars ...? Well we can't do all (or most) of those things and be orders of magnitude more militarily large than the rest of the world combined. I would like to see every presidential hopeful present a pie chart of how he would allocate the current federal budget among major priorities. Use the current CBO revenue estimates. No fudging about new revenues from better tax compliance or cutting bridges to nowhere in Alaska. Given a pie the same size as the real thing, how would you cut it. This would force them to confront what they want out of a military, and how much they're willing to pay for it.

Okay, I know. Nader isn't running this year.

Chapter 7 – Where’s Crazy Joe?

2007-12-22T22:17:00.000-08:00

This is chapter seven of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here The novel begins here.

Shitonya turned to my captors and said,

“That’ll be all boys. I’ll be sure to let Mr. Maudlin know what a fine job you’ve been doing keeping the premises secured.”

Gorilla number one then released me from my shackles, he and his partner turned and walked away without another word, and I found myself facing my liberator on the threshold. Too bad I hadn’t stopped to pick up flowers on the way in.

“So, should I let you in? You do seem like a bit of a risk to the operation.”

“Why Shitonya, after all these years I’m shocked to hear you think of me as anything but harmless.”

“Well, you have been known to do an honest day’s work from time to time, and your colleagues are not exactly happy about the precedent that sets.”

“Flattery will get you no where, toots, let me in. I’ve got pointless tasks to complete.”

“Sweetie, you better not call me ‘toots’ or I’ll have the sensitivity police on your ass, and a few other places, too.”

“Promises, promises. It’s tempting but I think I’ll have to pass.”

With that, she turned on her heel and headed down toward her desk a few steps from the door, leaving the coast clear for me to steal into my place of employ.

Before turning into my own office, I stopped in front her desk.

“So where’s Arthur? I’ve got a meeting with him in five minutes.”

A half shriek half rasp sound rose from behind me. It was Mauldin love interest number one, Altoona.

“Oh, he called about a half an hour ago. Said he won’t be in until after lunch, and that you should start the meeting without him.”

“I’m supposed to start a meeting that’s supposed to be just me and him without him? How’s that gonna work? You know I can’t keep to an agenda.”

“Don’t ask me, babe. Figuring things out is not in my job description. You’re on your own with that one.”

I was about to throw some out some questions about why everyone above and below me in the chain of command was either missing or killed in action. Something told me not to trust Altoona and Carboña with those kinds of thoughts, though. I turned into my office, threw my jacket in the general vicinity of a coat rack and sat down behind my desk. Shitonya was the one to talk to about this. She was the only one in the office who did a lick of work, and the only one so far as I could tell, rebuffed the boss’s advances. She hardly ever gossiped, either, but her rumors were always on the money.

“Then I guess I’ll just have to make an executive decision. Meeting cancelled. Shitonya, can you come into my office for a minute please. I gotta do the asphalt orders myself this morning, and I need some help.”

“What are you talking about? You can do those things in your …”

“Shut up and close the door” I hissed at her.

“Ever since they started that new system over at Amici, I can’t keep the orders straight. I don’t know how Pats did it,” I said, perhaps only slightly exaggerating my usually befuddled tone for the benefit of the other two secretaries, who had perfect hearing, except for the sounds of their own phones ringing.

“Oh, you mean the new order forms. Here, I think there in this cabinet behind the door,” said Shitonya, clearly picking up on my ruse as she shut the door behind her.

“What are you talking about? There’s no new system. And what the hell happened downstairs?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. You managed to get in the door, how come I couldn’t?”

“The stupid ID things didn’t work, so I just walked in. The guards never stop me. When I got up here, the ID thing didn’t work on this door either, so I used the key I never gave back when they installed that thing.”

“What about the others? How did they get in?”
“Carboña and Altoona were already in when I got here. I didn’t ask them how. This happens a lot, and I think they have keys, too.”

“Yeah, I know, but nobody stopped you downstairs, and nobody ever stopped me before. I don’ know, but with everything I’ve been through, I’m getting a weird feeling about this.”

“What? You think it’s weird that somebody in our office gets murdered, and the security gets a little tighter? If you ask me, that’s a pretty good thing.”

Maybe I was being a little paranoid, or getting a little carried away in my new role as a homicide investigator, but it seemed to me that that wasn’t quite what was going on, and I said as much to Shitonya.

“Security’s getting tighter? So how come everybody gets in like usual except the one guy who talked to the cops, witnesses, and maybe the killer?”

“White, what the hell are you talking about?”

“What I’m talking about is this. Crazy Joe was in the apartment with Pats, alone. Maybe Pats was dead already, and maybe he wasn’t. He says he didn’t kill him, but he sure isn’t acting that way. He’s disappeared off the map. I’m the last guy that talked to him, and I’m the only one with any connection to Pats except his wife that had any connection to him. And that’s not all.”

With that, I started to tell her about Hunny, leaving out the underwear details. After all, who knew where the line between appropriate and appropriate lay. At first I also left out the details of her family tree.

“So lemme see if I got this straight. There’s this incredibly hot chick who used to be some broke dumpy married guy’s girlfriend and now she’s shacking up with you. And she’s trying to get you to solve a murder she’s afraid to talk to the cops about because she trusts you, a slightly less dumpy, slightly less married, equally broke guy?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“And you’re going along with it cause you’re a knight in shining fuckin’ armor right?”

“I don’t like to flatter myself, but you could look at it that way.”

“I’m not buying it. You’re an idiot who can’t take his eyes off a nice pair of tits, and is so desperate to get laid that he’d jump in to bed with a killer.”

With that, I looked up at her face (not that I’d noticed her tits), and started to contradict her.

“Look, maybe you’ve got a half a point about the tits (not that I noticed), but she’s not the killer, I didn’t jump into bed with her, and I’m not desperate. Just very particular, not that it’s any business of yours.”

“More to the story? Like what? She’s a member of the free frickin’ French resistance and you own a piano bar you ain’t telling me about?”

“What?”

“Casablanca was on the tube last night. It’s the best I could do.”

“Right actor, wrong movie. This is looking a little more like the Maltese Falcon. But trust me, this girl is in trouble, and if I don’t help her I could be to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t want to know anything more about her than that. I just need you to help me with one thing.”

“I’m not helping you with anything until you tell me the whole deal. Who is this girl?”

“Come on, you’re the only one who can help me with this, and it’s too dangerous for you ot know anything else.”

“Nothing doing. Spill it.”

I realized at that point that there was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t crack this case by myself, and if I was going to be taking on a partner, I couldn’t keep holding out.

“Her name is Hunny Pugliacci, and she’s afraid to go the cops, because she thinks her father might be involved.”

Shitonya let out a long whistle, then said:

“Vinny the Pooh’s daughter? Man you are in deep shit. If you’re stupid enough to get this involved, you’re definitely to dumb to get out of it by yourself. What do you want me to do?”

“Find Crazy Joe, and get him to come into the office, but don’t let him find out that it’s me who wants him.”

“You got it. But this is going to cost you.”

“She says she can pay. I’ll give you, uh, a quarter of what she gives me.”

“Fifty-fifty partner, and I got one more condition.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Help me get rid of those to hos outside. Deal”

Under the circumstances, I didn’t see that I had much choice.

“Deal, partner.”

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

2007-12-06T09:10:00.000-08:00

This is something I wrote for my 25th Anniversary High School Reunion a couple of years ago. It summed up where I was at the time (with the impending birth of my son). Had I had a blog then, this would have been posted there. I just happened upon it while looking for something else and figured, what the hey ...

Just for a little context, nowadays, Stuyvesant has a reputation for being ultra competitive and uptight, and populated exlcusively by Asian-American genius overachievers. In my day, in keeping with the generally apocalyptic character of New York, it was a much funkier place. There was a distinct lawless, anarchic character to the place, shaped by the forces of waning hippiedom and rising punk in a decaying city. The principal at the time was a guy named Gaspar R. Fabricante, who was a complete cypher so far as any of us could tell. He had no relationship of any kind with any students or teachers. Periodically, he could be observed at the top of the main stairs of the school greeting the student body in the style of a tin-pot dictator, with slicked back hair and a forced smile. He would occasionally circulate some sort of communication or make an announcement over the PA system reminding us that we attended a hallowed institution. I'm sure announcements of similar character are still made in the present day Stuyvesant, and from what I gather would probably be taken more or less seriously at face value.

Such was not the case back then. To most of my friends, even though many of us were relatively high achieving, Ivy-bound, etc., the ideas that we constituted some sort of elite, and that the decrepit teachers and facilities that attempted to contain us actually deserved their reputation were patently absurd. I don't quite know why the memory stuck with me, because I had zero contact with the him, and gave him virtually no thought during my high schoole years, but GRF actually did pronounce "You are the new elite" at our graduation, just at the moment that a friend of mine in the front row sent up a puff of smoke from a bong hit ...

What I Did on My Summer Vacation
By John Albin, Stuyvesant, class of 1980

It was a cloudless June day in 1980. Though the sky was clear, the air hung heavy with anticipation, the anxious perspiration of imminent adulthood, and a hint of burning vegetation (which due to impending life circumstances -- to be described later -- I shall not identify). I sat in Avery Fisher Hall with 800 of my closest friends listening to the most inspirational orator since William Jennings Bryan predict my future. I'm speaking, of course, of the great Gaspar R. Fabricante and his vision of me as a member of the new elite, a Stuyvesantian bound for glory.

Sad, to say, Gaspar, I haven't quite lived up to that billing. Stuyvesant (and the 1970s) taught me many things, not least a capacity for, suspicion of pomaded authority, along with a mastery of wry detachment and indolence, to say nothing of the nail delay and the collected works of McKinley Morganfield and Chester Burnett. However, Stuyvesant didn’t teach me how to find my way in the world. That is something I’ve had to learn on my own, and is still a work in progress.

That work began just two months after Gaspar’s valedictory, when I set forth on the road to elitehood. The first stop (after a series of track fires and diversions to some of New York’s more apocalyptic settings) was a collection of ivory (well, copper-roofed, but that ain’t the metaphor) towers, in a community the great 20th century philosopher Carlin once called “White Harlem”. I, a simple youth from a small village in lower Manhattan, soon found myself trafficking (never proven) among an assortment of humanity from an assortment of lands, some unknown even to the cartographer Steinberg.

While at this fine institution, I continued honing my skills as an authentic interpreter of African American music, subsidizing my studies with weekend gigs and dreaming of seeing my name in lights at the Regal (or at least Dan Lynch). Eventually, I made it as far as a certain Delphic temple on 125th Street (as an authentic Ivory Coast pop musician), but I realized that, even though the world always made life comfortable for artists, it might nevertheless be a good idea to pick up a trade. With this in mind, I settled in for a long hard slog in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Marx, figuring that if the blues didn’t pan out, the job market was always bullish for philosopher kings.

This plan, of course played out to perfection. First, the obligatory sojourn in a Paris garret, followed by three years of editing elementary school textbooks. By 1988 I found my self in civil service, studying garbage accumulation on New York City’s roadsides. The mythical cave wasn’t available, but shadows cast on underpasses served nearly as well. I could sense elitehood around the next bend.

Slowly I accumulated knowledge and responsibility, making sure to avoid remuneration with each step up the ranks. After all, philosopher kings are in it for justice, truth, and discovering the forms, and I certainly discovered the forms. Personal, intellectual, artistic, and romantic growth followed the same glorious arc as career and finances for many years.

Through it all, my fecklessness rarely caused me much more than an occasional sleepless night. I had friends and flings, music, recreation, and navel gazing to divert me. I also had the friendship and indulgence of my parents. But In 1991, tragedy struck, literally. My father, who had always been my closest friend and confidant, suffered a massive stroke at the age of 56, which rendered him severely physically, intellectually, and psychiatrically disabled.

He had been an athlete, polymath, and epicurean, a larger than life figure to most who knew him. Now, he was left a cripple who could speak, and cry out in despair, but could no longer think, create, or enjoy life. The impact on our family was enormous, physically and spiritually. Between the strain of caring for a demanding invalid, and the daily realization that what had once been was no longer, we all barely treaded water for years.

Gradually, we found ways to cope. I formed bands, wrote music, and performed sporadically through the mid and late ‘90s. In 1999, I began what have become annual visits to Europe. Most years this has included tours of some of Switzerland’s spotlessly seamy juke joints (where standards are low and, pay is high) with fellow Stuyvesantian Tom Lyons (‘81).

In 2000 I met the love of my life, Ivana Jovic, and my European vacations started including trips to her native Serbia. She has dragged me kicking and screaming toward maturity. I’ve done my part too, making sure to bring her down to my level whenever possible. With many miles still to go, significant milestones have been passed. We began living together in 2002. We were recently married, and now are expecting our first child. I’ve even started doing the kinds of career and life planning that most of my classmates probably got to at least a decade ago.

All of this is a bit daunting for a somewhat past it former new elite. It’s the kind of stuff that I’m sure Gaspar figured out by the time he was 20. But it’s also exciting and inspiring. There have been struggles and disappointments. But there has also been joy, and plenty of good old affirmation of the quotidian. And, when I’ve opened my eyes and paid attention, one commencement exercise after another. As Molly Bloom once said (or was it Marv Albert?), “YES!”

Minna and her sisters

2007-08-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

A curse usually credited to ancient Chinese wisdom is "may you live in interesting times". I often think that my father Peter must have pissed off some ancient sage big time because he was born into quite an interesting household. His mother was one of four sisters nee Steigman, Minna (his mother), Rose, Lilly, and Olga. Rose, the oldest, escaped -- first to Westchester, later to Florida. Having escaped the folie a quatre Rose was only an occasional presence in my father's (and later my) life, flying north each summer to unite the remaining three against a common enemy.

These three spent almost their entire lives living close to each other in Manhattan, the last 20 or so years in the same building in Chelsea, and in neighboring country houses in the least fashionable corner of Fairfield County. Grandma Minna was the second oldest, and the closest to sane of the sisters. By the time I came along, she was retired from a career as a high school biology teacher and spent her time attending cultural events, gardening, dropping hints of her many affairs, and cooking large quantities of something she referred to as "food", but which was not readily identfiable as such. She also made frequent reference to things she used to do, such as playing tennis and the piano, but which she no longer could do, for reasons that were never clear. She remained vibrant and physically active with no outward signs of infirmity into her 80s, yet never touched the Steinway baby grand piano that stood silent witness to her abandoned concert career throughout my childhood.

Each morning my grandpa Joe made the coffee, and Minna exclaimed upon her first sip "Joe, this coffee is terrible! It's like dishwater!" Joe would then reply "Oh for Gord's sake Minna, if it's so terrible make it yourself!" She never did. Breakfast was always followed by a long, vigorous walk, and, when in the country, marathon sessions of ping pong in the barn on Lilly's nearby property. The sisters all fancied themselves expert ping pongers, though in reality they were no match for any of the men.

Joe was a classic, crafty spin-meister. Lilly's husband Lou (Grudin), though riddled with emphysema and arthritis by the time I was old enough to face him at the table, was a vicious smasher. Dad, a varsity tennis player and highly proficient in all racquet sports, was on a plane so far above the rest that they refused to play him, denying his gifts and declaring him a cheater. The same fate befell me when I showed signs of following in my father's athletic footsteps.

Minna was highly competent in her family's specialties, namely, disputing anything one of her sisters said at Led Zepplin-esque decibel levels, maintaining decades old grievances, mispronouncing any name she encountered, and disparaging anyone not related to her by blood, notably Joe and Lou. When not en famille, Minna was generally cabable of surpressing her worst instincts, and communicating civilly. Having also had the experience of giving birth to and rearing a child, she was capable of degrees of affection, jollity, and empathy almost completely lacking in her two childless sisters, traits that also helped her maintain a handful of friendships and get along with her neighbors.

As Calliope was to Minna, Terpsichore was to Lilly, the youngest, craziest, and most flamboyant of the four. In childhood and early adolescence, my sister Liz (then known by another name, which is another story) was an avid ballet and modern dance student. Lilly would often demand impromptu performances from Liz. She would then critique her form, while regaling us with tales of dancing "the bolly" in her youth. Lilly, who was five feet tall, grotesquely steatopygous, wore Murray's space shoes, and suffered from all manner of malady real and imagined, would then commence a demonstration of the "correct" technique, which would end mid-twirl in some combination of sneezing and spasming of various body parts.

What Lilly lacked in her older sister's argumentative versatility, she made up for in volume, paranoia, deafness, and production of bodily fluids. Her particular specialty was making it clear to strangers that she had no children because uncle Lou forced her to have countless abortions, preferring to forestall procreation until he wrote the great American novel and became a man of independent means. In the 1920s and 30s, this might not have been an a bad idea, as Lou was a published poet and critic of some repute, a polymath, and a minor figure in the modernist literary world, who showed promise of becoming much more.

Lou's poetic masterpiece, "Dust on Spring Street" is included in some editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and was called one of the greatest poems in the English language by William Carlos Williams, with whom Lou carried on a sporadic friendship and correspondence. Lou was close friends with Maxwell Bodenheim and other figures in New York bohemia. He was also acquainted with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, about whom he would say nothing more than "Ptui, that anti-Semite son of a bitch," when I attempted to interview him as a source for a college literature paper. When his novel Inkly Darkling was finally published in 1954, this review seems to have put an end to his greater literary ambitions.

Olga, between Lilly and Minna in age, was to put it cruelly but honestly, a person of no worth to anyone in the family. She had been married briefly in her youth to a man denounced by her sisters as a conniving abuser. Family legend had it that he met Olga on a cruise, conned her into marrying her to gain U.S. citizenship, and then left her as soon as the papers came through. I think it more likely that he married Olga (who in youthful photographs possessed a petite, doll-like beauty) for love, but an extended dose of the Steigmans was enough to send him to Australia.

Olga spent the rest her days living first with her mother, and then alone, working as a secretary for the Amalgamated Bank, and growing increasingly deaf, abusive towards children, and foul smelling. Each holiday season and birthday, Liz and I would buy Olga fancy soaps, perfumes and powders in the hopes of rendering the experience of being yelled at, insulted, poked, and pinched agonizing only to the senses of touch and hearing. Olga died when I was about 15, and my father and I were tasked with disposing of her belongings. I found boxes upon boxes of unopened toiletries stashed behind the furniture in her bedroom.

It feels heartless to admit this, but almost nothing more than this can be said about her. Almost immediately after her death, Olga disappeared completely from the consciousness of her family. She was almost never talked about, never the subject of reminiscences fond or otherwise. This wasn't superstition. No one feared speaking ill or well of the dead. It was simply that Olga was so insignificant to her sisters, that they paid no mind to her absence. Liz and I, having never had any feelings other than revulsion arising from the way she yelled, insulted, grabbed, poked, and stank, were guiltily relieved, but nonetheless relieved that we would no longer be subjected to her presence.

The sisters were raised by their mother. Her, name was Sarah, but she was known to all only by the nickname "Suchi". She called herself Suchi, and was never referred to as Sarah by anyone except on official documents. Suchi, who died when I was about three, and whom I remember only vaguely as a malevolent apparition, was feared and loathed by all of her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. Suchi came to America from somewhere beyond the pale of settlement (either Moscow or Minsk, depending on the document and the storyteller) with her four daughters and her sister, Gussie Zuckerman, who became a concert pianist and composer and made a name for herself as Manna Zucca. According to Minna, once they all got to America, Suchi took up with a boarder they had taken in, and tossed her husband the Luftmensch Torah scholar to the curb. He was never seen again by the sisters, who learned years later that he had died homeless in another city (variously recounted as Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle).

All other stories told about Suchi amplified the theme of her cruelty, manipulativeness, and divisiveness. She lived for a time with Minna, Joe, and my father when my father was very young, but was eventually sent to live with Olga after she accused Joe of molesting Dad. Even Minna, who rarely had a kind word to say to or about her husband, knew that such an accusation was preposterous. Joe, though not without some quirks, was a kind, gentle soul, completely incapable of anything approaching abuse of another human being.

Decades later, the subject of Suchi came up in conversation between my mother and Sophia, a Russian Jewish woman hired as a home health care aide to take care my father, who had become severely disabled following a stroke. As always happens among Ashkenazim, conversation turned to the names and geographic origins of our ancestors, and my mother described my father's monster of a grandmother. Sophia interrupted her.

"I'm sorry, Pat, what did you say her name was?"
"Suchi."
"Suchi? And She was from Russia? She spoke Russian?"
"Yes, yes. Mostly Yiddish, but Russian as well."
"Do you know what Suchi means in Russian?"

[It bears repeating at this point that Suchi was never called by her real name, called herself Suchi, and insisted that everyone else do so.]

"No, please tell me what Suchi means in Russian."
"It means 'bitch'."

Ah hah.

Liz and I experienced all the wonders of the Steigman clan at family gatherings, and during weekends and vacations in the country. We always had each other as refuge, day camp, friends, and activities as escape, and knowledge that we would eventually return to our parents as hope. Consequently, we were able to maintain a degree of detachment and amusement at the sisters' eccentricities, laugh at Lou's wordplay, and share conspiratorial asides with Joe, who kept his distance from the rest as much as he could.

Dad, on the other hand, had no such luxuries. He grew up in a cauldron of anger, argument, and erudition, and his personality reflected this. He possessed an absolutely astonishing mind. [My apologies for referring to him in the past tense in this context; he is still alive, but his mind is barely so.] By training he was an economist, but his intellect was restless and achieved heights of creativity in mathematics, artificial intelligence, chaos theory, chess, go, and even children's literature. I have never met a fellow academic who didn't spontaneously and sincerely describe Dad as one of the most brilliant people of his or acquaintance. Yet he spent much of his career in a (albeit tenured) backwater, unable to convince more prestigious universities to hire him, and unable to complete what he viewed as his most important work. The social and emotional deficits instilled in him by the Steigmans left him unable to navigate institutions and collaborations. They also left him with a distorted capacity for mature romantic love, which played itself out in a troubled marriage and embarrassing affairs.

In surprising ways, though, he transcended his upbringing. He was as outgoing and spontaneous as the Steigmans were xenophobic. He was fascinated by new people, cultures, and experiences, and had a number of long lasting, deep friendships. He was something of a fixture in the Greenwich Village cafe scene, particularly at the Figaro (which was once a boho outpost), where he was known as "Pete the Prof". He hung out in pool halls, and at basketball courts and tennis clubs. Consistent with his Upper West Side upbringing, he subscribed to the opera and the symphony, visited art museums and galleries at every opportunity, and called himself a socialist, but he also had an extensive collection of rock records, read science fiction voraciously, and listened to right wing talk radio in the car.

Above all, he was a wonderful father. He loved Liz and me as all parents love their children, but he also liked us as people, enjoyed our company at all stages of our development, and became our friend in adulthood. He was one of the dads in the neighborhood that all the kids like to play with when we were little, and was one of the "cool" parents when we were older, but he was also serious and responsible with our upbringing. He protected us from bullies, taught us to read write and do advanced math before we got to school, and was a stern taskmaster once we were there. As hard as he pushed us academically, he supported and "kvelled" at our experiences outside the classroom. He encouraged me to take the music I loved seriously and attended my gigs whenever he could. After one performance at a college dormitory, he walked up to me with a huge grin on his shaggy, bearded face and said "Now I know how Keith Richards' mother feels."

It is this side of my father that I hope has had the greatest impact on me. As my young son begins to emerge from babyhood and engage the world around him, I am often filled with sadness that he will never know his grandpa Pete, who would no doubt have surpassed himself in that role. At the same time I rejoice that I had the opportunity to know someone who was able to move past the curse of an "interesting" upbringing in some measure and achieve a state of fascination with the world around him. Alexander, may you live in fascinating times.

So Many Roads ...

2007-03-19T20:29:00.000-07:00

When people ask me what kind of music I play, I usually say something along the lines of "a bit of everything", because that's more or less true. In my gigging and jamming life, I've played all different kinds of rock and roll, jazz, blues, folk, r &B. I've even played in an authentic African band (with one obviously non-authentic member). But really, I play blues. For better or worse (often the latter), when I pick up my guitar, that's what I'm most likely to play for myself.

I got to the blues somewhat circuitously. When I was growing up, my father was an avid audiophile, with a pretty eclectic record collection for someone of his generation. This was the source for pretty much all the music I experienced up to about age 15. Tucked in with the classical, Beatles, and Kingston Trio records, there was some Muddy Waters, some Josh White, Jr., and an odd mix of progressive rock, stuff like Vanilla Fudge, Gentle Giant, and Cream.

As a little kid, I listened mostly to the Beatles and folk records, but when I started playing guitar, I stumbled onto the Cream. The songwriting credits on these records turned me into a bit of a junior Allen Lomax, and got me back to Muddy and co. But the playing of a white dude named Eric is what really got me hooked on playing blues guitar.

That led me to the infamous John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (the "Beano" album), which is the basis for the epithet "Clapton is God". Alas, "Wonderful Tonight" "Forever Man" and so much other dreck followed, but that's another story. The lead cut on this album is a song called "All your love (I miss lovin')". It's a minor blues that offers the Platonic form of the Les Paul-Marshall tone.

I'm never satisfied with a cover version though, so I had to chase down the original. "All your love" is credited to a guy named Otis Rush, who I think is the greatest of the second-generation Chicago Blues artists. This is the crowd (names like Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, and James Cotton) that got their starts backing the people who pretty much invented electric blues -- Muddy, Wolf, John Lee, et. al., and then emerged as solo artists in the early 60's. All of these guys are great, but to me Otis Rush has something extra going on.

Apart from the obvious talents -- a great singing voice, guitar tone, phrasing, and time -- there's something I find particularly fascinating about Otis Rush. One of the standard bits of wisdom about blues is that it's not just sad, dark, music. There's all kinds of humor, playing the dozens, ribaldry, love, hopefulness, and so forth. Not with Otis. With him you get all the darkness, sadness, and bitterness you can handle, and more. Death, depression unrequited love, you know, the blues. Some of this stems from the fact that he does a lot of tunes in minor keys, and as we know from music appreciation class, major keys are happy, and minor keys are sad. But the guy also puts out a vibe, and sings an awful lot of songs about being dying, or being mistreated by his woman, including at least one wherein the first person narrator is both dead and mistreated:

You've done me wrong
For a long, long time
And all you've done
Will never change my mind
So please try to love me
Please baby try
My love for you will never die

And these flowers grow
Where I lay and rest
And these colored blossoms
Darling hold to your breast
And darling know
It's my mind
Breaking out
From inside
My love for you will never die.

The other curious thing about Otis is the way he plays. He's left handed, but he plays a right-handed guitar, without restringing it. This makes all the fingerings, chord shapes and techniques not just mirror imaged (a la a typical lefty), but upside down, so you can't figure out what he's doing by watching; you have to use your ears. The only other player I know to do this is the late Albert King, and it has a similar effect in both of their sounds. Stevie Ray Vaughan comes closest of any "conventional" player to capturing it, but not quite.

Finally, for all you late night TV fans, come on, admit it, you've watched the Robin Byrd show. You know, the weird naked public access cable TV show with porn star interviews and stripper showcases? Anyway, ever notice how there's this really cool blues guitar tune over the opening credits? No, not "Baby you can bang my box" at the end. I'm 99.99% sure that's Otis Rush doing "Will my woman be home tonight" from a live in Japan album he did in the late 70's. That's the first Otis record I ever got, and the Robin Byrd thing is the same, note for note, inflection for inflection. Check it out, and if you can't find it on your dial, check this out from his prime:

And this when there were a few more miles on the odometer:

Chapter 6 – Morning with Hunny; back to the office

2007-03-19T18:32:00.000-07:00

This is chapter six of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here. The novel begins here.

Being a bachelor of uncertain domestic talents, my usual morning routine is to stagger out of bed, somehow make it to the deli on the first floor of my building, and return to my lair with as much caffeine and breakfast pastry as I can carry. On the not so rare occasions when the elevator is broken, this is hazardous, as taking stairs in a pre-caffeinated state can lead to serious injury. It is often said that a child learns to go up stairs more easily than down. Not just kids, unless the definition of toddler has been expanded by a few decades. I’m not much of a drummer, but I think the rhythm of my cranium bouncing off the faux terrazzo is what’s known as a paradiddle. .

The morning after my first evening with Hunny, I awoke as usual to the grindings of world class garbage crushing-machinery beneath my window. As I readied my skull for some early morning percussion, though, I sensed something was different. For some strange reason the bouquet of mid-summer dumpster juice that usually wafted in from the street seemed to be masked by something pungent and strange. As I clawed my way to consciousness the strangeness of the smell receded, only to be replaced by the oddity of its presence in an unlikely environment. My days as botanist in the highlands of Central America told me that I was detecting the volatile aromatic emissions of the high-temperature distillation of c. arabica, a process that had never before been successfully performed in the biological niche of this particular homo civilis vernula. Either that, or someone had made a fresh pot of coffee.

As I staggered the few feet from my bedroom to the kitchen, awareness of the previous day’s events worked their way toward the frontal lobes. The smell, and now the sight, in front of me told me that I hadn’t been dreaming. Once again bursting out of her Arthur Avenue uniform, Hunny lifted a steaming mug from my kitchen table and beckoned me to the table. As I sat down across from her, the sort of thoughts apparently condoned in my workplace sprang to mind. No doubt, this was one picture that appropriate though it might be to the desires of a lonely man, still didn’t belong on my office desk. What little blood left to circulate to my brain fought its way north and woke up whatever common sense was left after years of bureaucratic purgatory and a night as a public-sector private dick. Rule number one: stay away from the daughters of men named after whimsical woodland creatures. Warily, I took a sip of coffee and broke the ice.

“You know, I heard there was a coffee maker around here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before”

“Really? It was in the cabinet, right next to the coffee.”

“Will wonders never cease. How did that get in there? Next thing you know, a couple of eggs and a glass of OJ’ll jump out of the fridge.”

“Don’t press your luck smart guy.”

This kind of witty repartee could go on forever, and certainly wouldn’t improve unless I artificially raised my dopamine levels a bit, so I put the mug to good use for a few reps and then got down to brass tacks, whatever those are.

“Listen. I’ve been thinking about what you said last night, and I’m not saying that you’re right, but I’m getting a funny feeling there’s more going on on the job than I might have realized. The way Crazy Joe disappeared doesn’t make any sense.”

“So you’ll do it? You’ll find out what happened to Tony?” she said almost giddily

“I didn’t say that. In fact, I doubt I’ll be able to find out much, but at least I’ve got to find Crazy Joe and figure out what he’s been up to. After that, I can’t say what I’m going to do.”

“But you promise not to tell the cops about me, right?”

“Listen, I don’t know what I’m going to tell the cops. I’ve got to keep my job, and keep my ass out of trouble. If I can do that and keep your name out of things, maybe, but I’m not promising anything. That’s the best I can do for you.”

She seemed to deflate a bit, at least from the neck up, with that, but she knew she’d gotten as much out of me as she was going to.

“All right then, I guess I can’t ask for any more than that. So I guess you’re going to work, right”

“Yeah, I’ve got to at least start from there. Besides, my boss scheduled a meeting for me that neither of us is going to show up to, so I’ve got to get to the office. What are you gonna do?”

“Can I stay here?”

“I thought you said you weren’t gonna ask me for anything else.”

“What are keeping score or something? Besides, you’re forgetting something. You need me here.”

“Yeah? And why’s that?”

“Well, it’s either let me stay here, and fix your phone, or kick me out and hope the phone company shows up, and charges you 350 bucks to reconnect the lines in your walls. I read your phone bill – you don’t have a service plan.”

Damn! If they hadn’t broken up AT&T, I never would have wound up in a spot like this. Besides, it was getting late, and I had to get to work early to line up the day’s asphalt supply now that Tony wasn’t around, so I didn’t have time to argue with her anymore about deregulation of the telecommunications industry”

“All right, you win. But just for today.”

With that, she gave me what might have been a smile of gratitude, or triumph, I couldn’t quite tell. Either way, I didn’t have time to sit around and try to figure it out.

A few minutes later, dressed, and as well pressed and shined up as a man of my means can be, which is to say wrinkled and scuffed, I got ready to leave. As I headed out the door, she grabbed my arm and stopped me. She gave me a soft kiss on the cheek and as she looked deep into my eyes, said

“Thanks, and here I blow dried it, and I think it might work now.”

With that she handed me cell phone gave me a little shove through the door and closed it behind me.
So I found myself on the way to work at the usual time, with the usual level of stimulants in my system, but with an altogether different collection of thoughts and obsessions. In this state I was barely able to direct a few tourists back to Boston, failed to muster my normal level of fierceness in glaring at my fellow passengers, and almost gave up my seat to a person whose impersonation of an arthritic eighty-year-old woman with a “thirteen” totebag was quite convincing. Fool me once …

Having miserably failed to meet the standard of surliness expected of me as a resident of a natural history museum diorama, I merged from the subway and scurried the rest of the way to my place of “work”. Only to be confronted with a puzzle worthy of Indiana Jones. Years ago, there was no security in government buildings, and anyone could and did go in, including the people who worked there (who generally chose not to, at least in spirit). All of that changed due to the events of one bright autumn day. Now, municipal government was attacking security with the single-minded alacrity it attacked efficiency and public service.

My office building has four entrances, each with its own separate electronic security systems. . Each requires a separate electronically encoded card, each of which emits its own radar or electronic whatchamacallit that cancels out the others unless all four are positioned just so. This might have been the product of the highest levels of security wizardry intent on keeping evil-doing enemies of freedom away from the strategic bureaucrat reserve. Or it might have been low-bid contracting. In any event, being in the midst of a bad just-so day, I gave up entrance roulette and joined the line of visitors signing in with the security guard. As I reached the head of the line, I fanned my ID’s for the guard and awaited admission.

“May I see some identification please?”

“C’mon, you see me here everyday. My cards aren’t working on the door.”

“If you have a card key, please use it at the security gate, sir.”

“I did, and it didn’t work.”

“If your ID isn’t working, please speak to security, and they’ll take care of for you, sir.”

“Aren’t you security?”

“No, I’m protective services.”

“Since when?”

“I got a promotion, see?” he said, grinning and pointing to where someone had crossed out the word “security” on his badge and written “protective services” over it.

“Congratulations. You must be proud.”

“How did you know name?”

“Excuse me?”

“I said how did you know my name?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why did you call me Proud?”

“I just assumed that you were proud because you got a promotion.”

“Oh, so you think I can’t get a promotion without using my family connections, is that it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just want to get into my office.”

“Oh so that’s how you want to play it? Don’t want to tell me how you learned confidential information about a Protective Services employee? And then go insulting my abilities to get a job fair and square. We’ll see about that.”

With that, he hoisted a walkie talkie and punched a series of buttons.

“Security, this is officer Proud of protective services down at entrance 3.”
Ah hah.

“I got a code 6 here.”

As soon as he said spoke those words, an alarm went off somewhere above my head, and a voice crackled through a loudspeaker. “Security to the lobby code 6 in process”

Before I could get my bearings a pair of guards swooped down, hoisted me from both sides side and hauled me into a door I had never noticed before. Before I knew it, I found myself handcuffed and being perp-walked to an old-style manually operated freight elevator, where a third guard waited.

The two gorillas who were holding me let go, and the one to my right said,

“OK Pal, in you go.” He gave me a hard shove into the waiting car. I stumbled forward, bounced off the back wall of the car, and flipped around in time to see the gorilla number three slam the cage door behind his rainforest buddies.

“Wait a second! What are you doing to me? I work here,” I shouted

“We’ll see about that”

“You have no right to do this.”

“Sure we do. Ain’t you heard of the patriot act?”

“What are you talking about? You’re not federal agents – you’re rent-a-cops.”

“Private Special Enforcement Officers”

“What?”

“I said we are private special enforcement officers. You’re in enough trouble as it is, accessing confidential protective services information. I caution you not to risk further sanctions by further use of incorrect nomenclature.”

“Huh?”

“I will not release any more information about the details of this action until I am authorized to do so by my superior.”

“And who would that be?”

“First Assistant Deputy Assistant Commissioner for security and support, Arthur Maudlin.”

Well, it looks like I was being taken into custody in my own office. That would solve the ID problem.

“I surrender. Take me to your leader”

As I spoke, the elevator lurched to a stop, and I once again found myself levitated by my elbows, half flung down a corridor and unceremoniously plopped outside the entrance to my own office. Gorilla number two swiped an ID card along the card reader. No buzz, no green light. He tried another, with no better luck. He then gave up and picked up a telephone hanging on the wall next to the door.

“Hello this is security. May I need to see Mr. Maudlin please … What’s this about? Well, we captured an intruder attempting to gain access to the facility…Uh, yes he did have ID, but it is a suspected forgery … Why am I using the phone? Uh, my ID does not appear to be working… I see your point, ma’am … His name? Just a moment”

Turning to me, and looking a little less, a bit less Rumsfeldian than a moment before he asked “You -- what’s your name?”

Knowing better than to risk another nepotism incident, I suppressed all repartee impulses and gave him only the information required by the Geneva conventions, which he then relayed over the phone.

“Oh, you recognize the name? … Yes, I think it would be all right if you came out, identified him, and let him in.”

Ah the sweet smell of freedom. I could practically taste it. A moment later, a familiar face appeared at the door.

“Hello Mr. White, nice of you to make it in this morning.”

“And hello to you, to Shitonya. A pleasure to see you, as always.”

Next Chapter

I must be getting old ...

2007-03-09T10:54:00.000-08:00

Pardon the interruption. I've started several posts recently that have gone nowhere, and I'm about three quarters of the way through my next chapter, but everything is going as slow as molasses. So, knowing how my faithful readership awaits my every utterance, I've decided to go with old faithful -- a political rant. Here goes.

I must be getting old. I've been trying to wrap my brain around the Scooter Libby case, and I think I've wound up agreeing with the right wing punditocracy that Scooter shouldn't have been prosecuted. The charges were that he obstructed justice and committed perjury, and it's not clear to me that he did either of these things.

On the obstruction of justice counts, it seems to me that justice wasn't actually obstructed. Fitzgerald was appointed to:

Figure out who leaked Valerie Wilson's identity to Robert Novak
Determine whether the leak was criminal
See how far up the chain of command authorization for the leak went
Prosecute (if appropriate)

It's now emerging that Fitzgerald knew that Novak's two sources in the administration were Richard and Karl Rove quite a while ago-- they both owned up to it early, and (I think) Novak did too. There is no evidence that Scooter got in the way of Fitzgerald finding this out. The most interesting point here is that Fitzgerald didn't prosecute Armitage, Rove or Novak. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the leak itself didn't meet the standards for prosecution set by the law (the Intelligence Identities Protection Act). In other words, what Armitage and Rove did wasn't a crime. If that's the case, then there was no real "justice" to get obstructed in the first place.

A lot of anti-Bushies have gotten all righteous and sputtered about how national security was compromised and the safety of a CIA agent doing vital work was threatened. I'm not really buying it. First of all, I think the First Amendment considerations actually trump the security considerations. It's a bad law, created as a backlash to the anti-CIA backlash of the '70s. It's hard for me to view a conviction of anybody under this law as something to rejoice about. Second, who are we kidding. If the circumstances had happened 180 degrees differently, and if a CIA agent had been "outed" by the left in order to embarrass a pro-Bush apologists (the equivalent happened frequently during the aforementioned backlash), I think the left and right wings of the punditocracy would have switched places.

As for the perjury, as I understand it, perjury consists of knowingly lying under oath about facts that are material to the underlying inquiry. If you're testifying under oath as an expert witness about the copulatory habits of monarch butterflies and you fib about what you ate for lunch under oath because you don't want your wife to know you had a cannoli, you aren't committing perjury.

One of the reasons the perjury counts against Bill Clinton failed is that all those lawyer congressmen knew this. The judge in the Paula Jones case ruled that the Lewinsky business wasn't material to the Jones case and excluded it, ultimately dismissing the case itself. Because Clinton's Lewinsky lies were about a non-material issue in a non-case, there was no way to make a perjury case out of them (even in a setting so devoid of procedures and rules of evidence as an impeachment proceeding).

Scooter's lies are really a variation on this theme. His lies didn't influence what happened with Rove and Armitage and were about conversations with people who didn't disclose Valerie Wilson's identity. This makes their materiality to the underlying inquiry debatable. Moreover, it bears repeating that there probably wasn't a crime. Fitzgerald has very conspicuously not said that he thought the leak was a crime, but he couldn't build a case. He has been almost entirely silent about whether or not the IIPA was violated. What surprises me is that Libby's defense didn't pursue this angle. Instead, they tried to make the laughable case that Libby couldn't remember what he told to whom. His lies weren't lies, they were just mistakes.

Now we come to the chain of command question. Here's something anybody who has been paying attention to the case should know. Dick Cheney orchestrated the whole thing. There are smoking guns in the form of his memos, hand-written notes, and emails all over the place. These were introduced into evidence by the the prosecution to bolster its contention that Libby knew who Wilson before he told the FBI and the grand jury that he did. But these items were not used to build a case against Cheney. Fitzgerald has made it very clear that he thinks Cheney is responsible and has talked about a cloud hanging over the Veep. But he didn't indict him, he didn't forward a report recommending impeachment to Congress , and he didn't call for Cheney's resignation. If the leak was a crime, there's ample evidence to tie Cheney to it, and there's no evidence that Libby got in the way of Fitzgerald finding it. Fitzgerald took the investigation as far up the chain of command as one could imagine him going, and did nothing to anyone except Libby.

So why was this case prosecuted? I think for some combination of two reasons. First, Libby is a lawyer, and he lied to the FBI and to a Federal grand jury. This pisses off prosecutors. Second, it's possible that Fitzgerald was trying to make a case against Cheney, and he was trying to get Libby to turn against him. The trial could have been a result of Libby and Fitzgerald calling each other's bluffs. I think that Libby has actually got a strong possibility of winning on appeal. Expensive and high-powered though it may be, I think it was incompetent not to pursue dismissing the case under the logic outlined here.

Partly because I don't like it when prosecutors prosecute out of pique or bluffs, and partly because I like to swim against the stream politically, I hope the appeal goes pretty far and that the issues I outline get tested. Not that I have much sympathy for Libby, though. This whole matter is about something both despicable and stupid. The idea that Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger was some sort of junket or perk arranged by his wife is comical. Come on, Niger? How could these people have possibly thought that this would have undercut what Wilson, and the rest of the CIA, and British intelligence, and German intelligence, and Italian intelligence, and the U.N. said about the "sixteen little words" about Niger yellowcake? How could they possibly have had the balls to cite this as evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions in the first place. Many people deserve their time in the stocks for bringing about this war, Libby among them. But a questionable prosecution for perjury and obstruction of justice was not the way to get him there.

Chapter 5 – Hunny in my Tree

2007-02-16T18:01:00.000-08:00

This is the fifth chapter of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here. The novel begins here.

Leaving my office building, I headed toward the 7th Avenue IRT and my journey home. The IRT is a group of subway lines. So is the BMT. So is the IND. A lot of people don’t know this. At some point in the last decade or so, all traces of the New York I knew as a child disappeared. The whores were chased out of Times Square by a giant mouse. The junkies were chased out of Union Square by farmers. Homeless people were scooped up into unmarked white vans and deported to San Diego. New York accents were banned from Manhattan.

My Grandfather grew up in Manhattan and spent his whole life there. He spoke with the kind of accent you hear in old movies. Part Leo Gorcey, part Humphrey Bogart, with hints of the pale of settlement polyglot he grew up speaking. He used tell us kids bedtime stories about the charms of old New York. In his day, it was the Jews against the Irish – pitched battles in the Gashouse district against the gang led by his arch-nemesis Hugo Mahoney. The way Grandpa said the name, it sounded like “Oogie Maharney,” and in his stories, Grandpa always came out on top, hitting Oogie in the face with a rotten tomato, or chasing him into the shins of the beat cop.

I always knew grandpa wasn’t really gangster, or an angel with a dirty face, just a regular guy, retired from a regular job, who wore a fedora and a coat and tie when ever he went out. When he died, his final raspberry to the religious upbringing he walked away from when he enrolled in the Jewish Harvard was his instructions to be cremated. It’s a good thing we followed those instructions, too, because if there had been a body, some yuppie anthropologist who thinks an egg cream is supposed to have eggs and cream in it would have stuffed him and stuck him in a diorama in the Museum of Natural History next to the cavemen and the saber tooth tiger. Grandpa hated cats.

But I digress. One of the stranger things to have happened is that one day, in the middle of the night, somebody went and changed the names of all the trains. All vestiges of the three separate subway companies were erased. F’s were turned into V’s. V’s were turned into Q’s. The double-L lost an L. And nobody told the lifers. On the rare occasions when one of us could find another, we’d swap stories about flashers on the BMT or ax murderers on the IND. Meanwhile, flocks of newly arrived actors, lawyers, and media slaves stop and ask for directions to the red line, and we try to figure out why all these people think they’re in Boston.

But I digress. I took the subway back to my palatial civil servant’s villa, better known as a crumbling apartment, in a crumbling building, in a neighborhood that used to be overrun with hookers after the factories shut down at night. Now it’s the latest clone of Soho, but it’s still crumbling. Pushing and shoving my way through the phalanxes of smokers standing outside the 14 bars that have opened on my block in the last three months, I made my way to my building, inside and upstairs to my apartment.

As I started to turn my key in the lock, the door jerked open, and I tumbled forward into my foyer. I looked up from the floor to see standing in from of me the girl I saw loitering on Arthur Avenue.

Ordinarily, I gawk as well as the next guy, but when I saw her earlier, I was too preoccupied to give her the attention, she obviously sought. I could see now that she deserved, it too. From the brief glance I shot her way on Arthur Avenue, I had guessed she was jailbait because of the way she dressed – the only women on the streets who look like hookers these days are twelve year old kids. I have as active a fantasy life as the next guy too, but I have certain rules. Like never undress a minor with your eyes. Maybe the government can’t intercept what your eyes download to your brain, yet, but I’m not taking any chances.

Now seeing her up close, I could see that see wasn’t as young as I had thought. She was in her twenties, and dressed for, if not action, at least attracting the stares of civil servants who don’t get out too much. Beneath the spiked blond hair of dubious provenance, heavy mascara, multiple ear and nose rings, exposed skin, and tattoos was a certified natural beauty. Big green eyes, full lips, and porcelain skin, and cheekbones like a movie star. I picked myself off the floor, and lifted my jaw back into place before putting it into service.

“Who are you, and what are you doing in my apartment?”

“I’m a friend of Tony’s. A close friend. I need to talk to you. Your door was open.”

Two things told me she was lying. One, there was no way a vision like this was close friends with the likes of Tony Paternostro. He was a middle-aged, blue collar guy out of the Bronx, with a wife and kids, and a dead-end job. He hid from his battleax of a wife in neighborhood bars and social clubs with a one-eyed sociopath. She was a walking wet dream. Guys with looks, money, and connections for anything she could possibly want would be parading behind her, tripping on their tongues and signing over their condos in Florida to her. Lord knows who she hung out with, but it had to be someone with more obvious charms than a guy who spends his life around sticky black stuff and rocks.

Two, I’m a fourth generation latchkey-kid, native New Yorker. No silver spoon for me – I was born with a Medeco, a Schlage, and a Segal in my mouth. I’ve triple locked my door every day since second grade. In crumbling neighborhoods like mine, even ones where the cheapest apartments now go for three grand a month, that’s what you do. It keeps out the smokers. All that time I thought it also kept out girls with bodies that blatantly defy the laws of physics and who make no effort to conceal the color of their underwear. I guess I never got the memo that telling me they were allowed in after all. Maybe they only give those memos to the market rate tenants, like heat and hot water.

This was no time to discuss the finer points of the housing market though, and as much as I might have liked to let myself think with the wrong head, the events of the day wouldn’t let me. Besides, red lace thongs don’t do all that much for me. Not that I’d noticed. I’m not all that interested in looking at the outline of a nipple ring through a tight, nearly see-through blouse, either. Not that I’d noticed. I was trying to get to the bottom of why a barely clothed bottom threatening to escape from a tight leather skirt was in my apartment. Not that I’d noticed.

“Try again. I don’t know who you are, or how you got here. So how about you clear that all up for me, before I call my new best friend Detective Rendell.”

With that, I heaved my government-issue cellphone off my belt, fished Rendell’s card out of a pocket and started poking at the keypad.

“Please. Don’t do that. I can’t talk to the cops about this. You gotta help me.”

“I gotta help you? I don’t know anything about you, and I don’t think I want to, especially if you don’t want to talk to the cops about the murder of your ‘close’ friend.”

“I can’t talk to the cops. If they find out, I don’t know what they’ll do to me.”

“Who, the cops?”

“No the people who killed Tony”

“You know who killed him?”

“I think so, yeah.”

Regretting the words the minute they left my mouth, I asked anyway.

“All right, why don’t you tell me what’s going on, then tell me how you know Tony. Let’s start with your name.”

“Honey … ”

“You can call me honey once we get to know each other a little better, but for now why don’t you just tell me your name.”

“I told you – it’s honey. H u n n-y.”

“Yeah, and who’s your brother, Christopher Robin?”

“Ha ha. My daddy wanted to name me that, and he’s the kind of guy that gets to do what he wants.

“Yeah? Who’s your daddy?”

“His name is Vincent Pugliacci.”

The room reverberated with the sound of my jaw hitting the floor again. For the second time in a day, the name of one of the most notorious innocent-until-proven-guilty men in New York turned up in connection with a dead guy who used to work for me. On top of that, he appeared to have an appreciation for whimsical classics of children’s literature. Menace and whimsy can be a fearsome combination.

“So let me see if I got this straight. You’re Vinnie the Pooh’s daughter, and I’m guessing he loves his Hunny?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Cute, huh?”

“I guess so, but none of that explains what you were doing outside the scene of Tony Paternostro’s murder, and why you expect me to be able to help you.”

“Like I told you Tony and I … well, he was my boyfriend.”

“I’m having a little trouble picturing that”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Why does everybody say that”

“Well, he was … uh quite a bit older than you.”

“So?”

“Well, you’re a very pretty girl …”

“And Tony was a very handsome man.”

What can I say? Love is blind. Either that or “pear-shaped, pock-marked, and pale” is the new Brad Pitt.

“Let’s just skip that for now. Why don’t you tell me why you think I can help you?”

“Tony always said he trusted you. He said you’re the only boss who ever did anything for him.”

“Sure, at work I took care of him, but that’s just because he did his job OK, at least compared to whoever else was available. I’m still not seeing what you want from me.”

“Tony said that if anything ever happened to him, stay away from his wife, and stay away from crazy Joe. I got nobody I can trust so that’s why I’m coming to you.”

“Listen, all I can tell you is that if you think you know what happened to him, and you need someone to protect you, you’d do a lot better looking a little closer to home.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Start with your father. I heard he knows something about protecting people.”

“And a lot of other things too. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I can’t go to him because I think he might be connected to what happened to Tony.”

“What do you mean? You think your father killed your boyfriend? And you want me to do something about it?”

“I don’t know if my father did it. All I know is that someone close to him was involved. If this person was, and the cops come after him, he’ll know it was ‘cause of me.”

“Don’t worry about it. The cops can protect the person id-ing a suspect. They did it all the time on Barney Miller.”

“Who’s Barney Miller, and what’d the cops do on him?”

“Uh, forget it. Anyway, how would this guy know you told the cops about him?”

“Because I saw him running out of the building, and he saw me.”

“Look, I can see that you’ve got a problem, but I still think you should go to the cops. If you really think you can’t, then you’re better off going to your father and telling him what you saw. What would he do to his own daughter?”

“Don’t you get it? I can’t go to him. If he was involved, that means my own father killed the man I love. If that’s true, I don’t ever want to see him again, and I don’t want him knowing the reason why.”

“OK, but what do you want me to do for you?”

“I want you to find out if my father did it, so I’ll know whether I can ever see my father again.”

“Who do you think I am, Archie freakin’ Goodwin? I’m sorry Hunny, but I think you’ve got the wrong guy. All I do is push paper.”

“That’s not what Tony said about you. He said you knew stuff about my father’s business and the people that work for him. That you knew how to dig things up. He also said he could trust you.”

“Look, I know enough to know that I don’t want to dig any deeper. I also know that I already have a job, one I can’t afford to lose by interfering with a murder investigation.”

“You don’t have to worry about your job. I can pay you. A lot. And if you find out that my father is innocent, he’ll take care of you.”

“Are you crazy? What if he’s not innocent? Then he’ll really take care of me.”

“Now who’s being crazy? Look, Tony’s dead. You might be next. The only way you can protect yourself is finding out who did it.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. The inappropriate boyfriend of a mobster’s daughter winds up dead, and his boss has to worry about being next in line for a bullet? What, your father thinks I fixed the two of you up?”

“What do you mean ‘inappropriate’? He was a very nice man. And who would be appropriate? Some zip in a black shirt and white tie? Besides, this has got nothing to do with what was between me and Tony.”

“You’re saying your father was happy about you being in love with a married man who made next to no money and came home from work every day smelling like asphalt?”

“My father has never liked any of my boyfriends, but he’s never killed any of them.”

“First time for everything.”

“He didn’t know about me and Tony. Nobody did, so that can’t be why he killed him, if he did. If he did, it had to be about business. You and Tony’s business.”

“Then forget about you telling the cops. I’m telling them myself. Now. I’d rather take my chances with them.”

I hoisted the phone up again and tried to heave open its giant clamshell. She was too quick though. She grabbed it from my hands and heaved it through the open door. I heard a splash, and knew I’d be filling out forms in the morning.

“Nice shot.”

“I played shooting guard at Our Lady of Padua”

“You know that’s not the only phone in the world. You’re not gonna stop me from calling the cops.”

“Maybe, but for now, that was the last one in this apartment. The nuns taught shop, too. I know all about wiring.”

It looked like she had won the first round. If I was going to call the cops, it might not be for a while. There’s probably a code in the city procedures manual for how to replace drowned telecommunications equipment. I didn’t know it, but Carboña probably had it. Besides, they’d probably fine me for polluting the sewers. There’s probably a way to get the phone company to show up and fix your wires, too, but no one I know has ever cracked that code. I was gonna need to get to out of my apartment by myself to get to the cops. If she played hoops and took shop high in school, who knows what other skills the nuns imparted to her. Besides, I was taught never to hit a girl. The only people I was supposed to hit were Irish street urchins, and I didn’t have any rotten tomatoes handy. They were all in the fridge.

“All right. It looks like I’ve got no choice but to listen to you a bit more. But this doesn’t mean I’m gonna help you.”

For the first time since I fell into my apartment, somebody cracked a smile.

“Well at least that’s a start.”

I had to smile a little myself. Hunny seemed to have a way of getting what she wanted out of people. Not that I was ready to start moonlighting yet. I’d need to fill out a form to get approval to do that.

“All right, so what’s the story here? Why do you think this had something to do with Tony’s job?”

“I told you. If it’s not because he was my boyfriend, what else could it be?”

“For starters, it could be his wife.”

“No way. She needed him alive, and married. She wanted half his pension – Tony always told me she couldn’t collect if they got divorced or he died”

“Yeah I heard about that. I was there when the cops broke the news to her. The minute Rendell start asking her about her how things were between her and Tony, she broke out that story about the pension. Acted all pissed off about his dying before he filled out some paperwork that would have benefited her.”

“See?”

“Yeah, but it was all a little too neat – she was too ready to tell us she had no reason to kill him. Didn’t show the slightest hint of real emotion when she got the news. She was just pissed off that she didn’t get his money.”

“That’s what I’m saying. She didn’t care about him at all. All she cared about was what she could get out of him.”

“Maybe so, but I’m telling you, she didn’t seem surprised or affected by the news at all. After a minute, she acted like she was upset, but it was the fakest thing I ever saw. Almost like she knew he was dead. She’s got an angle in this, I bet.”

“No way. Tony says there was no way she could get his money unless he retired, and they were still married. That’s why we couldn’t get married – she wouldn’t let him go.”

After the m-bomb, I was tempted to say something, held my tongue. I still had electronic devices I cared about in my apartment, and more than one fixture with running water. Besides, it was getting late. I needed to get her out of my apartment. Civil servants need their beauty rest.

“Look, there are a lot of complexities to the pension system. I’ve heard all kinds of stories about guys thinking they had it all figured out, only to find someone’s hand in their pockets the minute they retired. Something else could’ve been going on, too.”

“Like what?”

“Like crazy Joe. That guy’s a walking disaster area, and Tony’s been hanging around with him for twenty years. Who knows what kind of shit he might’ve brought around? So why go get a good night’s sleep, think all this over, and then see whether maybe you might do better with the cops than with me.”

“I got no place to go. I can’t go back to the apartment – the cops have got it all sealed up. And can’t go back to my father’s place right now.”

“Don’t you have any friends, someone you can crash with?”

“No one I can trust. Look, just let me stay here‘till you get this figured out. It won’t take long. I promise, I’ll be no trouble at all.”

Before I could say no, she turned her back to me, pulled her shirt off and started walking toward my bathroom. I was disappointed to see that she wasn’t wearing a bra that matched her thong. Wasn’t wearing a bra at all, actually, but I guess I already knew that.

I tried to sputter a weak objection, but couldn’t get the words out before she beat me to the draw.

“I’m just gonna take a shower. I don’t mind sleeping on your couch, but I didn’t bring a change of clothes or anything to sleep in,” she said as the door closed.

“Why don’t you give me one of your shirts, and maybe a pair of your boxers? Just slip ‘em through the door and throw ‘em on the floor. And no peeking.”

With that, I heard the water in the shower roar to life. I resigned myself to having a new roommate and set about making her feel at home. I set up the pull-out couch in the living room for her and fished out some deluxe civil servant boxer shorts and a shirt I had long since given up on from a pile at the bottom of my closet. I then followed her distribution instructions to the letter, though do to the reflective properties certain glass surfaces, perhaps not the spirit.

The rest of the evening’s ablutions passed without further incident, and with teeth brushed and face scrubbed I retreated to my bedroom for a much needed rest.

Next chapter

How to Vote for President

2007-02-12T08:44:00.000-08:00

With the recent spate of announcements of presidential candidacies, it occurs to me that there would be great value in developing a systematic approach to candidate selection. With my background in the efficiencies of municipal procurement, who better than I to produce and disseminate such a system.

Behold the hand-dandy calcu-vote system:

1. Identify your most important core value

2. Rate each candidate according to degree of pandering to that value on a scale of 0 to 5 (0 = "I do not speak French"; 5 = "is your tongue supposed to go there?"

3. Identify 2 policy proposals from each candidate that conflate (your) self-interest and improbable predictions of macro-economic effects and rate each on a scale of 0 to 5 (0= "you want to raise my taxes and to fix social security?"; 5="cheap Chinese TV's and jobs at home? sounds good to me!")

4. Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 to 5 for combined naturalness and salt-and-pepper-ness of hair. (0=Donald Trump; 5=George Clooney)

5. Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 t0 5 for absence of melanin (0=Jack Johnson; 5 = George Will)

6. Sample each candidate's stump speech for 1 minute and add 1 point for each occurence of "Freedom" ,"America" ,"Hope", "Values" and "Future" up to a maximum of 10. For any occurences above 10, deduct 2 points per occurence

7. For each candidate, count the number of X and Y chromosomes. Assign 2 points for each X chromosome and 5 for each Y (up to a maximum of 5)

8. Add up the scores for steps 1-7 and vote for the candidate with the highest total.

9. If there is a tie, vote for Ross Perot.

10. If Ross Perot is not on the ballot select a fringe party candidate at random (make sure to bring a coin or die into the voting booth).

Without giving too much away (after all the ballot is supposed to be secret), I can tell you that I have put this system to very good use already, and I have a pretty good idea who's going to come out on top. Let's just say "President Vilseck" has a nice ring to it.

Of Course You Realize, This Means War

2007-02-10T21:05:00.000-08:00

According to a recent article in the New York Times, U.S. "intelligence" officials in Iraq (there's an oxymoron for you) believe that Iran is supplying insurgents in Iraq with munitions, including the most effective form of roadside bomb. The article alludes to the evidence U.S. officials claim to have unearthed, but makes no attempt to assess the validity of these claims. The article also mentions that Iranian officials flatly deny the charges.

This is an extraordinary story. Given the way the Times via Judith Miller got burned by the WMD claims leading up to the invasion, it's astonishing that that the Times would report these claims as straight news. I would think that most Times readers (and I would hope editors) would immediately sense their "here we go again radar" booting up. Yet the article alludes only very indirectly to the possibility that this is part of a P.R. campaign to start another war -- by quoting U.S. officials' denials that that's what it is. Beyond that, there's is no counterpoint and minimal political context to the story. There's also nothing on the opinion pages yet. One would think that the minute a story like this hits, the opinion writers would be raising "fool me once ... " warnings, but this isn't happening so far.

Ironically, the idea that support for Iraqi insurgents is coming from Iran is entirely plausible. Iran was a refuge for Shiites throughout the Saddam era. From what I understand, the border areas between Iran and Iraq are somewhat analagous to the "tribal" areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Allegencies are religious and tribal far more than they are national. Consequently, it's entirely logical that Shiite militants are getting arms from within Iran (even if not from the Iranian government). Yet the intelligence and military "communities" under Bush are so discredited that even if they present something that on its face seems reasonable, it's almost impossible for any thinking person to take it seriously.

Or so I would hope. For now, there is only speculation. If Joe "I am the Lorax" Lieberman starts talking about the the threat to U.S. troops posed by Irani armorers, though, we'll know for sure the fix is in.

You say tomato ...

2007-02-04T18:46:00.000-08:00

Electric guitar is a funny instrument. Compared to other instruments common in jazz and other improvised music, it's pretty hard to play a lot of notes, particularly at fast tempos. Those who do manage to achieve "speed" comparable to what pretty much any entry-level saxophonist or pianist can do are few and far between. Those can do this, and not sound like they're working really hard are among the the very best in the business. Those who can make speed sound easy and make unusual, insteresting music ... well ... that's genius.

Now, there's a "right" way, to play fast -- picking all the notes according to a system, keeping things even and tight. Using hammer-ons, and other guitarry quirks only for effect and expression. The ultimate example of this kind of tightness is probably Pat Martino. Outside of the world of jazz guitarists, he's relatively unknown. Among guitarists, though, he's a god, the true musician's musician, the platonic form of the way you're supposed to do it. But the chops aren't the most interesting thing about him -- his phrasing, his harmonic pallet, and an amazing dynamic range (both literal, and, for lack of a better expression, spiritual), are really what make him a killer. There's also the astonishing fact that he lost most of his mental capacity, including everything he knew about the guitar, following a near-fatal brain aneurysm, then systematically re-built himself intellectually and artistically, but that's a story for another day.

There's also a "wrong" way -- picking only a fraction of the notes, and hammering on, pulling off, or sliding into the rest, while paying no attention to your up and down strokes. That's what I do, an unabashed, lazy technique-cheater. It's the only way I can make the notes on up tempo tunes, and it sounds like it. It's also what John Scofield does, but he's a genius. For him, it's a style, a choice. When he plays, no matter how fast the tempo, and no matter how many notes he's playing, he always sounds like he's going slow, just lazing his way around the fretboard. I don't know any stories about his brain exploding, though I did once see him lose his chewing gum in the middle of a solo.

All of the foregoing is just an excuse for posting a video I scared up on YouTube -- a jam featuring Pat Martino and John Scofield, each tearing it up the way only he can. I'm not sure how it sounds to ears a bit less attuned to jazz guitar, but to me, it's as if they were playing different instruments, on different planets, yet, amazingly, perfectly complementing each other. Joey D. ain't half bad either ;-).

Enjoy ...

Chapter 4 – Back to the office

2007-01-27T19:54:00.000-08:00

This is the fourth chapter of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here.

Apparently, the Bronx homicide division’s headquarters were nowhere near lower Manhattan, and Rendell wasn’t offering to go out of his way. A short while later, he pulled up to the curb next to a subway station.

“Out you go. I’m done with you for now, but don’t leave town,” he said.

Shocked at the circumstances I found myself in, and frustrated with being dragged around town and bullied all day, my natural peace-making and problem-solving instincts rose to the surface:

“Wow, so cops really say ‘don’t leave town?’, or have you just been watching a lot of Kojak on cable?”

“A wise guy eh?”

I guess that answered that question.

“No just trying to win you over with my charming sense of humor, but I can see it’s not working. If you need me, you know where to find me.”

With that, I descended. A short while later, I found myself on the train, with plenty to think about on the long ride downtown.

I guy who worked for me, whom I was friendly with, but not too close, was dead. Really dead. Usually, when a City worker dies, no one notices for a while. Lack of movement and strong odors don’t mean much in a typical civil service office, but this time there no was getting around it. Pats was dead -- he didn’t just smell funny.

A no account scam artist sleaze bag and known associate of the deceased finds the body, and decides to tell me about it instead of the cops. I should be honored by his faith in me, I suppose, but confidant to the bums wasn’t exactly my first career choice.

The widow of the dearly departed can’t keep her stories straight. Either she worshipped the ground he walked on, or she couldn’t wait to bury him. Either she didn’t know a thing about her husband’s extra-curricular activities, or she knew exactly what he was up to, and wanted to make sure she got her cut.

As for the dearly departed, he was turning into a complicated guy. It seems he was stashing girlfriends in an apartment owned by a guy with an animal for a middle name. Never a good sign.

And here I was, a bureaucrat, not bloated yet, but getting there. Rip Van Civil Servant waking up in the middle of a mystery. Except, as we say in the business, it’s not my department. Mysteries are for cops. Not for guys who drift through a career or two, wind up in a job they couldn’t imagine themselves doing in a thousand years, and stay there until it’s too late to leave. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great job for a guy who thrives on paperwork and tedium, but I flunked torpor in college. I may not be an artist, or a poet, or a rock star, but I’m not this guy behind this desk. And I’m definitely not a homicide detective. With a long ride ahead of me and psychopathic fellow passengers to stare down, I tried to put thoughts like that out of my mind. Soon enough, I found myself behind the desk behind which I’m not the guy.

For a change, the phone rang.

Before I could utter an officially approved greeting, I found myself being warmly addressed for the second time that day

“Where the fuck you been? I’ve been trying to get you all day.”

I quickly filled Big Al in on the details, and for the first time in 10 years, I heard his voice drop below a bellow.

“Holy shit. Pats is dead? Shot? Why would anybody kill him?

Not having gained any insight into that question myself, there wasn’t much to say, so I said it.

“I don’t know. His wife didn’t seem upset -- more like she was pissed off. She said something about a death gamble or something, but I couldn’t really follow it.”

“You still didn’t read that pension booklet? How many times I gotta tell you. Read the fuckin’ book and pick a fuckin’ plan. Don’t you know that’s your money?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t ‘huh’ me. You know what I’m talkin’ about.”

“I know, I know, but I still don’t know what I’m gonna do. I might quit in six months and putting all that money into the pension would be like throwing it away.”

“Who do you think you’re kidding. You’re a lifer like me. You gotta take care of these things.”

“Yeah, yeah, but what does that have to with Pats?”

“Listen you dope, she said death gambit. She was talking about the death benefit in Pats’ pension.”

“Yeah that must have been it. But I can never figure that stuff out.”

“Big shot executive. Got numbers comin’ out his ass, but can’t even read his own pension plan. Jesus H. Christ. Do I gotta teach you everything?”

With that big Al launched into a detailed explanation of civil service pension options. Apparently, when you sign up, you have a choice. Either you take your full pension when you retire, and if you die before your wife dies, tough luck for wifey – she gets nothing. But, if you agree to take a reduced pension, if your wife outlives you, she can keep collecting. It’s called a death gambit because you have to bet on who dies first. It also, as I understand it, involves filling out forms.

“Sounds sort of like a blueprint for spouse-a-cide, if you ask me,” I said after he finished.

“Yeah, well I love me wife and I don’t worry about it.”

“Maybe Pats’ wasn’t so sure about his wife.”

“Yeah, but if he didn’t set it up for her to get the pension, she wants him alive, or she’ll never get a dime.”

“I guess that knocks her out of suspicion, but I’m telling you, there was something really funny about the way she reacted – almost like she knew he was dead already.”

“Look at you. Sam Fuckin’ Spade. Leave it the cops, and get your ass down to the pension office.

“Yeah sure. As soon as I can. Hey, what were you calling me about anyway?”

“Asphalt you dirtbag, waddya think? What am I gonna do tomorrow? Who’s gonna place the orders?”

“Oh shit. That was the last thing on my mind. I’ll take care of it.”

After I hung up with big Al, I made the requisite phone calls and made sure that streets would flow black for another day.

I decided it was time to turn to my in-box and see what the bureaucrats on high had for me today before settling into some real work avoidance.

“Memorandum:
To: All Department Employees
From: Commissioner Davis
Subject: Objections to Materials

It has come to my attention that some employees have been displaying appropriate materials of an unobjectionable nature at their work stations such as pictures. As you know, exposure to appropriate materials constitutes a serious violation of the employee code of conduct and may result in serious consequences.”

I tacked the memo up on my bulletin board, next a collection of similar missives, and made a note to surf the web for some appropriate porn to hang on my wall. I hate to be out of compliance with policy. Then I continued to work my way through the pile. After a while, I reached the bottom and decided to move onto my next activity – reporting back to my superiors about the day’s developments. By that time, it was a few minutes after five, and I noticed that everyone else had cleared out of the office. Oh well, too late for that. Time to clock out.

Actually, sign out. A person of my exalted status didn’t actually have to punch a time clock, but I did have to write in the time I came and left, and account for any time taken off, or extra time worked by filling in a code on the card. There’s a code for everything – sick-leave with a doctor’s excuse, sick leave without a doctor’s note, sick leave for when you’re just malingering, scheduled vacation, taking a day off when your not scheduled to take off, coming to work when you’re scheduled to take a day off. The City’s got it all covered. It all goes into a computer. Nothing ever comes out of the computer, but that’s okay. We know it’s in there.

I couldn’t find “overtime spent watching a corpse and interrogating a widow,” though. I bet the cops have that one in their time code book. I wrote in the closest thing I could find and headed for the door.

Before I could get there, the phone rang. Surprised by such a late call, I was barely able to squeeze out an official greeting.

“Jon White speaking, how may I help you?”

“May I speak to Jon White please?”

“This is he.”

“Mr. White?”

“Yes?”

“Oh thank goodness I caught you. I’ve been leaving messages for you all day.”

“Funny, I checked my voice mail, and there weren’t any messages. Who is calling?”

“Oh, well I never use voice mail. I prefer to write messages down.”

“I didn’t see any notes in my inbox.

“Oh no, I have them right here.”

“That would explain why I didn’t get back to you.”

“I beg you pardon?”

“Well, you didn’t leave the messages anywhere where I could see them, so I couldn’t respond to them.”

“Oh that’s all right, I have you on the phone now.”

“Let’s try this again. Who am I speaking to?”

“There’s no reason for you to use that tone with me!”

“Tone? I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of any tone. Can you tell me who you are and what this call is about?”

“This is Miss Davis from payroll.”

Ah, now were getting somewhere. A fellow civil servant. Time to turn on the esprit de corps.

“Yes, Miss Davis? How can I help you?”

“Please send the cards I mentioned in my messages.”

“But I didn’t get the me … Oh never mind. Miss Davis, I seem to have misplaced your messages. Could you please tell me what cards you need me to send you.

“We’re missing the timecards for two of your employees. Could you send them in please.”

“Which ones are you missing?”

“The ones which weren’t handed in last week.

“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. Which employees are you missing cards for?”

“Honestly Mr. White, the least you could do is look at your messages. Time cards for Anthony Paternostro and Joseph Pazzolini were not turned in last week.”

“Uh, Anthony Paternostro is dead.”

“That’s all right, just submit his card. Make sure all the right codes are written in – and make sure he signs it.”

“I don’t think that would be possible in his current condition.”

“Why? Is he absent? There’s a code for that.”

“He is dead.”

“Oh. Well just put the code for that and write and have him sign it. Then send it in as soon as you can or he won’t be paid.”

“I think that’s the least of his problems. How about if I sign it for him? Also can you tell me what code to use.”

“I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me to do your job for you. I’m sure you have a code book in your office.”

With that, she hung up. I decided to put off the late, questionably not-too-lamented Anthony Paternostro’s final payroll reckoning for another day, and headed out the door.

Next chapter

Live or ...

2007-01-26T07:48:00.000-08:00

Discussion of music tends to focus on recordings. This makes sense, of course, since the majority of music we experience is through recordings. For pop music fans, this is often enough, maybe even better than focusing on live performance since live pop music can be a very frustrating experience. Nevertheless, the musical moments that have meant the most to me have mostly been live.

A case in point: in a previous blog entry, I mentioned that I think Pheobe Snow is one of the all time great R&B vocalists. I would guess that to the extent that anyone is even aware of Snow it's through her one hit from the mid '70s, a pleasant song called "Poetry Man" that most people probably file mentally somewhere in the neighborhood of Carole King or Carly Simon. Not a bad neighborhood, but you wouldn't take out a mortgage to move there.

So why do I think she's one of the greatest singers since Aretha Franklin? Because I heard her live once. In the early '90's, Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame) put together a sort of musical repertory company called the New York Rock and Soul Review that performed regularly around town. The NYRSR was basically a bunch of studio cats and semi-luminaries jamming together on R&B songs. At one of the shows that I saw, the theme was soul music from New York. During a medley of Berns and Ragovy songs, the band started playing the intro to the Janis Joplin hit "Piece of My Heart." Fagen announced a special guest vocalist, Phoebe Snow.

Phoebe approached the stage through the audience, parting the crowd like Moses and the Red Sea. She picked up the mic, and proceeded to deliver the greatest vocal performance I have ever heard in any genre in my entire life. Terms like virtuoso, colloratura, soul diva, voice of god don't even begin to do justice to what this was like. The expressiveness, emotional intensity, range, dynamics, power and musicality were literally awe inspiring. As the song built to the chorus, she leapt up and down octaves and made you feel like she really was having a piece of her heart ripped from her. As the song ended, the audience exploded. We screamed for more, but I think we were all secretly glad there was no encore. There was no way this could be topped, and if it were, I don't think we would have survived the experience. If Janis had ever heard Phoebe sing this song, she never would have dared sing it herself.

The NYRSR put out a live album which has two Phoebe cuts: a duet of "Knock on Wood" with Michael McDonald, and a solo version of "At Last". "Knock on Wood" is pretty good, but the song itself doesn't invite the kind of majestic performance that "Piece of My Heart" does. "At Last" comes closer, giving a sense of what Phoebe can offer. I've scoured the web for bootlegs or you-tubes of her doing "Piece of My Heart" to no avail. The only thing live performance I could scour up was this:

Perhaps it's best that this is all I could find. I'm not as young and vigorous as I used to be, and I'm not sure I can spare any pieces of my heart.

Every story tells a picture

2007-01-23T06:47:00.000-08:00

There are certain songwriters who are artists pretty much beyond categorization or imitation. They merge music and lyric to create something so beautiful, intriguing, compelling (or some other inadequate adjective), that all you can do is listen. The most obvious examples for me are the Beatles, Stevie Wonder (though not in a long time), some of the great figures in the American musical theater tradition like Cole Porter, Rogers & Hartenstein, or A.C. Jobim & J. Gilberto.

What all of these have in common for me is that I have almost no desire to analyze their greatest work -- I just want to hear it, or play it, without feeling any strong pull to imitate it or figure out what makes it tick (except to the extent that I need to in order to blow over it if it's a "jazz" tune). I'm thinking of a song like "Fixin' a Hole" or "Golden Lady" or "Night and Day" or "Wave". Generally, I'm a pretty curious "say-how-does-this-thing-work" kind of guy, but with music like this, I'm pretty much content to let it send chills up my spine.

There's another category of songs/writers that achieve their own sort of excellence that I look at a bit differently. These tell a little story or vignette with, I don't know, closure? Character arc? A kind of Occam's razor of song elegance? Nothing missing, nothing excessive, singable, fun to play, with a hook to boot. These are the ones that intrigue me the most as a player and wannabe songwriter.

A case in point: "Dixie Chicken" by Lowell George/Little Feat. The song tells the classic story -- boy meets girl, girl gives boy cute pet name, boy loses girl, boy meets a crowd of guys in a bar who had their hearts broken by the same girl. It's got everything I love about a "story" song. Simple song form, with a great chorus and guitar hook. Mixture of humor, pathos, and self mocking in the words. A plot. Perfectly drawn scenes with clear who/what/when/where (though why is left up to interpretation). It's an utterly perfect song. At the same time, it's also so clearly structured and formulaic, that it's not too hard to do a half OK imitation. Lowell wrote a bunch of others that achieve similar perfection -- "Willin'" "Fat Man in a Bathtub" "I've Been the One" "Two Trains Runnin'" ...

Another one is Smokey Robinson -- "Tracks of My Tears" "Second that Emotion" "Ain't that Peculiar" "My Girl". He's maybe a bit closer to the Beatles in terms of ineffibility, but at the same time, he's got these kind of recurring characters and themes -- the weeping clown or lovesick soul, the cliche/stock phrase turned into a hook -- that give your friendly neighborhood plagiarist, er, aspiring songwriter a lot to work with.

A few of other writers inhabit this story telling world for me -- Merle Haggard, John Hiatt, Becker and Fagen, Jack Bruce, Mark Knopfler. But all in all, it's a pretty exclusive club, as perfection ought to be.

Bear or Lion?

2007-01-16T07:47:00.000-08:00

Over the last I don't know how many years my buddy Mike and I have have had a semi-regular Sunday night music session. If one of us has a composition in some state of recordability, we work on that. Otherwise, we just play tunes, usually jazz standards. One Sunday a couple of years ago, it was a standards night, and I hopped into a cab with my archtop.

The driver, a Sikh in full beard and turban, immediately asked me about the guitar -- what kind was it? did I have a gig? what kind of music do I play? Happy to have a little interaction, I answered his questions. Then I asked him if he played, and he said he didn't but was very interested in guitar. Then he asked me one more question: who is the best guitarist, Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix? A Sikh from India, driving a cab in New York City in 2004 raising the great 70's high school guitar nerd debate. Only in New York.

I answered that it's not a competition; both had a lot to offer. The guy wouldn't accept it. He felt that one must be better than the other, but he hadn't been able to figure it out for himself. He was relying on me, as a clear expert in the field, to resolve this question for him. I tried putting it different ways -- it's a matter of taste; they both had their ups and downs; Jimi was a more innovative technician, but EC opened peoples ears up in other ways. Jimi was a more adventurous artist, but EC had a few masterpieces that hold up well in any comparison ...

He still wouldn't buy it. One had to be better than the other. I have to admit it, I don't completely buy it either. But that's because of my own inner OCD. I'm a bit obsessed with comparisons in general, and have debates like this running through my head all the time. I'm also the sort of person who can see at least two sides to almost any question, so I never resolve anything.

My father had more than a bit of this streak in him. He would often replay the great debates of his youth, or compare stars from different eras. Patton vs. Rommel? DiMaggio vs. Williams? Ruth vs. Gherig? Ali vs. Marciano? Tilden vs. Laver? Bear vs Lion?

Dad, what do mean? Chicago Bears vs. Detroit Lions?
No, an actual bear vs. an actual lion.
A bear vs a lion.
Yup.
What kind of bear grizzly? Black? Panda?
C'mon. Be serious a panda's not a real bear. Black bears eat fruit. I'm talkin' Grizzly.
I say a lion - runs faster; king of the beasts; won't settle for berries or fish. Goes for the throat every time.
I say a bear -- much bigger and stronger can kill a deer with one swipe of the paw.
Yeah, but lions work as a team. They use strategy and superior numbers to knock out bigger prey. You ever hear of a pride of bears stalking a bison?
C'mon, a bear gets up on his hind legs, one, two, five, doesn't matter how many lions, they're all gonna turn tail and run.
And hide in the brush until the bear lets his guard down, then kick some ursine butt ...

After a few more rounds, of this, we'd face the disappointing truth. The bout would never happen. Bears live in Yellowstone. Lions live on the Serengetti. Anyway, they'd stay out of each others' way. A fight wouldn't be worth the trouble -- baby antelope are much easier targets. They'd probably go out for a beer and trade top predator tips.
Say, I like the way you attack the flank first and then leap at the jugular. Nice technique
Thanks. Pretty cool the way you snatch that Salmon out of mid-air -- you're pretty quick for a big guy. Play some ball in college?

That's kind of the way it worked out with Jimi and Eric, I suspect. Try telling that to a Sikh, though.

Can a Blue Man Sing the Whites?

2007-01-11T11:37:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in childhood, I decided I wanted to learn how to play flamenco music. So when my parents decided it was time to have culture forced down my throat by an embittered hack ... I mean start music lessons, I picked guitar as my instrument. My first lessons came at an embarassingly earnest day camp the summer I turned eight, where we sat around in a circle learning the "cowboy chords" to "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore" and "Tom Dooley".

I was spending that summer with my grandparents, so they assumed the role of practice cops. Each night, they sat me down with a wind-up oven timer and made me strum D, A, G, and C chords until the buzzed at the fifteen minute mark. Failing to see the connection between the length of time it took to cook brisket in a pressure cooker, a race horse named "Stewball," and learning flamenco, I failed to be inspired. Somewhere toward the end of the summer, the headstock of my guitar got snapped off in a doorway (imagine that!). It went unmourned. The lessons ended.

Over the years, I had more abortive attempts at learning music, each of which ended in frustration at being taught what the teacher knew, not what I wanted to learn. I did actually pick up a little bit of flamenco (the little bit one teacher knew), and sort of learned to read music. But the passion was gone. Along the way, a random adult passing through my parents social circle saw my guitar and showed me how to play a blues shuffle, which got filed away in deep storage. By about age 12, I'd completely had it with lessons and pretty much gave up the guitar.

Fast forward a few years to sophomore year of high school, and I became friends with a kid whose hippie older brother had disappeared into a cult, leaving behind a no-name acoustic guitar, a pre-CBS Fender Jazzmaster and an Ampeg Gemini amplifier. Discovery of these instruments coincided with discovery of certain combustible alkyloid plant matter, as well as the twelve-bar soundtrack often associated with said plant matter. Upon hearing Cream's "Crossroads" and the Doors' "Backdoor Man", I plugged in the Jazzmaster, and somehow that fragment of the blues shown to me in childhood defrosted itself. All of a sudden I kind of knew how to play music I liked on the guitar.

The credits on rock albums led me to names like Morganfield, Burnett, Dixon, Reed, King, King, and King, and, of course Johnson. It turned out that a whole bunch of other kids in my school were making the same journey with harmonicas, and I soon found myself as the only Brownie McGee in a sea Sonny Terry wannabes, all looking to cut class, drink Night Train, and jam. I also ran into names like Clapton, Butterfield, Bloomfield, Kalb, and Kooper. Eventually it struck me that some of these guys were black and some of them were white. I also discovered that there's this whole vein of weirdness on the subject, fueled by white liberal guilt and black militant anger.

Looked at one way, there is something to the debate. The blues was born out of the black experience in the south and the migration to northern cities. Country and early urban blues is full of references to sharecropping life, hoodoo, and the joys and miseries of life in the delta. It seems utterly absurd for a middle class northern white kid to sing about mojos and john the conqueror roots. It's also true that the great innovators of blues, R&B, and jazz by and large never got the coin or the credit due them, while their often tamer white imitators walked away with millions. To continue that heritage of expropriation seems a bit suspect

On the other hand, blues is not so much the music of black people as it is the music of black individuals. It's not as if everyone with dark skin south of the Mason-Dixon line can do what Muddy Waters did. Not only that, but all the really great blues artists sound completely different from each other. This is made abundantly clear to me pretty much every time I walk into a blues club. White or black, bad blues artists sound like unconvincing imitations of someone else. Good ones sound like themselves, with maybe some echoes of others, but an essence that stands alone.

Moving over to my third hand, it's not as if there are a whole lot black Americans whose experiences give them insights into life in the court of Frederick the Great or in 19th Century Milan. Yet you rarely hear it said that a black person can't play "white" music, or that Kathleen Battle is stealing Verdi's birthright.

All of these arguments melt away for me in the face of the music itself though. There are a handful of blues artists who have touched me and made me want to play the music. At first it was about technique -- the precision of Clapton, the pyrotechnics of Hendrix, the intricacies of the great finger pickers. Eventually, raw emotion, personality, and individuality are what kept me hooked. It was no longer "how does he do that?" Instead it was "how do I translate what I'm feeling into a sound the way he does?" In light of that question, I can name a few white guys who deserve to be listened to on their own terms as much as any of their contemporaries. I wouldn't say this is because they sound authentic or "black." It's because they sound like themselves, and they communicate who they are. Here's a few. Some are obvious, some a little obscure, but all worth a spin:

Mike Bloomfield (anything from his Takoma Records days will knock your socks off)
Paul Butterfield
Bob Margolin
Bonnie Raitt
The Blues Project
A fella named Eric (but you gotta go way back)
Delbert McClinton
Larry Carlton (go see him live; forget his studio work)
Jimmy Vaughan (always like him more than his little brother)
Pheobe Snow (live, the greatest female R&B singer since Aretha, IMHO.)
Ari Eisenger
Duane A. (especially with EC)
Peter-Green-Era Fleetwood Mac
Carlos Montoya
Manitas De Plata

Now if I can only finally figure out the rest of Malaguena ...

Chapter 3 – Interview with the Widow

2007-01-01T19:12:00.000-08:00

This is the third chapter of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here.

About fifteen minutes later we pulled up to a garden apartment complex in Westchester's least quaint municipality. We found the intercom, made our presence known, and after another demonstration of police aerobics, found ourselves standing in front of a third-floor apartment. Rendell rang the bell, and a few moments later the door was opened by woman who, if hair height contributed to vertical leap, could have been a playground legend.

"Hello Louise, I don't know if you remember me, but I'm Jon White, your husband's supervisor a work."

"Oh, yeah, I remember you Jon. What are you doing here?"

"This, uh, gentleman here is Detective Rendell from the NYPD, and I'm afraid we have some bad news for you."

"Oh shit. What did that idiot do this time? Is he in jail again? I hope he doesn't expect me to bail him out."

"Uh, I'm afraid it's not what you think -- he's dead."

"No way. He's just hiding out with that slut girlfriend of his in the Bronx."

"No, really, he's dead. I just identified the body."

"Was he on the job?"

"Uh, I don't …"

At this point Detective Rendell cut me off and said, “Mrs. Paternostro, the investigation has just begun and we don't really know what happened yet. But right now it does not look like he was at work.”

The widow P looked pensive for a moment than showed signs of her bereavement.

“Shit. I can’t believe that bastard croaked before I could nail the gambit down.”

Before either of us could ask her what she meant, she started grieving some more.

“That rat bastard screwed me again. I ain’t gettin a freakin’ dime. I could kill him,” she blurted out. As soon as she did, she appeared to realize that she may have set the wrong tone, buried her face in her hands and started boo-hooing somewhat over-ostentatiously.

As someone who stumbled into a civil service career, never quite believing my misfortune at having done so, I tended to overlook some of the intricacies of my compensation. The rules of government compensation are almost as tricky as the tax code. Some people work the system better than others and manage to retire wealthy when they’re 50 years old. Others toil in bureaucratic misery into their dotage and spend their golden years fighting with the cat for the last spoonful of friskies. It sounded like she might have been talking about some piece of fine print in the pension plan that I still haven’t read. Or not. I never really got it, but the widow clearly did, and was convinced she had gotten the short end of the stick.

As everybody knows, the greatest civil-service scam artists of all are cops. If anybody knows these things, Ed Rendell would. It would be interesting to see how the display we had just witnessed would play with him.

“Uh, Mrs. Paternostro,” he began. “I’m terribly sorry for your loss. If you don’t mind, though, I need to ask you a few questions.”

Either he’s a good poker player, or his cat better hide the friskies.

She brought the sobs under control and peeked out from under her two-inch fingernails.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll try, but first, tell me what happened”

“We’re not quite sure yet. A co-worker informed Mr. White here that he found your husband, apparently deceased. Mr. White then reported this to the police. We just came from the scene. We’re still investigating, but it appears he was shot to death.”

“Oh my gawd!” she gasped. “Shot? Who would do a thing like that?”

“Well, we were hoping you could give us some information about him that might help us figure that out,” Rendell responded.

“I don’t know what I could tell you. My husband was just a city worker. I can’t imagine anybody would want to kill him.”

“Well, Mrs. Paternostro, very often when a person is killed, the crime is committed by someone who knew him,” Rendell said in a reasonable facsimile of an understanding and sympathy.

“Let’s start by talking about how things were at home.”

The widow P. tensed visibly at the question.

“What’s that supposed to mean? You think I had something to do with this?” She shot back.

“Oh I’m sorry Mrs. Rendell, I didn’t mean to suggest anything like that,” Rendell countered with an unctuousness I never would have thought he could summon.

“I’m just trying to get a picture of what your husband was like, what sorts of things he did, who he hung around with. That sort of thing.”

“Oh I see. That’s okay then.” She appeared satisfied for the moment that she wasn’t under suspicion.

“Your husband was found in an apartment in the Bronx, Mrs. Paternostro. Do you have any idea what he might have been doing there?”

“Well, he’s from the Bronx, and his mother lived there, on Arthur Avenue. She died a couple of years ago. It was a rent controlled apartment, and my husband hung onto it. He was sub-letting it out.”

“Your husband was found in an apartment on Arthur Avenue, at this address,” Rendell said, showing here the address of the crime scene he’d written down in his notebook.

“Yeah, that’s the address. He must have been there checking on the tenants or something.”

“That’s a possibility we’ll have to check into. Do you know the names of the people he was sub-letting the apartment to Mrs. Paternostro?” Rendell asked.

“No, I don’t. He just told me he was renting the place to some Albanians, but he never told me their names,” She replied.

“Do you know if he had a lease with them? Maybe there’s a copy here somewhere?”

“Oh, I’m sure there wasn’t anything like that. Like I said, it was a rent-controlled apartment, and he wasn’t supposed to be doing that. He always used to complain about the landlord trying to evict him, and stuff like that. Oh my gawd! You don’t think the landlord killed him to get the apartment do you?”

“That’s definitely one of the leads we’ll by looking into Mrs. Paternostro. Do you know the landlord’s name, by chance?” Rendell asked.

“You know,” she said, starting to look very interested in the way things were turning, “I think I do. My husband used to take care of his mother’s affairs and such, and I’m sure we have that information around here. Let me go check.”

With that, she got up from here chair and walked out of the room. She returned a few moments later with a business card, which she handed to Rendell.

“I think this might be it,” she said as she handed Rendell the card. I managed to get a look at it as Rendell examined it. In plain type, with no logo or graphics it read “A Bronx Realty Company. Vincent Pugliacci, building manager.”

Rendell showed no signs of recognition, but as someone who had to sign off on contracts, I had seen the name Vincent Pugliacci many times, and it sure got my attention. Vincent “Vinnie the Pooh” Pugliacci was the president of Hundred Acre Asphalt and was known to have an interest in at least a dozen companies in the construction, demolition, trucking, trash-hauling, recycling, and landfill businesses. He was reputed to be the mastermind behind the biggest bid-rigging conspiracy in New York since the days of Boss Tweed.

His name surfaced in tabloid articles about the trials of other people, but he always managed to keep himself un-indicted. Several generations of Feds and local DA’s in jurisdictions all over the northeast had tried to take him on, but had never even gotten him into a courtroom. Maybe the evidence got shot down in the crossfire between dueling prosecutors. Maybe some grand jurors had misplaced sympathy for woodland creatures. From where I sat, all I knew was that every time he submitted a low bid things got complicated.

Or simple, depending on how you look at it. New York City spends billions of dollars a year on construction projects and all kinds of supplies and services. Over the years, the city has been victimized by every imaginable racketeering, bid rigging, feather bedding, kickback, and corruption scam. In response, elaborate systems for keeping contracts away from the bad guys have developed.

Nowadays, whoever bids on a contract has to fill out a two hundred page form listing the intimate details of his personal, professional, financial and legal life. On big dollar contracts, or contracts in industries with nefarious reputations, the forms are pored over by an army of investigators, auditors, and lawyers. Every name associated with the business and all of its affiliates are run by every organized crime task force in the country. If a contractor has even the faintest whiff of a problem, he gets knocked out and the next lowest bidder is selected. If investigators think he’s a bad guy, but they can’t prove it they’ll use any pretext – a late income tax return, unpaid speeding tickets, a summons for abusing a tree – to deny a contract.

Vinnie the Pooh had been run through that ringer dozens of times, and every time, the lawyers said there was no hard evidence that Pooh was connected, but things sure smelled funny in his waste disposal business. Something was rotten in Jersey, and they didn’t like the idea of giving him a contract. There was one catch, though. Every time he was low bidder, he was also the only bidder. For some no doubt completely innocent reason, no one ever bid against Vinnie the Pooh. With nothing, er, concrete to hold against him, and no, one else to give the contracts to, Vinnie the Pooh was the biggest supplier of construction materials to the city. He also had a reputation for being a big supplier the to the NYPD’s homicide division.

I found it hard to believe that a homicide cop never heard of a guy like Pugliacci, but I couldn’t tell what Rendell thought about this. He wrote something in his memo book and handed the card back to Mrs. P., and, still giving away nothing, proceeded with his questions.

“Mrs. Paternostro, your husband was found by a man named Joe Pazzolini. Can you tell me anything about him?”

“Oh yeah. Crazy Joe. Creepy little guy. He worked with my husband on his city job, and they hung around together sometimes.”

“When was the last time you saw the two of them together, Mrs. Paternostro?”

“I really have no idea. I wouldn’t let that man in my house.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, he was a real low class type of guy. The last time he was here, he took his eye out and started playing with it. Scared the shit out of my daughter.”

“Excuse me?” sputtered Rendell.

“He’s got one a them glass eyes. I ain’t got nothing against cripples and such, but there’s no excuse for something like that. In front of my children no less. Plus, he’s always gettin’ into trouble, and makin’ trouble for other people.”

“What kind of trouble?” asked the detective.

“My husband had to bail him out of jail a couple of times. And one time he and my husband were out all night together. When my husband got home in the morning, he stunk of booze, and he looked like he had been in a fight. After that, I told him that was it. I didn’t want to seem him again.”

“It seems that Mr. Pazzolini still knew something about your husband’s activities, though…maybe more than you do,” suggested Rendell.

“What do you mean by that?” asked the widow, looking like she was tensing up a bit again.

“Well, he knew where to look for him, and he found him. I understand that when co-workers of your husband asked you about him, you said you hadn’t seen him in three days. Let me ask you again Mrs. Paternostro, how are things at home?”

“Well I’m sure they’re mistaken. Me and my husband was married a long time, and we planned to stay that way,” said Mrs. P, not altogether convincingly.

“Was you husband still living here, Mrs. Paternostro?”

The widow P. tensed visibly and blurted out “Who told you he wasn’t? Of course he was. Why would you ask something like that?”

“No particular reason, Mrs. Paternostro. I’m just trying to fill in some of your husband’s background and immediate situation,” answered Rendell.

“Was he a member of any, you know, fraternal organizations? Social clubs? Did he moonlight at anything?”

“Uh, not to my knowledge,” She answered cautiously.

“Can you think of anyone, friends, neighborhoods, relatives, co-workers, he might have had disagreements with?”

“No. No one at all. My husband was an angel. He got along with everybody,” she said, a little too firmly.

Rendell muttered something that sounded like “everyone but you” under his breath while jotting something down in his notebook.

“WHAT DID YOU SAY?” said the grieving, and now aggrieved, widow, nearly shouting.

“Oh, I said ‘we’re done with you’, Mrs. Paternostro,” answered the detective innocently.

With that he turned to me and said “You, you’re coming with me.”

He then turned back to Mrs. The widow P.

“I’m sorry again for you loss Mrs. Paternostro. I have no more questions for you for now, but I may need to get in touch with you again shortly. Please make sure you don’t leave town for the next few days, In case there are any developments.”

“Leave town? Why would I do a thing like that? Where would I go?”

“Oh it’s just a figure of speech, Mrs. Paternostro. I’m sure you weren’t thinking of going anywhere.”

With that, it seemed the interview was over, and we exited the apartment.

Next Chapter

So Long, farewell, auf wiedersehen , goodbye

2006-12-05T18:35:00.000-08:00

One of the many great things about the Shrub Presidency has been his choices in high level officials. They're all so darn multi-talented, likeable and entertaining. Dick "Richie" Cheney doesn't just vice-preside, curse out senators, and hide in a burrow like a woodchuck, he shoots people in the face! Condi isn't just an airhead -- she's an airhead with a PhD, and she plays the piano! And how 'bout that Albert Gonzalez? Civil rights? Who needs 'em with old Al hangin' 'round. But the one I love the most, of course, is the one who's leaving. You know who I'm talking about. I'm talking about Rummy. 'Sfeld himself, the Ruminator, Don the mon Rumsfeld. The courtesy. The respect for other people's opinions. The willingness to spend other people's lives on pet theories and settling scores from the Ford administration. Could you really ask for anything more in a public servant? Well ask and ye shall receive. Turns out he's a denizen of the blogosphere, too. Why just take a looky-see over here (post number 8) and here (post number 3 and more)!

I was really afraid that we'd lose him to "spending more time with his family" once he left office, but I'm so glad he's decided to join us out here in cyberspace!

I'm an animal

2006-11-27T18:43:00.000-08:00

I subscribe to Salon.com -- an on-line magazine that features a combination of political coverage and "lifestyle" pieces. The political stuff is mostly fairly obvious liberal-democratic anti-Bush vitriol. Neither the writing nor the analysis is spectacular, but it's one of the few left-ish outposts that occasionally achieves some mainstream penetration. Plus, every one of its columns is in a blog format, and something I'm pretty fascinated with lately. As a hardnosed, cynical, dispassionate realist, who lacks a single atom of touchy feely senstivity, I try to convince myself that that's the reason I maintain a paid subscription.

Who am I kidding? Half the time I go straight for the fluff. Nearly every day, there's something about the "mommy wars"; or a singularly loopy letter and response [with dozens or hundreds of reader comments] in this guy's column; or some other "culture war" item that only the narrowest of demographics can follow. In order to get past the jump on all of this, and have the opportnity to pull out my what's left of my hair and mumble "what the fuck are these guys talking about", I have to pay to get past the jump. I'm hooked, so that's what I do.

A while back, there was an article that was really no more than a solicitation for commentary on the question of "why have kids?" [I don't have a link right now, but if I can dig it up, I'll post it.]. Every writer offered a treacly cliche on one of four basic themes:

1. I never knew unconditional love until my little sunshine was born
2. he makes me laugh
3. he completes me
4. after [mother, dad, the cat] died, there was a hole in my heart that stayed empty until she was born

A chorus of dyspeptic malthusians attacked each blurb the same way: Your "reason" is no more than selfishness and vanity. You want kids because of what they they can do for you, meanwhile you're filling the planet with more hungry fuel eating, greenhouse gas spewing ADHD Republicans in training. If you can't give a better reason than that, the planet is doomed. Neuter thyself. This preceding is paraphrase, not parody.

As a non-parent at the time it was a classic no-horse-in-this-race WTF are they talking about hair puller for me. I expected to move on, freeing the synapses for the next internal rant. For some reason, that didn't happen, though, and the question "can procreation be altruistic?" kept creeping towards the frontal lobes. Subsequent to the appearance of that article, I joined the ranks of the unconditional-loving-laughing-completed-heart-hole-filled, and the question has become a bit less hypothetical.

I'm almost embarrassed to acknowledge the truth about the warm and fuzzy benefits of childhood. My son does make me laugh, he does fill a void left by the the mental and physical deterioration (though not death) of a parent, he does give me a sense of completeness, and the unconditional love thing is really not half bad.

So what's in it for him? I guess the main thing is existence, which if he didn't exist wouldn't be much of a problem, so I guess that doesn't really count. And how about the rest of you? Well, for now, he has provided his share of stimulus to the baby industrial complex (thanks Grandma). He has also done a pretty good job of contributing to the college funds of the offspring of quite a few medical professionals, but I can't take credit for thinking of any of that before letting loose my little homunculi

So I guess there probably isn't any selflessness in the act. But it occurs to me, so what? No one asks you to justify breathing, eating, or mitosis beyond the benefits to self. It's what you do. So what if I happened throw in a little meiosis. I'm an animal, eukaryotic no less. What do you want from me? I got urges, drives, selfish genes, and all that. Besides, have you seen my kid? I swear he's the best looking, smartest, funniest kid on the planet. Plus, he's gonna take care of the whole global warming, inequality, poverty and disease thing. When he gets a little older. Right now, he's busy filling in holes.

Chapter 2 -- Scene of the Crime

2006-11-18T18:43:00.000-08:00

This is the second chapter of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." Chapter 1 can be found here

Arthur Avenue is the main drag of what used to be the Bronx's Little Italy. It still has the remnants of Italian-American quaintness – a kind of Potemkin village of restaurants, bakeries, and pork stores -- but, like all the other Little Italies around New York, the Italians are gone. The generations that came of age in the '50's, '60's and 70's shed more and more of their forebears' immigrant ways, and moved out to the 'burbs. All that's left are widowed grandmothers in rent-controlled apartments, surrounded by a wave of Albanians who have taken over the restaurants and changed their names from Gonxhe to Guido. When the grown kids come back to visit grandma, they complain about how the neighborhood has been taken over by foreigners, but to the news crews doing their annual “welcome home to Arthur Avenue” stories, Albanians are close enough.

As I exited the subway and turned onto Arthur Avenue, I could see a half dozen police cars parked up the street. As I walked toward the address Crazy Joe had given me, I could see the two EMT's standing on the sidewalk, next to an empty gurney. The smaller of the two looked like he weighed about 350 pounds, and was smoking a cigarette. The other was staring intently at a half-dressed, gleamingly pierced teenager sitting on the stoop of the neighboring building. I couldn't tell whether his heavy breathing was caused by the girl, or his girth, but in either case, he clearly was in no condition to speak. I approached the smoker, introduced myself, and asked what was going on. Given the level of lifesaving activity going on around me, I needn't have bothered.

"Dead guy. Fourth floor. No fuckin' elevator. We ain't bringin' him down."

Who says New Yorkers aren't helpful?

I headed toward the entrance to the building, where I was stopped by one of New York's finest. After we exchanged versions of courtesy professionalism and respect, he motioned me toward a plain clothes officer standing inside the vestibule.

"Excuse me," I offered. "I understand there's a body upstairs. I think I may be able to identify it."

"Yeah? Who the hell are you?"

Good thing they have that slogan on the side of the cop cars.

I introduced myself and explained that I was the one who called 911.

The CPR front gave way slightly to more commonplace gruffness.

"I'm Detective Mike Rendell. Come with me."

We ducked under the yellow tape sealing the building's inner door and headed up the stairs. In addition to being a role model for all police recruits looking to improve their relations with the community, it turns out Detective Rendell was also a paragon of physical conditioning. The three flights took a while.

When we reached our destination, Rendell motioned me through another blue phalanx into a dark, sparsely furnished railroad flat. We walked through the kitchen, straight into the next room, where there was a bed, a folding chair, a lamp, and a dead body. At least I thought it was dead. I've never seen an actual in situ corpse before, but the large pool of red liquid, classically rendered chalk outline surrounding a motionless form, and hovering lab guys probably weren’t part of a school production of "Columbo."

Rendell grabbed my arm and steered me closer.

"Okay, take a close look at this guy's face. You recognize him?"

I swallowed the lump in my throat, took a deep breath, and answered.

"Yeah. His name is Tony Paternostro. He works for me."

"What do you mean 'works for you'? Do a lot of guys that work for you get shot in the chest?"

"I work for the City, and believe it or not, this is the first time. Tony took care of ordering asphalt for street repair crews."

"Asphalt, huh? Lotta wiseguys in that business, aren't there? Your boy Tony -- he got any interesting friends? Anybody you can think of might do something like this?"

"C'mon, he's a city worker. You know us. We don't work hard enough to make enemies."

"Looks like his work ethic might have picked up a bit."

"I don't know what to tell you. We fill potholes. There are arguments, even a few fistfights, like in any blue collar job, but Tony hasn't been in the street in years. He was kind of a glorified clerk. Took care of getting trucks filled with asphalt. Talked on the phone pretty much all day."

"What about this guy that called you about this?"

"Crazy Joe? He worked for Tony, and they were kind of running buddies."

"So what's his real name? Why's he called 'Crazy Joe'?"

"Joe Pazzolini. He's missing a few marbles. Always gets into trouble on the job -- says obnoxious things to people, fucks things up, basically, a guy you have to stick in a corner."

"So how come he still works for you guys?"

"So far as I know, he's never done anything criminal enough to get fired. He's gotten some reprimands, and lost some days of pay, but he always manages to come out of hearings with a job. "

"I'm gonna want to talk to him. You know where to find him?"

"Actually, I'm not sure. He just got suspended from work, so he's not on the job. I don't know where he lives, but the personnel people at work have his address. I can try to track it down for you."

"You should do that. What else can you tell me about the dearly departed here? Married? Family? Friends?"

"Not too much. He's married. Lives … I mean lived in Yonkers. Crazy Joe told me on the phone that he kept this place on the side for meeting girlfriends. Tony and I never discussed love lives, though, so I can't confirm any of that."

With that, Rendell said to me "don't go anywhere. We're not done." Then he stepped out of the apartment.

He returned few minutes later, and said to me "We're going to see the wife. I want you to come with me and break the news."

"Listen," I said. "I really need to tell some people back at work about this, first."

"All right, but make it quick."

With that, I whipped out my government issue, economy sized, low-bid cell phone and called my boss.

“First Assistant Deputy Assistant Commissioner Maudlin’s office.”

It was, one of my boss’s secretaries, but I couldn’t say which. Arthur Maudlin had three of them, Alice, Carboña, and Shitonya. Despite being from different parts of the City and completely different backgrounds they had nearly identical voices that produced an effect somewhere between chalk on a blackboard an icepick in the forehead.

In addition to this gift (who could ask for anything more in a woman answering the phone), each was similarly endowed in secretarial and administrative skills. They couldn’t type, use a computer or file, had no idea how to transfer a call, and couldn’t even make a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, they were all three rumored to be sleeping with Maudlin. They never identified themselves when picking up the phone, expecting you to guess. Like concubines in a pillow book, they hated each other. If you guessed wrong, woe betide you.

Unable to bring myself to say two of the names out loud in the company of a stranger, I dove in and hoped for the best.

“Uh, hi Alice, Jon White. Is the boss in?”

I got it right on the first try. Maybe my luck was starting to turn after the morning’s fireworks.

“Yeah, Jon, he is. He’s been lookin’ fa you, awl mawnin, too,” she scraped.

“All right, put me through, then.”

Using her own version of the phone system, she dropped the receiver on the desktop, shrieked, “Artha! Pick up White on loin faw!”

After a few more rattles, and machine-tool-like vocalizations, the great man himself picked up the phone.

“Jon, where have you been all morning? I expected those reports to be on my desk at 11. I have a meeting with you know who this afternoon, and I can’t go in unprepared”

As usual, since he had no idea who or what he was talking about, neither did I. I fell back on my usual ploy. Knowing he never read email himself (relying on his crack secretarial staff to print it out for him and leave it in the inbox he never checked)

“Arthur, didn’t you read my email? I had to go out in the field this morning. But don’t worry, if you look on the computer calendar, you’ll see that the meeting has been postponed until next month. I’ll have all the data for you in plenty of time for that.”

“Oh I see. I must’ve missed that one, I read so many, I sometimes lose track. Thanks for staying on top of it.”

Worked like a charm.

“By the way, what were you doing out in the field?”

Not knowing of anyway to finesse this, I decided to go straight for the truth.

“Arthur, I don’t know if you heard yet, but Tony Pats died this morning.”

“Who?”

“Tony Paternostro”

“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that name. Was he a relative of yours?”

“Uh, no, he was one of our employees – in charge of ordering asphalt for the repair crews.”

Continuing with the hands-on managerial touch, he asked, “Why would one of our employees do that”

“Do you mean why would he be ordering asphalt, or why would he die?”

“Both, I suppose.”

I had always tried to set aside the rumors that Arthur Maudlin only held onto his job because his daughter babysat for the Mayor’s children, but it seemed that my inner cynic could no longer be ignored.

“Arthur, I know you’re very busy, and I can understand how you might not be on top of some of these details. Our division handles the asphalt contracts. I do the administrative end of things. Tony handles … handled the field operation for me.

“Of course, of course. I knew that. But what were you doing in the field? I needed you for that meeting.”

“Well, because he was dead, Tony was unable to handle things in the field this morning, so I stepped in.”

“I keep telling you, you really shouldn’t micromanage like that. You have to let your employees do their jobs. If this keeps up, it’ll affect your performance evaluation.”

“But Arthur, Tony wasn’t at work, and his job had to be covered.”

“Well, he should have been at work. It’s your responsibility to hold him accountable for his attendance.”

“Arthur, I do try to keep a tight rein on absences, but as you may be aware, death is considered a legitimate excuse.”

“It is? I suppose that makes sense. All right then so come back to the office now, I need those reports.”

I tried my best to fill him on the rest of the details, including my being dragooned into a police investigation. Ordinarily, the only time Arthur paid any attention to the non-estrogen-producing aspects of his surroundings was when his boss scrutinized him. I figured a murder in his branch of the organization chart might turn into an occasion for that, and might have expected Arthur to focus. But he was as disengaged as ever, his mind probably absorbed in the intricacies of scheduling three nooners in one lunch break. I told him I’d be in after lunch.

“All right then, I have meetings all afternoon outside the office. I’ll see you tomorrow, and we’ll go over the reports then.”

“Sure thing boss, see you first thing in the morning,” knowing full well neither of us would be in the office any time soon.

As I heaved the two halves of my phone shut, Rendell grabbed me by the elbow and steered me toward an unmarked police car.

“Taxpayer dollars at work, eh White? Let’s go pay a visit to Mrs Dearly Departed. Now get me that address and get in the car.”

Next chapter

Chapter 1 – Typical morning, plus a dead guy

2006-11-15T21:59:00.000-08:00

My day as a bureaucrat started as it often does -- the telephone rang. I picked it up and gave the official greeting

"Street Department, White speaking". Immediately, a voice began asking me how to get from North Carolina to Connecticut. Or perhaps it asked me why the hell traffic was backed up on the Belt. Or perhaps it told me that a streetlight in the Bronx was broken. Or perhaps there is a pothole the size of the sea of tranquility on Staten Island. Or perhaps it would ask me, or berate me about any one of dozens of subjects that have nothing to do with what I do for a living. I'm one of the lucky people whose name, bureaucratically obscurantist job title, and telephone number is published in various listings of government offices. Said number is also one digit away from the telephone numbers of a broad array of services. Many of those numbers are manned by recordings that inexplicably refer callers to my telephone number. Apparently dyslexia is a problem in government. I've tried to straighten this out with the listing and telecommunications bureaucrats, but the numbers at which they are listed allow me to do no more than request a permit to clean my sewer connection. I don't know exactly what a sewer connection is, though cleaning it sounds like a good idea

But I digress. The real story is that the telephone rang again. To my surprise, it wasn't the same person I just spoke to coming round the circle of bureaucrats.

"Street Department, White"

"Big fuckin' deal. Why the fuck didn't you order any asphalt for the Bronx Crew? I got trucks lined up around the block, 30 guys on site, and that sonofabitchbastard plant manager told me to go fuck myself."

"Good morning to you too, Al. Always a pleasure to hear your voice. What happened? Did you talk to Pats?"

Big Al wasn’t my boss, or anybody else’s, but he ran the show. There are more than a quarter of a million city workers in this town. Maybe eight of them know what they’re doing. Big Al is one of them. His experience and track record command attention. That and an unparalleled ability to use the word “fuck” as any part of speech.

"I talked to him Friday afternoon. Told him we needed 1000 tons from Amici Asphalt. He said he'd take care of it. Trucks show up this morning, and the whole place is shut down. Gates locked, and everything. All the other plants are closed, and I can't get any fuckin' asphalt in the Bronx. Pats ain't answering his phone, his cell, his beeper, or his radio. No one knows where the fuck he is."

"Did anyone try him at home?"

"Yeah. His wife said she hasn't been home in three days, and doesn't care if she never sees him again."

"That's weird. Let me make some calls. Get you some material. Track down Pats."

An hour later, the supply problem was solved, but the Pats mystery had deepened. Tony Paternostro, better known as Pats, was in charge of lining up our daily supply of asphalt, the hot, sticky, black gold that is the lifeblood of the road repair world. It's a somewhat difficult task. We, being the bureaucratic civil service misfits we are, never how much we need. And they (the suppliers who sell us the stuff), always have a higher paying customer they'd rather sell it to, as well as customer service policies based on the code of omerta. All in all, the task of balancing supply and demand calls for a combination of toughness and tact that few in our little world possess. Pats isn't necessarily endowed with a surfeit of either, but he gets by. More importantly, he always shows up for work, and always answers one of the half dozen communications devices strapped to his waist, night or day. Call it dedication. Call it loyalty. Call it overtime at time and half.

Failing to reach Pats myself, I made a few calls. No one had seen him or heard a word. He might have gone to A.C. over the weekend and gotten back late. He might have been at his girlfriend's, or his other girlfriend's, no one was sure though. Only one thing to do. Send Crazy Joe to check around.

Crazy Joe, one-eyed, unreliable, dishonest, stupid, and drunk, Pats's on-again-off-again sidekick and cross to bear, had keys to Tony's office, apartment, and car, and knew his habits and haunts. Crazy Joe had many fewer communications devices strapped to his waist than Pats, but for once, I knew exactly where to find him -- at a disciplinary hearing. Crazy Joe has done (or, rather, failed to do) a great many things in his career. Having fomented disasters as a laborer, dispatcher, messenger, gas station attendant, and clerk, his most recent assignment had been to sit by himself in a shed next to a fax machine and wait for a list of figures to come through. He was then supposed to wait for a technician to stop by, to whom he would hand the fax. This apparently had proven to be quite a challenge.

On the first day of his new assignment, Crazy Joe sat in the shed, the fax machine faxed, and the technician, a fellow of Middle Eastern extraction whose name was pronounced by yelling "Batman" while simultaneously coughing and harrumphing, stopped by at the appointed hour.

"I am Bat(coughharrumph)man. I have come for de fux."
"Dafuck you say?"
"Defux. Please gif me de fux"
"Dafuck you say?"
"De fux! I must have de fux!"

Crazy Joe then popped out his glass eye, threw it at Batman, yelled, "Get dafuckouttahere you Indian rat bastard," (according the complaint filed by Batman in triplicate. Batman retreated from the shed and immediately filed said harassment complaint with the department's equal employment opportunity office, on the grounds that he resented being referred to as Indian.

But I digress.

On the morning of Pats's unexplained absence, I knew where to find Crazy Joe. Emerging from the hearing room, his glass eye back in place, and his natural eye glassy from drink, Crazy Joe muttered curses and epithets at his inquisitors under his breath. I stepped out of my office and called to him.

"Joe. Come here. I need a word with you."
"Hiya Jon. Howya doin?"
"Fine Joe. How'd the hearing go?"
"Colored bitch suspended me for tree days widout pay."
"Yeah, well, just be thankful she didn't fire you."
"I didn't do nuttin'. Dafuck dese people fuckin' wit me faw?"
"Joe. You can't say racial stuff to people in offices. Doesn't matter what you say on the street, cause those guys'll kick your ass anyway. But don't talk about nationality in the office."
"Waddyou talkin' about? Dat guy wasn't colored. He was Indian."
"He's Iranian, Joe, and he didn't like you calling him Indian."
"Who gives a fuck? Indian, whatever. I ain't no racist. I got a colored guy livin' next door to me."

"Look at this way, Joe: You ever call a Napolitan' guy Sicilian by mistake?"
"Yeah ..."
"Well what happened?"
"He hit me in the head with a brick."
"Think of this hearing as a brick. If you don't know a guy, don't mention any countries. Trust me on this one."

"All right, all right. Is dat all you wanna talk to me about?"

"No, I need to ask you about Pats. You seen him in the last couple of days?"

"No. Me an him had a fight. I ain't talk to him in like a week. Why?"

"Nobody knows where he is. He's not answering any of his phones or his beeper, and he didn't show up for work today."

"Ah, he's probably hidin' from his girlfriend. She foun' out about the udda one. Treatened to tell his wife."

"What you mean 'hiding out'? Where is he?"

"Uh, he's got dis otha apartment up by Arthur Avenue where he hangs out sometimes."

"Yeah? I never heard about that one before. Anyway, I need you to go see if he's around. Tell him to give me a call."

"I don't tink he really wants to see me. See we, wuz out at dis afta hours jernt, an' ..."

"I don't want to hear about it. Just find him and tell him to call me, or the next time that Lady won't miss you with the brick, if you know what I mean."

"Awright, awrigtht. I'm goin'."

The rest of the morning was relatively quiet. Between sewer connection cleanings, I finished off some paperwork, divvied up one person's worth of work between three clerks collectively capable of substantially less than that, and declared myself worthy of lunch and a little fresh smog. When I got back, the phone was ringing."

It was crazy Joe.

"Uh, Johnny... I dunno howta tell you 'dis, but it looks like Pats is dead."

"What?!"

"I'm at his place now, an' he ain't movin', an' he ain't breadin'."

"Did you call 911?"

"Uh, no. Ya 'tink I should?"

"Joe. Call 911."

"See we had 'dis fight see, an' he looked OK when I left him, but now...I 'tink I should get outta heah."

"Joe. Give me the address.

"Uh, he don' want too many people knowin' 'bout dis place."

"Joe, if he's dead, he won't care, and if he's alive, I don't think he'd mind."

"Uh, okay, but don't tell nobody about me findin' him, awright?"

"Yeah, sure Joe, just give me the address."

As soon as we hung up, I called 911, reported the situation, then headed out the door.

Next Chapter

Are you sure?

2006-10-16T18:23:00.000-07:00

I've worked within the bureaucracy of a municipal government agency for many more years than I'd like to admit, and even more than I ever intended. Early on, my job was kind of fun. I spent a few years getting to know the details of an operation that provides an actual service, and the sometimes colorful characters who provide these services "in the field".

Eventually, I got pretty good at my job and was promoted up the administrative tree. The further up the tree I went, the more I became something of a bridge between between the field, and the bureacracy that "supports" it. This, too, was interesting for a while, but it eventually had a corrosive effect on my soul.

Yes, it's true. It turns out that bureaucracies are indeed full of lazy, spitelful, CYA-obssessed, and above all incompetent, well, bureaucrats. Bureaucrats, it turns out, are not frustrated idealists just waiting for someone out of a Frank Capra movie to inspire them to process forms quickly and simplify their procedures. And did I mention that they are often incompetent? More so than you ever dreamed? Well, they are.

This is where the soul-deadening part comes in. I've become so accustomed to the first answer or explanation (and usually, the second or third ...) someone gives me being false, quickly rendered in order to get rid of me, and completely contradicting any facts brought to bear on a conversation, that I can no longer simply accept what someone outside of work tells me. I assume that any answer to a question is some combination of deceptive, ill considered, and wrong. I cross examine every interlocuter with a series of "are you sures?"s and "perhaps you really mean?"s, and "consider the exact opposite of what you just said and imagine for a moment that that were true instead"s. This sort of thing may have served Socrates, well, but in the modern world, it just gets you branded a pain in the ass, and doesn't get you any closer to figuring out why they're threatening to cut off your cable service.

Recently, I have had something of a reawakening to the possibility of competence. A little over a year ago, my son Alexander was born. A prenatal ultrasound had revealed that he had a clubfoot, but we had been reassured that our son would not turn into Richard III and that the clubfoot could be treated non-surgically with a near certain prognosis of correction and normal function. Still the clubfoot was on our minds, and after he was born, it was evident.

The morning after he was born, it became apparent that something more serious than the clubfoot was wrong. The first time he tried to breastfeed, he choked and turned bright blue. Alex was quickly moved from the hospital nursery to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where he underwent a series tests.

It turned out he had a congenital abnormality of the digestive system and trachea called an esophageal atresia and tracheo esophageal fistula (EATEF) as well a minor spine and kidney problem. These problems taken together are a syndrome called "VACTERL" The EATEF part of the deal was "incomptible with life" but completely correctable with surgery.

To make a long story short, the surgery was successful, and Alex came home from the NICU five weeks after he was born. Over the following year, he has grown rapidly and turned into a very cute, active, bright child. There have been a number of complications and scares along the way, and he still requires close follow-up by an army of specialists, but to all outward appearances he is completely healthy and thriving. Obviously, he's also the best looking and smartest baby born in New York in the last several decades, but that goes without saying.

Along the way, I have probed every doctor as I would an accounts payable clerk in the agency where I work. Instead of sullenness, obfuscation, and failure to act, I have been greeted with clarity, compassion, accurate diagnoses, and optimistic prognoses that have all worked out they way the medical professionals said they would. I have met doctors who return calls at any time of day or night, patiently answer every question, laugh at my inappropriate jokes, and most importantly, treat Alex carefully and compassionately.

For all the good this has done Alex, it has also taught me to once again to value the opinions and abilities of other people. So these fine people have given me two gifts -- a wonderful, thriving son (who before the middle of the 20th century could not have survived), and they reanimation of a small piece of my own soul. I still yell at accounts payables clerks, but every once in a while, I allow myself to expect a co-worker to do something right the first time. They haven't lived up to that expectation yet, but I have hope.

Pickin' and Grinnin'

2006-09-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

For much of my life, I've spent as much as several hours a day playing guitar. Sometimes this has been serious "practicing", other times more like random noodling. My focus has usually been on electric guitar, but lately it has shifted more toward acoustic. Part of the motivation for this has been a search for songs I can play and sing for my young son, Alex. I no longer have time for more than a few minutes of guitar at a time (1 year olds demand a lot of attention. Who'd a thunk it?). So entertaining him with a bit of picking kills two birds with one stone.

Alex seems to like songs with a bit of a beat, and a happy major-ish kind of sound. He also likes to crawl up to the guitar while I'm playing, start swatting at the fretboard, and use the neck as a chinning bar. This all kind of makes open tunings work a bit better than standard tuning. I can take my fingers off the strings, pry him off the neck, and let him bat at the fretboard, and the results will be a little closer to music than it would be otherwise.

I've never been much of an open tuning player, though. I've occasionally played a bit of slide blues guitar, and done the Keith Richards thing, but rarely gotten too far figuring out chords and plucked phrases, a la the great fingerpickers. To address this deficit, I dug up a Blind Blake CD and started figuring out one of my old favorites, "Police Dog Blues", which Blind Blake plays in an open E tuning (or maybe D capoed up a whole step). This has got a strong ragtime beat, a gentle sounding vocal melody, and lots of cool licks that aren't too hard to figure out. It also has two of my all time favorite blues couplets. Singing about the dog who guards the house of a girl he's fallen for:

I'm scared to bother 'round her house at night
I'm scared to bother 'round her house at night
She's got a police dog craving for a bite

His name is rambling, and when he gets a chance
His name is rambling, and when he gets a chance
He leaves his mark on everybody's pants.

I love the way he sets up the expectation (by naming the dog "Rambling") that the dog will do one thing (like maybe ramble around the neighborhood), and winds up doing something totally different. Alex seems to like it, too. When he's getting all fussy and upset about going to bed, singing "Police Dog Blues" usually stops the screaming.

No if I could only get him to sit still for my solo arrangement of "Giant Steps" ...

What Happened to "X"

2006-07-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

OK, here's my first real post, and it's a doozy ...

I grew up in a high rise middle-income housing complex in Greenwich Village in the 60s and 70s. My family was part of the first wave of tenants who moved in as the building was completed. Many of these other tenants were also families with young children. The building was one of those classic NYC housing deals that don't exist anymore -- really nice, really cheap apartments, that no one ever moves out of.

As a result, most of the kids who moved in together wound up growing up together, attending the same schools, playing together after school, and, as we grew older, doing the things that teenagers do together. Of course we didn't all hang out together in one crowd, and we all had friendships away from the building, but there were fairly stable subsets of kids in the same grades who made the trip from infancy to adolescence together. My main partner in crime in the building for most of my childhood was a boy I'll call "X".

X and I knew each other even before we moved into the building. We played together as babies in the playgrounds of Washington Square Park. We went to the same junior and high schools. For several summers, our families stayed in beach houses near each other. It wasn't as intimate or deep a friendship as some I've had, but we were close and spent an awful lot of time together until about age 16. After that, we drifted into different circles of high school friends, and after we graduated, we went our separate ways. Over the 25 years since I graduated from high school, I've seen X only a handful of times, but it's always been friendly, and he has always been one of those people I think of trying to track down and catch up with.

Fast forward many years later and I hear a bit of building gossip from my mother, where X's parents still live, too. It seems X was arrested in an FBI sting for attempting to solicit a 13 year old girl (actually an FBI agent) for sex over the internet. He's under house arrest pending trial. He's not allowed to see his child, and is looking at a minimum five-year sentence if convicted. I google his name, and because X has spent much of his career as an entertainment and gossip journalist, the details are easy to find, and pretty lurid.

I get in touch with another building alumnus ("Z" who remained close with X long after I did) , who fills in some more of the background. X had had a drug problem, and had gone through a messy divorce, but there had never been a hint of anything like this before. Z says X had been getting his personal and professional lives together after hitting bottom and seemed to be doing well.

So what the heck happened? X was a fairly ordinary kid. Bright, though not particularly intellectual or academically dedicated. Good at sports, though not really a jock. Funny and gregarious, though not charismatic. A bit of a prankster, and a wiseass, but overall, he was a good kid. We grew up with some kids who got into some very ugly stuff, but he definitely was not one of them.

His growing up to become a gossip columnist surprised no one who knew him, but a pedophile? Was it drugs? Lonely late night hours on the internet robbing him of inhibition and judgment? A bizarre spasm of middle age? Or was this always something inside him? A ticking time bomb set up by something in childhood? I've gone over every memory I've got of him and his family, but I have absolutely no insight into this. "You think you know someone." A cliche, but in this case, the truest one I've ever met.