Art-Commerce

This does not equal that, almost always

2010-09-14T23:15:00.005-05:00

When I read this blog post, I was reminded (again) of something that happened in my youth. It was well after Joe McCarthy’s heyday, but still, it seems apropos.

When I was a freshman in college and Richard Nixon was President, I took a sociology course which sought to address some of the harsh political events and divisive opinions which were tearing the country apart. (The term ended with the killings at Kent State and – less remembered, perhaps – at Jackson State.) Over the term, a number of guest speakers offered their understanding of what was really going on locally and nationally in what seemed to me at the time to be a poisonous political climate.

One guest to the class was a local police official who told us the communists had infiltrated civil rights and anti-war groups to turn them against America. A fellow classmate – an upperclassman who was less inclined than I to grant that persons in position of authority were informed – asked the speaker “What is a communist?” I protested that everyone knew the answer, but he insisted that the official tell us over my objections. And lo, it turned out the man was ignorant: “They’re not like us; they don’t believe in freedom like we do; they’re…” His explanation petered out embarrassingly. He had no idea what he was talking about. He was almost totally innocent of the subject. And yet he had earlier produced a political thesis with the utmost confidence, a thesis which depended mightily on the presence of communists to justify both itself and his world.

While there were and are plenty of reasonable responses to the excesses of the anti-war movement of the late 60s and early 70s, lazily blaming them on a communist boogieman was patently stupid. It only served to shut down any reasoned examination of the opposition's motives.

This is of a piece with the “Obama is a Muslim” meme we live with today. Muslim is the new brand to freak out about here in America. Muslim is the new communist. What a Muslim is will not be pinned down in the current political discourse. It has become an unfalsifiable predicate. This is because being a Muslim is simply being other than me and mine. It's those other guys, who are not on my team. Islam exists for some only as a negative idea, the negation of their tribe which is engaged in some sort of Manichean struggle for “victory,” whatever that term may mean.

In this way, lazy thinking leads to violence.

Making a monster

2010-02-05T12:05:00.003-06:00

Back in 1998, two big corporations merged. Citibank joined Travelers Insurance Group in the biggest merger of financial institutions in US history. The merger was most likely illegal. After the disastrous crash of 1929 and the coming of the Great Depression, Congress enacted a law (Glass-Steagall) forbidding banks from entering into brokerage businesses. Travelers owned Salomon Smith Barney, an investment bank and brokerage firm. So the merger brought together financial interests that had been separated by law since 1933 when Glass-Steagall was enacted.

No matter. By 1999, Glass-Steagall was repealed, and the new Citigroup was safe to bungle the economy in innovative ways. An informative timeline of these and related events can be found here.

Yesterday, in testimony before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, John Reed, who was CEO of Citibank at the time of the merger, came out in favor of reinstalling at least some of the divisions between banks and brokerages he and Sandy Weill (Travelers CEO) effectively ignored and eventually got overturned 11 years ago. It wasn't the first time Reed had made noises to that effect: last fall he wrote a brief letter to the NY Times on the topic. But Reed seems to be on something a tear this week. He granted an interview with the NY Daily News yesterday as well:

Congress’ overhaul of U.S. financial regulations should include ordering banks to hold more capital, ensuring executives’ compensation is aligned with long-term profitability and banning firms that take deposits from also engaging in equities and fixed-income trading, Reed said.

“I would compartmentalize the industry for the same reason you compartmentalize ships,” Reed said in the interview in his office on Park Avenue in New York. “If you have a leak, the leak doesn’t spread and sink the whole vessel. So generally speaking you’d have consumer banking separate from trading bonds and equity.”

It's an interesting, if too short, article. But for compression, there's nothing like this from his testimony before the Senate: “There’s no question that when we put Travelers and Citi together we created a monster.”

Reed's prepared statement to the committee is here.

Culture and cultivation

2010-01-30T17:13:00.003-06:00

Okay, Alice Waters makes me tired. She’s domineering, precious and the product of much privilege – privilege she appears incapable of unlearning. In Thomas McNamee’s Alice Waters biography she is quoted regarding the end of her marriage to the effect that she knew her ex was unhappy and felt she made all the big decisions in their lives without his input, but she’d always thought they could work it out. (My paraphrase is probably harsher than her actual words, but the point struck me pretty hard.)

Yet I’m not ready to toss out the Waters' Edible Schoolyard idea like Caitlin Flanagan. And I can not equate gardening with field hand labor, as Flanagan does in her Atlantic article. There is much to learn from the experience of gardening, and it doesn’t necessarily conflict with educational achievements in math and language arts. Flanagan’s piece doesn’t mention that Waters is a trained Montessori teacher when she writes of “her decision in the 1990s to expand her horizons into the field of public-school education.” Regardless of one’s estimation of the Montessori method – I’m agnostic on the subject – Waters is not a dilettante in educational matters.

I know about Waters’ Montessori training because, like Flanagan, I read McNamee’s biography. Presumably Flanagan does, too. And yet she writes that Waters is “someone whose brilliant cookery and laudable goals may not be the best qualifications for designing academic curricula for the public schools.” Cherry pick facts much?

Much of Flanagan’s point revolves around the issue of class. After introducing us to a farm worker’s son who goes to school only to pick lettuce in the hot sun, she writes : “[Waters’] goal is that children might become ‘eco-gastronomes’ and discover ‘how food grows’—a lesson, if ever there was one, that our farm worker’s son might have learned at his father’s knee—leaving the Emerson and Euclid to the professionals over at the schoolhouse." That the farm worker’s son has knowledge on the topic is an interesting point to my mind, and not the least because his knowledge empowers him to own and teach the lesson. He is one sort of expert in the field of study. Leaving geometry and American Transcendentalism to others in favor of lettuce-picking, however, is surely not at issue because there is a garden in the schoolyard. The two are in no way incompatible.

I do not advocate accepting low academic achievement while teaching gardening in schools. That would be just plain stupid. But how much time do the children spend gardening in the project? Ninety minutes a week, according to Flanagan. And then they work in academic classrooms on related projects, which Flanagan believes interferes with mastering the basics of math, science and language arts. I don’t know if this is so, but if it is, it must be improved. Checking the Edible Schoolyard Web site showed me a couple of sample middle school math problems related to the garden and cooking: solving for x and y in a problem that asks the student to double a recipe, and building a model of a garden structure that has these interrelated polygons in these proportions. I’d be interested to see how they stack up against lessons in other 7th and 8th grade math curricula. If they are not up to snuff, then they should be improved. That they refer to the general topic of gardening and food is not itself reason to reject them, however.

I participated in establishing a community garden last year, and the community part of the enterprise amazed me. People who otherwise would never have met collaborated with one another. An artist became the friend of a plumber and a county commissioner. A Glen Beck fan worked along side Obama voters. A Church of the Nazarene preacher assisted non-believers and even a few Hindus make raised beds and plant vegetables. An agricultural science professor and a photographer spread mulch and composted manure.

All these diverse individuals came together because they were inspired by a common project. In one sense any common project – fire house, art gallery, or public restroom – would have done the trick. But that the task involved raising food added meaning to the work beyond a simple common purpose.

Food is important.

Beyond providing mere fuel, food is a part of the external world which has been selected according to custom and tradition, purified by fire and taken into our bodies. What we eat is subject to a symbolic, even spiritual dimension. Not for nothing do Christians profess communion though the symbolic act of eating and drinking. Not for nothing is Passover observed with a meal. Not for nothing is Ramadan a time of fasting. Not for nothing are there dietary laws associated with many great religions.

Alice Waters can be irritatingly foodie-righteous. Anthony Bourdain once compared her to the Khmer Rouge because of her intractability. But I believe she has a point when she asserts out that many of us have lost a meaningful sense of belonging to the earth because of the ways we approach food: industrialized, anonymous, processed beyond recognition. In this she is not alone. We are witnessing a cultural shift in America with respect to food and our relation to it. Alice Waters is only part of the change we are experiencing. Michael Pollan’s books on the subject echo and elaborate on many of her ideas. The connection between processed food and obesity has been researched and documented in physical anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s excellent book “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human.” Michelle Obama’s White House Food Initiative is also part of our changing system of beliefs on the topic.

What I have called a cultural shift Flanagan terms “Food Hysteria.” I assume the difference boils down to duration as much as anything. If my cultural shift jumps the shark next year, it’s Flanagan’s “Hysteria.” It is entirely likely that I am wrong and that I'm merely a faddist, but I am glad we built our community garden. And I’d like to see an edible schoolyard in my little town.

Connecting the dots; counting the beans

2009-11-06T21:42:00.002-06:00

One of the ugly things that precipitated the current financial mess involved large financial institutions holding assets that turned out to be a lot less valuable than they wanted them to be when they had to state what stuff they held was worth against what they were obliged to pay out. Specifically big finance found itself holding a lot of paper last year that should by rights be worth billions, but turned out to be illiquid in the skeptical market that followed the credit meltdown. So a bank with a buttload of collateralized mortgage obligations in its portfolio that they valued at a buttload of bucks had to let the world know every once and a while that their buttloads were basically half assed. Or worse. This made them less able to borrow money themselves and so they began to contract. Stating the market value of their holdings was integral to the current meltdown because a lot of their holdings were considerably less valuable than they'd thought. But the rules said they had to tell the truth.

I've blogged about this before -- over a year ago, in fact -- but some bad ideas just won't go away. Now the money boys want to put the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the folks charged with setting standards for honesty in accounting, under an oversight committee that will have leeway in calling for honesty in assessing the value of "distressed" holding during times of extraordinary financial conditions. There's to be normal honesty and another -- abnormal -- sort of honesty, when conditions mandate.

Last night at a gallery in Dallas, I spoke with a woman who, informed that the painting we were admiring was on sale for $95,000, asked why it cost so much. My answer was that was what the market would bear. It is worth what can reasonably be expected, given prior sales and the condition of the market so far as the artist and his dealer can assess it. Under those conditions, the painting was offered at that price.

Will it sell? Hell, I don't know. I own a six-year-old car. It is available for a price. If I set the price too high, it won't sell. Price it low enough, however, and I make a sale. Will that painting sell? It will if $95K is the right price.

The same is true for a CMO. Its value is what you can sell it for. A financial institution with illiquid assets on its books can not arbitrarily assess the value of its holdings apart from what they will sell for. What does it cost to buy it? Well, that's what it is worth. This is what is called mark-to-market accounting.

And yet it would appear there are arguments for another valuation system -- one based on the wishful thinking of bankers, not their much loved market. There is a move underfoot to move FASB into another realm, a realm devoted to loosening standards of valuation when "systemic risk" is abroad in the land and children are routinely devoured by wild things. The story is discussed here.

Meanwhile, check this:

(Image from Ritholtz)

The people of our nation are not working. This is because of a financial crisis. The crisis was caused by inadequately comprehending the values of assorted financial instruments and consequent recklessness in trading them.

Two thirds of all the economic activity in America is consumer spending. Jobless folks are way less likely to spend than their employed counterparts. And even employed folks who fear unemployment are less likely to buy stuff.

Loosen accounting rules? Sure. That's a great idea.

Dallas gallery hopping

2009-10-16T21:47:00.003-05:00

I prowled the scene this afternoon. Here's what I saw and thought.

At Barry Whistler Gallery, Lawrence Lee is still up and shining with some of the most elegant lines I've gazed upon since I first got acquainted with Fragonard's tree drawings back in the days of Bush I. Lee mines old racist depictions of African Americans and his supple imagination to produce some truly witty narrative-based graphite and ink and tea and who knows what drawings of crazy-assed tall tales that probably make sense only to him. So why tell the stories? Because they look great. And there's always that astonishing line of his.

The image above is from Lee's show at the now-defunct Clementine Gallery in Chelsea a couple of years ago. He's getting better.

Road Agent may or may not be defunct also. It still has the "Installation in Progress" sign on the door from last month. As I understand it, gallery owner Christina Rees has accepted a position as director at TCU's off-campus exhibition space over in Fort Worth.

Fort Worth 1, Dallas 0.

Dunn and Brown is offering Dale Chihuly glass stuff to discerning folks in the Metroplex. Why? I don't know. Maybe the bills are coming due. Still they had a kickass small group show in their "project" space with works by Trenton Hancock (whom I love and not just because he once speculated that everybody's soul looks like a pre-teen Caucasian girl), Jeff Elrod, Erick Swinson, Vernon Fisher, etc.

Swinson's savagely trompe l'oeil sculptures of a pre-hominid creature and a stag shaking off the bleeding"velvet" from its new antlers take the Halloween prize for amazingness and craft.

Down in the Design district, Conduit offered Michael Tole and Joe Mancuso. Too many flowers on one picture plane (yes, that's the point) and painstaking renderings of Chinese decor. Cool, but why? I can't say. Somebody tell me.

I tried to see the new stuff by Dornith Doherty at Holly Johnson, but the place was temporarily shut when I dropped by. Should have called first, I guess.

Over at Marty Walker, I caught a sneak peek of William Lamson's new work, and it was a pleasure. Building on his videos from last year, he set up several ad hoc machines designed to use wind and waves to make drawings during his recent tour of South America. The Chilean coast wave works were delicate and appropriately atmospheric. Others were bolder and more aggressively "expressionistic." Whatever that might mean when a kite is doing the expressing.

Above: William Lamson, Kite Drawing Jan. 31, 2009. 740-915 PM. Colonia Valdense, Uruguay.

The Goss Michael Foundation offered a small Mark Quinn survey. He's the dude who cast his own head in his own blood. If he makes it, he means it. Got it?

Quinn's Mother and Child (Alison and Parys), 2008, a marble sculpture of a nude woman and her baby, was an extraordinary thing to behold. Handsome and at peace with her body, Alison was born without arms and with improperly formed legs. Gallery literature quotes him as saying "She's very beautiful, she just looks different."

He's right.

A food show

2009-10-04T23:05:00.003-05:00

My piece is up and running at Project Gallery in Wichita, and I'm quite satisfied with it. Here's a quick, down-and-dirty edit of some installation shots.

The opening was Friday night. Saturday, the gallery organized a potluck dinner. Everybody brought something to share. My wife and I brought some homemade, locally sourced food: home cured bacon, home cured pastrami, a salad of purple hull peas we grew in the community garden, some home canned okra pickles, and some home canned pickled watermelon rind.

I fried the bacon for about the first half hour of the event, feeling a little bit like Rirkrit Tiravanija, but sillier and more bacon-y.

It was a lovely weekend.

Cow Hill tonight

2009-09-13T23:54:00.005-05:00

(Image from Keri Oldham's Web site)

I'm just back in from the front porch, the coyotes are howling out on the prairie and the street out front is damp. It shines under the lamps.

Last night we attended an opening for Peter Barrickman and Keri Oldham at Centraltrak in Dallas. Keri used to be a gallery manager at the now defunct And/Or Gallery. I reviewed a show they had last spring. Keri's watercolors are endearingly creepy, a blend of fashion illustration and automatic drawing where somatotype and psyche meet on an uncomfortable picture plane.

Barrickman's work is all over the map, but the fractured and squashed pictorial space of a landscape and idiosyncratic expression would seem to be his interest. Not surprisingly, collage enters into the mix often. Collage can do that to space.

At present, I'm imagining a review of Amy Blakemore's show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The magazine's deadline is Tuesday, and it's not yet written. Tonight I'm thinking of remembering the times I was disabused of comforting, but false, notions of how the world is. Amy's pictures are like that. Hard as stone and sweetly, achingly melancholy. Here's a beautiful picture. You loved him. He's dead. But still you love him. Let this picture's beauty comfort your loss. It's not love, but beauty is at least something.

Houston trip -- two kinds of strangeness

2009-08-31T18:20:00.009-05:00

My wife and drove to Houston last weekend to see the Amy Blakemore show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and to spend a little time away from this tiny town.

Blakemore's photos are powerful evocations of disillusionment and fading memories. Some of them are evocative of the emotional content in James Joyce's short story "Araby" in their sense of melancholy epiphany: "I thought it would be better, more than this..." Other times, her blurred and granular exposures suggest tilt shift digital photo processing. Always they are strange and haunting.

(Images via Inman Gallery)

Before we left for home this morning, we visited a Salvation Army thrift store on Washington Ave. in Houston because of an article I'd read in the NY Times about some works said to be by Salvador Dali that are up for sale there. Opinions vary concerning their authenticity, naturally, but I've seen them in situ. The drawing, sculpture, and prints are indeed on display in a glass case in the thrift store.

I took some pictures of the display, and my wife got a real bargain on a light sweater and some tops.

Ted Kennedy

2009-08-28T01:35:00.005-05:00

Here's a bit from an admittedly liberal blog. When he attended the funeral of murdered Israeli PM Rabin, Ted Kennedy quietly placed earth from the graves of his brothers on the grave of the slain peacemaker. His brothers were known to us all as political figures which we associated with certain ideals, but he knew them as his brothers. Blood kin. The dirt was not just dirt. It meant something, if only privately

Ted Kennedy's sins and transgressions were very public. His position of privilege got him out of some really bad situations that none of us could have hoped to escape, and these situations were largely of his own making. These facts offend the small d democrats of America. We hate class privilege. It isn't right. Well it isn't.

And yet he did accomplish some really good things in his many years in the senate. At least I think much of what he did was good. He was a major influence on the laws of our country, shaping them in ways that served to uplift and make better the lives of people who were decidedly not privileged. Here's some of what he did: Title IX (gender equality in college athletics), the ADA, race-blind immigration legislation, bilingual education, Meals on Wheels, the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects (in med/sci experiments), stopping military aid to the fascist Pinochet regime in Chile, education for children with disabilities, expanding the civil rights act to protect persons with disabilities, the Civil Rights for Institutionalized Persons Act, the Refugee Act of 1980 (asylum for persecuted persons), Employment Opportunities for Disabled Americans Act, the National Military Child Act, Civil Rights Act of 1991, Americorps, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, voted no on war with Iraq (one of 23 senators who did so).

Most of what he accomplished, he accomplished after that evil night at Chappaquiddick when Mary Jo Kopechne died. It is as though he had begun as the callow, drunken libertine his enemies call him -- a selfish irresponsible glutton who was rich enough and Kennedy enough to buy his way out of anything with money and social connections. But then something else emerged, something with a will and a capacity to make our nation better. In working to make America better, I think, he may have also worked to make himself better.

I am fully aware that some amongst us do not share my belief that he made our country better, and that is what it is. We will certainly disagree about many other things. It was always so. But the Americorps program has had a very real and beneficial effect on some of the little towns that dot this run-down portion of NE Texas. I've seen it. And allowing people from India and China and Jordan and Mexico to immigrate legally to the US the same as people from Western Europe has truly benefited this nation. Look what's happened to our national cuisine alone. I mean jeez!

Ted Kennedy did that for us. And he came to embody a certain attitude -- love it or hate it or whatever -- which may have died with him. He stood for something. He meant something.

Add to that the fact that he was a Kennedy. He was the son of Joe Kennedy, ambassador and alleged bootlegger millionaire. He was brother to Joe, Jr who died on an Air Corps mission in WWII, and brother to Jack who skippered PT 109 and survived to become a senator and later President of a Camelot White House before his murder. He was brother to Robert, murdered on the night of his triumphal victory in the 1968 California primary -- that terrible year of political murders. He was their blood kin, of their generation. My parents' generation.

And it passed with him.

I recall the November day in 1963 when John Kennedy as killed. We lived in a Dallas suburb at the time. I remember my mother sobbing on her bed. I remember not knowing what to do because I was still just a boy. And now the question arises. Why did she cry? She didn't know him. He was unrelated to her. He was a stranger. He was a glamorous, powerful man with a glamorous wife who lived a life so disconnected from the suburban reality of my mother's existence that they may as well have been separated by an ocean. But she sobbed that November afternoon for what had happened to him. And for what had happened to us. He meant something to us.

I once wrote a review of a show of Warhol's Jackie paintings which was presented in the building Lee Harvey Oswald used for his sniper's perch that awful day. My editor cut a line I'd written about our all being widowed after the killing of our President. But it was the memory of my mother sobbing that led me to write it. How can you explain that to an editor?

When Jackie died years later my mother bought a ticket to Europe. She had to get away even though she was retired and not flush with disposable cash. "That woman was too young to die" she explained. Jackie meant something. True or false, she meant something.

Ted wasn't John. Everybody knows that. He wasn't Bobby either. But he was ours. He was a Kennedy. And he was the last of them.

Hardiness zones and climate change

2009-08-20T17:33:00.003-05:00

The USDA is reportedly redrawing its plant hardiness zone map this year. Last time the map was updated was in 1990, although the National Arboretum Web site does indicate that their map was revised in 2001. The map above is part of an update I found on the National Arbor Day Foundation site. Areas in pink represent territory which had shifted one zone warmer between 1990 and 2006.

I'm making a stencil to plaster the map on a gallery wall to accompany my Twittervore video.

Twittervore

2009-08-13T20:48:00.003-05:00

This is the first minute or so of the Twitter-based video I'm working on. As noted earlier, the pictures were harvested from PingWire which presents images hosted by three sites serving tweeters. I pulled a couple thousand pictures of cooking, eating, and sometimes growing food from the constant image stream over the course of a few weeks in July.

The soundtrack was generated by an iPhone app called Bloom, which was designed by ambient sound guru Brian Eno and programmer and musician Peter Chilvers. The app costs four bucks, but that's considerably less than I'd have to pay Eno for his services.

I jacked the iPhone into a laptop running Audacity and recorded about 22 minutes of digitally generated ambient drones, gongs and chimes, which I next imported into video editing software along with the pictures. Aside from editing out some noise and reorienting a few sideways pictures, the pictures and sound are as they were when I got them. The video presents what the Internet and my iPhone churned out while I was paying attention.

I'm starting to really get off on the whole mashup of found image/found sound and future-cheesy technology. Maybe I should run it on a stack of Commodore monitors.

Archiving stuff

2009-08-09T14:34:00.003-05:00

I've spent some time this afternoon puttering about in Google Docs to see if it can be a useful cloud computing tool. So far, I've uploaded over a dozen art reviews with the intent of sharing them with associates and interested parties. Google made this link to one of them.

Here's another one. And a third.

I'm a lousy archivist of my own work, so I'm hoping this tool proves worthwhile. Now if I could only find the rest of my reviews.

Looming destruction

2009-08-01T14:05:00.003-05:00

My friend Josie directed me to this video:

She saw a longer version of it last month at the Hirshorn, where the scale of the projection and the audio of the ship crushing through the ice added much to the experience. Even at this diminished scale, the imagery is powerful.

Kentridge in Fort Worth

2009-07-26T00:12:00.004-05:00

My wife and I paid a visit to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth today. We drove to Cow Town to see the William Kentridge show, and holy mother of charcoal, the man is much better than I thought he was. I already knew he was remarkable, but the FW show is a revelation. Here's a version of a film that's in the show:

The title is Journey to the Moon. It may be in the exhibit, but my recollection is that this is not the same film. A room with multiple projected videos offers a variety of related pieces, many of which are titled Fragments for Georges Méliès. Méliès was the film pioneer who created Le Voyage dans la Lune in 1902 -- a landmark in early cinematography and filmic story telling. Coming a century later than Méliès, Kentridge's videos locate the 21st century artist in the history of movie making and conflate drawing, performing and filming. Not to mention conflating artist with model, director with performer, and process with content.

I took some notes today, but I need another shot at it all before I can review it. Two and a half hours in the museum wasn't enough. That's one of the troubles with video. Duration is like that -- it just takes time to haul it all in. We'll hit it again tomorrow after we check out of the motel.

More raw footage

2009-07-19T21:07:00.005-05:00

PingWire is a live feed of all images posted to one of three sites that host pictures for Twitter users. This means that anything of interest to tweeters for any reason (love, hate, desire, fear, you name it) appears on the site once it has gone through the uploading and publishing process. PingWire offers a glimpse into the collective mind of a significant subset of the Internet -- a visual guide to the unconscious. Like the Internet is dreaming.

Porn is there, of course. So are injuries, tourist destinations, and boyfriends. Last week there were scores of pictures sighted down the picture takers' supine legs at assorted beaches.

It turns out that a sizeable portion of the pictures tweeters share with the world involve food -- eating, cooking, and sometimes growing food. Some photos document a pretty child eating an ice cream cone. Some show empty plates. Others offer scrumptious desserts or elaborate platters of sushi.

Their motives vary widely. Some images appear because a besotted mother wants to show us her son's reaction to (e.g.) a crate of strawberries. Some are offered by disgusted patrons repulsed by the fare at a sub-standard diner. Some are snarky. Some celebrate pleasures.

Many are badly composed and unfocused. Others are professionally exposed ads for restaurants.

Last week I saved as many food and eating pictures as I could during a few hours spread out over four days. I harvested about 1300 pictures during that time. Today, I imported them into a video that turned out to be a little longer than 11 minutes at 1/2 second per image. There is no sound so far, and I'm probably going to rework it considerably, but even the raw footage is interesting to me.

At least it is tonight.

Cronkite

2009-07-17T22:10:00.002-05:00

He's dead.

"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
-- LBJ

Dear Senators Sessions, Coburn, Graham, Hatch and Cornyn

2009-07-15T11:14:00.004-05:00

Being. White. Is. Not. Neutral.

Sincerely,

Mike

Raw video

2009-07-09T21:47:00.005-05:00

I'm starting to think about food distribution for a show I'm going to participate in this fall. This video clip was shot a couple of days ago in the parking lot of a local supermarket. Sketchy quality video on an iPhone and didactic right now, I guess. But still...

The clip above is one of two I shot on the Fourth -- iPhone video again. It's less didactic than the first one, but food-related nonetheless. Barbecue might the be only valid reason to dump carbon into the atmosphere.

This post might mean my blog is becoming a sketchbook, but I can't yet tell.

Fog and death

2009-07-06T11:48:00.003-05:00

Robert McNamara is dead. I hated him once. While he was Secretary of Defense, 16,000 American servicemen and women died in a terrible, purposeless war. Another 42,000 Americans would die before it was all over. Somebody knows how many Vietnamese people died in that war, but I don't.

John Kennedy called him the smartest man he ever met. A master of systems analysis, McNamara crunched numbers both from the Pentagon's organization and from the bloody data he got from Southeast Asia to figure the smartest solutions to problems posed by both. I'm reminded of the finance systems modelers whose far-too-smart "products" precipitated the current recession. Apparently he came to agree with this assessment:

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend,” Mr. McNamara concluded. “Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

If you haven't seen the documentary The Fog of War, see it soon. Here's an excerpt:

From oxymoron to hypermoron

2009-06-28T16:39:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure what to do with a twitter account. Yesterday I tweeted: "Harvesting arugula seeds. Gonna make everyone I know an elitist when I hand them out."

That small joke came to mind this afternoon when I read Randy Kennedy's piece on Dan Graham in the NY Times because it offered this nugget:

The photographer and art historian Jeff Wall has written that while many other conceptual artists “abjured, apparently for good, any involvement with the world” outside of their methodologies, Mr. Graham’s aim has always been “to remain involved with the wider world as a subject and occasion for art, but to structure that involvement in the rigorously self-reflexive terms” opened up by conceptualism.
Stating it more simply, Philippe Vergne, the director of the Dia Art Foundation, calls Mr. Graham’s work “elitism for everyone.”

(Image: Two Adjacent Pavilions, 1978-1981 via Artland)

Corporate profits and truth telling

2009-06-28T13:56:00.004-05:00

Boing Boing contributor Cory Doctorow posted yesterday that the ways US companies choose to express their earnings has hidden an alarming decline in real profitability over the past 43 years. The source is the Deloitte Center for the Edge (via Jon Taplin's blog). A telling chart from the Deloitte report is reproduced above.

The Deloitte report is long on technical details about trends in worker productivity, mergers and acquisitions, rates of corporate taxation, and other macro trends in the US economy, but Taplin's point is about the differences between profitability considered as a return on assets (ROA) and profitability expressed as a return on equity (ROE). Quoting Investopedia, Taplin describes ROE as the classic Wall Street measure of profitability. Basically, it's the ratio of net income to shareholders equity:

Let's calculate ROE for the automotive giant General Motors for 2003. To get the necessary data, go to the GM's Investor Information website and look for the 2003 Annual Report. You'll see on GM's 2003 Income Statement that its net income totaled $3.822 billion. On GM's 2003 Balance Sheet, you'll find total stockholder equity for 2003 was $25.268bn and in 2002 it was $6.814bn.

To calculate ROE, average shareholders' equity for 2003 and 2002 ($25.268bn + $6.814bn / 2 = $16.041 bn), and divide net income for 2003 ($3.822bn) by that average. You will arrive at a return on equity of 0.23, or 23%. This tells us that in 2003 GM generated a 23% profit on every dollar invested by shareholders.

Many professional investors look for a ROE of at least 15%. So, by that standard alone, GM managements' ability to squeeze profits from shareholders' money appears rather impressive.

ROA, on the other hand is the ratio of net profits to all the assets the company owns -- factories, machinery, office furniture, money in the bank, etc.

Now, let's turn to return on assets, which, offering a different take on management's effectiveness, reveals how much profit a company earns for every dollar of its assets. Assets include things like cash in the bank, accounts receivable, property, equipment, inventory and furniture. ROA is calculated like this:
Return on Assets = (Annual Net Income/Total Assets)
Let's look at GM again. You already know that it earned $3.822bn in 2003, and you can find total assets on the balance sheet. In 2003, GM's total assets amounted to $448.507bn. GM's net income divided by total assets gives a return on assets of 0.0085, or 0.85%. This tells us that in 2003 GM earned less than 1% profit on the resources it owned.

This is an extremely low number. In other words, GM's ROA tells a very different story about the company's performance than its ROE. Few professional money managers will consider stocks with an ROA of less than 5%.

(Block quotes from Investopedia.)

The difference is debt. In GM's case, large debt obligations reduced the equity value of the company and so made the profit numbers look quite good when expressed as a percentage of equity.

The chart above is an examination of all US companies' profitability expressed as a percentage of assets over the past 43 years, and it's a horrible picture indeed. Talk about a crisis in capitalism.

We all know he's ridiculous

2009-06-21T23:48:00.003-05:00

But just how ridiculous is he? Consider this a challenge. I know you all can do better than I did.

Swap meet

2009-06-20T16:14:00.003-05:00

Swap meet today. I was selling cabbage and onions with two friends.

Tehran art, Tehran courage

2009-06-15T21:53:00.004-05:00

At least one pro-democracy activist in Tehran is putting up some very witty pictures around the city during the current civil unrest (to put a polite face on thuggish government agents beating students in the streets). The one above with the curious face card beastie obscuring Ahmadinejad's face on a political poster is typical. More pictures here. (via Andrew Sullivan)

Some of the protesters are very brave, particularly the Twitter posters who worked the past few days under the collective name of persiankiwi. I've been following them off and on for two days as they tell of danger and violence. A few of their tweets from today:

Militia still attacking people in sidestreets but main roads are peaceful marchers.

reliable soure from Ahvaz. Situation there is bad - violent clashes in streets.

confirmed - there is shooting in Azadi sq. protesters wounded and shot, no numbers yet, still hearing gunfire.

people are running in streets outside. There is panic in streets.people going ino houses to hide.

Baseej shooting in Azadi sq - army standing by and watching for now.

streets very dangerous now. groups of militia on motorbikes searching for protesters.

3 ppl from our group still not returned from march. no mobile contact. last phone contact 2 hours ago.

confirmed - khamenaie website hacked - the dictator of iran.

we honour and thank the people of Iran and especially the hackers. Baseej have guns we have brains.

tonight Kamenei will fight hard - he knows he is close to finish.

cnfirmed - karbaschi and karoubi heading to Tajreesh sq tonight at 11pm - now after 10pm

Tajreesh is close to Jamaran where Khamenei live. maybe marching to his house. unconfirmed

we are going offline to get a phone free for calling out. we are also moving location - too long here - is dangerous.

were attacked in streets by mob on motorbikes with batons - firing guns into air - streetfires all over town - roads closed;

3 of our group missing from afternoon - we have no news from them;

confirmed - homeowners in Rasht are giving refuge to people running from Baseej attacks.

Gohardasht in Karaj - confirmed - people in street batles with militia -

most activity is in north - Gheytarieh, Pasdaran, Gholhak and Niavaran still busy and noisy -

more than 100 students missing from Tehran Uni dorms - reports of several dead from last night

thanks to all people following us and trusting us. we are trying to give you correct info -

it is very hard here - we are under big pressure and risk - we are being tracked on twitter -

we are all tired - no sleep for 3 days - one of us is injured from baton - waiting for doctor

we only want freedom - we are peaceful - we have no life no future in IRI without freedom -

one of us is injured and we have doctor - we cannot go to hospital now as plainclothes are at all hospitals

we are routed thru mirror proxies - but service is unreliable - keeps cuting out - have to switch off lights now

our street is quiet now - we cannot move tonight but must move asap when dawn starts

All normal proxys out - all normal ISP's out in Tehran

reliable source - many arrested taken to Evin in past 24hrs - evin under heavy protectionwe must log off - will update asap - sources pls keep info coming - we thank u and will not print your id's - u know who u are

The dumb picture I had up in my profile changed to a green rectangle tonight. That's the color of the opposition, the color of that swatch covering Ahmadinejad in the pictur at the top.

Greening Dallas?

2009-06-14T22:58:00.006-05:00

Dallas used to look like the future. Parts of it did, anyway. Logan's Run (released in 1976) was filmed there (also in Fort Worth, Houston, a sewage treatment plant in El Segundo, CA, and other locations). The 1980 PBS TV movie based on Ursula K. Leguin's excellent novel The Lathe of Heaven was shot largely in Dallas, as well. Something about Dallas' sun-baked, concrete public spaces and impersonal, corporatist architecture appealed to filmmakers of the time when it came to imagining, say, the 23rd century. This likely says a lot more about the filmmakers and their audiences than it says about the 23rd century.

It certainly says a lot about Dallas, where the future used to go to get strange.

Another future Dallas was revealed near the end of last month when the winners of the Re:Vision Dallas architecture/urban design competition were announced. The contest invited architects and collaborators in the fields of urban farming, sustainable land use, etc. to create a city block that:

encourage[s] and value[s] relationships, while fostering respect for nature and our neighbors, privacy and resources, economy and consumption.

One of the three winning designs came from the San Francisco-based firm of David Baker and Partners. It looks like this:

The image is via the architect's Web site, where several others are available, as are some words which expand on the images:

Rather than simply placing a single building in the middle of a neglected space, the design team's conceptual reach extends beyond the property line into the larger city. The team proposes creating intersecting greenways pieced together from open space and disused lots to set up a framework for future development and to connect existing but disparate public amenities, such as the Farmer's Market and the Trinity River.

At the center of the greenways’ "X", Lone Star Square will function as the public heart of the new food/agriculture district, with orchards, garden plots, and historical elements from the city's past. Running through the system of greenways are a series of water features that filter harvested rainwater and convey it in a stream to the agricultural fields to be used for irrigation.

It's good that people in Dallas and elsewhere are looking into future green buildings and alternatives to the dystopic present in which a paucity of shops and amenities, multiple days of unsafe air quality, and oppressive summer heat make the urban experience just plain bad. Like the impossibly strange Dragonfly Building proposed for New York, the project arises from a good heart and good intentions, even if it is a latter day Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And I'm most hopeful for the idea of harvesting rainwater, even though we're now at the beginning of the dry season in this part of Texas, and some parts of the state to our south are well into a drought. But somehow the whole bigass shebang strikes me as just so very Dallas in its scale and structure and attitude. Consultants and experts and government workers decide solutions to problems that earlier consultants and experts and government workers inadvertently created via their solutions to earlier problems.

Meanwhile, up in Milwaukee, a guy named Will Allen -- who last winter was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant -- has worked patiently and persistently to create an urban farm in a blighted neighborhood. He's featured in the trailer below.

(The trailer is from the film Fresh, the Movie, which I have not seen) What I find admirable and encouraging about his project is that it is not the work of designers, but of a man and his compadres who want to make a place to live and live well. There is a connectedness both to a community and to an idea of living with the means of feeding ourselves that really good designers sometimes miss and Dallas implementers of designs have consistently missed.

I mean he's the author of the sentence "And believe in what the worms will do for you."

A couple of thefts

2009-06-08T23:30:00.006-05:00

The plants out at our community garden are starting to produce. Last night, I considered the three almost-ripe tomatoes in my patch and decided to let them ripen one more night before I picked them.

This morning they were gone. Somebody stole them from my garden, which is a crime in the State of Texas, punishable by a fine up to $250. Or so I'm told. You don't steal a man's tomatoes. It's just not right.

Tonight, I saw this piece in the New York Times about the new film Food, Inc. by Robert Kenner. I've not seen it, but reportedly it's an extended discussion of the factory-farm, processed-food institutions we Americans have come to accept as normal even though they represent a curious capital/government "partnership" that is anything but.

It's a hugely complex issue, to be sure, and a movie trailer can only deliver sound bites at best. But the folks behind Food, Inc. do seem to have touched a nerve with some of their targets. Monsanto, for example, has added this to its Web site. The page represents an extended counter-ad to address the issues the film raises from the Big Ag point of view. Included is a nifty Flash quiz about Monsanto's practices and policies. I aced it. (Hint: all you have to do is choose the answer that makes the company look the best.)

Not having seen the film, I can't judge the merits of either side of the case. And yet this settled me back some: item number four on the Monsanto rebuttal quiz reads:

Every year Monsanto sues or threatens to sue hundreds of farmers for saving their own seed.

The statement is false, according to Monsanto. Monsanto is loath to sue anybody! When you select an answer, the company's Flash quiz offers up a small bit of elaboration:

Monsanto pursues legal action against farmers who improperly save and resell or replant our patented seed only when other efforts to resolve the issue prove unsuccessful. The first time growers purchase Monsanto seed, they sign a stewardship agreement and contract not to save and resell or replant seeds produced from the crops they grow from Monsanto seed.

On the face of it, at issue is their right to protect their intellectual property. Developing cultivars, either through hybridization or genetic engineering, is expensive, and they want to assert their rights as owners of those products. I mean if the guys buying their seeds don't like the set up, they can buy somewhere else, somebody else's seeds. They're selling seeds like Microsoft sells software, in a sense. Replanting seeds from last year's crop is theft of intellectual property, according to this line of reasoning. And that's stealing something worth far more than the three tomatoes I lost last night.

It's the word "stewardship" in their argument that rattled me. Stewardship of the land is part of the mission statement of our community garden. Stewardship connotes caring, working to make things right so you don't undermine what makes food production possible. Alongside "stewardship," words like "sustainable" and "renewable" show up in our stated intentions. I know farmers around here who are devoted stewards of the land in this sense of the word.

Monsanto uses the word in another sense. "Stewardship" in what I quoted above is a hypertext link that leads to this page:

Monsanto is committed to enhancing grower productivity and profitability as well as supporting product stewardship by bringing new seed technologies to market - patented technologies that provide licensed growers the use of new seed for one single commercial crop. This commitment requires shared responsibility between Monsanto and our licensed growers.

Features & Benefits

To take advantage of the benefits of biotech seed and preserve the technology for long-term use, growers must adopt a sound stewardship plan. Such a plan includes:

signing a Monsanto Technology Agreement

complying with all agronomic and marketing guidelines

agreeing to plant traited seed for only a single commercial crop

If you have questions about seed stewardship or become aware of growers using biotech traits in an unauthorized manner, please call [phone number redacted]. Letters to report similar unauthorized action may be sent to:
Monsanto Trait Stewardship
[address redacted]

By introducing the capitalist concept of "product stewardship" and the corporatist concept of "trait stewardship" into the discourse of food policy, Monsanto has attempted another sort of theft, an egregious theft from our language. Our garden's humble admission that we must work within what is possible in our relation to the land, to make it fruitful while admitting that we must conform to the ways of plants and rainfall and soil and blight and bugs, is miles and miles from the protection of a product. Big Ag's request that farmers inform on one another only ices the cake.

Last night somebody stole some tomatoes from me. A bigger theft is underway.

Found at the market

2009-06-01T22:08:00.003-05:00

As Laurie Anderson once sang: "All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to tell me."

Seduced

2009-05-31T00:24:00.003-05:00

Nobody is like Isabella Rossellini.

Nobody.

The "Green Porno" series of short films is extraordinary, as are the sets and costumes designed by Andy Byers.

More here.

Living in a red state can have its rewards

2009-05-31T00:04:00.004-05:00

"He cooks that crystal meth because the shine don't sell.
You know, he likes the money, and he don't mind the smell."

Anybody who can say the song he's performing goes out to the First United Crystal Methodists of Durant Oklahoma is okay in my book. Especially when he follows that with a line about a hard-on like a bois d'arc fence post.

I said it before, and I'll say it again

2009-05-26T21:52:00.003-05:00

David Brooks is stupid. Slope headed, knuckle dragging, pissant waltzing stupid. His -- cough -- opinion piece in the NY Times today exhibits the kind of corporatist elitism and disdain for the values of ordinary Americans that only a guy who lunches with Wall Street honchos would champion. Exhibit A:

Recently we were uplifted when the president informed Chrysler’s secured creditors that they had agreed to donate their ownership stake in the company to the United Auto Workers.

Did this in fact happen? Well, no, not exactly. Setting aside the elision of secured credit and any putative ownership stake (the guys who got short shrift owned Chrysler debt, not equity -- bonds, not shares), there's the issue of what the UAW gave up: 50% of its retirees' health care fund in exchange for their equity stake in the company. Nobody gave them dick. They bought what they own. With their money.

Meanwhile, guys at hedge funds like Schultze Asset Management and Stairway Capital Management, who wouldn't agree to terms reducing their take in the Chrysler meltdown, put their interests ahead of what is best for the company and for the country. One line of reasoning was that the company was worth more as scrap than they'd get from the settlement they were offered. So let tens of thousands of Americans lose their jobs and hold a Chrysler garage sale. After it's all about maximizing investor returns, right?

Bloomberg reported on May 6:

The Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders are as follows, according to the filing: Schultze Master Fund Ltd. of Purchase, New York; Arrow Distressed Securities Fund at the same Purchase address; Schultze Apex Master Fund, at the same address; Uniondale, New York-based Stairway Capital Management II L.P; Group G Partners LP, based in New York; GGCP Sequoia L.P., at the same New York address; Oppenheimer Senior Floating Rate Fund, in New York; Oppenheimer Master Loan Fund LLC, at the same New York address; and Foxhill Opportunity Master Fund LP, based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Note that one of their number identifies itself as a "distressed securities fund." They specialize in risky debt. If they bought Chrysler bonds at face value, they plain aren't doing their job. Folks like that buy stuff at a discount. If any other members of that august group paid more than 50 cents on the dollar for the debt they held, I'd be mighty surprised. And yet they refused to settle for less. (The Feds offered 28 cents on the dollar for securities trading between 27 and 28 cents on the buck at the time of the offer, according to Bloomberg, that hotbed of Socialist, Stalinist, Batshit-Maoist ideology)

But I digress. The topic is how abysmally dumb David Brooks is. Consider this from his -- erm -- column today:

These events have heralded a new era of partnership between the White House and private companies, one that calls to mind the wonderful partnership Germany formed with France and the Low Countries at the start of World War II.

And this:

During the press conference with health care executives, I don’t even think Obama meant to give away $2 trillion of their money. He was going to give away just $750 billion, but he got carried away by the Era of Responsibility. “The stakeholders behind me have promised to cut costs by nearly 2 percent a year,” the president riffed. (The executives’ lips were like dead worms stretched across mirthless smiles. Their cheeks were like hardened clumps of concrete.) “They have agreed to support the administration’s reform package.” (Coronaries, epileptic seizures all around.) “They have agreed to donate their kidneys in my office right after this ceremony.” (The executives were now flopping about the stage, like a 3-D version of the Heimlich poster.)

Har har! German aggression! Donate their kidneys! What a wag!

You know what else is like hardened lumps of concrete? Both hemispheres of David Brooks' brain. In 2004, US spending on health care totaled over 15% of GDP. Think it's gone down since then? Big Pharma is doing just fine, even without two percent of its take. This is from Paul Krugman's blog last year:

Everybody knows that the US spends much more on health care than anyone else, without getting better results. Everyone also knows that health spending has outpaced GDP growth everywhere, thanks to medical progress. What I didn’t realize was just how clearly the evidence shows that the rising trend is steepest in the US. We have the biggest increase as well as the highest level.

He was responding to data that showed health care spending's share of GDP jumping from 7% in 1970 to 15.3% in 2004. During the same period, costs in Canada rose from 7% to almost 10%. Last year, the GDP of the US was about $14 trillion; 15.3% of that comes in at $1.989 trillion. Now Big Pharma isn't the whole pie, but when it comes to health care bucks, they certainly get their share. And that share is growing like a tumor.

And yet (back to my David Brooks is stupid theme) the Times's minister of dumbassery speaks of "enhanced negotiating techniques," disembowelment, shackles, Nazism, North Korea's totalitarian state, and Cossacks. The metaphors of violence multiply and surround his (as it were) argument. Eventually they become his entire case.

Brooks can use metaphors of violent coercion. That is what he has to say on the subject of economic policy.

Hey Ho Let's go! Shoot 'em in the back now.

Nevermind the ceiling, watch out for the bottom

2009-05-24T14:24:00.002-05:00

Paul Krugman:

I think there are two big structural changes that we'd want to see. One is we need to reduce the role of the financial sector in the economy. We went from an economy in which about 4 percent of GDP came from the financial sector to an economy in which 8 percent of GDP come from the financial sector, and in which at its peak 41 percent of profits were being earned by the financial sector. And there is no reason to believe that anything productive happened as a result of all of that. These extremely highly compensated bankers were essentially just finding new ways to offload risks on to other people.
As I've written, we need a boring banking sector again. All of this high finance has turned out to be just destructive, and that's partly a matter of regulation. But in the political economy there was also a vicious circle. Because as the financial sector got increasingly bloated its political clout also grew. So, in fact, deregulation bred bloated finance, which bred more deregulation, which bred this monster that ate the world economy.

The other thing not to miss is the importance of a strong social safety net. By most accounts, most projections say that the European Union is going to have a somewhat deeper recession this year than the United States. So in terms of macromanagement, they're actually doing a poor job, and there are various reasons for that: the European Central Bank is too conservative, Europeans have been too slow to do fiscal stimulus. But the human suffering is going to be much greater on this side of the Atlantic because Europeans don't lose their health care when they lose their jobs. They don't find themselves with essentially no support once their trivial unemployment check has fallen off. We have nothing underneath. When Americans lose their jobs, they fall into the abyss. That does not happen in other advanced countries, it does not happen, I want to say, in civilized countries.

And there are people who say we should not be worrying about things like universal health care in the crisis, we need to solve the crisis. But this is exactly the time when the importance of having a decent social safety net is driven home to everybody, which makes it a very good time to actually move ahead on these other things.

A financial sector that generates 41% of all the nation's GDP, but fails to do anything productive is not a working system of finance. It is a fraud.

More here. (Via Ritholtz)

Spring storms and me

2009-05-22T23:40:00.006-05:00

About three weeks ago, we had one of those Toto-I-don't-think-we're-in Kansas-anymore spring storms that occur in this climate from time to time. My wife, our two dogs, a radio, a lamp, and I spent a good deal of the evening sitting in the hallway while the storm raged outside. We heard unusual noises. The dogs made unusual noises, as well. The power failed. Howls and moans occurred. Some of the howls came from the dogs. Some came from the storm. Some came from assorted transformers and power lines.

It was scary.

But the storm passed. And the house held together. In fact, we went to a dinner party at a friend's place later that night. We had great fun eating by candle light, even after the power came back on.

My studio was another matter. It's a building next door to my house. The power of the storm was great enough that the roofing was lifted up and the wind forced rain water through the decking, saturating the ceiling. Waterlogged, it collapsed under its own weight.

No paintings were damaged, though a few minor studies now look rather more aleatory than they did before the event. The situation may be a lesson in using weather maps as sources of imagery (as I have done in recent years). Be careful what you deal with, boy; it may be stonger than you'd anticipated.

The insurance guys say they'll cover almost all of the cost, and I plan to angle for a little more than they have so far offered.

Meanwhile, I won't be working in that room for a while.

Loaves and Fishes

2009-05-15T23:02:00.004-05:00

Let me begin by confessing that I don't know for certain how to say what I want to say right now. Still, I'll try.

We have set up a fledgling community garden here in my little town, and that has led to numerous personal interactions and nascent friendships which I'd never suspected would happen.

More than plants can grow in a garden.

I've made friends with numerous stalwarts in the local Methodist Church, for example -- men and women whose worldview is hardly congruent with my own. I've worked with a man named Bob who is a master plumber and with Jim who is a master welder (and county commissioner) and with Lamont who is a master gardener. So many skills, so many people.

Today, I met (or rather re-met) Tim, a massage therapist and psychologist, who determined that he and his wife Frances needed to participate in the project. After some confusion about which plots were still open (our record keeping needs some fine tuning), we got him situated. The other re-acquaintance today was with Ron, the pastor at the local Church of the Nazarene, who wanted a project for his youth group to work on tomorrow during their weekend famine study. Ron and his church volunteered last month for our Big Event work day when they toted bales and slogged through dirt and mulch till our garden was almost ready for planting.

Yesterday, he emailed to ask if there were chores in the garden for his church's youth group to do during their weekend fast in observance of world hunger.

Wow.

Here's what I learned from Ron: the kids in his church will not eat for 30 hours this weekend. They will work to provide food for others during that time. They will earn money from pledges for each hour they fast. The money will be sent to feed the hungry in Rwanda. He told me that his instructions to them were to learn from their hunger, to understand the relationship between the pangs and their spirits, their souls. His asceticism was heart-felt and heartening, not mean-spirited in the least, but generous and loving.

Understand your luck. Understand the suffering of others. Understand how your spirit is part of this world.

It was an interesting -- even enlightening -- discussion. I mentioned the daily fasting of the faithful during Ramadan, the significance of eating to Christian communion, the ritual of the Seder meal for Jews at Passover. All this (and more) leads me to conceive of food not as mere fuel for our bodies, but as highly charged, symbolic stuff for our souls.

We were on the same page.

We found ourselves -- for the moment, at least -- in absolute agreement. A pastor in the Church of the Nazarene and a secular intellectual nodded and said yes to one another out in a garden with nascent tomatoes and sprouting beans and squash blossoms and okra seedlings and piles of mulch. We didn't and don't agree about theology, ontology, cosmogony, cosmology, ontogeny, ontology, phylogeny, or most other -ogonies, ogenies, and -ologies out there. But when it comes to food, we have common ground. More than that, we want to see another path for understanding our connection to the earth, one in which distinctions between our souls and our bodies amount to so much confused thinking.

Much of that path is bound up in eating.

Where did those pig lips get off to?

2009-05-11T21:57:00.005-05:00

There they are! I need them for Congressman Pete (I used to be district manager for marketing at Southwestern Bell so I'm an expert on economic realities) Sessions from Dallas. The Dallas Morning News reports Pistol Pete flapping his yap today:

Sessions told The New York Times that the administration intends to “diminish employment and diminish stock prices” as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy.

And he asserted that the Obama agenda is “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.”

Precisely how a nefarious divide-and-conquer strategy will arise from staggering unemployment numbers and slumping equity values I don't know. Just why an administration with Obama's very high approval ratings would want to divide and conquer anybody I don't know either. Nor can I know the congressman's ability to divine the President's intentions to undermine capitalism, given all the gigabucks he and his have poured into our ailing financial institutions in an effort to save capitalism.

Moreover, blaming current employment numbers and stock prices on an administration which has been in power for less than four months is patently bad faith partisan posturing in a recession that's a year older than that. Below is a screen grab of a chart for the S&P 500 during the previous administration.

Note the precipitous decline at the end of 2008. That stomach-churning drop at the right begins in September, when Bushman Hank Paulson let Lehman fail. And it is most important to remember that in the several years before that fall as much as 40% of all profits reported by US corporations came from financial institutions, companies whose earnings statements we now know involved magical thinking about the valuations of the derivatives like CDOs, CMOs, and CDSs they had on their books. This made their stock valuations a fraud and unreasonably inflated the whole index. That boom in '06 and '07 was made of air. Talk about inflicting damage on the free enterprise system.

So I just visited Pistol Pete's Web site and left him a message about his utter ignorance. I doubt he'll read it, but I had to say something.

The pig lips I reserved for my blog.

Another one shuts down

2009-05-05T21:19:00.005-05:00

The latest e-missive from young Dallas artist/gallerist Paul Slocum reports that his And/Or Gallery is closing when the next show (his 23rd in a little over three years) closes. The reason given is that he's going off to New York to pursue other plans. Slocum writes: "most of the artists that I personally work with are in New York, and I've decided that I need to be in closer contact to reach my full potential."

Slocum's Web site features some serious seizure-inducing wall paper, but more than that he's very carefully documented his art and culture activities over the past few years on it. He took a painting class from me back when I taught at UT-Dallas and successfully managed to vault far beyond it after graduating (computer science, summa cum laude). No wonder his Web site offers links to (among other things) numerous Atari hacks, a project to convert 1985 Epson dot matrix printers into musical instruments, and other nerdly items like a stop motion animation made of thousands of screen captures of found homepages.

Over the years, And/Or has featured works by Tom Moody, Cory Archangel, and many other edgy, intelligent artists. The last And/Or show will feature works by Austin artist Chad Hopper.

Image via the artist's Web site, which is worth checking out, especially for the Roz Chast-meets-Kurt Schwitters pictures.

It may not be everywhere

2009-05-04T21:12:00.004-05:00

The inverted Ford logo would seem to signify almost as much as the cracked windshield.

Zombie banks

2009-05-01T16:23:00.002-05:00

Via commenter "Bob" at the Baseline Scenario blog.

Richard Patterson review

2009-04-28T16:34:00.004-05:00

My review of Richard Patterson's current survey at Dallas's Goss-Michael Foundation is online at Glasstire.

Patterson is a YBA who has relocated to Dallas where he's having a fine time romping around in ultra-American culture and making paintings and sculptures which display equal parts wit and craft.

(image via James Cohan Gallery)

Competing narratives about the recession

2009-04-27T14:42:00.005-05:00

A guest post on the Baseline Scenario blog by "StatsGuy" offers a reasoned, thoughtful and well researched take (or rather several takes) on what led to the financial collapse. The essay looks at the concept of "too big to fail" in the financial world as it relates to systemic risk, the decline of the US middle class, and irrational exuberance as causes (either necessary or sufficient) for the Big Bust. Discussing the causes of the debacle is important to deciding what to do about it, of course. And the gist here is that getting all TR on the oligarchs of Wall Street -- worthy as the cause may be -- probably should be a lower priority at present. Along the way, the essay links to numerous informative publications, including this exhaustive timeline of political decisions that led up to our current mess.

Unlike most blogs, the readers' comments at Baseline Scenario are often as good as the articles themselves. I recommend reading the whole shebang.

On a related note, William Black's 2005 book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One probably should be on my reading list.

Perhaps unrelated:

Some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen...

A second look at the garden

2009-04-23T20:12:00.019-05:00

Part I

Back at the beginning of April we had a major work party at the community garden because we were able to plug into a local civic work day called "The Big Event." We had kids from the junior master gardener program out there with us.

We had guys from fraternities helping out.

We had geezers with whiskers.

We had generous people from the town and from local churches.

An Ag Science professor showed up and broke in his brand new tractor with us.

Working together, we got a lot done. That morning we moved 130 cubic yards of donated mulch (a cubic yard is 27 cubic feet -- you do the math) and mostly filled 36 raised beds with amended soil.

Part II

Then there was the saga of the bees. My wife and I have lived with a hive of bees for about two years. They've colonized the north wall of our house. I've sporadically tried to get them removed, but the sort of expertise one needs to open a house's wall and capture a hive living inside is rare. I think I have finally found somebody to take care of the hive for me, but he's working long shifts at present and can't do the job for another week or more. I can't bring myself to kill them in this time of Colony Collapse Disorder. Whatever is happening to bees in this country, the bees in my house are definitely healthy.

So healthy that a couple of weeks ago our hive produced two small swarms. Here's a picture of one of them:

The county extension service put me in touch with a beekeeper by the name of Don who brought a hive box for one swarm and a "catch box" for the other. He left the hive with me and took the other swarm in payment. So a day or so later, I lost my bee hauling virginity when I loaded the hive onto the bed of a borrowed pickup and schlepped them out to the garden site. I waited till they'd gone to bed for the evening and stuffed a dish towel into the entrance, but it was nervous making all the same.

The next day, I hauled them again because we determined they were too close to the garden plots. Now they're about 200 feet away, which seems about the right distance. And they've settled into their new digs quite well.

I took that photo this afternoon, as well as the one below.

That's one of our bees foraging about 200 yards from the hive.

Part III

So the garden is beginning to take off. Green stuff is poking out of the soil here and there. A few things are even blooming. The bees are pollinating. I've met and worked with scores of people I wouldn't have otherwise--church folks, politicians, educators, master gardeners, anti-poverty volunteers, plumbers, farmers, and the local feed store proprietors. I've learned a lot about irrigation, mulch, soil amendments, compost, charitable donations, local government, legal matters, insurance, human relations, and bees.

Would Joseph Beuys have called what I've done art? And if he did, would he be right to do so?

Torture and found lyrics

2009-04-22T20:24:00.002-05:00

The artist is Jonathan Mann. His Web site is here. I labeled this "politics" only because some people want it to be political. It isn't. It's a matter of justice.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Outrage

2009-04-12T15:52:00.002-05:00

This video is rather long, but I think it's worth watching:

BILL MOYERS: This wound that you say has been inflicted on American life. The loss of worker's income. And security and pensions and future happened, because of the misconduct of a relatively few, very well-heeled people, in very well-decorated corporate suites, right?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right.

BILL MOYERS: It was relatively a handful of people.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: And their ideologies, which swept away regulation. So, in the example, regulation means that cheaters don't prosper. So, instead of being bad for capitalism, it's what saves capitalism. "Honest purveyors prosper" is what we want. And you need regulation and law enforcement to be able to do this. The tragedy of this crisis is it didn't need to happen at all.

BILL MOYERS: When you wake in the middle of the night, thinking about your work, what do you make of that? What do you tell yourself?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There's a saying that we took great comfort in. It's actually by the Dutch, who were fighting this impossible war for independence against what was then the most powerful nation in the world, Spain. And their motto was, "It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere."

Now, going forward, get rid of the people that have caused the problems. That's a pretty straightforward thing, as well. Why would we keep CEOs and CFOs and other senior officers, that caused the problems? That's facially nuts. That's our current system.

So stop that current system. We're hiding the losses, instead of trying to find out the real losses. Stop that, because you need good information to make good decisions, right? Follow what works instead of what's failed. Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure. That would be another nice place to start. There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though they've had a terrible start to the administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks. And by the way, the folks who are the better regulators, they paid their taxes. So, you can get them through the vetting process a lot quicker.

Taleb: one guy's prescription

2009-04-08T10:11:00.003-05:00

From yesterday's Financial Times, ten principles to limit risk:

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

I find it interesting that so many commenters on the banking mess are saying the same things about the bailout. The pollution of the political process by banks, bankers, financiers, and fellow travelers is just plain wrong.

Update: Simon Johnson discusses turnaround scenarios here. Among his observations, this one stood out for me:

To me, fixing the banks - i.e., greatly reducing their economic and political power - is essential for all our futures, irrespective of when and how the economy recovers. We cannot allow the same kind of potentially system-breaking risks to be taken again, and we cannot assume that the solutions that failed in the past (e.g., tweaking regulatory powers) will work in the future. Next time, the banks won’t just be Too Big To Fail, they’ll be Too Big To Rescue - the fiscal costs if we let this happen again would likely be huge; where is it written that the U.S. will for all time have fiscal credibility and provide the world’s leading reserve currency?

It's come to this: Too Big To Fail is Too Big To Exist.

Oligarchs III

2009-04-05T22:51:00.000-05:00

Oligarchs II

2009-04-05T21:25:00.004-05:00

Not long ago I wrote here about the oligarchy the financial industry has become, concentrating wealth and political power in the hands of a few "Masters of the Universe" whose opinions about bailouts, regulations, and the wisdom of our financial system have all but become dogma for policymakers and the rest of us. Let me add to that this bit of information: the director of the Obama Administration's National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers receive more than $6 million as a managing director of New York Based hedge fund D.E. Shaw and Co. over the past 16 month, according to Bloomberg.

Now Larry advises Barry, and Barry (being the newest decider) makes the policy. But Barry's adviser Larry got $6 extra large from a big Wall Street player quite recently.

When Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia seized up economically speaking a bit over ten years ago, word got out here in the US that a large part of their problem had to do with crony capitalism -- a distorted credit market arising from an unholy comingling of finance and governmental power. Reading news reports at the time, we were led to feel superior to such undeveloped nations. America isn't like that.

Are we?

Our garden

2009-04-02T20:07:00.017-05:00

There's a reason I've been less than prolific here on the blog lately. We're creating a public garden here in Commerce, and I've been hauling and trenching and organizing just about full time for the past week and a half. Part time before that.

Here are a few pictures of what we've accomplished so far.

The land we leased hasn't been tilled for about 40 years, so it needed some attention. First it was tilled using equipment that belongs to Cereal Crops Research, Inc., an area non-profit that's been working with farmers in this area for a couple of decades to determine which cultivars are most successful in our climate and our soil conditions. The big John Deere machine below is disking with only its central part as it passes over the heavy "Blackland gumbo" at first. The greater weight on a smaller footprint was necessary to break up the heavy soil. Later the big wings came down for further passes.

After the soil was loosened, we applied two cubic yards of composted chicken manure to the area, and that was tilled in. Next came amendments to loosen the soil further, specifically three truckloads of salvaged potting soil. This was tilled in before it could blow away.

Since this area has been in a steady drought for the past few years, we determined to develop an irrigation plan involving drip lines to conserve water. The plan involved laying PVC pipes underground to each of the 36 individual garden plots. Trenching and plumbing were completed this week.

While the digging was being done, a few of us also worked on setting the raised beds in place -- no easy task. Those suckers are heavy.

Still to do are moving amended soil into most of the raised beds and mulching the pathways around them. County government has donated about 130 cubic yards of mulch, and we expect a number of volunteers to descend on us Saturday morning in conjunction with a larger civic event scheduled for that day.

This morning the mulch pile was steaming in the cool sunlight.

Our plan is to begin signing up gardeners on Saturday. Planting will commence soon.

Populist outrage and oligarchs

2009-03-27T13:57:00.003-05:00

One reason populist outrage over the excessive bonuses at AIG and elsewhere in the financial industry doesn't miss the point is discussed in an excellent Atlantic article by Simon Johnson and James Kwak. Johnson was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund in 2007 and 2008. He's currently a professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. His experience with IMF bailouts of faltering economies gives him a perspective on the crisis in the US economy which is not shared by many of the people working to solve our problems in Washington and on Wall Street.

He sees what's happening here to have much in common with the collapse of the Malaysian economy in 1998 and other emerging market economic crises: It's a case of oligarchs manipulating the government to maintain wealth and power. However, unlike the methods of corrupt crony capitalism in emerging economies (bribery, political graft, extortion, etc.), what the US has is an ideological predisposition to follow the big players' lead in matters financial, even when they are precisely the ones who have conjured the current fubar situation.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

The argument continues by looking at who the big players in government are (and were) -- Geithner, Rubin, Snow, Paulson, Greenspan, et al. -- and how they are and were intimately connected with major financial institutions, particularly Goldman Sachs. The political/governmental decision makers are one and the same as the financial guys. Furthermore, their worldview has become just plain common sense among so many politicians and policy wonks. Thinking like a megacapitalist is just the way you think in the halls of power.

I'm reminded of Louis Althusser and his ideological state apparatus.

Meanwhile the money keeps piling up around the financial services people and their companies as more and fancier financial products are developed, making more and fancier ways to make more and (presumably) fancier dollars. (image from the Atlantic)

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

Keep in mind the capitalist rationale for having a financial sector in the first place: The bankers and brokers provide an essential service to the economy by aggregating savings and lending to business both so that goods and services can flow efficiently through the market and so that innovations and start ups can find necessary funding. For this the banks and brokerages deserve a profit (it is argued), and for this their employees and executives deserve a good wage. In recent years, however, wealth has been concentrated in the financial sector itself where it has flowed and eddied and swirled in a gyre of more wealth and (I'd argue) where it has created nothing but wealthy people. Well, according to Simon Johnson, it also created a worldview in which financiers could do no wrong and the rest of us were just too ignorant and innocent of economic realities to have anything worthwhile to say in economic policy discussions.

While it is true that the ginormous bonuses assorted AIG players received are only a tiny fraction of the many billions we taxpayers have so far poured into the company's ravenous maw, our outrage -- our populism in the face of a huge payday for the people who blew our economy to bits -- is exactly the right response. A populist pushback against the evident groupthink in Washington and on wall Street would be a healthy thing, indeed.

Elrod review

2009-03-25T20:01:00.004-05:00

My review of Jeff Elrod is online at Glasstire. His small show of post-digital abstractions is at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Image above is Portrait (2003) from the Texas Gallery Web site.

Treading financial water

2009-03-24T15:33:00.003-05:00

As a former college teacher, I have a retirement account with TIAA-CREF. One of the funds I hold in that account is CREF Stock, a broad portfolio of US and foreign stocks in a wide array of industries -- materials, manufacturing, consumer staples, financials, etc. Their 2008 financial report arrived the other day, and here's a fun fact from what they have to say about my investment:

An investment of $10,000 in this account on December 31, 1998 would be worth $9,296 at the end of the period [i.e., 12-31-08], including reinvestment of dividends and distributions.

The screen grab above is from today. It shows a 10-year decline of 2.56%.

Now that's capitalism.

One pissed dude

2009-03-24T15:16:00.002-05:00

Matt Taibbi is mad as hell. From his Rolling Stone article:

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

But the major story for him is the transfer of power to the moneyed class. The transfer of cash is only a symptom of a political system purchased wholesale by oligarchs on Wall Street. The whole article is a wonderful, infuriating rant against a regulation-free financial system set up to make money and only money and nothing else but money.

AIG has pig lips

2009-03-17T16:47:00.005-05:00

A big batch of lips goes to our national insurance company for their bonus policy. We give them money, they give it to foreign banks and to each other. They handed out bonuses to selected employees totaling $165 million AFTER getting bailed out with taxpayer money. From the New York Times:

[NY Attorney General, Andrew] Cuomo did not name the bonus recipients, but the numbers are eye-popping, given A.I.G.’s fragile state. The highest bonus was $6.4 million, and six other employees received more than $4 million, according to Mr. Cuomo. Fifteen other people received bonuses of more than $2 million, and 51 people received bonuses of $1 million to $2 million, Mr. Cuomo said. Eleven of those who received “retention” bonuses of $1 million or more are no longer working at A.I.G., including one who received $4.6 million, he said.
A.I.G., which is now 80 percent owned by the government, paid out the so-called retention payments, saying the bonuses were needed to persuade workers to remain at its financial products unit. But the payouts have caused a public furor, and the White House said on Monday that the Treasury would write new requirements about the bonus money in the next $30 billion that it provides to the insurance giant. Already, the government has given A.I.G. $170 billion.

An amazing 73 bonuses of $1 million or more went to people in the financial products unit, the outfit that ruined the company with its penchant for selling those nifty credit default swaps. And Bloomberg reports even stranger news: AIG "budgeted $57 million in “retention” pay for employees who will be dismissed."

Pig Lips!

Or maybe they'd prefer pitchforks?

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Stephen's Angry Mob Will Crush AIG

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Mark Sanford
NASA Name Contest

I should be writing a review,

2009-03-15T18:15:00.003-05:00

But I got distracted by this. AIG spilled some of the beans. Here's where our money went when we funneled it through the faltering insurance giant:

A.I.G.'s Biggest Counterparties

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Government Business & Legal american internation A.I.G.

So we gave money to AIG because evil antimatter zombie demons were going to eat our wallets otherwise. And then -- because they'd insured a lot of shit they couldn't afford to cover when the market for the shit turned to more shit -- AIG gave money to...

Banks in France, Germany, Denmark, Scotland, Canada, and possibly Pluto, which is beyond Uranus.

Isn't it swell that the Fed and AIG formed a company to deal with the tanking securities behind a buncha rotting credit default swaps? I especially like what they named it: Maiden Lane III.

Maiden! Get it?

Not yet fucked!

What are we paying for?

2009-03-13T22:10:00.004-05:00

I've made a few investments over the years. I bought a few shares in Target, for example. On the whole it's done well; though during the last few quarters, it could have been better.

Over the past year, the value of a share of Target has declined considerably, but on the whole I've realized a gain on my investment. This is not because I'm a brilliant investor. My wife told me to buy Target, and I did as I was told. Also I looked into it a little before I bought. That's called due diligence.

Now as an American taxpayer, I am an investor in a number of other companies with wildly divergent business models. One of them is AIG. Now I didn't want to buy shares in AIG. I didn't research their business plan, their cash flow, or their prospects and decide to pick up a part of their business for my portfolio. All that was done on my behalf by the gubment last fall when Hank Paulson bailed the bastards out because not doing so would have been unthinkable in the face of the systemic risk posed by AIG's failure.

You do what is needed. You do what you must do. Because you're a mensch. Because you are an American.

But what did we buy when we bought into AIG's business? Well we bought a lot of things, naturally, and one of the things we bought was a shitload of credit default swaps -- obligations to make whole people who had taken on risks in other financial market instruments that had the possibility of turning sour. Things like collateralized debt obligations, mortgage backed securities, and plain old corporate bonds.

So far, I and all of my fellow taxpayers are into AIG to the tune of of $165 BILLION. We, the people, OWN its puckered ass. At close today, it was valued as a whole at $1.35 billion. This is not a winning investment by any standard. We spent $165 billion to get a portion of $1.35 billion in equity? This is how the system works?

And so as investment folks we should by rights get a glimpse at what is being done with our bucks. We're the capitalists now, right?

Not so fast, children. We bailed out an insurance company! That means they have obligations to others. The money we "invested" in AIG went elsewhere! From the NY Times:

Nevertheless, Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G., explained to investors last week that “the vast majority” of taxpayer funds “have passed through A.I.G. to other financial institutions” as the company unwound deals with its customers.

On Wall Street, those customers are known as “counterparties,” and Mr. Liddy wouldn’t provide details on who the counterparties were or how much they received. But a person briefed on the deals said A.I.G.’s former customers include Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and two large French banks, Société Générale and Calyon.

We spent many billions to do what? We spent billions to make whole the likes of Société Générale, and make sure they not suffer the pain of investing in mortgage securities based on non performing buyers.

Is this a great country or what?

And we don't get to know where the money goes.

Because of the way A.I.G. wrote its swaps, and because the company had a double-A credit rating at the time, it did not have to put up collateral to assure its customers that it would be able to pay on the insurance if necessary. Collateral would be required only if A.I.G.’s credit rating were cut or if the debt underlying the swaps declined.
Both of these “unthinkable” events occurred in 2008. Suddenly, A.I.G. had to cough up collateral it didn’t have.
SO, you see, the rescue of A.I.G. also involved a bailout of its many customers, none of whom the insurer or the government is willing to identify.

We are not allowed to know who is benefiting from our (it is OUR money!) rescue effort.

We bought an outfit that had enormous obligations to other outfits. AND nobody's saying just what and how much those obligations entail. So we can't do the due diligence an investor ordinarily should do on his risks.

Basically we're being asked to pick up the tab for a pig in a poke.

Cool, eh?

Picture of decline

2009-03-10T16:02:00.003-05:00

Seen in a supermarket parking lot: a painting in the bed of a pickup truck. Other items include a folding chair, a bag of trash, a music stand, and a wheel barrow.

Nationalized Citibank video

2009-03-08T17:50:00.004-05:00

I gotta get around to saying something about the money we're pouring into AIG and where is appears to be going. An I gotta get to Fort Worth to see the Jeff Elrod show at the Modern.

But in the mean time check this NSFW video.

The New F***ing Citibank - watch more funny videos

Fees and stock valuations

2009-03-05T21:04:00.004-06:00

Huffington Post today published a snarky little piece listing a few things that cost more than a share of Citigroup, Inc. One of them is a transaction at a Citi ATM. Under certain circumstances customers are charged a $1.50 fee to use their debit cards at Citi ATMs. At market close today, a share in the bank would set you back a dollar and two cents.

In December 2006, Citi traded as high as $57 a share, which puts its current value at about 1.8% of what it was valued at nine quarters ago. Hell, Marketwatch says Citi has lost 85% this year alone.

So what did the smart guys at Treasury and the Fed do back in February? They bought more equity in Citi, that's what. Ritholtz published a fine rant about it when it happened. His case boils down to this: the Fed and Treasury have 1. spent $25 billion for a 7.8% stake in Citi; 2. guarenteed 90% of the value of $300 billion in Citi's assets; 3. lent Citi another $20 billion; 4. converted taxpayer-purchased preferred shares to common stock -- that is, turned what was pretty much a pile of IOU's into a pile of shares in the bank.

Americans now own about 40% of Citi. And we only spent $45 billion for it.

Too bad the market capitalization for the whole company stood at $5.56 billion at today's close.

Let's see.... 40% 0f 5.56 = 2.224 and that's ... ummm ... almost 5% of 45. So far, we Americans have lost 95% of the money spent bailing out Citi.

Now you might (or might not) recall that Citigroup came into being in 1998 with the merger of Citibank and Travelers Insurance, which owned Salomon Smith Barney, in a deal that skirted the edges of the Depression-era banking law commonly called Glass-Steagall and probably actually violated it. Commercial banks like Citi weren't allowed to run investment services like Salomon under the existing banking laws. PBS's Frontline series has a nifty time line on the transaction here. (It's notable the program that link refers to was aired in 2003.) The following year (1999) saw the passage and signing into law of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act which effectively erased any problems the merger of a bank with an insurance conglomerate which owned a major investment house might have had with laws intended to prohibit any such financial cross breeding.

Ten years on, one has to ask how's that working for us?

Jon Stewart on the topic of CNBC

2009-03-05T18:19:00.000-06:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Obama paintings

2009-03-04T12:22:00.005-06:00

During the presidential campaign last fall, MoveOn.org sponsored an online art exhibit featuring works that somehow embodied or (more likely) illustrated the themes of the Obama campaign. Competition winners can be seen here. Although some of the selected images are not as lame as I'd predicted, overall there isn't any need for most of them. American art and politics can get by just fine without things like that.

Another site offers a collection of Obama art of another sort. Badpintingsofbarackobama.com contains an assortment of portraits, caricatures, and other images executed by mostly anonymous artists that fit the name of the site just fine.

On the other hand, I found a number of them delightful. Above, for example is our president festooned with a taco hat in the company of polychrome men and women in their underwear. The Mexican flag over the White House might give some people pause, but nobody can doubt the value of all those tighty-whity men's briefs.

Also who doesn't love tacos?

(image from badpaintingsofbarackobama.com via Andrew Sullivan)

Judge and jury

2009-03-01T20:42:00.003-06:00

I spent today jurying a high school art competition at UT-Dallas. Sponsored by the Texas Visual Art Association, it's an annual event in the UT-D gallery. I've done it before, but this year the competition had grown quite a lot over past years' numbers. Over 1400 pieces were submitted. We jurors (Brian Gibb, director of Public Trust Gallery and publisher of Art Prostitute; Liliana Bloch, director of the McKinney Ave. Contemporary; and Margaret Meehan, an active artist currently living in Dallas; and me) whittled the show down to a manageable 170 or so works after hours of viewing and muttering amongst ourselves.

Coincidentally, yesterday I had lunch with a group of artists including Robyn O'Neil who was in my tiny town to jury the student show at her alma mater. I had the pleasure of being her teacher some years back, though I really can't claim to have taught her anything. Robyn is an amazing artist. Here's a picture of one of her drawings:

(click on it to see the full image)

Lunch was wonderful -- great companionship and good conversation that ranged from schemes for financing a trip to Berlin to a YouTube video of Paula Deen losing her pants during a cooking demonstration.

A bit of a legacy

2009-02-20T22:11:00.003-06:00

I used to teach art.

A group show at 500X (a non-profit, emerging-artists space in Dallas) features the work of a number of my former students. Artists in the show with whom I've have a pedagogical relationship include Tia Petering, Michael Winegarden, Liz Elsberg, and Pati Dye. It's gratifying to see the kids doing so well.

A former colleague and estimable ceramic artist, Katherine Taylor, is also part of the show.

Thanks to Michael Miller, another former colleague, for the heads up.

Local artist

2009-02-17T14:59:00.001-06:00

Signage in front of a gallery in an area strip mall. What recession?

Only money

2009-02-17T11:24:00.002-06:00

Paul Krugman in yesterday's NY Times:

Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.

Cool, huh? Krugman compares the situation of the average American to that of a Bernard Madoff investor. The creation of wealth via Wall Street's financial engineering was a Ponzi scheme everybody bought into.

Cupcakes and presidents

2009-02-14T16:35:00.003-06:00

Cake baker extraordinaire, Zilly Rosen has created a double portrait of Obama and Lincoln in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her medium was cupcakes. Details of the process are discussed at the Obama Foodorama blog.

Using a grid technique technique much like the great Chuck Close, Ms Rosen and her minions arranged more than 5,900 vanilla cupcakes to recreate a photo of Obama by Annie Leibowitz and another of Lincoln by Alexander Gardener.

The installation is temporary, and the cupcakes are likely already eaten as I type this.

Here's a video of the process:

Online video chat by Ustream

Brandeis ain't alone

2009-02-09T18:47:00.005-06:00

An article last month in US News and World report has some seriously bad news for college types:

In all, the average college endowment lost 2.7 percent in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2008, according to Commonfund, an organization that manages many colleges' endowments. A follow-up survey found endowments lost another 22.5 percent in the five months that ended Dec. 1, 2008.

As Ritholtz observes, together with reduced state funding for research and teaching institutions, this financial slump will have effects on our country for decades to come. Scholarships will decline in number and value, and endowed research positions will go unfilled.

We're talking the big guns like Stanford, which has already cut business school positions and even a few of the university-issued Blackberries, according to CBS News.

Is our children learning? Not as much as they was a while ago. And they ain't gonna get much book learnin' for a while yet.

Paddy Hirsch talks toxic assets

2009-02-08T22:08:00.001-06:00

Toxic assets from Marketplace on Vimeo.

The one on mark to market that follows is a good one, too.

Working

2009-02-08T12:25:00.012-06:00

My wife and I visited the Dallas Art Fair yesterday. Because I flashed my press credentials at the door, I got a badge and a thick packet of stuff about the fair and the galleries therein.

It was a real deal. Real dealers doing real deals abounded. Art was everywhere and it was for sale. Major names. The chips were bluer in some spaces than others, but all chips were on the table.

Any worries about the state of the art market in our depressed economy weren't acknowledged. Instead we were treated to Cy Twombly hand-altered prints, Donald Judd wood cuts, a Henry Darger watercolor, and works by lesser known folks. All were desirable. All were available.

The little Jeff Koons Balloon Dog I saw (a few hours into the experience and after we'd both reached the saturation point) summed it all up most eloquently: A sweet object of desire, shiny and bright, which could be mine for the right price.

Groucho on real estate

2009-02-05T12:25:00.001-06:00

It's here, and it's relevant to the bust that followed the latest boom.

A Rose is a Rose is...you know

2009-02-03T13:45:00.005-06:00

Roberta Smith, writing about Brandeis University's decision to close the Rose Art Museum in the New York Times Sunday:

What better way to avoid the messy legalities of deaccessioning artworks, with the attendant denunciations from Association of Art Museum Directors and other professional organizations that monitor and weigh in on sales of individual works of art? (The association’s guidelines say that art works can be sold only to finance acquisitions.) If there is no museum, there are no guidelines to violate.

The university's board of trustees have decided that the Rose is a savings account, and they need to close it out. For the money. And this decision has been reached in spite of the fact that the museum operates almost entirely outside the finances of the rest of the university. It has (had) its own donors, its own budget, its own endowment.

In something of a demonstration of just how independent the Rose is from Brandeis, museum director Michael Rush has posted a statement condemning the closing on the museum's (Brandeis-sponsored) Web site:

Do not be fooled into thinking that the Rose is being closed because it is a financial drain on the university. It isn’t. While acknowledging the profound financial challenges every institution is facing, the Rose, a fundamentally self sustaining entity within Brandeis, is in relatively good financial health. The Rose is being closed due to the University’s desire to sell the cherished collection. Period.

What Brandeis is up to amounts to a sucker punch to the museum's many donors. According to Smith, 80% of the collection was donated to the museum. People decided, for whatever reason, to give their artworks to the Rose. They could have donated to any one of hundreds of other public collections and received the same tax benefits and warm fuzzy feelings, but they gave to the Rose.

Now their gifts have been effectively nullified. They didn't give art to a museum they respected and wanted to support. The gave fungible assets to a university's board of directors.

Anybody considering a donation to Brandeis in the future will have much to ponder.

Sell it all; sell it now

2009-01-28T17:19:00.005-06:00

(photo: John Blanding, Boston Globe)

Glasstire reports that the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is selling off its permanent collection. The school is strapped for cash. The museum will close sometime in the coming summer. I've not seen any timeline for the deaccession of the museum's collection of more than 6,000 works. It's a rich stash of modern and contemporary art that could bring millions into the school's coffers if the sale is orderly, and if the market for its prizes doesn't further collapse. A Washington Post story says that the museum's holdings were appraised at $350 million in 2007.

Artists represented in the collection include Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Matthew Barney, Helen Frankenthaler, Nan Goldin, Alfredo Jaar, Donald Judd, Annette Lemieux, Robert Mangold, Judy Pfaff, Anri Sala, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Jackie Windsor.

A steaming pile of blame for the university's financial distress lies on the head of alleged financial crook Bernard Madoff. From the Post story:

The private school, based in Waltham, Mass., has suffered investment losses and spent other funds on a construction boom. Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz also said in a Jan. 7 letter that some "staunch and generous" donors were hurt by Bernard Madoff's alleged fraud.

"It's like a one-two-three punch: The economy tanks, they overbuilt at the peak of the market, and their largest donor was hit dramatically by the Madoff scandal," said Mark Williams, a Boston University senior lecturer who specializes in risk management and has studied Brandeis's finances.
Among Brandeis's largest donors are philanthropists Carl and Ruth Shapiro. Carl Shapiro and his family foundation had losses of $545 million in Madoff's alleged Ponzi scheme, according to the Boston Globe.

My wife just said she wants Madoff to hurt and hurt bad, but it's not possible for him to hurt enough.

Google art

2009-01-27T20:06:00.013-06:00

Last May when the Google "Street View" camera passed down Sampsonia Way on Pittsburgh's North Side, an ad hoc collective of artists and neighborhood people (organized by Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley) put on a show. A small band marched by. Runners appeared to finish a marathon. A garage band practiced. In a garage, naturally. The project is titled Street with a View, and its effects can be seen if you do a Google map search for addresses on Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh and click on the street view option to get a panoramic picture of that address. Not every frame represents an intervention, which just makes the whole idea more appealing to me. Like an Easter egg hunt.

The Mattress Factory, which is located at 500 Sampsonia Way, was one of the participating sponsors, but so was Doug's Market, a neighborhood corner store. As was Google.

I ran across an image from the Google art intervention this morning over on Gizmodo, but others, including the marching band picture, have shown up elsewhere on the Web since the images went live back in November. Here are a few screen captures I made of the Easter eggs I found before visiting the Street with a View site.

That's the picture at Gizmodo that got me interested.

Creepy chicken sculpture by Nicholas Lampert.

I pasted the two above together to show the Love Laser and its evident effects. The artist's name is Ian Charnas.

The Langly High School Band marches past the Mattress Factory.

Another paste job, this time to get some perspective on the bed sheet rope she's holding.

Names of participants, background information and a couple of videos can be found at the Street with a View Web site.

link (via Gizmodo)

Sign

2009-01-26T20:34:00.003-06:00

I found this sign in a strip mall in Mesquite, TX a few days ago. Somebody's hiring, at least.

The end of an era

2009-01-26T11:52:00.003-06:00

Word has spread that Gerald Peters Gallery in Dallas is shutting up shop. A part of a Santa Fe-based gallery empire, the Dallas location has been in business for 22 years, according to their Web site. In the past year they've shown works by Jun Kaneko, Dan Rizzie, and a number of artists with Texas reputations such as Terrel James and Bill Komodore.

When Talley Dunn (now of Dunn and Brown Contemporary) was gallery director back in the 90's, they offered a very young Trenton Doyle Hancock his first one-person show. He was still an undergraduate student at the time. At the opening reception, Hancock dozed atop a big, galumphing platform designed to represent an early iteration of his mythical "Mound" characters. At set times during the evening, an alarm clock sounded and Dunn climbed up the mound to feed the artist a bite or two of brightly colored Jell-O. Then, as Hancock drifted back to sleep, colorful balloons tumbled out below him. The artist: sleeping, eating, shitting. It was great fun and more than a little edgy.

But lately, that sort of adventurous spirit has not been in evidence at Gerald Peters, as the gallery increasingly turned to safe bets with big price points. Dale Chihuly, for example. It couldn't have helped that a number of nationally recognized artists left to join Dunn in her new venture.

What the closing means for the art market in Dallas and nationally, one can only speculate. It sure can't be good, though.

Swedish?

2009-01-23T11:39:00.004-06:00

A debate is underway about the idea of bank nationalization in the face of the continuing credit crisis. In some quarters, what the Swedes did in the 1990s looks like a good bet for the American economy now. According to the New York Times:

Sweden placed its banks with troubled assets into a so-called bad bank, where they could be held and then sold over time when market and economic conditions improved. In the meantime, it used taxpayer money to provide enough capital to allow banks to resume normal lending.
In the process, Sweden wiped out existing shareholders.

That wiping out shareholder value part is a huge sticking point, of course. If you have a retirement account with exposure to the stock market, you stand to lose money if troubled US banks are nationalized. James Surowiecki sees deeper problems involving "political mischief."

But the F.D.I.C., for the most part, does not take over banks and run them with an eye toward turning a profit for the government. Instead, it tries to clean up the banks’ balance sheets and re-sell them, or their assets, as quickly as possible. But if the government were to nationalize the banks, the incentives would be different. As Steve Waldman put it, “We take the bank into public ownership because taxpayers who have been conscripted to accept extraordinary losses are entitled to whatever gains follow the reorganization they finance.” Once a program of nationalizing banks was started, then, one important goal would be to maximize the potential “gains” to be reaped. And one way to do that would be to declare banks that are solvent, and that have undervalued assets on their books, insolvent, which would allow the government to take them over and ensure that their profits would flow into the government’s coffers.

This "mischief" would be possible because of certain details about the definition of "solvency" when it comes to banks. If its liabilities are greater than its assets, it is insolvent. And yet, Surowiecki argues, under such conditions, a bank can continue to function because it typically can earn from its assets about three times what it pays towards its liabilities. His take is that declaring a bank insolvent is a judgment call, not a mathematical certainty.

Barry Ritholtz disagrees:

As previously noted, the dilly dallying around with these horrific banks and their grossly incompetant management must come to an end.

Sometimes the market gets it just right: The selloff in the financial sector might very well be the cumulative conclusion reached by traders that this sector cannot be rescued by nere recapitalization alone. The market, looking to open down 200 points, may also be sensing the inevitable nationalization.

The Brits, soon to nationalize Barclays, have the right idea: Go Swedish. Wipe out shareholders, bond holders, and all the bad debt and junk paper these firms hold. Zero it out, spin out the assets with clean balance sheets.

If the behavior of these corporate executives is nothing short than egregious: Their embarassing attitudes, foolish excesses, sense of entitled greed is annoying but tolerable when its on their ownshareholders dime; when the taxpayer is footing the bill, it is utterly unacceptable.

To paraphrase a Mellon, its time to liquidate the banks, liquidate capital, liquidate shareholders, liquidate bond holders . . .

He really is pissed about the abject failure of the top managers of financial giants like Citigroup and Lehman et al. They screwed things up so badly we're all hurting, and he's so mad, he can't quite type right.

I have no idea who's right, or even if it's possible to be right about all this. But I get the feeling we may be turning Swedish in a short while.

Illustrating the collapse of the GOP

2009-01-21T14:22:00.003-06:00

The troubled pachyderms above are from a book titled Deconstructing Dumbo by artists Thomas Fuchs and Felix Sockwell. Copies of the self-published book can be purchased at Fuchs' site.

Image from thomasfuchs.com (via Boing Boing)

Crowds from space

2009-01-21T13:55:00.004-06:00

The image above is a satellite photo of the Mall during yesterday's inauguration ceremony. The clumps of dark grains are crowds of people clustered around Jumbotrons to see the proceedings.

Image from Popular Science via Andrew Sullivan.

We live in rapidly changing times

2009-01-20T12:38:00.003-06:00

The senators and guests are still eating their lunch following the presidential oath, but the official White House Web site has already changed.

Obama's speech was lovely:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

And the part about giving up childish things -- that's worth looking into a bit closer. As Obama said, it comes from Scripture, from First Corinthians, Chapter 13. It's often called the love chapter because it proclaims the singular importance of love (in the sense of the Greek agape [αγάπη], love which cherishes and nurtures, but does not want to possess). Here is the verse Obama cited:

11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

To my mind it was a nearly perfect sentiment, expressing an admonition to partisan extremists that they have behaved childishly and the time has come to grow up. Basically he told Washington and America to just GROW UP, but he did so in the words of St. Paul, words which come from the same chapter as these words:

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

And:

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

What Obama did with that brief reference to Scripture has to rank as the gentlest and kindest smackdown ever. Ideological purity and partisan bullshit got us into a helluva mess because we were all behaving like children. It is time to start behaving like grownups.

Right now being a grownup requires that we engage creatively with the world, that we not rely on child-like habits of thought, that we put aside reflexive responses, that we stow away hobby horse ideologies. Now is a time for mature thought and adult action.

Art interventions

2009-01-16T16:56:00.003-06:00

A number of feminist and socially conscious blogs have reported that some delightful wag of an artist/vandal/interventionist in Berlin slapped stickers onto ads in Berlin's subway to make the images of smooth skinned celebrities (Britney Spears, Leona Lewis, Christina Aguilera) resemble an open Photoshop window.

It is an act of poetic compression which squeezes issues of desire, its manipulation, oppressive standards of feminine attractiveness, consumerism, alienation from the public sphere, mass media and conformity into a simple trope. That makes it very good art, I'd say -- not because of its estimable content, but because of the way the content is delivered.

Things like this have been done before, of course. As long ago as the 1950s, artists in Europe associated with the Lettrist International and its offspring, the Situationist International, defaced posters in public places. Their process was called "decollage" since it involved not adding an image to a given image (collage), but removing parts of an image to discover what lay beneath.

The image above is an example of decollage by Mimmo Rotella. The quasi-Ab Ex composition is no doubt attributable to the international spread of that style in the post-war period. Artists like Rotella can be seen as practicing a kind of archaeology of public spaces, digging up hidden images beneath the surface and allowing a Surrealist swarm of associations to result.

The Photoshop-like alterations in Berlin, on the other hand, are both additive (literally sticking stuff on posters) and subtractive (uncovering hints of the images' history).

Coosje van Bruggen

2009-01-13T12:08:00.002-06:00

Coosje van Bruggen is dead at 66. According to the New York times, she was responsible for the color choices in many of the sculptures she worked on with her collaborator and husband, Claes Oldenburg, beginning with Trowel I, 1976 (pictured above)

The Times obit is here.

Giving it away

2009-01-08T21:09:00.001-06:00

The Dallas Center for Contemporary Art is holding an auction this month to raise funds for their new digs. As I do each year, I've donated a painting to their effort. That's my painting above. The title is Bit. It's oil on a digital print on canvas. The auction is online here. Or if you prefer, my piece is here. I can't say I'm charmed by the green background for my little pink beauty (who displays art on a green ground?), but they didn't ask me about it.

Bid early and bid often.

Eliasson

2009-01-08T18:32:00.000-06:00

My review of the Olafur Eliasson survey at the Dallas Museum of Art is online here. There's an error: the captions for two images are switched tonight, but I've asked them to fix that.

The image above is Room for One Colour (2002).

TBD=there be dragons

2009-01-06T16:32:00.000-06:00

I saw an interview on TV once with evolutionary biologist and noted baseball fan Steven Jay Gould in which he explained his enthusiasm for Joe DiMaggio's legendary 1941 56-game hitting streak. Gould's argument -- informed by his deep understanding of statistics -- turned on the enormous difference between DiMaggio's accomplishement and the mean (average) hitting streaks of all other players in the major leagues. In a later piece in the New York Review of Books, Gould described the statistical research of a scientific colleague into the probabilities of other stand-out baseball accomplishments that showed they constituted no significant violation of what was to be expected in terms of their probabilities. But then he wrote:

But "treasure your exceptions," as the old motto goes. There is one major exception, and absolutely only one—one sequence so many standard deviations above the expected distribution that it should not have occurred at all. Joe DiMaggio's fifty-six–game hitting streak in 1941.

Here's a simple example of a bell curve marked to indicate standard deviations:

(Image from here)

Investopedia defines standard deviation thus:

A measure of the dispersion of a set of data from its mean. The more spread apart the data, the higher the deviation. Standard deviation is calculated as the square root of variance.

It's a measure of difference in numeric value of some sort within a class of like events and it's a measurement of the general likelihood of any member of the class holding that value. What made DiMaggio's streak so fantastic, Gould insisted, was that in terms of probability it never should have happened. Nothing lies that far off the curve. Except Joe DiMaggio.

This came to mind today when I got around to reading a long piece published last weekend in the NY Times Magazine about a risk model called Value at Risk, which is commonly used by financial professionals in their dealings. The author, Joe Nocera, describes VaR as a set of mathematical models which (it was believed) could assess the likelihood an investment would lose money in a given period of time.

Built around statistical ideas and probability theories that have been around for centuries, VaR was developed and popularized in the early 1990s by a handful of scientists and mathematicians — “quants,” they’re called in the business — who went to work for JPMorgan. VaR’s great appeal, and its great selling point to people who do not happen to be quants, is that it expresses risk as a single number, a dollar figure, no less.

VaR isn’t one model but rather a group of related models that share a mathematical framework. In its most common form, it measures the boundaries of risk in a portfolio over short durations, assuming a “normal” market. For instance, if you have $50 million of weekly VaR, that means that over the course of the next week, there is a 99 percent chance that your portfolio won’t lose more than $50 million. That portfolio could consist of equities, bonds, derivatives or all of the above; one reason VaR became so popular is that it is the only commonly used risk measure that can be applied to just about any asset class. And it takes into account a head-spinning variety of variables, including diversification, leverage and volatility, that make up the kind of market risk that traders and firms face every day.

Systems theorist and Black Swan author Nassim Taleb shows up quickly in the article to argue against such a model-based strategy. It's "a fraud," he says. As I understand it, his "Black Swan" concept is a lot like somebody hitting safely in 56 successive major league baseball games. It can't happen until it does.

“Any system susceptible to a black swan will eventually blow up,” Taleb says. The modern system of world finance, complex and interrelated and opaque, where what happened yesterday can and does affect what happens tomorrow, and where one wrong tug of the thread can cause it all to unravel, is just such a system.

Or to put in the words of a risk consultant also quoted in the article:

[Marc]Groz has his own way of illustrating the problem: he showed me a slide he made of a curve with the letters “T.B.D.” at the extreme ends of the curve. I thought the letters stood for “To Be Determined,” but that wasn’t what Groz meant. “T.B.D. stands for ‘There Be Dragons,’ ” he told me.

I have no idea whether Taleb is right in his crusade against models like VaR. But we all know that the bell curve had monsters at its extreme ends, monsters the smart guys didn't even imagine. They shouldn't even exist, according to the financial experts' thinking over the past few years.

Joe, Joe DiMaggio, we want you on our side.

Chaotic thinking

2008-12-31T13:22:00.000-06:00

"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first."

-- Werner Heisenberg

Part I

Back when I got my first computer (a used Tandy 1000 with two floppy drives, a 300 BAUD modem, and a whopping 384Kilobytes of RAM -- 128 original + a 256 expansion module -- something like the one above) a dear friend named Chuck insisted I look into chaos theory. It was the mid 80s and Benoit Mandelbrot's theories were all the rage in the artworld. Chuck had written a few little bits of code to emulate a series of chaotic orbital decay events using information he'd found someplace or another, and he found the visual patterns they produced endlessly interesting.

About that time I read a short article in the back of some popular tech magazine describing another kind of chaotic function in a program written in Pascal, so I tried my hand at transcribing it into Basic, which my version of MS DOS supplied for me. The resulting program was laughably primitive, only a few lines long. But it worked. Using the PSet command, it located a point on the screen's x/y axes that represented the values of two variables in a simple equation as determined by the value of a third which was controlled by some function I no longer remember. As the program ran, it drew a line of dots that descended the screen till, at a certain point, the line split, which meant that there were two true values for each of the variables. Then the two lines split. Then all the lines split again. And again.

All this happened in an orderly fashion until it got strange. That's the technical term for what transpired -- the lines my program drew are called attractors, and when they break into apparent disorder, one says that they are strange attractors. Strange they were. Dots proliferated in certain regions of the screen, always descending, but in no pattern that was at first predictable. Eventually another, non-linear structure appeared, a cloud of dots that seemed to coalesce into soft arcing forms that mimicked the arcs if the program's initial lines in a curiously organic way.

Part II

Back in October, the PBS News Hour ran a segment in which Paul Solman interviewed Mandelbrot and Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, a book about unpredictability and the limits of what we know for certain. About 5:15 into the interview the butterfly effect and the idea of turbulence comes up in their discussion of what's happened and will happen to the enormously complex international financial system. The ripple effects of the implosion of big players like Lehman Brothers and the maiming of bigger ones like AIG are not confined to the values assigned to their shares or to their debt instruments. Ripples are not confined even to one country. In a structure with as many interconnected obligations and mutual dependencies, a structure as unbelievably complex as international finance, they suggested, the effects of a meltdown can be catastrophic. That's the turbulence fear they express.

Look at the smoke from Bogie's cigarrette above (image from Wikipedia). It rises in a smooth ribbon for a bit, spreads, and expands. At first it's coherent, but at a certain point it becomes turbulent, chaotic. Eventually it no longer appears to be a single form; it is no longer even smoke.

Part III

A series of excellent articles by Brady Dennis and Robert O'Harrow, Jr. in the Washington Post describes the events leading up to the AIG disaster in detail. Here are some links: Articles one, two, and three. They are worth reading. The first part tells how three men who worked at the notorious junk bond firm Drexel Burnham Lambert -- Howard Sosin, Randy Rackson, and Barry Goldman -- conceived of new debt instruments that revolutionized the world's finanial markets. they hatched their ideas in 1986, about the time I was noodling with a short program written in Basic to illustrate chaos.

Partnering with AIG, they set up something called AIG Financial Products to offer novel and complex financial instruments. They made themselves and their company enormous amounts of money. And then things got chaotic:

Financial Products unleashed techniques that others on Wall Street rushed to emulate, creating vast, interlocking deals that bound together financial institutions in ways that no one fully understood and contributed to the demise of its parent company as a private enterprise. In the panic of mid-September's crash, the Bush administration said that AIG had grown too intertwined with the global economy to fail and made the extraordinary decision to take over the reeling giant. The bailout stands at $152 billion and counting -- almost 10 times as large as the rescue for the American auto industry.

Many of the most compelling aspects of the economic cataclysm can be seen through the story of AIG and its Financial Products unit: the failure of credit-rating firms, the absence of meaningful federal regulation, the mistaken belief that private contracts did not pose systemic risk, the veneration of computer models and quantitative analysis.

Note two things in the quote above: 1. "no one fully understood;" and 2. "the veneration of computer models."

These guys are smart. Sosin is an alumnus of Bell Labs, Rackson of the Wharton School of Management. Goldman holds a PhD in economics. But what was constructed -- the net of international financial obligations -- grew too big and convoluted to comprehend.

The computer models they and their colleagues trusted to guide them through it all suggest a poignant clue to Nassim Taleb's worries about our current situation. Edward Lorenz, the MIT mathematician and meteorologist credited with naming the butterfly effect, made his discovery when he was running an early computer weather model. When he reran one simulation, starting not at the beginning but a little ways into the model, the results were wildly different from his first attempt. The data from the second run were rounded off slightly, and the systems he was modeling are so complex that tiny differences in values -- less than a thousandth place in Lorenz's case -- meant huge differences in output.

A butterfly in Beijing can cause a storm in Texas.

Financial Products' management and the kinds of products they conjured into being changed over the years, but its mathematical and model-based business apparently didn't very much. Tom Savage, a mathematician, replaced Sosin (who left because of conflicts with AIG's management), Joseph Cassano, another Drexel Burnham alumnus, took over the reins. But the rigorous vetting of each transaction continued.

But even as Financial Products experimented, Savage said, he continued to stress the need to minimize risk. "That was one of the things that really marked this company, was the rigor with which it looked at the business of trading. . . . There was an academic rigor to it that very few companies match," he said.

"It was Howard Sosin who said, 'You know, we're not going to do trades that we can't correctly model, value, provide hedges for and account for.' "

The models continued to show that the products they were selling (increasingly credit default swaps -- insurance on third-party debt) were only the tiniest bit risky. It would take the chaos of a world-wide depression to make them go bad.

And then, one mortgage too many failed, so to speak. A mortgage securitized in a bundle of mortgages, which bundle was itself secured by a product sold by Financial Products. A cascade of rising collateral obligations and falling credit ratings ensued.

The butterfly flapped his wings.

Now we taxpayers own AIG. It's cost us $152 billion so far.

But Taleb's fear is that this only the first part of the ensuing storm. Turbulence and chaos are like that. What will come of AIG's troubles is yet to be seen.

Somebody always makes money

2008-12-29T23:33:00.000-06:00

The New York Times reports that a lot of old hands who were in the thick of the late 80s/early 90s bailout of a passel of failed and failing savings and loans, the Resolution Trust Corporation, are now homing in on the bucks to be gotten in our current mess. Says the Times:

What is obvious to former R.T.C. officials is that, like the last go around, a great deal of money will be made by a select group of investors and business operators, particularly those with government contacts. The former government officials said in interviews that much of what is motivating them is a desire to help the nation recover from this latest stumble. But they acknowledge they intend to be among the winners who emerge.

That $700 billion in TARP money is getting spread around. Deals are getting done. And, most importantly, commissions are being charged.

One interesting outfit emerging from all this is SecondMarket, which bills itself as "the marketplace for illiquid assets." This is curious largely because "illiquid" means there is no market for the asset. Illiquid assets are items of dubious value which are REALLY hard to sell. Say, for example, you own a basket of debt paper issued by a company like Lehman Brothers. What can you do? The debt issuer is bankrupt. If you're the guy charged with telling regulators and shareholders what your assets are worth, you need to find out what an illiquid asset like a bond issued by a bankrupt bank can be sold for. Nobody wants it, true. But there is still something of value left in the corpse of Lehman. Some spare change under the couch cushions, maybe. And your bond gives you claim to a portion of the remaining money pie along with all the other creditors in line for a slice.

The fine folks over at SecondMarket have a plan for you: they work to make markets for junk like that. Even if it's only a few pennies on the dollar, they can find somebody who'll buy your paper. The trick is arriving at the right price.

Currently SecondMarket deals in auction rate securities, bankruptcy claims, restricted securities, and limited partnership interests.

Auction rate securities were once touted as safe as cash. They're bonds with long maturity periods, but which are auctioned monthly or even weekly, so their value fluctuates according to what the market will bear at any given time. It's a long-term debt that behaves like something with a much shorter half life. But about 11 months ago the auctions began to fail. Nobody wanted to buy them because of their risk of default. They once were liquid. They became illiquid.

Restricted securities are financial instruments which are bought from companies under certain circumstances which are not registered with the SEC. They are part of the so-called shadow financial system. Since they may not be sold in the regulated market for financial instruments, they are also illiquid.

Limited partnership interests are basically hedge funds. Here's a telling quote from the SecondMarket Web site:

Limited partnership (LP) interests are ownership rights in investment entities
such as private equity funds, hedge funds, and funds of funds (also known as
alternative investment managers or AIMs). Over the past several years the
secondary market for limited partnership interests, which are typically longer
term investments, has grown tremendously.

The market is expected to continue to grow at a rapid pace as many limited
partners seek to reduce their alternative investment exposure. Many are
requesting redemptions or simply seeking to get out of their positions largely due
to poor fund performance, a need for capital or a desire to rebalance their
portfolios. To fund these redemption requests, many AIMs are selling their
positions at sub‐optimal levels, artificially decreasing capital availability and asset
prices as well as increasing market volatility.

The secondary market is comprised of folks trying to dump shit before the stink gets too strong for their noses or stomachs. And the dumping has pushed the price of their shit pretty far down. It'll go down more, but someday the price will rise. So the plan is to make markets for these items with people positioned to buy them at fire sale prices, people expecting an economic turnaround in a reasonable time.

The management team at SecondMarket includes a "Senior Advisor" by the name of Bill Seidman, a CNBC talking head, a former FDIC chairman, and the fist chairman of the Resolution Trust Corporation. Says Mr. Seidman in the Times:

“It is an enormous market,” said Mr. Seidman, who has already joined two such potential money-making efforts and is evaluating proposals to participate in a third. “I am enjoying this.”

Well there's big money to be gotten. Why not?

Here's why not: We have a system of finance designed to cheat us. Its job is to make industry and services possible. Its effect is to generate imaginary wealth.

Somebody wants to open a cafe? He gets a loan and works his ass off to pay the loan back. A school district wants to build a new computer lab? They float a bond and the honest citizens of the district pay taxes to make the debt right. Somebody wants to open a tech business? He borrows to make it happen and then works to make it happen and repay his debt along the way.

But the financial markets have gotten butt-ugly distorted. They've fallen down the rabbit hole and begun to hallucinate wealth and value when there is none. Market fundamentalists will tell us over and over and over again that they make entrepreneurship possible with their capital machinations, but I can see no proof of this supposition. They only make money for themselves. They care not for goods and services, except insofar as they can buy them with their many many dollars.

At some future date SecondMarket will begin dealing in collateralized debt obligations and mortgage backed securities and other instruments of financial innovation. And they'll make another boatload of money, as will their more savvy investors. When this happens, there will be no increase in entrepreneurship. There will be no new ideas about dinners out or digital widgets or instructional technology in public schools. There will be only dollars.

Can you see what is wrong with this picture?

Department of why not

2008-12-29T23:08:00.000-06:00

Houston's Art Guys are selling their name and their abject logo (above). Their Web site indicates the logo was the winning entry in a 1993 competition. Esteemed curator Walter Hopps was the juror. Imagining what the other entries looked like is, of course, futile.

The asking price for the Art Guys brand and logo is a hefty $500,000, which may sound like a bunch in the current depressed market, but as one of the Guys points out it comes to only $20,000 a year over their 25-year career.

Along with their announcement that they are engaged to a houseplant, the sale is designated an official Art Guys silver jubilee event.

Art, money, and big waves

2008-12-15T15:05:00.000-06:00

Dave Hickey in Vanity Fair:

Numbers tell the story. In 1976, Michael Milken was estimated to have earned $5 million at Drexel Burnham Lambert. By December of 2007, hundreds of times as many people were bringing home staggering multiples of that amount every year. This radical redistribution of wealth created the illusion of “high art prices.” In fact, art prices have fallen as a percentage of the buyer’s disposable income, so art is statistically less important to the people who buy it. The question of how good the art is and how long it will last is of much less consequence.

So think of the art world as a beach and money as the surf. Waves roll in but they always suck back out, leaving a few masterpieces, taking some beach with them. When a really gnarly monster rolls in, the best we can hope is that it will leave some beach behind and a few treasures in the sand, along with the wreckage and the bodies—because the wave will suck away. And when it does, as it is doing right now, the whales will either hold or dump. If they hold, art will remain a stable-valued, low-liquid commodity. If the whales dump at cut-rate prices, the art world will undergo its first catastrophic value re-adjustment in 40 years. It won’t be pretty, but it will be exciting to watch.

Looks like art, smells worse

2008-12-14T16:27:00.000-06:00

Here's a nice graphic over at Slate showing how much money has been committed to assorted bailouts and how much has been actually spent. Totals: ~$5.6 trillion promised; ~$2.3 trillion spent.

Slate's Flash graphic looks very much like a slick, Pop version of a Kenneth Noland abstraction. That's utterly not relevant to anything, except writing the word "Pop" and Noland's name in the same sentence gave me a unnatural rush of naughty glee.

Meanwhile, the New York Times' profile of Harvey Miller, the $1,000/hour bankruptcy attorney in charge of winding down the fetid corpse that once was Lehman Brothers, offers this harsh observation:

From his perspective as Lehman’s undertaker, Mr. Miller believes that the fallout from the firm’s messy bankruptcy could have been avoided. Regulators could have stepped in, he says, not necessarily to save Lehman, perhaps, but to head off the meltdown that followed. “They totally missed it,” he says. “Look what happened.”
When companies rushed to terminate contracts with Lehman, he says, investor confidence plummeted in just about everything — securities and the markets they trade on, corporate debts and the assets backing them, the power of the government and its readiness to use it. In the days after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, he notes, demand for corporate debt utterly evaporated.

The failure of a Wall Street firm poses its own special risks, because other companies that rely on it — such as counterparties to complex financial contracts known as derivatives — are all financially exposed to its collapse.
That’s why Mr. Miller says it was crucial for the government to head off the wholesale termination by counterparties of all their transactions with Lehman before the firm was forced into bankruptcy. “If the Fed or the Treasury said, ‘Let’s say to Lehman, there’s no bailout, we’re not going to save the company,’ they could have supported an orderly unwinding of all the transactions over a period of months,” he says. “It probably would’ve cost the economy a lot less money.”

Lehman owes counterparties and creditors $640 billion. A little planning and order when dealing with that fact beforehand would seem a good idea.

A little bit Moody about investing

2008-12-07T16:26:00.000-06:00

A long article in the New York Times today looks into one significant factor in the credit market collapse: bond rating agencies' going too easy on their evaluations of the risks surrounding a slew of mortgage backed securities. In the abstract, it's interesting reading. In real life, it's cause for rage.

The article focuses on Moody's, one of the big rating agencies on Wall Street, and on its role in facilitating the housing bubble (the others are Standard and Poor's and Fitch). Basically, it goes like this: Mortgage originators securitized the mortgages they produced into various financial instruments like bonds, collateralized debt obligations, etc. so they could sell these instruments to investors eager to get a good return on their money. The sale of the instruments produced cash which loan originators could then use to generate more mortgages. It's the job of a company like Moody's to assess the risk associated with the securities and assign a grade to them based on an estimation of the quality of the underlying debt. In the words of a Moody's spokesman quoted in the Times:

“Moody’s credit ratings play an important but limited role in the financial markets — to offer reasoned, independent, forward-looking opinions about relative credit risk, based on rigorous analysis and published methodologies...”

Nice spin with that "but limited" bit, eh?

Whatever.

Let's look at the "reasoned, independent, forward-looking" part of the statement. Financial instruments built out of mortgages and other sorts of debt are often divided into slices called "tranches" (tranche = slice in French) with a heirarchy of risk and reward assigned to each slice. Higher tranches get paid before lower ones. When all the debts in the security are paying as they should everybody gets a piece of the action. But as mortgage holders get behind in their payments or (worse) default, the lower tranches get nothing while the upper guys still get paid. I know that's horribly complex, but that's the way they do things. And complexity can be profitable.

So the Times reports:

Consider a residential mortgage pool put together in summer 2006 by Goldman Sachs. Called GSAMP 2006-S5, it held $338 million of second mortgages to subprime, or riskier, borrowers.
The safest slice of the security held $165 million in loans. When it was issued on Aug. 17, 2006, Moody’s and S.& P. rated it triple-A. Just eight months later, Moody’s alerted investors that it might downgrade the top-rated tranche. Sure enough, it dropped the rating to Baa, the lowest investment-grade level, on Aug. 16, 2007.
Then, on Dec. 4, 2007, Moody’s downgraded the tranche to a “junk” rating. On April 15 of this year, Moody’s downgraded the tranche yet again; today, it no longer trades. The combination of downgrades and defaults hammered the securities.

Millions in debt were rated an excellent risk in 2006. The same -- exactly the SAME -- debt gets a not so good score in a year, and four months later it's junk. Now nobody wants any of it at any price. This one example of a scenario that has been repeated untold times since the boom went bust and would appear to be what passes for "forward-looking" in the world of risk assessment.

Then there's the issue of "independent" opinions. Used to be that Moody's got paid by the people who bought securities, not the guys selling them. That changed in the 70s. Now the issuers of credit instruments pay rating agencies for the rating service, and the conflict of interest is just about inescapable. Add to that the pressures to maximize shareholder profits (Moody's went public in 2000) and you get a real problem. From the Times:

By the time Moody’s became a public company in 2000, structured finance had become its top source of revenue. Employees in this unit rated bundles of assets like credit card receivables, car loans and residential mortgages. Later they rated collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, yet another combination of various bundles of debt.
Moody’s could receive between $200,000 and $250,000 to rate a $350 million mortgage pool, for example, while rating a municipal bond of a similar size might have generated just $50,000 in fees, according to people familiar with Moody’s fee structure.
A standard of profitability at many companies is its operating margin, which measures how much of its revenue is left over after it pays most expenses. While operating margins at Moody’s were always enviable — in 2000 they stood at 48 percent — they climbed even higher as revenue from structured finance rose. From 2000 to 2007, company documents show, operating margins averaged 53 percent.
Even thriving companies like Exxon and Microsoft had margins of 17 and 36 percent respectively in 2007. But Moody’s and its counterparts were not founded to be profit machines.

Structured finance is a generic term for all those complex securities we've heard so much about as the financial markets spazzed out. The more complex the financial instrument, the more a rating agency could charge to assess its risk. A huge amount of money was on the line with each rating. This is what passes for "independence" in the world of risk assessment.

As to "reasonable," if we are to apply a pragmatic test -- say, looking at whether or not their ratings accurately reflected the realities of the products under scrutiny -- the verdict can't be kind. How could anybody claim that reasonable opinions about risk ended up with a global financial meltdown? As with the tech bubble before it, the housing bubble was irrational, and Moody's was integral to the irrationality.

There is ample blame for this mess. Subprime lenders who asked nothing regarding the credit worthiness of people who were buying houses they couldn't afford, government regulators who allowed big banks and other financial institutions to value their assets according to the "reasonable" opinions of rating agencies and didn't regulate like they should have, banks that leveraged every buck they had on deposit 30 times in reckless bids to maximize profits, doofus home buyers picking up properties on spec so they could flip them quick in an ever-rising tulip mania of a market -- all those guys and others had a big share in the mess.

But credit rating agencies like Moody's enabled a baseless boom by propping up false assessments of the underlying value of the securities that kept the credit flowing beyond any reasonable limit.

Past blast

2008-12-06T13:32:00.000-06:00

Back in the early 1980s, a good friend let me use his computer to type up my resume -- my first experience ever with a word processor. The machine was a Kaypro (pictured above) which ran an operating system called CP/M on a Z-80 CPU. With a whopping 64 kilobytes of RAM and two 5 1/4-inch floppy drives, its capabilities were somewhat limited, but it worked as long as you remembered to save your document frequently.

I found the picture today here. Unfortunately, I've lost track of my friend.

Chuck, If you're out there drop me a line.

Money and art

2008-12-04T21:34:00.000-06:00

UBS -- the Swiss banking giant which employs retired Texas A&M economics professor, former senator, handmaiden to high finance, and noted pissant Phil Gramm -- the Swiss banking giant which was the center of a recent tax-evasion scandal involving indictments of its Global Wealth Management division and Gramm's fellow UBS board member Raoul Weil over a scheme to allegedly hide $20 billion or more in assets belonging as many as 17,000 US citizens from the IRS -- that UBS -- is the main sponsor of this year's Art Basel Miami Beach. UBS was a sponsor last year's event in Florida, too.

UBS likes art. Or art collectors. Or art collectors' lucre.

ABC News reports:

According to the indictment, UBS bankers "solicited new business from existing and prospective United States clients at Art Basel Miami Beach."
"They sent their salespeople here. They have encrypted computers. They smuggled assets out of the country to help those people conceal what they should have paid the IRS," said Jack Blum, a Washington tax lawyer and consultant to the IRS. "So the question is, why should a bank like that be allowed to continue in business?"

So you go to an art fair to see some art? What're you some kind of schmuck? It's about the cash, numnutz. Sure you can pick up a Clemente at Mary Boone or a Sugimoto at Gagosian. Who can't? And what about a Francis Bacon doodle or a sweet sweet Larry Rivers bauble at Marlborough? Heck pal, with all those tax-free Swiss franks, why not get them both? But don't forget to drop by the smilin' folks over at the UBS booth. The can fix you up for some fine tax scams that'll make your capital gains -- aesthetic or financial -- just plain disappear.

Only chuckleheads play fair.

I don't know. It just came to me.

Grass fed

2008-12-03T20:44:00.000-06:00

Not long ago my wife and I bought a quarter steer from our egg lady. One of the compensations we get for living in a very small east Texas town (a local monthly calls itself the voice of the Upper East Side of Texas, heh) is that we have access to some incredible tasting, sustainably raised meat and eggs. The egg lady delivers a couple dozen free-range eggs -- okay, the chickens range freely, not the eggs -- regularly. And annually she slaughters a steer, parts of which we have bought on a couple of occasions.

A word about grass-fed beef: it's delicious.

Since the animal spends his life walking around and not penned, it can be a bit chewy if it's over-cooked. On the other hand, exercise gets blood flowing in its muscles and a diet of carotene-rich herbage both adds flavor and makes the fat distinctly yellow. Cattle evolved as grass eaters. They have a digestive system designed by millennia of natural selection to get the most out of a very fibrous, low starch diet. This document from Colorado State begins:

The rumen is a fermentation vat par excellance, providing an anaerobic environment, constant temperature and pH, and good mixing. Well-masticated substrates are delivered through the esophagus on a regular schedule, and fermentation products are either absorbed in the rumen itself or flow out for further digestion and absorption downstream.

It continues:

Feed, water and saliva are delivered to the reticulorumen through the esophageal orifice. Heavy objects (grain, rocks, nails) fall into the reticulum, while lighter material (grass, hay) enters the rumen proper. Added to this mixture are voluminous quantities of gas produced during fermentation.

Ruminants produce prodigious quantities of saliva. Published estimates for adult cows are in the range of 100 to 150 liters of saliva per day! Aside from its normal lubricating qualities, saliva serves at least two very important functions in the ruminant:

provision of fluid for the fermentation vat
alkaline buffering - saliva is rich in bicarbonate, which buffers the large quanitity of acid produced in the rumen and is probably critical for maintainance of rumen pH.

All these materials within the rumen partition into three primary zones based on their specific gravity. Gas rises to fill the upper regions, grain and fluid-saturated roughage ("yesterday's hay") sink to the bottom, and newly arrived roughage floats in a middle layer.

Then comes an illustration that may owe a lot to Carroll Dunham:

Or maybe not.

The point here is that cattle evolved an extraordinary digestive tract that has nothing to do with eating and digesting grains like corn. Feeding corn to cattle is an industrial agriculture practice and owes its being to economic factors and not good animal husbandry. Basically you can get a steer fatter faster on less land if you feed him corn. But a corn diet can also make the steer sick, so he also gets frequent doses of antibiotics.

The economics of corn are downright Byzantine with market distortions arising from huge agribusinesses like Monsanto and from USDA farm subsidies. Growing corn is also intricately linked to America's consumption of fossil fuels (transportation, processing, fertilizer manufacture, etc.) Michal Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma covers much of this info in engaging detail. Apparently there is molecular evidence that US citizens consume more corn (via corn sweeteners, animal flesh raised on corn diets, and so on) than do Mexicans.

Tonight I cooked a T-bone steak from our quarter steer for dinner. Grass-fed beef. I seared it in a steel skillet and let it rest while I fried some turnip pieces in the pan drippings. When they were nearly done, I added a chopped shallot and later some smoked turkey stock. After reducing the stock, I added some lemon juice and some grated horseradish.

I cut the meat off the bone and sliced it for serving with the turnips and juices. Nobody ate better. It was rich and flavorful and simple and right.

It was a huge steak. There is leftover meat for salads later and the bone and trimmings are in a stock pot simmering as I type.

Pimp my Prius

2008-12-02T21:07:00.000-06:00

Over at Juiced Hybrid you can buy all sorts of widgets to make your Prius cooler, hotter and more efficient. Items range from a bolt-on chassis stiffener:

To a device you plug into the car's diagnostic system that promises to teach you how to improve your mileage:

To an electronic module that will make your Prius run on battery power only at speeds up to 34 mph:

To a $5,000 kit to convert your Prius to a plug-in EV car with 360 lbs of extra batteries and a huge increase in mileage:

Juiced Hybrid claims you can expect up to 100 mpg with the extra batteries.

I searched the site and found no offerings for Prius duallies:

They did have a link to a Prius autocross race, though:

Somebody should organize the Texas Grand Prius (Marfa to Terlingua, say). I'd enter.

Talking and writing

2008-12-02T20:04:00.000-06:00

I'm actively procrastinating honoring a review commission. It'll happen, just not today. The ideas are coalescing. The images and wider-world references and associations have begun to arrange themselves. I've not written it, however.

Today instead I did a bit of yard work and noodled about in my studio and on the Web. Here's something I found on line this afternoon via a link at Smith Magazine:

Of course I don't think only about writing. I spend time with my wife, family and friends. I read a lot, watch a lot of politics on TV. But prose is beavering along beneath, writing itself. When it comes time to type it is an expression, not a process. My mind has improved so much at this that it's become clearly apparent to me. The words, as e. e. cummings wrote, come out like a ribbon and lie flat on the brush. He wasn't writing about toothpaste. In my fancy, I like to think he could have been writing about prose.
Yes, I had that cummings line in mind before I began. I knew I was heading for it. By losing the ability to speak, I have increased my ability to communicate. I am content.

The writer is film critic Roger Ebert. The quote is from a Sun-Times blog post that dates from late October of this year. I recommend it.

Last weekend

2008-11-29T22:56:00.001-06:00

We visited San Antonio last weekend, and I learned there are several missions in the city besides the Alamo. Unlike their famous sibling, these other missions are maintained by the National Park Service. The Alamo is owned by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and is located across the street from a Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum and other crummy tourist pits. I shot the image above in the ruined residence hall of Mission San José on the southern end of the modern San Antonio. I shot the image below the same morning in front of the Alamo.

The mission church was reconstructed after its dome collapsed in the 1870s, but much of the structure dates from its founding in 1720.

That's the west facade of the mission church. It is still a working Catholic church where mass is celebrated regularly. Mission San José had the good fortune not to have been the site of a much mythologized battle, so it gets no Christmas tree. And the crummy wax museum geeks leave it alone.

Nice guy

2008-11-29T22:23:00.000-06:00

Weird image:

His name is Jeremy Newton, and he's a graduate student at a university where I used to teach. He was invited to participate in a group show at Centraltrak in Dallas. The opening was tonight. That pink scumble of stuff above is a detail of a carpet of Pink Pearl eraser rubbings Jeremy made last year. The guy's a natural. He scattered a layer of eraser rubbings on a gallery floor before he'd ever heard of Barry Le Va. Maybe he still hasn't heard of Le Va. I don't know.

The trouble with what I saw tonight, though is that idiot gallery visitors don't look where they're going. Jeremy told me that his initial installation with the piece humbly and simply lying on the floor didn't work out because oblivious folks kept stepping on it. He had to set it on a low pedestal for the opening. Much was lost. Confining his oddball material to a raised platform took away some of its stubborn, mute factuality and made it only "art."

I've seen it in other contexts, and it's better than that.

Alamo

2008-11-20T23:50:00.000-06:00

I almost forgot...

My wife and I are in San Antonio for a conference. Our hotel is across the street from the Alamo. The Alamo sprinklers are running tonight:

All is well.

Tomorrow I'll gallery hop while she confers and conferences and more.

Wretch/retch

2008-11-19T11:56:00.000-06:00

Paul Cullum, writing in Vanity Fair, discloses a memo from horrible, horrible factory painter of tepid banalities Thomas Kinkade to the director and crew of his film, Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage. At least that's the title in Cullum's piece. IMDB lists the title as Thomas Kinkade's Home for Christmas. Whatever.

The memo contains 16 items which Kinkade wanted the filmmakers to bear in mind while working on the project. Here's one:

15) Nostalgia. My paintings routinely blend timeframes. This is not only okay, but tends to create a more timeless look. Vintage cars (30's, 40's, 50's, 60's etc) can be featured along with 70's era cars. Older buildings are favorable. Avoid anything that looks contemporary -- shopping centers, contemporary storefronts, etc. Also, I prefer to avoid anything that is shiny. Our vintage vehicles, though often times are cherished by their owners and kept spic-n-span should be "dirtied up" a bit for the shoot. Placerville was and is a somewhat shabby place, and most vehicles, people, etc bear traces of dust, sawdust, and the remnants of country living. There are many dirt roads, muddy lanes, etc., and in general the place has a tumbled down, well-worn look.

Everything should have a pleasing coat of moss on it. Like Hobbits and really stupid fixer-upper village dwellings in the rain. Jean Baudrillard, writing of the death of reality in "The Precession of Simulacra," says that nostalgia isn't what it used to be. I guess not.

The movie was released on DVD November 11 with no theatrical run, presumably because it's abysmally awful. Iceland, which is bankrupt and starving, will host a theatrical release tomorrow. Poor Iceland.

Warning: viewing the trailer is not advised. It is included here for evidentiary purposes only. Just use your imagination to conjure a feeble Peter O'Toole mouthing "Art is about LIFE." Poor Peter, money must be an issue for him. Just like Iceland.

Painters can make good films. Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly is wonderful and moving.

And Robert Longo's film based on William Gibson's story, Johnny Nmemonic is engaging, proto-steampunk stuff.

But this Kinkade stuff makes me shudder: there's an audience for it. They walk among us and like moss-coated memories of shabby miracles.

Kimbell image update

2008-11-19T11:43:00.000-06:00

The above image, from a story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, shows an architectural model of Renzo Piano's current idea for the new Kimbell Art Museum building. Published reports indicate that the model is accurate in the overall proportions of the structure and its placement relative to the existing 1972 Louis Kahn masterpiece. However, the project will likely evolve before construction begins in 2010.

Kimbell addition

2008-11-18T12:28:00.000-06:00

The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth announced plans to add another building to the justly celebrated 1972 structure by Louis Kahn. Renzo Piano, who worked in Kahn's studio around the time the Kimbell was designed, will design the new structure, which will be located just west of the existing museum. Just what the building will look like is not clear to me, but here's an illustration from the Dallas Morning News:

Adding to a masterpiece like the Kimbell is going to be a tricky job. The museum announced plans for an addition to Kahn's building once before to a storm of criticism from architects and the public. The earlier plan was to attach more vaults in imitation of the original structure, which would have seriously messed up the building's extraordinary aesthetics. This time the museum and Piano had enough sense to construct a separate building.

Here's an aerial view:

Here's another view:

I really love that building. I hope the addition causes no harm.

Art's spectrum

2008-11-17T14:38:00.001-06:00

I saw two shows in Dallas over the weekend that just about set the limits for the spectrum of activities covered by the blanket term "contemporary art."

At the Dallas Museum of Art the Olafur Eliasson survey "Take Your Time" celebrates and explores the conundrums surrounding perception and consciousness -- specifically the consciousness of perception considered as experiences in a continuous duration. It's all Bergsonian philosophy and the embededness of perception in the ever changing objects of its awareness, except when it's all look at the facts of the museum experience and how that context attends what you're getting out of these things you're looking at. The audience Saturday was enthralled. Smiles and appreciative murmurs abounded. Fun philosophy. (image via www.olafureliasson.net)

At Conduit Gallery I caught the last day of a smart, hip show by Fahamu Pecou, a painter and graphic designer based in Atlanta. His day job involves working with assorted hip-hop performers, helping to design the particular street-smart, tough guy images of masculinity so central to marketing their music and personas. This led Pecou to generate a Warholesque campaign for himself involving a series of paintings based on imaginary covers for (mostly) actual magazines like Artforum and Tema Celeste featuring himself as a star. His campaign slogan: "Fahamu Pecou is the shit." It's all the intersection of public image, race, and constructed gender executed with a fierce wit. The title of the painting above is Warn a Brother.

The party's over

2008-11-16T19:39:00.000-06:00

In the wake of the Enron fiasco, gray-haired men who knew business and its inner workings counseled us all that hastily conceived regulations aimed at preventing another fubar situation involving off balance sheet accounting and risky trades in derivatives would likely yield unintended consequences and actually cause more harm to the efficient operations of business enterprises than good for the safety of investors and the public. Regulations in general are bad for business, it was argued.

Government isn't the solution, quoth Reagan and his apostles; Government is the problem.

Tell it to Somalia.

But anyhow, back in 2002, Bush said “we need men and women of character who know the difference between ambition and destructive greed, between justified risk and irresponsibility, between enterprise and fraud.” His post Enron solution was to encourage rational, ethical behavior among the business class. In the words of LA Times reporter Ronald Brownstein:

Bush offered much the same balance Tuesday [July 9, 2002], suggesting that a key to solving problems in the boardroom was for chief executives to set a “moral tone.” Embedded in that summons is the conviction that the crisis of corporate ethics is primarily a problem of individuals who go bad, rather than a financial system that encourages even good people to make bad decisions–and a regulatory system that fails to deter them.

We all know how well that worked out.

So last week Bush offered this opinion on financial matters:

One vital principle of reform is that our nations must make our financial markets more transparent. For example, we should consider improving accounting rules for securities, so that investors around the world can understand the true value of the assets they purchase.

Second, we need to ensure that markets, firms, and financial products are properly regulated. For example, credit default swaps - financial products that insure against potential losses - should be processed through centralized clearinghouses, instead of through unregulated, "over the counter" markets. By bringing greater stability to this large and important sector, we would reduce the risk to our overall financial system.

Third, we must enhance the integrity of our financial markets. For example, authorities in every nation should take a fresh look at the rules governing market manipulation and fraud, and ensure that investors are properly protected.

Fourth, we must strengthen cooperation among the world's financial authorities. For example, leading nations should better coordinate national laws and regulations. We should also reform international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are based largely on the economic order of 1944. To better reflect the realities of today's global economy, both the IMF and World Bank should modernize their governance structures. They should consider extending greater voting power to dynamic developing nations - particularly as they increase their contributions to these institutions. They should also consider ways to streamline their executive boards, and make them more representative.

Improved accounting rules! Maybe we can make them even reflect reality!

Regulated trades for credit default swaps! What a concept! Could it be that a financial system representing several times the US GDP might need a little look-see from a regulator or two now and again?

Tighten up fraud laws! Can free markets survive?

International cooperation on financial regulations! Can world government be far behind?

We are witnessing the end of the latest incarnation of laissez-faire capitalism. Stubborn adherence to Reaganite dogma got us into a hellish mess, and even Bush knows it. It's over. Laissez-faire arguments will persist. Witness the silly calls to repeal capital gains taxes when Paulson first floated a bailout plan before Congress. Perishing few Americans can claim capital gains on anything right now. The tax bogeyman came to the lips of some conservatives almost as a Pavlovian response to a crisis, not a reasonable and pragmatic tactic in the face of bad financial conditions. But on the whole, the Reaganonomics ideology -- its worldview -- lies in ruins along with Lehman Brothers. Individual ethical choices are not the solution. Indeed individual choices are the problem, and the point is not ethics. Rather the point is that we must moderate capital's demand for more and more and more and ever higher returns on investment. And we must do so because excesses threaten capitalism itself.

What that moderating structure looks like remains to be seen. The G20 summit this weekend was a start, and apparently a pragmatic one. From the Economist:

Just what path the G20 will take is not yet clear. All sides interpreted this communiqué from the summit a little differently. Mr Sarkozy talked about the “historic” shift in America’s attitude to financial regulation. The Bush administration focused on the summiteers’ commitment to pro-growth policies and open markets. Leaders from emerging economies, not surprisingly, concentrated on their new global role.

In some areas the leaders clearly papered over their differences. The communiqué, for instance, nodded to Europeans’ desire for more regulation by promising to ensure that “all financial markets, products and participants are regulated or subject to oversight”. But it quickly tempered that point with phrases more to the Bush administration’s liking: promising to make sure that “that regulation is efficient, does not stifle innovation, and encourages expanded trade in financial products and services”.