Schumpeter once wrote that the Stock market is a poor substitute for the holy grail. In other words, capitalism is more or less incapable of producing belief in itself. And yet, there are people who do believe in it. Ziad Abdelnour is one of them.
For Ziad, business is war. And what is at stake in this war is the creation and destruction of worlds.
“The lifeblood of capitalism are the entrepreneurs, the financiers who make things happen.”
The drive to make things happen is not inherited, is not taught, is not capable of being transmitted by a propaganda machine. “It has to be in your DNA” says Ziad. Because of this, the profile of Blackhawk Partners has not changed for years:
I don’t back industries. I don’t back ideas. I back people.
These people—these capitalists, the billionaires who change the world—are rebels. Only by backing rebels, can you re-create the world.
This is what Ziad’s capital does: it empowers the rebels (re-bellare) to start the war all over again .
Don’t buy anything. Don’t borrow anything. Don’t open any kind of e-trade account, or invest in any kinds of funds, or buy any kinds of currencies, or pay any kind of broker. Read this book, cover to cover. Then write a letter of praise to Peter Schiff for his clarity of thought, his easy to understand explanations of economic realities, and his ability to map out alternatives for Americans with a little bit of good sense.
There are very few perfect beginnings to a story. Beginnings which move through images at the same rate as they move through text, rolling into a plot detectibly, sensibly, unhurriedly. A boy, for example, making the rounds on his bicycle, delivering the daily papers:
...At Colonel and Mrs Easterbrook’s, he delivered The Times and the Daily Graphic. At Mrs Sweatenham’s he left The Times and The Daily Worker. At Miss Hingecliff’s and Miss Murgatroyd’s he left The Daily Telegraph and The News Chronicle. At Miss Blacklocke’s, he left The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail. At all these houses, and indeed in practically every house in Chipping Cleghorn, he delivered every Friday, a copy of the North Benom News and The Chipping Cleghorn Gazette, known simply as The Gazette. Thus on Friday mornings, after a hurried glance at the headlines in the daily paper…. most of the inhabitants of Chipping Cleghorn eagerly opened the Gazette and plunged into the local news. After a cursory glance at correspondence, in which the passionate hates and feuds of rural life found full play, most of the subscribers then turned to the local column.
We can easily sketch in our mind a series of houses, in front of which stand assorted sizes of mailbox, and in which kitchens sit the inhabitants of this happy English village, eating their singular English breakfasts, reading the headlines, the correspondence, the local news, and then, more likely than not, the Classifieds, in which are published up to the minute or almost up to the minute ads, as relevant and localizable as Tweets.
Frank has the waves, which is why he doesn’t need much of anything else. Nevertheless he has an ex-wife, a girlfriend, 4 jobs and a routine, about which he is frankly religious.
He has the “Gentleman’s Hour” which is when other guys who don’t need to be at work at 9 or 10 AM ride the waves, lovingly, respectfully, uncompetitively.
Frankie thinks that priests should know what Italian husbands have always known: Italian wives will always find a way to punish you, and its usually in the wallet. You piss her off, and she’ll still do a job in the bedroom, but then she’ll go out and buy a new dinette set.
Have a bit of Christie as social chronicler, as drawing room critic of a leisure class which presents itself as a platform of unemployment. It is 1946 and the Angkatells are gathered togethered, after the murder. Lucy, the mistress of cognitive deviations, Henrietta, clever, independent and detached, Midge, dark, square shaped, and poor, David, a spoiled, sour intellectual, and Edward, the reluctant, bony, undeserving heir.
It is quite obvious that the notion of work is odd, uncertain, and turning: the way milk turns. “Is the woman sympathetic and pleasant to work for?,” Edward asks Midge. “If you must have a job you must take one where the surroundings are harmonious and where you like the people you are working with.”
But how does one explain the notion of work to an heir?
How to explain to a person like Edward… What did Edward know of the labour market, of jobs, They were all divided from her by an impassible gulf: the gulf that separates the leisured from the working. They had no conception of the difficulties of getting a job. And once you had got it, of keeping it… She had found a job for herself at 4 pounds a week… Midge had no particular illusions about working. She disliked the shop. She disliked Madame Alfredge. She disliked the eternal subservience to ill tempered and impolite customers. She doubted very much whether she could obtain any other job….
A 17 year old shop girl, circa 1946 or 2010?
Discontent does not stop at the door of the dress shop. Oxford is overgrown with it; circulates it, exports it.
“I must have a talk with you David and learn all about the new ideas. As far as I can see one must hate everybody but at the same time give free medical attention and a lot of extra education… Poor things all those helpless little children herded into schoolhouses everyday….
L.A./Hollywood relived by a suicidal ex-husband ex-producer ex-Jew with a screenplay. The screenplay is fresh off the bus from New Jersey, delivered to Charlie (post suicide) by his 21 year old nephew, Lionel. It is about Disraeli but that doesn’t matter. The screenplay is his property, and all Charlie needs to make it (again) in this town is one property.
The screenplay, nicknamed Ben and Bill, or Bob and Bill, somehow makes itself known to a studio, an agent, a casting director, who manage to get a black pro-Israel karate expert to play Disraeli, the Jew.
The characters are mimetic:
The studio executive assistant has the unwieldy habit of walking to the nearest ladies room, locking the door, and screaming. (It is always a mistake to actually read the screenplay.) We visit with her and her Beverly Hills therapist in intimate one hour sessions, at which she arrives hystericized with laughter. The therapist is straight out of DSM-V and full of noteworthy advice, relevant to any and all professional women over 35 who work among men. Cut out a small nook of rationality inside the chaos.
The director is paid in dinar which have been blocked from leaving Yugoslavia, and doesn’t talk to the actors. The actors are not worth characterizing.
Prepare to grow a dry grin and giggle while reading.
Let’s just say that murders happened in the middle of other things: a cop, a lawyer, a fire investigator get up, they fight with their wives, they eat. Sometimes they think. The law is something they think about. How it came to be what it is, where it came from, when it changed. If you have a father who reads, who respects the history of things, who loves the Law, you think about what a lawyer should be, what the law should be, what an institution like the law allows human beings to be.
In Europe, rich people sometimes keep a modest apartment in a poor or marginal area of their city. They call it their “pied a terre”. Translated, this means “foot on the ground”. It is said that their purpose in maintaining these small apartments is to remind them of their roots and to keep them in touch with reality. And that’s exactly why I always keep my copy of Letters To A Young Lawyer in my briefcase. The words within, the philosophy, Harris’ love of simplicity and reverence for the law, this is my psychological pied a terre.
Quiet, patient, relentless intelligence spills over the pages of this story about a girl geek, a journalist, a news magazine devoted to the critique of corrupt Swedish institutions, and an odd assemblage of Stockholm’s thugs, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and cops. None are verbose. Men and women think. Thinking happens without talk, without sounds, without annunciation. It is sometimes signaled by cigarettes. Sometimes by a walk. Much goes unsaid, and unshared.
All the good guys use Macs. Some of them smoke. The geek uses a powerbook, the journalist a Mac ibook, the magazine editor an Airbook. The geekgirl (Salander) is skinny, occasionally violent, abnormally intelligent, obsessively private. She does not emote; she enjoys: mathematics, sex, hacking. She has lesbian girlfriends, bank accounts in the Canary Islands, lawyers in Gibraltar, and a local accountant. She buys a 2.5 million kroner flat with a view and decorates it in one day of shopping in Ikea, for a total of 97,000 kroner.
Sit down at the kitchen table, have a cup of tea, and listen to the gossip, the rumours, the superstitions, the confabulations and conjurations of the people living in the village near Saint Anne’s well, in the magic woods of Whitethorn, where everybody tells stories. For example, the story of Neddy who was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
But you see I never wanted to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. Years ago we had one sharp knife in the kitchen and everyone was always talking about in with fear. ‘Will you put the sharp knife up in a shelf before one of the children cuts the hands off themselves?’ my mom would say. ‘‘Make sure the sharp knife has the blade towards the wall and the handle out. We don’t want someone ripping themselves apart’. They lived in fear of some terrible accident and the kitchen running red with blood… I was sorry for the sharp knife, to tell you the truth….
And so we step into the minds and hearts of these irish folks who live very populated lives, crowded with family obligations, loyalties, suspicions, immoralities and miracles….And everyone with an opinion of everyone else. And always the age old heaviness of poverty and the imperative to hide half of everything true.
Oliver August, correspondent for the Times of London in China is learning Chinese. His teacher asks him what Oliver means. Oliver responds: ‘Since a man that works on a farm was a farmer, a man who harvested olives was an Oliver’. His teacher then couples two radicals – olive (gan) and farmer ( no ). The 26 year old reporter is thereafter laughingly referred to as Farmer.
“Nobody in their right minds called themselves a farmer. Millions are fleeing the land to become city dwellers, to partake in the industrial revolution, to become richer. When I introduced myself people guffawed to each other. A foreign farmer has come to our China… !”
Oliver August is a sieve of a China in transformation from below. We get the language, the images, the words, the emotions, the slogans, the mixture of groundlessness and lawlessness, the sense that a Chinese being can rely neither on the earth nor on the sky for his limits. “Modern China was a magic mirror: you could see whatever you wanted to see…,” writes Oliver.
The country was both free and oppressed, at once anarchic and authoritarian, totally chaotic yet highly regulated.
Lai Changxing is an emblem of this new country; hence his is the story tracked by Oliver.
But alongside the story of the legendary Lai, a rogue reminiscent of America’s 19th century captains of industry, Oliver gives us the gossip, the rumours, the news. And the only way to report this news is “to get out and report what you saw yourself,” in sideways glances, from overnight trains, from hired cars driven by monks, from the streets and the restaurants…
But still more, Oliver gives us economics, politics, philosophy. Not cut and pasted out of wikipedia but lovely, incisive, pieces of thought, fresh from the sea, still smelling of fish.
The more China modernizes the more ravenous its appetite for the past becomes….
These wealthy Chinese who finally thought it safe to return from abroad “were known as sea-turtles who had finally brought home their nest eggs…”
A myo tan low is a building that scratches the sky…
A big-faced building iDam yam zi dasha is a building that gives the owner a lot of face…
There is a kind of being found among artists, a being-with peculiar to art school graduates, children of artists, girlfriends of artists, gallery owners and oglers and agents and wives, proximate to art, attached to it but uncertain of it, what or where or whose it is. Both proximate and remote, like a cat in a black box of which one must say it is both dead and not dead.
Such is art. On occasion, the remoteness of art maddens the artist. Deflects him from himself. Forces him to account for what he both has and doesn’t have. Impossible. A problematic with the face of Chas M. Columbia graduate, with roots on 113th Street and Amsterdam, previously of Oyster Bay.
Someone one said life is just high school, on and on… The obnoxious little shit we recall from ninth grade becomes the obnoxious little shit in the White House.
Forget Harley Street. The latest design in shrinks is a six foot 250 pound lesbian weight lifter who runs a pub with her bosomy girlfriend, and offers bed, morning after breakfast, and laundry service. This is what the 21st century male patient wants: a powerful, intuitive M.D. who can hoist him effortlessly over her shoulder, tuck him into bed without sexual threat or expectation, wash the blood off his shirt and serve up bacon and egg for breakfast.
Such a shrink, and only such a shrink can handle what the Iraq, the national health service and the Metropolitan police have brewed in ex-Lieutenant Charles Acland, now of London, hateful and harijan: untouchable.
She is a portrait of competence. She works for the big distributor of computers that packaged itself after cows. She has a knack for customer relations. She enjoys convincing users, individual by individual, that the big company wants nothing more than to make nice and relate, long term. She has removed all excess from her life, all things huge, or insubstantial.
We find her in a hospital room waiting for her brother to come back to life, as if she is watching some overlong Swedish film… A problematic brother, liked by animals, but “...when it came to humans no one knew what to make of the boy…. “. The problematic boy, Mark, has been damaged.
The language is full bodied, rich, ripe, generously given. All in good time. Bernadette Dunne, as usual, is remarkable. She narrates people thinking in low, cool tones, as if she were playing jazz for a small group of friends.
Slowly, slowly, the author mixes in big words, medical words, technical words to explain the misadventures and mistakes of the brain, configuring the brain as a fabulous animal which never stays the same. Mark’s brain is not what it was before the accident; it cannot recognize the familiar as familiar, cannot recognize his sister as the same sister, his friends as the same friends, his dog as the same dog. This misrecognition effects another: the sister who is not recognized by her brother slowly doubts her own identity, which dissolves into a piece of a town, a piece of a bed, a piece of a river…
In the middle of fields of Nebraska wheat, one theory of the brain folds into another, from a brain that tells stories, to a brain which functions like boy scouts waving their flashlights in the dark, to the brain as a series of mappings of other brain-maps,
My brain, all those split parts trying to convince each other, dozens of lost scouts waving crappy flashlights in the woods at night….
The brother, the sister, his girlfriend, a nurse’s aid, a cognitive neurologist from SUNY Stony Brook having a mid-life identity crisis…all of them unable to recognize themselves, unable, too, to recognize other beings, or other species… Hence, too, an ecological crisis: all species depend upon recognition, or go extinct….
1948 is a strange time to be a Jew. For Lonzman, the hero of this tale, it is the year the Jews in Israel are driven into the sea, and get a small beachside strip of Alaska as compensation. It is the year Lonzman’s father arrives in downtown Sitka where blue kerchiefed Jewesses sing Negro spirituals with jewish lyrics that paraphrase Lincoln and Marx. It is the year Lonzman’s father plays chess “like a man with a toothache, hemhorroids, gas, and a headache whose moves are like successive pieces of terrible news for the survivor Jews who play him. The survivors populate The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, with their chess, their holy books, their rabbis, their clans, their latkes, their typical and atypical habits, their policemen, their crimes.
But I’m curious, do you really feel you’re waiting for Messiah?
It’s Messiah, what else can you do but wait?
And Palestine? When Messiah comes all the jews go back there, to the Promised Land, fur hats and all?
I hear Messiah cut a deal with the beavers…
No more fur.
Landsman and Berkot confront Schmerle, the doorkeeper of the Verbove Rebbe, whose son, Mendele, has been found heroin-dead in a seedy hotel. Schmerle
“... looks east, looks west, he checks with the mandolin man on the roof…
“There is always a man on the roof with a semi-automatic mandolin.”
Imagine a big black woman, Myrna from Montreal, who decides to drive South, but feels peckish after an hour and a half and so stops and bumps into a one-vache town, a fairy-tale town:
Three Pines had what she craved. It had croissants and cafe au lait. It had steak frites and the New York Times. It had a bakery, a bistro, a B & B, a general store, it had peace and stillness and laughter. It had great joy and great sadness ….
It had sweet gay couples and poor married artists and old unmarried women; it had village size problems and village size evil and village style murder. It had Christmas, and at Christmas, “homes full of people there and not there,” yakking away in English and French. Myrna never leaves. Inspector Gamache, on the other hand, comes and goes. Each time there is a murder.
The bistro was his secret weapon in tracking down murderers. Not only in Three Pines but in every town and village in Quebec. First he found a comfortable cafe or brasserie or bistro. Then he found the murderer. Because Armand Gamache knew something that others didn’t. At the root of each murder was an emotion. Warped no doubt, twisted and ugly, but an emotion. One so powerful it had driven a man to make a ghost. Gamash’s job was to collect the evidence. But also to collect the emotions. And the only way he knew to do that was to get to know the people. To watch and listen, to pay attention. And the best way to do that was in a deceptively casual manner, in a deceptively casual setting. Like the bistro.
This was supposed to be about four retired couples, cops and wives, living in Florida and solving crimes (not cases). But Spillane turned it into a study of memory. Imagine a blinded amnesiacal lover secreted away inside a community of retired cops in New Jersey, and rediscovered by her old boyfriend after 25 years? What remains when memory disappears?
How does one lover make himself remembered to another?
If the boyfriend has the grainy voice of Richard Ferrone, and the nouns of a Mickey Spillane novel: doll, honey, kitten, what remains is instinct. And the girlfriend responds to being called a specific name by a specific voice. Hey, doll. All right, kitten.
We get information in clumps, tangles, bunches. There are facts, mixed up with opinions, references, foreign words, sounds and descriptions referring to where we are talking, what is going on where we are talking, the distraction-ridden machinery of a technologically frenzied environment, analogies dragged in from confused personal archives, elaborations drawing on gossip, rumours, and mother disciplines, percentages, abbreviations, brand-names, phrases in mixed tongues, side notes referencing the inaccuracies of the company we keep and the associations we accumulate.
Dialogue. Which is what McBain does. Consider Carella and Parker questioning an ex-boyfriend:
So tell us how you happened to break up?
It was the Passion. The Mel Gibson movie. I told Alicia it was Anti-semitic. She disagreed. I’m Jewish; we got into an argument.
So whose idea was it to split up?
My mother’s. I live with my mother. She said if we were going to fight already over a farkaktmovie that was just the beginning…..I hate Mel Gibson.
Thirty seconds to peel a character like an egg.
Ollie Weeks is asking Parker for advise because Ollie was kissed in the mouth by Patricia the other night after he played piano for her family. Yes, this is the fat, suspicious, comical sociopath who hates everyone equally. Except that now he has a sweet piano teacher, and a sweet girlfriend and is looking ten pounds less hateful.
Kling, meanwhile, is asking Carella for advise. About Sharon, who he loves and whom he followed and who now refuses to talk to him.
“Everybody’s always innocent, Brown said. Nobody ever did anything. Catch ‘em with the bloody hatchet in their hands they say this ain’t my hatchet this is my uncle’s hatchet…Wonder anybody’s in jail at all there’s so many innocent people around….
Brown and Kling are interviewing the head of Baldwin University’s English Department who is wearing a purple butterfly bow tie and telling Brown that “we’ve never anything like this happen before….”. Brown is wondering if his wife Caroline would go for him in a tie like that one…
Because conversations are never just about information and even information is never just about information. Because even cops hear by drifting in and out of their own conversations. Hearing from where they are being heard.
A short sharp meditation on how we know what we know and how we decide what we decide by the director of the Center of Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
When I became director of the Max Planck institute of Human Development, I wanted to create an interdisciplinary research group whose members actually talked worked and published together—a rare thing. Unless one actively creates an environment that supports this goal, collaboration tends to fall apart within a few years or may never get off the ground in the first place. The major obstacle is a mental one.
Researchers like most ordinary people tend to identify with their in group and ignore or even look down on neighboring disciplines. Yet most relevant topics we study today do not respect the historically grown disciplinary borders and to make progress, one must look beyond one’s own narrow point of view so I came up with a set of rules, not verbalized but acted upon that would create the kind of culture I desired.
Those rules included: EVERYONE ON THE SAME PLANE.
In my experience, employees who work on different floors interact 50% less than those who work on the same floor. And the loss is greater for those working in different buildings. People often behave as if they still lived in the savannah, where they look for others horizontally but not above or below ground. So when my growing group needed an additional 2000 square feet in which to operate, I vetoed the architect’s proposal that we construct a new building, and extended our existing offices horizontally so that everyone remained on the same plane…..
This pancake theory of organizational vitality is just one demonstration of the non-logical rules that govern human environments.
Intelligence is at work in what we call gut feelings, hunches and intuitions—despite the fact that we cannot account for them. Intelligence is also at work in the non-logical rules of thumb we use to navigate and predict the behavior of others.
Consider a woman waiting for a black suitcase at Kennedy Airport, and a cop who is looking only for a woman who is looking out for him. How does he zero in on the woman?
Consider a baseball player who wants to catch a ball: how does he calculate where the ball will be so he can catch it?
How does Harry decide on which of his two girlfriends he should marry?
Different heuristics and rules of thumb underlie intuitions, enabling fast action, utilizing ‘recognition memory’ and the ability to track moving objects… But these rules are not logical. Gerd Gigerenzer navigates the place that gut feelings hold within human knowing, inviting us to re-evaluate both knowing and feeling.
If ever there was a language of L.A., a language in which each noun, common or proper, is localized, dated, and cast in a Hollywood movie, it is the language of James M. Cain. And if Cain’s L.A. had a voice, she would sound like Christine Williams. She doesn’t sing, but she could be singing; she doesn’t hawk her words, but she could be a crier of the news that books hold; she doesn’t broadcast, but she could be advertising baby food or soap; or she could be doing all of these things. In her voice vibrates the radio hysteria of the 1920s, showy, fluttery, stagy, but fundamentally sweet and pure and hopeful. Indeed, it is the voice of a big country, of big spaces, with lots of land to cross, lots of square footage. Even indoors.
And so when Cain describes L.A., he talks about Glendale. The overspill. The life just outside the borders, looking in. As if all L.A. was really outside L.A., looking in.
The bathroom that he now whistled in was a utile jewel: it was in green tile and white tile, it was as clean as an operating room, everything was in its proper place and everything worked.
And before there were California girls, there were California women. They wore aprons over dresses, slips and stockings, they walked on pumps and pinned up their hair, even at home. They decorated cakes and cooked proper dinners, from scratch. They knew how to run a household and how to save money and how to mend things that broke. They had names like Mildred. And husbands like Pierce.
Increasingly, the essay, the critique, the report and the annunciation are being reconfigured in the form of fiction.
Michael Crichton has mastered this form. His Next is more than a story about the re-distribution of genomes; it is Critique, Satire, Farce and Science Report, with:
just the right amount of irony in representing jerks, like Brad the idiot nephew who attaches to underage teens, and relies on his rich uncle for jobs, cars, and bail;
just the right amount of irony in depicting the social-emotional infantilism of scientists who can’t navigate their way out of their self-made moral sinkholes;
just the right amount of Hollywoodability in scenes with children, animals and cars;
just the right amount of Doris Day type silliness in domestic showdowns between a sorry husband and his forgiving but disciplinary wife: here Blondie accepts the half-son, half chimpanzee Henry has brought home from the Lab, welcomes her role as Mommy, and scolds Henry for not thinking ahead.
just the right amount of mad British eco-alienated humour to work its way into the next Cadbury or British Air commercial…
I am reading, no hearing, a beautiful book where a photograph is described:
This is us when we are happy is not the message that Alice Roosevelt’s wedding delivers…and unlike Alice Roosevelt who continued to be an unrepentant thorn in her father’s side even after Teddy’s death, all the Curtis children never stopped believing “Chief” could do no wrong, never stopped believing Chief was the perfect father, even after absences of many years, never stopped seeking Chief’s approval.
The woman who gives this sharp, tenderized commentary on Edward Curtis, father, renegade husband and shadow-catcher is at the wheel of a car in L.A., stuck in traffic. She tells us about Edward with the same familiarity that she tells us about the shortcut (Fountain Avenue) she will take, the shortcut everyone takes, the shortcut each of the 30 million drivers currently sharing the road believes that they alone discovered.
He became, she tells us,
by disappearing from their daily lives, not a father but the myth of one, a myth they needed to believe in to survive. And despite his actions, despite all contrary evidence, they needed to sustain that system of belief even if it meant altering their memory, creating a false memory, a false identity of who their father really was. If Edward, the disappearing father was to play the good guy in their system of belief, then someone anyone had to play the villain because surely there was real unhappiness in their home in everything around them… and someone , never dad, no never him, someone else had to take the blame… the person who was too tired to cook dinner after working all day long, that other unromantic parent asleep at the stove in her flannel slippers, stressed out and exhausted: mom….”
And as she drives and thinks and turns her thoughts over, and over, she assembles the person of Edward Curtis, and how this photographer intersects with the structure of the family, how he poses and positions himself within the family so as to appear a certain way, to seem a certain way. This seeming was in fact his art.
It is no wonder that there is an aura of indeterminacy surrounding this shadow-catcher, an uncertainty arising from the distance he put between himself and his world, himself and his own century.
And with this distance comes a mystery, a puzzle which is reconnoitred but not entirely solved by the story we are told about a man who sets up a photography studio in Seattle just after the fire…
