Tag: books

Tunnel of Blues sold

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Looks as if I sold another photo to the astute folks at St. Martin’s Press for use as a book jacket photo illustration1.

Tunnel of Blues

I’m not positive about all the details yet, but I think this is the book: Through the Cracks, by Barbara Fister

More details as I get them2…

The photo is of a viaduct on 24th Street between Canal and Stewart, heading towards our Chinese herbalist.

Footnotes:
  1. earlier this year I sold a photo for Luck of the Draw [↩]
  2. like when the publish date is, what the illustration will look like, etc [↩]

Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago

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“The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago: A Biography of William B. Ogden” (Jack Harpster)

Looks to be an interesting book, I just bought myself a copy

William Butler Ogden, born and raised by a pioneer New York family, was truly a man of destiny. He took over his ill father’s lumber and woolens businesses when only sixteen years old; and for fourteen years he improved and expanded his family’s fortune. Devastated by the sudden death of his fiancé, and encouraged by friends to help promote the nascent railroad industry in America, Ogden moved to the small, swampy settlement of Chicago in 1835 when the population barely reached four thousand people.

Old Fort Dearborn, erected in 1803 on the Chicago River at Lake Michigan, was the genesis of the city of Chicago.

A year later, already a heavy investor in Chicago real estate, he became the city’s first mayor. Slowed, but never stopped, by a succession of financial panics that wracked the nation in the mid-1800s, Ogden became one of Chicago’s wealthiest citizens. As a leader of what was known as the city’s business-elite, he was also a principal player in the development of the city’s cultural, charitable and educational sectors.

Ogden built the first railroad out of Chicago, and was the driving force in making the city the railroad capital of the country. His role as the pioneer railroad entrepreneur in America was never questioned; and he was largely responsible for the young nation’s western expansion. He also built and operated the largest lumber empire in the country in central Wisconsin; a huge iron mining and foundry enterprise in Pennsylvania; Chicago’s earliest brewery; Chicago’s most successful real estate company; and a wide range of other business enterprises.

[Click to continue reading OGDENBOOKS.COM]

from the book jacket blurb:

William Butler Ogden was a pioneer railroad magnate, one of the earliest founders and developers of the city of Chicago, and an important influence on U.S. westward expansion. His career as a businessman stretched from the streets of Chicago to the wilds of the Wisconsin lumber forests, from the iron mines of Pennsylvania to the financial capitals in New York and beyond. Jack Harpster’sT he Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago:A Biography of William B. Ogden is the first biography of one of the most notable figures in nineteenth-century America.

Harpster traces the life of Ogden from his early experiences as a boy and young businessman in upstate New York to his migration to Chicago, where he invested in land, canal construction, and steamboat companies. He became Chicago’s first mayor, built the city’s first railway system, and suffered through the Great Chicago Fire. He had diverse business interests that included real estate, land development, city planning, urban transportation, manufacturing, beer brewing, mining, and banking, to name just a few. Harpster, however, does not simply focus on the business mogul; he delves into the heart and soul of the man himself—Ogden was a dedicated family man, a noted raconteur, a respected philanthropist, and a friend to many of the era’s rich and powerful.

The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago is a meticulously researched and nuanced biography set against the backdrop of the historical and societal themes of the nineteenth century. It is a sweeping story about one man’s impact on the birth of commerce in America. Ogden’s private life proves to be as varied and interesting as his public persona, and Harpster weaves the two together into a colorful tapestry of a life well and usefully lived.

Reading Around on October 13th through October 14th

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A few interesting links collected October 13th through October 14th:

  • F.A.A. Proposes Fines for United and US Airways – NYTimes.com – $3.8 million fine against United for operating one of its Boeing 737 aircraft on more than 200 flights with shop towels covering openings in an engine,
  • Vivian Maier – Her Discovered Work – THIS WAS CREATED IN DEDICATION TO THE PHOTOGRAPHER VIVIAN MAIER, A STREET PHOTOGRAPHER FROM THE 1950S – 1970S. VIVIAN’S WORK WAS DISCOVERED AT AN AUCTION HERE IN CHICAGO WHERE SHE LIVED FOR 50 YEARS BUT WAS ORIGINALLY A NATIVE TO FRANCE. HER DISCOVERED WORK INCLUDES OVER 40,000 MOSTLY MEDIUM FORMAT NEGATIVES. BORN FEBRUARY 1, 1926 AND PASSED AWAY ON TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 2009.
  • Critics’ Picks: Call it the “liberal Bible” | Salon Arts & Entertainment –

  • “Life of the World to Come (Dig)” (Mountain Goats)

    “Darnielle claims he’s always been fascinated by religious texts, but up until now more secular fixations have dominated his music: Ruptured relationships, literary heroes and his own difficult childhood are among the most common subjects of nearly two decades’ worth of studiously lo-fi Mountain Goats songs. And, as a die-hard black metal fan who, last year, published a short novel based on Black Sabbath’s “Master of Reality,” Darnielle may seem a particularly unlikely candidate to explore the spiritual.”


    “Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality: 33 1/3” (John Darnielle)

    Didn’t know who wrote this book, just thought it unreadable. I got through about ten pages before tossing it to the floor in disgust. Maybe there is more to it, but it wasn’t obvious.

Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious

Seth Anderson3 Comments


“Man and His Symbols” (Carl Gustav Jung)

Fascinating, long piece on the Carl Jung book known as Liber Novus, or The Red Book. There are a couple of sample pages in this promotional piece (PDF)

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.

Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the United Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Banhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.

THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.

[Click to continue reading Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious – NYTimes.com]

So for me, the important question is, when is the thing going to be published? And how do I get a copy of my own? Looks like the book is scheduled to be released in October of this year.

ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the Red Book — after he has traversed a desert, scrambled up mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited hell; and after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru, Philemon, a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on kingfisher wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane. This is when his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.”

The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it wasn’t for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.” Yet the very fact he wrote an epilogue seems to indicate that he trusted his words would someday find the right audience.

more information as I find it, but in the meantime, do click through and read the tale

Amazon has it available for pre-order:

Rockers of Ages

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I can’t say the Rolling Thunder era is my most favorite of Dylan eras, but this is humorous nonetheless.

Rolling Thunder Logbook
“Rolling Thunder Logbook” (Sam Shepard)

Rocks of Ages – New York Times … No one living has a better appreciation for the sneaky and unnerving power of American myth than Bob Dylan. In the fall of 1975, the United States was gripped by what the playwright Sam Shepard, who had been hired to work on a film about the tour, called “Bicentennial madness.” With 1976 fast approaching, America was obsessed as never before with its origins, and as Mr. Dylan knew perfectly well, there was no better place to launch his tour than the mythic landing ground of the Pilgrims. Mr. Shepard did not end up contributing much to the film, but he did publish a log chronicling the tour’s first six weeks. Included in the book is a bizarre photo showing Mr. Dylan and several fellow musicians peering over the side of the Mayflower II, a reproduction of a 17th-century vessel berthed at Plimoth Plantation. A stiff breeze is blowing, and two of the party are desperately hanging on to the brims of their cowboy hats as the front man of the Byrds, Roger McGuinn, speaks on a huge, ’70s-style portable phone. But perhaps the weirdest and wackiest portion of Mr. Shepard’s log describes how Mr. Dylan and his pals recreated the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. As the poet Allen Ginsberg sat beside the iron fence that surrounds the rock, chanting and chiming his set of Tibetan bells, Mr. Dylan haphazardly piloted a dinghy to the Plymouth shore.

Nate Philbrick’s essay continues
The book is a fairly quick, amusing read about what a major tour with rock stars is like, if you are Sam Shepard.

Media, Hillary and Sarah Palin

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“Why Obama Won: The Making of a President 2008” (Greg Mitchell)

I thought this was a big turning point in the 2008 election as well:

worst mccain photo

Greg Mitchell writes:

But I believe that a true turning point — though rarely noted — actually came in the summer, at the Democratic convention in Denver. No, it was not the general good vibes about Obama, the ringing speeches by Teddy, Michelle, Bill and Hill, and by the candidate himself.

Rather, it was the electronic media’s overblown coverage of the allegedly widespread threat by female Hillary delegates, and other Clinton fans, to bolt Obama in favor of McCain.

As you recall, the dissidents, known as “PUMAS,” got massive face time on TV and, it was said, they represented just the tip of the iceberg. And it was said (by commentators, not just by the new pro-Hillary media stars), that women, particularly older ones and suburban/blue-collar types who had voted for Hillary in the primaries, would likely abandon the Democrats in November.

There was no firm evidence for this, of course – and few pundits, on TV and in print, seemed to notice that the same few disgruntled Hillary delegates appeared on all of the shows. No matter. Obama’s possible defeat because of the possible defections was widely predicted.

Why did this matter, since the mass defections never happened? Especially since here and elsewhere at liberal political blogs no one ever took the threats seriously?

Because John McCain and his people bought it, hook, line and sinker, as I explain in my book Why Obama Won. This explains the sudden (though often ill-explained) rise of Sarah Palin to the top of their VP list. The McCainites saw an opening – which really wasn’t there – and went completely overboard. Not only did a female VP suddenly look like a great idea, but one who would have extra appeal to the particular type of Hillary primary voters so hyped by the media.

[Click to continue reading Greg Mitchell: One Year Ago, A Turning Point in 2008 Campaign: The Media, Hillary and Sarah Palin]

Too busy/lazy to look right now, but while the television yammers were seemingly fixated on the Public-Unity-My-Ass story, the blogs were a lot more skeptical of the Hillary-brigade.

Saul Alinsky Know Thine Enemy

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“Rules for Radicals” (Saul Alinsky)

I’ve heard of this book for years, but I’ve never read it myself. Add it to the pile I guess.

Saul Alinsky, the Chicago activist and writer whose street-smart tactics influenced generations of community organizers, most famously the current president, could not have been more clear about which side he was on. In his 1971 text, “Rules for Radicals,” Mr. Alinsky, who died in 1972, explains his purpose: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. ‘The Prince’ was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. ‘Rules for Radicals’ is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

It is an irony of the current skirmishing about health care that those who could be considered Mr. Alinsky’s sworn enemies — the groups, many industry sponsored, who are trying to shout down Congressional town hall meetings — have taken a page (chapters, really) from his handbook on community organizing. In an article in The Financial Times last week, Dick Armey, the former Republican House majority leader, now an organizer against the Democrats’ proposals on health care, offered his opinion: “What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good.”

[Click to continue reading Word for Word – Saul Alinsky – Know Thine Enemy – NYTimes.com]

If you follow politics and political theatre at all, you’ve encountered organizations that have followed1 Mr. Alinsky’s suggestions. Tips such as:

Make yourself look as big and scary as possible:

For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes; if you have organized a vast, mass-based people’s organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organization is small in numbers, then do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.

from the book jacket:

Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909 and educated first in the streets of that city and then in its university. Graduate work at the University of Chicago in criminology introduced him to the Al Capone gang, and later to Joliet State Prison, where he studied prison life. He founded what is known today as the Alinsky ideology and Alinsky concepts of mass organization for power. His work in organizing the poor to fight for their rights as citizens has been internationally recognized. In the late 1930s he organized the Back of the Yards area in Chicago (the neighborhood made famous in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle). Subsequently, through the Industrial Areas Foundation which he began in 1940, Mr. Alinsky and his staff helped to organize communities not only in Chicago but throughout the country. He later turned his attentions to the middle class, creating a training institute for organizers. He died in 1972.

Footnotes:
  1. knowingly or not [↩]

Wonder of Whifling

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“The Wonder of Whiffling: (and Other Extraordinary Words in the English Language)” (Adam Jacot de Boinod)

The author of Toujours Tingo


Toujours Tingo

Adam Jacot de Boinod, has written a new book:

“The Wonder of Whiffling” is a hugely enjoyable, surprising and rewarding tour around the language of the British Isles (with plenty of fine coinages from our English-speaking cousins across the pond, Down Under and elsewhere). Discover all sorts of words you’ve always wished existed but never knew, such as fornale, to spend one’s money before it has been earned; cagg, a solemn vow or resolution not to get drunk for a certain time; and petrichor, the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell. Delving passionately into the English language, Adam Jacot de Boinod also discovers why it is you wouldn’t want to have dinner with a vice admiral of the narrow seas, why Jacobites toasted the little gentleman in black velvet, and why a Nottingham Goodnight is better than one from anywhere else.

Monsieur Jacot de Boinod1 also added, in comments to this post, the following

Delving passionately into the English language, I also discover why it is you wouldn’t want to have dinner with a vice admiral of the narrow seas, why Jacobites toasted the little gentleman in black velvet, and why a Nottingham Goodnight is better than one from anywhere else. See more on http://www.thewonderofwhiffling.com

Listening to the Conversation's Ebb and Flow

Tangentially, and surprisingly, I’m at the beginning of a cagg of my own. Vowed to forswear booze for at least a month2 – my target to resume consumption is Labor Day. Why? Mostly vanity, my pants were getting a little snug, and I was polishing a couple of bottles of wine a day. Cause and effect, most likely. Anyway, possibly more on that subject

Footnotes:
  1. I assume I’m spelling that correctly, my French language skills have atrophied to point of parody [↩]
  2. along with gluten – bread, pasta, etc. – and a few other items [↩]

Reading Around on August 1st through August 3rd

swanksalot3 Comments

A few interesting links collected August 1st through August 3rd:

  • The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles – Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the information age, is LA’s greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles—whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board—has always been central to the elusive writer’s weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references. But did you know he actually lived there in the ’60s and early ’70s, while writing Gravity’s Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of rocket-science novels? His latest effort, Inherent Vice, is an homage to those bygone days, plus something no one expected from the notoriously private author: a semiautobiographical romp. Set in the twilight of the psychedelic ’60s, Inherent Vice is stoner noir, a comic murder mystery starring a detective who—like stories of Pynchon himself—smokes bales of weed, obsesses over unseen conspiracies, and relishes bad TV. And if you map the novel against Pynchon’s life in LA, it really does tie the whole room together.
  • Las Vegas 1953.jpg
  • Roger Ebert’s Journal: Archives The Greatest Movies Ever Made – But to quibble with specific titles, as I said, is a waste of time. We look at these lists for what we find on them, not what we don’t find. That’s why my Great Movies have never been a ranking, but a Collection, assembled in no particular order.

    Any list of great films helps breaks the hammer-lock of box office performance that grips too many American moviegoers. I can’t tell you how many people responded to my attack on “Transformers” by telling me how much money the movie was grossing, as if that had the slightest relevance. A great movie acts like a window in our box of space and time, opening us to other times and other lands. The more windows we open, the better.

    leary_psychedelic_0430.jpg

  • If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: Seminal Image Friday #1:Frames Within the Frame (Part One) – some great images here. Cinematography is an art form worth celebrating

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes

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Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip (click to pre-order from Amazon)
Calvin and Hobbes was that rare newspaper comic – smart, funny, and not cloyingly cutesy. And rare also in that once Bill Watterson grew tired of creating it, he stopped, and dropped out of the public eye. No recycled Peanuts here.

For ten years, between 1985 and 1995, Calvin and Hobbes was one the world’s most beloved comic strips. And then, on the last day of 1995, the strip ended. Its mercurial and reclusive creator, Bill Watterson, not only finished the strip but withdrew entirely from public life. There is no merchandising associated with Calvin and Hobbes: no movie franchise; no plush toys; no coffee mugs; no t-shirts (except a handful of illegal ones). There is only the strip itself, and the books in which it has been compiled – including The Complete Calvin and Hobbes: the heaviest book ever to hit the New York Times bestseller list. In Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip, writer Nevin Martell traces the life and career of the extraordinary, influential, and intensely private man behind Calvin and Hobbes. With input from a wide range of artists and writers (including Dave Barry, Harvey Pekar, Jonathan Lethem, and Brad Bird) as well as some of Watterson’s closest friends and professional colleagues, this is as close as we’re ever likely to get to one of America’s most ingenious and intriguing figures – and a fascinating detective story, at the same time.

Only 3,160 Calvin and Hobbes strips were ever produced, but Watterson has left behind an impressive legacy. Calvin and Hobbes references litter the pop culture landscape and his fans are as varied as they are numerable. Looking for Calvin and Hobbes is an affectionate and revealing book about uncovering the story behind this most uncommon trio – a man, a boy, and his tiger.


“The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes) (v. 1, 2, 3)” (Bill Watterson)

You can read a weeks worth of the strip at the GoComics website

Papa Hemingway as a KGB dilettante

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Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB

Last week, however, saw the publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), which reveals the Nobel prize-winning novelist was for a while on the KGB’s list of its agents in America. Co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, the book is based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 1990s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow.

Its section on the author’s secret life as a “dilettante spy” draws on his KGB file in saying he was recruited in 1941 before making a trip to China, given the cover name “Argo”, and “repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us” when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London in the 40s. However, he failed to “give us any political information” and was never “verified in practical work”, so contacts with Argo had ceased by the end of the decade. Was he only ever a pseudo-spook, possibly seeing his clandestine dealings as potential literary material, or a genuine but hopelessly ineffective one?

[Click to continue reading Hemingway revealed as failed KGB spy – guardian.co.uk ]

So the inventor of the Papa Doble was a dilettante spy? What exactly does that mean? Curious. And of course, The Soviet Union was an ally against Hitler in this era. But I expect more will be made of this in upcoming months.

Infinite Jest

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Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

My reading list

There’s a web-based reading group for this allegedly challenging book, but I haven’t started reading David Foster Wallace’s tome yet, still have about 100 pages left of American Pharaoh

http://infinitesummer.org/

The Modern Athlete

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“The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy” (Bill Simmons)

Bill Simmons is nearly finished with his book on a subject near and dear to my heart, the NBA. Avi Zenilman of The New Yorker interviewed Simmons on the NBA Finals, and the topic of the modern athlete came up:

The lack of college experience also means that you probably have less of a chance to have a conversation with a Finals player about English lit or political science. For instance, if you’re a reporter, maybe you don’t ask for thoughts from modern players on the Gaza Strip or Abdul Nasser, or whether they read Chuck Pahlaniuk’s new book. These guys lead sheltered lives that really aren’t that interesting. Back in the seventies, you could go out to dinner with three of the Knicks—let’s say, Phil Jackson, Bill Bradley, and Walt Frazier—and actually have a fascinating night. Which three guys would you pick on the Magic or Lakers? I guess Fisher would be interesting, and I always heard Odom was surprisingly thoughtful. I can’t come up with a third. So I’d say that the effects are more in the “didn’t really have any experiences outside being a basketball player” sense.

I can’t wait to see what happens to KG, Kobe, T-Mac, Carmelo, Howard and others when they finish with basketball. These guys have been mini-corporations and basketball machines since the age of eighteen. What will they do? What will be important to them? When I was researching my book, one thing that blew me away was how brilliant the guys from the fifties and sixties were. Not as players, as people. Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Bob Cousy, Wilt Chamberlain…these were thoughtful, well-rounded human beings who cared deeply about not just their sport, but about their place in society and (in the case of the black guys) their stature during such a tumultuous time. Everyone knows about Russell’s eleven rings, but did you know about everything he did to advance the cause of African-Americans? Everyone knows about Oscar’s triple doubles, but did you know that he filed the lawsuit that paved the way for a real players union and free agency? These were truly great men and the N.B.A. just wouldn’t be where it is if that wasn’t the case.

Nowadays, the mindset seems to be more, “What can I do to raise my profile? How can I become more famous? How can I make more money?” We need more David Robinsons and Steve Nashes and Ray Allens. The N.B.A. does a terrific job of getting their players into a community, but I wonder how many of those players actually understand why it’s important, or if it’s just something else on their schedule right between “Make a cameo on Kendra’s reality show” and “Meet with E.A. bigwigs about a possible N.B.A. Live cover.” Five decades ago, when Russell wanted to get his point across about something that was important to him, he would write a first-person account in Sports Illustrated. Today, Shaq gets his point across in a 140-character Twitter post. I don’t think this is progress.

[Click to read more of Studying The Finals: News Desk: Online Only: The New Yorker]

Amen to that.

Alien Hoopsters 6 on 6

Fools Gold

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“Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe” (Gillian Tett)

According to Gillian Tett (by way of New Yorker columnist John Lanchester), our current financial meltdown started because of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

first bore fruit when Exxon needed to open a line of credit to cover potential damages of five billion dollars resulting from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. J. P. Morgan was reluctant to turn down Exxon, which was an old client, but the deal would tie up a lot of reserve cash to provide for the risk of the loans going bad. The so-called Basel rules, named for the town in Switzerland where they were formulated, required that the banks hold eight per cent of their capital in reserve against the risk of outstanding loans. That limited the amount of lending bankers could do, the amount of risk they could take on, and therefore the amount of profit they could make. But, if the risk of the loans could be sold, it logically followed that the loans were now risk-free; and, if that were the case, what would have been the reserve cash could now be freely loaned out. No need to suck up useful capital.

In late 1994, Blythe Masters, a member of the J. P. Morgan swaps team, pitched the idea of selling the credit risk to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. So, if Exxon defaulted, the E.B.R.D. would be on the hook for it—and, in return for taking on the risk, would receive a fee from J. P. Morgan. Exxon would get its credit line, and J. P. Morgan would get to honor its client relationship but also to keep its credit lines intact for sexier activities. The deal was so new that it didn’t even have a name: eventually, the one settled on was “credit-default swap.”

[From Outsmarted: Books: The New Yorker]

I haven’t read the book yet, but I ordered it after reading these sentence:

The value of Gillian Tett’s book is in the level of detail with which she tells the story, concentrating on the specific sequence of inventions and innovations that made it possible. Tett, a Financial Times reporter who covered the credit markets, was one of the few people to have seen the implosion coming. A critical factor was that she has a Ph.D. in social anthropology—a “hippie” background, as one banker told her, intending no compliment. It helped her focus on what she calls “social silences” in the world of banking.

Midas Touch

Bankers and their greed, but of course, greed with consequence for all of us.

There was one final component to the J. P. Morgan team’s invention. The team set up a kind of offshore shell company, called a Special Purpose Vehicle, to fulfill the role supplied by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the first credit-default swap. The shell company would assume $9.7 billion of J. P. Morgan’s risk (in this case, outstanding loans that the bank had made to some three hundred companies) and sell off that risk to investors, in the form of securities paying differing rates of interest. According to J. P. Morgan’s calculations, the underlying loans were so safe that it needed to collect only seven hundred million dollars in order to cover the $9.7-billion debt. In 1997, the credit agency Moodys agreed, and a whole new era in banking dawned. J. P. Morgan had found a way to shift risk off its books while simultaneously generating income from that risk, and freeing up capital to lend elsewhere. It was magic. The only thing wrong with it was the name, BISTRO, for Broad Index Secured Trust Offering, which made the new rocket-science financial instrument sound like a place you went to for steak frites. The market came to prefer a different term: “synthetic collateralized debt obligations.”

John Lancaster’s article is fascinating, give it a read before the Rapture takes your neighbors away…

Fitz Being Smeared by Murdoch

Seth Anderson0 comment

First I’d heard of this

Patrick Fitzgerald may be the most feared prosecutor in the country, but even as he’s racked up headlines for big-name convictions (Scooter Libby) and indictments (Rod Blagojevich), the hard-charging U.S. attorney from Chicago has been waging a private crusade: trying to kill a book he believes maligns his reputation. In the past year and a half, Fitzgerald has written four letters to HarperCollins—owned by Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp.—demanding it “cease publication” and “withdraw” copies of Triple Cross, a 2006 book by ex–TV newsman Peter Lance that criticizes Fitzgerald’s handling of terror cases in New York in the 1990s. Fitzgerald raised the temperature even more last week, aiming to halt a paperback version. “To put it plain and simple,” he wrote in a June 2 letter obtained by NEWSWEEK, “if in fact you publish the book this month and it defames me or casts me in a false light, HarperCollins will be sued.”

Media experts say Fitzgerald’s letters, written on personal stationery and totaling 30 pages, are unusual for a top lawman. “We certainly find it highly offensive that a federal prosecutor would do something like this,” says Gregg Leslie of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. But Fitzgerald makes no apologies. The book’s claims, he wrote in an e-mail, are “outrageously dishonest.” He says that Lance “alleged that I deliberately misled courts and the public” in ways that led to the 9/11 attacks.

[Click to continue reading US Attorney Fitzgerald Fights a Book Publication | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com]

Claiming that Fiztgerald is responsible for 9/11? I could see why he would be offended. Is this payback for the Valerie Plame prosecution? or just another hatchet-job by News Corp?