London Calling

This financial crisis we’re in (and yes, you are in it even if you don’t think it impacts you) seems to be brining a lot of stuff up to the surface of collective consciousness that had sunk down and that many people were tempted to believe dead and buried.

One of those ideas is a particularly American one: Expansion and growth is always good, and any resultant problems are due purely to governmental interference. Growth=Good and if we simply get out of the way then all of the bad will be tossed away.

The environment, however, is now making the point moot. Whether the above right-wing dream is correct or not, it is now abundantly clear that humans are having a substantial impact on the environment. And even if there is some bizarre other explanation out there, established science is almost universally telling us this about the environment, so I am not sympathetic to those that profess some deeper belief or knowledge that this isn’t the case. Let them go get some data and publish some scientific papers to show us that human-made global warming isn’t a problem, otherwise just shut up, please.

Concurrently, however, Wall Street has now been knocked on its head and indeed has ceased to exist in its traditional form. All of the big Wall Street investment banks are now either gone or converted into traditional government-regulated banks.

Readers may be surprised to know that good ZOIDBERG (that’s me) worked on Wall Street twice, once briefly for Fitch (the number three rating agency) and then again (after optical networks and telecom imploded) at a company located in Trump’s building at 40 Wall Street. So I know a little about the nature of Mortgage Backed Securities, derivative securities and volatility analysis.

And what is just so darned clear to me is that the problem was NOT with “Wall Street greed”. Wall Street is paid to be greedy: Do you NOT want your retirement fund managers availing themselves of every opportunity to find and manage growth within your risk tolerances? Wall Street exists .precisely to leverage any and all possible fiscal advantages available to itself. It’s the only way to survive in a very competitive industry

In this case, what brought Wall Street down was not greed but the lack of legal and regulatory guidance concerning how extremely risky and volatile financial instruments must be handled and leveraged. Moreover, stuff extremely cheap money into the hands of the big investment banks and incent your top leadership to grow quickly with no oversite and you will inevitably create a catastrophe with a timeline that occurs after bonus season.

The sad thing is that these investment banks probably had developed some fairly viable financial instruments that, in a natural setting, would fill a risk niche that was actually needed by the big fund managers. In other words, there was a small portion of the instruments that infected the whole community and pulled it down, and with it a lot of stuff that was probably on average good rather than bad.

Hell, I even get the idea of these very dangerous Collateralized Debt Obligations. Although they didn’t exist when I was at Fitch, I can see that they cleverly found a way to turn very risky underlying mortgages into fairly stable financial instruments. This approach probably could have worked well while providing capital for homes, as long as they didn’t start NOT verifying income or jobs. In other words, the US government was giving away so much free money that the whole quality control chain broke down and poisoned something that probably met several sets of needs.

So the moral of this story is, our World needs some regulation so as to protect the vast majority of us from the consequences of a small number.

Someone remind me some day to talk about Basel II…that’s REALLY an important thing.

Although I doubt anyone reading this will have heard of him. He was a guitarist that often played over the years with Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz folks. My father is in mourning because this was one of his very good friends, and both of them had played the full run at a Chorus Line on Broadway. I think also that, as a deep member of the Jazz community and my father (who concurrently played with the Metropolitan Opera, American Symphony and other groups), a deep member of the classical world, I think they had some kind of mutual admiration thing going, though my father (if the truth were to be told) never liked playing classical all that much. Except for perhaps La Boheme and some of the modern stuff.

I remember hearing that “George reads the NY Post while playing the show” but I didn’t realize what that meant until I sat in the Chorus Line pit one evening. George Davis didn’t have the music on his stand: He had the Post on his stand and you could see his eyeballs moving back and forth and reading the paper while his hands were playing the show.

Indeed, George’s newer subs (substitutes) weren’t too pleased when they’d first arrive because George didn’t have the music any more, and it’s said that he probably didn’t retain it much past the first couple of weeks.

So my father is in mourning and I’m sure this will last a while.

Seems that whole jazz generation is rapidly drawing to a close and I too am saddened.

In the FripperBlog Fripp writes:

At a certain point, the Whole Performance can be undermined by the commitment of individual participants to their own partial performances. If the Whole Performance is not supported / affirmed to a necessary degree, it won’t reach critical mass. On the outside, notes are played; on the inside, Music finds no ears, no friends to welcome its entry into the world. This is pretty much an everyday tragedy in my professional life, one I could no longer bear after 2003.

How King Crimson, one particular concentration & expression of the Muse, can enter into the notes is mysterious; yet quite real & available to experiencing, if we allow it.

I’ve experienced this during many concerts, but for some reason it is most pronounced with King Crimson. In particular, there are times when Crimson is playing great and every individual is playing great. It’s nominally a great performance of one of their better songs.

And yet, it’s a tossup as to whether or not this will register in my ear as “music” or merely lots of patterned sound. In a way, it’s almost like a very excellent simulacrum has appeared in place of the music.

The difference, for me, between music and mere musical sound is very hard to put into words, but I know it when I hear it, and I think that others attuned to this thing can hear it too. It is, in a way, objectively “there”. To describe actual music, I’d use words like fluid, nonmechanical, life-like, spontaneous…but these are very elusive qualities.

To give another example, take the best examples of your favorite food cooked with absolutely fresh ingredients. There’s a very lively and radiant quality to the food, and you know that you will likely remember this meal for a long time. It makes you happy and joyful, and the time of the meal seems all sparkly and alive, the people you’re eating with warmer and more dear to your heart. And yet, it’s easy to find the same exact food cooked the same way but perhaps with vegetables that aren’t 100% fresh: This latter lesser dish will taste 99% the same. It will even taste “great” on some levels, but it will be missing something very very faint that you can’t put your finger on but that makes the difference between merely good food and a meal to remember the rest of your life.

Within a single concert, Crimson can flash back and forth between music and extremely well played musical sounds…you can hear it going in and out. And sometimes (like at the Savoy in 1981), Crimson locks on for the duration and the result is a concert that stays with you for the rest of your life and that you remember like it was yesterday.

Well, after 2 years and some change, I’m starting to understand some things about England.

I guess the first thing I’m starting to put together is the role ROCK played in the 60s and 70s for working class British males in particular. If you listen to early Bowie, Richard Thompson, The Who, The Beatles and even the Rolling Stones, there’s often a theme of escaping entrapment and moving beyond one’s “station” (such a British word) and be free.

And I think that this was not utimately about ecnomics, though that’s a factor. It’s about just how closed-in and almost claustrophobic England can be. And that makes sense because it is an Island after all, not a vast continental land mass like the US. But as a result, The British can be far more interested in the politics and the social aspects of an activity as opposed to the activity itself. They worry about someone upsetting the balance, or disrupting the order of things. They speak in a passive voice (as I caught myself doing in the last sentence) and talk about how “getting it right” or about how (Vini Reilly) “can’t sing”, as if there were objective criteria that floated down from the heavens.

Hence it is no surprise that so many of the British pop/rock singers sang about breaking free from these constraints. And, perhaps more importantly, how rock and roll could itself act as the vehicle right on out of one’s “station”, which was yes economic but, more importantly, social because now one could buy one’s way past the expectations and prisons that so easily form around one here.

My and the generation of expats that came over with us are all now getting tired of this place. And I admit that the weather is a factor. But a repeated pattern is that we expats (from all over the world and from a variety of backgrounds) share the common fact of having pretty much no local friends. The British, we find, are a peculiar people, and they can be hypersensitive.

Don’t get me wrong, they can be self-effacing and funny. On an individual basis and in small doses, I find that the British are amusing and kinda cute. But in groups they drive you crazy as higher reasoning shuts down and the go into Brit-mode.

And then of course there is the weather, and that has to have some impact on one’s personality in the long run. Indeed, for a lot of us (myself included), it will be this that brings us back to the US: Seeing the sun in an unequivocally deep blue sky is such a rare joy that you know you need it. And surely, knowing that no piece of good weather will ever stick around for more than a few hours, certainly you will develop that sceptical irony that they so treasure and don’t believe Americans have (they aren’t able to detect it when we show it, though).

Reading the diary I’m actually happy not only for Fripp but for everyone that the latest round of concerts could have gone so well.

Again, Fripp’s complaints about photography.

It appears so simple, doesn’t it? “Hey Fripp, photography is a major issue because you make it an issue. Just get over it.”

The problem with this observation is that it is most likely true but useless.

If someone has an issue (and we all do), stemming perhaps from a disfunctional family environment while growing up, to just ignore the issue is to lie to oneself. You have that issue and simply ignoring it does nothing really to make it go away, it will just come back in a much weirder and more virulent form.

There’s no forcing an issue away, there’s no fighting it head on or ignoring it. One can only come at it sideways, angular-like, perhaps like opening a Chinese box puzzle or solving one of those linked metal ring problems.

To insist that Fripp simply ignore photography is to insist that Fripp not be Fripp.

It’s also to insist that you not be you or that you simply block out the thing that drives you crazy. It can only be done with massive amounts of drugs or other forms of mental shutdown. It’s to live a lie and we’ve all had enough of that. We are who we are and we might as well acknowledge that and start from there, because where else can we truly start?

Ugh.
My predictions were right: The Blog is indeed a ‘Splog.

I’ve been gettin’ splog in my comments morning, noon and night.

However, in gmail I used the filters to redirect the hose at our new Spammy, and why not do the same? All you have to do is apply some of the criteria. I use the incoming Wordpress email address and then redirect everything to one of the addresses below. (Of course, these email addresses will probably get shut down soon but they have been operational for a few weeks now.)

Here are the email addresses:

1. jeasiataina@mymail-in.net

2. mataltess@mymail-in.net

3. gicfupuplilia@mymail-in.net

So why not redirect your Spam back at ‘em?

It will apparently be called Virgin-Oxford.

Ah Windermere and the Lakes District. Even nice in the rain, though after a while the rain starts to wear on you. It had practical impacts as well, forcing us off more difficult hikes due to the wind and lowering fog. One cabbie said he’d heard of hikers having to crawl around on hands and knees to make their way out.
But nevertheless we hiked, and I even had to express severe doubts to the wife about frolicking up to 2400ft given the fog rolling in and increasing rain.
Hiking, if you don’t do it, is a far more strenuous activity than you may realize, and that makes it fun and challenging, and you have to choose your level of difficulty carefully.
Here’s some photos from the hike and towns (Ambleside, Bowness-on-Windermere)…





…and so on…

…maybe photos later.

Some of the vistas we saw from our big hike could not have held even one more drop of Englishness or English beauty. At least, the views fulfilled any and all images that this American (with ancestors on the mayflower) held in his brain.

Of course, however, it was raining practically the whole time, except for a few hours during the afternoon we first arrived.

Windermere the lake itself was pretty too, and supposedly “The Largest Lake in England” (though not including Scotland).

A trombone link sent to me by my dad.

If you’re not familiar with the institution that is known as Bill Watrous, he is a famous old studio trombonist. If you’re not familiar with jazz trombone, look at him cranking out the notes: There appears to be no correlation between the cranked-out notes and his slide placement. (In reality, of course, each slide position can generate several different notes, but these are part of an overtone series, not adjacent notes on a scale, so seeing someone play the trombone looks kinda strange if you didn’t grow up seeing it.)

http://www.themusicpage.com/showVideos.php?v=183