December 23, 2008
FRANCE!
I type this dispatch from Le Borde Neuve in southern France, where I am fortunate enough to be spending time with the Buckland clan for Christmas. Surrounded by mountains and grape vines, life is truly simplified to "Eat, Drink and Be Merry". Living in New York, it is so important to occasionally step into a slower pace of life and this is the perfect place to do that. Here I realize just how much we pack into our lives at home and I am grateful for the perspective; I don't think I could live anywhere else at this point in my life, but refreshing vacations like this one are absolutely neccessary to maintain my way of life in the city.
The days seem longer here (although we just experienced the shortest one of the year) and I have taken advantage by making music and reading. I read Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers" yesterday (when was the last time I read a book in a day?) and enjoyed his analysis of success in a cultural context; Reading that success in sports is often determined by bithday (based on cutoff dates in youth sports) was encouraging to me because I now know that my athletic prowess went unfulfilled only because of my December birthday... I know also that I am a less diligent worker because of my culture of summer vacation (as opposed to longer Asian school years and culture of demanding rice cultivation)... But while there are many societal aspects that determine who I am, there is also the 10,000 hour rule, which suggests that anybody can master a skill with 10,000 hours of practice. But who has time for that? Gladwell also wrote a very interesting article in The New Yorker recently about education, specifically about how it is impossible to know who will make a good teacher based on any tests or previous education because good teaching requires highly personal interaction and an ability to adapt methods for different students. He compares it to college football quarterbacks stepping into the NFL; although it would seem to be the same game, the QB's job in college is very different from the pros. Both require sound fundamentals, but the offensive and defensive systems change so much that it is virtually impossible to tell who will succeed. Ryan Leaf is one of the most famous examples of a great college QB who became an enormous loser in the NFL, but history is littered with other failures of highly selected, award winning college QBs who go on to become busts as professionals. Then there is Tom Brady, a lightly regarded 6th round draft choice who has become one of the sports' legends and led The Patriots to 3 Super Bowl Championships (so far...). Obviously there are other factors that go into a player's success, but some of the most important skills are immeasurable.
December 12, 2008
DANCE!
In the past week I have seen 3 incredible dances. For a company party (way to go, Music Together of Park Slope!), Alaina and I were treated to Alvin Ailey. It was my first time and about Alaina's seventh, but we were both completely blown away by the performance. Their bodies move beautifully and seem to grow and engulf the entire stage. I was thinking how this art would be one of the first ones I would want to show to aliens from outer space as it demonstrates the capabilities of the human body to the fullest extent and uses music to transcend emotion, often without a single word spoken.
I'm not sure aliens would quite get Les Freres Cobusier's "Dance Dance Revoution" unless they too had a similar appreciation for dripping irony. Any human with that capacity is sure to get a kick out of this show, though. Set in the future as an underground dance club in a world where dancing is illegal, 50 dancers get down behind a dance prophet named Moonbeam Funk as they avoid the law and, indeed, dance fight to a revolution.
December 7, 2008
Garden of Earthly Delights
I remember the painting well from my freshman art history class: Heironymous Bosch's beutifully weird triptych of Paradise, The Seven Deadly Sins, and Hell. Five hundred and four years ago, the Dutch master graphically depicted a gruesome fall from grace for mankind; twenty four years ago, Martha Clarke choreographed a piece based on this image and brought the horror and beauty to life. The show is playing at The Minetta Lane Theatre and is one of the most incredible dances I've ever seen. From the four-legged animals initially roaming the stage to the harnessed bodies flying through the huge theater space, the human body is on full display with purpose in every movement. The music creates a perfectly eerie atmosphere to accompany the scenes and the musicians themselves become an integral part of the movement, liberated from the orchestra pit and interacting with the dancers as they play. It is truly a remarkable and haunting spectacle.
Moody's
As our economy sinks faster than anyone could imagine, we have started to see some serious finger-pointing: The freewheeling banks who couldn't approve loans fast enough; the defaulting homeowners who should never have taken those loans and now the credit-rating services such as Moody's and Standard & Poor. These agencies began as independent rating services paid by investors interested in the value of their purchases, but have since become much more important and involved in the process of debt trading. Much of the housing boom over the past 15 years was fueled by multi-mortgage securities packages traded by banks as a way of limiting their risk. Because these packages contained hundreds or thousands of individual residential mortgages, investors relied on these services to assess the risk as a whole. In theory, this is a great way for the market to regulate itself-- if the package is high-risk, the rating company should alert the consumer and force the seller into a higher interest rate. In a perfect market, with perfect information, nobody would be fooled into buying someone else's bad investment. But, of course, we don't have anything resembling a perfect market and this becomes yet another example of bad information leading to fundamental collapse. It would be one thing to say that they made bad assessments of so much debt (which they did) but it is another to suggest that they had a financial incentive to rate this debt higher than it realistically should be (which they may have). Years ago, Moody's began charging the seller to rate their offerings. This is a fairly blatant conflict of interest that would naturally lead to grade inflation as companies shopped around for better ratings. To make matters worse, the government allowed companies to lend more or less depending on their credit-rating. Again, in theory, this should lead to a stronger market, but in reality, the ratings were for sale and led to the destruction of a few banks when they were recently downgraded and forced to come up with immediate cash on hand that nobody was willing to lend them. Obviously there were many factors leading to the current credit crunch, and the rating system is just one more failure, but it illustrates how our market system is rigged and warped by its own structure.
In our garden of economic delights, we ate the apple of capitalism, money begat money, and our banking sins have led us into financial hell.