Month: September 2005

I need a place to jot down a few New York stories…

A friend of a friend was preparing a new restaurant. He hired a couple of carpenters to do some woodworking. They were almost done when two huge goons showed up and noted that they weren’t members of the union. If the restaurant owner didn’t have them dismantle the work that had been done so far and hire union replacements, the goons threatened to make life so unpleasant for patrons that the restaurant would go bankrupt. The woodwork was torn out and some union carpenters were hired to redo the work at triple the original cost.

The same restaurant owner shopped around for a cook. He found a guy at a local Italian restaurant with a reputation for patronage by the Mafia. The cook agreed to leave the Italian place and come work at the new restaurant. Shortly thereafter he was found in an alley having been beaten by guys wielding baseball bats. His leg was broken and he was told that he shouldn’t consider changing jobs.

I visited my friend Matthew. His mom had just gotten some dark chocolate drops in the mail. I was eating one and his Labrador Retriever was begging. Matthew’s wife cautioned me not to share even a half drop: “chocolate is poison for dogs.” We all left the apartment. I bought some handmade chocolates at Martine’s on the 6th floor of Bloomingdale’s (59th and Lex). Matthew and I met at the Guggenheim where I absent-mindedly left the b-dale’s bag on a shelf for 15 minutes. When I returned, it was gone and it was never turned into the Lost and Found. Mourning the loss of our gourmet chocolates we found out that while we were all out the Lab had gotten up on a table and consumed an entire 1.5-lb. bag of dark chocolate drops. Perhaps four hours after the consumption, the 60 lb. dog was made to vomit up the offending material and she suffered no symptoms of ill health.

A different friend has a girlfriend who likes to ask him for money to take cabs. His response: “Why would you want to take a taxi when you can ride a $10 billion subway?”

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One thing about visiting Manhattan is that it puts one into direct contact with a lot of people who make their living being creative. One friend is a working classical and jazz composer and I asked him why he uses Windows. “The best program for composition, especially for opera, is Sibelius, and for the first couple of years there was no Macintosh version so I switched to Windows and now I know how to use it.” As for architects, the perennial choice of Hollywood for a cool character’s occupation (cf. “One-Hour Photo”), it turns out that they all use AutoCAD. AutoCAD is a Windows-only application and therefore young architects are Windows users.

Most Macintosh users, of course, only need basic email, Web browsing, and word processing. But a big part of Apple’s premium price depends on the perception that Macintosh users are somehow more creative. How long can this last given that people who actually ARE creative have seemingly all switched to Windows?

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I came down here to Manhattan mostly to see friends but ended up walking and talking our way through a handful of art museums and galleries. Here’s a report: Monday: Guggenheim Russia! show. Very exciting with 600 years of unfamiliar incredibly skilled artists. Save yourself the hassle and cost of getting a Russian visa and the trip to St. Petersburg and Moscow. Tuesday: Metropolitan Museum. The blockbuster shows have all closed but the Prague show is kind of nice for fans of medieval art. Wednesday: Chelsea Galleries. Joel Sternfeld’s photographs of experimental utopias across the U.S. were competent and the accompanying texts were riveting (Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24th). Andy Denzler’s paintings of the Bush family and associates at the Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, 531 W. 25th Street, merit a visit, especially for the joyful and strange portrait of the twin daughters. Adam Cvijanovic’s murals at Bellwether, 134 Tenth Ave (18th), win the award for lowest cost per square foot ($75,000 for a huge Tyvek three-wall installation; peel her off and take her home!). Sol Le Witt brings up the other end of the value spectrum with some $45,000 pieces that you could execute yourself if you had access to some scrap metal and/or paint and an art student. The most disappointing art were photographs of strippers on poles by Philip-Lorca diCorcia at the Pace gallery (534 W. 25th if you want to see what others are paying $45,000 to own). Gary Winogrand did some great photos inside strip clubs, concentrating on the sad patrons. His pictures were available in large editions and were not expensive. DiCorcia’s photos are taken when the strip clubs were closed so there isn’t anything to look at besides a woman and a pole. They aren’t that different from what a working photojournalist would probably capture if given an hour inside a strip joint and told “take a picture of a woman hanging from a pole.”

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I spent Sunday attending the wedding of two friends.  Generally the idea of being trapped inside a hotel conference room on a fine summer’s day fills me with horror.  In this case, however, the wedding had some cultural interest because the groom was Korean-American and the bride Chinese-American.  One big difference was the level of participation of the parents.  They came right up to the front and, before any vows were exchange between bride and groom, each of the young people promised to love and honor his or her in-laws.  Another difference was the level of intelligence and education in the room.  Asian-Americans are our most discriminated-against ethnic group.  They have a tough time breaking into the Old White Guys’clubs and golf games.  They are officially discriminated against by universities and government because they aren’t the right kind of minority.  How do Asians respond?  Apparently by studying and working like demons.  A person at the reception who attended an Ivy League college, earned an M.D. or Ph.D., and was a good enough violinist to play in a symphony orchestra would have been average.  The Taiwanese-American woman officiating had an M.D. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from MIT.  Twenty more years of Affirmative Action and we will have effectively bred a super-race of Asian-Americans.

My favorite part of the wedding was the groom’s mother’s toast.  She recounted how, not having ever been introduced to a girlfriend, she sat her son down and said “I’m your mother.  I will accept whatever you tell me, even if it is difficult.  Just tell me the truth:  Are you gay?”  Thanks, Mom.

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http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer details an idea for giving a Joe Consumer the illusion that his smartphone is his only computer but still providing him with 99 percent of the function of a home PC that would otherwise need to be separately administered, upgraded, etc.

Comments would be appreciated as I’m going to talk about this at Xerox PARC in a month or so.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20050922/tc_pcworld/122653 is a fun story for former Treo owners such as myself.  I had about 10 Treos, each of which suffered a catastrophic hardware failure after about two months.  I gave up when they stopped replacing them under warranty.  I sorely miss the keyboard but my Motorola/WinXP phone has been working great for about a year.

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This has been my week of comedy shows.  At the Piper Malibu and Meridian Owner’s and Pilot’s Association annual convention we were fortunate to have the opportunity to hear from Norm Macdonald and Victoria Jackson, Saturday Night Live alums.  Tonight it was a younger generation at Harvard Square’s Comedy Studio (upstairs from the infamous Hong Kong restaurant).  Out of the nine acts featured by comic/emcee Dan Sally, the clear standouts were Rebecca Anderson’s impersonations and Matt Soni’s stage presence.  The worst was oldster Gary Sohmers, a public TV junk collector, who said that the secret of happiness was to surround oneself with the stuff of one’s childhood and to hate George W. Bush.  To my mind, Sohmers’s only redeeming feature was his graying ponytail, which made him resemble the television producer driving in his Jaguar during the opening scene of the movie Intolerable Cruelty (seen with Spanish subtitles in Bariloche, Argentina).

I’m parking this posting here so that I can come back five years from now and say that I saw Rebecca Anderson and Matt Soni back before they were famous.

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Done with my CFII (checkride was yesterday; hot, bumpy, surface wind gusts to 24 knots, but I passed and now can teach Angelina Jolie her instrument rating), I jacked into the World Wide Cybernet for the first time in awhile and found the following email from a reader of http://philip.greenspun.com:

Are you Philip Greenspun? Do you perform as Bonkers the Clown?
What city are you in?

John Rain – Dallas, TX

Perhaps it is time to revise my personal site.

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http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/09/08/report_rates_boston_most_expensive_city/ says the following:

Propelled largely by high housing costs, Boston is now the most expensive metropolitan area in the country, outpacing Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and even New York City, according to a report that will be released today.

The report found that last year, a family of four living in the Boston area needed $64,656 to cover its basic needs. This was $6,000 more than in New York City, and about $7,000 more than in San Francisco. Living expenses, which include healthcare, child care, and other basic needs, were $44,000 or less in Austin, Texas; Chicago; Miami; and Raleigh, N.C.

The third annual ”Housing Report Card,” produced by the Boston Foundation and the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, concludes that even an uptick in housing production could not halt the relentless climb of Greater Boston’s housing prices, which are increasing far more rapidly than are wages.

Should we be concerned that housing prices are so high?  In some ways it is depressing that government here is so restrictive that even rich people are forced to live in 120-year-old wooden slums.  In Cambridge, for example, it is illegal to tear down an old structure and rebuild something decent of the same size; the new house would have to conform to modern zoning setbacks and height restrictions so that if you tore down the typical 2-family or 3-family 4500 square foot slum you’d only be able to build a dollhouse to replace it.  On the other hand, perhaps we should feel good that people love it here so much they are willing to pay $2500 per month for a small apartment.  On the third hand, maybe it is only because most of the rest of the country has become such a sprawl-ridden wasteland that Boston seems comparatively attractive.

I was driving up Route 1A the other night to visit a friend in Marblehead.  The route goes past wooden slums hard by the highway all through Everett, Revere, and Lynn.  One’s gut feeling about such an apartment is “they would have to pay me to live here”, especially since the daily traffic jams getting in or out of the slum are horrific.  Yet compared to the rest of the country these apartments rent and the slum houses sell for far more than a nice comfortable place of equivalent square footage almost anywhere else in the U.S.  I guess I’m not surprised that people would be willing to pay a premium to live in beautiful Back Bay or among the intelligent wanderers of Harvard Square but why are the prices in the slums of Everett so high?

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The New Orleans tragedy highlights the need for some better measures of national well-being.  If our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is rising we tend to think that the national well being is rising.  Some of the problems with assuming this direct correlation are subtle.  Mexicans are happy even though economically poorer, perhaps partly due to their strong family ties.  An American who moves from his pleasant home town in the Midwest to the sprawling wasteland of Southern California is probably earning more and generating more economic output but perhaps his enjoyment of life has been reduced.  It would be tough to adjust for these subjective factors.  Calamities such as New Orleans or 9/11 might be worth adjusting for.

Consider a less emotionally charged example.  In Case 1 you decide that your Jeep Grand Cherokee isn’t big enough to carry pretzels and walnut oil back from the Trader Joe’s.  You give the SUV away to your sister and buy a Chevrolet Suburban.  In Case 2 you get distracted listening to NPR complain about the cruelty we are inflicting on our Afghani guests in balmy Guantanamo Bay, skid on the ice in the subfreezing depths of a Massachusetts February, and crash that Grand Cherokee into a tree.  You buy a Suburban as a replacement and the local tree company is hired to remove what remains of the tree.  In Case 2 the GDP will be reported as higher.  In addition to a new SUV being bought a tree company was paid.  Never mind that in Case 2 your sister is still walking everywhere and people who had enjoyed shade from that tree are getting skin cancer (their treatments will further inflate GDP).

In New Orleans a tremendous amount of money will be expended on getting us back to where we were before.  The same people will be living in substantially the same housing and working in substantially the same office buildings and yet $billions will have been spent to pump out water and shore up foundations.  In New York at least $10 billion will be spent on rebuilding the World Trade Center site.  It might be a little nicer than what was there on September 10, 2001 but functionally will be similar in terms of office space square footage.  This $10 billion will be recorded as an addition to GDP but it won’t have the same positive impact the World Trade Center remaining standing and $10 billion of entirely new office space constructed in growing regions of the U.S.

What’s the point of this analysis?  When you look at decades of GDP growth and can’t figure out why there are still so many poor people ask yourself what percentage of that GDP was spent on replacing stolen car stereos, reglazing broken windows, hiring extra security personnel after terrorist attacks, and other similar “get back to where we were” projects.

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