Okay, Mets Fans

It seems like only about two weeks ago, oh wait - it was, when the Metsies dropped three straight at home to the Phils and one of those unscientific single vote surveys on the Daily News' Mets page asked if they would win the division, Yes or No. My fellow No voters numbered only 18 percent of the respondees. A week later, after, well, you know, the survey question was How Will the Mets Finish? Title, Wildcard or Out of It. While my solid 18 percent had drifted down to Out of It, another 25 had at least realized there was no way they were going to win the division.

There's a reason why, kiddies, they are called the Amazin' Mets in the first place. A flair for resourceful failure is in their DNA, and those of us old enough to remember their first seasons might have, in the midst of the disaster, seen ghosts of happier, more carefree days. Wherever you are Marv Throneberry, this one's for you.

After their hot start, injuries took a harsh toll, and, as I mentioned last time, it felt all-in-all like a building year. Let's not forget they stayed in first this long because of the woeful play of the Phils and Braves more than any innate capability of their own. But getting Endie and Moises back made a huge difference and when Pedro returned they indeed reeled off that 9-1 stretch (Can anyone tell me the last time they won ten in a row? Didn't think so.) before the wheels came off.

They came off through the usual mix of bad luck, bad fielding and bad decisions, compounded daily. I would point to three specific factors after the All-Star break, Maine forgetting how to start, Reyes forgetting how to lead off and Randolph insisting on using Mota long after it was clear the poor bastard was completely snakebit. Those three factors, I'd say, cost at least seven games which should have been won.

It pains me to criticise Randolph because he has done a very fine job all in all. And one can see the logic in using Mota as he did. Mota is a professional, deserving of an opportunity to get back on track and would be called upon to pitch well in the post season.

But after a while, when the man's appearance caused an audible groan to go up from the stands, and probably distinct shudders from his players, Randolph should have realized he needed to stop framing a very unstable pen for post season work and find someone to get three outs in a seventh inning without giving up a run. That, of course, got harder and harder to do.

The bullpen was a problem from the getgo, and the team's unbelievably hot start, and a general relief pitching malaise in the rest of the league, probably lulled management from thinking they had to do something about it this year. Now have a look at the Cubbies, who clinched Friday night, and see what fixing your bullpen midseason can do for a scrappy ballclub.

Notwithstanding Glavin's unprecedented breakdown, the bullpen wasn't a factor on Sunday. The Mets lost the game, and the season, with a characteristically listless effort at the plate.

A collapse of such dimensions will reverberate at least until this time next year, a stretch which the skipper, GM, and franchise players will spend under a cloud. Hard to believe, but the Mets' last season at Shea may look a lot like their first.

UPDATE 10/1: This morning some 87 percent of those replying to the News' question Is This the Worst Day in Mets History? give a weepy Yes. Most are probably too young to remember the real worst day, April 2, 1972, when Gill Hodges died of a heart attack just shy of his 48th birthday as the season was getting underway.

Nodes In Passing

Perceptive viewers will notice a new link in the right column. Taking the place of the Big Rock Candy Mountain (apparently on hiatus after a brazen site-jacking) is Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog, a beautiful ongoing collection of vintage American documentary photographs. If nothing else, you should read the fascinating and poignant story behind the blog's name.

Pictured here is a self-portrait (I think his right hand has just squeezed the bulb of a pneumatic shutter cable) of the under-appreciated Russell Lee, for my money the greatest documentary photographer this country ever knew. But don't take my word for it, have a look for yourself.

Race Notes

It gives me great pleasure to link to Krugman's column today, now that he's out from behind that wall, and blogging! He sketches out the downward curve, or is it a death spiral?, of a political party which has bound itself hopelessly to the concerns of aging, racist southern males.

One of the greatest things I've heard any of the current crop of candidates say was from John Edwards, back when he was running in '04. Might have been one of the debates when the subject of race came up, and how often we need to talk about it. He said, and I paraphrase, "Always, always, always. Everyday."

The second smartest thing I've heard a candidate say was this year, and Edwards again. When asked about Hil's big money lead, he said money won't be as important this time around (and he might have added from here on out.) And look who's doing well at the state level this month.

Big media would like voters to think candidate fund raising is important because it is of the utmost importance to them. It is a sizable source of ad revenue, especially in local markets, and, at another level, it makes the races easy to cover. Now I am not saying that ten mil will trump fifty, not this year anyway. But a lot of messages are going out for free now, reaching people interested in hearing them, and no one without the wit to see this, or the skills in that direction, will be elected president.

Smile When You Rate That, Stranger

Yesterday I caught the 2:10 perf of 3:10 to Yuma a fine horse opera, though a far cry from the masterpiece of the genre which some claim. Excellent cast and a great story, though told with a few too many closeups for me. Russell Crowe found the center of each moment he was on screen while including everyone around him. (This generosity is the pinnacle of film acting, and no one is better at it than Paul Newman.)

Christian Bale, though very good, finally struck me as miscast. The part called for a mild, beaten man, a maimed veteran and failing rancher, who gradually rises to the call of action, finally to act alone. The dampened rage in Bale's eyes instead causes one to feel he is calculating the right moment to reveal himself as, I guess, a western Batman. That never happens, and the full revelation of his character's truth at the finish is hobbled slightly for it.

But, hey, go see it. We need more good westerns. The move to rate it as one of the best ever, though, got me to draw up my own top ten, which follow immediately:

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon Ford's virtues overwhelm his faults here. Great scenery, the Duke's best performance, Indians cast as Indians, wonderful horseback riding, and the superb Ben Johnson. I think I've seen it 20 times and I never get tired of it.

Unforgiven This is the greatest western ever made.

Bad Day at Black Rock Set in the 1950's, Spencer Tracy is the crippled Man in Black who gets off the train in a jerkwater western town and is forced to right some wrongs. Fantastic cast, taut, fast-paced storytelling, an underappreciated American masterpiece.

Little Big Man A great novel about Indians made into a great movie.

High Plains Drifter Clint delivers a high body count and gains extra points for weirdness.

Tom Horn The next-to-last Steve McQueen pic. Screenplay by Tom McGuane, an honest and stylish gem.

Open Range 'Nother overlooked gem. Great cast, beautiful scenery. The landscape is a character.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid One of the most likable movies ever made.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller In all candor, I have not seen this in a while and so don't know if it still measures up, but it has Julie Christie, and the texture of its sound and images once delivered viewers into a thoroughly imagined, authentic feeling past.

Deadwood (season One) Okay, kind of a cheat, but its epic narrative sweep, complex use of language, great ensemble character acting and spectacular set has redefined the genre. David Milch got to rewrite Gunsmoke and we are a better nation for it.

I have left off Sam Peckinpah's famous works. They seem kind of draggy to me now. As well as classics like Red River (Clift beats up Wayne? I don't think so.) and High Noon (Quaker lady shoots bad guy? I don't think so.) Buffalo Bill and the Indians might deserve inclusion, but I haven't seen that one for a while either. I've never liked The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, a watchable movie with a wonderful cast, is overloaded with middlebrow ideas of law and order.

If I picked a top 12, I might have added The Missouri Breaks just for Brando, and The Last Picture Show just for Ben Johnson, or maybe that other McMurtry deadend Texas saga, Hud. On another day The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly might have been included. My several readers are here invited to take issue in comments.

On The Arid

I wasn't planning on writing anything today, but just ran across this neat observation on a blog devoted to statistical analysis of energy issues. Don't worry, what caught my eye was a funny look at the noise machine:

I heard the weirdest thing on the radio this morning. We have perhaps 4 right-wing talk stations around here and one of them has a B-lister named Jim Quinn in the morning, who broadcasts out of Pittsburgh and also gets streamed to XM satellite. I have listened occasionally cause the guy has the mildly entertaining presence of a cardiac-prone road ragester; but I find it particularly peculiar that the local station doesn't even bother to replace his show's commercials, and so they essentially rebroadcast all the Pittsburgh commercials and traffic reports here in the Twin Cities -- over AM radio! That makes no sense to me as I note in comparison that XM actually has the business savvy to replace the commercials with national interest.

So I think this gives proof positive that these Freeper radio stations don't make ANY money at all

Ah, yes, the Cities, where Al Franken has pretty much evened the gap between himself and Sen. Oleagenous Boob. It's little notes like the above which lead me to believe, as regular readers keep hearing me say, that a lot of rightist blowhards are going away fairly soon. When times are good, rich assholes can spend as much as they like on their crusade to pour hogwash into the ether. But when the big system stumbles, when money levels begin to fall, when it becomes pretty clear that people really aren't paying attention, a lot of those wingnut welfare checks are going where the woodbine twineth.

Rochester Blues

As if waiting for my post about the decline of my hometown, MarketWatch plunges in the knife and twists it with a list of the worst cities to do business in in the United States.

49. Rochester, N.Y., 114 points: This upstate New York town might have finished last, were it not for Hurricane Katrina and the lack of reliable tourism statistics. The city was dead last in job growth and in the bottom 10 in population growth and Russell 2000 measures.

It did, however, finish eighth in the S&P 500 category, thanks to a handful of big-name firms like Bausch & Lomb (BOL) , Eastman Kodak (EK) and Constellation Brands (STZ).

48. Tucson, Ariz (snip)

47. Buffalo, N.Y., 125 points: This upstate New York City [sic], known for its tough winters, is much in the same boat as 49th-ranked Rochester -- and it isn't just because of the weather, says Richard Deitz, senior economist for the Federal Reserve Bank's Buffalo office.

According to Deitz, neither Buffalo nor Rochester ever fully recovered from a decline in heavy industry several decades ago.
"Our economy has not fared very well, certainly over the last couple of decades," Deitz said. "Climate can be a factor, but it's not the only factor."

Buffalo was next to last in population growth, as it lost nearly 3% of its residents. It now has only one major company, M&T Bank Corp. (MTB ) , which sits on both the Fortune 1000 and S&P 500 lists.

I could write a book about what western New York was and what it has become -- oh, wait a second, I'm almost done with it. Anyway, I'll spare you too many details about the past this morning so as to consider the future. Frankly I'm delighted that Rochester and Buffalo are among the worst cities for business in this country, mainly because the way this country has done business these last, oh, 40 years is largely responsible for fucking them to where they are today.

This is not an indictment of some Wall Street cabal, or cadres of Washington bureaucrats. The leading citizens of western New York conducted its steady fall, a failure of imagination and courage combined with their rock-ribbed Republican scorn for the new, while a very complaisant white working class went along for the ride.

For just as Rochester, in 1830, was the first western boom town (you can look it up) which, in the space of a century, became the paradigm high tech, white collar urban center, it was also, in 1964, the site of the first wide scale race riots in this country in almost two decades (well, Newark beat it by a couple weeks.) It. Never. Recovered.

If there's any city which has a head start on considering the consequences of a post-industrial future, it's Rochester. Right now it looks pretty grim, and it could look even grimmer very soon. But as the old ideas of commerce and order collapse, I'd like to think that Rochester and Buffalo, in the midst of no small natural beauty, history, and with their remarkable, sorely tried souls, might find sustainable ways forward, socially and economically, which the rest of the country might come to emulate one day.

Crash Course

That crashing sound you hear is the U.S. dollar abroad, where it is falling to record lows, including parity with Canada, as gold, and oil shoot higher.

Very shortly we might consider the Fed's drastic move as the moral and tactical equivalent of disbanding the Iraqi Army, both bold moves made against wise advice, in a faceless process meant to please only a few true believers, the end result of which will only be accelerating disaster.

Perhaps in both instances there were no real good decisions to make either way in what was rapidly becoming a very complex situation. And, indeed, each example has its own unique trappings of folly. What strikes me as interesting in the Fed case is how shrill the crying for relief had become, how drastic the measure to offer succor, and the incontinent reaction of temporary optimism.

In igniting inflation, Bernanke knows that wages will not rise, nor will manufacturing exports increase enough to help the economy. (Recall that durable goods production now accounts for about 10 percent of our GDP.) He knows also that it won't revive the housing market which had been the main engine of the Iraq Bull Market. What it will lead to is a sale of hard assets, you know, mines, real estate, factories, to foreigners, who have now lost the last tissue of respect for American fiscal management.

The Fed chairman, who I here predict will eventually have to resign, for his family or something, has shown only deference to the critically ill credit interests and a reluctance to consider the broad outlines of a ruin which his decision has brought into much sharper focus, and one magnitude closer to fruition.

Go Read

From Counterpunch:

The investment banks may be waiting until Tuesday hoping that Fed-chief Ken [sic] Bernanke announces a cut to the Fed’s fund rate that could send the stock market roaring back into positive territory.
But interest rate cuts do not address the underlying problems of insolvency among homeowners, mortgage lenders, hedge funds and (potentially) banks. As market-analyst John R. Ing said, “A cut in rates will not solve the problem. This crisis was caused by excess liquidity and a deterioration of credit standards….A cut in the Fed Fund rate is simply heroin for credit junkies.”

snip

Consider this: In 2000, when Bush took office, gold was $273 per ounce, oil was $22 per barrel and the euro was worth $.87 per dollar. Currently, gold is over $700 per ounce, oil is over $80 per barrel, and the euro is nearly $1.40 per dollar. If Bernanke cuts rates, we’re likely to see oil at $125 per barrel by next spring.

Inflation is soaring. The government statistics are thoroughly bogus. Gold, oil and the euro don’t lie. According to economist Martin Feldstein, “The falling dollar and rising food prices caused market-based consumer prices to rise by 4.6 per cent in the most recent quarter.” (WSJ)

That’s 18.4 per cent a year, and yet Bernanke is still considering cutting interest rates and further fueling inflation.

snip

Bernanke can either be a statesman---and tell the country the truth about our dysfunctional financial system which is breaking down from years of corruption, deregulation and manipulation---or he can take the cowards-route and buy some time by flooding the system with liquidity, stimulating more destructive consumerism, and condemning the nation to an avoidable cycle of double-digit inflation.

We’ll know his decision soon enough.

Read the whole thing

The unexpected size of the cut might be a Fed signal that from here on, the banks are on their own. Conversely, it might be panic.

Boom Time

This summer the Eastman Kodak Company spent a great deal of effort blowing up three enormous buildings in their vast manufacturing facility in my hometown of Rochester, N.Y., vivid acknowledgement of the company's headlong decline over the last 15 years.

Growing up in Rochester in the 60s, where my dad's only connection to Kodak was playing golf with its executives, and then spending several years as a professional observer of the company (I worked for a few photo magazines you have probably heard of), you can be assured I have a few opinions about the company and how it got to the point where quickly demolishing whole sections of its film and paper plant could be considered entertainment for the locals.

But before I elaborate, have a look at the first building to go. I should explain that part of the fun that morning was to leave an inkjet printer running in the doomed building (As my mom used to say, I kid you not), with a video camera recording its last moments, which is what the inane master of ceremonies is nattering about before they blow the sucker.



I hope you noted all the people in the crowd taking digital photos.

Though Kodak PR billed this as a new revolution (the overthrow of desktop publishing??), the only relevant revolution was the one started by George Eastman after he invented and marketed the roll film camera, an item which got cheaper and easier to operate as the 20th century went along. It was an invention which gladdened the lives of millions of people, one might even say improved the society, for four generations and brought an ocean of wealth to Eastman personally, which he did his best to give away, and Rochester in general.

But the culture of success, and a promote-from-within management philosophy, led to a fatal myopia when the digital revolution hit. Even though it had plenty of warning, and no little internal research and development regarding the new technology, Kodak management drove the company straight into the chasm opened up by digital cameras and inkjet printers.

Hewlett Packard took the Kodak business model, sell the hardware at cost and make money on the process material, while Kodak was coasting on the brand, buying, and then selling, a film development company. Reduced to essentials, the business was selling color dye in boxes, a market Kodak had invented and then dominated for over half a century. The only reason why desktop printers, inkjet cartridges and paper should not today be the main purview of the Kodak company, is their shithead executives, effigies of whom should have been in that factory in place of that inkjet printer.

Before we leave off, here's another view of the implosion of Building 9, some distance from the official reviewing stand, where the hoi polloi have gathered to cheer the loss of high-wage jobs in the city. As always, their reward comes at the end.



Yessir, the air is dense with dusty irony and particulate stupidity in our post industrial era, a time when most people lack the wit to be furious with executives too dumb to run things. If you suspect I am drawing wider conclusions, you are right. As I am fond of repeating here, everything is connected.

My vision of current events is very much based on the decline I've witnessed in my hometown. For all its faults, and it was a world class polluter in its glory days, Eastman Kodak was one of the great companies this nation produced, a mainly exemplary local employer with, by the very nature of its work, an international vision. Its lesson should, but won't, be attended to by other huge operations now facing, with some real unease, the digital sink, like newspapers, TV networks and authoritarian political parties. Their implosions, now counting down, won't be as visible as Kodak's factories, but will be a lot more fun. No toxic dust either.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

'Fess, Tuts & Toussaint, cuttin' UP.

Tight Trope

Under the stark headline Twin Cities home sales plummet in August, which indeed tells most of the tale, is this tile of journalistic boilerplate:

"With buyers concerned by the news they hear on housing, it's understandable that some are waiting on the sidelines," siad [sic] Deb Green, [president of the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors]. "While they wait they're missing buying opportunities."

Let's see... lack of even cursory analysis? Check. Reflexive comment by industry spokesperson? Check. Promotion of optimism in the face of harsh news? Check, mate.

Now the Star Tribune offers an online county foreclosure map, so it's not like it is completely committed to propping up the Chamber of Commerce agenda up there. But papers hate delivering bad news and do their best to wish it away, or, when it's unavoidable, go into as little detail as possible.

The essential message of papers is that the world is a comprehensible place and that order, the order of community and commerce, prevails. It is a message that's harder and harder to sell, not only because the news lately has been mostly rotten, but that they have had to compete with TV, the essential message of which is that the world teeters nightly on chaos, and that community order can't prevail without, I don't know, some big haired guy yelling about how nuts and dangerous liberals are, or Oprah lecturing teenagers, or cops busting domestic abusers, or we stay in Iraq.

Both messages are dumb, the print media's brain dead and the broadcast's insane. There's nothing like persisistent facts on the ground to underline the failures of both, both having fully supported the failures of our dumb King Zog, led the cheers for the housing bubble, dismissed climate change, and overlooked the subject of peak oil.

It's the end times for all of them, papers, networks and Zog's party, joined at the heads in a lasting folly one might call monied optimism. Turns out it's been leveraged for years.

Fad Out

One unacknowledged aspect in the current to-and-fro among the talkers concerning the Iraq Project is just how unconvinced the American public remains. All the statements and stats, the PR tours and articles, the troops and the wonks, have not made the stupid adventure more palatable to the people, who seem the only party in sight to have learned the lessons of Vietnam. The GOP is going to get grilled like chickens in the next election.

The splendid IOZ touched recently on something I've been thinking about, and, at the risk of adjusting his meaning to my own, I want to add a few thoughts regarding the media climate.

While the presumptive influencers of public opinion serve at the whim of their corporate masters, the corporation itself depends on the whims of the buying public. This is a fancy way of saying that the Iraq Project was sold much like a fad. Public opinion was marshaled around a graphic promotion of action figures, accessories, and TV shows, all to advance a reassuring collective will. (Join us! It's Fun!!) All very professionally done by PR experts. Some fads, like Rock 'n' Roll, become part of the culture. Some, like Frisbees and yo-yo's, wax and wane in importance. Some, like hula-hoops and pet rocks, leave posterity wondering how dumb people can be.

It is a grim step indeed to call the Iraq Project King Zog's Pet Rock, but there it is. No one seems as satisfied with it now as he. The public has turned away and even a few at court are looking at him sideways.

Anyway, the executives have rolled out all the marketing for the IP they can. The last ad space has been bought, the final talking head paid for, and from here on out, every market bombing, every helicopter shot down, every month when U.S. fatalities rise from the previous, will leave them looking more and more like the smart douchebag with a store full of rocks.

And for the salesmen, their glory days are one Friedman Unit past. The talkers have another year of sophist nagging and bullying whining left, as their influence over the public becomes transparently less and less. And then they are going away for good.

The Tenor Of Our Times

The subject of money and Art I touched on in the previous post has been rubbing up against me these past couple days following the passing of the Great Pavarotti.

Let me first say that it was my distinct privilege some 27 years ago to hear him sing the role of Riccadro in Un Ballo in Maschera, an unforgettable experience. The clarity, the power, the music in his voice outshone everyone on stage (that night the Met touring company performed in a hall in Boston with the acoustics of a barn.) His acting, while not subtle, was majestic nevertheless, allowing the voice to tell you everything you needed to know about the character.

My grandmother heard both Caruso and Pavarotti (though Luci-Pav only on record) and declared Pavarotti superior. A wonderful, miraculous talent, a voice from heaven, distinct and unique to our age.

That said, he should have packed it in twenty years ago. His subsiquent recitals, starting with the Three Tenors nonsense, were a series of exponential embarrassments.

His obits all declare how he brought opera to millions, when in fact he took a style of singing and a certain dependable repetory onto enormous international stages, often outdoors, for tens of thousands of paying customers at a sitting. Rather than lift people up, he brought high art low. The hype, the bombast, the huge stages and soundsystems, the endless chain of pop co-stars, all while his voice got progressively thinner and drier.

All for what?

I am not saying he sang cynically or without joy these last 20 years, only without shame. As for the serial compromises, he had his own conscience to attend to. Did he teach? Did he direct? Did he preside over a company or sponsor a season or a festival in the provinces? Anything which might indeed be called bringing opera to the people?

Ahime, non, just a gimmick that got staler by the year, the secret to which was gulling people into thinking they were experiencing something special. Alas, art, which presumes to awaken us to the nature of our lives, demands a certain discipline and dedication from all concerned, even the spectators. Nothing the matter with mere entertainment, but to pretend you are moving the spirit, when in fact you are only selling tickets, rates as a crime.

It should be recalled that Caruso mainly worked himself to death by age 46, his voice already in decline. Whatever plans the great man had after retirement from the stage can't be known. He did have a huge hit with Over There, but there was a war on and whether he'd have eventually performed with Bing Crosby, or Sophie Tucker, is hard to say.

Plutonian Mode

Here seen is a new work by the Brit artist Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, a platinum skull covered in diamonds, reputedly sold for 50 million quid, (about $100 mil. for the likes of us.)

Forget for the moment the questionable nature of the deal (for details see link above) and the whole Po-Mo "Is It Art?" Question. (Short answer, Yes. Longer answer, It doesn't matter.) Since Duchamp, Art (cap A, that is, for the stuff collected for galleries and museums) has been focused mainly on the intentions of the artist rather than the work per se. I have no problem with this very liberating idea whatsoever. However, since Warhol, Art has been inevitably tied to notions of the hierarchy of Capital, which has not killed Art so much as contained it intimately in the corporate underworld.

Pluto, god of the underground realm, rules riches (buried treasure), shit, death, the ultimate undoing of all plans. If you don't think that that is what the rather-too-smart Mr. Hirst had in mind in producing and marketing that thing, then the rest of what I have to say today will be of no interest to you whatsoever.

Ours is a Plutonian age, which some date from the discovery of the planet Pluto in 1930, others from the discovery of Plutonium ten years later. Certainly life on planet Earth has, for the most part, been Pretty Fucking Awful since 1939, and we should register no surprise that Warhol, a very profound thinker unburdened by any apparent intellect, moved Art so unashamedly into the, so to speak, velvet underworld.

Our death-loving American culture has been given free rein since Andy first set paint to silkscreen. Vietnam and its mental echo Iraq, the heady justifications and potent arms, the think tanks and money men, keeping the hawks in control and the right politicians in the black. I sense an apotheosis, though, in the reign of dumb King Zog, the quintessence of every lousy idea and stupid actor this country has ever come up with. Once you wake up you see images of death everywhere, tattoos, t-shirts, TV, a bracing celebration of the inevitable which, however, lacks, at least in our Mall Culture, any spiritual dimension whatsoever. As a nation we seem to be very good at dispensing death but utterly incapable of admitting its claim to ourselves.

I can't help thinking that Hirst's object is the final expression of nearly a century of Western artistic motion, an artifact and a fetish, a kitch-culture point of anxiety and greed. It is both the ultimate high value Art object and a symbol of payment overdue, a market peak and a sign of change. For there is no rebirth without first the work of Pluto. In three hundred years I can see Hirst's skull fought over by mercenary bands or resting at the bottom of a deep mine shaft, thrown there by someone with the wit to know where it would do the most good.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

Slime