The World Doesn't Work

The famed $700-billion bailout plan, Largely as a throw to taxpayers having trouble swallowing a plan using hundreds of billions of dollars of their money to prop up banks run by executives who make more in a year than most people earn in a lifetime, contained restrictions on the compensation that could be offered to executives of companies that accepted the money.  It was more a punitive measure than a constructive means of solving the credit crisis.  Lavish as they are, executive compensation figures still pale in comparison to the shear scale of the problems facing the global economy.

That being said,  when Alan Greenspan made his little admission last week that the world doesn't work quite the way he thought it did.  He said he'd been working under the assumption that institutions would act in their own self-interest in a way that protects their shareholders. 

Could it be that, as compensation packages became more and more larded with extravagant bonuses and golden parachutes, the interests of managing executives became dangerously decoupled from those of the shareholders?

Conservatives have often pushed to grant corporations the legal rights and protections the constitution affords people but it's important to remember that they're not actually people.   They're large groups of people and it's entirely possible for some of them to act against the best interests of the rest.  The consequences of this are worst when those people happen to be in charge.

Thanks, I guess

I just had to comment on this article by Christian Schneider, largely because it's not the sort of thing one would expect to see coming from a conservative think-tank.  Milwaukee is apparently again feeling the slow creep or urban exodus and, as crime fears rise and condo projects falter, Schneider is admirably concerned for the future of our state's largest city.  He hits on an interesting solution for urban revitalization, namely "The Gays!"

As a card-carrying Madison homo, I'm pleased, if a bit bemused ("Gay" is only to be used as a noun ironically, Christian.) .  It's nice to see that some conservatives have stopped peaking into our bedroom windows long enough to realize that the rest of the house is rather well kept. That said, there's a little more to it than just inviting the friends of Dorothy to fix up a neighborhood or two.

Schneider is talking about the "creative class" ala Richard Florida and frets over Milwaukee's relative disadvantage in attracting creative bohemians (like gay people) who tend to have high incomes and foster a vibrant, tolerant atmosphere.  To his credit, he realizes the folly of the city trying some sort of clumsy pandering.  If Milwaukee is really interested in courting the creative class (gay and otherwise) she need look no further than her smaller sister.  

It wasn't long ago that the differences between Milwaukee and Madison were really striking.  Milwaukee was hemorrhaging population to the suburbs as crime rose and manufacturing jobs left by the thousands.  Madison was riding the swelling tide of the knowledge economy and saw the university's research prowess parlayed into billions of dollars in development.

Milwaukee has largely learned that lesson.  Its four large universities have taken the lead in trying to turn a city built on brawn and beer into a brain trust but there was a severe caution a couple of years ago.

Conservatives didn't consider Wisconsin's marriage ban to be an economic development issue but they should have.  It was not an issue of great internal contention in Madison.  The UW - Madison was unequivocal about the chilling effects of writing bigotry into the state Constitution and, effectively, hanging a not-welcome sign out to an entire group of people, not that most people here needed to be told.  The city rejected the ban three to one. 

Milwaukee did not.  The ban's passage was all but assured when the state's largest metropolitan center voted for it by a slim margin.  

It's hard to cover up that kind of intolerance.  Milwaukee has a thriving gay community but, to really become known as a city that values the creative class, it has to demonstrate that it shares their values.

No, Virginia, there is no timeless architecture.

The State Journal released its paean to the State Street redesign today and there it was, in the photo caption: "timeless."  Specifically, the new look is said to create, "a more modern but timeless landscape."

What the hell does that mean?  My guess is that they're trying to encompass both the "sleek" buss shelters and the trite, bastard-victorian curlicues tacked onto the streetlamps and kiosks.  Nothing highlights State Street's waning status as the center of Madison counterculture like faux old-world charm.

"Timeless" is usually used as a code-word for old-fashioned.  It's symptomatic of the mistaken impression that things only started coming in and out of style within the last fifty years.  The solution is imagined to be a reversion to the architectural fashions of yore or, more likely, kitschy misinterpretations of them like the hulking "prairie style" pedestrian bridge that looms over East Washington Avenue.  Surely, Frank Lloyd Wright would've designed something just like that if someone had gotten him blind drunk and dulled all of his pencils.

There's no avoiding time.  The current wave of post-modern nostalgia will pass and, in twenty years, people will wonder who could've thought those lamp posts were a good idea.  What I think distinguishes tired old relics from cherished icons is the care that went into them.

The State Street redesign, with its design by committee, its lack of any sort of coherent theme and its upcoming pathetic excuse for public art (a friend referred to the chosen design as a horizontal phallus with a beaver) is unlikely to stand the test of time.  That's alright, too.  Time marches on and, if everything we built were worth saving, future generations wouldn't have anyplace to leave their own mark.

How to not debate

You really have to marvel at the skill (or luck) of the Republican political machine.  Coming into last night's vice-presidential debate, they were faced with a quandry: Sarah Palin has serious knowledge gaps on national issues.  Her interview answers with Katie Couric had turned into a magnificent fiasco for the McCain camp.  She would simply fall apart whenever Couric insisted upon a direct answer to a question Palin couldn't bluff.  

Despite her inability to fabricate information she doesn't have, Palin is rather adept at political BS. She has a demonstrated ability to effectively deliver pre-packaged talking points, be they off a teleprompter or from memory.  The challenge was to ensure that Palin would not be knocked off her talking points.  They had to turn the debate into a speech.

They had a few tools at their disposal.  First, Joe Biden, Palin's debate opponent, is a notorious "gaffe machine."  The Obama camp had a comfortable lead coming into the debate and wasn't enamored of the possibility of Biden running his mouth a bit too long in the highest profile event he's likely to headline. 

Second, (and I'm speculating here) they had some dirt on moderator, Gwen Ifill.  The fact that Ifill has been writing a book on the african-american political experience, including a chapter on Barrack Obama, was well known before the McCain people  agreed to the debate.  They could've brought it up at the time but, by agreeing to Ifill as host, they had something to tar the moderator with should things not go their way.

Now the stage was set and it was time to pick the format of the debate:  90-second responses with no follow-up.  Ifill was effectively neutralized as the follow-up, the bain of Sarah Palin's existence, is off the table.

Come debate night, the outcome was predictable.  Whenever Sarah Palin was asked a question outside of her prepared talking-points, she simply didn't answer it, choosing instead to rattle off a prepared screed on an unrelated topic.  Thus, we got a lot of unasked-for fluff about energy policy and whatever the hell she was talking about when asked about her greatest weakness. Even if the format had allowed, Ifill was not in a strong position to insist on any sort of substance from either candidate, especially Palin.

An effectively-moderated, actual debate might have turned out substantially differently but neither campaign wanted to take that risk.  Whoever won the debate, we lost.

Senate to Future: F$@k You!

In a bold move to make the famed $700 billion bailout bill more palatable to house republicans, the Senate made it horrible.  In a bill that aims to add probably the largest single portion ever to the nation's multi-trillion-dollar debt, the Senate actually introduced . . . TAX CUTS!

Yes, that's right, as long as we're spending almost three-quarters-of-a-trillion-dollars we don't have, to bail out a bunch of shortsighted, rich pricks, we might as well blow an even bigger hole in the budget.

The tax cut bonanza includes language to prevent the Alternative Minimum Tax from effecting 20 million middle-class Americans, 8 billion dollars in tax relief to midwest disaster victims, and 78 billion dollars in additional lard to extend other tax breaks (unnamed in the article) and fund renewable energy.

On their own merits, arguments could be made for these provisions.  The AMT has been malfunctioning for years and hitting people it was never meant to.  Disaster victims are swell people and could use help getting back on their feet and not all renewable energy is as big a boondoggle as ethanol (no specifics on where that funding is going or what the other tax breaks are).  The point is, when you're taking out a couple thousand dollars in debt in the name of every man, woman and child is this country, you should at least be sensitive enough not to add to the insult, especially when the bill still doesn't contain any direct help for people losing their homes in the crisis this bailout is actually supposed to address.

I hope this blows up in house republicans' faces.  First they claim that they tanked the bill in a fit of pique because Nancy Pelosi blamed the financial crisis on the president.  We need this thing or we don't and if any of these guys actually thought they were consigning the U.S. financial system to total collapse on account of bruised feelings, I'd very much like to break more than their egos. It's more likely, though, that they just didn't want to admit that the government could actually be a solution to a problem the private sector created.  The Senate's hoping a little deficit-financed tax-cutting will buy them off.

In any case, these people need to go.  What is needed right now is a pragmatic solution negotiated with the best interests of the public in mind.  What we've got has already been held hostage to petty partisan scores and ridiculous ideological inflexibility.  This is unacceptable.

Eine Kleine Unpleasant Musik

Mads (UW Madrigal Singers) is launching headlong into modernism this semester with Vinko Globokar's "Kolo," written in 1988.  "Kolo" is as much a piece of performance art as a piece of music.  The choir plays the "archaic mass" to trombonist Mark Hetzler's "isolated modernist man."  We'll be circling, whooping and all manner of things on the stage of Mills Hall.  A more fitting venue than the brutalist (a descriptively named movement in modernist architecture) Mosse Humanities Building one would be hard pressed to find.

The piece opens and closes with a lovely chorale but most of it is thoroughly unpleasant.  The archaic mass is somewhat unkind to our trombonist hero.  There's truth in Globokar's portrayal of a large mass of people (particularly a choir) displaying disdain toward a modernist.  The genre never gained really wide public acceptance and, even now, there's been some dissention within the ensemble about performing a modernist piece but is it necessary that the ensemble like the piece when that wasn't necessarily the point?

As with all musical/artistic genres it's difficult to clearly date and define modernism but it's a movement that came of age in the middle of the twentieth century in a world that had just experienced two horrific world wars.  Large parts of Europe, Asia and Africa were decimated as humankind witnessed its capacity for inhumanity reach new heights.  In the coming decades, artists and composers became interested in communicating some of the darker emotions and realities that had been so prominent in the first half of the century.

Public response was . . . mixed.  Modernism certainly held considerable sway (though not total dominance) in the academy for the better part of the twentieth century.  Lay acceptance was not as general.  Audiences, especially in symphony halls, are likely to hear much of the same repertoire today as was heard a century ago.  Newer pieces in those venues are also likely to be by composers who bucked modernism in its heyday (Copeland, Barber, etc . . . ) or neoromantic composers of the post-modern period.

As time passes we can view modernism with more sympathetic eyes.  With a little perspective, the visceral and the primal can be appreciated for what they are and, with an open mind, we can start to appreciate what the composer was trying to say to us.

So what's the point of this gross oversimplification of a century of music history?  Only that beauty need not be the sole aim of art. 

Returning to the venue, perhaps the Humanities Building holds a caution.  There is certainly validity in the artistic exploration of negative emotion and general "ugliness."  That being said, people will generally find unpleasantness to be . . . unpleasant.  Attempting to chain people to a brutalist aeshtetic statement for forty years made architect Harry Weese no friends at the University.  Kolo, on the other hand, is twenty minutes long.  I think peple will be willing to Give Mr. Globokar at least that long to make his point.

Why is Wisconsin Public Television so spastic?

I've been a bit of a nerd since I was a kid.  Since about the time I was thirteen, I would plop myself down in front of Wisconsin Public Television on idle weekends and watch woodworking programs.  New Yankee Workshop, This Old House, I even used to watch Hometime.  

Now that I'm a member of productive society, I've built myself a mythbox (open source Tivo . . . nerd, remember?) and that has had some consequences.  I've meant to donate to WPT to show my appreciation for my weekend shows but it's difficult.

In earlier days, I would invariably turn on WPT one Sunday afternoon and find, to my horror, that there was a pledge drive.  Instead of Norm Abram, I'd see some self-help guru spouting his worthless BS *for hours* or maybe I'd find Andre Rieu gassing some room full of unsupecting Vienna blue-hairs with the fumes from his industrial hair-care products.  My favorite part was when they would cut away to some green-screen shot of him hacking artlessly away at that violin in front of an alpine lake, his naugahyde face grinning emptily at the camera.  I think he's an android.

Anyway, nowadays I see none of the horrible fill-programming Wisconsin Public Television rolls out to extort people into ponying up if they ever want to see the good shows again.  I see nothing at all because my Tivo isn't set to record crap.

Thus have I not remembered to send my gift to WPT and tell them to keep the woodworking on the air and thus do I now see no woodworking programs in the month of guide data my computer keeps on hand (except one measly TOH on WPT cable which doesn't come in well enough to record).  I could call and complain but I haven't actually given them any money.  I could donate and complain but they might just use my money to air more Wayne Dyer.  I'm screwed.