Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, April 30th, 2009

Here's what 50 stations are playing this week in the world of AAA and Jazz (minus the top 20). New to the list is local boy Roy Rogers. If you want to relive the sixties and have a good source for acid or whatever (those days are long gone for me), you can try Fleet Foxes. If you want to relive the eighties and have a good source for acid or whatever, you can try David Byrne and Brian Eno.

But for me, the biggie on this list is Elvis Costello's new album, which I haven't heard yet. It looks to be a country thing recorded in Nashville. The first time he tried to do this, back in 1980 or so, the session musicians snickered the whole time through, and the album was a disaster. This time he has the standard alt-country lineup with T Bone Burnett producing. Costello is one of my favorite pop lyricists, but he's also one of my least favorite pop singers. In another era, he'd write the tunes in the Brill Building and some sweet voiced hunks would sing them. I swear the world would truly be a better place today if songwriters wrote, singers sang, and never the twain did meet.

1 Gomez A New Tide ATO 2009
2 The Decemberists The Hazards Of Love Capitol 2009
3 Bell X1 Blue Lights On The Runway Yep Roc 2009
4 The Blue Note 7 Mosaic: A Celebration Of Blue Note Records The Blue Note Label 2009
5 Sarah Borges & The Broken Singles The Stars Are Out Sugar Hill 2009
6 Tierney Sutton Desire Telarc 2009
7 Dan Auerbach Keep It Hid Nonesuch 2009
8 U2 No Line On The Horizon Interscope 2009
9 Andrew Bird Noble Beast Fat Possum 2009
10 Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz! DGC / Interscope 2009
11 Eliane Elias Bossa Nova Stories Somethin' Else / Blue Note 2009
12 Ruthie Foster The Truth According To Ruthie Foster Blue Corn 2009
13 Tom Harrell Prana Dance Highnote 2009
14 Benny Golson New Time, New 'Tet Concord 2009
15 Roy Rogers Split Decision Blind Pig 2009
16 Fleet Foxes Sun Giant [EP] Sub Pop 2009
17 Elvis Costello Secret, Profane And Sugarcane Hear 2009
18 Bruce Springsteen Working On A Dream Columbia 2009
19 Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock & Jack DeJohnette Yesterdays ECM 2009
20 Michael Wolff Joe's Strut Wrong 2009
21 Shemekia Copeland Never Going Back Heads Up / Telarc 2009
22 Buddy & Julie Miller Written In Chalk New West 2009
23 The Vignola Collective Gypsy Grass Dare 2009
24 Radam Schwartz Blues Citizens Savant 2009
25 Greg Skaff East Harlem Skyline Zoho 2009
26 John Fedchock New York Big Band Up & Running Reservoir 2007
27 David Byrne & Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today Todomundo 2008
28 Mark O'Connor Americana Symphony: Variations On Appalachia Waltz Omac 2009
29 Elvis Perkins In Dearland Elvis Perkins in Dearland XL 2009
30 Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavilion Domino 2009
31 Great Lake Swimmers Lost Channels Nettwerk 2009
32 Joey DeFrancesco Finger Poppin' Doodlin' 2009
33 Red Holloway Go Red Go! Delmark 2009
34 Bat For Lashes Two Suns Astralwerks 2009
35 The Arcade Fire Funeral Merge 2004
36 The Felice Brothers Yonder Is The Clock Team Love 2009
37 A.C. Newman Get Guilty Matador 2009
38 Ramblin' Jack Elliot A Stranger Here ANTI- 2009
39 Camera Obscura My Maudlin Career 4AD 2009
40 Ray LaMontagne Gossip In The Grain RCA 2008

Whining 101

I've never been to Princeton. I only know it by reputation. Historically - this goes back to before F. Scott Fitzgerald - it has been a school with an upper crust country club atmosphere that it sometimes gets nervous about, so nervous that it tries to impose rigor across the board.

I imagine Princeton is similar to Stanford. It gets mostly wealthy WASPy students (neither place has much of a Jewish population and both had the same Jewish adverse admissions dean for a time), although it does make a serious effort to attract those from moderate incomes and those that aren't white. With the exception of the super-wealthy, the students are potentially top notch although a good number of them have worked so hard in high school to get to their fancy school of choice that they are more than a bit burned out by the time they arrive on campus. The resources available are tremendous. The professors have outstanding research resumes and in terms of teaching range from "I'd rather shoot an undergraduate than teach one" (that quote comes from a Stanford professor, actually) to balancing research and teaching with élan.

And as the cliche goes, it is what you make of it. If you want to coast and party hearty you can do that and graduate (some even - I don't know how this is possible - graduate with less than a 2.0 GPA); but if you want you can also work like crazy and get an outstanding education. If the mix is like Stanford, about one quarter of Princeton students do the former, one quarter do the latter, and everyone else is in between.

For what it's worth, I was admitted to both Princeton and Stanford for graduate school. I decided to go to Stanford because my assigned research advisor at Princeton was one of the creepiest people I'd ever met.

Princeton is also the one prominent institution that has successfully tackled grade inflation. A few years ago, the faculty overwhelmingly voted in favor of guidelines limiting A's to 35 percent of all grades in large classes. In 2003, the median GPA of a Princeton graduate was a princely 3.49. In 2008, it was 3.42. That's not a drastic drop, but in the world of higher ed, it's a major change. This year the median GPA will likely be about 3.40. I imagine when all is said and done the median GPA of a Princeton graduate will eventually hit a bottom of about 3.35 and stay there for awhile.

From a practical standpoint, the recent drop in grades means that about 100 graduates, about 8 percent of the graduating class, will no longer meet the grade point cutoffs for jobs in consulting firms and on Wall Street that Princeton students of a middling caliber used to meet. A few placements in medical school and law school might be effected as well, although it should be noted that Princeton places over 85 percent of their medical school applicants and law schools receive (imprecise but useful) measures of average undergraduate grades at schools along with individual applications.

Since not every graduate wants to work on Wall Street or for McKinsey or go to law school perhaps 50 students are significantly effected by Princeton's GPA change in terms of influencing their post-graduate prospects. They weren't great students before. They aren't great students now. They used to be on the bubble. Now their bubble has popped.

That's it. Fifty mediocre Princeton students have likely had their early journeys in adulthood slightly altered. This is hardly anything to get worried over. The best Princeton students are still going to the best places. The worst are doing who knows what. But a tiny sliver of the middle is indeed being effected because Princeton has become a little more rigorous over the last few years.

You would think that such a minor change would hardly be noticed. But oh no. All you have to do is read the campus newspaper, The Princetonian, over the last few years to get an idea how unpopular this slight grade change has been with students. There have been op-eds, editorials, and opinion pieces disguised as news articles that all say the same thing. The grade change is horrible. Students are hopping mad. Apparently parents of students are hopping mad as well. They want A's. They hate the dean and president responsible for eliminating a few of those A's.

The amount of whining from adults and students in these articles and in the comments online about Princeton's minor change in grading boggles. It's a collective temper tantrum. I can hear the crying all the way across the continent.

I don't understand it myself. You go to school to learn. The parties are fun but they are frosting. And a Princeton graduate more than likely is still a B+ or better student. Before grade deflation, grades were so high at Princeton - in particular in the humanities - that it was likely impossible to motivate a significant portion of the student body. Now students are paying a little more attention, which may be why faculty are still overwhelmingly in favor of Princeton's grade deflation policy.

Work hard. Play more efficiently. Whine less. Study more. It's really not all that difficult.

A Dreamy Day

I went to a ball game with a hedge fund manager. Nice seats on a sunny day. The seat cost me nothing, compliments of the hedge fund manager. He asked if I wanted a beer. "No thanks," I said. "It's Passover. He said, "How about some wine, then?" I said, "Sure." He was a young guy, very quiet spoken and mild mannered. "What kind of hedge fund manager is this?" I thought.

I sat in my wonderful seat eating matzah, a chicken burger like the ones my mom used to make (called conclette in Yiddish; mix some ground chicken breast with egg, garlic, and a little matzah meal; fry in peanut oil, very yummy), followed by flourless chocolate cake. The cake made a mess all over my fingers; very sticky stuff it was.

The pitcher for the visiting team was a 42 year old knuckle baller. Oddly he was wearing the number 42. I looked around the field. Everyone was wearing the number 42. I wondered what that meant.

I sat on the aisle. A friend of mine was next to the hedge fund manager talking shop about my friend's high tech company. I watched the game. It was about 60 degrees and the air was dry, usually lousy weather for a knuckle baller. Ball movement tends to be non-existent on days like that for knuckle balls and hitters face 60 mph peaches; they smile when they come to the plate.

Not this game, though. The knuckle baller went over five innings without having any base runners, 16 number 42's making consecutive outs until his third baseman booted a routine grounder. He still had a no hitter going for another seven batters. Very strange stuff.

I was parked illegally - the lot had been completely full when I got there so I invented a space - so I said good bye to the hedge fund manager and left with my friend after the middle of the ninth inning, the visiting team 8 runs ahead, to retrieve my car a little early. We got to my car to find one tire completely flat and another leaking. We quickly changed the flat one, but by then the game was over and everyone was trying to leave. We stood in a traffic jam in the lot while the second tire went completely flat. I pulled over and parked.

I looked outside the parking lot. Where an abandoned building once was the last time I was at a game, there stood a NAPA auto parts store. I couldn't believe my luck. I walk over to the store with my friend, weaving through the standing cars. I ask the clerk how long they'd been in business. "Six weeks," he said. We buy some Fix-A-Flat. I call up the nearest location of the chain tire store where I bought the tires; they said come on over and we'll fix or replace them for free.

It's a 20 mile drive to get to the store, but more or less on the way home. As I drive, I remember that I have driven past this store front many times; it's along a back way I use to get through Bay Area traffic when I'm coming home from places like Yosemite during rush hour. Traffic is smooth now, though. We get to the tire shop. They fix both tires for nothing - both had nails in them - while my friend and I eat mediocre Mexican food. I just have a flan because it's Passover.

Then we drive home, my friend happy because the Red Sox won and me happy to have seen a decent game and gotten home with little or no fuss despite some significant obstacles.

Quite a dream, huh? Except it wasn't a dream. It happened a couple of weeks ago on Jackie Robinson Day (hence all the number 42's). The knuckle baller was Tim Wakefield for Boston. Three days later I looked at my tires and decided that two of them were almost bald and the other two weren't much better. I now have a new set of four. I'll go to another game next week. Here's to hoping the new ones don't run into any nails.

Now I know this issue of reality versus perception is an old philosophical one. For me, it really doesn't matter that much. If I had dreamed the above sequence, it would have had the same impact on my life. What philosophical category that puts me in I have forgotten. Why psychological category that puts me in is another issue entirely.

Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 52

The Fourth Hand

"One crak." My mom takes a sip of coffee from her cup made of fine German china, one of the few things my family brought with them from Europe.

"Two bam." Eva, a dozen years older than my mom, in a floral dress and and lace wrap, takes a piece of my mom's strudel.

So it went. Once a month I'd come home from school and three ladies would always be there calling out their tiles. There was Eva, a German war survivor, always cheery yet formal. There was Rosie, another boundless optimist just like the other two, American born and diminutive, usually wearing a sweater even in the summer. Of course, there was my mom. The game would rotate from house to house once a week.

I still don't know what craks and bams are. But my wife does. My mother-in-law does. My daughter does. Every Jewish woman I've ever known well knows how to play mah jongg, an ancient Chinese game that uses tiles that originally were made from bone, and now are made from plastic.

My wife owns a set of these tiles. My mother-in-law does too. So does my daughter I think. They don't play regularly, hardly at all. My mother played the game once a week for thirty years.

How did a Chinese game become an entertainment staple for Jewish women in America in the 20th century? I have no idea. It's a card-like game and it's kind of exotic. Playing cards in my mother's eyes was a crude thing to do. When she said the word cardplayer, "kurtenshpiler" in Yiddish, it was always with derision.

Ah, but Mah Jongg. That was something real ladies did. It showed refinement and class. How this distinction came to be made is anyone's guess. It was just implicit. Card playing was done at night with cigarette smoke in the air. Mah jongg was done in the day with the best china. You dressed like a lady should dress, as if you were going to a charity luncheon. You talked politely with your friends. If you talked about other people, you didn't gossip, but focused on their successes. These were the unwritten rules of these three ladies.

Playing mah jongg was part of being balbattish. You kept up your home. You made sure your kids' clothes were clean and untorn. You made sure your husband was color coordinated when he walked out the door. There was always a meal on the table promptly at 5:30 so after you could watch the 6 o'clock news as a family. And you played mah jongg. It was all part of a package.

Except there was one problem. You play mah jongg with four people. My mother played mah jongg with Eva and Rosie for decades. But the fourth? There was never a suitable fourth who shared their sensability for the long haul.

At first, a good friend of my mother's used to come by, Honey. But there were compatibility problems. She was a top notch bridge player, fast talker, crude and down to earth. She hated getting dressed up. Mah jongg or "mahj" as it was known for short was simply beneath her. She lasted for several years, not really fitting in, and then she'd had enough. She always liked my mom. "But those other two," she just shook her head.

A second fourth hand came on board, Sylvia, someone my mother barely knew from synagogue. She caught on instantly to the vibe of the other three. She dressed up. She was polite. Unlike the first fourth, she didn't mind that every week they set some money aside from the bets for a yearly trip to Chicago to have lunch and go to the Phil Donahue show (and after this TV show went off the air, Oprah Winfrey). Honey used to call Phil Donahue a fag and laughed about it. Sylvia, like the other three, thought Phil Donahue was one of the sexiest men on Earth. "And so intelligent, too," they all concurred.

My mother became fast friends with Sylvia as a result of mah jongg. They'd shop together and drive down to Chicago together to buy clothes. With Sylvia on board, the mah jongg group was as tight as it would ever be. Then one day, my mother walked into her friend's house and found her slumped over her kitchen sink at the age of 42 dead of a heart attack. That event really shook my mother. She was very conscious of her own mortality for two or three years because of it.

The mah jongg group was back to three.

A new fourth hand was found, someone who was a dead ringer for the comedian Madeline Kahn, Marylyn. She even talked the same way as Kahn, with the same strange theatrical rounding of her vowels. She was American born, came from serious money and unlike the other three wasn't sunny. She dressed up because she always dressed up wherever she went. It was an odd fit this oh so serious and status conscious woman in the mix with the other three.

I doubt she would have lasted except for one thing. There was something always a little off about her personality - nervous and diva-like - but three years into being the fourth hand, she literally went off her rocker. Off to an asylum she went for three months. And when she got out her doctor recommended that she return to normal activities. One of those normal activities was mah jongg. Back she was at the weekly table, the temporary fourth hand sent off to exile.

Marilyn wasn't the same woman when she came back. She'd stare off into space, rattle off words that made no sense. She'd shout out in anger over little aspects of the game. My mother and the other two adapted. The joy of playing clearly was gone, but now they shared a communal role. They were being good eggs helping a sick woman.

Every 18 months or so Marilyn went back to the asylum. The temporary fourth hand - another German-born survivor, Ava - would come back. You'd see the original trio relax and enjoy the game of mah jongg again. But it was understood that this would be a brief enjoyable holiday. No one ever suggested that Marilyn not come back and join the group. It was just understood that weekly mah jongg was therapy for Marilyn.

For ten years this shuttling of Marilyn into and out of the asylum went on. She died in her fifties of cancer. The temporary fourth came back full time. My mom, Eva and Rosie finally were back to being ladies again not nurses. The only sore point was that Ava would not infrequently mention that she didn't understand why they had kept Marilyn on all of those years, that it hadn't been fair to her. The other three would say nothing when Ava's hurt feelings would periodically surface. Once a year they'd all go to Chicago to see Oprah, although they still remembered Phil Donahue fondly, and have a ladies lunch in the big city. They'd talk about how good a person Oprah was for weeks after. She wasn't crude like the other TV hostesses. She was a real lady. It's probably true that Oprah would have made the ultimate fourth hand at my mother's mah jongg table.*

About a year before my mom died, Eva passed on. She was about 80 at the time. I saw her about a month before she died and watched her play. Thirty years of watching women play mah jongg and I still don't know the rules. She was still sunny as always and alert. That was probably the last time my mother played mah jongg at her home.

My daughter has my wife's aunt's mah jong set on my father-in-law's side I think. My wife has her aunt's set on her mother's side. I don't know who has my mother's set. Maybe we do. I probably should learn how to play. But I think that there is another unwritten rule out there that of course my mother never told me: real men don't play mah jongg.

*Oprah's mother lived outside of Milwaukee for many years. She was a vivacious woman and my mom met her a couple of times. According to my mother, Oprah was in high school with me for a brief time. I remember a very shy, huge black girl who had a locker down the way from me, was in choir, was harassed now and then by upper class boys, and who disappeared in the middle of the year. Was it her? According to my mother, it was. And who am I to dispute my mother on this very important issue?

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, April 22th, 2009

Here's what about 50 jazz and AAA stations in the US are playing this week. There are live CD's that make me wish I could have been at the show and then there are live CD's that I also feel great about listening to at home. For me, Keith Jarrett's new CD is the former not the latter. Cracker aka David Lowery usually has one fun song per CD; but I haven't heard this new one yet. There are two guitar strumming son's of famous people on this list this week; maybe that's a new trend. I'm starting to think that, musically, Tierney Sutton is the Susannah McCorkle of this decade and that's not a bad thing at all. Buddy Miller is the best country singer and guitar picker ever to come out of New Jersey; that's probably not a bad thing either. Melissa Morgan's CD might be the best new one on this list for smooching.

1 Terrence Brewer Groovin' Wes Strong Brew 2009
2 Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock & Jack DeJohnette Yesterdays ECM 2009
3 Sarah Borges & The Broken Singles The Stars Are Out Sugar Hill 2009
4 Buddy & Julie Miller Written In Chalk New West 2009
5 Tom Harrell Prana Dance Highnote 2009
6 Booker T. Potato Hole ANTI- 2009
7 Here We Go Magic Here We Go Magic Western Vinyl 2009
8 Joey DeFrancesco Finger Poppin' Doodlin' 2009
9 Justin Townes Earle Midnight At The Movies Bloodshot 2009
10 Stanley Clarke Jazz In The Garden Heads Up 2009
11 Dan Auerbach Keep It Hid Nonesuch 2009
12 Bat For Lashes Two Suns Astralwerks 2009
13 Branford Marsalis Metamorphosen Marsalis 2009
14 Claudio Roditi Brazilliance x4 Resonance 2008
15 Vicente Fernandez Para Siempre Sony BMG Norte 2007
16 Cracker Sunrise In The Land Of Milk And Honey 429 2009
17 Camera Obscura My Maudlin Career 4AD 2009
18 Jimmy Greene Mission Statement Razdaz Recordz / Sunnyside Communications 2009
19 Tierney Sutton Desire Telarc 2009
20 Nicole Herzog Time Will Tell TCB 2009
21 U2 No Line On The Horizon Interscope 2009
22 Clifton Anderson Decade Doxy / EmArcy 2008
23 Various Artists Keep Your Soul: A Tribute To Doug Sahm Vanguard 2009
24 Melissa Morgan Until I Met You Telarc 2007
25 Fleet Foxes Sun Giant [EP] Sub Pop 2009
26 Eddie Daniels & Roger Kellaway A Duet Of One: Eddie Daniels & Roger Kellaway Live At The Bakery IPO 2009
27 Ruthie Foster The Truth According To Ruthie Foster Blue Corn 2009
28 The Vignola Collective Gypsy Grass Dare 2009
29 Ann Hampton Callaway At Last Telarc Jazz 2009
30 Benny Golson New Time, New 'Tet Concord 2009
31 Eliane Elias Bossa Nova Stories Somethin' Else / Blue Note 2009
32 Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears Tell 'Em What Your Name Is! Lost Highway 2009
33 Miles Davis Kind Of Blue Columbia 1959
34 Thomas Marriott Flexicon Origin 2009
35 The Clayton Brothers Brother To Brother ArtistShare 2008
36 Sam Roberts Love At The End Of The World Zoe / Rounder 2009
37 Nickel Creek This Side Sugar Hill 2002
38 Bonnie 'Prince' Billy Beware Drag City 2009
39 Elvis Perkins In Dearland Elvis Perkins in Dearland XL 2009
40 Los Inquietos Del Norte Mi Vicio Eagle 2008

Permission to Remember

Attached is a video clip from a documentary, Permission to Remember, which is about my father's home town of Ludmir.

A little background first. There were about 20,000 Jews in Ludmir before the Germans invaded. Less than 100 survived. The survivors' stories that I've heard involve mostly amazing luck mixed with some help from local Christians who hid Jews in barns, attics and crawl spaces in exchange for jewelry.

How many Christians were there like this? A few tens at most. They risked their lives either out of a sense of humanity or out of a desire for lucre or a little of both.

The story in the documentary Permission to Remember by Yael Kipper Zaretzky, which was shown on Israeli TV a few years back, concerns a man who claims to have helped his mother save Jews from Ludmir. A child less than 10 years old during the war, his story makes no sense. I'm guessing that he either fabricated his story of heroic deeds or has a false childhood memory. Somehow, he found one person to "verify" his tale (not a survivor) about how he and his mother saved several Ludmir Jews. Based on this "evidence," Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Israel, conferred upon this man the title of Righteous Among the Nations or "righteous gentile," which comes with a pension and the right to live in Israel. He lives in Jerusalem now, living better than he ever lived in the Ukraine.

It's clear that Yad Vashem made a mistake. There are no survivors from Ludmir who remember this man or his mother saving anyone. One of the survivors has tried to get Yad Vashem to re-open the case. Yad Vashem, like any bureaucracy, is loathe to admit any kind of error. To reconsider this case would open the door to reconsider others. To how many people has Yad Vashem falsely given honors?

For Moshe Margalit, the Ludmir survivor who has battled Yad Vashem and is featured in the video clip above, the bureaucratic blunder is an affront to the memory of his childhood and his family. "After so many people from our town were murdered, it pains me that a bastard like him should falsely receive the title of Righteous Among the Nations," he has said.

Moshe Margalit is a civil man. He has tried in vain to work through the bureaucracy of Yad Vashem to right a wrong. I've tried to imagine what it would be like to watch this documentary with my father if he were alive today.

My father was not a civil man. He would be seething as he watched. I know what would be going through his head. "Ten thousand dollars and it's done," he might say out loud if it was just me and him watching. "That's all it would take to hire someone to kill the son of a bitch." He would be perfectly serious. Justice would be served in my father's eyes.

Now I don't think my father would actually hire a killer. But it would be the very first idea that would come to him, thinking about this impostor. He'd think about it long and hard as a viable option. If he mentioned it to me, I'd of course try to argue the other side. The man was just a boy at the time. Certainly, he did no harm. And if this is what he remembers or even if he just made it up to get a free ticket to Jerusalem and a pension, let it go.

But my father was not someone who let anything go. He'd think through who he would have to call and how he would find a killer. He would weigh in his mind the odds of getting caught. But never would he think that such a plan was not the right thing to do. My father would have had many sleepless nights over this "righteous gentile," a man posing as a savior of Jews from the town where almost all of his family and friends were murdered.

Today is Yom Hashoah, the day of remembrance for the Holocaust. My father and mother are long gone. Soon all remaining survivors will follow them. Many have moved past their bitterness. Many have not. It is not my or anyone's right to judge them for their inability to forgive society for the horrible things they endured. On this day in synagogues across the country, those that are left will gather and tell their stories. They are so few in number that people like me, children of survivors, are sometimes asked to go to schools and synagogues and tell the stories of death and destruction that our parents once told. It's an odd experience for me to do this. I feel like a bit of an impostor, at best a watered down version of the real thing.

For me, having a few false heroes like the one from Ludmir on this planet is nothing to lose sleep over. But I didn't live through what my father and mother did. I have lived a fortunate, comfortable and blessed life.

The principal story of the Holocaust is the triumph of evil. Those that tried to fight that evil do not need pensions. They don't need honors. They were simply doing what anyone with a conscience and soul should have done, but sadly very few actually did. In my father's region in the Ukraine, there were fewer than 2000 survivors out of 1.5 million Jews. The annihilation was done with the full complicity of most Ukrainian citizens. There were hardly any "righteous gentiles."

In the video clip above, a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist with a "university education" intrudes on the conversation. You don't need much imagination to visualize how somehow like that would behave to Jews in Ludmir during the war. And it wasn't just Jews who were murdered in Ludmir. The town was divided between Poles and Ukrainians at the time. Ukrainian ultra-nationalists were actively driving Poles out, murdering them and literally nailing them to the floorboards of their own homes as a warning for other Poles to leave.

There are those who try to find some silver lining in the Shoah. They point to the ones who were saved and those who helped them. They point to people like my parents who lived good lives after and did their best to simply go forward. All of this is true. But for me, these are trivial issues. For me, what is important is that outside the city of Ludmir - a place I will never visit - there is a mass grave filled with thousands including all of my aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. Four generations of a vibrant Jewish dominated city were murdered. And even the memory of those before them has been desecrated by those who have used Jewish tombstones to pave city streets.

Sometimes, certainly not often, it's good to simply be reminded that darkness is darkness and that humans are capable of the most atrocious deeds. That's what I'm thinking about today.

Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 51

Blue Margarine

My parents came from the sticks in Poland so the fact that we lived in the sticks in the US, a medium size city with a rather small Jewish population, didn't bother them in the least. They were actually proud of Milwaukee. As far as they were concerned it was just the right size. There was enough going on culturally - for example, you could see some theater downtown from a decent traveling troupe once a month if you had the inclination - to keep things interesting, and it was big enough to provide financial opportunities in real estate without the hustle and bustle of a big city.

My parents didn't like New York at all, even for a visit. It was too big for them, plain and simple. One time my parents were visiting and my father decided to take a little nap on the grass of a small park in Manhattan. He woke up because of some rumbling underground. "What was that?" He asked.

"It's the subway," my mother answered.

"You can't even take a nap here. It's even noisy in the ground. This place is crazy."

Then there was the attitude of New Yorkers. That haughtiness. That feeling of superiority. In Yiddish culture, snobbery is associated with Litvaks, Lithuanian Jews. They were the ones with ostentatious erudition. They were the ones who thought they possessed the only proper way to speak Yiddish (and Lithuanian Yiddish is what is used when Yiddish is taught today). My parents didn't like Litvaks as a rule. And their attitudes toward New Yorkers were essentially the Americanization of their feelings about Litvaks. New Yorkers were snobs. Who needs them?

We didn't visit New York much as a result. I think the last time we went was for the 1964 World's Fair. Once again, my father refused to make reservations, which meant we ended up in a Holiday Inn about an hour away from the location of the Fair in Flushing Meadows (I think our hotel was in Yonkers). I don't remember much of that trip except that the Wisconsin Pavilion's highlight was a one ton block of orange-yellow cheddar cheese (even at the age of eight, I was completely embarrassed by the lack of creativity shown by my state) mounted on a refrigerated truck bed.

Oh now it's coming back to me. GM had a Hall of the Future that we waited in line for hours to see; I don't think that hall mentioned the word "bankruptcy." We also had to wait hours to try our luck with a surefire item of the future, the video phone at the ATT Pavillion. My father after using this thing - my brother and I in one booth, my parents in another - and looking at the blurry black and white images, said, "Why would anyone want to see me? I'm not a movie star. And what if you're in the bathroom? Who wants to see that?" I'm sure he wasn't the only one who instantly figured out that this technological wonder had no real mass market.

But one key reason we didn't go to New York much was that there was another big city much closer, Chicago. It was only a two hour drive away, two and a half if you were too cheap to use the toll road (and we were definitely too cheap to use the toll road). When we went to Chicago, we never went any further south than Rogers Park. Why would we? Skokie and Rogers Park were where my mom could find good kosher butchers, far better than those found in Milwaukee (we'd come with my dad's fishing cooler to store the meat). We could stock up on bagels at a place on Touhy Avenue (Milwaukee at the time did not have any decent bagels whatsoever). And then there was the curious thing about margarine and Wisconsin.

For a Jewish balaboosta like my mother, margarine was the greatest invention of the 20th century. Jewish dietary laws say you can't have meat and milk together. It's a strange law. But it is what it is and it means that if you have any kind of meat, you can't use butter. Margarine is a loophole in those dietary rules. I'm sure if those ancient rabbis had known about margarine, they would have recognized it as a means of following the letter, but not the spirit of the no milk with meat rule and axed margarine from the approved list of foods. But modern rabbis have been more forgiving. Margarine is a major staple in any kosher household.

The funny thing was that margarine was illegal in Wisconsin when I was a kid. The same state that thought it would be the height of cool to display a one ton block of cheddar cheese at the World's Fair (I'm still embarrassed by that and I don't even live in Wisconsin anymore), had, in an effort to promote butter, banned margarine unless it was dyed blue. No one wanted blue margarine and that was the point of the rule. Keeping Kosher in Wisconsin was a little like being a drunk in a dry county. You had to drive across the state border to get your margarine. Literally at the border on US Highway 41, there were a couple of grocery stores that had refrigerator cases of the stuff for Wisconsinites to take home. Supposedly, it was also illegal to transport margarine across the state boundary, although I never heard of anyone being pulled over after making a margarine run.

Beef, bagels and margarine. That's what these trips were about. If my mom needed a dress for a special event, a simcha, we'd end up in Chicago as well (it's also where we bought my cream colored Bar Mitzvah suit). But there was also something not at all material but equally if not more important. There were some landsleit of my parents who lived in Chicago.

I talked about my father's manic friend Moishe in an earlier post and also a bit about his never-able-to-collect-Social-Security friend Sheeya. My parents liked to hang around successful people. They just felt more comfortable with the go getters. Sheeya was not at all successful. He had a tailor shop on Devon in Skokie, a tiny messy thing, and his family lived in a small apartment nearby where wall-length mirrors gave the illusion of space.

Sheeya was an exception to my parent's stick with the successful rule for friends. He was energetic and mirthful despite his bad luck. I once asked my dad why he didn't have Sheeya make him a couple of suits. "Are you kidding?" He looked at me strangely. "Sheeya?"

I nodded. "Why not? He could use the money."

"Nobody should buy anything from Sheeya. He's the worst tailor in the world."

But Sheeya did like to talk, which made him entertaining, and his wife was balbatish, which my mother appreciated. Plus, in his youth after the war, Sheeya was on a Jewish refugee soccer team that famously beat a Munich professional team. My mother was at that game; then again, maybe she wasn't and just said she was. It was one of those games where if everyone who said they were there actually had been there, the stadium would have been filled four times over. The victory was a memorable point of pride in the community of DP camps in Bavaria. Sheeya got esteem points from both my father and mother because of his role in that game. "Such a little guy he was, but he could run like the wind," my mother would say with pride in her voice. Sheeya was the one person who was their shared link to Europe. I think that counted for a lot as well.

In the summers we'd come on Friday so that we could do our kosher food shopping. If we stayed overnight, we'd sleep in the house of a childhood friend of my mother. Her husband was a builder like my father, but much more successful, which made my father more than a bit jealous.* The wife was the one who I mentioned in an earlier post gave me and my sweetie a crystal candy dish as heavy as a bowling ball for a wedding present.

My family was ornamentally religious. We kept kosher and we went to synagogue more than occasionally, but first and foremost my parents were business people. In the US, keeping the Sabbath meant losing potential revenue. That was unacceptable to my parents and they were not at all observant on Sabbath days. My mother would light the candles Friday night and occasionally my father would raise a glass of wine and mumble a prayer, but that was about it.

This family in Chicago where we stayed had one more star on their Jewish caps than us. They turned on the TV before sunset and kept it on so that you could watch the sports games (only on one channel, no channel flipping was allowed) on Saturday. Lights were turned on before sunset as well and they stayed on. Somehow, it was considered acceptable to play cards on Sabbath, and we would sit at the dining room table playing Kalooki, a two-decked rummy-type game, for hours. The family had two daughters - one my age - and one son my brother's age. My mother's friend would watch me carefully when I was around her daughter; I think both she and my mother had some plans. But alas, there was not one bit of attraction between us.

Sundays, we would drive back home loaded with the aforementioned beef, bagels and (not blue) margarine. When we crossed the border, my mother would sometimes be a bit nervous about the margarine in the back of the station wagon. It was true that no one had ever been pulled over for possession of this banned substance, but there was always the possibility of a first time. What would the fine be if we were caught, she would wonder. My dad was non-plussed. "They've got better things to do," my dad said. "You never know," my mom replied. "I know," my father said. "They've got better things to do."

*My father used to say about my mom's childhood friend's husband - who was by nature a braggart - that he took too many risks. My father was right. Twenty years later, the man would go bankrupt, which, of course, was a source of shame to the family. My mother would frequently console her friend on the phone. My father, on the other hand, felt vindicated.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, April 15th, 2009

Here's the top 21-60, my top 40, of what about 50 jazz and AAA stations are playing this week. The Gene Ammons CD is a nice little time piece.

1 Tierney Sutton Desire Telarc 2009
1 'Papa' John DeFrancesco Big Shot Savant 2009
1 Bell X1 Blue Lights On The Runway Yep Roc 2009
4 Jimmy Greene Mission Statement Razdaz Recordz / Sunnyside Communications 2009
5 Bill Cunliffe The Blues And The Abstract Truth Resonance 2008
5 Eliane Elias Bossa Nova Stories Somethin' Else / Blue Note 2009
5 Ann Hampton Callaway At Last Telarc Jazz 2009
5 Claudio Roditi Brazilliance x4 Resonance 2008
5 Mike Clark Blueprints Of Jazz: Vol. 1 Talking House 2009
10 Bruce Springsteen Working On A Dream Columbia 2009
11 Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock & Jack DeJohnette Yesterdays ECM 2009
11 Terrence Brewer Groovin' Wes Strong Brew 2009
11 Branford Marsalis Metamorphosen Marsalis 2009
14 Andrew Bird Noble Beast Fat Possum 2009
14 Sarah Borges & The Broken Singles The Stars Are Out Sugar Hill 2009
14 Great Lake Swimmers Lost Channels Nettwerk 2009
17 Miles Davis 1958 Miles Columbia 1958
17 Vetiver Tight Knit Sub Pop 2009
17 John Doe & The Sadies Country Club Yep Roc 2009
17 Bob Dylan Together Through Life Columbia 2009
17 Ruthie Foster The Truth According To Ruthie Foster Blue Corn 2009
17 Ben Harper & Relentless 7 White Lies For Dark Times Virgin 2009
17 Booker T. Potato Hole ANTI- 2009
24 The Felice Brothers Yonder Is The Clock Team Love 2009
24 Thomas Marriott Flexicon Origin 2009
24 Gene Ammons Boss Tenor Prestige 1960
24 Shemekia Copeland Never Going Back Heads Up / Telarc 2009
24 U2 No Line On The Horizon Interscope 2009
29 Indigo Girls Poseidon And The Bitter Bug IG / Vanguard 2009
29 Various Artists War Child Presents Heroes Astralwerks 2009
29 Greg Skaff East Harlem Skyline Zoho 2009
29 Lily Allen It's Not Me, It's You Regal / Parlophone / Capitol 2009
33 Slim Harpo Baby, Scratch My Back Excello 1966
33 Randy Crawford & Joe Sample No Regrets PRA 2009
33 Susan Tedeschi Back To The River VMG 2008
33 The Derek Trucks Band Already Free Sony / Victor 2009
33 Eric Lindell Gulf Coast Highway Alligator 2009
33 Fleet Foxes Sun Giant [EP] Sub Pop 2009
39 Robert Glasper In My Element Blue Note 2007
39 The Vignola Collective Gypsy Grass Dare 2009
39 Denise Donatelli What Lies Within Savant 2008
39 Derrick Gardner & The Jazz Prophets Echoes Of Ethnicity Owl Studios 2009
39 Michael Wolff Joe's Strut Wrong 2009
39 Dan Auerbach Keep It Hid Nonesuch 2009
39 Jeff 'Tain' Watts Watts Dark Key 2009
39 Death Cab For Cutie The Open Door EP [EP] Atlantic 2009
39 Ernestine Anderson A Song For You HighNote 2009
39 Raphael Saadiq The Way I See It Columbia 2008
39 Radam Schwartz Blues Citizens Savant 2009

Once Again, There is No Such Thing as Free Speech in Academe

A couple of years after I received tenure, I went to a Faculty Senate meeting and gave a speech denouncing a new administration-based initiative. Two weeks later, my research accounts were being audited. I wasn't surprised. I was pissed, sure. And being a vengeful, immature sort (as an old boss and friend once told me when I patted myself on the back for showing a rare flash of forbearance, "Stuart, you'll have senility before you'll have maturity") who holds a grudge (it's a pailischer - Polish Jewish - stereotype), I vowed one day I'd make the shmuck who had me audited pay. I did. It was indeed sweet.

But the point is that if you say something people don't like on an academic campus, you can expect to get hammered. Speech isn't free. It comes with a cost. And while of course anyone can go before the Faculty Senate and mouth off, speech is generally not even free in the sense of allowing anyone to say anything. It's rare that anyone who has anything to say that doesn't follow current academic fashion will be allowed to give a talk on a college campus.

For example, Al Gore, Mr. Global Warming, is not exactly the most honest lecturer on the issue of climate change. He twists and bends facts to suit his needs. Yet, I'm sure any college campus would love to have him speak. It's academically fashionable to talk about hurricanes, polar bears, global warming and our impending doomsday. Al Gore's global warming counterpart, Bjorn Lomborg, is not exactly the most honest lecturer either. He too twists facts. But his arguments about why we have more important things to worry about than global warming are just as worthy as those of Gore. If a college campus were to invite Mr. Lomborg to speak on global warming, there would be howls of protest. And rarely would a college campus even think of inviting him. Last year, he spoke at places like Iowa State and University of Alaska. Harvard, Yale, Stanford et al. didn't think he was worth having over. So much for free speech.

I once offered to teach a class at a nearby university that will not be named. There was positive interest. I was asked to put together a syllabus and book list. One of the books on my list - which included a lousy, fact-poor book dearly loved by environmentalists, Silent Spring - was Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist, a book that environmental scientists go ballistic over and some even refuse to read. The discussion of my teaching a class ended. So much for free speech.

Last week, a faculty member at Bowdoin College got into hot water over writing and distributing a research paper that ranks liberal arts colleges. Bowdoin ranks at the bottom of the heap in that paper. I've read the paper. I don't agree with its findings. Its rankings are just as arbitrary as US News. Rankings are dopey. And so is the paper by the Bowdoin professor. He's not the only faculty member to ever write a dopey paper. Most research papers that you find, published or unpublished, are horrible. In hindsight, I even wrote about a half-dozen dopey papers over my academic career.

Be that as it may, you can imagine that a professor that writes a research paper dissing his own university isn't exactly going to be popular with his administration. That professor can expect a payback. It's only natural. Add in the complicating factors of him disrupting a meeting with prospective students and their parents (Talk about no common sense. Even I wouldn't do that.), and the culture and personality clash between the professor, a big city Jewish boy, and a dean, a small town WASPy Texas girl, and you can expect a mess.

A mess is exactly what happened. The dean formed a committee. The professor was found at fault by that committee - stacked no doubt because committees in universities are generally designed to produce conclusions desired by administrators - for omitting a reference to a confidential grading report published by Franklin and Marshall College. He awaits disciplinary action by Bowdoin's president.

If every faculty member in America who omitted a reference in an unpublished paper was subject to disciplinary action, most faculty members would be on the equivalent of academic death row for being repeat offenders. In this case, there is the complication that the omitted reference is confidential.

The professor in question says he didn't know that the material was confidential. That's pure baloney. That's exactly why he omitted the reference. The Franklin and Marshall grading reports are well known to be confidential. It's stated that this is so right on the documents.

Now we get to the part of the story that actually interests me. Arguing over free speech on a college campus is silly. Free speech doesn't exist. But grades! Now you have me interested. Every year or so Franklin and Marshall publishes a document listing the average grades on a bunch of college campuses. It's strictly for the use of the participating colleges.

It shouldn't be. When someone enters a college and is paying $200K to get a college degree, they should have some idea of what that they are buying. One thing they should know is whether the school grades harshly or easily on average. That information should be transparent. It isn't.

Instead, a student walks into a college campus blind as to what to expect grade-wise. If they happen to go to a place like Hope College, they're in grade heaven. If they happen to attend a place like Hampden-Sydney they are in grade hell. Yet both schools attract a similar caliber of student.

It's a bad thing when a professor breaches confidentiality in his or her research. It's unprofessional. But it's also unprofessional for colleges to hide their grades. It leads to misinformation and unnecessary worries on the part of students. It makes it difficult if not impossible for professional schools, graduate schools, and employers to make sense out of who is a good student and who is mediocre.

By including Franklin and Marshall's grading report data in his research, the Bowdoin professor indeed did the right thing. It's silly for that report to be confidential in the first place. But he can be expected to pay a price for doing the right thing. And he can be expected to pay a price for disrupting meetings, telling his dean to "get lost," and writing papers that give low rankings to his school. There is nothing special about a college campus vis a vis free speech. It doesn't exist. It never did.

Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 50

On the Beach, Part 2

For my parents, going to Miami was more than a "vacation." Always in the background was the sense that they had the will to overcome anything. They had survived the War and nothing was going to hold them back. In some ways, they were like people who survived cancer. Every day was precious to them. Damn if they weren't going to enjoy themselves even in the dead of winter.

They would always check up on the weather back home when we were in Miami. The colder it was in Milwaukee, the happier they were in the ocean or at the pool. The other greenhorns poolside seemed to share the same joy mixed with defiance. Here we are in paradise was the collective sentiment. Twenty five years ago we were in hell. It was almost as if, collectively, they were trying to thumb their noses at Hitler in everything they did.

A few years ago, I was in New York visiting the Tenement Museum and an older Jewish couple asked me where my parents were from. They assumed I was born in New York - most people do - and that my parents were children of turn of the 20th century immigrants like they were. When I told them that my parents were from Poland, I got that familiar look of pity that I usually get from American Jews of a certain age. I knew what was going through their heads. His parents were survivors. Poor kid. He was raised by people so scarred by war that he couldn't possibly have known happiness.

But that wasn't the case at all. My parents damn well knew how to have a good time.

In Miami they'd go out dancing at night. And there was always New Years Eve to drink some schnapps and wear silly hats.

One year we stayed at a hotel that had a somewhat unusual pool. The main part of the pool was diamond shaped, and then a wedding band-like circular river of water flowed out of the main pool. Between the diamond and circle of water was an island bar reachable by a bridge.

The hotel management didn't want anyone swimming in the river part of the pool - who knows why - so there were little four inch wide barriers every 10 feet or so. My friends and I would pretend we were dolphins and jump over the barriers, swimming the river anyway.

New Years Eve that year found me in the pool with my friends - I always loved the water - and my dad, already shiny faced from a couple of shots of god knows what came walking by. He was in his best suit on his way to the hotel party when he waved to us. I could tell he was full of mischief. He just had that look in his eyes. Then there was how he carried himself when he was really happy. He would swing his arms a certain way. My daughter does the same thing.

My father saw one of the little barriers across the skinny part of the pool where we were doing our dolphin thing. Then he said to one of the greenhorns he was with, "You know, if you have a strong heart, you have good balance." He was always coming up with stuff like this. I have no idea from where.

"My heart is good. I'll show you." He said.

My dad walked to the barrier next to where my friends and I were hanging out in the pool. "He's not going to walk across that thing, is he?" A friend asked me.

"My dad? Oh yeah. He's gonna do it."

A little drunk on schnapps, in his best suit and in his black leather shoes, he started to walk across the barrier, which was really like a balance beam. Halfway across he slipped and splashed ass first in the water. The spray hit my face. Everybody laughed including my mother.

My dad went back upstairs to change his clothes, ready to party the night away. That's the kind of man he was.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, April 8th, 2009

OK, I'm trying something different this week for my top 40. Since the top 20 CD's being played by AAA and Jazz radio stations are rarely, if ever, worth a listen, I'm skipping them entirely. My top 40 begins with number 21 on the list. So my top forty is really a top 21 though 60. Shhh. Don't tell anyone. But I think that this might be a better mousetrap.

1 John Scofield Piety Street EmArcy 2009
2 U2 No Line On The Horizon Interscope 2009
2 Nicole Herzog Time Will Tell TCB 2009
2 Ximo Tebar & The Ivam Jazz Ensemble Steps Sunnyside Communications / Omix 2009
5 Michael Wolff Joe's Strut Wrong 2009
5 Various Artists Keep Your Soul: A Tribute To Doug Sahm Vanguard 2009
5 Buddy & Julie Miller Written In Chalk New West 2009
8 Great Lake Swimmers Lost Channels Nettwerk 2009
8 Gomez A New Tide ATO 2009
8 Tierney Sutton Desire Telarc 2009
8 Radam Schwartz Blues Citizens Savant 2009
8 Ann Hampton Callaway At Last Telarc Jazz 2009
8 Eliane Elias Bossa Nova Stories Somethin' Else / Blue Note 2009
14 Billie Holiday Lady Day: The Master Takes And Singles Columbia / Legacy 2007
14 Bruce Springsteen Working On A Dream Columbia 2009
14 Jeff 'Tain' Watts Watts Dark Key 2009
14 Gary Smulyan High Noon Reservoir 2008
14 Various Artists War Child Presents Heroes Astralwerks 2009
14 Mike Clark Blueprints Of Jazz: Vol. 1 Talking House 2009
14 Ruthie Foster The Truth According To Ruthie Foster Blue Corn 2009
14 Claudio Roditi Brazilliance x4 Resonance 2008
14 Vetiver Tight Knit Sub Pop 2009
14 Booker T. Potato Hole ANTI- 2009
14 Randy Crawford & Joe Sample No Regrets PRA 2009
25 Kaki King Dreaming Of Revenge Velour 2008
25 Minus The Bear Menos El Oso Suicide Squeeze 2005
25 Benny Golson New Time, New 'Tet Concord 2009
25 Jane Monheit The Lovers, The Dreamers And Me Concord 2009
25 Joey DeFrancesco Finger Poppin' Doodlin' 2009
25 The Bob Sneider & Joe Locke Film Noir Project Nocturne For Ava Origin 2009
25 Radiohead In Rainbows TBD / ATO 2008
25 The Felice Brothers Yonder Is The Clock Team Love 2009
33 Other Lives Other Lives TBD 2009
33 Bonnie 'Prince' Billy Beware Drag City 2009
33 Bill Henderson Beautiful Memory: Bill Henderson Live At The Vic Ahuh 2009
33 Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock & Jack DeJohnette Yesterdays ECM 2009
33 Raphael Saadiq The Way I See It Columbia 2008
33 Clifton Anderson Decade Doxy / EmArcy 2008
33 Julian Lage Sounding Point EmArcy / Decca 2009
33 The Charles Tolliver Big Band Emperor March: Live At The Blue Note Half Note 2009

Trying to Bring Back the Illusion

The above graphs come from last week in the NY Times (you can click on them for better detail). They show clearly that our latest economic boom cycle (now gone bad) was created not by government spending, not by business growth, but by two things: personal debt and banks overextending their lending. It was a finance boom. And it was, as the exponential rise relative to the GDP shows, completely unsustainable. The transition from linear to exponential growth in the finance sector debt took place in the Reagan years. The same transition for personal debt took place at the beginning of the Bush years (no, I'm not saying Clinton is off the hook; he's complicit in this mess, too).

We had a boom based on borrowing. Individuals bought a whole lot of junk they couldn't afford including houses. Banks bundled massive amounts of debt because they were under the illusion that firms like AIG provided them with real insurance for their overlending; somehow they thought that they could have huge rewards with almost zero risk. Every reward has some risk. When people are making massive amounts of money, the risk is huge. There are no exceptions. When people are making massive amounts of money and everyone believes that they are doing so without risk, you have a classic bubble mentality.

There was nothing substantial that created our growth except financing and extreme risk taking on the part of both individuals and banks. In the 1980s we had a savings and loan bubble. In the 1990s we had the internet bubble. In the late 2000s we had a credit bubble. The effects of the last bubble have been by far the most devastating.

Instead of staking the health of our economy on a series of bubbles that every ten years or so pop, it would be best if we had an honest conversation about what it would take to have a truly healthy economy in this country. How can we truly raise all boats? What can we do to create an economy where almost all have a livable wage? What can we do to have a real economy instead of one based on illusions?

Obama doesn't want to have this conversation. He's hoping to bring back the credit-based economy of the 1980s to the late 2000s. I don't understand the logic of trying to do so. That bubble already popped. We can't bring it back. The debt load of the American consumer continues to be maxed out. They can't buy any more goods and services unless they start earning more, something that hasn't happened in over 30 years. The banks, even if their toxic assets are unloaded, can't lend like they once did because they now know that there really is no way to insure their debt. That game is over.

Recreating the credit bubble isn't going to happen. We need to find a way to not bring back the financial sector, but to bring back other aspects of business in America. We as a country need to make real items again instead of inventing new financial instruments that go pop every ten years.

The last time we had a healthy economy we actually made things, not financial instruments, but tangible goods. I'm going to make the supposition that when you're making money based on real goods not hot air, you have a more sensible and cautious outlook. There is no easy money. You have to make something real that people need. Then you have to sell it to real people. It's not glamorous to have an economy based on real items I know (although the iPod is a pretty cool tangible good). But we don't need glamor. We need an economy that employs people and allows them to put food on the table.

I don't believe Summers or Geithner understand this. They are too enamored of Wall Street. They seem to believe that if the public is given the information to allow them to realize that our country has lived off a bubble and that our major banks are truly insolvent right now, the economy will completely collapse. I disagree. It's better to deal with the pain now than to try to revive our economy with happy talk. The current economic recipe of the Obama administration is one that I fear will drag out our pain for untold years.

Transparency is what we need, not happy talk and silly schemes to try and free up banks of untold trillions in toxic assets or allow them to hide their toxic assets through legalized phony accounting. The wrong people are in charge. We need to have some economists in positions of authority that truly realize that there is whole world out there beyond Wall Street and Washington DC that is not only truly hurting, but has the potential - both in terms of a labor force and in terms of a source of innovation - to get us out of this mess.

The financial titans of Wall Street had their chance. They proved to be inept and greedy.

I obviously have my biases. Who doesn't. But one of the strange things about how people view Wall Street is the assumption that because these people are rich, they must be very smart. I would have to disagree. There are geniuses out there to be sure, but there are a lot of poorly educated, undisciplined people in positions of authority on Wall Street. I should know. I taught some of them.

The tools these people use aren't that sophisticated and most don't really understand them anyway. For example, options trading is heavily based on equations that steal from physics that you learn as a first year graduate student. The people who developed these equations are geniuses, supposedly, and some have won Nobel Prizes. I sat in a class of 30 learning that material in a math class well before the stuff was widely used in options trading. I'm no genius. Neither were the other 30 people in that class. It's pedestrian stuff really. You have to be smart, but not terribly so.

I believe that Obama has the potential for greatness in him. But in terms of the economy, he's tied himself to people who are so conventional in their way of thinking that they can't possibly solve our economic problems. Every time Summers and Geithner open their mouths, I cringe. There's no original thought going on there. If I hear one sentence from either of them, I know what the next two sentences are going to be. Their solution to our current economic nightmare is what is called in mathematical parlance as "going to the previously solved case." They want to press the reset button for Wall Street. The problem with that is that the "previously solved case" was never really solved at all.

It's as someone decided to make a movie sequel of the Wizard of Oz where the Wizard is still an omnipotent figure. Sorry, Toto already pulled the curtain in the first movie. The Wizard is just a funny little bungler. Everyone knows it. And now everyone knows that the Wall Street titans are funny little bunglers, too.

It's time to start thinking about a different way for this country to make money, not one that borrows from graduate school physics, but one that is very practical. Make something good. Make something the whole world wants. Make it better than anyone else.

Tales From The Old Country and Beyond, Part 49

On the Beach

A few years ago I was in Miami, Florida doing some interviews at the National Hurricane Center. I decided, though it was far away, to stay in a hotel on Miami Beach for old time's sake. It had been a good thirty five years since I'd spent any time there and of course it wasn't the same. The Jews essentially were all gone. I ate at Wolfie's delicatessen one night and that place was certainly unchanged. I swear they hadn't even changed the upholstery - cracked and with holes - since I was there as a kid. It was virtually empty. The bread was stale. It closed last year.

Miami Beach was my parents' winter Mecca. They wouldn't make a pilgrimage every year, though. My father liked to do most of his construction during the winter months because the labor was cheaper and he could find better workers. But sometimes there would be Christmas weeks when his construction crew would just balk at coming to work either because there was a cold front or they were too hungover. If worked stopped, then off to Miami Beach we would go.

This of course meant that our trips were last minute things. We never made a reservation. Think of it. Christmas week in what was at the time the most popular winter vacation spot on the East Coast. What were the chances of finding a room in a hotel when your constraints were that it had to be directly on the beach ("Why go if you aren't on the ocean?") and cost less than ten dollars a night ("I'm not spending crazy money like a bunch of stupid American Jews do!").

Those quotes are from my father. He said them a lot every time we drove south to Miami. But there was another thing going on, this "no reservation" policy of his. It was a definite issue of pride with my father. Like my mother viewing recipes as pure American craziness (Here's a joke from Poland for you: Why didn't the American have any ice cubes in the freezer? Because he didn't know the recipe!), making reservations was, according to my father, nothing any sensible European ever did.

It was an affront to him, making reservations. You want to go out to eat? You walk into a restaurant and sit down. They only take people with reservations? That's for snobs. You walk out and find some honest food somewhere else.

The drive to Miami would take two days, usually in the middle of a cold snap. Sometimes we'd get caught in a snowstorm and it would take a day longer. This was before the Interstate Highway system was fully established. Most the roads were two lane US Highways.

When we would hit the Mason Dixon Line, my father and mother would be extra careful about keeping the car doors locked. The South was foreign territory to them. They didn't understand a word Southerner's said (somehow Southern accents were synonymous with a Scottish brogue to them, something I talked about in another blog post). Plus there was the pervasive racism of the South. It scared the hell out of them. They both assumed that if someone was a racist, they were also an anti-Semite, and probably violent to boot.

Who knew who was or wasn't a member of the KKK? You had to be circumspect. And they both knew that as soon as they opened their mouths, people would know that they were foreigners. They might was well have had the word "Jew" printed on their car. They were always nervous all the way from Kentucky to Florida.

But once we crossed the Suwannee River, they relaxed. Florida was civilization. And Miami Beach was the Paris of Jewish American life.

We'd drive along Collins Avenue, the main drag in Miami Beach, and head north to where all the new and relatively cheap hotels could be found. One by one we'd stop, asking if there was a room available and what the price was. I'd sit in the car while these negotiations took place. Usually the result was my father storming out of the hotel lobby, angry and affronted either by the lack of a room or the price for a room.

But eventually, usually within six hours or so, with a lot of screaming and shouting along the way about how stupid Americans were with their reservations, we'd find a hotel somewhere between 80th and 140th on the beach side of Collins Avenue. In hindsight, these were always incredibly dumpy places, cinder block things with cheap furniture. But I didn't care. Neither did my parents. We were warm. We were on the beach. There was a pool and shuffleboard. We were truly happy.

And there were Jews. Lots of them. Every hotel we'd stay at would have at least a dozen families like us, greenhorns with their kids. They came not usually from New York - those families tended to stay on the southern part of the beach - but from the Midwest. Places like Cleveland, Detroit and especially Chicago. My parents loved these people. They'd all sit poolside getting burnt to a crisp - this was before sunblock - talking Yiddish and enjoying each other's company.

I'd look at the barrel chested men with tattooed numbers on their arms smoking their Lucky Strikes or Pall Malls and wonder how they could be so happy. The answer was that most people who had lived through the war were a depressed lot. I'd see them in Milwaukee trudging through their days carrying the tremendous emotional weight of the War. It never, ever left them. But the ones that came to Miami were different.

They, like my parents, had the energy to come down to Miami once a year for some sun and freilachkite. Like my parents, they'd go out to eat - some fish or deli - every day, see a show at night, and wake up to hang out again by the pool or on the sand, spending their time bragging about their kids or talking about the perilous nature of Israel.

Miami Beach at the time truly was Yiddish heaven. My parents would go see the bawdy comics like Belle Barth, who'd sing "risque" songs like this:

East side, west side
All around the town
They call me Mattressback Annie
'Cause my pants are always down
I am strictly Kosher
No I don't eat any pork
But I find lots of salami
On the sidewalks of New York

No, they wouldn't let me go to hear this stuff. It was "adults only." But they did take me to the Yiddish vaudeville on Lincoln Avenue every once in awhile. These were strange things. The theater was old, needed new seats, and wreaked of mold and mildew. But even though the hey day of Yiddish vaudeville was long gone, that theater would be packed during winter vacation.

The variety show would last a few hours because of course people had to get their money's worth. Mostly, there would be comedians on the bill, little guys in suits whose principal material consisted of kvetching and self-deprecation. There's one guy left in the world, I think, who still does exactly what these comedians did, Jackie Mason. But you can still hear more than vague echoes of it in people like Jon Stewart aka Stuart Liebowtiz.

Sometimes you'd get a magician or juggler in the mix, but that was a dumb idea; these never went over well. Usually toward the beginning there would be a Yiddish one act soap opera. They called this type of theater der shundt literally "diarrhea theater" because of its shlocky quality. In the story, a family would be in dire trouble. Usually, there was some shameful thing they had to overcome which involved saving the honor of the family for their children. The women in the audience would be crying as the drama unfolded. The men would be tapping their fingers on their armrests waiting for the next comedian.

Laughter and tears, that's what this was all about. Then of course there had to be a good dose of Zionism to end the show. A movie screen would come down, and there would be a short about life on the Kibbutzim or a new hospital being built in Beersheva with the latest equipment (thanks to your donations). Or there would be some old Hebrew movie like Hill 24 Doesn't Answer about the War of Independence that would make everyone, men and women cry. The screen would go back up. Everyone would sing Hatikvah together, and then they would head back to their hotels.

This is a good stopping point. I'll finish up next time.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, April 1st, 2009

Here's what about 50 Jazz and AAA stations were playing this week. You have to get down to about #20 before some interesting things show up.

1 Diana Krall Quiet Nights Verve 2009
2 Dr. Lonnie Smith Rise Up! Palmetto 2009
3 Madeleine Peyroux Bare Bones Rounder 2009
4 Neko Case Middle Cyclone Anti / Epitaph 2009
5 Branford Marsalis Metamorphosen Marsalis 2009
6 Benny Golson New Time, New 'Tet Concord 2009
7 'Papa' John DeFrancesco Big Shot Savant 2009
8 Tom Harrell Prana Dance Highnote 2009
9 Ann Hampton Callaway At Last Telarc Jazz 2009
10 The Clayton Brothers Brother To Brother ArtistShare 2008
11 Wynton Marsalis He And She Blue Note Label 2009
12 Various Artists Vicky Cristina Barcelona [Original Soundtrack] Telarc 2008
12 The Blue Note 7 Mosaic: A Celebration Of Blue Note Records The Blue Note Label 2009
12 Michael Wolff Joe's Strut Wrong 2009
15 Sean Jones The Search Within Mack Avenue 2009
15 The Decemberists The Hazards Of Love Capitol 2009
17 Various Artists Miles From India Four Quarters / Times Square 2008
17 Claudio Roditi Brazilliance x4 Resonance 2008
17 U2 No Line On The Horizon Interscope 2009
20 Tierney Sutton Desire Telarc 2009
20 Terrence Brewer Groovin' Wes Strong Brew 2009
22 M. Ward Hold Time AAM / Dauntless Promotion / Merge 2009
23 The Derek Trucks Band Already Free Sony / Victor 2009
23 John Scofield Piety Street EmArcy 2009
25 Leonard Cohen Live In London [Sampler] Columbia 2009
25 Bruce Springsteen Working On A Dream Columbia 2009
27 Eliane Elias Bossa Nova Stories Somethin' Else / Blue Note 2009
27 Jorma Kaukonen River Of Time Red House 2009
27 The Bob Sneider & Joe Locke Film Noir Project Nocturne For Ava Origin 2009
30 Various Artists Dark Was The Night 4AD 2009
30 Morrissey Years Of Refusal Attack / Lost Highway 2009
30 Randy Crawford & Joe Sample No Regrets PRA 2009
33 J Dilla Ruff Draft Stones Throw 2007
33 Nancy Wright & The Tony Monaco Trio Moanin' Chicken Coup 2009
33 Daniel Sadownick There Will Be A Day In Time 2008
33 Eddie Daniels & Roger Kellaway A Duet Of One: Eddie Daniels & Roger Kellaway Live At The Bakery IPO 2009
37 Clifton Anderson Decade Doxy / EmArcy 2008
37 Ernestine Anderson A Song For You HighNote 2009
37 Julian Lage Sounding Point EmArcy / Decca 2009
37 The BPA I Think We're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat Southern Fried 2009

Oh The Economy!

A few months ago, it was considered unacceptable for General Motors to go into bankruptcy. The economy would completely collapse should this happen, supposedly. Now the reality is that GM will almost certainly go bankrupt in the next 60-90 days.

GM should go bankrupt. They make horrible cars and have been making horrible cars for decades. They went into the sub-prime mortgage business to maximize profits from their finance division. Greed and poor manufacturing should be penalized. It took awhile for the reality to set in that the US can't keep GM afloat forever, but what was once unthinkable is now being gradually accepted.

Today it is considered unacceptable for the US to nationalize its major banks. It's considered un-American. It's considered to be socialism. The world as we know it would end, supposedly. Instead, bowing to this current political reality, the Obama administration has proposed a strange government assisted sale of these banks' toxic assets. Wall Street loves this government assisted sale because a small group of very wealthy people will be able to buy assets with essentially no risk of a downside and a huge potential upside. This is considered to be "American" I guess.

Joseph Stiglitz has a very clear eyed and easy to understand description of what this sale is all about in the NY Times today. Paul Krugman had a similar piece last week, but it was way too hyperbolic and emotional (he tends to be that way).

The Obama administration has tried to be pragmatic on many issues. The idea is to pass legislation that can be passed given the constraints of what they view Congress and the American public will and won't find acceptable. In this case, though, it needs to throw out pragmatism. Keeping insolvent banks afloat is as ridiculous as keeping GM afloat. A group of greedy people created a mythical system of bundling investments without risk. The Obama plan is to essentially bring back greed by giving these same players somewhere on the order of a trillion dollars of government money.

They want to restart the greed game again. New regulations will supposedly keep the game from getting out of hand. Good luck with that.

We need to move to a different kind of economy, one that isn't based on ever increasing consumer debt loads for the American public and massive turnover of junk securities rated AA by rating agencies in complete conflict of interest. The economic growth of the last thirty years was to a large degree one big Ponzi scheme. It started with Reagan. It ended with Bush. It was unsustainable. It was inevitable that this "new economy" would collapse. It's over.

Perhaps the Obama administration, after throwing away several hundred billion more dollars away in an attempt to restart the greed machine that defined the American economy (and was the envy of the world), will come to the realization that they need to nationalize America's banks. Somehow, just like the tens of billions of dollars that were thrown away in a hopeless effort to save the auto industry, I think it would be better if we simply bit the bullet now.

But don't listen to me. This is just a blog that I've typed at 120 words a minute. Joesph Stiglitz says the same thing. So does Paul Krugman. Those are two Nobel Prize winners in the "nationalize" column. It's time for Congress and the Obama administration to stop putting index fingers up in the air to gage the political winds and simply do the right thing.