Strategic Default — The Personal and the Social

A couple doors down from the condo we rent, there’s another condo that’s probably exactly like ours. Except that there’s a lockbox on the door. We don’t know who put it there. There is no “for sale” sign and no sign of anyone coming in and out. A couple weeks ago, there was a letter from the city about unpaid water and/or sewer bills. Does the city have the right to do that? Today, the mailman came around to ask if we knew who lived in that apartment. Mail hasn’t been picked up for weeks. After we were unable to tell him anything useful, we overheard one of the neighbors saying he also didn’t really know the people who lived there. . .or where they went.

This is our first “in the flesh” taste of the mortgage crisis since returning to the US, but there are other signs. Since getting a pay-as-you-go SIM card for her phone, Carrie will occasionally get telemarketed by companies offering to help her pay off debts she can’t manage. Ads for debt consolidations and bail bondsmen appear during prime-time cable programming. There is, of course, the standard talk of new institutional and personal austerities in the air — both at Stanford and at McGill.

“Strategic default” is a term used to describe the practice of borrowers walking away from debts they can’t afford to pay. It’s usually used in the context of investors, and wealthy people who bought extra properties with ridiculous loan arrangements. Of course it could apply to anyone who walks away from a debt figuring it will cost too much to collect and hit to the credit record is less of a concern than actually paying out the money.

I wonder whether the term couldn’t also be ironically turned back on institutions in the United States charged with maintaining the public trust, especially in the finance sector. As in the government has “strategically defaulted” on its responsibility to regulate financial institutions upon whom it has showered all sorts of favors, and politicians have strategically abandoned the people they are supposed to represent in the service of raising money to get or stay elected. The sense of a shrinking middle class is palpable, and one can only wonder about the poor in such wealthy surroundings as ours (Palo Alto has some of the richest ZIP codes in the US, so it is not really a cross-section; Mountain View isn’t as rich). But we can read daily about the incoherent anger of the tea partiers, or that matter, of the Obama voters whether left or center who feel betrayed. Hope is a state of mind and works well for getting elected. It is not, however, a very successful social program.

At last! A lo-boy record!

I’m used to books taking many years to finish, but lo-boy three has taken much longer than we expected when we laid down most of the tracks in the summer of 2004. “Six years in the making” is overselling and pretentious — especially since it spent most of those six years languishing on hard drives waiting for Mike and I to finish it. But in the summer of 2009 we got it 99% done and I handled the rest when I was well enough to do it this spring and summer. I am delighted to have it done and quite pleased with how is sounds.

Listen to the whole record at the bandcamp site. From there, you can download it for any price, including free (for the “price” of your email, which we will only use to contact you if there’s more new lo-boy in the future). It is also available in hardcopy from CDBaby and in pay-for-digital form from iTunes and Amazon.

Also, the album art by Allan Mcleod is really stunning.

In case you’re wondering, the “explicit” label was required for Werner Herzog because we used the word “fuckers” once. But it was for artistic reasons, I assure you.

In another post, I will write up a few recording notes for the curious.

PS — If you haven’t downloaded 2003’s Ballet of Trucks, it’s still fresh.

PPS — Other new music and audio will be up in the coming weeks.

Varia

Yet another overdue entry. Life has a way of being busy even when it’s not. Or rather, we don’t have a ton of unstructured time.

Last week, our path takes us a little out of our way to a place called Philz Coffee. It’s a chain, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, we’ve driven by the place dozens of times. It’s in a mall we call the “hippy mall” because all the signs are tie-dyed. The dry cleaner is all eco and stuff.

Anyway, Carrie goes into Philz for a latte. First, she gets a spiel about how the “don’t use any machines” from a guy who is standing in front of a giant grinder. Then, when we pay, the woman at the cash register says “is this your first time? When welcome to your new addiction!” Which is hilarious if you think about it. She’s clearly not paid enough to say that sort of thing unless she actually believes in it.

American (or at least Californian/Peninsular) customer service is so much more earnest and enthusiastic. When I first moved to Quebec, a friend said “just remember, the customer is always wrong,” and I’d gotten used to that. Here, we’re just swept away in the ecstasy of consumption.

Anyway, the coffee is indeed handmade (sort of steeped like tea) and the thing-that-was-not-a-latte didn’t work all that well for Carrie. But on a friend’s recommendation she returned to purchase a mint mojito iced coffee a few days later and was suitably impressed.

As for me, Philz offers nothing of interest that I can see, though I do share Carrie’s new bubble tea addiction, which is more at the “can’t stop it so we might as well manage it” stage. It’s not that you can’t get bubble tea in Montreal. The awesome Vietnamese sub place in our metro station has it. It’s just that it’s somehow of this place, even though it’s not.

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In other news, the second yoga class went better, and we’ve got a bit of a swimming routine down at this point. I’ve inverted my mornings and afternoons, so that mornings (which are shorter) are more for others and afternoons are for me. This works well because the email chatter from the east coast dies down in the afternoon.

Saturday we spent in Oakland and Berkeley. Berkeley seems to me a bit of a shadow of its former self, and not only because Cody’s bookstore is closed (Moe’s is still amazing–I walked in not knowing I needed to read Cassirer’s philosophy of the humanities but I walked out convinced of the necessity). You still have weird outfits, random erratic behavior and various hippy trappings on Telegraph Ave, but I perceive it as much more of a generic “campustown” than I felt it was when I last visited in 1997. Dinner with Steven, Robin, Jillian and Doug, however, was classic and timeless.

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Also, would it be too much to ask for both the NFL teams for which I root to not have quarterback sexual harassment/douchebaggery scandals at the same time? Thanks. Although I bet old NFL greats like Joe Nameth and Michael Irvin are really happy that sexing was not possible during their careers.

Yoga Review

Today I had my first yoga class ever.

You might be asking how it came to be that a person such as me winds up in a yoga class.

Convenience is king. A group of people got together to hire a yoga teacher to come up to the Center twice a week. I was assured it would be okay for beginners. (Though Thursday’s class is “advanced” and 90 minutes long so I won’t be found anywhere near it, at least for now.)

By “beginner” I mean that until today I really had no idea what yoga was. I knew there was something about positions and flexibility and the possibility of weird cultish stuff. And it’s supposed to be good for you.

I loved it and hated it. It’s like very, very slow calisthenics. Like if you ran jumping jacks and pushups through a time-stretching algorithm. Our teacher went a little too fast (happily I am not the only person who felt this way–hopefully next Monday will be a little slower). A colleague chalked it up to the age difference–she’s 20, but knows a whole lot more about yoga than I do; I’ve never been a big believer in worrying about age differences between teacher and student. She clearly knew exactly what she was going and had a bit of that coaching/encouraging vibe that makes you embarrassed to give up, which is good. I am not flexible, nor is my balance great, nor am I certain that my body was in any of the positions that I commanded it to assume over the course of 45 minutes. There were dogs, tree, cranes, frogs, warriors, and a bunch of other stuff. There was also my stomach. It turns out that yoga is not designed for fat people. It hurts more to sit on my knees than I think it’s supposed to, and some of the twisty positions were not, shall we say, possible according to that law of physics which says that two kinds of matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time. But I spoke with her about it afterward and we will see if I can do some alternative stuff to lighten the load on my knees, at least for now.

I am now at once stiff and sore and stretched and loose. I don’t know about the whole cosmology that goes with it, but it’s less boring than swimming or a treadmill. There was a bit of that, ah, Californian positivity that one would expect from a yoga class in California. After reading “Smile or Die” I can’t quite get on that bus, but if others like it, all the better.

For all my complaining, it’s a good workout and challenging (for me at least) and what’s sabbatical if you don’t get some exercise? Especially since I’m walking a lot less and in the car a lot more. We’ve been swimming at the beautiful Stanford pool (free for visiting scholars and fellows), which is less bloggable, except to say that I am totally sold on salt water pools and will seek one out in Montreal when I return.

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How I know I’m back in the US: the announcer on the Monday Night Football game says the following about a player:

“He came out of nowhere! He was in Canada for two years!”

Crappy American Monochrome Paper Money

The title says it all. As my mom pointed out to me, American money now has some color variation in different denominations. But looking down into my wallet, all I see is a sea of green.

Like those grass lawns that shouldn’t exist in Arizona.

Canadian money comes in different colors so that you instantly know what kind of bill you’re dealing with. When I arrived in 2004 it felt like play money. Now I realize what a brilliant decision color coding is, and apparently have a hard time living without it. This does, however, raise questions. Does monochrome American paper money “toughen up” its users somehow? Does colorful Canadian money with hockey on it somehow make its users “softer”? Less “rugged”?

Reading the Financial Facelift (Online)

Every morning, I sit down to breakfast, say “what’s going on in Canada?” either to myself out loud to Carrie, open the iPad and read the news online. Reading newspapers online is not entirely satisfying but enough so. We are trying not to subscribe to a paper while here. But reading online leads to another experience–comment threads. I normally steer clear of these things, but lately I have become fascinated with them.

Especially enjoyable in a driving-by-a-car-wreck sort of way is a Saturday column in the Globe & Mail called “Financial Facelift.” The premise of the column is that a person, couple or family submits their finances to a financial planner who offers free advice through the column. It is very much a cross between a classic advice column and what I imagine goes on in those home improvement reality shows.

Some features of Financial Facelift are fairly predictable: the planner always assumes a good rate of return on the portfolio regardless of the reality of the market or its outlook, and if the subjects of the week have debt, it must be cleared, unless it is a mortgage. If they are spending a lot on what appear to be optional things, the planner will tell them to put that money into investment (never savings) regardless of implications for lifestyle, and so forth. From week to week, the subjects differ. Sometimes it’s young people starting out, sometimes it’s people close to retirement, sometimes it’s people who have their acts together, sometimes it’s people who don’t.

But since reading it online, I have actually become obsessed with the comments thread that goes with each article. Now, it is well known among journalists and people who write for online publications (I am not including blogs here, which have a whole other things going on) that comments threads attract a certain sort of soul in disproportionate numbers. And indeed, each week, regardless of who the subject of the Financial Facelift is, they will be treated to a torrent of derision for their financial choices. It is a festival of financial resentment, combined with extreme judgementalism and a Protestant ethic. Some people haven’t saved enough, or should be sending their children to private school, or shouldn’t. They give too much to charity or not enough. If they are public servants, they are definitely making too much money and have too good a retirement plan (especially jaw-dropping to me was the case of a military couple who wanted to retire at what I take to be normal military retirement age, and who got the same “public servants are paid too much” — nobody would dare say that about a military person in the US). I suspect the anti-tax lobby is overrepresented in the comments as well.

Now, you’d think that I would hate this sort of thing and find it annoying and offensive, and intellectually I do. But for some reason that is probably best left unexamined, I find it hilarious. The predictability of the comments somehow is a note-perfect harmony for the predictability of the column itself. Both are outrageous, but in totally complementary ways.

Life on Sabbatical

I haven’t said much of substance in this space apart from my SSHRC post, which is a whole other story. So let me set the scene. This is my first sabbatical, and I’m still figuring things out.

I had wanted a fairly routinized life, and so far that’s what I’ve gotten. We spend all day every weekday at the Center in our offices working, with a few exceptions (like when we shoved off early to catch the 49ers game). I am keeping to a 40 hour a week work schedule, more or less. I try and divide it up so that mornings I’m reading and doing my own work and afternoons I spend taking care of other people’s stuff. It’s a big crunch time for letters and September is traditionally the time when academics need to write, revise and polish the templates for letters of rec they will use throughout the year. I don’t expect every afternoon to be devoted to others’ needs but for the next week or so it’s going to be like that. Wednesdays there’s a talk at 4:30, with socializing before and after. There have also been a number of receptions and informal social events. We cooked some but we’ve been going out to eat a lot for dinner, perhaps too much, though it’s fun to explore. Evenings are short because I’ve decided to try and be on an earlier schedule and Carrie is humoring me since we commute in together. Weekends vary depending on what else is going on. We’ve gone on day trips and explored, but last Saturday I spent the day working on an audio piece and then we went swimming in the afternoon and had dinner with friends in the evening. The pool was great but afterwards I felt like Don Draper looks in the episode of Man Men where he decides he has a drinking problem and goes for his first swim. (I wasn’t even allowed in a pool until sometime in August because of the radiation treatment.) Sunday is of course football-oriented but we’ve been taking walks in the sunshine.

I should be getting more regular exercise. We loved the salt water pool at Stanford (free with your ID!) so that’s an option, and I should be devoting more time to music and audio practice, but that will come when the rush of deadlines is through. (I’d hoped to send off the penultimate ToC for my Sound Reader this week but it looks more like Monday or Tuesday). We are in our car much more than in Montreal, but it’s easy to get around. I love the heat and sunshine but it turns out that radiated skin just doesn’t like 90-degree weather regardless of whether you’re in the sun or out of it.

I’ve met some other really interesting people at the Center and will join a reading group on postcolonial theory and politics. I talk with other fellows every day at lunch, sometimes about ideas, sometimes about more idle gossipy stuff. I’m also starting to get some distance for my job and am beginning to reimagine parts of it. I occasionally “sneak away” from a more teleological task and instead just read something I’ve come upon for interest. I’ve already checked out dozens of books, though most of them are for the sound reader.

Not bad for September. Among our biggest successes: not spending much time getting set up. It took just over a week.

That’s the basics. Now we can get on to bloggy subjects like why American paper money is inferior, comparative studies of burritos, reading newspapers online instead of on paper, and my conflicted reaction to the incredible ease of consumerism here.