Outer Life

Portrait of the Artist as a Loon

When it comes to artists I have a weakness for eccentrics.

I don't just accept eccentricity in artists. I expect it. At some level, I even savor it.

If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that I don't savor, expect or even accept eccentricities in most other people. Would you be okay with an eccentric CEO, lawyer or teacher? Eccentricities in an artist signal positive things, such as iconoclastic genius, while eccentricities in someone like a tax accountant signal negative things, such as audits, huge penalties and a plea bargain.

It's not enough to connect eccentricity with creativity, and conclude that artists are creative and others are not. Anyone who's worked with a great tax accountant understands the central role of creativity in the tax world. I think, though, that the unreliability and unpredictability we associate with eccentricity is something we are prepared to accept in artists and not in others. While it's great to have a creative tax accountant, we also want him or her to be reliable enough to input the right numbers, make sure they add up and then mail the whole thing in on time.

Anyways, I'm not the only one who savors eccentricity in artists.

How else to explain the Cult of Glenn Gould?

I've long admired Gould's versions of Bach's Goldberg Variations. His 1955 recording was the first version I heard of that piece, so it formed my thinking and made other versions seem, in comparison, like tedious finger exercises rotely repeated in slow motion by intermediate keyboard students.

But that's it for me on the Gould admiration front. I never drank Gould's Kool-Aid. I haven't savored his eccentricities. Perhaps that is why I'm now wondering how much of Gould's persistent fame is due to his ability and how much is due to his eccentricity.

Recently Michael Dirda of The Washington Post, in "The canny madness of a remarkable man and his musical talent" (link via Arts & Letters Daily), reviewed a new Gould biography by Kevin Bazzana (Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould). The reviewer recites a few of Gould's many eccentricities:

Gould's peculiar habits and convictions have always led many to speculate about his mental stability. The pianist avoided shaking hands, famously wrapped himself up in layers of clothes even in the summer, dosed himself with thousands of pills a year, feared flying and germs (he traveled with a can of Lysol spray) and gave up the concert stage in his mid-thirties. When he sat down at the piano, Gould needed to be just above eye level with the keyboard, which consequently required any concert grand to be up on blocks while he crouched in that special low-slung chair (its seat just 14 inches off the ground). By the evidence of surviving photographs, he bent over the keys like a hunchback. . . .

"He would lope gracelessly onto the stage," Bazzana tells us, "perhaps with his hands in his pockets, looking uncomfortable, then bow perfunctorily, sheepishly. Then came the whole spectacle of Gould playing: the sidesaddle address, the bobbing head, the crouching and pouncing and swaying and flailing, and always the conducting whenever he had a hand free. He sweated copiously. His tangled mane of hair flopped this way and that, and he sometimes wiped it back with a handkerchief. To control his stamping feet he would cross his legs -- hardly a less eccentric option. His mouth smiled and pursed and gaped, his lips sometimes marked the beats, and of course he sang -- and hummed and clucked and buzzed."

If you consider yourself an equal opportunity connoisseur of eccentricity, ask yourself whether you would you accept Gouldlike behavior from your tax accountant. Would your eagerness to use his services -- even your willingness to refer your friends to him -- increase if he wore several layers of winter clothing while he sat behind his office desk on a 14 inch chair, hunched over a computer with sweat pouring off his face as he talked to himself and regularly popped pills? I think not. Even if he was really creative.

So Gould the pianist is inextricably intertwined with Gould the eccentric. But would Gould continue to be so compelling to his many fans if he was a more ordinary man?

Turns out he wasn't a complete loon. Gould's biographer found a number of normal traits:

The ethereal artiste assiduously studied his contracts and his stock portfolio, liked big cars, enjoyed steak and potatoes, wrote pompous, almost Jamesian prose, racked up a slew of traffic violations.

If that part of Gould was better known, if he wasn't so wondrously strange, would he be as popular?

An Impatient Patient

Someone close to me is recovering from a back injury.

She's miserable.

Not because of the pain, mind you. Since she started resting her back, avoiding anything that would stress it, the pain has subsided.

She's miserable because she can't do the things she used to do. She's eager to work-out again. To run up the stairs. To lift heavy things. To live her life the way she used to.

She keeps pushing the envelope, trying to accelerate her recovery. Every day she expects everything to be better and gets angry when it's not. She ignores her doctor's "go slow" advice, figures it's time to get back to normal. Her back inevitably gives out again, prolonging her recovery.

It occurred to me there's a reason why our word for someone recovering from an injury (patient) is the same as our word for our capacity to tolerate delays, suffering and the like without getting upset (patience). She is the former without the latter.

Needed: One Speech Processor

If you ever hear me speak, you might be surprised. My spoken discourse is nothing like my written discourse.

I've been writing on computer word processors for over 20 years. Writing on a computer is completely different from writing on paper. You don't have to think in a straight line. You can just throw thoughts on the screen, see what sticks, move it around and gussy it up. It's so easy, you can always edit, you're never committed until you're done. Flow is more important than direction.

I speak exactly like I write. This is a big problem. Unfocused thoughts, stray phrases, meandering dialogues spew forth from my mouth in rapid succession. Unfortunately, I can't clean them up with a speech processor before you hear them.

I try to slow down. I try to focus my thoughts before my mouth opens. But decades spent haphazardly but productively harvesting ideas on a computer screen have twisted my brain. My brain thinks the way I write, even when I speak. My brain often doesn't understand that I can't revise it once I say it. My brain only wants to hit a groove, throw out ideas until something works, turn ideas over and over until they sound right.

Tonight I participated in a debate of sorts. Before the debate I circulated a cogent, concise and (dare I say) clever written argument. During the debate I was called on to amplify one of my cogent, concise and clever thoughts. Nothing cogent, concise or clever came out of my mouth. I'm sure my colleagues wonder who ghost-wrote that cogent, concise and clever broadside for me.

I wasn't nervous. I wasn't unprepared. I was just speaking on the issue the same way I had previously written about it. The only difference was I couldn't clean my spoken argument up after I said it.

I know a lot of people who speak the way my finished writing product reads. I know someone who can dictate page after page of clean prose. How I envy them. Maybe if my vocal chords could produce something near what my fingers can tap, I'd spend a lot less time sitting in front of a computer screen. Somehow that seems healthier to me.

This Chest For Rent

When I was a teenager, I slathered myself in logos. Alligators on my shirts, "Op" on my shorts, the Nike swoosh on my shoes. I even owned a few pairs of Nike socks (close-out irregulars at Marshall's, but no one knew).

My mother did not appreciate my need to look like an Indy car. She pointed out that one could obtain the same quality apparel, sans logo, for a significantly lower cost. She even found some store brands with their own logos in a futile attempt to satisfy my logo cravings. She did not appreciate that the Payless Nike knock-off shoes, with their upside-down swoosh, were worse than no logo at all.

Today I look back with some embarrassment at my youthful idiocies (so many idiocies, so much embarrassment).

I now see my logo-bedecked body as an unwitting donation of free advertising space to Corporate America. What a tool I was.

In my wise old age, I scrupulously avoid logo apparel. If a designer wishes to advertise on my body, it can do so by renting the space for a reasonable fee. So far none have taken me up on the offer. Probably because so many of you remain willing to turn your bodies into free billboards.

Paul Fussell, in Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, offers a class-based explanation for the persistent popularity of logo apparel:

"Legible clothing" is Alison Lurie's useful term to designate things like T-shirts or caps with messages on them you're supposed to read and admire. The messages may be simple, like BUDWEISER or HEINEKEN'S, or they may be complex and often lewd, like the one on the girl's T-shirt: THE BEST PART IS INSIDE. . . . As you move up the classes and the understatement principle begins to operate, the words gradually disappear, to be replaced, in the middle and upper-middle classes, by mere emblems, like the Lacoste alligator. . . .

There are psychological reasons why proles feel a need to wear legible clothing, and they are more touching than ridiculous. By wearing a garment reading SPORTS ILLUSTRATED or GATORADE or LESTER LANIN, the prole associates himself with an enterprise the world judges successful, and thus, for the moment, he achieves some importance. . . . Brand names today possess a totemistic power to confer distinction on those who wear them. By donning legible clothing you fuse your private identity with external commercial success, redeeming your insignificance and becoming, for the moment, somebody.

It's impossible to find sports shoes without logos, it's nearly impossible to find sports hats without logos and it's getting harder and harder to find regular clothes without logos. Maybe I'll start a designer label known for its absence of a logo. But then the absence of a logo would be a logo of sorts.

I Wish I'd Written That

Reading blogs is often more rewarding than writing them.

Two cases in point:

I was all set to write an indignant piece on Spain's decision to throw in the towel when I beheld "Spain cowed, surrenders to terrorist demands" in The Ventilator. The Ventilator says all that I wanted to say, and says it much better. The Ventilator's piece even ends with Kipling's "Danegeld," just the right coda for Spain's appeasement. My time was much better spent reading this than it would have been spent writing a pale imitation of it.

I was also planning to explore the magical ability of presidents to create jobs. Every presidential election seems to revolve around this issue, with each side claiming their giganto-rific job creation machine is better than the other side's. If we only choose the right candidate, jobs will be popping out all over our economy like Jiffy Pop. I have never seen one these giganto-rific job creation machines. Occasionally in a dark moment I suspect they've never existed at all. Then I read "Oh why, oh why can't we have a better press corps?" in Asymmetrical Information. Jane Galt quotes from a recent Robert Samuelson column in the Washington Post:

We are having a ferocious jobs debate, most of it fraudulent. If presidents could easily create jobs, the unemployment rate would rarely exceed 3.5 percent.

She then skewers the most giganto-rific job creation machine of them all -- FDR's engine that drove us out of the Depression:

Furthermore, comparing the two makes Bush look like the Employment Fairy; jobless numbers under FDR before the military buildup began in 1940 averaged 19.2%, running from a low of 14.3% to a high of almost 25%. (To be fair, the latter came during the first year in office--but also to be fair, the rate was 19% in 1938, so it isn't a clear case of the rate getting steadily better during his term.) And the "solution" FDR finally found to unemployment was World War II -- a solution that required a lot of co-operation from abroad. . . .

I wish I'd written that.

Fun With the Federal Budget

When I was young and foolish in the ways of the world, I dove headfirst into politics.

Now that I am a little older and much more cynical, I look back on my political years with more than a little embarrassment. Politics hasn't changed. I have.

Today I can't listen to politicians speak without thinking of Eddie Haskell speaking to Mrs. Cleaver. Political platforms read like the list of cures on the side of a bottle of snake oil. Any discussion of lofty ideologies and ideals is overwhelmed in my mind by the stench of the legislative sausage factory that grinds up ideologies and ideals in order to stuff them into laws. It's not wholesome. I can't shake the idea that politics is just another spectator sport, different from football and baseball only in that it's less entertaining to watch.

I'm not completely alienated, however. I just find different things interesting today. I used to ponder the Great Ideas and debate the Great Issues. Now I increasingly find myself rolling up the sleeves and studying the innards of the process, thinking about unintended consequences, decisionmaking biases and the role of incentives and disincentives. Sort of an apolitical approach to politics.

I am, for instance, fascinated with how our federal government actually spends our money and with the ins-and-outs of a process that manages to please politicians of all parties and ideologies. Brian M. Reidl of The Heritage Foundation, in "How to Get Federal Spending Under Control" (link via The Daily Dish), offers some interesting grist for my mill:

• Better for government to perform a few vital activities well, rather than a multitude of activities poorly.
• Ford Motor Company would not waste money today by building outdated Model T’s alongside their current Mustangs and Explorers. However, in 2004, the federal government still refuses to close down old agencies such as the Rural Utilities Service (designed to bring phones to rural America) and the U.S. Geological Survey (created to explore and detail the nation’s geography).
• [E]liminating government programs seems reckless and bold to legislators who have never known of a federal government without them. Although thousands of programs have come and gone in the nation’s 228-year history, virtually all current programs were created before most lawmakers came to Washington. For legislators budgeting and implementing the same familiar programs year after year, a sense of permanency sets in, and termination seems unfathomable.
• Few local governments, for example, would consider taxing their own residents to fund the following pork-barrel projects found in the 2004 federal budget: $725,000 for the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; $200,000 for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio; $150,000 for a single traffic light in Briarcliff Manor, New York; $100,000 for the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee; $500,000 for the Montana Sheep Institute; and $50 million to construct an indoor rainforest in Coralville, Iowa.
• The federal government cannot account for $17.1 billion spent in 2002.
• With 342 separate economic development programs, the federal government needs to make consolidation a priority.
• The $2.3 trillion federal 2004 budget amounts to $21,673 per American household.
• Some policymakers believe that low-income individuals cannot be trusted to make intelligent economic decisions with their vouchers, condescendingly implying that government employees know best how to run the lives of poor families. . . . Food stamps provide the model for a successful voucher program. Instead of building a bureaucracy to grow and distribute government food to low-income families, the program simply provides families with vouchers to purchase food themselves.
• During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt reduced non-defense spending by 36 percent to save resources. Policymakers funded the Korean War by immediately reducing non-defense spending by 25 percent.

An Italian Eye for This Shabby Drabby Guy

I'm in a clothing rut. I haven't invested a dime in my wardrobe for four years. The last time I ventured into a clothing store, I dove headfirst into the dot com bubble by filling my closet with business casual threads. I still wear those dated duds but they're wearing out.

More importantly, I feel an urgent need to dress for success. As I move up in my chosen calling, I'm increasingly finding myself dealing with people who dress much better than I do. If I want them to accept me as a peer, I must dress more like them. At least that's what John Molloy would have me believe.

Problem is, I have no idea how to dress well. As a kid I cut my clothing teeth on remainder bin cut-outs from Marshall's. Since them I've picked up odd pieces here and there without any idea of what I was doing. I have no style or "look," unless shabby drabby counts as a look. If I walked into a clothing store with a huge wad of cash, chances are I'd blow it on crap I'd hate the next day.

So, in my never-ending quest to spend ever-increasing amounts of money, I'm considering visiting with the proprietor of an exclusive men's clothing store in my area. He's like a personal shopper, helping clothing ignoramuses construct cohesive and durable looks while peddling high-end clothing to them. He comes well-recommended by people who look much better than I do. Instead of just calling him, though, I did some research. I noticed that he carried Kiton suits, a make I never heard of before.

Turns out Kiton suits are something special. At least that's what this profile of Murray Pearlstein, the proprietor of another high-end clothing store -- Louis Boston -- tells us:

"Kiton disproved everything that I had learned about clothing," [Pearlstein] says. The revelation? The clothes don't look "perfect"—they drape to follow the line of the body. "Look," he says, showing me a photograph of a Kiton tailor at work. "They use basting stitches to create fullness and mold the chest of the suit. The tailor crosses his legs and moves the cloth over his knee to put in the roundness." . . .

"Watch," he says, waving his arms to show how the Kiton suit gives. "Other hand-tailored suits look perfect. But to me perfect is when I look natural. I'm not following the suit, the suit's following me."

Kiton suits are tailored in Naples, Italy. There's something about their Neapolitan origin that explains their uniqueness, as this exploration of Kiton suggests:

Naples remains the center of Italy's artisan culture and the home of bella figura, which is not just a phrase that applies to a man in a suit with pleats that don't pucker. Bella figura is about personal style. There is nothing ironic in the phrase -- at least, not when it's said in Naples. It is always a compliment (as opposed to brutta figura, which is pretty much the worst thing that can be said about an Italian). But even in Naples, where people shun air-conditioning and a man would never dream of removing his suit jacket during a meal even on the hottest summer day, bella figura has become a difficult faith to uphold. It is no longer considered essential, for example, that a Neapolitan man wear bespoke socks; in fact, it's almost impossible to find them in the city. Still, standards have not been abandoned completely.

It's very comforting to know, in times like these when bespoke socks are almost impossible to find, that standards have not been abandoned completely.

This explanation of bella figura pretty much defines it as exactly what I am not:

In Italian culture, people are traditionally expected to behave with a sense of decorum and formality at all times. This concept is known as "bella figura" ("beautiful figure") and is often used in reference to the ability to put on a good performance or simply to present oneself well. What other people think is considered extremely important, and your actions must always at least appear to be the "right" thing to do. Moreover, there is a belief that behaving appropriately, especially out of loyalty to family members, friends, and neighbours, contributes to the beauty and sense of order in the world. You will find that the belief in "bella figura" becomes quite pronounced the further south in Italy you travel.

How much would you pay for bella figura? Kiton suits retail for about $5,000, give or take a few thousand. With all the money I'm going to save by not buying bespoke socks, maybe I can afford to buy a piece of Kiton's bella figura.

Incessant Bleating Drowns Out Incessant Bleating

Charles Stillman is the lead attorney for Mark Swartz, one of the defendants in the Tyco corporate looting trial. Yesterday Mr. Stillman delivered his closing argument in somewhat challenging circumstances:

Mr. Stillman, at times trying to talk over the incessant bleating of a car alarm, asked jurors to ignore the more salacious evidence in the case. . . .

From "Attorney Contends Swartz Lacked Intent To Commit a Crime" (WSJ, $).

Buffett's Annual Letter: Ornery But Still Worth Reading

I've been reading Warren Buffett's letters to Berkshire Hathaway stockholders for over 20 years. Together, they're better than any textbook you'll find in a business school.

Unfortunately, this year's letter (PDF) is not one of Buffett's best. He writes as if distracted by something. His normally good-natured folksy tone has been replaced with an angry hectoring tone. He's going through the motions. The formatting is uneven and thoughts are interrupted by the occasional

****************

thrown in for no apparent reason. He's not happy with the current political situation, taking swipes at Bush, one of Bush's tax officials, trade policy, budget deficits and tax policy.

With all this, you might think Berkshire Hathaway had had a bad year. You'd be wrong:

Our gain in net worth during 2003 was $13.6 billion, which increased the per-share book value of both our Class A and Class B stock by 21%. Over the last 39 years (that is, since present management took over) per-share book value has grown from $19 to $50,498, a rate of 22.2% compounded annually.

Every year Buffett confidently predicts there is no way -- repeat no way -- he can continue this kind of performance. We simply have too much money to invest, he explains. Then he goes out and turns in a 20%+ year.

Buffett's grim letter stingily shares only a few decent stories, the best of which is the explanation for how he came to acquire Clayton Homes:

As regular readers know, our acquisitions have often come about in strange ways. None, however, had a more unusual genesis than our purchase last year of Clayton Homes.

The unlikely source was a group of finance students from the University of Tennessee, and their teacher, Dr. Al Auxier. For the past five years, Al has brought his class to Omaha, where the group tours Nebraska Furniture Mart and Borsheim’s, eats at Gorat’s and then comes to Kiewit Plaza for a session with me. Usually about 40 students participate.

After two hours of give-and-take, the group traditionally presents me with a thank-you gift. (The doors stay locked until they do.) In past years it’s been items such as a football signed by Phil Fulmer and a basketball from Tennessee’s famous women’s team.

This past February, the group opted for a book – which, luckily for me, was the recently-published autobiography of Jim Clayton, founder of Clayton Homes. . . .

Upon receiving Jim Clayton’s book, I told the students how much I admired his record and they took that message back to Knoxville, home of both the University of Tennessee and Clayton Homes. Al then suggested that I call Kevin Clayton, Jim’s son and the CEO, to express my views directly. As I talked with Kevin, it became clear that he was both able and a straight-shooter. . . .

In October, we had a surprise "graduation" ceremony in Knoxville for the 40 who sparked my interest in Clayton. I donned a mortarboard and presented each student with both a PhD (for phenomenal, hard-working dealmaker) from Berkshire and a B share. Al got an A share. If you meet some of the new Tennessee shareholders at our annual meeting, give them your thanks. And ask them if they’ve read any good books lately.

One A share is worth about $94,000 and one B share is worth a little more than $3,100. I figure Berkshire Hathaway spent about $200,000 (at today's stock prices) for the M&A advice provided by Dr. Auxier and his class. Pretty cheap when you consider how much investment banks make on similar deals.

Aristide v. United States of America

You've gotta love our justice system. Is there anything our courts can't do?

Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide plans to sue the United States and France for allegedly kidnapping him, one of his lawyers said Monday.

Aristide, who arrived in the Central African Republic a week ago, has repeatedly accused the United States of forcing him into exile after a rebellion plunged Haiti into chaos.

Lawyer Gilbert Collard said he and an American colleague would file identical suits in France and the United States in the next few days once they receive final authorization from Aristide.

"We will file suit against the French ambassador (in Port-au-Prince) and against the (U.S.) military authorities that carried out the abduction of the president," he told Reuters.

"The suits will target the Bush administration and the French government," he said. "If we get support from some African states, we will also appeal to the relevant commission of the United Nations."

Asked whether the lawsuits could succeed, Collard replied: "You never know. In a world where you can abduct a democratically elected president, you have to hope a democratic judge would find a way to do this."

From "Aristide Aims to Sue US, France for Kidnap" (Reuters).