When the city that never sleeps sleeps

"Irene," from the ancient Greek "εἰρήνη," meaning "peace." And peace the storm brought to the restless city. An eery, uneasy peace, a mandatory peace, as the cells of the apple battened down the hatches and the circulatory system, aka the MTA, froze well in advance of the buckets of rain and the winds' lashes and kept so well after the fury (thankfully much less intense that initially feared) abated to leave the streets to dogged pet walkers, stray tourists, and boastful runners.

Twenty years ago almost to the day I was captive of Hurricane Bob, grading summer session final exams. The department was not deserted. One could easily partition the population hurrycanned in that solid university building into two: on the one hand there were those who could not get their fill of weather advisories. On the other, there were the Europeans, who glued their ears to the radio desperately seeking news of the Soviet coup d'état. At that time I squarely belonged in the latter group.

And now? Now I am musing how singular for the first hurricane in a generation to follow on the heels of the first quake in a three generations.

Not my fault!

How not to enjoy a sunny respite from the monsoons of the last few days, an afternoon when even the volatility of the markets was swelling the longs's sails and blowing headwinds into Midas'? But a sudden sensation as if dizziness or involuntary muscle twitching dragged my reality back in check. The most natural explanation was an earthquake. I had actually experienced similar and bigger tremors in Rome, Italy. In the evening of November 23, 1980 (my birthday!), one of the deadliest quakes in Italian history was a frightful experience on the 7th floor where I was living. There were a few more. But this is NYC, not in a seismic region! Had someone badly messed up at one of the nearby construction sites? Or was this the ultimate terrorist attack? (Been seeing too much sci-fi...)
Soon the radio announced it had indeed been a seismic tremor. A modicum of chaos in a region utterly unaccustomed to this force of nature ensued. The epicenter was soon located somewhere in Louisa County, VA, near Mineral. Geologists commented that this was the work of a ancient fault, the remnant of the geological heydays of hundreds of millions years ago when the Appalachian rose, the so called Spotsylvania fault. Admittedly, today was my 3/4 birthday, but not my fault!

S&P, rated R

One day someone will make "Standard & Poor's" the movie, which I doubt will be rated for general audiences, and Louise Story will likely write the treatment. For now, the 63 trillion dollars (CDS gross notional in 2008) question still remains how to rate the raters as to the extent they contributed to the credit cataclysm in whose wake we dwell. According to a story Ms. Story published today in The New York Times, the government is probing S&P. The goal appears to be bringing a civil suit, and the main thesis of the investigators is that the business side influenced the analysts' side not to "kill the golden goose." In other words, Henry Blodget & Co. redux, only with credit gizmos like ABS CDOs rather thatn .com stocks.

The inquest appears to have begun before the recent downgrade of US debt. Given that the rationale for the downgrade was exquisitely political, one cannot wonder whether this time the political and strategic side of S&P talked to the analysts. Knowing they were already under investigation, they may have considered the ploy of the victim of government intimidation to at least try to mitigate the reputational risk that would ensue if the allegations of collusion between the business and rating side were corroborated. As many pointed out, it would be hard to portray the rating failures of the credit crisis as mere ineptitude in such case.

Innuendos, all innuendos, admittedly easy to believe... But this is what you get when you lose credit (from the Latin credere, to believe), and that is what S&P, like his ABS issuing clients, cannot spare enough, "they've got 500 standards, and they are all poor!"

What is Art Today?

Four peoples stare at each other, suddenly one starts running, others seem on the verge of tears, the guy on the left grins satanically, he buffets his own head, a toupee falls, with his right hand he pulls up a gun and shoots perhaps after the man who ran away, then, with the left hand he opens a can of beer and start guzzling.
In another feature, we see the back of a man in a business suit. He pulls a wallet from his back pants pocket. He turns. Suddenly a sprightly and diminutive Japanese dancer decked in full garb springs from behind the man. The man counts banknotes from his wallet with an air of consternation. He's on the verge of pulling out some note, but never does so. Meanwhile, the dancer leaps around and makes the kabukiest of faces ... The man leaves the scene, she seems to do so, too, but then returns with a final face.

These are just memories of two of the 45 ultra-slow motion films that were projected on a huge screen this past July on the south side of of the Josie Robertson Plaza at Lincoln Center. They must be seen, how can one possibly render the action-stretching of slow motion in words? People streaming out of the Metropolitan Opera House, of mere passers by like yours truly found themselves unexpectedly enthralled.
Like modern physics astounding us with the invisible phenomena at molecular and smaller scales, these short films discovered the microscopic nature of performance. That was art shedding light on art. In their thrall, viewers were wondering "What is Art Today?"
And the features before their eyes were answering that Art is precisely the asking of this Question!