Grown Ups Talking

Once again the experts are monopolizing the airwaves and wirewaves. Every politician is claiming they know how to sort out the economy. Every one is wrong. I’m starting to think it doesn’t matter, that eventually life will sort it all out.

That’s the problem with all this instant information. You start to feel like your opinion matters. And I’m not being cynical here, but how much do I and my colleagues know about credit default swaps? The people who invented them don’t know what the can do, can’t predict their impact on the world, don’t know how to fix the mistakes. How on earth can I and my colleagues, normal people that is, decide any better?

And do you notice how everyone is very good at explaining what went wrong now? Books are galloping off the presses: we have The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris (Feb 9, 2009); Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods Jr. (Feb 9, 2009);
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman (Dec 1, 2008) and relentless articles and speeches, all glibly explaining why and when and how our economy has fallen off a cliff.

Well where were all these people a year ago? Or two? Or five?

Aren’t pundits and politicians and economists supposed to help us? What’s the use of explaining it after the horse has run away?

Know-it-alls. Meanwhile I don’t think many of them have lost their jobs.—Pomerol

The storm is over and light breaks through the clouds. I, Pomerol, have come out from under the fog of freelance and now greet the new day of no work.

Yes its good to not be staying up til 2, but that means I’ve joined the huge growing army of the un, or partially unemployed. OK I’m not technically unemployed. But I can’t guarantee these jobs will return on schedule.

Hey ho, I guess we’ll learn to grow vegetables.

My main concern now is the economy, which has been roaring back into my face now that it’s come up for air. The theater of the absurd that is AIG handing out our taxes to its executives is annoying me quite a lot, along with millions of other partially employed tax-payers.

I say name them and shame them. It should be a badge of dishonor that these “financial leaders” took this money, and the knowledge of that should follow them around the rest of their lives. Or we could put them in stocks—a fitting punishment, don’t you think?

This will not fix the world. But it will cheer up partially employed types like myself.

Meanwhile, Chianti and I will be meeting our friend Shiraz for drinks and whines later this week. Free time has its advantages.—Pomerol

The other evening the slipper and I watched the recent film “Twilight” starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, which features an innocent but feisty young girl who falls in love with a smoldering vampire in Forks, Washington.

Last fall we got into “True Blood” on HBO which stars Anna Paquin and Bill Moyers and features a feisty young girl who falls in love with a smoldering vampire in Louisiana.

Between 1997 and 2003 we occasionally watched “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” which starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanz and featured a feisty young girl who falls in love with a smoldering vampire, in Sunnydale, California.

What’s with all the vampires? Is it lack of excitement in our lives? Are we feeling like we’re generally too full of liquids? Are our current crop of available men too dweeby and we all really long for someone who will attack us and murder us? Do men really want to suck women’s blood? Weird. And gross.

Of course there is the economic theory. When you think about the heady days of dotcom bubbles and real estate whirlwinds, it turns out we were being ruled by, lent to from, preached at, and generally brokered to by evil, power-hungry, undead bloodsuckers.

In that case, all this rampant vampiring is actually a cogent assessment of what we have perceived of as our life as underlings in a bloodthirsty society. You could see a vampire romance as business as usual on Wall Street.

Or, we just like smoldering guys with wan faces.

So we might just settle down to watch ‘Moonlight’ a new detective show where the blonde, young, feisty journalist is fascinated by the smoldering detective, who is, of course, a vampire in Los Angeles.

Yep, business as usual.—Pomerol

The weather has been veering wildly from early spring with blue skies and balmy sunshine; to deepest winter with snow drifts, biting cold and pissed off birds.

Of course, teaching last night in my cramped, windowless, classroom on the coldest day of the year they had the air conditioning on.

Yes, the upside down world is normal now. Nature itself seems to be reflecting our upside down global economic bouillabaise and there’s no end in sight.

Thomas Ricks, author of “Gamble”, a look at the Iraq War, said on the radio,"Obama has inherited the worst foreign policy situation in the history of the United States, and the sad part is, it’s not even his biggest problem.”

We have been lulled into a credit stupor where dreams come true without doing any work. We are all birds shivering and stamping our claws and cursing the altogether expected, but still terrifying economic ice storm.

Poetry, ay? At this point we may end up with not much more than words.—Pomerol

In a vague bid to further my education in things that I do and like, I, Pomerol, have been going to arty/designy lectures recently.

Not all of them are a success. Lecturers are often trying to add the occasion to their resume and promote, i.e., find a buyer, for their work. Or they parlay this public, slobbering, orgy of self-congratulation into a series of grants which allow them to pursue their artsiness in exotic locations and sleep with the thriller writer.

Fortunately tonight’s was interesting. The speaker was this geeky typography guy. Now I am a designer and I mess about with type most days. I know much more than most people and I actually teach typography. But this guy was craaazy. He spent ten years fiddling about with one book. He hand prints them and paints color on them individually. He photographs carved medieval letters and designs alphabets based on them and incorporates them into his prints.

See, this is a strange nether world of single-minded lunatics. Type is Art, books are amazing masterpieces which take years to complete, their quest is in the stars and between the lines.

I like type, but I’m not really in his league. It is, however, interesting to observe these creatures in their natural habitat.

But one thing struck me once again. Typography is all about presenting words. The phrase “it’s not what you say but how you say it” is typography all over. For instance, Bush and Obama both said, America doesn’t torture. Its all in the presentation.

And before I forget, how ’bout that universal health care plan? Wa hey! And good luck. He’s going to need it. —Pomerol