I’m all for saving money, but stories like this one in today’s NYT always get my proverbial goat. It’s a review of two books, one of which emphasizes that saving one million dollars by the time you retire is officially not enough.
“Indeed, writing that you need at least a seven-figure nest egg is perhaps the biggest contribution that Michael K. Farr makes in A Million Is Not Enough,” the reviewer writes.
Ugh. That reminds me of the people who say you just can’t live in New York City on less than $150K a year. You want to shake them and say: “Gee — don’t about six million people do exactly that?”
A few facts for those who live outside Manhattan:
— The median household net worth in America is about $55,000. That number is, if you hadn’t noticed, substantially less than $1 million.
— Even for people about to retire (the 55-64 age bracket), the median is $112,000. (See here.)
— If you remove home equity — which is probably fair, since retirees can’t eat their guest bedroom — median net worth for families nearing retirement is just $32,000.
On one hand, those numbers are a bit scary, and they’re an excellent reminder that it is important to save, invest, et cetera at a young age. But on the other, they’re also proof that the vast majority of Americans will not have anything close to $1 million at retirement, and yet they will survive. Setting a goal that, for most Americans, seems so astronomically absurd only pushes them into inaction.
I’m learning a lot about the art of book criticism this semester, from reading and (hopefully soon) from doing. It’s remarkable to me how much the reviewer’s preconceptions can infect their work. Take for example these two reviews of the new biography of the novelist and Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is.
That he has been able to achieve this owes much to the generosity, openness and fairness of his subject, Sir Vidia Naipaul…Success of this sort takes more than talent. It is also an act of will, and Naipaul’s will has been exceptionally powerful. He is a master writer because he has seen himself as the servant of Literature. Nothing has been allowed to stand in the way of his work and his achievement…This is an excellent biography which does nothing to diminish one’s respect for Sir Vidia and leaves one liking him much more than I had expected…
It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the “gruesome sex”, the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality…
The second is from Paul Theroux, the American travel writer who has a very public falling-out with Naipaul some years back. But the Theroux version of Naipaul is the broadly accepted p.o.v. from what I can tell, and the details in the two reviews seem to back up the Naipaul-as-colossal-asshole theory.
Take their differing takes on Naipaul’s relationships with women. He was married to Pat Hale for 41 years, but carried on a very public decades-long affair with an Anglo-Argentine woman named Margaret Gooding. Now remember, these two reviewers read the same biography of Naipaul. First Massie:
[Pat] helped him through a nervous breakdown, chivvied him with good advice, supported him from her earnings as a teacher in the first years of the marriage, organised his daily life, and remained his most devoted and admiring reader and adviser. But she could not satisfy him sexually; he had, as he confessed when already distinguished, frequent recourse to prostitutes, an addiction he found necessary but shameful. Then in Argentina he met a married woman, Margaret, who gave him for the first time in his life full sexual satisfaction. He could not relinquish her; neither could he cast Pat aside. For some twenty years he ran them in tandem, often making both miserable. However, they reluctantly accepted the position. It sounds cruel. Often he was cruel. But would it have been any kinder to have left Pat for Margaret, or to have discarded his mistress?
What a wonderful spirit of justification! Should I ever cheat on a wife, I hope I have an Allan Massie at the ready to shift the blame to her sexual unsatisfactoriness. How cruel it would have been to sleep with only one woman at a time!
Reading the same book, Theroux gives a slightly different take, a sadist having finally found his masochist:
[Margaret] apparently refused to be interviewed for the book, but her archived love letters supply the missing narrative. They are rapturous, despairing, pleading, speaking of “his cruel sexual desires”. She acknowledges that he is her black master, that he regards his penis as a god, that she will worship it, abase herself…Margaret shows up unexpectedly in Wiltshire. Naipaul is displeased with her. He beats her and afterwards explains, “I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt…She didn’t mind at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn’t appear really in public. My hand was swollen”…Eventually Naipaul told his wife Pat about the relationship, divulging some details and showing her intimate photographs. She was devastated but stayed with him and he was reluctant to offer a divorce. He gave her literary jobs to do, went on reading his rough drafts of his fiction to her — in which the sex scenes were based on the rough sex he enjoyed with Margaret.
So he liked a bit of kink. But how did he treat his long-suffering wife? More Theroux, starting with excerpts from Pat’s diaries:
“You are the only woman I know who has no skill,” Naipaul told her. “You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station.” As though to prove him wrong, Pat bitterly referred to Naipaul as “the genius” in her covert diary. French believes that Naipaul never read it, although he sold it with his papers for a hefty price. In terms of telling Pat’s story, it does this poor woman complete justice. Let us not forget that much-reported admission when Naipaul said, almost swanking, “It could be said that I had killed her…I feel a little bit that way.”
And the grand sexual finale:
Dissatisfied with Margaret, annoyed with Pat for having cancer (“He felt angry that [Pat] was dying and angry that she was not dying fast enough”), he meets a Pakistani divorcee in Lahore and very soon afterwards asks her, “Will you consider one day being Lady Naipaul?” He dumps Margaret without explanation. Pat (so as not to be a nuisance) forgoes more chemotherapy and dies miserably. Six days later, before the worms can pierce Pat’s winding sheet, the Pakistani woman has moved into the house. There the story ends, a powerful lesson in karma as the sour and much-shrunken figure marries this peculiar stranger.
Still more remarkable details in this Telegraph story about the biography. I recognize the need to separate the writer from the written, but I have to say that Naipaul’s cruel streak has deadened whatever pleasures A House for Mr. Biswas may have provided — you can feel the barbarousness on every page, even if it’s directed at targets different (the poor, the uneducated, the non-white) from poor old Pat.
Normally, when one sees the phrase “sick Nazi orgy,” the assumption is that “Nazi” is being used in a loose, metaphorical sense — in the manner that certain angry young liberals call anything they dislike “fascist,” even if it has nothing to do with the trains running on time.
But in this case — which is one of the more smile-inducing stories of recent months — no, they really mean “Nazi.”
The Nazi orgiast in question is Max Mosley, the head of Formula One racing and the son of Britain’s most famous fascist, Oswald Mosley. (Well, maybe Lord Haw Haw beats him.) His mom was the noted Nazi Diana Mitford, who is probably better known to Americans at the sister of Jessica Mitford.
(Americans may know Oswald Mosley best as the inspiration for Roderick Spode in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels, or as the real “Oswald” [not Lee Harvey] in the lyrics to Elvis Costello’s “Less Than Zero.”)
A great reminiscence of a 1978 pilgrimage to Memphis to hang out with power-pop legends Big Star — back before they became power-pop legends. (It’s fair to say that if one of your two guitarist/songwriters is wearing a paper hat at a fast-food joint, you haven’t yet become a legend.)
The people making the pilgrimage turned out to be Peter Holsapple and Will Rigby (who would later start the dBs) and Mitch Easter (who would later produce R.E.M.’s Murmur and Reckoning).
Friends of Crabwalk Dept.: My old childhood buddy Josh Caffery is one of the centers of gravity in a certain sector of the south Louisiana music scene. (It happens to be my favorite sector: the smart young folks who are trying to reclaim Cajun music from its own Scylla and Charybdis, old-timey stagnation and lowest-common-denominator commercialism.)
He helped found the Red Stick Ramblers a few years back, then produced the best snapshot of the scene, the terrific compilation Allons Boire Un Coup. (It won Best Cajun Album from Offbeat not long ago. And it really is terrific — the title track is hypnotic, and big talents like Cedric Watson, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, the Pine Leaf Boys, Racines, and just about every Savoy are accounted for.)
Now Josh has taken on the job of chaperone/guitarist for south Louisiana’s version of Menudo, a.k.a. Feufollet. (I kid because I love!) Feufollet gained notice as a band of young kids a few years back, having been one of the first cultural outputs from intensive French-language instruction in Louisiana public schools. (Check those early album covers.) But they’re all college-age by now, and they have a new record coming out on Valcour on April 15 called Cow Island Hop, and you should buy it.
My copy is in the mail, so I can’t do a full review, but Valcour has posted an MP3 of one song, “Femme L’a Dit,” and it makes me hopeful. The melody sounds a lot like the Red Stick Ramblers and, to be honest, doesn’t even sound particularly Cajun — more like a soulful French chanson. Anna Laura Edmiston — one of the few females in the scene — has grown into her voice nicely and can pull off the full-throated-diva thing better than she used to.
But the greatness comes after the vocals end and the horns come up for a New Orleans-style rave up, with tuba, sax, trumpet, and fiddle all playing and counterplaying. Historically speaking, there’s been much less interchange between Cajun music and New Orleans music than you might imagine, and I’m all for new sounds that can reach a broader audience while staying true to their roots.
And this may be just my longstanding desire to merge Cajun music and indie rock talking — but if they’d just loosened up the sound a touch more, the horn section could have had the ramshackle, tumbling sound of perhaps the finest Louisiana-bred rock musician of the past 15 years, Ruston’s Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel. My biggest complaint with most contemporary Cajun recorded music is that it’s too precise and well played and ends up with the sort of clean-room feel that you get listening to folk music on NPR. One of the things I loved about Allons Boire Un Coup is that it’s an album of drinking songs and, on several tracks, it sounds like the musicians had taken the theme to heart in the studio, if you catch my meaning.
(More Feufollet tracks at their MySpace. And their label, Valcour, led by Joel Savoy, is also the place to buy Allons Boire or fine releases from Cedric Watson, Cedric/Corey Ledet, or the Figs — which feature Josh’s lovely wife Claire on banjo.)
This essay in the Sunday Times Book Review is painful to read — if only because anyone who would really break up with someone because he/she had never heard of Pushkin should have his/her reproductive organs seized by the state.
(The only person I’ll agree with in it is Salon’s Laura Miller, who once broke up with someone who loved Ayn Rand. Someone who loves Rand is either (a) the owner of spectacularly bad literary taste, which is forgivable, (b) a believer in a bunch of truly poisonous philosophical hooey, which is less so, or, most likely, (c) both of the above, which truly approaches dealbreaker status.)
(Warning: Long nerdy post. The CrabBot 2000 estimates it will be of interest to 6.4% of crabwalk.com readers.)
While I don’t share the information-wants-to-be-free technoutopianism of some of its proponents, I like Creative Commons. The idea is to create an easy way for people to declare their creative work (to varying degrees) part of the public domain, so that it can be reused or manipulated by others. It’s a fine idea — making it clear when and how it’s okay to use someone else’s work, and when and how it’s not.
But I’ve got a quibble. Some CC-licensed works (let’s talk about photos for now) have a non-commercial license. That means, according to CC, “[y]ou may not use this work for commercial purposes.”
But it doesn’t define what “commercial purposes” are.
Someone named Aaron Landry is concerned that a photo he took — that was licensed as “non-commercial” via Creative Commons — was used to illustrate a post at the highly popular blog Boing Boing. Aaron says that, because Boing Boing sells ad space and makes money, using his photo was a violation of his license.
But it depends on how you define “commercial purposes.”
I ran into this confusion last year, when I was still blogging for my newspaper. I wanted to be able to use CC-licensed photos to illustrate some of my blog posts, but I didn’t know if that counted as commercial use. So I emailed CC to ask what “commercial” meant. The response I got, unfortunately, was something along the lines of: “We can’t tell you whether that’s commercial use or not. We’re not in the business of approving or disapproving particular behaviors.” (The actual emails are on a computer many miles away, alas, so I can’t quote them.)
Obviously, selling a CC-licensed photo would qualify as a commercial use. And putting it on, say, the packaging of a good you’re selling would probably qualify too. Or using it in an ad for one of your products.
But does using it on a blog owned by a for-profit corporation automatically make it “commercial,” even if the use itself isn’t going to make any money? Or is it the money-making nature of the blog itself that makes it “commercial”? Is it the presence of advertising? If so, is every random blog with Google Ads or an Amazon affiliate link a “commercial purpose”?
The CC license’s legal language only refers to use that is “primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.” There’s obviously no private monetary compensation when I post a photo on a newspaper blog — no money is exchanged for the photo. Is using the photo giving the newspaper any “commercial advantage”? That seems unlikely to me — no one is going to buy or click on an ad on the page because the photo is there — but maybe in a theoretical sense.
Maybe the answers seem obvious to everyone else, but those of us coming from a news background are used to the idea that commercial enterprises can sometimes use copyrighted material under “fair use” if it’s part of our newsgathering. Example: Imagine Joe Shooter has taken a beautiful photo of his girlfriend. If my newspaper wanted to use his photo, say, in a marketing campaign, it would have to license the rights to the photo from Joe. But if Joe is murdered by his girlfriend because she didn’t like the photo, we could run the photo in the newspaper — because it has become newsworthy in and of itself and would fall under “fair use.” That’s even though my newspaper makes money selling the news.
Fair-use rules require an evaluation of “the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.” But federal courts in recent years have tended toward de-emphasizing the commercial question. Take this copyright case from 1994, in which a district court ruled that one of Texaco’s research scientists, a man named Donald Chickering, had improperly photocopied articles he was interested in in a scientific publication named The Journal of Catalysis (to which Texaco had a paid subscription). Part of the district court’s reasoning had been that Texaco was a for-profit company and that, therefore, the photocopying was de facto commercial. But the Second Circuit, on appeal, disagreed (starting around paragraph 35):
We generally agree with Texaco’s contention that the District Court placed undue emphasis on the fact that Texaco is a for-profit corporation conducting research primarily for commercial gain. Since many, if not most, secondary users seek at least some measure of commercial gain from their use, unduly emphasizing the commercial motivation of a copier will lead to an overly restrictive view of fair use…[cites another case saying that] if “commercial” nature of a secondary use is overemphasized in the analysis, “fair use would be virtually obliterated”…[and another case calling a] categorical rule against commercial uses unwarranted since this “would cause the fair use analysis to collapse in all but the exceptional case of nonprofit exploitation”…
The bold section, to me, makes sense: Just about anything could be construed as having a commercial purpose. The web site you’re reading now is a purely personal, non-money-making enterprise for me. But if it’s good, someone might offer me a paying freelance job because of it. (It’s even happened!) So does that mean anything I do to make crabwalk.com better is “commercial” in nature?
The appeals court ended up affirming the lower-court judgment for other reasons, but it ruled that Texaco — even though it was a for-profit company and the scientist was copying the materials so he could get better at making money for the company —
…was not gaining direct or immediate commercial advantage from the photocopying at issue in this case — i.e., Texaco’s profits, revenues, and overall commercial performance were not tied to its making copies of eight Catalysis articles for Chickering.
So, at least in the context of fair use, the courts say a huge corporation can copy copyrighted material and have it not be for “commercial advantage.” Or at least “direct or immediate” commercial advantage.
Now, I am so not a lawyer, so I’m certainly willing to be convinced that I’m wrong here. CC licenses and fair use are obviously not the same thing, even if the internal logics are similar. And if people like Aaron Landry don’t want their photos to be used by people like BoingBoing, they should certainly have the right to have their wishes obeyed.
But I just wish the CC people could make it clear, one way or the other. Unlike with copyright law — where Congress passes the law and it’s up to the courts to interpret and tease out the finer meanings of specific cases — Creative Commons creates its licenses itself. They should be in a position to give some better guidance on this — so people like Aaron know what rights they’re giving away, and people like Boing Boing and me know what rights we have.
Have you seen the new DirecTV ad campaign? The one that just launched a couple days ago, apparently. Features a bunch of empty suits representing Big Cable, sitting around a boardroom table and being dumb. Video of the ads here, here, and here.
To the extent that anything’s been written about it (and it’s a limited extent, judging by a-Googlin’), it’s been that mockumentarian Christopher Guest is directing the spots and that they feature some members of his comedic company of players. But I think the key point they’re missing is that these ads are attempting to evoke the glories of Arrested Development, the greatest television program of all time.
Think about it: Who are the lead actors in the commercials? Ed Begley, Jr. — a.k.a. Stan Sitwell, the Bluth family’s hairless corporate rival. And John Michael Higgins — a.k.a. Wayne Jarvis, the Bluth family attorney turned turncoat prosecutor. It’s the same humor, the same handheld camera work, the same boardroom scenes. Mitch Hurwitz should be getting royalties!
Despite the fact that approximately 17 people watched the show in its original run, this is not the first time a pop-culture entity has reached for a little Arrested flava. There was the Veronica Mars episode that featured guest appearances from George Michael (Michael Cera) and Maeby (Alia Shawkat). And, of course, Juno, which featured both Cera and his Arrested father, Michael (Jason Bateman).
All that — plus the fact that whenever I lend out my Arrested DVDs I have to fight to get them back — suggests the Arrested Development movie, whenever it may arise, may have more success at the box office than the series did on Fox.
Whenever I’m around blogging triumphalists — the kind of people who would applaud the withering-away of the mainstream media and think of journalists as elitist, “MSM” know-nothings — I try to point out the huge swath of contemporary human knowledge that would never have come to light without institutions like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
Don’t get me wrong: I love blogs. But no blog would be able to do something like this story from the front page of Thursday’s NYT. It’s the complicated (but worth it!) tale of how a 22-year-old guy named Efraim Diveroli ended up with federal arms contracts worth perhaps a third of a billion dollars despite, oh, any number of what should have been red flags. Like his penchant for domestic disputes with girlfriends that required police intervention. Or the fact his company’s vice president was a masseur. Or, you know, the fact he was 22 years old.
As it turns out, young Efraim — the main supplier of American-funded ammunition for our side in Afghanistan — appears to have been giving them illegally purchased 40-year-old Chinese ammo that doesn’t even work.
Anyway, it’s a great piece of reporting that crosses continents and is beyond the ken of even the finest blogger. But I’ll add the one thing I can. Whenever I see a young person do something newsworthy, I always look him/her up on Facebook and MySpace. And in this case, paydirt:
Here’s his MySpace page, which appears to have been last updated in 2005. Some highlights, in case it comes down (all emphases mine):
His “About Me”:
Well of course im a super nice guy!!! , i know what i want out of life but not exactly quite sure how to get it yet. I was born and bred in miami beach and have no immediate plans to leave but i have thought about it. Im a pretty easy going guy and many say i have a good sense of humor. I had problems in high school so i was forced to work most of my teen years and i probably grew up way to fast. I finally got a decent apartment and im content for the moment , however i definately have the desire to be very successful in my business and this does take up alot of my time.
What kind of gal he’s looking for:
a sweet pretty girl with a good attitude and love for life , a woman that will stand by her man because she knows he would do the same for her no matter the circumstance [ed: you can judge for yourself by the mugshots whether Ephraim is really the stand-by-his-woman kind of guy]
To fulfill the stereotype of this kind of guy, his favorite movies include Scarface and The Godfather — and, slightly against type, American Beauty. Dude must love floating plastic bags. And his interests:
for the moment im basically just working and chilling with my boyz when im not, im looking for some hobbies like i keep saying im gonna go to the gym and i started playing football again which is definately my favorite sport. im one of those guys who needs to be entertained and having lots of fun all the time so if your also an undiagnosed case of ADD look me up. i like to eat good food and i dont know how to cook so i eat out alot!!!! ilike to travel whenever posssible sometimes for business , and of course i like going clubbing or going to a movie, oh and ive really taken a liking towards fine scotch whisky recently dont ask me why….
His mugshot is on the left, his MySpace photo on the right:
This video (made by a friend of a friend) is particularly mandatory viewing for (a) multiracial crabwalk.com readers, (b) people of full or partial Hawaiian ancestry, (c) Barenaked Ladies fans (and now is not the time to start evincing shame over that fact), and (d) people with good hearts. The rest you, um, go read Metafilter or something.
I would like to associate myself with this article proclaiming Babe: Pig In the City an overlooked masterpiece. Easily the best hoofed-mammal-in-a-metropolitan-area movie of the past two decades.
Helpful hint: If your friend invites you to an NHL game and has the best tickets imaginable, take him up on it. (Thanks, James!)
Another hint: While the railing along the glass may seem like a good place to put your beer, it is not. Large gentlemen enjoy banging into that glass, and that can negatively affect your beer’s location.
Joshua Benton is a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News, among other things. He is currently at Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship. (More.)
