Is Everybody Happy?

I was reminded this morning of a favorite recent book, "The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino" by Alec Wilkinson, and out this month in paperback. Neutrino is a nearly indigent person Wilkinson has written a curious life and times account of. The proposition that his subject is the happiest man in the world - without root and in pursuit of his dreams - remains the book's beautifully-written debate until the very last word. If hard times are often unhappy, happiness, Wilkinson shows us of Neutrino, can often be difficult too.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

This Land

Anne Guiney has a good editorial in the 1.21.09 issue of The Architect's Newspaper, on the new public works, or the infrastructure projects promised by the Obama administration which could transform large parts of the country while employing people, much the way projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority did in the 1930s.

"For architects, engineers, planners, developers, mass-transit advocates, and anyone with an interest in smart growth, that means it's time to speak up and join the discussion about funds from the federal stimulus package, and to advocate that they be used in ways that are truly sustainable and forward-looking."

Elsewhere in that issue, an article on new buildings for the D.C. Public Library system. The architect, David Adjaye, is quoted: "It's not just about making libraries, but about making centers of excellence for the community."

Note to the Obama administration - the national library system is our intellectual and educational infrastructure, and needs the large-scale imagination and infusion of project funds that bridges and highways are likely to get. The mind travels too. Provide for its adventures.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Success/ Dress

Okay. The important things. Fashion. If the economy's failed, do you still need to dress for success?

Or, do you:

1.) Spend all day in your pajamas.

2.) Spend all day in your exercise clothes.

3.) Go stark naked because you're going stark raving mad.

4.) Re-gift the clothes.

Let's talk about 4.)

There's Career Gear.






Very very very good cause. I gave them clothing a few weeks ago. Let someone else have a crack at cracking the nut. Here's two suits, one jacket, four trousers and whatever I forgot to take out of the pockets.

And, there's Derick Melander. He's an artist who makes art out of second-hand clothing. The New Great Depression. I promised you art.













Melander has work in "Queens International 4" at the Queens Museum of Art (yes, there is), a kind of 'biennale' concept for Queens. Like - brick-oven pizza.

Derick explains that he's collaborating with Goodwill, who are donating (that gives me the kind of vertigo that makes me want to black out) a bin outside the museum where you can donate clothing which Derick takes inside and folds neatly and makes an art piece out of, and furthers his career (with gear), and then donates the 'piece' of clothing back to Goodwill.




















Will the circle be unbroken? Apparently - not.

FYI, Goodwill now runs an e-Bay-like online auction on its site, and as of tonight, there was a 'Kate Spade floral purse' up for grabs.








$42.11 US, at last look. Brother, can you spare a thousand dollars?

It might go nicely with a dress for success.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Tragedy is Good

This also from dinner last night. My hosts know a little boy - he's seven? - who understands from hearing it everywhere and all the time that 'the economy is bad.'

"The comedy is bad," he tells people, gravely.










Bright little kid.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Eight Nights A Week

I couldn't resist. Visit "Dating A Banker Anonymous." I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I'm assuming that's the point. In either order.

"Are you or someone you love dating a banker? If so, we are here to support you through these difficult times. Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists– and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships. DABA Girls was started by two best friends whose relationships tanked with the economy. Not knowing what else to do, we did what frustrated but articulate girls have done since the beginning of time - we started a blog."

The founders' resume experience: "going out eight nights a week."

DABA's tip (1) for the New Great Depression seems to be: get dressed up and go out and buy yourself a drink with your friends. Not half bad. As they say, you go girl. And take that, Tucker Max.


Thank you for listening, ma'am.

"Let's Ketchup!"

I had a brisket dinner on Park Avenue last night. I don't know what to make of that - part hard times, part great times? A year ago that might have been a 'hobo blackface' charity event.

But this was straight from the heart. My hostess decided to make something comforting because even though she and her husband and their two daughters are pretty well off, people are scared. You might be sitting at a marble countertop in an apartment on the 18th floor on Park Avenue, sipping a good red and catching up, but the shadows are all around you. Some of them walk in the door as your guests.

After-dinner talk was kids disappearing from private schools because their parents can't pay their tuitions anymore. And then, as my host pointed out, it's only a few skips and skids into 'no health insurance,' 'no food,' 'no home.'

This from the 18th floor, where the views are good. I'm going to get us that brisket recipe, which involved a lot of ketchup. Thank you Mr. and Mrs. Smith - you are excellent people and beautiful friends.

In the midst of appetizers and discussion, their youngest daughter, age thirteen, announced - unprompted - that she thought we should call the current situation a Depression, and get on with it. Look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Start thinking constructively good instead of dwelling unproductively bad. If it's going to suck, let's make it a Really Great Depression. It will involve a lot of ketchup.

Out of the mouths of babes (in electric-blue jeans.) She could put me out of a job. I am going to try to get her to write for me here. You need to hear this.

I also joined Facebook several days ago, because I thought it would be good to 'network,' which seems useful to the unemployed in theory anyway. You certainly have the time for it. I got immediate contacts, responses, 'hey how are you,'s friend requests, voices from the deep past (now a shallow grave), etc., but there was something about it that felt like we were all people on a long line waiting for a bowl of soup, talking to each other while we waited. My host last night suggested that a truly clever entrepreneur could now launch "Inyourface," which would deal with the basic attack of being in instantaneous and unavoidable touch with everyone you've ever met. I'm guessing there would be 'enemy requests' and the rest.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.


FYI, Heinz's website has a ketchup widget, and social networking features, "squeeze a message," and "splat a friend." You send friends a message that says, "Let's ketchup!"

Chocolate Gravy

If you've got a favorite recipe for biscuits, don't forget the chocolate gravy. Have a look at "brother, can you spare a thousand dollars." And thanks to the people of Hartsthorne, Oklahoma. Hard times can indeed be a festival.

I use Edna Lewis' "Biscuits for Two or Three," from her "In Pursuit of Flavor."




"I used to make biscuits for at least 5 or 6 people," Ms. Lewis writes, "but since I have been living alone, I have altered my biscuit recipe to make 8 or 10 large biscuits that are just the way I want them."







Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Ms. Lewis' portrait is by John T. Hill

Sleepless In Seattle

Furniture Today reports that mattress sales plunged 41% domestically, and domestic mattress units were down 39%. This is news to lose sleep over. Where, might I ask, are you going to keep your money when all the banks fail?

People - Rest In Peace. Take one child out of private school (let them draw straws: bendable-cuppy ones), but, in the words of the country song, don't use a stone for a pillow.



On a positive note, Mint, the personal money management website, has posted a story, "7 Financial Tips From The Great Depression," which is very much in the spirit of "Thomas Cave's Tattoo." Read and enjoy it.

What, you might well be wondering, is the spirit of "Thomas Cave's Tattoo"?

Hopefully, time will reveal it to be a home, for the constructive virtues of being in a bad situation and making the very best of it. Great Depression virtues of handiness, thrift and invention. And instruction and help with the New Great Depression household in everything from cooking to sewing to singing while you're drinking (or not), keeping mind and body together, and entertaining life's larger thoughts as you watch the campfire and they fly out the top, sparks towards the stars. Let's grasp their meaning before they go black.



Thank you for listening, ma'am.

(FYI, the painting above, "Unemployed in Jungles Outside Seattle, Wash., Cooking Up a Mulligan from Meat and Vegetables Gathered from Nearby Farms, is a watercolor and ink in the collection of the Washington State Historical Society.)

"For Duty and Humanity!"

In what parallel universe would thinking about a Depression be more comforting than thinking about a recession?

The universe in which we now live now, I would propose. Six of one, half dozen of the other, as they say. The "recession" - also a term to which the pundits and their public were dragged kicking and screaming, struggling like puppies in a bag on its way to the river - just keeps bleeding away. It's recession, it's deepening recession, it's deep recession.



It's deep everybody-knows-what, is what it is. And no one is blaming the puppy.

Next up for admitting, now that the "recession" is about as deep as it can get (well, it could get deeper, until you're eating Chinese, if your self-denial is shoveling really hard ... ) is that it might - might - be wading, falling, lurching, stumbling, wandering, backing, sliding, tumbling, skidding, limping into Depression territory. The New Land. Not the bottom of the barrel, but the heavenly afterworld of recession. You are no longer sick, and struggling. You are in A Whole New Place, ready to prospect and stake a claim.

Doesn't that feel better than bleeding to death? Especially in a roomful of doctors? (How much anesthesia will you need to keep you knocked out for the next two years, while they pass the knives back and forth across your chest?)



For an excellent view of the semantics of "Depression" vs. "Recession," visit Jeffrey Hill's satisfyingly literate blog and watch the CNN video. Mr. Hill is an English teacher living in Le Havre, France.

FYI, the Three Stooges production still above is taken from "Men in Black," a 1934 short film in which the Stooges play med students on their first day of work at a hospital. (Their med school credentials: they have the highest temperatures in their class.) "For Duty and Humanity!" is the Stooges' repeated line in the short. "Men in Black" is the only Stooges film to be nominated for an Academy Award, as best Short Subject (Comedy). It was intended as a spoof on "Men in White," a Clark Gable and Myrna Loy film released the same year.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Thomas Cave's Tattoo

At the New York Times, we (reporters) were not allowed by the copy desk to use the word "irony." In ironical situations. As in, "ironically, ..." The copy editors encouraged us to say, "paradoxically" instead. In a pinch.

What to do? It was just a rule. Some of the best bars in New York have rules. If you want to drink in them, you abide by them. At some point in the history of American journalism, the New York Times was a very great bar. And I don't mean that ironically.

What to do about Mr. Cave's tattoo, though. The gentleman in the photograph who graces this home page. He had his social security number tattooed on his arm. Was this a defiant gesture? He looks defiant, as only the handsome and smart can look defiant, in Dorothea Lange's beautiful portrait of him, with his wife. Was this the defiance of confidence? Or high intelligence? Or the defiance of honesty - that at this moment in time, nothing could have put the cards on the table like branding yourself with the government's number for you. For better or worse. That it was little to lose - your name, your identity, the broad expanse of your bicep - if you had the confidence of your life and the love of your wife behind you?

Was it expediency? Was this man tired of being asked, by the swarming worker-bee bureacracies, as he followed work. Foremen, agencies, photographers, press corps. The Great Depression, for better or worse, became, thanks to the government, a media event. Perhaps one of the first, best, and well-orchestrated, of the twentieth century.



I'm reminded of a more recent generation that made popular the idea of having bar codes tattooed to the backs of their necks, as if to say, we are not persons, we are products to scan. To sell, or sell to.

I admire Mr. Cave's impulse more. It seems cleaner, more like real irony. He wears it seriously, but lightly. He's put himself up for full exchange, with the confidence of winning. Maybe that's what the Times feared we had lost of the gift of doing. For everyone who can do it, do it.

Thanks for listening, ma'am.

Good Times

I promised you good times ("And where are they?!" I can hear everyone shout.)

Let's let Mr. Obama do the worrying tonight. I think about him and his family being in a new house. And being in a new house is in itself exciting. Especially for kids.



Malia and Sasha - go for every window.

I have a friend in southern California who likes to cook beans. She and her husband inaugurated an informal tradition recently of cooking beans one night a week - Bean Night. Part austerity, part comfort. He's a chef at a five star hotel. She's a 'lady from Texas.' They agree on beans; she provides the Mexican bean pots and the cornbread; he provides the rigorous innovation.

They eat Very Well. On Dirt.

On a December visit, we talked about Bean Night, and the idea that something as lowly as a bean - uh, I mean, 'noble peasant,' etc. - could make haute cuisine. And still be considered a 'bean-counting' bill of fare. If you had to upscale a bean, did that mean shaving truffles on it, lobster claws, whatever.

I came back home and invented 'bean gras.' It's basically force-feeding beans, as though they were geese. Food people will tell you there are no new recipes, but here is a recipe for bean gras.

You take a piece of pork belly, about two pounds. You roast it, slowly, in a slow oven, about 300 degrees for a couple of hours, rubbed in salt and pepper. You eat that, for a meal of your own design. But you let the fat from it congeal, and you scrap that into a bean pot with a bag of beans. Standard supermarket bag - I don't know the weight. Use navy beans, or small white Northern beans. Add some water to cover the beans and give them an inch or two of water above. Then bake that for a couple of hours. Watch your water, and don't let the beans dry out, or let them stay too wet. You could do this over a campfire, if you were Mr. and Mrs. Cave. Just let them simmer. Until they are bean gras.

If you use a Very Good Bean, this is like beans that have been raised on pig butter.

Thank you for listening ma'am.

Next up: drinking songs from the surf mama Courages of San Diego.

The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself

"This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today."

This from Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inaugural address in 1933. I think we're talking about the "D" word.

“We just have a difference here, and I’m president.”

This from the New York Times account of a "polite but pointed exchange" between Mr. Obama and the No. 2 House Republican, Eric Cantor of Virginia." The President took note of the parties’ fundamental differences on tax policy toward low-wage workers, and insisted that his view would prevail.

Inauguration.



Check.

One week down, and counting.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Everything You Wanted To Know About Poverty, But Were Afraid To Ask

People jumping out of windows, shooting themselves through the head, poisoning their children because they can't afford them - it's the stuff of great cinema, but do we really want to live this way?

Let's be calm.

"We are setting out a clear road map to restore profitability and enable us to focus on maximizing the Value of Citi," it said in a statement with the earnings.

Sounds pretty cut-and-dry, huh? Road maps.

What Citi needs, apparently, is a belt-clip GPS - not something that's awkward to open and impossible to fold. But then, maybe that's why they couldn't see the road - the map was in their faces.

The earnings: "Citigroup capped a devastating 2008 by announcing Friday that it would split into two entities and that it had posted an $8.29 billion loss for the fourth quarter," reported the New York Times in the same story. Uh, this in fact, was the news, not, the uh, road map.

"Peter Dixon, an economist at Commerzbank in London, said the decision to split the the financial giant was 'an indication that the era of big financials is at an end for now."

Hey Ma! Come to the radio! The era of big financials is at an end! For now!

Mr. Dixon would make a knock-down grim reaper. "My presence at your door is an indication that the era of you and all you've known is at an end for now." Have hope. It's for now.

Unfortunately, this stuff is getting easier to find. Corporate-release dessication devices like 'road maps' and 'indications' aren't keeping up with the juice that keeps bursting out of the bodies. Nurse, sponge. Bigger sponge - elsewhere in the article, Merrill Lynch loses $15.3 billion in the same quarter.



My recommendation is that we put the guy who landed the Airbus in the Hudson River in charge of the economy. He's got demonstrable skills at high altitudes, when you're double-birded and your engines go quiet.



I'm sure Mr. Sullenberger III uses road maps for toilet paper - after he's memorized them. Obama, make the call. The financial services sector can't park company jets in open fields. Readers, the lines are open.

A friend is facing cancer. He's been told by the doctors that it's beat, but, he's looked out that same window that Mr. Sullenberger III's passengers did, and listened to the wind whistle as the Bronx glided towards them. My friend's gainfully employed - no worries there - but in an understandable and perverse twist of perspective, he has no patience for his job. The little things, the 'mini-crises' as he calls them, that constitute people's and professions' sense of importance on a daily basis. As I understand it, it's basically b*llsh*t when you're sick from the cure, and it's too soon to be happy you're alive.

I thought to myself, would I rather be facing unemployment or cancer? Was that as easy to answer as it appeared? Cancer - your life is being taken away from you. Unemployment, your life is yours to lose. You look at family and friends like you've put them on the wrong flight.

My apologies to my friend. After this short callow moment, my prayers go out to him, and his wife and daughter. I am happy for their new health.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

What Depression?

Funnily, people are allowing themselves to discuss the New Great Depression without actually coming out and calling it that. "Doctor, I've got this friend..."

Michael Cannell, a designer writer and founder of "The Design Vote," dissects the state of American design, and possibilities rent by austerity during the Depression (then) and the not-Depression (now) in a New York Times piece, "Design Loves A Depression."



We have only good things to look forward to in American design, if history is a guide - if only we will accept the fact that this is a new Depression. Mr. Cannell very adroitly sums up some of the more preposterous seating arrangements of the old prosperity. Vis a vis "The Design Vote," populism=Depression=patriotism. Perhaps the government can start issuing books of stamps for the purchase of elegant folding bicycles and contemporary pendant lighting.

People love a party, and parties love a brawl. Murray Moss, a Manhattan shopkeeper whose shop, Moss, has for many years meant to be a self-appointed Mecca for all things well-designed, responds to Mr. Cannell in a post on Design Observer, "Design Hates A Depression." Note the D word again. The items Mr. Moss is getting bothered about are, of course, for sale in his shop.



Full disclosure: I was once asked by a Moss shop assistant - you can tell by the improbably expensive clothing - to stop taking notes in the shop while I was looking at the tchochkes and recording my thoughts for an article in the New York Times. He had no idea I was a reporter. On whose authority was I prohibited from making notes while walking through the shop? It was Mr. Moss's policy, the assistant told me.

"We have a 'no-note-taking' policy," he said. The fear, a publicist for Mr. Moss explained in a follow-up call on 'the policy,' was shopkeepers' espionage, not reporters. God bless.

In a stone thrown from across the puddle, architecture and design critic Stephen Bayley addresses design and challenge in The Observer. The great economic collapse will take place in an Italian bakery in Soho, like a feathery chocolate souffle cake falling. Pudding!



The recession will actually be a repression, typically of the English.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Due to an unusually high volume of calls

I called the New York Department of Labor's unemployment insurance line, to register, and got this message: "Due to an unusually high volume of calls, wait times may be exceptionally long."

Uh oh.

Thanks for listening, ma'am.

"Every feeling waits upon its gesture"

News from all over. An artist friend applies for food stamps in San Francisco. Writer Eudora Welty's Depression-era photographs go on view in New York.

"Eudora Welty in New York: Photographs of the Early 1930s" continues at the Museum of the City of New York through February 16.

"It was the same Depression we were feeling here in Mississippi, but evident in such another way in the city: lines of people waiting for food and people selling apples and sitting there in Union Square, all reading the daily paper's want ads." What will people read when newspapers disappear? Or will the hungry gather with their Apples in the city's hot-spots, waiting for their batteries to die?



The New York Times, in reviewing the exhibit, quotes Welty's memoir, "One Writer's Beginnings" in which she writes, "Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture..."

My San Francisco friend's roommate's father was so incensed by the two boys' gesture in applying for food stamps that he bought his son a laptop: a more culturally appropriate social raft for middle class scions set adrift.

The two boys went on a spree with the stamps in a supermarket, like Finn and Sawyer in a melon patch.

Every feeling.



As of Oct. 1, 2008, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the new name for the federal Food Stamp Program. Coming to a town near you.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Destroy Debt

For those who've asked, the bit on rolling loose change with your kids referred to in my last post appears in a January 12, 2009 New Yorker magazine "Talk of the Town" item called "Family Jewels." The piece is on Bernard L. Madoff, old prosperity's latest scourge, and the briskening business in jewelry-selling among the frightened rich. Rolling change is mentioned as one of "20 Inexpensive Ways to Entertain Your Kids in the Winter," being posted on destroydebt.com, a website devoted to, in their words, "understanding, managing and getting rid of debt, with a special focus on community and expert advice."



Where's Godfrey when you need him? "Bobos" - New York Times columnist David Brooks' coinage for the morally self-correcting, though heartily consumerist next-generation of "yuppies" - are becoming hobos.

More on bobos, Brooks, and William Powell tomorrow. Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Spare Change

I sat down on my bed and started sorting and rolling coins last night. Quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies. For the past year, I'd been emptying my mid-town office pockets into a ceramic dish in a bureau drawer. Now it was time to make it money. If this isn't a Depression evening's entertainment, I don't know what is. A friend caught me doing it and told me that the New Yorker magazine had published a "Talk of the Town" bit recently about rolling coins being a fun thing to do with your children. I wonder if it went on to say that it might become a good way of feeding them too, in the not too distant future.

My friend also told me that a local bank had a machine that would do the sorting and counting automatically. Sorry kids, dad needs the money - now. I took my bag down the road and got in line at the "Penny Arcade" at the TD Bank. TD Bank used to be a Commerce bank about ten minutes ago. TD calls itself "America's Most Convenient Bank." Does that mean there will be no wait if there's a run on it? We'll see.

There were two people on line in front of me at the Penny Arcade.


The man before me spilled his bag of change into the whirling discs that sort and count it, watched the digital sweepstakes read-out, and then accused Penny Arcade of short-changing him. The Southeast Asian woman in the TD bank hostess blazer smiled and commiserated, while explaining that Penny Arcade is just a machine and doesn't make mistakes.

The man left with a scowl. I'm confident he'll be back, with a bandana on his face.

I was up next at TD's gaming table. When banks start to feel like Vegas, you know you're in trouble. In went the grocery-bag-full of coins. They spilled and sprayed and tumbled into the wheeling discs like people being spun on an amusement park ride.

$149.98. That was yesterday's take. Not exactly work, but, hey, it got me out of the house.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Thomas Cave

A note about Thomas Cave and his tattoo. Mr. Cave is the gentleman in the photograph that graces this home page. The photograph was taken by the American photographer Dorothea Lange, who so powerfully documented the country and its citizens during the Great Depression. I found this photograph at www.shorpy.com, a website with a specialty in Depression images. According to Shorpy's site, the Lange photograph, titled "535-07-5248 and Wife," was taken in Oregon in August of 1939. The gentleman is described as an unemployed lumber worker. His tattoo is his Social Security number, by which he is referred to in the title of the photograph. A public records search conducted by Shorpy's revealed that the number belonged to Thomas Cave, who was born in 1912 and died in 1980 in Portland. His wife's name, Ann Kathryn, who died in 2000, appears on their tombstone, a photograph of which is appended under Shorpy's readers' comments.

Mr. Cave is 27 years old in Lange's picture. He has the look of confidence in the future - that bumps in the road only bounce you higher - that I wanted to capture in this blog.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Welcome to the New Great Depression

The New York Times set me out on my great journey.

I was laid off in May, one of 15. I had been a reporter for ten years, a journalist, elsewhere, for many more. News was bad. Late in 2008, news got very bad. The country was in trouble, like me. Then the world was in trouble. People talked about recession, a word which still had a whiff of barbers' antiseptic, stringent but healthy. An economic term, used by professionals who knew what they were talking about. Nothing good, but nothing worse than a sharp pair of scissors. A haircut that would hurt, but. The shop - that friendly, familiar neighborhood institution - was still open for business.

No one - very few - were using the "D" word. The news talked about stimulus. Then more stimulus. And more. Friends in the know - financial types, real estate developers, investors - all took me aside and told me, "it's going to get much much worse in the next few years." Hopes rose, on the strength of a newly elected president. Economies fell, replaced with an edifice of dust that had not been seen since September 11th.

But, you know this.

Welcome to the New Great Depression. We're going to use the "D" word, and let it set us free. Over the Christmas break - break from what? I thought, and what a great Depression holiday, from Steinbeck to Sturges - I realized with a shock that i was not unemployed. I was an expert - on the New Great Depression. Or, well-placed to become one, if I worked hard.

I'm able-bodied. I 'write good.' A friend suggested a blog. Newspapers are dying. Why not give yourself the gift of life?

"Thomas Cave's Tattoo" is that. We're going to look it all in the eye, hopefully have some fun along the way, meet people, see the world, learn and teach, survive, and thrive. I am here to barter, trade, share, talk, listen, discuss, argue, understand, and make peace with the lack of the old prosperity. It was corrupt, and corroded, and it's gone.

As was true of the Great Depression, this could well be a time for great works - public, private, patriotic, personal. If the New Great Depression produces art, literature, theater, community, and other untold intelligent riches, I want to be a part of it.

Stay with us. We're beginners but we're fast studies.

And thank you for listening, ma'am.