If I were in a foamcore fantasy band...

I just ran across this local blog, “Foam Core Fantasy.”  I discovered it because the author (who goes by Cyndy) sometimes comments on Scenic Wheaton’s blog.  (My running joke about the difference between my own Wheaton blog and “Scenic Wheaton” is that mine could easily be titled “Splenic Wheaton.”)

When I first saw the phrase “Foam Core Fantasy,” it struck me as an excellent name for a band.  The band’s sound would be something like mildly spacey effects-heavy synth pop backed with hair metal guitar.

Like some unholy fusion of Esqu¡vel, Erasure, Pet Sh0p Boys, Def Leppard, and Poison, maybe.

It turns out that the foam core in question actually describes something along the lines of engineered pre-fab construction panels with extraordinary R-values.

I have no idea where the foam core blogger’s house is located or even whether it’s in Montgomery County, for that matter.  A few of the exterior photos suggest some semi-rural suburban gentrification haven like Olney or Burtonsville.  The house pictured exudes a sort of 21st-century farmhouse exurban boho chic.

I’ve stumbled across other similar blogs while searching for home improvement keywords and FCF falls under what I might call the “home remodeling fetish” blog genre.

Due to our current circumstances, I personally favor the “Xtreme DIY” blogs that get into the nuts and bolts of home improvement materials and practices.  The XDIY blogs are good sources of know-how and inspiration for people who can’t (stand to) pay other people to perform improvement & reconstruction work for them.

Anyways, the FCF blog inspires me to put more home “improvement” stuff up here in this sprawling blogspace, once the spouse and I get back into the low-budget demolition & seat-of-our-pants “design-build” renovation work later this spring.

More pictures + less blogorrhea  ==  less echo-chamber diarist blogging

(I was originally going to embed a video of “If I were a carpenter” in this post.  Ultimately, I just couldn’t bring myself to inflict any of the cheesy versions of that song on the few hapless souls who stumble on this junk heap of blogging damage.)

Pokin’ fun at the usurer suspects...

Happy April Fool’s Day, folks.


I hate practical jokes because I tend to suspend disbelief with alarming ease, particularly when I’m off my meds.

There are so many fools in this world that we definitely need to claim a day all our own, if not an entire week or fortnight.  In that spirit, I present you with this silly post from this weekend that I almost neglected to stick up here.

Following the financial/banking “series” from last week, below are some words to the effect that bankers are wankers.  If you are in the banking industry and you are not a wanker, then please forgive me for these cheap shots.  They are, of course, aimed at your unsavory colleagues, not you.  I’ve thrown in a couple of curiosities and non sequiturs for variety.

And if you are unfamiliar with colorful cockney vernacular (e.g. wanker), maybe try renting a few choice episodes of “Only Fools and Horses” or something.

These nugatory nuggets are presented in vainglorious Comic Sans MS (where installed) for your general irritation and vexation.

“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”

—Anonymous

(often attributed to Mark Twain, probably erroneously)

“Banks have a new image.  Now you have ‘a friend,’ your friendly banker.  If the banks are so friendly, how come they chain down the pens?”

—Alan King  (1927 – 2004),

American comedian

“Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.”

—John Berryman  (1914 – 1972),

American poet

“bank’s closed”:  Slang from the 1920s that meant no kissing or making out was allowed.

great halls of power

just as the most important people in the city
are complete and utter bankers
the most important people in the army
are the absolute highest rankers

—Michael E.  (b. 1967),

British wag

(This guy is likely riffing on British rhyming slang vis-à-vis wankers.)

Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer

This is a song to celebrate banks,

Because they are full of money and you go into them and all you hear is clinks and clanks,

Or maybe a sound like the wind in the trees on the hills,

Which is the rustling of the thousand dollar bills¹.

Most bankers dwell in marble halls,

Which they get to dwell in because they encourage deposits and discourage withdrawals,

And particularly because they all observe one rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it,

Which is you must never lend any money to anybody unless they don’t need it.

I know you, you cautious conservative banks!

If people are worried about their rent it is your duty to deny them the loan of one nickel, yes, even one copper engraving of the martyred son of the late Nancy Hanks²;

Yes, if they request fifty dollars to pay for a baby you must look at them like Tarzan looking at an uppity ape in the jungle,

And tell them what do they think a bank is, anyhow, they had better go get the money from their wife’s aunt or ungle.

But suppose people come in and they have a million and they want another million to pile on top of it,

Why, you brim with the milk of human kindness and you urge them to accept every drop of it,

And you lend them the million so then they have two million and this gives them the idea that they would be better off with four,

So they already have two million as security so you have no hesitation in lending them two more,

And all the vice-presidents nod their heads in rhythm,

And the only question asked is do the borrowers want the money sent or do they want to take it withm.

But don’t think I’m against banks,

Because I think they deserve our appreciation and thanks

for eliminating the jackasses who go around saying that health and happiness are everything and money isn’t essential,

Because as soon as they have to borrow some unimportant money to maintain their health and happiness they starve to death so they can’t go around any more sneering at good old money, which is nothing short of providential.

—Ogden Nash  (1902 – 1971),

American wag

1.  While this line sounds outlandish to us today, thousand dollar bills (with Grover Cleveland’s likeness) were around when Nash penned this poem.  The U.S. Mint ceased issuing larger denominations after World War II and they were retired from circulation entirely in 1969 to help thwart organized crime rackets.

2.  Nancy Hanks was Lincoln’s mother, so “one copper engraving of the martyred son of the late Nancy Hanks” would refer to a penny, naturally.  This might have been more obvious had you grown up way back during the early 20th century like I did.  Truly I am an “old soul.”  Okay, now you know I’m yanking your chain.

* * *

Below you’ll find my stab at an Ogdenashy ode.  Only I take aim at a very 21st Century set of targets.  This is clearly more jeer than jeremiad, inveighing against influential and irresponsible media figures with churlish cheekiness.  However, the underlying target is really their employers, the mainstream media outlets that featured personalities who indulged in chatty cheerleading during the bubble and splenic spluttering during the bust.

Business media personalities are just like anybody else, except they have unusually exorbitant hair & makeup allowances

This is a verse to celebrate every silly talking head,

Who lulls with such fatuous chatter the most easily led.

Most fashion-plate correspondents sit in Herman Miller Aeron chairs

And affect light conversation and smiles that draw willing viewers’ stares,

And particularly because they all observe one rule, and their fans do a great deal to support it,

Which is you must never deliver news or analysis unless it is dumbed down and distorted.

Fiend, you forsook to foresee the financial fiasco, forsooth!

Objectivity: FAIL, you fraudulent Wall Street mouthpiece herald!

If we worry about our savings is it your duty to deny us the reverse of the coin of truth,

Even if it costs us some more numismatic portraits of the martyred son of the late Rose Fitzgerald?!

While your ink-stained betters lose their shirts despite all their toil,

You still prosper while peddling your infotainment snake oil.

But don’t think I’m against air-brushed personalities,

With their packaged presentations and banalities,

Because I think they deserve our full gratitude

for helping to cultivate our dull attitude

Besides which, we'd be hung higher and drier

And find ourselves even more out-of-lucker,

If our culture failed to be a supplier

Of the latest, greatest model of sucker

—Publius Ignominius Stuporis Slumburbius

(two-bit American wag)

Joey ♥ Maria

* * *

Gabba gabba hey...  To make up for that kind of lame Ram0nes song, I feel compelled to include a classic from 1977’s R0cket to Russia  LP.  “Teenage Lobo†omy” keeps up the brain damage theme (albeit sans zombies), complete with Lego stop-motion action.  Hey, these little dudes play air guitar better than I do, and I have the luxury of articulated elbow and wrist joints.

Foreclosure Fallout in the Mid-County

A foreclosed home on the corner of Turkey Branch Pkwy & Independence St in lower Aspen Hill.
This neighborhood is not included in the county’s new focused revitalization program.
(Saturday, March 28.)

The Montgomery County Department of Housing and Community Affairs (DHCA) held a community “charrette” for its new Focused Neighborhood Assistance (FNA) program last night at Wheaton High School.  This was basically a public feedback and discussion session.  Evidently the term “charrette” comes from urban planning circles; it was originally applied mainly to creative sessions run by planners, policy-makers, designers, architects, and other experts.

In the March 31st meeting, any experts in attendance mostly acted as facilitators and observers, except during the introductory and wrap-up speeches, where county leaders treated us with enthusiastic exhortations such as “Be a squeaky wheel!” and “Be an informed wheel!”  (I grew up in this county and I have to say that the shrillest “squeaky wheel” residents can be exhausting and occasionally mildy terrifying to put up with.  Maybe having a comfortable salary and an advanced degree in some optimistic field like urban planning makes dealing with the restless rabble more tolerable.  The planning/housing eggheads at the meeting certainly seemed to be perky, perpetually positive-thinking types.)

For information on the FNA initiative, visit the county housing authority’s informational webpage:
“Foreclosure Prevention”

Most of the maps listed on the DHCA webpage link to large, rasterization-intensive PDFs (>1.5MB each).  These graphics were generated in February based on information released by real estate data clearinghouse RealtyTrac.  If you open up the countywide map (~2.85 MB), you’ll see that the greatest concentration of foreclosures occurs along a southeast-to-northwest axis.  This pattern closely aligns with many declining neighborhoods that tend to attract lower-income residents, as well as those blocks hit particularly hard by recent population destabilization and densification.

If you’re interested in the incidence of foreclosures throughout the entire state, check out Maryland’s Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) website for its Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), which features a map color-coded by foreclosure impact level.  A sum of $26.7 million has been allocated for this program; it’s unclear how much of that will find its way to Montgomery County.

The statewide residential stabilization program falls under Maryland’s Neighborhood Conservation Initiative (NCI), first rolled out in tandem with former governor Glendening’s statewide “Smart Growth” program.  Ultimately, Maryland’s push for “Smart Growth” fell far short of living up to its name, as Environment Maryland outlines in their sobering report, “Not So Smart: Land Consumption in Maryland after a Decade of Smart Growth.”

And yet even today, pro-growth advocates still caricature the opposition as “slow growth” obstructionists who stand in the way of economic “progress” and social “progressivism.”  This smear is pretty astounding, given the overwhelming evidence that the pro-development crowd that has dominated government and local politics over the last two decades has rammed through policies that have degraded quality of life measures throughout the county.  This trends have hit densely populated regions like swaths of the mid-county, as well as rapidly developing exurban regions that used to be more rural and rustic in character.  When pressed, a lot of long-term residents agree that this county has become a considerably less appealing place to live for much of the rising middle class.

And yet when you look at the District 4 Special Election, the few candidates in favor of more active measures to achieve residential population stabilization and safeguard the local environment are constantly sidelined and marginalized by the most well-funded Democratic campaigns, as well as local politics beat journalists.  It appears that the aggressive staffers and volunteers enlisted in these slicker campaigns have transferred much of the rhetoric, tactics, and funding streams used in the national political theater to a humble local council race.  They are counting on members of the usual lock-step, pamphlet-ready Democratic voting blocs to usher in their anointed candidates and shut out all of the other worthy contenders, many of whom are long-term residents and civic activists who have a much more direct ground-level appreciation of the history of this area and the steady decline many of these neighborhoods have experienced for decades.

“Growth is good” is about as sound a statement as “Money quells all ills” or “Poverty is ennobling.”

“Smart” growth in Montgomery County quickly devolved into shortcut growth-at-all-costs expansion and an explosion in construction/renovation projects driven by developers who seduced politicians and residents with their visions of economic invigoration and a transformed metropolitan landscape.  A lot of residents, particularly in the west county, have profited handsomely from these policies.

The decline in rising middle-class neighborhoods like mine has been swift and dramatic during the 2000s.  Top-down policies and planning measures that catalyzed fast growth starting in the late 1990s rapidly created thousands of low-end jobs with depressed/stagnant wages.  Loosening credit standards, misleading leftist political rhetoric, and an ever-expanding stock of cramped and crowded slumburban rental units and sub-units helped paved the way for this steady race to the bottom.

And unlike in places like northern Virginia, broad economic development and job growth hasn’t kept pace with the residential overpopulation and densification bubble in Maryland.  Now that county employees are increasingly missing out on perks like cost-of-living adjustments, they may finally develop a deeper appreciation of what so many other residents are struggling with right now.

And yes, “densification” appears to be a legitimate word.  Using it here only invites obvious slurs about the stupefication of local leaders and residents during the Dumb Money decade.  (Hey, I sipped half-heartedly at the Kool-Aid, too, until about 2004 or so.)

Well, well.  Google tells me that British tunesmith Graham Parker once wrote a song titled “Stupefication.”  This minor associative tidbit gives me the perfect pretext for including my gratuitous music vid embed of the day, an early new wave gem from three decades back:



This song — from Parker’s 1979 acclaimed LP Squeezing Out Sparks — arguably has a quasi-suburban feel to it, especially since the accompanying vid features plenty of goofy girl-next-door Londonettes along with the come-hither caddishness of Mr. Parker.

Ahem, now let me return to the weighty subject of mid-county suburban decay.

* * *

The county’s revitalization program targets a few key areas hit hard by foreclosures, including one upcounty region (Germantown).  Their mid-county target area is Glenmont.

I wish I could say that this is merely a pilot program, but it looks like county officials are being very cautious about the initiative because of their depleted budget and re-shuffled policy priorities.  Ms. Cantor of the Mid-County Regional Services Center used the word “scant” at least twice while describing the level of funding available for the effort.  Speaking for County Exec Leggett, one official emphasized that local priorities are currently ordered as follows: “public safety, education, and safety net services.”

It looks like Montgomery County has been monitoring preliminary and active residential foreclosure trends for several years, along with the socioeconomic and other demographic data they normally compile and analyze for policy guidance.

I excerpt one of these maps below; again, the data was current as of February.

This is a snapshot approximating foreclosure activity in west Wheaton and Glenmont during the 4th quarter of FY 2008.

FNA = Focused Neighborhood Assistance
CAE = Connecticut Avenue Estates

For the original maps this graphic is extracted from, again, see the DHCA’s foreclosure resource webpage.

The area surrounded in blue is the mid-county zone being targeted by this program.  The vast majority of people within this area identify as Glenmont residents.  (Glenmont and Wheaton share the same census-designated place, or CDP.)

My household falls within the triangular area outlined in red, which roughly comprises much of the the “Connecticut Avenue Estates” (CAE) legal subdivision.  (Portions of “Connecticut Avenue Park” and “Montgomery Highland Estates” are cordoned within this red boundary as well, albeit unintentionally.)  There are at least a thousand households with the CAE subdivision designation; at least a couple of hundred of them are located in the southern region of the county’s targeted area, north of Randolph Road.  CAE is an aging high-density subdivision that the county has targeted before in combatting mid-county suburban blight.

Too Little, Too Late?

We’ve got a mid-county landscape studded with foreclosures and overshadowed with many other manifestations of creeping suburban blight.  These trends have been worsening for the past fifteen years or so, accelerating during the last 5 - 7 years.

While we are grateful that the county is finally addressing these long-developing patterns after all these years of decay and neglect, it’s frustrating that officials can only muster up the resources to focus on this very circumscribed area for this latest round of revitalization efforts.  Even with these well-defined constraints, DHCA officials made sure to repeatedly temper residents’ expectations about the project at Tuesday night’s meeting, which is certainly a good idea during this lean fiscal era.

If anybody has any other ideas about how or why county leaders arrived at this particular targeting decision, I’d really like to hear it.  I think they may have been chosen in part because of an emerging groundswell of civic involvement within that neighborhood.  Congratulations to the men and women behind the new Greater Glenmont Civic Association (GGCA).  The county is obviously looking to capitalize on the energy and “human resources” within these neighborhoods in its FNA initiative.  Incidentally, GGCA seems to tilt toward the southeastern portion of the region highlighted in the map above, which is centered on the subdivision known as “Glenmont Village” near the Glenmont Metro station.  The western regions of the neighborhood seemed somewhat isolated from this civic movement (e.g. portions of “Glenmont Hills,” “Connecticut Avenue Park,” and “Stoneybrook Estates”).

Those of us in neighboring communities (e.g. west Wheaton, Aspen Hill & north Kensington) really ought to redouble our own efforts to resurrect and support our own flagging and oft-neglected neighborhood groups.

Zombie Bankers Feast on Brains of White House Economic Brain Trust

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Bankers at major living-dead Wall Street investment firms have continued to graze on the gray matter of prominent members of the new administration’s economic crisis team.

Among the reported victims are:

• Timothy Geithner, SecTreas

• Larry Summers, NEC Director

• Neel Kashkari, Interim Asst SecTreas for Financial Stability

Financial jocks jumped on news of Geithner’s proposed “public-private partnership.”  Investors delighted, noting that the plan preserved the sanctity of business-as-usual investment market culture without any threat of significant “change.”  High fives were heard everywhere throughout global trading floors and boiler rooms.  Whether they were genuinely grateful for the plan, or just looking to make a few gratifying long sales before Friday, Wall Street profiteers rallied and the Dow climbed 500 points on Monday.

Mainstream media talking heads rejoiced, then promptly phoned their brokers for updates at the bottom of the hour.

* * *

In other news, marginalized economists and scholars successfully thwarted the zombies by donning lampshades and sitting in the corner while the weekday party took off.  However, a few of them snuck out earlier this week and reported their close call with the financial undead on various op-ed pages, blogs, and public broadcasts.

* * *

Okay, kidding aside, here’s a sampling of various experts’ reactions to these recent developments:

First we have Paul Krugman’s early rejection of the plan as details were leaked over the past few days:  “Despair over financial policy” (The Conscience of a Liberal [NYT blog], 3/21/2009).

He declares, “The zombie ideas have won” and repeats the refrain that the Treasury Department is tempting fate by preserving a systemic moral hazard.

Then we also have other reactions of disappointment and disbelief, like those aired Monday morning on NPR’s Boston-based current affairs program, On Point.  I excerpt some of the discussion below, representing typical objections to the plan from both the left and the right:

“[Geithner, Summers, et al] have decided that the way to get private money, to rescue these toxic assets, is to double down on the same kind of strategy that Hank Paulson unveiled back in October that didn’t work, which was to have the government put up guarantees — in this case [the] government’s providing as much as 94% of the capital.  I think there’s an echo chamber effect going on where Larry Summers and Tim Geithner are talking to each other, and they’re talking to the likes of Goldman [Sachs] and Citigroup.  They’re talking to the very same people who created the mess, and they’re not talking to the critics of this approach.  My sources say they’re not even talking to Paul Volcker — who nominally heads a task force appointed by the president, that has never met — who’s a critic of this.  They’re certainly not talking to Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize laureate at Columbia [University], Nouriel Roubini at NYU, Paul Krugman — well-informed people who think this whole approach of having government put up a lot of the capital, guarantee almost all of the loss in the hopes of bringing hedge funds and private equity — the least transparent part of the system, the most underregulated and prone-to-abuse part of the system — back to the party, to do the same kind of convoluted deals that helped cause this mess.  And it’s incredibly risky, it’s incredibly expensive, it may well not work, and there’s also the risk of political backlash.”

“Let me just say:  If this were to work and a lot of rich guys got even richer, I would hold my nose and say, ‘If that’s the price that it takes to get the banking system running again, I can live with it.’  My concern is more that it’s not going to work and furthermore that it’s rife with potential for abuse.  Let me give one little example and I hope this is not too technical:  So, a hedge fund — or private equity company — comes in and says, ‘We will buy this toxic asset at fifty cents on the dollar.’  It’s a pool of loans.  Then [the company] buys a credit default swap.  So, it’s ‘heads I win, tails you lose.’  If the value of the asset goes up, [the] hedge fund makes out.  If the value of the asset goes down, the government eats the loss, and the hedge fund collects on the credit default swap.  There is all kinds of potential for these gains.  And make no mistake about it, this was not designed [in] the best interest of the U.S. taxpayer.  This was designed on Wall Street, by Wall Street, for Wall Street.  .... If you look at the transition from Paulson to Geithner, it’s the same team.”

“This [current approach] is the worst of both worlds.  The Treasury, which does not have the resources to do this properly, is intervening in an episodic and ad hoc way.  If you're going to have this degree of government involvement, it’s better to do it with your eyes open, with some transparency there.”

“[Hedge funds and private equity firms] exist to do deals — complicated, highly leveraged deals.  This [plan] gives them a chance, gives them a new lease on life.  Better yet, it’s guaranteed by the government.  Hedge funds — people are deserting hedge funds in droves — this gives them a new lease on life.  And I think the administration is underestimating the populist backlash against using taxpayer money and taxpayer guarantees, so that a whole new round of rich guys — in some cases the same old rich guys — can get even richer, at taxpayer expense.  I also think that the government is going to need more money one way or the other and, if you do it via an RFC, where you don’t enrich private speculators but you help ordinary people and you do it directly, there’s going to be much more popular consent for spending taxpayer money and putting taxpayer loan guarantees at risk, if you don’t do it by enriching a lot of middlemen, but you do it more straightforwardly.  And, you know, Citi, what Citigroup worries about — since they are, I mean, if anybody’s insolvent, Citi’s insolvent, right?  The government has put about 65 billion dollars into Citi.  You can buy the thing by buying up all of its shares for 17 billion right now.  If that’s not insolvent, I don’t know what’s insolvent, because if it weren’t for all this government money, they’d be out of business.  So we’re really not talking about 12,000 banks.  We’re talking about a handful of large banks — Citi, maybe Bank of America, possibly Wells Fargo — that would have to go through some kind of receivership project and come out the other side.  [It’s] much better to do this straightforwardly.”

—Robert Kuttner

co-founder & co-editor, The American Prospect

distinguished senior fellow, Dēmos public policy research and advocacy organization

columnist, The Boston Globe

“Any time we subsidize the banks, like this plan does, we are giving some money to those long-term debt holders and to the equity investors in the banks.  If you forced the long-term debt holders to convert into equity — which is sort of a receivership, sort of a Chapter 11, but could be done somewhat differently so that the government wasn’t necessarily running things — you get a private sector solution and the banks become potentially quite solvent, ’cause there’s a lot of long-term debt out there and it doesn’t cost the government anything.”

“I have to agree with Bob [Kuttner] — which I don’t often do — on most of what he said.  This is not a good solution, there are better solutions out there, and the plan is flawed.  ... I think that the thing to understand is [that] there are two possible scenarios:  The scenario number one, which the administration is banking on, is that the toxic assets — and they are ‘toxic’ assets, not ‘legacy’ — are undervalued, and that the banks are fundamentally solvent.  That was the assumption in the original Paulson plan; that is the assumption here.  The other scenario is that the toxic assets are correctly valued and the banks are not solvent.  This is where Paul Krugman is [coming] from, this is Nouriel Roubini, on the right you got Luigi Zingales, one of my colleagues, Ken Rogoff — former chief economist of the IMF — and in my view that’s probably the more likely scenario.  So now let’s look at what happens in this plan under those two scenarios.  If the scenario is that the toxic assets are correctly valued, and the banks are not solvent — meaning they don’t have enough equity to support their business — this plan is not going to help.  ’Cause the banks won’t sell, ’cause if they’ve got these things marked at a particular point, if the value that the hedge funds pay is not above those marks, this doesn’t help because it doesn’t give them more equity.”

“The whole idea here is to get the banks solvent, to get them more equity.  .... that I think is the most likely scenario, ’cause remember [that] the economy has deteriorated substantially since the first Paulson plan, and, you know, we were in trouble at that time [too].  Well, ... they take that gamble [under the current plan] and now you’ve created a situation where it’s heads, the hedge funds win, and tails, the government loses.  And this becomes a very, very expensive program.  And that’s also the case, by the way if we’re in the situation where it is a liquidity problem, not a solvency problem.  The hedge funds will either make a lot of money, which will create outrage at the other end, or the government will end up losing a lot of money, neither of which is great, and there are better solutions.  The government really doesn’t get anything here.”

—Steven Kaplan

Neubauer Family Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

To be continued...

More “Me decade” Redux and Madness

Happy Friday the 13th for the second month in a row.

“I’m as mad as a hatter and I’m not going to take you any more...”

You may or may not recognize that as a corruption of the famous line screamed by apoplectic news anchor Howard Beale in Network (1976):

“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more...”

He builds up to this crescendo after saying other things that eerily resonate with our current climate of anxiety:
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad.
Everybody knows things are bad.
It’s a depression.
Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job.
....
Banks are going bust.
Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter.
Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere that seems to know what to do and there’s no end to it.
....
We know things are bad, worse than bad, they’re crazy.
It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore.
We sit in the house and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller and all we say is,
‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms ... just leave us alone.’”

When the madman utters the climactic line, he is exhorting the Everyman, the Silent Majority impassively assembled in the anemic blue glow of their living room television sets, to literally get up out of their seats and go scream their outrage out their windows.

Paddy Chayefsky, the creator of this timeless American character, explained his attitude about Network like this:

“People say to me: ‘Jesus, you moved into some pretty surreal satire.’  I say:  ‘No, I still write realistic stuff.  It’s the world that’s gone nuts, not me.  It’s the world that's turned into a satire."  We never lied.  Everything in the movie is true—with some extensions.  It's very hard to describe simply and realistically what is going on without being grotesque.  I think the movie is right now. .... I think the American people deserve some truth—at least as much truth as we can give them—instead of pure entertainment or pure addiction.”—“Chayefsky: ‘Network Is True’,” Time, 12/13/1976

I was reminded of the Network rant scene for the umpteenth time recently while checking out “Silver Spring, Singular,” a downcounty blog that attracts a lot of attention because of its whip-smart & candid writing, topical currency, and its connectedness to the goings-on of greater Silver Spring.  Plus, it’s got plenty of photos and graphics and the blogger keeps comments open to Anonymice, which makes things livelier and more engaging.

SSS introduces a recent post with the following:

“I don’t know about on yours, but the locals on my neighborhood message board are mad as hell about the ‘melee’ in [downtown Silver Spring] this past Saturday and they aren't going to take it anymore!”
[Acronym expansion, formatting, & linking all added.]

SSS accompanies the post with a movie still from the Angry Man classic Falling Down (1993), which left me scratching my head over the madman movie mixed metaphors.

SSS: “... the regularly expressed opinion that ‘it's just like that in Bethesda’ is total bulls***.  Anyone who says this has clearly never been to Bethesda.”

Springular sure got that right.  Downtown Bethesda invests a lot of money in attracting the right crowd of self-actualizing professionals and big spenders.  BUP and friends do a bang-up job of keeping baggy-pants, saggy-seat crews out of their scrubbed urban districts.

The most aggressive people you’ll encounter in Bethesda generally include the Type-A jerks that jockey for the plummest parking spots in the downtown garages, the aging frat boy drunks that frequent “Caddies” on Cordell Avenue, and the Valet Parking Mafia that extort fat tips out of west-county and NWDC gentry flush with an embarrassment of disposable income.  While some of these potential rowdies may threaten bodily harm if you make the mistake of wasting their time or delaying their gratification, none of them is very likely to break out in fisticuffs with you.

123cartoon on WashingtonPost.com quips:
“The ‘Stop the Violence’ concert is over. You may now return to your previous violent nature. Thank you for coming.”

»»»

Sublime Magic theatre. Entrance not for everyone. For madmen only.

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Here’s an English etymological enigma.  “Mad” variously means angry, crazy, and a combination thereof.  Why and how did this come about?  Is there psychological research that bears out the observation that raging makes can make you raving?

SSS: “Also, while people certainly have every right to be upset, some use this as an excuse to prop up their bogus theories about how these miscreants will invade Silver Spring throughout the week once the Fillmore is open. Yes, because those Seal (actual Fillmore performer) crowds can get completely out of hand.”

Hey now, once Seal starts singing some of his more provocative lyrics, what if the crowd starts to take it a tad too literally:

“But we’re never gonna survi-i-i-i-ve unless, we get a little crazy...”

Now back to more madcap madness:

Thayer Avenue said [on SSS’s blog]:
How did you gain such a penchant for drawing in the crazy people to the comment board? I never cease to be amazed.

And “Thayer Avenue” said this before I added my damage to the mix.

I splenically snorted in return:
“‘Thayer Avenue’?  Perhaps this proud member of the Nouveau Silver Spring gentry should try on the address and blogger moniker ‘Woodmont Avenue.’  It appears that Thayer doesn’t much care for the untidy opinings of us ‘crazy’ east-county riff-raff.

Springular, how did you gain such a penchant for drawing in the downcounty gentry to act as such wet blankets on the comment board?  I never cease to be crazed, er, amazed.”
[more crazy stuff followed this jabbering....]

Thayer Avenue said:
“Wow, Sleepless. I make an off-handed, generalized comment and you end up attacking me, The X-Files, *and* linking to classic Bernstein all in one fell swoop? Very impressive.

I think my work here is done!”

Indeed!

Springvale Roader informs us:
“Well folks, this is timely. This coming Sunday and Monday, AFI will be screening the documentary, ‘Crips and Bloods: Made in America.’ http://www.afi.com/silver/new/nowplaying/events.aspx#crips

I plan on wearing my red bandanna...or should I go with blue?”

Thomas Hardman weighs in:
“I was more hoping for a screening of ‘Lord of the Flies’.”

Well, here in the south-central loco-en-MoCo ’hood of west Wheaton, I guess we would have to sport blue bandannas to this cultural event, as MS-13 claims to be the dominant “click” in these here parts.

Yeah, so I’ve heard that the AFI Silver is trying to make it in this recession just like a lot of others arts-and-culture institutions.  May I suggest the following quadruple feature, curated by myself:

“The All-American Angry Man Film Marathon”
…featuring conniptive classics from the 1970s through the 2000s…
Network — 1970s
Ruthless People — 1980s
Falling Down — 1990s
Gran Torino — 2000s
Why, this could even be the basis for yet another AFI superlative list...

...“100 Years, 100 Rages” !

“How nifty, Barbie®’s fifty”

(WARNING: Skip this digressive post if you hate bubblegum pink and/or prefer to steer clear of the general morass of American popular culture.)

I watch the news semi-regularly and I’ll bet that more than a few Americans have noticed that the network news anchors have started softening their evening broadcasts with lots of uplifting, aw-shucks human-interest stories.

These segments are obviously meant to serve as antidotes to the steady stream of bad news bearishness bombarding us from the global marketplace.

Perhaps these salt-of-the-earth profiles of courage and altruism are there to inspire and shame the hoi polloi into staying put in their overstuffed couches instead of taking to the streets armed with steak knives and handguns.  (They could be right; many people seem to be pushing aside their woes and seeking comfort in entertainment and social connections right now.)

A few days back the well-coiffed talking head personality anchors were paying homage to that paragon of perfect, injection-molded plastic womanhood, Barbie^®, who débuted early in 1959.

Amidst the retrospective coverage of this pop culture milestone, I heard about a bizarre Mattel^® product launch from 1975, “Growing Up Skipper^®.”  This junior cousin of Barbie^® was an “action” figurine; if you cranked her arm, her torso elongated and her bust “grew.”

Actual marketing copy printed on the box:

“She’s 2 dolls in 1 for twice as much fun!”
“Make her grow from a young girl to a teenager in seconds!”
“Cute little girl! ... Tall, curvy teenager!”

This “toy” should have been packaged with a miniature paperback book:
Are You There God?  It’s Me, Body-Dysmorphic Skipper^®

For those of you who think that toys and play time don’t have a lasting impact on children, check out this caustically funny commentary [warning: language].  It’s a blistering account of mid-seventies childhood drama between the author and her cousin, allegedly the Growing Up Skipper^® doll’s “most fevered and devoted disciple.”

Incidentally, 1975 is the same year The Stepford Wives hit U.S. theaters, presenting Americans with an assault on the ideal of suburban domestic perfection by swapping pretty, docile, affluent suburban housewives with near-identical animatronic body doubles.

* * *
The media blitz on the Barbie^® merchandising empire & its cultural aftershocks led me to dig up an arty artifact from the eighties.
This unnamed cult film has a running time of about three-quarters of an hour and looks like it was partly shot on Super 8.  Official prints were yanked and destroyed in the wake of a copyright suit won about two decades ago.  Bootleg copies still circulate; I don’t name the filmmaker, title, or subject here because I don’t want the files to get pulled.  But if you have any familiarity with American popular music of the 1970s, then you can probably follow along here.

The film imaginatively dramatizes the real-life story of a woman was who the vocalist/drummer of a ubiquitous brother-and-sister pop powerhouse with lots of lush orchestral chart-topping hits throughout the early-to-mid-’70s.  (Can you guess which one?)

It’s a lovingly enacted 1:9-scale tragedy of female suffering, complete with painstakingly crafted miniature props and sophisticated mise-en-scène featuring Barbie^® line dolls outfitted in dead-ringer ’70s and early ’80s fashions.

Without further ado, click here (Youtube) if you’re still curious.  (Right after the page loads, try pausing the player in order to give the stream a chance to buffer footage a few minutes ahead.)

* * *

“The early seventies had felt like the last moment of pure, popular culture fantasy and fakeness that I shared with my parents, when we were still united in this image of happy American familyhood.  And The C________s’ music seemed especially emblematic of that time.”

—the auteur who directed and co-wrote the film linked above

What’s a little startling to me is this: as a child growing up in the Washington area in the late ’70s through mid-’80s, in many ways I lived in a late ’60s through mid-’70s time warp.  This is because my decidedly Establishment parents listened to a lot of WGAY* and their LP collection consisted of selections like the orchestral folk-pop stylings of The Sandpipers and the soundtrack to Ryan’s Daughter.

While my spouse’s boomer parents were more plugged into the “counterculture” and familiar with the mid-to-late Beatles catalogue and even ventured into the post-punk and new wave territory of bands like Talking Heads and the Clash, as a tyke I remember being enthralled by cheesy Las-Vegas-revue-like pop arrangements such as Steve Lawrence’s rendition of “Go Away Little Girl”.

This decade-lagging anachrony from early childhood may explain some of the chronic cultural disorientation and confusion that afflicts me to this day.

* * *
And finally we have Sonic Youth’s cover of a song that was a signature Top Ten hit by that same ’70s pop group.  (The Sonic Youth interpretation was originally released as part of a 1994 tribute album.)

The vid features Thurston Moore as Tragic Troubadour Ken™ and Kim Gordon as Rocker Chick Couture Barbie™.

* * *
So here’s wishing a belated happy birthday to that indestructible American icon, Barbie^®, and that princess of 1970s pop perfection, Karen C________ (March 2, 1950 – February 4, 1983).
* For those of you who didn’t live in the D.C. area before 1990 or so, WGAY was an adult contemporary easy-listening radio station.  (Its transmitter was located on Kemp Mill Road in Wheaton before it moved to the World Building in downtown Silver Spring.)

(More trivia:  According to this source, oddly enough, the “GAY” in WGAY originally stood for “Government And You” way back in the forties.)

Caught DUI/DWI? Don’t be caught DOA.

And we’re talking about political demise here as well.

* * *
This week many of us have done our level best to ignore how the Dow/S&P, the Nikkei, the Hang Seng, the DAX, the London Exchange, etc. are all plunging and anemically regaining value in paroxysms of wild panic.  Meanwhile the news on job losses and industry contractions is making many people seek oblivion in whatever form they can come by it, whether that’s a liquid, a capsule, a pulsating LCD display, or whatever.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been something of a train wreck these last few weeks.

So I fear that I have to resort to mordant humor and patent absurdity that may get me in trouble.  Please forgive this lunacy.

* * *
I tend to take drunk driving and alcohol abuse pretty seriously.  This position made me very popular among the carousers in my cohort of collegiate alcoholic conformists.  Well, if you grow up around a bunch of annoying gin-and-tonic-addled adults, the sXe lifestyle starts to look a tad appealing.  One only tends to get drunk to emulate Mom and Dad if one doesn’t hate their pickled guts too much.

You know, it’s a little like non-smokers who grow up associating foul ashtray smells with the rank stench of Mommy’s sweater or Daddy’s sportcoat.

* * *
Proud Papa-to-be Pagnucco over at MPW generously provides the text of Ike Leggett’s letter in support of stricter DUI/DWI enforcement measures using a clever ignition interlock device that only activates if the operator exhales a “clean” enough breath.

Are such devices hard to foil?  Can you get a (presumably sober) child to exhale into the thing, for instance?  Yes, it’s true, drunks will attempt stunts like this.  Let’s just hope they don’t try it in the Old Wine(-o) State.

* * *
We just have to make sure that these gadgets are simple enough that tipsy Maryland politicians like state Dels. Barve and Taylor can use them effectively.

Hmm, I think I feel a tickle of farce coming on.



Let’s start with the “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” premise but replace the Jersey bit with some Old Line State flavor.

“Herman & Kumar Go to the House of Crabs” is more like it, the House of Crabs in question being the stale echo chamber occupied by Maryland Delegates.

Or what about the sequel: “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay”?  Man, that’s so ’07/’08.  The Gitmo goons are closing up shop and Barve and Taylor probably won’t get profiled as enemy combatants unless (a) they go on a drunk driving spree in Carroll County and/or (b) Bobby “Persecution Complex” Ehrlich gets voted back into the Governor’s Mansion and jumpstarts another spying & profiling program directed at his mortal enemies.

Nope, we need to adjust the tone for a new era of dope, er, hope.

“Herman & Kumar Escape from Annapolis Soirée.”  Yep, that’s much better, plus it sort of rhymes with “Bay.”  “Chesapeake Bay” would be another obvious possibility, although then we have to explain how these two pols ended up in that pfiesteria-infested pond to begin with.  Crumbling infrastructure anyone?  A few certifiably shoddy bridges would be like money in the bank for Maryland Democrats.  We’re talking Federal Stimulus paydirt here, kids.  But that’s a topic for another long-winded post.

But, ahem.  Back to our DUI duo.

We’ve got the promise of a narrative here.  Picture this for starters:

Herman & Kumar stagger out of a stultifyingly boring engagement full of hobnobbing Maryland muckety-mucks.  The open-bar drinks and phony praises are pouring forth freely.  Then they stumble into the leather-upholstered bucket seats of their respective luxury vehicles, now outfitted with this clever breathalyzer “interlock” ignition device.

After spending too many hours in the dense, soporific fog of Maryland Democratic politics, Herman & Kumar breathe hearty sighs of relief into their ignition interlock mouthpieces.  The dense vapors of their winey breaths immediately trigger the fuel cell contacts to close; their keys fail to budge.  After screaming invective at their vehicles that would make Mike Subin blush, they each whip out their BlackBerrys and implore their long-suffering wives to come pick them up.

Hey, this could be the setup for a brilliantly staged candid-camera press conference on the new device.

If such a press conference were to occur, we’d hope that Herman & Kumar wouldn’t louse things up by doing something embarrassing like inserting their car keys in the wrong car holes or something.

Paging Parris “thwarted-by-the-child-proof-safety-lock” Glendening, anyone?