Sergio Scaglietti, RIP

Okay, I completely realize very few readers of this blog will recognize the name or be particularly moved by the man’s passing. True, there are huge issues of injustice to be addressed everywhere and at once. But just for a moment, I want to mark the passing of an artist, Sergio Scaglietti, who died November 20th, at 91.

If you don’t recognize the name, Scaglietti created the bodywork for most of the cars produced by Ferrari, including some of the great icons of the marque, the 250 Testarossa

and the 250 GTO

You probably have to be a gearhead like me to be willing to elevate Scaglietti’s creations to art, but with modern automobiles generally resembling either refrigerators or military assault vehicles (the latter, I think, is deliberate, all the more to reinforce the macho fantasies of the owners), I miss a time when someone would create something beautiful, even stirring, out of sheet metal.

Here’s the NYT obit, if you’d care to know more about the man – Sergio Scaglietti.

Later,

You must remember this . . . .

On November 26th, 1942, Warner Brothers released what would become one of the most popular and admired motion pictures ever, Casablanca. What is essentially a pedestrian tearjerker of a plot is elevated to art by perhaps the wittiest, most memorable script in film history and measured, mature acting, including a beautiful sense of timing across the cast. This is my favorite movie of all.

Think of all the elements of this movie that have become common currency in our culture, including several lines given to Claude Rains, as Capt. Renault: “I am shocked! Shocked!” and “`Round up the usual suspects.” Can anyone hear the first few bars of As Time Goes By and not think of Rick and Ilsa?

One of my favorite bits in the film is the coda to that first line. After Capt. Renault informs Rick he is shutting the club down because he has discovered gambling going on, the croupier, played by Marcel Dalio, comes up and hands Renault his share of the evening’s take, for which Renault, with a straight face, not missing a beat, thanks him (please excuse the silly header someone put on).

There are tons of sources of information about Casablanca, including Wikipedia, of course – Casablanca entry – but while it’s great to read about it, just do yourself a favor and go buy a copy.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

Later,

Late Night Listening with Fear of Strangers

I loved this band. In my late-night disc jockey days in the early/mid 80s, I played their music a lot, and seeing them live in a local club in Montpelier was ecstasy. Energy, melodies, and imagistic lyrics.

There isn’t much in the way of good video available, but here’s a home-brew vid of them performing one of their best, Shopping for a Dog:

Later,

When one of your former propagandists calls you crazy, you have a problem, whether you know it or not

David Frum (coiner of the phrase “the Axis of Evil,” which helped send us into tragedy in the Middle East) has joined the ranks of conservative apostates, at least as far as the current state of the Right is concerned, declaring the current Republican leadership completely out-to-lunch (paid for by corporate lobbyists, no doubt) in terms of providing coherent national policy and true leadership.

In this commentary in New York magazine, Frum, while reminding readers of his solid conservative credentials, observes that the Right has constructed a separate reality for itself, one that leads to really stupid, and even dangerous, policy decisions, summarizing:

This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

This doesn’t mean Frum has become a born-again progressive (like me, after shrugging off the mantle of my Republican heritage decades ago), but he is sounding his alarm not only for his party, but for the country, as well.

Later,

November 22nd, 1963

I was sitting in Mr. McPhail’s social studies class, just after lunch when the principal came on the intercom.

There was worse to come, but despite all that has happened since, and all we have learned, John F. Kennedy’s assassination still has the power to sadden me deeply. The early 60s were a moment of optimism, despite the fact that nuclear annihilation was never more than minutes away. After Kennedy’s death, there was always a certain heaviness around our shoulders.

Later,

Our economic/fiscal problem in a nutshell, from Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis, writing in Vanity Fair has a lengthy piece on how California became governmentally dysfunctional. It’s an absorbing piece, but one sentence early on really grabbe me; because it sums up our current national economic crisis – The people who had power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death.

Amen.

Later,

Late Night Listening with the Big O and KD

Whoa . . . .

Later,

Christina Romer explains

The former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and current economics professor at Berkeley Christina Romer lays out how we got into this mess in a recent speech. As the title suggests, she separates facts from, well, just about everything we hear from the Right and certain Very Serious People in DC.

Thanks to Dr. Krugman for flagging this.

Later,

Terrific Time magazine piece on some of the myths about American poverty

I can’t post it; because it’s behind the Time paywall, but go pick up a copy of the magazine, or at least read it in your library. Ms. Kiviat’s piece is excellent, and there’s a very good photo essay on the web site that accompanies it.

I will note two important myths about modern poverty that Ms. Kiviat addresses. One is that poverty really isn’t all that bad; because look at all those people who own things, like Xboxes for their kids? The undercurrent here – that if you spent money on food and not Xboxes, you’d be fine, ties into the second myth – that being poor is your own damned fault. Both of these arguments are advanced by people whose agenda is lower social spending, not doing anything about poverty.

1. POVERTY IS SIMPLY ABOUT NOT HAVING ENOUGH INCOME

Jessica Jakubac, an Edgewood parent, lost her last job because her son woke up one morning with an inflamed leg. Jakubac rushed him to a clinic and would have called her office to say she’d be late, except that she doesn’t have a home phone (too expensive) and her cell-phone service had recently been cut off because she couldn’t pay the bill. By the time she called from the doctor’s office later that day, she’d been logged as a no-show, which compounded the numerous late arrivals already on her record because of chronic trouble with her car: it needed a new battery, but she couldn’t afford one, so she often had to find a jump start first thing in the morning.

Living with a small financial margin isn’t just about not being able to afford things; it’s also about not being able to get things done. A few times a year, the United Way of Central Maryland runs a poverty simulator in which middle-class participants are given a set of tasks, along with situational constraints like relying on family for child care, taking the bus and depending on the money from a teenager’s after-school job. Some people grow so frustrated that they quit before the exercise is over.

Volatility also plays a major role in what might be called the chaos of poverty. Over the course of a year, 20% of families in the poorest fifth will see their incomes drop by at least half from one four-month period to the next, according to Urban Institute research. Poverty often goes hand in hand with shifting work schedules, child-care arrangements and transportation and living situations–all of which are taxing to manage and have a negative effect on children.

2. FOCUSING ON INDIVIDUALS IS THE KEY TO POVERTY ALLEVIATION

It’s easy to frame poverty as an individual problem, but some of the highest-poverty pockets of the country are places that have been hit hardest by the collapse of decent-paying manufacturing jobs. To discount macroeconomic forces is to miss a big part of what drives U.S. poverty.

Since 1980, worker productivity has risen by 78% but full-time-worker pay, including fringe benefits, has grown by just half that. Less educated workers–those most prone to poverty–have fared the worst, according to MIT economist Frank Levy. Furthermore, while college-completion rates have grown substantially over the past generation, those gains are concentrated among richer families, as research by the University of Michigan’s Patrick Wightman and Sheldon Danziger illustrates. The increasing price of college is a factor, as is the fact that, for the poor, taking time off work to be a student is often not an option. But the education gap between kids from rich and poor families has not only been growing but starts even before kindergarten. A good school in every neighborhood is surely one of the most powerful antipoverty programs imaginable, but enriching preschool may need to be part of the equation too.

Go read the whole thing.

Later,

Three important issues regarding deficits, government spending, and public perception

Bruce Bartlett, at Fiscal Times, has a very good column on (a) the fact that the public knows next to nothing about government spending and budgets, (b) the media has done next to nothing to educate them, and (c) Barack Obama missed an important opportunity by not explaining how we got here, fiscally.

Oh, to have this kind of clear, pragmatic thinking advising leadership . . . .

Later,