My Friend Toni Gets a Blog

My friend Toni has got herself a blog. It's everything you would hope a blog to be: thoughtful, original, and imimitable, one person's effort to put her own stamp on the universe. Toni has had more time than one would wish for over the last few years to attend to this sort of thing, and it is a pleasure to see her put her talents to such a good end.

"If Your Phone Rings and Nobody's There--It'll Be Me"

My mother always told me I would get in trouble for trying to be too clever. Looks like she had the right dope.

I sent an email to a bunch of my friends--maybe you got it--and asked a favor. But I couldn't help myself. I festooned it with cute: "Trust me," I said, "I will not ask for your password, and will not require you to deposit a $10,000 good faith fee in a foreign bank account."

Well, I should have remembered that it doesn't make sense to yell "Hi, Jack!" in the airport security line. My friend Toni reports:

I just found your email in my "junk" box because my mail program looks for certain phrases that indicate it might indeed be an invitation to bail out a Nigerian in distress etc. etc., so by telling us you were not enlisting us in such a scheme, and by using similar words to do so, it triggered the "junk" alert ... .

Here's the message I got above your email: "Appears to be advance fee fraud (Nigerian 419)."

A mail program that's too smart for its own good I guess...

Ah, you are too kind. I'm sure it is I, not the program, who is (acting) too smart for his own good. Of course, as Toni observes the same disappearing-message thing " I suppose could be happening to this very email I'm sending to you!" Right, except that it didn't. So what have we learned? We've learned that Toni's security program is more careful than mine.

Update: He could have asked us.

PS: I have no idea why this message is appearing in a weird type face all of a sudden.

Welcome, DeLong Throng

Follow Me, Men!

..to your one stop shop for nothing in particular.  That's our problem--branding--unless you can identify an audience for "attention surplus disorder "  An "underrated" ranking from  DeLong is too kind, although the tag "law professor" is somewhat misleading: it is true that I've been on the coal face down here at the law school man and boy these 40-plus years now but after all that time I'm pretty much of a busted flush on law: I would rather talk about Caravaggio or Shakespeare or Verdi or Genghis Khan.   And more, oh so much more: I offer a nomination for The Luckiest Horse in the Fifth Millennium BCE, and The Biggest Fathead in the Second Millennium AD,  plus the predictable mindless yapping  and the occasional absurdly misguided prediction.

Oh, and at no extra charge you get The Wichita Bureau,  The Alabama Bureau, My Cousin Dave, my sister Sally, my friend Joel,   my friend Toni and the twins, Ignoto and Ignota.  Oh and of course, acute or acerb asides from Mrs. Buce.

So wallow and disport yourself ad libitum.  And as the serving maid said to Prince Philip--"Save your fork, ducks--there's pie!" 

Hey, Scratch My Back, Will You?

My friend Toni points to a prize: a website devoted to documenting fake Buddha quotes.  The site offers elegant examples, along with some interesting insights into the whole fake-quotes enterprise: how this stuff gets manufactured, and why.  It seems that some people just lend themselves to this kind of treatment--Yogi Berra and Will Rogers no doubt heading the list.  But the manufacturing of undocumented or undocumentable quotations surely tells you something about the sensibilities of the quoter and the anxieties of the time.  My own first encounter with this sort of thing came back during the 1964 Presidential campaign (Johnson-Goldwater).  I was working the Kentucky state capitol for The Louisville Tiimes, and I noticed that some well-wisher was festooning the men's rooms with little paste-ups of one-liners, mostly devoted to showing either how (a) Khrushchev was rooting for Lyndon Johnson or (b) Lincoln was plumping for Barry Goldwater.

Khrushchev seems to have faded from view but my guess is that Lincoln still stands high in the fake-quote league tables, particularly for his (supposed) habit of telling the rest of us we ought to get off our Fat Butts and quit taking government money.  Here's  a whole catalog of Lincolnisms here, together with some remarkable documentation and history; see also link,  ("other misnomer," mid-page).  Churchill, of course, gets similar treatment.  We tried to deal with one tiny corner of the Churchill cathedral here just the other day; for a more extended selection, go here.    Mark Twain is almost too easy, but here are a few offerings.  link.

Yogi Berra is, of course, such a cosmic sink of fake quotations that he almost beggars any effort at collection; Snopes even offers up a fake Yogi Berra commencement address ("Do not covet thy neighbor's wife unless she has nothing else to wear"--who knew that the Yogi was also a zen master?).  Ironically, it appears that Yogi probably did say "I never said most of the things I said" (or something very close).  Quotesleuth Fred Shapiro documents it here, with some bonus comments on the peculiar Yogi style.

With the Buddha (though not with the Yogi), I should think part of the problem is sheer remoteness:  who can we accurately transmit anything across almost unimaginable chasms of time and space.    Anecdote, I remember when young reading two different translations of Lao Tzu.   I couldn't make head or tail out of the first so I moved on to the second.  I couldn't make sense of that either--and I got the unsettling sense that the two translations bore little or no resemblance to each other.  As Lao Tzu himself would surely say, bummer.  Thanks again, Toni, and meanwhile, my own favorite Buddha quote is the headline to this post.

A Little Daylight Music

My friend Toni just stopped by my coffee shop table to remark on how nice it is to hang out in a spot that pipes in a Beethoven trio. She's right. of course, but it triggered the memory of a more complex venue. I was sojourning in central London; you could get great bread from an Italian bake shop down in Soho. Walking home with a fresh score, you'd pass the coffee shops that were juicing up the morning lineup with--through the open windows--a strong dose of Mozart.

You'd also pass the hookers who, apparently having failed to make their nut for the night before, were still out there in their black net stockings trying to cadge their own trade.

Fresh bread, stale hookers and Mozart: my, that takes me back.

Hello, Marketing?

My friend Toni is author of a book called How to Be Sick, aka "A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers." Kudos to Toni: she now has Korean translation. But the Google translate Englishing of the Korean title reads "What Hurts the Living."


One may hope that something is lost in translation.

Juan and Natalie Play Palookaville

Juan Diego Flórez took a near-unprecedented encore at the Met last week, in Daughter of the Regiment (nine high C’s). Mr. and Mrs. Buce caught up with the show today at the Palookaville multiplex and we can see what the excitement is about. Flórez indeed puts on a remarkable show, but it was also a good lesson in the unfortunate side effects of this kind of promotion. That is: the Met’s Daughter is a remarkable show all round, and the Flórez bravura number is only one, and maybe not the greatest, of its virtues.

I had heard about the encore, but I hadn’t read any of the reviews or commentary, so I didn’t know what a complete, fully-formed, well-intergrated morticed-at-the-joints production we have here. Also, how it succeeds in taking a big risk.

Daughter is, of course, a total war horse, but the production is nearly new. The most notable feature is a lot of new spoken dialogue—surely a tremendous risk with any classic, although perhaps a little less risky with a free-floating comedy than it would be with something solemn and marmoreal like, say Otello. Anyway, the dialogue works, and “works” not just in the sense of “not failing” but in the sense of actually adding something to the show. In its original form, Dialog is an extremely good-natured boy-meets-girl romance (if built on the silliest possible premise). The dialogue adds a layer of acerb comedy—comedy that is good enough in its own right, but also sufficient ot add a texture of complexity and irony to the whole stew. So, a much better opera (to my taste) with than without.

This is one of the operas that made Luciano Pavarotti famous, in company with Joan Sutherland (it’s also the opera that ended Kathleen Battle’s Met career when Joe Volpe canned her sorry soprano ass after some backstage misbehavior back in 1984). I’d say Flórez is at least a fit successor to Pavarotti—maybe not quite as marvelous a piece of machinery, but more thoughtful and reflective, with a more precise sense of what he is doing. And the guy is buff, equal to all kinds of acrobatics and capable of hoisting his leading lady into mid-air. Compare Pavarotti who you suspected of scarfing down an extra plate of pasta between scenes.

Thing is though, for all Flórez’ high C’s & stuff, Natalie Dessay as his lady is at once his match and a necessary complement. She didn’t sing so much as shout her way through the performance, with a lot of her own areobatic stage play—but with voice enough of her own to keep up with her co-star. Indeed, just after Flórez belts out his high notes in “Ah, Mes Ami,” Dessay presents herself as his foil with her farewell song, “Il faut partier,” made not a bit less touching by the fact that she’s wearing pants and an undershirt, and tugging a rope line of laundry. More: Flórez himself said that he found his second-act aria (which is less flashy) more difficult than the first, and he certainly did it credit. Dessay, by the way, comes across as just as physically fit in as her co-star. When we saw her at Santa Fe a couple of years ago, we remarked on how tiny she seemed. She is pretty small; but arms like those betray that she spends not much more time at the conservatory than she does at the gym.

And the encore: actually, Flórez didn’t do it for us, which was fine with me. He took a long, long ovation and you could see him working his throat; we actually thought he was going to. But just as well: this encore stuff shouldn’t get to be a habit. Indeed I have to say I suspect there was a good deal of marketing in it to begin with: I think I read somewhere that Peter Gelb, the major domo, asked him several weeks ago if he thought he might be up to it if, you know, the need arose. The need arose and so did Flórez rose to the need, and Gelb got one of those unbuyable rounds of pulibicity he seems to be good at.

Fn.: My friend Toni offers an Amazon review of the London version of this rendering here, and of an earlier Flórez performance here.

Revenge of the Nerds with Briefcases

It's true: we're surrounded by IP lawyers.

First, we learned that the government may owe royalties on torture music.
As they say, ignore the Constitution if you like but don't mess with ASCAP.

Next, my colleague Anupam points me to the travails of John McCain's mashup.

And finally, my friend Toni reports on the word game that they play on Facebook. It's "Scrabulous," but when she logged on this morning, she learned:

Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.

When word games are outlawed ...

Update: The saga continues (link).

Book Fair II: Bernhard on McEwan

Here's Episode II of the Underbelly summer Book Fair. We pass the mike to my opera-loving friend Toni Bernhard, for a suggestion that has nothing to do with opera:

I recommend Ian McEwan's Amsterdam: A Novel. Not the best reviewed of his books, it's my favorite of his and, for you beachcombers, a quick read. One reviewer called the characters soulless but McEwan knew what he was doing. The plot: two men, former lovers of the same woman, meet at her funeral and make a pact I shall not divulge. The novel is biting, dark, funny, very British and only 198 pages long. It's not a profound book but it's prose at its best and that's good enough for me.

Afterthought: Toni's Amazon opera reviews are here. Much more book fair still to come. For your convenience, we will be collecting all the Book Fair posts here.

Travelling Again

I’m off to a teardrop on the coast of Maine to watch the Perseids, and to provide succor for Mrs. B’s carved and scraped shoulder. If all goes well, we may stage our own private reading of As You Like It. I assume I'll be out of wi-fi range, so I'm not even bothering with the laptop. Some things to do when I’m away:

Go to Credit Slips and read the cool posts by Emily Kadens about hanging bankrupts, etc.

Watch for a new liquidity crisis with the guidance of Mark Thoma, (who reads Brad DeLong so you don’t have to).

For sane skepticism about real estate, see Calculated Risk. For a more excitable view, see Housing Bubble.

If the oil market starts caterwauling, visit Oil Drum.

Save yourself the trouble of reading all those 10Ks with Michelle Leder. If you really like getting under the hood of financial statements, visit AAO.

For a new fave in the realm of acerb commentary, visit Jenny Diski (I really must update my blogroll). For a blue/white peacock on a blue/purple tree, visit my old friend Toni.

…and if this isn’t enough, for a really cool collection of new links, go here.