Corner Office #2

Love the “Corner Office” column series.

Here’s a nice bit from today’s, an interview with Wendy Kopp, founder and chief executive of Teach for America:

Q. Any particular time-management techniques?

A. The best time-management thing I do is reflect an hour a week on the overall strategic plan for myself — what do I need to do to move my priorities forward? And then there are the 10 minutes a day that I spend thinking about, “O.K., so based on the priorities for the week, how am I going to prioritize my day tomorrow?” I don’t know how I could do what I do without spending that time.

I am obsessive about that system because the world seems to be moving faster and faster, so you have to figure out how to still drive things proactively instead of just becoming completely reactive.

LOLZ!

I don’t know anything about Wendy Kopp; she seems like an admirably oriented human being w/saint-like work-ethic, someone whose book I should probably tear several chapters out of and smoke: “…this vision, that one day all children in our nation should have the opportunity to attain an excellent education” — a sentiment essentially beyond reproach, I’d say.

Without access to excellent education, how will young people learn to participate in society, to drive things faster and faster, proactively? How will they learn to develop paradigm-shattering marketing techniques and implement superior conduits and methodologies for information- and data-sharing? We’ll need plenty of people who shit spreadsheets and circuit-bend the internet as preventative treatment for impotence; much health care professional teams to nurse our bloated, bluetoothed bodies into septuagenarianism (time to catch up on yr reading!), those GOOD mathematicians and engineers who will trailblaze the maze out of climate change, over-population, and fossil-fuel scarcity while simultaneously providing a new speculative investment bubble to revive the economies of the Northern hemisphere. Let’s make sure that every child has the self-esteem, confidence, and intellectual toolkit necessary to navigate the marvelous and invigorating labyrinth of modernity that leads to the bureaucrat’s cubicle, the conference room table, and the catered reception.

“We made you poor — join us!”

Fave Trax:: Plaster Hounds

Plaster Hounds

2004 Chromatics (in KRMTX phase) LP sports an impeccable cover design, drum machine/guitar/voice tones that I’m still trying to steal, and “best-drummer-in-hardcore” Max Anarchy from Get Hustle. Go!

Cemetary Grates

Two weekends ago Taner & I ran across this advice column query in the Post (which was answered soberly).

DEAR AMY: We buried my father 10 years ago in a part of the cemetery that used to be quiet and secluded. Now, to one side of our plot, the surviving pot-smoking members of some woman’s cancer support group gather there regularly.

On the other side, every relative of a Chinese lady has to burn incense, paper money and mini firecrackers.

In front of our plot, a metal band plays a CD that could be called “Wake the Dead” in memory of its former drummer.

Behind our plot lies an old Scottish man, whose clan blasts bagpipes in his honor.

My mother’s asthma is triggered by smoke and flowers; my migraines are triggered by noise.

What can we do to prevent this? — Pain at the Cemetery

Regulators mount up

The “special fact” in the 4th paragraph is not up high enough in the story for my tastes…

Staffer at SEC Had Warned Of Madoff
Lawyer Raised Alarm, Then Was Pointed Elsewhere

By Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 2, 2009

 An investigator at the Securities and Exchange Commission warned superiors as far back as 2004 about irregularities at Bernard L. Madoff’s financial management firm, but she was told to focus on an unrelated matter, according to agency documents and sources familiar with the investigation.

Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, a lawyer in the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, sent e-mails to a supervisor, saying information provided by Madoff during her review didn’t add up and suggesting a set of questions to ask his firm, documents show. Several of these questions directly challenged Madoff activities that much later turned out to be elements of his massive fraud.

But with the agency under pressure to look for wrongdoing in the mutual fund industry, she wasn’t able to continue pursuing Madoff, according to documents and two people familiar with the investigation, and her team soon concluded its work on the probe.

Walker-Lightfoot’s supervisors on the case were Mark Donohue, then a branch chief in her department, and his boss, Eric Swanson, an assistant director of the department, said two people familiar with the investigation. Swanson later married Madoff’s niece, and their relationship is now under review by the agency’s inspector general, who is examining the SEC’s handling of the Madoff case.

As far as illicit relationships go, is this not more ”newsworthy” than that Marc Sandford’s affair?

Tristan’s Metier

Two excerpts from a Glenn O’Brien interview with Kraftwerk from 1977.

When did you start the group?

RH: We started playing together in ‘68 with different people. Then we set up our studio in 1970. So Kraftwerk was founded in 1970. We’ve played with different combinations of people, but for the last three years we’ve been playing with the two drummers we have now: Karl and Wolfgang.

Do they use regular drums at all?

RH: No, it’s all electronic. We have invented some special electronic drum system and patented them. We had regular drums with amplification and echo machines.

FLORIAN SCHNEIDER: But they were not sensitive enough. They were too loud. Too noisy.

RH: Now we can make all kinds of volume changes. And also the attitude of the player is a non-physical one. Our drummers don’t sweat. So they are like us. They are not subhumans doing the dirty work. They are like computer programmers.

* * * * *

Would you like your music to be beamed to other solar systems?

RH: Of course. So far we’ve been beaming ourselves around the world. When we wrote the song ‘Autobahn’ we were beaming ourselves into American car radios. Dreams come true.

You don’t have moral ideas. Do you have political ideas?

RH: We strongly believe in anarchy and self rule.

When did you start the group?

RH: We started playing together in ‘68 with different people. Then we set up our studio in 1970. So Kraftwerk was founded in 1970. We’ve played with different combinations of people, but for the last three years we’ve been playing with the two drummers we have now: Karl and Wolfgang.

Do they use regular drums at all?

RH: No, it’s all electronic. We have invented some special electronic drum system and patented them. We had regular drums with amplification and echo machines.

FLORIAN SCHNEIDER: But they were not sensitive enough. They were too loud. Too noisy.

RH: Now we can make all kinds of volume changes. And also the attitude of the player is a non-physical one. Our drummers don’t sweat. So they are like us. They are not subhumans doing the dirty work. They are like computer programmers.

The Tab

Lest we forget:

June 22 (Reuters) - Following are security developments in Iraq at 1100 GMT on Monday.

MOSUL - Gunmen killed two Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint in east Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

MOSUL - Gunmen opened fire on policemen in central Mosul, killing two, police said.

MOSUL - Police found a body with bullet wounds to the head and chest in central Mosul, police said.

BAGHDAD - A parked car bomb in central Baghdad’s Karrada district killed five people, police said.

FALLUJA - A suicide bomber detonated himself outside the Falluja municipal council building, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad, killing one person and wounding five, police said.

KHANAQIN - A roadside bomb killed three soldiers near the town of Khanaqin, 140 km (100 miles) northeast of Baghdad, the army said.

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb went off near a police patrol, killing three civilians and wounding 12 others near al-Hamza Square in Baghdad’s northeastern district of Sadr City, police said. The victims were all students in a passing mini-bus.

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb wounded three people in Baghdad’s eastern Habibiya district, police said.

Never Wanted to Be One

Fragile State

Because we don’t have blog turbo that let’s you upload video ($60/yr?!) we will not be able to follow through on my morning dream to post heart-softening clips from a certain body of water near Dickenson’s County Store… and instead must continue posting about wretched things such as imperial sociological experiments in Afghanistan.

In today’s WPost there’s a solid piece on USAID projex in Afghanistan (by the author of the celebrated book that’s being remade into a movie that’s given a title stolen from Eat My Mind’s space page and no longer just about dorm rooms anymore, starring, of course, Will Hunting). The newspiece focuses on the agriculture sector in Afghanistan and several funky blunders (aka “war bloopers”) by the previous administration. Given the avowed goal of rebuilding the Afghan state, it is strange how much the Bush Dudes completely bypassed the government. Instead of working with the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture to ”build capacity” (as the development heads say) they set up expensive worthless development projects through private contractors, who, leaning heavily on some flat-earth free enterprise textbook, determined Afghanistan had a comparative advantage in pomegranates & almonds & such and tried to convince farmers to take on these crops because markets in Dubai were totally trying to buy snacks. For example, etc. Bush Dudes, as Lewis Lapham once said, were utopian anarchists. In this case, Utopian–in that they carried some hyper-abstracted political theory about the harmonizing function markets in society–and Anarchic–in that, through their actions/priorities, they sought to render government agencies irrelevant. (Despite spending almost $8billion on agriculture initiatives, when the current minister of agriculture assumed the post he was shocked to find his office without phone, internet, or staff.) What is wildstyle is that this tack was somewhat novel and a departure from the prevailing imperialist state-building orthodoxy. I mean, if you want to be a 21st century neo-colonialist there are playbooks you can pull off the shelf. And that way, when you fail, no one in Washington will give you a hard time. But these guys…      [Snap, need to get the weekend started--will continue da rant on Monday]

Human Potential / Potentially Human (Remix)

Of course the flipside to “Be a Fascist to a Fascist” is “Show Compassion to Robocop (He’s a human too (sometimes))”

A backer of Mir Hossein Mousavi helps evacuate an injured riot-police officer during riots in Tehran on June 13, 2009. (Olivier Laban-Mattei / AFP / Getty Images) More pictures

Mmm mmm mmm for the [sight] of it ($hoop)

“A new study finds that the mere sight of money warps judgment. In several experiments, researchers asked people to identify as many words as possible from a set of random letters – as in the games Scrabble or Boggle – and voluntarily score themselves. They were offered several dollars each time they reached a certain score. However, for some of the people, the researchers had put thousands of dollars in cash on tables in the middle of the room. For those people, the rate of cheating was much higher.”

Gino, F. & Pierce, L., “The Abundance Effect: Unethical Behavior in the Presence of Wealth,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (forthcoming).

Good dinner party joke

Did you hear about the white supremacists on a rampage in D.C.?

Yeah, they’re blocking the nomination of Robert Groves to head the Census Bureau because they’re worried he won’t under-represent minorities in urban areas!

rejoinder style

Shortly after assuming the English throne in 1603 King James summoned the nation’s religious leaders to discuss all things theological.

In the discussion on baptism, the Bishop of Peterborough then made a fool of himself. Apropos of nothing much, he said that he knew of one case in which an ancient father had baptized with sand instead of water. ‘Whereto his Majesty answered pleasantly, “A turd for the Argument. He might as well have pissed on them, for that had been more liker to water than sand.”’ The bishop’s reputation never recovered.

A turd for the Argument. Ah yes, from time to time we all have endured conversational contributions such as this. Always on the receiving end, assuredly. Now comes an appropriate expression to put rogue bishops & freethinkers back in their place.

Great Seal of Massachusetts

Alerted to the existence of this funny thing by N. Chomsky, by way of Bookforum:

Fried Green

Das Randy Dandy; Da Durnan HisSelf

Of the lyric poet Sappho, who hailed from Lesbos in the time of Solon, Harry E. Barnes writes:

Though only a few of her poems are extant we get from them an impression of the purest lyric ecstasy. It is as though her words were “tipped with fire.” We have here the clearest and simplest communication of personal passion in language of exquisite simplicity and grace, with a poignancy and an insight never excelled. One or two examples must convey a suggestion of this simple beauty. A girl who failed to get married is compared to an apple that ripens out of reach—“Like an apple that ripens on the tip of the bough, yes on the very tip—for the gatherers had forgotten it; no they had not forgotten it but they were unable to reach it.”

Da Durnan, rapt & transported by the scent of an rose;

poolside, American Embassy in Cairo, c. 1846

Reality Fatigue

From The New Yorker (again…not cool, I realize…):

Finally, as Obama said, “there remains the question of detainees at Guantánamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here—this is the toughest single issue that we will face.” This group, “who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted,” might be held in preventive detention, perhaps forever. It’s a sobering thought, that Obama could consider approving this kind of long-term detention, and it remains to be seen how much evidence would be required to justify such an extraordinary step and how many cases it would involve…In any case, it’s hard to imagine any President agreeing to release people who, as Obama put it, “in effect, remain at war with the United States.”

Doesn’t need to be said again, but still:

Yes, it is hard to imagine any President releasing prisoners who are at war with the United States. But why do we care about the United States if the rule of law is applied randomly or to complement political moods? What exactly is worth protecting (besides all of our stuff) in a nation with no legal or theoretical skeleton?
I’ll answer my own question: The sun rising/setting over the Grand Canyon, the towering majesty of the Redwood; Pollack’s manic manifestations of the modern human psyche, Coltrane’s quest for musical union with the Divine; the taut prose of Raymond Carver, and the excitement of televised professional football. Let’s not forget the quiet, God-like smile that curves the corners of your firstborn, wrapped in swaddling clothes as she is, cradled in warmth and light.

Queen Christina

Toto Wampage

From The New Yorker:

Cast of characters:

Margaret Mitchell, author of the thousand-page blockbuster novel “Gone With the Wind.”
David O. Selznick, the legendary, manic producer of “Gone With the Wind.”
Victor Fleming, a vigorous and resourceful man who was then directing “The Wizard of Oz” — few considered him an artist.
Sidney Howard, East Coast playwright and screenwriter.
Ben Hecht, the greatest and most cynical of Hollywood screenwriters.

The story:

When summoned by Selznick, Fleming hadn’t read Mitchell’s novel, but he took a look at the screenplay and immediately told the producer, “Your fucking script is no fucking good.”

*    *    *

Hecht agreed to work on the script as long as he didn’t have to read the book. Selznick told him the plot, but he couldn’t make any sense of it, so Selznick retrieved Howard’s version, and, as Hecht listened, Selznick and Fleming read it aloud, Selznick taking the role of Scarlett, Fleming reading Rhett.

In this manner, the three men worked eighteen or twenty hours a day, sustained by Dexedrine, peanuts, and bananas, a combination that Selznick believed would stimulate the creative process. On the fourth day, according to Hecht, a blood vessel burst in Fleming’s eye. On the fifth, Selznick, eating a banana, swooned, and had to be revived by a doctor.

Athletica (only two months until the article on Marto’s new bistro)

In addition to namechecking Lululemon the NYT’s article on some ex-junkie no-nonsense yoga guru to the stars has this choice 1990s post-modern fiction nonsense:

“Come on people, let’s get started,” he said in a New York accent, as if leading a conference call.

Then he cranked up “Misty Mountain Hop” by Led Zeppelin and led the students through a warm-up of sun salutations. Soon he had them stretching into a difficult split pose.

“Didn’t you see the torture memos this week?” called out Jane Harman, a 63-year-old devoted student in the front row, who also happens to be the United States Representative for the South Bay region of Los Angeles County.

The teacher responded, “That’s why I’m doing this.”

“I can’t feel my face”

The NYT review of Reynolds Price’s “Arden Spirits,” an memoir of his student daze in 1950s Oxford, includes the below paragraph with a metaphorical punchline of dubious acceptability:

Mr. Price was hardly on the sexual sidelines while at Oxford, however. While traveling in Italy with a friend, he began loitering in the Borghese Gardens in Rome at night, where the “wooded throughways and bushes also converted, almost instantly at sundown, into the central pick-up spot for whores of all gender.” He takes a lover who, Mr. Price imagines, carried “a whiff of genetic memory of the passage of Attila and his Huns through medieval Europe.” Now there, you think, was some face-melting sex.