OF A GOLDEN AGE

This NYT piece on the shopping habits of prominent men bore out an unexpected appearance by personal hero Chuck Close:

I hate to shop. For the last 20 years I only shopped once every two or three years. I would go to the big and tall store and buy only what I could find in 20 minutes, tops — usually a few dozen briefs, T-shirts and sweaters. If there was time left, I would try on a jacket. Nothing needed to be perfect: just fit and be black.

Now I am buying African block-print shirts and pants in a riot of colors and patterns from an African street merchant. I visit him every few weeks to see what’s new. I buy 10 or 15 at a time.

Chuck Close is a job creator, you guys. You can see him wearing an aforementioned black jacket in this riotously delightful interview on the Colbert Report.

Another man in the piece says he wants to buy multiples but “not like Steve Jobs.” I can think of worse things than to resemble one of the world’s wealthiest geniuses.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is in $3 billion worth of hot water over a laundry list of ethical and criminal violations related to a drug that was found to cause heart problems.

I used to help coordinate some logistics for pharmaceutical dinner programs, and it’s really like a game of chicken with the FDA spending limits. The GSK offenses included in this settlement are, the company alleges, old and outmoded and no longer GSK’s modus operandi, but who can say?

Here’s something interesting though:

GlaxoSmithKline, with a market value of more than $110 billion, had net profit of about $5 billion on sales of $43 billion in the year ending Sept. 30. [...]

Frances H. Miller, a Boston University law professor and health policy expert, said, “Although $3 billion is a very big number in terms of drug industry settlements, it’s not a very big number in relation to almost $50 billion in annual revenue for the world’s fourth-largest pharmaceutical company.”

A company’s annual revenue has almost no bearing on its profit margins! I could make $100 billion a year and spend out $99.99 billion on costs. Moreover, $43 billion in sales is NOT “almost $50 billion” — in my personal school of mathematics, we don’t just round up almost a sixth. This quotation is an inflammatory soundbyte at best, because the bottom line is that this settlement eats up 60 PERCENT of GSK’s annual profits. That’s an enormous blow! Doesn’t a recordbreakingly huge criminal settlement stand on its own as a news story, without painting it as, still, some kind of financial underreach?

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in this settlement, and I believe there should have been prison time on the table for the responsible parties at GSK. But I don’t believe in misleading journalism or the glossing over of important numbers

This Joshua Holland piece, The real “class war” in America, is worth reading and absolutely fascinating. Here:

That narrative ignores two simple and indisputable truths. First, contrary to popular belief, we don’t all start out with the same opportunities. The reality is that in the U.S. today, the best predictor of a newborn baby’s economic future is how much money his or her parents make.

It also ignores the fact that living in an individualistic, capitalist society carries inherent risk. You can do everything right — study hard, work diligently, keep your nose clean — but if you fall victim to a random workplace accident, you can nevertheless end up being disabled in the blink of an eye and find yourself in need of public assistance. You can end up bankrupt under a pile of healthcare bills or you could lose your job if you’re forced to take care of an ailing parent. Children — innocents who aren’t even old enough to work for themselves — are among the largest groups receiving various forms of public assistance.

Here’s what I’m reading today:

Ponzi-Scheme Suicide (from the New Yorker blog “Back Issues”), which quotes from and links to a 2009 piece on the storied history of Ponzi schemes. The thing is, cited suicide Ivar Kreuger is of much more moraled stuff than Ponzi and friends . . . Relatively speaking.

His suicide note began, “I have made such a mess of things that I believe this to be the most satisfactory solution for everybody concerned.” Two weeks later, accountants at Price Waterhouse declared his companies insolvent. He left behind widespread destruction. The venerable house of Lee, Higginson went bankrupt, and one partner had the decency to admit, “I suddenly knew we had all been idiots.”

How to Reboot Star Trek (from excellent Forbes blogger Alex Knapp), in which he lays out some scrappier, more relevant modern retakes on the Star Trek oeuvre.

What kinds of economic challenges arise in an era where money is obsolete because scarcity is obsolete? How are cultural conflicts and civil liberties issues resolved? Does the Federation have political parties? I think that there’s a real potential to tell some interesting stories that have never really been told on TV in a science fiction context. And the beauty of it is that this show can be cheap.

And finally, Rookie’s GREAT interview with Jeff Garlin, Can I Please Say This?, is loaded with useful soundbytes ranging from general good advice to the A.D.D.-specific. Here’s one:

The only time that it really doesn’t pay off to be open is sometimes when you’re in love with somebody, because you reveal yourself and if they decide they don’t like that part of you, that’s horrible, and it’s really hurtful and sad, and I’ve always hated that. But, you know, I am the way I am.

Marty linked me to this Grantland interview with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of my favorite actors. He makes some welcome and thoughtful comments about (500) Days of Summer, a movie I loved but a lot of people hated.

It’s sometimes possible to lose sight of who the person is that you’re actually with instead of who you imagine them to be.

I did a movie about that called (500) Days of Summer.

Yeah, with Zooey Deschanel. I thought it was really effective in communicating that notion.

It was a widely misinterpreted movie, I think.

Really? How so?

Well, people tend to say, “Why didn’t she end up with him? He was so nice!” But I think that he was really quite guilty of projecting a fantasy onto this girl that she didn’t necessarily deserve, and that, honestly, he was pretty wrapped up in his own selfish point of view.

[Laughing.] I’ve been there many times myself, and the movie sort of spoke to me because over the years I’ve often been guilty of projecting a fantasy onto girls.

We’ve all been guilty of it. I’m sure I’ve done the same. And we all do it to one degree or another in every relationship. But it’s just funny to me, because I felt like the point of that movie was illuminating this guy who is basically delusional, who keeps projecting all these things onto this girl, and how that’s a problem for him, and how he then sort of grows out of it. But it seems like a lot of the people that see the movie don’t quite catch that. They just think he’s a great guy.

From Duplicate Keys by Jane Smiley:

She had Alice’s favorite face, pale, peaceful, and good, unglamorous, a face that never fell apart with animation like Alice’s own, a face that Alice was used to staring at and analyzing, wondering if Susan was pretty or beautiful, wondering if the fascination of it came from Susan or from herself.

I like when fiction allows a place for people to observe their friends and acquaintances for its own sake.

When I was in school, a beloved professor had us read two novels in succession. The first was beautiful and inward-looking, with a shifting narrative perspective that showed us each character’s thoughts in first-person depth. The second told a similar story but in strict third person. Suddenly, we learned how people’s personalities were based on how they looked, what they wore: A woman with short hair had certain traits, for instance. Since then, I’ve tried to pay attention to how writers use observations to draw their characters. I like how Alice looks at Susan with a loving, attentive eye borne of old friendship.

Duplicate Keys has a lot of promise so far (I’ve barely started it) — to be simplistic, it reminds me of the plot of the Big Chill. There are a lot of main characters, all different but all very trusting in one another at first glance, and all brought together by a traumatic death. We’ll see!

All you have to do is use “pasta” in the headline and I’m there:

In Italy, pasta is consumed by 99 percent of households at an average annual household rate of 72.6 pounds, while in America it is consumed by 84 percent of households at an annual household rate of 12 pounds, according to Nielsen data provided by Barilla.

This means almost 1 in 6 American households doesn’t consume pasta, and since the numbers were gathered and provided by a pasta company, the real number of pasta abstainers may be even higher.

But really, imagine being part of the 1% of Italian households that don’t eat pasta! You’d be the laughing stock of the whole nation.

Miss Manners offers perspective for nondrinkers:

If people would stop monitoring what goes or does not go into other people’s mouths, the world would go around a lot faster.

Miss Manners also finds peculiar the notion that only some horrid prohibition keeps everyone from drinking at every opportunity. And, incidentally, that no one is driving home.

The dismissive reply is a cheerful, “I just don’t like it.” Enjoyment is not a matter for debate, and whether it is the taste of alcohol that you don’t like or its effects need not be stated.

Last night I went to bar trivia with Ed, a fellow nondrinker, so when our team won a round of beers we got 7up instead.

Here’s a neat item from my personal collection: a lady’s handkerchief featuring an illustrated calendar of 1953 with all the holidays circled.

Yes, the illustration for May is Whistler’s Mother. Maybe the suggestion is that May is for mopes? Or . . . art?

George Lopez’s late-night show on TBS has been cancelled. The plus side is that I no longer have to rush for the remote after Conan ends, as though Lopez somehow transmits the plague. Maybe it does!