roberthart_phd

With a name like "Gustav" how can it NOT try to destroy Georgia?

Looking back, I was thinking that my posting frequency was perhaps stretching into some steadily increasing function of time (distance between post 2 and 3 is the square of the distance between post 1 and 2, etc.) but now I am wondering if it is perhaps a funky fibonacci sequence with a periodic reset. Or maybe it's a non-random but behaving-as-if-it-were-random set of occurences. Regardless, mousse is on my mind (coincidentally my 5 year old is watching Moose A. Moose on Noggin....different kind of moose).

My life is settling into a nice stable core (not the public/social choice definition of the equilibrium solution, mind you) of activities/loves/needs/addictions in the following categories: gastronomical, oenological, beautifical (for the beautiful game, of course), and gamblophilical (with a very heavy focus on the pokerphily, with small dabs of other related activities involving point spreads of foreign exchange rates). Interestingly, each of these BY THEMSELVES are probably enough to drive someone to ruin; I think I am banking on the sum of the parts collectively being less than the whole. This weekend saw the uncorking of a very nice wine picked up at the Reynolds Family Winery in Napa (a merlot of all things, since my wife and I are definitely cab preferrers but this is one of those quality merlots that reminds you of a luscious Napa cab), a final table in a 500+ NLHE tourney (and a cash in a PLO tourney at the same time), some excellent football as Espana simply destroyed an Amazonian German side (actually it was a good contest but the Spanish back four had an amazing run through the knockout stages, and Fernando Torres actually ran OVER the German defense - literally in the case of poor Phillip Lahm) and several different executions of the elusive mousse.

Mousse and I go way back. When I was a child we ate out a lot, and somehow along the way I decided that I was going to have chocolate mousse every place we ate. For no particular reason I carved out this little space for myself, and over the course of about 15 years probably had 50 or more versions of mousse.

Fast forward to the precipice of middle age (or halfway to life expectancy, although I think we all know that self selection and censoring means that my PERSONAL life expectancy is only loosely related to the aggregate numbers reported for all 300 million of us here in the USA) and as much as I love eating great food what I REALLY love doing is creating great food, or at least aspiring to create great food. And for me the great food part is more about creative expression than technical execution (which is why a lot of my food is inspired but tastes kind of shitty). After having a tasty peanut-butter and coconut mousse at a friends house (but the mousse was fresh so still a bit loose) I decided I needed to do something at home.

I've gone through about 4 iterations (one great thing about mousse is that it is not time consuming to make) ranging from the disastrous (a "Reese's" mousse using peanut butter and chocolate...WAY too much peanut butter and had the consistency of fudge...in fact I probably made fudge and didn't know it) to the not half bad (chocolate and espresso mousse that was light but not perfect). The challenge is that the perfect mousse (aspirationally at least, if we subscribe to the school of thought that perfection doesn't occur in reality) is at once rich, dense and bold while also being fluffy, light and delicate. Which means I am now on a serious "Einstein special theory of relativity (the e=mc2 one, not the cooler 4 dimensional one)" quest for the ideal balance between egg whites, heavy cream and the solids.

Could be worse.

I'm feeling guilty. You see, since I have caught a complete case of footballing obsession (which has been fed like kerosene by having a very close friend who has been developing it as well....leading to an exponential decrease in time to full-on affliction) and have chosen the club which is the manifestation of that addiction, I am actually experiencing the astronomical highs and Marianas Trench lows of the ride. Granted, the last six months have provided a good bit of both (the Carling Cup, with both the Arsenal drubbing and raising the cup against a poorly coached Chelsea side, was pure ecstasy; too many league wins turned to draws and defeats early in the season, a complete home stinker vs. PSV yesterday in the UEFA Cup) but I don't feel like I have earned the right to feel this way - but the reality is that I do.

I read Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby last summer on vacation, and conceptually understood the premise (mainly that the relationship to the team is not fun, not a blessing but more like a painful obligation that bears no relation to logic or intelligence and produces what primarily amounts to long periods of suffering punctuated by moments of extreme stress, tension, nausea and occasional bliss) but didn't quite get it. Now I do, I totally get it, and I am ashamed.

During the Arsenal return leg, I was in NYC on business and found myself watching the game sandwiched between two Aresnal fans with a Spurs fan two away from me to the left. Even up 4-1 with 5 minutes to go I was ANXIOUS, expecting that somehow it was all going to go bad. I know my colleague that day felt similarly, but the thing is that he grew up in North London, and had been a Spurs fan for 25+ years, and thus had a much broader array of misery to call on for that feeling. Perhaps his sense of dread was that much worse, but if so, perhaps the best thing for me to do would be to forget football exists, because I am not at all sure I can take it.

Following the FA Cup loss to ManU and a hardy 0-0 draw at Everton, Spurs took Manchester United 1-0 into extra time, honestly outplayed them for a full 94 minutes, yielded a corner that Tevez/Dawson put in with 30 seconds in injury time left for a draw. That feeling, a sickening, helpless, weak feeling of loss and despair has to be an order of magnitude worse than the joy of victory, even lifting a cup.

At the end, I suppose it is my journey, and my experience, and I hope the rest of the global Spurs community forgives me the conceit of feeling horrific based in so many ways on the historic pain the collective has endured for so many years.

We pride ourselves here, some more than others and with an excess that borders on monotony, on being the most capitalistic of capitalist societies (those whose pride is near jingoistic tend to write editorials for the Wall Street Journal). While many of us are more sensitive to the distortions that can occur in free markets (not intentional gov't distortions, the kind that appear naturally), and that random dumb luck can play a sizable role in how things in your life turn out, I think it is safe to say that we generally believe that markets tend to be much better the more free and open they are.

So, why is it that we want our sports leagues to compete as socialist organizations? Why do the same people who praise equality of opportunity and shun equality of outcomes see the latter as some indication of value in sport?

The whiners of Major League Baseball lament the disparity that exists because some owners spend more than others. The reality is that some organizations are also far more efficient in running their businesses, both from acquiring tv contracts and pricing and marketing their team to the specifics of player evaluation and contracts. "Small market" teams complain they can't compete, yet you have Philadelphia calling itself a "small market" simply because they botched their media deals - yet they are the 5th largest city in the country.

The NFL is held up as the fountainhead of good competition, yet any reasonable analysis suggests that a large portion of that competitive balance is artificial and comes from scheduling. The astute gambler can find some nice value on season total futures wagers this way. The NFL has a hard salary cap, and revenue sharing from national tv contracts (which makes a decent amount of sense since the league negotiates the contract). Still, there is a much bigger random component that produces playoff appearances and a championship than in other sports.

Amazingly, the far less free-market oriented nations of Europe and, well, just about everywhere, employ the most free-market oriented approach when it comes to football (not US football). Teams are much more explicitly businesses, there is no draft that penalizes successful teams, players are typically sold for cash rather than traded, and if you do not manage your team well on the pitch you get relegated to a lesser league (with dramatically lower $ potential); screw up off the pitch and you become Leeds Utd, who went from Premier League Champion to bankruptcy to their most recent relegation to League One (the third tier league below the EPL and the Championship).

Wouldn't we all like to see the Kansas City Royals and LA Clippers and Houston Texans fighting against relegation? It's amazing we screw this up so bad, and as a result have boring, unwatchable games at the end of seasons (unlike last year when a lot of EPL excitement was among the bottom dwellers fighting for their life). The NBA had teams obviously tanking games in an effort to get Kevin Durant or Greg Oden - if they were looking at being an CBA team the next season things might be different.

Of course, over here soccer is ridiculed for being boring and low-scoring. Yet there is nothing boring about a 0-0 game when you have to have that point to stay in the Premiership....

Argh.

At this rate my next post should happen in a little under 2.5 years, so set your alarms for October 2009!

What is truly alarming is not how long it's been since I last posted, but how ridiculously short the time [i]seems[/i] to have been. Work and family obligations dominate, as per usual, but in ways that chew up so much time that it is really a struggle to find time for odd pursuits (such as writing details of your life for an audience that approaches 0 at the limit for sure).

Of course, with that complete lack of time I've still managed to pick up a violent case of oenophilia, so bad that I know the difference between west bank and east bank bordeaux, both by label and taste and have added myself to the Screaming Eagle mailing list hoping against hope that I could find my way to paying $5k for a bottle in 20 or 30 years. But that also coincides with an overriding desire to exercise and otherwise take care of myself, such that miraculously I am in better shape than I've been since my early 20s (as I rapidly approach 40). AND, I've also been completely hooked by Premier League football, such that I am watching replays of 2006/7 season games every afternoon, counting the days down to Aug 11, and following the transfer season such that not only do I know who Torres and Bent are, I have solid opinions about how they will affect the fortunes of Liverpool and Spurs in 07/08.

Oh, and I am now working with neural nets and other tools that fall under the broad guise of complexity science, this being for my real paying job, so I am of course going to be using this new skill set to model important things, like college football spreads and totals and global forex markets. If only I could find some things to do in my free time....

Time flies when you work your tail off and essentially have no life (in direct contrast to the more common usage). So this caught my attention this morning:

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/CNBC/TVReports/HedgeFundDropsFiveBillionDollars.aspx

A bit hard to wrap your head around. The amazing part is that the guy had a good year in 2005, pulling in about $800MM for the fund, pocketing a nice $75MM for his troubles. And the dude was up TWO FREAKING BILLION AT THE END OF AUGUST, THREE WEEKS AGO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So it's not that he managed to reduce the equity of the fund by 52%, he really lost 61% of the funds nice $11.5BB bankroll.

And all by the age of 32. So the question is: how do you handle this? I'm serious, I know I've ground up a stupid $50 online poker stake to about $1k, pissed it away quite quickly by doing everything I should not have (since I can't stand NOT to play big when in reality (a) I am out of my league and (b) I am playing with too much on the table relative to what is in the account so I play like a pussy to boot), and was pretty upset about this, taking it far harder then I should given that there was no financial impact to me (luckily having reached a stage where losing a grand doesn't matter very much so losing a grand that I had earned from a $50 starting point didn't affect me one iota) and my faults are so obvious that it isn't an indication that I am an invalid either.

But this is the dudes livelihood, and we are talking serious scratch here. Hard to believe that this young man, early 30s, nailing a +$800MM year for his fund and pocketing $75MM in the process, didn't think his feces were aroma-free. And when the numbers are this big it really is hard to gain a sense of magnitude, but the dude is going to have to repeat his stellar 2005 performance each and every year through 2011 just to get back to even. Guess he could always go borrow a few billion from Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and try an aggressive Martingale scheme...

I am thinking it would take self confidence and fortitude that borders on delusional to shake this off. The guy has single handedly ruined a whole bunch of people, or at least cut one corner of their net worth in half. Wouldn't the slightest bit of self doubt begin to creep in? Wouldn't you at least once, perhaps during your 15th gin and tonic, consider that you really don't have any differentiable skills and just lucked into your $75MM? I am frankly fascinated by this. People talk about how amazing it is that top poker professionals can shake off getting two-outed to the tune of $100k (and frankly many can't shake off getting 9 outed of a measly $10k tournament); this is roughly equivalent to losing a penny in the couch cushions here comparatively. Maybe he really is super-gambler and just missed.

I know personally that rationally and logically there isn't any reason to worry about outcomes (excepting the sometimes overlooked fact that the outcomes are our best estimates at the true underlying model - which means every time we miss there is that slight chance that we aren't getting the situation right....this is much more of an issue in more subjective areas like sports betting and stock market betting; poker, and the flop games esp. usually give you a clear answer on if you were on the good side).

Between this story and the new General/PM/Dictator of Thailand repeatedly saying "nah, we're only going to be here for a few weeks, no biggie, everything will be fine...". 18th coup in Thailand since 1932, which means they are having coups, on average, as often as we have presidential elections here in the U.S. Who needs representative democracy if you can just keep the coups coming on schedule!!

Doesn't get much better for a Robby-centric sports day - watching Iran/Portugal right now (a goalpost away from an upset in the making, so far), the US tries to grasp at redemption in a few hours v. Italy, which would be just a colossal upset, FIFA-rankings be damned, the U.S. Open is in full swing, and Monty (!) and David Duval are in the hunt, and the one and only Rice Owls begin their quest for a 2nd national championship in baseball in a few hours, as a slightly slighted #2 seed (given their near consensus #1 ranking in the polls).

AND I actually dragged some prize $ in an honest to Da Vinci UB tourney with a bunch of people last night - - here's to a stellar weekend!

I really had no idea. The extent of my travels has been the continental US, a little bit of Canada, Cabo San Lucas and Cozumel and Belize on a cruise.

So needless to say my first trip to Europe was eye-opening. Unfortunately since I was only in London for less than 48 hours, I didn't get to do much, but everything is so integrated with the core of the city that you can't help but experience it. It took me about a day to figure it out, but I finally realized what it was. London is, to me, simply stunning in a way that is hard to describe, but I think it is a combination of really broad areas of natural greenery, and amazingly beautiful historical architecture that holds it own against new development.

Of course, just the mere existence of actual history probably helps. Living in Houston, we have some history, but it dates all the way back to the late 1800s and the war for Texas independence. Which seems like YESTERDAY when you are reading about the Tower of London and what was going on in that spot 2000 years ago.

Again, wow. I can't wait to get back. Given how lovely I think London is I will probably spontaneously combust when I go to Italy or Greece...

Oh, and no minor point that unlike in the mindless bible belt here, there are card clubs all over the place where a willing adult can go donk off a couple hundred pounds if he/she so desires....

Still trying to catch up - not having any success. Flying to the UK next week for my first trip overseas (only took me 38 years to do so...hope I'm not 76 before going again), perhaps on the 9 hour flight I will be inspired to actually add something of value (or at least multiple paragraphs) to the journal.

By the end of next week, I will have spent 7 working days in the office here over the period of four weeks. So much for "working from home"... :)

So much going on lately...pretty massive life changes...but no time to write it down, save this:

http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=2429904

My favorite line is this:

"We, as a society, allowed this to happen to two young girls. They're building up their entire lives for this moment. And who are they after that?" Al-Doory said. "It can't help being absurd and funny because of the situation. But it's serious.

"I really believe in the story. We're not just making fun of people. This isn't a parody."



Good to know that we, as a society, are now responsible for "building up their entire lives for this moment", the moment being Harding calling out a tire-iron shin-hit on Kerrigan before circulating her wedding sex video and offering up to skate topless to raise cash. I hope I can find the will to sleep, knowing that we, as a society, are somehow culpable....

This isn’t so much about music on my MP3 player, although I got to thinking about it listening to the Fleetwood Mac songs. And I was thinking, while listening to Second Hand News, and Never Going Back Again, and Gold Dust Woman…that an album like Rumors is rare.

I’m really not much of a Fleetwood Mac fan, didn’t like Tusk, and I think I developed a hefty distaste for the University of Southern California because their band appeared in the video (and I am certain that this added exactly 8% more enjoyment to watching Vince Young make them his bitch in January), and I don’t even really like any of the individuals in the band. But, they pulled one out of their hat with Rumors, which accomplishes that which most albums fail to do, be more than a compilation of songs, but a unified whole that far outweighs the sum of its parts.

And it is not, I don’t think, a thematic thing, or storytelling thing. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville has been described as a series of stories mapping her evolution to womanhood through the trials of relationships and self-awareness. Which may or may not be true, but to me that’s not what makes it great. It’s great on a far deeper level, almost an unconscious level, where the lines between songs at times blurs, and it elevates almost to the level of one 55 minute masterpiece composition with small breaks. What is greatest about Exile, and which wouldn’t have had the same effect when all music was vinyl, is that the end of the album leads so perfectly into the beginning, that there is never really an end (in grad school I once listened to it on a continuous loop for most of a twelve hour drive between Houston and Tallahassee). Sure, there are some great stories, and some real pain and emotion, I guess (although while I can relate to a song like Fuck and Run, it’s hardly a sad memoir of my lost innocence…its more like a call to action), but to me the album completely transcends its individual moments.

So, I watched a show that was all about Rumors, and had the band members sitting around and waxing poetic about making it, which is really quite an indulgent activity, if you think about it, sitting and discussing amongst yourselves why your masterpiece is so great. If you tried to get Charlie Kaufmann to sit and talk about writing Being John Malkovich, I’m guessing he would spontaneously combust. But, somehow, this show didn’t come across as bad as it seems like it would, primarily because they all had to admit they still, to this day, have no idea how Rumors happened. Sure, they wrote songs, some great songs, and they certainly thought they were good….but their incapacity to understand how it ended up so perfect is, I think, the only explanation that makes any sense at all. Charlie Kaufmann can’t talk about his work (truth be told, he doesn’t seem to be able to manage much of any social interaction), because he doesn’t know how it happens. True genius, when you get down to it, is really much closer to mental illness or handicap than not. Most of us are simultaneously blessed and cursed by normalcy. And I think when artists like Fleetwood Mac or Liz Phair touch on greatness, it is largely accidental. So they, being normal people who can on normal days explain the process by which they produced their art, try to explain their greatness, and end up completely missing the point. True genius (like Kaufmann, the greatest screenwriter of my lifetime for sure) is as hard for the genius to explain as is autism by the autistic; it is merely their state of being.

Which leads to the question: can a great album be made intentionally? And I think most artists strive to make good art, or great art, or to simply express themselves and hope it comes out great, so I’m not asking if most bands are out there tanking it (well, except for Creed). But I think my premise is that true genius produces greatness as its natural output (and, musically, I still don’ t think that this always produces great albums), and non-genius can basically hope to get lucky. Which is how Rumors happens, and is then followed by Tusk.

A lot has been made about the Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band trio; a response that drove Brian Wilson insane and led John and Paul to produce what many consider the best album of all time. Unfortunately, I can’t comment because I haven’t listened to these albums in their entirety, and when I did own Sgt. Peppers it was the movie soundtrack with the Beatles’ songs performed by Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, Aerosmith, and George Burns. None of whom have created a great album. The Beatles can, I think, be put into the genius category with little issue, and I think we could also argue that they wouldn’t be much help in explaining how it happens.

But Wilson tried so hard, tried himself nuts, to create genius that I get the feeling, (mind you even without a side-by-side listen to all three), that it’s not quite the same. Good Vibrations is undoubtedly a masterpiece, more Bach than Beethoven or Beatles, but even it is different, in that while it comes across as effortless, it was most certainly effortful, so much so that a Canadian band named after nude women is making fun of you for it thirty years later.

Another interesting theme in my collection is the prevalence of “second bands” (or sometimes 3rd or 4th). Again, not exactly cold fusion here, as Clapton alone populated half of the UK bands selling records in the 60s and 70s.

Big Audio Dynamite (and the cleverly named Big Audio Dynamite II), Public Image Limited, Tom Tom Club. All came from some fairly pedigreed “important” bands, and all couldn’t be much different from their predecessors.

For all of their “punk” labeling, the Clash were really more Marley than Rotten, a pre-hip-hop reggae hip-hop band with the occasional loud guitar (there’s a reason Train in Vain is their greatest moment, because it is their soul). This becomes completely transparent when Mick Jones bailed to start BAD. In fact, as I’m writing this, I realize that E=Mc2 was also on that same episode of 120 Minutes. I didn’t even know this was the remains of the Clash, but I (of course) loved it. The Bottom Line became one of those dance club songs that just worked, even though it wasn’t a 120 BPM mixable dance club song, but it still fit and made for a point of greatness in an evening. BAD II took it a step further, and were basically a reggae band that had a couple of pop songs.

PIL is probably more of a natural offshoot, in a weird way, simply because John Lydon has way too much to offer and say. There is a reason The Sex Pistols one and only album is one of the greatest albums of all time…because it is filled from front to back with non just great songs, but great pop songs albeit hidden amongst a decidedly lo-fi backdrop. Sure, they were expressing a bit of disappointment with the administration, but Anarchy in the UK would have been just as great if they were singing about Liverpool fighting to a nil-nil draw against Chelsea, or their favorite pair of socks. And so it was for the entire album. This is another discussion for another day, but to me the single defining feature of the great punk bands wasn’t the multicolored hair, or the pierced nostrils and labia, but just how poppy and catchy the music is.

So, Mr. Rotten, after his least important bandmate whacks his girlfriend and himself, moves on to the world of synth-pop. And nails it; Seattle and Rise are, again, pure pop masterpieces, catchy as can be and very danceable (doesn’t get too much better than “I could be wrong, I could be right”; again there is a hefty message in there lyrically, but Lydon was, above all, the author of some of the catchiest hoks around- it is easy to imagine him in a parallel universe writing 1950s commercials for dishwashing detergent). My first exposure to PIL (before my 120 Minutes epiphany) was when I went to an INXS concert (let’s say fall 1987) and PIL was opening up. I had never heard of them, and apparently neither had nineteen of the twenty thousand teens and twenties who were there for the main act. At one point, Lydon actually stopped the music and berated the crowd “doesn’t anybody fucking dance here??”. A bit of profanity was all that was left of the punk icon’s punkness. Can you imagine Sid Vicious asking the audience if they dance? More likely he’d throw broken glass at the audience before taking a dump on the front row and dying of a heroin overdose. One important side note about this concert was that I went with a girl who I had been seeing behind the back of my prototypical high school “sweetheart” for a couple of years. So, when sweetheart and I break up, I ask this girl on what could be called our first sanctioned date. We go to the concert, and you would have thought that I skinned her hamster before leaving. She, effectively, had no interest whatsoever in the “available” me. Which proves beyond all reasonable doubt that all women (except my wife, of course) are completely nuts. And that somehow Michael Hutchence is (well, was) responsible.

Tom Tom Club is a bit different, because to say they are different from The Talking Heads is like saying Hemingway is different from Burroughs – everyone is fucking different from Burroughs. The Talking Heads are still one of the strangest, interesting and hard to pin down bands I’ve ever heard. I recall two old Saturday Night Live episodes, probably from the very early 80s, when I was a nascent teen, one of which had Devo pre-Whip It (which is when I think a bunch of us finally “got” Devo, which means we liked their pop song and took 15 years to realize how fucking great they were) and the other with The Talking Heads “performing” Take Me To the River. Which amounts to David Byrne standing almost completely still, looking around like he is liable to off the entire audience if he can just get his hands on a flamethrower or scatterbomb. Now, I watched both of these with my mom, which no doubt helped guide my opinion that these were “weird” groups of men, with strange radiation suits and black rimmed glasses and a look of quiet lunacy. No wonder I needed 120 Minutes to set me straight.

So, we get Once in a Lifetime (and anyone who tells you they haven’t secretly wished they penned the line “this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife!” is either lying or in a coma), Road to Nowhere, And She Was. The last one did it for me, I think I finally got it (and I am fully aware that I’m explicitly, for at least two essays now, neglecting my rule that the bands most popular songs are rarely their best…but I don’t care, these are my songs), that there was a simultaneous simplicity and amazing depth to their music and lyrics. Beck writes good music with strange lyrics, because I think he just randomly chooses words that fit the music. The Talking Heads have lyrics that only seem simple, and at times random, but after a tiny bit of thought are so much more. And She Was? First cut – she was what (and the song answers, “smart about it, no doubt about it”)? Second cut – she was as in she simply is back when this all took place. She had reached her place in the universe where everything else ceased to matter, except for the simplest act of her being. And isn’t that what we all really want?

So, after all that, Tom Tom Club wants to make us dance and be happy. And, of course, it works magnificently, simply (and, I think, simple in the truly simple, not just the apparently simple) and, like PIL, quite danceable. Much like the change of pace Tom Tom Club was from Talking Heads, I probably used Pleasure of Love a hundred times when I had run out of records at 130 or 140 beats per minute (and it is no fun to mix your way back down anyway) and needed to jump to 100 BPMs. And the quirky electronic chirps and squeals to start, with Tina Weymouth telling us “he was a masterpiece”, did the job every time.

Several of my entries have a very specific start point in my musical history – a single episode of MTV’s “120 Minutes” back in the summer of 1988. Up to that point, I listened to what most average kids listened to, The Cars, The Police, Journey, Rush, The “Rock the Casbah” Clash and a bunch of other MTV music which we thought was really cool and progressive (INXS, Duran Duran), largely because of videos containing half naked women smearing food on themselves.

What I wasn’t listening to was Elvis Costello, The Cure, The Smiths, The Ramones, Sex Pistols, et al. A girl in my class worshipped Elvis Costello, and I certainly didn’t get it - - until about 20 years later.

So when I came across this show, I was exposed to a whole new world. On a single episode I saw Don’t Let’s Start by They Might be Giants, Victoria by The Fall, Birds Fly by Icicle Works, Suedehead by Morrissey, Just Can’t Get Enough by Depeche Mode. Really, in retrospect, this isn’t all that exciting or mind-bending…but at the time it was. I hadn’t been exposed much to different music, and never really thought of the possibilities, and just how much I appreciated good music that was not something you could hear on the radio. What was certainly an excellent episode of 120 Minutes ended up having a “gateway” drug effect on my musical habits (much like my first real Ecstasy experience a year later…endlessly playing Train in Vain by the Clash (a far different Clash than the Rock the Casbah version) and then Close to Me by The Cure with two friends, who, no doubt in large part to this experience, married 4 years later, and thinking that there was no way that anything could feel or be better than that). And the dual-gateway effect resulted in me quitting college and jumping full on into the world of club music and DJing (which somehow seemed like an honorable career path at the time – didn’t really see how my aspirations were aiming a bit low).

What’s great about this experience, for me, was that it was wholly organic, I didn’t listen to Morrissey because he was so deep and brooding and spoke to me and my eye-linered clan about the misery in our existence; I just liked it because it was good. Someone turned on the lights for me, and I could see, but it wasn’t in a way that automatically cast a shadow on the rest of the music I liked. I still liked the Cars, and in fact if anything is true its that the Cars were really a transcendent band, as good today as ever, and certainly as important as their ‘Post-Punk’ counterparts like Costello, the Talking Heads, Devo…well, maybe not Devo. Ironically, by getting so heavily interested in spinning and mixing records, I worked my way into a position where I felt totally comfortable with my musical tastes and preferences. One consequence of being a DJ, is that you generally stop dancing at dance clubs, and rather sit and listen, to the music, the mixing (mainly the mixing), figuring out what the DJ is trying to do, and applauding the moments of genius (which is hard to explain, but it completely revolves around finding the perfect song, and usually not the obvious choice). So you too begin the search for the non-obvious, which inevitably leads back to songs that wouldn’t generally be considered “cool” to the dance club crowd.

My friend Curtis and I, he a much better DJ who worked far longer than me, at much cooler places (Numbers and Red Square in Houston), spent several nights back at his place, usually with a couple of other random people, going through his music trying to find “the” song (no definition, but paraphrasing the Supreme Court definition of pornography, you know it when you hear it). And after hours of various chemicals, and all the usual suspects, we almost inevitably ended up on Hard Luck Woman by Kiss or And We Danced by The Hooters. The thing is, had some random dude at a party with the same people we hung out with tried to play The Hooters….he be cut out of the drug pool and sent home in shame.

So thanks to 120 Minutes, I was able to stall my college graduation by four years, pick up my first marriage, child and divorce, start graduate school just in time to spend the greatest bull market in world history as an $8,000/yr graduate assistant and a woefully underpaid Assistant Professor, and convince the cool kids that The Hooters were better than anything they’d hear on 120 Minutes.

This is a bit behind, but I'm pretty sure we all have a hyper-annoying relative who shares every excrutiating detail of their banal lives at Xmas. Here's my version:



Merry Christmas!

This has been such an exciting year for the Hart family, and we are happy to share the following update.

Of course, our life revolves mainly around Braden, who turned 3 in September. He just loves to play any sport, and we think we have a major leaguer in the making! He also loves to paint, and show off his penis. He has been making such exciting strides potty training; in fact he has developed very strong sphincter muscles – just last week he crapped out a perfect bust of Oprah. Of course, he’s been replicating the current president since birth (tee hee).

This summer we rediscovered our passion for gravel. One morning we set out on an impromptu tour of the roads of southeast-central Texas, just to take in the native roads. It was so moving we nearly had to find an “hourly rate” motel (wink wink!). It was thrilling to see so many species of unconsolidated rock fragments, especially those indigenous to the area.

Denise recently explored the theme of monogamous homosexuality in Sesame Street’s ‘Bert and Ernie’ through paint, dance, spoken word poetry and puppetry.

We spent much of the early part of the year adjusting to our new roles as Robby began working from home for his new job. Because of this, he rarely has to bathe or dress, which leads to some pretty uncomfortable moments come Girl Scout Cookie time! And Denise switched from 8-5 to a 7-4 work schedule…which means she is generally pissed off at Robby’s smelly, naked, sleeping ass when she leaves in the morning!

We’ve really found a new love in developing and caring for our yard. The $20 a week we pay Alejandro has to be some of the best money we spend (shhhhh, don’t tell the IRS!). We haven’t won “Yard of the Month” yet, but a fiver to the selection committee should change that soon enough.

Braden attended his first Rice football game this fall, watching the Owls win their only game of the season against a despondent Tulane squad. But, as usual, Braden parlayed the Owls plus the points with the under, and lost his ass again. We’re going to close his offshore account if he’s not careful!

What a busy year! Aside from all of this, Robby has been working on a proof of Fermat’s last theorem, rebuilding a 1965 Mustang and reading romance novels, when he’s not gambling or passed out drunk. Denise has been learning to channel the energy from her road-rage into scrap booking and obsessive-compulsive flossing.

Because of Robby’s new job, Denise explored some “work at home” options as well, but after some investigation discovered that her only options were medical record transcription and lesbian porn…and nobody puts Baby in a corner!

Finally, family time is always the best, we made several trips to New Braunfels to spend time with “Paw-paw”, “Maw-maw” and “Nana”. Playing baseball in the backyard, showing Braden off to the Elks Lodge degenerates, watching football, screaming at the computer, doing Tequila shots until 5am, really nothing but good times at Rio Roble! We unfortunately missed out on “Wurstfest” this year, billed as the ten-day salute to sausage. Ten days closer to cirrhosis, perhaps, but we’ll be there next year for sure.

We hope all of you have had as thrilling and fulfilling a year as we have. Nothing but great expectations for 2006!


The Harts

This is a song I hadn’t heard in close to 20 years until just a few weeks ago. And getting reacquainted was much like meeting up with an old friend, a good friend that you haven’t seen in an equally long time.

Of course, what naturally strikes us is the cosmetic differences, that our old friend is, surprise, not a young man in his early 20s but rather wears the pair of decades in very noticeable ways, in a graying of the hair, a gentle (or not so gentle) expansion of the waistline, a fullness in areas that were formerly lean. And it is shocking, in a way, in that your memories don’t stand the test of time.

So it was with this song. I contacted a good friend of my wife, who is an expert in the ways of illicit downloading (we’ll call her “dope man”). After much fruitless searching via conventional and overtly legal means, I had run into a dead end. Benjamin Orr’s solo album was out of print, and there was nary a copy to be found (although I did see several cassette versions of the album, The Lace, on eBay). So I rang up the dope man, and she hooked me up within an hour.

I was disappointed. The song, upon first listen, sounds so very much like a song recorded in 1987. Which it was. I was ready for three minutes of cool, we’re talking nearly 20 years of anticipation since my last listen, when I realized for the first time that Benjamin Orr was The Cars, that Ric Ocasek might have married Paulina Porizkova, and made a solo album of his own, but Orr was in a different league. And I got slapped by synthesizers and a drum machine, and it sounded pretty much gay.

Then I listened a second time, and then a third. And I, yet again, started to get it. My old friend was still there, it’s just that a lot has happened in music the last 20 years. We’ve had New Kids on the Block, and Nirvana, and Britney Spears, and the White Stripes, and all that. And so my buddy didn’t look the same, he wore his age front and center, but after a brief period of small talk and catching up, the essence was right there. This is a really great song, in a catchy song kind of way. We won’t forget the Beatles or Brian Wilson because of it, but it definitely works.

And it does what it does best, showcase Orr and remind us that he performed the vocals on most of The Cars’ songs that mattered (Let’s Go, Bye Bye Love, All Mixed Up), I’m omitting what amounted to The Cars’ biggest hit, Drive, which was also vocalized by Orr, because it is as relevant to understanding The Cars as Every Breath You Take is to understanding The Police. Like so many, the greatest work produces the conditions for massive commercial success; the latter not to be confused with the former.

In the end, this song serves as a reminder why we all lost when cancer (pancreatic cancer, which allegedly has about a 10% survival rate) stole Orr five years ago.

Just a note to say what you already know, that I am about a month behind on EVERYTHING, including updating the journal. I have pieces of about six entries in process, but work has been center stage of late.

Will be back soon.

Seems like as good a place as any to start my project. Sorry in advance to Nick Hornby for bastardizing his wonderful idea.

As I mentioned, the songs I've chosen, more or less, are a greatest hits compendium from the last 25 years of my life. Songs that mattered, one way or another. Some were tied to the lost years in the late 80s when I quit college and went to work as a bartender and DJ in a few of Houston's more interesting clubs. Some just resonate in some way, and others are just so fucking good that it wouldn't make sense to have an mp3 player without them.

Cherub Rock falls into the latter category. I think the best way to say it is a "greatest song by fucking massive band at their peak" song. Which takes some 'splainin.

Siamese Dream came out in 1993, and was an integral, yet really quite different, part of the Seattle scene (although the Pumpkins were from Chicago). The Smashing Pumpkins were certainly a grunge-type band that sounded a lot more like their musical brethren than not...but they were also really unique, musically and lyrically, and were very heavy (sounding, not like, "shit man, this shit is heavy....pass the bong") while not sounding as intentionally heavy like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, etc.

It's hard to remember now, especially since Billy Corgan has since gone completely insane and is channeling Lex Luthor (I'm of the belief that Zwan doesn't exist), but the Smashing Pumpkins were just about the biggest band in the world in 1993-94. Nirvana was coming down, and were only a few months from Kurt Cobain's suicide, Pearl Jam seemed to spend more time fighting Ticketmaster and being generally pensive and glum. The other bands were never that great, just rock and roll bands with a license to play their music and be classified in the same category with bands that were truly their superior (Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, etc.; STP was an exception and picked up when Corgan, et al. fell off - - probably could have been even better if not for Scott Weiland's near-continuous desire to off himself via heroin; the songwriting was always good, and was at times getting better). And when I say they were huge, I don't mean in ticket sales or radio airplay, or other measureables, but more just in the sense that they got it, in a way no one else was quite getting it at the time, and they were clearly the best of a group of peers that were considered the peak of musical art of the time.

And then there is this song. The band had many songs which had greater sales, MTV-rotation, radio airplay, etc. But all of them (save one, which comes later) were perhaps a little more radio friendly, but nothing compares to this song. From the first drumroll, to the slow build of the guitars, to the freaking hook (which is genius)...it is all there. And the song is big, not that it is the loudest or heaviest, but it fills a room. Shit, it fills open-fucking space. Spring semester of my final year at Rice, we had a "senior-day" luncheon or something one afternoon, which of course was "Reason 1,756 to get blasted in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, three weeks before graduation". So my best friend and I, after numerous adult beverages, wander up to the dorm room of some classmates, this dorm room overlooks an open common area, and go put Siamese Dream in the CD player. They have the speakers sitting outside, really nice, big (4 feet tall or so) expensive speakers, and we, as the song starts and builds, realize we need to be playing this song as loud as the system will allow.

This is undoubtedly a song that needs to be played loud, because what is amazing about it is that despite it's girth, it still has the soft vocals and somehow manages to be massive and beautiful and inspiring, all at the same time.

Needless to say, we had to fork over for a new set of speakers shortly before graduation (which, at the time and with my bank account, was like having to replace someone's car today). Well worth it.

And this was it for them, the other songs from the album "Today", "Disarm" and certainly on subsequent efforts (up to and including Mr. Clean leaving the band) never come close to achieving what they did with Cherub Rock (again, one minor exception). Which is interesting to think about; the individuals all exist, and frankly aren't terribly old. And it isn't like they are Dexy's Midnight Runners who couldn't possibly have more than one hit, but rather it is like this song captures everything correctly, a group working together and hitting their stride at precisely the right moment, a confluence of their internal group dynamic and the world around them needing them to be there at that moment. Even the slow intro-crescendo is seemingly self-aware, the song as a realization of its own destiny, and the song capturing its place in the world structurally and thematically.

Which doesn't happen all that often.

The other song I referred to cryptically above is Drown from the Singles movie soundtrack. It has a lot of the same qualities, much slower but still with this very gradual build. And even as a slower, quiet song it is just HUGE. Fills the empty space in a nearly indescribable way. And when I listen to it now, I am filled with a near sense of awe, like "how did they do this?". Even a masterpiece like "Good Vibrations" has an answer: (a) Brian Wilson is a genius but, more importantly (b) he worked his fucking ass off and drove himself completely insane to make that song. I think Drown is the exact opposite, like it just happened, because it was supposed to.

Been meaning to write about this for some time, but in this year's WSOP ME coverage, there was an actual hand that I think captured high level play better than just about anything I had seen.

It's late in the event, and Phil Ivey makes a standard raise from the button, SB folds and Andrew Black is on the BB with something like A5 of diamonds. Given that Ivey would raise in this situation just about 100% of the time, Black re-raises (likely thinking his hand is the best).

So, given that Ivey KNOWS that Black KNOWS this about Ivey, he RE-RAISES to signal that this is one of the times he has a hand (and because he knows that Black could play back at him with any two cards as well....in fact this hand more than most is one where the cards they are holding are largely irrelevant). So, what does Black do? Given that he KNOWS Ivey KNOWS that Black KNOWS Ivey would make a play, Black correctly surmises that his hand is good (or, more correctly, that Ivey's hand is no better than average) and moves in.

Very rarely do you get to see this third level of thinking during the play of a single hand sequentially. Also note that Ivey didn't waste time and effort with some big Hollywood production, he folded his hand immediately.