very simple

Different streets on the upper west side have varying levels of enthusiasm for holiday decorations. One of the prettier streets in the wintertime is 67th, where every building along the block covers every tree they’re responsible for with white lights. It just makes everything a little less bleak in the dead of winter.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I gave this four out of five stars over at goodreads, but largely because I think the overhype of this book on a whole bunch of end-of-year-best-of lists increased my expectations to a (perhaps unrealistically) very high degree. But it was still a great read. A meditation on time, aging, the follies of both our youth and old age, on our ability to reinvent ourselves, sometimes over and over again. Told through a series of short stories, each in a different voice (including one powerpoint presentation), each focused on a different character, jumping as far back as the 1970s and as far forward as 2020-something, but all inextricably linked and culminating in a complete circle of interconnected lives. Really quite beautifully woven together.

Went to a party in queens tonight for some friends who are moving out of town. I had a lot of fun, and a lot of wine, which is probably not a good combination with blogging but…whatever. The biggest issue was getting out there. It’s normally a pain to get out there from the upper west side, since I have to go to Times Square and essentially double back on the N train to get to Astoria, but tonight was just classic. Apparently, the MTA decided that the N train didn’t need to run between Times Square and Queensboro Plaza, so, after finally discovering the signs indicating as much, I trekked over to the 7 train, to go to Queensboro Plaza, where I could pick up the N “shuttle” to Astoria Blvd. When I FINALLY got to QP, I stood waiting for the N for about 20 minutes, with about 150 other people. After said 20 minutes, they finally announced that we really needed to be on the downstairs platform. There were no signs anywhere indicating this. So all 150 of us raced down to the lower platform to hop on the train, which proceeded to sit for another full 20 minutes. So that was fun. All-in-all, it took me about 90 minutes to get there.

Needless to say I took a car service home. Which took a total of 20 minutes, including dropping someone else off first.

Photo is from my long wait on the OUTDOOR platform in queens.

About a gazillion years ago, I went with some girlfriends to Vegas. Since none of us actually gamble (other than about $20 in slot machines), we took a day and drove out to visit the Hoover Dam. I worked with electric utility companies, and one of my friends was an architect, so we had an incredibly nerdy time, and made sure to take the hard hat tour, which allowed us to actually go inside the dam and see its inner workings. For obvious reasons, post-9/11, this tour is no longer available. I also seem to be missing any actual photos from the trip, largely due to the fact that I was using my first, incredibly crappy digital camera, and I don’t think those pictures ever made it onto any sort of computer, but I did bring back one souvenir, which I’ve managed to hold onto all of this time. Periodically I wonder what the heck I’m actually going to do with a hard hat, but for now, it’s something to take a picture of.

The Time Warner Center here in Manhattan is essentially a very fancy mall. A very fancy mall that installs giant sculpture shows in the lobby, because it’s classy. Normally, there are two giant Botero sculptures of a naked man and woman, but those have been removed (I believe temporarily) in favor of an exhibition of sculptures by Dali. or based on artwork by Dali. I’m not really sure.

All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean

A really in-depth look at all of the decisions and events that led to the 2008 financial crisis/collapse, from the internal workings at all of the major investment banks, the sub-prime lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the ratings agencies and AIG. No one (or very few people) actually committed “crimes”, but everyone kept pushing the envelope of what was appropriate within their given sphere, and each bad decision was compounded by the bad decisions of 100 other players. Each of these financial products (from the mortgages themselves to the securitization vehicles to the collateralized debt obligations to the credit-default-swaps to the synthetic CDOs), when first created, made perfect sense. But not necessarily when all thrown into the mix at the same time, each one feeding off of the other in a vicious cycle of lower and lower standards and more and more debt.

It’s hard to say who was the worst player in the bunch. Was it AIG, which essentially allowed the entire risk-management function to exist inside Hank Greenberg’s septuagenarian head? Or the ratings agencies, who kept giving all of these things triple-A ratings, which were supposed to mean that the investments were as “safe as treasury bonds”, even after they were well aware of the underlying problems? Or the investment banks who sidelined their own risk-managers because they didn’t turn a profit? Or the subprime lenders, who were handing out reams of money to people that they knew could never pay it back, even in a best-case scenario?

And of course, popular notions of “who’s to blame” are often not anywhere near the truth. Fannie and Freddie got a large share of the blame for causing the problem, but in actuality, they were very late to the party, and only ended up in the subprime market in the first place because they were required, by law, to guarantee a certain percentage of low-income housing. Because the subprime lenders were undercutting the more traditional “hard money” lenders that had previously serviced this market, Fannie and Freddie almost had no choice but to start buying up subprime loans. Of course, they didn’t take a step back and try to use their mighty lobbying power to get out of this obligation, or to highlight the problem, but it’s a very different scenario than the idea that they “caused” the entire mess.

Just amazing.

Not quite as “entertaining” as McLean’s prior book, “The Smartest Guys in the Room”, but then again, the collapse of our entire financial system was bound to be less entertaining than a bunch of guys in Houston who were just giant fraudsters, spending tens of thousands of dollars on everything from race cars to strippers.

I don’t actually go into this shop very often, mostly because I don’t drink tea, and I certainly don’t need to start a scone-eating habit, but it’s always been one of my favorite storefronts in the neighborhood. Amidst a sea of ever-expanding chain stores that seem to be invading the upper west side, alice’s is at least a little bit unique (even if this isn’t their only location!)

This was my favorite cold-weather purchase this year. I’ve been looking for a hat like this for a while, and none of them were quite right. What I particularly like about this is that it is both soft and oversized, so I can stuff all of my hair into the top. And it’s extremely warm. Purchased at H&M for something ridiculous like $8.

I know it’s cliched, but I just couldn’t help myself when I was walking down broadway earlier today. It’s still a great-looking building, even if everyone and their mother has taken some variation on this picture.

In November, I rearranged my living room. This involved moving my giant, heavy bookshelf, which in turn required me to remove all the books for the first time in several years.

As a consequence, I ended up with a pile of (mostly) mass market paperbacks that I really never planned on reading again and had no sentimental attachment to, so I decided to pack them up for Housing Works. And here they sit, because I never seem to remember to actually take them with me when I leave my apartment. And lest you think I’m entitled to avoid a big hassle, there’s a Housing Works shop two blocks away.