A podcast about books & life — not necessarily in that order
Well, the cassuolet was well-received, as was the chocolate cake. It was a nice evening all around, until the blackout around 8pm. We busted out a ton of candles, drank and bantered till around 11pm, at which point all 4 of us crashed out.
Still no power today, so we’ve stopped in at my office to check e-mail, look up movie schedules, and figure out if our favorite dim sum place is open on Sunday.
It’s some godawful weather here in the northeast. We’re expecting a pair of Amy’s friends this afternoon for an early dinner. She’s been cooking and cleaning all day while I’ve been cleaning and trying to stay out of her way. It seems to have worked out okay, provided her friends are on the right bus out here from NYC.
We spent yesterday at this giant-ass outlet mall in New York state. I’ve written about this place a few times before, including one of the first posts I ever wrote. No Hugo Boss clothing this time around, but I found a couple of pairs of decent pants for the fall/winter.
Our routine for visiting this mall is that we
a) go on Saturday
b) leave a half-hour before the place opens
The latter enables us to get together before buses from NYC start showing up and the parking lot becomes jammed with rental cars carrying The Axis: German and Japanese tourists who have come to buy luxury goods on the cheap.
We got a late start yesterday, since Amy had to handle a work-emergency in the morning. When we reached the place, it was around noon, and it was a Friday.
That’s when Amy discovered the importance of going only on Saturdays: Hasidic Jews won’t be there.
As it is, there were enough Hasidim present yesterday to populate Samaria. The place was overrun with head-covered moms pushing multiple baby carriages, two or three more children in tow, while sections of the parking lot looked like a reunion for Country Squire station wagons.
This led Amy to ask, “What exactly are they all here to buy?”
I replied that we should open a headscarf and wig store up there: “And the best thing is, we could take Saturdays off!”
Anyway, we spent a bunch of hours up there, with Amy searching pretty much in vain for fall clothes. On the plus side, we swung by my office on the way home and picked up my new Amazon delivery: a couple of 1gb SD cards for our digital cameras, a gravy separator, and a pair of books, My Horizontal Life, by Chelsea Handler (whose show on E! is a hoot), and Lost Girls, Alan Moore’s pornographic comic book about Alice (of Wonderland), Dorothy (of Oz) and Wendy (of Neverland) meeting in a hotel in Austria shortly before WWI.
I read the first few installments of the comic years ago, and, um, enjoyed it a lot. I’ll let you know how the collected edition (three books in a slipcase) works out.
Once we finally got home, we busted out the gin and our most recent Netflix choice: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. It’s one of the most entertaining movies I’ve watched in a while. Robert Downey, Jr. is typically fantastic, but Val Kilmer’s also pretty fun to watch as Gay Perry, the private eye. Run, don’t walk.
Anyway, our guests swear they’re on the right bus, and oughtta be here in half an hour. Amy’s made a cassoulet; I’ll let you know how it goes (she also picked up some neat cheeses for hors d’oeuvres, and made a chocolate cake for dessert). If it weren’t typhooning out, we’d take her friends on a nice tour of the gardens out here.
That’s the skinny. I hope everyone else is having a drier holiday weekend.
LONG article about how a popular type of mortgage, the option ARM, does not actually provide money for free, and is about to annihilate a lot of homeowners’ finances:
After prolonging the boom, [option ARM] mortgages could worsen the bust. They also betray such a lack of due diligence on the part of lenders and borrowers that it raises questions of what other problems may be lurking. And most of the pain will be borne by ordinary people, not the lenders, brokers, or financiers who created the problem.
Gordon Burger is among the first wave of option ARM casualties. The 42-year-old police officer from a suburb of Sacramento, Calif., is stuck in a new mortgage that’s making him poorer by the month. Burger, a solid earner with clean credit, has bought and sold several houses in the past. In February he got a flyer from a broker advertising an interest rate of 2.2%. It was an unbeatable opportunity, he thought. If he refinanced the mortgage on his $500,000 home into an option ARM, he could save $14,000 in interest payments over three years. Burger quickly pulled the trigger, switching out of his 5.1% fixed-rate loan. “The payment schedule looked like what we talked about, so I just started signing away,” says Burger. He didn’t read the fine print.
After two months Burger noticed that the minimum payment of $1,697 was actually adding $1,000 to his balance every month. “I’m not making any ground on this house; it’s a loss every month,” he says. He says he was told by his lender, Minneapolis-based Homecoming Financial, a unit of Residential Capital, the nation’s fifth-largest mortgage shop, that he’d have to pay more than $10,000 in prepayment penalties to refinance out of the loan. If he’s unhappy, he should take it up with his broker, the bank said. “They know they’re selling crap, and they’re doing it in a way that’s very deceiving,” he says. “Unfortunately, I got sucked into it.” In a written statement, Residential said it couldn’t comment on Burger’s loan but that “each mortgage is designed to meet the specific financial needs of a consumer.”
This is one of those instances where the financial industry is at fault, but they couldn’t have pulled it off without the help of idiotic consumers. Any transaction I get into worth $500,000 is not going to involve someone who put a flyer in my mailbox.
It’s the end of the summer, so I’m taking a long weekend (off Thursday – Monday). I haven’t written much lately, but I figure most of my ‘regular’ readers are traveling and only checking in intermittently. That’s summertime for ya.
I spent yesterday taking care of errands, including my belated/extended taxes, which I’ve been procrastinating on since we filed the extensions. More errands to get done today, unless I decide to spend my time finishing a book, watching a movie, or trying to write a longer piece for the 9/11 anniversary. I have something in mind, but I’ve been kinda uninspired of late.
The week-long dreary weather is probably the biggest contributor to this malaise o’ mine. Last week, I chalked it up in part to my “wheels-within-wheel paranoia” about how world events have been unfolding. A day or so later, I realized that paranoia wasn’t an appropriate term. After all, I don’t feel like these machinations are targeting me, nor that there’s a single overarching cabal organizing events to suit its needs.
Nah, my mental paralysis is caused more by my trying to understand the multiplicity of forces in action, not One Central Plot. It reminds me of something I said in the weeks after 9/11:
“Somehow, this president has to figure out how to work in concert with Pakistan but not anger India, without placating India to the point of angering China, without assuaging China so much that Japan and South Korea get nervous, and I’m pretty sure that I could beat him at tic-tac-toe.”
I don’t work in international relations or foreign policy; I’m just some schlub from New Jersey. My biggest problem is that I’m trying to make sense of things.
Fortunately, football season is coming up.
I’ve never listened to the Roots, but I liked this interview with drummer/producer ?uestlove, particularly for his take on the music biz ?ua biz. And his ‘fro, which I aspire to.
Ron Rosenbaum, one of my favorite living writers, is keeping a blog! Check it out!
And he recommends another one! So there!
We watched a little of the Emmy Awards last night, before the finale of Deadwood started. Unfortunately, there was a typhoon going on, so we lost the picture for a while. Amy gave up on trying to catch that episode, and we TiVo’d a later showing for her viewing this evening.
So, while she finds out how things shake out with Swearengen, Hearst, et al., I’ll share the following Emmy-moment with you.
(I should note that we were watching largely out of malaise. It had been a pretty dreary weekend, and Sunday was one of those days in which I engaged in so little activity I never really got hungry. Awards shows aren’t really my thang, except for goofing on how wackily everyone dresses.
(It was pretty funny that Conan O’Brien spent the opening number of the show performing a song and dance about how his network is doomed. And that irony thing might just catch on. Anyway:)
We were watching the “Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie” category, and marveling how the first four nominees — Ellen Burstyn, Shirley Jones, Cloris Leachman (always a hoot), and Alfre Woodard — were all on the senior circuit.
“Is this the lifetime achievement award?” Amy asked.
“Can’t be, unless they all have breast cancer or abusive spou — oh, wrong Lifetime.”
Naturally, the award went to the fifth nominee, 30-year-old Kelly Macdonald, who was in a TV movie about the G8 or something. It starred Bill Nighy, who is pretty entertaining but has chosen to wear some terrible eyeglasses in his promotional pics.
“Have we seen her in anything?” Amy asked.
I thought she looked familiar. “She’s Scottish, so maybe she’s been in a Danny Boyle film,” I said.
Amy reached for the laptop to find out and, as her bio came onscreen, I announced, “Oh, I remember: she was the underaged girl who got naked on top of Ewan Macgregor in Trainspotting!”
“And that’s why I love you,” Amy said.
My parents were worried when Dr. and Mrs. Capers moved in next door; the house they built was shaped like an ark. “Do they know something we don’t?” Mom wondered.
The Capers helped me grow up (sorta like in loco grandparentis) and they showed an awful lot of kindness to my mom after Dad left. Dr. Augustus T. Capers died on Thursday, at the age of 87, after a full life.
Update:
I went to the funeral today in Paterson. The program included the following:
Reflections of Life
Augustus Theodore Capers was born on September 30, 1918 in Charleston, SC, the son of Wade and Anna Morris Simmons. When he was a young child, his mother died and he was raised by his great aunt, Florence Capers, and her husband. They moved to Paterson, NJ with Augustus at the age of 5 years. On Thursday, August 24, 2006 at 6:45 a.m., he entered into eternal rest while watching the sun rise.
In 1943, he graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, earning a Bachelor of Science in Biology. He received his Doctor of Dentistry from the Dental College of Howard University in 1947 and achieved further distinction with the highest score on the NJ Dental Examination in 1948. This began his dental career in Paterson, which extended over 50 years. During the Korean War he served as a captain in the U.S. Army Dental Corps and was honorably discharged.
Dr. Capers and his wife Gertrude were champions of civil rights. They founded the first black democratic club in the city of Paterson. Both served the community by advancing equality in housing and employment opportunities within the City Administration, the Board of Education and the Police Department of Paterson. Dr. Capers was appointed as the first black dentist to serve on the dental staff of the Paterson school system by the mayor. In 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey sent congratulatory greetings as Dr. Capers was the first black State Assemblymen elected by the citizens of Passaic County, District 14-B, who elected him to a second term. During this same year, he was elected to serve as a member of the Board of Directors for the Paterson Boy’s Club. Dr. Capers was honored by the Bergen-Passaic Howard University Alumni Club and his fellow Paterson Kiwanis Club members for his commitment to community service, consumer advocacy, justice and equality.
His ties to the Paterson community remained strong in his twilight years when Dr. Capers and Gertrude retired to Ringwood, NJ. Both he and his wife, a published author, were honored by the Paterson Public Library. Her poignant memoir, “A Scent from the Blue Ridge,” (under the pen name Trudi Capers) serves as a tribute to her husband’s accomplishments and a reflection of the history and the genesis of the civil rights movement in the City of Paterson, while tracing her family’s roots from slave and American Indian ancestry. In September 2002, Dr. Capers and Gertrude celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary with family and friends.
He leaves to cherish his memory: his beloved wife, Gertrude Stanton Capers; three children, artist Selena James, Superior Court Judge Michelle Hollar-Gregory, and financial consultant Augustus T. Capers, Jr.; as well as three grandchildren, Dr. Robert A. James, Jr., and Ryan and Kyle Hollar-Gregory; sons-in-law Robert A. James, Sr. and Milton R. Hollar-Gregory, esq.; nieces Betty and Virginia; nephews Vreeland and Melville; and many cousins, other family members and friends.
It’s the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s whomping of the Gulf Coast. I’ve been down to New Orleans four times since then. I’ve tried to chronicle a little bit of the reconstruction, or at least my viewpoint on the progress.
My perspective is limited, of course. Amy’s family lives about 25 miles from the city, so the people I see the most down there talk more about the after-effects, not their own property loss. We’ve made trips into the city each visit, but mainly in the central business district and the French Quarter. I haven’t gone through the lower Ninth Ward in any of my visits, but I also don’t visit the South Bronx when I go to New York.
Or does the WTC site serve as a better analogy? Ray Nagin seemed to think so, when he contrasted NOLA’s rebuilding pace with the five-year span since the Twin Towers were knocked down: “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”
It was a cheap shot, but Nagin’s a mentally unstable grandstander, so that needs to be factored in.
How does the city get rebuilt? Darned if I know. I wouldn’t exactly trust a “master plan” developed by the crooked politicos of Louisiana in concert with the ass-clowns in Washington, and the Army Corps of Engineers is already covering its ass about the possibility of the current levees being unable to handle another major storm. I’m having enough trouble just trying to settle on a color for my home office, since the official VM wife objects pretty violently to the deep green currently in place.
(Witold Rybczynski in Slate has a neat piece about how a new-urbanist project in Denver provides an example of how to start putting together neighborhoods, but it all presupposes that the neighborhoods aren’t built in a locale that’s existentially flood-prone.)
I’m having trouble coming up with anything to say that I haven’t gotten at already, so why don’t you, my dear readers, tell me what you make of New Orleans? A bunch of you came to visit in March for my wedding, but I want to hear from those of you who haven’t seen it, too. Tell me what you remember of the city, if you’ve been there before, what you thought if you’ve been there post-Katrina, and what you think of the ways and means of rebuilding a city that wasn’t in great shape before it’s cataclysm.
(Update: I know it’s hard to believe, but Ray Nagin has more to say!)
I have zombie dreams every few months and they’re no fun, let me tell you. I figure they derive from a persecution complex that probably sub-derives from my family’s history as Jews in eastern Europe.
The result is a pretty standard scenario in which I’m the target of a shambling mob (at least they’re not high-speed zombies like in 28 Days Later or that Dawn of the Dead remake). Typically, it takes either the extreme end-game peril or the exertion of going all Dusty on a zombie’s skull to wake me up.
It’s not easy getting back to sleep after that, so I try to get up quietly so as not to wake my wife, take my book from the nightstand, and head downstairs to read.
Despite my susceptibility to these dreams, I don’t go out of my way to avoid zombie flicks. I don’t usually seek them out either, unless one is from a director whose work I follow (like Danny Boyle, of whom I now realize I’ve seen every U.S.-released film), but if a zombie movie’s on TV, I’ll likely watch for a bit. And Shaun of the Dead is one of my favorite movies of the past few years. (Also, I went to YouTube to search this gem out.)
Thursday night, I was working pretty hard to put together an article for my magazine (“write an article” would be putting it too charitably). It was an ugly process, made slightly easier once I made myself a Hendricks & tonic. It’s not an article that I’m happy with, but they can’t all be winners.
Amy turned in around 10, and I followed shortly after, a little buzzed and burned out. I barely had the motivation to go through my nightly ablutions.
That night, I had a zombie dream. I don’t recall a lot of the set-up, but I do remember my wife standing in our hallway looking around the corner down the stairs of our house, and running into my office to tell me that three zombies were coming up the stairs. For no apparent reason, there was a cricket bat by my door, so I grabbed that and ran over to the top of the stairs.
Shambling up at us was one of my oldest friends, who’s a bohemian in NYC nowadays. Two kinda generic art-guys were in tow (they were wearing black turtlenecks, which is all I can remember about them now). They weren’t dripping gore or anything, but they were clearly zombies.
Having the high ground as well as the advantage of a fully-functioning nervous system, I immediately went to work with the cricket bat, braining my old friend and her two undead accomplices. I remember that it took a few shots to put them down, but at least I didn’t have to resort to flinging old records and kitchen appliances at them, as Shaun & Ed did.
I woke up immediately after, heart racing from the oneiric adrenaline surge. Figuring there was no getting back to sleep, I got my book (Pride & Prejudice, if you’re wondering) from the nightstand and headed downstairs to read.
But the instant I reached the landing, I realized exactly where my dream had come from; I had left the front door of the house open. My aforementionedly witty and image-associative subconscious decided to quote Pete from Shaun of the Dead to let me know, “And the front door is open . . . AGAIN!!”
Fortunately, it also left me with that cricket bat, so I guess I can’t complain.