and speaking of bubbles...

The most vulgar excesses of empire manifest themselves only when the empire in question is in decline. A number of historians and historical sociologists have made this observation with respect to social systems as varied as the Roman Empire and the Antebellum South. I thought of them last night at Katsuya in Hollywood. I know that sounds weird. Have you heard of Katsuya? I believe they have restaurants all over the world - Tokyo, New York, London, Berlin...even Palm Springs. The best way I can describe the place is as a Japanese restaurant that feels "very NBA." It's the kind of place, in other words, at which I could picture LeBron James arriving with his posse in a black stretch Hummer. As the doors to the limo fly open, the bass from some hellish Lil Wayne jam rattles the windows outside and a dozen or so flashbulbs pop, lighting up another round of celebrity worship. Katsuya is a place for those for whom money is no object, a place that takes the Japanese emphasis on respect and hospitality to new levels of servility and decadence...as long as they have your Visa Platinum number keeping a tab. Just keep the Cristal flowing and put it on my tab. Another three bottles of sake, please, and put it on my tab. Can we get another few plates of the yellow tail with crispy rice, and throw in a few kobe beef platters while you're at it, and put it on my tab... The wait staff is comprised of genetically perfect looking Japanese guys and dolls, and they tabulate your charges with digital pads that feed the orders back to some central nerve center that then forwards the order to the low-wage Mexican workers who assemble the food and who remain completely hidden from view throughout the entire evening. ...At one point, I ambled from our table to the Men's room, ambient techno buzzing in my ears. The women standing at the bar were all young, but not so young as to not evince a slight hint of desperation, with their their thigh-highs and low-cut-sweater-mini-dress thingamajigs. It's been unseasonably warm here in Los Angeles, but these women seem to sense that it's cold outside. They outnumber the men at Katsuya by something on the order of three-to-one. ...Katsuya strikes me as a protective bubble for the very rich, shielding them from the harshness of today's world. The weird thing is, though, that it all seems so flimsy and cheap at the same time. The marble in the bathroom isn't real marble. The walls are all adorned with artistic photographs, but look closely and you see that they're photocopies, not the real thing. The dark lighting in the place can't completely hide the fact that the fabric covering the booths is frayed and worn out. It's a teetering house of cards, a decaying, flim-flam moument to a decaying, flim-flam era. Just up the block, a few streets north of Hollywood Blvd, there are protective bubbles of a decidedly different kind, a grouping of tents that together make up a homeless encampment. The tents are also frayed and worn out, but for different reasons. Still, make no mistake about it: There is a causal relationship between the two bubbles, but the bubbles themselves help keep the relationship hidden. A relationship between people takes on the appearance of a non-relationship between things...

...I don't wanna make it seem like I didn't have a good time at Katsuya. I did. I ate. I drank. I laughed and I enjoyed myself. I tried not to think about the grossness of it all, knowing what I know, or at least what I think I know. I tried and largely succeeded to not be a downer, a dark cloud, a buzzkill. It was hard. Sometimes - maybe most times - it's better not to know.

the beginning of the end of the beginning of the end

How will historians look back on the economic era we're living through now? This is the kind of light 'n easy question I wrestle with when I'm running on the elliptical trainer at the gym… The paradox of people making history is that the real meaning of what they've done and of how they've done it can only be grasped well after the fact. So the first problem is defining a coherent period to interpret. The challenge here is that we're now only at the very beginning of a new period, so its significance isn't really knowable in a deep way… If, off the cuff, I were to draw up a schema of American economic history, I would say that the election of Reagan signified, at least symbolically, the end of the broadly based liberal consensus that resulted in the New Deal and the War on Poverty. Capitalists in the 80s began to take back a lot of the power that had been stripped from them over the previous 50 years. The capitalist gains were consolidated during the 90s as most of the Reganite assumptions became accepted truisms in mainstream American political discourse: Welfare state, bad; state spending on anything other than defense, bad; taxes, bad; collective bargaining, bad. Unregulated markets, good… Everybody wins when capitalists are free to pursue their business interests. Wall Street’s interests and Main Street’s interests are the same…

But there’s a wrinkle in all of this because the capitalist consolidation of the 80s and 90s was built on the flim-flam foundation of over-easy credit, deregulation, and rampant financialization. I say flim-flam because typically the way out of recession is to allow a Darwinian shakeout of weak firms, thereby allowing the markets to adjust back to some semblance of equilibrium. Then innovation, pent-up demand and eventually rising wages bring the economy back to life. But with a badly eroded and increasingly uncompetitive manufacturing base – or what people are talking about when they say that we don’t produce anything anymore – policymakers had to find other ways to prop up the economy. At the tail end of the first Bush’s presidency, the Federal Reserve began to pump tons of liquidity into the markets and aggressively lower interest rates in an effort to lift the economy out of recession. In lowering interest rates so dramatically after almost two decades of inflation paranoia, the Fed essentially encouraged ordinary people to use the debt markets to finance lifestyles that their otherwise stagnant incomes could not afford. Although the S&L crisis and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management were initial and largely unheeded signs of the pitfalls of the neo-laissez-faire turn in U.S. economic thinking, the policy created an unprecedented if also unsustainable boom. Throw in the commercial exploitation of the internet and the innovations of the dot-com era, and the American economy looked superficially like it would grow indefinitely. The Dow went through the roof, passing 7,000, then 8,000, then 9,000, the 10,000, the 11,000. People were talking about Dow 36,000, and they were taken seriously! I can remember watching Abbey Joseph-Cohen, one of the superstar equities traders at Goldman Sachs, talk to Louis Rukheiser on Wall Street Week about the American economy being like a freight train that could not be knocked off course. Only now do we see this for the mania that it was.



It’s clear that the Fed long ago stopped thinking about the long-term implications of monetary policy. It’s all about the political economy of the here and now. Historically low interest rates in the naughties fed a boom in the mortgage markets that took on a life of its own and acted as a temporary fix to much deeper structural problems. People not only bought houses they had no business buying, but used the artificially inflated equity in their homes re-do their kitchens, buy a few extra inches of flat screen, get nicers car, take longer vacations on Maui... And just as the internet bubble burst in 2000, the mortgage bubble burst in 2008. So now we’re at a point where there are seemingly no bubbles left to inflate, unless there's something unforeseen - something we take for granted - like water or air, that will eventually be commodified and make for a market that will act as a solution to our economic problems, even as it leaves millions of people without he most basic of necessities. I'm just thinking out loud here. The main point here is that here we are at the end of the age of Reaganism, the end of the flim-flam era, the end of the bubble era, the end of empire. It's the start of something new. But what is it, exactly? What will it be? An age of austerity and a deteriorating way of life? Will things improve, or will they continue a slow decline indefinitely. It's much too early to tell...

a holiday in the sun

I have not had much chance to write lately due to being swamped at work. But I just finished writing a big report, so I thought I’d reward myself by venting all the bitterness ‘n bile that’s been building up in my system over the last few difficult weeks. …One of the reasons I have time to write now is that today is my office's Christmas party, and rather than celebrate a holiday I hate with people I despise, I’d rather sit at my terminal at work and cleanse my soul. It’s a funny bit of business these Christmas parties. Nobody likes one another, and nobody really wants to be there, and yet we do this shit year after year. Why not just give us the day off, or at least send us home early? I don’t get it. It reminds me of what I’ve just had to endure during a week back in New York visiting with my family. It was a rocky time for me emotionally. I stayed with my parents, which is what I usually do when I go back East for visits, but it’s gotten increasingly difficult. I’ve really started to feel like I get in the way of their way of life when I’m cooped up in their cramped apartment. Over time, there’s been a kind of just-below-the-surface emotional distancing between me and my parents. They would of course be appalled to hear me say this, but only because a sober analysis of the situation – as opposed to denial and wish fulfillment – would reveal that what I’m saying is true. There’s always been distance, I think, always been an unpleasant sense on my part that they don’t really ‘get me’, don’t understand that I’m not motivated by the same things they’re motivated by, but I’ve only recently come to realize that this is perhaps not a ‘me problem.’ Don’t get me wrong, though. I have plenty of me problems, and I’m willing to accept some of the responsibility for not having a particularly nurturing relationship with my mom and dad. It’s complicated and not the kind of thing I can pick apart and explain in detail now, writing at my terminal while all the pathetic stooges I work with sit in some miserable cheap Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, pretending to like each other, and wishing they could order a few $5 margaritas to dull the painfulness and boredom. It's not like the good old days when guys 'n gals would get freaky at office parties and dance with lamp shades on their heads. Drinking during office hours is strictly verboten, at least in the public sector.

...If I sound a bit out of sorts, I suppose it’s because I haven’t been able to lose the toxic fumes swirling around me in the wake of the Thanksgiving trip. Thanksgiving day was really bad. I was there, seated at the table, along with my sister and my sister's husband. We all love each other and are mutually supportive. I'm lucky to have them there. But then there’s my mom, who wears a face in a jar that she keeps by the door. She's emotionally stunted and deals with her anxiety with an eating disorder and by remaining disingenuously upbeat about everything, even in the face of the seething hostility of my older sister, who is my father’s daughter from a previous marriage, and her adopted daughter. And then there’s my dad’s older son, who's practically deaf and, so the parental line goes, dropped so much acid in the 60s that he’s just sort of spaced out. He doesn’t participate in the (stunted) conversations at the festive dinner table, but I think this has less to do with drugs and more to do with a personal choice. Can't say I balme him. His second wife is at the table with him. She’s from China and speaks very limited English, but has nevertheless gained a heavy New York accent for the words that she can speak. In itself, these minor details about her would not be all that significant, at least not until I told you that he’s 65…and she’s 25, two years older than his daughter, my niece, who is at the table, too. If all this sounds extremely fucked, that’s because it is. My niece recently graduated from Princeton but decided to marry some dude well below her station, whom no one else in my family likes...because he’s well below her station. How soon those who’ve advanced from the lower middle classes forget where they came from! My niece and her hubby got married about a year after she graduated from high school, so she did not have a typically Princeton-ish experience at Princeton. She made no friends, absorbed very little either intellectually or socially, and basically could have had the same experience at any state or even community college, and it would have been cheaper and less fraught with all the crushing expectations that come with graduating from a place as stuffy and status conscious as Princeton. My parents are furious with her husband for a long list of reasons, not the least of which is that he supposedly “ruined her life” by taking her out of the whole Princeton vibe. What makes it worse is that, now that she’s an ivy-league graduate - but, in a sense, not really an ivy-league graduate - she has no real plans to be a doctor, a lawyer, a professor, an investment banker, etc. Instead, she’s basically the administrative manager in her father’s store, a job that, truth be told, does not require more than a high school diploma. Ever seen Five Easy Pieces? …And finally, my dad is seated at the head of the table, grouchy and bossy as hell, and looking for any little thing to be aggrieved about. These days you’ve gotta walk on egg shells around him. His temper will rip the fucking face right off your skull. I love the guy so much, but my love is put to the test if I’m around him for too long at once. Funny thing is, I think the same goes for him with me. Call it a push. …So try to imagine, if you will, what the feeling is like at that Thanksgiving dinner table. Sounds really loving and warm and happy, doesn't it? And then afterwards, when everybody’s left with a belly full of food and a head locked in a vice-like grip of stress, my parents sit together and go through a detailed post-mortem, ruthlessly picking apart every flaw in every person who, only a half hour earlier, was seated at their table. My older sister is described as “angry and shallow”; her daughter “has no intellectual curiosity about anything”; my older brother is “out of it”; his daughter is “a total failure in life”; her husband is a “fucking asshole.” There's so much negativity swirling around this conversation that it's even too much for me, and I usually thrive on negativity. My parents know better than to say anything too pointed about my sister or her husband when I’m in the room, which is good. But, in the words of Robert Plant, it makes me wonder: What exactly do they say about me when I’m not there?