Outsourcing and Liquidation: Business Topics for Our Times

So it’s a jobless recovery after all. Is anybody still waiting for Godot? Better to contemplate the insights in these two handy volumes for our post-recessionary times. With The Black Book of Outsourcing, the cult of outsourcing will be your friend whether you’re a still viable business or a downsized employee. If the Black Book fails to save your business, then turn to Last Rights: Liquidating a Company. It’s sure to smooth your transition to the business afterlife.

With their jet black dust jackets, both volumes would sit smartly on a doily beside the guest log at your local undertaker’s. But you can’t judge these books by the wry subtext of their covers. Inside, they are all business and absorbing reading if you find strategy to-do-lists and taking inventory scintillating.

Remember the verbal inventiveness that begat rightsizing from downsizing? You’re gonna love the verbal spawnage from outsourcing. The Black Book identifies backsourcing, cosourcing, heresourcing, insourcing, multisourcing, massivesourcing, and the self-congratultory smartsourcing. Surely writers of The Office could make hay by goosing up this material a la Seinfeld’s Label Maker episode, which explored the deeper meanings of gifting, re-gifting, and de-gifting.

While The Black Book ‘s primary audience is established businesses, its dust jacket, among other things, promises that by reading the book you’ll learn What to do if Your Job Is Outsourced. Wouldn’t you know that the book’s upbeat advice to fallen employees is essentially, Outsource Thyself!—either by brokering your skills with established outsourcers or by founding your own outsourcing kingdom.

When All Else Fails. If outsourcing can’t save your business, head straight for Last Rights, which serves up the mechanics of business liquidation from soup to nuts. “The day-to-day management of a business undergoing a liquidation involves many of the same matters as running an ongoing business, except that the goal is to reach a point where there is nothing else to manage,” observes coauthor Ben Branch, a professor of finance at the UMass Isenberg School of Management.

One of the book’s revelations involves Federal Bankruptcy Code Chapter 11. Chapter 7 offers straight-up liquidation. Chapter 11 allows you to restructure—to take another crack at business viability. But seven of eight firms that file Chapter 11 go down the tubes, notes Branch. Many,in fact, wind up deploying Chapter 11 to morph more advantageously into Chapter 7.

When Last Rights first appeared in the spring of 2007, it became the first book on the planet to offer a pragmatic guide to business liquidation that integrated business and legal perspectives. Considering that more than 95% of America’s businesses fail within their first five years, Professor Branch was puzzled. “I’m not entirely sure how to account for our singularity,” he observed. “I do know that most books on the subject have focused on the legal side of bankruptcy. There’s also a bias on success stories in business writing. In a sense, Last Rights is a guide to the management of salvaging as much as possible from a failure.”


For a view on the sunny side, check out the video below, which explores the benefits of Laughter Yoga in the workplace.



Subscribe to Wig & Pen.

Walking the Walk with Mayor Bloomberg

Mayor Bloomberg

When New Yorkers elected Michael Bloomberg as their mayor, they knew that they had chosen an independent spirit who could not be bought politically or financially. Now, with 2/3 of polled New Yorkers ambivalent about his determined advocacy of a 13-story Islamic center near Ground Zero, the mayor's steadfastness on the issue has offered us rock-solid evidence that he indeed "walks the walk."

That is consistent with Mr. Bloomberg's recollections of his own wonder years. The mayor, a secular American Jew, grew up with admirable tolerance toward Arab-Americans, Albigensians, Shriners--you name it.

Wig & Pen Walks the Walk. With that in mind, this blog's proprietor--also a secular American Jew--aspires to be more of a mensch, like Mayor Bloomberg. In other words, he asks, what cultural prejudice or angst might he give up to walk the walk, just like the mayor?

After hours of neurotic High Holiday deliberations, I’ve settled on a high-risk course of possible action--ownership of  a Rottweiler. Let me explain. American Jews--secular or otherwise--typically steer away from ownership of Rottweilers and other Teutonic dogs. In 1910, Rottweilers joined Dobermans, Airedales, and, of course, German Shepherds as the breeds of choice for German police work. That arrangement lasted right through the Third Reich. (The original German police Rottweilers had catchy names--Max von der Strahlenberg and Flock von Hamburg.)

Over the decades, this writer has encountered but one American Jew with a Big Four Reichdog under his roof. The man was a victim of circumstance: His wife, an arid Dane, lorded over an intimidatingly powerful Doberman.

Rottweiler reconciliation now?

There must be other exceptions. Next week, at the corporate water cooler, please poll your workmates. And please share any titilating findings with the readers of this blog. (A second exception:  The Israeli armed forces make prudent use of German Shepherds. A friend of mine who gushes with conspiracy theories speculates that Mossad agents smuggled and rehabilitated the first of the recruits from Argentina.)

My back pages. As a grade schooler during the 1950s and 60s, I first learned about the dark side of German Shepherds from my grandfather, Abraham Isaac Sandman . We regularly bonded over TV, but he drew the line at Rin Tin Tin, the show about a crowd-pleasing Shepherd boarded by the U.S. Cavalry and his young pal, Rusty. One day, when Rinty was making life challenging for a Comanche, I overheard my grandfather just outside the TV room mutter, He’s NO good, that Jew-eating dog.
Several years later, my grandfather—a fan of the WWII stalag comedy Hogan’s Heroes, adamantly refused to accept that its two brightest “Nazi” stars—Sergeant Schultz (John Banner)  and Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer) were both played by Jewish actors. (Klemperer was the brother of Otto Klemperer, the great conductor.) My grandfather was adamant:  No Jew--no matter how despicable--was capable of such camouflague.

A Change of Heart and a Proposal to the Mayor. For me, then, owning a Rottweiler would be a cultural stretch, perhaps even an exorcism of atavistic cultural demons. And I’d have an opportunity, just like Mayor Bloomberg, to walk the walk. But the more I think about it, a second, thornier issue emerges like a hound at the gate: I'd be respponsible for a high-maintenance beast. For me, the Maginot Line for pet ownership has always been: Do I need to walk it?  My late gouramis--Bisquick and Sapphire--and my several cats never presented such challenges. After they went to the pet shop in the ground,  I leapfrogged right over dogs to the high-maintenance vicissitudes of a son.

Mayor Bloomberg is clearly a better man than I for the job. He could adopt a Rottweiler himself--or perhaps take a position in Rottweiler futures, or even create a Rottweiler futures index. Mayorissimo: How about leveraging a dust mite among your billions in a start-up hedge fund that embraces all four breeds of German police dogs and that spreads your risk with positions on chihuahuas and "Yin" pooches like Black Labs and Goldens? And you could manage the fund in New York's financial district not far from the new cultural center .  .  .


Wagner, of course, was another of my grandfather's betes noires.
Here's a Nazi propoganda homage to Wagner that I found on  music critic
Alex Ross's New Yorker blog, Unquiet Thoughts.

Globophobia, Bolshaphobia, and the Kessler Syndrome

Globophobia

Twenty years ago, I discovered an intriguing fact about a coworker. An attractive, confident women in her early thirties, she had a master’s degree and a glass-is-half-full attitude. One day, a visitor appeared at our office door with several helium balloons and a card addressed to one of our student workers. After signing for the delivery, my coworker passed the balloons and card to someone else in our office, and quickly left the room. When she returned several minutes later, she was pale and falling apart.

Later in the afternoon she confessed to a fear of balloons since childhood. But she didn't know why. As a child, she had been ambivalent about birthday parties. Isn't your father a policeman? I asked. He was a cop, no less, with a dark sense of humor. (This blog’s legal team has instructed me to go no further than to note that Dad had once tried to freak out Mom by planting CSI-type evidence in the freezer.) Then it occurred to me: my friend’s fear might have stemmed from her dread over balloons popping, a sound not unlike that of some low-caliber handguns. That, she responded, made some sense. But she just wasn’t sure about the cause and origins of her fear, which is clinically known as globophobia.

Bolshaphobia

Fears for the Rest of Us. Praise the gods of randomness! you might be thinking, for having spared you, your family, and your friends from balloon terrors and other surprising phobias (see Wikipedia's phobia roster). But don't sigh so fast! Many of us have imbibed phobic cocktails collectively. A generation ago bolshaphobia (fear of communists) and nucleomituphobia (fear of nuclear weapons) were all the rage. When I visited my dentist a month after 9/11, he noted that business was booming—his patients were grinding and breaking teeth, fillings, and crowns faster than he could say, Please rinse. And now as we move on with our lives, the specter of accelerating global warming must certainly be taking its collective psychic toll and stoking the therapist’s time-honored mantra--I’m sorry, but we have to stop.

Rx for the Author of Wig & Pen. Since little is normal about this blog, you won’t be surprised to learn that its proprietor is in the vanguard among those with an aspiring collective phobia. It involves the Kessler Syndrome, which entails the scary geometric progression of space junk. Here’s how it works. Most artificial satellites travel just outside the earth’s atmosphere in low-Earth orbits. That allows them to communicate effectively with the earth’s surface and to do exciting things like snooping on military and business facilities. When one of these satellites breaks up, either due to collisions or to deliberate destruction (in 2007 the Chinese blew up their Fengyun-1C spacecraft while testing an antisatellite weapon), it exudes thousands of pieces, each which can take out other satellites. Thus, space junk begets more space junk, which begets much more space junk. Stopping the proliferation involves forcing the junk into the earth’s atmosphere, where it will burn up. Proposals include deflecting the junk with lasers or through collisions with special satellites made from super-strong light-weight materials.

Such science high-jinx gives little solace to Wig & Pen’s afflicted blogster, but as a name, the Kessler Syndrome has a ring worth suffering for. Had George Costanza or Alvy Singer [Woody Allen's role in Annie Hall ] the chance, they might have embraced it with angst. Shouldn’t the name of both the phobia and the junk-generating phenomenon be one and the same? And shouldn’t the author of Wig & Pen be the first to earn the diagnosis?

The Kessler Syndrome

Glasnost, Amherst College Style

 Clark House Fence(l.)                President's House (r.)

“The fence is inconsistent with the way the college is; we don’t have a fence between ourselves and the community,” Amherst College’s director of design and construction Tom Davies recently told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Director Davies was explaining the college’s principal decision to take down the 80-year-old, 310 foot-long wooden fence around the Clark House, a former private residence alongside Route 9 in the heart of the campus. Built in the mid-1800s, the Greek Revival building currently houses classes and offices for political science and several other departments.

The Amherst Historical Commission Protests. On Monday night, the Amherst Historical Commission, citing the town’s demolition delay bylaw, voted 3 to 1 with one abstention to commute the fence’s capital sentence for a year. This blog’s readers can judge the aesthetic merits of the fence from the above photo or on their own field trip to the site at the corner of Rt. 9 and Seelye Street. But they should do so sooner rather than later: the fence’s ongoing deterioration, including rot and decay—and facilitated by neglect from the college—increasingly serves the naysayers’ case. While Director Davies cites philosophical reasons as paramount, he also points out that the college would need to fork over $15,000 to paint and repair the fence.

And if he were so inclined, Director Davies might remind us that up by the college’s War Memorial sits the fenceless outdoor sculpture of favorite son Robert "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" Frost. Still, inconsistencies remain. The college president’s residence, pictured above, is mindfully sequestered behind soaring arbor vitae and other greenery. If ubermenchen still roamed the earth, they might call it a fortress of solitude.

Good Fences? Good Neighbors?

                                                                             

Imodium at Tanglewood

It’s intermission at Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall (The smaller hall used mostly for chamber concerts). I’m sauntering across the lawn to the facilities when I spot a diminutive vending machine about the height of a newspaper box. It sports an official-looking red cross beneath eight fully loaded rows of colorful packets of Imodium, Pepto Bismol, Bayer’s, and five other restoratives. The pigmy machine’s sensory overload is almost too much to process. Have I died and gone to seniors pachinko heaven? No, but there’s no doubt about the vending machine and the concert’s shared demographic.

Back at my seat, I do a 360 and observe the usual sea of grey interrupted by occasional thirty- and forty-somethings. The Ozawa Center invariably sports a smattering of even younger concert goers, but I am always suspicious that they are music students associated with Tanglewood.

Elliott Carter and Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Much of the audience had come to hear Bach chamber music, but the evening, organized by the great French pianist and new music advocate Pierre-Laurent Aimard--featured a brilliant, instructive olio that included Bach, Elliott Carter, Intermission and the L’il Medic 8 machine, more Bach, and the gut-wrenching Ligeti Horn Trio. Having persevered through the Carter, the septugenerians beside me failed to return after intermission. (The similarly annuated couple behind me who wondered whether the Hungarian Jew Ligeti was Italian stuck it out.) Carter, whose music has no tonal center but is eternally youthful with conversational and exclamatory vivaciousness, presented his relatively younger audience with inadvertent irony: He is still composing great music at age 101½ .

Such musings of superannuation brought me back to a Peter Serkin concert 20 years ago in Marlboro, Vermont when the pianist jumped into the Italian Concerto. Three measures in, he jumped right back out when his playing fell prey to feedback from the sound system. It took ushers and the audience nearly half a minute to home in on the source of the disturbance: an oblivious, elderly man in the third row whose hearing aid was feeding back into a nearby microphone.

But let us give youth its due. Several years ago just after the precocious chanteuse Sonya Kitchell began a set at the Iron Horse Coffee House in Northampton, Massachusetts, time, space, and music froze after an exceptionally loud cell phone went off. Immediately, an indignant audience-wide search began, which produced the culprit: Sonia Kitchell’s young saxophonist, who sheepishly produced the phone from his saxophone case on stage. When his time to solo arrived, his riffs revealed exceptional energy, exceptional passion.

To Sheathe or Not to Sheathe . . .

Here’s a suggestion that will bring magic to your next soiree. Have your guests fess up their attitudes and behavior toward umbrella sheathing. This, of course, applies principally to umbrellas that collapse in on themselves; not to most traditional pole umbrellas, which rarely come with sheaths. (Don’t worry about disenfranchising the owners of pole umbrellas at your party. They will revel in smugness as guardians of umbrella tradition. And they will gloat over the behavioral foibles of your other guests, particularly if they happen to be their spouses.)

The big question, of course, is whether your guests use or ditch their sheaths. Wig & Pen put that question to thirty owners of collapsible umbrellas. Twenty-four confessed to a sheathless lifestyle, five said that they sheathed religiously, and one said that she wasn’t sure. Among the sheathless majority, eight,
including the author of this blog, admitted to setting sheaths aside for possible later use. None of them got around to using them, though, although several confessed to micro-twinges of guilt. In contrast, six nonsheathers disposed of their sheaths immediately after the point of purchase—some with relish; some with indignation.

The five dedicated sheathers all exuded a passion for organization. Some admitted to creative ordering systems of everyday artifacts like clothes and cutlery. One sheath-abiding informant noted that he had learned respect for umbrellas from his father, who had lived in London. England, he emphasized, is an advanced civilization in the ways of rain, fog, and rain gear. (When poring through his late father’s personal effects, he had discovered different colored umbrellas that coordinated smartly with the dead man’s differently hued suits.)

James Smith & Sons: London's Largest Purveyor of Umbrellas

Another dedicated sheather was a health educator who had imparted sex education in a variety of venues, including a county prison. A show-stopper in her act involved the proper ensheathment of a condom on an oversized latex “demonstrator.”

Share your sheath-worthy research with the Wig & Pen community! For starters, you might consider the following avenues of inquiry: Is umbrella sheathing behavior positively related to traditional demographic variables like age, gender, and income? How about differences in attitudes and behavior between boomers and Xers? between florists and roofers? between Shriners and Albanians?

Do dedicated umbrella sheathers have a lower incidence of STDs than their sheathless counterparts? How do couples with contradictory sheathing habits mediate their differences? (Is counseling advisable? And If so, how does one find a sheath-neutral therapist?)

Before you begin your research—one more insight, inspired by a friend in marketing. Umbrella sheaths are hybrids—part packaging, part umbrelloid. If you want them out of your life but are conflicted, view them as packaging. You’ll toss them post haste, unless of course, you get mired in proper sheath recycling.

In Praise of Squirrel Literacy

“Squirrels nest in trees?—No way. I thought they lived in stone walls or in holes in the ground like chipmunks,” protested a friend in her early 40s. A similar response from a second friend suggested a pattern. (Both, of course, were referring not to short-tailed ground squirrels but to the ubiquitous grey squirrel that has adapted so successfully in our midst.)

Both of my friends are graduates of fine colleges, but, remarkably, both have lived nearly their entire lives—nearly 95 years combined—in rural Hatfield, Massachusetts. Unlike neighboring Northampton and Amherst—both multicultural hotbeds—Hatfield—with its predominance of Polish, Irish, and Anglo-American descendents, is as ethnically homogeneous as the milk from its Holsteins. If I moved to Hatfield and its several Jewish families fled, I would be the town Jew. This year’s high school graduating class of about 40 sported one African American—a school-choice nonresident [Was she pushed or did she jump?]

Squirrel Literacy Now! If my two soon-to-be former friends from the sticks are so profoundly squirrel-challenged, what about the rest of us from places on the map that don’t involve squinting? A recent New York Times article by science writer Natalie Angier makes a splendid case for squirrel literacy and the squirrel’s—especially the grey squirrel’s—extraordinary adaptive fitness. According to Angier, they can leap 10 times their body length, and rotate their ankles 180 degrees, which allows them to grip with the tenaciousness of a reverse mortgage salesman at a senior center. Those assets combined with double-jointed hind legs allow squirrels to accelerate and change direction on a dime. If they played football, they’d be finesse backs, split ends, safeties.

The surprisingly sophisticated squirrel brain allows for tactical deception. They’ll bury a nut/seed, dig it up, and rebury it, over and over again. If they suspect they’re being watched, they’ll fake the interment and move on to safer ground. Confession is good for the soul. As a five-year-old, I watched a squirrel bury an acorn from my backyard window. When the critter vanished, I retrieved the nut and jiggered the burial site to appear untampered. Then, at my back window, I observed the creature dig in frustration. In retrospect, I’m not proud of my behavior then and, for that matter, of my unkind words above directed at the good people of Hatfield. But for me, impulse control has no pride.

Squirrels are also “master” kvetchers, emphasizes Ms. Angier. Their repertoire of chucks and kuks runs the gamut of negativity from mild discomfort to the prospect of neighborhood-wide bedlam.

A Tale about a Tail. Without question, the squirrel’s lightening reflexes, its loquaciousness, and its juiced-up metabolism give you one furry jive artist. That was much of the charm in Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, an account of escalating squirrel chutzpah in the face of peril—the taciturn, lethal owl, Old Brown. During the six-day adventure, Nutkin’s siblings and cousins paid Old Brown tribute in mice, moles minnows, and fat beetles, the latter which Potter insisted were as good as plums in plum pudding for Old Brown. Nutkin, on the other hand, offered annoying riddles and escalating impertinence, which culminated on the sixth day:

Nutkin made a whirring noise to sound like the wind, and he took a running jump right onto the head of Old Brown!...Then all at once there was a flutterment and a scufflement and a loud "Squeak!" The other squirrels scuttered away into the bushes. When they came back very cautiously, peeping round the tree—there was Old Brown sitting on his door-step, quite still, with his eyes closed, as if nothing had happened. But Nutkin was in his waistcoat pocket!

This looks like the end of the story; but it isn't.Old Brown carried Nutkin into his house, and held him up by the tail, intending to skin him; but Nutkin pulled so very hard that his tail broke in two, and he dashed up the staircase and escaped out of the attic window.And to this day, if you meet Nutkin up a tree and ask him a riddle, he will throw sticks at you, and stamp his feet and scold, and shout—"Cuck-cuck-cuck-cur-r-r-cuck-k-k!"

A Jive Artist Supreme!

When I think about the Celtic's Ray Allen, I think about retired Cleveland Cavalier Mark Price. Mention Mark Price--I think about phonology.

In April 2009, my son and I lucked out with a behind-the-scenes tour at the TD Bank Garden, several hours before a Celtics game. Shortly after admiring photos of Ted Williams’ elegant swing in a mini-shrine devoted to the great batsman, we noticed Ray Allen alone on the floor circumnavigating the 3-point arc. I began counting. Before I lost interest, Ray had made 17 of 20 3-point jumpers from his “spots” around the arc. Most of the positive outcomes were all net. If you focused on just the bottom of the net, you’d see it flip half a foot upward with clone-like precision before dropping back down in the ball’s wake. Ray’s delivery was efficient but much more. Its gracefulness was a basketball analog to the Williams swing.


Forget Ray’s streakiness in this year’s playoff finals. Historically, he shares stratospheric company with the NBA’s shooting elite. Only Reggie Miller has made more 3-point shots. And in lifetime percentage for free throw completions, Ray ranks number nine (.885) on a compressed roster led by the astounding Mark Price (.904).

These days, Price, who spent most of his career with the Cleveland Cavaliers, is a shooting coach for the Atlanta Hawks. He trains other NBA players at the Mark Price Basketball Academy in Suwanee, Georgia. The academy’s Mark Price Shooting Lab employs radar and video tracking equipment to evaluate shooting arc and the mechanics of a shooter’s form.

Mention Mark Price--I think of  phonology. That’s because of a memorable moment with my late aunt—a language scholar—inspired by my high school friend, Marc Price. Aunt Sylvia and her husband, my Uncle Bill—a philosopher and editor—were language sticklers. They were that rare couple that at the dinner table might argue over the use of the subjunctive.

One June just after the end of the high school year in Worcester, Massachusetts, Marc and I visited Sylvia and Bill in Washington, D.C. Marc returned to Worcester a week later; I stayed on in Washington. After he had left, Sylvia remarked that she had enjoyed his company. But she had one reservation: Every time you hear his first and last name together, she emphasized, there’s a sonic explosion. That’s the k sound and the p sound colliding without the buffer of a consonant in between. That’s phonological trouble, she said. I’m sure his parents had no idea what they were doing when they named him. We’ll all just have to grin and bear it.

For the future author of Wig & Pen, that insight proved far more eventful than dinner time revelations about the subjunctive. It was the beginning of a realization that I had better pay greater attention to the role of sound and rhythm in both writing and speech. So in making tradeoffs as a writer and editor, one inevitable question on my short list of concerns is and always will be—How does it sound?

Bastille Day Greetings from Wig & Pen!

Je me souviens! On an extended August weekend in 2002, only nine months before American supermarkets would begin bowdlerizing “French” from French fries after France’s refusal to buy into the mess in Iraq, Amherst, Massachusetts welcomed an unprecedented invasion of Francophiles.

More than 1,000 owners and enthusiasts of schlumpy Citroëns descended on Amherst and the University of Massachusetts for the International Citroën Car Club’s annual convocation. The first such gathering outside Europe, the event attracted owners from that side of the pond and others who had trekked in their marginally dependable autos from as far away as Washington State, British Columbia, and Mexico.

With exhibits at the university’s Student Union and Campus Center and hundreds of Citroëns parked around the campus pond, the gathering reached full strength on a 90 degree Saturday afternoon. Every owner had a unique tale to impart of how and where he had purchased his Citroën, his Job-like patience in securing replacements for malfunctioning parts, and his survival on the road in an oversized kitchen appliance.

Like antique car owners, Citroën drivers don’t drive—they motor. By necessity, they are resourceful mechanics. And their bricolage extends to amenities. One owner proudly showed me a phonograph secured on erector-set brackets in the crawl space otherwise known as the back seat. A second revealed an oddity under the dash of the passenger’s seat that  looked like an ensconced aquarium with a spigot. It produced cold Orangina.

The gathering disbanded on Sunday morning. That afternoon on a drive north to Greenfield via Route 5-10, I noticed a disabled Citroën on the side of the road. Several miles later I saw a second and then a third. From that point on I looked away. Two days earlier, meeting up with a supercilious Belgian in Antonio’s Pizza in downtown Amherst put things in perspective. When I joked that Citroëns would struggle in Nascar, he sniffed, Monsieur, it iz not ze speed, but ze nuance of your adventure that matters.

AN IVESIAN STATE HOLIDAYS SYMPHONY?

Lately I’ve been listening to Charles Ives’ Holidays Symphony, a compelling four-movement evocation of Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving Day. Ives was a true music revolutionary. Some consider him America’s greatest composer.

Ives’ movements often begin contemplatively and build, sometimes fitfully, to crazy-quilt climaxes of multiple American musical themes.  The Holidays Symphony’s 4th of July movement, for example, juxtaposes fragments of Colombia, The Gem of the Ocean; The Battle Hymn of the Republic; Yankee Doodle; Reveille; and a jagged motif by Ives himself. You feel that you’ve time travelled to some late 19th –early 20th century overloaded soundscape of musical Americana that’s on the verge of an Ivesian  breakdown. That’s usually when Ives pulls the plug, leaving you in a parting wake of musical contemplation—an exit rather than a resolution.

Nobody on the planet is a better advocate for Ives than Michael Tilson Thomas, who demystifies and adds excitement to The Holidays Symphony in a terrific DVD in his Keeping Score series. After he dissects the symphony movement by movement (accompanied by vivid multimedia examples), he treats you a winning performance under his own baton with the San Francisco Symphony. Visit the Holidays Symphony’s Keeping Score website here.

So how about an Ivesian symphony dedicated to genuinely obscure state holidays—i.e., holidays celebrated largely by state employees?

That occurred to me on Bunker Hill Day (June 17th), one of three springtime holidays “celebrated” by state workers in Massachusetts. The other two are Patriots Day and Evacuation Day. (The latter commemorates the day in March 1776 when the Brits abandoned Boston.) Massachusetts may lead the nation in such state observances, but other states, in their own poignant celebrations, have much to offer the musical enterprise at hand.

Favorites include Cesar Chavez Day in California, Arbor Day in Nebraska, and Pioneer Day, a.k.a. The Day of Deliverance, in Utah. Alaskans celebrate Seward Day and Alaska Day and Hawaiians undulate on days that honor Kamehameha the Great and Prince Kūhiō. Finally, there are holidays heavy on southern charm like Lee and Jackson (that’s Stonewall, not Andrew) Day in Virginia and Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.

With a so much inspiration and so little time remaining on another one of my state days off --a Personal
Day--here are my preliminary .   .   .

Sketches for an Ivesian State Holidays Symphony

First Movement: Lee and Jackson Day—Virginia, January 2. A choral quartet version of the elegiac southern hymn, Washing in the Possum’s Bounty gives way to a spritely string orchestral arrangement of Debussy’s Golliwog’s Cakewalk. (evoking the exuberance of Confederate aspirations). Staccato upwellings of Dixie intrude, yielding a strident hybrid consummation. After the bottom drops out, a lone fiddle takes us downstream with a spectral rendition of Robbie Robertson’s The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

Second Movement: Evacuation Day—Massachusetts, March 17. For openers, any lush Elgarian theme will do for veneration of all things British.  Upon restatement, the theme incurs escalating pepperings from impolite fifes and drums. Next, a full orchestral wash of London Bridges falls victim to merciless sonic deconstruction. The movement’s coda—the specially commissioned Evacuation Tango—accompanies footage of state workers rising en masse from their desks and abandoning their offices.

Third Movement: King Kamehameha Day—Hawaii, June 11.  Sonic titillation from a lapping surf morphs into a traditional Hawaiian chant with thumping shark-skin drums offering a plea to the forest god Kane for Kamehameha the Great’s (1738-1819) shadow “to never grow less.” A spinning Bakelite radio dial surfing across snippets of big band swing settles in on Laurel and Hardy’s rendition of Honolulu Baby (Where’d you get those eyes?). In recessional, slack key guitar master Ledward Kaapana bids us a terminal aloha with Lei' Awapuhi (Yellow Ginger Lei).




Final Movement: You decide! My short list is a toss-up between Utah’s Pioneer Day (July 24) and Rhode Island’s Victory Day (August 15), which celebrates the United States’ defeat of Japan and the end of WWII. For Pioneer Day, you might glean inspiration from the apocryphal  From Jeptha’s Bosom: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s Wonder Years. If you favor V-Day--Rhode Island is the only state that celebrates it, probably because of the heavy involvement of its naval bases in the Pacific War--why not finish up with Randy Newman’s exuberant Political Science [They All Hate Us Anyhow, So Let’s Drop the Big One Now?]

An Ivesian Puzzlement

Finally, Wig & Pen  wonders how Ives would have viewed this proliferation of state holidays and their “get out of jail” cards for state and (other) employees. Music, after all, was Ives’ avocation. In the work-a-day world, he commuted from Danbury, Connecticut to Manhattan as an insurance executive. He ultimately owned his own firm, Ives & Myrick (1907-1930), where he developed estate-related insurance products for well-to-do clients.

In the early days of the last century, many viewed the insurance business as radical. By the standards of the day, then, Ives pushed the envelope both in business and in music. Given his pioneering disposition, would Charlie Ives have welcomed state holidays and encouraged his employees to take the day off?  That Is The Unanswered Question.

Subscribe to Wig & Pen.

MR. YETVIN

The previous Wig & Pen entry touching on Nikita Khrushchev evoked the childhood reminiscence below.


That’s not Mr.Yetvin in the above photo, but my grandfather, Abraham Isaac Sandman. Like Yetvin and Nikita Khrushchev, he spoke fluent Russian, was built close to the ground, and exuded a peasant’s unstuffiness. Unlike Yetvin, Zadie saw the glass as half full. For him, an indispensible recreation was swimming (perhaps natating is a better word) stark naked at the YMCA with his ageing mates. (Watching them launch from the diving board was breathtaking.)

Another passion was grocery shopping on behalf of the two women in his life, his wife (my grandmother) and his daughter (my mother). A savvy arbitrageur, he would travel the seven hills of Worcester, Massachusetts with his portfolio of coupons in search of the slightest price advantage. His accomplice was always his light blue 1952 Mercury, dubbed the Speedmobile by the kids on my street. “Luyis, into the machine; times a- wastin’,” he'd exhort.  My friends would ride their bikes or run alongside the Speedmobile, keeping pace and often passing us.

Mr. Yetvin was decidedly bald. His suspenders and khaki pants secured shirts with large checks that resembled Kansas from the air. To my friends and me, Yetvin and Khrushchev might  have been separated at birth. It was 1961—the year of the Bay of Pigs. We were deeply fearful of Russian missiles and Russian spies. Yetvin’s disposition exuded subversiveness. He would snarl at any children who got too close to the embankment-lawn that buffered his brick cottage. Some of the kids would respond with cat calls, even flipping him the bird. Little Howie Rubin once rode his bike half way up Yetvin’s pitched driveway. Yetvin followed him down the driveway with an edger.

In the late spring of 1962, the Yetvin Affair took a foreboding turn. Our neighbor stopped mowing his lawn. By July it was nearly waist high. More than once we watched Yetvin—sometimes smirking, sometimes snarling—take a sickle to what looked increasingly like a wheat field. “A sickle—like in the Soviet flag,” remarked my next door neighbor, Adam Weinstein.

Then one day in late July, Jamie Rubin—Howie’s older brother—rang my doorbell. “Get down to Yetvin’s—now,” he gasped. “The lawn is burning. The old fart set his lawn on fire.” The embankment and several yards of lawn behind it were ablaze. My fear was Pavlovan and primal. The crackling flames, the heat, the smell, and the prospect of a dangerous elemental force out of control in a middle class Worcester neighborhood—What could be more unsettling to an 11-year old?

Back in the early 1960s, everybody burned paper and brush in outdoor metal incinerators. Smoke and its
byproducts were regular ingredients in the evening air. But Yetvin’s inferno was an affront to the neighborhood, to the order of things—and worse still, to the sanctity of the American lawn. For weeks, the jet-black scorched earth that once was lawn festered as a badge of his subversiveness. “Stay away from Yetvin and his yard,” my father demanded. “He’s unstable.”

Ten years later as a student of anthropology, I had an epiphany while reading Smolensk under Soviet Rule, a book about agricultural practices, land distribution, and politics in a Belarussian city and district during the 1920s and 1930s. Russians, it turned out, burned their fields to enrich their fertility ( a variant on the widespread practice of slash-and-burn agriculture.) That brought back memories of Yetvin. Suddenly he seemed a tad less loony—although no less subversive or mysterious.  If you have inside information about Mr. Yetvin, please contact this blog.  What became of  him? And more to the point, what actually was his game?

On Invisible Gorillas, Khrushchev’s Shoe, and Photoshop

Take two and call your lobotomist in the morning. In a classic psych experiment, about half of a subject group charged with counting a basketball team’s passes in the half court failed to notice the accomplice in the gorilla suit who briefly strode onto the court. A presumably honest Hillary Clinton remembered sniper fire overhead when touching down in her 1996 visit to Tuzla in war-torn Bosnia. Reporters recalled a different story: a peaceful landing and welcoming ceremony graced by a child reading a poem.

These and much more are grist for Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons’ new book, The Invisible Gorilla, an exploration of the distortions and outright illusions that accompany our individual and collective perceptions and memories. Don’t be fooled, note the authors: our brains are not cameras—they construct and reconstruct memories and perceptions with creative aplomb—sometimes they addeth; other times they taketh away.

If the shoe won’t fit . . . Reading the New York Times’ thumbs-up review of the book several Sundays ago ignited my own memory of perhaps the greatest collective illusion of the Cold War era. Remember footage or photos of Khrushchev banging his shoe during his 1960 speech at the United Nations? Nikita with shoe is one of the iconic images of the era. But according to former Washington Post journalist Peter Carlson in his entertaining K Blows Top, there was no video and no photo of the “act.” Alas, we’ve inherited just one photo of the shoe—a loafer, which sits inertly on the desk in front of K.

Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, who has lived in the United States since 1991, notes Carlson, regularly asks audiences if they recall images of his father banging the shoe. “I say, please raise your hand if you saw it, and many people raise their hands. They really think they saw it,” he remarks in Carlson’s book. Try your own version of the question at your next party. Some of your friends will bet the house that they saw K’s shoe in action. Their certainty will reflect  the viral potency and reinforcement of the human herd's collective memories.

Two weeks ago, I became excessively agitated upon discovering the Web photo (above right) of Khrushchev in the act—so agitated that  I emailed Khrushchev’s biographer, William Taubman, at Amherst College. The professor’s response was decisive:

I'm certain it's been photoshopped. Because even if he did bang his shoe (which I doubt), he is alleged to have done so while seated at a desk rather than standing at the lectern. But after interviewing a lot of people about the whole episode (many of them after my K bio came out), I believe K only brandished his shoe but did not bang it.

Learn how Professor Taubman arrived at his conclusions in his sparkling, meticulous opinion essay in the July 26-27 issue of the International Herald Tribune here.

A Note to Self-Important Photoshoppers. Be advised that Photoshopping a loafer into K’s hand and launching the photo into cyberspace may reflect your affinity for a consummate Stalinist tradition. Prominent party members among Stalin's millions of purged victims regularly got the air brush in official photographs. Consider the before-and-after frames below of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), who was purged in 1939 and executed in 1940. The photos are highlights in the Newseum’s intriguing Web exhibit, The Commissar Vanishes. Visit it here.

And take it from Chabris and Simons—getting a handle on perception and memory can be a tall order unto itself. Additional “noise” is not required. Please hold the Photoshop!

Subscribe to Wig & Pen.

Wig & Pen Remembers “Diaperman” Gary Shider

Wig & Pen grieves in reporting the passing of Gary Shider, a.k.a. Diaperman, a.k.a. Starchild, a mainstay in George Clinton’s wondrous troupe, Parliament Funkadelic (a.k.a. P-Funk). Mr. Shider, a vocalist and guitarist, earned his moniker by performing for decades in just a diaper. I got to see him for the first and last time in February, when my son dragged me to Funkadelic’s standing-room-only concert at the House of Blues in Boston.

In spite of my middle-brow musical apprehensions, the musically and comedically sumptuous show quickly won me over. Because the concert came on the heels of my annual visit to my urologist--Dr. Phillip Kick--watching Mr. Shider evoked both wonderment and envy. Here was an artist and a man, I thought, who in his golden years had earned the protected luxury of having a beer or two on stage—with full urological impunity. Sadly,  he never reached his golden years, departing for the eternal funkathon on June 16th at age 56.

Gary Shider died of cancer. The Sweet Relief Musicians Fund is coordinating a benefit concert and fund on behalf of Gary and his family. Learn more here.

A Question for Vladimir Morales and Wig & Pen's Readers

On June 7th , Amherst’s Select Board voted unanimously to adopt a resolution that prohibits the town from selling or buying goods or services to or from Arizona. The resolution also encourages Amherst’s residents and businesses to do the same. Thus, the town has responded to Arizona’s notorious “immigration” law, which gives police extraordinary powers to demand proof of identification by birth certificate or visa from anyone whom they suspect might be an illegal immigrant. Wig & Pen considers the Arizona law to be despicable. This blog is ambivalent about Amherst’s response.

NOW, on behalf of Wig & Pen’s readers, this blog seeks clarification involving a specific incident from Vladimir Morales, the Amherst Town Meeting member who played a pivotal role in the Amherst resolution’s adoption.

To cut to the chase: On Wednesday evening, while walking through town, I passed by La Veracruzana, one of Amherst’s culinary and cultural jewels. Owned by community-minded Martin Carrera and operated (predominantly) by Latinos, the restaurant recently installed a flat-screen wall TV to air every game of the current World Cup tournament. So far; so good.

It must have been after 8 p.m.--after World Cup coverage—but right in the middle of the Red Sox-Arizona Diamondbacks game, whose progress was clearly evident on the restaurant’s wall screen TV. When I got home, after voicing my customary skepticism toward interleague play, I asked my 18-year-old son whether he viewed La Veracruzana’s airing of the game as a breach of the Town’s resolution. His characteristically upbeat response: The Red Sox whipped their asses. Didn't they? So it must have been a good thing.

So Vlad, was it a good thing, a bad thing, or some shade of grey?

Please elucidate  below or via ariel@som.umass.edu.

Thank You!

Massachusetts Embraces Faustian Economics

With a trifecta of casinos in the offing for Massachusetts, will the state’s wager on casino gambling prove to be an investment in Faustian economics? Without question, the state’s balance sheet and several local communities will benefit. But there will be collateral damage. If you or your loved ones are among the body count, be sure to tell your nearest chapter of Gamblers Anonymous that Wig & Pen sent you.   You can drop in unannounced on regularly scheduled meetings throughout the state. And if you’re in Latvia, there are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday night gatherings in Riga.

But when all is said and done, nothing prevents a tumble from grace more swimmingly than prevention. In yeoperson work for the Indiana Prevention Resource Center, a public health professional and a library science maven have tackled gateway gambling issues that plague Indiana teens. On page 22 of their study, they depict decks of Jack O Lantern and Candy Corn playing cards, a toy roulette wheel, and a Monopoly board under the heading, Gateway Gambling?

One state over in Champaign, Illinois, the YMCA is offering a youth camping experience that the Indiana duo would no doubt abhor. There’s probably still time for you to enroll the underage members of your family.

The Blood Is the Life. While on the topic of Gamblers’ Anonymous, isn’t the vampire a splendid candidate for 12-step intervention? I'm talking intervention via affinity groups that pay more than lip service to Romanian language skills, the non-kitchen uses of garlic and oregano, and so forth. The vampire’s subversive appeal, after all, is that—like a well-adjusted Victorian—you can relate to the generic compulsion that accompanies addictiveness, while the addiction itself remains at an unreachable distance from your own—be it sex, drugs, or philately. (Lamentably, I recently learned that my 12-step proposal was not the first: Vampires Anonymous, a camp flic released in 2000, explores the phenomenon, but not apparently with much success. The Internet Movie Data Base panned it with a rating of 4.9 out of 10.)

Just like any addiction worth its cred, the vampire’s has its own gateway dynamics. To that end, Wig & Pen leaves you with a photo of the the hapless accolyte Renfield  from Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. Over the course of the movie, Renfield, played by the hyperbolic Dwight Frye,  works his way up the food chain from flies to spiders to rats. Before his untimely death at the hands of his master, he's just begun to explore humans, but with the experimental tentativeness of  a protopubescent.

Substitute M&Ms, petits fours, and, Crispy Creams:  Don't Renfield's rantings have universal, cautionary bite?

Stations of the Cloth

Ten years ago over my morning coffee at Rao’s in Amherst, I looked up to see my friend Bruce Teague flipping through what appeared to be a Lands End catalog. That seemed a tad out of place for Bruce, who usually dressed with Franciscan abandon. I should mention that Father Bruce was at the time head priest at St. Brigid’s, Amherst’s largest Catholic Church.

At Bruce’s table, much more came to light. The catalog had a four-color Lands End look—but instead sported liturgical vestments—chasubles and copes, stoles, funeral sets, dalmatics, and—of course—albs. These were the good works of the Holy Rood Guild, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trappist monastery, St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. The elegance, craftsmanship, and sticker price of Holy Rood’s offerings (most embellished dalmatics begin at $1K) made one conclusion inescapable—these Trappists have transcended the business purgatory of jellies and jams.

“I know many of the models; that’s Father Timothy; that’s Father Anthony,” confessed Father Teague, while treating me to a tour of the catalog. You too can view it first hand, through the Holy Rood Guild’s inspiring Web site at this link.

I also recommend Brother Emanuel Morinelli’s discussion of the Guild and its business model here.

And for whimsical inspiration, take a look below at the Ecclesiatical Fashion Show—the one saving grace in Federico Fellini’s otherwise tedious movie, Fellini Roma.

On Sartoral Expansion, Contraction, Concealment

One of the odder hypotheses in Mindless Eating—Brian Wansink's book on the behavioral traps that lead to unwise eating habits—involves those orange jump suits worn by prisoners. Wansink contends that weight gain associated with extended prison stays may have as much to do with prison wear as with the usual suspects—lack of exercise and starchy prison diets. That’s because loose fitting orange fatigues take away the girtho-static advantages of the pants and belts that automatically let us know when we’re bulking up.

It would be criminal, though, to limit that line of inquiry to the prison population. Might it not, for example, prove a cautionary boon  for wearers of North African and Middlle Eastern garb like jelabas, hijabs, jilbabs, and ultimately, the full burqa? What a timely topic for cross-cultural empirical research.

More on the burqa. “The burqa is not welcome on French soil,” France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy has emphasized. President Sarkozy considers the burqa anathema to an open, democratic society—especially to its women. [although banning it would be indisputably undemocratic].

But aesthetics might also be a factor. What an affront the burqa must be to a society whose self-identity is enmeshed in high fashion and visual refinement? Is any nation more obsessed than La Belle France with the full disclosure of physical beauty--especially of its women? Sarkozy certainly hit the jackpot himself with his own significant other (even though she is imported).

The power to conceal. The burqa, moreover, has the capacity to conceal much, much more--Not only who resides within but what accessories may be lurking. I first learned about sleight of hand from my maternal grandmother, a substantial  woman who frequently produced tissues, a powder compact, and legal tender from her sleeves and occasionally her bodice. Endowed with  a burqa, Nanna  might have added  her alligator wallet, a deeper line of  cosmetics, perhaps even my uncle’s service revolver.

Mr. Sarkozy, take notice: Democracy can be a bitch and the open society will always have its enemies. You, in fact, may ultimately be one of them.

Graduation Special: Hand Sanitizer and the Dean’s Advantage

Two weeks before this year’s graduation ceremonies at my university, parking-meter-shaped Purell dispensers like the one above began popping up on campus. They are artifacts from last year’s H1N1 preventive campaign that have earned a future in my university’s public heath initiatives. Graduating students at commencement ceremonies would do well to take them and hand sanitization more seriously.

When they cross the stage to receive their diplomas, graduates shake the hand of one dean (or chancellor, or provost). But the hand that they’re shaking is an uber-hand—a node in a network, if you will—that has just pressed the flesh with scores, perhaps hundreds, of less than deanly extremities.

That’s something that deans know intimately, so when they finally sit down, most of them worth their advanced degrees reach for the sanitizer.That clear realization among deans is what I call The Dean’s Advantage. But most graduates who have just pressed the flesh with one dean think in terms of one hand—not the many hands that have just been up close and personal with the One.

That’s why they should get sanitized right away. Incidentally, don’t expect the dean to sanitize periodically during the handshaking queue. The scale and time constraints of the ceremony will always favor a linear assembly line, not lean production where the dean might halt the flow.

But there may still be a way out of this: consider the “GE Handshake” in the video below.

Tails of an Office/Desk Distribution

Among the more than 100 faculty offices at my school on the UMass Amherst campus, the two depicted above may well be the end points on my building’s Oscar Madison-Felix Unger continuum. The professor sporting the Oscar desk (above left) typically takes care of business without much trouble as long as the work at hand stays in his active working space—i.e., on top of everything else. But today’s active workspace can soon become tomorrow’s substratum. To deal with that, the professor periodically has a student assistant or two—in accounting, not archeology or historical geology—wade through the strata and sort the material by subject for assignment to boxes.

His Ungerian counterpart and owner of the desk on the right has no such challenges, requires no such help. And I will forever be in his debt for having nudged me to spiff up my moustache, which to my surprise had been a tad longer on the left than on the right.

TWO WHO CRIED WOLF

                                      
What did pioneering social scientist Stanley Milgram and comedian Redd Foxx have in common?

Both cried wolf at least once too often.

In 1962/63, Milgram gained national notoriety for laboratory experiments that conned subjects into believing that they were administering electric shocks to other subjects to facilitate their learning. (The subjects on the receiving end of the juice were imposters; the shock machine only appeared to shock.) When the true subject, i.e., the shocker, had second thoughts about administering increasing voltage, a confederate of Milgram’s—an authority figure in a lab coat—would urge the shocker to continue. The experiments served up the shocking conclusion that Americans were excessively obedient in the company of an authority figure.

Milgram paid a price for the downside of his fame and his methods—Some colleagues and students were never quite sure when and if he might be putting them on.

Which brings us to a tale of disbelief at Harvard University on November 22, 1963. Here it is, according to Thomas Blass’ terrific book about Milgram, The Man Who Shocked the World:

So when . . . [Milgram] burst into Emerson Hall in the midst of a lecture by Talcott Parsons about the nature of the social system, and rushed to the podium yelling, I have horrible news. President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas,” he was met with outrage and skepticism. Barry Wellman, now a sociologist at the University of Tornoto remembers blurting out: You’re just doing another experiment on us.

                                                                                                                                  
And what about Redd Foxx ? Scarcely an episode of the 1970s TV series Sanford and Son went by without his character, Fred Sanford, clutching his chest and crowing to his long-suffering son, Lamont, “Oh! It’s the big one; Elizabeth [Fred’s deceased wife], I’m coming to join you, honey!”

Years later (1991), when Mr. Foxx collapsed at a rehearsal on the set of his new CBS television series, The Royal Family, his costar, Della Reese, and much of the cast at first suspected that he was treating them to his signature routine. But they soon realized the truth: Mr. Foxx was down for the count at age 68.