Gear Acquisition Syndrome

One common affliction in guitarists is the belief that he or she desperately needs some new piece of gear.  The new gear is obsessed over and lusted after for months.  Then, the guitarist breaks down and buys the equipment only to discover that they are the same guitarist they were before.

The Misanthrope is no stranger to this disease and his growing collection of guitars is a testament to his weakness.

This time it was the Gibson ES-175.  As a young player, I had always thought of true hollow body guitars as nerdy, dorky instruments.  Even though one of my favorite players, Steve Howe (pictured here on their 1973 World Tour) played an ES-175 for most of his career with Yes, I still never had much interest in them.

As I got older, I moved from solid body guitars into my first ES-335, which is just a fantastic sounding guitar.  I've played it almost exclusively for the last 5 years and it is set up to my exact tastes.  Still, I felt no urge to take the next step and go for a full hollow body.

When I started listening to a lot of jazz players like Grant Green, Wes Montgomery, Herb Ellis, Tal Farlow, I really started to appreciate the deeper tone that they were getting from their instruments.  At the same time, my ears have, frankly, gotten a bit tired of the sharper sounds that can come from an electric guitar.  

So, I started looking at hollow body electrics.  I didn't like a lot of the body styles I saw, like the Gibson L-5, but I found myself coming back again and again to the ES-175.  Today, my new ES-175 arrived.  I ended up getting the Steve Howe Custom Shop model, mostly because 2008 Custom Shop instruments have their frets done by an incredible machine called a Plek and also because I liked the tobacco sunburst finish on it more than the vintage sunburst that they offer with the standard ES-175.  It's got some different things on it to replicate Howe's guitar, but it is overall very beautiful.  And I got it brand new for a huge, huge discount from list and retail by searching on eBay, the world's greatest guitar shop.

When I plugged it in, it was, hands down, the most beautiful sounding electric guitar I have ever played.  If only I had know when I was younger!  The tone is just what I was looking for all these years.  Deep and mellow but still clear and ringing.  With just a touch of overdrive on the amp, the bridge pickup sings.  Amazing.

I'm going to spend a little time with it, experimenting with different string gauges, before I take it in for a do-over by my guitar guy at Peekamoose.  I'd like to put .013s on it or maybe even heavier.  I can't imagine what the tone will be like with that much string pushing air.

But, of course, I am still the same player I was yesterday and I still can't play jazz properly.

Black Watch

ScottishFest '08 continued last night as Scottish Lass, Scottish Dad and I went to St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn to see "Black Watch."  The show is a production of the two year old National Theatre of Scotland (Motto - "Hae a wee dram and a drama, ye crabbit get") and it is simply one of the best things I've seen in the theater in New York.  It is the story of the Royal Highland Regiment, known as the Black Watch because of its dark tartan and its mission to "watch" the Highlands, and its final mission as an independent regiment in Iraq.

The acting is superb.  In fact, it is so seamless that I kept forgetting that these weren't real veterans on stage.  The direction and music took full advantage of the possibilities of live theater. And the story itself was moving without being maudlin or polemical.  Scottish Dad, not the type to display emotion openly, was clearly a little snuffled up at the end when the bagpipes started.  (I can't blame him.  Bagpipes, like church organs, go right to my heart and make me weepy almost instantly.)

The show is on until December 21st, so if you can swing a ticket do not fail to go and see it.  

WHAT THE $^&%*(??????!!?!?

Check out this story from Nebraska.

No, I'm sad to say it is not a hoax.

Guns Are Just Tools - Unfortunately, So Are Investment Bankers

A lot of friends have been asking me to explain what is going on in the financial markets lately.  It's not an easy subject to condense, but this article by Michael Lewis, the author of Liar's Poker, is a pretty good summary of the way that Wall Street built the bomb that destroyed it.  The subject is mostly restricted to Wall Street and the way that repackaged subprime loans spiraled out of control, but it is a great read and well worth the investment.

One thing you have to bear in mind is that until the 1980s, most investment banks on Wall Street were private partnerships.  That constrained the amount of capital they could put to work, but it also meant that each partner was taking financial risk with every strategy they pursued.  After they all went public, that risk was borne by public shareholders, leading to a pretty significant shift in risk appetite at the management level.

When I worked at Goldman, Sachs in the early 1990s, it was still a private partnership.  I will never forget one of the partners saying to me, "I lie awake at night and think, 'Some 27 year old is betting 10 times my net worth on some strategy I don't fully understand.  It's terrifying."  That fear disappears when the company is owned by public shareholders.  It's the not the root cause of everything, but it is symptomatic of recent Wall Street, where so many were paid so much and yet took so little personal risk.  It's recipe for disaster.

Armistice Day

Today is the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I, which ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.  The Great War, the war to end war, is better understood by another name by which it was called at the time - The Meat Grinder.  Although the gruesome effects of modern weaponry had been seen as early as the American Civil War, the Great War brought insane body counts and casualties to a peak never before seen in human history and, God willing, unlikely to be seen ever again.  The Battle of the Somme in 1916 resulted in 1.5 million casualties over four months.

Veteran's Day, which is today, commemorates the end of that war.  For many years after the war, in many of the countries that had sacrificed entire generations to the Meat Grinder, everything stopped at 11 AM on November 11th each year as a memorial.

In the U.S., Veteran's Day has been largely supplanted by Memorial Day as the primary military holiday, but it is still a Federal holiday and older Americans will remember the symbolism of the 11th hour.

My father's step-father lied about his age in 1917 and joined the U.S. Expeditionary Force to fight in France in the last year of the war.  When I began to study history, I tried to ask him about his time in battle, but he would only give me one answer, "That was a long time ago kid."  He was gassed at one point and described to my father the sight of the low cloud of mustard poison creeping across the field in the late evening light.  Ninety years later, one of the companies I work with in my professional life is working on a potential treatment for mustard gas exposure in a terror attack. Amazing to think about.

At any rate, take a few seconds today to listen to this recording  (link to the clip is at the end of the article )of a battle in the last days of the war.  Chilling stuff.

Potvin Sucks

The Scottish Parents are in New York for three weeks on an extended holiday.  As Scottish Lass and I were discussing last night, it's hard to have her parents in Australia as any visit has to be quite long to make the 24 hour flight in each direction worth it.  One great thing about her parents is that they are obsessed with New York and love it, so having such a long stay to wander around is a real treat.

Last night, Scottish Dad and I went to the Garden to see the Rangers beat the Lightning, 5-2.  We were joined by my own Dad.  Now, bear in mind that Scottish Dad has a thick Glaswegian accent and can sometimes be difficult to understand.  And my own father has a fairly noticeable New York accent.  It's not quite Goodfellas, but let's just say that the words with a pronounced "r" sound at the end are few and far between.  This made for a fascinating listening experience as Scotsman and New York got on like a house on fire.  It kind of sounded like this:

Scottish Dad: AYE MGHRMGN  AYE MGMRH  AYE URGHG

Cavalier Dad:  Dollah Yawk Dollah Yawk Dollah Yawk

Scottish Dad, a former hockey player, got a solid NHL experience.  We got a decent fight about 5 minutes into the first period, a hat trick out of Chris Drury and an even better fight in the third started by Tampa Bay's goalie.

And, of course, Scottish Dad got to hear the immortal chant, "Potvin Sucks."  Hearing this over the course of the night reminded me of the days when my Dad would take my brother and me to Ranger games as kids.  He had a connection that sometimes got us great seats (back then, the red seats) and sometimes got us nosebleeds (the blue seats).  I think I learned more about swearing in the blue seats than I learned anywhere else in my childhood.  And I will never forget the enormous open air urinal that was 32nd Street between 6th and 7th after every game.  Literally hundreds of people would just wander into an abandoned lot and deposit the remains of their watered-down, overpriced Budweiser.

So I have to admit that I got a little nostalgic as I watched my Dad, now approaching 80, get himself up and down the stairs to his seat.  He's got some knee problems now and his gait is much slower; certainly slower than his high school days, when he was called "The Gazelle" as part of his New York City champion high school soccer team.  I also look at his hands, now starting to curl a bit from rheumatoid arthritis, and remember how comforting they were when I was a kid.  

I remembered one game when I was very young, maybe 8.  The Rangers were playing the St. Louis Blues and we had great seats behind the bench.  Between periods, my Dad walked us up to the glass as the teams were filing back in from the locker room.  Suddenly, one of the St. Louis players said to me, "Hey kid, you want a hockey stick?"  Then he handed me a stick he had broken at the end of the previous period.  I was excited, to say the least.  We got back to our seats and the game began again.  I think it was a playoff game or a late-season game to determine if the Rangers made the playoffs.  The Garden was packed and rowdy.  At some point, the Rangers scored a goal and the entire arena went apeshit.  I was still small and the noise scared the hell of me.  I started to cry.  (Give me a break, I was tiny.)   At any rate, my Dad put his big hands on my shoulders and I felt totally safe in the midst of the screaming crowd.

Dads are awesome.  Call yours today and tell him you love him.

This Is Going To Kill New York

Bloomberg is being honest about his plans to raise taxes in New York City.  I admire the fact that Bloomberg is not sugar-coating the situation and that he is taking action now.  

Unfortunately, the proposed increase in the income tax will absolutely destroy this city.  I already have the pleasure of paying an additional 3.7% on top of my nearly 6.85% New York State tax just for the pleasure of living in a city with horrible public schools, decaying roads and insane cost of living.

Few people love New York more than I do.  It's my birthplace and my home and I get a little crazy if I am away from it for too long.  But if the income tax goes up here and Obama raises my federal taxes and my payroll taxes, I am really going to be forced to leave the city and possibly the state.  The most realistic possibility is New Hampshire, where there  is no income tax but where I can get to Boston and New York with relative ease.

I have long defended New York's insane costs as the price of the city's amazing vibrancy, but I think we have reached the tipping point when I am paying over 11% of my income just to be here.  I wish I were just speaking hyperbolically, but I'm afraid that I have already started to look into where I would move.  It's just too much after a while.

Hilarious

Now that Obama has been elected, the Iraqis are saying, "Please don't withdraw too fast, Mr. Obama!"

During the campaign, I had to endure many Obama supporters telling me that the Iraqis wanted us out as soon as possible and Obama would withdraw immediately.  When I told them that was not at all what opinion polls showed about the Iraqi attitude, that they wanted to be independent but they knew that they needed the U.S. presence for security, they scoffed.

You can't make this stuff up.

Congratulations to Obama

With Ohio gone, there is no real chance for McCain, so Obama is President.  Congrats to him for running a brilliant campaign.

I do believe that the voters have made a grave error in choosing such an unknown, inexperienced man to be President, but now we get to find out what he is going to do.   According to what his supporters have told me, the world will now start loving America, all of our mortgages will be paid and we will be sharing the wealth.