One Small Loan for Private Citizen, One Giant Leap Forward for City of Little Rock

We have a cupcake boutique!

My Classic Vanilla cupcake was delicious.

Market Intervention

Now is the time to patronize any new small businesses I've been intending to visit but haven't yet made it round to.

First up, Cupcakes on Kavanaugh.

How To Be the Next Gombrich

London Times publishes a reading list

Banana Republic II

McArdle reams Pelosi.

Brooks heaps scorn on House Republicans.

Also, I fixed the McArdle links in the earlier post.

Banana Republic

No Bailout. Listening to Repubs and Demos point the finger at each other. Lovely.

Watched Paper Moon tonight. See, the Depression wasn't that bad.

Bailout

Looks like the bailout is going to go through this morning. To say I understand economics would be a real stretch, but I understand enough to note that a lot of the objections to the bailout I hear from citizenry left and right seem to have less to do with economics and more to do with pissed off populism. Frankly I don't know what to think. Megan McArdle has been invaluable to me helping to explain this mess, and her libertarian bona fides make her support of the bailout all the more convincing (here, here and here from last week). The problem for me is the utter uncertainty of how this will play out (which supporters of the bailout also acknowledge), not simply in the short term (economy continues to stumble but does not meltdown?) but in the long term with regard to the structure of our economy and even the principles and old verities on which I've grown up assuming it was prefaced. Under those principles markets should operate freely for the most part, but then widespread banking instability was assumed a thing of the past as well. I just don't understand enough to anticipate at all where this is going, and in that void is the inarticulate fear of a loss of something valuable and a shape of something new that we will regret.

Update: I've fixed the links

Wow I Watched Something That Wasn't Political

Saw Libeled Lady and Gilda this weekend. Glamorous old Hollywood is a nice escape when your netflix selection is 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. This is exactly the kind of netflix rental that plays havoc with my illusion of the money-saving rental scheme, the red envelope sits around forever and then I cheat on it with TCM.

This was interesting: Classic Beauties: How They Aged!
Although this sort of thing is depends entirely on the shot they select to represent "old." The "young" shots are all studio stills and the "old" shots are just random pics. Audrey Hepburn aged better than that. So did Lauren Bacall. The Myrna Loy shot is just mean. It's like the modern internet age version of the memento mori. Beware your passing youth!

Best title encountered while late night TV watching:

Leaves from Satan's Book

This is an old silent (1921) tracing Satan's tricks through history's darker moments (thank you TV Guide). Right now we seem to be in the French Revolution and the Marseillaise singing masses have an evil glow. A hero looking fellow appears on the verge of fainting. Or maybe that's Satan. Hard to tell. Next up Satan is scheduled to go to Finland and goad nasty Russians into occupying their neighbor. This seems like a stretch for the greatest hits list of Satanic activity, but then the film is Scandinavian and artistic license will be all they've got vs. Russia for the rest of the century. Piano music very tremulous and heavy just now... This is fun... Somebody should remake this for modern times. How about Leaves from Satan's Book: the Sequel? What a great way for the Georgians to let off a little steam, this time without completely losing face. Or maybe Satan can show up as a chief executive of an over-leveraged investment bank. Then he can golden parachute to safety and cackle manically about frozen credit lines from a ledge overlooking Wall Street.

Ike and Osborne

How poignant. Ike, or what was left of him, blew through Little Rock last night and took out Jennings Osborne's light display, or what's left of it. Is this the end of the saga?

Jennings Osborne is a local business man who made national news a few years ago when his neighbors complained about his three million strong Christmas lights display. He bought out both next door neighbors and expanded his show to three lots before the Arkansas Supreme Court shut him down as a public nuisance in the famous Yule Duel of 1994.


In defeat Osborne packed most of the show off to Disneyland but kept a couple of patriotic symbols and a massive American flag.


Over the years the display has faded to a pretty decrepit single flag and then came Ike.


It wouldn't be the Osborne light saga without the neighborhood angle and thus when the massive flag fell it took out the power lines running up Cantrell, cutting power to all surrounding neighbors.


Oh to be a fly on the wall at the next Robinwood block party.

Starbucks Ceremony

Raise your lattes. P joined R and M as R's mother Judge G swore them all in. How appropriate to swear to uphold the constitution next to the mother load of caffeine that will enable you to do it.

It is such a beautiful day out...

...I wish I belonged to an intramural sports league.

Good Mornin'

Up late last night with a friend's Happy Engagement shrimp boil/hurricane watch party. In consequence slept in this morning, together with a sister who was traveling until midnight last night. A few minutes ago we shared groggy-eyed a pot of tea and caught up, which makes this one of the nicest Sunday mornings I've had in a while.

Random thought on music: so much more enjoyable if you are the listener to know the musician and know the flaws. Not a question of live vs. recording but personal vs. impersonal. Personal is so much better, where my sister smiles before she hits a certain passage, where the hitches are. I'm not surprised by amazing music on a disk, but I am always astonished to see a person play it. Is that irrational?

I have Schubert's G-flat impromptu on disk. Alfred Brendel no less. My sister on the piano this morning with the same piece. Her first instrument but not her best and really only has snatches of it down. But when she plays it's not some purity found in nature but something to be approached note by note, first by Schubert, then later by my Dad, then later with the kids lying under the piano to hear the notes reverberate down on top of them, then later by my sister playing around on Sunday morning.

Just One More Speech To Go

My boyfriend is excited because after two weeks of political conventions he is about to get his girlfriend back.

Old French Documentaries and Matthew 25

Watched "The Sorrow and the Pity" with my Dad over the weekend, Marcel Ophul's 1972 film about the WWII collaborationist government of Vichy France. It's long but fascinating, focusing on personal interviews and allowing a lot of scope for explorations of motivation. And it is for that very reason, for the personal context that accompanies every stage in the narrative, that a sense of heartbreak grows with the watching. The betrayal of ideals in Vichy's collaboration with the Nazis was breathtaking in its completeness, nor did it die with Vichy proper. During the siege of Berlin, a fact not mentioned in the film, fascist French units fought with the Germans against the Russian advance. Such actions in retrospect condense into obvious black and white choices. If you can't back the right horse in WWII, when could you ever. The underlying assumption is that one could never make such a mistake oneself. But through the interviews of "The Sorrow and the Pity," if one can't excuse the betrayal one still comes to appreciate the confusion of the time. How loyalties to one virtue could lead an individual into alliances completely unworthy of their devotion. How a cramped political vocabulary that forced so much into a prism of Fascism or Communism obscured larger realities and impelled people to act as if under compulsions that with more imagination or more attentiveness they could have seen as non-existent. Why allow an aversion to Communism to force you into a proxy Fascism? On the basis of such delusions, such mistakes, and such blindnesses to allow yourself to stain a lifetime? It's heartbreaking. Chagrin and pity are good words for it.

With that tinkering around in the background, Dad reached for the Bible after dinner Monday night and began his evening devotional.

I have to confess I was a little distracted. Where Christ's parable had the throne of judgment, I imagined the judgment of history. Where the righteous and unrighteous were divided as sheep and goats, I saw the resistance and the collaborationists. So far so good, a blithe analogy. A simple warning, if I take the trouble to tune back in to my Dad in the background, to do right, back the right horse, be holy etc. But there was more there. Notice, pointed out my Dad, that both sheep and goats are incredulous as to why they end up where they do. Not only are the unrighteous mystified over the source of their wrong, the righteous are mystified over the source of their right. How they did wrong or right is an equal mystery to both parties. In this, Christ suggests that in the end we do not anticipate the grounds upon which we will be judged. Not that those grounds are unknowable, but simply that we are bad at applying the obvious to everyday life. How obvious seem the moral choices faced by Frenchmen in WWII with the benefit of hindsight. Yet in practice, the intersection of scores virtues and vices and our own limited vocabulary of options, our lack of perspective, obscures the "obvious" to such an extent that thousands of people find themselves complicit in great wrong. It is a disturbing idea that our estimation of where the right lies should be so faulty, all the more if you are convinced of the necessity of right action. How to survive a true judgment, by history or even a more supreme judge? There is some comfort in the fact that it wasn't in the capacity of sheep or goat to spot the moving hand of God in their daily events that salvation lay - "When were you ever in prison, ever naked, ever sick?" they say -it was in the inculcation of a reflex to do right in the most absurd and trivial moments (to the prisoner, the stranger, the sick). See the instincts of your heart, scripture seems to warn, be wary there and there be on guard to have that heart renewed and true. Because who can say with any confidence that they will read the tea leaves of history right or guess correctly when the Judge will come and of whose party he might be.

Ahoy the Ark

Still raining. Massive tree down in the front yard. Lots of leafy rubbish in the streets. Power is out in all the surrounding neighborhoods. The stop lights on Rodney Parham are dead. And it's been this way all day. Why? All the Entergy linesmen were sent down to Louisiana. Crafty, crafty hurricane.

Rain Rain

Atchafalaya Houseboat

I wanted to see this PBS program tonight but missed it. After reading that book on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker I've wanted to know more about the hardwood swamps of the Delta wetlands. There are supposed to be pockets of swampland all along Arkansas's Cache and White rivers, mostly second growth remnants of the hardwood cathedrals that used to be there. And I've even heard of river people in some parts - nothing like Bayou Chene in LA - but still... It would be nice to know more. What this history is, what still survives...