Just Over the Horizon

I’m sure people get weary - and if they are being honest - annoyed, at the way New Yorkers extol the virtues of food shopping in the metro New York area. I previously recounted the interesting explanations in “The Works” by Kate Ascher of the CSX railheads and Hunt’s Point wholesale in the Bronx which have a lot to do with the quantity and quality of fresh food here.  I was stunned when I got to know the high-end groceries in the Chelsea area in Manhattan. And then in 2008 I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the trucks can actually go over bridges, as North Shore Farms in Port Washington is really just as good as Garden of Eden and Chelsea Market. The cheese oval is 30 feet long and there is a full time cheese sommelier. Fresh fruit, veggies, meat and seafood are correspondingly great. And if that’s not good enough for me, I can drive a mile further and go to Whole Foods (but of course taking a very, very deep wallet).

But today I am forced to search for new superlatives.

Last Sunday over post-sailboat-racing beers, one of the crew said - with a mischievous grin - “have you been to eetaly?”. I thought, this is odd that a well-educated person would so egregiously mispronounce the name of that great country, so I responded “can you spell that please?”. She replied “Eataly!”. (By the way, after I got the inside of the joke, I tried this out at the lunch table at a software conference on Monday; table full of Manhattanites, and to my delight I got them all the same way. Imagine, a bumpkin from the wilds of Pennsylvania having heard of a new food experience in the City before they did!).

So today I went to see for myself. 50,000 square devoted to Italian food, to purchase grocery style, or sit down and eat; a central set of wine bars, circular maybe 60 feet in diameter with many stations; you are encouraged to roam around the whole place with your wine; a microbrewery is to open this year, as is a roof garden; 6 restaurants on site total are planned, several are open, not sure how many of the total.

Operating on sensory overload, I bought veal cutlets, salami, cheeses, fresh pasta, bread and some sauces. I know I didn’t really poke in anywhere near all the corners. The fresh pasta counter has people working right now, not this morning. The bread bakers are working right now not this morning. The oven looks to be maybe 40 feet square and 15 feet high and seems to share with the pizzeria. Six different rusticas among a couple dozen total artisan breads today.  Seafood to die for. Meat counter with whole rabbit let alone 40 feet of other meat. And there is a separate Tuscan pork products department which I hadn’t even seen when I bought salami.  The dried pasta and sauce section is the size of many grocery stores.

Pretty amazing.

Here’s from the New York Post in August at the opening:

“What happens when three of New York’s most beloved Italian-American restaurateurs team up with the founder of a gourmet food and wine market in Turin, Italy? The result is the grand, ambitious, sprawling Eataly, opening Tuesday in the Toy Building at 200 Fifth Ave. between 23rd and 24th streets.The complex features areas for shopping, learning and — of course — eating, as you might expect from a multimillion-dollar project dreamed up by culinary bigwigs Mario Batali, Joe Bastianich, Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Eataly founder Oscar Farinetti.”

My crummy Blackberry pictures don’t do it justice, so have a look here:

http://ny.eater.com/archives/2010/08/first-look-at-culinary-funhouse-eataly.php

As I have recounted in these pages before , I acquired a strange interest in reading about the history of finance etc., even before the current “crisis” came to full bloom; and the stranger because I only arrived in New York in 2004 and have nothing to do with financial services.

But since that blog post, I’ve read many more books, truly more than I can count or remember, and probably more than anyone needs to read.  More recently I’ve read Paulson’s “On the Brink” and Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail”.  And just for good measure but unrelated, I’ve read Christopher Hibberts oldie but goodie on the Medici which goes to show you that there is nothing new under the sun in terms of boom and bust or human avarice.  What does one learn from all this?  Well first of course that you have to form your own opinion about who is right and who is wrong; second that we are unlikely to every know a lot of the full truth of what went on in say 2H2006-2008; and lastly that only a fool would say we won’t be here again in the requisite number of years of collective forgetting.

Which brings me to Michael Lewis’  2010 “The Big Short”  .  There isn’t too much ambivalence about Michael Lewis.  He made a fortune at Salmon Bros. in the 80s, retired in his 20s to recount the madness he’d lived through, found his book to be a runaway best seller among young business students (who…hmmm…came into their prime in the mids of the first decade of the 2000s) and had no shortage of death threats.

He’s written a number of books since his first, but this time decided to tackle an aspect of the crisis that is easy to understand if you’ve read this other mountain of books but probably not widely thought about - those shorting the housing/real estate uber-market.

He focuses on three hedge investors, of quite varying sizes and sophistication, who decided as early as 2003 that there was a big problem looming and there was money to be made by betting on the other side because incredibly enough noone else seemed to understand what was going on.   In some cases, they shorted directly via housing industry stocks, banks and mortgage companies.  In all cases, they eventually bought credit default swaps.

The CDS  has some characteristics of an insurance policy, hence our now famous friends at AIG Financial Products in London sold a bunch of them; but they were far, far from the only ones to do so.  As a buyer, you negotiated what asset-backed (or later one could say vapor-backed) structured financial object you were swapping against, and paid a premium for a period of time to own the right to a payout on the demise of the underlying object, just as with a life insurance policy.  OK this is a huge oversimplification.

The book is very, very funny and engaging in a tragic-comic way.  As Lewis recounts it, all three sets of these folks in different ways spent not months, but years being in-your-face to the industry either because of a strange quixotic desire to save the world, or to test whether people were dumb enough to let their hedges carry on or they should get out of the positions, or both.

The smallest of the three is quite interesting.  They were three college friends who raised $110,000 from their families to start their fund.  They leveraged that to $1000,000; and with that they bought primarily CDSs.  You and I and Mom and Pop can not buy CDSs, because they were an insider vehicle from the git-go; so these guys had a hard time establishing enough credibility to buy them.  For most they used Bear Stearns as intermediary.  When Bear started its death spiral they became panicky that even though what they predicted was coming through, if the issuer was dead, they might be dead.  As you may remember, there was “Bear Weekend” and “Lehman Weekend”.  History will judge Paulson, Geithner and Bernanke on those weekends.  But Cornwall Capital decided not to let their CDSs run to the BIG BIG money of full default, but to try to sell them because they were such fly-specks.  Two of the three principals were out-of-pocket and the third was visiting his in-laws in England (Cornwall).  He set up shop in the only pub in town with WiFi, to try to sell their positions.  On the Friday before Bear Weekend, he couldn’t sell at any deal he was willing to make.  On Monday, he couldn’t leave the pub because of the incoming calls and emails from the firms wanting to buy their CDSs because they saw they needed the insurance policies.  The other players in the book made far, far more money - but these three college friends sold their CDSs for $80,000,000, or an 8000% profit on their investment.

Do we learn anything from this?  In one of my early and quite captivating reads, Charles Ellis says of Goldman Sachs that the main thing which compelled the partnership to incorporate was that the current partners gave up so much of their profits to the retired partners and they felt this couldn’t go on as the retiree partner population continued to grow.  (Hmmm…and my pension…)  So they incorporated.  Michael Lewis’ firm Salomon was the first to do it, followed by all the rest over time.  Lewis raises the simple and obvious but compelling point that a partnership would have been much less likely to invest up to 40 times capital in the insanity, but a corporation had only the thin fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.  He makes the further point that the way thing played out, and/or the way Treasury made them play out via the bailout system, you pick your conspiracy theory, - the bondholders remained largely whole, while the stockholders went bust or way down.  If you are Pavlov educating your dogs, what does that and the ridiculous charade of the Congressional investigations tell you about the likelihood of anyone learning any lessons from this?  And lastly, he offers the scary opinion in the afterward that the real, never-to-be-told reason for the bailouts was that the total number of CDSs out there owned by the firms - that is the multiples of multiples of CDS on the same underlying “assets”, and their interconnectedness among the firms was huge, orders of magnitude more than publicly acknowledged, that the key players in the Administration knew that very well, and that they knew that if all the firms went down it was really the obligations behind those CDSs that would take the world to a financial nuclear winter.

Where are we when we need you, Dr. Pavlov?

BTW - If you get into this stuff a bit, you can go down a wormhole of blogs and web sites purporting to explain things.  Lewis credits a Harvard undergrad with doing analyis post-facto for her undergrad thesis which really helped him and it has become a foundational piece among the junkies.  I found  it  quite interesting even if I don’t understand it. 

Lastly, as a wannabe software guy who actually can do some software, I stumbled about Jonathan Felch.  AFAICT, he had nothing to do with ABS (Asset Backed Securities) or SFV (Structured Finance Vehicles) the nice name for CDOs and synthetic CDOS.   He and I have in common trying to promote the Groovy programming language in large skeptical enterprises.  This piece of his is fascinating to me both because of his obvious technical virtuosity of which I am jealous, and his spooky Wall St. geekiness.

Labor Day is past and the summer season is over, but there will still be a bit more boating before ski season beckons.  I’ve been blessed with a busy sailing season thanks to the kindness of friends and good health. 

Highlights include:

• May delivery from the Hinckley yard in Maine aboard the beautiful Sou’wester 42 “Northern Lights”
• Bit of cruising on Western LI Sound on our own boat
• Delivery from Chesapeake to Halifax of Sabre 362 “Razor’s Edge”
• Weekend Sonar racing on Manhasset Bay
• Tuesday evening match race drills on the addictive Swedish Match Race 40s in Oyster Bay
• Thirsty Thursday evening racing on Manhasset Bay
• July delivery to Camden, Maine aboard Northern Lights
• July coastal cruising in Maine aboard Northern Lights - said by the locals to be the best weather in 25 years
• On-the-water assistance for the Grade 2 match race event, the Knickerbocker Cup

Still to come - On-the-water assistance for the Grade 1 match race event, the Argo Gold Cup in Bermuda in early October, and the “put-to-bed” delivery of Northern Lights back to Hinckley in mid-October.  Phew.

Snaps from Halifax delivery…

Lovely day for the chute approaching Halifax

Sunrise somewhere(?) offshore

"Short-stay" town dock in Edgartown (Chappaquidick ferry in bg)

Some possibly interesting/amusing anecdotes from the Halifax trip…

Razor’s Edge’s owner loves to sail - that is he races primarily because of the voyage.  He has doublehanded this 36 footer round trip across the Atlantic.  He believes in vane self steering.  The fact that his Raymarine Autohelm 4000 got cranky is not important to him.  I like autopilot for non-race situations, I think the crew is more rested and happier not having to steer most of the time.  Two years ago when we brought Razor’s Edge back from Bermuda, after a patch of 35 knots we had fair weather and a lot of boring steering and neck/shoulder ache; so this year Dave and I decided we needed to fix the autopilot.  We made a special trip to Annapolis with a new drive belt and clutch kit in hand, not being sure exactly which model we were dealing with.  The clutch kit was not even remotely correct, the drive belt was OK.  Turned out it was the same 4000 variant as I have on my boat so I had the PDF service manual on my laptop.  In its endearing military manner, Raytheon has a procedure for adjusting the drive tension on this variant which involves a circuit board to inject a signal, a special tool to turn the eccentric and an ammeter.  We had none of these, but we did have two sets of rusty allen wrenches and we took a guess at turning the eccentric.  The guess wasn’t too good and Razor’s Edge’s owner promptly removed the drive for his Bermuda doublehanded race (which he had to drop out of, ergo our major change in delivery route).   Dave and his engineer sons however later improved it to the point that with some strategic duct tape on the clutch lever it steered us hundreds of miles without a problem - or almost so.

We stopped in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard for fuel.  Not wanting to carry the heavy NE cruising guide back on the plane, I had copied pages and promptly forgotten to pack them.  So we only Reed’s and Eldridge’s advertisements for phone numbers regarding the closing time of fuel docks.  We felt we’d get in too late to Nantucket for fuel, and in fact we also got in to Edgartown too late but were able to smile and get a fellow to take us to fuel the jerrycans at a convenience store.  We had to hit Pollock Rip on the other end of Nantucket Sound at about 6:00 am or wait for another tide cycle, so we had to leave E-town at 2:00 am - showers, dinner, nap.  And we had the full monty for the 35 mile trip out at 2:00 am - dark, rain, fog, wind.  I would prefer to do that narrow, twisty passage with good visibility next time, but it was OK.  We hit 10 knots over ground in the rips, the helm gets very squirrely, wouldn’t want to oppose that current.

So it was early summer in Canada - of course you would expect fog, and we hit it right on schedule about 25 miles from Cape Sable - nice and thick, and of course that coinciding with the fishing fleet, the big draggers like in “Perfect Storm”.   We started MARPA-ing away (Mini Automatic Radar Plotting Aid), but if you’ve done this you know that while MARPA is stunning (can you imagine what WWII CIC officers would have given to have it?), it is really challenged by fishing boats.  They stop, they go in reverse, MARPA decides they aren’t really there, they come back, and so forth.  So we had one that we knew was close, and getting closer, but actively fishing so very hard to get a handle on.  One of our crew started on the horn, it gives us some reassurance but is highly unlikely to be heard aboard the fishing vessel.  And then there he was, popping out of the fog - < 100 feet away and we were perfectly centered to t-bone him.  Fortunately we had a young helmsman with good reflexes and we shot past his stern.  As far as I could tell, the crew never even made eye contact with us, but it’s their home turf, we’re the interlopers.   That’s as close as I’ve ever been in the fog, OK not to be that close again.  After we passed Cape Sable we didn’t see visually or on radar another vessel until we were nearly at the Royal NS YC dock - 125 miles later.

The near miss was late afternoon, by evening we’d entered a weird cycle of clear with light wind, then fog banks, 25 knots for 15-20 minutes, repeat.   But we were enjoying sailing as we’d had to do a lot of motoring.  I happened to look at the radar window and saw that it said “no data available.  I went below to have a look and realized that the radar had shut itself down because battery voltage dropped to 11 volts.  I’m pretty obsessive about battery condition, so I suggested we start the engine promptly which we did - to find that the folding prop was hung up.  This shakes a boat so that you would swear the engine and transmission will just break right off the mounts and/or tear the shaft out of the stuffing box - very scary.  And the trans linkage was wonky such that we really couldn’t find neutral so the violent shaking kept up.  We started and stopped the engine several times, looked below at linkage, didn’t have any great ideas.   We finally decided to try a hard rev of the engine in reverse and the prop unfolded and all was well.  I wasn’t looking forward to a dip in the 50 degree water at night.

So then I in my infinite wisdom suggested we add a jerrycan of fuel before we went off watch at 10:00 pm.  While we had filled the cans, the ship’s tank was a guesstimate since leaving Cape May 450 miles back, and we’d done a lot of motoring up the Jersey and New York coasts.  So we got set up and started to pour - and one of the 25 knot lines came through.  We were running on autopilot with the breeze on the quarter, full main and genny, with the duct tape over the clutch, and the boat rounded up hard and of course took a nice 30+ degree heel.  The boat was fine, but the problem was we didn’t have enough hands to get off autopilot because of trying to deal with the diesel fuel.  Amazingly we only spilled a few cups, but as all sailors know, a teaspoon of diesel fuel on deck is a mess, so this was a big mess.  We dumped two jerrycans into the tank, spent 45 minutes soaping and rinsing deck and sea boots, and hand steered for the rest of the watch.

We were doing Swedish system, which Dave and I like, so we did  2-6 and then went off for the long morning watch.  The day become fantastic, light breeze behind us and warm.  I couldn’t sleep in the bright sun, so got up and started a “last voyage day” omelette - all the remaining eggs and anything in the fridge or cupboard that looked interesting.  My watchmates were sleeping and Dave’s sons were on deck listening to MP3s of “Car Talk” on iPod speakers.   All of a sudden the VHF came to life with “Sailing vessel Razor’s Edge, this is Coast Guard Halifax Center, over”.  So I answered, and they asked “please tell us your current position, course and speed”.  I did, they said thank you, out.  Then I got to thinking about the conversation…at a prescribed point as you near the Halifax approaches (still about 25 miles out from Halifax itself), you are to call the control center - but this is not the Coasties; so - how did they know who we were and that we were in Canadian waters??   So I woke people up for the big breakfast, recounted the story, and we made jokes about Keyhole satellites reading our transom and so forth.  About 2 hours later, one of the crew amazingly got a cell signal and email, and found that loved ones thought we had vanished, and called the Canadian Coast Guard.  Turns out it was a familiar condition of modern day life - over-reliance on gadgets.  We had an iBoats transponder aboard for the Bermuda and St. Pierre races - and it had stopped about 11:00 the previous night.  (We actually had reason to believe later it was in fact their server systems and not the transponder).    Dave called his wife every night at 7:00 on sat phone and had done so the previous night, but we later disappeared and she called Razor’s Edge’d owner, who initially discounted the possibility of problem but then decided he should be more sensitive to the folks at home and called us in as a possible “overdue”.  Of course we had no idea this was happening and when the CG called it was a stunning day.  We took a 70 degree or so turn to the left for the 25 mile reach up the bay to Halifax, set the chute, and held 7+ knots, arriving earlier than we’d optimistically planned.  Royal Novia Scotia Yacht Squadron is a lovely spot, very nice people, very good racing program.  Halifax is a very nice medium size city.  We were there during their equivalient of NYC “Fleet Week” so the town was hopping.  The nights required a fleece walking and sleeping bag.  Not exactly around the corner for most cruisers, but recommended if you have the time.

RNSYS - looking towards clubhouse

A post update will be needed when I remember where I put the pictures from the fantastic cruising week in Maine.  My dad and mom sailed there for  a number of summers with a neighbor, and I’ve done the delivery trip I guess about 6-8 times now, but had not cruised.  It is as nice as they say. 

Finally, there are many, many pictures and new this year video clips, of the 2010 Knickerbocker Cup, on the Manhasset Bay YC  web site http://www.manhassetbayyc.org (follow the KCUP link) far better than my meager talents and equipment can portray.  But the following is a poor Blackberry snap of the two Russian crews on my boat, with their race boat rafted up, waiting for wind.  Evgeny Neugodikov is #8 in the world, and our houseguest team Sergey Mushikin is #32.  Sergey was knocked out pretty early in the round robins of course disappointingly for them, so they are quaffing beer and Evgeny is sipping water.  I was honored with a Russian Federation Sailing team golf shirt.

Cheers and sail on!

Well, the summer sailing season is upon is and I should have more reasons to blog, just being lazy.  I’ve been blessed with wonderful sailing opportunities this year, the problem is an embarassment of riches and too many choices.

But in the midst of that, I still read a lot of books and want to comment on a couple.  The first is “On the Brink” by Henry M. Paulson, former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.  The second is “Sonic Boom” by Gregg Easterbrook.  The third is “The Age of Wonder” by Richard Holmes.   Certainly on the surface they don’t seem in any way connected, but I kind of think they are.

I suppose you would say I was raised in a center-right environment;  I am still a registered Republican, but like I imagine a lot of Americans, I was exhausted by what I perceived as the ethical turpitude and incompetence of the Bush administration.  Enter Hank Paulson, one might say letting the fox into the chicken coup.  But his book - obviously a self-justification, as we would all write were we in his shoes - paints an interesting  picture.  I knew a bit of his story by reading the corporate history of Goldman Sachs, recounted in these pages.  He had an uphill climb, as a gentile and a Chicagoan.  But he reached the top by extreme hard work, and he presents himself as not interested in riches and fame, and motivated by the stimulation of the jobs he held, of course culminating in Sec Treas.  Paulson is 3 years older than I am.

“Sonic Boom” by Gregg Easterbrook is about the near future.  His premise is basically - you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Yes, we have a tragic and empathetic financial mess right now, but in the long view it will be seen as a speed bump.  The fundamentals of globalization and staggering productivity gains will only experience network effects, feedback loops, etc. etc. and the world economy will grow in ways we can hardly conceive of, with attendant increases in benefits to many many people of the world who need it.  BUT - he emphasizes that the very network effects that do and will cause all this to happen also produce our always-on, zombie like, disconnected, bewildered - and dare we say it??? - unhappy state and that this not only won’t go away but is likely to become more pronounced.  Since the underlying causes will themselves be more pronounced. Hmmm…..  Gregg is 3 years younger than I am.

Back to Hank Paulson - he tells in somewhat breezy style but considerable detail about his side of the crisis.  I guess it should come as no surprise that he didn’t personally invent many of the paths that seemed bizarre from the outside - like approving $700B in TARP money to buy bad debt and then deciding to recapitalize banks instead of buying bad debt.  Legions of staffers and outside economists pushed him in that direction and he agreed.  He tells us that he suffered from teenage years with bad tummy under stress, and recounts that he was physically sick at a number of major moments during the crisis.  He gives high praise to Tim Geithner for his calm, cool analytic skills and grasp of the big picture., (I have to say that’s my perception as well) and similarly kudos for Ben Bernanke.   In their minds, and I think in the minds of my neighbors and friends in the Port Washington, there really wasn’t much to discuss - this had to be saved or the world economy would have gone down.   My sense is that they are mostly right, but of course we will never know in detail.

Then there’s Gregg Easterbrook’s interesting take.  He says - forget about whether the fund managers should be strung up by their thumbs - fundamentally these actions saved…the baby boomers!! at the expense of the young people who will pay the bills for  us baby boomers when we are slobbering in our wheelchairs.  We (sort of) preserved the mortgages on outrageous oversized homes of baby boomers, and set up kind of retaliatory structures that will make it hard for young people to enter the housing market going forward.   Hmmm….

Of course there’s more to both books - Easterbrook has some pretty important things to say about health care needing to be fixed and if it’s not the Sonic Boom will be much smaller long term.  Paulson points out, and I hear this in the scuttlebutt around New York, that at the real, real root of our problems is savings disparity between the East and West.  We have to increase the savings rate in the US, no ifs and or buts, cannot continue as we are, and a good way to do that, though we may all hate the thought, may be a Value Added Tax.

Finally I come to Richard Holmes’s book.  This takes place roughly from 1780-ish to 1850-ish.  It is beautifully written and focuses on the way our undertanding of  nature evolved into what we know of today as technology; he views this from a technical but equally importantly from a cultural and religious perspective of the time.  It emphasizes England, because he is English, but includes connections to French, German, Italian and nascent American  “natural philosophers.  By the time of the beginning, some pretty heavy stuff had been worked out by the likes of Newton, Hooke, Boyle and others - but it hadn’t been applied or commercialized.   In fact, the thrust of this book is about understanding what it meant to apply and commercialize.  And in fact to invent the very word “scientist” which didn’t exist until a Royal Society lecture in 1820ish. 

The book covers the “maturation” of the Royal Society, the explorations of the Pacific, ballooning , the advent of chemistry as we know it with a “pretty boy” by the name of Humprey Davy, the building of big electric batteries, safety lamps in coal mines..you get the picture.

The end of the book brings in Charles Babbage, who was by any measure an eccentric fellow, and as we know labored his whole adult life on mechanical analog computers.  He was close friends with Michael Farraday, partied and toured Europe with him, on Babbage’s nickel..we might remember Farraday as building the first electric motors and elucidating the basic electromagnetic prinicples that make radio and our always-on cellular life ultimately possible.

So - “Age of Wonder” is a fascinating look at a time we might consider naive and sweet, of course humans have never really been naive and sweet except in hindsight, but I think it’s fair to say that all of us technologists of today are a whole lot more focused and cutthroat - we’ve had the ensuing 200 years from the time of this book to apply and commercialize the age of wonder into things that…are good…???…

There are many opportunities to hear “Messiah” presented in the New York metro area - including a quite good “Grade 2/3″ (to use match racing parlance) performance this Sunday in Port Washington.  Being a bit of a “junkie”, I wanted to hear another one this year, preferably a “Grade 1/2″. 

The New York Philharmonic with guest conductor Helmuth Rilling and his singers, Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart, are doing it this week but I couldn’t make an evening performance.  So I decided we’d try an open rehearsal on Tuesday morning.  Obviously the potential audience is mostly music students and retirees, but Avery Fisher was actually quite full.  The first 15 or so rows were roped off, but having arrived pretty early, we sat center a few rows back from that, probably very expensive seats - but all seats are $16 at an open rehearsal.

It’s funny to see the orchestra and chorus in jeans and warmup clothes with backpacks, Starbucks, and water bottles instead of tuxedos.  They also slouch and cross their legs and chat.  Some of the German kids in the chorus were studying City maps between their bits.

I like to have a libretto for Messiah because basically it is 4 dozen or so Bible verses repeated a bunch of times, and even after many times of hearing it, it’s not easy to tell what they are singing.

This is the 2nd Messiah I’ve heard with a countertenor (male voice equivalent to mezzo-soprano) which can be somewhat disconcerting.  Daniel Taylor is a conductor in his own right and voice professor at Univ of Montreal and at McGill.  Of the four solo parts his were the least, but I was very impressed that he was the only one without paper music.  And several times the conductor had everyone pick up at particular spots to work on a section, and Taylor would just nod and be right in there, like he had a clear mental picture of the whole thing.  Maybe all the pros can do that, but he seemed very professional.  The other soloists were very good as well - Shenyang (only one name) the bassist is out of central casting for bassists - BIG guy.

The only drawback to the open rehearsal is that if the conductor feels they have something down cold, he just stops it - which unfortunately he did in…the Hallejuah Chorus!  But otherwise this seemed like the real thing and a very interesting way to hear such a performance.

I just finished a quick read of David Loyn’s “In Afghanstan”.   Loyn has been a BBC correspondent for 30 years, most of that time covering less-than-desirable places featured regularly on the news.

I would not say that Loyn presupposes success or failure of the US in Afghanistan; but as he recounts the whole history of external involvement in this tragic country - which had the misfortune to be geologically incredibly challenged but at the same time at the crossroads of important gateways between East and West - it’s quite clear that to Loyn at least,  sucess in Afghanistan on the part of the US would be truly a first.  Everything we hear or see about Afghanistan has happened at least once , usually multiple times, and not infrequently many times before.  The incredible intransigence of the combatants is born of their geography, in a crucible measured in many, many centuries. 

Can 33,000 troops, a new strategy and the technology and new-found wisdom of the US make a difference?  I certainly would like to believe that it would, but Loyn’s book makes it clear that the odds are very, very long based on history.  What do you think?

Yesterday we attended an all Bach organ recital by Cameron Carpenter in New York.   Cameron is a 2006 graduate of Julliard, BA and MA, and believes that the organ as a musical speciality is in great danger of dying; his antidote includes: new interpretations, showmanship, and promotion of the virtual organ.  As you might guess, these do not win him fans among the tradionalists. He started performing commercially in 2007 and has since played all over the world, so surprisingly doesn’t get back to his musical home in New York too often.

The concert venue was St. Mary’s of the Virgin in Times Square.  Until we got got there I didn’t realize it was an Episcopal and not Catholic church, in fact I know it as “Smoky Mary’s” (for their proclivity for incense).  As I felt at St. Machias (”The Actor’s Chapel”) a couple of blocks south across from the Eugene O’Neill theater, it is amazing to step out of the craziness of Times Square into such a space.  The church is designed similarly to a small cathedral, with a clerestory and fan vaults, very lovely.  It has an Aeolian-Skinner pneumatic/electric instrument dating from 1932.

This recital was recorded by Telarc for an upcoming CD/DVD, with interesting multiple triangle microphone nests on 50 foot stalks up near the pipes,  which are on the West end of the church, as is the console.  Powerful lighting was installed all around the console as was a high-def studio camera, connected to an equally heavy-duty high-def projector onto a screen just before the nave of the church. 

We got there early, and found our seats.  Having heard that he does this I wasn’t completely surprised, but Cameron Carpenter introduced himself to everyone in the audience that he could reach in the box pews until about 15 minutes before performance time.  He was very friendly and down to earth.  I told him I had been looking forward to this for a long time (which I meant in the general sense of hearing/seeing him perform) and he said something like  ”well one way or other it will be memorable”, which I later realized probably meant that he assumed I understood musically that he would be criticized for his interpretation.   I’ve read since Saturday’s performance that even people who like him feel that, while he is technically the most skilled in the business today, his interpretations of Bach are not his strong suit.  They impressed me tremendously in virtuosity, but in spots I felt there was a mix of old and new that didn’t quite work - this coming from someone who knows almost nothing about music.

I then asked him what he thought of the instrument and he said “for a pipe organ, it’s very good”.  He first kind of rocketed on to the organ performance stage with the Marshal and Ogletree virtual organ installed at Trinity Wall St. after its Aeolian-Skinner pipe instrument was damaged in 9/11.  This http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/arts/music/07carp.html article about that appeared right after I heard him on NPR.  So I knew he much prefers virtual organs.

While waiting for the performance to start, I couldn’t help but overhear two guys talking in the pew behind us who were obviously organists, so eventually I engaged in the conversation.  They were in their 50s and big fans of Cameron Carpenter, but made jokes about how the Julliard crowd wasn’t likely to be there.  They also said the organ was in their opinion the best in New York and that one can go to Julliard for free student organ recitals any Thursday during the school year.

A few minutes before 3:00, Cameron then switched from black jeans and tee into his show garb - no not a typical organist’s alb,  but tight white jeans and tee shirt emblazoned with hundreds of sequins, and white flamenco shoes.  He says he orders the shoes from Cuba because they allow his incredible pedal speed much better than organists’ flats.  I don’t know whether it was an accident of the lighting or carefully designed, but while on the screen in the front of the church his sequins were silver and didn’t reflect much light, if you cared to get a crick in your neck and watch the top 1/3 of him behind and above you, he flashed like fire, it almost hurt the eyes.

Anyway, the performance was really remarkable.  (I’m on thin ice musically in the following…) He did the Tocccata in F Major which he transposed to F#, followed by the Preludes and Fugues in B Minor, A Minor, E Minor, D Major and G Major.  He did this because they form a tonal cycle.  I was pretty confused because the program said one Toccata plus 5 prelude/fugues = 11 pieces, but he had 13 heavy black books.  Each book contained pages of his transcriptions kind of pasted in of varying sizes.  I was too far away to see them clearly but I guess they were hand made.  His skill and speed are truly remarkable.  Several times he did his trademark, where he switches the foot pedals to the upper registers, leans back holding on to the chair and plays the hand parts with his feet at lightning speed, the flamenco shoes moving so fast you can hardly see them, then transitions back to the hands with no gap.  As the guys behind us said it would, the sound seemed to come from everywhere in the space even though all the ranks were far above and behind us.  Really wonderful to live close enough to easily get in to events like this.

Revolutionary  was his first CD for Telarc which I bought after hearing the NPR interview.  Since then he’s done a self-published one of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, also recorded on Trinity Wall St.’s virtual instrument, and Saturday’s performance will be released as CD and DVD in April, 2010.

The program says that Cameron Carpenter finds time in his schedule to visit high schools to promote the organ and donates instructional time to promising students.

 Here are a few links. 

This http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2kqFt2SQw&feature=player_embedded# is the famous foot work on the Chopin Etude at Trinity Wall St and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtKgOZX3DcU is a longer one also on that instrument.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Carpenter

http://cameroncarpenter.com/

Of course I’m a bogus New Yorker, but there might be a few more like me…  Today the NYT business section had a light-touch editorial discussing the similarities between Goldman Sachs and the Yankees.  Both garner no neutrality, you either love them or hate them.  Both are swimming in money and use their financial superiority to get..more superiority.  BUT - it’s hard not to admire the fact that both are disciplined, hire very wisely, and win most of the time.

So having watched the whole World Series, and since it was supposed to be a very nice day in Manhattan, I decided to go to the Parade.  I had no illusions that I’d actually get close enough to see anything - spots directly on Broadway were filled before the sun rose, obviously watching it on TV was the best view, but I looked at it as a study in human nature, and I wasn’t disappointed. 

I left on the 9:11 from Port Washington.  I was somewhat surprised (shouldn’t have been) that there were lots of Yankee fans on that train.  Schools were closed in both New York and New Jersey.  I asked a group of kids in my car which (subway) train they would take, and they said the “2″ or “R”.   We got in around 9:55.  The “2″ is the closest train to the LIRR gates in Penn Station so is natural, but it was mobbed.  So I hiked up to the A-C-E which I am more familiar with anyway, and took the “E” to its terminus at Chambers St., getting there around 10:40.

I asked a number of people on The Railroad and the train if they had a plan - not surprisingly, it didn’t seem that anyone at this late hour had any ideas for getting close.  So, I exited on the South side of the WTC station onto Vesey St., which is just a block from Broadway, and started working my way East.  Let it be said, this is not for those with claustrophobia, and I border on that;  I just put it out of my mind and it was OK except for a few moments when it was nearly hard to breath.

Shortly after exiting subway, St. Paul's Chapel on the right

Over my left shoulder, the hardy people climbing scaffolds

To be truthful, I probably never saw the Yankees, but it was actually hard to say. 

A float!! Probably not the Yankees

At a certain point I figured it was time to bail out, so I turned around.  Surprisingly, it wasn’t hard to get West, and within 5 minutes I was in a blank spot.

View West on Vesey St. over the WTC building site

Within a hundred feet of the above picture, I realized that all was not clear sailing.  Since I’d arrived earlier, NYPD had erected barricades all along Church St. and it was, if anything, more jammed and claustrophobic than earlier; that is, most of was wanted to leave and ease the crowding, but we couldn’t move.  Eventually I got across Church St. and, looking North, figured walking was going to take a while.  So I ducked back in to the A-C-E station, which was mobbed, and got an “A” train to 14th St.  From there I was in familiar territory and walked up through Chelsea, past the General Seminary building, which is structurally complete. 

By now feet and legs were very, very tired.  But as I often do, I talked myself into thinking that it wasn’t worth taking the subway, so I kept on going up the linear park along the West Side Highway, to Pier 88.

NYPD divers doing ?? under the bow of the Intrepid

And lastly, the USS New York, which is docked just north of the Intrepid.  Needing to get back home, I didn’t take the time to figure out whether/how one could board her, I’d heard you can;  it’s not a beautiful ship as compared to a destroyer, it’s essentially a troop carrier on steroids, but it’s big. 

USS New York

And so, I headed back to the Island, tired, but feeling like I’d seen a good slice of America.  Cheers!

First - the final results of the King Edward the 7th Cup at latitude 32 degrees:

1st Ben Ainslie (GBR) Team Origin
2nd Adam Minoprio (NZL) ETNZ/BlackMatch
3rd Ian Williams (GBR) Team Pindar sponsored by Argo Group
4th Eric Monnin (SUI) Swiss Match Race Team
5th Johnie Berntsson (SWE) Berntsson Sailing Team
6th Mathieu Richard (FRA) French Match Racing Team
7th Blythe Walker (BDA)
8th Torvar Mirsky (AUS) Mirsky Racing Team

None of “our” folks from the Knickerbocker Cup made it into the top 8 places. It goes to show that deep experience in match racing wins - although even the famous Peter Gilmour was knocked out.  Torvar Mirsky was very impressive to me in the first couple of days, I’m glad to see they made it through.

Back to northern latitudes.  As previously, we made the trip from Port Washington, NY to Southwest Harbor, ME in 3-1/2 days.  The first long day was the length of Long Island Sound plus Fisher’s Island Sound, to Stonington, CT (85 miles).  Good dinner at the Dog Watch Cafe at the end of the dock at Dodson’s Boatyard.  Nice touch below:

Fire pit in chilly air in front of Dog Watch

Lovely Monday afternoon off New Hampshire

We had dinner Tuesday night at the Red Sky in Southwest Harbor http://www.redskyrestaurant.com/, a small and simple but upscale place with an excellent menu.  Last year, Kyle Morris of Morris Yachts (maker of jewel-like high-end sailboats also in the Mt. Desert/Bar Harbor area) came to dinner while we were there.  This year David Rockefeller and entourage came in.  He is of course so recognizable, and to me anyway does not look anywhere near his age of 94.  He has a home in Seal Harbor, a couple of miles away, a Hinckley 59 sailboat, and is having a new Talaria line motoryacht built by Hinckley, some say as a boost to keep them going.  By coincidence, just this past Saturday’s New York Times business section had this article about Hinckley’s financial woes http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/business/10hinckley.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&dbk=&adxnnlx=1255609029-ILMEJ1cwL+VpHRr4pabksw which mentions Mr. Rockefeller’s order.

The weather cleared but it got quite chilly Tuesday night, Wednesday we reluctantly left for the return to reality.

"Hinckley Heaven" with Somes Sound and Mt. Desert Island hills in distance

Thunder Bay

Well it turned out that I had a bit of Day 4 this morning.   Of my boatmates of the other days, Dave had a court appearance (he is a process server as a part-time job along with his sports activities) and Suthy was fairly nervous about doing mark boat by himself.  He was late for a dinner engagement last night, so I got him a copy of the SIs (Sailing Instructions) which have an appendix of chart of Hamilton Harbour with the out-of-bounds buoy locations drawn in.  We knew them pretty well by now, but Suthy wanted them so I took them in this morning in street clothes for flying.   There is a legal liability associated with these little marks, if someone destroys one of these IODs on a reef inside our marks, the club would be stuck and not the skipper;  yesterday in fact two boats went outside our marks, from our vantage point it appeared they were on someone’s patio, but no damage;  they both got (offsetting) penalties.  When I found Suthy, no one had been located to go with him so I told him I’d go out until my taxi time;  heck better to be on the water than in the shops, I had no room to carry anything or particular inclination.

Dave’s personality took some getting used to, but I learned a lot from him.  He told me that he entered the management ranks at Bermuda telco without only a high school education because he was good with process and I could see it in action, I really enjoyed him as well as Suthy.  He knew how to do this mark boat stuff to make the PRO’s job easier, and this PRO was a stickler and had a laser range finder and electronic compass.  I think I remembered most of it and tried to put it to use today.

It was another gorgeous day, but not much breeze, post-front.  I see from tonight’s results that they didn’t finish the quarter-finals which, given forecast for more of the same, may make Sunday a long day - hey it will be just like Manhasset Bay!

Suthy had someone radio in to beg for backup, and this person came out on “the barge”,  thus I got to ride around for a while on that.  “Timmy” (a man my age or so) owns and drives the barge, and can turn it on it own axis.   He also is a sailor and another one bitten badly by the match racing bug.   He told me he’s about to take his test for umpire so he can start doing Grade 3 events in Bermuda.

A NATO fleet came in today, I think 6 ships, which disrupted things a bit, and the wind was very shifty, so David Campbell-James decided to shift the whole race course West at the advice of locals who said the northerlies like today are always very shifty over the buildings of Hamilton.  Timmy thus suggested he take me in while they were moving the course, and that was it for me and Gold Cup 2009.  Below are a shot of the barge with the aforementioned dog, and the big score board on the veranda.

Cheers.