A Painting Is Not a Refrigerator

This is what civilizations and societies always do: remake the past in the present’s image, mistake the current conditions of knowledge and experience and feeling for an unchanging human condition or biological reality.

— Simon Reynolds, “You Are Not a Switch”

Camille Paglia has a very odd, rambling piece in The Wall Street Journal today, talking about capitalism and the visual arts. I am unfamiliar with Ms Paglia’s oeuvre, so I cannot say whether the style of this article is of a piece with the rest, but if it is, I am unimpressed. It reads like a disjointed tour d’horizon, pointing out features of the landscape, interspersed with unsupported and grandiose claims, that never comes to a recognizable conclusion: “Here is a thing, and here is a thing, and this is a fact. Ergo, QED.” Huh?

Her basic thesis seems to be that the visual arts are stuck in the doldrums:

Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Well, okay, one might quibble whether leading contemporary artists like Damian Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami are good artists, or artists who will leave a lasting historical impression on the visual arts, but only a fool (or a cultural critic seriously ignorant of the contemporary art scene) would deny they have indeed been highly influential.

She goes on:

What has sapped artistic creativity and innovation in the arts? Two major causes can be identified, one relating to an expansion of form and the other to a contraction of ideology.

Painting was the prestige genre in the fine arts from the Renaissance on. But painting was dethroned by the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Permanence faded as a goal of art-making.

This is just dumb.

First of all, the dethronement of painting as the prestige visual art—which, by the way, has been a very long time coming, and started far earlier than the 1960s—and the rise of multiple competing media spurred innovation, and unleashed a vast influx of energy and creativity into the field which it otherwise would not have enjoyed. In addition to opening up new aesthetic dimensions to explore and exploit that painting with pigment on a two dimensional surface could not, contemporary arts like video and photography and new industrial techniques for sculpture and printmaking attracted vast new numbers of artists into the field who would otherwise have lacked the talent or interest to make meaningful art in traditional media. (Not everybody can paint.) The fact that ways of creating visual art exploded vastly expanded creativity and innovation, not sapped it. This is just plain common sense, in addition to historical fact.

Second, Ms Paglia’s unsupported assertion that permanence faded as a goal of art just isn’t true. Sure, visual artists have been exploring the aesthetic dimensions and implications of impermanence for some time now, all the way back to Ms Paglia’s self-professed “hero” Andy Warhol and his “happenings” in the 1960s, if not before. But for every shark carcass rotting in a tank of formaldehyde or public sculpture carved out of flowers, contemporary artists have given us plenty of paintings, sculptures, and objects which are designed, if only by virtue of being composed of plastic and metal more durable than any organic pigment, to last much longer than your local museum’s Da Vinci. Lastly, just in case Ms Paglia hadn’t noticed it herself, impermanence has become a permanent psychological, sociological, and economic feature of contemporary society. Does she think visual artists as a class are so insensate to this fact or so reactionary that they would not find exploring the condition of impermanence to be an interesting and important theme for their art? And what better way—as only one of many solutions—to do so than to make the work of art itself impermanent? After all, let art collectors and museum curators worry about how to preserve your decaying ice cream sculpture of Henry Ford: that’s conservation, not art.

Hang on. She’s not done yet:

But there is a larger question: What do contemporary artists have to say, and to whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s.

And what is missing from this airless ideological echo chamber, according to our narratrix? Why religion and capitalism, of course. (This is an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, after all.) ¹

But this is just loony too.

* * *

Put aside, for a moment, the fact that contemporary art has made the nature of modern societies, including capitalist ones,² a central theme and topic. To be sure, most artists’ treatment of contemporary socioeconomic mores has been critical rather than laudatory, and it is reasonable to expect the political monoculture Ms Paglia postulates in the art world (and which I have no particular reason to doubt) might have something to do with this. Put aside the facile conflation of art world and academy which Ms Paglia uses to bolster her ideological point, a conflation which ignores substantial areas of difference between the two and the irrefutable fact that many (most?) successful practicing artists never went to college. And put aside the fact that ongoing recession in the economy and the recent global financial crisis has soured the opinion many members of society have of capitalism, a fact which perhaps indicates the great unwashed are less out of synch with the critical stance artists take toward their society than Ms Paglia would have us believe.

No, what is really loony is her implied notion that denizens of the art world were ever anything but card-carrying members of a hermetically sealed sociopolitical echo chamber. Visual art is now and always has been a hand-crafted luxury good, produced by a relatively small community of artisans in tiny numbers for an equally tiny community of wealthy patrons and collectors. Fine artists have never been in touch with “the general audience,” whatever that is supposed to mean. They produce and sell art for and to the sociopolitical elite, whatever that elite happens to be at the time. In the past, the art-sponsoring elite consisted of Popes, Borgias, and wealthy Dutch merchants, among others. Today it consists of the pillars of modern financial capitalism, wealthy plutocrats and corporate institutions. This forms a particularly ironic counterpoint to Ms Paglia’s assertion that fine art is hostile to capitalism, given that the hedge fund grandees, Philip Morris corporate art buyers, and trust fund parasites contemporary artists sell to are its greatest boosters. Do you really think Steve Cohen is unaware of the political agenda of pieces in his collection? Do you really think he cares?

Let’s face it. The general population normally doesn’t give a rat’s ass about fine art. Sure, they make an annual pilgrimage to the local art museum, for some “kulcha,”—normally when out-of-town relatives visit, natch—and they visit museums and historical cultural sites when they travel abroad. But in each instance almost all of them look blankly at the artwork of any era, mumble how their child could do better and scoff at the newer ones, and can’t wait to get back to some football and pizza at the hotel. You want to know what kind of art the common man likes? Leroy Nieman prints and Thomas Kinkade paintings. The common man in Renaissance Italy was just as oblivious: he might ooh and ahh over the realism of the sword cut in Jesus’s side on the painted altarpiece, but he didn’t linger in church for aesthetic contemplation. The concept of fine art for the common man is nonsense. They have no interest in it. Why should they?

* * *

What is particularly bizzare in the end about Ms Paglia’s disquisition is her schizophrenic take on what she sees as the solution to the problem she has manufactured identified. In one breath, she says “young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds,” presumably by being taught how to woodwork, throw a pot, or scumble oil paint across a canvas, like the heroic Americans of her youth who grew up with steel mills, shoe factories, and leaded gasoline. In the next, she glorifies clear-eyed, commercially savvy Promethei bringing sleek and streamlined industrial design to the masses. Industrial design, Ms Paglia laments at the end, which lacks the spiritual dimension of great works of art.

What conclusion, if any, is she actually trying to draw?

Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.

Thus young artists have been betrayed and stunted by their elders before their careers have even begun. Is it any wonder that our fine arts have become a wasteland?

College students are the common man, Camille, in numbers if not socioeconomic status. Most of them will have little interest in or interaction with fine art of any kind over the course of their lives. Far fewer of them, plus some talented non-college graduates, will ever actually pick up a brush, chisel, or video camera. An even smaller subset of these will ever make an impact at all. Their output will be tiny, scattered, and subject to being lost, ignored, or appreciated for all the wrong reasons. Most will never be able to support themselves or their families.

If there is a tragedy about fine art, it is that it is simultaneously so small, unprotected, and unimportant on a personal scale and potentially so important on a cultural and historical one. You can’t socially engineer your way around that. It is the nature of the beast.

That is what fine art is, Ms Paglia. It has always been a wasteland.

Related reading:
Breakfast in Fur (June 24, 2012)
L.H.O.O.Q. (July 29, 2007)


¹ Hence the title, unexplained or even addressed in the article, “How Capitalism Can Save Art.” You may note that I do not address her point about fine art’s divorce from religion. First, I am not so sure this is true, at least when it comes to spirituality, but it is incontrovertible that religious institutions no longer sponsor fine visual art in the way they used to. Should that change, I am sure you would see a veritable resurgence of religious artwork. Artists gotta eat, too, you know.
² I hope and presume Ms Paglia realizes there are and have been non-capitalist societies in the world and that they have included at least their fair share of artists.

© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Too Much Is Never Enough

Villager: “How can we find a samurai we can pay with only rice?”
Gisaku: “Find hungry samurai.”

— The Seven Samurai

The private equity industry has a problem.

And no, by a problem I do not mean the Presidential candidacy of one of its former grandees and the unwelcome proctological scrutiny which that has called down upon its normally painfully private denizens. Instead, these fiercely proud ronin are running out of time.

Let Andrew Ross Sorkin explain:

The private equity world is sitting on [approximately $1 trillion of uninvested capital]. It’s what the industry calls dry powder. If they don’t spend their cash pile snapping up acquisitions soon, they may have to return it to their investors.

Nearly $200 [billion] ¹ from funds raised in 2007 and 2008 alone needs to be spent in the next 12 months or it must be given back.

Private equity executives, after spending the last several years largely on the sidelines amid the economic uncertainty — often proclaiming “patience” as an explanation — have begun to be anxious that they may need to go on a shopping spree.

Now a person educated in the aspirational propaganda of Atlas Shrugged and the Private Equity Growth Capital Council might wonder just what the panic is about. Surely the gimlet-eyed fiduciaries of Park Avenue, when faced with the unattractive selection of poor quality, overpriced corporate merchandise for which they blame their relative inactivity over the recent past would be cold bloodedly rational enough to simply return their investors’ capital with a smile and a shrug and a “Better luck next time, Old Bean,” no?

No, not really. Not even close.

* * *

First, to unpack this mystery one must dispense with a couple mischaracterizations Mr. Sorkin and his sources employ which cloud the issue at hand. Mischaracterizations, truth be told, which I and almost everyone else in the finance industry use as descriptive shorthand simply because it takes too much time to speak completely accurately. The biggest of these is that private equity firms actually have the hundreds of billions (or trillion) of dollars of limited partner funds they raise to invest in their sweaty little hands.

Tempting as it may be to imagine Steve Schwarzman and Leon Black dressed in top hat, tails, and duck bill masks whooping and hollering atop $10 billion mountains of gold coins in swimming pool vaults deep under Midtown Manhattan streets, private equity firms almost never get to hold the actual money nominally under their control for longer than it takes to keystroke a wire transfer into somebody else’s bank account. The multibillion dollar funds they raise with such fanfare in the press represent commitments by their limited partners to invest up to that amount in appropriate investments described and limited by the master fund agreement, not actual currency sitting in a bank account. When the financial sponsor finds and buys a company, it levies a capital call on its investors, and they are contractually obligated to deliver those funds in a timely fashion so the general partner can purchase the target. The trillion dollars which Mr. Sorkin so gleefully describes is not actual money gathering dust under the Carlyle Group’s mattress but rather a promise to invest that much by the pension funds, university endowments, and other institutional investors who employ it and its brethren to make money.

Second, there is the issue of how long financial sponsors actually get to call that money from investors, the key issue at hand but one which Mr. Sorkin skips rather lightly over in his haste to portend doom. For while most private equity firms raise investment funds with lives of a decade or more, by the same token most of them have significantly shorter actual investment periods. Usually, if the general partner is unable to find appropriate companies to buy or other investments to make within four to six years of the initial closing of the fund, the limited partners’ obligation to fund further capital calls goes away. More importantly, from the private equity firm’s perspective, the fund agreement dictates that it can no longer charge its full (2%) management fee on the full committed amount. In other words, if financial sponsor Dewey Trickem & Howe only spends $4 billion of its $10 billion DTH Rape and Pillage Fund XXIII by year six, it can no longer charge its limited partners $200 million per year in management fees. Instead, it can only dun them for 2% (or less) of the actual money invested, $4 billion, or a paltry $80 million. Given that DT&H has lots of expenses to pay, including luxurious Park Avenue office space, oodles of advisors and consultants, and legions of sharp-toothed Henry Kravis wannabes, you can just imagine how little they want to let that $6 billion of uncommitted capital (and, more importantly, $120 million of annual income) slip through their fingers.

Gross these management fees up across the multiple funds which large asset managers run in parallel (Fund I, fully invested and in harvest mode; Fund II, recently fully invested; and Fund III, recently raised and currently being invested), and you can see the 2% management fees which these firms charge add up to some serious revenue. Spread it out across multibillion dollar investment firms which employ a relatively paltry few hundred professionals, and you may understand that incentives to make investments which actually make money for limited partners get materially blurred by the incentive to gather assets.

In fact, faced with the decision to stick to its investment criteria and let lousy, overpriced opportunities pass—thereby losing associated management fee income—it becomes painfully clear that many private equity firms face very strong incentives to take a flyer. After all, the funds they are investing are, for the most part,² not their own but rather their limited partners’. Why not invest them in second-rate, overshopped, undermanaged properties at 10 times EBITDA? Sure, the likelihood that you’ll earn a decent return is slim, but the financial sponsor’s employees hold a contractual option to 20% of the upside (the famous “carried interest”) on the off chance it does. In some respects, it is a free option, and everyone knows you shouldn’t give up free options without a fight. Sure, the investment will probably be crap, and may even go belly up, but dem’s da breaks, no? Caveat (institutional) investor.

* * *

So it is a fair and reasonable worry that the wall of soon-to-expire institutional commitments to private equity may trigger a bout of less-than-fiduciary shenanigans on the part of the finance professionals entrusted to manage them. This situation is also a timely reminder that the primary mission of any institution, once it becomes large enough, is the perpetuation and survival of the institution itself. Notwithstanding private equity’s reputation for attracting ruthless, clear-eyed homo economici, it is well to remember that incentives are not always what they seem, and often cut both ways.

It is also a salutary cheer to me and my colleagues in my industry, who are busy sharpening our skinning knives and licking our chops as the bison herd thunders toward the commitment expiration cliff. For it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.³

Kambei Shimada: “Go to the north. The decisive battle will be fought there.”
Gorobei Katayama: “Why didn’t you build a fence there?”
Kambei Shimada: “A good fort needs a gap. The enemy must be lured in. So we can attack them. If we only defend, we lose the war.”

Good. I’ve got a couple of real lemons to unload.


¹ The original article published Monday evening cited $200 million as the amount requiring investment, but I have taken the liberty of correcting it, since this is clearly ludicrous. Two mid-size financial sponsors could spend $200 million in an afternoon without hardly trying, much less Blackstone or Carlyle. I wouldn’t be surprised if Steve Schwarzman spent $200 million on crab claws alone each year. An otherwise uneducated reader might also wonder what the fuss is about if only 0.02% of the trillion dollar total is expiring by year end. It seems they need to teach some remedial mathematics in journalism school.
² Now to be fair, many private equity firm professionals invest a significant amount of their own money in their funds alongside limited partners, and this can act as a powerful reinforcement to their proper fiduciary duties. But without this natural alignment of incentives from skin in the game, limited partners should be exceedingly skeptical that financial sponsor employees have their best interests fully in mind at all times.
³ And it’s a big bison herd. Levered up at a typical 30% to 40% equity ratio, $1 trillion of uncommitted equity in private equity hands translates to $2.5 to $3 trillion of purchasing power. Fire up the barbie, Ralph!

© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Defending the Indefensible

Francie Stevens: “The man I want doesn’t have a price.”
John Robie: “That eliminates me.”

— To Catch a Thief

Lauren Tara LaCapra put up an interesting piece on Goldman Sachs’ declining employee compensation yesterday on Reuters. As part of it she interviewed a “prominent investor” in financial stocks who believes that Goldman is not doing enough to cut pay. He says

management is not seeing things the same way as shareholders because they have fared much better financially, even in bad times.

To illustrate this gap, he compared return-on-equity for common shareholders against compensation as portion of common equity. (For ROE, he divided pretax earnings by common shareholder equity and for the compensation measure, he adjusted pay for estimated tax costs and divided that by common shareholder equity.)

According to his calculations, Goldman employees have done better than shareholders by 10 percentage points, on average, since the firm went public in 1999. That equates to $34.7 billion over those 12 years, he said, not including what Goldman spends to repurchase shares issued to employees.

To put that figure in perspective, Goldman’s current market cap is about $57.5 billion.

But this is just bizzare, like comparing apples and carburetors.

* * *

When it comes to discussing compensation in investment banking, people seem to forget that bankers are a factor of production for the firms which employ them. At base, banking is a pretty simple business; we gather together a bunch of other people’s money and hand it over to employees who we hope will use it to make even more money. Our raw material is money, or capital, our finished product is money, or return on capital, and our primary operating costs are the cost of that capital, the cost of the labor which turns money into more money, and various other lesser doodads we supply our employees to help them accomplish this transformation, like information technology, real estate, travel and entertainment reimbursement, and lobbyists to keep the government and regulators off our backs. Our productive assets are people, highly skilled labor who wear shoes and walk out the door every day. Investment bankers are like the robots and machinery that manufacturing companies use to transform steel and plastic and energy into, say, automobiles. Unlike General Motors’ robots and assembly lines, however—or the loans and common equity in our own industry—labor does not show up on our balance sheets. Labor is simply an operating cost, a cost of doing business.

Common equity, on the other hand, is a residual claim on the profits of a business, after you have paid your operating costs and the claims of other capital providers like lenders and bondholders which are senior to you. Return on equity is an output of your business model; employee compensation cost is an input.¹ And, most importantly, the cost of labor in banking, like everywhere else, is determined at least intially independently of the cost (or required market return) of equity. If you want to run an investment bank, you have to hire and retain investment bankers, whether you are profitable or not, and you will pay the going rate in that labor market. Since we are fungible factors of production, if you cannot afford to pay us what your competitors will, we will leave and you will be unable to generate any profits at all. You might as well shut down.

Now of course the price of labor, like any factor of production, is sensitive in the intermediate and longer term to the returns on capital which employs it. If, as we may be witnessing now in finance, the long term returns to capital in an industry decline, there will be fewer capital providers who want to fund investment banks, banks will shrink, and fewer bankers will be employed. Aggregate and average individual banker compensation will decline. But this adjustment is not immediate, and the demands of inertia and wishful thinking will likely keep labor rates higher than otherwise justified for quite some time.

* * *

Another factor comes into play, which commentators, journalists, and investors seem to have trouble remembering when contemplating compensation in my industry. Even before new risk control mechanisms like clawbacks were implemented in response to the recent financial crisis, investment banks paid a very substantial portion of banker compensation in the form of deferred pay. A generic mid-level investment banker might be paid a fixed salary of $250,000 per year and earn an average bonus of $1,000,000 in a decent year. But of that $1,000,000, perhaps as little as $250,000 might be paid in cash, with the rest coming in the form of unvested stock in the company, restricted stock units, options, and other funny money which get paid out over a period of years. A simple such scheme might have the banker getting $750,000 in restricted shares of the bank’s own common equity which vest in equal installments over the next three years. (A few particularly nasty programs use what is called “cliff vesting,” in which the deferred pay vests all at once after three to five years.) The form such pay takes is often restricted stock, with the number of shares determined by the price of the bank’s stock on the award date, when the bonus is awarded. If Bank ABC is trading at $50 per share, for example, the banker in question would have 5,000 shares vesting on each of the first, second, and third anniversary of the award date.

A little thought will show you that such a scheme is far less favorable to the banker than it appears at first blush. While the banker gets headline pay of $1,250,000, she only receives $500,000 now and must wait to collect the remaining $750,000 over the next three years. Furthermore, she is exposed to the rise or fall of the bank’s stock price: she receives 5,000 shares on each anniversary whether the stock is trading at $50, $25, or $100 per share. Also, unlike the favorable carried interest capital gains treatment her former brethren and occasional nemeses in the private equity world enjoy, she gets taxed at full ordinary income tax rates immediately upon vesting, calculated on the value of the shares at the vesting date.

From the banker’s perspective, she is being forced to advance her employer a three-year interest-free loan for 60% of her nominal compensation, with the added disadvantage that she is exposed to the potential decline of her employer’s stock price, over which she individually has almost no control, to anywhere below $50 per share up to and including zero. From the bank’s perspective, this is a great deal: they have acquired zero-cost financing for 60% of their current year labor costs with no mandatory repayment risk. It is forced equity investment, the cheapest capital you can find. And, unlike true common shareholders who can take their money and run at any time, the banker cannot sell or hedge her stock prior to vesting. Lastly, if she leaves the bank voluntarily for a competitor, most banks automatically cancel her unvested shares; she only gets paid for past years’ work if she still works for the bank. Captive, costless, non-recourse capital. The true mark of my industry’s genius.^{2, 3}

* * *

This also means that the published financial reports of investment banks are practically indecipherable when it comes to understanding what is happening to current compensation policy and practice. Each year, the employee compensation expense line item on banks’ income statements reflects a combination of current cash compensation and the vesting of deferred compensation from up to three to five years previous. Goldman Sachs’ reported compensation expense in 2011 included pay from 2011, 2010, 2009, and perhaps even 2008 and before. There is a terrific lag to the data, and the reported number tells you almost nothing about current pay practices. In fact, if awarded pay is in fact declining, you can be certain that reported compensation ratios significantly overstate how much of the pie is being allocated to bankers now.

All of which is to say that the headline compensation ratios, and the ubiquitous average-pay-per-employee numbers that get bandied breathlessly about in the press—usually with a healthy helping of outrage, natch—tell you little about how banks are trying to control one of their biggest operating expenses. I cannot tell you what transpires in the executive suites of the biggest banks, but I guarantee you that investment banks have made a study and a science of squeezing their employees as hard as possible over pay for decades. The stated goal is to pay everybody the smallest number that will be sufficient to keep a dissatisfied banker from throwing up her hands in disgust and walking across the street to a competitor. The science comes in when designing the form such pay will take that will be the most advantageous for the bank itself while numbing the employee with reams of complex, one-sided terms and restrictions.

In my view, it is undeniably true that most investment bankers would accept significantly lower pay if it were paid 100% in cash. I know I would.

Which is not to say I’m a cheap date, mind you.


¹ This is not entirely true of investment banking, since the majority of our awarded pay depends in large measure on the current year profits we generate for the firm. But this is an ex post perspective; ex ante, to employ an investment banker, you have to budget the going rate. Read on.
² Just imagine if General Motors paid 60% of the money it owes its current vendors—robot manufacturers, power utilities, assembly line workers—with GM stock. Stock it would not have to deliver if it didn’t employ those vendors in subsequent years. The auto industry might even become profitable again.
³ And lest you think I am placing excessive emphasis on the cash-conserving nature of this practice, please note that non-cash deferred compensation in the form of restricted stock units and options at Goldman Sachs alone represented $2.8, $4.0, and $2.0 billion of total reported compensation expense of $12.2, $15.4, and $16.2 billion in 2011, 2010, and 2009, respectively. Those are some pretty sweet interest-free loans to the Squid from its squidlets.

© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

The Laughing Policeman

A society that admires its shock troops had better be bloody careful about where it’s going.

— John le Carré, A Perfect Spy

This picture is beautiful. Just beautiful.

It was posted earlier today by Twitter account @reclaimuc. I have no idea whether it was posed, photoshopped, or merely a serendipitous tableau. I have no idea why the policemen and woman in the picture are laughing. But the framing—capturing the police, the telephone booth ad, the TD Bank branch entrance, and the building address of Two Wall Street—is simply spectacular. As an extra bonus, and for extra frisson, the tonality of the photo perfectly evokes that in The Matrix movies. Urban photojournalism doesn’t get any better than this.

Kevin Roose of New York Magazine later tweeted to explain that the ad in the picture is a fake, designed to promote an upcoming series on Cinemax. This makes sense, as it seems unlikely any real organization would be so tone deaf as to publicly advertise its services in earnest in such a way.¹ I don’t care.

Sometimes fate and fiction collide in such a way that the veil of dissembling and polite convention covering our everyday life is torn aside, revealing the slightly sordid truth beneath. It would be hard for anyone to pen a better exposé of the naked power structures undergirding the surface of my fair city in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twelve than this serendipitous little photograph.

Mayor Bloomberg must be exceedingly annoyed.


¹ Although behavior by certain Presidential candidates recently exposed in the news does plant a seed of doubt in my mind as to just how clueless members of the plutocracy can actually be.

© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Kingdom of the Animals

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

— William Butler Yeats, “A Drinking Song”

Human beings are animals.

Most of the time, most of us take this self-evident fact so much for granted that we entirely forget it. We forget that we are flesh and blood, sweat and skin, muscle and bone. We forget that we get tired, that we sicken, that we get hurt. That we die. Until one of those things happens to us, or to someone we are close to. Then the unavoidable reality of our animalness slaps us in the face with its wet, heavy truth. And the accompanying metallic tang of fear.

There is another time which reminds us, more gently and more pleasantly, that we live our lives chained to the world of flesh. This is the time we take time to spend with each other, to touch and feel the muscle and sinew beneath our loved ones’ skin. I am always surprised when I take a woman or a child into my arms; surprised once again—so many times, over so many years, yet always as if for the first time—at how soft and silky is the skin, how taut and supple and strong are the muscles quivering beneath. Surprised at the strength and durability of the fragile package containing the soul and personality of someone so precious to me I cannot imagine their absence. The absence I know, sooner or later, will come, no matter what I want or pray or can do.

Take time to embrace your loved ones, my friends. Feel their strength; feel their fragility. Smell their hair and their skin.

And rejoice in your beautiful despair.


© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.