Books bring comfort in tough times

This edition of my book club isn’t about a specific book, but books in general.

It’s true that I have stopped buying books and turned to the public library for the latest tomes, but I do have the comfort of many books that I’ve bought over the years.

A neighbor walked into my house one day and noticed something that you apparently don’t see in houses nowadays: several bookcases with books on every shelf. I am a bookish fellow, which usually scares people away, and those shelves are all full, and some are doubled up.

I can’t help it; books are a passion for me. Sure, I watch TV and have a small DVD collection of good movies and episodic TV, but my books are my pride and joy.

The first hardcover book I bought was “The New York Philharmonic Guide to the Symphony,” and other notables in my collection in include Will and later Ariel Durant’s epic 11-volume work, “The Story of Civilization” (I bought it in hardcover from a book club back in the 1980s), and books that I took home from my last newspaper job. In the latter case, the books editor received books and put them on a giveaway table after she was finished with them.

When I moved from my house in Lake Worth in 2001, I dumped a large collection of “Star Trek” novels, something I regret to this day. In my house moves, most of the stuff that goes is boxes containing books, and in my garage are stored a few more books.

Some were bought on a whim, some were for a serious effort at self-improvement, and most were for entertainment. They’re not on the shelf to impress people, but to show that I am a man of words.

No matter what happens, those books will stay with me forever. When I die many years from now, I hope there are still libraries, and that they will accept donated books, so someone else can have the pleasure I have had over the years.

Palm Beach takes another beating

The revelations about Bernard Madoff’s company and the gigantic amount of money allegedly lost have a lot of people quaking in their boots, and it’s no wonder.

It’s interesting, though, because this is the third time since around 2001 that someone has taken the glitterati of Palm Beach for patsies, and conned some of the island’s richest Richie Riches out of a portion of their golden nest eggs.

I guess you might say Palm Beach is a “target-rich” environment, with a large population of trust-fund types and old money folks who just can’t bear the thought of betting their life savings on FDIC-backed CDs and money market accounts, and believe that investing with their “pal” is the only way to fly.

The two incidents that preceded the Madoff revelations are:

• Thomas Abrams’ Pheonix Financial Group, which according to Online Fraud magazine’s Fraud Digest took $33.9 million from 100 to 150 investors. “Abrams lured wealthy, elderly potential investors through his charity, Pheonix Foundation for Children. (Abrams purposely misspelled ‘Phoenix’ to attract attention to his organization.),” the site reports. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2002.
• The KL Financial Group fraud (see the Receiver’s final report in .pdf format, filed Dec. 10, 2008). “While in operation, the defendants defrauded approximately 200 investors out of nearly $194 million,” the report says. Among the principals’ activities was the setting of a fake trading room in a West Palm Beach office building to show potential investors.

And now Madoff.

Back when I worked for the Press Journal in Vero Beach, Fla., I read about someone who committed fraud against a retired man and took him for his entire life savings.

The retiree had worked his whole life for a railroad and had retired with a six-figure sum (and, I assume, a pension and Social Security). He had met a man at church who told him he could turn that nest egg into a lot more.

Well, the retiree (who admitted he was mostly illiterate) trusted the man because he met him at church, and handed the whole amount to the man, who proceeded to abscond with it. This poor, hard-working man now had nothing. The crook said he was sorry, and got a long prison term for his crime.

As for me, I was furious. They don’t make them much lower than those who steal from the elderly and the infirm. I felt than and now that the job of the media was and is to be a watchdog and alert people before – not after – if someone is not on the up and up.

It is astonishing to me, though, how many of the rich end up getting taken. I mean, if you’ve attended all the best schools, if not taken classes and learned anything there, something had to stick, right?

But it may be that the rich aren’t that much different from the rest of us. They’re suckers for a British accent or someone who donates to charities or attends religious services. The only thing left is to be aware that there are people out there who believe that your money is their money, and they’ll figure out a way to get you to part with it.

What’s that old saying: “A fool and his money are soon parted.”

I’ll be following the revelations in the Madoff affair, and thanking my lucky stars that my family has had the sense to avoid “sure things” and affinity frauds.

But for those on Palm Beach who are sitting in their mansions and wondering how much is left, it was an expensive lesson in how untrustworthy some people can be. For their sake, let’s hope the third time is the charm.

The urban dystopia, then and now

I watched “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” recently, and that movie plus my re-watching of “The Wire” on DVD brought up some thoughts about cities, society and progress.

“Pelham” is set in early-’70s New York City, and it was kind of jarring to see and hear the regular stereotyping, not only in the dialogue but even in the closing credits. The leader of the train hijackers is considered “a fruitcake” (read: gay) because of his British accent, there is talk about how women are inferior in their performance of jobs with the Transit Authority and Police Department, and the most sexist blather is about how one of the hostages in the subway car is an undercover police officer and is believed to be a “dame,” which would seem to limit the officer’s effectiveness.

In fact, the officer is a man dressed as a hippie, wearing long hair and with sandals on his feet, and he turns out to be a hero after the robbers set the subway car in motion at high speed and make their escape. He jumps out, shoots a hijacker and is shot himself.

Walter Matthau played Lt. Zachary Garber of New York City’s transit police, and when he descends into the tunnel and finds the injured officer, he says, “Don’t worry, miss, the ambulance is on its way.”

I place movies like “Pelham” in the same category as “Serpico,” “The French Connection,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Taxi Driver.” Maybe it’s a characteristic of movies made in and about the 1970s in New York City, but the movie-version city is always on the verge of total chaos brought about by some event. It’s crowded, gritty, under extreme social and economic stress, and basically a pressure-cooker.

Contrast this with “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” which are late-’70s films that show a much more upbeat view of New York City. “I don’t care what anyone says; this is still a great city,” Woody Allen’s character Isaac says in “Manhattan.” Diversity, a threat in the other films, is a strength in the above-mentioned works by Allen.

Now flash-forward about 30 years or more.

HBO’s series “The Wire” is set in post-9/11 Baltimore, a city also seemingly on the verge of collapse. I have all five seasons on DVD, and recently started a project to watch from Season One.

“The Wire” is the best series HBO has ever aired, and maybe the best ever on television, and while HBO has had some awesome series, this one is the most real. There are great actors here, but the real star is the city of Baltimore. The characters, good and bad, serve it, leech off it and use it to further their ambitions, grabbing for crumbs as the city’s government flails about and struggles to stay afloat financially and otherwise.

Nobody is totally clean – or totally dirty. That ambiguity makes “The Wire” great, and it’s a pity that the show’s creators and stars are not decorating their houses with Emmys. I guess the show was too real for many people. I know from reading and listening that some thought there were too many black characters. Well, the real world is sometimes hard for people to take when it’s presented on television.

The grit in Baltimore is there, but not in the washed-out colors of a ’70s film like “Pelham.” There’s the drug trade, the public housing project “towers” (CGI’d in because the series was shot on location after the “towers” were demolished), the “pit,” the cops, the system, the police cars, the Escalades and the bosses (drug and police), who demand much and go ballistic when things go wrong. And when someone screws up, the penalty is real assassination for those in the “game” or career assassination for those on the police force.

There is the struggle to make a living, the compromises that are made, the values that are touted and then dismissed, the dreams made and lost, innocence flowering and lost. There are a few small victories, and a few are even preserved to the end.

I feel a connection between “The Wire” and “Pelham,” and it’s the notion of the big city and its battles. But I feel less pessimistic about a city like New York than Baltimore. I am biased because I grew up in Queens and saw Manhattan as a shining city to visit, and have never been to Baltimore.

Still, while life is hard in New York City, I always get the feeling that it will somehow triumph, while the Baltimore of “The Wire” seems to be doomed.

Season Five really hit home because of its focus on the media, and again the bad are rewarded and the good are punished. Again, that’s why its ratings were so low; it was just too real.

The future of the city is up in the air. Places like Detroit have seemingly lost everything, and now there will be no printed daily newspaper seven days a week. Other cities may claw their way back to the heights.

It’s hard to imagine now, but the New York City of the era of “Pelham” was thought to be so over. As it turned out, it wasn’t and even survived probably the worst disaster imaginable on Sept. 11, 2001, which only shows that bricks and mortar may be destroyed, but people are made of stronger stuff.

But even then, sometimes people lose. And that’s the message of “The Wire.” And when they lose again and again, it can be too much.

Are the newspapers doomed? Probably

I’ve had a lot of time of late to think about journalism and its future. Today’s announcement that the Detroit News and Free Press will cut back printing and delivery is the beginning of the end for the big-city print newspaper, I strongly believe.

As usual, it’s being pitched in the Detroit News as “innovative,” “dramatic,” “exciting,” “unique” and so on.

As we said when I was a teenager: “Yeah, right.”

The readers are promised a better news product, more stories, more, more, more. But they’re getting less – a lot less — and staffers from the newsroom to the pressroom are going to lose their jobs at those papers. All in the name of “more.”

Personally, I don’t buy it.

I worked for a newspaper, the Boca Raton News, that got smaller seemingly every day. The TV book got smaller. The comics got smaller. Reporters and editors left and were not replaced. Events weren’t covered. And each withdrawal of the paper from the community was hailed as the harbinger of a new and improved newspaper that was, in fact, getting closer to the community.

That’s called “spin.” Like a lot of people at the Boca Raton News, I got so dizzy I left when the publisher announced an “exciting” new development. He was buying the paper from its owner, which had itself overseen dramatic reductions in coverage.

Bu-bye.

So I moved to other papers, and watched their exciting innovations, which cut coverage. It seemed like right after I arrived, the paper downsized and cut back while claiming to expand.

Finally, like many people in the business, I had to leave my newspaper and not voluntarily. Still, I left as a professional and with my pride intact. Consider this: I was the last newsperson in the building on my final night, and was the desker assigned to update the Web site. I did it right and I did it well. I know I am missed there.

But will newspapers be missed? Will people 20 years from now walk out in the morning, pick up a pile of paper in a plastic bag, bring it in, separate the sections and spread it out on the table, and read the news of their town, city, state, nation and world? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe big papers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post will be the last of their breed, but the smaller papers will be gone and will exist as Web sites.

But I think what will not go away is the demand and need for good, intense and searching local news, and that’s why I’m trying to be optimistic about the future of journalism and still believe that I have a few good years left in this business.

Here in Florida, newspapers have exposed corrupt politicians and unethical business people, and made life better for millions of people. Newspapers have fought hard for open government; in this state, we call them the Government-in-the-Sunshine Laws. Meetings have to take place in public, with the media watching closely, and government officials have to be very careful to not discuss public business outside the framework of a public meeting, and have gotten in trouble for doing so.

This hasn’t stopped all government corruption, but believe me it has made the government fear the media, and exposed and prevented lots of “sweetheart deals” from taking place in government contracting.

Although I rarely had anything to do with some of its best exposures, I was proud that my former paper was at the forefront of exposing the misconduct in government and business. The paper took its lumps, mostly from those who were written about, but it was a point of pride that it was able to take on the powerful and tell the people what they needed to know.

But that’s in the past. What of the future?

Maybe the time has come to seriously look at separating the “news” from the “paper.” The reality is that local newspapers’ business models are dying. Part of it is the ongoing economic recession and huge cuts in consumer spending and advertising, but part is that the logistics and costs of dropping paper in someone’s driveway is prohibitive. If you’ve ever seen a newspaper printing plant, you can see that a lot of money went somewhere. I’m not saying it was wasted, but in the future such infrastructure may have to give way to a better, faster, less expensive means of distribution.

When I first saw the World Wide Web, I was a college journalism student in the mid-1990s. I was doing a story on the computer network on campus at Florida Atlantic University, and someone in the computer department took me in her office and showed me Mosaic, the first Web browser. I kind of had a feeling that this was something different from DOS command-line operations and more like what America Online was offering, and that it had a ton of potential.

People then still trained to work in print journalism, and for their writing to appear in a newspaper, but it soon became clear that there would be a new way to bring news to the people.

Just as when offset printing replaced hot type, the consequences for many people who work in the old technology are devastating. Heck, I was an eager embracer of all things new in the newsroom, and it didn’t stop me from losing my job, so it’s not just an academic exercise for me. I may never work in a newsroom again, though I will always want great journalism to continue.

Will it?

China’s high times coming to an end?

Recent stories in the news media, including this one from Newsweek, have detailed China’s woes.

Apparently, having an export economy based on jobs relocated from other countries is no guard against a bad recession when the people in those countries stop buying your products.

Most of the toys American children get at Christmas are made in China now, and with our economy heading downhill and layoff announcements surging, fewer parents have the money to buy toys and are cutting back severely, and it’s being felt in China, with factories closing and reports of unrest among laid-off workers increasing.

It just goes to show that while being a low-cost country does has its advantages, when those high-wage jobs migrate from wealthier countries to the low-wage country, the latter becomes dependent on the formers’ ability to generate new jobs that pay well enough to buy the products, even at reduced prices. Eventually, if that does not happen, there will be a day of reckoning. That appears to be what is happening.

It’s sad all around.

I exist in a privileged frame of reference, since I’m single with no children and unemployed, so I’m not buying very much beyond food and paying my bills. Multiply me by lots of other Americans, and China is really caught in a bad situation.

Indeed, China could push President George W. Bush and President-elect Barack H. Obama to hurry up with some sort of economic stimulus package, if only to get money into Americans’ pockets so they will start buying stuff again, including toys. It may be too late for Christmas 2008, but it would be a good start for Christmas 2009.

No Christmas rush at the post office

When I got out of the military in August 1982, I was faced with the need, actually for the first time in my life, to find a job.

The Marine Corps mostly insulated me from the brutal recession that hit in the early 1980s, but unemployment was still high when I left and jobs were hard to come by. I would have to work to find work.

I worked in the basement of a hardware store for one day, and a tip led me to the big United Parcel Service center in Maspeth, N.Y., where I joined a gigantic line for holiday jobs at the company. I actually landed and kept a position during the Christmas rush in 1982, and had hoped to stay, but the economy was still slow and the boss informed me that he had to let me go. It was a good work experience.

I had met a former squadron-mate from VMA-513 before getting the UPS job, and he had told me that former military types could just walk in and take the post office test. I did that, took the clerk and mailhandler tests, and awaited the news.

There were few hopes, because the U.S. was in a bad recession. Some of the guys from my squadron had gotten out of the Marines, then came back in when finding a job proved difficult. I was determined to make it, though, and decided going back was a last resort.

It never came to that.

I was hired and started in the Postal Service in January 1983, and then transferred to West Palm Beach from Long Island in January 1986.

In those days, there was the famed “Christmas rush” in the Postal Service, in which you could work enormous amounts of overtime and make a lot of money. There was a huge amount of mail in terms of both Christmas cards and packages, and it was not uncommon for people to work the maximum overtime, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, from the day after Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve. And the echo of the rush would linger beyond New Year’s Day.

The night before the final delivery day before Christmas Day would be the most hectic of all in the postal facility, with the goal of not only getting all the mail canceled but also getting all the packages out. It was almost a relief when we were finished with canceling the mail and would move to another part of the building to work on the parcels.

Being single with no children, I would usually volunteer to come in on Christmas Day to really grab some overtime and holiday pay. One Christmas Day, I ended up working 12 hours because of a crush of work that came in. It was a memorable paycheck that year.

I left the Postal Service in June 1994, and Christmas rushes became a thing of the past for me. Former postal co-workers told me that the rush was greatly attenuated because people were sending fewer cards; I’m sure the current economic situation is also cutting down the rush.

Newspapers would have a bit of a rush, since some employees would pick the holiday season for their vacations, and I was always one to work all the holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s) to grab the holiday pay and overtime available. Having been laid off from my previous newspaper in September, I really miss that extra pay as well as my regular paycheck. This year, you might say, I’m watching what little rush there is from the sidelines, but am eager to get back into the game.

Maybe after the economy bounces back, there will be more Christmas rushes. Let’s hope so.

Sold my soul to rock and roll

Walking through a local big box store about a week before the stampede that was “Black Friday,” I noticed the piles of boxes of a video game called “Rock Band.”

I’ve also seen that there’s a new version coming out, and there’s talk of variants for different bands of the ’70s, though a version for The Beatles probably won’t happen.

It makes me wonder, because it seems I never see or hear of teenagers forming their own garage bands anymore. Back when I was a copy editor for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, I read an article about a bunch of guys my age who had a garage band that played ’70s songs, though the leader noted that neighbors would call the police (law enforcement, I snarkily clarified in a photo caption, and not the ’70s band) to complain about the noise.

Maybe teenagers today are too busy, or worried that noise complaints could lead to an arrest and felony charges by officers who prefer “Begin the Beguine” or something by Dionne Warwick.

Though I’ve managed to block out most of my teen years, there are some good memories. Among them are the times with a band some friends of mine had in which I was a roadie, though they seldom had a gig in which carriage of equipment was necessary. Still, that illusory status enabled me to sit in on the band’s practices; a privilege granted to few, and even then sometimes practices were closed even to me.

Just about every garage band of that era had “Smoke on the Water” on its playlist, and more ambitious groups would try “Stairway to Heaven” if the mood struck. My friends in the band tried some “originals,” including some dreck I typed up for them. I’ll admit this, the band’s leader did set some of my work to music, and for that I’m grateful.

The band’s members were in high school, but took their music seriously and practices could be really intense. Every band dreamed of success and getting the attention of someone big and important, and this one was no exception.

I still remember the band’s biggest gig, which was at a bar in Queens, N.Y., called Your Mother’s Moustache. A sign in the doorway read: “Guys 21, Girls 18, No Exceptions!” Still, the band attracted its mostly underage clientele and we settled down for beers and a rockin’ set by the band. It launched into a rousing opening with Queen’s “Tie Your Mother Down” that should have started the place rocking out, but the drummer broke his foot pedal during the song and that delayed the second song by about an hour as a replacement was procured. The mists of time obscure what happened afterward.

I soon left for Marine Corps basic training after graduating high school, and lost contact with the band. After I left the service, I was back in touch with one member, but a fight that was mostly my fault ended our contact for good.

It was a pretty fun and creative time, though, and with groups like Aerosmith as a model those little garage bands had a lot of fun, if little success. In a way, I miss those days when you could walk down the street and hear, muffled by a closed garage door, a group of young men (and a few young women) trying to figure out the chords to a song by Kansas, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, the Beatles or any number of groups whose hits were on the playlist at the rock stations on the radio.

According to a recent article here, those who play “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” sometimes want to learn a real instrument, so maybe there’s hope after all for the future of garage bands. And maybe they’ll need, if not a roadie, someone to be their press agent when fame and fortune hits.