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Tuesday, March 7, 2023, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

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What a pleasant day Friday was for me. I had two tickets to see Hugh Eakin speak about Picasso’s War, his fantastic account of how modern art came to America, at the Norton Museum in nearby West Palm Beach. (You can read my review of the book here.)

K was out of town, so I asked M, Number Three Son and fellow art lover, to join me.

I was expecting an elderly, slightly disheveled Oxford-donnish fellow to appear. Instead, Mr. Eakin turned out to be a young-ish, bespectacled nebbish with an appropriately nebbish-y voice.

This is what he looks like:

This is what he sounds like.

It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the man, however. He was smartly funny in a self-effacing way that, for someone that went to both Harvard and Cambridge and has had a spectacular literary career, is both rare and adorable. Moreover, he had clearly done some serious research on his topic. He was able to answer every question thrown at him, including one of mine, with authority, grace, and detail.

Afterwards, I asked M if I could stop by to see Hudson, Number Five Grandson. M and his wife M keep a strict schedule for their one-year-old. The lights in his room are turned off promptly at eight o’clock. So, looking at his watch, M agreed, so long as I understood that there would only be time for me to assist him with Hudson’s bath and bedtime story.

When I got to their home, I realized that I was interrupting a dinner party. I apologized, but M and M assured me I was not intruding, and invited me to stay.

The bath and bedtime story were wonderfully rewarding in every sense that time spent with a one-year-old grandchild could be. Coming downstairs afterwards, I discovered that two of the three dinner guests were friends of M’s that I had known since they were in their early teens. Back then, they were all misfit kids that had found their way to a public but very exclusive high school for the arts (as had M). And now, they were very accomplished professionals with promising lives.

So, I stayed and enjoyed an excellent meal and some excellent Pinot Noir. And I went home feeling very lucky indeed.

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The Economy & Investing

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Then: The Housing Bubble

Now: The Car Debt Bubble?

According to a report published recently by YahooFinance, Americans are borrowing more money to buy cars than ever before. What’s worse, they are often borrowing more than the cars are worth.

Does that sound familiar?

This is what happened with housing in the years leading up to the 2008 crash.

It’s not unusual for drivers to carry some negative equity. But dealers say that an increasing number of people are showing up at their lots up to $10,000 underwater, or “upside-down,” on their trade-ins. They’re buying at still-sky-high prices and rolling debt from one car to another. “As trade-in values begin to cool, each month more and more consumers will find themselves falling from positive to negative equity,” said Ivan Drury, director of insights at auto-market researcher Edmunds. “Unless American car shoppers break their habit of buying again too soon, we’ll see the negative equity tide continue to rise.”

Another Reason Florida Rules 

I often remind my friends from New York that living there puts a significantly greater tax burden on them than living in Florida, where we have no income tax. In response, they say, “But you have higher property taxes.”

But that’s not true. As you can see from data compiled by WalletHub, Florida ranks 24th in terms of “effective real estate tax rate” (at 0.86%), whereas New York’s property taxes are more than twice as high at 1.73%.

Click here.

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Arts & Letters

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Another Auction, Another Record Sale 

Sotheby’s London sold a Wassily Kandinsky painting for a record-breaking $45 million on March 1. The 1910 landscape was recently given to the 13 heirs of a German Jewish businessman persecuted by the Nazis, according to The Wall Street Journal. The painting, Murnau with Church II, had hung in a museum in the Netherlands for 70 years. The buy was the largest for Sotheby’s winter sale, beating out a $29.2 million Gerhard Richter and a $28.1 million Picasso portrait of his daughter.

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Worth Watching

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Women Talking 

Directed by Sarah Polley

Starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, and Francis McDormand

Released in theaters (US) Dec. 23, 2022

Available to buy/rent from Amazon

The title worried me. Was this going to be a two-hour movie of women talking? And it was. But it wasn’t as dull and pretentious as that might sound. In some ways, in fact, it was quite good.

The Plot: In a remote Menonite colony in the 1990s, a secret is revealed. For years, a small group of the men have been drugging and raping some of the women. Eight men are arrested. Then, inexplicably, the rest of the men in the colony set off for town to bail out the rapists. While they are gone, the women discuss their options: Fight back. Leave. Or do nothing.

Interesting: The story is based on a novel (Women Talking, by Miriam Toews) that was inspired by real-life events that occurred at the Manitoba Colony in Bolivia.

What I Liked: 

* The acting: The cast is a who’s who of accomplished actresses, and they all played their parts well.

* The photography and the music: Although it could have been more varied, the dark tones worked well.

* The script: Some of the lines were very good.

What I Didn’t Like: 

* The decision to make it a stage play instead of a movie.

* The script: For every very good line, there were two that were cringe-worthy.

* The artificial “Me Too” elements: Was it necessary for one of the rape victims to cut her hair short and became, essentially, the community’s first transgender man? And what does that say about the director’s interest in exploring the subject by having the only male character express himself as a simple-minded and effeminate wimp?

In Summary: 

The movie had great potential. And several very good moments. But, ultimately, it failed because of all the Woke clichés.

Critical Reception 

* “A movie that deliberately hovers between drama and parable, the materially concrete and the spiritually abstract, and whose stark austerity sometimes gives way to bursts of salty wit and cathartic laughter.” (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times)

* “It breaks free of the bleak narratives that have boxed in cinema’s rape victims over and over again. At the very least, it’s something we haven’t seen before.” (Megan Gibson, New Statesman)

You can watch the trailer here.

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Worth Considering

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The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

The Final Word on Wearing Masks

A friend of mine, whose spouse has COVID, has been told by his daughter that if he wants to see his granddaughter, he must wear a mask. Another friend insists that anyone who may have been near this woman, must mask up. Talking about this to K and her sister G last night, I said something like, “But everyone knows that masks don’t work.”

And then I got an earful.

“Save your conspiracy theories for your blog,” they told me.

So here I am.

I wrote about the ineffectiveness of masks in the Dec. 20 issue I provided further proof Feb. 10.At that time, I felt that the studies I cited were more than enough to embarrass the CDC, the Biden administration, and the media for promoting them as effective safeguards for so long. Instead, they’ve been walking back their misinformation, one step at a time.

Their narrative continues to be: “We were just reporting the science as we knew it then.”

Which is a bald-faced lie. The data and the analytics have been there since day one. And now, a newly released report – the most rigorous and extensive review of the scientific literature on masks – concludes that there was never any scientific evidence that masks reduced the spread of COVID. Neither surgical masks nor N-95s. Not even a little.

Click here.

If you don’t have time to hit the link and read the report, at least take a look at the following graph. It tracks the results of the experiment that occurred across the US in the first two years of the pandemic, when mask mandates were imposed and lifted at various times in 39 states.

The black line shows the weekly rate of COVID cases in states with mask mandates that week. The orange line shows the rate in states without mandates.

As you can see, the trajectories are virtually identical. And if you add up all those numbers, the cumulative rates of COVID cases are virtually identical, too. So are the cumulative rates of COVID mortality. (The mortality rate is actually a little lower in the states without mask mandates!)

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Readers Write

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Re the Feb. 28 issue:

“The population growth charts in your Feb. 28 issue were staggering. And the man fired for not essentially cheating on his wife, what!? LOL…. Always interesting/insightful topics.” – HG

“‘Unchained Melody’ was covered by so many different bands and singers. It was written by an incarcerated man, which, to me, gives it even more passion. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times, and it was never done better than by the Chambers Brothers. It still gives me goosebumps.” – AS

 

Re the Mar. 3 issue: 

“Loved Bob Ross as a kid. (Grew up near his homebase of Muncie, IN.) Still love him as an adult.

“As an aside, have you ever seen a Bob Ross original come up at auction? I’ve read a couple of pieces that partially explain the lack of sales, despite his prolificacy. Here’s one.” – SL

 

“Your piece on the lab leak conspiracy theory was spot on. Here’s a good summary by Jesse Watters of what went down.” – PW

 

Re my recent COVID posts: 

“Maybe you could bring up the info in this tweet as another side effect of the COVID vaccine.” – RF (my brother-in-law)

My Response: Awesome! I loved the comments from the people responding to the tweet!

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"Were it not for hypocrisy I’d have no advice to give."
"Were it not for sciolism I’d have no ideas to share."
"Were it not for arrogance, I’d have no ambition."
"Were it not for forgetfulness, I would have no new ideas to write about."