The Sadness of Gatsby

Although I rarely watch a movie that doesn’t come with captions anymore, I felt – as someone with a degree in English literature – that it was necessary to see the latest version of The Great Gatsby on its opening day.

I love Fitzgerald’s collective oeuvre, that of romantic yet heartbroken young men. This Side of Paradise is in some ways an even better example of that than The Great Gatsby. (If you want the modern version of Fitzgerald, pick up any of Scott Spencer’s early books, especially Endless Love.)

But as I watched the latest film version of Fitzgerald’s book, I felt irretrievably sad. I loved that director Baz Luhrmann turned Long Island into a leafy, verdant version of Disneyland’s Storybook Land, with glistening mansions that look like fairy tale castles. I have no idea if that’s what Great Neck and Little Neck – Fitzgerald’s models for West Egg and East Egg – looked like in the 20s, but it made for stunning visuals. I’ve written before about movies that should and should not be remade. Gatsby, I fear, belongs in neither category.

I still have vivid memories of the previous version, the one with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. I remember where I was during all the pre-release hoopla, the sturm-und-drang over producer Robert Evans wanting his then-wife, Ali MacGraw, to star, until Steve McQueen stole her away during the making of the appropriately named The Getaway. To this day, I’m still not sure whether Ali MacGraw would have been better than Mia Farrow. In fact, I’m not sure anyone could play well the 20th century’s biggest b***h incarnate, except for one particular ex-wife of a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless.

And that to me is the inherent sadness of the story. Here is a young man who corrupts himself – and eventually gets killed – in the name of love. I’m all for that sort of thing, but the irony is that Daisy is just so not worth it. She spurns love for money in marriage, and when she finds that true love again, she reverts to her true self. As Fitzgerald wrote of her and Tom: “They were careless people … they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

That basically is the crux of the problem that I keep having with this story, as wonderfully written as it is (and as visually compelling as the new version is): Gatsby is an idiot. Nick Carraway says famously that he’s worth more than all the others put together, but that rings hollow for me. He’s become a criminal in pursuit of a false idol – and he can’t see it. I know we’re supposed to root for Gatsby and accept this fatal flaw, but he comes off as a materialistic, narcissistic adolescent carrying around medals of honor in his pocket (did he win them, or buy them?). He’s densely unaware that life moves forward, not backward.

Maybe I’m cringing at Gatsby now because I used to be like him. I was always looking backward, looking for something I was sure I’d missed. Whenever I read or heard the exchange when Carraway says, “You can’t repeat the past,” and Gatsby replies, “Of course you can,” a shiver sprinted down my spine because I believed it to be true. The love I had for one girl was so intense so long after the relationship was over that one of my therapists accused me of necrophilia – being in love with something dead.

Because I got to grow up and Gatsby didn’t, perhaps I should have more sympathy for him. But the older I get, the more he strikes me as dim as the light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

Life in the Valley Gets Weird Yet Again

It’s happening again. Life in Silicon Valley is getting that otherworldly glow it gets every few years. The rest of the world doesn’t always take notice when this happens. It did when the PC was invented and when the Web was invented. But those of us who live here – and especially those of us who were born and raised here – can tell when the surge has started again. Sometimes it’s all we can do to flail for something that seems solid and hang on for dear life.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, in the heyday of the PC, I could sense part of it. Business at the technology publishing companies where I worked pulsed so strongly that if I didn’t like my bosses, I could just pick up a phone and start interviewing. Sometimes people called to recruit me. It was so strong and so intoxicating that when people talk about the recession of the early 90s, I have no idea what they’re talking about.

And that was even before the Web. Once that invention rewrote the rules about how people used computers to communicate, late in the 20st century, being here was like being in the middle of the Gold Rush. Every time I switched jobs, my salary jumped. At the end of the decade, I was making three times what I’d made at its start. Of course, the boom eventually busted, and at the beginning of the 21st century, I was back to making one-third of what I’d made a couple of years before.

And so it went. Silicon Valley surged again, until about five years ago, when it receded again. Now it’s surging again. There are a cluster of new technologies that are making everyone excited: mobile technology is only one of them, but that’s the one everyone sees, what with tablets and smartphones. But the tablets and smartphones are connecting to wildly new efficient architectures in the bowels of companies, incorporating such buzzwords as virtualization and the cloud. As with the Web, there’s a raft of new capabilities that vendors are trying to sell, and I’m one of the people that they’ve asked to – as I have during my entire career – translate these capabilities into English.

That’s why things are getting weird again. I can see it from my desk. In years past, I would call Europe or Australia once a month. In the last two months, I’ve had calls to Pune, Beijing, Macau, Singapore, Sydney, Sao Paolo, London, Oslo, Prague, Istanbul, Frankfurt, and probably a few more cities that I’ve forgotten. Different projects, different clients. More than once I had early morning calls to Europe and late afternoon calls to Asia – an advantage, I guess, to living in California, but it gets old after a while.

I can see it outside my door, too. Housing prices are always a good bellwether of weirdness. Business is booming, so they need employees. The employees need a place to live. Houses in our neighbor have a “for sale” sign up one week and a “sold” sign the next. If you’re already here, it’s like having a lottery ticket that keeps paying off year after year. If you’re just arriving, it’s like trying to buy a winning lottery ticket.

Sometimes the weirdness comes down a very personal level. Back in the 80s I noted that Silicon Valley was the kind of place where you could dial a wrong number and someone you knew would still pick up the phone. It hasn’t changed. I have a longtime friend who’s gone to work for Company A and wants me to write case studies for them. This would hardly be worth mentioning except that I also have a long-term relationship with Agency B, for whom I’m writing a couple of white papers on behalf of Company C – Company A’s biggest competitor. Even though I’ve told Agency C about the offer from Company A, it does not want me to stop writing material for Company C because their products are so arcane and bringing someone else up to speed would be problematic. It won’t be the first time I’ll be writing material for competitors at the same time, and it’s not the first time I’ve faced these complex disclosure issues but it always feels … weird.

It also feels weird because, as always, there’s an innate inequality to it all. As companies struggle to shed what they’ve done that isn’t working and ignite what they think will work, I have friends who are out on the street. Some have been there since the last downturn rewrote the rules around them. Others are there for the first time. It’s like being at a party full of glimmer and glamour, until you notice that off in a corner, there’s a really vicious game of musical chairs underway.

And so it goes. Someday I won’t notice all this churn because I’ll be retired and it will swirl on without me. But in the meantime, there are two advantages to having been through it so many times. You’re experienced enough to know that this kind of craziness won’t last forever – and you’re smart enough to savor it while it does.

Eight Reasons Why This Season of Mad Men Is Driving Me Mad

You know you’ve become over-involved with a television show when it starts to frustrate you and you watch it religiously anyway. That’s the way it’s been for me with Mad Men from the beginning. Although I loved the idea of a series about an advertising agency in the 60s – when Madison Avenue was as cool as Silicon Valley was in the 90s – I didn’t even watch the first season.

I hated that they kept showing Don Draper’s home life. I didn’t want to see his home life – I wanted to see the workings of the ad agency. It was about as far from McMahon & Tate as you could get (if you don’t get that reference, then you clearly don’t understand that this column is written for Boomers).

But then I couldn’t help myself, and I got sucked in. And even though I still don’t think it’s as brilliant as everyone says it is (sometimes a scoop of orange sherbet is just a scoop of orange sherbet), I’m still hooked. Which is why the current season is so aggravating. To wit:

Don Draper. Can someone please get this man a character arc? I understand the man is changeless – have you noticed that his hair stays Sixties-short and Brylcreemed even while everyone around him is growing hideous sideburns – but we’ve already seen him ruin his marriage by sleeping around. Why does he have to do it again?

Milestone Millstones. I thought the idea of showing the angst of throwing a wedding on Saturday, November 23, 1963 was wonderful. But the Sixties were crazy enough on their own without hanging episodes on touchstones like Martin Luther King’s assassination. Soon: Bobby Kennedy shot! Stay tuned!

Character Confusion. Am I the only one who initially thought that Peggy Olson was sleeping with Sterling Draper’s new copywriter, Michael Ginsburg? The actor who plays Ginsburg and the actor who plays Peggy’s boyfriend, Abe Drexler, look startlingly alike with their shaggy moustaches and tousled hair. Did we all look that horrible in the Sixties?

New York, New York. Between the Sixties and the Seventies, New York deteriorated from the place to be to the place to leave. It started on a downward spiral that it has only recently recovered from. Yet other than the scene several seasons back when Roger and Joan are mugged on a garbage-strewn street, everyone still seems to live in the pristine Manhattan of old.

Homosexual Happenings. Gay pride blossomed in Greenwich Village in the Sixties, but where the heck is Sal Romano, the character axed for being gay back in 2009? I keep expecting him to walk through the door. If they want to hang an episode on a milestone, let it be Stonewall. That at least would be original.

January Jones. One of my friends finally explained to me that January Jones, who plays Betty Draper Francis, was pregnant last year, and that’s why her character gained so much weight. But why haven’t they done anything with it? This is a character who used to be a model, for crying out loud, in a decade when women were still judged by how they looked. And what’s the deal with her black hair? Blondes had more fun back then. Are we supposed to discern something from this?

Sally Suspense. The Sixties were a big time for runaways. I’ve been waiting patiently for the Drapers’ daughter Sally to hit the road in search of that creepy guy Glenn. What was the point of his cringe-inducing character if not for some payoff yet to come?

Missing Music. Another friend of mine noted that this is a show set in the Sixties, and yet we haven’t heard a peep from the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, or anybody. We agreed that it was probably a royalties issue, which is particularly problematic when a production company asks to license music for the DVD series. But still …

But the real reason Mad Men is driving me mad is that last night’s episode was everything I ever wanted from the series: intrigue, repartee, shenanigans, all relating to the agency and getting clients and only tangentially touching on their home lives. That’s the show I want to watch. But I’ll watch the one they broadcast anyway.

Random Thoughts on Traveling Last Week

Business travel last week took me through six airports, two hotels, two railroad stations, and more Starbucks than I can count. Some random thoughts on being in Boston and New York and other points along the way:

● Judging by the honking and bad driving, Boston is more than back to normal.

● I do believe that Boston’s T is my favorite transit system in the world. I miss tokens, though.

● At a dinner in Boston, I prophesied that they’d be telling their where-were-you-when-bombs-went-off stories for ten years – because that’s how long it took those of us in California to stop talking about the Loma Prieta earthquake (though we will, upon request, be happy to bring it up again).

● On the other side of one wall of my room between ten and midnight my first night in Boston, I heard someone who was clearly obsessive-compulsive zipping and unzipping a garment bag. Imagine my surprise the next morning when I opened the door and realized that on the other side of the wall was the hallway. I googled the name of the hotel and “haunted,” but nothing came up. I finally asked the front desk clerk. He gave me a strange look and replied, “You’re the fourth person to ask me that in the last few weeks.”

● I couldn’t remember the last time I stayed at a hotel that issued metal keys with diamond-shaped plastic tags. At least I couldn’t forget my room number, since it was embossed on the plastic.

● Environmentalists complain that airplanes are carbon-spewing nightmares, but I think what travelers do on the ground is worse – Styrofoam cups in plastic wrap, linens washed every day, takeout containers, and more. I carry a Starbucks traveler mug and I still feel guilty.

● My cousin and her daughter came into Boston from Rhode Island on Amtrak. I walked right up to the end of the platform at South Station to meet them, and later in the day, when my cousin decided to change her departure time, Amtrak swapped her tickets in the blink of an eye. I miss doing that in airports.

● Now that I know it costs $13 to go through the Holland Tunnel and $15 to cross the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, I will never complain about the $6 fee to cross the Golden Gate Bridge again.

● I asked the west African cab driver who took me from Newark into Manhattan if he liked America. He said, “Of course. Back home there are no jobs and if you criticize the government, they kill you.” Kind of makes gridlock look more benign.

● Grand Central Terminal is considerably different today from the first time I visited it – when it was still Grand Central Station – in 1972. It’s cleaner, brighter, and the food is better. I miss Nathan’s, though.

● The best part about traveling to new places is having dinner with old friends.

● The last time I stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City (see lobby above), I saw actor Chris Noth and was propositioned by a prostitute in the lobby bar. This trip was much less eventful.

● The only time to visit New York is for three days in the spring. Any longer and in any other season is just madness.

● Speaking of madness, two weeks ago the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco charged us $62 per night to park our car in their garage. The same charge at the Roosevelt in midtown Manhattan would have been $55 per night. I say this purely to shame the Marriott.

● My last random thought is the same one I have after every trip, business or pleasure: it’s good to be home.

Pardon My Paranoia

On the mental bookshelf holding my imagined-but-yet-unwritten novels is the story of a revolutionary movement in contemporary California. Hispanics, angered at their treatment and the historic theft of the state’s wealth from their Mexican homeland, embark on a campaign to take California back, using traditional terrorist tactics such as bombings to deliver their message. In response, the government declares a state of martial law, imposing severe restrictions on the movement and civil liberties of the citizens in the name of protecting them from terrorism.

The twist: the government quickly finds and eradicates the terrorist cell. But the powers-that-be realize that a citizenry under martial law is much easier to control. They decide not to let the public in on the fact that the terrorists have been eliminated, and instead occasionally stage skirmishes and explosions to make it look as if danger still lurks. It takes the efforts of one man, formerly accused of being one of the terrorists, to find proof of this dastardly turn of events.

I don’t think this is a particularly original story (and in fact, my creative writing teacher in college said that the ancient Greeks used all the good plots first). It is probably inspired by a book I read back in the days after Watergate called The Last President (not to be confused with one of the more recent Daybreak series with the same name). Therein authors Michael Kurland and S. W. Barton postulate what would have happened if the presidential administration (read: Nixon) had murdered two enterprising journalists (read: Woodward and Bernstein) before they were able to uncover anything compromising about the administration (read: Watergate). In it, just as in my story, the authorities plan further attacks on the public in order to justify the suspension of civil liberties.

Now, I am not a left-wing nut job who sees right-wing nut jobs lurking around every corner and behind every explosion. But my unpublished novelist’s mind can’t help plotting. Anyone who lived through the 20^th century would do the same; it’s not as if it’s never happened before. The government has always found someone for us to fear, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was the Bolsheviks. In the 1940s, it was the Japanese. In the 1950s, it was the Communists again. In the 1960s, it was the radicals. In the 1970s, it was Palestinian terrorists making political demands. Later, it became Islamic terrorists making religious statements. Roseanne Rosannadanna was right.

At the same time, American history is littered with instances of the government overstepping its bounds in the name of furthering its own goals: Watergate, Iran-Contra, and more recently, we had to invade Iraq because of those weapons of mass destruction (which turned out to be no more real than my novel). Back during the Watergate hearings, bumperstickers popped up saying I love my country but I fear my government. Back then, they were plastered on cars belonging to liberals; today I suspect Tea Party supporters might claim them too.

Add to that the unsettling feeling generated by a 2010 Washington Post report that discovered:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

Sometimes I worry that hell hath no fury like a government agency in jeopardy of losing its funding. We’ve been relatively safe over the last dozen years since 9/11, underwear bombers aside. But what happens when politicians in the throes of sequester start looking for budgets to dismantle? What’s to stop an agency or agencies chartered with stopping terrorism from staging a high-prolife, low-fatality event just to convince us of the necessity of their existence? How would we know?

All I’m saying is, if the members of the Tsarnaev family who believe the brothers were framed are right, we may have more to fear than we think we do.

Middle Age Cranky’s Rules of The Road

There’s a great line in When Harry Met Sally when Billy Crystal skewers the idea of everyone thinking they have a great sense of humor. Everyone can’t have an above-average sense of humor, he argues – it’s mathematically impossible.

The same argument applies to driving. Everyone thinks they’re an above-average driver, but that’s mathematically impossible. Based on what I see on the roads the times I drive, it’s also just plain unbelievable.

Of course, I consider myself an above average-driver. When it comes to math and probabilities, I’m probably not as good. That hasn’t stopped me from calculating the following twelve rules of the road.

1. The speed of the car in front of you is directly proportional to the time you have left to make your appointment. Low speed = minimal time left; high speed = maximum time left. Corollary: the closer it is to the time of your appointment, the lower the likelihood you will find a parking space.

2. Your age is directly proportional to the likelihood of seeing the stupidest behavior you’ve ever witnessed on the road. That is, the older you are, the more likely you are see stunts you never thought you’d witness and never wanted to see.

3. The likelihood that lane markers are considered less as “boundaries” and more as “suggestions” increases exponentially the closer you get to any given downtown area.

4. The cost of the car in front of you is inversely proportional to the likelihood its driver will use its turn signals.

5. A driver driving too slowly in front of you on a city street will only realize they are doing so when they see a yellow light. They will then accelerate enough get themselves through the intersection, leaving you stuck at the red light.

6. Signs warning you of a road closure are only posted after your last opportunity to choose an alternate route.

7. The most reliable way to ensure that you only get green lights in the car is to pick up your mail as you leave your house.

8. The last person to notice that a stoplight has turned green is the first person in line.

9. The likelihood that drivers are completely oblivious to the fact that they’re impeding the flow of traffic increases proportionally as you move from the slow lane to the fast lane on the freeway.

10. Refraining from accelerating around a slow driver in the name of safety and politeness because you are about to leave the freeway doubles the chances that they will take the same exit.

11. The chances of your being rear-ended increase exponentially if you are carrying something expensive and/or fragile in the trunk.

12. When you leave a buffer of room between you and the car in front of you on the freeway, chances are 100 percent that someone will think you’re leaving that space for them to merge in front of you.

Finally, one last probability: your level of aggravation about driving is inversely proportional to the chances that Congress is going to increase funding of mass transit. Sigh.

 

The Tax Man Cometh and Supporteth Idiocy

It’s a big week for taxes here in California: property taxes are due the 10th and income taxes are due the 15th. For those of us who are self-employed, the latter means not only settling the bill on 2012 taxes, but making our first-quarter payment on our 2013 taxes. I hope whoever scheduled this triple-whammy dies a slow, painful death.

That said, I don’t mind paying taxes. Having an income to be taxed beats the alternative. Though I started out my adult life as a Republican, I have come to believe that those who have benefitted from being able to live and work and flourish financially in America should share some of those proceeds with those less fortunate. The former shouldn’t have to give all of it, and the latter shouldn’t get it forever, but there has to be a middle ground.

The middle ground is just where I find myself. There are people on my right who think government is the problem. There are people on my left who think government is the solution. As I wrote a couple of years ago, the answer is neither big government nor small government, but rather effective government.

And that’s what I fear is missing today. One of the great things about the profit motive under which capitalism functions: when a process doesn’t work, there’s motivation to change it. In government, when something doesn’t work, there may be energy to change it, but there is an equal or greater amount of opposing inertia to stop the effort.

Let me cite just two examples, one national and one local. The U.S. post office is in trouble. Electronic mail and online banking have almost made it an anachronism, like buggy whips at the dawn of horseless carriages or men’s undershirts at the debut of It Happened One Night. I’ve made my own suggestion for fixing the postal service: deliver first class mail daily, junk mail weekly, but the government was more tentative: it suggested cutting Saturday delivery to save $2 billion dollars. Great!

What does the General Accounting Office do in response? According to a March 2013 article in the New York Times, the GAO determined that the post office did not have the authority to make the change without Congressional approval, based on wording in the most recent budget appropriations bill. When one government agency (even an oversight agency) throws a monkeywrench into another agency’s attempts to save money, this is not effective government.

Closer to home, the state of California has an extensive community college system. In the less than 50 miles between San Jose and San Francisco, there are at least a half dozen junior colleges. They provide an excellent, low-cost education for those who are still searching for their passion and cannot afford tuition at the state’s two other higher-education institutions, Cal State University and the University of California. (Don’t ask me why we have three different educational systems; that’s for another column.)

The problem is of these 72 junior colleges, many of them exist in districts that govern only one or two colleges. That means, according to a March 2013 article in the San Francisco Chronicle written by California Watch reporters, “three [of the] districts had three chief business officers, five directors of campus facilities, three athletic directors and three public relations chiefs in 2011.”

If any government system called out for consolidation at the administrative level, this is one. But don’t hold your breath. The article continued, “Even before a merger could be approved, a litany of other financial, legal and political hurdles would stand in the way. Several groups must sign off on the deal, including the community college system’s Board of Governors, a committee of K-12 school officials in every affected county and the merging districts’ boards of trustees, which would be voting on whether to eliminate their own positions.”

I have never heard of public sector officials voting to eliminate their own jobs. Even when it becomes patently clear that the system must change, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the system has inserted safeguards to prevent that change. I’m reminded of the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey killing the astronauts to protect itself.

So as I prepare to write any number of checks this week to pay taxes for last year, this year, and the ground I live upon, I do so with a grisly mix of gratitude and grumpiness, proud of the good things I support and frustrated by the idiocy I witness.