Very Bad Robert Boyd

Kyle Fisher (Jon Favreau) is days away from his wedding and welcomes his bachelor party weekend as a chance to break free from the pressure from his Bridezilla fiancée Laura (Cameron Diaz). Things are as chaotic as expected in their hotel in Las Vegas — drink, drugs and a stripper.

However, trouble begins when Kyle's friend Michael (Jeremy Piven) accidentally kills a stripper (Kobe Tai) in the hotel bathroom. When a security guard finds her body, he threatens to call the police but is silenced when he is stabbed to death with a corkscrew by Robert Boyd (Christian Slater). Boyd, a real estate salesman and recent graduate of a self-help program, takes charge of the group and devises a plan to dispose of the bodies by burying them in the desert. The group grudgingly goes through with the plan, but soon guilt and nerves begin to destroy the group and unravel their lives. (Wikipedia)

The above scenario is complete fiction. I have never stabbed a security guard. Certainly not with a corkscrew (would that even work?).

(The one prominent "Robert Boyd" in fiction, and he turns out to be a psychotic murderer. And even worse, he's played by Christian Slater.)

Yet Another Robert Boyd Who Is Not Me

This Robert Boyd is a virtuoso flamenco guitarist--check out his superb website for some samples of his fantastic playing.

(I can play two chords on the guitar--but they're both really good chords!)

A Note on Ahead of the Curve

Ahead of the Curve by Philip Delves Broughton.

I read this book because I wanted to compare the Harvard MBA experience with my own. Broughton was the head of the Paris bureau for the Daily Telegraph when he decided to make a change in his life. Like me, he was older than his fellow students. He also was culturally from a different place than many of his fellow students. He tries to minimize this in the book, and indeed he befriends classmates from drastically different backgrounds from himself. But it was an issue for him, just as it was for me.

Harvard is famous for using the case study method, but I didn't realize how exclusively it was employed. No textbooks, just cases. We used cases, but we had textbooks and I used them and still use them as reference books. I can't imagine not being able to do this--that seems like a pretty drastic difference from the Rice MBA way. On the other hand, Rice uses formal teams more than Harvard did. Broughton deals with teams in some of his classes, but for me it was always important to get on a team right away in virtually every class. That's tricky if you are shy. In the first semester, we had no choice--we were randomly assigned a team. In the second semester, we were assigned teams for our big company projects based on our interests and strengths (it was a little less random). In the second year, we could pick our own teams in any given class. It was always important to get smart, committed people on your team--at least, that was my strategy, and apparently it was Broughton's as well in his "Dynamic Markets" class. (One of my favorite memories of B-school was when a woman in my international finance class shot across the room to ask me to be on her team because she wanted to be on the same team as someone smart! Little did she know... But we ended up on the same team in many classes subsequently, so I must have done OK.)

The book discusses his classes, and many of the professors must have been made uncomfortable by his assessments here. But what is more interesting is his simultaneously inside yet dispassionate look at the culture of getting a job. This is as big a part of the MBA experience at Harvard as it was at Rice, and as it presumably is everywhere. Broughton is married and has a baby, so he is unwilling to take the soul-killing banking jobs that so many of his classmates are primed for. No 100 hour weeks for him, thanks.

But at the same time, he finds it hard to compete. He didn't have the math background many of his classmates entered with, and had never done spreadsheets. This puts him behind for finance right from the start. In general, he finds getting a job hard. He decides not to work over the summer in an internship (the standard practice) when he can't get one in Boston. And although he interviews 10 times (!) for Google, they won't make a decision, and he finally asks them to no longer consider him. (Sounds insane, right? I had a classmate who interviewed 11 times with BlackRock before they decided to pass on him.) You would think that Broughton's obvious worldliness compared to his classmates would be a plus. But that's not how corporate HR departments look at MBAs. They want round pegs for round holes. I was lucky in that regard--my job listing didn't come through HR but through a department head, and he hired me because he liked my number crunching skills, my background (which was mostly irrelevant to the job--which was perhaps a plus), and my interview.

Ahead of the Curve was highly entertaining and probably should be read by anyone going for an MBA--at least, a traditional full-time MBA. I imagine the experience is quite different for those getting "executive MBAs."

Enough With the Punk Rock Oral Histories Already

Years ago, someone gave me a copy of Please Kill Me (1997), the oral history of punk/new wave in New York City compiled and edited by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. It's a great read despite McNeil's unaccountable dislike of the Talking Heads (he refers to David Byrne's "yuppie whine," as I recall). So anyway, I guess that book was successful because it spawned a version for L.A.'s scene called We Got the Neutron Bomb (2001) compiled by Brendan Mullen and Marc Spitz. It was fine and useful but perhaps not as good Please Kill Me. It was the first of a bunch of books put together by Mullen, who ran The Masque, an early punk venue in L.A. About a year later, he came out with Lexicon Devil, an oral history/biography of Darby Crash of the Germs, co-compiled with Adam Parfrey (the publisher) and Don Bolles, one of the Germ's drummers.



I just read Lexicon Devil, and to get myself in the mood, I watched The Decline of Western Civilization again. (I saw it originally when it came out in 1981.) It's very interesting to watch it now knowing a lot more about the featured bands and other personalities. When I first saw it, I was just shocked and a little scared. (Yeah, I was kind of a wuss.)

The book covers the filming of it. Crash was really spiraling down at that period. They filmed him early in the morning, so he is a bit incoherent. But hell, before I've had my coffee, I'm a bit incoherent. He is filmed with a bath-robed punkette called Michelle Baer, and the movie makes it look like she is his girlfriend or a groupie who slept over. Crash was gay, though, and Michelle was a beard for the movie! This guy who seemed so self-revealing and unashamed was in the closet.

The problem with some oral histories is that the compilers may get some good stuff, but have no organic way to fit it in with the rest of the stuff. So Lexicon Devil is full of these weird hanging chapters. I think that's one thing you lose when you don't have a writer--the ability to structure the material in a logical, unfolding way. In the end, there is just too much information about Darby Crash here. He wasn't that talented or interesting. His band-mate, Pat Smear, has what is to me a much more interesting story. But he didn't "live fast and die young," so Crash gets the book.


An oral history that really could have used a writer is Gimme Something Better (2009) by Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor. This is the oral history of the (wait for it) San Francisco/East Bay punk scene. New York and L.A. had these incandescent beginnings, and while punk continued in those places (especially L.A.), what followed was really different from the late 70s scene that helped spawn punk. In L.A., especially, there was real tension (both aesthetic and tribal) between the "Hollywood" punks and the O.C./Huntington Beach punks. It was the difference between the older punk rock and hardcore.

In San Francisco, you get the feeling that the older stuff never really took off the way it did in New York and L.A. (there is no San Francisco equivalent to the Ramones or X). Hardcore was really the language of San Francisco punk. The ethos was defined by Maximum Rocknroll. It was a bizarrely close-minded political and aesthetic point of view, but the magazine helped nurture a scene that lasted for decades in the face of almost total obscurity. Unfortunately, this purity of approach leaks into the structure of this massive book. The justification for this approach is expressed in the introduction by Jesse Michaels (Operation Ivy):

The oral history format has the great advantage of eliminating The Rock Writer. The Rock Writer writing about punk usually has one aim: to arrogate intellectual ownership of something he or she knows absolutely nothing about. That bullet is dodged here.

The problem is that in the course of this nearly 500-page book, hundreds of names (and noms de rock) are thrown at the reader with little help. A new name will appear and you have to flip to the back of the book to figure who it is. That person will be speaking of someone else, and you can only hope that the context will make it clear who that other person is and what his or her significance is. The chapters are arranged around particular bands or locations or events, but the chapter titles don't tell you this, and you are likewise not given any information like what the timeframe was.

And let's face it--compiling an oral history is no less an authorial intrusion than writing it out in prose. As any student of film 101 knows, if you are given unedited news footage, you can tell any story you want with it. The footage would still be "real"--but the process of selecting and ordering the cuts allows you to spin the story the way you want. The same is obviously true of oral histories. Boulware and Silke's approach is an aesthetic decision, not an expression of absolute truth. They told the story they wanted to tell, and using only the words of their interviewees, were able to pass it off as more "authentic" than a non-fiction prose book would be.

Therefore, I make this plea--no more punk oral histories!

Who Should Have a Historical Marker in Houston?

OK, so Lightnin' Hopkins is getting his own historical marker up on Dowling later this year. That's good--well-deserved. Lightnin' makes me proud to be a Houstonian. As Slampo says, he deserves even bigger official kudos. But Slampo follows up with the fact that historical markers tend toward the highly respectable and avoid the disreputable demimonde that are undeniably part of our history. These markers also tend to whitewash their subjects (but it's hard to blame them for that, usually). I'd go even further and say that historical markers tend to be seriously boring objects about mostly pretty boring subjects. On one hand, I don't have a problem with the boring bits of history--after all, lots of important parts of history are basically pretty boring.

But I'd like to see more exciting people, places, and events from Houston's history on historical markers.

So I throw it out to you--what persons, places, or events from Houston history should be "honored" (or at least recorded) on a historical marker? You can see a list of already existing markers here.

New Improved Supreme Court Justice Robes

Created by John Coby over at Bay Area Houston.

Picture of the Day

This is the bottom part of the Bullwinkle oil production platform. To give you a notion of the scale, those things in the foreground are cars. It was the deepest "fixed leg" platform in the world, located in the Gulf of Mexico and owned by Shell. (There are deeper production platforms and ships, but they unlike Bullwinkle, they aren't buildings coming up from the bottom of the ocean. They may be fixed to the bottom with cables or be free-floating and held in place with stabilizing motors.)

According to the Chronicle's energy blog, the current owner of Bullwinkle, Superior Energy Services, is planning to decommission Bullwinkle.

Note on Dead Again

 
Dead Again by Masha Gessen. 
I got this book as part of a relatively new interest in the Russian intelligentsia. I had always been a little interested in non-conformist art and read the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago (as well as several other Solzhenitzsyn books) in high school. But it was picking up The Whisperers and Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes that really got me interested. The tragic history of the great artists and poets who were suppressed by Stalin is perversely attractive. I will readily admit that an interest in oppressed artists is fundamentally adolescent. And indeed, for me it is also interesting to learn about the accommodations that artists made. You can see the same journey in Orlando Figes--Natasha's Dance, when it deals with the artists under communism, deals only with the tragic, oppressed artists. But in The Whisperers, Figes deals at length with the complicated case of Konstantin Simonov, an insider, an official artist, but a liberal who tried to push things in a freer direction.

Zhivago's Children was just as fascinating. The Thaw and subsequent "re-freezing" that lead to the human rights movement in Russia is a fascinating period. As large and dense as Zhivago's Children is, it seems like the surface is only scratched there. But what happened during Perestroika and after the fall of the Soviet Union to all these artists, poets, scientists, activists, etc? Masha Gessen's Dead Again provides a sketch.

Her book was published in 1997, so there hadn't been much time for the post Soviet Union intelligentsia to shake out. She is a breezy writer who comes out of a journalistic background, so she doesn't really feel the need to develop a thesis like Vladislav Zubok, an academic historian, did in Zhivago's Children. Indeed, both Figes and Zubok are historians, writing about the past. Geesen is a journalist writing about contemporary events. The difference in style and substance is captured by the difference between those two professions.

The main thing Geesen writes about is how the intelligentsia, who were a united front during the late Soviet period, collapsed into squabbling factions--which they had been prior to communism. You had one one hand the Western liberalizers, the Sakharovs and Bonners, and on the other hand, the nationalist/orthodox thinkers like Solzhenitsyn and Igor Shafarevich. This difference existed in Czarist times--the Slavophiles versus the Westernizers. This time around, the ultranationists anti-semitic right had a certain advantage--namely, the last time the Westernizers won a decisive victory, they brought with them the Western philosophies of socialism and dialectical materialism. Westernizing had been a tragedy for Russia. On the other hand, capitalism and democracy obviously worked out petty well in the West, so why not try it in Russia?

Gessen deals also with the dissident intelligentsia who were suddenly thrust into politics--and almost as quickly spit out. She addresses nascent Russian feminist thought. She deals with the younger generation of Russian intellectuals, making a labored analogy with the characters in the Douglas Copeland book, Generation X. And she talks about the old human rights campaigners going into Chechnya--a war that had just ended (but would soon restart).

Since then, it seems (to a casual outside observer) that things have gotten worse for the intelligentsia. One thinks of the brutal murders of Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova (and of many others) and the impunity with which these crimes are committed. At the same time, one thinks of young geniuses who put their brains to work engaging in criminal computer hacking schemes.

But I know that when I read these accounts, I am getting a narrow and highly biased account of the intelligentsia. I'd be interested in a more complete picture.

Note on Duchess of Palms

 
Duchess of Palms by Nadine Eckhardt
Nadine Eckhardt was at the center of Texas literary history and Texas (and U.S.) political history. Her life really encompasses the changes in American society from the 50s through the 70s. She married Billy Lee Brammer, the author of The Gay Place (a great novel about Austin and Lyndon Johnson), in the early 50s and was part of the liberal Austin political scene of the 50s that informs so much of The Gay Place. She worked in Johnson's office with Brammer for several years when Johnson was Senate leader. After divorcing the chronically irresponsible Brammer, she met and married a state legislator, Bob Eckhardt, who later became a Congressman from Houston in 1966 (he served until he was defeated in 1980). Eckhardt was author of the Open Beaches act (one of the most liberal pieces of legislation in Texas ever--it essentially made a huge chunk of valuable Texas land public property forever--although there have been recent attempts to undermine it) and was a sponsor of the War Powers Act in Congress. Nadine Eckhardt wasn't a retiring wife--she was actively involved in her husbands' careers. She was also witness to some important events.

Unfortunately, she is not a good writer. This memoir is useful for filling in bits of history, but whenever you want Eckhardt to dive in and give you details, she moves onto the next thing. For example, for readers of The Gay Place, what would be interesting would be a non-fiction description of the scene in Austin among young liberal political types in the 50s. What was a typical evening like? Who was sleeping with whom? What happened when Representatives from bumfuck Texas came to Austin for the legislative term--and went wild? At first, I thought Eckhardt wasn't describing this scene because it was, perhaps, embarrassing. But she readily admits to affairs, flings, one-night stands, and various infidelities. She clearly isn't embarrassed by them. So why not describe the milieu? It was an interesting time, sort of a pre-history of the counter culture, a precursor to what Austin would later become. But you get the barest outline of it here.

Another thing she does as a writer is to suck the suspense out of a story. When she meets Bob Eckhardt, she talks about being so in love that she became blind to some of the faults he had--faults that would later lead her to divorce him. Urgh. I understand she didn't write a novel here, but by telling the reader that she would be divorcing Eckhardt several years later just as she is describing falling in love with him, she sucks the interest out of the arc of their relationship.

So a frustrating read. Still, you get an excellent feel for Lyndon Johnson and life in his office. You get a good picture of life in Washington, D.C., during 1968 when cities burned after the assassination of Martin Luther King and when antiwar activists were mainstreaming the counterculture. (Eckhardt starts smoking pot and sleeping with a Georgetown student around then.) Her encounters with black radical Ray Robinson in Resurrection City are recounted in some detail and are really interesting.

Duchess of Palms is a very short book, and a quick read. My main disappointment is a nagging feeling of what it could have been, which is probably unfair. Nadine Eckhardt is not a novelist or even a professional writer--she is someone who has lived an unusually eventful and interesting life, and provided us with a sketch of that life.