Fellow Pilgrims,
My apologies for radio silence. I know how hard it is to wait. Perhaps the signal is not intermittent, but has simply stopped? Writer’s block, or worse? Just kidding. I hope this has been an easy time for you, but for my part, this winter into spring has been too much of a muchness, for reasons good, bad, and largely beyond my control. Keeping this newsletter strictly professional, which of course life is not, I’ve been working on planes, working in New York City and other places too, teaching intensely, meeting bureaucratic requirements, speaking on this, writing on that, trying to articulate what seems to be the meaning of . . . I’m working beyond my capacity, which tends to produce a sense of dread.
“Working” is the tell, already disingenuous in the way of my Calvinist ancestors. We know all about dread. The gas is on, the vehicle unfixed, the meeting/student spaced, “Intermittent Signal” did not go out, the podcast wasn’t recorded, I’ve misplaced my ticket (or phone or passport) and we are about to board. And those are the unimportant things.
Not that nothing got done, far from it. (Weber’s point.) Thinking about Cyber-Social Dynamics: Intentions, Meanings, Judgments (podcast) was the inaugural talk/workshop for the new Center for Cyber-Social Dynamics at the University of Kansas’s Institute for Information Sciences. I am very excited about this new center, run by a philosopher with the connivance of a computer scientist, both friends. Thinking about technology is really hard to do well, and my hopes are high.
Speaking of operating beyond capacity: airlines. A few days ago, I’m flying home, leisurely “free” brunch in the new lounge, excellent food. I work at a big raw grained table, with good light, and a view of the tarmac. When time, I mosey to the gate, and find the flight oversubscribed. They offer $500 to fly a few hours later. I text home. We have a houseguest coming the next day, so we have hospitable tasks, and the later flight will mean we don’t get to bed until late, but she says sure, take it. Baby needs shoes. Meanwhile, the computer moves the bid up to $600. I go back to the lounge, where I am gently chided for arriving more than 3 hours early. Pleasant dinner, glass wine, more work, my usual place. I head to my second, later flight. Pandemonium at the gate. Seriously overbooked, but not everybody has checked in. Who will show? $1000, the gate attendant says, but you have to stay overnight. Nobody moves. The last stragglers show. The price goes up. At $1400 I crack. Thank you, she says to both me and Jesus. I ask what happens if nobody takes the money? We have to remove somebody. Sounds ugly, I say. We try to avoid it, she says. Thank you so much . . .
I was willing to find lodging, but the airline buys me a hotel room plus transit to and from, not great transit and not a great room, clean though. I’m in Queens, directly across the river from the Empire State building, just east of my usual hotel.
So close and yet so far. I walk around, attempting to capture the pretty lights and the pathos, worried about getting mugged, gentrification notwithstanding. A few hours sleep, confusion but no traffic, and I’m back in the lounge. Another excellent free breakfast, watching the sun rise, more work. My houseguest arrives today. We load. My first class ticket was downgraded to comfort, never used, and now on my third plane I’m in an exit row in main. We sit. And sit. “We are too heavy. I need five passengers. $1000.” Quick text. I take it. I make my fourth flight, now in the back of the plane. The shame of it all! Airline staff begins asking me about the total, and comparing me to Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the man who lived in Charles De Gaulle for almost 20 years. I’m not worthy. I get home, $3,000 dollars richer, and for a few hours, caught up. Dread abates. I have time to help get the guest quarters shipshape, shower and change, and head back to the airport to meet an old friend, who manages to reassure me that the international legal order is not in fact collapsing. Really. One must be grateful.
Speaking of being paid for not being there: over the last few years, Amy and I have written several law review articles on the culture of equity markets, especially in the tech/Silicon Valley context, and what that might mean for society writ large, under the heading “social capitalism.” The underlying idea is that once most people do not work, or do not work enough to support themselves, we can no longer think about human welfare vis-à-vis a labor theory of value, and so both “left” and “right” become incoherent. And we will pay ever more people for not working. Very roughly speaking, we seem to be reversing the classic movement from status to contract, and so are becoming neo-feudal. (“Thank you for your status,” as they say without irony in air world.) Post-modern with a vengeance. I’m not sure it is a bad thing, but it is a big thing. The latest installment, almost certainly the last formatted as a law review article, is here:
Progressive Corporate Governance Under Social Capitalism: Do the Right Thing or Share the Wealth? (SSRN); Progressive Corporate Governance Under Social Capitalism, Va. L & Bus. Rev.
Earlier pieces include:
Snapchat's Gift: Equity Culture in High Tech Firms; Matt Levine Commentary
Unicorns, Guardians, and the Concentration of the US Equity Markets
There is much, too much, more, on the forms of war and the crisis of representation in political economy, and things I need to write. Some talks will be cleaned up and used to make me appear productive during the summer, when I hope to be swinging a hammer.
One must struggle to keep perspective. Drink more water, literally and figuratively. NYC has been a blessing, but madness, too. Crazy raving in the streets, not some beat poets, just raving, and the social workers have all left for better jobs. The omnipresent reek of stale marijuana smoke, the swarms of electric bikes delivering dinner, as if fireflies mutated into wasps, all this seems new. I hope to write a long essay about what has changed since Covid, indeed I think the idea of the City is changing. And by the City I mean a sort of idealized Manhattan. I have been meeting folks at the beautifully redone Hotel Chelsea, which could never foster the artists it once did, not least because it has been so well redone, and so we are left with a nostalgic dream, which too is interesting. Now, however, I do not have the time and am not ready to write that essay – I’m even trying to get a friend to write a book about his life in fin de siècle NYC, for me to edit and muse upon – but that’s a parallel story.
For now: on a sharply blue winter day and on the advice of a banker, I walked from lunch in Hell’s Kitchen, W 52nd and 10th Avenue (they talk like that), south on 10th to Hudson Yards, where I took some pictures and got on the High Line. As you may know, the High Line is an urban trail built on the tracks of an old elevated freight line that used to snake through the West Side, sort of like the elevated light rails seen in the outer boroughs and in Chicago. I walked south on the High Line all the way to the end, at the new Whitney Museum, with its fine views out over the Hudson, down to the Statute of Liberty, and over the Village to downtown, and uptown, to Hudson Yards and the increasingly dense forest of skyscrapers and newer supertalls in midtown. I went to the Whitney to see “Edward Hopper’s New York.”
As it happens, perhaps the first exhibit I ever saw, seriously experienced, was of Edward Hopper, in Dusseldorf of all places, unless it was Dortmund. The friend of the family with whom I was staying was fascinated by America, and by Hopper in particular. That was over 40 years ago; I hope he reads this.
I’ve seen a lot of Hopper since, including the painting everybody knows, Nighthawks, at the Art Institute of Chicago. For reasons unclear to me, this painting was redone in 1987 by Gottfried Heinwein with Hollywood figures from the fifties [glamorous] as Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Heinwein’s reworked image makes a great poster, and my pizza joint, which has a “Glory Days” theme, has one such poster. Probably for the good of the Whitney’s exhibit, at least people pondering the paintings, “Nighthawks” did not leave Chicago.
Hopper lived for many decades in the Village, in the same walk up apartment with the same woman, his muse/model/wife Jo. No children, and given that Hopper is such a great painter of loneliness, maybe that matters. For reasons also unclear to me, I long associated Hopper with California, even if he was not of California. Like David Hockney but of course completely different, maybe with a Joan Didion sensibility. Perhaps it was some nude of Jo standing in morning light. Be that as it may, as the Whitney convincingly demonstrates, Hopper is deeply rooted in, expressive of, New York.
And yet Hopper’s New York is strange, and not just because he worked almost and more than a century ago, when the built environment was different. For one thing, apart from variations on Jo and the odd staring businessman, there are almost no people. Writing this, I realize that my own photographs of the City tend to focus on things, buildings, perspectives, traces of people rather than people themselves. Still, I think Hopper is concerned with absence rather than formality. For another thing, painting as the Empire State Building (and Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building) are going up, Hopper seems entirely uninterested in the vertical. In New York! And there is a kind of through the window voyeurism, lives glimpsed, often from elevated trains before they were driven underground or became urban trails. There is so much more, in the handling of light, in the handling of figures who seem so stiff – the overall effect is of loneliness. I started to say “unutterable” loneliness, but Hopper has in fact uttered it, painted it, and that is an enormous achievement, if perhaps a sad one.
I came away from the Whitney and walked way uptown, to the upper East Side, and had a most enjoyable dinner with an alum, a very good lawyer. We ate and drank well, and talked about students, and children, and law, and business, and the mostly forgivable foibles of people we knew or knew of – it was not lonely. I left dinner into a slushy snowstorm, walked a couple of miles back to Chelsea, my shoes wet, for a warming nightcap from a bartender with whom I discuss dogs.
I am not sure what to do with Hopper’s anatomy of loneliness, for all of its undeniable power. Sympathy, certainly, and I think admiration for the courage it takes to carry on. But let me finish today’s missive otherwise. Recently I stay just to the west of NoMad, on the amorphous border between Chelsea and what is now called the Fashion District, but which used to be the less glamorous garment district. It isn’t all gone – there are still furriers, and button shops, and stores that sell mannequins. The theater district has become impractically touristic and unmanageably expensive, to say nothing of loud (I once lived on the northern edge). Much production, especially TV, has moved south, to Chelsea. More to my point, much of the theater crowd, and the people trying to break into theater, live or at least work in Chelsea. Young people from all over form what my wife calls a community of hope. They work in hotels and bars, often, or at least that is where I meet them. And they sing, at “Karaoke” nights, where the talent ranges from the star of your high school to professionals practicing in front of friends. For the price of a few drinks, you can hear drop dead beautiful singing from a few feet away. Most of these people will never “make it,” in the sense of earn their living with their voices, singing songs from that bizarre, wonderful genre, the American musical, much less covering the power voices of the last few generations of pop music. And yet these aspirants make it every day, by doing something they love, beautifully, with friends.
One more thing about singing, as reminder that there is more to life than loneliness, or dread, or even serious work. As I finally finish this Signal, I am leaving Chicago. Some Episcopal churches, during Covid when singing was forbidden, adopted sign language to express hymns they could not voice. Now the hymns are sung again, but the sign language remains, which gives high church a welcome touch of the ecstatic. Our first grandchild was christened, on Easter Sunday, no less. Renewals.
Enjoy the spring, and safe travels, pilgrims.
-- David A. Westbrook