Democrats vs. Republicans

I see so many threads on Facebook where Republicans blame Obama for the deficit, and Democrats blame the previous administration for inheriting problems they didn't create. The republicans have always claimed they were for smaller government, and yet all they have done is increase it when W was in office. And the Democrats are continuing to do the same. It should not be about Democrats versus Repulicans.

Ultimately, who should be responsible for our fiscal well-being? Should it be my job to take responsibility for my own welfare and that of my family, or should it be the job of my government?

I say, each of us should be responsible for our own well-being and that it should NOT be the government's job. Their job should be protecting our right to three things only: life, liberty, and property. Period! This means that whenever they levy a tax, they are violating two of those rights, because we don't really have much of a choice (violating liberty) in paying those taxes (violating our right to property) right? The more bloated the government gets, the more they take away our property and disburse it as they feel is good. This is never what our country was founded for! Quite the opposite, in fact. I wish people would begin to realize this and realize that the national dialogue shouldn't be about Democrats vs. Republicans, but rather something altogether more profound.

Reflections of 9/11

Nine years ago I got a phone call at 9:10am telling me to go up on my roof in Jersey City. There, less than 5 miles away I saw my two favorite buildings dying. THe thing that struck me about that day was how great the weather was in NY. The sky was blue, the sun was shining brightly, and the temp was about 70. I also remember wondering how much this event would affect my life. Profoundly, I realize now.

I remember vividly the papers people posted all over the city in the coming days, asking for information about their father/brother/spouse/girlfriend who was last seen in Tower 2 or 1 on the 89th floor or the 101st floor. As the days progressed, these notices became more and more painful to look at.

I remember working a piano bar up town on Sept 12, and everyone wanting to sing happy broadway songs at the top of their lungs. I gave them what they wanted and felt like a dirty cheap whore. I hated my job that day.

I remember working a piano bar in the village, much closer to ground zero, on Sun Sept 15th, and everyone was desperately clinging to each other as we tearfully sang God Bless America, and the National Anthem and the song Anthem from Chess, and Billy Joel's Miami 2018. I felt the healing begin that day, and such gratitude that I was allowed to channel that healing through my music and my chosen career.

Subway stories

I was riding the 6 train downtown yesterday. It was crowded but I got a seat. There was a man standing in front of me reading the script for "Death of a Salesman". He was about 50, needed a shave, was perhaps 40lbs overweight, and unkempt in a defeated sort of way. As the train neared the 33rd St. station, the girl next to me got up and this guy went to sit down. The train lurched to a halt and unceremoniously deposited him into the seat. Once he uncrumpled himself, I looked over, and said to him, "You'll make the perfect Willie Lowman." We both laughed all the way to 14th St.

Crazyness in the Markets

Yesterday, I decided to short the S&P500, which is essentially a direct bet that if the broad US markets go down, this trade will profit. Today, everything seems to be falling apart with everyone worrying over possible contagion from the Greek bond markets (Greece is going bankrupt and their bonds are becoming worthless). Also, when I got off my plane in St. Louis today and turned back on my iPhone, all my stock charts had a strange and very deep "V" in the middle of the afternoon. WTF? Apparently all the major markets lost 8% of their value in minutes and then immediately gained it all back. It makes no sense. Something's very rotten. Anyway, the markets closed down close to 3% for the day. I suspect until all of this stuff with the European capital markets figures itself out, investors are in for a rocky several months. I'm tempted to increase my bet against the market tomorrow.

3am swim

Last Tuesday night I found myself doing a NYC bar crawl until 4am with my best friend Link. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but it just seemed to unveil itself without any planning or intention. 3 bars and several vodka’s down the line we were sitting at the bar when Link decides to try and balance his iPhone on the rim of his martini glass. (Of course, for those of you that have iPhones, you know that this would be akin to seeing if your pacemaker works in a strong electromagnetic field just for the fuck of it. And of those of you that don’t have iPhones and are most likely jealous of those of us that do, yes, even you probably can’t fathom such heresy either.) As he begins to remove his hand from the completely unbalanced phone on the rim of the glass, I ask him what the hell he thinks he’s doing as, predictably, the phone takes a 3am swim in an espresso martini. The bartender, a close friend to both of us, immediately pulls the phone from back from it’s soggy grave, where upon the phone displays the following message:

This accessory is not made to work with this version of the iPhone.

Amazingly, after drying off the phone as best we could, and letting rest overnight, it still works with no glitches, although there is a subtle coffee smell.

UPDATE: 9 days later and the phone is fine.

booking the summer

I have been talking to two venues for a few months now, either of which would have made for an interesting summer. One was in a coastal resort town in Mexico, which would have been great fun, and the other was much closer to home in a resort on the jersey shore. Both jobs would have taken up most of the summer, and so I stopped booking other dueling gigs to see what would happen with these two. It turns out that both of them fell through, and I was way behind on booking my summer schedule as a result.

So, one morning as I was having my customary cup of French roast, sitting in front of my computer in my underwear, I sent out 5 emails to clubs and agents I work with, explaining that I was seeking to book May, June and July. By 10pm, I had confirmed 8 weekends of work in 5 different clubs.

This is light years away from where I was only 1 year ago when I would struggle with each booking, as I was only beginning to establish my reputation as a dueler. This day, being able to secure so much work with so little effort, is an arrival of sorts. I’ve been working so hard over the past 3 years at this, that it’s nice to get such a material recognition of my accomplishments.

Dueling at the Waldorf Astoria??!!

In October I was contacted by a large restaurant chain to put on a dueling show at their annual corporate conference that they were holding in NYC this year. It was to show appreciation to all of their managing partners, and there would be over 500 of them at this 3 day conference. We were scheduled the second night as one of three “nightlife opportunities” available to the conference particpants. (Aside from us there was also a “dance club” and a Swing Band.) It was a big deal and they were the kind of client that we all dream about. They pay great money, and you can almost make your entire month on one job like this. When I was told that the conference was being held in the Waldorf Astoria in NYC, I almost shit myself. A dueling piano show at the Waldorf??!! There couldn’t be a more inappropriate location for dueling pianos that the stuffy and venerated grand old dame that is the Waldorf. Imagine doing the Gang Bang song, or Bang Bang Lulu next to Cole Porter’s original piano (which is grandly displayed in the lobby)!! And yet there we were!

I subcontracted out two guys from out of state: Jason, a veteran that was driving up from Baltimore, and a very new player, Brian, who had access to all of the equipment and piano shells I needed to put this gig together.

The day before the gig I met with the client’s production manager who walked me through the hotel and showed me how to get to where we would be storing our equipment during the day and where we would then be performing at night. It was quite a trip to navigate from the service entrance to the place where we were to store our equipment, involving winding passageways, two elevator trips, one to the 3^rd floor, then carting everything through a large kitchen, only to take another elevator back to the lobby, and then another winding and narrow hallway that led us through yet another kitchen, and finally to the storage room.

Brian arrived in the city with his Toyota 4-runner packed to the gills with amps, stands, cables, keyboards and of course the two baby grand wooden piano shells in which the keyboards would hide, completing the illusion of dueling “pianos”. I met him out on the street as he was driving by and somehow managed to squeeze myself in his front seat between the gear shift and a casio keyboard. I directed him to the hotel, where we began the laborious process of unloading everything and carting it through the byzantine back passages of the Waldorf. It took us well over an hour but finally we finished and then went to my favorite Vietnamese place for lunch.

Brian and I spent the afternoon walking around midtown, where I showed him Rockefeller Center, St. Pauls, Bryant Park, Grand Central Terminal, and the shops on 5^th Avenue. Finally we retired back to my apartment and waited for our partner Jason to arrive. He arrived at 7:30, and at 8:10, the exact time I had planned for us all to walk over to the Waldorf, I get a call saying the gig has been moved up a half hour! So we rush over to the hotel, and as we are getting close Brian remembers that he may have left 2 pieces of the piano shell outside the elevator in one of the hotel’s kitchens. He goes flying off to try and find these while Jason and I move all the equipment out into the lobby where we set up for our show. 15 minutes later Brian calls me on my cell saying that the pieces are no where to be found. I tell him to get down and set up the sound and Jason and I will scour the hotel to see if we can locate them. These pieces were integral to the set up of the piano shells and had three basic functions: 1. To support the electric keyboard that sits in the wooden shell, 2. A place to install two of the three legs of the wooden shell, and 3. A ridge that would block anything that might be spilled on top of the shell from reaching the keyboard.

After walking through all the passages that we had had to move the equipment through earlier, I set Jason about the task of coming up with an alternative way to set up the piano shells so that we could still do the gig. I then contacted security, and tried to track down the missing parts. After 25 minutes of being escorted to the carpentry shop, the paint shop, every dumpster in the place, and all the many hallways they might have been put, we finally spoke with the kitchen manager who informed me that she had them thrown out as they were cluttering up her kitchen all day and no one knew what they were. She took me to the main trash compactor where she said they would have been thrown, but of course by this time there was no retrieving them.

I returned to my partners in the lobby, where with the assistance of the slick but very helpful hotel manager, they had enlisted the house carpenter to drill new holes to attatch the legs to the piano shell, and had stacked up milk crates to rest the keyboard on. A black table cloth was draped over the milk crates to hide them from view. The piano shells, now with all three legs were strategically placed in behind the keyboards, so that if you didn’t look too closely, and from exactly the right angle, you might think that we were playing baby grand pianos. Of course the illusion was destroyed the moment you walked towards either side of center, but at least we were able to go on with the gig.

Finally it’s time to start and Jason and I begin playing as the lobby fills up with conference participants. I found out later that Brian went into the bathroom and vomited, because he was so upset at having lost those parts. I on the other hand was so happy to just be playing and doing our show, having worried that we might not ever get it off the ground! About 2 hours into the show, a woman comes up to the piano that I’m playing and trips and spills an entire glass of white wine INTO the keyboard. Both my partners immediately come to my aid, and try and wipe off the keyboard while I continue spewing out the words to the Sir Mixalot hiphop song, Big Butts, while unwrapping my microphone from it’s stand and moving my act to the dry keyboard, never missing a lyric. Shortly thereafter, we take a break, where my partners inform me that the soaked keyboard is completely unplayable, as it would launch into demo mode, playing through it’s repertoire of demonstration songs, without any warning whatsoever! (I was wondering why my partner was playing Clair De Lune during my Great Balls of Fire solo!!)

We all agree that Jason, who is the most experienced of the lot of us, would play the working piano, and I would, with great fanfare and grand gesticulations, pretend to play the broken piano. When it was my turn to do a song (every 2^nd song), I would just tell Jason the song and key and hope that he knew it. It was pretty funny pretending to play in front of 100 or more people who never had a clue that my keyboard was completely silent. At one point Jason yells at me, “Get off the bass!!”, a common complaint among duelers when your partner hijacks the bassline of the song you are playing. This was funny since I wasn’t playing anything, of course!

Finally the show is over, the client happily hands over the check, none the wiser, and I make an executive decision to march all the equipment right out the front door onto Park Avenue rather than go back through the employee area and kitchens and elevators. As Brian tries to load up his 4-Runner at 3am, he can’t get everything to fit, because the lost pieces were integral to supporting some of the load in order for everything to fit just so. Jason and I are standing on the sidewalk, trying to be helpful, but not really able to be, waiting for Brian to figure out this puzzle. Finally, it’s all in, and Brian and I go back to my apartment, while Jason begins his long drive back to Baltimore, all of us a bit worse for the wear.

Be very concerned. This is a big deal:

New York Times article today:

Credit Agency Warns U.S. and Others of Risk to Top Rating

...The ratings of the Aaa governments — which also include Britain, France, Spain and the Nordic countries — are currently “stable,” Moody’s Investors Service wrote in the report. But, it added, “their ‘distance-to-downgrade’ has in all cases substantially diminished.”

Growth alone will not resolve an increasingly complicated debt equation,” Moody’s said. “Preserving debt affordability” — the ratio of interest payments to government revenues — “at levels consistent with Aaa ratings will invariably require fiscal adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion....

This is a big deal people. If the US Dollar looses it's status as a reserve currency, there could be economic chaos, out of which a new economic world order would arise. Big scary statement, I know. And those of you that know me personally, know that I'm not prone to hysteria, but rather that I think with a rational, well-ordered mind.

This is the scenario: The first step is increasing our sovereign debt to dangerous levels. We've already done that, thanks to our leadership for the past 25 years, Republican and Democrat alike. The second step is for the credit agencies to downgrade our bonds. That's what this article is portending. The third step is a rush to the exits as people try to get out of the US dollar, and Treasury Bills. That's when the shit begins to hit the fan.

A great change is beginning and at the end, the US will not be the premier economic power that has been for the past 70 years or so. The only question now, is how long is this process going to take, and how orderly or disorderly will it be.

A letter to family and friends

I've been giving this a lot of attention and though in the past 2 years. I've been doing a ton of reading in the past couple of years trying to understand what has happened with the economy, why, and where we are headed. I read entire books, financial blogs, economic blogs and of course the daily financial news (the least informative of the four). I think my opinion is based on some solid information and analysis.

As a country we are in a debt crisis, and what now seems to be the beginnings of a recovery is merely the effects of stimulus actions by the government and the fed, and this recovery is untenable because there aren't really jobs being created, and our economy isn't really creating more products and services. So, I don't see the stock market moving much higher in the next several years based on fundamentals. Here's the problem: As a nation we have racked up so much debt, much of it prior to the stimulus began in Sept '08, and our ability to pay off that debt (through increased tax base due to increased Gross Domestic Product (GDP)) isn't improving, and yet we keep piling up more debt and doing it faster than ever before. The US is like the family that keeps refinancing their house and taking all the equity out, and then one day they wake up, and don't have the money to pay the mortgages and the bank takes the house back. The difference is that the US Government can always print cash to pay their monthly debt service, but printing money always leads to inflation.

By keeping the interest rates so low, and adding money into the money supply, without a real recovery based on fundamentals to increase Government revenue, we are setting the stage for inflation. Because our National debt is so very high, and getting higher faster than ever before, we have already set the stage for hyper-inflation. There is solid research that states that throughout recorded history, when sovereign debt gets to a certain point, serious inflation is always the result. We are past that point. The Government has been printing money (by selling government bonds) like it's the last night of the world to fund what it can't pay for in actual tax revenue, and our Government has been living beyond it's means for decades.

But there's more. As inflation takes hold, it becomes more and more expensive for our government to restructure it's debt. Today they issue bonds (T-bills) that they have to pay back in 2 years at 0.82% interest. In 2 years they will try get that money to pay this debt by selling more 2-year T-bills, but by then maybe they will have to offer 8% for anyone to want to buy them. And in 2 years from then, maybe 15% or 20%. At some point the market will just stop buying them, and that's the day everyone realizes that the emperor has no clothes.

What does this mean to you, the investor? It means that when the shit hits the fan, your cash will loose much of it's value. With hyper-inflation, if that occurs, your cash will essentially loose ALL it's value (think Wiemar Republic in the 1930's or Zimbabwe in the past 10 years). Your stocks will perform better than cash only in the sense that the stock prices are driven up by inflation, but because inflation is so bad for the economy, the companies won't really be doing well, and thus the share prices after adjusting to inflation will really be loosing money too. Any bonds that you hold will loose value as the interest rates increase (interest rates increase with inflation), so they are not safe. Real Estate value will raise as inflation takes hold, so that's good for homeowners, but will there be any buyers in a currency crisis?

Can a currency crises of this magnitude really happen to the United States of America, where the currency essentially becomes valueless?? Yes, I believe it can. Will it? I don't know. What I do know is that we have gone well past the point of fiscal responsibility with our National balance sheet and that if the US Government was a publicly traded company, it would be a terrible investment.

Here's what I really hope you consider, and not as an investment, but as insurance against a serious devaluation of the US Dollar, and/or high inflation. Buy gold and silver and put it in a safe and forget about it. Really...forget about it. This is not a short-term investment. Precious metals are notoriously volatile in the short run. No, this is an insurance policy against the devaluation of our currency, and in my opinion, our currency will continue to loose value over the next 1-10 years. This is your kids college education in 10 years. Even if doomsday doesn't occur, there is no way that given our ever increasing Deficit and our huge debt load, that a dollar in 2 years or in 10 years will buy anywhere near what a dollar buys today. But hopefully an ounce of gold will. A note of caution: buy the actual physical bullion and put it away. Don't buy futures or ETF's. There are reputable companies that will sell you physical bullion delivered to your door for about $25 or $30/ounce over spot price.

Also, be very careful about how much you put into stocks and bonds. I'm slowly decreasing my exposure in the stock market. Also, since I don't believe in the long-term viability of the US Currency (or US Government Bonds), I'm investigating other currencies to keep my cash in. (The Euro isn't one of them...they are in bad shape too.)

I don't expect you to take what I say as Gospel, and drink the Koolaid, as it were...but I do hope that you take some steps to protect yourself should this come to pass. What happened in the past couple of years has been awful, but I'm afraid there's much more to come.

Working in the deep south

There was some drama this weekend at a gig I did in the deep South, as one of the other fly-in piano players was asked not to perform on Saturday night because his vocals are just too weak, and he is very difficult to understand. It sucked for him, for sure. He's been doing dueling pianos for over 10 years, and the past 3 years he's had to have several vocal surgeries, and his voice is a shadow of what it must have been before. Anyway, he was a total professional about it, and my remaining partner and I did the entire gig, with a bit of help from a local trainee who was understandably nervous, but made up for it with enthusiasm and got the job done. Meanwhile, me and my remaining partner put on an amazing show doing our 2-way, which was immensely satisfying to me. It was a packed house, over the fire code limit for sure. They were the type of audience that gave you so much love and enthusiasm that you feel like a rock star. By the end of the night 2 fights broke out just in front of the stage, but even with that, it was such a great night for us and I that it all was good. Because we didn't have to split the tips 3 ways, we each made more in tips, plus extra money from the house for having to play without a third, in addition to our regular salary. While feeling bad for our third partner, Jonathan, that was sidelined, I couldn't help a guilty feeling of glee as well. Jonathan has always been generally nice to me, but I've always felt an underlying current, subtle perhaps, but undeniable, that he was the experienced dueler and I was the upstart, with so much to learn. So as I said before, it was satisfying to put on such a well-received show, even as we were handicapped with losing the third man, and knowing that Jonathan was watching us do it. Don't get me wrong, I don't want bad things for Jonathan, truly I don't, and I hope over the next year or so he is able to rehab his voice. Loosing your voice is a danger of this profession, and it's one of the reasons I am glad I don't have to work 5 or even 6 nights/week like some of the house players I encounter in my travels.