Like the joke punchline says, “Trust me!”
One of my favorite shows on cable TV is American Greed. The show depicts various situations where someone’s avarice brings about his or her own destruction more surely than Nemesis in any Greek tragedy. Although they occasionally cover plain old blue-collar criminals like a professionial silverware thief, the focus is usually on white-collar, financial crime, invariably some sort of Ponzi scheme or another. Others, I know, don’t share my fascination with this sort of wrongdoing, but I find this behavior extremely interesting for a number of reasons. One is the amazing ease with which so many criminals are able to perpetrate these frauds for prolonged periods of time. It seems like for every bad actor there’s a horde of suckers, just waiting for him to call to hand over everything they have. Another is how so many Ponzi schemers follow the same predictable, shoddy trajectory from an inability to restrain their appetites, this compulsive need to spend, acquire, and consume material goods, right down to the identical purchase of fleets of expensive cars; to the point where the scheme falls apart and the schemer desperately tries to stave off the inevitable, sometimes including murder; and the inevitable crash and demise, usually in the form of a lengthy prison sentence, but also extending to suicide or international flight. Another facet is the incredible amount of damage a Ponzi schemer can do. A burglar can only knock off one house at a time. A financial fraud can simultaneously rip off thousands of people and utterly destroy their life savings, leaving them to face old age in complete destitution.
Due to this interest, I’m currently writing a crime novelette, entitled The Track, about an intelligent, but very naive young woman in Florida who gets a job with an “investment firm.” (Please note air quotes.) I like using Florida as a location because many Ponzi schemes have occurred there. Moreover, there’s something about a sun-drenched atmosphere that paradoxically connotes noir to me. An excellent film that makes sunny scenes seem sinister is Orson Welles’s Lady From Shanghai.
Silly picture to go with a silly title.
Tuesday, September 1, I went to the Black Cat, a DC nightclub to watch a documentary about the Canterbury Scene with the really dreadful title, Romantic Warriors 3. The documentary is the third in a series about early progressive music, hence the 3. Among more interesting things, I learned that Jimi Hendrix suggested that Mike Ratledge add a fuzz box to his organ after the Soft Machine told him they were worried about opening up for such a wild guitarist like him. I also learned that Robert Wyatt quit Soft Machine after doing album 4 because they wouldn’t let him sing any more. It was nice seeing pictures and films of Wyatt as a young, strong, able man. He was a really superb drummer.
Daevid Allen had a lot of footage. He was quite old and didn’t look at all healthy, so it was probably taken shortly before he died. He had a lot to say and was his usual, genuinely amusing self (pausing at one point to both cross his eyes and roll them back into his head). I’ll close with two general observations. 1. Some of the guys in the Canterbury Scene seem so shy and reserved (that is, English), it’s a wonder they had any kind of a musical career at all. Dave Sinclair talked at length about how he hates to perform live; Mike Ratledge quit playing in ’76 and hasn’t been in public since; and 2. I think that Caravan, Hatfield and the North, and Soft Machine performed possibly the whitest, white people’s music ever made. You really can’t see it as anything but very English, not that this is a bad thing. I like it very much as some of you may too.