(The Lipstick Building)
I have made another colossal mistake in a life that appears to be an endless sequence of misadventures in early-adoption.
I am drowning in updates as it is, what with the intelligence mob commenting on the daily acts of lunacy, and the Chinese Peril crowd forwarding the translations of the PRC media with veiled warnings attached, and the updates LinkedIn and Facebook.
Now I have just thrown myself open to the universe on my mobile phone. It is Twitter, and apparently all the hip mobile people are linked to it, including the Mumbai terrorists, who stayed awake for six days on FARC cocaine and had supporters monitoring the Twitter accounts of some of their victims in order to better track and kill them.
It occurs to me that I should have provided my Blackberry number to Twitter, since I rarely use the thing, but got sidetracked in the information flow with one of my favorite and most alluring architectural oddities.
I was plowing through the explanation of how a nice fellow in the Lipstick Building conned come very respectable people into letting him play with $50 billion dollars, which he apparently misplaced.
I like the Lipstick Building. It is up on East 53rd Street in Manhattan, and is one of the school of buildings that came along in the mid-1980s, the age of greed and untrammeled ferocious optimism. The may speak disparagingly of Gordon Gecko these days, but let me tell you, it was a vast improvement over Richard Nixon’s stagflation. The buildings had more than a hint of whimsy to them, vast real structures of steel and soaring stone in the shapes of something else.
Down in Washington, in go-go Fairfax County, we got the Shopping Bag Building, a fifty story brick monster that had handles at the top, just like the Lord God Himself was going to pick it up and take a spin around the Galleria Mall next door.
Of course, there was also the Toilet Bowl Building not far away and the less said about that the better.
The Lipstick Building had a lot going for it. There is nothing more sensuous than a tube of lipstick, crimson-tipped to radiate sex and power. They could have called it a lot of things, I suppose, since there is the clear quotation of the grandmother of all skyscrapers, the Flatiron Building, and from the proper angle the structure could be the graceful prow of one of the old oceanic liners, like Titanic. But lipstick is what cries out of this one, intensely feminine, and not an office that doesn’t have a nice enticing curve to it.
Bernie Madoff’s operation was on the 17th floor, and that is where the most colossal mistake a lot of people made was orchestrated. It was known then as the “hedge fund” floor, as if anyone really knew what that meant. The term sort of shouts out caution, hedging your bets, hedge-hog, that sort of thing. Bernie was pretty clever about the whole thing. His hedge fund only promised about 10% profits, which not so long ago seemed a rate that was safe as houses.
These days, with the T-notes down to zero interest, ten percent seems breathtaking, and that is what the federal prosecutors now say about his fund.
The twitter is that this was the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world, which is nonsense. Certainly it is bigger than AmWay, but much smaller than Social Security. Bernie made the thing work by leveraging the reputation of his brokerage firm against the hedge fund, and paying the ten-percent return to the oldest investors by transferring the deposits of the newest. It all actually works, if there is a limitless number of suckers, and with the numbers of idiots so large these days, it went on far longer than one would expect.
There appear to be limits to all things except twitter, as we have unhappily discovered of late. Once the line ends, the enterprise collapses of its own weight. It does not affect me directly, since I am not smart enough to be that stupid. The losses will probably top $50 billion though, and no man or woman is an island these days. I am prepared to kick off my flip-flops and expect a minor wave associated to come ashore on my peninsula shortly.
Accordingly to the Times this morning, the list of those smart folks who “invested” with Bernie is impressive, and includes a giant Spanish bank, members of the Palm Beach Country Club, publishing tycoon Mort Zuckerman, the owners of the New York Mets, Philadelphia Eagles and the chairman of the General Motors Acceptance Corporation.
The latter used to be in the car business, as I understand it.
The burning twitter this morning in financial circles is how one single individual managed to pull the thing off, but it seems like only about fifteen minutes ago that a 31-year old rogue trader named Kerviel nearly brought down banking icon Société Générale with some unauthorized shenanigans. So, smart is as smart does.
I think the interesting thing is how long this all went on. That requires a lot of attention to detail, just like architecture. We will be looking at the buildings of whimsy for another generation or two, or perhaps longer if the smart folks keep reproducing. People with big egos like to put their stamps on the cityscape, and if people like me arrive and pass from the scene without much impact, that is just fine.
Saddam Hussein was one of the smart guys that knew his architecture. The Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad was the glittering face of the Baathist regime for those who visited Iraq in the days of his glory. Saddam had President George H.W. Bush’s face placed on the floor of the entrance of the hotel, where everyone coming and going had to step on it.
Apparently that is a deadly insult in the Islamic world, which is typified by fervent attention to cleanliness. I recall marveling at the sight of Iraqis pounding their footwear on a toppled statue of the dictator which I recall using as a no-strike aim point in an earlier air war.
Shoes are a statement just as profound as the buildings, some times. I remember Nikita Khrushchev pointing his shoe at the United Nations, and it did not occur to any of us at the time to wonder if he might have been a secret jihadi.
There were a lot of innuendos raised about the President Elect in that regard before the election, so I will be paying much more attention to footwear in the days to come.
By the way, when that Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at the current resident of the White House yesterday, I was very impressed by President Bush’s athleticism. He ducked the first shoe with the sort of grace that Mr. Clinton had when his wife would throw lamps at him. In this case, though, Mr. Bush was quite open about it on the next leg of his farewell tour of the wars he initiated.
On Air Force One, the President told reporters that the shoe appeared to be “a size ten,” and that the incident reminded him about his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the time, the President noted that he had looked into the limpid pools of the former KGB agent, and seen his soul.
’t know much about the man who threw the shoe, but that he had, indeed, seen his sole.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com