Buttermilk & Molasses

The Great Unraveling: It Ain't Over 'Til It's Different

Economists over the past year have talked in the visual language of the alphabet -- is the current recession a "V" (fast decline, fast resurgence) or a "U" (fast decline, flat creep, quick rebound) or a "W" (down, then up, then down, then up)? More pessimistic observers talk Canadian -- the recession as a hockey stick, which is to say an extended flat market with a moderate bump at the end.

Robert Reich thinks we're in an "X" market:

My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track -- a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can't "recover" because it can't go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin.

If Reich is right, we're in for a few long years of uncertainty, fits and starts, and questionable reinvention as government and corporations continue to try to apply various adaptations of old solutions to what increasingly is becoming a different model.

Thanks, Robin Hilton, for Kat Edmonson, Beck and Malajube

Way back in the early 1990s, my roommate Richard brought home two CDs that I absolutely hated. One was Nevermind by a band called Nirvanna. The other was a trippy, eclectic work titled Mellow Gold by some naif with the moniker "Beck". After a few years, my reactive pushback against both performers faded.

Fast forward a generation, and toss in a visit to NPR's "All Songs Considered" website. Host Robin Hilton hit a triple this week with a series of recommendations that each snagged my attention in very different ways.

First up -- a Canadian troupe named Malajube and the lovely, dark video that rides along with an infectious pop number, "Il Luna". Poking around Malajube's website, I discovered a more eclectic visual romp for "Porte Disparu".

Second, a jazz singer from Texas -- Kat Edmonson -- who Hilton describes here:

I'm admittedly dubious when it comes to singers who cover well-worn jazz songs. How many versions of "Body and Soul" or "Stardust" do we really need? But when I heard Take to the Sky, a new collection of jazz standards and pop-song covers from Austin-based singer Kat Edmonson, I was immediately taken by its unusually novel arrangements. The songs are still rooted in traditional jazz instrumentation and patterns, so it's not like they're wildly experimental. But Edmonson and the gifted and inspired musicians in her backing band rework the songs enough to make them sound entirely fresh. Take to the Sky includes cuts like Cole Porter's "Night and Day" and the Johnny Mercer-Henry Mancini song "Charade," but also features a gorgeous, smoky version of John Lennon's "(Just Like) Starting Over" and Carole King's "One Fine Day."

Like most of the CDs I listen to, I popped Take to the Sky in my computer without checking the liner notes or track listings, to avoid any preconceived notions of what to expect. This opening song is so beautifully re-imagined, I didn't even recognize it, at first, as one of the most covered songs around: Gershwin's "Summertime."

I took a listen, and he's right. Edmonson's cover of "Summertime" is wonderfully conceived. Go take a listen to it here.

Finally, our old friend Beck. Fame and talent can carry you a long way, even when a shmuck in Richmond spends years trying to dismiss you. Beck's brand new website is nothing if not fun to explore, and he's filled it with all sorts of amazing little gems, as Hilton explains:

It started with the brilliantly conceived Record Club, wherein Beck and some of his friends get together and cover some of their favorite songs, like the Velvet Underground & Nico track "Femme Fatale."

Beck has since added a mix-tapes section called Planned Obsolescence, as well as a new interviews section called Irrelevant Topics, featuring completely unstructured conversations between Beck and other artists. His first guest is Tom Waits.

The website actually did more to bring me around to Beck than any of his hit songs over the years, many of which are buried in my brain for a variety of reasons.

Don't Piss Off Musicians, or Break Their Guitars

This bouncy little video, and accompanying back story, has been making the rounds on Twitter, but there's an important customer service lesson for airlines -- and everyone else operating a business. The lesson is a simple one: technology levels the playing field, and crushes the ability of your marketing and PR teams to whitewash poor service and dismissive attitudes toward customers.

Here's the back story from musician Dave Carroll:

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say “no” to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.

New Cultural Magazine Set for Richmond this Summer

GRID (which apparently stands for the "Greater Richmond id") is set to hit the streets in July, a reworking of the old URGE magazine (which ceased publishing earlier this year). As silly as the name sounds, I suppose the "id" focus beats out Richmond's traditional super-ego way of engaging the world (moralistic, focused on repression and policing unacceptable desires).

GRID's website says that it:

is a magazine and web channel that captures metropolitan Richmond’s diverse and interesting people, cultural vibrancy and business innovations; its unique array of galleries, museums, stores, restaurants and events; and the wide range of design-forward living options in chic urban and suburban spaces.

It's going to be interesting to see how it stands up to the Times-Dispatch's robust arts and culture coverage.

Richmond's Great Rock and Roll Swindle

In a meeting about the Richmond Region Cultural Action Plan yesterday, I heard that representatives from the city and various organizations had been engaged earlier in the day in a discussion about Richmond's moderately absurd admissions tax -- essentially, a 7% exercise in pickpocketing as Richmond.com's F.T. Rea explains:

"It" is the seven percent tax The City of Richmond extracts from every dollar for an admission ticket that changes hands within its boundaries. Richmond’s "admissions tax" comes off the top of the gross, before any other splits or payments are made.

Now, in this time of upheaval and change, some progressive thinkers in Richmond are zeroing in on how to allay the admissions tax The City collects from the Byrd Theatre, the Siegel Center, Poe’s Pub, and every business in town that sells tickets or collects a cover charge at the door. 

By the way, Chesterfield County and Henrico County don’t have such a tax. Which means movie distributors know it’s usually better for them to ship a print of their feature film to a cinema house in the suburbs.

During yesterday's discussion, a couple of interesting anecdotes were shared.

The first was that the Byrd Theatre essentially needs to sell an extra 5,800 tickets every year to pay the admissions tax. For a movie house with one screen that seats (at most) twice a night, that's at least 10 extra tickets for every movie they show.

The second was a little more abstract. If a promoter was bringing a $1 million show through Virginia, he'd make $70,000 less in Richmond than in Charlottesville or Norfolk -- all things being equal. Guess where he's not likely to spend too much time haggling for dates?

Rea has a few more facts:

The admissions tax in Richmond is not unique. Unlike, Charlottesville, most cities in Virginia have such a tax; the rate varies. Which only means backward thinking exists in lots of places.

By the way, there’s no admissions tax in Austin or Nashville. In those two cities, known for their great live music scenes, the thinking appears to be more enlightened than what has prevailed here.

Richmond took in $2,447,670 in admissions taxes in 2008. No doubt, any spokesperson for The City will say Richmond needed that money.

Meanwhile, Gallery5's Amanda Robinson is about to have an aneurysm over on her Facebook page. Here's the string of Facebook updates she posted after receiving notice from the City of Richmond that Gallery5 needs to pay the city 7% of each show by the 20th of each month, or risk being shut down:

I can keep silent no longer. If my organization goes down because of our greedy city, we will go down with pride. Our city is supposed to be supporting its Historic Landmarks, instead it took a struggling non-profit gallery to try to keep our landmark standing. Now, the city wants to charge us for not being up to code, not paying specific taxes that we should not be paying anyways, and other fees....

...associated with the upkeep of our space. They want US to pay THEM??? My ass!! They want us to pay them a % of our shows under this Admissions Tax Law, when no one gets payed in our space and we can barely keep our head afloat. This admissions tax that is lumped in with the....Meals Tax?? Did you know that a large % of our meals tax was taken from the homeless... to allocate to... CENTERSTAGE????

No wonder, our city is now hassling all of this struggling businesses, restaurants, bars, venues, non-profits, etc and trying to get us to give them MORE money. I say NO! I say that our city government, not our tax payers, struggling non-profits and historic buildings should pay for their sketchy business practices.

I cannot keep my mouth shut. I have been volunteering for 5 years to an organization that started JUST because our city would not support one of its own Historic Landmarks. Instead of helping us, they are penalizing us even more. Why don't you fix the history that you have, instead of giving more money to muddy our future?? HELL NO. NO MORE. There may be no more G5 after this year, thank our city for that.

Looks like CAPS isn't the only thing keeping artists down these days.

It sounded -- during yesterday's discussion -- like the city was serious about exploring changes to the admissions tax, but that there was a fair amount of research and studying planned before it went to City Council or the Mayor's Office.

Given the mood in the culture community, it might be a good idea to fast-track this one.

Reburbing the Suburbs

There's been a growing conversation about the future of suburbia in America, driven in no small part by the expectation that a car-driven society will soon become unsustainable and the more immediate impact of an economic backlash against the very consumer model that built our more modern suburbs.

BLDGBLOG just posted a tidbit about a new ideas competition called Reburbia:

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!

Reburbia is sponsored by some of the more innovative voices in modern design out there, including inhabitat and Dwell.

Naturally, this made me think of Richmond with its incredible sprawl of recent years -- massive housing blocks carved out of once-distant counties like Powhatan and Amelia, huge shopping complexes rising up out of western Chesterfield and Henrico. But it also made me think of Koln, Germany, where I spent a summer during high school riding whatever passed for a metro/light rail system from Germany's version of suburbia to the center city. Koln had long strings of villages cascading outward from its core, connected by trains.

I could re-imagine a Richmond with a rail/hub transportation system with one main east/west line essentially running along Broad Street/Main Street from Church Hill to the Goochland County line, and three north/south lines following 288 (western Henrico and Chesterfield), Powhite and I-95. But eyeballing an aeriel view of the region, there would still be vast tracts of surburban property sitting outside of those corridors and their interconnected hubs.

And as the Baby Boomers make their way into assisted living facilities or the downstairs bedrooms of their middle-aged Gen X children over the next 15 years, I wonder what sort of smart planning is going to be needed to help shape new population patterns that are smarter, more efficient, and account for a significant drop in housing demand for the foreseeable future.

It'll be interesting to see what emerges from the Reburbia project.

Dwight Jones, One Affable Piece of Glass

Chris Dovi and Scott Bass of Style Weekly do a masterful job of not-quite revealing any details about the man Richmonders call, "That guy who replaced Wilder".

The cover story does make simultaneous cases that Dwight Jones is failing to lead the city at a time of economic crisis and successfully leading with a savvy, behind-the-scenes approach to running a city. But it never really provides enough ammo for either case to allow the reader to make an informed decision.

But maybe that's how Jones likes it.

The Dovi/Bass piece mirrors conversations I've had with folks in Richmond's political, business and policy bubbles. Jones is like an affable piece of blown glass -- nice to look at, but hard to get your hands around. And while I was hoping for a tougher piece in Style this week, what they did deliver is the first in-depth exploration of the mayor's first half-year in office -- and raise the bar for the mayor's team to actually begin to move from planning to delivery. And soon.

Has City Hall become too polite? Unlike the always-castigating Wilder, the Jones administration is so bent on keeping the peace that some people worry City Hall is becoming leaderless at a critical juncture. Revenues are dwindling while real estate values plummet, and like the rest of the country Richmond attempts to navigate through the worst economy since the Great Depression. The two most controversial issues facing the city during the last six months — the Shockoe Bottom ballpark plan and the downtown master plan — were settled without Jones’ visible leadership, or anything resembling an official position from the mayor’s office.

If the Wilder adrenaline rush was too much too fast, one high-ranking official at City Hall sees danger in puttering along upstream without vigorous public discourse about where exactly the city is going. Debates have had a tendency to end without much direction from Jones: The Shockoe Bottom ballpark proposal died because Highwoods Properties withdrew it; when controversy bubbled up over the downtown master plan earlier this year, the mayor’s office remained largely silent.

“What is happening is the cooperation is going too far,” the source says of the extended honeymoon that’s descended over City Hall and over Jones’ relationship with City Council. “The city administration and City Council; they’re supposed to be checks and balances, but they’re not acting as checks and balances.”

What’s unsettling, the official says, is that the opposite is true, with some elected officials seemingly more interested in promoting Jones’ agenda than scrutinizing it: “There are certain council members … they’re pretty aggressive about making sure the mayor’s agenda is carried out. Other council members are stepping back and not offering any push back.”

Many people read the mood as simply an aftershock of Wilder.

Richmond.com Explores Richmond on Twitter

If you're plugged into the whole social media/technology networking space around town, then you know that Style Weekly, RVA Magazine, RVANews and Richmond.com get it. They're using Facebook and Twitter and websites and print to broadcast a variety of interesting narratives, and to engage their readers (and attract new ones).

And in the midst of this technological cauldron, Twitter appears to have emerged recently as a Richmond favorite.

Richmond.com's Amy Rose Dobson took a look at how Twitter is changing the way local orgaizations engage their public. One of the folks she spotlighted was Jonah Holland, who has fast developed a reputation as a social media consultant who not only "gets it" but isn't afraid to get her hands dirty in the process:

Jonah Holland, public relations and marketing coordinator at Lewis Ginter (lewisginter on Twitter), says using Twitter has been a great way to reach out to guests and get a feel for what they are saying. “I can go out into the garden and take pictures of the flowers and the butterflies and get it out to our followers immediately.”

Holland also points out that Twitter creates more opportunities for Lewis Ginter to provide customer service. “One gentleman tweeted that he was going to be attending his son’s wedding at the Garden and I reached out to him. It meant a lot to him to have a contact here. Afterwards he sent a tweet saying what a great experience he had.”

The smartest quote in the piece? Here it is:

Holland at Lewis Ginter says, “When I think of social media it is a time commitment, but if you think of it as an investment in your organization it is worth it. I would like to spend more time on it.”

RVANews Has the Best Funny Pages

I'd be saying this even if the Richmond Times-Dispatch was staffed to the gills with award-winning editorial cartoonists: RVANews is so lucky to have landed Chris OBrion, and to have spelled his name correctly.

OBrion, you may recall, made you chuckle heartedly earlier this spring with his cartoon featuring the Downtown Plan and Rachel Flynn when it appeared in Buttermilk & Molasses.

OBrion's latest -- focused on baseball in Richmond -- is funny enough to tear the cat gut from a laughing baseball. If that even makes sense.

The Great Unraveling: Economics as the New Cold War?

I couldn't turn away from global strategist John Robb's latest piece for World Politics Review when he kicked it off with my favorite diplomat, George Kennan. (And don't tell me normal people don't have "favorite diplomats".) Robb offers a send-up to Kennan that uses Kennan's ephemeral 1947 telegram that essentially shaped a half-century of U.S. foreign policy as a filter through which to examine the 21st century.

The new enemy? Global economics.

In a nutshell, Robb argues that our new global economic system is overconnected and "dynamically unstable"; that nation-states are becoming irrelevant; and that new emerging groups will prove to be more agile and disruptive than we can imagine. It's a glum assessment, and Robb argues that we've hit the point of no return:

It's unlikely that we will see any reversal in the spread of the global supernetwork. To the contrary, it will continue to expand, complexify, and intensify. As a result, the nation-state as an organizational system will continue to weaken, shocks and disruptions will occur more often, and super-empowered oppositional groups/networks will organically proliferate. In sum, the only policy solution that could possibly work is one that attempts to limit the spread of chaos at the lowest possible cost.

Bleak, no? His solutions are not as depressing, but they seem unlikely to rise to the surface absent some additional economic and structural pain.

Jolie O'Dell Hones in on the Perils of the Startup (Like Floricane)

One of Richmond's new favorite writer/video interviewer/tech geeks is ReadWriteWeb's Jolie O'Dell, who swooped through town during June's Science Museum throw-down hosted by the Social Media Club of Richmond. Not only did uber-poster O'Dell post a slew of video footage of the panel discussion on the impact of social media/new technology on news media, but she ten spent the social portion of the evening pitting Richmond's second-favorite satirist, Jeff Kelley, against RVA Magazine's bearded wonder Ian Graham -- followed by NBC12's tweet-crazy Rachel DePompa paired with me.

This week, O'Dell issued a Twitter-generated request: POLL: What was your "darkest hour" as an entrepreneur? Did you ever srsly have to consider closing up shop? Pandora did.

I sent her a quick email reply. Who knew it would wend its way into her latest piece for ReadWriteWeb's startup channel?

O'Dell starts off with the teetering almost tragic stories of Pandora and Twitpic before turning her attention to me with this inspiring subhead: The Mundane Details.

Entrepreneur John Sarvay emailed us to share his own story. "I'm discovering that there are a couple of different scary startup moments - the dramatic cliffhangers (new company teetering on the brink; new company meets sexy venture capitalist; new company takes off) I think are dwarfed by the mundane (waking up every day wondering if there's enough cash in the bank).

"Nine months into my own startup, I've discovered a nice middle ground."

But that comfortable middle ground was nowhere in sight when Sarvay woke up the morning after his startup's launch party with a severe case of entrepreneur's remorse.

"I realized I'd spent more on the launch party than all of my other business marketing. In the first three months of 2009, I brought in three percent of what I earned the previous year. The economy was continuing to melt down. I was insane thinking I should launch a business on my own.

"That lasted three days."

Little by little, cash started flowing in. By this May, Sarvay wrote, "We had enough cash flow to actually pay our bills for the month - both for the business and for our household. Going into July, we have enough to pay those bills for three months."

"This whole startup process has been simultaneously terrifying, stupid, exhausting, exhilarating, and validating. It's the smartest thing I've ever done. If I'd done it three years ago, I'd have failed. I might still fail. But I don't regret one second of it."

The interesting thing for me is that I've had maybe all of five days of doubt and panic during the entire nine month experience. I fully expected to find myself curled up in my closet sometime during month three of this journey.

What Demands Our Witness in Richmond?

Roger Cohen's Op-Ed on Iran in today's New York Times included a quote that got me to pondering. Cohen, who just returned from a tulmutuous few weeks in Tehran -- getting emotionally embroiled in the first vestiges of a revolution -- was pondering the role of journalism during the Iranian crisis. He turns to sociologist Max Weber, and then concludes:

a basic truth gets lost: that to be a journalist is to bear witness.

That started me thinking about what -- here in Richmond, in Central Virginia -- should be drawing the attention and witness bearing of our journalists, that small handful of diligent and skilled writers and reporters from our local papers, TV stations and community web sites.

What surfaced for me was mostly big picture stuff -- growing economic disparity; the continuing struggle to educate kids in our local schools; the tension (and blatant lovemaking) between local developers and politicians. The list is long, but I'm not sure there are many journalists in town who are taking -- or able to take -- the broad view or the long view.

So, two questions for anyone interested in taking a shot:

• Which journalists in town are "bearing witness", and to what?

• What are the areas in our region that demand more serious attention?

The Great Unraveling: Misread, and Possibly Still Misreading

It would not have been as disconcerting to hear Vice President Joe Biden acknowledge that the Obama administration "misread how bad the economy was" if he had used the present tense. Biden's candor on ABC's "This Week" is likely to find itself walked back by various administration representatives in the coming days, but I think the comment is a telling indication that the White House's fiscal guys still see this recession as a catastrophe averted, rather than one still in the process of developing.

As an independent business owner, there is nothing I'd rather see than an economy on the mend, but that's not the reality I see stretching ahead over the next few years. The private sector is still trying to untangle itself from the ropes -- and we're just starting to see state governments and the nonprofit industry grapple with serious revenue shortfalls. And with another $40 to $70 trillion remaining to bleed out of the current global system (compare that to the $14 trillion GDP of the United States, and wince), we've still got a ways to go -- and few signs that the policymakers are inclined to act.

Here's a micro story: I've now spent eight weeks with two groups of unemployed workers in the Richmond area, focusing on helping almost 100 people regain their footing in this economy. These groups skew older, white and more educated -- people at the peak of their earning power, who now find themselves nearing retirement with 401k plans slashed (or cashed to pay the bills) and almost no easy opportunities. This snapshot mirrors what I'm hearing from other markets around the country, and my sense is that come 2011 these displaced workers are going to find themselves making $20-40k less than they were making in 2007. If they're working at all.

Nassim Taleb, who has drawn attention for his book Black Swan and for his anticipation of this global economic unravelling, said last week that we're "in the middle of the crash".

Taleb, who came to prominence for his early warnings about the dangerous practices at financial institutions, instead directed the discussion toward the big picture, voicing his concerns about the direction of the economy and public policy. "The system is very fragile. You may have green shoots or whatever you call them . . . but you're still in a world which is breaking, and that world should break. Nature breaks anything that's too big," he explained. As finance became increasingly reliant on exotic products and high leverage ratios, complexity grew far beyond what regulators could understand or should have allowed.

As a result, there is excessive leverage in too many parts of the world; Taleb estimates that $40 trillion to $70 trillion globally needs to be deleveraged. The United States annual GDP is approximately $14 trillion. Until the financing problem is solved, it's going to be difficult to resume normal, healthy growth. "We're in the middle of the crash, so if I was going to forecast something, I know it's going to get worse, not better . . . You're going to have much less leverage in the system."

But Taleb is not convinced the process is fully underway. Rather than working off debts, he says the government is looking to inflate asset prices through stimulus plans.

Taleb's concerns echo those of John Robb, a global analyst whose doom-and-gloom scenarios toy with my own penchant for hyper-realism. Today, Robb pointed me in the direction of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's latest demoralizing piece in the Telegraph:

The Centre for Labour Market Studies (CLMS) in Boston says US unemployment is now 18.2pc, counting the old-fashioned way. The reason why this does not "feel" like the 1930s is that we tend to compress the chronology of the Depression. It takes time for people to deplete their savings and sink into destitution. Perhaps our greater cushion of wealth today will prevent another Grapes of Wrath, but 20m US homeowners are already in negative equity (zillow.com data). Evictions are running at a terrifying pace.

Some 342,000 homes were foreclosed in April, pushing a small army of children into a network of charity shelters. This compares to 273,000 homes lost in the entire year of 1932...

...What is so disturbing is that governments have not even begun the spending squeeze that must come to stop their countries spiralling into a debt compound trap.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, with a good nose for popular moods, says: "We must overhaul everything. We cannot have a system of rentiers and social dumping under globalisation. Either we have justice or we will have violence. It is a chimera to think that this crisis is just a footnote and that we can carry on as before."

Evans-Pritchard concludes:

We are moving into Phase II of the Great Unwinding. It may be time to put away our texts of Keynes, Friedman, and Fisher, so useful for Phase 1, and start studying what happened to society when global unemployment went haywire in 1932.