Today is Billy Crudup’s birthday. Also, Graham Jones, guitarist from Haircut 100. Kevin Bacon, Wolfgang Puck, Billy Eckstine, Beck and Nelson Rockefeller.
And me.
Apropos of nothing, here’s a rare full-frontal shot of Daughter and I on the roof of the Met at the Big Bambú exhibit. Just so you know who you’re dealing with.
Yeah, that’s my man-purse. I got it for free from Kenneth Cole. You got a problem with that?
We like to take the girls to the local thoroughbred track a few times over the course of the racing season. Monmouth Park (The Shore’s Greatest Stretch) is actually a pretty big deal in the racing community. The Breeder’s Cup is held there on a regular basis.
Horse people are an economically diverse bunch. They’re either hat people or track people. The hat people own horses. The well-heeled wives wear wide-brimmed hats, smile big toothy grins, and greet one another with air kisses. Some [actually, many] are cosmetically enhanced. The husbands wear pastel jackets and pinky rings. They seem to be a happy bunch. They sit in the clubhouse. We don’t ever sit in the clubhouse, so the only time we ever see hat people, is when they come down from their lofty perch to have their photos taken in the winner’s circle with the jockey and the horse.
We’ll usually sit outside with the track people. Track people are grinders. They are there to make money. So are the owners, of course, but the track people seem to need it a hell of a lot more than the hat people.
There’s a thread that runs through track people that ties them all together. There is a common element. Aside from horses and $2 bets, they have an affinity for the drink.
(This one was a loser. They all were.)
Some of them drink beer for breakfast. I don’t think this guy is kidding.
That’s his son playing in the dirt. I’ll bet he’d like some attention from dear old dad. I wouldn’t say I was anti-alcohol but, like organized religion, it should be used in moderation. Too much of either is a bad thing.
This is the tattoo du jour. She had the footprints of her newborn tattooed onto her leg. I’ve never seen that before, so she get a point for originality. Seriously. Do you know how difficult it is to do something totally original?
She’ll be four in about three weeks and I realized that that was probably the last time I’ll ever rock her to sleep. She usually goes to bed without a problem and if something is wrong, she’ll call Mrs. Wife. So that was it. I’ll never rock her to sleep again. I haven’t rocked 8-Year Old to sleep for years and years. I can’t remember that last time I did. It just slipped away without my noticing. Nothing last forever. Not the good stuff and, thankfully, not the bad stuff either.
Play Me*, I’m Yours is the installation by British artist Luke Jerram. It follows a successful run in London. Jerram gathered 60 used pianos and placed them in parks, plazas and on street corners throughout the five boroughs. Anyone can walk up, sit down and bang out a tune.
This is one of two pianos in Times Square. It was smack dab in the middle on an island on Broadway and 47th Street.
All 60 pianos were painted by volunteers. Each piano has its own distinctive design. One of them was painted by Sophie Matisse, granddaughter of Henri Matisse. (Not this one.) The pianos are protected from theft by being tethered to big cinder blocks. That, and the fact that they’re pianos.
I thought it was going to be a lot of people just plonking away at the keys but most of the people I heard play seemed to be quite accomplished. There were dozens of brief concerts in a wide variety of music styles. For free!
This piano was painted a boring battleship gray. Not very imaginative at all.
But it was in a great location. Right behind the New York Public Library’s stone lion, Patience. (Or is that Fortitude? They all look alike to me.)
The paint job on this one was also nothing to marvel at. They placed it in a playground in Madison Square Park. This piano took a lot of abuse. Many of the kids were playing with their balled-up fists. But what can you expect?
Of the several I saw, this was clearly the most imaginative paint job. It had a great location, too; at the southern end of Times Square.
In what other city can you stumble upon this unlikely pair of strangers—a young Japanese guitar player and an old black piano player—and watch them find their way through a quiet song, all with the warm, summer Times Square night swirling around them? This town is pure magic, I tell you.
* Every time I stumble across one of these pianos and see the exhibit name painted on the side, I get Neil Diamond’s Play Me in my head as an unwanted earworm. This is courtesy of my mother, who played Diamond’s Moods album constantly when I was a kid.
You are the sun
I am the moon
You are the words
I am the tune
Play me
Spent some time feeling inferior
Standing in front of my mirror
Every Picture Tells as Story
Rod Stewart
For the past two months I’ve been employed as a consultant at a financial institution doing what I’ve always done—slaving over a hot Mac designing marketing material and print collateral for new business development. It’s certainly not the most creative way to spend the day (that would be Mapstew), but it’s decent enough and it allows me to live a fairly comfortable existence—especially for someone with my amount of university-level education (which is to say, none).
The stuff I produce is intended for institutional investors. Pension funds. Endowments and foundations. Union funds. City and municipal funds. SOMEONE has to manage all that money that’s sitting around!
My current gig, however, is something new for me. The material I design is for the private banking sector. Not faceless institutions, but people with an astonishing amount of personal wealth. These people are called High Net Worth individuals. Old family money. Executives with 7+ figure bonuses every year. But it doesn’t end there. There’s a category above that. They’re called (and I’m not kidding about this) Ultra High Net Worth individuals. This job has given me a peek into a rarefied world that you and I can only dream of. And it hasn’t been good for my sense of accomplishment or self.
Here’s a section of a proposal that address the healthcare services available:
The United States offers arguably the best healthcare in the world. Paradoxically, many times that does not result in finding and receiving the best care, even for people with the means to pay for the latest treatments and with philanthropic relationships to top hospitals.
The audience for this material is people who have had entire hospital wings named after them. But this is the part of the proposal that laid me flat:
[You will receive] 24-hour access to your own advisory team, objective data on the best physicians and treatment options, expedited access to care, the collection and secure storage of comprehensive medical records for every family member.
My mom didn’t have a very comfortable end and the thing that kept gnawing at my guts throughout her last year was, “If I had more money, I could make things better for her.”
Expedited access to care. That means they never see a waiting room. They step over people like my mother. They don’t share an antiseptic-smelling room with someone who is dying. What if my wife or daughters get sick? Where’s my advisory team for them?
In the back of these brochures are biographies of the investment advisers. I get lost in reading them. Unbelievable accomplishments. Ivy league pedigrees and study abroad. Important associations and a series of capital letters and Roman numerals after their names. The bios for the institutional investors are purely factual. Do you have your Series 7? But in the world of private wealth management, they’re trying to make a personal, one-on-one connection. The bios include the spouse’s name, how many children, hobbies (Sailing. International travel. Fencing.) and important philanthropic work.
I’m not filled with self pity and I’m not fishing for compliments. I don’t think these people are any better than I am. And I certainly don’t think that all Ultra High Net Worth individuals are inherently happy. But I do sit awe of the incredible lives they’ve built. I’ve never had the intellectual capital or, more fatally, the ambition to live that large. How did they do it? I’m sure many of them had advantages that I didn’t, but that’s no excuse. I work pretty hard but the truth is that I never really tried my best. I liked having a lot of time off. I was always just coasting.
I’ve never felt more ordinary and ill equipped to handle the crisis that will inevitably come my way.
For more information, please contact your Family Wealth Director.
I received some horrific news this morning. Someone wrote to say they were unable to enter a comment on my last post. The only reason I blog is for the warm, whorey feeling I get when I read the comments. And, let’s face it, what’s better about blogging than the party going on in the comments section? Not much.
So I hope it’s just a temporary glitch and not something that’s been taken away from me permanently. How dare they. How dare they introduce this satisfying, albeit trite, thing into my otherwise humdrum life and then deprive me of it. If I weren’t so damn lazy I’d tuck my tail between my legs and head over to WordPress.
Exile on Pain Street 