wealth | Exile on Pain Street

b/w [abbreviation] 1. (music) “backed with.” Commonly used with 45 and 78 RPM records, referring to the flip side (also called the “B-side”) of a record.

Oops!… I Did It Again

I had another round of Mohs surgery to have a spot of Basal cell carcinoma removed. This is my third time under the knife. The first two times it was high on my forehead but this time it was right above my eyebrow, so I got a bit of a shiner. I have to go back after the New Year for more of the same.

I wish I could step into the way-back machine and talk to my younger self. I’d say, “Listen, stupid. Put some sunscreen on and reapply it every few hours. Wear a hat. And go to college.” I was trying to think of something positive that came out of this and the only thing I could come up with was that The Daughters are learning a valuable lesson from their vain old man. Let that be a lesson to you, too. Do you want to walk around looking like this? People stare.

Money, Honey

Every so often, a play will open on Broadway that’ll become an event that’s bigger than the play itself. The New York Times and New York magazine will deem it a living miracle and the culture lemmings—many of whom don’t actually give a damn about theater—all line up for tickets, which artificially inflates the price and renders the show unaffordable for the plebeians. It happened with Rent and The Book of Mormon.

Hamilton is such a show. Tickets are being sold into next summer. No joke. It’s an impossible ticket. You simply cannot see it any sooner than that. Unless…

A senior executive from the California office was visiting. I asked if he was doing anything fun while in town. He said he saw Hamilton last night and enjoyed it.

Two weeks prior to that, I was talking to a visiting board member. He said he came in on Friday with his wife to spend the weekend in the city. I asked if he did anything fun. He said he saw Saturday Night Live.

“How did you get tickets to SNL if you just got into town the day before?”

“I have a guy.”

“Ah. A guy. How much, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“$1,250 each.”

That’s how life is for the well-heeled. They click their fingers and things appear. I used to prepare marketing material for the Private Wealth division of a major investment bank. I’d always known about High Net Worth clients, but that assignment introduced me to Ultra High Net Worth clients. It gave me a new benchmark for my own mediocrity.

I didn’t grow up in abject poverty. There was always food on the table and a roof over my head, but not much else. When you grow up quasi-poor, no matter how well you end up doing for yourself and your family, inside your head, you’re still poor. These constant, nagging episodes don’t help matters.

I’ve seen what wealth can do up close. It goes beyond hard-to-obtain show tickets. Ultra High Net Worth clients never go to a hospital emergency room. They have a team of private doctors and specialists on-call. I’ve also seen what it’s like to be broke. It drove my father away. I am a lethal cocktail of envy and resentment.

I’m a bit of a social lefty, so I was shocked (shocked!) at my reaction to the attacks in Paris. My knee-jerk solution was to detonate a thermonuclear device over Syria. I doubt that’d eradicate the problem entirely because filth and roaches can survive being radiated, but I’ll bet that’d slow them down a bit and show them we mean business. My bride and I lived about a mile from the World Trade Center when it came down and it took me back to that week. Vive la France.

Central Park Autumn

Well here I am Lord, knocking on Your back door
Ain’t it wonderful to be, where I’ve always wanted to be
For the first time I’ll be free here in New York City

Harry Nilsson

I work in an office tower on 6th Avenue in the middle of Manhattan. As you might expect, there aren’t many residential buildings nearby. It’s almost exclusively pencil-pushing, paper-shuffling edifices. Other neighborhoods—Chelsea, the Upper East and West Sides, the Villages—are more resident-oriented. But that’s not to say there aren’t ANY residential buildings in Midtown.

Directly across the street from my office is an apartment building. Architecturally, it’s a quiet affair; not at all like the soulless glass and steel structures that surround it. Its facade is brick with some flourishes.

Central Park, which is on fire right now with autumnal splendor, is just three short blocks away. Aside from immediately after a gigantic snowstorm, fall is when the city is at its most pastoral and beautiful. People come from all over the world to stroll through Central Park in the fall. These fortunate few, these denizens of the better addresses, can simply walk out their door, turn left, and in a matter of minutes be enveloped in Manhattan’s rustic beauty.

But sometimes, you don’t want to make that three-block walk. It may be too early in the morning. You might not look your best. In that case, you take your coffee and your iPad and sit outside on your sun-drenched terrace.

And that’s no reason to miss out on the splendor of autumn. You can always spend a small fortune to have a landscaper haul autumn up the service elevator and reconstruct it right outside your terrace door.

* * *

Within a 48-hour period last week:

At a jewelry auction in Geneva, the Pink Star diamond fetched $83,000,000, a record price for a gemstone. At the conclusion of the auction, the auction house played The Theme from the Pink Panther by Henry Mancini. Get it?
Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for $142,000,000 at Christie’s, the most ever paid for a work of art. Wild applause broke out after six minutes of frantic bidding.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 both achieved record highs.

Those first two points are intrinsically linked to the third. I wonder what it’s like to inhabit that ionosphere? Do you think they’re aware of the rare air they breath? Do they possess the proper depth of appreciation for their circumstances or are they blissfully blasé about it? I’d like to be blissfully blasé.

I’ve entered the prices realized from last week’s Post-War Modern Art auction at Christie’s (scroll down). It was a phenomenally successful event. The results far exceeded their wildest, sugarplums-dancing dreams. I read an excellent commentary on how it was difficult to actually see the art through all the dollar signs. The author found the auction…

“…painful to watch yet impossible to ignore and deeply alienating if you actually love art for its own sake.”

* * *

Here’s an interesting little doodad by Camille Norment that was on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art recently.

Triplight. 2008

It’s an old-timey Shure microphone—the kind that Sinatra and Billie Holiday used—with the guts replaced by a small, slowly pulsating light.

The shadow cast is supposed to be a “luminescent rib cage” that calls to mind the absent performer; the pulsating light reminiscent of breathing. Well, I don’t know about all that but it was mesmerizing to look at.