Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 68

On a Sunday afternoon when any red-blooded American male ought to be watching the NFL conference playoffs, this boy is reading through promotion and tenure cases in preparation for Monday morning's meeting. And listening to the Guarneri Quartet's complete Beethoven string quartets. I'm afraid I can't embed the video, but you can click here to see them shedding a few bow hairs on Rasumovsky No. 3. Wow.

Half Moon Bay

To be precise, Princeton Harbor and Cowell Ranch Beach, on a beautiful MLK weekend...

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 67

I don't know very much about his evidently sad personal life, but as a lyricist Lorenz Hart could be a cold, cold, bastard, and funny as hell. Ella Fitzgerald, with her cool precision and wit, was the perfect singer for Rodgers and Hart's nastiest songs. And this may be the nastiest of all...

When love congeals,
it soon reveals
the faint aroma of performing seals,
the double-crossing of a pair of heels.
I wish I were in love again!

Foothills Park after the rain

Every winter I hope to stumble across one of these—Hericium coralloides—on a hike in the foothills; this is the first in several years, thanks to the recent generous rains, I suppose. It is the loveliest of fungi. It does resemble its namesake coral, or to my eye a delicate calcite formation in a cavern. But in fact it is soft and rubbery, and supposedly quite delicious. Identification is pretty foolproof, so I would not hesitate to take one home for the skillet, were it not too beautiful to pick.

You can almost hear the vegetation slurping up the water, which gives the forest and chaparral a kind of radiance, even before many of the plants have leafed out.

Visit to the de Young

Always something new that catches my eye for the first time. In a special exhibition of prints from the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915: James McNeill Whistler's Weary. Whistler was an extraordinary printmaker.

And in the permanent collection, Elmer Bischoff's Yellow Lampshade (1969). I suppose I've seen it many times, but never really looked at it. A large, beautiful composition that invites you to tell the story.

A Room with a View

I hadn't seen the movie in many years. It's every bit as good as I remember. After having watched her chewing up the scenery in a Harry Potter movie this week, it's nice to see Helena Bonham Carter at her most engaging. Granted she also makes a fine, fine villain. Now streaming on Netflix!

No. 300

Nothing to say, but I just had to make sure I made it to my 300th post of 2015 before 12am 1/1/16. Happy New Year!

Minimum wage and poverty reduction

Raising the legal minimum wage involves tradeoffs, but my reading of the evidence and analysis is that there will be more gains than losses for low-income workers and their families under most of the proposed increases. The logic of setting different state and local minimums is nicely argued by Arindrajit Dube here. Still, it's worth remembering that raising the minimum wage is not a very well-targeted policy for poverty reduction, compared with, say, increased generosity of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). David Neumark makes the point here. As he notes, the two policies can be complementary, so progressives should push for more on both fronts.