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August 29, 2014
Pantheon: Charlotte Rampling. Still smoldering.
Cannes Film Festival 2001
Circa 1975
Posted by JD Hull at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)
NYT op-ed: 24/7 workplace email is Bad Craziness. How about time-outs evenings and weekends?
In the New York Times yesterday, contributing writer Clive Thompson, also the author of "Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better”, suggests that Americans should strive to be more like our suddenly more-mellow cousins in Germany (yeah, Germany) and end the tyranny of 24/7 emails. We should have regular--yes, daily--off-periods or "time-outs" for workplace email. In America, would such a regime be wimpy, sane or something in between? At WAC/P, we like and support the idea. The Western preoccupation with constantly checking business and workplace email has become an hysteria that feeds on our employee-as-peasant mentality and increasingly has little to do with thinking and solving problems, i.e., doing work. Thompson's "radical" if sane piece begins:
This Labor Day weekend, odds are you’ll peek at your work email on your “day off” — and then feel guilty about it.
You might envy the serene workers at Daimler, the German automaker. On vacations, employees can set their corporate email to “holiday mode.” Anyone who emails them gets an auto-reply saying the employee isn’t in, and offering contact details for an alternate, on-call staff person. Then poof, the incoming email is deleted — so that employees don’t have to return to inboxes engorged with digital missives in their absence. “The idea behind it is to give people a break and let them rest,” a Daimler spokesman told Time magazine. “Then they can come back to work with a fresh spirit.”
Limiting workplace email seems radical, but it’s a trend in Germany, where Volkswagen and Deutsche Telekom have adopted policies that limit work-related email to some employees on evenings and weekends. If this can happen in precision-mad, high-productivity Germany, could it happen in the United States? Absolutely. It not only could, but it should.
White-collar cubicle dwellers complain about email for good reason. They spend 28 percent of their workweek slogging through the stuff, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. They check their messages 74 times a day, on average, according to Gloria Mark, an authority on workplace behavior and a professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Image: Ralph Steadman
Posted by JD Hull at 08:35 AM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2014
America, Good Works & Bad Taste: The What About Clients/Paris Head-Out-Of-Your-Ass-Now Challenge.
Take heed that you do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise you have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. That thine alms may be in secret. --Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6, Verse 1-4
What happened to the secret, anonymous or quiet side of good works and giving? --WAC/P, 2014, Jackson 5
The recent ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was tacky, tasteless, fun and great because it raised tons of money for and awareness about the fight against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as "Lou Gehrig's Disease". The Challenge entailed a fun ceremonial drenching by ice water and the promise of check followed by a challenge to your (most famous?) friend to do the same. See Jon Bon Jovi's video below. But to some it was also the pinnacle of our showiness and cluelessness about giving money to deserving causes and, especially, helping the less fortunate. Americans have always supported charities and, thanks to their leadership, Generations X and Y seemed to have amped up the altruistic impulse. Money is not enough. It's personal. You give your time.
Everyone, it seems, devotes their time and energies regularly to a worthy cause or institution. Above all, we talk or write about it at great length. We have become so public and even flamboyant with our services-to-others that information about them now routinely (almost as if it's seen as required) appears on resumes, CVs and job applications. Also being disclosed is information about religious affiliations, often in connection with some community service. We see it on Facebook and other Internet musings and hear it in casual live conversation. Community service these days is not only nice. It's cool, and a social "must", too. Americans of all ages and demographics are compelled to give us an inside peek at their personal goodness.
Many of the resumes I've seen over the past decade have information on community service or religious affiliation. Some are tolerable. Some of them scream "Hi, I'm a twit". Certainly, lots of these disclosures are sincere and done advisedly; people want us to know who they really are. But they are trumpeting, whether it's true/sincere or not, "hey, I am a nice person, and concerned about others" (i.e., service in the community) or that "hey, I am a devout person, and I'm both nice and honest" (i.e., affirmative identification with a religion). I am getting tried of it.
Keep that stuff to yourselves, maybe? Quit embarrassing yourselves. If the information we don't really want from you is true, we are confident that it will shine through you somehow in an interview or in the workplace. We want you to grow and benefit from the gift of community service, and your faith if you have one. But please don't talk about it. Showing us is just fine.
What happened to the secret, anonymous or quiet side of good works and giving? Wasn't that the original idea of the spirit, at least, that gave life to our giving?
One possible solution is the "What About Clients/Paris? Good Works Head-Out-of-Your-Ass-Now Challenge".
Here is how the WAC/P? challenge works:
Starting now, for one full year, any time, energy or money you or your family expend to (a) help the less fortunate, (b) find a cure for a disease, (c) fight or correct an injustice or (d) otherwise engage in any service or act of kindness, whether or not planned, shall be expended anonymously, secretly or, in certain cases, as quietly as possible. By way of example, and without limitation:
1. You may not write or mention that currently you or any member of your family are pitching in twice a week in the "inner city" at Jojo's Soup Kitchen,
2. That you took a leave-of-absence without pay to volunteer for 6 weeks at the Children's Hospital in Chile after the earthquake,
3. That you or your husband gave pro bono financial advice to the Church of the Final Thunder (or that your kid mowed the minister's lawn),
4. That you helped an elderly traveler fix her spare tire or help her get to her doctor's appointment on time.
5. You get the idea.
Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession (1954), based on the book by Lloyd C. Douglas (1929)
Posted by JD Hull at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)
This Recession won't die any time soon. Discuss.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:37 AM | Comments (0)
August 26, 2014
Today's Sensitive Hollywood Moment.
Or Overheard in Santa Monica. A true risk-taker college friend--no matter what they tell you 95% of Duke grads are not bust-out thinkers and leaders but instead very bright, pleasant, straight-up bourgeois citizens who play it safe; ironically, and by stealth, my intellectually über-wide open beloved alma mater even teaches them how to do this so they can replicate their parents if they so chose*--who failed miserably a bunch of times in the movie business but finally made it big in the writing-production side of nighttime television has this saying: "Dude, I've been broke--but I've never been poor." I love that.
* I loved Duke and am grateful beyond words to have been admitted. I expected that the university and my classmates would change my life in wonderful ways--and they did. I chose it over Dartmouth and some other fine schools. But we should all expect the world's "great" universities to drive new ideas, produce new kinds of people and make everyone, frankly, a little uncomfortable. They should never uphold the status quo.
Tobacco entrepreneur James B. Duke. West Campus, Duke University.
Posted by JD Hull at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)
In The Atlantic: Dumbing down education, killing college and scamming law students.
In case you hadn't heard, on page 62 of the print edition of the September issue is "The Law-School Scam" by Paul Campos. It stars the InfiLaw System's three laws schools Florida Coastal, Arizona Summit (previously Phoenix) and Charlotte, Michigan's Thomas M. Cooley, Chicago's John Marshall and a few other law schools with names like 1920s-era apartment buildings which, before the 2008 Recession, were some of the players in the strange but unrelenting movement to make it easier and easier for people to become lawyers in the United States. If much of the Campos's well-written article seems familiar, it's because (1) several blogs have specialized in the "law school scam" (one blog even includes the phrase in its title) over the past four or five years and (2) David Lat's Above The Law has done a nice job of reporting on the strangest of all educational sagas: declining applications to "for-profit" law schools that are arguably of marginal quality in the first place coupled with people not particularly well-suited to attend law school applying anyway, getting in, running up huge debt to get through and expecting to obtain law jobs after graduating that simply no longer exist. Which reminds us. Don't miss the comments following the article. This subject makes folks angry.
Photo: Matt Dorfmann
Posted by JD Hull at 04:38 AM | Comments (0)
August 20, 2014
"Dizzying" transformations: The Hill, H Street, Logan Circle, U Street...
Another DC revitalization. No hookers, though. Where do they go, anyway?
Posted by JD Hull at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)
August 19, 2014
New Clippers owner Steve Ballmer kicks out the jams.
Last night at the Staples Center.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2014
Joshua Pierce's "The Snooze Button (And Other Stuff)".
"This book is about stuff that annoys me, like waiting in lines, babies, boring sports, and job interviews. It's also about awesome things such as animals and boiled peanuts."
It's funny. You can get it on Amazon.
Posted by JD Hull at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)
I like Ohio.
Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders lives mainly in London now. Like me, she went to a truly great public high school in the Ohio suburbs, hers being up north in the more industrial Cleveland-Akron megalopolis. I like Ohio. I was lucky to spend half my childhood there. But whenever Hynde and The Pretenders over the past 30 years have performed this song--to be fair, it could be about quite a few Midwestern cities--her voice drips with anger, and you know what she means. It's powerful. Here's one of her tamer renditions.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)
August 14, 2014
304 East Capitol Street, N.E.
Someone I met when I was 18 just sent me this picture. It's of where I lived on Capitol Hill after I was married. Federal style townhouse now about 130 years old painted the same regal blue. First-floor apartment. Just married, and both 29, a young associate and his smart, kind and so beautiful law student wife--the one who went to William and Mary, danced, played the violin, looked like Ali McGraw, was a vision and had worked as a buyer at Garfinckel's--lived there. Both driven. Both senior class presidents. 304 East Capitol is one block from the Folger Theater. Two blocks from SCOTUS. Three from the Capitol dome. Four from the subway. The neighborhood brims over with cocky, interesting, well-read, well-rounded and ambitious people. Pre-marriage girlfriends in the bars here and in Georgetown pouring beer on my head or leaving for Israel for something I'm sure I did or said. Hungover Sundays. The miracle of Spam. World-class academics, actors, musicians, statesmen and political pros just passing through. Gay men on bikes cruising me most summer days on way home from work. The Field and Stream splendor of the Tune Inn. Young men with names like Arvin from Salt Lake not only drinking like pros but trying to pick up waitresses with brogues named Maeve who would only eat them alive and humiliate them--in public--by critiquing their lovemaking the next day. The neighborhood has, say, 30 AA and NA meetings a week. Three rehabs. Interns named Muffin and Sugar. Resident members of Congress with their guards down. And within lunging distance of 10 churches, 8 parks, 12 secondary schools and maybe 60 restaurants and bars with names from D.C. history like Jenkins Hill and Tunnicliff's. Funny bartenders. Mean waitresses. Is this a great 'hood or what?
Posted by JD Hull at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2014
Sterling Hayden: Our Purest Lover of Being Alive.
Although Hayden (1916-1986) was not in love with Hollywood or acting, he was a highly regarded actor who was cast in westerns, action films and film noir for over forty years, usually as a leading man. He was also a spy, war hero, seeker, sailor, adventurer, rebel, gifted writer and eccentric's eccentric, all six foot five of him. He was authentic. Never contrived, posed, phony or obliged to be different. Never sucking up. A pure lover of being alive. Read his biography, artful screed and best work, in "Wanderer" (1977).
Posted by JD Hull at 03:17 AM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2014
Robin McLaurin Williams (1951-2014)
Rest in Peace, Sir Robin. Man-Child. Preacher. Madman. Rogue. You were truly touched by fire. See NBC coverage.
Posted by JD Hull at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)
August 11, 2014
Crystal, the missing notary.
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Crystal, blowing off work again--and just when you need her.
Not exciting. Just useful. In October of 1976, Congress passed a barely-noticed housekeeping addition to Title 28, the wide-ranging tome inside the U.S. Code governing federal courts, the Justice Department, jurisdiction, venue, procedure and, ultimately, virtually all types of evidence. 28 U.S.C. Section 1746 is curiously entitled "Unsworn declarations under penalty of perjury".
It allows a federal court affiant or witness to prepare and execute a "declaration"--in lieu of a conventional affidavit--and do that without appearing before a notary. Under Section 1746, the declaration has the same force and effect of a notarized affidavit. Read the 160 word provision--but in most cases it's simple. At a minimum, the witness at the conclusion of her statement needs to do this:
"I declare (or certify, verify, or state) under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct. Executed on (date). (Signature)”.
A "unsworn" declaration with the oath required by section 1746 can be used almost any time you need an affidavit, e.g., an affidavit supporting (or opposing) a summary judgment motion.
Some lawyers who practice in federal courts still don't know about the existence of Section 1746, (probably because so many of us practice primarily in state courts, and we stick to comfortable state practices and folkways). I wouldn't have known about it either; a Justice Department lawyer clued me in on it 20 years ago.
Federal judges understand and accept it. It saves clients, witnesses and lawyers the time, cost and aggravation of getting client statements notarized. Your three notaries--Nadine, Crystal and Raphael the Librarian, together with their notary kits--are in the office like clockwork, except, of course, the very days you need to have them witness and notarize a document. So it's a useful and convenient provision.
Not exciting--but it is one of the few efficient, and reliable, moments anyone sees in the trial process.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)
Three Yale law students in Slate: American sex offender laws are unfair, draconian and based on bad science.
In Slate today, the article "Sex Offender Laws Have Gone Too Far" argues that both state and federal sex offender registry laws are draconian and wrongly based on "the terrible exceptions" rather than the norm. We agree. Bravo to the three Yale law students--Matt Mellema, Chanakya Sethi and Jane Shim--who wrote it. Part II of this story on what to do about it ("making registries smarter and better") will appear in Slate on August 15. Excerpt from today's piece:
In seeking answers to those questions, over the last several months, we were surprised to find that one of the sharpest—and loudest—critics of the ballooning use of registries is Patty Wetterling [mother of an abducted child missing since 1989].“These registries were a well-intentioned tool to help law enforcement find children more quickly,” she told us. “But the world has changed since then.” What’s changed, Wetterling says, is what science can tell us about the nature of sex offenders.
The logic behind the past push for registries rested on what seem like common sense assumptions. Among the most prominent were, first, sex offenders were believed to be at a high risk for reoffending—once a sex offender, always a sex offender. Second, it was thought that sex offenses against children were commonly committed by strangers. Taken together, the point was that if the police had a list, and the public could access it, children would be safer.
The problem, however, is that a mass of empirical research conducted since the passage of Jacob’s Law has cast increasing doubt on all of those premises. For starters, “the assumption that sex offenders are at high risk of recidivism has always been false and continues to be false,” said Melissa Hamilton, an expert at the University of Houston Law Center, pointing to multiple studies over the years. “It’s a myth.”
Posted by JD Hull at 07:00 PM | Comments (0)
Adams Morgan, Washington, D.C.
The 'hood with a little bit of everybody.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2014
Worship This: The Holy Surprise of a Child's First Look.
He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. An imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the universe, the locksmith of mysteries of the atom and the universe. --Walter Issacson, in Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, 2007)
Children come with Imagination. It's standard issue. --Holden Oliver in 2009
"E" at the beach: Another fresh take.
Try this at home and work: The Holy Surprise of a Child's First Look. Forget for a moment, if you can, about Clients and Paris. WAC/WAP? is at heart about Quality, Old Verities, and Values--the things no business, government, non-profit group, religion, politician or leader (a) wants to give you or (b) can give you. No, not even family and friends can. You have to find them on your own. Work and Service, whether you are paid for them or not, are inseparable from these things.
At this blog, at our firm, and in our lives, we seek (in the largest sense) serious overachievers, and aficionados of life, past and present: identifying them, learning from them, having them as friends, hiring them and, above all, never holding them back. It is often hard to find these people--or even to remember that they once existed. We do, after all, live in a cookie-cutter world. Originality, intuition, authentic spirituality, and even taste are not valued--these traits are often feared and attacked--in most of the West. This is especially true in America, where we continue to be geographically, culturally and (some think) cosmically isolated. The United States, despite its successes, high standard of living and exciting possibilities, has become world headquarters of both moral pretension and dumbing life down. Besides, fresh thinking leads to painful recognitions. It's easier to let something else do the thinking for us.
"Fragmentation" is a word some people (including those with better credentials than the undersigned to write this) have used for decades to describe modern humans all over the world: lots of wonderful, intricate and even elegant pieces--but no whole. So, in our search for coherence, we look for clues. We look to television, advertising, and malls. To work, and to professional organizations. To secondary schools, universities, and any number of religions (none of the latter seem "special"--they say identical intuitive and common sense good things, but just say them differently), and to an array of other well-meaning institutions.
In fairness, all of these have their moments (hey, we all like our insular clubs).
And, importantly, we seek answers from others we know and love--family and friends--who have been soaked in the same messages and reveries, who make us feel comfortable with the same choices, values and lives that gnaw at us all in rare moments of clarity and solitude, and who are able to "reassure" us so we can get back "on track".
So what's missing? We think it's Imagination. Children come with Imagination. It's standard issue. Some lucky adults hold onto Imagination, even as it is bombarded with a tricky, confusing, and lob-sided mix of messages favoring mediocrity over quality. Until Imagination becomes a value in and of itself, a lot us will "shuffle off" life on earth without even knowing what happened in the past 80-odd years. We denied ourselves (a) thinking our own thoughts and (b) acting on our own. We would not even fight for these qualities. We would not take chances. We built, embraced and often defended a Cliff's Notes life. We were uninspired, desperate to fit in, and frightened. We "missed it". We missed it All--like drunks who slept through the Super Bowl. Our children, friends and people who respected and loved us even took notes on what we thought, said and did here as "spiritual beings" having a "human experience. They emulated us. That means you and me, Jack. How do you feel about that? Oh well. Next time, maybe?
Which brings us, finally, to Albert Einstein. True, few of us can have Einstein's talent for Western logic, or his IQ. But Einstein's advantage over other physicists may have been that he was a "new soul". He looked at everything as if he were seeing it for the first time. Imagination.
Take work. He approached it from a wellspring of joy. There are, and have been, others like Einstein in that respect. Those are the kind of people we want as friends to inspire us, and as co-workers to solve clients' problems. His IQ and genius is not the point. We'll take an IQ a lot lower than Einstein's (for associates, though, Coif or Law Review would be nice).
Reverence and a child's awe. Imagination. That's the outlook we prize here at WAC? Energy, intensity and creativity always seem to come with it. If it comes with serious brains, we'll take that, too.
From past posts, and with grateful nods to Samuel John Hazo and Cleveland's Peter B. Friedman.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)
August 09, 2014
How to work.
Detroit, July 19, 1970
Posted by JD Hull at 12:10 AM | Comments (0)
August 08, 2014
What I learned at work today.
If there is something about a strategy, a client demand, a candidate for employment, a new firm policy, a document-in-progress or draft of a pleading, brief or contract for a client, and you just can't articulate the problem, your instincts are trying to help you. Articulate it. Discuss it. Fix it now.
(Sorry to be metaphysically clumsy. It happens.)
Posted by JD Hull at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
August 07, 2014
(And since Thursday is the new Friday.)
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
--Samuel Johnson
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Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
August 03, 2014
On the good foot.
An American story. While my fellow James Brown fan Holden Oliver (see post below) has not yet had the opportunity to see the movie because he lives in a Stepford-like rural part of northern Austria which may not have the market to support showing it at local theaters, last night I did see Get On Up, the new movie on the life of James Brown produced by Mick Jagger. I will give it an A-/B+. Cast and music outstanding. Some of the story, even if you know lots about James Brown, is unfortunately a bit confusing and hard to follow. Our suggestion: re-edit that bad boy. Or it could just be me and/or the Ibogaine my doctor made me take before the movie. N.B. Seriously, two things. First, do re-edit this movie so that people can get it. Second, don't underestimate its appeal. I saw Get On Up in whitest part of seriously white and tacky Orange County--and was surprised that most of the audience liked it. I have been wrong about many things...Anyway, good god. On the good foot. Maceo! Maceo! Tim! Tim! Walk for me, Tim.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:40 PM | Comments (0)
August 01, 2014
The Mystical Warlike Magic Welsh.
Welsh Druids were always feisty. They chanted. They were naked. They did not fear death. And they cast spells just before battle.
Pay no mind to all those New Age yahoos and beer hippies from all over the UK and Europe at Stonehenge and Glastonbury this time of year. The Welsh are really it. The real thing. They are the most authentic and toughest of British Druids--and always have been. Tacitus wrote of how Romans soldiers were frightened by, and reluctant to attack, the natives of northwest Wales 2000 years ago. Welsh Druids were not just warriors. They were way-wild, crazy and mystical. They chanted. They were naked. They did not fear death. And they were said to cast spells just before battle. Their priests, especially, were stone nuts, and had "old" knowledge they could and often did use. No conquering Roman grunt wanted to wake up in camp one morning with his mates on the way back to Rome--for a triumph, strong wine and the missed company of sultry sporting women--to learn that he had been turned into a Tawny owl, sand lizard or crested newt at some point during the night. Everyone continued to be amazed with the powerful combination of Welsh grit and Druid magic. We understand that, in the last several centuries, southern England's aristocracy has been giving the modern Welsh, still living large over on the western side of the big island, a run for their money, and making a stab of reclaiming and getting its pagan on, too. We came upon this older, strange unsourced news item. Winston Churchill as a druid priest? Well, why not?
Druid HQ: Island of Anglesey
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)