CatherineRhodes.com

This typeface reflects the optimism of post-war Europe

WHAT TYPEFACE IS THIS? You’ve probably never thought about it, but magazine publishers certainly do. A designer choosing a typeface is like a director casting a role. I just Netflixed a fascinating documentary called Helvetica, which is about the development and use of that font. The year was 1957, the era was post-war, and the mood was rampant idealism. Helvetica was modern. It was so clean and neutral that it allowed the meaning of the content to shine through unemcumbered. Typefaces follow trends. When my magazine Working World was launched in 1988, Helvetica had fallen out of favor and I refused to use it. The face looked too boring, too corporate. The design at the time was trending towards grunge, towards crazy creativity and hand-drawn type. We had a guy who worked as a freelance ad builder and I absolutely hated his style. “Mr. Helvetica Bold,” I called him. It was a grave insult.

This video says it all: “I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.” After eight years of an inarticulate simpleton in the Oval Office, isn’t it a relief to have this man representing us?

The Sunday talk shows still lead the news cycle

BOTH MEN participated in the round table on “This Week,” George Stephanopolous’s show on the Sunday morning talk show curcuit. George Will presents the pure conservative position and Robert Reich the liberal. They were discussing what should be done about AIG specifically, and the banks in general that are being bailed out with TARP funds. Mr. Will said that AIG should submit to the discipline of the market by reorganizing under the appropriate chapter of bankruptcy. Mr. Reich said, “you’ll ge no disagreement from me there.” They both seemed surprised to find themselves in agreement.

The Richard Meier design is a piece of art

Beauty is essential for the soul

FEELING STRESSED by the challenge of running a small publishing company during the Great Recession, I retreated to the Getty for an afternoon of solitude.When the Getty Center first opened one of my East Coast friends informed me that the Getty “was too good for Los Angeles.” We did not deserve it. We were too shallow and barbarian to appreciate it.

Then came the Disney Hall — a truly magnificent concert space. Opening night was Mahler’s Second, the Resurrection Symphony. People were awestruck, the music sounded so perfect. I remember the old days when the LA Phil had to play in the rectangular box of the Music Center. The acoustics were so dreadful the orchestra had to change the way certain instruments were played to compensate for the deficiencies of the room. During the first season at the Disney Hall, audiences were particularly poorly behaved. One night a pack of people arrived late and were seated after the first movement (a bad practice IMHO). Esa Pekka Salonen turned and glared at them and waited painfully for them to sit down before continuing with the piece.

I think Los Angeles has grown up a lot since the installation of the west-east anchors of culture in the Getty Center and the Disney Hall. We’ve moved beyond our collective adolescence and learned to embrace our treasures. We would be deficient without them.

TO ANYONE WHO WANTS to read one article and come away with a complete understanding of the financial meltdown, allow me to make a recommendation. It’s a piece by Matt Taibbi in the issue of Rolling Stone that just hit the stands yesterday [1075, April 2, 2009].

Using AIG as a case study, he lays out the the entire imbroglio in a story format explaining who the key players are and what terms like credit-debt swap actually mean. Sample excerpt:

… The Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny 400-person unit within the  company called AIG Financial Partners, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists…..Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks for Washington’s deregulation of the Wall Street casino. ‘It’s all about the regulatory environment, says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. ‘These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. What is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that.’

For some reason this piece does not appear on the Rolling Stone website. It might be a chapter in a forthcoming book and Mr. Taibbi wished to retain online rights. Whatever the case, it’s worth tracking it down. If you email me I’ll fax or snail mail you a xerox. Or support print, and go buy a copy of the magazine.

Peggy Noonans’ column in the Mar. 14, 2009 Wall Street Journal is especially insightful.

The sale of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying wildly imprudent Wall Street of the ‘00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety. or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn’t notice.”

I’ve often wondered if emotional pain isn’t a good warning sign, much as physical pain is, to let our soul know when it is too close to the hot burner. The tagline for Prozac’s print advertising is: “Sadness is normal, depression isn’t.” But perhaps the standard for diagnosing depression has become too low.

Life is full of unintended consequences and this may be a gigantic case. If one follows Ms. Noonan’s theory, antidepressant use in New York increased after 9/11, and antidepressants lead to bad bad decision-making during the Bush years. So, would it be too much of a leap to postulate that the terrorists won? Flying a handful of planes into buildings had the outcome of bringing down American capitalism.

JOHN STEWART IS A GENIUS. On this show he presents mind-churning insights like, if we bail out the banks for having the toxic assets and bail out AIG for insuring the toxic assets, aren’t we buying the same toxic assets twice?   Hmmm…. to that I would add — now we’re providing aid to homeowners, so is the taxpayer covering the assets three times?

Note that on this segment John Stewart calls out financial analyst Jim Cramer for encouraging his viewers to buy Bears Stearns, which went under six days later. The show has launched a fued between Stewart and Cramer which is continuing with much glee.

The writer is obviously not Mormon

YOU MIGHT THINK that my polygamist heritage would make ‘Big Love’ my cup o’ tea. After all, I am descended from Sarah Cutler, second wife of David Evans, founder of Lehi, Utah. He had six wives, each of whom has a plot in the town cemetary for their own  line of descendents. Must be a big graveyard.

I watched about half the first season but abandoned the show due to  a comment the first wife made to her teen daughter. The Jeanne Tripplehorne character told her girl that she didn’t want to force her into the polygamist life because she wanted her to “have choices.” This is utterly ridiculous. To opt for the controversial, illegal lifestyle of a polygamist, that mother would be a True Believer.  There would be no thought of “choices.” This is the right path, the only path — God has ordained it — and all children would be expected to follow. The writer is obviously a secular-humanist and the concept of choices is his or her overlay on the story. In real life, if the daugher had left the polygamist cult the other members of the family would have sat shiva for her. (Oh, wait. Wrong cult.)

He plays the piano

Memories of Berlin

They even stand alike

I’M MAD LUCKY to be so close to my family — my sibs, kids, parents, even my ex-husband and his girlfriend. Last weekend my brother Stef flew in for a couple of days from Waterloo, Ontario, to help me with some business matters. As a finance professor, an all-round smart guy and someone who’s known me my whole life, his advice is especially meaningful. We went to the Disney Hall to hear Sarah Chang play Mendelson, we saw the ‘Two Germanys’ exhibit at LACMA, we spent a day in the office crunching numbers, and Stef absorbed a lot of vitamin D, which he desperately needs. A quick check of Toronto’s weather on my iPhone predicts about 30 degrees today with heavy rain/slushy snow.

At one point during the weekend, Offspring #1 pulled into the driveway too fast and popped the front tire on the wagon. The ex dragged him to the junkyard for the day to find a new tire and rim and they replaced it. Useful tip for saving hundreds of dollars during the recession.

You’re not your job.  You’re not how much money you have in the bank.  You’re not the car you drive.  You’re not the contents of your wallet.  You’re not your fucking khakis.

You buy furniture.  You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life.  Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled.  Then the right set of dishes.  Then the perfect bed.  The drapes.  The rug.  Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct.  The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club