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Professional: High Impact Customer and Technical Services Leader - http://www.linkedin.com/in/RichWalsh

Fan of: good books, diverse music, Philly sports, SJ Sharks, LFC, road bikes, belgian beer & 'The Wire'.

Curator of: http://www.61stPVI.org

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2012 (1)
2011 (7)
2010 (12)
2009 (15)
 

My Favorite Songs of 2011

Here's my personal list of favorite songs for the year in order by artist or group.

I restricted the list to 24 songs and, like last year, to only one per recording, which was difficult at times though I felt like I didn't listen to - or was as engaged with - as many recordings in 2011 as prior years.

The List:

 * Adele - Rumour Has It  [Since this was deservedly the year of Adele, I felt I needed a song for the list and this is the one I grew to like best.]

 * Beirut - Santa Fe

 * The Black Keys - Lonely Boy

 * Bon Iver - Wash.  [Though Holocene seemed to get the most play, I liked this song and Minnesota, WI more.]

 * The Civil Wars - Barton Hollow

 * Coldplay - Paradise

 * Cults - Go Outside

 * Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi (with Norah Jones) - Black  [I chose this over Two Against One because it was so effectively used at the end of the awesome Breaking Bad season finale, but both songs are great. Season's Trees is also a fine song from the Rome recording.]

 * The Decemberists - June Hymn  [This was easily my favorite recording of the year so lots of choices but this was my favorite over Rox in the Box and This Is Why We Fight.]

 * Drake (with Rihanna) - Take Care  [Headlines is a pretty damn good song too.]

 * Fleet Foxes - Grown Ocean

 * Florence + The Machine - Lover to Lover

 * Foster the People - Helena Beat  [I liked this song as well as Call It What You Want more than the much bigger hit Pumped Up Kicks but they're all infectiously good.]

 * The Head and the Heart - Lost in My Mind

 * Iron & Wine - Tree by the River

 * M83 - Midnight City

 * Metronomy - The Look  [I enjoyed The Bay a lot as well.]

 * My Morning Jacket - Holding on to Black Metal

 * PJ Harvey - Let England Shake  [I know PJ Harvey has been recording for a while now but I really feel like I don't listen to her enough and this song rocks.]

 * The Roots - The Other Side  [Lighthouse is another really fine song from this recording.]

 * Scars on 45 - Give Me Something

 * Tom Waits - Bad as Me  [He sure hasn't lost his mojo.]

 * Trombone Shorty - Buckjump

 * Wilco - I Might

By the way, Kathleen Edwards (a big favorite of mine) put out Change the Sheets as an advance of her soon to be released recording and, while I think it is a great song, I'll consider it as part of my 2012 picks rather than here.

 

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G's Beef Bourguignon.jpg

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Her first effort with Julia Child recipe. Very labor intensive but oh so yummy. Paired well with a 2006 Monticello Vineyards Estate Merlot.

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Fish Head Fertilizer

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A salmon fish head in the service of G's new tomato planting. Six more where that came from. Thanks Race Street Seafood....I think.

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'This Time is Different' by Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff

[Cross-posting latest book summary I added to LinkedIn.]

For what was undoubtedly first conceived as an academic book, I found This Time is Different (http://www.amzn.com/0691142165) to be surprisingly readable with many helpful graphs and charts.  It explores the history of financial crises from the perspective of two basic premises:

  1) Economists have lacked a comprehensive database that contains sufficient geographic and temporal scope to effectively perform broad-based crisis analysis in a quantitative way.

  2) Crisis episodes are often preceded by a pervasive sense of 'this time is different' as participants believe they can ignore the patterns and signals of earlier episodes because people are wiser, markets are stronger, macroeconomic policies are better, etc.

Reinhart and Rogoff define a financial crisis as consisting of one or more events where a sovereign country defaults on some aspect of its debt or where bank failure rates, inflation increases or currency crashes achieve certain threshold levels.  

The authors then outline how they painstakingly assembled for the first time the sort of database necessary to analyze these events across many countries and over long time horizons.  Some of this data goes back eight centuries, though their core set focuses on sixty-six countries between 1800 and the present.  An important goal was to have countries represented from all continents and at varying stages of market development.

Most of the book is devoted to reviewing crisis events through the lens of their data to identify themes.  One conclusion is that while many countries seem to learn how to avoid sovereign defaults as they become advanced economies, the evidence indicates that the other crisis types - especially banking problems - remain a recurring problem for all.  Thus, there really is no empirical basis for the 'this time is different' aspect of human nature.  Another grim conclusion is that the level of debt a country has in the aftermath of a banking crisis rises 86% on average while the time required for asset prices and output to return to pre-crisis levels can be quite protracted.

The last part of the book explores the most recent global financial crisis - what the authors term the 'Second Great Contraction' - based upon the earlier research and with specific comparisons to the Great Depression.  However, since the book was completed in 2009, this exploration is only partial as the full story continues to unfold there.  It would be helpful to have this subject revisited in a few years.

The book is designed to support a certain amount of skipping around and targeted reading (for instance some people may just want to read the chapters on the current global crisis).  While this style of organization has its advantages, it does introduce some annoying repetition when reading from start to finish.  Another minor irritation to me is that there are a few inconsistencies between the text and the charts/graphs and so more rigorous proofreading would have been helpful.

Carmen Reinhart was a guest on EconTalk shortly after the book was published and her interview (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/11/reinhart_on_fin.html) is a worthwhile hour long discussion on its themes and implications.

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'Green Zone'

Finally had a chance to watch the Green Zone film tonight about the whole Iraq WMD fiasco and starring Matt Damon.  Probably not for everyone in content and/or style - its box office results would surely lead one to that conclusion - but I enjoyed it.  

I thought this was clearly the most polemic film by Paul Greengrass since his great Bloody Sunday that first garnered him some widespread attention.  (That one recounted the 1972 Derry civil rights march and its tragic aftermath.)  I never have a problem with his jumpy, hand-held directorial style because some of my favorite TV shows are that way too, starting with Homicide in the 1990s.

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'Where Good Ideas Come From' by Steven Johnson

[Cross-posting latest book summary I added to LinkedIn.]

Where Good Ideas Come From (http://www.amzn.com/1594487715) addresses the topic of innovation with a focus on what the author terms 'good ideas' to avoid narrow semantic definitions of the concept (such as the word 'inventions') and to broadly apply the concept across multiple disciplines and environments.

I always find Steven Johnson to be an entertaining, eclectically knowledgeable writer and this book is similar in style to others (using what he terms his fractal long zoom approach) and often builds on themes he has explored in earlier works such as the value of emergent behavior in ecosystems and cities.

The majority of the book covers seven patterns of innovation, which often are mutually reinforcing, and Johnson cites many historical examples from 1400 to the present to illuminate these patterns.  (He also has a lengthy appendix that chronologically summarizes important good ideas over this time period.)  The patterns are:

    *  The Adjacent Possible
    *  Liquid Networks
    *  The Slow Hunch
    *  Serendipity (which contains a shout-out to DEVONthink, my favorite information management software)
    *  Error
    *  Exaptation (a term borrowed from evolutionary biology)
    * Platforms

The book closes with a four quadrant taxonomy of innovation that attempts to organize various innovations by their origin (market vs non-market based and individual vs network derived).  In particular, the author's a fan of the quadrant where good ideas arise from open collaboration in non-market settings and he argues this will remain an important source of innovation even in a world of intellectual property protection and market competition.

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'The Quants' by Scott Patterson

[Cross-posting latest book summary I added to LinkedIn.]

The Quants (http://www.amzn.com/B0036894XC) is a survey of the growth of math-based modeling in financial services and its impact on profit making and crisis generation.  The author is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal and he mostly tells his story from the perspective of some younger quants (two running hedge funds and two working within Wall Street investment banks) as well as two 'pioneers' in the field - Ed Thorp and Jim Simons.

The book is a quick read and the extensive direct access Scott Patterson had to many of these players as well as his interviews with other people such as Benoit Mandelbrot provided a personal dimension to the tale.  The Quants overlapped somewhat in scope with The Myth of the Rational Market (http://www.amzn.com/0060598999) by Justin Fox which I had read earlier this year.  That book, which I preferred, charted a more rigorous focus on the development of Finance theory in the 20th century but offered less of the day to day impact on Wall Street.  Due to timing, it also did not really cover the most recent financial crisis whereas Patterson's story ends in 2009 as the pieces were being put back together and lessons were trying to be learned.

In that respect, it's hard to dispute that the quants over-reliance on the accuracy of financial models which undervalued risk coupled with the 'industrialization' of computer-based trading were an important contributing factor to the start of the crisis.  However, they were certainly joined by lots of other bad policies, strategies and actors in the full realization of the crisis.

This is the first book by the author and it shows.  While it's breezy writing does make it a fast read, parts of the book seem a bit cobbled together with repetitions from earlier parts and Patterson's somewhat breathless style and overwrought figurative language were more annoying than helpful to me and temper my recommendation.

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'Last Call' by Daniel Okrent

[Cross-posting latest book summary I put out on LinkedIn.]

Last Call (http://www.amzn.com/0743277023) is quite a fascinating tale of social and political history in the United States.  The path to Prohibition and the sorry 14 year life of the only constitutional amendment to ever be repealed had many more twists, unexpected alliances and unintended consequences than I ever imagined.

Daniel Okrent starts out with some background on the prodigious drinking habits of the country during the 19th century, which in turn led to a temperance movement that had a sensible core desire to combat the negative social effects of these habits and often overlapped in philosophy and leadership with other "progressive" religious/social movements of the time such as slavery abolition and women's rights.

However, the altruistic motives of temperance became much more convoluted moving into the 20th century as the movement weaved itself into the many other battles engendered by rapid industrialization, extensive immigration, growing urbanization and unresolved racial/ethnic tensions then present in the country.  Among other things, the aim of the temperance leadership - primarily the Anti-Saloon League or ASL by then - became legal prohibition rather than moderation advocacy which ultimately set the path to the 18th Amendment.  This amendment only really became possible with the passage of the 16th Amendment, as the income tax provided an alternate means of revenue for the federal government to potentially replace the very high amount of revenue it obtained from the alcohol excise tax.  

No matter how one might view the wisdom or motives of Prohibition as it began in 1920, it's outcome was dreadful.  It did not truly represent the will of the majority of the country due to some representation quirks in state and federal legislatures and its enforcement was chronically underfunded from the start.  So, drinking moderated somewhat but criminal activity rose unmoderately.  The specifics of the Volstead Act, which provided the legislative structure for the 18th Amendment, also provided a few interesting exemptions which both influenced behavior and garnered some fortunes.  In the end, the organization of a much more coherent opposition to Prohibition (with as many strange bedfellows as the alliances which led to it) and the need for more jobs as the Depression lingered led to a surprisingly quick repeal process in 1933.

The most interesting person in the book is Wayne Wheeler, who effectively ran the ASL and devised the tactics of what we would call wedge politics today.  He used these tactics to great effect and was enormously influential in his time (he died in 1927) but is now on the wrong side of history and mostly forgotten.

Daniel Okrent did a great interview on EconTalk earlier this year (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/06/okrent_on_prohi.html).  I would recommend it as either a supplement to reading the book or getting the gist of it in an hour.

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My Favorite Songs of 2010

Here's my personal list of favorite songs for this year in order by artist or group.

I restricted the list to 25 songs and to only one per recording  - which was especially hard when considering the overall excellent music from Arcade Fire, Deerhunter, Josh Ritter, Laura Veirs, LCD Soundsystem and Spoon.  It was also painful to not include a song from The New Pornographers, but I thought they put out their weakest effort to date (though I did like Crash Years and a few other tracks).


The List:

  *  Arcade Fire - We Used to Wait   [Great HTML5 video collaboration with Google on this song too]

  *  Ben Folds & Nick Hornby - From Above   [Love the out chorus at the end as well as the collaboration of a musician and a novelist]

  *  Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside

  *  Citizen Cope - Keep Askin'

  *  Corinne Bailey Rae - The Blackest Lily   

  *  Deerhunter - Desire Lines   [Final instrumental break sold me on this one over Helicopter]

  *  Gil Scott-Heron -  Me and the Devil   [I didn't think he was still recording until I heard this great funky song]

  *  Janelle Monáe - Tightrope   [impossibly catchy]

  *  John Legend & The Roots - Humanity (Love the Way It Should Be)   [Their updated cover of Wake Up Everybody was outstanding too]

  *  Josh Ritter - Rattling Locks   [This guy is really good; I don't listen to him enough]

  *  Junip - Always

  *  KT Tunstall - Fade Like a Shadow

  *  Laura Veirs - Make Something Good   [The most lovely song you will ever hear with 'steer manure' in the lyrics; Wide-Eyed, Legless is also amazing]

  *  LCD Soundsystem - You Wanted a Hit   [My particular favorite though Pow Pow is quite clever and humorous as the next track]

  *  Old 97's - Every Night is Friday Night (Without You)

  *  Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - Better Things   [I Learned the Hard Way is also a great song]

  *  Spoon - Nobody Gets Me But You    [A tough choice with so many fine songs but the beat and instrumental flourishes just rock]

  *  Stars - Fixed   [I became a big fan of this Canadian band this year, including some older songs]

  *  Sufjan Stevens - Vesuvius   [As always, he's musically dense and lyrically strange]

  *  The Black Keys - Howlin' for You

  *  The Concretes - Good Evening 

  *  The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio   [How can you not like a song with 'I was carried to Ohio with a swarm of bees' in its lyrics?]

  *  Tracey Thorn - Why Does the Wind?   [Very happy to hear her singing again after EBTG]

  *  Trombone Shorty - Hurricane Season 

  *  Yukon Blonde - Wind Blows

So, lots of outstanding new music in the first year of this decade from a diverse group of artists in both style and experience.  Despite all the whining from the traditional music industry about their economic state, it's very gratifying to listen to all this good work.

January 2011 Postscript
I would have seriously considered Money Grabber by Fitz and the Tantrums, Kontrol Phreak by Lyrics Born and O.N.E. by Yeasayer for the above list if I had listened to them as carefully as I've done recently - though I don't know what I would remove.  Also, Lost by KT Tunstall really is a beautiful song as well to complement the choice I made.

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'What Hath God Wrought' by Daniel Walker Howe

[Cross-posting latest book summary I put out on LinkedIn.]

I had wanted to read this contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series for a while because the period of the American experience the book covers (1815-1848) always felt like a bit of a black hole to me.

In that respect, I found What Hath God Wrought to be very informative as I gained a much better appreciation of how the people and events during those years set patterns of culture, structure and behavior that still show their mark in the United States of today.

This was the period where the country concluded one war with Britain and forced another one with Mexico, thus fully shaping the geographic extent of what became the contiguous United States - save for the small part of the southwest obtained via the Gadsen Purchase a few years later.  

It was a time where the *relative* homogeneity of the country first started to unravel between territorial expansion, the gradual rise of industrialism and urbanization, and changing patterns of immigration.  This, in turn, created more pronounced sectional and economic conflicts which led to the formation of what we now consider to be today's two-party political framework, the American style of election campaigns and persistent conflicts over the role and mechanisms of national government.

This was the era where the country's religious/spiritual impulse deepened but greatly diversified in its expression, spawning numerous - and often contradictory - movements to improve individuals and society.  Sadly, it was also the shameful era where the country allowed the institution of slavery to strengthen its grip and where it treated Native Americans most callously.

Though undoubtedly influenced by the lens of early 21st century experience from which he is writing, Daniel Walker Howe does make a compelling argument that the interlocking revolutions in transportation and communication technologies during this time (especially the railroads and the telegraph) were a key enabler to the degree with which the country changed as they allowed the dispersion of goods, capital and ideas across the growing landscape at a rate unthinkable in earlier times.

While the book is clearly very well-researched, it is written in a lively and approachable style.  I particularly liked how the author varied chapters between those that were more chronological in approach and those that were more thematic.  That said, it is quite long at ~850 pages and felt repetitive at times.  Some tighter editing would have been helpful in my view.

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