Tool’s Version of “No Quarter” is a Metaphysical Meditation.

Sometime in the mid-nineties, when I first heard Led Zeppelin’s classic “No Quarter”, I thought that Robert Plant was fretting about having no quarter, as in no 25 cent coin. I thought he agonized about not being able to call someone. If you’re over 30, you will remember that there were times when one needed a quarter to use a payphone. A quarter was the price of one phone call. I had no money back then, collected quarters all week to do the weekend laundry, thus I could sympathize with someone not having enough change to make a phone call. I fully believed that it was a valid reason for such a haunting song.

My then boyfriend, after he was done laughing, explained to me another meaning of the word “quarter”. He said that Plant was lamenting the lack of a shelter, a place to stay. That makes sense, I thought. For years afterwards I lived with this thought in my mind.

Wikipedia offers yet another meaning behind the song. There’s a military term “no quarter” that is used to describe a situation where the victor takes no prisoners (thus no quarter), and vanquishes the defeated. It’s even darker than the previous two situations. But still not dark enough. The band Tool took it to a whole new level.

Tool is a progressive rock band from the 1990s that has never achieved mainstream status. Instead it has gained a cult following. Some call it a “thinking-man’s metal band.” Its members and especially its lead singer Maynard James Keenan (MJK) are known for their seclusion and disdain for public spotlight. Their music is not available on iTunes. Given my own disdain for commercialization of everything I can’t help by commend them, even though I had to go through some maneuvers to get my hands on their albums. During their live concerts Maynard, crowned with a Travis Bickle haircut, stands in the back of the stage, avoiding spotlight; his goal is to connect with the audience through lyrics and delivery, not through showmanship. He performs, convulsing in a half-bended posture, his own private catharsis in the dark corners of the stage, away from the public eye. Such delivery is meant to appeal to audiences’ own personal struggles, to invite thought and self-examination, to make one a participant rather than merely a spectator.

Tool ventures into areas where others are afraid to tread. Perhaps this is the reason it has never become mainstream: mainstream is all about helping us through a hard day’s grind, to cheer us up. It’s Paul McCartney and Beyonce, or Pearl Jam if you’re socially conscious. But Tool is merciless in its candor. Its music is too haunting, lyrics – penetrating, delivery – visceral; an extinct combination of mastery nowadays.

Tool’s trippy, melancholic rendition of the song, already dark and brooding to begin with, is a meditation on our own restlessness, our existential agony. It calls on our deepest, Kierkegaardian anxiety, our metaphysical blues, a kind of sadness that is impossible to nail and put into words. This restlessness is what you think about when you lay in bed unable to sleep, when you commute to and from work in a state of supine trance. When you look at the water or at the fire. When you’re suddenly alone and your phone is quiet. When you drive late at night on an empty highway listening to Pink Floyd. Or that one time you took acid in your twenties. Maynard lifts up the curtain and invites us to look into a scary black void, a “path where no one goes”, a “no quarter.” We peek into this abyss and, horrified, pull back, grateful to be distracted back into our normal busy, thoughtless state by a phone call or a twitter message.

Busyness is a welcome distraction, a mind-numbing drug. We seek to avoid thinking about our universal loneliness – the kind of loneliness that is in the back of our minds even when we are surrounded by friends and relatives that love us. And how can one claim otherwise, how can one deny his loneliness today, in the age of a ubiquitous selfie and Instagram – tools designed primarily for the deliberate displays of staged fun, only to serve, ironically, as ultimate manifestations of loneliness? If it wasn’t for our busyness, then that nagging, baffling, suppressed despondence that we tuck behind the defiant cheer in public would drive us to religion or drinking or drugs.

This is the source of our melancholy. Maynard pierces our hard-built rationales to reveal their hollowness. He comes in and tells us there’s no Santa. He makes it difficult for us to keep pretending that we have made it work. He drags us, kicking and screaming, to come face to face with the question: “Why must it be like this?” But our entire lives we tip-toe around the answer. The answer is just too terrifying to contemplate. A search for answer would force us to examine our own state, our own actions, our accepted notions and customary ways, and we are ill-equipped and unprepared and unwilling to do so. We live the way we do because we have bills and responsibilities, but to think that we chose to have those bills and responsibilities is unfathomable. To think that such way of life wasn’t ordered upon us by some supernatural force, that it wasn’t predetermined would then prompt us to deal with it, but we have no tools and capacities to deal with it.

Sure, we’ve heard of Thoreau, living alone by his pond, and Bertrand Russell with his praise of idleness, we’ve read all the clever books. We are all educated and aware of the predicament. Like Davos attendees, who make sure to mock, with faux self-deprecating chuckle, their own attendance at a posh retreat as an unavoidable chore because of “business”, we, mere mortals, in a similar manner, have no willpower or genuine desire to get out of the routine. We can only softly mock our complacency, in quiet resignation. We’ve made adjustments and accommodations – physical and mental, we’ve learned to maneuver, excel at survival, we are resourceful and flexible. Why isn’t THAT a virtue, Maynard? Oh, Maynard, have mercy on our feeble minds! We are just fallible humans, for Chrissake. We just want to get through this with as little thinking as possible. We already have enough to worry about.

We are all homeless who pretend, real hard, to have found refuge. It is cruel to deny us our little illusions, our meager “quarters.” Maynard, you heartless bastard.

Unbelievable Blindness.

So extremists parties all over Europe are poised to win elections. It is making the Davos crowd nervous.

And what else did you expect? This year income inequality is all the rage and everyone is positioning themselves as defenders of the common folk. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, a $160bn hedge fund, bemoans the danger of extremists parties emerging and urges the moderate parties to “do something about it.”

But him and other Davos attendees – all billionaires and movers and shakers – don’t take it one step further. They don’t call on themselves to stop fucking with the politicians, stop lobbying, stop asking for favors. They refuse to admit that the current scheme works like this: business interests lobby the politicians –> politicians act on it –> common man gets squeezed (asked to work harder, study more, take more loans, take more pay cuts, etc.) –> economy dives –> businesses ask for more favors and loopholes –> common man gets fucked even more –> politicians bring on austerity –> common man gets fed up – >extremist parties win.

But Ray Dalio doesn’t see it that way. He think that he stands outside from all this mess and just does his business. He thinks he can just ask mainstream parties to get its shit together and when they will everything will be back to normal. But the cycle has to run through. So when the extremists win the Davos crowd will have no one to blame but themselves.

Fuck’em. Try to do business with Syriza and Sinn Fein and UKIP. See how that goes.

Our Obsession with Innovation Is Just a Marketing Trick.

This article eloquently puts to words an old pet peeve of mine.

Progress in communication is only good in a sense that we now communicate faster and more efficient. But this innovation did not change the content of those communications. We’re still saying the same old shit to each other, just faster. The quality of data, and by that I mean the content, the ideas, the thoughts, is not a subject to innovation. We’re not becoming better humans now that we possess an iPhone. So if you praise technology you have to praise only the delivery of content, not the content itself. And if so, then what’s the public good of such innovations? How did it make our lives better? Other than make us available 24/7 to our employer and everyone else? And gave us the tools for gratuitous displays of our daily routines? Is that progress? And what’s the social utility of this progress? The ability to send your boss a spreadsheet at 1am? Yeah, before you couldn’t do that and now you can. Now we can download the entire content of the Library of Congress to our devices, but what use is it if we have no time and desire to read it?

We adjust our lives to innovations, not innovations to our lives. You weren’t sitting in 1985, thinking: “Oh, man! Imagine how cool it would be if there were such a device that we could take pictures with and then to display them immediately in some kind of cyberspace that everyone had access to!” No one was thinking that. But such a device got invented by tampering, not by purpose and now we somehow consider it a great technological achievement.

The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof. Presumptions of obsolescence, which are often nothing more than the marketing techniques of corporate behemoths, need to be scrupulously examined. By now we are familiar enough with the magnitude of the changes in all the spheres of our existence to move beyond the futuristic rhapsodies that characterize much of the literature on the subject. We can no longer roll over and celebrate and shop. Every phone in every pocket contains a “picture of ourselves,” and we must ascertain what that picture is and whether we should wish to resist it. Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.

Let me put it in even simpler terms. The technological leap from a rotary phone to a cell phone was revolutionary. The change between iPhone5 and iPhone6 is just marketing. It’s big business selling us shit we don’t need.

And, yes, as the author suggests, it is the revolutionaries’ burden to prove that a life with an iPhone is better than a life with a Blackberry.

The People Who Look Into The Table

I rarely write about Russian politics, if ever. But today I read Alexey Navalny’s speech he gave in court and I was at awe. So, as usual, he’s being convicted on some fabricated charges, but the speech he gave is for history books. He keeps talking about people who “look into the table”, using this metaphor to describe people who are either too scared, or too lazy or too indifferent to what’s going on in Russia right now. It’s too powerful and I wanted to translate it into English. So I spent an afternoon translating it and here it is. Read and weep.

THE PEOPLE WHO LOOK INTO THE TABLE.

“How many times during his life, a man, who doesn’t do anything criminal or illegal, can deliver his last word? Zero, zilch. Or, perhaps, if he’s unlucky, it happens once. For the last year and a half, 2 years if one considers appeal – this is my sixth, seventh, maybe even tenth last word.

This phrase – “Defendant Navalny, you have your last word” – I have heard many times. It seems that we all have our last word – me, somebody else, all of us are having our last days. They all want us to say our last word.

I said it before, but I see that the last days are not coming. And more importantly, what makes me convinced in that is if I could photograph all of you here, like this, the three of you or all of you, with the representatives of the so-called victims. These are the people with whom I interact recently.

These are the people who look into the table, you see. You all are constantly looking into the table. I’m talking to you and you constantly look into the table, all of you. You have nothing to say. The most popular phrase – surely, you know this – which is addressed to me. Detective, prosecutors, FSIN employees, anybody, civil judges, criminal judges, say this phrase more often than anything: “Alexey Anatolyevich, you understand.”

Yes, I understand. There’s one thing I don’t understand though – why do you always look into the table? I’m under no illusions. I understand perfectly, that none of you will now spring from your seat, turn over this table and say: “I can’t take this anymore! I’m leaving now!” And the representatives of “Yves Roche” won’t stand up and say: “Navalny has convinced us with his eloquence!”

A man is not made this way. A man’s conscience compensates his sense of guilt. Otherwise people would throw themselves on the beach like dolphins. It’s impossible to come home and be overwhelmed. It’s impossible to come home and tell you children, you spouse: “You know, today I participated in jailing an innocent man. Now I am suffering and will always be suffering.”

Continue reading →

On Playing Short Stacked.

Being short-stacked early in a tournament, due to some unfortunate hand, is mentally draining. You barely just started and you’re already at a disadvantage. An inexperienced player will get upset and will try to win his chips back, putting himself in bad situations. A table full of smart opponents will sense his tilt and will take advantage of that player’s recklessness. When I have a short stack I generally tighten up, but when everyone shows weakness, I try to gamble. More often than not it works. And what’s more defining of poker, or of any betting situation, than the notion of “more often than not”?

But early stack sizes, as I have learned, don’t really mean much. A big stack early in a tournament, achieved through some nice double up, is not a guarantee that a player makes it to a final table. As well as a short stack is not a sign of an upcoming demise. Just yesterday, a guy at my table flopped quads early on, doubled up. Another was a luckbox, completing all his draws. I couldn’t get any cards for hours. None of those early winners, however, made it to the final table. I have. Short stack sharpens your senses, forces you to heighten awareness. You don’t allow yourself to miss an opportunity. I doubled up through some loose guy at some point.

Most of the time, though, you will just be slugging away, stealing blinds, picking up small pots here and there, keeping  your head just above water. The mastery of this grind is what gets you to the final table, not an early double up. That’s how I usually get to a final table, just crawling over the doorstep with a small, battered stack. Too many times I was at 20 and even 10 big blinds at dinner break, all hyper and adrenalized and in no mood to eat, only to double or triple up at the opportune moment and end up at the final table. When blinds go up and the pots get big, your small stack becomes a weapon that everyone has to be mindful of. When I’m yet to act everyone has to figure out if I’m gonna shove or not. And if I shove, they have to figure out how much they’re prepared to spend to find out what I have.

A few days ago, I was down to about 15 big blinds and got AK – a monster hand for a short stack. Normally, it’s a no-brainer all-in. But what gave me caution this time is that I was first to act, so instead of shoving I just made a min raise. And waddaya know, someone shoves all-in after me and another one does the same. What this told me is that whatever they thought I had, they had me beat. After an action like this, the only prudent way is to lay it down, even if that leaves you with an extremely short stack. I can’t say for sure what they have, but a raise-reraise-reraise action is a bad sign for AK. Sure enough, there were KK and AA there. I would have been dead. But I lived to see another few rounds. Preserving your stack over such pitfalls is what will carry you on to still be around when the opportunity comes to double or triple up.

I died a glorious death in a similar situation about a year ago when I got QQ. Again, I raise and there are two all-ins after me. I snap call and get into, you guessed it, KK and AA. It cost me my tournament life. At the time I just thought that the motherfuckers are simply trying to get me. A chip on the shoulder and impatience (my usual scourges) is the quickest way to get killed in poker. Over the last year I worked hard on reining those in. Today, I would have laid those QQ down after an action like this. Today, I would get the message loud and clear.

I play with a short stack so often, for such long periods of time, that I kinda got used to it. While being a disciplinary tool, short stack also unties your hand in some way. It’s like fire – deadly if mishandled, powerful if managed properly. It teaches you not to be a fool when handling it. Too much of extreme action either way, whether tight or loose, and you’re dead. What a beautiful, powerful and profound game!

Better Late Than Never.

Oh, God, how much I understand this guy’s agony. This confession is not to be missed. Your corporate job kills you, turns you into a robot, makes you “dead inside” and thus properly inert, impotent to do anything about it. You lose the skills necessary to break away. And we are appalled at a medieval barbarity of the “dark ages”, we wallow in our own “enlightenment” and “human progress”. Isn’t corporate culture a modern version of an inquisition chamber, a Procrustean bed?

Inflation Debacle Is Approaching Metaphysical Proportions.

This morning I saw this article from Jesse Eisinger about Paul Singer and other hedgies paranoid fantasies about encroaching inflation.

His argument can be summed up as: just because we don’t really see inflation it doesn’t mean that the inflation bugs’ paranoia isn’t justified. It’s just that they simply observed that every time Fed gets involved with its monetary policy it ends up inflating some kind of bubble. As an extension of that thought, he argues, all those bank-saving maneuvers and stress-tests were really for the show, to restore public confidence, but really did nothing to improve banks’ balance sheets.

Krugman weighed in on this, of course.

Sorry, but I don’t buy that.

For one thing, if you want to claim that the stress tests were all fake and the banks were truly insolvent, shouldn’t we have seen a reckoning by now? I’d say that in retrospect it’s clear that many assets really were temporarily underpriced thanks to the market panic, and that once the panic subsided the big banks were revealed to be in better shape than many people (including me) believed.

Which really brings entire discussion into the metaphysical. Does something exist if we don’t observe it? Even if you have to contort yourself to find inflation in the Hamptons and in Aspen, it doesn’t mean it exists. Not the way Paul Singer and the hedgies would like it to exist.

They almost remind of people who see Jesus on every piece of toast. They see it because they want to see it.

My Book Is Out Today.

“The American Spellbound” is available in digital and paperback on Amazon.

I wanted to write a brief summary of what this book is about, but it was difficult to nail it down, it has too many themes: the immigrant story, the hard work, the futility of hard work, the death of the American Dream, the hubris of the elites. I covered many of these themes in my blog many times. Somehow I managed to fit it all in a novella.

So it’s not a chick lit, God forbid, not a “women’s fiction” genre.

Here’s one more small passage about poker:

A poker table is a distilled Darwinian preserve. It’s a modern-day Wild West, where a hand can either strike gold or deteriorate into an OK Corral shootout. “The gunfight is in the head, not in the hands,” a gunslinger once said, and he was right. In the long run, the best mind wins, not the hands that have been dealt.

Poker awards us a luxurious clarity. It spares us from misjudging others’ intentions. Everyone at the table has the sole goal of taking our stack. This simple axiom is liberating. It invites us to check our hubris and identity at the door and focus on the game; whether we decide to accept the invitation is up to us. In realm of poker, there are no men, women, straights, gays, Republicans, Democrats, religious, atheists. It’s a free-membership club with no agenda and no tolerance for illusions, biases or morality tales — just the rules, ordained and enforced by the Poker Gods.

The rules are strict but simple: Poker asks, nay, commands all its adherents to cut the bullshit and embrace reality. It will toy with the deluded — those who have everything figured out — with the playful cruelty of a cat toying with a mouse. Bring all of your convictions and credentials, your anger and insecurities to the poker table and the Poker Gods will tease you and mock you and fill you with false hopes and send you to the ATM a few times before releasing you, broke and steaming, at 5am.

Bill Gross’s Come To Jesus Moment.

Bill Gross, the rock-star bond manager of Pimco (and now of Janus Capital), whom I frequently criticized on my blog for being wrong on Treasuries and the Fed, does a complete 180 in his recent letter to investors.

In short, after he dispenses with philosophical ruminations, he comes to conclusion that monetary policy isn’t evil. It simply isn’t enough to get us out of subpar growth and should be combined with fiscal policy (you know, like, spending by the government).

The real economy needs money printing, yes, but money spending more so, and that must come from the fiscal side – from the dreaded government side – where deficits are anathema and balanced budgets are increasingly in vogue.

Wow.

Book Excerpt # 3

Note: I make a ton of pop-culture references in the book. Led Zeppelin makes several appearances. Vika is a big fan.

Vika looked for thrills by traveling to exotic destinations during her mandatory two-week vacations.[1] While traveling through Cambodia and Vietnam, Vika, wearing white silk pants and Tod’s moccasins she purchased for $400 during the layover in Hong Kong, fancied herself to be a sort of female Captain Willard. Locals didn’t cooperate. On a boat tour of the Mekong Delta, she tried to entertain her local guide and a couple of hippie German tourists by quoting Apocalypse Now, only to be met with blank stares.

“Charlie don’t surf,” she said in frustration, as no one around seemed to appreciate her wit.

“Who is Charlie?” her confused guide inquired.

On a tour through Scottish castles, Vika’s plans to enjoy the pastoral scenery and contemplate on medieval culture and epic battles by listening to the Lord of The Rings soundtrack were ruined by her accompanying girlfriends, who insisted on playing Russian pop songs nonstop in the car. She attempted to deal with this grating dichotomy by enlightening them on the narrative and significance of the book, its powerful allegories, and how it’s not about elves and orcs at all. Despite her best rhetorical efforts, her words didn’t have the desired effect.

“They just walk and fight, walk and fight. Where’s the sex? And maybe shit wouldn’t get out of hand if they all just stayed home,” was the overwhelming verdict.

She eventually managed to talk her girlfriends into letting her play the “Battle of Evermore.”[2] “A good gateway drug,” she thought of her choice. Given the chance and hoping for greater effect, Vika sang along — about the Queen of Light and the Dark Lord  — missing the notes, but compensating for it in passion. Still, she failed to generate any interest, just a lot of giggles.

“Let’s find Vika some nice Scottish goblin for tonight,” someone suggested. “Let them play Mordor!” Everyone burst into cackle.

“Fuck you guys!” Vika gave up. “I should have just brought my headphones,” she brooded.

[1] A trader must take an uninterrupted two-week vacation once a year for compliance purposes.

[2] A Led Zeppelin song from album IV that makes references to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.