Hard Times: June 2009 Archives

I was relieved when I read this afternoon that Bernard Madoff received the full sentence requested by lawyers prosecuting his case: 150 years. In contrast, Madoff's lawyer's request for 12 was both a joke and an insult to the people whose lives Madoff all but destroyed.

The presiding judge, Denny Chin, said he wanted to make an example of Madoff and believed that levying the full 150 years would be a deterrent to future white-collar criminals. The Madoff sentence is the third-longest for any white collar crime, according to a compilation by Forbes.

The $65 billion Ponzi scheme that Madoff had constructed since the 1980s was a vast, far-reaching deception. It convinced thousands of people that Madoff was a man with eminent financial savvy, an ability to turn modest wealth into a fortune through wise investments. But all he was really doing was taking the money from new, unsuspecting customers and giving it to older clients to create the illusion of successful returns. It was a gigantic jig-saw puzzle with numerous missing pieces, and eventually the 71-year-old Madoff could no longer keep up the charade.

When he ran out of money last December, and told his kids about the Ponzi scheme, it's doubtful that Madoff thought that in just six months he'd be facing life behind bars. But even if he did suspect this fate, his apology to his victims rings as hollow as the investments he pretended to be making.

During his trial, Madoff turned to his victims and apologized, claiming that he lives in a tormented state for what he's done, and while he knows it won't make any difference, he feels he must say how sorry he is.

Bull. He's not tormented for defrauding his clients; he's tormented because he's been living in a holding cell in Lower Manhattan for nearly four months. If he really feels bad about what he did, he wouldn't have spent 20+ years doing it.

Madoff will most likely be sentenced to a medium-security prison in Upstate New York or New Jersey, to ensure that he is close to his family. Authorities do not intend to sentence him to a maximum-security facility because he is not a violent criminal, but his sentence is also too long for him to be a candidate for a minimum-security prison or a "prison camp" -- a facility in which prisoners are granted maximum freedom and the illusion of being outside through open-air yards with fences instead of walls.

Madoff is likely to find his next job in the kitchen or laundry of his new home, earning no more than 40 cents an hour.

[Image: The AM New York blog]

The Friday before last, I stopped into the Virgin Megastore at Union Square for its final day of business. The shelves were mostly bare, but there were still scads of people combing their contents for great deals on music and movies. I was too depressed to stick around, having already witnessed the closures of my two favorite music stores this year: Kim's Video, on St. Mark's, and Etherea, on Avenue A.

Of course, Kim's didn't close completely -- it reopened a few blocks away -- but in a fraction of the space it had on St. Mark's, and with a fraction of the selection. I suspect it won't be long before it shutters its new doors, too.

With the digitization of music, movies and now books, I fear the worst: a Fahrenheit 451-type scenario, in which future generations may not live without those things, per se, but will never develop a sense of context.

In Ray Bradbury's novel, all books have been destroyed, so a group of elders have each memorized a specific book, and they pass that book on to the next generation in the oral tradition. Thus each person is a repository of one text, but nothing more.

The author himself, now 87 years old, is speaking out to save the public library in Ventura, California, which is in a massive deficit and is likely to follow its for-profit counterparts if something isn't done to save it. But what is the likelihood of that happening? The problems faced by the Ventura library are not unique to that city. Will libraries become the sole province of private universities? And if so, how long will that sustain itself, if the entire book publishing industry falls apart?

There can't be anything to shelve if no one's printing the books.

I began thinking about this months ago, when it became obvious that music and movie collections were fast becoming obsolete. With innovations like the Amazon Kindle, will collections of books -- personal, academic, public -- be next?

[Image: The Bookworm, by Carl Spitzweg]

Do you know Capucine? She's an adorable 4-year-old French girl who tells adorable stories about animals and more. Her videos have been watched by hundreds of thousands -- which gave her and her mother, Anne, an idea.

They have made t-shirts, buttons and magnets featuring drawings by Capucine based on her stories, the proceeds of which are being donated to EduRelief to create "Capucine's Library," a project to help raise literacy rates in Mongolia. The effort has raised nearly $1,500 so far -- chip in yourself and help one adorable little girl help a whole lot of other adorable little children.

David Carr is a media columnist for the New York Times, but he's also a recovering drug addict whose journey to the vaunted offices of the country's largest paper nearly killed him. His memoir, Night of the Gun, recounts the author's long, murky descent into crack and alcohol abuse back in the 1980s, his recovery in the 90s, and his miraculously successful efforts to rebuild a life for himself in the 2000s.

Here Carr talks with Rachel Sklar of the Daily Beast about some of the topics nearest and dearest to him:

In South Bend, Indiana (home of Notre Dame), volunteers at the South Bend Center for the Homeless have been working to address the problem of homelessness through an innovative program that introduces the homeless to the great classics of world literature. Rather than viewing the homeless as people living on the fringe of society, the coordinators of the program -- known as the World Masterpieces Seminar -- awaken in participants a sense of their own value and their unique perspectives on the world. What makes the program so interesting is that the program is taught by two Notre Dame literature professors, Steve Fallon and Clark Power, using the same works and same approaches as they use with their university undergraduate students.

Here, Steve Fallon, professor of English and chair of the Program of Liberal Studies at Notre Dame, explains why his World Masterpieces Seminar program has already achieved such success in South Bend in solving for the problem of homelessness.

AWEARNESS: When most people think of the classics, they think of a very privileged part of society that has been exposed to the great writers like Shakespeare, Homer, Milton and Plato. What was your inspiration for bringing the study of the classics to the homeless population of South Bend?

There are a few urban enclaves in this country that act like magnets for young, hip, artistic sorts who want to pursue their dreams, or simply join the "scene." Every city has a trendy neighborhood, but some require a small fortune to rent an apartment there.

Perhaps no place in America embodies this reality like Willamsburg, Brooklyn, that formerly rag-tag industrial cluster of old factories and dilapidated apartment buildings just across the East River from Manhattan's Lower East Side.

When I first moved to New York, in 1999, Williamsburg was a place where you could find a raw loft for under $1,000 and feel like a pioneer on the new urban frontier. There were a few restaurants and bars, but for the most part, going to Williamsburg felt like going to Philadelphia -- that is, a long way from New York City.

These days Williamsburg is home to scads of twentysomethings who all seem to be in one band or another. And they're as interchangeable as they are numerous: every time I exit the Bedford Avenue station on the L train, I feel like I'm immersed in a grand social experiment, in which the subjects change as frequently as the marquees at the local music venues. Where do all these kids come from, I wonder, and more importantly, where do they all go when their time is up?

The New York Times published an article on Monday about the funding for residents of Williamsburg -- their parents. The article suggests that a great number, if not a majority, of those hipsters are heavily subsidized by moms and dads who've earned enough (by being square, no doubt) to pay their mortgages and their kids' $3,000-per-month rent. But in these dire economic times, the article goes on to say, those pools are rapidly evaporating. Though, most hipsters are loathe to admit they receive any assistance from anyone residing in those godforsaken suburbs.

Suddenly, paying for your 25-year-old child's loft so he or she doesn't have work is starting to seem like a luxury many parents can live without. Meanwhile, their kids will either have to relocate to cheaper digs or figure out pretty fast if they're capable of earning their keep.

I suspect that resume-writing services will be in high demand in the coming months, as well as clothing that fully covers limbs adorned with tattoos.

[Image: Stuffhipstersdon'tlike.com]