Monthly Archives: November 2013

Oy vey!

A precious moment.

Date: November, 2013
Place: The CJM on Mission Street, SF
Modus operandi: Stroke of luck
Weather: SF afternoon sun
Gear: Panasonic GX7, 14-45mm kit zoom
GPS: Click the image
Me: Loking forward to a pastrami on rye at Wise Bros Deli in the CJM
My age: 61

When she was alive, my mother (1915 – 2003) never hesitated to remind me that I was the outcome of 15 centuries of documented Christianity, documents which sadly went up in the inferno we know as Blitzkrieg.

Yet, as a former denizen of that most anti-Semitic of nations – Poland – she never hesitated to inculcate in me a deep admiration of Jews. As a child I thought nothing of this. What child cares about ethnicity, after all? Then as I made my way in the business world in New York and most especially at Salomon Brothers, the genius of her insight was made clear. How could one not hew to a nation so disproportinately represented in the worlds of art, music, finance and science? Oy vey, and in economics and psychoanalysis.

Snapped, appropriately enough, outside San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, an exemplar of art and culture in that most cultured of American cities, San Francisco.

Panny GX7, kit zoom, magic light courtesy of the City by the Bay.


“Oy Vey” Traffic Sign on the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn, NY.

Macy’s parade

Flashback to 1983.

Snapped thirty years ago on Thanksgiving Day, Central Park West, New York City:


Pentax Me Super, 28mm Takumar, Kodachrome.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Today’s New York Times:

There is but one prevailing emotion when you are there, wondering whether hypothermia will end it all, and that thought is “Why am I not in California?”

Municipal Corruption

Institutionalized.

Procurement corruption in government takes various guises.

In Russia, it’s dead simple. You either buy the new paving materials from my brother or I put a bullet in your head.

In India, I slip you a few rupees and you buy from my brother.

But in the SF Bay peninsula it’s both institutionalized and sophisticated. I get on the city council, I pack it with cronies and we approve a $16 million repaving project for three blocks of Burlingame Avenue without putting the thing to a vote. And my brother still gets the contract. All the street improvement projects in my town are awarded to but one lead general contractor, which is hardly surprising.

Further, the paving contract, in all its magnificent corruption, halves the number of parking places in the city’s richest shopping area by changing from diagonal to parallel parking and even the parking spaces are covered with six inches of the finest marble. We are told on the many placards surrounding this abomination, which has snarled traffic for over a year now and will continue to do so for one more year, that this is all to “improve the shopping experience”. Meanwhile, the money spent could have provided two MacBooks and three iPads to every single student in the city’s public schools – K through 5, Intermediate and High schools.

Looks darned nice though, doesn’t it?


How to slip your brother $16mm.

iPhone5 snap.