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The Blog : July 2008

The Wrecking Crew at IFC this Friday
Wednesday, July 30, 2008 - 6:54am

Last night I finally started reading Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, by Peter Ames Carlin. After reading a section about Brian's adoration of Phil Spector in the early 1960s, I started thinking about the group of session musicians Spector used on many of his recordings. Known collectively as "The Wrecking Crew," these professional players turned up on many of the biggest hits of the sixties for a wide array of artists, including The Beach Boys. (In fact, they were the studio musician's for the 1966 BB masterpiece Pet Sounds.)

With my curiosity piqued, I began to wonder whether there were any books or movies out there that would tell the Wrecking Crew's story, even telling M. that I wished there was a documentary about the group, something like Standing in the Shadows of Motown, the 2002 film about the Funk Brothers, a group of Detroit musicians who played on numerous Motown hits.

I kept reading the Brian Wilson book, all the while thinking about the need for a Wrecking Crew documentary, even being so bold as to think that if there was nothing suitable out there, perhaps I should look into making the documentary myself (because, you know, I have SO MUCH filmmaking experience!).

After I put my book down and started getting ready for bed, I did a quick Google search to see if such a documentary already exists.

It does.

Not only does the film exist, but it starts THIS FRIDAY at the IFC Center in Manhattan. This freakin' Friday. Two days from now. What are the odds?

The movie is titled, fittingly, The Wrecking Crew and was directed by Denny Tedesco, son of Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco.

Anyway, looks I'll be in NYC this weekend if anyone wants to join me.

Documentary, Movies, Music, Phil Spector, Pop, The Wrecking Crew
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The Smartest Guys in the Room
Monday, July 28, 2008 - 1:35pm

The Smartest Guys in the RoomIn a different year, I never would have finished this book.

I have a long sordid history of not finishing books. It's not uncommon for me to start and stop reading 9 or 10 books over several months before something finally clicks and I finish a book. Even during my more prolific reading years in my teens and early 20's, I still suffered from a sort of literary ADD that made me put down a lot of books after only 20 or so pages.

Well, maybe I've turned a corner of some sort because last night I finished The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, one of the slowest reads I have ever experienced.

I know very little about management, investment and corporations. I know even less about accounting. For this reason, The Smartest Guys in the Room was a very difficult book to read. But that shouldn't detract from the book's quality at all. Indeed, it is a high compliment. This is a remarkably written and researched book that actually managed to get me to understand quite a bit of what happened at Enron.

The events that transpired at Enron were far more the result of incompetence than malice. Sure, the finance people were plenty malicious, but had higher ups like Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling had the slightest interest in running a company's day to day operations, the financial shenanigans would never have have gotten off the ground. Skilling, meanwhile, made ridiculous promises to investors about Enron's growth and earnings that all but required the accountants to lie at every turn. In truth, the only people at Enron who seemed to be halfway good at what they were doing were the ones intentionally breaking the law (most notably CFO Andy Fastow). And there actually weren't that many of them. Everyone else was just willfully blind or painfully stupid. (Skilling does, however, deserve a substantial amount of blame for moving Enron from a stable asset-based company to an illusory one built on high-risk energy trading and dealmaking.)

Highly recommended.

52B/52W Progress: 8 down, 44 to go.

Currently Reading: TBD

Books, Enron
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Book 7
Thursday, July 17, 2008 - 8:14am

A Firing OffenseI finished my 7th book of the year a little over a week ago: A Firing Offense, by George Pelecanos.

I decided to read something by Pelecanos because of his connection to the television series "The Wire." (Pelecanos was a writer on the show.) A Firing Offense is his debut novel, and the first entry in Pelecanos' Nick Stefanos series of books.

I definitely didn't love this book. The plot was extremely thin, centering on Stefanos' search for a missing teen. However, Pelecanos spent far more time describing the seedy beer-soaked world in which his characters live than on the story at hand. Thanks to Stefanos' sometimes endless hours at his day job, a consumer electronics store, I now know a great deal about the deceptive methods employed by such stores to extract as much money as possible from each customer. Sadly, I now know very little about finding a missing person.

Given that this was Pelecanos' first novel and that he has built quite a reputation in the years since, I suspect I'll find his later novels more impressive than this one.

52B/52W Progress: 7 down, 45 to go.

Currently Reading: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Books
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Off to AALL at PDX
Thursday, July 10, 2008 - 12:53pm

Tomorrow morning I'll be in the air headed to Portland, Oregon, for the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries. I'm excited to be returning to AALL following a ridiculous budgeting kerfuffle by my former employer a year ago that caused me to throw my hands in the air and say, "Screw you, guys! I'm going home."

Things have been much smoother this year. So smooth, in fact, that I got a complimentary upgrade to first class for tomorrow's flight. Nice. (Sounds like a good time to catch up on the Lullabot and Acquia podcasts.)

There's a lot to look forward to. On Saturday evening I'm going to dinner with several colleagues (including Portland's funniest law librarian, Rob Truman) at Andina with several colleagues, then when the conference officially starts on Sunday I have David Pogue's keynote and the bloggers' meetup to keep me busy. Monday brings a CS-SIS roundtable, two CS-SIS hot topics, the Indiana University (see you there, fellow Hoosiers!) reception, and of course the infamous West party. On Tuesday I'll be up bright and early for the CS-SIS breakfast and business meeting (though due to a registration error there'll be no breakfast for me). If that's not enough to keep me busy, I think there's an educational program going on, too. (Perhaps I should look at the program sometime.)

One of the great things about AALL is that it recharges my librarian spirit and makes me want to be excellent at what I do. It's a great feeling. I also get to see a lot of people I rarely communicate with outside of email, IM, and Twitter. Heck, I'll probably be meeting a couple of them in person for the first time.

I doubt I'll ever match the exhaustive (and exhausting) coverage I gave to the 2006 meeting over on Library Laws, but hopefully I'll be able to give people a taste of what's going via Twitter, flickr and this blog. (Look for the "official" conference tag: aall2008.) See you in Portland!

AALL, aall2008, Conferences, Law, Library
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How a messy Wal-Mart satisfies customers
Tuesday, July 8, 2008 - 9:51am

On a recent trip to Wal-Mart, we were treated to the store's usual array of messiness: dirty floors, open packages and poorly retaped packaging from returned merchandise, misplaced merchandise, and generally uncontrolled dingy clutter. This seems to be the case at every Wal-Mart location in the country -- except the brand new ones. When a new location first opens its doors, it is always a sparklingly clean example of retail efficiency. Not only is the store pristine, but every single one of those 30+ checkout lanes is open for business. Come back six months later, however, and you'll find a dumpy, dirty store standing in its place. By then, the corporate gods of cleanliness -- and the people who man those extra cash registers -- will have moved on to another new location (or as is more likely these days, a newly refurbished location).

So I wondered, how does Wal-Mart get away with this in city after city, neighborhood after neighborhood? The obvious answer is price. With the country in the midst of a full scale recession, low price is big motivator for customers.

But I think there's more to it than just that. I recently listened to audio version of Super Crunchers, a book by Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres that discusses the growing use of statistical analysis of datasets to make more precise business decisons. One example Prof. Ayres outlines in the book involves an airline that tests three separate strategies on customers who had a triggering negative event (e.g., a cancelled flight) during their travel with the airline. The first group received nothing, the second group received a letter of apology, and the third group received a letter and a trial membership in the airline club. Members of the second group were far more likely than those in the first to book future travel with the same airline even though they received nothing more than a form apology. As for the third group, about a third of those actually renewed their club membership when their trial expired, meaning the scheme actually resulted in additional revenue for the airline -- from customers who had a negative experience with the airline, no less!

So how does this play into Wal-Mart and its messy stores? Well, at the checkout counter these days there is usually a question displayed for customers on the credit/debit card machine: "Was your store clean today?" Whether Wal-Mart actually uses the responses to adjust its store cleaning strategy is anybody's guess, though surely the higher ups are aware of the cleanliness problem in many of their stores and this is a clever way to pinpoint problem locations. But what this question definitely achieves is giving the customer the satisfaction of providing feedback. Thus, if I am appalled by the messiness of the store on a given day, I can angrily select "No." This will probably make me feel a lot better because Wal-Mart actually provided me with an opportunity to vent my frustrations. Better yet, I am able to do so in a non-confrontational way. As a result, I leave the store more satisfied with my shopping experience and am more likely to return.

Of course, as Wal-Mart surely knows, I'd be even more satisfied and likely to return if I had selected "Yes."

Shopping, Statistics, Walmart
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