Moss Review Part 1: More of Bangkok

Moss Review Part 2: More of Bangkok

CNN; Last week on Israel: Old News

In the last few days there has been some disagreement over how the Israelis regard Obama. People are saying he can't be trusted. Others say they like him. The Israelis thought that the announcement of the 1600 settlement buildings in East Jerusalem being built was bad PR during VP Biden's visit over a week ago. People were writing in, responding to "Cafferty: Time for U.S. to get tougher with Israel?" CNN's Jack Cafferty's blog, expressing negative opinion on the US giving two and a half billion $ a year in aid. In other words, the US should use that money as leverage to make Isael back away from more settlements and ease up on Palestine, specifically with regard to trade restrictions and needed outside aid coming in, and allow Palestinians more self-determination.

Bersani's New Book: Panned

DECONSTRUCTED SELF by Leo Bersani. It's about Flaubert, the author of Madam Bovary. I couldn't finish it, it was so badly written. I expected it to be better, considering Bersani is a friend of David Ferry, a poet who won the National Book Award for his translation of Gilgamesh, a mythological Persian poem, but I found it impossible! I should have known not to trust a man's name that sounds like a spreadable cheese that's not real cheese.

The Impending Greek Default

In the second paragraph of The New York Times article printed Thursday, February 25, 2010 we read a lugubrious reminder, "Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers."

Does this sound familiar? When you buy mortgages that are below prime and they're owned by people who don't have sufficient income, and the price of their houses upon which the mortgage is based goes down, in other words, assets that are not backed up with value--Then people buy these swaps, which is like a form of insurance; but the trouble with these insurance policies is they're not regulated, so whether the insurance companies will actually pay the people who buy the policies is unlikely because they're not regulated by State or Federal Regulatory Agencies. It's like buying health insurance from a company that can't deliver when you get really sick.

Credit-Default swaps are a form of unregulated insurance. People are betting on a negative outcome. If Greece goes down so will the euro--And that's bad for American businessmen--therefore the dollar will go up and that will hurt American Exports, but it may help European Exports.

An earthquake in Chile in 1945; Professario Extrordinario

(The picture above is of David L. Van Vactor, my father, the composer's son) In 1945, during WWII, my grandfather David G. Van Vactor, 1906-1994, was sent to Santiago de Chile and other South American capitals by the US State Department to the National University of Chile ( see, www.rogerrhodesmusic.com/dvv_bio.htm ). He was flown down with a woodwind quintet. They were composers as well as musicians. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, after playing Solemn Variations written by my grandfather, received fourteen curtain calls. He spoke fluent Spanish and very good German and was on the radio there. He gave ten flute recitals of Baroque music and conducted a lot of symphony orchestras. (below is a picture of my grandfather, David G. Van Vactor, the composer)

David G. Van Vactor was repeatedly invited to conduct the symphony orchestra of Chile and had numerous pieces of his own composition played by the orchestra. The Chileans called him the "Professario Extrordinario." He had a significant influence on a lot of younger Chilean composers whose pieces he critiqued and discussed with them. My grandfather's great friend Domingo Santa Cruz ran all the music in Chile, and he was also a composer. When I say, all the music in Chile, I mean the opera, symphony and orchestra and the music department in the university.

In Chile my grandfather went to the top, the furthest north called la Serena and then to the furthest south called Puerto Mont and he also conducted a piece in La Concepcion, which is 70 miles away from where the epicenter of this most recent earthquake struck. A lot of Germans settled in la Concepcion, so my grandfather who spoke German could speak German to the orchestra.

When my father was seven years old with his older sister in a movie theatre watching King Kong in Chile, having been just dropped off by his parents, the movie screen moved suddenly, he said to me today, "we thought it was part of the movie. And then everybody in the theatre started to get out, to be ready to run out in case the building collapsed, but it didn't." This earthquake in 1945 was pretty tame in comparison to more recent ones. The really big one was in 1960, 9.5 on the Richter Scale.