Douglas Martin

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“Millionaires Don’t Hire Astrologers. Billionaires Do.”

October 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Using information gained through astrology, tarot cards and hypnosis is probably only a marginally dumber way to play financial markets than by employing sober study and analysis. You could wind up in a barrel supported by suspenders either way. About two decades ago, all manner of hoodoo was apparently welcomed by those looking to make a killing in the market. The opening of Douglas Martin’s 1994 New York Times article about New Age coming Wall Street:

WALL STREET has traditionally been home to bulls and bears. But lately, more extraordinary beings are finding their way to the trading rooms and executive suites of the city’s financial community. These are the psychics, hypnotists and astrologers who bring an extra dimension to the already arcane science of investing money.

Call it a foolish fad, but believers claim that billions of dollars are managed by people who consult planetary movements in advance; and some 27.5 million Americans review the stars to make decisions, according to a 1990 Gallup poll. No one has calculated how many do so for investments, but a mini-industry has emerged around New-Age Wall Street. Consider: A hotel near the stock exchanges is offering a new guest service, a tarot card reader. At the Wall Street Hypnosis Center, 165 William Street, a dozen or so traders visit monthly to keep their unconscious minds honed for split-second decisions. And at the New York Astrology Center, Eighth Avenue at 37th Street, computers and stars are used for investment advice.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, while hardly endorsing metaphysics, finds nothing intrinsically wrong with such unorthodox means of analysis, if fully disclosed, says Michael Jones, a spokesman.

As J. P. Morgan once intoned: “Millionaires don’t hire astrologers. Billionaires do.”

You . . . Are . . . Getting . . . Richer

The hypnotist’s words flow like a stream, as New-Age music fills the book-lined room. “You’re comfortably embraced by the clouds, floating and drifting, floating and drifting,” Ruth Roosevelt purrs. “You get a perspective up here. You see opportunities you didn’t realize you had.”

Ms. Roosevelt, founder of the Wall Street Hypnosis Center, helps clients quit smoking, lose weight — and make investment choices.

She continues: “Perhaps you see a trading pattern that needs to be changed.”

She suggests to her client, Damon Vickers, chief equity strategist for Equigrowth Advisors, an investment company with $15 million under management, that he may find solutions in his subconscious. She says a new hedge fund he is establishing will be doing gangbuster business in a year’s time.

“You’ve been making the money, because you’ve been disciplined,” she says, seeking to underline one of his main trading goals. “You’ve reined in your emotions, so you have clarity of thought and purpose.”

Ms. Roosevelt, who charges $100 an hour, began her practice two years ago, after a long career as a trader, most recently at Prudential Securities, where she was a vice president. She switched to hypnosis, she says, because of a fascination with the mind.

“There is very little I don’t know about the emotions a trader can have,” said Ms. Roosevelt, who studied hypnosis at, among other places, the New York Training Institute for Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Ms. Roosevelt sees trading as akin to primitive humans dealing with physically dangerous situations. “At the moment of truth, is it fight or flight, attraction or retrenchment, fear or greed?” she asked. The goal is to bring control and composure to an overpowering situation. This comes from the unconscious, she says.

In practice, this means some traders have to learn to curb their urge to gamble, and let profits run. Others have to pull the trigger and take a sensible risk. Some have developed an aversion to picking up a phone and need to regress to earlier situations — say, calling a girl (or a boy) for a date.

“The trance enhances their power,” she said. “It will enable them to have greater control over themselves or other people.”

To outsiders, it can seem a lot like losing control. Mr. Vickers thinks the benefits are such that he doesn’t care if his customers know about his hypnosis. “If it bothers people, I don’t want them as customers,” he said. “I can’t be anybody but myself.” More Towels? Tarot?

Barrie L. Dolnick is the resident conjurer at the glossy Millenium Hotel at 55 Church Street. Just call the concierge and Ms. Dolnick, a 33-year-old former advertising executive in London and New York, will appear with tarot cards, charms and astrological charts.

Ms. Dolnick turned to conjuring full time because it had already proved profitable part time. At a rate of $100 an hour, she sees more than 200 regular clients in her Union Square office, in addition to those at the Millenium.•

 

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“Mr. Freberg Was A Hard Man To Pin Down”

April 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Stan Freberg, a household name for several decades in America, just passed away. He defied easy categorization, doing many things–satire, records, voice acting, radio, etc.–but was probably best at being an adman, lending the form a wryness and angst it hadn’t previously enjoyed. He was sort of the Philip Roth of the 30-second spot. Or maybe Joseph Heller? From his NYT obituary by Douglas Martin:

Mr. Freberg was a hard man to pin down. He made hit comedy records, voiced hundreds of cartoon characters and succeeded Jack Benny in one of radio’s most prestigious time slots. He called himself a “guerrilla satirist,” using humor as a barbed weapon to take on issues ranging from the commercialization of Christmas to the hypocrisy of liberals.

“Let’s give in and do the brotherhood bit,/Just make sure we don’t make a habit of it,” he sang in “Take an Indian to Lunch,” a song on the 1961 album “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America,” a history lesson in songs and sketches. Time magazine said it may have been the “finest comedy album ever recorded.”

His radio sketches for CBS in 1957 included some of the earliest put-downs of political correctness (before that idea had a name). One sketch entailed a confrontation with a fictional network censor, Mr. Tweedlie, who insisted that Mr. Freberg change the lyrics of “Ol’ Man River,” starting with the title. He wanted it renamed “Elderly Man River.”

Mr. Freberg made his most lasting impact in advertising, a field he entered because he considered most commercials moronic. Usually working as a creative consultant to large agencies, he shattered Madison Avenue conventions. He once produced a musical commercial nearly six minutes long to explain why his client, Butternut Coffee, lagged behind its competitors by five years in developing instant brew.

His subversive but oddly effective approach caused Advertising Age to call him the father of the funny commercial and one of the 20th century’s most influential admen.•

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With Dick Cavett, giving the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi a deserved roasting.

A vintage Freberg Cheerios commercial, which was very offbeat for the time.

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“Today, A Vision Has Gripped Him, And He Begins Scribbling Furiously On A Yellow Legal Pad With A No. 2 Pencil”

December 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ralph H. Baer, who just passed away, began dreaming of designing games for TV sets in 1951, but it wasn’t until 15 years later that he started to fully flesh out the idea, eventually creating the first home video-game system, the Odyssey. From his New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin:

Flash back to the sultry late summer of 1966: Mr. Baer is sitting on a step outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan waiting for a colleague. By profession, he is an engineer overseeing 500 employees at a military contractor. Today, a vision has gripped him, and he begins scribbling furiously on a yellow legal pad with a No. 2 pencil.

The result was a detailed four-page outline for a “game box” that would allow people to play board, action, sports and other games on almost any American television set. An intrigued boss gave him $2,000 for research and $500 for materials and assigned two men to work with him. For all three, as they plowed through prototype after prototype in a secret workshop, the project became an obsession.

In March 1971, Mr. Baer and his employer, Sanders Associates in Nashua, N.H., filed for the first video game patent, which was granted in April 1973 as Patent No. 3,728,480. It made an extraordinarily large claim to a legal monopoly for any product that included a domestic television with circuits capable of producing and controlling dots on a screen.

Sanders Associates licensed its system to Magnavox, which began selling it as Odyssey in the summer of 1972 as the first home video game console. It sold 130,000 units the first year.

Odyssey consisted of a master control unit containing all the electronic gear, two player control units that directed players on the TV screen, and a set of electronic program cards, each of which supported a different game. Plastic overlays that clung to the screen to supply color were included. To supplement the electronic action, a deck of playing cards, poker chips and a pair of dice were included.

But the guts of the device were what mattered: 40 transistors and 40 diodes. That hardware ran everything. Odyssey, often called the first home computing device, had no software.

Several months after Odyssey hit the market, Atari came out with the first arcade video game, Pong. Though Pong became better known than Odyssey and was in some ways more agile, Sanders and Magnavox immediately saw it as an infringement on their patent.•

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“[Miss Quigley] Had Made Her Celestial Recommendations Through Phone Calls To The First Lady, Nancy Reagan”

October 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Astrology is complete bullshit, and the leader of the free world being governed by it, as President Reagan was, is a scary thing, though, luckily, those dice rolled well for international relations. The opening of Douglas Martin’s New York Times obituary of Joan Quigley, stargazer to the Reagan White House:

In his 1988 memoir, Donald T. Regan, a former chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan, revealed what he called the administration’s “most closely guarded secret.”

He said an astrologer had set the time for summit meetings, presidential debates, Reagan’s 1985 cancer surgery, State of the Union addresses and much more. Without an O.K. from the astrologer, he said, Air Force One did not take off.

The astrologer, whose name Mr. Regan did not know when he wrote the book, was Joan Quigley. She died on Tuesday at 87 at her home in San Francisco, her sister and only immediate survivor, Ruth Quigley, said.

Mr. Regan said that Miss Quigley — a Vassar-educated socialite who preferred the honorific Miss to Ms. (she never married) — had made her celestial recommendations through phone calls to the first lady, Nancy Reagan, often two or three a day. Mrs. Reagan, he said, set up private lines for her at the White House and at the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Further, Mrs. Reagan paid the astrologer a retainer of $3,000 a month, wrote Mr. Regan, who had also been a Treasury secretary under Reagan and the chief executive of Merrill Lynch.

“Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise,” he wrote in the memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington.

In an interview with CBS Evening News in 1989, after Reagan left office, Miss Quigley said that after reading the horoscope of the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, she concluded that he was intelligent and open to new ideas and persuaded Mrs. Reagan to press her husband to abandon his view of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’ Arms control treaties followed.•

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“The Farm Sprang In Part From Spiritual Revelations He Had Experienced While Using LSD”

July 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Utopian communes usually go wrong, wronger or wrongest, but The Farm, a hippie collective in Tennessee founded 43 years ago by ex-marine Stephen Gaskin, who just passed away, came to no horrible conclusion. The opening of his New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin:

“Stephen Gaskin, a Marine combat veteran and hippie guru who in 1971 led around 300 followers in a caravan of psychedelically painted school buses from San Francisco to Tennessee to start the Farm, a commune that has outlived most of its countercultural counterparts while spreading good works from Guatemala to the South Bronx, died on Tuesday at his home on the commune, in Summertown, Tenn. He was 79.

Leigh Kahan, a family spokesman, confirmed the death without giving a specific cause.

By Mr. Gaskin’s account, the Farm sprang in part from spiritual revelations he had experienced while using LSD, the details of which he described to thousands of disciples, who gathered in halls around San Francisco to hear his meditations on Buddhism, Jesus and whatever else entered his mind.

But to his followers, he ultimately offered more than spiritual guidance. In founding the Farm, they said, he gave concrete form to the human longing for togetherness coupled with individual expression that had energized the counterculture.”

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“The Prince Once Described Himself As ‘A Combination Of Bank Manager, Psychiatrist And Nanny'”

May 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein, the money manager who made those three-chord wonders, the Rolling Stones, into multi-millionaires, just passed away. Unsurprisingly, his life was colorful. From his New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin:

“On the most prosaic level, Prince Loewenstein got the group to stop accepting paper bags full of cash as payment. On the grand scale, he led in planning a tour — its biggest at the time — to coincide with the release of the Steel Wheels album in 1989. The tour grossed $260 million worldwide and represented a patching up of the strained relationship between Mick Jagger and Mr. Richards.

The prince once described himself as ‘a combination of bank manager, psychiatrist and nanny.’ He helped Mr. Jagger negotiate his divorce from Bianca Jagger in 1978 and his estrangement from Jerry Hall in 1999.

When Mr. Richards was arrested on heroin-trafficking charges in Toronto in 1977, Prince Loewenstein showed the extent of Mr. Richards’s casual spending — $350,000 in the previous year — as evidence that Mr. Richards was wealthy enough not to have to commit crimes to feed a heroin habit. The charge was reduced to ‘simple possession of heroin.’

Rupert Louis Ferdinand Frederick Constantine Lofredo Leopold Herbert Maximilian Hubert John Henry du Loewenstein was born on Aug. 24, 1933, into Bavarian royalty on the Spanish island of Majorca. An ancestor helped repel the Huns in 907.”

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“Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste”:

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“I’ve Lost Touch With The World”

May 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Videos | Permalink

The final vignette from Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, which features Lower East Side staple Taylor Mead, who passed away on Wednesday. He acted in numerous Andy Warhol films, but let’s not hold that against him.

From Mead’s obituary by Douglas Martin in the New York Times: “It was as an actor in what was called the New American Cinema in the 1960s that he made his biggest mark. Warhol recruited him as one of his first ‘superstars,’ and from 1963 to 1968 he made 11 films with Mr. Mead. In all, Mr. Mead figured that he had made about 130 movies, many of them so spontaneous that they involved only one take.

The film critic J. Hoberman called Mr. Mead ‘the first underground movie star.’ The film historian P. Adams Sitney called one of Mr. Mead’s earliest films, The Flower Thief (1960), ‘the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema.’

The Flower Thief, directed by Ron Rice, stars Mr. Mead as a bedraggled mystic wandering the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco with open-mouthed wonder. He carries with him his three prized possessions: a stolen gardenia, an American flag and a teddy bear.

It goes almost without saying that Mr. Mead was playing himself, as Susan Sontag observed in Partisan Review. ‘The source of his art is the deepest and purest of all: he just gives himself, wholly and without reserve, to some bizarre autistic fantasy,’ she wrote. ‘Nothing is more attractive in a person, but it is extremely rare after the age of 4.'”

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