Hip to be poor

I feel like I’ve been waiting for this day all my life…it’s finally hip to be poor. Celebrities, industrialists, investment bankers all feel the sting. Waitresses, lawyers, fishermen, brain surgeons, we all share the same leaking boat now. Almost exactly a year ago, the entire country sat mesmerized before the sight of the stock market in freefall, frozen like deer in the headlights at the sight of our retirement funds, college accounts, life savings, hopes, dreams & reasons for living dissolving into thin air. Hello…Can you say "new reality"? Today you can’t open a magazine or newspaper without being bombarded by inane suggestions on how to save what little money you have left – switch from Starbucks to Dunkin! Shop at Wal-Mart! Buy generic! Olay instead of La Mer! – stratagems with about as much effectiveness as trying to stop an incoming tide with a sieve, and which offer the added stupidity of relying upon the same consumerist paradigm that got us here in the first place - buy this instead of that. Save more by spending…less. Discussion of dwindling finances is the subject du jour in the public forums, and if you want to participate in the conversation, you’d better be prepared to talk poor. It’s the chic thing to be. Poor is the new green. In the red is the new black.

This new hipness takes many forms. Some people are of course really poor. Homeless poor, hungry poor, street person poor. People sleeping on subway grates, wearing plastic garbage bags instead of clothes. Others are newly desperate, the foreclosure & short sale & unemployed poor. Many are recent arrivals to poordom, members of the struggling and debt-ridden middle class. And then of course there are the relatively affluent but still less-rich-than-they-were upper strata. Regardless of where you stand on the scale, you’ve probably had some sort of unpleasant reality to adjust to over the past 12 months. If you’re lucky, you’ve done some thinking as well.

Because that’s the one thing that no one has really been addressing – the thinking that landed us in this mess. Buy-spend-buy-spend-buy-spend…what passes for contemporary American “culture” - and its value system - depends entirely upon consumer spending. It’s the engine that makes our society run. We measure our worth by our net-worth, our success by our financial assets, who we are by what we have. If this recent crisis forces us to do nothing more than examine the structureless underbelly of what we believe, it will have served a useful purpose. Raise your hand if you’ve spent your adult life in the service of a financial lie, presenting a prosperous face to the world, while all the time running as fast as you could to keep up. I know I have. Expensive shoes, jewelry, travel experiences, beauty products. Name brands. Never a dime to my name, little in savings, everything leveraged and borrowed against and perpetually in motion, Peter paying Paul paying Peter. I refinanced my house 3 times in the past 8 years. My current mortgage is now three times what my house’s original asking price was. I am not a stupid person. My IQ is 130. The New York Times is delivered to my door daily. I re-read War & Peace, just for fun, ha ha. But wait a second…if I’m so smart, then how come I’m so poor? And didn’t I KNOW better than to get sucked into the machine? Didn’t I read Thoreau and Emerson in college? Didn’t I swear I’d never adopt the shallow materialist values of my parents? Didn’t I have IDEALS? Didn’t me and my friends who grew up in the sixties utterly reject the whole shallow consumerist paradigm?

The truth is that none of us have escaped it. I doubt anyone in this culture CAN escape it. It’s too pervasive. We can no longer even string together our thoughts in non-economic terms. We are “consumers”. We are “products”, products of our culture and products of our times, flipping through magazines, surfing 150 channels, defining ourselves by the aptly-named “goods” that we buy and the purchases that we make, our $1500 handbags, our $900 shoes, our adjustable rate mortgages. We live it, we breathe it, we dream it. We are it.

Well, now the alarm clock has gone off. And unpleasant shock that it’s been, it feels good to finally be awake again. There’s something bracing about finally facing reality. It’s like I always knew this was going to happen, that my past “success” was a triumph of smoke and mirrors and empty values, that it would all come to an end one day, but now that it has, oddly I don’t feel all that bad about it. I’m still here. So are you. No fear, no regrets. Now move on.

Six degrees of separation

By now most of us are familiar with the “six degrees of separation” concept, the notion that everyone on the planet is pretty much related somehow. You know…Barrack Obama turns out to be related to Thomas Jefferson, George Bush and Vladamir Putin are actually distant cousins, the person sitting at the next desk is descended from the Romonovs, etc. Well something kind of strange happened recently – call it an amazing coincidence of sorts – that started me thinking. What about the six degrees of separation between buildings?

This is what happened. I had a client who was purchasing a house at 28 Channing Street. Right about the same time I got a new listing for a house at 18 Congdon Ave. The two houses are in the same neighborhood, two or three blocks apart, and my buyer actually looked at both houses. So far so good. He put in an offer on the Channing St house, and to his delight, it was accepted. Meanwhile, to my delight, my listing at 18 Congdon was also put under contract. Even better. But this is where it starts to get spooky. My buyer, in his excitement about buying the house on Channing, went over to City Hall and did some research on the property, going all the way back to the moment it was built. And what he found was this: that the person who had built 28 Channing had done so while living at 18 Congdon. The two houses had a six degrees of separation type link and we – my buyer, my seller, and me - were the connective tissue.

Fast forward to later the same week. I was trying to find some background info on Moorland Lodge and kept running into a blank wall. Then I came across an entry for it on the National Register District website, claiming that it had been built by Vera Scott Cushman, heiress to the Chicago department store fortune of Carson Pirie Scott. Now the Carson Pirie Scott building in Chicago is one of THE most famous buildings in the history of American architecture, designed by Louis Sullivan, one of the very first skyscrapers, one of the very first buildings to ever employ a curtain wall, etc. It’s totally landmark, ultra famous with the scholarly set. And then it occurred to me – there was a six degrees of separation thing between the CPS building and Moorland Lodge! They’re relatives – once via Vera Cushman, and once again via me noticing the link. It was incredible. Believing I’d possibly stumbled upon one of the greatest secrets of life ever, I became more and more convinced that there might be an invisible network of relationships connecting seemingly disparate buildings. Could it actually be that a system of secret architectural energetics mysteriously underlay the everyday visible world? If true, I was so THERE…

So I started looking for these connections everywhere. And finding them. I didn’t even have to leave Vera Scott Cushman and Moorland Lodge far behind; it turns out that Cushman went on to live at Avalon out on the Drive, which in turn became the Van Alen estate, which in turn is what swallowed up Wrentham House and put it under a spell for decades…which means that Moorland Lodge & Wrentham House are sort of like distant long-lost cousins, reunited by their present day Lila Delman-client status. Or how about Berry Hill, next door to Moorland Lodge? Prior to being Moorland Lodge, a structure belonging to the Berry Hill estate stood in that location, although whether the earlier building was demolished to make way for Moorland Lodge, or was just radically rebuilt & enlarged is an open question. But either way, it would seem there’s a family connection of sorts.

Postscript. I’d finished writing this blog, but hadn’t yet pulled the photos so I could publish it, when I came across an old 2007 issue of Food & Wine magazine a few weeks ago. It had been floating around the back of my car ever since, and the other evening I finally got around to bringing it inside. I set it down on my kitchen table and casually glanced down at the label on the cover, and what I saw froze my blood. It was addressed to an occupant at 17 Chestnut Street, a house I had just listed two days before.

I rest my case.

Studies in Pessimism

It’s rough out there. Staying positive can present a bit of a challenge these days, especially if you are, like me, of a naturally melancholic bent to begin with. Billion dollar bailouts. Terrorist attacks. Dwindling retirement accounts. Falling home prices. And that’s just out there in the macrocosm. Here in my own personal little microcosm, conditions aren’t a whole lot better. One friend is on the verge of losing her house to foreclosure. A former co-worker from the NYYC committed suicide last month. Evils big and little seem to be multiplying exponentially all around me, like a cartoon snowball careening down a hill, growing huger & more avalanche-like as it picks up speed. Christmas is coming. My bank account never looked worse. My cat is still missing. My 52nd birthday looms. My weight is not what it should be. My houses aren’t selling. Another turn of the snowball. Add some self-doubt to the equation. What had I accomplished with my life? My achievements felt, well…small, my contributions paltry, my significance negligible. The upbeat approach was fast becoming a thing of the past, a speck in the distance.

So there was nothing else for it - it was time for a trip to the bookstore. When my internal settings need adjusting, only a bookstore can fix me. A conflicted agnostic, I don’t have a church. A therapy drop-out, I don’t have a therapist. I do, however, have a bookstore right down the street. So it was there I turned my trudging steps towards.

It’s been a bad decade for bookstores on the island, and the Newport ones have been steadily disappearing ever since the Barnes & Noble opened in Middletown several years ago. The sole exception has been Kelley’s Books, on the corner of Broadway and Malbone. A used bookstore on a busy street without so much as a parking lot, Kelley’s is an unlikely candidate for role of sole survivor, but there you have it. Used books, bent covers, poor overhead lighting. No lattes are served, no fresh mozzarella & pesto panini are available, no cds or greeting cards or magazines are sold. The inventory isn’t computerized, the proprietor tracks his customers on hand printed index cards he keeps in a dented metal box under the register and the background music isn’t even Muzak – there’s just a staticky radio tuned to a classical music FM station. Kelley’s is an un-hip throwback to a time when the only reason you went to a bookstore was to look for books, period. Even better, since it’s a used bookstore, your finds are pretty much dictated by chance and serendipity. Any pre-planned agenda is pointless; the only way to go is to abdicate all pretense at control and just browse, drift with the tides. And maybe it is precisely this not having to be in mental control that is the sweet secret reward of a visit to the bookstore. What a relief to not have to be responsible for your own consciousness, even just temporarily… In fact, now that I think about it, it’s probably safe to say that just about all of my vices tend in that direction. Farewell, self!

But back to the books. Instead of finding what you’re looking for, you’ll find what you weren’t looking for, and sometimes what you didn’t even know existed. Did I need a book on three modern Icelandic poets? I didn’t even know Iceland had any modern poets. Did I walk in there in search of yet another copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson? Nah. Did I have any intention of settling down with a good re-read of Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism? Nope. But no way could I resist the gloriously self-pitying melodrama of his opening line, to wit, “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” Bitter words, fighting words, succinctly if mordantly put, and so completely over the top that I burst out laughing, right there in the aisle.

So if you’re feeling the pain of the season, I suggest you hie yourself over to Kelley’s for a dose of righteous attitude readjustment. Forget real estate. Forget the economy. Forget your mortgage and your car payment and your tax problems. Lose yourself in the stacks. Flip through an art book. Check out the science fiction. Pull out that classic you’ve always been meaning to read. You’ll be chuckling along with Schopenhauer in no time.

10 Signs of Fall in Newport

In addition to the crisp, clear weather and a bit of foliage, there are more things that signal the end of summer and the beginning of a new season in Newport.

1. Less boats and more empty docks and moorings every day

2. The festival/concert tent at the Newport Yachting Center disappears and the Ice Skating Rink returns

3. PARKING! – no more sticker parking and no more meters

4. the lifeguard stands at the beach disappear

5. the roses have a second (third or fourth if you have the right kind) bloom that surprises even those who enjoy it every year

6. the summer college kids are replaced with school year college students

7. visitors who arrive on the cruise ships enjoy our scenery and history with less crowded streets and shops

8. the big yachts are at Newport Shipyard preparing for their sail south

9. the cannons at the 3 yacht clubs, which signal the flags going up at 8am and down at sunset, go silent

10. ??? any suggestions for #10?

The grammar of money

That $700 billion dollar bailout… the first question everyone wants to know is, “will it work?” Actually, that’s probably really only the second or third question. For just about all of us, the number #1 question is, “what should I do with MY money?” At least that’s the question that’s been on my mind these days. To all of you who’ve been asking the same thing, I have only one suggestion to make: Spend it. And hurry. What are you waiting for?

I went out and bought a ruby ring last week. Heck, why not? My 401K lost $6000 in a single day last week – what am I hanging on to the money for? Six thousand dollars. I could have gone to Europe, gotten a face lift, put a flat screen TV in every room of my house, bought Manolos & Jimmy Choos & Louis Vuitton handbags. I could have gotten a dozen Botox treatments. I could have put down the money on a BMW, like all the rest of you realtors are driving, and scrapped the whole dinged-up Toyota Echo aesthetic. But no. I had to “save” it. I had to “invest” it. I thought I could make my money “work” for me. The mistake was mine. I believed that money could act like a verb. It can’t. Money is a noun, and nouns are what it does best. Real estate. Jewels. Cars. Vacations. Treat it like a concept & it’ll act like a concept, shifting ephemerally with every breeze. Treat it like the material object that it is, and it’ll reward you with other material objects. Concrete things. Solid, tangible pieces of actual reality. It’s simple, really.

So go out and buy that big house. Test drive that brand-new car. Speak to me, Harry Winston. Because I’ve learned my lesson, and learned it the good old-fashioned hard way. You CAN’T take it with you. And what a relief, at long last to finally be able to stop trying.

Got lunch?

Ever wonder where to go to lunch when you're in Newport? Look no further than Pasta Beach, right next door to the Lila Delman office on Memorial Blvd. They have the best pizza this side of Rome - in fact, it might even be better!

When I went to Rome two years ago, I stayed in the "Centro Storico"(literally means the historic center), just two doors away from Bafetto's, arguably the most celebrated pizzeria in the city. Since my companion and I had a thirteen-year old in tow, we ate there virtually every night.


What makes for great Roman pizza? A super hot grill, a super thin crust and of course, the freshest of ultra-fresh ingredients. Last week I tried Pasta Beach's proscuitto and arugula pizza, and it actually surpassed anything I can remember tasting across the Atlantic. It was so thin I could practically see through it, and the chef had lightly drizzled it with just a little tomato sauce, some fresh mozzarella, a couple of handfuls of arugula tossed with extra virgin olive oil and aged balsamic vinegar, and then he'd layered every inch of the thing with the thinnest slices of proscuitto di parma imaginable...YUM!!!









So next time you find yourself at the Newport Lila Delman's, shopping for the house of your dreams, be sure to stop in at Pasta Beach. You won't be disappointed!