Morgan Stanley CEO Calls for More Regulation of Wall St at Vanity Fair-Bloomberg Event

This piece originally appeared on the Front Page of the Huffington Post on November 18 2009.


At a Vanity Fair and Bloomberg event in Manhattan on Wednesday night, audience members were delighted by an impromptu (and slightly coerced) appearance by Morgan Stanley CEO, John Mack, who called for far more stringent policing of Wall Street.

Mack, sitting inconspicuously amongst a crowd of business journos and financiers, was cheekily ambushed by Bloomberg’s Margaret Brennan during the ‘additional questions’ portion of the evening, after a stellar panel of business reporters (and one historian) speculated on the causes of the financial crisis and analyzed how governmental and news institutions have handled the event.

After a quasi-joke that he was hiding from the camera, Mack grudgingly stood up and answered questions from Brennan and the panel. Mack, who will step down as CEO of Morgan Stanley next January, thought press coverage of the crisis had been, “overall, fair,” and honed in on the urgent need for greater regulation of the finance industry.

“Regulators have to be much more involved,” Mack said. “We cannot control ourselves — [regulators] have to step in and control the Street.” He added that some positive changes have been made, pointing to the fact that in the halls of Morgan Stanley, ten or fifteen federal regulators now roam daily.

“I love it,” Mack said. “It forces firms to invest in risk management.”

The ‘Covering the Crisis’ panel consisted of Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough (formerly an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal), Niall Ferguson (a professor of history and business at Harvard and contributing editor for the Financial Times), Bethany McLean (a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the reporter often credited with having brought down Enron) and Andrew Ross Sorkin (the NYT’s chief mergers and acquisitions reporter and columnist). The discussion was moderated by a pithy and tongue-in-cheek Michael Lewis, who left Portfolio in February to join the ranks of Graydon Carter’s mag (the man at the helm of Vanity Fair was in attendance, as was the Bloomberg group’s multimedia CEO, Andrew Lack).

Some highlights from the conversation…

* Lewis: Should Lehman have been allowed to fall? Sorkin ummed and ahhed and then said yes; Ferguson said no; so did Burrough: “Lehman was losable. They were isolatable. You could put them on an island. If you had lost AIG, I’m not sure it was isolatable.”

* Lewis: What caused the crisis? Sorkin said deregulation, monetary policy and leverage; McLean blamed the political emphasis and encouragement of universal homeownership; Ferguson listed all the above and then proclaimed that we have all missed one important factor: China.

* Brennan to Mack on media coverage of Morgan Stanley and the crisis in general: Mack described the coverage as generally fair, but then declared that coverage of the Stanley/Mitsubishi deal was “bullshit.” * Brennan (host of cable TV news show, InBusiness): Did cable news coverage affect the crisis? Sorkin said it may have upped the panic ante, because even neutral, realistic reflection of the panic reverberates and thus intensifies alarm; Burrough was more condemnatory: ” TV journos have too much time to fill. Your job is not to reflect passions, it’s to report facts”; Ferguson argued that major financial meltdowns happened long before cable news.

* Lewis to Sorkin: Is there anything you didn’t uncover in your book? (Sorkin’s new book, Too Big to Fail, looks at the collapse and bailout of Wall Street. Lewis had implied earlier in the evening that Sorkin’s source list and the information he extrapolated during the reportage, was quite impressive): Sorkin said he wished he had access to the confidential notes taken during that 5 hour meeting on what to do about AIG, on that fateful Tuesday last September…

Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi

This film review originally appeared on the Huffington Post, on August 17 2009

As a journalist in Afghanistan, or Pakistan… Or Iraq. Or any other war-ravaged land where you don’t speak the language, let alone the dialect of the region in which you’re expected to unearth and unravel a never-before-told story, there is only one way to get that story: you hire a fixer.

A fixer: translator, shepherd, travel agent, private investigator, Rolodex and secretary, rolled into one for the journalist in a foreign land. To describe these ghostlike figures as indispensable is barely sufficient, since without them, the bylines of many celebrated foreign correspondents and the critical stories they propel back to the West, may cease to exist.

In 2005 and 2006, one of these correspondents, an American named Christian Parenti, filed several reports from Afghanistan for the The Nation. He used a fixer called Ajmal Naqshbandi, a 24-year old cherub-faced Pashtun from Kabul. Parenti left Afghanistan at the end of 2006, and Naqshbandi moved on to another project, this time with veteran Italian radioman, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, sent to cover the war for La Repubblica.

En route to meet with Taliban commanders for an interview in March of 2007, the team is ambushed and kidnapped by a militant group led by Mullah Dadullah — a close aide of Mullah Omar, who was known to boast about his orchestration of various Shia massacres and was once described as “the backbone of the Taliban.” Although Italy secured Mastrogiacomo’s release, Naqshbandi, in a move that sparked outrage across Afghanistan, was beheaded by his captors a few weeks later.

Ian Olds’ Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi is the story of one of the thousands of silhouettes who roam war-zones every day so that we, thousands of miles away, can grasp what is happening on the front-line of wars that affect life on this continent too.

The first time we come face to face with the fixer, he standing at the base of a sandy mountainside in Kandahar, a southern province home to the second largest city in Afghanistan. Parenti is there too, behind the camera. He swings the machine around erratically, before the picture suddenly unblurs and a man comes into focus — his head conspiratorially wrapped in black scarves to reveal only the top third of a wrinkled, umber face. The man dawdles in the sand as he shifts the weight of the rocket launcher hanging from his shoulder, from one side to the other. Then Parenti pans left, and lands on two more Taliban soldiers, their faces also concealed, Kalashnikovs dangling in their hands.

This is Naqshbandi’s life; ferrying one enemy to another on a daily basis, in abandoned buildings and isolated swatches of desert in locations that regularly make headlines as the latest dire front for NATO and American forces. On this occasion, Naqshbandi has managed to arrange a meeting for Parenti with active Taliban fighters. The gun-toting interviewees confirm that Pakistan has been supporting the Afghani insurgency after a series of questions from Parenti, whose voice is filtered then echoed in the local dialect by Naqshbandi.

With his plump cheeks and a smile that is at once mischievous and ingenuous, Olds’ protagonist is instantly beguiling. Perhaps because we know he is destined, unfairly, for such a horrific end, we are quick to take his side.

But Naqshbandi is an enigma, at first innocent and sweet, with each frame his motives are less obivious. In one sequence, Naqshbandi talks with a friend about his work while Parenti and Olds sit obliviously in the back of the car — neither speaks the local language. His friend asks if the reporters will take photos in the village. “If I feel like it I’ll let them,” Naqshbandi says, “Or I’ll just tell them its too dangerous — ‘hide your camera they’ll kill us!’”

Ultimately for Naqshabandi, Parenti is a paycheck — and a meager one at that, complaining that The Nation pays nothings compared to the major papers and broadcasters.

“Money matters,” he tells his friend. “Because these people don’t have friendship. They don’t know anything about it. They know you while you’re working with them, but after that they don’t even recognize you. These people are all the same; European, American, from London, from anywhere.”

In Fixer , the audience is transplanted back and forth from Parenti and Naqshbandi’s experience in 2006 — at times nerve-racking but generally successful from a journalistic point of view — to grainy Taliban footage of their hostages and other military victories. The Taliban footage is one of the most spectacular elements in the film, raw and unnerving, it offers a glimpse into the other side; an eerie glimpse, but an important one. One video shows the gruesome decapitation of Naqshbandi and Mastrogiacomo’s driver, censored to the point that we avoid seeing his head being sawn off, but every other part of the victims body, and his killer’s working arms, are visible as the Taliban’s sentence is carried out.

Old’s own work behind the camera is thoughtful and beautiful, certainly intensified by an elegiac soundtrack designed by Jim Dawson, who worked with the director on his critically acclaimed documentary Occupation: Dreamland, which followed a deployment of American soldiers in Fallujah.

When Old languidly pans across boundless, arid landscapes, it seems amazing that it is this land — a deserted expanse of rock and dust — that torments a military machine backed by billions of dollars and the most sophisticated defense technology in the world.

Perhaps the most tragic layer of Fixer, is the hopeless chaos in which Afghanistan is drowned; a growing insurgency; a flaccid government; a people bereft of trust in its ‘elected’ leaders and repulsed but scared to death of gun-wielding insurgents and regional warlords. And this was in 2006; three years later, the country is mired in a bloody battle exacerbated by a second front in Northern Pakistan, and a heaving insurgency determined to sabotage the impending election.

But this is life in Afghanistan; it has been so for decades. And one of the most amusing moments in Fixer, happens immediately after the Kandahar meeting when Parenti asks Naqshbandi if he’ll tell his fiance about their day’s work. “No, no not at all” he exclaims, “She will kill me.” The angry girlfriend — not the militants — the real danger, Parenti jokes.

Last year, James Nachtwey — arguably the modern-day god(father) of war photography — was bestowed the coveted President’s Award at the Overseas Press Club for the fifth time. He dedicated his prize to the Naqshbandis:

“We all know the value of colleagues who often go unsung — the fixers and translators and drivers who take such great personal risks… to make what we do possible. Whatever abilities we might have, we absolutely need the assistance of people who know the language and the culture and how to navigate hostile terrain. I don’t know how many times I’ve only been as good as my driver. They love their countries. They truly value journalism. When we leave, they stay.”

Indeed, for Naqshbandi, Nachtwey’s words are especially and tragically germane. When we leave, they stay.

Electric Zoo 2009: Electro En Masse, Arrives in NYC

26,000 electronic music fans gathered at Randall’s Island Park over the Labor Day weekend for the inaugural Electric Zoo Music Festival, the first get-together of its kind in New York — a city used to seeing rock and folk bands descend on its various stages for festivals like All Points West (ok, technically it’s in Jersey, but New Yorkers have claimed it as their own) or CMJ Music Marathon (where, allegedly, Coachella booking agents come to scout bands for the next year’s lineup), but a city not familiar with having some of the worlds most famous electronic DJ’s in its realm, all at once.

To continue reading, see the original October 5th article at the Huffington Post…

Nick Hornby and Juliet, Naked

This piece originally appeared in the Books section of the Huffington Post, on October 21 2009.

It begins with a dank, grimy toilet. Well, a camera and a toilet. And of the two people standing beside the stained porcelain, only one of them wants to be there. The woman taking the photograph — she definitely does not. But she’s doing it for the man who is pretending to urinate in the bowl where, allegedly, a cosmic rock and roll event took place twenty-two years earlier.

For the man, this rank lavatory is tantamount to most tourists’ mythic notions of the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building or the Grand Canyon. Duncan did not come to America for the aforementioned sites; he has come only to visit those that are relevant to the life of the 1980s rock-star-turned-recluse, Tucker Crowe. Such locales include recording studios; a childhood home; an ex-girlfriend-cum-muse’s driveway; and this grotty restroom in the Pits Club, Minneapolis.

His latest novel, Juliet, Naked, is another confirmation that Nick Hornby writes misery well — particularly oblivious misery (think Will Freeman in About A Boy).

Duncan is miserable, though he doesn’t realize he is. He avoids it in his Tucker Crowe fixation. Annie, his girlfriend, is also miserable. She is acutely aware of it. She’s childless and bored, and doesn’t even really like Duncan, despite having spent the last 15 years with him.

Then there’s Tucker Crowe. He’s miserable too. Although his six-year old son, Jackson, goes some way to curbing the feelings of deficiency and despair that have come from two decades of not being able to produce an album, let alone one song after the release of his critically acclaimed record, “Juliet”, in the late 1980s. There’s also his four failed marriages, and five illegitimate children. He has one friend. He’s called Fucker.

Nonetheless, despite having gone Howard Hughes for over 20 years, and in fact, kind of because of it, a group of obsessive fans — self-dubbed Crowologists — have managed to find each other on the internet, allowing this washed up musician to be rabidly dissected, every day, by a pathetic virtual assemblage. Duncan is their leader, or thinks he is. So when Annie uploads a review of “Juliet, Naked,” Tucker’s first release in over two decades, which contests Duncan’s own critique, their relationship implodes. Duncan realizes his misery. Annie’s desperation is heightened. And Tucker’s silence is broken; in response to her analysis, Tucker emails Annie.

In Juliet, Naked, music is a central character, as important as the men and women who it brings together and breaks apart. This is no surprise coming from Hornby, for whom music is fundamental; “a kind of fuel,” he says. His most well-known incarnation of this creed, High Fidelity — a comic salute to record store nation and its quirky inhabitants. In this latest offering Hornby goes a little further, examining the relationship between artist and product; artist and fan; and both in the wake of the digital media revolution.

“One of the things I wanted to write about is art and how much it means to people, and the artist’s relationship with his own work and his audience,” Hornby says over the telephone. “And it’s not necessarily just about music; [Juliet] could be could have been about writing too.”

The English author has just completed a grueling two-week tour in which he simultaneously promoted his new book, as well the Sundance multi-award-winner, An Education, which he screen-wrote. In his film review for the New Yorker, David Denby said Hornby’s “dialogue is sharply etched,” and the film’s stars, Peter Sarsgaard and newbie, Carey Mulligan, have garnered impressive reviews.

“[The film] is more and better than what I had in my head,” Hornby says. “The director could imagine and see things I couldn’t. And the cast is just sensational; every single performance is brilliant. They find material in lines that I hadn’t noticed while writing.”

When he answers the phone for our interview, Hornby is in L.A, watching the tail-end of a baseball game. He appreciates the sport, but the love of his life is undoubtedly soccer, and more specifically, Arsenal Football Club. This obsession paid off; his memoir on fandom, Fever Pitch, launched his career (“I was a ten-year overnight success,” he quips) in 1992. The book was adapted into not one, but two films. His other much-loved novels, About A Boy and High Fidelity, were also adapted for the big screen, and Johnny Depp has bought the film rights to his 2005 dark comedy, A Long Way Down.

“The one thing that’s different in the film is that the actors are better looking than the rest of us,” Hornby says drolly. “They can never look like the characters you create in fiction.”

Hornby’s work has been so successful at the box office, that now, long before he finishes his latest travail, movie-makers clamor to plan the cinematic adaptation. Juliet, Naked is no different. During this two-week stay, he has met with many interested parties; “I haven’t sold it… yet,” he says.

I have no doubt that Juliet will be made into a film. It’s full of time-honored Hornby misfits: sad, bewitching and always entertaining — characters that seem born to flit from paper to the silver screen. Duncan is too pathetic; Annie is too deadpan; Tucker is too broodily good-looking (in my imagination at least); and sideline characters, like Annie’s tragic shrink, Malcolm, and Tucker’s embittered love-child, Lizzie, are too hilarious to be left theatrically unrealized.

As for the meta aspect of the novel — the internet and its relationship to art, art makers and art devourers, Hornby is unresolved.

“I think it’s quite an exciting time, if you’re a consumer,” he says. “You have a little box on your desk that contains every piece of recorded music ever made; you can find things you didn’t know existed. But no-one has figured out yet how the artist is going to get paid.”

In his own line of work, Hornby’s royalty statements are yet to be affected, which he attributes to his readers having a strong relationship with the printed page. “But we’re breeding kids who are reading things on screen,” he acknowledges. “I can’t do it myself. I can read a short newspaper piece, but not a whole novel.”

Recently, he was frightened to read about the imminent arrival of the “vook,” a new e-reader that will make the Kindle look like parchment.

“Half video and half book… That, to me, seems like a repulsive idea,” Hornby says. “You’re leading people to a post-literate society; you can see a society where we eventually don’t bother with the written word at all… That’s pretty depressing.”

However, he grants that what matters most are the words themselves, and his children give him hope. “My little one is frighteningly adept with a computer,” he says. “But they’re still literate!”

Our conversation is brought to close when Hornby has to decamp to a final U.S appointment before he flies to Europe for the next grueling leg of his film/book PR tour; he’s off to meet a party interested in turning Juliet into a film.

Despite writing more than a handful of best-sellers, which can now be consumed via paper, film, fiber optic cable or mp3 player, Hornby says the book-writing process doesn’t get any faster or easier: “The only thing I’ve learned, is that I will probably finish it.”

Prom Night in Mississippi

This film review originally appeared on the Huffington Post on the 20th July, 2009.

In 1954, Charleston High School was ordered, like every other school in the country, to desegregate. Integration was instantaneous at some schools, happened a year or two later at others, and then, of course, there were determined stragglers; schools that used the Supreme Court’s 1955 declaration of desegregation at “all deliberate speed” to delay and sometimes avoid integration altogether.

Sixteen years after it was supposed to happen, Charleston High School in Mississippi, finally allowed black students inside its walls.

Of course, Charleston’s dwindling white population, who had fought so hard to stave off integration, managed to hold onto one small piece of Jim Crow: At this southern high school, white students attend one prom; black students attend another.

Lucky for Charleston, superstar Morgan Freeman calls the town of 2,100 home. And this segregated prom thing — it really didn’t sit well with him.

So in 1997 Freeman volunteered to pay for the prom, as long as both black and white students could be in attendance. The offer was declined; the separate proms continued.

In a new documentary, filmmaker Paul Saltzman follows Freeman as he attempts, once more, to coax a revolution. And so Prom Night In Mississippi begins, and we’re seat-side with Freeman as he steers his dust-covered BMW through the asphalted backwaters of the Mississippi Delta, determined to foot the tab for Charleston High’s first integrated senior prom.

“Tradition is one thing,” he tells the superintendent of the East Tallahatchie School District. “Idiocy is another.” This time around, Charleston High accepts Freeman’s offer and Saltzman hurls us into the lives of the senior class as they prepare for what is not just a history-making event in their small town, but another step in the nation’s never-ending quest to achieve racial and civil equality: one made more difficult by the fact that the all-white prom isn’t canceled.

Tallahatchie County is one of the poorest in the United States; more than 34 per cent of Charleston’s inhabitants live below the poverty line. It’s a town steeped in the blood of confederacy slave policy, where the hanging of blacks in the town square was an unexceptional event in the early 1900s. A Mississippi State flag, emblazoned with the symbolism-soaked confederate flag, flanks the ‘Stars and Stripes’ on a flagpole in the center of a town where 60 percent of the inhabitants are black. That percentage is higher at the local high school.

There is something so jarring about a segregated prom in 2008, when the documentary was filmed. It’s not as if we’re unaware that racism still runs rampant in this country — between Sotomayor’s Supreme Courtstill healthy Ku Klux Klan, you can’t avoid it. But there’s something about this bastion of segregation at Charleston High that is so loathsome to watch, and perhaps it has something to do with the innocence-of-youth factor; that basically at the end of the day, these young, hopeful black students are told by a white coterie, “Okay, thanks for coming; it was great going to school with you all these years, but as for celebrating this milestone, we don’t want to share it with you.” hearings and newly published photos of a

Of course there are some white students who refuse to attend the event. Nonetheless, in that one night, the all-white prom diminishes all those Supreme Court decisions; all the sit-ins and demonstrations; the thirty-years of integrated classes at Charleston High. And that makes the pro-integration students not just endearing, but inspirational. They are candid and funny and many risk their family lives and jobs in their march to end segregation here.

But Prom Night misses the voice of the staunchly pro-segregation whites, and it’s those voices we are dying to hear. We hear about their bigotry from their children, and their children’s friends, but Saltzman’s team was forbidden from going anywhere near them or their all-white gatherings as soon as filming commenced. So, the few white parents we meet in Prom Night are not George Wallace incarnates. Not even close. The racism here is far more simplistic than that. As one mother of a white student explains, “My grandmother always told us we were all put on this earth different, and when we all start integrating there’s not going to be anymore individuality… And if that’s the way god wanted us he would have made us all the same to start with.”

Saltzman equipped all of Prom Night’s protagonists — mainly students — with personal video devices in the lead-up to prom, which provide some of the most touching moments in the film, as we share unfiltered, intimate and spontaneous confessions with members of the senior class: they are excited about making history, but nervous about what may transpire on the night.

There is a change in tone when the prom finally arrives. After the screening, a friend described it best when she said, “at some point it stopped being a documentary and started being a feature film.” It doesn’t take away from the message, but I would have liked to see the candid, unidealized texture that characterized the first three quarters of the film, extend until the final frame.

Certainly Prom Night is uplifting, illuminating and enjoyable, enhanced by a thumping R & B/hip hop soundtrack and the unselfconscious musings of the senior class. But how uplifted can you truly be, knowing that the following year, Charleston High School had another all-white prom. Or that Saltzman’s film, far from capturing a dying tradition, taps into a new era of educational segregation in this country, with recent reports that conclude the nation’s schools are more racially segregated now than at any other time since 1954. Which makes Prom Night in Mississippi that much more important to watch.

Don’t Believe the Headlines: North Brooklyn Property Market Falters

This article originally appeared on the Brooklyn Ink.


If you pay attention to some media reports, north Brooklyn real estate is still booming. “The world is not coming to an end. Repeat, everything is okay,” property blog Curbed.com proclaimed recently following a record breaking condo sale in Williamsburg. Admittedly, mid-range residential prices have risen more than 10 percent from July to September in the gentrifying areas of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, while prices in neighboring zip codes dropped only slightly in the same quarter as the economy nose-dived. Meanwhile Brooklyn Heights recorded its highest residential purchase price last month with a $10.8 million brownstone sale on Remsen Street. Then “The Edge” condominium development in Williamsburg announced shortly after that it had smashed the neighborhood record with the sale of one of its premier duplex apartments for $5.145 million.

These records are misleading. Although there are pockets of prosperity in certain neighborhoods, realtors working on the ground tell a different story – one of falling demand, capital for home buying and home prices. They also describe a transformation of the real estate market – once a fertile ground for speculators and foreign investors – into one sustained by long-term buyers only. “There’s a downturn across the borough. Anyone who says there’s not is looking through rose-tinted glasses,” says Sal Cappi, Vice President of Filmore Real Estate, who handles residential sales in Boerum Hill and surrounding downtown areas. “The speculative part of the business really took a beating. People who have bought to re-sell in the near future – that part of the business is pricing down in anticipation of the next few years. But homeowners with a time frame of 10-15 years will still buy for the right price – and some will still pay a substantial price.”

Some observers attributed the Remsen Street record to northern Brooklyn’s assimilation with the Manhattan real estate market and the fact that brownstones are a scarce commodity. Josiah Madar, Research Fellow at the Furman Centre for Real Estate Policy, admitted the sale was “a little surprising” amid the economic crisis, but argued that neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights, Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill do not conform to real estate trends in the rest of the borough. “Due to their proximity to Wall Street, quality of housing, and the demographic that lives there,” Madar said, “those markets are more tied to Manhattan-type issues and more closely aligned, in this case, with the very high end Manhattan residential market. Brownstones are still such a limited commodity and they are always in relatively high demand even when things go south.”

The brownstone market, which only accounts for 3 percent of borough sales, has made significant price gains since the 3rd quarter of 2007, with an 8 percent increase in the average sale price, but the number of sales is now down nearly 60 percent compared to the same time last year. Meanwhile, sales of newly built properties in Williamsburg have also slowed – despite fetching the occasional phenomenal price. “In Williamsburg you’ll see records because there’s been so much new construction and so much high end construction in recent years, and that’s what for sale,” Madar argued. “And it’s not surprising to see lots of huge sale prices – the odds of setting a record are higher when the residences are new.”

However, the recent record breaking price at “The Edge” actually represented the combined sale of two separate apartments, so it is not as significant as publicized. It also masks the fact that sales have slowed considerably at all developments. Apartments at the Kent Avenue site went on sale in April but developers have so far sold only 20 percent of the 575 units. Meanwhile at several other projects nearby, such as The Realto on North 5th Street, as few as 30 percent of the properties that went on sale in May have moved. Sarah Burke, senior vice-president of the Developers Group building the schemes, admitted the market has “slowed” in recent months and it has been forced to re-adjust prices in some locations. But she remains optimistic and is expecting things may get better with the inauguaration of Barack Obama in January. “This is the end of a marathon for us so we didn’t expect a sprint,” she said of the low condo sales figures. “This is a very good time to get out there – there are deals to be had.”

This is not true if you are an overseas investor. The group had kept the Manhattan and north Brooklyn housing markets afloat when the weak dollar provided relative bargains. That is now changing as the Euro and pound both slide against the greenback. “There’s still interest from overseas,” added Filmore’s Sal Cappi. “But with the dollar strengthening it has had some impact. The discount is not as great so there are less foreign buyers.” Cappi has worked in Brooklyn long enough to remember the last big housing market slump two decades ago. He sees similarities between the causes of the two crises and expects the same outcome. “Prices fell by around 25 to 30 percent then, and it’s similar to 1987 now. Real estate is a cyclical market – it goes up and down like a wave but it always ends up going higher eventually.”

- Katya Wachtel and Joe Jackson