I have now officially begun preparing for Thanksgiving. I’ve ordered chestnuts and some smoking pellets (I’m beginning to run low). There is simply no comparison between fresh domestically grown chestnuts and the Italian chestnuts you find in stores. For one thing they’re so much easier to peel that they trim an hour or more from my prep time.

Next up: order the turkey from our little local grocery store.

You might want to take a look at this article on the long, slow painful decline of jobs in California (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds). It’s a picture of a 20 year transmogrification in the state’s economy. Chock-full of thought-provoking graphs and charts.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of the info. California was the greatest beneficiary of two consecutive bubbles: the dot-com/tech bubble of the 1990s and the housing bubble of the Aughts. It’s not entirely surprising that when each bubble burst that California would lose as it had gained while the bubbles inflated.

While I have little doubt that adverse business climate has been a self-inflicted blow to California, I can’t help but think that the enormous change from enterprises that were bound to premises to a more networked world hasn’t injured the state as well. I seem to recall that in some of the interviews with Steve Jobs that were recycled after his death he complained about the problems with opening and operating manufacturing operations in the United States and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t have his eyes focused solidly on California.

I think that California finds itself increasingly in a pickle, torn between competing interests. Retired public employees and other recipients of the state’s largesse have interests that are largely at odds with those of small, vulnerable but potentially mobile start-up companies.

Speaking of movie musicals here’s my list of what I think are the best movie musicals. This list only contains musicals that were written expressly for the screen. By and large I think that adaptations of stage musicals as movies are execrable. I’ll explain why some time but that’s a post for another time.

My all-time favorite movie musical is Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I don’t think the pieces ever came together better. Good story line, acting, songs, fabulous integration of character, lyric, choreography, and plot, and probably the best ensemble production numbers ever put on film with possibly the greatest assembly of dancers ever to appear in the same movie including the man whom I believe to be the finest dancer ever to appear on film (and, yes, that includes Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly): Tommy Rall (Frank).

Here, in no particular order, are the others films I’d pick as the best movie musicals.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

This is many people’s pick as best movie musical. For me the original music in Seven Brides puts it ahead.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Yes, it’s a musical. Fantastic music and lyrics, visually stunning, sly screenplay, a cast that includes among the best that Broadway had to offer. It’s an evergreen for good reason.

The Band Wagon (1953)

Like Singin’ in the Rain this movie resurrected a gaggle of 1920s chestnuts. The “ballet” in which Astaire attempts to out-Kelly Kelly in a send-up of Mickey Spillane is priceless. Rare screen appearance by the incomparable Nanette Fabray.

Gigi (1958)

See my comments below.

White Christmas (1954)

Again, resurrects a bunch of chestnuts. Tight book—I pick this over Holiday Inn because of the superior book. Irving Berlin really knew how to put on a show. And the cast is just impossible to beat. The Bingisms, e.g. “weirdsmobile” said of Danny Kaye’s character (those weren’t written, folks, they were ad libbed), are just a delight. Early screen appearance by the preternaturally beautiful George Chakiris in the boy chorus of Rosy Clooney’s nightclub number. BTW, the Crosby-Kaye rendition of “Sisters” actually used in the movie was a hammed-up just for laughs outtake that was too good to leave out of the movie.

On the Town (1949)

Okay, I lied. This was written for the stage but IMO it’s unquestionably one of the best movie musicals.

Top Hat (1935)

I think that this picture is the best of the Astaire-Rogers collaborations. It may be Helen Broderick (mother of Broderick Crawford) and Edward Everett Horton’s character performances that seal the deal for me. The dress, worn by Ginger Rogers in the “Cheek to Cheek” number and designed by her (described as “a chicken being attacked by a coyote”), garnered her the nickname “Feathers”.

By and large I can’t stand Busby Berkeley musicals and that’s why you won’t find any of them in my list. I don’t like the objectification of women that’s a staple of his choreography and I find them just too weird. Not weird in a good way. Delirium tremens weird.

But that’s a start for a list. I may think of others.

Last night I watched, for the umpteenth time, Vincente Minnelli’s production of Gigi starring Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan, Maurice Chevalier, and Hermione Gingold. I saw it for the first time when it came out in 1958, no doubt at the drive-in. As I watched it yet again a number of thoughts occurred to me and I thought I’d pass them on.

Leslie Caron is, of course, charming in it. She’d appeared in the 1951 Anita Loos play adapted from Colette’s novella and the show was, essentially, written as a vehicle for her—something to help her get out of the waif image in which the megahit Lili (which I also saw at the drive-in) had put her. However, what struck me is that if it’s Gigi’s story, it is told through Gaston’s, Louis Jourdan’s, eyes. I’d need to prove it with a stop watch but I believe he has the most screen time of any character, substantially more than Gigi.

Consider the movie in context. Lerner and Loewe had a Broadway hit with My Fair Lady; it was still running. Gigi is also a vaguely Pygmalianish story, this time set in France rather than England, with tableaux of boulevardiers rather than a chorus of cockneys. They clearly wanted to reproduce their hit. However, I think that Jourdan succeeds where Harrison failed: he makes a thoroughly unpleasant character delightful. Despite his leading man good looks he was essentially a character actor and, I think, quite a skilled one. It may not be giving Harrison enough credit. I’ve mentioned before that personalities tend to come over the footlights to me. I believe that’s the reason I find Marilyn Monroe or Buster Keaton simply too sad to watch despite their talents.

BTW, Louis Jourdan is still alive. He’s over 90, living in France with his wife of 65 years.

The movie was also something of a swan song for Maurice Chevalier. He got to, probably was enouraged to, do all his old music hall shtick. He was seventy when he made it although IMO his best acting job was yet to come as Panisse in Fanny. Note, especially, the marvelous scenes with the old pros, Hermione Gingold or John Abbott (the valet). Their timing, style, and delivery are simply delicious—qualities that I think only come with experience.

Like many Minnelli shows it’s a high concept movie and visually stunning. So much attention to aesthetic detail.

It’s certainly one of the great Hollywood musicals. I wouldn’t mind seeing it on the big screen again.

Here’s a good example of what I mean by “talking down the economy”:

For the second time in as many months, President Obama has taken the nation that elected him president to task for its own lackadaisical economic performance on the global stage.

Obama told a group of CEOs today that the United States has gotten “lazy” and that America lost its hunger in promoting itself in a global marketplace.

“We’ve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted — ‘Well, people would want to come here’ — and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America,” he told the CEOs who are gathered on the sidelines of the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings, which the United States is hosting this year in Hawaii.

Workers in the U. S. work longer hours than workers in Japan, Germany, France, and the UK and have for years. FDI continues to increase here. Who is this “we”?

What’s the president’s point in this line of argument? That the U. S. must work twice as hard to stay in the same place?

My view, contrariwise, is that policy, set by policymakers in Washington, DC including this president and his predecessors for at least the last 30 years, has caused an enormous torrent of malinvestment in the U. S. and that malinvestment has resulted in greater income inequality and less economic growth than would otherwise have been the case.

We spend too much on our military, we spend too much on healthcare, we don’t protect our workers and industries while subsidizing trade with countries that subsidize the hell out of theirs. We import too many unskilled workers and not nearly enough skilled ones. We have maintained a ruinous fiscal policy for at least the last generation. Lazy, indeed.

Citing Nomura’s Global Macro Strategy group “Tyler Durden” of ZeroHedge pronounces the euro dead:

Nomura’s Global Macro Strategy group tackle the problem that is now abundantly clear the euro area as currently constructed is not stable and so it will have to change (hence, the Euro is dead!). The direction of travel is being set out by northern European politicians and is worth noting – more Union not less. But two points are critical to note; first that the new euro area may be so different from the one the current members signed up to as to make a process of voluntary re-application for euro stage II necessary to determine future membership, and second that any new variable geometry euro will take a long period of time to set up. How then to cover the intervening period?

I think that “more union” will be politically impossible as long as German nationalism attributes the country’s prosperity to thrift and hard work and the poverty of the EU periphery as due to their being spendthrift layabouts. For goodness sake until forty years ago Greece was ruled by a German prince as had been the case for most of the period after it gained its independence from the Ottomans 180 years ago. If the country was maintained as a sort of classical theme park while the rest of Europe industrialized, whose fault was that?

To be honest I think the pronouncement is premature. Undead would be a better characterization. The euro will have the ability to walk around and live by draining the blood of the living for a long time to come.

I don’t know about you but I find Barry Ritholtz’s explanation for the financial crisis as good as any. In his explication it was caused by a combination of interest rates held too low for too long, changes in regulation, a flight from regulation, Wall Street’s compensation scheme, and too much confidence in ratings agencies.

I think if you just say “excessive confidence” that pretty well sums it up. Confidence in the Fed, the Great Moderation, government regulations, the ratings agencies, and that housing prices will always rise, just to start the list.

Take a look at this re-working of the cover art for an old children’s book over at Mish’s place. Pretty good summation of the EU situation, IMO.

Megan McArdle gets around to making the point that I’ve been making here for some time:

One possible story about the financial crisis is that an unusually rosy period of growth in the west taught us to expect–no, to need–an unsustainably high rate of low-risk return on assets.

but then she goes off into the brush:

We made a whole lot of unsustainable promises during the boom years, most of them involving permanent increases in the ratio of non-workers to workers. Those promises required a very steady cash flow, but also (because of demographics) a very high rate of return. Otherwise the previous compact–in which current workers had allowed the elderly and disabled to skim a portion of their rising earnings from increased productivity, in exchange for the promise that they’d get the same deal when the time came–would be broken. Workers would have to turn over all of their increased earnings, and in fact cut into what they’d had previously, in order to keep the system going.

Unless the “boom years” begin in 1965 (or 1935) what promises requiring a steady cash flow have been made?

Contrariwise, I see the developments in the economy over the last 30 years as completely consistent with a flight to safety model for capital investment, with “safety” increasingly being defined as “whatever the government is subsidizing”. Healthcare comprises the overwhelming preponderance of “unsustainable promises”, healthcare depends preponderantly on government subsidies for its revenues, and, consequently, investing in healthcare is seen as a safe bet whether the investment takes the form of spending huge sums on getting the education and training necessary to become a physician, building a hospital, or pharmaceutical stocks.

Another possible definition of “flight to safety” is “flight to whatever the Baby Boomers are buying”. That used to be houses. Increasingly, it will be healthcare. Both of these definitions could be in operation. They’re not necessarily in competition with one another.