May, such as it was.
Thinking about Servpro, Phil Spector, greedflation, and Martin Amis.
Each month my friend Robert Long over at Experience Machines posts a list of things he’s read and enjoyed. Most of the links relate to AI and rationalism, though premium subscribers also get access to Wie man wird, was man ist, Robert’s bonus roundup of German children’s books that have been unfairly neglected and/or removed from at least one public school library.
Check it out, if you’re so inclined.
There are other recommended reading lists I could recommend. Probably my favorite is one that doesn’t exist, at least not outside the world of Platonic Forms. It’s a list consisting entirely of other lists, an infinite regression of open browser tabs that you’ll get around to reading, someday.
And before that day, there’s nothing stopping you from recommending all those interesting if unread articles to someone else. Let them be the one to curl up with a 12,000 word essay on the history of land use regulation in twentieth century Britain. Or not: in all likelihood, they won’t read it either. Your recommendation absolves both of you of any obligation to do so. It’s an acknowledgement of mutual potential that would be spoiled if either person were to do something so crass as actually read.1
Here’s one such recommendation for you to politely ignore: The Library of Babel, by noted futurist @JorgeLuisBorges.
“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries … On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian is analogous to a god…I pray to the unknown gods that some man - even a single man, tens of centuries ago - has perused and read that book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.”
Consider the below a partial cipher and imperfect compendium of what has tortured, battered, and annihilated my attention in the past month.
Messy Situations
The Succession finale led me to read about real world family businesses that have navigated an intergenerational ownership transition. One example is Servpro. What started as a husband and wife-owned painting business in 1967 grew through franchising into one of the world’s largest cleanup and restoration service providers. (Think fires and floods). In 2019 Blackstone purchased a majority stake in Servpro for more than $1 billion. Two of the founder’s children left the company after the deal, while one stayed on and gets to do interviews where he can give not un-Roy like quotes like, “as soon as I transitioned to CEO, we worked on a more functional organizational chart and rebuilt the executive management team, which has worked really well.”
The franchising dynamic is one I’ve written about before. A sizable amount of cleanup and restoration demand comes from large scale natural disasters, which are unevenly distributed both geographically and temporarily. This makes it a business where a national operator has built in advantages over local ones. Servpro can establish relationships with large insurers - related, State Farm will no longer insure new homes in California - and offer its 1,700+ franchisees an additional pool of work by deploying them in “Disaster Recovery Teams.” And though residential and facility services hasn’t been a sector with much/any brand differentiation, this could conceivably increase the return a franchise like Servpro gets from its marketing.2
Monsters
I nodded vigorously while reading Monsters, Claire Dederer’s, “interrogation of how we experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity.” Dederer has excellent taste, which is to say, she likes many of the same things I do. That’s a problem so far as those things include the films of Roman Polanski, paintings by Caravaggio, YouTube clips of old Charlie Rose interviews and/or Mike Tyson knockouts, V.S. Naipaul’s essays, and seemingly all good music. Monsters makes a satisfyingly qualified case that all this can be consumed without making yourself an accomplice to the creators’ bad behavior.
Dederer is credible because she is not an aesthetic absolutist. She has no problem acknowledging that some art is cancellable because it’s functionally compromised: The Cosby Show cannot possibly work as a feel-good family sitcom knowing what we do now. Other works can safely be forgotten on the basis that they would have eventually been anyway - virtually all art is. This requires subjective evaluations of quality, which Dederer acknowledges and encourages. For me, the only Woody Allen problem worth wrestling with is how Midnight in Paris possibly has a 93% Rotten Tomato score.
Polanski though … To paraphrase The Dude, that creep can direct. Rosemary’s Baby is worth wrestling with not just because it’s a more skillful film than any of Woody Allen’s,3 but also because of how its fantastically unsettling effect is subsidized by knowledge of director’s dark biography. The same could be said of Chinatown, Knife in Water, his adaptation of Macbeth - even his adaptation of Oliver Twist.
Phil Spector is only briefly discussed in Monsters, though he takes the top spot on my personal pound-for-pound rankings of bad people who make good stuff. Putting aside the murder - never a great start to a sentence - Spector was as known during his working years for his violent and erratic behavior as he was for the trademark Wall of Sound. (Though Spector was Jewish, it doesn’t quite improve our estimation of his character to hear that he described his production as a “Wagnerian approach to rock and roll”). Listen to almost any one of his songs, and amidst all the layered orchestration and reverb, you can always hear the sound of a diminutive psychopath waving a gun around the studio. It sounds a lot like desperation. Does this make Be My Baby a richer song?4 And am I a monster if I say yes?
Margins
While I was thinking about how moral considerations influence our understanding of aesthetics, lots of other people were doing the same, but with regards to inflation. Greedflation is the word of the day: it’s the idea that creamy corporate profit margins are driving inflation. This strikes me as plausible, but maybe not meaningful in the long term.
Axios has an summary of the debate,5 but those who have attained a higher than third grade reading level may also be interested in Former Fed Vice Chair Laird Braenard’s overview (this is from January):
“The labor share of income has declined over the past two years and appears to be at or below pre-pandemic levels, while corporate profits as a share of GDP remain near postwar highs. Retail markups in a number of sectors have seen material increases in what could be described as a price–price spiral, whereby final prices have risen by more than the increases in input prices.”
Months of Covid-related supply chain disruptions seem to have conditioned consumers to accept higher prices, though this has not quite resulted in a 1970s wage-price spiral, where higher prices for goods and services leads to higher wage demands, which leads to higher input costs, which leads to higher prices for goods and services. Instead, we’ve seen generalized expectations of input cost inflation sustain consumer’s willingness to bear price increases above and beyond the actual input cost inflation (of which labor is a primary component).
That’s the what. Explaining the why is more controversial. Though increased market concentration is one possibility, that still leaves questions unanswered. One is timing - why pricing power is only being flexed now, when markets have been growing more concentrated for years. (Here’s a good paper from 2017 on superstar firms, rising profits, and falling labor costs). Another question is why price increases have shown up where they do, including in industries with structurally low concentration.
Restaurants would be an obvious example (a burger costs what?), and this WSJ article on how one large franchisee group sets prices suggests that as businesses grow more professionalized, they get better at raising prices. More professionalized businesses tend to be larger ones, but technology is making it easier for even the smallest businesses to identify its profit maximizing price - and then to implement it. Sticking with restaurants, Toast’s QR codes eliminate menu costs, while the much dreaded tipping screen at check-out is a way for your local coffee shop to exploit the same quirks in consumer psychology that airlines have long understood make us willing to stomach sticker shock, as long its unbundled into digestible amounts.
My gut (and some recent earnings announcements) says that many businesses have pulled forward price increases and will see margins contract sooner rather than later. The American consumer has been thus far indefatigable, but a reduced labor share of income, slowing growth, depleted savings, and rising interest rates will put us to the test.
Martin Amis: smoker
I’m going to have to find a way to describe Martin Amis as something other than “favorite living novelists.” Plot was never what you went to Amis for - his idol Nabokov described it as atavistic desire from the campfire and cave days to find out “what happens next” - so it’s fitting that he died in the most predictable way: esophageal cancer, the same disease that killed his friend and fellow lifelong smoker, Christopher Hitchens.
Amis was very funny on smoking. There’s a great bit in Money about chain smoking, but it only works in the larger context of a metafictional commentary on first person narration, so let’s try this one instead, from The Information:
“Before the children were born he sometimes thought that he might vey well give up smoking when he became a father. But the boys seemed to have immortalized his bond with cigarettes - this living relationship with death. Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn’t be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette.”
Among the many retrospectives that have been written about Amis this week, one in the Sydney Morning Herald specifically considered his career as a smoker. It links to an unrelated 2022 New York Time trend piece about smoking making a comeback among the downtown crowd, but unaccountably fails to mention that one of the people quoted in that piece is none other than Martin Amis’ daughter. I’m sure he would have appreciated that: the son of a famous novelist producing a daughter of a famous smoker. It’s no Servpro, but as far as family business successions go, not bad.
I'm reminded of a story told to me - and almost certainly invented - by someone who worked for the New Yorker shortly after college graduation. An older editor expressed incredulity that this person could make it through more than two decades of life without reading Proust. I believe the exact quote was, "how interesting." So he stops by the Strand on his way home that evening, and over the course of a year, works his way through the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. He waits for an opening until one day he sees it - an opportunity to casually mention to the editor that he's read Proust. "All of it?" the editor asks. "That's right." The editor gives a sympathetic nod, maybe fiddles with a pipe or something. “That's missing the point."
Not to brag, but last year I was there in person to watch Memphis defeat Utah State 38-10 in the the Servpro First Responder's Bowl in Dallas.
Funnier too. Ruth Gordon throws 105 from the moment she appears in the Woodhouse's peephole.
A great Ramones cover is also produced by Spector. And while you’re down here in the footnotes, could I interest you in some more 70s era Spector productions - all perfect, and all disowned by the performer as shlockily overproduced travesties?
Maybe this cut from Dion's post heroin, pre born again Christian phase? Or this one, in which a phenomenally horned up Leonard Cohen tries his best to sound like a drunken lounge singer who’s trying his best to sound like Leonard Cohen? You want Beatles? Take your pick. More Ramones? Rock 'n' Roll High School it is.
I have a soft spot for Axios' spiritual forerunner, USA Today. Many fond memories from childhood vacations of flipping through that paper while sampling some midrange hotel's continental breakfast and generally having a great time pretending to be an adult. Axios though, I've never seen the point of. Seems like a lot of big talk about recreating the local news network, grafted on to a bunch of articles with titles like "The Israel-Palestine Situation Explained (1 min read)"
....just like Ronnie sang....