20th
One of the more clever things about my book—which, incidentally, is now available on Amazon for like 11 cents, though I can’t vouch for the resellers, they may be reselling from jail, but even so it’s a pretty good deal, if you ask me, you could read the thing and then re-sell it just for the paper and probably turn a small profit—anyway, one of the clever aspects of this now very affordable book is that I *changed the name of everything*. I changed Dissent to “Debate,” at certain points I changed Boston to “Baltimore,” I moved everything back a year (for some reason this became very important at some point and I spent days doing the math). I did buck tradition however by refusing to change “Harvard” to “Yale,” and I stand by that decision, come what may.
Anyway, I bring this up because I also changed Morgan Stanley, where I spent a year temping after college, to “Fidelity.” And Morgan Stanley, I’m proud to say, is one of the two lone investment banks standing after the market turmoil. I wasn’t actually very good at PowerPoint, not at all, but I did do my best, and maybe my counterpart over at Lehman—a young up-and-coming writer who also spent most of his time looking for things on the newfangled so-called world wide web—maybe spent just a little bit more time, doing that, and that’s why Lehman is no longer with us.
Or perhaps Lehman is no longer with us because of that unbelievably bright and borderline criminal streaming three-tier screen they put on their new midtown headquarters in 2002. It must have been an answer to Morgan Stanley’s three-tier stock ticker, which was just down the street, except that whereas Morgan’s ticker was just a ticker, bright yellow letters and numbers on a black background, really by the standards of midtown a subdued signal of its commitment to crunching the numbers for you, its customer—Lehman’s screens displayed all sorts of things, though not narrative things, and they could practically blind you. I remember the first time I saw them at night, they were just playing an ocean scene, but it was brutal, brutally bright, and I had to cross the street. It was an offense—it was like a rock band actually using its amplifiers to *kill you*; it was just going too far, and I wonder what they’ve got playing now. If you go to the Lehman website, the main portion of the page is your typical boilerplate i-banking pablum—“South Korea: Reaching Higher”—but then, on the right, in “News and Announcements,” there’s a link to information on “Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s Chapter 11 filing.” Yeah. Put that on your three-tier streaming million-watt bragging screen.
(Image above from Weblicist.com, here, which has a whole series of images of the building, plus a whole lot of other New York images besides, including “Naked Man in the Park.”)
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