nobody knows if a stock's going up, down, or sideways

 

I watched the Martin Scorsese-directed 2013 film, The Wolf Of Wall Street.  On Amazon Prime now.

That movie is weird.  Or maybe we should say, It's about some people who did some weird stuff.  It's based on a true story, as is Hustlers (Jennifer Lopez:  "Call the police?  What are they going to tell them, 'I spent five thousand dollars in a strip club -- send help'??").

In The Wolf of Wall Street, the people in it seemed to really like going out of control -- a lot.  It's hard to see how people want to live like that.  Some of it seems to be sort of a "gang mentality" -- they're trying to impress each other, and keep up with each other.

        I was suffering from a bad cold, and in some of the Wolf-Wall Street scenes I would look at Leonardo DiCaprio, how he appeared after a night of partying (and driving) -- I thought, "Gosh, he looks how I feel.  And he did it to himself by taking drugs.  I mean, he spent money to feel that way.

        (He should have called me and see me at work, I could cough near him and he could feel / look that way for free.)

        Watching that movie, I become like a Safety Manager:  "No!  Don't do that!  No!  NO!!"

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What he starts out doing, when he is hired on Wall Street, is cold-calling.  I did that at Shearson-American Express in Boston, the summer after graduating from college.  

The difference between my cold-calling and the cold-calling in the movie:  in the movie, the person doing the cold-calling is a licensed broker, and can move right into selling the person a stock, while on the phone.  

        I was not a licensed broker, I was an assistant, so I could not sell anything, I could just call and see if the person (usually a business owner) would like to speak with a broker.

I found a very low rate of "Yes," but no one was super rude or anything, which is kind of surprising when you reflect back on it.

        I didn't have to cold-call.  I learned about it from someone and asked if I could do it.  There was plenty of time in the day.

The way the stockbrokers behave in the film:  wild and crazy, even during the work-day -- they take drugs during their meetings!  The place where I worked, nothing was like that, at all.

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Martin Scorsese selects music for his movies that I like -- we have the same taste.  Some of the songs included in The Wolf of Wall Street:

Sloop John B

Mrs. Robinson

Movin' Out (Anthony's Song) by Billy Joel

Pretty Thing

    and Road Runner, by Bo Diddley

Dust My Broom (Elmore James)

Smokestack Lightning (Howlin' Wolf)

Gloria (by Laura Branigan)

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launch-pad

 

        Someone was saying recently that cough drops are just candy and don't help a sore throat or a cough.  I don't feel that way, though.  I think they help.  (And they do taste good...if you have a sore throat, the small pleasure of a good taste can offset the negative thing, the pain....)

I love it when cough drops are called "lozenges."

I don't know why, but I love that word.

LOZZ - enge. ... That soft "g" like in gem, not hard "g" as in gaffe.

        (Politician:  "I surely cannot make a gaffe, as long as I imbibe a lozenge before going up to the microphone."

        British politician:  [same sentence, but with an English accent...])

lozenge

lounge

        "We had a peppermint lozenge at the Peppermint Lounge."

[Wikipedia] -- The Peppermint Lounge was a popular discotheque located at 128 West 45th Street in New York City that was open from 1958 to 1965, although a  new one was opened in 1980.  

It was the launchpad for the global Twist craze in the early 1960s.  

Many claim The Peppermint Lounge was also where go-go dancing originated, although this claim is subject to dispute. ------------------------

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holiday night

 

---------------------------------------

Christmas season

with a reason

for an Island Of Quiet

to rest our thoughts

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♪ ♫ slow down, you move too fast

 

Prince Harry and his wife Meghan had a documentary on Netflix.  Online hate racing through Internet -- my android tablet was jumping up and down, and it wasn't even on!

Something I noticed and pondered, over time, was -- before Harry and Meghan met, William and Catherine and Harry used to be kind of a group of "three musketeers," in their casual free time.  They were family, and friends.

        You would see photographs of them laughing together, sitting together....

In a friendly relationship like that, it's a married couple plus a single brother.  Girlfriends and dates of Harry's may have come and gone, but the three friends -- William, Kate, and Harry -- remained solid.  There would be pleasant feelings of being able to count on each other.

        For the single brother, there's the fall-back position whenever he isn't dating someone -- he can always go see William and Kate.

        For the married couple, Harry may have sometimes been a "buffer."  If either spouse might be grumpy about anything, Harry would be there to help joke it away -- smooth it over.  He provided masculine company for Prince William, and probably help with whatever Kate wanted, if she asked.

        Let's play a song!  Let's bake some muffins!

        Almost always available.  "The spare," as the royals say.

Then Harry meets Meghan and starts dating her.

In theory:  two happy couples, having fun together.

In practice:  circumstances improve for Harry, and get a little less good for William and Kate.  Buffer -- no longer available as often as before.  Good, trusted, supportive friend -- no longer available as often as before.

Another aspect that occurred to me -- sometimes in relationships of this kind, the married couple can come to depend on a little bit of a feeling of superiority, believing the single friend to be yearning for what they have.  

        Inside of these types of feelings can grow a strong affection for being "onstage," performing their happiness as a couple for the brother / friend who they may come to regard as their "audience."

Then he meets Meghan and it's like, "What happened to our audience?  Where'd he go?  

        What do you mean, he's looking at this American Meghan-person, and not at me / us??!!"

_____________________________

Another thing I noticed was that William advised Harry not to move too fast in his relationship with Meghan, and this admonishment was not well-received.  I read that.

        (Yikes.)

        Is it good advice?  Yes.

        Should it come from his brother, who is close in age to Harry?  No.

I feel like most people in Harry's position would be able to listen to that advice without resentment if it came from someone in an older generation -- a parent, uncle, aunt, even grandparent maybe.

        But to hear it from a sibling who is basically in your same age group -- most people would be hard-pressed to not get aggravated.  It would be received as:  'I am your contemporary and I know so much more than you about affairs of the heart.'

        ('Ah yes, thank you for your wise words -- please follow me over here, where I can show you our swimming pool -- up close!')

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Laguna Beach

 

Jerry Hall, photographed by Patrick Lichfield

------------------ [excerpt from Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures.  Quadrille - 2010] --------------------------------

Patrick Lichfield

Patrick and his lovely wife Leonora were neighbours of ours on Mustique.  

They were often there at the same time as us, and their children were similar ages to ours, so I knew him first as a friend.    

We'd all get together at people's houses for dinner and games, and Patrick and Leonora were great fun.  He was an extremely well-known photographer, though we only did the occasional job together.  

        One of them was an advertisement for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel chain, which we shot in Laguna Beach, California, with me in a cowboy hat and a white shirt standing in the desert.  

On the day we had to shoot it one of my children was sick and I had to stay in the hotel, so Patrick shot the background and then came and shot me and superimposed the two.  

It was very successful and is still running all these years later.

___________________________

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picture this

 

Terence Donovan photograph of Jerry Hall

--------------------- excerpt ----------------

Terence Donovan

I did a lot of work with Terence after I came to live in London.  

He was one of the original celebrity photographers in London along with David Bailey and Brian Duffy.  

        Between them they captured and helped to create the swinging sixties that made London the fashion and style centre of the world.  

Terence was a lovely guy, and great fun to work with.  He'd take the photos quite quickly, get it all sewn up and then we'd go out and have caviar for lunch and he'd entertain us with stories.  

He was a black belt in judo and wrote a book about it, and he used to tell me about it.  

        He was an adventurous photographer, who always loved to try something new.

______________________

{Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures.  Quadrille Publishing - 2010}

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photographs and memories

 

photograph of Meryl Streep, by David Bailey

--------------------- [excerpt from Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures -- Quadrille, 2010] -------------------------

David Bailey:  A Lifelong Friend

David Bailey is the most wonderful photographer to work with.  

We have had so many good times, producing such glorious photographs together.  

His sharp, pared down, tightly cropped and gritty monochrome images transform his sitters into heroic figures.  

He gave me a shot he had taken of Bob Dylan which is one of my favourite photographs of all time.  And I have always loved the photos he has taken of me.     

        One of the things I love most about Bailey is his integrity.  If he doesn't feel inspired by a job, he turns it down -- no matter how much money is on offer.  

Bailey has dyslexia and, while not always adept at articulating his thoughts verbally, he is a visual genius.  He left school at 15 and learned his art by becoming a photographer's assistant, and by his early twenties he was taking pictures for Vogue.  

        Because he works so instinctively, clients have to trust him and let him do his job -- and he always produces stunning photographs....

        One of the most memorable shoots Bailey and I did together was for French Vogue, in the south of France.  We went with the great artist and photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, who was then in his late eighties.  

        Lartigue had been famous in his youth for his images of the privileged world of France at the turn of the century.  

His photographs of horse drawn carriages, early automobiles and glamorous women and their friends had really captured an era.

        He had been re-discovered in his seventies in New York and had started working for Vogue.  When I met him he was an adorable smiling, white haired gentleman who took snaps of me while Bailey photographed us both.  Later I called his wife begging for one of those photos, but she told me that sadly they hadn't come out well.  I'd have loved to have seen them.

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