It's not news that AG spent some time playing clarinet in the Herbert Jerome band. In the memoir, so the grey lady informs me this morning, he recalls, during down-time, band-members clouded in tobacco and marijuana smoke in one room, while he sits alone in the next ensconced in an economics tome, or - I'm imagining,- some of the texts that pre-figure his inauguration into the Rand cult . I picture the standard jazz repertoire filtered through his green-eye-shaded, Objectivist sensibility:
"How High The Prime."
"I'm Growing Sentimental Over Me."
"In A Rationally Exuberant Mood."
"Tea For Two - With Separate Checks, Please."
"I Concentrate On Me."
"I've Got Liquidity - Who Could Ask For Anything More?"
"Concerto For Kooky (For Ayn)."
"In The Wee Smaa Structures Of The Minimal State."
---and that's just the first set!
I used to have a bunch of cartoons about AG outside my office door. As most of them were about how powerful he was as Fed Chair, I took them down when he stepped down. But one I still have up dates from soon after he married Andrea Mitchell.
ReplyDeleteIt depicts a hallway, with a sign over a door saying "Greenspan-Mitchell Honeymoon Suite." A vocal bubble coming from behind the closed door says "Alan, please, not another speech about the dangers of irrational exuberance!"
On his book tour, Alan is using his long ago developed (but not forgotten)jazz talents at improvisation of the melodies in his book.
ReplyDeleteI wonder about "pillow talk" with Andrea over the time period of the past few decades and whether such made its way into her journalistic commentaries. I'm too old to wade through her comments over the years but perhaps there is a liberal economist out there who can contrast such commentaries with Alan's current comments in his book and on his tour to determine the extent of any pillow talk revealed.