The Awkward Pose

The Costco Workout

Posted on 07/05/2013 by paulefallon

Being late the party, what can I say about my first trip to Costco that has not already been said? The bargains are good, the quantities obscene, and the clientele value-driven. It’s only been a few years since I ventured into my first Wal-Mart, and Costco does not disappoint in taking that low price shopping experience to a higher, more frantic plane.

I was lured into wholesale paradise by the need to supply a party for 100+ people to celebrate my daughter before she heads off to the Peace Corps. She had a detailed list of how many pounds of strawberries, half gallons of salsa, towers of plastic cups, dozens of chicken wings and cartons of frozen hamburgers we would need. The experience aligned with my expectations, but greatly exceeded them. The warehouse atmosphere was charged; the palette stacks ominous, the sample ladies pushing nibbles at intersections ubiquitous. Still, Costco seemed to amplify my preconceptions rather than change them until I realized something I had not anticipated. Shopping at Costco is great exercise.

First, there is the walking. Costco has over a mile of aisles and my calves got a good stretch as we explored every one. Second are the carts; double size versions of their supermarket cousins, my shoulders pulsed like Rocky Balboa as I pushed pounds of frozen meat. Towards the end of our visit, when we left our carts in a central spot to scatter and fetch those final items we missed on our first pass, I found myself curling cartons of 24 count power bars. I got a lower back workout lifting all the items to check-out and then replacing them to our baskets on the far side of the cash. The only thing that got lighter was my wallet. We motored our goods, and our quads, to the car and chest pressed them into the trunk. When that was full, we stretched our torsos stuffing things into the back seat as well. Back home my gluts burned trudging quarts of condiments up the stairs.

Aside from the illusion that we are saving money buying more food than we possibly need to eat, Costco might just be the healthiest shopping experience in America.

My new gym?

Posted in United States | Tagged Costco, exercise, shopping | 6 Comments

1000 Bikram Yoga Classes

Posted on 06/30/2013 by paulefallon

Today I hit a milestone – 1000 Bikram yoga classes. The date corresponded with completing exactly four years of practice, an average of 250 classes per year. I wasn’t counting until one day the owner Jill told me I was on class 200; since then I have made calendar ticks to mark my progress.

I would like to say that my 1000^th class was unique, but it really wasn’t; we were an easy going Sunday crowd with many familiar faces and a good balance of heat and effort. I managed what I consider a ‘complete’ class’ in that I held every posture, though I am still short of full expression in many poses. Hitting the four digit number did not miraculously stretch my body to new depths.

In a world of seven billion people, individual achievements are constantly eclipsed. At the nearby Andover studio, an elderly woman, Elaine Brody, recently completed 1000 classes in 1000 days! On her milestone day a new practitioner joined the class, to whom Ellen reportedly said, I wish I were you. I can understand what she meant; after 1000 classes the euphoria of the new is gone. I still love Bikram and acknowledge its benefits, but that feeling of walking on a cloud after class, the marionette looseness of my joints, and the incredible thrill of balancing on one perfectly still leg are now an integral part of my regular being. The exhilaration is diminished.

Fortunately, the satisfaction, health, and well-being remain.

Posted in Yoga | Tagged Bikram yoga, Bikram Yoga Boston, yoga | 1 Comment

Rumblings of Revolution

Posted on 06/23/2013 by paulefallon

In 1977 I spent beautiful spring afternoons in an overheated classroom with a view of a trash compactor in MIT’s nondescript Building 12 snoozing through Urban Sociology, the last of my Humanities requirements and perhaps the most boring course ever conceived. I learned only two things in that class. First, that I dislike social science, which possesses neither the elegant rigor of pure science nor humanities’ grace. Second, that ’revolution cannot occur in a country where 70% of the people are content’, as the professor quoted one fine day. Apparently, at least 70% of Americans in 1977 were satisfied with their lives and I must have been one of them. Secure that we would not plummet into revolution any time soon, I dozed through the remainder of the semester.

That comforting statistic helped me to sleep soundly for over thirty years. Then, around the time my ironic friend Larry informed me that, ‘70% of all statistics are true’, I started having doubts. I realized that progress is not always forward. After all, the world turned retrograde for hundreds of years during the Dark Ages, the Belle Époque ended with the most gruesome war to end all wars (until the next one), and Afghanistan circa 1950 was a progressive country while Afghanistan circa 2013 is a tragedy. Could it be possible that despite all of our resources, wealth, and opportunity the United States could devolve into a country ripe for revolution? Could the 1980’s mantra Greed is Good subvert into the 2020 mantra that Greed destroys US?

This morning I watched Wealth Inequality in America, a six minute video that left me reeling. Not only are less than 70% of Americans content, significantly more than 70% of Americans are loosing their race on the economic treadmill while a tiny proportion of our citizens grow wealthy beyond imagining: http://economy.money.cnn.com/2013/03/08/wealth-video/. Watching the video unspool our wealth inequality in six minutes is like watching an acorn balloon into a towering oak through time lapse photography, except that this seed could germinate revolution.

We Americans love our revolution, but the United States is not a place prone to upheaval. In the last two hundred years Mexico has had five revolutions; Haiti has had too many to count. We staged our single battle against Mother England, won, and established a stable and relatively equitable government. As revolutions go, ours was an outlier. Rebels are rarely wealthier than their oppressor, though eighteenth century Americans were better off than their English cousins. Revolutionaries are usually poor, but even more often revolution is triggered not by poverty per se, but discontent fomented by an inequitable economic pie.

Back in 1977, when 70% of Americans were content, revolution was unthinkable. But how low does that percentage have to drop before bellyaching turns into action, civil disobedience, and insurrection? I am not aware of a metric that maps the spiral towards revolution, but I discovered the Gini coefficient, a measure of income equity, which has a likely correlation. Gini coefficients range from 0.00 (perfect equity) to 1.00 (total inequity). The CIA tracks every nation’s Gini coefficient because countries with high Gini’s are more prone to civil unrest, totalitarian regimes or both. In the 2009 Gini view of the world, the map is blush in Scandinavia, where the Gini is as low as 0.25, it grows beige across Europe, Canada and India, tan across Russia, orange for the United States, Mexico, and China, where our Gini is about 0.45, red for Brazil, and Congo, maroon for Columbia, Bolivia and Haiti, and blood red for South Africa, whose Gini of 0.70 is the highest in the world.

Gini is not a measure of wealth; it is a measure of fair. And the United States has colored itself solidly among the nations of the world whose income is distributed unfairly, the countries most prone to either iron-clad rule or revolution.

I get numb by the numbers broadcast about national debt, bailouts, and the Gross National Product. But the simple calculation of dividing the $54 trillion United States GNP by the 315 million people who live here illustrates that each citizen’s proportionate share of our country’s wealth is $170,000. Few of us have that much income, but because the one percenters have so much more flowing their way, the vast majority of us have less.

The United States will not have a revolution soon; it is not among our current strategies for affecting change. But if we keep moving in the direction we are, with increasing inequality and increasing discontent, our culturally accepted methods of influencing government and economic policy will fail, and the people who experience inequality – which is virtually all of us – will turn to other means to achieve equity. I hope it does not come to that. Let’s use our democratic processes to translate the will of the people rather than the will of lobbyists or corporations, to make the United States a land of greater equality rather than a land of greater instability. We are blessed to be so rich. Let us use that blessing to become more just, compassionate, and fair.

The Gini Index for 2009

Posted in United States | Tagged Gini, Gini Coefficient, inequality, MIT, revolution | Leave a comment

Same Little Boy – All Grown up

Posted on 06/16/2013 by paulefallon

The ENR McGraw-Hill 2013 Best Global Projects Awards was well organized, like most social events orchestrated by engineers. Dinner prompt at 6:30; alphabetically ordered project descriptions at 7:30. Winning teams paraded to the platform in business suits; there was only a smattering of women. ENR snapped a formal photograph, followed by the random click of iPhones, general applause and on to the next winner. Dessert served before 8:30, everything finished by 9:00 pm.

I believe I smiled direct at the camera for the main photo but somehow I could not maintain that attention, so what appeared on Len Gengel’s iPhone was this peculiar image of me right angling into space. Back at our table, we all had a good laugh at my clueless expression, but I realized it was not something new. The photo captures the very same person gaping away from the view finder – wondering what in tarnation I am supposed to be doing – that inhabits the earliest photo of me at age 22 months. The more things change, the more the stay the same.

Paul E. Fallon, looking away at ENR McGraw-Hill Awards, 2013

Paul E. Fallon, looking away at Christmas, 1956

Posted in Personal | Tagged 1956, Christmas, ENR, McGraw-Hill | 1 Comment

Fifty Years On – Can We Recapture the Spirit of Peace?

Posted on 06/10/2013 by paulefallon

Fifty years ago today President John F. Kennedy gave the commencement address at AmericanUniversity that announced steps towards peace with the Soviet Union. Although the speech lacks a singular punch line such as ‘Ask not what your country can do, ask what you can do for your country’, it is hailed as a great speech and was remarkably effective, since it led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty less than six months later.

What is remarkable to me in reading the speech today (full text at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html) is the tone of conciliation, the humility, the realization that what we share with our enemies is much greater than what divides us. The speech acknowledges our differences, but reaches past them to search for a peace based on our commonalities. Below are selected quotes from the speech that I cannot imagine any current politician uttering. How have we become simultaneously so weak we cannot acknowledge any virtue in our enemies yet so self-absorbed that we cannot look in a mirror and ask hard questions?

“No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.”

“So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

“Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude towards peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad. We must show it in the dedication of our own lives.”

For the sake of our country, and the world, I hope that we can rediscover the sense of hope, shared responsibility, and respect that is the foundation of John F. Kennedy’s transformational speech.

Posted in United States | Tagged American University, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy speech at American University, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, peace | 1 Comment

Be Like Brit Dines Among the Big Boys

Posted on 06/07/2013 by paulefallon

Last night Be Like Brit orphanage in Haiti won the McGraw-Hill / Engineering News Record 2013 Best Global Project Award for Residential / Hospitality projects. We were honored along with two other community-based efforts in the developing world: the El Rodeo suspension bridge in Nicaragua by Bridges to Prosperity from Denver, and the elegantly simple Schoolhouse South Africa in Johannesburg by Cornell University Sustainable Design.

This is the inaugural year for ENR to honor projects from a global perspective. The judges were particularly interested in projects that demonstrated creative construction techniques, cultural sensitivity, and sustainability, all of which are evidenced in Be Like Brit, which one judge called an “excellent design that considers the art of the possible in Haiti after the earthquake.”

Five of us, John Thompson and Brian Twomey, our structural engineers from Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, Len Gengel and his sister Chris, and me; enjoyed the festivities and the view from the 50^th floor of the McGraw-Hill Building in mid-town Manhattan. But as the ENR editors announced our fellow award winners, which included Rem Koolhaas / ARUP for Beijing’s China Central Television Building, Michael Arad / Handel Architects’ National September 11 Memorial in New York, and Renzo Piano’s The Shard in London, we realized that Brit’s memory was being commemorated among the best design and construction that this world has to offer.

Be Like Brit – 2013 ENR Best Global Project Award – Residential / Hospitality

El Rodeo Suspension Bridge – 2013 ENR Best Global Project Award – Bridges / Tunnels

Schoolhouse South Africa – 2013 ENR Best Global Small Project

China Central Television Building – 2013 ENR Best Global Project Award – Office

National September 11 Memorial – 2013 ENR Merit Global Project Award – Cultural

The Shard – 2013 ENR Best Global Large Project

Posted in Haiti | Tagged Be Like Brit, Best Global Projects, China Central Television, CUSD, El Rodeo Suspension Bridge, Engineering News Record, ENR, Haiti, Handel Architects, McGraw-Hill, Michael Arad, National 911 Memorial, Rem Koolhaus, Renzo Piano, The Shard | 3 Comments

The Queen of Versailles

Posted on 06/02/2013 by paulefallon

My definition of a good movie is – do I wake up thinking about it the next morning? According to this criterion, Queen of Versailles is one of the best movies ever made because I can’t get it out of my mind.

Jackie Siegel is a very nice woman. True, she is a leggy blonde of questionable blondness, the mother of seven children who admits its fun to have them as long as there are nannies. True, she wants to trade up her 26,000 square foot house on its own gated island in Orlando for a 90,000 square foot version of Versailles complete with spa, bowling alley, and whatever whim pops into her head.

David Siegel is a very nice man. True, he is an aging entrepreneur of questionable ethics who claims to be the hand behind George W. Bush’s 2000 victory in Florida. True, his cultural compass points in a retro direction; the highlight of his year is having all 50 Miss America contestants grace the main stair of his mansion while he flirts with the current title holder in front of his wife.

When we meet this pair and their hoard of children, dozens of dogs and nineteen personal staff, it is 2007 and George’s time share condo empire is expanding faster than Rocky Balboa’s chest sprinting up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We are dumbstruck by their house, their cars, their two story closets; only to learn that they are moving up when we visit Versailles with its three story stained glass dome, twin grand stairs, five million dollars of marble floor and a warehouse where Jackie hoards every Louse XIV artifact she can get here hands on before move-in day. Money is so abundant it is irrelevant in their frantic accumulation of stuff.

2008 rolls around, banks teeter, the Feds bail them out, but the banks ratchet credit down, the time share business tanks and with it go Jackie and David. They lay off 7,000 employees. Jackie opens a personal goodwill store where former employees can buy her excess stock at deep discounts. She downsizes. Instead of shopping the antique markets of Europe she wheels through Wal-Mart, but she still has two nannies in tow to navigate her five shopping carts. When Jackie presents her son a new bicycle; he shrugs and tosses it on the pile of other new, untouched, bicycles. These people have been gilded so long, nothing is precious.

Everything about this couple should be despicable, yet they are also rich in redemptive qualities. Jackie is an ordinary girl from Binghamton, NY, a go getter with an engineering degree who escaped an IBM cubicle job when she realized it deadened her, moved to New York City and redirected her energy to becoming a model, a beauty queen and the wife of a tycoon. We believe she loves this man thirty years her senior, she demonstrates it in every frame of the film. She is eternally cheerful, patient with children, and loving towards her husband even as the financial crisis makes him ever more despondent.

Toward the end of the film, when the largest time share in Las Vegas has gone belly up, Versailles is for sale, but they still have their private island mansion, David refers to his wife as another child. We can’t help thinking his biggest mistake is not financial miscalculation so much as a personal one; Jackie is more than a pretty woman with an amazing chest, she is his greatest ally and should be his closet confidante. But he has no concept how to include this woman into his grinding business life. He flails alone.

For her part, Jackie exits the movie outside her mansion, reiterating her faith in her husband, and vowing to stay together no matter that the future might bring. “We could live in a $300,000 four bedroom house; we could get bunk beds.” Are we supposed to laugh at the prospect of this family moving into a house no bigger than her current closet, or are we supposed to laugh because the minimum life she can envision is still far beyond what most Americans can afford?

Of course in the end no one is laughing. The Queen of Versailles is a tragedy, as much as tragedy as the film’s namesake. Doesn’t Jackie know that Marie Antoinette’s excess ended her up at the guillotine?

The last few years have brought a revisionist perspective for the original Queen of Versailles. Sophia Coppola made a redemptive biopic of the French Queen; the ART staged a play that portrays Marie as a victim. Jackie and David Siegel are clueless, narcissistic people who live a powerful yet shallow dream, and they demonstrate in this film how unsatisfying the pursuit of material goods can be. Their self-absorbed, unsustainable way of life is disgusting. After spending an evening with them I feel sorry for them. But I do not dislike them. I believe they are victims of their culture exactly as Marie Antoinette was a victim of hers; blinded by the delusion that consumption conveys meaning. Marie had her head cut off, while the Siegels survive, for now. In 2013 they still live on their island, they never sold Versailles, they are back at building it once again. Even in the wake of the financial crisis, they reflect so much of America; still pursuing an easy, corrupt dream rather than doing the hard work of imagining a more satisfying one.

Jackie and David Siegel

Posted in United States | Tagged David Siegel, financial crisis, Jackie Siegel, Marie Antoinette. Versailles, Orlando, Queen of Versailles, Wal-mart. Louis XIV | 2 Comments

Tough Yoga

Posted on 05/30/2013 by paulefallon

The line between success and failure can be fine, but once we trip over it, we cannot always raise ourselves to the other side. I knew an evening class would be grueling, but I thought it doable. I had been away for the weekend, driving up the East Coast on a workday Monday was stressful, but we pulled into the driveway at 5:40 pm and if I hustled I could make the 6:00 pm in Harvard Square. I know the Bikram yoga class times like others know train schedules. I raced into the studio with two minutes to spare, changed into my yoga shorts and took a spot toward the back.

For the next ninety minutes everything went wrong. I was too full from lunch, the room was too hot, too humid; I could not focus my mind. I stretched though half moon and awkward pose, but got dizzy on eagle. I fell out of standing head to knee, twice, and by the time we got to dancer pose I was standing in a shallow pool of my own sweat. Each pose got feebler until I took a knee at triangle. I tried to navigate head to knee but by the first sabasana I was finished. Midway through the spine series I left the room – a Bikram failure.

I am suffering yoga block. In the past month I’ve sat out more poses than I have in over 900 classes; twice I’ve had to leave the room. Some days the humidity feels like a choke hold around my neck. I still have great days when I leave class limber and energized, but a weariness plagues me. I am committed to completing my 1000 class mark, but I wonder if perhaps I need a breather, something lighter, some cooler air in my quest for fitness and mental clarity.

Posted in Yoga | Tagged Bikram, Bikram yoga, yoga | 3 Comments

Fly China

Posted on 05/25/2013 by paulefallon

On a short trip to China – I was gone just a week – the proportion of time on a plane is great, but it is as revealing a place to find cultural differences as anywhere. There are no boarding announcements for our flight from Hong Kong to Nanjing; Chinese line quietly at the gate well before boarding time and advance when allowed. I am sitting in a chair, nose in a magazine, when the only announcement, final call, echoes in the background. I scramble to get on board, one of only two Westerners trekking to this provincial city.

On board, announcements are made in Mandarin and that florid, exaggerated English distinct to Asia. Please be so kind as to fasten your seat belt as we would not like you to be distressed in event of unfortunate turbulence. The plane is late leaving the gate due to air traffic control. It is 6:00 pm on a busy weeknight in Hong Kong. No worry to me, although the announcer spins so many variations of sorry she is comical.

Flight attendants hand out Hagen Daz ice cream cups. I like this delay. People get up and open the overhead bins, visit with their friends a few rows back. The plane starts to move, just like that. No announcement. Ice cream distribution continues as we taxi out the runway.

I sit next to a middle aged woman in a trench coat. When I indicate that I have the window seat next to hers she looks at me in dazed surprised, as if sitting next to a Westerner is like winning the lottery. I suspect this may be her first flight; she’s wearing a Turbojet badge on her lapel, just like a five year old that visits the cockpit and gets a pair of wings. Her husband, in the aisle seat, wears workingman’s clothes and a baseball hat. The plane is still climbing when he gets up, shuffles through the overhead and brings out a technical manual full of graphs. He studies the entire trip. They do not say a word to each other.

_______________________________

My return flight from Shanghai to New York is on China Eastern, a low, low budget airline. There are no individual screens, no in-flight menus, not even Diet Coke. The central video monitors show nature films, bears and pelicans frolicking in the wild. People stand through much of the flight, the aisles are packed. The flight attendants enforce uniform group behavior. We must close our window shades at a specific time and raise them exactly eight hours later. They bristle at my brash suggestion that I will shut my shade if any of my neighbors object to the light. No, all shades are to be closed.

Around hour thirteen, just before we pass into US airspace, the monitors run a short film in which flight attendants demonstrate stretches that passengers can do in their seats to reinvigorate their extremities. All around me people extend their arms overhead, extend them at 45 degree angles, bend their elbows and tap their opposite hand at several locations up and down their arms. I do not follow along. I am dumbfounded by the docile way the group follow whatever is directed. After my week in China I am amazed at the power of the Chinese to move and act in a singular direction. When these folks land in the U.S., I wonder what they think of our determined individualism.

Posted in China | Tagged air travel, China, China Eastern, Hong Kong, Nanjing | Leave a comment

US and China – Going Green

Posted on 05/19/2013 by paulefallon

The United States is going green, albeit in fits and starts, with modest increases in automobile fuel efficiency, a smattering of wind power, and a shrugging acceptance of electric cars. Conservation is not a word that falls easily off the American tongue and fracking provides a new messiah excuse for the burn baby burn school of energy that refuses to lip serve any virtue in conservation. Still, we are getting there.

China is not very green. Everything is wrapped in plastic, there is little recycling; they drive cars as big as ours and are building roads to carry more and more of them. It will be some time before they consume as much energy per capita as we do, but it could happen. While we are starting to trend in a conservation direction, their trajectory is still up and up.

Many in the US believe that China needs to turn the conservation corner and be more sensitive to environmental and climate issues. The Chinese insist that we had our time to develop and now it is their turn, climate can wait. But China is no longer a developing country; it is a developed country. Sure, some areas are still lagging twenty-first century standards, but that is true in the US as well. Much, much of China is fully developed and it is time for China to put more focus on the global impact of their rampant growth spurt.

When I was working in Nanjing, every day my fellow workers looked at the sky and muttered, “It’s not very sunny today.” The sun was up there, obscured by the grey pall that hovers over the city. Their obstinate denial of pollution is an elephant in the room sort of party joke. Though no one would voice it directly, I felt their grief in lamenting the sun, worried that it might never shine on Nanjing again. One day I explained that the United States used to have grey skies but now they are clear again. They accepted those words with more gratitude than anything else I added to our work together.

Eventually the Chinese will wake up and decide their pollution is unacceptable, both physically and economically, and they will decide to fix it. Once that occurs, the characteristic difference between the US and China will shine through. When the Chinese government orders reductions in carbon emissions and recycling of solid waste, these hazards will be addressed faster and more comprehensively than we do in the United States. The debates and lobbying and competing interests that play out in public here stay behind closed doors in China until a government edict emerges and a billion people all change their habits.

It has been forty years since the environmental movement nudged the United States to clean up our water and reduce pollution, yet we are still arguing about emissions standards and climate science. We are an argumentative nation that airs many opinions; if not perfectly, at least with a broader range than in China.

The United States will get to green incrementally. The only question is will we go far enough, fast enough to avoid climate catastrophe. China can get to green quickly once it decides to go. The only question is will it turn its environmental course around soon enough to avoid climate catastrophe.

Haze over Nanjing

Posted in China, United States | Tagged China, climate, climate change, emissions standards, fracking, Green, Nanjing, pollution, United States | Leave a comment