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The Great Leader
A Faux Mystery
by Jim Harrison
A black-comic detective novel in the vein of No Country for Old Men, Jim Harrison's The Great Leader follows a retired detective in hilarious and bold pursuit of a sinister cult leader.
Imprint Grove Paperback
Publication Date October 23, 2012
ISBN-13 978-0-8021-4598-7
Dimensions 5.5" x 8.25"
US List Price $15.00
Jim Harrison was born in 1937, in Grayling, Michigan. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and The New York Times.
Read More About Jim Harrison
Best-selling and beloved author Jim Harrison has won international acclaim for his masterful body of work, including Returning to Earth, Legends of the Fall, and over thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In his newest and most original work to date, Harrison delivers an enthralling, witty, and expertly crafted novel that follows one man's hunt for an elusive cult leader, dubbed the Great Leader.
Detective Sunderson is on the verge of retirement when he begins to investigate a hedonistic cult, which has set up camp near his home in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. At first, the self-declared Great Leader seems merely a harmless oddball, but as Sunderson and his unlikely sixteen-year-old sidekick dig deeper, they find him more intelligent and sinister than they realized. Recently divorced and frequently pickled in alcohol, Sunderson tracks his quarry from the woods of Michigan to a town in Arizona that is filled with professional and criminal border-crossers, then on to Nebraska where the Great Leader's most recent recruits have gathered to glorify his questionable religion. But Sunderson's demons are also in pursuit of him.
Rich with character and incredibly funny, Jim Harrison's The Great Leader is at once a gripping excursion through America's landscapes and the poignant story of a man grappling with age, lost love, and his own darker nature.
Tags Literary
"The Great Leader is precisely what readers will want reading it to be: enthralling, exhilarating, provocative." —The Globe and Mail
"A wild ride . . . [and] a thoroughly enjoyable tale of religion, sex and money. . . . this is not your grandfather's detective novel." —Tim McNulty, The Seattle Times
"Enjoyable . . . The best moments come when the detective loses the trail and looks up to find, in Harrison's precise and powerful descriptions, the landscapes that surround him, where religion, money, and sex disappear, and 'a creek is more powerful than despair.'" —The New Yorker
"America's greatest living writer . . . After 34 books, endless Hemingway comparisons, and too many battles with gout, legendary author Jim Harrison is unsurpassed at chronicling man's relationship with wilderness. . . . The Harrison Legend . . . has only grown. . . . The Great Leader is hugely enjoyable—Harrison is probably incapable of writing a novel that is not enjoyable. The language remains stunning." —Tom Bissell, Outside Magazine
"Profound but raunchy, hilarious but illuminated, Harrison's best work is invariably rich, dark and delicious. . . . This book is both wise and full of fun." —The Washington Independent Review of Books
"Harrison is still writing sentences that make you yearn for more. . . . The Great Leader [is] a dark, wry story about a man troubled by loss and life's big questions . . . a man's man in the very best sense of the expression—a man we'd love to camp out with if we could only put up a tent." —Carolyn See, The Washington Post
"Harrison's story of an aging cop trying to tie up a final case is much more than a detective story. . . . The real mystery that Harrison explores in The Great Leader has little to do with cults or missing persons, and is much more concerned with how a man whose entire life has been defined by his work carries on after that job has ended. . . . The Great Leader is most successful when it explores Sunderson's process of reinventing himself, and Harrison seems to know this. Chasing the Great Leader, Sunderson begins to realize that the job may no longer matter to him, and his response to that growing realization is what truly carries the plot." —John Shortino, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"To enlighten and to entertain: what else is there? And while good books—even so-so books—serve both functions, if you ever have to choose one over the other, keep in mind that a book that entertains without enlightening can still be a guilty pleasure, but a book that enlightens without entertaining is algebra. Meaning that on some level your brain has to have a good time or it's pointless, and I am happy to report that The Great Leader carbonates page after page after page. You might go so far as to compare it to Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. . . . [Or] Willie Mays. Mays was a magic act, but the kind that left you with the feeling that the miraculous stuff surprised him too. And that's where Harrison fits in, 30-odd books down the road—his own shelf in the library—and you can still feel the excitement every time he pulls something new out of his ear. Which pretty much happens on every page he writes. . . . Pick up the book for yourself, drop it on the floor and wherever it falls open there will be something just as good. . . . Jim Harrison can break all the rules he wants and come out smelling like a rose." —Pete Dexter, The New York Times Book Review
"Jim Harrison brings his established fascination with the rugged places of the natural world, the pleasures of good food and the persistence of sexual desire to this sometimes playful, often poignant story of one man's twilight quest for redemption. . . . Jim Harrison's latest leaves no doubt he still has much that's fresh, entertaining and thoughtful to say." —Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness
"The lyrical narrative cascades between dark comedy and revelation and, though it plows familiar soil, could be among Harrison's more rewarding in years." —Ted Roelofs, The Grand Rapids Press
"Jim Harrison conjures The Great Leader of a bizarre hedonistic cult." —Vanity Fair
"The Great Leader is precisely what readers will want reading it to be: enthralling, exhilarating, provocative." —T.F. Rigelhof, The Globe and Mail
"Harrison writes of [the natural world] with such specificity and beauty." —Colette Bancroft, St. Petersburg Times
"The Great Leader is a novel filled with Harrison's trademark charisma, style, humor and lusty goodwill, along with endless paragraphs of superb observation . . . reading Harrison is always a pleasure, as nearly every page is a contagion of delightful insight and a burst of happy pleasure. Harrison, the author of more than 30 books of fiction, poetry, essay and memoir is perhaps our greatest American writer if judged by the fulsomeness of his vision of humanity (Balzacian), the lustiness of his prose (Millerian), the enormousness of his concern (Faulknerian), and the acuteness of his judgment (Didionian). The Great Leader provides both enlightenment and joy. What more can we poor readers ask?" —Gaylord Dold, The Wichita Eagle
"A mountain, a mess and an agonized moralist, Detective Sunderson makes this mock-epic one of the most memorable tales of contemporary master Harrison . . . Wounds-and-all portrait of a lion in winter, beleaguered but still battling." —Kirkus Reviews
"[The] cat-and-mouse game between the two main characters is used effectively to explore the intrinsic tensions between the universal truths of justice, religion and morality . . . A classic Harrison novel, complete with humorous and introspective characters." —Joshua Finnell, Library Journal
"Comic backwoods noir . . . [T]he story's motifs of lust and power, sex and death resonate." —Publishers Weekly
"The publication of a new opus by Jim Harrison is always a cause for celebration in my world." —Our Man in Boston
"Eminently readable . . . Harrison is adept at mixing in humor—both laugh out loud and quietly sardonic—to the mix." —Chazz W
"Jim Harrison demonstrates yet again why he stands among our finest and wisest writers. The author's voracious appetite for life bursts forth on each page . . . In many ways, [Sunderson] embodies the aging Harrison, who seizes the occasion of this novel to reflect on old age and—as he has for decades now—to celebrate life and the natural world." —Joseph Barbato, Red Weather Review (online)
"A conversation with Jim Harrison is like opening a box of Cracker Jacks. You get to nibble through the delightful crisp kernels knowing a prize awaits: You just won't know what it is until you get there. His books always hold similar delights, and both his newest novel, The Great Leader, and his poetry collection, Songs of Unreason, are super-sized and filled with prizes where you least expect them . . . His writing style . . . is both complex and simple, but always boiling when it hits the page." —Bill Castanier, CityPulse
"It has been said that Harrison is that rare writer who can successfully blend the life of the mind with the life of action . . . His prose, like his characters, is direct and intelligent, without many grace notes and devoid of filigree. There is, in other words, a zen-like transparency to the Harrison process. That process, the act of conveying content, is trumped every time by content. Pulling that off consistently, as Harrison continues to do, is a talent that is reserved for the best of the best. This novel is an example of how rare such a voice has become." —Doug Bruns, MostlyFiction Book Reviews (online)
Bookseller Praise:
"Jim Harrison is a grand old man of American letters, so he can play with cliches all he likes, thank you very much. A retiring cop obsessed with his last, unresolved case? Check. Last case revolves around a pedophilic cult leader? Double check. Retiring cop drinks excessively and is surprisingly successful in his pursuit of sexual liaisons with young women? Yeah, that's here too. But, damn, the man can write, and the clich's serve their appointed purposes in this engaging and needless-to-say-but-I'll-say-it-anyway well-crafted and beautifully written novel that just bursts with the muscular, hard-bitten prose of the Master." —Conrad Silverberg, Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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Detective Sunderson walked backward on the beach glancing around now and then to make sure he wasn't going to trip over a piece of driftwood. The wind out of the northwest had to be over fifty knots and the blowing sand stung his face and grated his eyes. It was below freezing and the surf at the river mouth was high and tormented where Lake Superior collided with the strong outgoing river current. The wind and surf were deafening and Sunderson reminded himself how much he disliked Lake Superior other than as something admirable to look at like an attractive calendar. He had been born and raised in the harbor town of Munising and two of his relatives who were commercial fishermen had died at sea back in the fifties bringing grief and disarray to the larger family. The most alarming fact of prolonged local history was the death of 280 people at sea between Marquette and Sault Ste. Marie. How could you like a killer? In his long soon-to-end career with the Michigan State Police he had never met a killer he liked.
His ex-wife who had loved even the crudest manifestations of nature thought his feelings about Lake Superior reprehensible but then she had never been held tightly by a sobbing aunt at a funeral. With two sons and two daughters his mother had only room to hold his crippled brother Bobby who had lost a foot in the rail yard of the local pulp mill.
When he turned to take the narrow path back upriver he found a piece of freshly charred wood and the damp blackness came off on his fingers. In his rush to get through the woods to the river mouth and possibly find the remains of the floating pyre he hadn't closely studied the river banks, which he did now with a little pleasure, glad to be out of the wind, the roar of it now just above the thick alders and stunted trees. He was on the track of a cult leader with various aliases, a purported child sex offender, impossible to prosecute as neither the mother nor the twelve-year-old girl would talk to him. He didn't need a lot of aimless paperwork miring up his retirement. Usually such offenders were a furtive uncle, cousin, or neighbor. A cult leader seemed beyond Sunderson's experience.
A half mile farther on he spotted a Phoenix Suns ball cap stuck in a logjam and retrieved it. He managed to get wet to his crotch retrieving the cap, which brought on a fit of shuddering shivers that pinched his temples. There was a smear of blood on the inside brim about which he felt noncommittal. Indeed, on the morning of the day of his retirement party five days later the state lab would determine that the blood was from a raccoon. His quarry, whom he called Dwight, one of seven discovered aliases, was so devious that Sunderson wouldn't have been surprised if it had been elephant blood. The Phoenix Suns ball cap made sense as Dwight possessed two diplomas from the tawdry degree mills of Phoenix, probably phony. The complainant in the sexual abuse charge, the father, had abandoned the cult and moved south to the spawned-out factory city of Flint and could not be found. It seemed obvious that the cult leader was faking his death to deter pursuit.
To still his shivering Sunderson had eaten the last of his baked bean and onion sandwich and taken a strong pull from a flask of schnapps. Of course drinking on duty was highly out of order but he doubted that there was another peace officer within fifty miles of this remote location.
He was tired and cold when he reached the longhouse, which was skillfully constructed of logs. These cult layabouts could have made solid money building summer cabins, he thought. If it weren't a hundred feet long it would have been a nice place to live nestled in a hardwood valley near a creek that emptied into the river. Before he made notes from seventeen witnesses that he considered uniformly unreliable he had made a mental note about the creek for future brook trout fishing should the cult abandon their dwelling with the disappearance of their leader, the Great Leader. Their name not his. The witnesses all looked hung over having had a wake for their leader where they doubtless drank vast amounts of their brackish berry wines, which he had tried on a previous visit. The worst was the blackberry and the best elderberry. He questioned idly what they would do with thirty cords of split hardwood stacked for winter when they abandoned their home.
These couples were packing their decrepit 4WDs: two Broncos and a Suburban missing most of its rusted-out front fender. The females were red-eyed from weeping but fairly attractive—at least by Upper Peninsula standards, which were none too strict—a consistent trait in Dwight's cult members. Sunderson liked to tease the Great Leader about this matter though it startled the adjutants or bodyguards always surrounding G.L. as his subalterns called him. G.L. aka Dwight enjoyed the teasing, pointing out that at the university in Marquette you could tell the U.P. female students from those who came up from downstate because the locals were far chunkier. G.L. was also amused when Sunderson had spit his blackberry wine on the ground thinking it tasted strongly of Robitussin cough syrup.
"What kind of fucking geek would drink this?" Sunderson had asked.
"My people," G.L. had answered, adding that all herbalists knew that blackberries increased sexual energy.
Sunderson nodded to several stragglers on the way to his vehicle parked near the bathhouse, dreading the bonejarring, half dozen two-track miles out to the gravel county road. A certain air of lawlessness was always possible in the U.P. for the simple reason that unless it was a fairly serious matter no cop wanted to pursue it especially if the weather was bad. It was fun to send rookie cops off fifty miles in the winter to break up a fight in a country bar when by the time the bar was reached the fight would be largely forgotten unless weapons were in evidence, rare in the old days but more common in recent years.
A few miles down the bumpy road and two pulls from the schnapps flask plus turning the heater on high and he was at last truly warm. This made him sleepy and he had to pull off on a side road and take a short nap, which turned out to be long enough so that when he awoke the car was cold and the world was dark and a fine sleet beat against the windshield. He felt a slight edge of panic but then it was only six o'clock, which may as well be midnight this far north. A brother-in-law ran a chain of recreational trailer parks in Arizona and Sunderson had been invited to run one of them after his upcoming retirement but the idea nauseated him. He had, however, promised to look over a trailer park when he visited his eighty-seven-year-old mother in a place called Green Valley, Arizona, during the Thanksgiving holiday. Sunderson was nearly computer illiterate but at the office Roxie, the secretary he shared, had looked up Green Valley and it decidedly wasn't very green, especially the beige mountains of mine tailings to the west of the retirement colony.
He pulled off the highway near Marquette and bought a pasty, a Cornish meat pie, for dinner then ended up eating the pasty in his driveway in front of his darkened house thinking the microwave would ruin the crunch of its crust. Previously well trained he had become a slob in the three years since his divorce. He had become so deep in thought that he actually nipped a finger on the last bite of the pasty. He was unsure indeed if the G.L. was a criminal in the sense that there was prosecutable evidence against him. This was his first genuinely interesting case in many years. It had begun when a man had flown up from Bloomfield Hills to Marquette in his private jet and shown Sunderson a piece of paper demonstrating that thirty thousand dollars had been drawn from his daughter's account. His daughter was the "queen" of the G.L.'s enclave. She was free, white, and twenty-five.
Sunderson had no interest in mysteries or detective fiction, those childish recipe books of mayhem, but it was not easy to see that a crime had been committed. Few citizens at large understood the triviality of a detective's job in this remote nonurban area—the city police handled their own pathetic crimes though Sunderson was occasionally called in for a stumper. As a student of history Sunderson favored Hannah Arendt's delicious phrase, "The banality of evil."
Sunderson sat down briefly at his desk to make a few notes but felt dullish after a big whiskey. He usually did his notes before a drink, when he liked to think that his brain was percolating, a sense that his mind was actually carbonated with the details of a case. A daily report to his chief was pro forma but was usually a list of the unproven suppositions before you eventually hit bingo.
1. Noted again that all cult couples have daughters around eleven, twelve, thirteen, or plus. Is Dwight, re: the rumor of sexual abuse, organizing his own breeding stock?
2. All members are closemouthed but will jabber profusely about the levels of spiritual development they wish to attain.
3. I have to find a lady to clean this fucking house top to bottom.
4. Little chance of resolving this case, a thousand to one against before I retire but curiosity has me by the balls. Historically America has always been full of cults, why?
It was to be one of the most horrid nights of his life in mental terms. After another sturdy whiskey he put a large afghan made by his ex-wife over his head and picked out a Netflix ordered by Roxie who monitored his queue. There was a fine-looking young Italian woman riding a bicycle in a skirt, with the skirt blowing up her back revealing a lovely butt in white undies that were drawn up fetchingly in her butt crack. This drew the attention of men she passed including a priest. The priest diverted Sunderson because the previous August there was a tentative charge against a priest for putting his mouth on a boy's penis during a church swimming party but when Sunderson interrogated the boy in the presence of his parents the boy was not absolutely sure it was the priest because there were dozens of other swimmers and the boy admitted the sexual event had happened underwater. The boy's father had stalked out of the room in anger on seeing a generous lawsuit disappear. The father was an insurance man and a well-known local chiseler. Sunderson certainly didn't tell the parents that there had been another complaint against the priest, but then the judgments of millions of dollars offended him, thinking that perhaps ten grand should be tops for an improper blow job or maybe twenty. The boy was 170 pounds and able-bodied and Sunderson couldn't help suspecting the complainant as much as the possible perpetrator.
The sight of the leering priest in the film and the obvious fact that they had needed a wind machine to blow the girl's skirt up her back dissipated Sunderson's nascent hard-on and he slept, waking with a yelp at 3:00 a.m. to a north wind rattling his house windows, also a tree branch cracking. He had lost all of the mental clarity of the day before, the lucid analysis of the hike down the river after the witness's testimony, and now he had become victim of a shit monsoon of dream images of the G.L.'s camp.
The seventeen witnesses had generally agreed that the floating pyre was anywhere from fifty to a hundred yards downstream when the flames appeared and a pistol shot was heard. Sunderson had stood before enough bonfires to know you couldn't see far beyond their brilliant light but in the dream the entire encampment was lit in the manner of those throbbing discos he hated to enter when he searched for a miscreant. It was up to each generation to be duped into lassitude by their own music. The faking of death had become obvious.
His panic on awakening from the night's lurid dreams was mostly caused by being wedged down in a corner of the big leather sofa with the afghan knotted around his face, a gesture toward suffocation. As a man with an extraordinarily ordinary mind the confusion he felt was blasphemous as if he had suddenly lost his arms while driving. The female cult members were dancing naked to tom-toms but were frightening rather than sexy and what was Roxie doing among them? Sunderson and Roxie met three times a month at his place for sex but she would park two blocks away and walk with her chow dog down the alley at night to keep their secret intact because she was married. A cult member was also roasting Sunderson's dog Walter on an open fire though the dog had been dead several years. Oh how he missed Walter. He fully expected his mind to clear with retirement but as it neared it was apparent that it would take a while.
He walked out on the front porch in his undershirt to feel the bracing sanity of being cold. It took less than a minute and he was pleased to see that a heavy oak limb had fallen on the newish Chevrolet Tahoe of the jerk across the street who was a swindling broker currently keeping a low profile. Back in the house he made a plate of Italian sausage and fried eggs.
Resuming his Netflix he used a lot of his home-pickled horseradish root under the assumption that indigestion was a preferable reality to his dream life. Now the Italian girl was naked on her bed and said "ouch" when she plucked one of her pubic hairs after which she began to masturbate. It was electrifying despite his almost immediate acid reflux. Evidently Italian sausage and horseradish held unsympathetic qualities. It was time for a Gas-X pill and a tender nightcap of Canadian whiskey. He would save the rest of the movie for the hour before Roxie made her next stealthy night visit. Both of them were of Scandinavian parentage and favored an orderly adultery regularly scheduled every ten days. He would stand on his back porch and she would come down the alley on foot in inclement weather or on her pink snowmobile in winter. She was a member of a women's snowmobile club called the Snow Queens and was pissed off when he said the group's name illustrated the general lack of imagination in the Marquette area. He loathed snowmobiles referring to them as "crotch rockets." He also didn't care for one of her favorite sexual positions which was to sit nude on his clothes dryer turned to "cotton sturdy high" to feel the warm vibrations. He was 5'9" and had to stand on a low stool for proper contact and feared pitching over backward at climax. Afterward she would cozy up on the sofa in his terry-cloth robe, smoke a number of Kools, and drink a Bud Light, and they would watch the eleven o'clock news. In contrast, on a trip to Italy with his wife he had been absurdly and elegantly stimulated by the draped forms of Renaissance women in paintings. Sexuality had so many layers and those at the bottom were pathetic indeed.
He tried to sleep but it was hopeless. The grimaces on the faces of the naked dancing women were utterly unlike any he had seen in his waking life except on a fourteen-year-old girl over in the Keweenaw who had shot an uncle who had been abusing her. She had a crazed glare and could not stop laughing. She used a 12-gauge shotgun with No. 8s in his lower abdomen, turning into red putty his offending organ and the surrounding area. There was no real effort at prosecution except for formalities because her rectum had to be surgically repaired. At the time he wondered what chance she had for a normal life if such a thing existed though now, six years later, she was playing basketball at a small college downstate and was a premed major. This said nothing about the state of her mind but Sunderson remembered so clearly looking up "Maenad," the mythological women given to tearing men into pieces. Oddly, the most awkward thing about the abused murderer was her utter beauty.
He made coffee at 4:00 a.m. and went to the study, a literal cave of books that used to be in the basement but had been moved up to the former dining room after the divorce. His ex-wife, Diane, had joked that his book buying each month exceeded their mortgage payment which was only two hundred and fifty dollars. She had worked as an administrator at the large regional hospital and they had lived well on their combined salaries, no longer true for him alone but he didn't care because he had his books, nearly all historical in nature. He had been a brilliant student of history at Michigan State in East Lansing. He had been strongly encouraged by his professors to go to graduate school but he was mortally homesick for the Upper Peninsula, especially in May when the homesickness would become a palpable ache in the throat. He applied as a courtesy and received a graduate assistantship but one day on his way to visit a professor in faculty housing he had passed the Michigan State Police headquarters and stopped on impulse. In his Munising youth everyone thought the state police were zippy and along with being a UPS driver it was one of the best jobs in the U.P. He adamantly rejected the idea of teaching because he didn't want to be trapped indoors during his favorite brook trout month which was May. Other than history, brook trout proved to be his only other lifelong obsession. It was mostly their lovely remote habitats, some of the smallest and unobtrusive creeks and springs, and beaver ponds.
Within three weeks he had taken the recruit exam passing with the highest score possible, and at their urging went on to get a master's in criminology. He didn't mind being an ordinary trooper but his talents and knowledge of the U.P. were exhaustive and within a few years he was a detective in Marquette with a decided aversion for any administrative job.
His heart warmed when he sat at his desk, as if a heart could smile. The only slightly jarring note was the original Marilyn Monroe calendar, discreet by current standards, and also a photo of the actress Blythe Danner who used to figure large in his limited fantasy life. His friend Marion, a mixed-blood middle-school principal, had loaned him a book on Native American longhouses, which he had misplaced but now turned up under a pile of early logging monographs. At the onset Marion had told him that Chippewa (Anishinabe) didn't build longhouses but they were the chosen dwelling in the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy—Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Tuscarora—and in certain Pacific Northwest coast tribes like the Salish and the Suquamish who built one five hundred feet long. This latter fact jogged his mind and he shuffled through the papers of the Great Leader's slender file finding the record of a Dwight Yoakam (an alias using a country singer's name) being charged for disturbing the peace in Port Townsend, Washington, the year before. When Roxie called for the details Dwight had alarmed a group of Japanese tourists by speaking in tongues. When Sunderson had impounded Dwight's old mint Nash Rambler for the day on the flimsy charge of larceny by conversion he had found nine current license plates in the trunk, one of them from the state of Washington. It was hard to explain to the Bloomfield Hills father that if his twenty-five-year-old daughter Portia, whom the cultists called Queenie, wished to give away thirty thousand dollars, mostly for propane heat for the longhouse and bathhouse, she was free to do so. The father, Sunderson thought of him as Mister Bigshot, got drunk at the Verling House the night he was in Marquette and propositioned a waitress for a grand, or so said an informant. They bathed in the Jacuzzi of the Teddy Roosevelt suite in the hotel on the hill. He fell asleep so she pulled the plug in the drain so he wouldn't drown, removed the thousand from his wallet, and took her friends out drinking with a little cocaine on the side.
He didn't have all that much information on the Great Leader but he still refused to ask the FBI for help. They were both nosy and condescending and as the disaster of 9/11 indicated they didn't like to share the information they themselves ignored. Roxie had done the best she could in helping him build a file but in four days he would no longer be able to use her services. Despite his apparent intelligence he had never learned the computer mostly because of a lifelong aversion to electricity. When he was seven a cousin had been electrocuted having climbed the fence of the power station behind the pulp mill.
The ideal substitute for Roxie was the sixteen-year-old girl next door named Mona. She was an ace hacker and a detective friend of his who specialized in computer crimes told him that he kept her under surveillance. She mostly dressed in black explaining to him that she was a goth, which Roxie had explained to him but he kept forgetting the details. They talked a great deal partly because they were neighbors living solo. Her single mother was a traveling cosmetic salesperson so Mona was mostly alone though she said that she was never lonely. When they were both raking maple leaves a few weeks before Mona had teased him about blocking off his remaining dining room window with yet another bookcase.
His Lutheran childhood still carried a miniscule weight but enough to make him ashamed of his motive. He could stand in front of the case and at eye level pull out Slotkin's treatise on violence in America and look across thirty feet of yard directly into her bedroom. Strictly speaking it wasn't illegal but what was it? A bare butt crack was mere negative space but then it could make the temples of a man very nearly sixty-five years old pound unpleasantly. The biological imperative was a distracting nuisance. Checking his watch he knew she would be getting up for school in fifty minutes and the question was did he have enough self-control not to take a peek, which often devolved into a fifteen-minute trance? Part of his mind ached with guilt over this dubious matter even though since he was in his own home peeking wasn't criminal. Sexuality could be like carrying around a backpack full of cow manure, especially for a senior frantically holding on to waning impulses.
He read the Great Leader's file backward in lame hope for new perspective. His quarry Dwight had started religions in four locations in the United States, and had attempted three more in other countries including Canada, France, and Mexico. He had only lasted three days each in Hattiesburg and Oxford, Mississippi, when the police advised him to leave in a hurry. In both Montreal and Arles, France, he had lasted a scant three weeks before he drew too much attention and with an alien passport it was easy to get rid of him. It had occurred to Sunderson that for the populace in general religious belief can have nearly the attraction of money. Dwight lacked the apparent greed of the raft of southern evangelists who had built empires but he had certainly managed to live well enough. As far as he could determine Dwight was still short of forty years old. The second time he visited the longhouse people were otherwise diverted and he had a quick peek through the curtains of Dwight's bailiwick, which could be called primitive regal, say the tent of Kublai Khan with a wealth of deerskins on the wall, bear skins on the floor, and a beaver skin duvet on the bed trimmed with mink pelts.
Sunderson wasn't well traveled enough to know if foreigners were in general as gullible as Americans. In America you didn't need credentials or if they were called for they could swiftly be created. A number of the Great Leader's current devotees were college graduates though Sunderson had come to the conclusion that most colleges were a mere continuum of the utter slovenliness of high school. In the seventh grade our students are competitive with Western Europe but by the twelfth grade we're in twenty-seventh place. When Sunderson had read this it made him happy as it helped explain why the United States Congress was so obviously ignorant of American history, not to speak of those sullen louts that had been in the executive branch. Bush would say, "History tells us," and then come up with something history doesn't tell us as pointed out by one of Sunderson's heroes, the journalist David Halberstam. When Halberstam died in an auto accident Sunderson had a private evening of mourning with the writer's books spread across his desk.
To peek or not to peek, that was the question. It was eleven minutes to zero hour when Mona's lights would come on. Was he so fatigued by a bad night that he lacked moral resolve? Probably. This was a wan attempt to recapture the melancholic, philosophical mood he used to feel reading Kierkegaard in college. Of course even then he would have dropped Either/Or like a hot skillet if a nude girl had appeared before a window. Biology defeats philosophy in the first round. What was this stomach-souring anguish of sex? Even wise Socrates tripped over his pecker.
He tried to divert himself with history. The Congress of Vienna in 1814 was the occasion of a speech by someone—he needed to look it up—that warned against the dire consequences of raising a mediocre man to power. Quite suddenly he had to go to the toilet, threatening that there would be no dawn Mona, but he accomplished the humbling task in a trice. He was back within twenty seconds of zero hour having synchronized his clock with her alarm as closely as possible indicated by her turning on her bed lamp. His neurons raced. A prof had said that the Enlightenment wasn't very enlightened. He pulled the Slotkin volume and her light came on. She flopped out of bed and stood. She leaned over to scratch her tummy. Her butt was aimed at me, thought Sunderson, either the gates of heaven or hell. She stood and turned to the window, instantly quizzical. Oh my god I forgot to turn out the light and she doubtless sees the crack of light in my window. He ducked, then crouched with his chest against the desk figuring that if he turned out the light now she'd know he had been watching. What a fool to forget the light! He felt the sweat on his forehead, the navy blue shame of the geezer or near geezer possibly caught at his ignominious vice. He had more than a touch of acid reflux, which didn't help. When clothed Mona, usually in goth black, looked too slender but in the nude her breasts and bottom were ample. His old dick, sometimes a friend but now a foe, was pointlessly hard and deserved, he thought, to be slammed in the desk drawer for its implicit stupidity. How do we account for the theory and practice of our guilt?
His eye caught a few words from a piece of paper that belonged in the Dwight folder but had been carelessly stored. It was the testimony of a Carla G., the only person he could find who had become somewhat disaffected with the Great Leader's cult and returned to Marquette. She insisted that Dwight had moved headquarters from Marquette to Ontonagon for greater control but Sunderson knew it was the cheaper land over to the west. Carla G. was a shopper and claimed that was the reason for her departure but on further probing she began to cry and it nearly ruined his whitefish sandwich. They were lunching in the bar of the elegant old hotel, the Landmark Inn, and several women of the feminist persuasion glared at Sunderson as if Carla's weeping was his fault. She finally admitted she had quit the cult because Dwight had maintained that she was his true love but she soon discovered he was screwing the other members, sometimes even a few of the men, and possibly underaged girls. Sunderson practically gasped at this new detail and then her mind wandered off into details about the Great Leader's various masks and costumes. He had a half dozen or so tree costumes made of the bark of different trees in order to be invisible. He had a round mask with his face on all sides, with eye holes, and his features bleeding into each other so it looked like he could see like an owl. The last bite of the whitefish sandwich was hard to swallow. Out in the parking lot at her car Carla had embraced him in her thin summer dress putting her hips and pelvis into it. She started crying again and said that her father had abandoned the family when she was only seven and all she could remember was all the spankings he gave to her on her bare bottom. With a glint of something in her eye she suggested that he come to her apartment. He said that it would be improper for him to do so until late October when he retired, and she said, "What do you mean?" as if he were the naughty instigator. At that moment her cell phone rang. She answered with an air of importance and a loud voice squawked, "Carla, I want your ass on my face right now!" She reddened and struggled with her car door. "That young man likes you," Sunderson chuckled and walked away, absolutely convinced that Carla was a fabulous liar about everything and was in all likelihood a frontwoman and spy for Dwight in addition to being nuts.
In truth Sunderson was fair looking. Many thought that though he was verging on sixty-five he could pass for fifty-five. He was without vanity so this meant nothing to him. "Sixty-five is sixty-five," he would reply. Roxie had said many times that he looked "ratty" but that was because he had bought no new clothes in the three years since his divorce. When he had lunch with his ex-wife Diane a few weeks before to settle a business matter she was appalled because both the cuffs of his sleeves and his sports coat were frayed. She had insisted on signing the house over to him because when her parents from Battle Creek had died she had become "overloaded," plus she was now married to a retired surgeon who shared her passions for art and nature. He had only met Bill a few times, mostly because doctors don't normally hang out with detectives and because often during their marriage when invited out he had the slightly paranoid feeling that people would have preferred if only his wife had shown up. Near the end of it all he had asked just how she demonstrated her love for the arts and nature. They were having dinner and she broke into tears at the question and left the table for her small private room where she listened to classical music and looked at her art books. He didn't explain that his cold crankiness was caused by a child-beating incident that afternoon. A boy of ten had been unmercifully beaten by his drunken father. The boy lost several teeth and his nose was crushed flat. His mouth was too swollen to talk so he wrote, "I don't want dad to get in no trouble." It was out near Champion and when Sunderson and a trooper led the handcuffed man out the door Sunderson tripped him so that he pitched off the steps onto the sidewalk on his face. He never shared this sort of information with his wife who found so much unbearable. A hatchling robin fallen to the ground out in the yard brought her to tears.
On the way to work he was drowsy so he drove down to the harbor and stood out in the cold north wind that was pushing waves over to the top of the break wall. He felt forlornly on the wrong track with the Great Leader. His colleagues and captain in the state police teased him with, "Where's the evidence of a crime?" Everyone knew there wasn't a provable one and it was certainly an ironic way to end a fine career. His uncle John Shannon who was a commercial fisherman liked to say, "Every boat is looking for a place to sink." There were far more rumors of sexual abuse these days than day-old bread and in this case the mother and daughter were unwilling to testify.
He turned and looked at the huge Catholic church on the hill and received a modest jolt in his frontal lobe, not really a clue. The year before the divorce they had taken a vacation in northern Italy and his wife had been in a serene trance over religious art and architecture while he as an historian mostly saw the parasitical nature of the Catholic Church. This was what truly goaded him about Dwight who had managed to get seventy people to give up their lives and money. By living in primitive conditions in the "past before the past" as Dwight called it they would have a wonderful future. Was this any more cockamamie than the Mormons, or the Catholics for that matter? The idea that something so obviously stupid worked with people irked him. They beat on their drums, chanted in tongues, danced, and hunted and fished. As the members spiritually matured their pasts would reshape themselves. Dwight seemed to utterly believe in what he was doing and then one day he didn't and would move on. The little information Roxie had gathered on the Great Leader's activities seemed to center on the Mayan calendar, the nature of which Sunderson didn't yet understand. He suspected that it was true Dwight had had sexual relations with the twelve-year-old daughter of a cult member but there was nowhere to go with this. Sunderson was concerned that when you looked into the history of religion those in power generally devised a way to get at the young stuff, which seemed also to be a biological premise in other mammals. This was scarcely a new idea as Marion had noted. Just as Sunderson's hobby was history Marion, as a mixed blood, was obsessive about anthropology.
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Steps Issue No. 123,
Hitting All the Right Notes
By Eric Breier
Cal State San Marcos' campus looked quite a bit different when music professor Bill Bradbury joined the faculty in 1993.
Only Academic Hall, Craven Hall and Science Hall 1 had been built. As for a state-of-the-art music studio, well, only if you count a closet in Science Hall 1.
"It was not a lot bigger than my office," Bradbury said. "We had a mixing board and some mics and I could squeeze about eight or 10 students in the closet."
Times have certainly changed.
In the past three years alone, CSUSM has added a music major, an innovative music lab and received the prestigious designation as an All-Steinway School, among other milestones.
"It's really a new era for music on our campus," Bradbury said. "There are a lot of exciting things happening for our students."
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All-Steinway School
Ching-Ming Cheng, a CSUSM associate professor of music and a renowned classical pianist, says the University's designation as an All-Steinway School "marks the beginning of a new chapter for CSUSM's music program." Photo by Andrew Reed
Inventory upgrade
Earning the All-Steinway School designation was not even on Ching-Ming Cheng's radar when she arrived at CSUSM in 2011.
Cheng, an associate professor of music and a renowned classical pianist, took one look at the 61-note keyboards being used by students at the time and knew an upgrade was paramount.
By 2015, thanks to a fundraising event at which Cheng performed, CSUSM was able to open a music lab with 30 new, 88-key digital pianos.
The music lab was the first step on an important journey for the University's music program.
In October 2016, nearly $150,000 was raised for the purchase of a Steinway D Concert Grand piano, the instrument of choice for most concert pianists. CSUSM students experienced playing on the Steinway D in the spring as part of their senior capstone projects.
"It's like you've been driving a Volkswagen and all of a sudden somebody gives you a Tesla," said Dana Burnett, a lecturer in the music department.
Building on the momentum from the acquisition of the Steinway D, the University publicly announced its goal to become an All-Steinway School on April 9, 2017, following a performance by Cheng at the California Center for the Arts Escondido. CSUSM reached its goal exactly one year later, joining an exclusive group of fewer than 200 universities and conservatories worldwide with the All-Steinway School designation.
"In music, especially in piano performance, having a good instrument can bring you to the next level," Cheng said. "For all the elite music schools around the world, becoming an All-Steinway School is really the goal. When you present yourself as an All-Steinway School, you don't really need to say much more. That's when you know that the teachers know what they're doing, and the school knows what's important and how to support students.
"I'm really grateful and happy to be in this community where everybody supports music so much."
Merryl Goldberg
The CSU Board of Trustees has recognized CSUSM professor Merryl Goldberg with the prestigious 2018 Wang Family Excellence Award for Outstanding Faculty Teaching. Photo by Christine Vaughan
Student-centered approach
The All-Steinway School designation and the music lab aren't the only unique aspects of the program.
Music professor Merryl Goldberg, who arrived at CSUSM the same year as Bradbury, notes that the small professor-to-student ratio is a boon for students, who are able to provide input into the structure of their degree.
"Their path might be rock 'n' roll, it might be classical or mariachi or some type of folk music, but we're able to support and nurture students in any path they choose," Goldberg said. "It's really student centered."
The program has a group of core courses that all music majors take and then they are free to emphasize a specific area based on their interests.
"The flexibility in creating your own degree that works for you is really unparalleled," said Spencer Osborne, who will graduate in spring 2019 with a degree in music composition. "I don't know another school that does that."
Students' musical experience when they arrive at CSUSM runs the gamut from those who are highly skilled to others who are at a beginner level.
Kristina Vo is one who arrived at CSUSM highly skilled on the piano, but she never considered majoring in music – not until she took a course with Cheng.
Kristina started playing the piano when she was 7 years old and continued through high school. Then she quit, figuring it was time to focus on her economics major when she enrolled at CSUSM.
Then Kristina signed up for an intermediate piano class taught by Cheng. With her previous playing experience, Kristina figured she would get an A in the class before moving on to fulfilling other graduation requirements. Instead, with encouragement from Cheng, Kristina added a second major and graduated in May with degrees in economics and music.
"The professors are really passionate about teaching and conveying their passion to students," Kristina said.
Curtis Taylor
A lecturer in CSUSM's music program since January 2016, Curtis Taylor is a renowned trumpeter who has played in a dozen countries not to mention with some of the heavyweights of jazz.
Burgeoning program
The growth over the past few years has attracted talented musicians eager to be part of CSUSM's burgeoning music program.
"We have really high caliber faculty," Bradbury said. "There's a lot of faculty-student interaction, which is really important, especially in music."
Renowned trumpeter Curtis Taylor, a Grammy Award-winning artist who has played in a dozen countries and with some of the heavyweights of jazz, is one such instructor.
While some of his students are relatively new to their instrument, Taylor embraces the challenge of getting them up to speed. A music lecturer at CSUSM since spring 2016, Taylor begins each semester by finding a common starting place and building upon everyone's knowledge base.
"That happens through the instruction and the concepts I teach, but it also happens through the students who know a little more helping the students who don't know as much," Taylor said. "I try to foster that team-building environment.
"It's so rewarding. Even if people don't go on to have a career in music, you can take the skills you learn from music in practice and discipline and consistency, and you can apply it to any area of your life that you want to excel in."
Malesha Taylor is another recent addition to the music program, becoming the department's voice teacher in the spring.
Malesha Taylor taught Vocal and Instrumental Instruction in the spring and will be leading a performance ensemble that will perform traditional and contemporary gospel music in the fall.
"What I really like about this music department, which is unique to all music departments that I've ever seen, is the students are learning different genres," said Malesha Taylor, noting that the repertoire of her students includes classical, Latin jazz, traditional jazz, musical theater, pop and soul, among other genres.
Malesha Taylor
An accomplished musical artist, CSUSM lecturer Malesha Taylor wants "students to feel like they can look into jobs and opportunities in the music field." Photo by Andrew Reed
Bright future
Curtis Taylor and Malesha Taylor are two of nearly a dozen lecturers in the music department. Bradbury, Cheng, Goldberg and department chair Mtafiti Imara comprise the full-time faculty.
Their presence and work toward developing the music major – not to mention the revamped music lab and All-Steinway School designation – have helped put CSUSM's music program on the map throughout the region.
"Our award-winning music faculty are skilled and talented artists, teachers and scholars," said Julia Johnson, dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences. "They have won multiple awards, including Emmys and grants from organizations like the National Endowment of the Arts or the Federal Department of Education Arts in Education Program.
"Additionally, they travel globally to perform for and to educate audiences in every part of the world. Students studying music at CSUSM have the benefit of learning from these accomplished professionals as they work toward their own professional goals as musicians."
Bradbury still remembers the email he sent to faculty when the music major was approved three years ago. He noted that the "grunt work" was done, referring to the committees, the seemingly endless paperwork and designing the curriculum. It was time to start the "real work."
"Now we have students coming here expecting this degree," he said. "We have faculty with so much energy who are so supportive of the students. It's really an exciting time."
The department members aren't resting on their laurels. Space constraints are an ongoing issue as the music department shares Arts 111, the campus' lone performance hall, with dance and theater classes. One of the more immediate priorities is raising funds for student scholarships.
But seeing all that has been accomplished in a short period of time, Cheng has no doubt they can reach these goals and more.
"Every semester something good happens," Cheng said. "We're growing so fast. We keep getting the right support.
"The community really sees the importance of music education and arts education."
STEPS Magazine
Steps Magazine is published semiannually by University Advancement at California State University San Marcos. The purpose of the publication is to showcase CSUSM programs and initiatives, share student success stories, and highlight opportunities for alumni and friends to engage with and support the University and its strategic funding priorities.
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text:
BASTARD BACHELOR SOCIETY BY SARA NEY
Get ready ladies because Sara Ney has a new romcom series out that is going to leave you giggling! I absolutely loved this book! It's a neighbors to lovers romcom and a standalone in a brand new series. Make sure to check this one out!
Release Date: January 28, 2020
Genre: Romantic Comedy. Neighbors to lovers.
Series: Bastard Bachelor Society #1 (can stand alone)
What is the Bastard Bachelor Society?
It's a gentleman's club—like the dignified men of the past used to have.
Except, we're not gentleman, and we're not dignified.
We're ineligible bachelors; bored, jaded and not looking for relationships. Quite the opposite actually…
We're so committed to being single, we've created a high stakes bet to see who can remain single the longest. Rules are involved. Prizes.
Laugh it up, but I'm no loser.
Enemy number one to my single status? My irresistible neighbor,
Abbott Margolis. She with her evil cat Desdemona, and Sexy AF pencil skirts. She's kind and beautiful and hilarious. We can't get involved, no matter how much her meddling grandmother pushes us together. But if I was going to lose this bet for anyone? It would for Abbott.
Let's face facts: I'm a bastard, unwilling to settle down.
Especially when there's a bet to win.
Apple: https://apple.co/2Ncl8mx
Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Rs53Lv
Nook: http://bit.ly/2uUNprf
Kobo: http://bit.ly/35SByGV
Actual Rating: 5 stars
Neighbors to Lovers | Romantic Comedy
My first thought after finishing Bastard Bachelor Society was, I NEED MORE. Not because the book isn't complete (it is- there is no cliffhanger) but because I am IN LOVE WITH THIS WORLD. Sara Ney has written a HILARIOUS neighbors to lovers romance with this book and I was giggling the whole way through. Not only that, I felt so connected to Brooks and Abbott (she's a girl, don't let the name fool you). I think this is because I saw a little of myself in both of them! Their sense of humor, the way the act when around each other, and the silly things they do had me in a fit of giggles. I'm telling you; my stomach was ACHING because of the amount of laughter coming from the depth of my soul!!!! AH!!! If you're a fan of romantic comedies, you won't want to miss this book! It's so much more than the title (I'll admit, it made me think this was another DB book). READ. THIS. BOOK!
Abbott and Brooks are neighbors. They live across the hall from one another and have hit it off from their first "meeting". It may not have been the best meeting for Brooks, but it led to a fantastic friendship! The two spend all their time together as JUST FRIENDS and show no mercy when it comes to picking on each other. But things start to get blurry when they decide to try out an extreme cuddle… and their vastly important friendship may lead to something neither of them really wanted in the first place…
How the Bastard Bachelor society fits into this story is for potential readers to find out! It may or may not leave some characters feeling a bit hesitant when it comes to romance and there's a possibility that it stands in the way of true love. But sometimes out characters need to figure this out for themselves which is exactly what happens in BBS. You are going to LOVE IT.
Secondary characters also play a major role in this book. The first one that comes to my mind (and may even be my favorite character EVER) is Desdemona. She's the attack cat (bahaha) of Abbotts. She may or may not have two chapters in her own POV too so… You'll have to read it to see what that's all about, but she really steals the show! She's a barrel of laughs!!! Then we have Nan. She may be rich and loves spoiling those she loves but she's also pretty aggressive when it comes to hooking her granddaughter up. Sort of reminds me of my own nan! I LOVED HER! And the other bastards? Well, here's to hoping their books are coming soon because I honestly cannot wait!
Romcom readers, don't miss Sara Ney's latest! It's a hit!
Sara Ney is the USA Today Bestselling Author of the How to Date a Douchebag series, and is best known for her sexy, laugh-out-loud New Adult romances. Among her favorite vices, she includes: iced latte's, historical architecture and well-placed sarcasm. She lives in the Midwest, collects vintage books, art, loves flea markets, and fancies herself British.
For a list of cities/venues Sara will be signing at, or to purchase signed books, please visit her website at www.authorsaraney.com
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Dubai Property Market Crash BubbleOmiX Update 2011
Housing-Market / Middle East Mar 07, 2011 - 04:30 AM GMT
By: Andrew_Butter
If you drive out on the highway towards Abu Dhabi past the Jebel Ali Free Zone, look on the right and you will see, partly covered in sand, the remnants of the billboards that used to declare, "Where the Vision of Dubai Get's Built".
I met a guy who claimed to have come up with that tag-line. He was a young American, very nice and very-very smart, based in New York working for a big-name branding company, with absolutely no clue of what Dubai is/was about. But he was making really good money, and that's fundamentally what everything is about, in Dubai.
That particular "vision" was going to be bigger than Hong Kong. My conversation with the nice young American was a big factor in what made me decide to "retire" the part of my business that did real estate consulting.
Up to then I could explain what was happening and if I did a ten-year projection on the revenue stream for a shopping mall or a hotel, I'd have a pretty good chance of being within 20% on Year Ten. Starting 2007 my models broke down. The "crunch" came when I gave my ""opinion of value" to an investor on a "fantastic-once-in-a-lifetime" plot of land that was being offered at a very special price that only someone "really connected" could get, of $200 a square ft of GFA.
I told him that was a stupid price and he should not buy; three months later he called me in a huff to complain that the land had been flipped at $300. I said "OK but you were going to develop (a four-to-five year commitment), not flip; and anyway I don't do gambling". That didn't go down well and we haven't spoken since; although I did notice his Ferrari in the long-term parking at the airport a while back, covered in dust.
Anyway, the "vision" that I'd been working with until then was the one that Sheikh Rashid told to my mate Eric Tulloch (sadly departed) in 1978.
"I will build the infrastructure and the rest will follow".
At some point in all the excitement, that vision got changed to:
"We will build the rest and the infrastructure will follow".
Back then I knew nothing about bubbles but I was fascinated with Dubai and how and why the economy had more than doubled in size from 1990 to 2000, and then more than doubled again from 2000 to 2005. In 1990 Dubai was 15% the size of Singapore; in 2005 it was half its size and Singapore is no slouch when it comes to allowing free-market economics to rip, like when you start main-lining Adam Smith mixed with Speed.
Then there was the bubble, then there was the bust, and here we are.
This is a chart that I put up in July 2009 which was when I think I finally figured out how bubbles work. I've updated it to my estimate of where prices are now (the Orange dot).
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article12114.html
That orange dot is about 10% below where I predicted, I think the reason for that is I had not anticipated how much the bust would affect economic activity and also I under-estimated how much pipeline inventory there was. Although in my defence by that time I'd found other jobs for my researchers so I was eyeballing.
What caused the bubble in property in Dubai was pretty simple, (although I admit it took me about a year to "twig" what had been going on).
Up to early 2007 the price of housing (rentals and owned) had tracked the ratio of economic activity divided by the numbers of housing units, just like it does everywhere in the world. Sure interest rates are important but local interest rates hardly changed over that period.
But there was a lot of growth in the economy, on top of that was the start of property that foreigners could own, called "freehold", which created a bit of a feedback loop as more and more people got involved in property, and they all needed a place to live, so more and more people got involved in property, round and round.
Then people piled in from far-and-wide with money in their pockets so then there was a shortage of new places to live, and so prices got bid up, for anything that was available. That resulted in a huge discrepancy between rents/prices for new units and what tenants in the older units paid in rent (there was no market for sale in that sector since foreigners could only buy freehold), so prices of the new stuff almost doubled. Everyone was looking at the "new" prices, which reflected only a sub-section of the market, rather than the market as a whole.
The red line "Other than Market Value", is where (in my opinion) prices ought to have gone if the market had been "efficient", and would probably reflect the whole market of rental (practically everyone rents in Dubai), if the "older" units were included. But there are no statistics on that; in fact there are hardly any statistics on Dubai, and those that there are, are one-year to eighteen months late, which is pretty useless in a place that's changing that fast.
In my opinion, the lack of meaningful statistics was one reason there was a bubble, which was a classical example of "asymmetry of information", people would look at the newspapers, they could see that an apartment could rent for say $25,000, and that the nominal yield was say 5%, so it made sense to pay $500,000.
But the "assumption" they made was that the price they could rent-out a new unit for today was a reflection of what the whole of Dubai was paying, on average. And as we all know, "Assumption is the Mother of all Frappuccinos".
Then, the big-name branded real estate consulting companies who didn't have any more of a clue of how Dubai worked, than the nice American branding expert; piled into town, and they got paid big bucks "facilitating" the new-boys-in-town bankers like RBS and Deutsche Bank to lend $100 billion to developers based on "sure-fire" RICS valuations; plus a total misunderstanding about how the constitution of the UAE works, as in "sorry sweetheart, Uncle Abu Dhabi is not your fairy godmother".
But that was good money if you could get it, and if you had the ethics of a sewer-rat and if you didn't mind your customers leaving their Ferraris at the airport.
Anyway just as the new-kids-in-town declared that 2009 was going to be an "even better year than 2008", the penny dropped. Or more precisely the demand for the sub-market of hugely over-priced property started to get satisfied by new inventory, and then there was the "pop".
The pop was helped along by a decision to make it more difficult for people from non OEDC countries to get visas, which was a factor feeding the market. But "visas" were not the cause of the bubble; up to 2006/7 the market had been driven by "fundamentals", which included people who live behind the barbed-wire fence that separates the rich nations from the threat of influx from poor nations.
There's nothing wrong with that; Dubai works, first because it has modern infrastructure including reasonably good standards of the rule of law (at least compared to its neighbours, and sure the courts are not Dubai's strong-point), it is safe, and outside of the "vision" thing, there an absence of petty corruption that is endemic in the "Third World". Second it's open; anyone who has money can come to Dubai and set up a business (that often does not do any business in Dubai).
As in the line from Confucius on how to get a city to prosper, "Make the local people happy, and attract foreigners from afar", which is something China has been very successful at doing.
Dubai was then, and still is, the best place to base a business for 2,000 miles in any direction; and now that property prices have come down from where they were when everyone was having "visions", it's even better.
The black dotted line that dips down to 150 was the prediction that I made in July 2009 about where the bottom would be, although you would have had to be pretty quick to catch it, and it was pretty "theoretical" because there were practically no transactions.
The thing about Dubai is that there isn't a proper law on foreclosure so when you take a loan, you just write a hundred post-dated cheques, and if the cheque bounces, you go to jail, or you run away before your name is posted on the computer at the airport. Foreclosure takes a lot longer, so the market didn't exactly "clear", it just stopped.
But I know of some transactions that followed that path; a friend of mine wanted to buy on the Palm in early 2009, and he asked for some free advice. I said "if you want to live there" (I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to live on the banks of an algae-filled canal), "then now is the time". He was offered a "standard" villa for $1.75 million; I said "grab it".
But my friend is real-smart which he says explains why he has much more money than me. My theory by the way is that's more to do with my deep vein of human kindness, as in giving free advice to people who can afford to pay, and if they did pay they might be more inclined to take it. Anyway he told me, "I Never Accept the First Offer".
So he messed around looking for a better deal, and what he did was typical Dubai; instead of trusting the agent he was using, he went to see ten other agents. And every one of them found the same property, and they all told the owner they had a "cash buyer" in their pocket. So he figured that with ten "cash buyers" in the market he was going figure a way around whatever it was that was forcing him to sell at that juncture, and he put the price up, so my mate was gazumped by himself (as in "shoot yourself in the foot"). Nowadays you won't find a unit like that for less than $2.3 million, which pretty much fits the curve.
Right now (in my opinion) the price of property in Dubai more or less reflects the fundamental of supply and demand.
Prices are down on pre-bubble (say January 2007) because there has been a lot of new inventory (and there is more to come), and also the amount of economic activity has gone down (a bit) in nominal terms since then (my opinion also).
That explains why a temporary 40% over-pricing ended up in a fairly short-lived 60% decline; that subsequently bounced (a bit).
No one with any brains is building new property in Dubai at the moment; unless they managed to get some really cheap land (construction costs are rock-bottom), but most good land is tied up in litigation and has a half finished building on it; all that's happening now is that some of the half-competed units are slowly getting finished.
One of the things about Dubai was that many developers (not the ones I advised mind), forced contractors to take risk and signed lump-sum contracts rather than taking the risk of price changes in steel, concrete and MEP during construction themselves; now those owners are crying.
What will drive the future now, is the rate of growth of the Dubai economy.
Of course, no one really knows what the size of the Dubai economy is, since there is not really any tax and so there is no direct way of measuring it. And the valiant efforts to estimate the size of the economy (typically done by benchmarking some not particularly reliable proxies), are a year to eighteen months late.
But you can build pretty good models if you know your proxies; here are some that I use:
That data is all "public-domain", as in you can look it up on the net or in the Dubai Chamber of Commerce Library. Of course if you know your way around and you pay a bit extra, you can get it in "real time", but then that's not "Official", and if something is not official in Dubai then it's a rumour; although in some cases even if it's "official", it's a rumour too. I hope that's clear!
Anyway, sticking with the "public" stuff; my comments are as follows:
1: Net Airport Arrivals: That's the numbers who came into Dubai Airport less numbers who left and it's a pretty nifty way to get to population. Although not all of the people passing through the airport live in Dubai, and Abu Dhabi Airport is catching market share, but for the first time in many years, in 2009 more people left Dubai Airport than flew into Dubai Airport.
Notice how it's gone down quite dramatically, like 17%; the last time that happened was in 1998 when they had a purge on the "illegal" immigrants (people who had over-stayed their visas). Those all came back the next year, but the ones who left Dubai in 2009 and 2010 probably won't come back, unless they want to subscribe to Dubai's unique guaranteed sure-fire weight-loss program, as in debtor's jail.
2: Occupied housing units are from DEWA; anyone who does not have an electricity connection in Dubai is "not economically active"; so that's a good benchmark. Interestingly those were still going up in 2009, probably reflecting migration of people with jobs in Dubai from next-door Sharjah.
3: Light passenger vehicle registrations are a reflection of how much money is being spent (new-car sales). Although there is a complication there because many cars are re-exported from Dubai which affects the ratio of new-buys, and to get to the bottom of that you have to look closely at that which is really tedious; big picture, that flat-lined in 2009; reflecting a drop in economic activity (the amount of money being spent).
4: City Deluxe Hotel Lodging Revenues used to be one of my favourite proxies (goes to business travellers who relate to the way Dubai's economy works), but when occupancies go over 90% annually there is price elasticity; plus I suspect the property bubble migrated into that market, people who think they are rich when in reality they are not, spend big on luxuries like first-class hotels.
5: GDP is a bit of a mystery, up to 2006 that was published promptly (i.e. never more than nine months late) by the highly efficient and very professional, Dubai Municipality. Then that job was transferred to the newly formed Dubai Statistics Centre, which only recently published the outcome of it's deliberations for 2006, 2007 and 2008, so now it's running two years late.
What's interesting is that the numbers put out by Dubai Municipality (before) used to be posted on their website, but now they are not there any more; as if they have been "expunged". That's quite a mystery; a possible explanation is that the people putting the new numbers out were at the time, very much into the "new" vision of Dubai that you can see on the road just past Jebel Ali. Plus of course when you are having a conversation with the guys you owe $100 billion to, $90 billion GDP has a better ring to it than $60 billion.
The ultimate driver of economic activity in Dubai is the price of oil and the price of oil has gone up and is going to go on going up.
Dubai hardly has any oil; revenues are about $2 billion a year out of $91 billion GDP claimed "officially" in 2008; but it services a region that is full of oil; which is why it works.
Now that the "visionaries" have run out of foolish bankers to lend them money so they can create housing bubbles and clog up the roads with their Ferraris, the rest of Dubai can get back to what it did before, with the bonus of a great infrastructure, a pretty decent government (particularly after the re-shuffle), and very cheap property prices relative to anywhere within 2,000 miles (for the same quality).
Insofar as property is concerned, as I said, prices are on the "fundamental" now; they may go down a bit as the last of the developments get finished which will drive the fundamental down (that could take another one or two years, realistically). After that, prices will start to rise, albeit quite slowly.
After so much "vision", it's nice to get back to reality.
By Andrew Butter
Twenty years doing market analysis and valuations for investors in the Middle East, USA, and Europe; currently writing a book about BubbleOmics. Andrew Butter is managing partner of ABMC, an investment advisory firm, based in Dubai ( hbutter@eim.ae ), that he setup in 1999, and is has been involved advising on large scale real estate investments, mainly in Dubai.
© 2011 Copyright Andrew Butter- All Rights Reserved
Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.
Andrew Butter Archive


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UPDATE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, Skye Galaxy will play for us tomorrow, Sunday, at 3pm. Today we will open with DJ Walt Vieria. Less lag, more art!
I was very honoured, not too long ago, to be given the opportunity to curate a full-sim exhibit at the LEA as part of their guest curator initiative. The theme for this installation is inspired by my own virtual art collection, which I realised recently is full of rusty, steamy, cogged and vintage-inspired works. I do not fully participate in the virtual Steampunk communities, but it is an aesthetic I very much enjoy, particularly for the way in which it engages with contemporary anxieties over time and place by embracing anachronisms and an imagined past. These themes relate to my academic research interests in 19th century art and design, alongside those of urban renewal, and dystopic/utopic narratives.
As such, I envisioned an installation where there exists a main build – a 'development' – that has fallen into ruin. It is subsequently rescued and repopulated by a selection of artists whose work loosely embraces similar themes.
The first and perhaps biggest hurdle was, of course, the overall build itself. I knew I had to find someone who could make something that would not only suit this rusty theme, but also have the incredibly rare trait of being an immersive builder who was open enough to have other artists come in and add their work to theirs, with the possibility of it not being a perfect fit. And in that, there was one very clear candidate for me.
Haveit Neox's vision extends beneath the waves.
One of the things that impressed me about Haveit's amazing work 'Second Libations' was that not only was it an incredible build with a full, narrative backstory, but he had also solicited stories from others to include in his work. Also, I knew Haveit to be one of the warmest, most down-to-earth (and least fussy!) artists I've ever met, in any world. His is a natural collaborative spirit, so I asked him to be my mastermind, and was thrilled when he accepted.
The fabled merchant city that rode atop the back of a gigantic whale met with a calamity that ended its existence abruptly. In the middle of the ocean, a horrific storm caused two huge ships carrying toxic chemicals to collide into the swimming whale city. The whale and all the populace died in the flood of chemicals that saturated the waves.
The whale turned to bones, and the city to rust, it was nearly half a century before this city adrift was discovered. An expedition of artists, searching for land to build an art colony, came upon the decomposing city. With the intent to regenerate the place, they set to work by first towing to safe harbor the floating mass. Each artist then undertook their vision. The empty shell of the city suddenly filled in and expanded as each artist found their niche in the Rusted Development. No longer at the mercy of invisibility, the city humbles its rusted façade to the highlights of the art within.
With Haveit's vision coming together, it was then up to me to rally the other artists who have contributed. I of course wanted a selection of work that would suit the build, but I was also interested in pushing collaborative boundaries, juxtaposing the work of those you might not normally see together.
Detail of the thought-provoking work 'Rule 10: You Are Not Allowed To Fish' by Rose Borchovski.
In particular, I wanted to combine the work of those who traditionally work on their own immersive builds, with the work of some of my favourite virtual photographers. And I must give an extra kudos to all: to the immersive builders – for some it was a huge step out of their comfort zone to contribute to something that they saw as wholly built already; and to the photographers, who each stepped out of the '2D' realm to make their artworks that float, fall, and become part of the environment in a dynamic way.
Works range in scale from Blue Tsuki's massive 'Big Time', to Bryn Oh's delicate and intricate 'Nest'.
Please do join us for the opening this Saturday, May 12th, at 2pm at LEA 1.


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Home » Mitigating Risks in Industrial Ammonia Refrigeration Installations
Ammonia RefrigerationCompressors/CondensersFood ProcessingDairy FoodsRefrigeration Systems
Mitigating Risks in Industrial Ammonia Refrigeration Installations
Processing plants and cold storage facilities can lessen the risks associated with a large ammonia charge while preserving energy efficiency and product quality.
The refrigerant charge of industrial ammonia refrigeration systems can range from 5,000 lb on the smallest systems to as much as 200,000 lb in large food processing plants.
The options for using a secondary cooling medium to reduce the ammonia charge include simple pumped carbon dioxide systems (often are known as volatile carbon dioxide brine systems) and cascade systems where carbon dioxide compressors are used.
With an electronic expansion valve and control arrangement, the DX valve controls the superheat of the refrigerant at the outlet of the evaporator. Because electronic superheat control adjusts to capacity and changes in system pressure conditions, it results in a highly efficient room temperature or process control.
Due to the high specific heat content of carbon dioxide and its lower density, smaller components and line sizes can be used (compared to those for a traditional brine system) for both the outward and the return lines. The smaller volume of circulating carbon dioxide means that smaller pumps can be used, which yields lower energy consumption for the circulated cooling capacity. The smaller carbon dioxide pipes have a smaller surface and therefore lower heat loss compared to larger brine/glycol pipes.
Hernan Hidalgo, Danfoss North America and Jim Hower, Danfoss
KEYWORDS ammonia release / ammonia training / ammonia-carbon dioxide cascade systems / cascade systems / cold chain / cold storage / defrost controllers / direct expansion (DX) / liquid overfeed system / low charge ammonia refrigeration / pulse-width moderation / refrigerated warehouses
Typical industrial refrigeration systems — approximately 90 percent of installations today — utilize ammonia as the primary refrigerant. The refrigerant charge of these systems, however, can range from 5,000 lb on the smallest systems to as much as 200,000 lb in large food processing plants. Using high volumes of any kind of chemical requires an added layer of responsibility, including structured safety protocols, risk mitigation and a proactive approach to maintenance. Thus, the demand to quantify, measure and mitigate the risks associated with these industrial facilities has accelerated the adoption of new technology, changes to best design practices and a formal structured approach to plant operation.
In recent years, the cold chain has relied primarily on the use of natural refrigerants to meet food safety requirements, which, fortunately, has positioned the industry such that it is less likely to be burdened by the uncertainty and challenges of hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) and hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerant regulations and availability in the future. Most of the industrial refrigeration plants in operation today have been designed for the use of ammonia, which provides outstanding thermodynamic efficiency with lower mass-flow rates than synthetic refrigerants. With its inherent efficiency, natural properties and low price point, ammonia is expected to remain the dominant refrigerant in this market segment.
In addition to its many benefits, however, an ammonia-based refrigeration system presents risks, including the chemical itself. The industry has been challenged to meet a higher level of regulation to mitigate the inherent risks of this natural refrigerant choice. One way to limit risk is to implement methods to minimize the refrigerant charge.
As processing and cold storage plants have undergone significant growth in capacity in the last few decades, so have refrigeration systems. The need for larger vessels and pump-circulated ammonia has become the standard, and it aligns quite well with the expansion requirements of the industry. Today, investments in the cold chain are favoring technologies that enable the growth, sustainability and safety of new and existing plants. This emerging trend has been seen across small, medium and large facilities, regardless of the nature of the product being refrigerated. The emergence of more stringent regulations, food safety requirements and constraints in space has led to the investigation and implementation of alternatives to reduce ammonia charge overall. Some of the most widely known technologies include:
Ammonia electronic direct expansion (DX) systems. This provides electronic injection control for centralized plants.
Ammonia/carbon dioxide (NH3/CO2) refrigeration systems.
Compact packaged and self-reliant refrigeration systems with direct expansion operation.
Each provides advantages and deserves a place in refrigeration plant design, construction and operation.
Ammonia Electronic Direct Expansion Systems
Direct expansion — or DX, as they are often called — systems have been known in the industry for a long time due to the use and availability of thermostatic expansion valves. In the past, however, facility owners and contractors have questioned the performance and reliability of ammonia thermostatic expansion valves. Unstable liquid injection and flooding typically lead to poor food quality.
While electronic expansion valves have overcome many of these barriers — rendering clear and sound solutions to the market — progress also must be credited to the advancement of dedicated algorithms used by stand-alone controllers. These controllers facilitate the task of PLC-based control as well as changes in evaporator and heat exchanger designs.
Electronic ammonia direct expansion systems use a simple, well-known and reliable principle of controlling the superheat of the refrigerant at the outlet of the evaporator. Because electronic superheat control adjusts to capacity and changes in system pressure conditions, it results in a highly efficient room temperature or process control. The main benefit, however, can be measured as the dramatic reduction of the ammonia charge both at the evaporator and the engine room sides. In most applications, an electronic direct expansion system easily can be added to a plant expansion where vessels would be at maximum capacity and the need for larger investments in equipment and real estate could lead to cost concerns.
Electronic control of superheat in ammonia systems has successfully been applied to both medium and low temperature evaporators, making it an attractive alternative to pump-circulation systems.
Superheat control via electronic controllers and sensors, coupled with improvements in heat exchanger design, has become a proven option for reducing refrigerant charge. In ammonia systems, superheat has been reduced to a stable, middle-single-digit figure compared to mechanical thermostatic valves that require anywhere between 10 and 15 degrees. Pressure transmitters and temperature sensors connected to an advanced stand-alone superheat controller provide accuracy and flexibility in small or large plants, releasing central PLCs from tedious, time-consuming iterations that tend to slow down the communication networks. When it comes to the choice of liquid-injection valves, it is important to select a technology that works at both full and partial load.
Both pulse-width-modulating valves and motorized valves have been carefully crafted with advanced materials to provide a reliable, safe performance in evaporator flow control. They can enable the leap to successful use of direct expansion systems on an industrial scale, allowing facilities to reduce the overall ammonia charge.
NH3/CO2 Systems
A traditional method of reducing refrigerant charge is to utilize a secondary cooling medium. In the past, pumped glycol was used to exchange heat between the ammonia system and the refrigerated space. While the system offered a simple alternative, offsetting negative consequences such as reduced efficiency and multiple design compromises had to be considered. Electrical energy typically is the second largest operating cost in most industrial facilities, so glycol solutions often were not a cost-effective option.
A number of developments have occurred that have improved the options for using a secondary cooling medium to reduce the ammonia charge. They include simple pumped carbon dioxide systems (often known as volatile carbon dioxide brine systems) and cascade systems where carbon dioxide compressors are used. Regardless of the choice of system, the introduction of carbon dioxide to all of the refrigerated areas significantly reduces the ammonia charge in the plant and brings some additional benefits during the installation of pipelines.
In principle, ammonia is contained in the engine room, where screw compressors and heat exchangers — typically plate-and-shell units — are used to condense the returning carbon dioxide vapor from the refrigerated areas. The technology has made a leap from process industries — where very low temperatures were required for deep-freezing — to cold storage and process areas where sensitive products and large numbers of people could be exposed to an ammonia release. In both cases, electronic direct expansion for carbon dioxide can be used, making it ideal to further reduce overall refrigerant charge.
Regardless of the design specifications, using carbon dioxide as a secondary refrigerant reduces the ammonia charge by up to 90 percent. In terms of energy efficiency, carbon dioxide can provide the benefits of a glycol system while reducing the power consumption an additional 20 percent compared to pumped glycol.
The next step in the evolution of industrial design and construction has been the development of self-contained, somewhat portable and easy-to-install ammonia ultra-low charge, or ammonia/carbon dioxide, packaged systems.
Packaged systems offer further reduction in ammonia charges thanks to efficiencies gained in evaporator design, defrost strategies and liquid-injection control. Ammonia/carbon dioxide packaged systems are available from a number of OEMs and vary depending upon the size and the needs of the plant. These packaged refrigeration solutions can be used for new construction, expansion or retrofit applications. These systems allow for similar energy usage while eliminating the need for centralized pumped recirculation vessels and piping across the facility, which are the primary drivers of large ammonia charges.
Ammonia ultra-low-charge systems are emerging as a potential solution for cold storage or distribution centers. These packages offer a reduced refrigerant charge and the ability to work with a single refrigerant while utilizing a refrigerant that is well known by most stakeholders in the industry. Package manufacturers assert that the units can be installed in a fraction of the time of centralized systems.
There is no single answer to mitigating risk and reducing charge in industrial refrigeration installations. Recently, a general consensus that refrigerant charge reduction needs to be accelerated and prioritized in facilities has led to multiple viable solutions for the industry. Regardless of the circumstances of the facility, these solutions can be implemented today to provide the risk mitigation required without penalties to energy efficiency and while maintaining or improving food safety and quality.
Recent Articles by Hernan Hidalgo, Danfoss North America
A Cool Solution
Hernan Hidalgo is a key account manager with Danfoss North America, Industrial Refrigeration Solutions, in Baltimore. For more information, call the author at (410) 513-1144 or visit www.danfoss.com.
Jim Hower is the North America sales manager for industrial refrigeration at Danfoss. For more information about industrial refrigeration from the Baltimore-based company, call 410-931-8250 or visit www.danfoss.com.
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ROGER ARMITAGE, a partner in accountants Mazars, is to become a Town director in September.
The 60-year-old has worked on the takeover deal with his friend Ken Davy from the firm's office in Huddersfield and is to join the new regime when he retires at the end of this month.
"I'll obviously be taking a look at the financial side and making sure the club fits within Ken's parameters of at least breaking even and, hopefully, trading with a profit," said Mr Armitage, a lifelong supporter who has worked for the same company for 44 years.
"Ken has done his bit by rescuing the club and now we hope the supporters do their bit so that we can do the housekeeping properly. We can only pay out what comes in and we very much need as much support as we can get."
Mr Armitage and wife Wendy live at Linthwaite. They have a son, Martin, 32, who was educated at Colne Valley High, and three grandchildren.
Born at Holt Head and educated at Elland, Mr Armitage was senior partner at Revell Ward when Mr Davy's company, DBS, was floated on the stockmarket. He has known Mr Davy for over 40 years.
Mr Armitage's mother Elsie, who is 88, and his sister, Angela Waterhouse, live at Marsden.
His brother, Julian, sits in the Lawrence Batley Stand upper tier and has hardly missed a Town match for years.
"I have watched Town myself since the age of five and my favourite player was Dave Hickson, because he once travelled back on the bus with us into town!" said Mr Armitage.
"It still seems like yesterday when I was watching the unchanged defence, the Frank Worthington era was enjoyable and then the Mick Buxton teams when I was taking my son along to watch."
Martin works for accountants Simpson Wood in Huddersfield and his wife, Karen, is with Mazars in Leeds.
"I am looking forward to working at the club and with Ken," added Mr Armitage.
"I have acted for Ken since I was a junior in the firm and we have had a very good friendship and mutual respect throughout that time.
"Ken is a man of vision and what he has done fo the Giants and for Town is tremendous."
Mr Davy who has now rescued both major sporting organisations, said: "Yesterday was an historic day for the football club. It was also an important day for the rugby club, the Stadium and for the town itself.
"There were times when it looked like we weren't going to make it. The fact we have reflects credit on the whole town. In taking Town forward, I am keen to take maximum advantage of the synergy between the football club, rugby club and stadium.
"While the clubs will remain separate companies, each can gain in strength from the other and benefit from a financially sound, well-managed stadium."