Book Review: Nickel And Dimed

Once I stand and watch helplessly as some rug rat pulls everything he can reach off the racks, and the thought that abortion is wasted on the unborn must show on my face, because his mother finally tells him to stop.

As I read the book, I thought about the kinds of things I might say as I wrote the review. I wanted to highlight the author's elitism, her all-encompassing hate for anyone who doesn't share her politics, her sneering judgementalism, and her inability to relate to anyone or anything that isn't already a perfect mirror of her own preconceived thoughts. Then, near the end, she finally cooked up a phrase so hideous that it makes anything I might say superfluous.

"Abortion is wasted on the unborn." In six shockingly ugly words on page 165 of her sensational book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America, Barbara Ehrenreich manages to succinctly encapsulate all the hate for humanity she displays throughout the rest of it.

The story behind my reading of this book was an economic policy debate I had been having with an old friend of mine, faithful Stationary Waves reader CH. As we know, I favor free market solutions to most of life's economic problems. CH, on the other hand, tends to favor the more mixed-market-leaning-toward-greater-government-paternalism at the heart of modern leftism. And while CH doesn't consider himself a leftist, the one book he chose to recommend to me in hopes that it might change my mind about welfare policy was Barbara Ehrenreich's - a book filled to the brim with actual quotes (cited approvingly) from Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, and so on. Thus, even if CH considers himself a centrist, Nickel and Dimed is unequivocally a leftist book.

The premise runs as follows: Moved by her own insistence that the working poor can't make it in America without an expansive social welfare safety net, Ehrenreich hatches the idea of attempting to live as a member of the working poor. She would show up in an average American town - which, for the book's purposes, turns out to be Key West, Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis - cook up a fake story and a fake resume, take a low-paying job, rent an apartment, and prove to the world that she couldn't do it. Instead, she manages to prove a different thesis altogether: Barbara Ehrenreich hates humanity.

I would like to critique Ehrenreich's approach to this problem, but what stands out more than anything else in the book is Ehrenreich's all-consuming hatred. It is shocking. It is so pervasive that it makes an objective analysis of her work nearly impossible.

For example, while working for a maid service in Portland, Ehrenreich tells the story of a bizarre murder fantasy she has while cleaning the home of a person whose crime appears to be that he/she is politically conservative:

The exalted mood [of trying to see her position as a maid as a noble calling - ed.] lasts for about a day, and there is back-sliding even within that - for example, when, in a huge, gorgeous country house with hand-painted walls, I encounter a shelf full of arrogant and, under the circumstances, personally insulting neoconservative encomiums to the status quo and consider using germ welfare against the owners, the weapons for which are within my apron pockets. All I would have to do is take one of the E. coli-rich rags that's been used on the toilets and use it to "clean" the kitchen counters - a plan that entertains me for an hour or more. (p. 109)

A page or two later, Ehrenreich's maid experience reaches its stunning climax when one of the other maids slips and sprains her ankle. Ehrenreich implores her to go to the hospital, but the maid is adamant that she does not want to go. For reasons still mysterious, Ehrenreich decides to incite a labor strike among the rest of her 4-person maid team in an attempt to pressure the injured maid to go to the hospital and to pressure the franchise manager to give her a paid day off.

This is perhaps the most interesting part of the book because the maids refuse to go along with Ehrenreich's strike. In fact, they resent her for trying to make them strike. They never look at her the same way again. Yet even this experience is insufficient to get Ehrenreich to question her own thesis. She reasons that they suffer from some kind of Stockholm syndrome. She cooks up a strange rationalization theory about how their manager emotionally manipulates them. All because they refused to go along with a strike aimed at getting a single maid a paid day off.

To top it all off, the allegedly emotionally manipulative manager ends up giving the injured maid a paid day off anyway, and gives Ehrenreich a raise because she stood up for her teammate. But, as a manager, he plays the role of villain in her story, and Ehrenreich misses all of this, so committed she is to her own priors.

Earlier in the book, while in Key West, Ehrenreich describes her experience outing herself. She tells a fellow colleague that she's not really a waittress - she's a writer! His response to her is classic: "Oh yeah? Who isn't?" The message is clear. The working poor don't care about Ehrenreich's messianic complex, they don't care about her noble calling to low-wage work experience, nor about her noble calling to journalism. The reason they don't care is because they're too busy living their own lives to play into Ehrenreich's misguided fantasy about what their world is like.

Above all, Ehrenreich's hatred and elitism shine through as the only consistent message throughout the book. A friend-of-a-friend offers her a place to stay for free in Minneapolis in exchange for house-sitting. Rather than enjoy the experience and be grateful, Ehrenreich launches into a paragraph-long criticism of the decorum of her hosts and what she imagines their personalities to be. (She never actually meets them!) She disqualifies herself from jobs requiring a drug test by smoking marijuana (apparently it never occurs to her that she might have more food/rent money if she stops buying drugs). She takes sleeping pills for non-medical reasons and wakes up hung-over for her first day at a high-paying job, and so decides to give up the job entirely. She condescendingly refers to Wal-Mart employees as "Wal-Martians" (hurr hurr hurr, geddit? martian? hurr hurr...). She picks fights with her managers, describing them all in entirely one-sided, negative terms, speculates about their character. She freely admits to her problems with authority. She refuses to

In short, Nickel and Dimed is full of page after page of anger, disgust, elitism, indignation, and criticism. So much so that nothing in the book can actually be taken seriously.

That doesn't mean Ehrenreich's thesis statement isn't true. It might very well be. But we'll never know from this book because the only thing she manages to prove is her own all-consuming misanthropy. Reading this book made me sad and uncomfortable - not because the poor in the book were suffering, but because nearly every sentence of the book was hateful and ugly.

I wanted to evaluate the merits of Ehrenreich's experiment. I wanted the book to be about something tangible, that I could discuss with my friend, CH. I wanted it to challenge my assumptions about life as a member of the American working poor. But, I know no more about the plight of the working poor after reading this book than I did before I read it. Unfortunately, however, I now know a lot more about Barbara Ehrenreich's personal character. And what I learned does not bode well for her.

Considering that, the one remaining question I have is why on Earth anyone else felt the book was so powerful? How can people read a phrase like "abortion is wasted on the unborn" and feel anything but a pang of disgust. (And look, I'm no pro-life Bible-thumper here. That phrase is disgusting on a human level, regardless of how a person might feel about the issue of abortion.) Why did this book sell?

If there are any silver linings to be found here, it's that the working poor Ehrenreich meets do seem to be "making it." One of the maids she meets aspires to live in a mansion like those she cleans. The young runaways she meets in Key West manage to better their situation from living in a truck to living in a dingy apartment. Many of her fellow employees manage to get a raise while she's working there. While Ehrenreich manages to lose most of her money and own up to effective homelessness, her coworkers never do reach that point. They don't have a good life, but they live it a lot more effectively than Ehrenreich does. If she had been more honest about her experiment, she would have seen that.

Hopefully, someone out there will repeat this experiment and provide the debate with something more useful than hate. 

A Few Reasons Why I Like Central America

1. The plants are beautiful.
2. The animals are unlike anything I am used to seeing.
3. The beaches are stunning. The water is a lot warmer than what you find at most US beaches. Usually less crowded, too.
4. The coffee is superior.
5. The dairy products are not just superior, but vastly so.
6. People tend to be more polite to strangers as a general rule, at least in my experience.
7. The combination of beaches and mountains is unlike anything you'll find anywhere else, except perhaps Hawaii.
8. The pace of life is quite a bit more relaxed.
9. Yucca in any capacity is delicious.
10. Although they can be annoying, street dogs are always good for a laugh.
11. All of the local bands I've ever heard have been absolutely top-notch quality.
12. The air feels different, and it's really nice.
13. It's a great place to get outdoors and be active.
14. I'm a bit of a sucker for Mayan history and ruins.
15. I like how small towns tend to be built around a central location, where everyone hangs out.
16. There are some really incredible museums.
17. The art scene is vibrant.
18. It offers perhaps the best "bang for your buck" in terms of a holiday destination for North Americans.
19. It has an intangible magic that just somehow clicks with me.

What else can I say? Plenty, actually, but that will have to suffice for now.

Workout Of The Day

Friday is a good day to take all the pressure out of your daily workout. By now, we are typically so tired from a week of work, responsibilities, workouts, effort that we simply cannot wait for the weekend to begin. It's no surprise that whenever I go to the gym on a Friday afternoon, the place is absolutely dead.

It sure is tempting to just forget about workout out entirely, pack up after work, and head straight to the latest fun-spot. No one will judge you too harshly today if that is exactly what you choose to do.

That said, some of us still like to feel like we've accomplished something physical, even on our lazy days. So why not embrace the comparatively low levels of ambition and just go with it? Head out for a nice bike ride, or a light run through the park. Do your favorite lifts at the gym. Maybe take your things with you so you can head straight to dinner afterward. Work your workout into your weekend plans.

For my part, I'm going to go on a nice, easy run.

I'm Always Right. And Always Wrong

Robert Murphy has been fighting a good fight about "empirical" economics. (Here, here, here, etc... )

While I think I might be a bigger fan of quantitative economic models than he is, the thrust of his argument is absolutely correct. Straight to the heart of the matter, he asks, "What would the world have to look like if the empirical approach didn’t work in economics?"

Elsewhere, at Worthwhile Canadian Iniative, he says this:

[...] In the meantime, though, can you clarify *what it would look like* for NGDPLT to fail? 

For example, my first thought was that we'd need to see a country suffer a typical business cycle, even thought NGDP kept growing at trend. But wouldn't Scott Sumner just say, "Well, that's clearly a supply-side recession. Nothing the central bank can do there." ? 

Then, what if we found a country where the central bankers explicitly told the public they were targeting level NGDP, but then in practice they realized it was impossible, and a recession occurred because targeting NGDP level leads to recessions. Even here, Scott would point to the time when it broke down and say, "Ah, they stopped targeting NGDP level. I'm right again." 

So I'm thinking it might be literally impossible to find an example of what you mean. In fact, I think Scott once wrote a post saying (somewhat tongue in cheek, but not really) that even if the Fed did what he said, and we got huge price inflation, that it would still be the right policy.

It's not fair to pick on Scott Sumner in exclusivity here, and that is not my intention. In fact, in this post, Murphy specifically calls out Paul Krugman instead. The names have been changed, but the story is the same. And the story is what I would like to write about today.

Macro-economic models are always both right and wrong. In today's world, there is very little theoretical disagreement about how the economy works in the long run. This is important because it highlights the fact that on almost all of the major, important theoretical points, most economists largely agree. The disagreement is not over the essential behavior of the economy; instead, economists disagree about the short-run impact of various temporary "shocks."

For many decades now, we've known that economies experience "business cycles." There are "booms" and "busts," or peaks and troughs in the level of economic growth. No one disputes this, although there is plenty of discussion over why it happens, and hence how to react to busts/troughs when they do occur.

But for every recession or depression - for every economic downturn - there is always a recovery. No economy stays in the dumps forever. The "everyman" can consider this cause for optimism. Economists can consider this cause for simply sticking to whatever narrative they have chosen long enough to be exonerated by data.

What I mean is this. Business cycles really do seem cyclical, despite the elegant complexity of the macro-economy. This suggests that anyone's narrative will appear to be true if they stick to it long enough. If Economic Jones is wrong about Ruritania in 2013, he can always wait until Ruritania's macro-economic data adhere to Jones' prediction, at which point he can say, "I was wrong about the exact timing of it. I did not think that the central bank would be so dense as to not follow my sage advice. I did not expect the fat cats on Capitol Hill to make such bad decisions. But, ultimately, I was right about the thrust of it."

And this is true of, not just Scott Sumner and Paul Krugman, but also Robert Murphy and Ryan Long and all the rest of everyone. No one can reliably guess the suit of the playing card I'm holding up right now, but at the end of the day, there are only four suits. If I keep drawing cards, and you keep guessing, eventually you're going to get it right.

So the name of the game that a lot of economists like to play is to just keep calling out the same suit over and over until the card matches what they're calling out. If Paul Krugman keeps saying "more stimulus," then a slow recovery confirms his theory, a second recession confirms his theory, and even a full economic recovery merely proves that the recovery would have been even faster or bigger had the recommended "more stimulus" been implemented in the first place.

Some time ago I wrote another post about this. That was a far more abstract post, but it was written to explain precisely what's going on here. In that post, I pointed out that when logic becomes sufficiently complex it becomes prohibitively difficult to understand the relationship between the various steps in the chain. A implies B is easy enough to follow, but when B implies C, C implies D, ..., X implies Y, and Y implies Z then we do not always have enough intellectual processing power to recognize the relationship between, say, H and Q. We want to start with A and we want to end up at Z. If there are too many steps between A and Z - or if those steps are sufficiently complex - then all we really end up doing is providing a veneer of reason for a misguided set of priors.

The smartest among us figure it out in an almost Pavlovian way. They start to realize that their stories are most convincing when they stick to one point and wait for the data to confirm it. They probably and quite genuinely believe that they have come up with a valid explanation for the universe. But, they have not. Instead, they've just become quite excellent at rationalization.

In that respect, I think Robert Murphy's point about "empiricism" in economics is a valuable and important one. It also extends to other disciplines, such as history. Any historical event is sure to confirm your prior beliefs about some other event that came before it. This is why leftists who opposed the war in Iraq feel vindicated by the events in Syria, while rightists who supported an Iraq invasion also feel vindicated; and yet both sets of people are arguing for opposite tactics to address the Syria question.

A stopped clock is right twice a day. Stay on point, and you'll always prove to be correct. Eventually.

Workout Of The Day

It's Thursday, getting close to the weekend. Try to make today somewhat difficult so that you can relax a little when the weekend comes. Today it's running-only.

I'm going to suggest a more elaborate fartlek workout today:

• 1 minute hard
• 2 minutes easy
• 2 minutes medium effort

Repeat this a total of five times, and take five minutes to warm-up.

Our Need For Autonomy And Some Implications

In bygone ages, the toughest question anyone faced regularly was, "What do I have to do today to ensure that my family and I can eat and stay alive until tomorrow?" As our species has improved our ability to provide for ourselves, this question has become progressively less interesting. But human beings don't just stop thinking once we've solved a problem. Our insatiable minds relentlessly seek out new problems to solve. Hence, regardless of how you happen to feel about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, something very much like it is bound to be true of human psychology.

This was formally recognized by the old, pre-Samuelson economists like Ludwig von Mises (with whom I am most familiar, relative to others). People have needs and desires whose urgency corresponds to the immediacy with which we seek to satisfy them. It is as elementary as this: If you feel like eating, but you also want to play some basketball, you will choose your course of action based on how hungry you are. If the urge to eat is overwhelming, you'll opt first for food. If not, it's off to the b-ball court. This may seem pedantic to the point of absurdity, but it is through this very line of thinking that we arrive at things like demand curves and diminishing marginal utilities. That is to say, even if it rather elementary it is nonetheless highly profound.

So, in Maslow's famous hierarchy, the tip of the pyramid - the highest and most final set of needs - consists of all the attributes of "self-actualization," such as morality, creativity, problem-solving, and so on.

These problems, however, were most famously explored by the Ancient Greeks, and we've been taking a crack at each one of these problems for nearly every second of our lives since then (and probably beforehand, too). For perhaps three thousand years - three eons - human beings have been grappling with the very apogee of the famous hierarchy of needs. This says to me that, if the hierarchy is to be seen as some sort of gauge of societal progress, one of two things must be true: Either society has not progressed much in three thousand years, or there is a higher level on the pyramid that Maslow hadn't yet identified.

I'm neither a psychologist, nor a sociologist, nor anyone particularly important really. But at the risk of a small stroke of vanity, I would like to propose a new tip to the pyramid: Autonomy.

Today, we seem to have managed to come to grips with self-actualization. This was no small feat, but also not out of the question in today's world. We have endless piles of technology helping us solve problems. Mass communication has enabled most of us to overcome prejudice (not that prejudice has been eradicated, of course, but society does seem to have provided social and psychological mechanisms for dealing with it in a healthy way). Morality and creativity have been explored for the past three thousand years, and we are now able to pursue both with relative ease... via mobile phone apps in many cases, for chrissakes.

Where we now seem to struggle most is with self-direction. In the health care sector, for example, the main frontier of medicine is tailoring (and even genetically synthesizing) health care solutions to the individual, i.e. having some self-direction when it comes to our bodies. In the political sphere, the major challenges around the world involve over-throwing despots and learning to function in systems that allow each of us to live our lives freely independently (whatever the particulars may happen to be, in your opinion). In the professional world, we grapple with managing our own careers, getting to the positions we want, and having some say in the day-to-day business operations. DIY is all over YouTube. We no longer reach for a cold Budweiser, but think long and hard about setting up a small micro-brewery in our own garages.

Make no mistake about it, the new frontier of human progress is autonomy, and how to achieve it without having to completely dismantle society itself. This brings me to my last set of points.

There will always be a trade-off between individuality and being part of a group. It is inevitable, and I have spent some time in the past arguing that humans are both individualistic and collectivistic. Getting elementary again: We all want to socialize and be a part of a good group of people; but we also have a set of personal needs and ambitions that we retain only for ourselves. Our goal here should be to balance our place in our community with staying true to our own individualistic integrity (or creed).

Our individualism may lead us to want to pursue some kind of economic ambition or a lifestyle choice that puts us at odds with the group. We might be inclinded to advocate that society change its ways to conform to us, rather than conforming to group pressure. This is a good thing when the cause is noble and fair, but a bad thing otherwise.

Thus, to achieve the right balance between autonomy and a well-functioning society, we need to practice some kind of restraint. I believe it's more than fair to pursue one's own personal ambitions relentlessly; but on an ethical level, we have to understand that society functions best when everyone collectively has the same leeway that each of us has individually. Respect for other people's autonomy becomes paramount here.

Perhaps there are two additional levels to the hierarchy of needs: Personal autonomy is the more immediate, and after that comes mutual respect for the autonomy of others; otherwise called social cohesion.

Workout Of The Day

Make it a shoulder day today. This can be difficult, but it's the kind of thing that really pays off.

First Do This:

• 3 x 10 lateral raises
• 3 x 10 military press
• 3 x 10 front raises
• 3 x 10 shoulder shrugs

Then Do This:

• 4 mile fartlek run: 2 minutes hard, 2 minutes easy, repeat until finished

The Impact Of Fat On Diabetes

My doctor has me trying something new. What you are about to read is still very new to me and I am not sure how well it will pan out. In fact, what follows is information that is apparently not common knowledge among most endocrinology experts. That is to say, take this with a grain of salt because it hasn't been fully vetted. I mention it here simply to report on new information that, for now, appears to be working for me.

According to research conducted at the clinic at which I am a patient - which I am told has not yet made it into the clinical literature - dietary fat in excess of about 30g of total fat consumed at a single meal delays the release of sugar into the blood stream. The delay is on the order of three or four hours after a meal. Thus, should you decide to consume more than 30 grams of fat (which is not a difficult thing to do, considering that we're talking about total fat, not just saturated fat), you can expect to experience a sugar spike 3-4 hours later.

While this sounds like "just one more complication," hearing this news was actually wonderful for me. My blood sugar has not been as controlled as I would prefer, and I have been wracking my brain for reasons why not. I almost completely eliminated red meat from my diet. I stopped eating more than 60 grams of total carbohydrates per meal. I stopped eating foods with a high glycemic index. Yet, nothing seemed to impact my blood sugar at all. My insulin seemed ineffectual because my BG was too high all the time. I didn't know what to do.

But, speaking with my diabetic educator (who behaves more like a clinical researcher), I learned that her patients have been observed to bring their BG within tight controls after putting limits on how much fat they consume at a meal. Well, this all seemed to make sense to me because it jives with my BG mystery and explains why even seemingly low-carb meals have sent my blood sugar into the stratosphere. Over the past few days, I have dutifully assessed the fat content of my meals and imposed limits on how much fat I consume at any given time. So far, it seems to be working.

Of course, the real test for me will be how well it works after the two-week point, which is the point at which my body has, in the past, adjusted to new approaches blood sugar management. But I am hopeful.

Workout Of The Day

I'm just keeping my body healthy for the rest of the week before I head out of town. So, nothing intense or serious at this point, just consistent workouts. Today will be a five-mile run or so. Why not join me?

Some Links

This just in, from Penelope Trunk. I do not typically like articles like this, but this one struck me as incredibly honest and positive-in-spite-of-itself. This is a blog post for married adults; you've been warned.

Tim at Spootville decided to avoid corn syrup in a bid to eat healthier foods. (Follow-up here.) The only reason I haven't joined him is because my doctor just changed my diet recently and I don't want to make too many changes at the same time. I think you, the reader, should join him, though. I'm not against corn syrup, but I think it's useful to avoid certain foods periodically if for no other reason than to see what else is out there.

Posner says something that I found striking:

Partly because of the information revolution, which brings vivid images of war into our cell phones and laptops, it has become difficult from an emotional standpoint for the mighty United States to be seen as standing aloof from grave abuses of human rights in foreign countries, though we managed to do that in the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides, and in other genocidal episodes as well, and Assad doesn’t need poison gas to kill civilians. It doesn’t help that the consequences of our bombing Syria are not easy to foresee, and that wars develop their own momentum.

I find this striking because it is often said that Americans no longer have the stomach for successful war because the information age puts the grisly images of what it takes to win right there on our TV screens. So I guess this means that the information age makes war both unavoidable and untenable. Plus ca change...

This blog comment from Robert Murphy is a good explanation for why I think NGDP level targeting is basically circular reasoning that leads nowhere. But what do I know?

John Cochrane seems optimistic about Raghu Rajan's tenure at the central bank of India. Based on what he's written, I share his optimism.

Workout Of The Day

Monday is triceps-and-chest day. I feel like doing some good, old-fashioned weight lifting today, so here is what I am suggesting:

First Do This:

• 3 x 10 bench press
• 3 x 10 incline press
• 3 x 10 cable crossovers
• 3 x 10 tricep pressdowns
• 3 x 10 cable tricep extensions

Then Do This:

• 4 mile run

Maybe try to work in some isometric movements on those lifts while you're at it. I haven't done that in a while, and I remember enjoying it.

Why Stop At Putin?

David Henderson writes about an article posted on InfoWars.com. The article implies that Putin's opposition to US intervention in Syria is grounded in the idea that he does not want competition supplying natural gas to the rest of Europe.

I did not read the full InfoWars article, I merely skimmed it and read Henderson's post at EconLog. I cannot vouch for any of the information supplied in the article or its accuracy. What I would like to point out is that, if one is willing to accept this argument, then there is no reason to stop this line of thought at Putin. Indeed, the InfoWars article does seem to imply that Obama's motives are no better than Putin's, i.e. that Obama wants to intervene in order to make the gas pipeline happen.

I remember back in the 90s the leftists of the world were pretty thoroughly enraptured with the old "petro-tyranny" arguments, the "American jingo-imperialism" arguments, and so on. It seemed so preposterous at the time, but I think that was because twenty years ago the world had not lost as much subtlety as it has since. People still believed in coyness. Nobody wore their lives on their sleeves (or Facebook pages). National secrets were still national secrets.

Now, on the one hand, I feel that the development of society has been a progression toward the better. I am far more comfortable in a world in which there are few real national secrets held by governments. We are all better off knowing that our governments are spying on us, and sending us overseas to drop bombs for the sake of our oil companies, and so on. We're better off knowing because we can't do something about it unless we know there is something that something needs to be done about.

But, on the other hand, it's a shame that we live in a world in which this sort of thing really happens. That old quote, mistakenly attributed to Frederic Bastiat, is exactly right: "When goods don't cross borders, armies will." One day, society will realize that free trade is the only feasible way to avoid war. The question is not if people will realize it, the question is how much death and stupidity must society wage before it finally learns?

Workout Of The Day

As it turned out, I was able to get more of a workout in yesterday than merely running. So today's workout is really what I did yesterday (and what I did yesterday is what I'm doing today). Sorry for all the confusion, but sometimes you have to grab the lightning when it strikes, you know?

First Do This:

• 4 x 10 pull-ups
• 4 x 10 seated cable rows
• 4 x 10 back extensions
• 4 x 10 standing barbell curls
• 4 x 10 deadlifts

Then Do This:

• 4 mile run

Concert Review: Joe Satriani

As a teenager, I had the good fortune to wear out a VHS copy of the original G3 concert video, the one with Eric Johnson, Steve Vai, and Joe Satriani. (Apparently this video is now available on YouTube, here, for example.)

When I say "wear out" I mean I used to watch that video multiple times per week. I was obsessed with it. My friends would get together for hours-on-end jams, and when we were finally so tired that we couldn't move our hands anymore, we'd head into my basement and watch this G3 video.

Time passes, tastes change, and the music world undergoes unfathomable transformations. Almost twenty years later, I am still listening to Joe Satriani, despite the dire predictions from my friends and others, who condescendingly insisted that I would one day "grow out of it."

But grow out of what? Satriani is an iconic musician, a man who has managed to attract an enormous world-wide fan base by playing instrumental rock songs that are decidedly "uncool" in a world progressively more and more obsessed with what is "cool" with each passing year. That kind of thing doesn't happen in a vacuum. It takes a musician with a real ability to communicate with the audience, a musician capable of composing meaningful, emotional music, to make that sort of thing happen.

I have understood all this on an intellectual level. I even thought I understood this on a profound emotional level, as a dedicated fan willing to buy many Joe Satriani albums.

Last night, though, I realized that - having never seen and heard him live, in concert - I did not really understand Joe Satriani.

This is rare, especially in this day and age. Most good musicians a capable of - indeed, they even specialize in - conveying their musical essence on a recording. Most great artists in this day and age play the recording studio (or the Pro Tools rig, or whatever) as though it were another instrument. They sequence rhythm and ambient tracks, they overlap layer upon layer of guitars, keyboards, and vocals. They record as many takes as they need in order to make the recording sound like what they want. So, when you see the average musician perform in this day and age, you can expect to hear something very much like the album. Coldplay, for example, put on a great show, but at the end of the day the songs were not very different from what you hear on the album. I saw a Porcupine Tree concert once that sounded exactly like the album. In both cases, it was impressive, to be sure.

But last night, when Joe Satriani took the stage with a phenomenal trio of side musicians (Bryan Beller on bass, Macro Minnemann on drums - both from the Aristocrats - and the amazing Mike Keneally on keyboards and second guitar) and started playing, my jaw hit the floor. That's because there is a certain class of musician out there who has the incredible ability to speak to the audience's collective heart during a live performance in a way that cannot possibly be described or anticipated.

It can't be recorded, either. Like I said, I've been watching Joe Satriani live videos for nearly 20 years; I've been buying his CDs, and looking him up on YouTube, and reading about him in articles, etc., etc. But the true essence of Joe Satriani can't really be captured by technology. It must be experienced firsthand.

The set consisted of Satriani standards: "Always With Me, Always With You," "Satch Boogie," "Surfing With the Alien," "The Crush of Love," "Flying in a Blue Dream," "Summer Song," and so on. But I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the newer material they played. I can remember hearing at least six of the eleven songs off the new Unstoppable Momentum album. Thus, Satriani made it clear that he is not simply a legendary, beloved guitarist content to rest on his laurels, but rather a still-vital artist touring behind an all-new album. In fact, I was impressed by how well the new material compared to the older "hits." Satriani easily proved that he still has plenty of impressive material bouncing around in his trademark bald head.

The band was full of an invigorating energy. All four musicians were running and occasionally even jumping around on stage (okay, Minnemann was stuck behind the drum kit, but was no less physical in his performance). Keneally even got to enjoy a few solo spotlights of his own, and proved that he's the right man for the job of keeping up with a guitar legend. The performance was so infectious that even those apparently reluctant audience members - the wives, girlfriends, and mothers of the die-hard Satriani fans, who had been dragged there mostly as a compromise or acquiescence to the intense pleading of their friends and family members - were screaming and dancing (yes, dancing to instrumental rock guitar music) throughout the full course of the evening.

When it was all over, my own wife looked at me and said what we were both thinking: "That was the best concert I've ever been to in my life."

No exaggeration. If you have the opportunity to see Joe Satriani during this Unstoppable Momentum Tour, don't think twice. This is the real deal.