BELLE DE NUIT

Will the wonders of technology never cease? Two mavericks in economics -- Edward C. Prescott, 63, and Finn E. Kydland, 60 -- were just awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize for demonstrating that "innovative technology" and some other stuff "play a much greater role in causing booms and recession than fluctuations in demand." In other words, they "placed new emphasis on supply-side shocks like technology in explaining higher productivity."

This must hardly come as news to Mae Lee, a Jersey City, N.J., madam who has exploited the power of technology to grow her business and increase its productivity. As Andrew Jacobs reports this morning, "The realm of the dingy bordello and the vengeful pimp is increasingly giving way to professionally run enterprises, many of them headed by women, that have seized on the anonymity and marketing power of the Internet."

Nobel laureates Prescott and Kyland did not mention the empowerment of women in their prize-winning work, clearly an oversight. But Jacobs, who did not share in the prize, points out that the Manhattan Yellow Pages these days lists more than 30 pages of escort services, far more than the number of pages listing psychologists, plumbers or real estate brokers. (Talk about empowerment, Mae Lee also runs "a Christmas toy drive for needy children.")

As long as the subject of technologically empowered call girls has come up, our favorite former blogger, Belle de Jour, will have a book out soon, "Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl." If it's as entertaining her blog was, it ought to be a movie.

Coincidentally, a friend writes:

I saw Robert Frank's "Cocksucker Blues" (actually it was little more than raw footage barely spliced together) at a special screening, when I was living in London. It was at a little avant-theater in Chelsea. Go see it if it comes your way ... classic verite in the rawest sense, "real" to say the least. I always wondered what happened to that footage. Frank, as you likely know, made "Pull My Daisy" with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso in the late '50s.

Released in 1959, to be exact. There's also a jazz album "Pull My Daisy," by the David Amram Quartet, and a poem "Pull My Daisy," by Kerouac, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Here's the first stanza:

Pull my daisy
tip my cup
all my doors are open
Cut my thoughts
for coconuts
all my eggs are broken
Jack my Arden
gate my shades
woe my road is spoken
Silk my garden
rose my days
now my prayers awaken

That's the technology of language. Very productive.