I'm Moving My Blogging To WordPress

I'm going to move my blogging to Wordpress as of today.
I've been with Blogger a long time and it seems to me that it hasn't really done me any wrong, so I really shouldn't walk out. However, people have been telling me just how wonderful it is over at Wordpress so I guess I'm moving over because I've been persuaded by promises of easier blogging. not that there was anything uneasy about this place. I like it here - but it's time to try something new again.

The new blog link is here: http://artneuro.wordpress.com/
So please come and join me there.

I'm going to attempt to bring back the SpaceFreaks side with the Flaming Horses side, so this is going to be a bit bumpy.

Movie Doubes

The CIA Edition
You never get your ducks to line up this nicely. Well, hardly ever anyway. Watched two films in a row at he cinemas featuring the CIA as the centre-piece setting.

'Burn After Reading' and 'Body of Lies' are both high in star power and marquee directors taking on the rather difficult topic of espionage. 'Body of Lies' directed by Ridley Scott moves headlong into the all-serious terrain of tracking down terrorists in the middle east. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a modern day American Lawrence of Arabia who goes almost native in trying to ferret out the enemies of the USA. Russell Crow plays the CIA analyst who guides him deeper into trouble, if not betrays him to the worst enemies through excessive abstraction and detachment. It's an action packed film with very grey moral areas explored in a frenzied, confused manner.

'Burn After Reading' is a Coen Brothers vehicle that explores the messy lives of people living in Washington DC, which naturally (rather than tangentially) intersects with the day-to-day business of the CIA and surveillance. It's a very black comedy that revolves around the idea of known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns. In this film, the CIA fail to learn anything of value because all the action we see on the screen is inscrutable to the CIA in terms of national importance - it's not but it's deeply personally important to all the players involved.

The CIA On Screen

The more recent incarnations of the CIA on screen have not been positive. This is most probably a reflection of the Bush year policies which have left the American public apopleptic in a kind of ethical aphasia. What can you say about the failures of intelligence that led to things like 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq? Films such as 'The Good Shepherd' have sought to shed light on the organisational culture of the CIA while films such as 'Rendition' have sought to highlight the issue of torture as subcontracted out by the CIA to other nations.

In any case, movie-land seems to have decided that the CIA is fair game. This is possibly a reaction to the 1990s where the FBI seemed to be fair game in films such as 'Silence of the Lambs' and the endless (interminable) 'X-files' franchise of TV shows and movies. I guess the perennial villain has moved on from the inscrutable serial killer in the American landscape to the inscrutable terrorist in the middle eastern landscape.

The CIA we see on 'BoL' is every bit as Machiavellian and self-serving as the previous films have portrayed, but it paints its picture boldly as if to say, if you do enough bad things for the state, then the state looks the other way. One has to decide to abandon everyday morality to root for these characters who are working at the extremity of state control. They're all in the zone where Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessep lived in 'A Few Good Men', and we'd better be up to handling this truth or we're just munchkins. Terrible things are done to people in the name of intelligence, including torture and framing an innocent man who gets killed by the bad guys. There's something incredibly ironic going on with 'BoL' where the tactics of the CIA men are almost indistinguishable from those of the Terrorists. It's only that the terrorists explode a bombs in public spaces killing ordinary people that keeps them a little more morally culpable than the CIA, but it's really not by that much more.

In turn, with 'BAR', the Coen Brothers do not spare the rod as they depict the CIA as a sort of club of white guys who all went to Ivy League universities and are in most part, snarky, petty bureaucrats with too much time and not enough vision or imagination. The way Langley appears in this film is as a series of cold, echoing interiors punctuated by air-conditioned quiet rooms where people hold meetings over seemingly trivial details, far away from the maddening crowd. The very orderliness and quietness of the Langley office seems to incapacitate the intelligence apparatus from getting real. Instead, the world appears to them as trivial reports spoken i such rooms. In 'BoL' such trivia is the vital source of clues - in 'BAR', it becomes the cypher of confusion. One can't help but think that Intelligence is the industrialisation of the game 'Chinese Whispers'.

In either case I can't imagine the actual workers at CIA would take kindly to either film. Not that I care because what they do for a living should be just as subject to critique as the next job.

Surveillance As A Way of Life

The Coen brothers have been poking fun at various parts of the USA for their cultural mores in succession. 'O Brother Where Art Thou' lampooned the South; 'Fargo' poked fun at the Mid-West; 'The Big Lebowski' dismantled LA pretensions; 'No Country for Old Men' ripped into Texan mores; and now we have a film about Washington DC. They've been very good and 'BAR' does not disappoint.

The people in Washington DC, if this film is to be believed, are incredibly savvy about surveillance and espionage, but they have no common sense. Harry, played by George Clooney used to be in 'Personal protection' but now works for the State Department. He is acutely aware that somebody is following him and his assumption is that it is an espionage organ. When he finally manages to confront one of his tails,he finds out it is a man from a detective agency hired to get divorce proceedings details against him.

When Chad, played by Brad Pitt, finds dates and numbers on a file on a CD-R, he doesn't think it is somebody's banking account details - he immediately leaps to the conclusion it is espionage material. His first plan is to track down who the disc might belong to, and then try to organise an exchange. His partner in crime Linda, played by Frances McDormand is equally savvy about espionage, if a little out-dated. When the American 'agent' fails to play ball, her immediate reaction is to drive to the Russian embassy in the hopes of securing a sale there.

The point, is, these are not the thoughts people would ordinarily have, given the evidence. The whys and wherefores of the story are totally distorted by the heightened assumptions about espionage. Maybe it is true, and that the very proximity of Langley in Virginia makes people in Washington DC assume the most espionage-ridden paranoiac scenarios in their lives. It's hard to tell from Sydney.

Both films feature satellite surveillance images. It is how the film begins and ends in 'BAR', giving the impression that what we are seeing, is one big surveillance recording that we are watching. It's not necessarily true, but what the beginning and the ending shots signify is pretty simple. The signified blinks at us more surprised.

Satellite surveillance is also how the centre stays in touch with field agents in 'BoL'. There have been a whole bunch of movies depicting this process, from 'Enemy of the State' (directed by Ridley's brother Tony) to 'Patriot Games' directed by Phil Noyce back in the 1990s when the CIA didn't look so vulnerable. When Phil Noyce did it, it seemed it was a device to send the violence peripheral to the story, so that the characters got detached from the violence. In Ridley Scott's version, it seems the CIA handlers in Langley are far more emotionally engaged in the process as if they are playing one big PS3 shoot'em up game, but with real people.

It was Hitchcok who showed us that there was a fine line between surveillance and voyeurism in 'Rear Window', but cinema in the 2000s has hit the point where voyeurism is a legitimate state tool. It's kind of creepy we've come this far in this direction so fast. That is to say, for a business filled with death, there seems to be a lot of libido invested in to it by the characters of both films. Espionage is in a sense how love is made and how ordinary people get fucked up.

In any case, with both films, the surveillance is not the point. They are both trying to explain how it is that the CIA has a vast apparatus for surveillance and still can't seem to get their man Osama bin Laden. Why is this so? If one were to believe the 'BoL' version, it is because they rely too heavily on technological solutions when in fact it needs very messy, untidy, difficult human solutions -all of which requires patience and silence and proper watching. The film tacitly implies that the Americans have lost the ability to wait out an opponent, and instead wants to solve it all with one big machine that solves problems through Satellites and airplanes and high tech toys.
If one were to believe the 'BAR' version, it's because the world they are practicing their surveillance upon moves too quickly and is so complicated that the men doing the surveillance cannot draw proper conclusions from what they are seeing. The ending is gut-busting ly hilarious, but when reflected upon, it's a chilling insight.

Of course a third answer would be that they just don't want to find bin Laden alive because of what he might say in the lime light of the world media. Neither film states this, but after watching both, you start to consider this as a real possibility. I mean, the CIA can't be this dumb, right? There must be a better reason!

Directors Revisiting Their Old Films

If you do enough stuff, you find you do some things over and over again in your work. Sometimes it's intentional, other times, it's not. Each time it surfaces, you say to yourself "Oh dear". I've played similar passages in my guitar breaks, and I've even shot the same spiral staircase in 2 different films. You don't want to do it, but sometimes, the options narrow down to one and it's where you've been before. Most of the time it happens because you run out of time and you just revert to something you know will work, but when a big time Hollywood film director does it, you have to ask,"What' going on here?"
It's the moment you've inadvertently established a signature moment of your own work.

Without a doubt, Ridley Scott's most important film is 'Blade Runner'. Ever since that film, we've seen him re-do moments from that film. For instance, in 'Black Rain' Michael Douglas finds evidence in a bathtub, much like Harrison Ford's Deckard does in a hotel room. In 'Gladiator', the deep structure of the family is recycled from Blade Runner: A father with two sons - one good, one bad, one spiritual, one by biology, - and a daughter. In 'BoL', it is Leo DiCaprio's character getting two fingers broken by the villain which references Roy Batty breaking Deckard's fingers in the climactic confrontation in 'BR'.

It was a little awkward watching the moment because I instantly knew there would be two, after the first hammer strike. I don't know why he couldn't have thought of something else, but perhaps it is a signature moment he wanted to insert as a nudge and a wink to us 'BR' fans. We still love your work, Ridley.

The Coen brothers also were working to rework some of their tropes. The sequence with Tilda Swinton's Dr. Cox with the Divorce lawyer is a reworking of 'Intolerable Cruelty', but inverted because the lawyer is anything but suave and Swinton is a cold fish; she's anything but pyronic unlike Catherin Zeta-Jones in 'IC'. George Clooney's endless patter about being some kind of security specialist reminds us of his excellent turn in 'O Brother' but it is somehow deformed into an unseemly obfuscation and dissembling by a serial adulterer. Frances McDormand's Linda also seem to reprise the single minded pursuit of her her character in Fargo, but this time it's inverted to being a kind of monomania about plastic surgery rather than simply finding the truth. The moment Clooney's Harry confronts the private eye tailing him echoes of a similar moment in 'The Big Lebowski'.

All of these instances don't mean much in of themselves except when viewed against the rest of their work. Perhaps the Coen Brothers are working on their own version of conceptual continuity. If so, it is admirable.

Black Comedy Is Never Understood

It's one thing to say people don't get irony; it's a whole new dimension of misunderstanding when it comes to black comedies. Some people just don't like them, saying they're misanthropic. I actually don't see what's wrong with a bit of misanthropic fiction. 'Wuthering Heights' for instance isn't exactly full of philanthropic impulses, and neither is the narrative voice undertaken by Jane Austen in her more famous novels. If there's one thing that makes me shudder, it's that tone of Jane Austen's incipient class-snobbery; so it's not like great fiction can't come out of such misanthropy. The other camp of critics just don't get it. Richard Corliss of 'Time' magazine wrote that he just doesn't see the point of the Coen brothers making 'BAR'.

To me, it's self explanatory. There are a lot of stupid people around, and should there be a confluence (or a perfect storm) such stupidity could multiply into what J.K. Simmons' character calls a 'cluster-fuck'. There's no damn mystery, and it's not that misanthropic to write about the foibles of stupid people going wrong - it's common fair in comedy except writers work hard to add lovable features to these characters. That's how sit-coms work. The characters are stupid and do stupid things, but we are sentimentally invested in them, for reasons we're not entirely sure. It's not misanthropic or cynical. In fact it would be more cynical to write 'Forrest Gump', but of course then we'd be back to the Tropic-Thunder-"don't play the full retard" discourse so we'll skip that today.

The point is, even masterful black comedy specialists such as the Coen brothers can make a film where the film critic of 'Time' Magazine just doesn't *get* it. What chance have I got when I, a total unknown to the world, go and make 'Key Psycho'?
Not even my friends get that one, but fans of black comedy roll around the floor laughing. Which is to say, there are few extreme misanthropic black comedy specialists working in fiction such as myself, because the market is a lot smaller and a lot less inspired than you would hope. I like doing them but I just can't justify continuing to do them. I am sick of this wall of misunderstanding. Nonetheless I like my coffee, comedy and US Presdient black, okay?

A Quick Note About Brad Pitt's Chad
This guy just keeps amazing me. His turn as Chad in 'BAR' is wonderfully nunanced and is a fine misture of neurosis and hyperactivity. It's charming as well as comic. In a sense his performance holds the film together. Across the two films, if I had to pick one performance that I thought was a standout, it was this one. I had to work really hard to recall Tyler Durden after this turn. The man is under-rated.

A Quick Note About George Clooney's Harry
George Clooney's performance in this film wouldn't be so ironic if he hadn't done 'Syrianna', donning a similar beard. I laughed at his stuff because ll I could think of was how serious he was in 'Syrianna' and how trivial his concerns were in 'BAR'. It's a great bit of casting that worked to subvert a star's own buggage.
Also, appearing with Tilda Swinton as his lover also echoed 'Michael Clayton' which was funny, as well as the moment he accidentally kills Bard Pitt's Chad, after all the 'Ocean's 11' movies.

A Quick Note About Leo DiCaprio
My partner says she likes watching any film where Leo DiCaprio looks tense like he's under a lot of stress. That's a lot of films. So I have seen a lot of Leo DiCaprio in the lst 5 years. He's very good but he's getting to be a little Johnny-one-note.

A Quick Note About Russell Crow
I don't know how to say this, but while he's not doing the 'full retard', he does seem to be doing the 'full fat'. He looked uncomfortably corpulent and on his way to late-Elvis-dom. A bit of a worry there. He sure didn't look much like Maximus, which makes him a great actor in part, but also, he did look like he's letting himself go.

Baseball Stories - Obama Edition

Obama As White Sox Fan

Here's a pretty cool article in the NYT about Barack Obama and White Sox GM Kenny Williams.

All 30 general managers at baseball’s annual executive meetings here at a Southern California resort spent Tuesday distracted by more than arbitration seminars and beckoning golf holes. Like many other citizens, they sat around televisions expecting to watch the national election returns deep into the night.

But Williams, general manager of the Chicago White Sox, followed the coverage with a keener sense of anticipation than any of his contemporaries. Not only is he one of just two African-American general managers — the Los Angeles Angels’ Tony Reagins is the other — but as a fellow prominent member of Chicago’s black community he has known Barack Obama for almost 10 years, and considers him a friend.

They have hung out at mutual friends’ barbecues, shot hoops at a local health club as recently as this summer, and — with Williams intrigued by public-policy issues and Obama a longtime White Sox fan — discussed each other’s jobs far more than their own.

“I’m interested in all these questions of foreign policy and national security,” Williams said. “In between his games, shooting a couple of baskets, he asks me, ‘What about your pitching?’ I said, ‘Excuse me, you worry about national security, I’ll worry about the pitching.’ ”

The ability of baseball to heal America, as Walt Whitman wrote. :)

Obama Might Help Baseball Back To The Olympics?
This one is a bit further out with the pixies. I don't think baseball is a good fit with the Olympics and I remain sceptical it can ever get back. While it was loads of fun in Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Athens and Beijing, its entry into the Olympics in the first place was predicated on the amateur comp. Now that the Olympics want Major Leaguers to turn up and there's no way the owners will have a bar of it, it's a really bad mismatch of expectations.

So it is against this context we find this article.

With Barack Obama in the White House, baseball officials think their sport could have a better chance of getting back into the Olympics.

"If the perception internationally of the United States improves by virtue of his election, then I think the U.S. stature in international sport of every type will be enhanced," San Diego Padres chief executive officer Sandy Alderson said Wednesday at the general managers' meetings. "I don't think the United States has the international stature in sport that it once had."

Baseball was added as a demonstration sport in 1984 and 1988, then was a medal sport starting in 1992. The International Olympic Committee voted in July 2005 to drop baseball and softball following the 2008 Beijing Games. When a vote for reinstatement took place the following February, baseball lost 46-42 and softball failed 47-43.

At the time, International Softball Federation president Don Porter said: "I think anti-Americanism was a factor." Softball was added for the 1996 Atlanta Games.
"I think clearly how the world looks at America is going to be different with Barack Obama in the White House," Cleveland Indians general manager Mark Shapiro said.
"And that will be initial. And then how he leads and how he governs will determine how they look at us over a sustained period."

Colour me sceptical. I just don't see it. The IOC and MLB are diametrically opposed in assumptions about sports. MLB is one of the first modern professional sporting organisations; the Olympics still cite amateurism and participation as its benchmark values. The MLB is focused on markets and everyday business for 162 season games per team plus play-offs; the Olympics are heavily invested in 2 sets of quadrennial events that last for 2 weeks. While the market is still very American, the composition of MLB teams are very international and post-Nationalism. The Olympic Games sing about being International, but when the competition begins, it's all about flag-waving Nationalism.

Even a quick survey like that shows just how distant their values actually are, and that makes them more incompatible as partners than you would think. All the things MLB values and has accomplished does not mean much to the IOC, and vice versa. It's hardly the basis for mutual understanding, let alone agreements to be made. Throw in the steroid/PED issue and you have a hornet's nest of 'issues'. Even with Barack Obama's vaunted oratory, it's going to be a really hard sell to bring back baseball to the Summer Games.

Nate Silver Scores Big

A couple of weeks ago, I alluded to baseball stat nerd Nate "PECOTA" Silver who was running his own analysis of the US Presidential election campaign and drew the conclusion that Obama would win with about 348.6 Electoral votes (It's looking like 364). He said at the point, it was Bottom of the Ninth in a 2-0 ball game with one out. McCain is at bat, but Palin's just been picked off first.

Anyway, Yahoo ran this story today about all the pollsters and Nate Silver got the pole position of mentions.

First, we can look at Nate Silver, a new prognosticator to the political scene. The baseball statistician turned Electoral College map savant really was the belle of the election ball, living up to his website's tag line: Electoral projections done right.

While Silver never did any of his own polling, he analyzed all the pollsters' findings and spit out every voting model possible. Ultimately, he said Obama would win by 52 percent to 46 percent. In the end, Obama won 52 percent to 46 percent in the popular vote.

Silver's Electoral College map wasn't far off either. This graphic below, shows a comparison of what he projected vs. what actually happened. Unless I'm looking at this map wrong, the only thing they projected incorrectly was Indiana. (A note: Many news outlets have not called Missouri yet because it's so close. The latest numbers have McCain ahead by about 6,000 votes. If that's the ultimate outcome, Silver got that right too.)

Pretty special effort there. I'm telling you, the smartest sports fans in the world are baseball fans. :)

Music Life

Joaquin Phoenix Quits Acting For Music

For some reason known only to the man himself, Joaquin Phoenix has announced he's quitting acting to take up Music.

Phoenix is apparently giving up acting to pursue music, a passion of his since he learned to play guitar to play the role of Johnny Cash in 2005's "Walk the Line." According to Billboard, Phoenix is working on an album with Tim Burgess, frontman for the UK group The Charlatans. Burgess said, "Once he learnt guitar he found that he had quite a lot of demons inside himself that he wanted to expel through music.

Phoenix appeared at the charity event on Monday with his brother-in-law, Casey Affleck. Affleck is married to Phoenix's younger sister, Summer. In explaining his retirement decision, Phoenix said, "It's Casey's time now."

Affleck confirmed for E! Online that Phoenix is telling the truth when he says he's leaving the acting profession, saying, "I guess he's getting into music. He's putting out an album." But both Affleck and Phoenix hurried away from the cameras without elaborating.

It's all a little nutty if you ask me, but what do I know?
Drummer Bill Bruford once said that if there is a choice between playing music for a career and something else, then there is no choice at all, you become a musician. That's probably what happened to Joaquin Phoenix, based on a bunch of guitar lessons so that he could play Johnny Cash.

What I'm In To Right Now
Tom Waits. Just send me more Tom Waits stuff.
I can't do that stuff, but I'd like to incorporate some of that vibe into my future work.

What I'm Looking For
There's a bit of cognitive dissonance in my own wanting-more-instruments thing. For a start, I don't know if the instruments I want necessarily dovetail with the music I'm playing.
For instance, I would like a fretless bass. Why? Because I'd like to seriously noodle around on a fretless bass and do some mellow stuff... I think.

The reality is that I'm more likely to get more use out of a grunty bass with round-wound strings than a fretless with tape-wound strings. I'm not really a jazzer, so why fake it?

Another instrument I'm more than passingly interested in is the Micro Korg with a vocoder. Why? Because I think I'd like to play around with some vocoder stuff. Of course, when I stop to think about it, I could do that stuff within Logic because it has a vocoder tucked away somewhere in its many little nooks. The thing is, I'd just like to play with a vocoder. Not necessarily turn myself into a late 1970s techno outfit.

I mean realistically, I'd probably end up doing a version of "Machine Messiah"'s vocoder section and never use it again. So why get it? - But I still would like one.

Then there are the constant sirens inviting me to the sea of indulgence... guitars. Wont go there today, but the call is eternal. Would like a Double Humbucker Fender Jaguar, I keep thinking... but I just can't justify it to myself.

Ditto with the digital piano. Would like one, but then where do I put it? And I might end up just doing a bunch of covers of things like 'Hey Jude' and 'Let it Be' with it', and what would be the point of that. But a digital Piano is something I'd like to have. You can never have enough good instruments with which to make noise.

Another thing I'd like to get is a really good electronic drum set. Why? because I'd like to play drums. Yes. At this point in my life, I want to learn to play drums. I've even bought a book on how to do basic stuff like paradiddles. Yet, it seems like a distant goal. Do I really want to be taking up drums at this point in my life? Yes I do. Can I afford it? Not yet.

This is why I...

Bought Another iPod
When I bought my 60GB iPod in Jan 2006, I thought it would last me a long time. I guess 2 months short of 3 years is a lifetime in technology terms. I began to reach capacity a little while ago and decided I needed to get the 160GB iPod classic. What is this need for capacity? I don't know. My own music tallies up to 17GBs of information because I carry it around as .AIF files, which is sort of unwieldy-huge enough that all my stuff won't fit on a 16GB iPod Touch. Bummer.

Recently Walk-Off HBP handed me another 19GBs of music, which just doesn't sit on my iPod with the rest of the stuff I want to have at hand, so I've been listening to that 19GB in piecemeal. It's not much fun. So the need for capacity has grown exponentially in the 3 years, as Moore's Law implies. besides which, Brew's Law says nothing succeeds like excess and 160GB is nice and excessive... until they come out with a 250GB iPod, one would think.

Then of course Apple updated their latest series of iPods and the largest-capcity iPod classic in the new range only goes to 120GB. The Apple shop in Chatswood said they'd sold out the 160GBs.
"No-no-no-no-Nooooooooooh!"

That's me screaming in my own head as I checked out the new 120GB iPods. Yeah, it's got new features and stuff, but being short-changed 40GB is no mean thing. Do the maths! It's a 32GB iPod Touch plus a 8GB iPod Touch's worth of capacity they're short-changing you. Yeah, that's 40GB all right, and it's more than the 30GB that was the second biggest iPod when I bought my iPod Video back in Jan 2006. Nobody's going to sit quiet at that 40GB of capacity not being there.
The guy in the shop shrugged and said, "Yeah well, these are slimmer."
Slimmer? What's he talking about slimmer, like it's some selling point? Who gives a shit about them being slimmer? This isn't exactly super-models or starlets or hookers, it's iPods! They still weigh like bricks!

Thus I thought the 160GB models were all gone, and felt further bummed out.
Then by accident I found out there were still four of them lying around at Dick Smith at Macquarie Centre, so it was time to go and score one for myself. By the time I arrived at the DS Power House, there was just one black one left. They had sold 3 of them that very afternoon. All of which goes to show that other people were on my wavelength and scrambled to score the left-over 160GB iPod classics over the new, slimmer 120GB models.

Of course I found out today that Tony Fadell, the dude in charge of iPod development has left the firm. He probably got shoved out of the door for coming up with the 120GB model after the 160GB model, and then claiming it was a good idea. It's not, dude.

BTW I got my new car, a Mazda2. It's hardly musical, but it's still pretty cool.

Obama Wins

Just How Bad Were The Bush Years?

If you'd told me back in 2000 after Al Gore had his Presidency stolen away, that the 2008 Democratic Candidate who would displace the Republicans from the White House was going to be a black man, I probably would have laughed. Most people would have. Well, Obama won.

In a historic victory over Republican candidate Senator John McCain, the President-elect told a sea of supporters in a Chicago park.

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where any things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive ... who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer," he said.

Senator Obama told the crowd that his victory belongs "to you", and the voters who turned out did so because they believed this time "must be different and their voices could be that difference".

He said America was not a collection of individuals, but "we are and always will be the United States of America".

He said it was "a long time coming" but "because of what we did on this day" during this election, "change has come to America".

Listing the challenges ahead, including two wars and a financial crisis, Senator Obama said that he was hopeful for America.

"There will be set backs and false starts," he said.

"I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face ... "

Senator Obama congratulated Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin for all they had achieved and looked forward to working with them.

He said Senator McCain had "endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine".

So much for the Bradley effect. People really did want change. That vibe was in the air from the moment he got past Hillary to win the nomination. Here's the thing: I ended up rooting for the guy, not because of him, or because of the other guy, but because of history. And when you think about it the first Black POTUS coming to power in our lifetime is historic and worthy of telling your grand-children one day that we were there to see it.

Of course if you're one of those people rootin' for the other side, you're probably thinking, "Fuck, how did that happen?"

It happened like this: George W Bush's Presidency was so-o-o-o bad, that America was willing to vote in a relative newcomer, a relatively inexperienced executive, and a black man to boot, rather than return the GOP to power. That is to say, America said that a young black man with relatively less experience than his white counterpart, had to be a better choice than the guy who was going to follow in GWBs footsteps - And that simply blows me away. GWB was so bad, that...

...Ahh, fuggedaboutit.
The point is, change has come at last. It's been a long time coming.

Media Bias?

Complaints By The Media, Of The Media, For The Media

There's always this complaint that there's this thing called 'media bias' and that this bias is always to the left. Fox News often claims it is more balanced because they invite commentators from both sides of the Left-Right divide even the though the host is a frothing-at-the-mouth fascist. It's all self-serving rhetoric that passes for commentary from Fox News, but that's its alleged justification for spreading its noxious disinformation as news. If any media is biased, it's Fox News.

For years, our national carrier the ABC has been under pressure from the Liberal and National parties for its alleged media bias. Successive boards and chiefs have been appointed with a view to changing this alleged mysterious bias, and most of these boards and chiefs fail to accomplish anything of value mostly because the bias is a figment of the Right's imagination. The ABC is not a hotbed of Communists, Trotskists and Marxists. It's a hotbed of frustrated filmmakers.

Part of what escapes the understanding of the conservative thinkers is that the very notion of critical thought made giant strides out of Karl Marx and Engels in the 19th century as they dissected the nature of Absolute Monarchies as Czarist Russia and ancien regime kingdoms such as the Kaiser-led Germany and the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even in the 20th Century it was the Marxism-inflected Semiotic School that made the greatest in-roads into dissecting the expanding area of mass media. Conservatives in most parts are flag-waving monarchists in any country.

The upshot of all this is that just about every media production course is inflected (or infected, if you like) by a Marxist analysis method in discussing images, sound, meaning and so on. This has led to a situation where most people working in the media who are literate are somewhat left-leaning in their outlook because their critical framework is founded in Marxist thinking. Is this good? I don't know. I'm pretty sure I suffer from it as much as the next person who studied media and communication in my generation. It's a bit of a drag, because I don't necessarily want to be led by my brain to the Left - indeed, it's hard work staying in the middle because the Left always comes armed with words, while the Right always come armed with... arms, it seems.

It is in the very absence of the viable, contemporary 'conservative' frame work by which to analyse texts, events, people that leaves the conservative voice left out of these discourses - and let's face it, even the notion of a discourse comes out of heavily Marxist French contemporary philosophy. What chance has the Right really got if it has lost the ability to argue from Hobbs and Hume, while the boffins of the Left keep coming up with new-fangled ways to deconstruct (there's another beautiful Marxist-inflected term) phenomena. Simply put, the Right side of politics is lacking in any kind of vocabulary that can viably and ably present a critique. Marshall McLuhan's work is nice, but it can't withstand the volume of words invested in the French-Philosophy-derived critical discourses.

You sort of have to go back to Immanuel Kant to start a critique without Marx, but for the two facts:
1) Kant's critique of Pure Reason is a heck of difficult book to digest for the average Right wing hack.
2) It's not necessarily going to lead to the sort of conclusions the contemporary right is going to like, any more than the contemporary French philosophy.
In other words, Kant, can't cut it. Not alone, anyway.

In that light, I want to link to this article by Gerard Henderson in the Herald today.

I've lost count of the number of ABC journalists, based in or visiting the United States, who are covering the presidential election. But the number does not really matter since they all seem to be saying much the same thing.

With a few exceptions, Australian commentators are following their American counterparts - they are barracking for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party ticket. It is difficult to recall any other election in a democratic society where the media has been so obviously supporting one side in a two-sided contest.

It is not so much a case of conscious bias as the prevalence of fashion. The US President, George Bush, the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and the Republican Administration in Washington DC are very unpopular, especially among journalists and commentators.

John McCain has been afflicted by the fact that he is the Republican candidate during the time of an international financial crisis and when the US is involved in an unpopular military commitment in Iraq. More importantly, Senator Obama is a young and charismatic son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, who is promising change, renewal and all that.

Gerard Henderson thinks what his side is up against is 'fashion'. That it is fashionable to adopt Barack Obama as the candidate of choice when there is a man who appeals much more to Gerard in John McCain, and that is why the media is lauding him. I have to say this is a woefully inadequate analysis of the media for the reasons I mentioned above, but we'll go along with it for the moment.

The overwhelming majority of opinion polls suggest a comfortable win for the Obama/Joe Biden ticket. Even so, some pollsters give the Democrats a relatively modest lead of about 5 per cent with a large number of undecided voters. What's missing in much of the reporting is an examination of why the Democratic ticket is not further ahead and what an Obama administration would mean for the US and the rest of the world.

It seems that Obama's inability, so far at least, to win a huge vote turns on the fact that he is the most liberal (in the American sense of the term) candidate to run for president in decades.

This is reflected in his voting record in the US Senate and his past associations with individuals and organisations on the radical left. The list includes the Chicago clergyman the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the self-confessed one-time urban terrorist William Ayers of Weather Underground infamy, and former Palestine Liberation Organisation spokesman Rashid Khalidi.

He sounds like a man who hates conceding defeat but must because the reality is against him; and so he is laying a curse on the reality by blaming media bias. It's understandable. Back in 1996-2000, I found it really hard to stomach the great lurch to the right that saw John Howard get entrenched and George W. Bush come to power, and the 7 years that followed were just painful. And I'm only casually a leftie - a chardonnay socialist who can't stand much chardonnay - I try to stay dead bang in the middle as advocated by the song 'Won't Get Fooled Again' and even then the rise of the right in the last decade had me reaching for my vomit bag. So I imagine Gerard Henderson to be understandably reaching for his vomit bag as the Socialist cause makes a big comeback. It happens to all of us Gerard - dude, your horse is not a bad horse, but it's just getting beaten by a better one. Get over it.

However, if the Right actually had a contemporary philosophical foundation for mounting proper critiques, their jobs at convincing the public against the perceived bias might not be so difficult. That is to say, if the Right were actually a little more intellectually competent and rigorous, instead of stooping to the lows of Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair and Miranda Devine, it might be able to better shape tomorrow without reverting to paternalistic fascist arguments that rightfully (pun intended) garner it such scorn and ridicule.
Go back to Hobbs and Hume, and bring it up to date. Siding with the religious nuts is not going to win the middle where I sit.

Rupert Murdoch Dispenses Advice

Nice Work If You Pay Us
Citizen Rupert Murdoch has written an article that appeared in the SMH of all places. He starts off coyly by admitting that he might no longer qualify as an Australian but quickly plays the "I don't care what you think, I've been called worse" card and proceeds to lambast Australia. It's his time and effort, so really, he's free to waste whatever is left of his life on this article, but I couldn't help but notice just how pedestrian his advice actually is:

The Australian economy is coming up against one of these challenges: a financial crisis whose origins are overseas. In recent weeks the Australian dollar has fluctuated as wildly as a whirling Dervish, and the impact is beginning to be felt in the real economy. There is no use bemoaning the problem. In this new century Australia is wedded to the world - mostly for richer, very occasionally for poorer, certainly for better, and only rarely for worse. I fear that many Australians will learn the hard way what it means to be unprepared for the challenges that a global economy can bring.

By most measures - the rule of law, economic performance, and the quality of life - Australians today live in one of the most ideal societies on Earth. Here's my worry. While Australia generally does well in international rankings, those rankings can blind us to a larger truth: Australia will not succeed in the future if it aims to be just a bit better than average. We need to revive the sense of Australia as a frontier country, and to cultivate Australia as a great centre of excellence. Unlike our parents and grandparents, this new frontier has little to do with the bush or the outback. Today the frontier that needs sorting is the wider world. Complacency is our chief enemy…

Oddly enough, what follows is a bunch of common sense advice.
- Globalisation is here, so work harder.
- Do something about welfare payments.
- Do something about education and schools.
- Do something abou Aborigines and Reconciliation.
- Do something about global warming.
Pretty darn obvious. It's not like the average Australian hasn't embraced globalistion for a start when a vast many of them have gone out and bought cheap big screen TVs made in China in the lst 2 years. Or when they've bought cheap shoes from Indonesia or cheap cars from Thailand (with Honda badges). Australians are more than happy to embrace globalisation, judging from consumer spending.

[We] need to reduce dependency on government … to reform our education system … to reconcile with Australia's Aboriginal population and to maintain a liberal immigration system. At a time when the world's most competitive nations are moving their people off government subsidy, Australians seem to be headed in the wrong direction. In a recent paper [the director of the Institute for Private Enterprise] Des Moore pointed out that while real incomes had increased since the end of the 1980s, about 20 per cent of the working aged population today received income support, compared with 15 per cent two decades ago. While a safety net is warranted for those in genuine need, we must avoid institutionalising idleness. The bludger should not be our national icon.

This above bit is interesting too. Australia's official unemployment rate dropped to the high 4.0% range during the Howard years and this was accomplished by tightening restrictions on the Welfare programs. At one point they were busily devising ways for mentally deficient patients (let's not put too fine a point people with IQ lower than 75) to get 16 hours per week of gainful employment, just to pump employment figures. It was almost comically cruel watching them put these policies into motion. Yet, the unemployment rate fell for better or worse.
Worse?
Yes, there is a scenario where low unemployment - maximum employment - can be bad.

Ross Gittins pointed out that at 4.5% a nation's work force is close to full capacity anyway, and that lower unemployment than that figure invites inflation - and it did so much that it forced a succession of interest rises until the credit crunch hit. In short, the Australia of the bludger as national icon is long gone. Who exactly is this mythical 'Joe the Bludger', Rupert? In turn, what has come to light is that the Howard Government was busily handing out welfare to middle classes that fit its vision of a typical Liberal Party voter. So you sort of wonder if Rupert Murdoch really does stay in touch beyond visiting his family once in a while.

I don't really know why Rupert Murdoch suddenly felt the urge to say this stuff. Maybe he did because he's Rupert Murdoch, he does as he wants; but it's a bit (pardon the pun) rich coming from a guy who was born with a silver spoon, and never was found wanting for money in his life to go wag his finger at the rest of us telling us to work harder.
For a start, your companies can pay your bills on time, Rupert!

The Who To Come Back Down Under

Pleiades Mailbag Presents!

I can't explain the eternal appeal of this band, even after they've lost their rhythm section to rock'n'roll deaths - heck I still love them - and they just keep going. They're also one of the bands that I do blog about when news comes my way, so here it is. The Who are touring Australia to kick off the Melbourne Grand Prix amongst other things.

While they’re yet to announce a series of tour dates, British rock ‘n roll legends The Who have been confirmed as the special musical performance for the 2009 Melbourne Grand Prix.

Led by Roger Daltrey and Peter Townshend, the “My Generation” rockers will take the pole position at the famous car race, which last year saw New York City make-up rockers KISS closing proceedings. According to the band’s website, Townsend says he’s “hoping to see an even bigger crowd” at Albert Park next year.

“Few bands can lay claim to being among rock royalty, but British rock gods the Who must surely feature on any list of the best bands of all-time,” said Zara Lawless, Acting CEO of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation. “Last year, an estimated 65,000 people stuck around after the big race to see a full, two-hour concert extravaganza from KISS. If you thought that was big, I urge you to get along to next year’s Grand Prix to be part of an event that people will talk about for years to come.”

Dates for the 2009 FORMULA 1™ ING Australian Grand Prix are Thursday 26 – Sunday 29 March. Tickets will be available to the general public on Monday 3 November.

Don't know if I'd spend up big to be there when the city of Melbourne is going to be filled with Grand Prix tourists.

In conjunction with news about that tour, Pleiades also sent in this interesting article about the time The Who toured NZ in 1968.
This bit caught my eye for some reason:

"After the first show, in the intermission, Bob Pridden said 'I'm going to take their stuff off the stage seeing they're not coming back."

"I went 'What? What do you mean they're not coming back?'. I thought they were in the dressing room but as it turned out, they'd got a cab with Wiggy and gone back to the motel. I went back and they were all sitting on the floor, having a beer and talking about blowing the rest of the tour out.

"They were saying 'F*** it! Let's get out of here". So I was trying to explain that if they got up and walked out, they had to look at the fact they they were probably going to end up in a situation where these promoters weren't going to pay them. I think The Who were only getting about a thousand pounds a show!

"I said 'you've gone through all this shit, you've put up with the Australian end of it, and you've got one more day to go. You've got another show to do in Auckland and another day to go in Wellington and then it's over. At least if you do it, nobody can take your money away from you and let me tell you, you've earned it."

"So they came back and did the eight o'clock show and took the attitude that they were just gonna have a bit of fun with it, and that's what they did."

The Australian leg of the tour was infamous. The Australian press hounded them for their bad behaviour in the utmost Australian-Wowser way, and the band got more defensive as they fielded dumber and dumber questions from the hostile Australian press. I acually own a promotional poster from that tour. Anyway, the rest of it is a classic bit of Who-Lore so it's recommended reading. As they once sang, long live rock!

Thanks to Pleiades who sent in the link.

On The Eve Of The US Elections

Just Before Obama Makes History
All my life, it seemed impossible that a black man (and by extension any coloured person) would or could become POTUS. We'd seen Morgan Freeman play a very dignified POTUS in 'Deep Impact', but it just seemed like one of those fanciful Hollywood notions - a bit like Geena Davis playing one or the amazing career portrayed by Martin Sheen in the 'West Wing' series where a pretty wonderful Democratic parallel universe unfolded. All of this was a stark reminder at just how awful a choice had been made in having George W Bush as POTUS.

It's interesting how fast, how far-reaching his candidacy has been in readdressing the countless wrongs that have been done. There is a chance that this is the beginning of something great, like a renewal of the American dream, the great promise that was once there in the Constitution. It just might be a black man who leads America out of its current mess and leads it to a place where it can lead the world with true authority. We'll see. The expectations have never been this high.

This is going to be good.

Saying Bye To Bush
I nearly wrote 'elected' George W. Bush, but in fact I have to say he had the election jury-rigged to steal it from the man who would have made a much better POTUS than himself. The tragedy is somehow Amrica allowed itself a POTUS so committed to abstract notions that he was willing to appoint incompetents based on their beliefs about Abortion and 'Roe versus Wade'. After 8 years of the country being run into the ground, both fiscally and financially as well as international prestige and reputation-wise, it seems appropriate to celebrate the coming end of his sad Presidency.

This is a Presidency that saw (just to name only the MAJOR disasters):
9/11.
The War in Afghanistan
The War in Iraq
The military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay
The Sub-prime loans crisis
The Complete meltdown of the financial markets that led to the bail out - with his treasury secretary begging his own party on bended knee in Congress

I'm sure there are going to be any number of right wing commentators who are going to try and salvage the legacy of this Bush Administration, but the facts are, he ruined America. It is fitting tat just as the last days of GW Bush are about to come to pass, Oliver Stone is coming out with his movie 'W'. I hope he puts the boot in hard.

Watch Out For The Grassy Knoll
Speaking of Oliver Stone, he of 'JFK', of all the things that haunt us all is the 'Military-Industrial Complex'. I always recommend people read this book 'Voltaire's Bastards' which explains just why there is such a conglomeration of interests. It essentially comes down to the fact that the US Government never completely wound down its war-footing after WWII, and as such there were a plethora of firms that kept wanting government contracts to make arms.

That is to say, there's a whole bunch of companies that only make weapons, and weapons for the US government at that - and they form a dirty big part of the US economy.

Years ago, Japanese aviation engineers from Mitsubishi went across to the USA to find out just what resources could be used to build the FSX fighter jet based on the F-16. To their amazement, they found that these companies made parts that were never tested in volume, and were never placed in general domestic civilian use. This surprised the Mitsubishi engineers because even though Mitsubishi make weapons for the Japanese Self Defense Services, they also make vast consumer products from pencils to automobiles.

And yet, here were whole cities in Arizona and Colorado that specialised in making things that were just for weapons, never to see light as commercial parts. The funny thing is, these communities always want small governments, less taxation, but more government spending on arms because that's the only way their economies function. An elaborate kind of corporate welfare for a whole sector of the economy. This is who the Military-Industry Complex are, and this is why they keep harping on about the right to bear arms and the threat of socialism. They're the people who Oliver Stone thinks detested JFK so much because he was going to deny them a war, that they organised the assassination.

Guess who they're voting for, and why there might be gunmen on some grassy knoll waiting for the Barack Obama motorcade.
It's not about race, it's about their collective hip pockets.

Australian Films Tank At Box Office

Our Own Market Still Hates Us

It's not a laughing matter that the trend continues. The top 4 Australian films combined have grossed less at the box office than a mediocre offering from Hollywood.

In a sign of how Australia's independent film industry is struggling, the best film nominees at this year's AFI Awards - The Black Balloon, The Jammed, The Square and Unfinished Sky - took a combined $3.9 million at the box office. In comparison, American-made films romped in at the Australian box office - even those universally panned by critics.

Step Brothers, the Will Ferrell gross-out comedy that scored 3/10 from The Sun-Herald film reviewer Rob Lowing, took in $8.7million from Australian audiences, while Alvin And The Chipmunks earned $17.63million. The highest-earning US film was The Dark Knight with $45.6million in Australian takings alone.

"We had a number of small films this year but, let's face it, that's what we have the budgets for," said Elissa Down, director of The Black Balloon, which scored 11 AFI Award nominations this year. It was made for just over $4 million but took in just $2,265,000 at the box office.

"We had a great screen average and we were told by a number of exhibitors at art-house cinemas that they were seeing teenagers in there for the first time, which was great," Down said.

The comparison with big-budget American films is often painful for independent filmmakers because it is not an even playing-field financially. But some filmmakers believe it is important for the industry to become more aware of what Australian audiences want to see.

"It is a shame because we're competing against American, big-star, $100 million films," said Dee McLachlan, director of The Jammed. "But I think it's up to us to get Australian audiences engaged back in Australian stories."

Australian films have been competing against bigger budget American films for a long time, and have continued production in spite of losses for over 3 decades. It's nothing new. The result we are seeing comes directly from the funding bodies' collective disregard for the Australian audience for that 30 years span.

There's been much confusion as to what form an Australian Film Industry should take, but that discussion alone is fraught with ideological culture wars. There is an old Doug Mulray joke that went, you could easily get funding from the AFC if you pitched 'Pitch Black and the Seven Pygmies' provided you had a one-legged wheelchair-ridden Aborigine woman playing the main character. Yes, it's highly racist and inflammatory, but it wouldn't be so funny if it didn't have a modicum of truth. I was on my way driving to AFTRS in North Ryde when I heard the joke on-air and burst into laughter at the bitter truth of it, feeling paralysed by the poisonous wit.
I was surrounded by the very ideological adjustments (and cognitive dissonance I might add) that these things are important.
Well, yes, they are important, but not to the market. Not even to an Australiasn market, whose culture we are allegedly trying to preserve by making these government funded films from their tax-payers' money. Get that. We're taxing people to make these loser films to preserve an Australian identity on the screen, even if the people stay away in droves not to watch it.

The simple fact is, the various funding bodies have hardly cared about Australian audiences since inception. It's only when in the late 1990s under the Howard government that film bureaucrats were asked to explain their successive years of losses that the notion of market returns crept into the discussion - which leads us to today's article above. It's a bit hard to ask Australian audiences to suddenly take notice of Australian films after 30 years of being served the film equivalent of the Coogee Bay Hotel Gelato.
They don't trust us to tell a story that they might find interesting or satisfying or worth consuming on a Friday night or a Saturday with a date or with buddies.