Flaming Horses

I'm Moving My Blogging To WordPress

2008-11-10T18:35:00.004+11:00

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

2008-11-08T18:31:00.016+11:00

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

2008-11-07T22:40:00.005+11:00

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

2008-11-06T21:57:00.010+11:00

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

2008-11-05T18:02:00.004+11:00

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?

2008-11-04T17:47:00.007+11:00

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

2008-11-04T07:21:00.007+11:00

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

2008-11-03T18:32:00.003+11:00

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

2008-11-02T22:39:00.007+11:00

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

2008-11-02T10:31:00.009+11:00

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.

Record Hunting Blues

2008-10-31T21:29:00.008+11:00

A Long Time Ago...

...in what seems like a galaxy away - which is to say, the Sydney of the 1980s - I used to go record hunting with my high school buddies. Our hunting grounds were placed in the stretch of Pitt St between Bathurst St and Goulburn Street. There used to be a row of secondhand vinyl shops, as the CD was only beginning to come out. All the vinyl people were casting off ended up in the sales bins and this was where we started collecting albums.

Today, it is the CD that is going out of style, but not without a fight it seems.

"The whole price market has changed: record companies now do deals with big major stores, like the JB Hi-Fis and Big Ws, Kmarts, Harvey Norman, so they go out at prices sometimes below what they sell to other people," Lehne says.

As for Dirt Cheap CDs' model of importing cheap CDs, margins were thin but the weak dollar has made it worse.

Specialising seems to be the secret to surviving as an independent. That has been the case for niche stores such as Ashwood's Music and Books, on York Street, and Red Eye, the 26-year-old record store that sells new and second-hand music in three shops in the Sydney CBD.

"Jazz and classical are still strong, vinyl is selling," says Ian Vellins, the manager of Ashwood's. "It's just that the contemporary pop CDs aren't selling because everyone downloads them. The only thing that's not selling is everything that would get an ARIA award."
---
THE CITY CD SEARCH
Ashwood's Music and Books Specialises in rare and collectable vinyl, books, sheet music and memorabilia, as well as CDs. 129 York Street, city, 9267 7745.

Lawson's Record Centre Stocks rarer styles such as jazz, blues and world, latest release CDs, DVDs and more. 380 Pitt Street, city, 9267 3434.

JB Hi-Fi Australia's sixth-largest retail chain has good deals. In city in Strand Arcade and Galeries Victoria, 500 George Street, 9267 8444, plus many suburban locations.

Red Eye Records Shop 1 (new and imports) and shop 2 (metal-industrial-punk-horror and cult DVDs) are both at 66 King Street, city, while the second-hand shop is at 370 Pitt Street, 9262 9755.

Mojo Music The self-proclaimed kings of the back catalogue stock blues, jazz, country reissues and more. 32 York Street, city, 9262 4999.

Egg Records New and used LPs, CDs, film and related memorabilia. 3 Wilson Street, Newtown, 9550 6056.

The Recordstore Specialists in new and second-hand vinyl, particularly beats and hip-hop styles. 255b Crown Street, Darlinghurst, 9380 8223.

Revolve Records Relics Bargains amid the new-release vinyl. Shop 3, 65 Erskineville Road, Erskineville, 9519 9978.

Birdland Records Long a specialist in jazz and related forms of music. 231 Pitt Street, city, 9267 6881.

For more CD and record stores around Sydney, see sydneymusicweb.com/

Aah, Ashwoods and Lawsons! Those were the days!
My particular favourite haunt was a place on 310 Pitt street which is now a flashy comic book shop, but it used to be a small, dingy, dark, hole-in-the-wall place run by a fellow called Greg - Greg was a bearded relic of the 1970s (complete with blue denim jacket) who knew so much about Prog Rock acts from around the world. As such, if you put a word in with Greg, he'd keep an eye out for obscure records for you. How obscure? Try these titles I bought from him:

Robert Fripp: 'Let the Power Fall'
Keith Emerson: Sound track to 'Nighthawks' (starring Sylvester Stallone)
Chris Squire: 'Fish Out Of Water' (as well as Patrick Moraz's 'Story of i').
Gordon Haskell: 'It Is And It Isn't'
John Wetton: 'Caught In The Crossfire'

Most lot of these albums are not on CD even to this day, and if they are, you have to order them in from some obscure little re-release label in the boondocks of America. As you can see, the principal arcana in which Greg specialised, was tracking down solo albums by prog rock alumni from Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer and Genesis. I've bought 'Exposure' by Robert Fripp 3 times in my life, but the first vinyl pressing was from Greg's shop. It was 'mint condition', in its own little plastic sleeve.

I bought it and listened to it ONCE when I taped that ONE occasion on to a TDK Gold cassette, and then proceeded to thrash that cassette to death. So my original vinyl copy of 'Exposure' is still what you would call 'mint condition'. Such was LP lore.

Greg also made some extraordinarily astute recommendations for things like Camel albums and other assorted '70s rock music with neck-twisting time-changes and bizarre instrumentation. This stuff was gold when the mainstream Music Industry was busy trying to sell us Culture Club, Wham, and Madonna; And you have to understand that in the day before the internet, Amazon, and indie distribution, it was nigh impossible to find 'just-that-thing' put out by the second guy to play drums for the 3rd incarnation of the Prog Rock act Such-and-Such. Greg knew all this arcane, difficult, obscure, subtle, delicate, and yet TOTALLY meaningless stuff like some Gandalf of Prog.

He wasn't the only guy. There was a guy at Lawsons who also knew all about Led Zep bootlegs - not that I bought any, and a guy at Red Eye who knew all about different pressings from different countries. Secondhand LPs came with an entire system of Lore that was passed on from people who just loved recorded sound on to the next. Thus, many an hour was spent wandering up and down Pitt Street in search of an immaculate copy of 'Tales From Topographic Oceans' or 'Lamb Lies Down On Broadway'. It was hard work, because you were counting on people to be clever enough to buy this stuff, but dumb enough to let them go without having played them too often. When that venture proved impossible, we ordered special German and Japanese pressings of these materials.

It was enough to turn any kid into a total music snob of the worst kind - but I liked it (And still do, thank you very much). Just as an aside, when people rang me up to tell me they'd seen my life on the screen when they saw 'High Fidelity', I knew exactly what they were talking about. I lived inside of those shops for a significant part of my youth, and yes it's true: In life it's not what you're like that is important, but what you like. We all liked vinyl recordings.

Then came CDs, and the rest of life where you scored jobs and re-bought the LP collection. How could we not? Foolishly, I never let my vinyl collection go. I still have all those obscure albums plus the LP catalogue of the major Prog Rock acts. It fills me with a funny sense of nostalgia when I think about the passion be-spent upon these things that sit on my shelf silently. Even my CDs are getting to be played less and less as I spend my listening time working on my own music and letting the iTunes-iPod complex handle my playback of these acts. One of these days I might own a Data cube that houses 100Terabytes, with all these songs loaded up, uncompressed - and I'd still never let go of my LPs or CDs.

David Dale Is My Hero

2008-10-27T18:30:00.005+11:00

Staying In Touch (With Trivia, With Style)

Growing up in 80s, the most fun part of the SMH was the backpage of the main section where David Dale held court with his 'Stay in Touch' column. The SiT column covered bizarre news snippets from around the world - the sort of weird-ass news that comes in the AP 'Oddly Enough' wire. It most probably was the AP Oddly Enough wire to which he had access and we were not to know it back then, but all the same, David Dale made the silly parts of the world and its affairs a must-read everyday.

When I reflect on it further, the tone of this blog might find its roots in the tone of SiT columns of the 1980s, in which case David Dale would be my spiritual father of journalism. Sometime during the time I dropped out of Med School, he left the Herald to go edit The Bulletin where he was criticised for bringing his style of whimsy to a 'serious' publication. I never bothered to read The Bulletin under his editor-ship which goes to show any artist or journo performs as a function of his/her context.

Anyway, today I noticed I clicked on 2 articles by the said David Dale and enjoyed them both so I thought I'd link them here.

The first is his observation about Nathan Rees.

In just eight weeks as NSW Premier, he has said two gloriously unpredictable things: that his favourite book is Paradise Lost, published in 1667 by the puritan poet John Milton, and that if you think you are in love, then you are in love (said last week when discussing traffic).

That's two more surprises than Morris Iemma gave us in three years as premier (unless you count his resignation). It is starting to look as if we might have an interesting person running the state and, in my book, that's much better than having a competent one.

If we're honest, we elect politicians to entertain us. Canberra and Macquarie Street are soap operas, sometimes overlapping with crime thrillers and screwball comedies. The public service can do the grunt work. The job of politicians is to engage our emotions and inspire our imaginations.

State politics throws up too few eccentrics. The finest in the past 20 years was the mercurial Jeff Kennett in Victoria, who revealed only after he retired that he suffered from depression.

In NSW, Bob Carr never felt the need to justify his preference for Roman history over football. I ran into him once on a bus that was taking people round Sydney's museums. He said he was late for his official duty of launching the museum tour because he'd been watching a TV documentary that proved it was not Nero who set fire to Rome but Christian terrorists trying to bring down the empire. Carr couldn't stop talking about it.

Nathan Rees's fascination with Milton ranks with that. Paradise Lost tells the story of Lucifer's attempt to organise a revolution by the angels in heaven and overthrow the dictatorship of God. God wins and banishes Lucifer and his freedom fighters to the underworld.

Milton clearly had sympathy for the devil. Lucifer is the most interesting character in the narrative. The illustrator William Blake said Milton was "of the devil's party without knowing it" - which may reveal something about Rees's continuing relationships with some Labor powerbrokers.

Quotes we should expect to hear soon in Rees speeches: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n" and "The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heav'n of hell, or a hell of heav'n". Sounds a lot like NSW to me.

Eccentricity is underrated as an incentive for voters. Gough Whitlam was the first of the Great Unpredictables, because his brain overflowed with ideas that didn't fit within standard political rhetoric. His divagation on the pronunciation of the word kilometer ("The versifiers among you have always used pentameters and tetrameters, and you've got a pretty fair diameter and perimeter yourself") makes Rees look positively pedestrian.

The bounding joviality in his writing is infectious and it actually threw me back to my teenager revelry just reading it. I don't know what to make of Nathan Rees as of yet, but I'm already positively disposed towards him as a result of reading this article. It may be the case that David Dale has made the unpalatable, palatable; but there is much to be said for a column that can persuade on the strength of its wit, and this is the essence of David Dale - he's one witty bastard.

The second is a regular column of his current column, 'The Tribal Mind'.

Australia's top-selling DVDs (first week of October): 1 Supernatural Season 3; 2 Horton Hears A Who; 3 AFL Premiers 2008 Hawthorn; 4 Two And A Half Men Season 4; 5 Heroes Season 2 Digipack Box Set; 6 Two And A Half Men Season 3; 7 Heroes Season 2 Slimcase; 8 Two And A Half Men Season 1; 9 Beverly Hills 90210 Season 5; 10 Happy Feet.

Only two of the 10 are movies. One is a sports documentary. The rest are TV shows. And therein lies the mystery: why are three of the 10 best sellers based on a TV show which Channel Nine is already showing for five hours a week, two of them from a show Channel Seven is showing for an hour a week and one from a show Channel Ten is showing for an hour a week?

This is my speculation: it's because there is no longer any trust between viewers and TV stations. The fans of Two And A Half Men, Heroes or Supernatural are thinking: "Yes, they may be showing it now, but any minute they'll cancel it, move it to late at night without telling me, play it out of order or interrupt the sequence with old episodes. The only way to be sure of seeing it in the correct order, when I want to, is to buy every possible DVD. And then I'll never need to watch TV again."

Of course, no blockbuster movies were released around the time that chart was compiled. The top 10 a month from now will no doubt include Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Sex And The City, and Indiana Jones And The KIngdom Of The Crystal Skull. But if my thesis about the breakdown of trust is correct, the remaining six next month will still be TV shows.

Interesting how he never pulls punches. One has to admire a guy with much spine and I suspect the one thing about David Dale is that he;s not short of spine. I like that. A couple of years ago, he made the astute observation that not even the top grossing Australian films at the Box Office were making a profit, and promptly got rebukes, but he's been right all along.

Anyway, I thought I'd fly that out there, just because it hit me today, just how much I still get a kick out of reading his columns after all this time.

News That's Fit To Punt

2008-10-24T20:32:00.009+11:00

Greenspan's Concession

Alan Greenspan has made one last appearance at the Senate to explain his perspective on the recent financial market turmoil. In the process, he got a right grilling, and had to admit that maybe he had it wrong.

But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Now 82, Mr. Greenspan came in for one of the harshest grillings of his life, as Democratic lawmakers asked him time and again whether he had been wrong, why he had been wrong and whether he was sorry.

Critics, including many economists, now blame the former Fed chairman for the financial crisis that is tipping the economy into a potentially deep recession. Mr. Greenspan’s critics say that he encouraged the bubble in housing prices by keeping interest rates too low for too long and that he failed to rein in the explosive growth of risky and often fraudulent mortgage lending.

“You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the committee. “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”

Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

On a day that brought more bad news about rising home foreclosures and slumping employment, Mr. Greenspan refused to accept blame for the crisis but acknowledged that his belief in deregulation had been shaken.

He noted that the immense and largely unregulated business of spreading financial risk widely, through the use of exotic financial instruments called derivatives, had gotten out of control and had added to the havoc of today’s crisis. As far back as 1994, Mr. Greenspan staunchly and successfully opposed tougher regulation on derivatives.

But on Thursday, he agreed that the multitrillion-dollar market for credit default swaps, instruments originally created to insure bond investors against the risk of default, needed to be restrained.

I wish I could be wrong the way Greenspan was wrong. 18 years in the top job and having steered the American economy into a succession of bubbles-and-bust scenarios, he's still sitting on a mighty reputation as one of the more successful men on the planet. Not to put too fine a point on it, the man has metaphorically trashed daddy's car three or four times but has never been asked to pay up. Perhaps that is the limitation of metaphors.

It's not all his fault per se, but it is true that a lot of the contributing factors were given the green-light by Mr. Greenspan.

CBD Metro to Rozelle?

Current NSW Premier Nathan Rees announced that he is asking the Federal Government to back a Metro that goes from Town Hall, Martin Place, Barangaroo, Pyrmont and Rozelle.

Plans would then emerge as to an "extension to Macquarie Park and Epping as a second phase" or a "future West Metro as an Alternate second phase".

More detail on the "sequencing" of those lines would be made available in the November mini-budget, Mr Rees

But neither Mr Rees nor the co-ordinator-general in the Premier's Department, David Richmond, could put a costing on the CBD project, despite the fact they had just briefed Infrastructure Australia bureaucrats on it.

Later, the Premier's office advised the CBD metro project would cost $4 billion, one third of the cost of the North-West metro that the former Premier Morris Iemma announced in March.

The NSW Opposition Leader, Barry O'Farrell, said Mr Iemma may have been the "ditherer'' but Mr Rees was the "gibberer'' who had devised the plan "on the back of a lemon squash coaster''.

"I'm wondering if my kids will see this North-West metro ever built,'' he said.

"If it wasn't so serious it would be a joke ... He makes it up as he goes along.''

The metro line would also service the Education Minister Verity Firth's marginal seat of Balmain, a further win for Ms Firth after she won a decision on Callan Park earlier in the week, with Mr Rees announcing it would be kept in public ownership.

Mr Rees said the project was about setting in stone that Sydney would have a metro system.

"By getting appropriate public transport into the Barangaroo development, which everyone recognises will be the heart of the financial district, means that over time we demonstrating to the region and the world that Sydney is not about pulling things out of the ground and mining, it is about financial services and related services and the export of our expertise."

Umm, yeah Mr. Rees. If the plan is to turn Barangaroo into a kind of Wall Street of Australia, then it's definitely going to need its own station. It's a little disappointing the sucker stops at Rozelle. Would be better to at least get up to Drummoyne, which would cut some buses down Victoria Road.

It seems woefully inadequate for a start, but it's a start all the same. The opposition is proably going to inherit this project and stretch it out to the North West any way.

A Thought About Sydney's Public Transport System

I've been taking the Sydney PT for the last 3 weeks since my accident and I'm getting a first-hand look at just what the problem is when it comes to urban transit. Here's my daily trip to work:

- I take a 7min walk to the station, and wait for the bus on average 7-10 minutes.
- Then I ride the bus down Victoria Road over the Anzac Bridge into Town Hall, which takes about 40minutes.
- There, I walk for 5 minutes which includes the ticket buying exercise and going down to the platform.
- The train inevitably arrives within 5 minutes, and takes about 10 to get to Sydenham.
- From there I walk to the office - a 5 minute walk.

All in all, it takes 75minutes to get to work, but none of the steps in of themselves are really that dreadful. It's not even that tiring if I can get a seat on the bus. I inevitably do on the train. The thing is, I'm always aware that the trip to work by car is 25minutes through traffic on City-West Link and Norton Street.

The least reliable aspect of this trip are the buses, and even then, they're not as bad as the press is braying about it. What's really bad is that on a rainy day, Victoria Road clogs up with traffic. It's as if Sydney's commuters are the Wicked Witch of the West and deice that they're going to melt if they don't drive their cars to work. You can easily sit for an hour on a bus on a rainy day - and that's not the bus' fault.

I've been told it's been worse since the Lane Cove tunnel opened. I can well imagine that people commuting in from the North West might opt for going down Victoria Road rather than pay the toll, and who would blame them? If you include the Harbour Bridge toll, you would be paying 5 tolls a day, just to commute.

In fact one of the things the NSW government really should do to ameliorate the traffic situation is to dismantle tolls. That way, people will opt for the shortest distance to work rather than try to rat-maze their way around the tolls and congesting suburban roads. Right now, there's so little rationality in the way the whole thing is set up. People are rewarded for avoiding toll roads; people feel the tolls are a punishment. It's clear the Macquarie Infrastructure model is a crock of shit that has turned Sydney into an urban dung-heap in a matter of 15 years.

The other thing that struck me about Sydney traffic is the fact that Sydney is a lot more diffuse than we think. The urban density of Sydney is actually quite low in parts. Thus, we spend a heck of a lot of our time getting to places driving past interminable rows of 1/4 acre block houses. It's clear that the absence of planning for Sydney - a condition which lasted decades - has come back to bite us. The metro project is only going to begin to address these problems and we may not see the results of it for a long time.

My Song Of The Week

2008-10-20T21:40:00.004+11:00

Slave To The Original...

My Coelacanth band mate Chella Elaine sings 'Slave to the Rhythm'. I did the Trevor Horn & Steve Lipson impersonation. Need I say more?

Check it out here!

Inflation Indexing Is A Scam

2008-10-20T17:40:00.003+11:00

The Government Has Been Lying All Along

Have you ever wondered how certain prices of things keep going up but you look at the CPI as posted by the government and it says something like 3%, and you wonder, what's deflating in price to compensate for the 10% rise you saw in the prices of say, everyday groceries? I have. If there's one thing that hasn't made any sense at all, it's been the inflation reports on things that people buy the most - food and rent.

Here's an article in the SMH that basically confirmed my worst suspicions about the Government.

In the 1980s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) put pressure on governments in the developed world to rein in inflation and labor costs. These governments had - and continue to have - huge unfunded future pension and healthcare costs which cloud their economic future.

They were encouraged in the early 1990s to bring in a new form of CPI that ensured reported inflation remained within a tightly targeted range of 2%-3%.

This included Paul Keating's Australia. The new index would not be a CPI - which simply measured changes in prices - but rather a National Affordability Index which measured how well all households collectively could afford goods.

Inflation had historically been overstated, contended the IMF, and contained an ''upside'' bias thanks to a number of factors: principally the qualitative improvements in goods and the ''narrow'' income base (that is, wages and salaries) upon which changes were measured. It was not broad enough, supposedly.

The case for qualitative improvement in goods was that the latest model TV may well cost more than an older one, but it had greater functionality.

Under the new measure, the two could not be compared without making an adjustment. A notional historical value for the new TV had to be determined - and here began the mathematical gymnastics - and then converted into an effective net present dollar value which was then compared against the old price of TVs.

According to the ''narrow'' income base argument, rather than just using wage and salary income purchasing power, all households' incomes should be calculated when measuring the economy's purchasing power.

This seems simple enough.

In practice, however, the top 15% of tax payers pay nearly 50% of our income taxes and this same group represents more than 60% of all consumer consumption in our economy.

By including all of this additional purchasing power when calculating the new ''average national affordability index'' you end up with some significant distortions, or ''downward bias''.

Urged on by the IMF, a rash of world governments adopted this new framework in the late 1990s within a matter of months of each other. All G20 nations now use it. They did this so they could start reaping the economic benefits.

*Ugh*. I do begroan with all! The top 15% of tax payers determining 60% of consumer expenditure pattern has to be one of the biggest skews in a statistical analysis of pricing. It means it includes price fluctuations of things like a 7 series BMW or a Rolls Royce in amongst the prices of staples such as poultry or bread or vegetables.

To make things more clear, check out this section:

As an example of how removed from reality the ABS calculations and assumptions can be, imagine that a loaf of bread costs $5 and you buy four loaves a week. If it cost $3 previously, you would be worse off to the tune of $8 a week. The ABS, however, might argue that you are in fact better off and that inflation has fallen.

The ABS could assume under their new calculations that, at $5 a loaf, we would only buy three loaves a week instead of four loaves thereby saving $5.

This is known as a quantative assumption. Quantative assumptions, though, are based on consumption trend data that is 12- to 18-months old.

Further, the ABS may assume that another less-price-inflated item is substituted for another loaf saving you another $2.

The problem, as you can see, is that we are talking about a loaf of bread here, a staple product, not a plasma TV set.

This is called a ``substitution assumption'' and it is based on an arbitrary estimate, or guess. (The ABS would prefer to call it a well constructed and tested mathematical model based on real world data. and so forth).

This can have a profound effect on what is known as the basket of goods (the set of basic groceries that the ABS uses to determine food price movements) and an equally profound effect on the final new CPI number.

''The ABS is basically free to play around with what is in the basket until they can model the right number,'' says Beavan.

Further, the average net household income has been driven up by the explosion in executive and upper-echelon pay packets, so you could say that multi-million dollar CEO bonuses drive up the national average income, meaning there is more money available to pay for goods so the goods are now more affordable - although the local pre-school and the average pensioner has not seen a cent.

*Ugh*. You wonder why we don't take to the streets with pick axes. It's because we have mortgages - I don't, but most of the self-respecting population does. But when they do get kicked out of their situation, they might invest in some pitchforks and torches and go witch-hunting for the idiots who came up with this indexing system.

Presidential Debate - McCain v Obama

2008-10-16T21:17:00.007+11:00

Actually Seeing These Candidates

I've only seen Barack Obama in small clips, so the recent round three was my first opportunity to actually watch him in action as well as a straight comparison with his opposite number John McCain. To be honest I think Obama's native intelligence has been understated by the press - it was abundantly clear that he's a much, much smarter cookie than I'd been led to believe - while the press has overstated the policy agenda of John McCain's campaign. McCain looked like a insubstantial retard next to Obama.

Throughout the debate it seemed pretty obvious that McCain's mantra was still the Republican chestnut of smaller government and tax cuts and rebate to the rich sort of stuff at best, which is disappointing because it shows he has very little awareness that that line of reasoning led to the current financial crisis. If anything was obvious as daylight was the fact that if one voted for a McCain presidency, it really was going to be more of the same, in spite of his insistence that he's not George W. Bush.

Obama has been criticised for some time now as having very little policy specifics, just blankly offering change without a concrete policy platform. This characterisation was simply wrong. The man is full of concrete plans that he can't say enough about without the moderator cutting him off in mid-flight. If the debate was anything to go by, Obama seems to have more of a plan than McCain.

McCain spent his equivalent time essentially attacking Obama for being liberal, or for having friends who used to be radicals or having voted for a Pro-Choice bill while being a Illinois state politician. I have to say this was a boring tactic by McCain. Frankly, I'm not interested in 'Roe versus Wade' as a issue at all or whether a judge would overturn it or not. While McCain railed against the ideological framework for picking judges, he sure was happy to roll in the ideological claptrap of abortion as an issue.

It's a non-issue. The only reason it can be made into something that resembles an issue is because there are enough stupid people who insist that it should be an issue. Bottom line, I don't really care if some trailer-park trash teenage girl gets impregnated by some trailer-trash boy, and is wondering if she should have the right to terminate the pregnancy or not. It's just not a pressing issue on my horizon. I'm sorry if it sounds callous, but it's just not an issue.
The pressing issues for the USA is going to be how it gets through the current economic mess caused by the lack of oversight that was sanctioned by the current Bush administration; the two wars being left as the legacy of this same Bush administration, and how to actually take a step towards a greener energy-economy which hs been resisted by the Bush administration.

It is clear that John McCain is coming too late in history. The part of history where the very arguments that McCain was trying to mount held any weight, was consigned to the dustbin 12months ago when the credit crunch came in to dismantle the extensive debt structures America and the rest of the first world had built up. This is no time to be insisting on small government and more tax cuts for the rich. In that sense the debate illustrated just how out of touch, out-moded and out of luck McCain was as a candidate. It's simply not going to matter what he says. The time for his kind of politics has passed.

The Idiots In Middle America
It's sad but true that one of the most anti-intellectual things going around is Hollywood tailoring its product so idiots in Middle America can 'get it'.

There's something about the Presidential debate that is operating on the same level. As I noted before, the metaphorical 800lb gorilla in the room is the financial crisis which is going to turn into the looming recession. Yet, the debate's format itself wants to tackle such moronic issues appointment of judges who might overturn 'Roe versus Wade' or the effect of negative campaigning or whether the oil import proportions can be cut, or whether the education voucher model in Washington DC could be mounted Federally. I don't think too many people would have been wiser about just how much the candidates are actually trying to have a plan that deals with the metaphorical 'gorilla in the room'.

I saw the dissection on Fox afterwards and the pundits were happy to talk about negative campaigns and the abortion issue, with the woman from Fortune Magazine trying to characterise Obama as a 'liberal' and therefore something bad. They went to a bunch of scruffy looking swinging voters who then said a bunch of incredibly idiotic things like "I'm voting for a President, not a debater." Dude, stay at home if you're not interested in the debate! Don't waste our time with how inadequate your mind is in digesting what just took place.

Another nork sumgly said "I think what Obama' saying is right, but I still won't vote for him."
That's not a swinging voter, Fox television! That's a racist prick who has no rational argument but simply can't abide a black man.
I don't know why I get irritated by this, because it's Fox. But it is so stupid. You sort of wonder if people really are going to take pointers from that moronic cast of imbeciles.

They say a country elects a government it deserves - and perhaps 8 years of George W. Bush cements all the negative connotations of that expression. Nothing depressed me more than just how dumbed down the actual coverage was, in the light of the actual debate.

McCain Supporters Boo Their Man

2008-10-13T20:04:00.002+11:00

Ugliness Is Spreading

Following on from the weekend's Obama-Hate post, I found this article in the SMH today.

When a visibly angry McCain supporter in Waukesha, Wisconsin, told the candidate on Thursday "I'm really mad" because of "socialists taking over the country", McCain stoked the sentiment. "I think I got the message," he said. "The gentleman is right." He went on to talk about Democrats in control of Congress.

On Friday, McCain rejected the bait.

"I don't trust Obama," a woman said. "I have read about him. He's an Arab."

McCain shook his head in disagreement, and said:

"No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with (him) on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign is all about."

He had drawn boos with his comment: "I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."

The polls now show Obama is way ahead. It's interesting McCain is trying to restrain the anger being directed against his opponent. At least the guy is a decent guy for doing that.

Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus actually pegged it at 89.2% likely that Obama will win - and that was last week on the Colbert Report.

Pretty cool. I love how Silver says it's bottom of the ninth, McCain is down 2-0 and Palin just got picked off first base. Sounds about the right metaphor to me.

Matsuzaka's Near-No-Hitter

2008-10-12T09:53:00.004+11:00

The Weirdness of Dice-K

I'm not following the Rays-Bosox ALCS at all, but this headline caught my eye.

Matsuzaka's 2008 season must have been the most suspect, least impermeable 18-win, sub-3.00-ERA campaign in history, full of high pitch-counts and low innings-counts, as well as a league-leading 94 walks issued. His survival was predicated largely on a .164 opponents' batting average with runners in scoring position, lowest in the majors.

"When Daisuke is pitching, at some point you run out of patience," Ortiz said. "He won 18 games this year. I don't know how he does it, but he does it."

He began Friday night at his maddening, inefficient best/worst, walking the bases loaded between a pair of outs, only to extricate himself delicately. He mixed in only 12 strikes among his 27 pitches in the inning.
"I had a tough time getting going," Matsuzaka said through an interpreter.

Presumably, someone said something to him between innings -- tongue-lashings typically require no translation -- because he was a different pitcher from then on, beginning with a three-strike dismissal of Dioner Navarro to open the second. From the second through the sixth inning, Matsuzaka needed only 16, 16, 10, 10 and 10 pitches.

"He went against his norm," Floyd said. "He usually pitches backward [by throwing breaking and off-speed pitches early in the count], but he went to his fastball. We hadn't seen that from him before."

Matsuzaka still had a no-hitter entering the seventh, and more importantly a 1-0 lead, but Crawford drilled a single into right field -- at which point Larsen, whose 1956 perfect game remains the only no-hitter in postseason history, breathed a sigh of relief -- and moved to third on Floyd's single to left-center.

With double-barreled action in the Red Sox' bullpen, Manager Terry Francona not only stuck with Matsuzaka -- who wiggled out of the jam on a shallow fly ball, a strikeout and a harmless grounder to short -- but also sent him back out for the eighth having already thrown 107 pitches.

I mean, it's a great performance of sorts. He just doesn't like it when a batter gets a hit. So he refuses to throw strikes. A quick look through Fangraphs shows his BABIP is a little better than league average thank to the Bosox defense. He walks a tonne more guys than league average but it's his AVG against that shows he just doesn't allow the hitter to take good swings.
Conseqeuntly his WHIP is a hair below league average, which is amazing.

The Dice-K theory seems to be that a walk isn't as good as a hit if nobody can get a hit to drive in the run. Amazingly, it's working. I have a feeling Billy Beane's A's would have a shit of a time if they faced Dice-K in the play-offs. It wouldn't be a crapshoot when his patient hitters will be waiting for their pitch, and it never comes.

Yomiuri Giants Win The Central League

2008-10-11T19:04:00.007+11:00

From 13.5 Games Back

The amazing part worth mentioning is that they came back from being 13.5 games behind the Hanshin Tigers and pipped them for the League's top spot on the last day.
Check out the chart:

The red squiggly line going up is the Giants, the yellow squiggly line sagging is the Tigers. As late as 8th of July, the Giants sat at 13games behind. They actually caught them once on the 21st of September, and then dueled the Tigers to the finish line.

My father is cursing this one more than the Yankee no-show for the Post-Season (or the market meltdown). The Tigers are his NPB team since childhood. I actually don't have one, which makes it hard to talk to Japanese baseball fans. I barely saw anything in Japan, and any time I'm there and I see a game, I'm struck by how different it feels to MLB.

One time slugging 3B for the Yomiuri Giants and now manager, Tatsunori Hara is the guy being thrown into the air.

I think it's worth noting that Hara was brought back several years ago to revitalise the Giants, so he has surely accomplished his initial mission. He's certainly doing a better job than the last time he was a manager.

It's the first time the Yomiuri Giants have won 2 years in a row since 1989-90. The 13 games made up is actually the second highest turn around in the history of the Central League. Another Giants team managed by Shigeo Nagashima overcame a 11.5 game deficit in 1996.

The Obama-Hate

2008-10-11T08:50:00.007+11:00

Which End Is The Rough End Of A Pineapple?

I'm not a socialist in any real sense. I'm actually a free market capitalist. An ideal economic outcome for me is that over a million people click on those links to the right on this page and go purchase my recordings, thank-you-very-much. (and I might add, you really must!)
I'm really not all that Bolshy in the sense that I don't really care what the rich own - the means of production or even a Ferrari for show. I do care about what they do to people who aren't rich, but I'm really not into more taxation or dirty big strikes to bring down industry.

So back in my Uni days when people used to shout socialist slogans, or God-forbid Trotskist theory, I'd shrug and say, "that world doesn't include the possibility that I own a Fender Stratocaster."
The answer I got was " no, we believe it should be a world where everybody has a Fender Stratocaster."
Well, not everybody wants one. Some people want Gibsons. :)

There are US articles are popping up now about the rallies held by the McCain-Palin camp which are pandering to a lot of anger. CNN had this article.

"When you have an Obama, [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the rest of the hooligans up there going to run this country, we have got to have our head examined. It's time that you two are representing us, and we are mad. So, go get them," one man told Sen. John McCain at a town hall meeting in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
It's almost a cry for help, with the GOP party faithful amazed McCain could possibly be losing.
"And we're all wondering why that Obama is where he's at, how he got here. I mean, everybody in this room is stunned that we're in this position," another man said at a rally.
"I'm mad. I'm really mad. And what's going to surprise you, it's not the economy. It's the socialists taking over our country," another man said.

That's pretty scary. The point of my preamble about my non-Bolshy-ness is this: There's hardly a single candidate in my lifetime that has run for POTUS that I could classify as anywhere near socialist. The only exception I would make is Hillary Clinton's role as First Lady in the first Clinton administration where she tried to introduce universal healthcare - much like our own Medicare - and failed. That's it. The rest of the bastards from Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dole, Dukakis, Mondale, Bush I and Bush II, Reagan, Carter, and Ford did not have anything resembling what might be called a 'social conscience' necesary to be labled a socialist.

Neither has Barrak Obama said anything that makes me think that he is anything like those people I've encountered who are real socialists. He is passionate about politics, but there's nothing that makes me think he's a committed socialist. He has nothing in common with the people I used to see peddling the socialist rags on the corner of George and Park streets in the city. Nothing wrong with that, but he just ain't no socialist.

The other thing is this: if it should so happen that the United States went full-on-Socialist for 4 years, they might actually be surprised at how some things improve in that country - namely their abysmal healthcare. Instead there are fat white idiots angry at the possibility that Obama is riding into the Whitehouse with ex-terrorist friends and a socialist agenda. Give me a break.

What's truly pathetic is that the poor whites want to vote Republican because the candidate in their corner is coloured, in spite of the fact that the Republicans have diligently created the conditions of their enduring poverty in the last 8 years. They trust McCain more because he's white? That's it? What do you do with such people who want to cut off their dicks to spite their balls? And McCain and Palin are pitching their sad little 'anti-socialist' rhetoric at these people as if America really was under some threat from the brigade of nuts who sing 'Internationale'.

I'm not saying Obama is the best candidate out there, or that his candidacy is significantly better than that of McCain. It's just that the election is being fought on nothing to do with real issues and a whole lot of paranoia about socialist ghosts that are simply not there.
It's pathetic.

UPDATE:
Here's something from Saturday Night Live. Watch out for Bill Murray's profound question. :)

Financial Crisis As Strategy

2008-10-10T17:25:00.003+11:00

Pleiades Mailbag

Here's something from the ever-trusty Pleiades mailbag.

...every major US financial panic since at least the Panic of 1835, the titans of Wall Street—most especially until 1929, the House of JP Morgan—have deliberately triggered bank panics behind the scenes in order to consolidate their grip on US banking. The private banks used the panics to control Washington policy including the exact definition of the private ownership of the new Federal Reserve in 1913, and to consolidate their control over industry such as US Steel, Caterpillar, Westinghouse and the like. They are, in short, old hands at such financial warfare to increase their power.
Now they must do something similar on a global scale to be able to continue to dominate global finance, the heart of the power of the American Century.

That process of using panics to centralize their private power created an extremely powerful, concentration of financial and economic power in a few private hands, the same hands which created the influential US foreign policy think-tank, the New York Council on Foreign Relations in 1919 to guide the ascent of the American Century, as Time founder Henry Luce called it in a pivotal 1941 essay.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that people like Henry Paulson, who by the way was one of the most aggressive practitioners of the ABS revolution on Wall Street before becoming Treasury Secretary, are operating on motives beyond their over-proportional sense of greed. Paulson’s own background is interesting in that context. Back in the early 1970’s Paulson started his career working for a rather notorious man named John Erlichman, Nixon’s ruthless adviser who created the Plumbers’ Unit during the Watergate era to silence opponents of the President, and was left by Nixon to ‘twist in the wind’ for it in prison.

Paulson seems to have learned from his White House mentor. As co-chairman of Goldman Sachs according to a New York Times account, in 1998 he forced out his co-chairman, Jon Corzine ‘in what amounted to a coup’ according to the Times.

Paulson, and his friends at Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, had a strategy it is becoming clear, as did the Godfather of Asset Backed Securitization and deregulated banking, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, as I have detailed in my earlier series here, Financial Tsunami, Parts I-V.

Knowing that at a certain juncture the pyramid of trillions of dollars of dubious sub-prime and other high risk home mortgage-based securities would come falling down, they apparently determined to spread the so-called ‘toxic waste’ ABS securities as globally as possible, in order to seduce the big global banks of the world, most especially of the EU, into their honey trap.

So yes, the rest goes on to argue that the current panic is part of a greater design in a strategy designed to help American Financial power grow. It might be true; but it also might be that this whole thing is just another house of cards coming down.

Too Much At A Loss
Here's another link sent in from pleiades about how there weren't enough digits on a clock in NYC.

NEW YORK - In a sign of the times, the National Debt Clock in New York City has run out of digits to record the growing figure.
As a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been switched to a figure - the "1" in US$10 trillion ($16.5 trillion). It's marking the US federal government's current debt at about US$10.2 trillion.
The Durst Organization says it plans to update the sign next year by adding two digits. That will make it capable of tracking debt up to a quadrillion dollars.

That's a lot of dough.

No More Political Discussions At iCompositions

recently, there was a thaw in the iComp stance on politics, wherein they let a free debate on politics take place on 2 threads in the forum; both of which wen upward of 30+ pages of comments. Unfortunately some of the participants were less than ethical and started to drag the debate down into the gutter. As a result the site has gone back to its original 'no political discussions' dogma.

It's quite unfortunate in that the discussions in good parts were interesting. It's sad that the forum canot be a true forum as long as there are hecklers and wowsers and idiots taking it hostage every few comments.

It's never a good day when freedom of speech is thwarted, but if there are idiots who cannot discern that freedom of speech is not freedom to vilify, then it is eminently understandable. Sometimes it is time to abandon principles and do what's right.

Project Update (of Sorts)

2008-10-09T21:24:00.011+11:00

Life In The Weird Lane

Gra-Gra (of 'The Ownerless Mind' blog) sent in the lovely picture above. It's a metaphor for our existence. There's the fat cow of capital, with the regulated flow of milk controlled by fat capitalists squirting this stuff in tiny portions into our tiny little waiting mouths, bit by bit. Or perhaps not.

Film Projects
Got a short film coming up. Might be exciting, might not. It's a courtroom drama set deep in space on a mining colony, except it's more a Spanish Inquisition than a proper courtroom. The Corporation is big and fact and nasty and extremely exploitative so the law is a flimsy thing. The interesting thing about the project is hat it coms attached with somebody with a name, which I'll reveal at some point. It's still being fleshed out, but the script is just about ready.

'GAD' is still in limbo. We're waiting for some people with a name to do something worthy about it. Beyond which, I'm reallynot in a position to say much.

'Crashing by Design' is also in limbo because neither I nor Kendal have had time to sit down and plan the next draft. I hate it when projects lose their steam, but that's where we are, working in a vacuum while holding down day-jobs.

Recording Projects
With any luck, I'll put out a couple of more CDs by the end of the year for you all. That's right, coming soon are a couple of CDs with songs that date from my Satellite City days which either never got played with that band or were played but never recorded. These songs represent a chunk of my life that was consumed with Rock music. Yeah, capital 'R' Rock, man.

I promise it has some really cool songs - possibly the coolest songs I've ever bashed out, with none of the Zappa-esque lyrical excursions into deranged, warped, obscene human foibles that is more manifest in my recent works. Damn it, some of these are indeed love songs - love songs I wrote for women whose names, birthdays and postcodes I remember - who probably don't remember squat about me. Such is life for the errant songwriter.

The two CDs will be titled 'Escape From Satellite City' and 'Tales From Satellite City' respectively.

Another Thought I Had On Bill Henson
The press is having a field day since it was revealed that photographer scouted for talent and the principal of the school *gasp* let him. In principle it's not that different from if a talent scout for an athletic or sports organisation, or an acting/modeling/dancing agency scoped out the talent at the local Primary School but society being what it is, it has one rules for 'healthy' sport and another for 'degenerate' artists.

Of course nobody even reflects on the abject hypocrisy, instead they're focused on Henson as some kind of child-porn producer of their worst nightmares. In a sense, Henson's work sails very close to the prevailing moral winds, but at the same time, nobody with an artistic education/training has come out and said, "you know what? Bill Henson is a pornographer." That alone kind of flies in the face of the media sensationalism.

And in all this media shit-storm, Bill Henson seems largely unmoved. If it had been me I think I might have gone spare at the abject misrepresentation of my work. Even a Labor PM and his Deputy are saying how revolted, disturbed and concerned they are by this development. You'd think the principal allowed him to physically molest them (or take photos without consent), but clearly that is not what happened.

So my conclusion is this: Bill Henson is an inordinately brave artist - much braver than I; and for that fact alone is deserving of much admiration. I would never undertake his subject matter, given society's willingness to deliberately misinterpret his work as 'child porn'.

Yes, I might write songs about Pony the Orangutan prostitute or Josef Fritzl the Austrian Dungeon Dad, or David Hicks hanging out in Five Dock, but I sure as hell am not going to write songs about celebrating the nascent sexuality of a low-teen girl lest the AFP come surging through my door to confiscate my computer.
So much for my weirdness. I guess it shows I'm a pretty ordinary guy, which probably explains why my creative output is never going to change the world.

Still Freaked Out

2008-10-06T11:39:00.005+11:00

Can't Seem To Sit In Cars

I've had the opportunity to sit in a car a couple of times since the accident, and I've noticed my stomach seems to churn every time we come to an intersection with traffic. It's like my sympathetic nervous system kicks in with the Fight-Fright-Flight and I just get tense. I see potential accidents everywhere now, and I just keep seeing the worst at any and every intersection with it actually happening - but my heart skips a beat every time some idiot takes a chance.

Years ago, a friend of mine DW had a bad accident on a motorcycle in Borneo. She almost lost her foot but somehow she avoided amputation. She's been on painkillers ever since. When she came back to Sydney she said she just couldn't handle sitting in people's cars, and it would freak the hell out of her any time something remotely like an accident might happen and she could sense it. At the time I thought, "wow, that's a little sensitive," but what do you know? I've got something much like it now.

I've been thinking about it a little and what it is, is that some kind of imprinting takes place during crises and once that happens, your white brain goes, "uh-huh, learn that shit quick so you don't end up in it again!" I swear, I see potential accidents at every crowded intersection.

Not sure how long this effect is going to last. If it keeps going I think I'm going to have to go get it diagnosed as PTSD or something. It's seriously a freak out.

News That's Fit To Punt

2008-10-04T15:35:00.008+10:00

Bail Out Happens

In the end the House voted on the bailout.

The bipartisan legislation reversed the House rejection earlier this week that sent global stock markets plunging. The measure authorizes the government to buy troubled assets from financial institutions reeling from record home foreclosures. The bill contains $US149 billion in tax breaks and affirms regulators' power to suspend asset-valuing rules that companies blame for fueling the crisis.

``These steps represent decisive action to ease the credit crunch that is now threatening our economy,'' Bush said at the White House.

The House approved the measure 263-171, four days after rejecting an earlier version. The bill's defeat on Sept. 29 caused a 778-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, prompting dozens of lawmakers to switch their vote on the legislation, the government's largest intervention in the markets since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

``The issue is stopping the panic,'' said Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. ``The plan's not perfect, but it's certainly better than doing nothing. Now Treasury has to be very aggressive about purchasing a wide range of assets very quickly.''

There are many discussions as to whether it is a bail out or a rescue package or good money after bad, but the bottom line is that without shoring up the US banks, the global role of the US economy is going to be greatly hampered.

Perhaps The American Century Is Coming To An End
Here's a great article in the SMH. I'm surprised there are still great reads in the Herald some times.

In Washington, George Bush and his top economic officer had spent hours in the White House persuading and cajoling the congressional leaders of both American political parties to endorse his rescue plan. With the burning smell of some of the biggest financial institutions in the world still fresh in their nostrils as their ruins smouldered in New York, Bush grew increasingly frustrated.

"If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down," he said of the US economy, marshalling the inimitable eloquence of the President who has given rise to a minor industry of books and wall calendars featuring the manglings known as Bushisms. All efforts failed.

"In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury Secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr, literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to blow it up by withdrawing her party's support for the package," The New York Times reported.

Pelosi leads the Democrats in the House of Representatives. Bush and Paulson are Republicans. Pelosi jibed: "I didn't know you were Catholic." And then, on the business at hand: "It's not me blowing this up; it's the Republicans." It was Bush's own party blocking the plan. Paulson reportedly sighed, "I know, I know."

It was on the same day, September 25, that China launched the Shenzhou 7 space mission, sending aloft three astronauts or, as the Chinese call them, taikonauts. Two days later, Colonel Zhai floated out of his module and "walked" in space for 20 minutes.

Zhai radioed back to his President and the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Jintao: "The space-walk mission has been accomplished smoothly. Please set your mind at ease, Chairman Hu and the people of China. In the vastness of space, I felt proud of our motherland."

Hours after the Chinese module returned to Earth safely, the US House of Representatives rejected the Bush Administration's rescue plan to allow the Treasury to buy distressed debt so that US credit markets could start to function again. US stocks fell by 7 per cent and more than $US1 trillion in value was destroyed as investors despaired. It was one of the biggest one-day falls on Wall Street.

There's more in this thought provoking article.
The 'Coelacanth 2' album's working theme has been about The American Century, so I take great interest in discussions on this point.I have hard predictions of an end to the US hegemony and the end of the American Empire, but I am always wary of such claims. Unless the barbarians at the gate end up parading down Pennsylvania Ave with a noose around the captured POTUS's head, I don't think it's a likely 'scenario'. This is just a temporary dip in its power, mostly thanks to the ineptness of its current leadership.

That's not to say these damages by the current incumbent idiots cannot be undone.

A Note About Oil

Because the Financial Review does not have a free-to-public online edition available, I cannot reproduce the text here. Clever people, those Fin Review folks. Anyway, in it was an article last week about the crude oil market which drew my attention. OPEC has been tightening quotas in order to drive up oil prices because naturally, per unit sales helps their economies more and they know the world is hooked on to it. Iran in particularly loves it when the oil price goes up and the price rise puts a hurt on the US consumer.

What is not widely reported is that Saudi Arabia often over-produces its quota and then sells off the excess production to oil companies in order to lower the crude price.
The reason given for this was that if the world consumer moves away from their SUV to a hybrid car, them they are not coming back to the SUV market - in other words, Saudi Arabia does not want you to be weaned off its chief export. It made me laugh.
After my accident, I think I want to wean myself off cars entirely.

Damien Hirst's Big Haul

He's like some chubby rock star, really. Yet his works are worth millions.

What could be dumber than Hirst's dot paintings, painted by assistants with stencils? Or ashtrays of all sizes filled with used butts? Such pieces were sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds in last week's auction. The piece-de-resistance was his Golden Calf - a dead bull with gilded hooves and horns in a gold-rimmed tank of formaldehyde. Nothing could serve as a more pointed "up yours" to wealthy, eager buyers. It was a descendent of the effigy erected by the Israelites while Moses was conversing with his Maker on top of the mountain.

Hirst may be saying that money, or perhaps the stockmarket, is the false god of our times. Just as easily, he might be talking about himself. "Here I am," he says. "Come and worship!"

This sort of grandiose cynicism is greeted with admiration in art circles - "Ho, ho, Damien is really giving it to those rich capitalist bastards." In this scenario, Hirst becomes ever more subversive as his personal wealth increases. By this standard he must be the most subversive artist that has lived, since he is now said to be worth more than $US1 billion and employs almost 200 people in a chain of specialised art-making workshops.

Money exerts a narcotic influence on seemingly rational minds and Hirst has made the accumulation of capital his central artistic concern. In this, he has perfectly captured the temper of our times, in which cultural achievement is measured by the mass media in dollar terms. So it is hardly surprising to read in a wire service article reprinted in many papers around the world (including this one) that last year "Hirst sold a platinum skull encrusted with 8601 diamonds for £50 million, which is thought to be the world's most expensive piece of contemporary art".

In fact, as reported in The Art Newspaper and other sources, the skull was actually "sold" to a group that included Hirst, his dealer and his business manager. His record-breaking achievement must be tempered by the knowledge that Hirst was both creator and purchaser.

The auction represents an even greater triumph of publicity over probity, because we have no way of knowing who was buying all those works via the telephone. Even if the artist was not personally involved, there were enough dealers and high-end collectors who simply could not afford to see the auction fail and the value of their own investments plummet. The idea that this event represented a "gamble" on Hirst's part was sheer spin. This was one auction that never stood a chance of failure.

It's a bit mind-boggling where Contemporary Art has got to right now. The diamond encrusted skull is a little bit too 'Elton John' in its aesthetic, but what the heck. It's still a Diamond encrusted skull! Literally, it is what it is in a way that defies critical dissection.
This following bit caught my attention:

One gets the measure of Greer's shallow nihilism when she writes: "What is touching about Hughes's despair is that he thinks that artists still make things." Call me naive and sentimental but I believe that's almost the definition of an artist: someone who makes things. Those who employ hundreds of people to make saleable commodities are perhaps better known as "manufacturers".

Few people embrace poverty but for most artists the pleasure of making things exceeds the pleasure of making money. If it were the other way around, everyone would tailor his or her work to the most obvious commercial imperatives. Yet some artists, driven by their own wilfulness or creative compulsions, will persist with works nobody wants to buy for most of their careers

I think the art work is actually an artefact of the artistic moment. The legacy of the inspiration. The physical evidence of the Edisonian notion - the artwork itself represents the 99% of perspiration part, but signifies the 1% of genuine inspiration. This has been my personal theory for about 10 years but every time I bring it up with artists they treat me like I've gone insane or have no insight whatsoever into why they do what they do. Don't listen to me guys, but I am somebody who has translated 2 books on Contemporary Art, so I do think I have a clue.

Nonetheless, when you think about it, when you buy the finished album by say, your favorite band, you're really buying something that represents the culmination of the labor which points to the inspiration - what's this song about? - and not the artistic moment itself. It's certainly true of my songs, good and bad, that the final recorded version is merely the reflection of the moment I went "ah ha! There's a cool idea!"

All the pricing issue is a matter of how much people value the labor or materials. Sometimes a work of art is worth less than its materials - much like the copper statue that was stolen and smelted for export to China. Damien Hirst is doing alright.

I Nearly Died Tonight

2008-10-03T00:32:00.007+10:00

Near Death Experience
I went out tonight to pick up my missus. I drove 2 blocks to a roundabout and got hit from the side by a guy trying to drive through the roundabout without slowing down. Miraculously, I wasn't injured.
The glass shattered, the door bent like tin foil, but it held enough integrity that I wasn't touched.

Seriously, I was lucky the other guy didn't hit my car hard. Had they been going another 10kph faster, it probably would've put me in hospital. If it had been 15kph more I might have been dead.
Anyway, I walked away to tell the tale. I'm one lucky son of a gun.

I'm comprehensively insured. So the financial aspects are not pleasant but not impossible. The guy was screaming "You better have insurance you bastard!" for about 3-5minutes as I sat there stunned in my car. He was pretty pissed off. I was more like "Holy shit. My legs work."
his partner came over and asked if I was alright.
Nothing hurt, so I knew I was okay but I was shaken so I said I'd tell him in 5 minutes.
He said he would call a police car. I said fine. he came back and said the police said it was a minor accident so they wouldn't come. I thought, "wow. I could've died but the NSW Police don't want to come."

After exchanging details, I drove home, hanging on to the door. I was calm in most part, but mostly in shock. Then this seething anger came... and went. I rang the police and reported the accident.
Now I'm here typing this stuff up. It's 1:15 AM. I'm wide awake and can't go to sleep.
Even after a stiff drink.

EDIT: having posted this, suddenly I'm getting a memory flooding back about Erica at my school who died in an accident after completing her exams. Erica was a nice girl who reminded me a little bit of that girl who likes Jughead in the Archies comics. Shortly after finishing her last exam, she was at a party in Strathfield sitting in a parked car when a speeding Porsche T-Boned the car she was in and that was that.
By the time I turned up to do my last exam, I was accosted by a girl called Melanie, who said, "Have you heard about Erica?"
And when she asked that question, I knew in a flash something dreadful had happened from Melanie's expression. And thinking how frail and transient life actually is - And I think that moment influenced my decision to quit med school.
And I think that could have been me tonight, except I'm longer in the tooth and I wonder if I've done anything of value since that day. Probably not, if my best songs are Dungeon Dad and Pony the Orangutan, but there you go. :)

Side Orders On The Second Bail Out Plan

2008-10-02T20:06:00.004+10:00

Pleiades Mailbag

Here are some interesting links from our man in the info-sourcing business.

This one talks about the pork barreling to get the Bill through; in other words, little riders to help the House members go home to their electorates with something to show.

Senators attached a provision repealing a 39-cent excise tax on wooden arrows designed for children to an historic $700 billion financial-markets rescue that passed tonight by a vote of 74-25. The provision, originally proposed by Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith, will save manufacturers such as Rose City Archery in Myrtle Point, Oregon, about $200,000 a year.
It's one of dozens of tax breaks benefiting Hollywood producers, stock-car racetrack owners and Virgin Islands rum- makers included in the broader legislation in an effort to win support from House Republicans, whose defection contributed to a rejection of an earlier version of the legislation two days ago on a 228-205 vote.

``This is how Washington works,'' said Keith Ashdown, chief investigator at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington research group. ``A big pot of pork is their recipe for final passage.''

Representatives for Wyden, a Democrat, and Smith, a Republican, didn't immediately return calls. Jerry Dishion, president of Rose City Archery, was in meetings and unavailable to comment, a receptionist at the company said.

Most of the provisions are part of a package of provisions known as ``extenders'' because they are renewed for only a few years at a time.

That's pretty handy if you're a recipient but you sort of wonder how any of this actually helps America beyond the bill. Anyway, that's how it's done in Washington. Horse-trading for all.

This one covers an energy tax break as part of this process.

The U.S. Senate approved tax cuts valued at more than $100 billion, including a host of alternative energy credits and dozens of breaks for businesses and individuals, as part of its $700 billion bank rescue bill.
The legislation, which the House likely will act on tomorrow, passed the Senate on a 74-25 vote. It would give the Treasury Department authority to buy troubled assets, chiefly mortgage- backed securities that are burdening financial institutions.

The Senate added the tax provisions to woo Republican votes in the House, where an earlier version of the bailout plan failed by 12 votes on Monday. The tax package would spare 24 million American households from a scheduled alternative minimum tax increase this year, renew credits for business research, and extend $17 billion in energy incentives.

House adoption of the provisions would end a 10-month stalemate in Congress over how to deal with the budget impact of the tax breaks. It would also bolster the balance sheets of companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Harley-Davidson Inc. that rely on the research credit, as well as those producing energy from wind and solar sources.

It would be ``virtually impossible'' to expand solar energy without the credit, Madison Grose, a managing director at Starwood Capital Group LLC, said yesterday in an interview before the vote. ``The cost to the rate base for these types of projects is substantially higher without the investment tax credit being part of the capitalization of the projects.''

So much for that one. It's hard to see if one is meant to feel good about it at all when the whole economy might go down the gurgler but there you go.

Yankee Hotstove

2008-09-30T22:24:00.006+10:00

The Hot Stove Begins Early
That's what happens when they don't make the play-offs. Just checking around the blog-verse, there's a certain resigned air to most of the Yankee Empire of fans. 1) it was bound to happen some day; 2) there were a lot of injuries this year; and 3) that Hughes-Kennedy-Chamberlain troika didn't quite transpire the way it was hoped.

The past few years' post-season appearances have been pretty bad, so it's only a matter of degree of disappointment that's different. 2005, 2006, 2007 were all crappy entries in the annals of Yankee Play-off appearances. They had no pitching and no mongrel in them.

The Brian Cashman Watch Begins... Again
It doesn't seem like it, but it's already been 3 years since we did this merry-go-around when Brian Cashman seemingly won a battle of wills with George Steinbrenner to run the team his way, with his vision. Since then, the 'Steinbratz' Hank and Hal have taken over where George left off and it's been anybody's guess. So here we are again, waiting to see if Cashmoney is going to stay with the organisation in which he came to prominence.

As the Yankees enter another off-season, their first priority is to re-sign Cashman, who is well liked by the Steinbrenner brothers. Hal Steinbrenner has worked closely with Cashman and Manager Joe Girardi, and Cashman said, “I have a tremendous relationship with the Steinbrenner family.”

Hank Steinbrenner has publicly promised to be aggressive in pursuing free agents this winter, and the crop will be thick. The Yankees will explore Sabathia, although they are pessimistic about his desire to play for them.

Well that's nice. He might stay then. That would be very nice. In an organisational sense, he's an in-house product, much like Mo and Jeter and Jorgie, so you'd think he'd stay to see it out.

Things I'd Rather They Didn't Do...
More from the link above:

The Yankees could let Cabrera and Brett Gardner, two strong defenders, compete for the center-field job. But they must prove they can hit. The team could also see if the Dodgers would trade center fielder Matt Kemp for Canó, who has bothered many in the organization for producing so little after being rewarded with a long-term contract. Canó could be replaced at second base by a free agent like Orlando Hudson.

The O-dog is a funny guy - he once called JP Riccardi a guy who dresses like a pimp - but I'm not sure another older player is what the Yankees want. Cano after all, did have a sucky BABIP most of the way of the season. He was down 40 points from his career norm.

Had he hit to his career norm, his line of .286/.305/.410 would have translated to
.326/.345/.501, which is roughly his 2007 line with a touch more SLG. The guy's still an excellent 2B. Matt Kemp is a very nice player, but the upside of Cano is too good to trade away at the lowest point of his value.

Things To Watch Out For...
...apart from signing Cashman.

1) Will they sign Mark Teixiera?
2) Will they sign C.C.Sabathia?
3) Whither Moose and Andy?
4) Who will they sign as the other catcher?
5) What's the bench going to look like in 2009?

Thus the hotstove begins.

UPDATE: Overnight, Cashman confirmed he would return, so that part is done.

“I consider coming off a season where we didn’t reach the playoffs for the first time since 1993 as a personal challenge,” Cashman said in a statement. “I’ve never been one to run from a challenge, and I look forward to having the chance to go after this thing again.”

New York’s shortcomings this season led many to believe that Cashman would not be back with the Yankees in 2009.

However, Cashman received a vote of confidence from Yankees co-chairmen Hank and Hal Steinbrenner, who made the decision Tuesday in an effort to jump-start what likely will be a turbulent offseason in the Bronx.

Hank and Hal Steinbrenner, the sons of Yankees principle owner George Steinbrenner, praised Cashman in a joint statement released by the team.

“Holding the position of general manager for any major league team is a challenge,” the statement said. “But to do so in the great city of New York, where baseball is passionately followed 12 months a year, you must possess a number of unique attributes.

“Brian has shown throughout his Yankees career that he has the dedication, integrity and know-how needed to perform - and succeed - in this environment. Having him in place allows us to begin an offseason of hard work, and we are pleased he will be working hand-in-hand with us to bring the New York Yankees back to the postseason.”

So that's a good sign. If I were him I'd keep going until they took the desk away from me. :)

House Rejects Bailout Package

2008-09-30T08:29:00.007+10:00

Principled Stupidity

You have to admire people who live by the sword and then die by it. You just wish that they'd acknowledge the dying part. The House voted down the bailout package.

WASHINGTON — In a moment of historic import in the Capitol and on Wall Street, the House of Representatives voted on Monday to reject a $700 billion rescue of the financial industry. The vote came in stunning defiance of President Bush and Congressional leaders of both parties, who said the bailout was needed to prevent a widespread financial collapse.

The vote against the measure was 228 to 205, with 133 Republicans turning against President Bush to join 95 Democrats in opposition. The bill was backed by 140 Democrats and 65 Republicans.

Supporters vowed to try to bring the rescue package up again as soon as possible, perhaps late Wednesday or Thursday, but there were no definite plans to do so. A former Treasury Department official predicted that the administration would try to get another House vote before the end of the week, and with only “tiny tweaks” to the package, given the relative closeness of the vote.

Stock markets plunged as it appeared that the measure would go down to defeat, and kept slumping into the afternoon when that appearance became a reality. By late afternoon the Dow industrials had fallen more than 5 percent, and other indexes even more sharply. Oil prices fell steeply on fears of a global recession; investors bid up prices of Treasury securities and gold in a flight to safety.

The vote was a catastrophic political defeat for President Bush, who tried to muster national support for a recovery plan in a televised address last Wednesday, then lobbied wavering Republican legislators in intensely personal telephone calls on Monday morning.

“We put forth a plan that was big because we got a big problem,” the president said afterward. “And we’ll be working with members of Congress, leaders of Congress on the way forward. Our strategy is to continue to address this economic situation head on.”

I've hardly ever sided with George W. Bush on any issue, but this was a rare instance I could see the point. Even many of the Democrats saw the point. The Republicans who saw the point, knew it flew against their credo of small government and not spending up big deficits, but voted for it. That leaves the Republicans who simply said "no, it's socialism, and that's un-American".

I'd like to say, "For fuck's sake, you're playing with the worlds economy and most of the world is 'un-American' - as in not of the USA - so why let that get in the way f a good deed?"

I've been keeping a close eye on this because it augurs for the marketplace for films that I work in and this is a disaster. The last thing I need in my life now is a 'Great Depression II - The Return of the Hunger'. This is giving me the shits today, along side other aggravations in life.

Of course then these back-biting idiots start playing partisan politics with it, mostly because they ca, at other people's expense.

Immediately after the vote, many House members appeared stunned. Some Republicans blamed Ms. Pelosi for a speech before the vote that disdained President Bush’s economic policies, and did so, in the opinion of the speaker’s critics, in too partisan a way.

“Clearly, there was something lacking in the leadership here,” said Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia.

Democrats, meanwhile, blamed the Republicans for not coming up with enough support for the measure on their side of the aisle.

Members of both parties, doing a quick political post-mortem, said those who voted no had encountered too much hostility for the bill among their constituents, and were worried that a vote in favor would be political suicide.

Get that? Instead of doing what's right for the country, and by extension the world economy, they chose to sit on their meal tickets - and blamed the other side for the failure.
This is actually worse than the Yankees not making the post-season.

Lightning Strikes Dead A Teacher

2008-09-29T22:03:00.005+10:00

Benchmark for Infrequency

There's a statistical remark, "you're more likely to be struck by lightning." It usually means the odds are so small, it may as well be insignificantly small. Then, you see a headline where somebody actually gets hit by one and you think... "Oh boy."

Winthrop Baptist College social studies teacher Gregory Crombie, 41, and 19-year-old Thomas McGuinness, died after the group was caught in an electrical storm in Khon Kaen province late yesterday.

Three Thai nationals also died after being struck by lightning, but the college says they were not with the Winthrop college student group sightseeing at the waterfall.

Mr Crombie's sister-in-law Thongsom Paggangwaesang told local media the group had been swimming at the waterfall when the storm hit at Mukdahan, 642km from Bangkok.

She said two bolts of lightning struck and several people collapsed.

So there you go. You're a perfectly healthy 41y.o. dude on a trip, and bang, a lightning strikes and you're a goner. No time for midlife crises. What is that but an 'Act of God'?

NSW is A Racist State

2008-09-29T20:30:00.003+10:00

...According To A Study

Sometimes I sort of wonder what constitutes the baseline for racism. It's actually a hard thing to bench mark when you think about it, so you sort of wonder how much veracity there could be in any study. How do they account for cultural prejudices that precede people's lives, such as ancient enmities between peoples? How do they adjust for that context? I mean, can there be such a thing as a replacement-level racist, and if so can they be persuaded to desist?

Anyway, here's what AAP has to say:

A study into racism has found Muslims, or people from the Middle East, are most likely to encounter prejudice in Australia.

Human geography and urban studies Professor Kevin Dunn also says older Australians are more worried about this group than younger or middle aged people.

"It's an indicator of a narrow view of what constitutes Australianism," Professor Dunn said.

And .. he's found while 40 per cent of Australians believe some ethnic groups do not belong in the country .. one in 10 has outwardly racist views.

The overall figures surge to 65 per cent for people over 65 but drop to 31 per cent for those aged 18 to 34.

I think in the wake of 9/11 attacks, any Rorschach Test will reveal that we as a population has been duped into suspecting every Muslim as a potential Terrorist. What was that catchphrase? "Alert, not Alarmed"? Well, 7 years later the war on terror has eroded the tolerant, egalitarian Australia that used to exist.
Pretty damning, really - And I say that as a non-Muslim. What ever happened to the Australia of a 'fair go'?

Mussina Wins No.20

2008-09-29T18:53:00.006+10:00

He'll Make The HOF Now

Moose won no.20. It makes me very happy.

In a season with little to celebrate, his teammates gave him a rousing welcome—one he had waited his entire 18-year career to receive. Mussina had just become the oldest pitcher to win 20 games in a season for the first time as the Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox 6-2 Sunday in the opener of a rain-delayed day-night doubleheader.

“This is one of those things that I think will take a while to sink in,” said Mussina, who has won at least 18 games five other times.

The playoff-bound Red Sox won the second game 4-3 on Jonathan Van Every’s bases-loaded single with two outs in the 10th.

Less than three months before his 40th birthday, Mussina (20-9) gave up three hits in six shutout innings in his final start of the season. He returned to the field to bring out the lineup card for the second game.

Last year he had the highest ERA of his career (5.15). This season, it was 3.37 after he allowed one earned run in 16 innings over his last three starts.

“I’m proud of myself to be able to do this after last year,” he said.

Previously, the oldest first-time 20-game winner was Jamie Moyer, who was 38 when he went 20-6 for Seattle in 2001. Mussina, who hasn’t committed to playing next season, could be the first pitcher to retire following a 20-win season since Sandy Koufax.

“I just had a lot of fun playing this year,” Mussina said. “I don’t know what the future holds. When you’ve got 18 seasons in, it could always be your last year.”

Mussina is 269-153 with a 3.69 ERA in his career. and his previous high for wins came in 1995 and 1996, when he won 19 games each year for Baltimore. Mussina went 0-2 in his last four starts in 1996, leaving his final one with a 2-1 lead after eight innings only to watch Armando Benitez allow a tying homer to Toronto’s Ed Sprague in the ninth.

I know, the highlights for the end of season coming to this is a bit sad, but you have to be happy for a guy who has won 18games in a season 5 times and yet has never won 20 until now. Why 20? I dunno - because we are into the decimal system I guess. 270 wins is a lot of games to win in this day and age of setup-men and closers taking the ball out of the starting pitchers' hands sooner. Not only did he have to pitch well, he had to pitch for a lot of good teams. When he came into this season, even No. 251 looked dicey given how poorly he pitched last year. More significantly, he finished with an ERA of 3.37, with a 5:1 K:BB ratio. More amazingly, he did it in front of an unforgiving defense:

Check out the poor BABIP numbers last year and this year. It's almost unfair. So it's no fluke of the bounce of the ball that netted him his scintillating 3.37 ERA. Looking at those numbers, there's an argument to be made that he pitched astoundingly well this year and more than deserved his 20 wins.

Anyway, it's all on his resume now. Those pesky writers won't be able to deny him the Hall of Fame on account of never having been a 20-game winner now. Best of all, he did it against Boston.

Paul Newman Passes Away (1925-2008)

2008-09-28T09:49:00.005+10:00

Goodbye Cool Hand Luke

Paul Newman passed away at age 83.

The 10-time Academy Award nominee died Friday at age 83, surrounded by family and close friends at his Westport farmhouse following a long battle with cancer, publicist Jeff Sanderson said Saturday.

In May, Newman dropped plans to direct a fall production of "Of Mice and Men" at Connecticut's Westport Country Playhouse, citing unspecified health issues. The following month, a friend disclosed that he was being treated for cancer and Martha Stewart, also a friend, posted photos on her Web site of Newman looking gaunt at a charity luncheon.

At 83, you can't say he was too young to die, yet my mind is filled with the way he as in all his movies so I'm a little surprised. Even in Road to Perdition, he seemed spry and full of beans. He seems to have been around forever.

My earliest memory of Newman is as Butch Cassidy; in particular the scene where he is challenged by one of the underlings. He then says he's going to explain the rules and kicks the guy in the nuts saying there are no rules. As a kid I found that incredibly funny. Then there was his turn as the con man in 'The Sting' that I marveled at. He was so smooth end eloquent when putting one over Robert Shaw.

He was a wonderful actor.

Schwarzenegger's Global Warming Conference

2008-09-27T22:14:00.003+10:00

Go Arnie!

Here's some news from California...

The governor said he will invite officials from Europe, as well as from Australia, China, India and other countries, in the hope of forming an international alliance of community and regional leaders.

He is planning the conference for November, a month before the United Nations holds its next round of international climate talks in Poland. Governors from all 50 states also will be invited.

"The real action for any new ideas is always on the local level," Schwarzenegger told a gathering of the Commonwealth Club of California, a nonpartisan educational organization. "This is how we can push the agenda."
Schwarzenegger has been at odds with the Bush administration over environmental policy, criticizing what he calls a failure of leadership on global warming and other matters.

People quibble too much about this guy's merits. Okay, so he's not Einstein or Jesus Christ or a Democrat, but he is doing the right thing, taking on the battle to save the planet. That plus sticking it to President GW Bush. So, yes, go Arnie!

Afghanistan Redux

2008-09-26T17:10:00.002+10:00

'The Man Who Would Be King' - Revisited

One of the more haunting films I saw on TV growing up was 'The Man Who Would Be King' starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. What I didn't know was that Christopher Plummer from 'Sound of Music' fame plays Rudyard Kipling, and completely over my head went all the references to the Freemasons. Also, it was directed by John Huston which is interesting because it does smack of 'Black Heart White Hunter'.

Why watch this now? Good question. Well, apart from the nice price tag I saw for it, I think it was the British Army uniforms from the 19th Century worn by Michael Caine that got me in. He did look rather dashing in 'Zulu', and Sean Connery is well, Sean Connery. Indeed a movie that features two Brit stars of the 60s can't be that bad to watch again. Perhaps a more adult insight might be found.

There are indeed fascinating ideas lurking in this story, not to mention the fateful geography of Kafiristan. You'd think it was a fake place name, but it is not!

Kafiristan takes its name from the inhabitants, the Kafirs, a fiercely independent people with distinctive culture, language and religion. They were called Kafir ("infidel") because they were not Muslim. In 1896 Emir Abdur Rahman Khan, who conquered the region for Islam by sword^[1], renamed the people as Nuristani ("Enlightened Ones" in Persian) and the land as Nuristan ("Land of the Enlightened"). Only three valleys, Birir, Bumburet and Rumbur, escaped because they were located east of the Durand line, under the administrative control of the British Raj and later Pakistan.

So yeah. It's a film set in Afghanistan, with Englishmen trying to get a kingdom going.

What's Good About It

Considering how simple the story is, the script manages to convey a number of complex ideas that are germane to the 'why' part of the story, and it boils down to this: two army officers decide to go into deep central Eurasia, equipped with the modern military know-how and try to carve a kingdom for themselves, because... they can. The essence of the story is in the 'can'; the willingness to undertake an audacious move with just a bunch of guns and military know how is beautifully and indelibly expressed.

The boundless, jaunty energy of both characters played by Connery and Caine is infectious and totally skips over any post-colonial trauma for India and Pakistan. Perhaps the overt Imperialism in Kipling and hence the film is a bit too much for us to take these days, there's something profoundly charming about both Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan. they do make a dashing duo, sort of 'Bond and Palmer'.

What's Bad About It

Time has not been kind to this film. The acting seems very old-style and a little stilted. Connery over-acts for the shot-size in parts and Caine is a little cheesy as he reprises his Zulu schtick in other parts. It's not bad as such, just a little on the nose by our contemporary standards. The lighting in the studio scenes are nice, but most of the location exteriors just look flat and unimaginative. I'm not exactly sure where they shot it (wikipedia says Morocco), but it all looks like America to me.

Other Thoughts

I kept thinking "damn, we're still there fighting in Afghanistan." What's worse is that we're in Afghanistan for as equally intangible reasons as Danny and Peachy. After all, there's actually something of the current military campaign that echoes what amounts to 'Danny and Peachy's excellent Afghan adventure'.

Danny and Peachy set about going in to Afghanistan with the hope of using 20 rifles to secure one of the tribes to be their army. From there, they are going to use their military acumen to conquer the rest of Afghanistan. It's a wildly fanciful story except that is exactly how the CIA fought the Taliban in 2002. They went in there and gave superior weapons to the North Eastern tribesmen - some even presumably from Kafiristan/Nuristan - and sent them in to take down the Taliban Government with US Air Cover. In fact, the entire Afghan campaign since 9/11 could be characterised as 'Danny and Peachy's Extraordinary Afghan Adventure Part 2' - although serious minded people would be in denial.

They'd be kind of wrong to be in denial.
Let's face it: how different is the goal to become a King and to establish a stable government in Afghanistan? If Rambo III was a little silly, then surely the real life wars in Afghanistan are worthy of comedy. Kipling would've seen the tropes and laughed. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe we're there because Kipling wrote this magnificent short story that got made into this wonderful film and people are still programmed by it to go to Afghanistan? Who knows?

When Peachy implores Danny to come home with him, he looks out at the Afghans and says, "they're savages!" It's a bit cruel and unkind, indeed it's downright imperialist and priggish. It's more like they are barbaric than savage, I thought. How little things change. Yet the fact of the matter is, we're all Danny and Peachy in Afghanistan. What was a bittersweet parable by Kipling is still the defining text of how the West with all its technological edge fails in the Central Steppes of Eurasia.

Alexander, The West and Parthia
Parthia, the Empire to the East has been the counter part to the Western Civilization for along time. Alexander marches deep into terrain on his way to making his great Empire, but this is more of a punctuation in a long line of history written by people of the Persian area. Xerxes hailed from there, as did Darius. The Roman Empire stopped on the doorstep of the Parthians and today, Iran has inherited the political legacy of the Parthians and the Sassanid Persians.

It's no coincidence then that the story turns on the recognition of supposedly Alexander's symbol which has been co-opted by the Freemasons. I'm sure there is a mountain of literature on the significance of these things, which I'll politely sidestep because I want to get to one point: We in the west are largely ignorant of what the world might look like from the Parthian/Persian perspectivie. As such, we are driven by our own needs and seem to stumble into Afghanistan over and over again when in reality it might be somebody else's problem.

Like Alexander himself, Danny and Peachy fail because they have no conception of the depth of the Kafiristani culture. They all ride in proudly as conquerors but do not realise that they have been co-opted into the local war. This too has a historic echo in what is happening today as our troops fight in Afghanistan siding with Karzai's government, shooting at the Taliban.

It's also a little like the observation that the Connecticut Yankee ultimately fails in King Arthur' court because of his own cultural prejudices and his failure to take in to account the local culture. It's a story that seems to keep repeating in history, which is probably why this yarn by Kipling keeps its relevance.

The Last Game At Yankee Stadium

2008-09-22T20:48:00.003+10:00

The Last Game

Yankee Stadium closed today. The Yankees are moving to the new stadium across the road. I guess it means one of these days I'm going to have to trek out to NYC to have look at their new digs. Fortunately, they had enough in their tank to stave off elimination for 1 more game. It's doubtful the Bosox won't win 1 game in the next four, and it's not exactly likely the Yankees will sweep the Jays so that is all she wrote for 2008 when it comes to the Yankees.

My Memories of The Stadium
I was 11 when I finally got to see a game at the Stadium. It wasn't long after the renovations back in 1977 and everything was still freshly painted. Thurman Munson was the Catcher, Ron Guidry was on the mound, around the horn were Chris Chambliss, Willy Randolph, Fred Stanley, Graig Nettles. The outfiled left to right was Lou Piniella, Mickey Rivers and Reggie Jackson. It seemed like a colossally big place. I got an aurograph from Mickey Rivers. He was very polite; he sort of shuffled around and occasioanlly cocked his head to th side.

I know from objective facts that its capacity of 56,000-odd makes Yankee stadium smaller than Sydney's own Telstra Olympic stadium or the Beijing Birds' Nest, but it always looms large in my memory. The only other time I walked into a stadium and was blown away by its dimensions was when I walked into the Colosseo in Rome. It was a strange sensation as if I had been there before, and then it hit me - I was re-experiencing the moment I stepped into Yankee Stadium as kid. Which is kind of weird because it suggests:
- Babe Ruth is more real to me than say, the Emperor Diocletian.
- Some parts of my brain are indelibly centred around my Yankee-fan experience.
Anyway, I don't have much else to offer. So much has faded over time.

My Yankee Fan Day In Sydney

2008-09-19T17:04:00.006+10:00

Take Off That Hat If You Don't Know Anything About It, You Shit!

I pulled up at the lights next to a guy in a swish looking car. He had a Yankee cap on.
So I asked him, "Did they win today?"
"I don' know," he said.
"Did Moose win no. 18?"
"What?" he responded
"They were up 7-1 when I left home.," I yelled.
"I don't know. I don't watch it."
"So you don't know if Jeter got a hit?"
"Who?"
"Derek Jeter..."
The the lights changed. So we drove off on our merry ways.

One of these days I want to make a doco where I ask people in Sydney a bunch of Yankee related questions and get their responses. They shouldn't be wearing those Yankee caps if they don't know who Derek Jeter is.

Moose won No.18 for the season.

NSWFTO

2008-09-19T08:46:00.004+10:00

Dealing With Rejection

Just a quick note to tell you all the NSWFTO declined to back our little project 'Crashing by Design'. The prospects for which were essentially sunk by an unfavorable Reader's Report written by one NG. MW informed me by phone that the meeting essentially goes on what the Reader's Report says so they decided not to go ahead.

Which is fine until you sit there and ponder if the Reader's Report was actually fair. I've been canvassing a few fellow screenwriters who have come back and said, "what she says is right, but how she says it is hostile". I actually disagreed. The Reader completely missed the Hamlet plot points we worked into the story and she kept complaining that it didn't ring true to her when in fact, the part she was complaining about was based on a true story.

If you get sunk by somebody who is making a good point, then yeah. It's a fair cop. When you get sunk by somebody who didn't get the story, then it's not a fair cop. Thank you NG, I'll never forget you and your idiotic input that sunk our application. One of these days I sincerely hope I have the opportunity to repay that favor when I get to sink one of your projects.

I also imagine that a script that tacitly points to the various corruptions in NSW is not going to win over a NSW Government organ, but you get that.

Photoshop Palin

2008-09-17T17:02:00.006+10:00

They Fooled Me Jerry!

Last week or so, Yahoo news posted up a news story with this picture above. This is it here. Of course it turned out to be a Photoshop-manipulated image based on the one below.

There's a critique of the phenomenon here.
Sarah Palin reminds me of Pauline Hanson with a few tweaks and kinks. Her appeal is essentially the same as Hanson: ill-educated rednecks plus disenfranchised right wing nuts with an axe to grind. She seems to be better educated (which is a plus) but comes burdened with a psycho-Christian religion that is waiting for the 'rapture' (which is a major minus). So should McCain win and then die in office, as roughly a third of Presidents have done, then she'll have her trigger-finger on the doomsday switch. Are we comfortable with that?
I'm not.

Metallica Mix & Mastering Is Allegedly A Mess

2008-09-16T23:21:00.004+10:00

Interesting Thread

I'm not a Metallica fan at all. Heavy Metal generally isn't my thing, though there are some metal acts that I do like. I understand Metallica's position as some kind of pinnacle act of its genre, but they've never really come close to selling me a record. It's a little tricky for me to like HM because I just can't get at the kinds of themes that interest HM acts. There used to be a guy who I'll just refer to as SV that I used to know back in High School who was totally into his stuff, and it was he who introduced me to Van Halen and the tapping thing - but I just couldn't get at the rest of the silly posturing. And there used to be a tonne of silly posturing in Heavy Metal.

Anyway, it seems the latest album sounds like an over-compressed sonic pancake and the punters are actually a little more than upset with the production value. If you want to know what musician types are saying about it, here's an interesting thread at iComp.

If you feel brave enough to listen to the whole album, you can do so track by track, over here.

If you want to know what engineering boffin types are saying there's an interesting thread here.

Here's a link to a diagram that shows just how crunched the sound is on the current Metallica album.

Now, the funny thing is, yes I can telll all the distortions and clipping, and they are unpleasant indeed, but I kept thinking "isn't this what it has always sounded like?"

Any way, I just thought I would just put that out there... and wait for the hate-mail

Obituaries - Richard Wright (1943 - 2008)

2008-09-16T21:35:00.001+10:00

Pink Floyd's Keyboard Player Passes Away

It's a real drag when a rock star dies. Even if it's a a guy who is much older than 27 - in this case a still-spritely 65. Intimations of mortality abound. Can't say I was much of Pink Floyd fan back in High School, but Walk-off HBP was big on them; pharmakeus and his guitar identity was practically born out of them; and when I got to University, I was surrounded by quite a number of people who just loved 'The Wall'. It was all part of the canon of rock you had to know when you were a teen in the late 1970s through to the 1980s.

To this day, my favorite Pink Floyd album is 'Animals', partly because it is a total Gilmour-Guitar-fest, partly because it has the word 'animal' in the title, partly because it's a cynical nasty album, but also because the keyboard work makes for such a beautiful backdrop for all the guitar heroics. I also love Wright's understated playing on 'Dark Side of the Moon', which forms the vast majority of the harmonic information on that album. 'Great Gig in the Sky' is Richard Wright.

I'll never forget the time a fellow student in Med School gave me a cassette with 'The Wall' on it as a gift because he felt it expressed how he felt about the world. I listened earnestly for about a fortnight on my walkman because he kept asking me if I felt that way about life; and I had to say no, I felt more like Jimmy Cooper, the four-personality mod in 'Quadrophenia', than the protagonist in 'The Wall'. I think I let him down really badly.
It kind of scares me to think that person is out there now practising medicine, along with all the other emotionally stunted people from Med School.

Yet there was a lot of it going around, and I think that people *got* the mood of that album because of Richard Wright's tremendous moody playing. After all, it's not like it's (pardon the pun once again) wall-to-wall guitar heroics on that album.

'Wish You Were Here' is another album that defines keyboard atmospherics at their best. It's hard to imagine it now but there was a time when the album defined lush keyboard production value. Still, being a guitar more of a guitar kind of dude, I tended to hang for the lead breaks, but what makes Pink Floyd so compelling is in Wright's work.

All the while we kept hearing stories about how unwanted and unloved he was by Roger Waters through the years and it seems hardly possible. how could he level so much venom against the musician that gave so much style and substance to his largely bellicose lyrics? It's all very odd.
One thing is for sure - Richard Wright will be sorely missed.

Tropic Thunder

2008-09-16T00:02:00.003+10:00

Diminishing Signification Through Parody

The world is a cruel place for actors. There's just no hiding the fact that actors are totally the playthings of circumstance who get passed around as names and a brand and a look as their names become a commodity, and their identity becomes laden with roles they take on, but this experience is actually hollow because they didn't really do the things the characters did in the films or plays they appeared in, they simply acted it. Their very existence is Martin Heidegger's future, where in he said the future was a shining darkness, stretched across like a screen (I always thought he must have meant movies). This confusion of identity and meaning of course only visits itself upon the successful ones. The less successful simply travel through roles without acquiring any meaning at all. They simply pass through the business like so much scenery and fodder.

So when you consider a film directed by a star about stardom, you are forced to reckon with the dual reality where actors are playing a certain kind of fictionalisation of their largely fiction-enhanced lives, where their identities simply become crutches for their every day existence.
Tropic Thunder then is that rare film where the filmmaker tries to open up the backstage, only to turn that backstage into a cornucopia of laughs.

What's Good About It

For a start, it's just flat out funny in at least 50% of the scenes. The much discussed 'retard' exchange is more insightful than advertised. As Robert Downey Jr., who is playing an Australian who is method-acting his way as a black American explains, playing the full retard will not net you an Oscar. It's a great thesis, explained in wonderfully succinct detail. Playing the full retard, is not good.

The comedy is decidedly black. This is no pun, even with Robert Downey Jr's Sgt. Osiris character. The humour is in many ways a kind of gallows humour best reserved for sardonic laughs. You get the feeling that the people who would enjoy this film the most are in fact, actors. Sure enough, the director steps on a mine and is dead by the end of the second reel. However, his blasted head does get played around by Ben Stiller in classic black comedy style where handling of a corpse is de rigeur. There is also the continuing sideshow of the Agent and the Studio boss which highlights much of the gallows humour.

What's Bad About It
The film takes giant swings at the ego of star actors, but at the same time, none of it is anything that is profoundly wounding. The nudge-wink factor makes the film pull short of condemning anybody. Even Robert Downey Jr.'s excellent pay-out of Russell Crow has the air of a gentle homage. I guess I wanted more poison in it, but because it's made by the people who inhabit the centre of the same star-actor universe, it stops short of being truly cutting.

The film also never finds the right mode of comedy. In parts it is happy doing parody, but in other parts it is reaching out for a more interesting character comedy. The film vacillates between these modes of comedy and this contributes to an alienating effect. You're never sure if you're meant to invest anything into these characters. If you do, you could be betrayed by the film-makers; if you don't the story renders itself largely meaningless. It's a little confusing.

The film is at its funniest when the parody is right, or the commentary on the film business is sharp. The film is at its worst when the jokes are gratuitous fat jokes, fart jokes and animal jokes.

What's Interesting About It

The film kicks off with a bunch of trailers for fictional films. Then we are thrown into a Vietnam movie action sequence which climaxes with a parody of the the death of Sgt. Elias in 'Platoon'. Then it is revealed to be a movie in the making and we enter the world of fiction within fiction. This gets a little trickier as we navigate the book the fictional movie is based upon turns out to be a complete fabrication within the film Universe as well, when Nick Nolte confesses he was never in Vietnam, and we find he never lost his hands. So the film is about a fake film being made about a phony experience written by a phony man made by actors trying to impersonate these phony characters with as much 'realism' as they can muster.

The film actually comes close to confronting something about fiction all the while showing the ineptness of shallow star actors to convey any real emotional truths. We almost glimpse something about why we watch this stuff. The closest film in terms of this polemic was 'Galaxy Quest' where the good aliens believed the events portrayed in a TV show much like 'Star Trek' to be true and when they find out it was fiction, fail to understand why humans would do such a thing.

Why do we do fiction? At all? It's an interesting thing to ponder.

Other Thoughts

Robert Downey Jr. is simply amazing. After his turn as Iron Man/Tony Stark, his performance in this film is like a magic trick. His Australian accent is a little suspect, but as impersonations of Russell Crowe go, it's hilarious. If you ever meet Russell Crowe, I suggest you don't bring it up because he most likely will punch you in the face. Then again, I suspect he punches everybody in the face at least once.

Jack Black as the addict was not as interesting as his other roles in the last few years. Maybe it's good that he got away from the rock dude schtick he has been building up over 3 or 4 pictures. And yet, I kind of miss that guy. This guy he played was nowhere near as intense.

Tom Cruise... *Ugh* :(
Going into watch the film, I heard his performance as Lee Grossman was great. Perhaps because I had been told so much about it, I expected too much. I was mostly underwhelmed. All I saw was Tom Cruise paying out on studio execs. Which is fine, but it wasn't really anywhere near as brilliant as what Robert Downey Jr. was doing, nor was it as interesting as I was led to believe. As for the dance, it reminded me of his little dance routine in 'Risky Business'.

The Great Depression Part II?

2008-09-15T22:34:00.006+10:00

'Small Government' You Say?

Here's something I don't get. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae essentially gave out huge amounts of bad loans to people it shouldn't have handed such loans. That's why they're called bad loans. It's not like there's a special, different definition for 'bad' in this case. It's just awful decision making on the part of management. Then, when the credit crunch comes, they go running to the government and the government bails them out.

So much for all that laissez-faire small government talk - they just simply throw tax payer's money at those people. In turn, the bosses of these firms leave these companies with their golden parachutes worth $13m and $8m respectively. Hang a minute, I think to myself, isn't that money from the public purse that they're taking as their golden parachute? Why doesn't the American public get more angry about this stuff?
It's ethically and morally fucked up, but nobody seems to give a shit. It's astounding. It's also pathetic to see that all that grand talk about the power of capitalism comes down to the Federal Reserve bailing out these crippled mortgage giants.

Don't Look Now, But There Goes The Banking Neighborhood

Lehamn Bros. has decalred bankruptcy. The Federal Reserve got together with a bunch of banks to create a $700b fund to shore up the hole being left by the imploding Lehman Bros. What's worse, the Fed is swapping out Treasury Bonds for the next-to-worthless mortgages. Isn't this a little bit like swapping dollar notes out in exchange for bits of used toilet paper?

Anyway, the estimated global exposure of the financial sector to the Lehman Bros collapse is estimated to be in the order of $850billion. Got that? That's US$85,000,000,000.00. Naturally, the ASX told people to stop trading with Lehman Bros. in Australia sometime this morning and the rest of it is a major meltdown of the financial sector.

Meanwhile the Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch amid the deepening crisis. The Federal Reserve is stepping in actively to shore up the financial sector because the price of not doing so would be a rerun of the Great Depression - and nobody in their right mind wants that. The question that naturally follows is, are they too late? You certainly hope not, but you get the feeling the horse of the credit crunch bolted a good 14months ago.
So just where are we on this alleged economic cycle?

All Hail Derek Jeter

2008-09-15T07:31:00.010+10:00

9 hits in 3 Games

This is what the season has come to... watching milestones for the players. Derek Jeter came into the last home stand at the current Yankee stadium ever, needing 9 hits to tie Lou Gehrig for most hits at Yankees stadium. Yes, it's an obscure stat, like how he recently passed Babe Ruth on the all-time hit list for the Yankees. As Steven Goldman rightly pointed out, Jeter made so many more outs doing it.

In fact Jeter has been a sub .300 hitter for most of this season through the vagaries of BABIP, so it seemed rather unlikely that he would even get his average up over .300 this late in the season. The graph above shows his BABIP movement through the seasons and you can see that he was way below his career rate until the second half of the season.

Steven Goldman suggested he needed to go 22 for 65 over the last bit of the season to get there.

JETER .300 WATCH
The Yankees have 16 games to play. Jeter averages 4.04 at bats per game, giving him another 65 at bats on the season. He's presently 165 for 557, so...

If he goes 20-for-65, or .308, he will finish the season with a batting average of .297.
If he goes 21-for-65, or .323, he will finish the season with a batting average of .299.
If he goes 22-for-65, or .338, he will finish the season with a batting average of .301.
Get your hitting shoes on, Captain.

In the three games with Tampa Bay, Jeter went 9 for 11, raising his average to .306. He still has 13 games to go in the rest of the season, and if he hits the rest of the way at career norm, he'll stay above .300 for sure. I doubt he's going go all Mark Taylor and stop just because he tied Don Bradman - one of the all time wet decisions. In any case, it's a nice piece of drama, but I would have preferred it if the Yankees were playing the Post-Season.

UPDATE:
I caught up with my old man today. When I pointed out to him the 9-for-11 spot by Jeter in the last 48hours he simply snorted "Too late." He's actually a lot angrier than I am about the Yankees not getting to the post-season.

Dungeon Dad - The Sequel

2008-09-10T22:00:00.004+10:00

So Far, No Hate Mail
That's right. Since posting my song about Josef Fritzl the Dungeon Dad, I haven't exactly received any hate mail for it, which is pretty good going for me. Anyway, seems there's now another Dungeon Dad, this time in Poland.

The case in Poland involves a 45-year-old man identified only as Krzysztof B, in keeping with Polish privacy laws. Police detained him on Friday in the eastern city of Siedlce after his wife and daughter came forward. Police said they believe the man was trying to flee Poland.

His wife, identified as Teresa B, said on private TVN24 television that the man used to order her to watch television whenever he went into the girl's room, closed it and took out the door handle.

"My daughter was frightened and did not want to talk about it," the mother said. She learned the facts when she found her daughter's diary, the mother said.

She said the man beat her and her daughter when they asked that he stop the abuse.

"He intimidated us; he threatened that my daughter will be dead, that he will destroy us all, if anyone learned about it," Teresa B said.

Investigators collected the hospital records of the children and were trying to find them and carry out DNA tests to determine their paternity, national police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski said.

Prosecutor Miroslaw Zoch in Siemiatycze cautioned that it was too early to say whether the man fathered the two boys.

This is the picture of the guy getting carted away:

Not surprisingly, his fly is undone.

More On Pavano

2008-09-07T17:22:00.004+10:00

4 Year Miscreant?

I know the easy thing is to kick Pavano for his non-contribution. After all, its a 4 year $39.95million contract he signed to pitch for the Yankees. Anyway, here's an article in the NYT that explores his side of the story.

In hindsight, Pavano said, he could have had Tommy John surgery that summer, but the Yankees did not recommend it to Andrews.

“I think I could have, but we’ll never know,” Pavano said. “He was told not to. He was told to take the bone chips out and rehab it.”

Two starts into the 2007 season, the elbow pain returned, and Pavano insisted on major surgery as the only way to heal everything. It took four doctors — Hershon, Andrews, Lewis Yocum and David Altchek — to find one who agreed definitively. That was Altchek, the Mets’ team doctor.

“They had to go through all that red tape; that’s why I had to go get all these opinions,” Pavano said. “It was crazy. And I had to walk around with my heart in my throat: ‘Are you serious? You’re messing with my career here.’ You think I wanted to have Tommy John surgery? But I knew I needed it and I knew I could come back from it. That’s why I was all for it.”

Altchek told Pavano he had done everything he could to come back from the 2006 operation. His only choice was Tommy John surgery, in which a tendon from Pavano’s knee was used to replace an elbow ligament.
It took place June 5, 2007, nearly two months after he had last pitched in a game. Pavano said he wished he had the operation sooner.

“I would have been back seven weeks earlier this year,” Pavano said. “That would have been a considerable amount of time to help the team.”

General Manager Brian Cashman said the fact that Pavano had bone chips in 2006 did not necessarily mean he should have had reconstructive surgery.

“That doesn’t mean the ligament was gone yet,” Cashman said. “Bone chips usually mean there’s an unstable ligament, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pitch another 10 years without having Tommy John.”

In any case, Cashman said, he does not blame Pavano for wondering what different steps he might have taken. If anybody can relate to Pavano’s frustration, it is Cashman, who championed his signing.

“At the end of the day, he was hurt,” Cashman said. “People always say, ‘Why do you stick up for him? Is it because you signed him?’ I’m just being objective. The guy, I know, can pitch when he’s healthy. He just hasn’t been healthy. It’s not because he mentally wanted it that way. It just happened.”

I'm sure it was really frustrating for Pavano to live through all that... and get paid $39.95m. I guess that's the point. The sympathy runs out when the money runs out, and the money has been running out the door with Carl 'American Idle' Pavano. Maybe it could have been handled better, but there seems to be a point at which Pavano should have spoken up sooner about his back pain and then subsequent elbow pain.

Teammates recognize that his pitches are not as sharp as they will be, and they respect his approach. Pavano is challenging the hitters, and himself, with a fastball that has command but little pop.

“Obviously, his stuff now is not that good, but he’s going out there and competing, he’s going after guys,” reliever Brian Bruney said.

“There are guys with way better stuff than he has that don’t go after people like that. The guy’s got heart and he wants to win. I’ll take that any day.”

Pavano will be a free agent after the season, and he could turn a decent September into a new contract with another team. He may succeed the way the Yankees hoped, just not for them. His time on the mound with the Yankees has been brief: he has made 22 starts, pitched 126 1/3 innings and compiled a 7-6 record.

If all this were true, then Pavano sort of owes it to come back for a cut-price rate for 1 year and show what he's really got. I hate it when the Yanks rehab a pitcher like Lieber and Dotel and they end up pitching for other teams. Pavano owes a year of his best effort under normal conitions. It would be a serious drag to see him pitch somewhere else and do alright.

My Song Of The Week

2008-09-07T11:16:00.004+10:00

It's More Like Song Of The Quarter

I've been preoccupied with lots of other things so I have not managed to record at a pace of a song a week, let alone, a song per month. That's how life goes, sometimes.

I've posted up a song about Josef Fritzl, a.k.a The Austrian Dungeon Dad.
The song is imaginatively called 'Dungeon Dad'.

Hadron Collider Rap

2008-09-06T23:16:00.001+10:00

Yankees Update

2008-09-04T18:31:00.003+10:00

Where've You Been All My Life, Carl Pavano?

There's this to contemplate, late in a disastrous season.

The Yankees have won the last six games that Carl Pavano has started.
OK, so three were in 2008, two were in 2007 and one was in 2005. But six in a row is six in a row. When the Idle pitches, the Yankees win. Mark it down.
Pavano wasn’t happy with his outing tonight. Given six runs of support, he couldn’t through the fifth inning.
“I feel like I cheated my team tonight,” he said.
Tonight? Tonight?

Aiyah. Good, in a season that's gone bust but, aiyah!
Where's Kei Igawa? Send him in to pitch!

Movie Doubes

2008-08-31T22:26:00.019+10:00

John Lone Special - 'Last Emperor' & 'Year of The Dragon'

Today's movie double is a trip down memory lane. For some reason I managed to pick these DVDs up almost one after the other. They evoked so much memory, I kind of had to watch them back to back.

There was a time under Deng Xiao-Ping that China's world profile was making great strides. There were constant jokes about Deng and Hu Yao-Bang - uh-huh, that's a real politician's name. Yes, there was a time when it wasn't Who You Knew in Beijing but Hu Yao-Bang.

Anyway, after some kerfuffle to do with oh, Tienanmen Square in 1989, China's big push for international respect took a beating. The hang over of which went against Beijing's bid for the 2000 Olympics back in 1993; and even the hand over of Hong Kong not withstanding, the international community probably didn't feel comfortable with 'Communist China' getting its claws on the Olympic Games to beat its chest. It would have to wait until 2001 for that to transpire, and even then it took a punishing in the media stakes this year at the Olympics. I would imagine the top level people in China are wondering if the two wek extravaganza really helped China's international image.

Part of the problem for them as well as anybody is that the goal posts keep moving - and the Western media is one of the most obvious examples of goal-post movers and history re-writers. There's no point in the finger-wagging the Chinese authorities leveled at the media, it may as well have been admonishing hookers for plying their trade on a busy night. Shame it was their party where the hookers turned up - but that's what you get when you invite the whole international community to your place. They tend to check out your ornaments critique your decoration choices, and joke about the bathroom smell.

So it seemed like an interesting moment in time to reflect back on those heady days prior to the Tienanmen Square incident and to see just what the West thought of China back in the late 1980s.

John Lone's Big Moment In Cinema

It's hard to imagine this, because he's been anything but prominent since, but these two films represent the apotheosis of the actor John Lone's international career. Its a shame because his filmpography reads as follows:

Iceman (1984)
Year of the Dragon (1985)
The Last Emperor (1987) as Emperor Puyi
The Moderns (1988)
Echoes of Paradise (1989)
Shadow of China (1990)
Shanghai 1920 (1991)
M. Butterfly (1993) as Song Liling
The Shadow (1994)
The Hunted (1995)
Rush Hour 2 (2001) as Ricky Tan
War (2007)

Judging from the fine performances in 'YotD' and 'TLE', he's hardly been used properly and it's a real shame he hasn't done more important work. It is possible, playing Henry Pu-Yi and arch-antagonist Joey Tai typecast him as the 'Suave Asian Villain' and there was nothing left to do. I'm actually surpirsed Quentin Taranatino hasn't cast him in one of his shoot'em up movies.

What's interesting about Joey Tai in 'YotD' for instance is the degree to which he reflects against the prejudices he knows are being leveled at him just because he's Chinese. It was pretty funky to see an Asian villain who could stare down the West and say "I'm not interested in what you've got. I want my own thing."

It's also ironic that the Chinese American community protested against this film, because in a very real way, this film opens up the future world where Hong Kong cinema crashes through to the west bringing with it Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun-Fat and company. It is in that very sense that John Lone did pioneering work here and should get more credit than he's received.

As for his turn as Henry Pu-Yi, he was almost too handsome to be playing that man. He brought such an aesthetically pleasing facade to a man who was essentially a gormless twerp who had little moral or ethical compunction about doing bad things; Lone's Pu-Yi comes across as possibly more endearing and sophisticated than the real man. That's the 'beauty bias' for you - and I'm sure that was Bertolucci's plan - but all it leads to is a confused rewriting of history.

Rewriting History

If there's one thing that the movie business does well, it is to present image as a kind of defacto fact. If you saw it, you'd better believe it. Bertolucci's signature movie in the 1980s was 'The Last Emperor'; and it's a rather one-eyed book about the last Manchurian Emperor of China who subsequently got coopted into being the head of state of Manchukuo - his ancestral country - by the Kwantung Army of Japan. It's a miserable chapter in Japanese history, as it is a miserable chapter in Chinese history. Essentially, in the wake of the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese sought to set up a buffer zone to keep Russian interests away from the Pacific Ocean. To that end Japan annexed Korea and then tried to set up Manchukuo as a sort of frontier 'buffer' country against Russia.

All of this is part of what makes it so miserable in as much as the Koreans and Manchurians forever won't forgive the Japanese for their miserable colonial experience; the Chinese will always blame Japan for a pile of its miserable woes, but neither was there to actually defend their miserable borders from an Imperialist Russia. So much Japanese blood was shed protecting those places from the Russians - all in the post-19th-Century-colonialist period that was the early 20th Century. Not that it jusitifes it in any moral sense, but the strategic imperative to set up Manchukuo and the subsequent administration of Manchukuo was a miserable experience for all because nobody wanted to be there or to do it properly except for the crazy and the dedicated.

I doubt you could sell that real estate to the Japanese today. That frontier has moved south to the 38th parallel, and it's North and South Korea's problem now. Although the nukes in North Korea has again made it everybody's problem.

Bertolucci's vision, alas, does not extend into the nuances of these post-colonial conflicts in the Far East. He's more interested in telling the decadent moody visual narrative he forcibly constructs around the persona of Henry Pu-Yi. If you read enough history like I have, the film's actually deplorable in parts, commendable in others and generally out of focus as to what really was Henry Pu-Yi's position and what was volitional. It even doesn't adequately address if his volition really mattered that much. The Juggernaut of History just runs him over as it runs over China. The fabulist ending with the magical cricket appearing from a little container betrays Bertolucci's own inability to come to terms with the Juggernaut of History running roughshod over human beings.

Post-Colonial Trauma

In the instance of 'Year of the Dragon', it's America's struggle with getting over Vietnam. Michael Cimino of 'Deer Hunter' fame directed 'Year of the Dragon', where Mickey Rourke plays a disgruntled, personality disordered, driven cop who takes his hard-boiled style down to China Town. Just as he is looking for a rematch with the Asians, Cimino was looking for a directorial rematch with Polanski and 'Chinatown'.

I won't go into the referentiality of the script, needless to say, that both films rest their case on the supposed inscrutability of the Asians. Back in its day, 'YotD' was a hard-hitting film about the drug trade, but time has not been kind to it. The subsequent influence of Hong Kong cinema has obliterated any sense of tension in the scenes in which the machine-guns are let loose in the restaurant. It just looks cruddy by our current standards. Remember, this film was Pre-Die Hard too, se we're talking about 3 generations of action movie violence that have come since.

It's ironic that the Manchukuo experiment contributed to the formation of North and South Koreas an therefore the Korean War. The Korean War soaked up a lot of blood too, but nobody talks about it anywhere near as much as Vietnam. The Vietnam War too is a post-colonial war which the Americans inherited from the French.

Thus, to see a character who is a Vietnam Vet who goes toe to toe with a resurgent Asian villain is indeed an appropriate and cogent set up for a story. The anxiety that flows on from the Vietnam war experience is in a sense the very trauma of the post-colonial experience, reflecting and coming back to haunt America. In some ways this film is being overlooked because of its out-dated crappy action; the deeper readings seem more relevant than 'TLE' today.

China As The Great Unknown

China never looks or sounds like China when people from the West talk about it. China, thinks it's the centre of the universe... at least the parts that matter. It has thought of itself that way for at least 3000 years. Its history is populated with real men - Men of Honour, Men of Valour, Men of Principle, Men of standing; and that is what the character for Han in Han Dynasty means. The Han dynasty was the Empire of Men, as in Mankind. The rest of the foreigners were just a pack of uncivilised animals. The West was like a bunch of barbarians who have suddenly manifested out of nothing on their shores in the 19th Century, disturbing their peace, peddling Opium.
It's a vast contrast to how the Average white person thinks back to their school days and their Chinese classmate, who they saw as "That Chink". Or "Ching Chong Charlie." It's kind of pathetic, really.

Thus China as it presents itself to the world is considerably different to the way the West views it. I think the Chinese don't get the depth of the contempt that's been leveled against China over the last 200 years. The gap in that understanding in a way underscores the angry tantrums the Chinese government displays when it feels slighted. Then the westerners ask a whole bunch of rude questions about its customs and pass judgment. It's really not a functional relationship.

Fortunately we get to see this dysfunction in both films. This is because in many ways these films are Orientalist fantasies of the west, projected onto the East. The West keeps insisting Asians are inscrutable. Well, yeah, if you want to paint your fantasies on their faces, they're going to just shrug and walk away, wouldn't you say? Neither of these films would've been remotely credible without John Lone for this reason.

Mickey Rourke And The Glory of '80s Cinema

I once read somewhere that only the French and the perverted like Mickey Rourke - and the French like Mickey Rourke because they're all perverts anyway. Count me amongst the perverted then, not because I'm not French, but because I'm still a big fan of Mickey Rourke's films. Don't ask me why, I just think he has a splendid screen presence and his 1980s filmography alone should be enough testament to the man. This is the guy who is in 'Angel Heart' and '9-1/2 Weeks', 'Year of the Dragon' here, and 'Rumble Fish' as the Motorcycle Boy. Even his vanity project 'Homeboy' features dialogue to die for and moments of true sentiment. The man has *something* going in his work.

Okay, 'Wild Orchid' was terrible and he keeps appearing as this orange-looking dude lately, but he's still great.

At The Movies

2008-08-30T11:00:00.009+10:00

Vigilantism As Art Form - The Dark Knight

I've been meaning to write this review for weeks. I've seen the thing twice! Is it that good? Yes... But not without its obvious and not so obvious faults. He's not exactly Iron Man, and he's not exactly the Punisher, but the re-imagined Batman has many of these elements going in to this new brooding incarnation.

I keep saying I'm not sure about these comic book adaptations, but the more they make them, the more they seem like they are going to be the staple of adventure movies in the decade to come. One thing is for sure, these movies have matured and come of age within the context of cinema since the Superman movies in the late 1970s.

What's Good About It

I wonder about the merits of an epic action movie based on a comic book, but this one makes good on its promise. In fact I've never particularly liked either Superman or Batman so I'm actually suspicious about any offering from the DC stable as opposed to the Marvel stable. Having said that, this new series of Batman movies starring Christian Bale are making amends for the quixotic, idiotic, bizzaro and inept entries that collectively starred Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney.

The lighting and cinematography in this film is singularly sepctacular. It's one of the best pieces of lighting you will likely see this year. The sound is also astoundingly good. The film bristles with a filmmaker's kind of enthusiasm for the medium itself, and that is rare. The Spiderman series is the only one that comes close to combining the comic book tropes nicely into the cinema form.

The performances are interesting and in the case of Heath Ledger, totally riveting to watch. Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon is a fascinating study in understatedness, considering his earlier incarnations as bad cops galore; this is the guywho played Lee Harvey Oswald in 'JFK' after all. It's just not the kind of comic book movie that was around even 10 years ago. The constant drive towards a method-acting realism by the performers keeps the film consistently engaging. Gone are the extrvagances of a Jack Nicholson Joker or Jim Carey Riddler. In its place is a psychotic monster with guns. It's a long, long, long way away from when they used to throw up graphics of 'Kapow!' on the screen with every staged punch for the Adam West TV series - and it's a better viewing experience for it.

The lesson is, when you do any movie, be committed and true to the universe in which it is set.

What's Bad About It

Through out the movie, there is a sense in which the citizens of Gotham want to stand up and be counted. The ordinary people who are peripheral to the plot want to do good deeds. Perhaps they are inspired by the Harvey Dent character, or in the case of Brian, the guy in the hockey pads, he's inspired by Batman himself. Batman cares little for it. When he is aksed what the difference is, Batman's response is "I don't wear hockey pads."

It's funny the first time but there's a sting. Batman actually doesn't have a moral or ethical standing above Brian the wannabe. He simply has better means to put his vision into action. He can do it - and Brian can't - because he is rich and powerful in the city. Brian, the ordinary guy can take a back seat and keep out of the way. Frankly I think that's... uhh, for the wont of a better word, fascist.

So when in one of the shocking developments the psychopathic Joker kills Brian in his Batman get up and hangs him outside the mayor's window, it's a real drag. It's the moment you realise that the Batman text has nothing to do with the better instincts of people at all. It's kind of a dark fascist fantasy about survival of the fittest, dressed up as a battle between good and evil. It acknowledges that it is a battle between one kind of psychosis against another - and I'm not sure I like that patina at all. Indeed, the second time I saw it, the moment that made me almost cry (I kid you not) was when they show the video the Joker takes of Brian moments before his death.

The ordinary dude dies in the face of not only psychosis but Batman's disregard. It's a terrible, terrible moment that just flies by in the film. But I kept thinking where is Batman's personal responsibility to that citizen whom was inspired by his deeds? We're the ordinary people. Are we to be the victims of the powerful all the time? In a real world absent of Batman, are the filmmakers saying we're a bunch of putzes? Is one ordinary person, not up to the task of changing his world? Not sure I like the ramification of that at all.

Other Thoughts

I refrained from mentioning it here at the time he died partly because I'm not really into sensational deaths as such. Besides which plenty of people were blogging the event and what would be the point in duplicating those efforts here?

If you're going to check out of life, even accidentally as the case may be it would be nice to hit as high a note as Heath Ledger did with his Joker before turning out the lights. I know there is talk of a posthumous Oscar and all that. Trust me, it's much more deserving of finer accolades than a measly Oscar.

A few days before the film opened in Sydney a TV station played 'Casanova' starring Ledger, and it was stunning just how good Ledger was in that film. Then there was that wonderful debut in Hollywood with '10 Things I Hate About You' as well as his turn as one of the Grimm Brothers in Terry Gilliam's 'The Brothers Grimm'. Were reminded by this film that Heath Ledger actually was a colossal talent and his passing is an immense loss to the world of cinema.

Pope Is Upset At Frog On A Crucifix

2008-08-29T16:51:00.004+10:00

Art World Causes Offense Again

I guess it's one of my hobbies now to keep track of instances where art causes offense. In fact part of the Art Neuro credo ought to be 'cause offense to idiots'. The Pope Benedict, he of the Hitler Youth and Wehrmacht, is upset at this work of art above:

It "has offended the religious feelings of many people who consider the cross a symbol of God's love and of our redemption," Pahl quoted the pope as writing in the letter.
Pahl himself has long opposed the display of "Zuerst die Fuesse" ("First the Feet" in German), even staging a hunger strike this summer and saying he would not seek re-election unless it was removed.

In a telephone interview with The Associated Press today, Pahl said he was outraged by the museum's decision to keep the work, which he claims "pokes fun at the Catholic population and offends religion and the pope."

The 1990 wooden sculpture shows the crucified frog nailed through the feet and hands like Jesus Christ. The frog, eyes popping and tongue sticking out, wears a loincloth and holds a mug of beer and an egg in its hands.

The museum said the one-metre-tall sculpture has nothing to dowith religion, but is an ironic self-portrait of the artist and an expression of his angst.

"With humour and a tragicomic sense, which belongs to art since the times of Greek tragedy, Kippenberger ... faces his condition of suffering, which he expresses in many works, also, for example, in a video in which he crucifies himself," the museum said in a statement.

One would think a man associated with Nazism, even involuntarily might refrain from charging the art world with offense but no. Clearly he is a man born of his times and he sees 'degenerate art'. That Wikipedia links to this article, just in case you are too jaded to click:

Degenerate art is the English translation of the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions. These included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art entirely.
Degenerate Art was also the title of an exhibition, mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937, consisting of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art. Designed to inflame public opinion against modernism, the exhibition subsequently traveled to several other cities in Germany and Austria.
While modern styles of art were prohibited, the Nazis promoted paintings and sculptures that were narrowly traditional in manner and that exalted the "blood and soil" values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience. Similarly, music was expected to be tonal and free of any jazz influences; films and plays were censored.

I take it His Excellency the Pope is not entirely enamored of modern art, let alone contemporary art. According to Wikipedia, Martin Kippenberger was more interested in his own existence than spiritualism. I really doubt a depiction of a frog on a crucifix is going to cast Catholicism in a worse light than it already is cast by some - but I guess even such a maliciously idiotic reading is also a reading of the work itself. Clearly the Catholics are champing at the bit to take offense, and that is by defition wowserism, and they have that much in common with the Nazis.

The irony in all of this is that this was once the Church that paid for the Sistine Chapel. You'd think they had a bit more latitude with art and artists.

Yankees Update

2008-08-28T08:09:00.005+10:00

What's Actually On The Farm?
This one is going to be a look at the farm system, because the big league team just burnt down the bridge to the post-season yesterday with their 7-3 and today's 11-3 loss to the Red Sox. I mean, that's it. End of the dynasty thank you very much. So it's time to look at 2009.

Looking at the MiLB stats, it seems to me there is the shortage of position players is only going to get worse before it gets better.

I think it's another year of failure for Eric Duncan, which is really bad news, because he's essentially following the same trajectory as his 3B predecessor Drew Henson - always a bad sign in my books. Both were touted for their power, both never quite mastered the strike zone, both peaked early to go to the Arizona Fall League, and both have struggled afterwards. There's something wrong with the development in Yankees scouting and development when they've made the same mistake twice.

Juan Miranda on the other hand seems to be proving himself. If you discount Melky, Betemit, Broussard, Shelley Duncan and the retreads, the cupboard's actually bare for position players. Whoever the position players a re meant to be, they're not coming up in 2009.

The limiting factor to this problem is that between 2008 and 2009 there might not be a significan turnover of the roster. The Yankees are pretty committed at C, SS, 2B, 3B, and LF/DH. CF is in flux, but it seems hard to see how they'll go back to Melky after his disastrous season. Maybe it's Brett Gardner's job to lose. 1B and RF are up for grabs, but the Yankees seriously need to think about those spots going forwards. To make matters more complicated, their old players actually did all right. It was mostly the young players who failed to turn in the projected performances. It's going to make for an interesting off-season.

Steven Goldman Says...
The Yankees have been drafting nowhere near as well as the Red Sox. I can't reproduce his chart here, so you should go have look, but I can see his point of view.

It took until 2006 for the Yankees to have a better draft than the Red Sox, with a quicker turnaround on the best players. Until then, it wasn't draft position that did them in, but savviness. If the Red Sox are up at the moment and the Yankees down, that's why.

Beyond that, as the saying goes, the Yankees know that if they have any bullets left in their gun they'd better fire them. There's nothing deeper than that that needs to be said — they can keep the Wild Card race interesting, or they can end it. Stay tuned.

It's not even close. The Red Sox farm system has drafted better. That's not to say it's been more fruitful overall, but the Yankee drafts at this point in time are not looking good. After Gerit Cole didn't sign this year, you can almost count the 2008 draft as another lost year for the Yankees.

CJ Henry
2005 top pick by the Yankees, CJ Henry has signed up to go play basketball.

What makes Henry's decision particularly newsworthy is that he is the older brother of 6-6 small forward Xavier Henry, one of the top five players in the 2009 recruiting class.
C.J. Henry said Tuesday he is enrolling in classes at Memphis and will join the Tigers for the 2008-09 season. His contract states the Yankees will pay for his college, so he will be a walk-on for coach John Calipari at Memphis.

It will be Henry's first competitive basketball season in more than three years. He is 6-3 and was a successful high school player with big-time college ambitions before turning pro in baseball.

"It had to be a quick decision," Henry told Sporting News. "It came down to Memphis and Kansas, and I made the choice of Memphis because of the players they have there, and it'd be a great chance to win a national championship. Coach Calipari has a track record of putting players in the NBA."

Henry contacted Memphis and told the coaching staff he wanted to come. Calipari coached Carl Henry, C.J.'s father, when Carl played for Kansas in the mid-1980s.

Xavier Henry also will choose between Memphis and Kansas. A source close to the recruitment told Sporting News in July that Xavier is leaning toward choosing the Tigers.

"Before I even started thinking about which school," C.J. said, "I asked him what he thought about me going back and playing basketball. 'Would you be fine with it?' He said yes. 'What do you think about me going to Memphis?' He said, 'I don't care.' It's not going to affect his decision. I made the choice based on me, the best situation for me. And he's going to do the same."

He's a weird 'prospect', CJ Henry - he sure stretches the definition of the word. It's doubtful he even fits into the definition any more. The weird part is that he's going to come back and pay baseball for the Yankees next year. I sort of doubt it.

Of course in the intervening time since the 2005 draft, he was traded to the Phillies for Bobby Abreu; then cut, then picked up again by the Yankees earlier this year. If his sole function was to make the Bobby Abreu trade, then he has done more than enough for the Yankees, but it is weird that such a non-baseball type has lasted this long in the system. My guess is that he won't amount to much in basketball either, as we saw with Drew Henson and Football - so toegther with Eric Duncan, he underscores the failures of the Yankees to spot and develop the right kind of talent.

Mailbag

2008-08-25T21:47:00.005+10:00

Large Hadron Collider Nears Completion

Pleiades sent in this cool link showing some pictures of the Large Hadron Collier being built on the border of France and Switzerland.

Psychopaths Rule The World - That's Why It's Crazy
Here's another interesting link from Pleiades about the psychopaths who rise to positions of power.

Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, injure, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The inventor of civilization — the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers—was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies — especially military hierarchies.
Military institutions are tailor-made for psychopathic killers. The 5% or so of human males who feel no remorse about killing their fellow human beings make the best soldiers. And the 95% who are extremely reluctant to kill make terrible soldiers — unless they are brainwashed with highly sophisticated modern techniques that turn them (temporarily it is hoped) into functional psychopaths.
In On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has re-written military history, to highlight what other histories hide: The fact that military science is less about strategy and technology, than about overcoming the instinctive human reluctance to kill members of our own species. The true “Revolution in Military Affairs” was not Donald Rumsfeld’s move to high-tech in 2001, but Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall’s discovery in the 1940s that only 15-20% of World War II soldiers along the line of fire would use their weapons: “Those (80-85%) who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges” (Grossman, p. 4).
Marshall’s discovery and subsequent research, proved that in all previous wars, a tiny minority of soldiers — the 5% who are natural-born psychopaths, and perhaps a few temporarily-insane imitators—did almost all the killing. Normal men just went through the motions and, if at all possible, refused to take the life of an enemy soldier, even if that meant giving up their own. The implication: Wars are ritualized mass murders by psychopaths of non-psychopaths. (This cannot be good for humanity’s genetic endowment!)

Marshall’s work, brought a Copernican revolution to military science. In the past, everyone believed that the soldier willing to kill for his country was the (heroic) norm, while one who refused to fight was a (cowardly) aberration. The truth, as it turned out, was that the normative soldier hailed from the psychopathic five percent. The sane majority, would rather die than fight.

Pretty interesting reading. It echoes the Bolero section of 'Allegro Non Troppo' where the psychopathic chimp blows the world up.

Yankees Update

2008-08-24T11:06:00.009+10:00

Jeter Hits 2500th Hit

It's been a lackluster season in some ways for both the Yankees and Jeter, but Jeter did manage to make milestone by hitting his 2500th hit of his career. As usual, he gave his patented vanilla-flavoured-athlete-comment:

BALTIMORE (AP)—Derek Jeter is honored to be part of an exclusive club with Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. For now, however, the New York Yankees shortstop is more interested in keeping his team in the playoff hunt.

Jeter got his 2,500th hit Friday night, joining Gehrig (2,721) and Ruth (2,518) as the only players to reach the mark with the Yankees.

“Anytime your name is with someone like Gehrig and Ruth, it’s pretty special,” Jeter said. “To be quite honest with you, I don’t even think about it much because we’re trying to win games here. That’s something you reflect on maybe when your career’s over.”

New York entered Saturday trailing Boston by six games in the AL wild-card race. Jeter is doing his best to keep the Yankees’ hopes alive—he was batting .486 over his last eight games to raise his average 15 points to .296.

Jeter is the 88th player in baseball history to have 2,500 hits. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, in the last 65 years only two players were younger than Jeter (34 years, 57 days) when they reached the 2,500-hit plateau—Hank Aaron and Robin Yount.

“When you think about Derek Jeter, he’s been consistent through his whole career,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “He stayed healthy, plays everyday, works very hard at what he does. There aren’t a lot of people who have 2,500 hits. Shows you what kind of player he is. Been a very good player for a long time and he’s got a ways to go, still.”

God, the boringness of the comments from Jeter have been just as relentless over the years. It's like he took the 'Bull Durham' dictum of "give boring interviews" to heart at some point in his infancy and stuck to it for 30+years. Just like clockwork, he knocks out a milestone hit and says essentially the same thing he did when he knocked out his 2000th.
Well, we still love you Jetes.

Carl Pavano Sighting

Amazingly, the season has come to this: the rotation consists of Moose, Pettite, Sir Sidney Ponson, Darrell Rasner, and now Carl Pavano. Wang, and Joba are sidelined with injuries, Phil Hughes too, but he was effectively demoted, just as IPK was; and Dan Giese who did so well is out with injury as well.

So, Carl Pavano it is is.

BALTIMORE (TICKER) —With the New York Yankees in desperate need of starting pitching, the team is turning to an unlikely source - Carl Pavano.

Pavano, who has not pitched in the major leagues since April 2007, was activated from the 60-day disabled list and returned to the Yankees’ injury-riddled rotation Saturday against the Baltimore Orioles.

New York’s Opening Day starter last season, Pavano underwent “Tommy John” surgery two starts into 2007. It was supposed to be a comeback season for Pavano, who missed the entire 2006 campaign with a variety of ailments, including two broken ribs suffered in an automobile accident.

But that comeback was put on hold indefinitely, as the 6-5 starter needed more than a year of rehab and recovery. In five rehab starts at Class A Charleston and Class AA Trenton since July, Pavano went 1-1 with a 3.31 ERA in 19 innings. In his most recent tune-up, he struck out six over six innings for Trenton, giving up a one run.

That was good enough for Yankees manager Joe Girardi, who is hurting for depth on his pitching staff. Ace Chien-Ming Wang has been out since mid-June with a torn tendon in his right foot, and second-year phenom Joba Chamberlain is sidelined with tendinitis in his rotator cuff.

Top prospect Phil Hughes, who has been nursing a fractured rib, was a candidate to start, but his recent rehab outings have not been promising.

That leaves it up to Pavano, who is 5-6 in 19 starts over the last three seasons.

Pavano signed his lucrative four-year, $39.95 million deal with the Yankees after a breakout 2004 season in which he went 18-8 for the Florida Marlins and finished sixth in the National League Cy Young Award voting.

He began his Yankees career in stellar fashion, throwing 6 1/3 strong innings to defeat the division-rival Boston Red Sox - who also had coveted him during the offseason but lost out in the bidding war for his services - in the second game of the 2005 season.

Since, it’s been all downhill for Pavano, who went 4-6 with a 4.77 ERA in 17 starts in 2005 and missed the last two months of the season with an injured right shoulder.

Thus in the 4 years, he's made half a season's worth of starts in which he's been just under league average. Had he done so for the other 3 and a half seasons worth of starts that got given to the assorted combo of Shawn Chacon, Aaron Small (who both did okay by the Yanks), Darrell Rasner, and whoever else that the waiver-wire scouring threw up, this might have been a sort of all right contract.

I know that earlier in the year I said if the Yankees ever needed to go so deep as to require Pavano to pitch at any point in the season, this season would be a disaster. Well, it is that disaster now.

Melky Cabrera
I jinxed the guy at the beginning of May. He did look very good at that point in time.
Since then, he's been nothing short of a disaster, so he finds himself in AAA Scranton Wilkes-Barre. In his place is Brett Gardner but it remains to be seen if he can do significantly better than Melky.

I think I pointed out the last time I delved into it, but his BABIP has been disappointing for this season - .264 is 36 points lower than his norm of about .300. If you put those 36 points back on to his line it would amount to an Ave of .278 and an OBP of .363; which is sort of what the Yankees were looking at on paper as the season started. His ISO is around .110 so his SLG would have been about .470, so he should've been about a .830 OPS player. Instead he turned in .633.

I'm not really willing to write the guy's future off, but this year sure was an unmitigated disaster for young Melky. Wouldn't you know it, he's killing the ball in AAA.

Play Off Odds
The erstwhile fellas at RLYW have a beautiful pie chart showing the Yankee's chances of making the playoffs. It's not encouraging:

You'd have to say they're toast.
I don't think I've felt this toasty in a long, long, long time. I'm kind of resigned to it in as much as there hasn't been a Yankee team with enough pitching since 2003. This year was going to be transitional, and a lot of things did go wrong.

Sick In Bed

2008-08-21T18:00:00.003+10:00

Stomach Flu Is Not Much Fun
For a few days I've just had this gastroenteritis. Anything I eat except crackers goes through me like I am a digestive non-entity. Nearly crapped my pants 3 times a day for 4 days now. Anyway, I'm getting better now.

View From The Couch - Olympic Softball

I caught the play-off game between Australia and Japan that went into extended innings. Of course the Olympics being the Olympics, they have a special rule for extended innings where both teams start with a runner on second, to speed up the game. Of course if the managers are idiots, then the game does not get shortened by a great deal, as evinced by the 12 inning game. That's almost 2 games in one, so clearly it didn't work.

Pleiades rang up during the break between the 7th and 8th and asked me what I thought. At the time I thought it was a nice tight game. But then as the innings progressed, it dawned on me that these managers were going to Sacrifice Bunt every lead off hitter. I got depressed just watching.

The game was already a low-scoring Pitcher's duel as the game stumbled into extended innings with a 2-2 scoreline. What was really annoying to see from both teams was that the first batter in each of these extended innings laid down a sacrifice bunt to move the runner over from Second to Third. The crazy thing is that the runner on second is in scoring position already - that's the point. So what you should be looking to do is simply get a hit to score that run, with 3 outs to do it. Not sac bunt that runner over, and try to score that runner with 2 outs in hand.

Now call me Bill James' long lost cousin, but it plain sucks to see so many outs wasted. Indeed, Australia scored a go ahead run in the inning when they didn't sac bunt, but swung away. The Japanese also scored a run in the bottom of the inning, but that was also swinging for it albeit after an unnecessary bunt. Had they not bunted, they might have won it in the bottom of the 11th.
It was as if neither manager wanted to win.

Let's put it another way. The run expectancy on a 0-out runner on 2nd situation is actually 1.189 to the end of the inning. This is compared to the 0.555 of 0-out, nobody on:

That's a chart I stole from here.
Now, that's from the MLB 1999-2002 seasons, but I can't imagine that Softball is skewed significantly differently to the above. So the managers are given roughly half-a-run advantage to score 1 run, which would stand up if your closer is Mariano River or Trevor Hoffman. The thing is, the other team also gets the same leg up in the bottom of the inning. In a sense, that runner on 2nd is illusory in that you start with a runner on second against you in the other half of the inning. That is to say, the other team has the same run expectancy to score that run right back.

So if you really want to put a winning margin on the other team, you have to score more than the bonus runner, because chances are, they have a just as good chance of scoring that runner on 2nd... except in this game, both managers quickly converted their runner on 2nd, 0-out into Runner on 3rd, 1 out.

Runner on 3rd 1 Out has a run expectancy of 0.983, which is just under a run. So you can see that by sac bunting the bonus runner across, the team has subtracted from its run value by a quarter of a run and made it less of a sure bet. Sure, the hitter could fly out and the runner stays on second for an even less (0.725); but you still have to look at scoring more than the bonus runner for the same reasons. A Sac Bunt is giving away a precious out.

The best way to put it is this: if you play for 1-run, that's all you will get. And when the opposing team gets the same bonus runner, then it's a moot point whether you really are closer to the end of the game by having that bonus runner on 2nd base - unless your opponent manager returns the stupid favor of sac-bunting their bonus runner over. Which is exactly what happened in the seemingly interminable game.

Other things I saw that made me wonder:
Was Australia's Pitcher really called 'Tanya Harding'?
Was Australia's Catcher really called 'Titcume'?

From the Mailbag

2008-08-16T17:44:00.007+10:00

Some Stuff From Pleiades

Pleiades has sent in a couple of interesting links.
No.1 is interesting, contrarian commentary from Uruknet, which is dare I say some kind of Pro-Saddam English language site in/about Iraq.

The ruling, by Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle -- a long-time right-wing apparatchik -- must be seen to be believed. As Reuters reports:

Government employees who engage in questionable acts, such as abusing prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility or engaging in defamatory speech, cannot be held individually liable if they are carrying out official duties, the court said.

"The conduct, then, was in the defendants' scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States," Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in the opinion.

WP's excellent analysis of the ruling and its implications should be read in full. But here is a taste, from his conclusion:

So let's recap, shall we? A Federal court has ruled that some of the highest officials in our government are not accountable for their acts of treason, mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity -- not because they were following orders (for surely some of them, especially Karl Rove and Dick Cheney [photo], were giving the orders); not because they thought they were doing something righteous or Blessed by God; but simply because they held positions in the United States government -- regardless of the fact that these actions violated the most serious federal and international laws, regardless of the fact that they all knew their actions were deeply illegal, and regardless of the fact that they were never legitimately elected to those government positions in the first place -- or legitimately re-elected in the second place.

Furthermore, the court decrees, this immunity applies not only to the principals in this case but to all manner of American government officials committing all manner of horrific crimes -- including torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Did you get that? Do you finally get it now?

And these are the people who preach to the world about democracy and freedom and rule of law.

Well, maybe. The guy I work for likes to say "Sucks to be you!" when ever he gets his way over other people. I think it's a descendant of the Thucydides notion that the strong do as they do and the weak can only deal with the strong in the capacities which they can.

No.2 is the actual source quoted in the article. I think the point is this:

It is interesting -- and horrifying! -- to note that this decision ventures well beyond the "just following orders" defense which was used by the Nazi war criminals and found wanting at Nuremberg.

It even goes beyond the "divine right of government officials" long desired by the Dominionists of the allegedly "Christian" so-called "Right". At least under the proposed "Constitution Restoration Act", government officials would have to claim they believed they were carrying out the will of God in order to be absolved of their crimes.

Now, at best I'm not big on War Crimes Tribunals - On bad days I think they are a bad joke. I mean, hanging Saddam or Milosevic or Karadzic is just so little compensation for the vast pain and suffering they visited upon ordinary people. trying them makes us feel better as it serves to make it look like justice is being served but it's always just a political front - And then to kill them in a kangaroo-court-sanctioned execution is pathetically inadequate. They can only pay with one death for millions. Calling it justice is an insult to the idea of justice. But that's just me.

So Thucydides is right. The strong do as they do. The rest of the world just has to deal with it in the ways that they can.

News That's Fit To Punt

2008-08-14T21:19:00.008+10:00

Hello Big Foot?

In amidst the excitement of the Beijing Olympics is news that Big Foot (insert guffaw here) albeit as a cropse, has been found. Yes, that's right, Big Foot, a.k.a. Sasquatch has been the elusive beast of the wild in the North American continent since the famous footage of 1967, but to my amazement there have been people *hunting* for him all this time.

TWO US professional Bigfoot hunters claim to have found a body of the legendary creature and will present evidence of the astounding discovery to the world's press and scientists tomorrow.

Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, who run Bigfoot expeditions, say they found a dead Bigfoot in the woods of north Georgia, in the southeast of the US, about two weeks ago and have put the carcass in a freezer.

They along with "the real Bigfoot Hunter" Tom Biscardi, who has endorsed the find, will front a press conference in California, where they say DNA and photo proof will be presented.

Mr Whitton, a Georgia police officer on leave to recover from a shooting, and Mr Dyer, a former prison officer, have posted photos of their "find" on their searchingforbigfoot website.

They describe the creature as being a 2.3m tall "part human and part ape" male and weighing over 230kg with reddish hair and blackish-grey eyes.

The infamous feet are described as being flat and 41cm long with five toes.

I'm glad to hear the feet are as advertised. There's something so idiotic about this that you hope it is a passing hoax that will be debunked quickly, but something tells me it's going to turn into such a media circus of claims and counter claims that the scientists will never get a clear shot at it - like Cold Fusion or UFO sightings.

The Montauk Monster

Then there's this other internet sensation story about a corpse of a creature that washed up on the East Coast of USA.

Dubbed the Montauk Monster after the Long Island town where it was found, the creature has prompted speculation it was part of a secret mutant breeding program undertaken by the US Government.

I don't know. It's just too much. As if that' not enough...

The Alleged Yeti Hair In DNA Lab Tests

This is even nuttier.

A BRITISH scientist is anxiously awaiting the results of DNA tests on hair claimed to be from a yeti after initial examinations showed it had human and ape-like characteristics.

Ian Redmond, a biologist and expert in ape conservation, said the hairs found in the Indian jungle resembled samples collected by the conqueror of Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, in the 1950s.

"Under the microscope, they look slightly human, slightly like an orang-utan and slightly like the hairs brought back by Edmund Hillary," Dr Redmond said.

"These hairs remain an enigma. They could be a new species, but the DNA tests will hopefully tell us more."

The hairs were brought back from India this year by BBC journalist Alastair Lawson, who contacted Dr Redmond and was put in touch with a team at Oxford Brookes University in south central England.

Lawson was given the hairs by yeti believer Dipu Marak, who retrieved them them in dense jungle in the Meghalaya state of India after a forester allegedly spotted the creature on three consecutive days in 2003.

Mr Marak believes the hairs come from an ape-like Indian version of the fabled yeti, or abominable snowman, called mande barung, which he believes stands about 3m tall.

Dr Redmond and scientists from Oxford Brookes examined the hairs last Thursday under powerful microscopes, comparing them with samples taken from an Asiatic black bear, yaks, orang utangs and gorillas at Oxford's Natural History Museum and even a hair from Dr Redmond's beard.

"The hairs are complete with the cuticle, and between 3.3cm and 4.4cm long and thick and wiry and curved," Dr Redmond said.

"At one point we thought they looked like they came from a wild boar. That was quite a tense moment, but when we got a sample from the museum it turned out they were quite different."

Dr Redmond also contacted the English laboratory that analysed the hairs brought back by Hillary in the 1950s from his Everest expedition and found they were similar in appearance.

While the microscope tests were inconclusive, the hairs are now undergoing DNA tests in separate laboratories in Oxford and Cardiff.

Dr Redmond admitted his excitement at a potential scientific breakthrough was tinged with fear.

"My concern is that if we do find something unusual, it will be from a very small population of animals and I would want to talk to the State Government and Indian Government so they are not inundated with people trying to catch one for a museum.

The mind boggles. The picture up to of this section is Sir Edmund Hillary with an alleged Yeti scalp.

Meanwhile In Texas...
I just want to offer you this link.

The animal appears to have a long snout and forelegs slightly shorter than the hind legs, the textbook, or rather folkloric, description of the animal that likes to attack livestock, particularly goats, and drink their blood. Short-haired (rather than hairless like the classic chupacabra) the dread beast looks like a small dog, or perhaps a coyote crossed with a small dog such as a pit bull.

Uh-huh.

What I'm Working On

2008-08-11T17:28:00.003+10:00

One Last Time

I'm prepping a CD of 'Satellite City: Live at the Manning Bar'. Yes, I'm re-working those recordings one last time. Sometimes I feel like I've polished these recordings so hard there's nothing left of them to enjoy for myself. However, it is this one last time because after this process is done, I'm consigning it to history - and so I should. I've been the custodian of these recordings for the last 19 years and (yes, you read that right, 19 years!) it's getting to the point where if I can't get this off my plate for good, I'm just going to not deal with it at all.

Even so, I trotted on to Sydney Uni campus to get some photos of the Manning Bar - and it was closed so I ended up with some photos of just the Manning House from outside. It's been years since I'd been on campus; so damn long that I couldn't even recollect my angst of trudging past the Physics Building towards and away from the Bosch Lecture Theatres. All I could recall was a vague feeling of discontent and not belonging. Winters used to be shit, and summers were shit too. I used to hate it, but it was long past the embers' last flash of anger in that fire.

When I listen to it as closely as I have done, all the faults manifest themselves mercilessly while the actual *good* seems to recede more and more. It's hard to explain but I feel buried in the faults getting more and more depressed. All the charming mistakes and bum-notes just revert to being just that, while the added clarity actually sheds light on what exactly it was that was being played. You know this used to be good and fun, you think, but the process keeps demanding closer inspections of things that perhaps are better left to sleep in time.

Yet I have a memory of what it was like to play these songs on those particular nights - and its significance still resonates within me, and it is that which keeps me at the grind. The pleasant surprise is, there are people actually waiting for these recordings. I guess the best outlook is that this time next year, it would all be history at long last. Until then, it is one last herculean effort to get it right. Really, the last step is just getting it self-published and them I'm done. I feel like I'm staggering to the finish line with this thing and when it's all said and done, I'll crack open a scotch in a lonely room and have one last listen and be *done*.

First Memories of Politics

2008-08-07T21:42:00.005+10:00

Post-Watergate Generation - Gen-X Style

It's been bothering me for some weeks now that any time I stop to think about politics an politicians, my mind turns to preconceived cynical positions - that they are tax-spending, self-indulgent, corrupt, power-hungry, self-centered, costly narcissists, living on hefty sums from the public purse. That if you took most of the suits an expensive trappings away, you'd find naked ambition incarnate. None of it's good. And when it comes to my gut feeling about how they impact our world, I see them more as ineffectual or arbitrarily tyrannical but mostly incompetent. This is probably not true, so I have been wrestling with where these thoughts came from.

I've been chatting with Terry McGee lately, when I see him on the odd occasion, and it turns out he once ran for office. He didn't win, but he did run. In other words, he had great faith in the system. I couldn't believe it, but it's true. And he is very proctive about issues and participation. When we do chat, he seems to find my degree of profound cynicism pretty disturbing. So I told him of my political memories and he sort of smiled and said, "That's different. The worst thing then, that Watergate did was rob a generation of people their political faith; and you're just another casualty. That's probably why governments try to cover things up. They're protecting the children."
Interesting thought.
Terry says he grew up across the road from a MP, and that was enough for him to look up to politics as a noble cause. Maybe Terry is right, and we of the Post-Watergate Generation got really jobbed.

Thus I began to ponder what my first recollections of politics was about, and then it hit me. It was Richard Nixon resigning over the Watergate incident. I remember bobbing up an down in a suburban pool with some fellow kids from the primary school and the conversation was about what a bad man Richard Nixon was to have be forced into resigning as POTUS (we didn't quite use the term POTUS, but it's late night typing so...). We didn't quite understand it, but what I remember talking about was how Nixon made some people do illegal break and enter jobs - and POTUS really should not be sponsoring such activity. That was 1974 - a great year for prog rock records but an awful year for politics.

I remember watching the movie 'All The President's Men' on television at some point, and while we never see Richard Nixon himself, the film made a great impression upon me of just how crooked the man was - and while revisionist histories come an go to rehabilitate his legacy, the biggest impression it may have left is on Generation X who won't trust politicians. I'm sure I'm not alone in this outlook. My school friends certainly weren't.

Another thing that left an impression on me was the 1976Lockheed Bribery Scandal in Japan which brought down indictments against Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka. Within 2 years I had witness 2 heads of governments brought down by their own wrong-doing. After that, what can a poor boy think of politicians but as corrupt bastards? I don't think I ever got over it in the sense that I have never found any of these people admirable on a personal level.
Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, these men are all deeply flawed in my eyes. The list of Japanese Prime Minsters is even worse.

The other thing is this: my own adage about Politics has been since my High School days, 'Won't Get Fooled Again'. Why? Apart from the fact that The Who left an indelible impression my thinking back then, it really comes down the great suspicions it levels against ideologies and ideologues. In that sense, the song allows a teen to confront the unfairness of teachers, school, and even the petty boss presiding over the crappy summer jobs. So even if it's true that the new boss is the same as the old boss, as long as we practice a healthy cynicism towards politicians, it seems to me we will be safe.

When I got to University, it was a year after the Australian Union of Students had collapsed (Thanks to Peter Fucking Costello!). There was a great sense of loathing floating around University of Sydney Campus over that. What I remember most vividly is a cartoon by Adam Long where he wrote:

1. Dogs lick their balls
2. Dogs lick each other's balls
3. but there's one thing that dogs won't do and
4. that's indulge in Student Politics.

In other words, politics was shit. You got the feeling from the ambience on campus, ALL politics was shit, and it was. Somehow, these things then became the building blocks of my political perception. They were lying, cheating, power-hungry mutts with fleas, but worse.

So when it comes to the recent Obamamania, it leaves me a little cold. For heaven's sakes, he's a politician, I think. How different could he really be? How different would he be to any of his crap POTUS predecessors? When he preaches 'change', I think about Bill Clinton's campaigns - and I recall in 1992 how suspicious I felt about him too.

What does all this mean? It means that my jaundiced view is perhaps an inevitable product of the times in which I've lived and that when I do go and have a go at them and they wince, they've only got themselves to blame. :)

Obituaries

2008-08-07T18:14:00.005+10:00

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn passed away this week.

He was born on December 11 1918, in Kislovodsk, southern Russia, and grew up a loyal communist and staunch supporter of the Soviet regime. Solzhenitsyn studied physics and mathematics at Rostov University before becoming a Soviet army officer after Hitler's invasion in 1941. As a student he edited the Komsomol newspaper and was awarded one of only seven Stalin scholarships for outstanding social and scholastic achievement.
It was while at university that he began to write short stories, and drafted the plan for an immense Tolstoyan novel intended to celebrate the October revolution. But his devotion to socialist principles and indiscreet hostility to Stalin's autocratic rule led to his undoing.
Shortly before the war's end, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the labour camps.
For many years he had little expectation that his writings would see the light of day but the daring One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich caused a sensation. Its revelations about Stalin's policies and the evils of the labour camps were described as "a literary miracle". Within weeks his name was known all over the world.
Last night the Russian government expressed its condolences over his death. "President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to Solzhenitsyn's family," a Kremlin spokesman said.

Back in the day when I had literary ambitions, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's work stood there forbiddingly telling me I didn't have the kinds of life experiences from which to base great fiction upon. I would start reading Gulag Archipelago and just want to cringe and die at the thought that I had something important to say. Now I know better - I don't - which is why I write this blog. Yes, there were other writers with more style or more insight, or more moral authority, but Sozhenitsyn was the living literary witness to the devastation of Stalinism. If Orwell was able to describe the mechanism of such brutality in Animal Farm, Solzhenitsyn was the man who copped the brunt of that mechanism.

As such, it's kind of weird to see how conservatives took Solzhenitysn to their collective bosoms as the leading light of anti-communism. It sort of glosses over his literary achievement. Of course that all got lost in the shuffle of Perestroika, Glasnost and the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall. You don't see the same conservatives lining to save the other people on the planet who are caught in other awkward, awful situations. Some of them even create them, like Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray, but we won't get into that today.

So now Solzhenitsyn is gone, you sort of wonder if his work is going to continue to carry that weight going forwards into history. How much relevance do such texts hold in a world given over to iPhone releases and instant gratification.
Anyway, I'm sort of meditating on all this and drawing a blank. Does anybody care to offer a comment?

The Bank Job

2008-08-02T22:05:00.009+10:00

More Fiction Than Fact, But Fun!

That's it, that's most of my review... So repeat after me with your best husky cockney tone: "what's it all about then eh, Jason?"

What's Good About It
I don't know why crime fiction from England is so compelling. The robbers in the East End, the sleuths, the crooked cops, the journalists, the politicians, the prostitutes and pimps; it's all a never ending circus of characters that make up the vast ocean of crime fiction in England. This film lands somewhere in the tradition with the attendant trappings. It's one part 'Get Carter', one part 'Italian Job' and one part 'The Ipcress File' - All of them are some-time-cockney-boy-done-good Michael Caine's movies. If if were still 1971, I'm guessing it would be Michael Caine organising the gang that goes digging into the vault.

Luckily for us, it's not Caine's cine-successor Jude Law doing the stuff, but a more rough-around-the-edge Jason Statham. I don't know why, but his baldness and scruffy charm lends a certain credibility to his life-weary character. He is a wonderful star who carries enough baggage into the role to understand what we are seeing is highly contextual. Indeed, the world of London Crime in the 1970s is something that requires a nuanced, relativist mindset to navigate. Prostitution and porn, graft and greed, high office and bondage, all roll around in the mud joyously and it takes a seasoned-looking Statham to make it look overwhelming as a daily grind.

Then there is the preposterous connectivity of the narrative that links John and Yoko through to Lord Moutbatten via Porn Barons, black activists, crooked cops and the MI5. It's all very entertaining how the screenwriters manage to juggle so many balls in the air and still get the story to hang together. Indeed, it's dressed like a heist movie, but it's only when they get to the vault to find that what they find does the story hit the thrill-gear - and that's not a bad choice.

Tim, the MI5 guy looks like an echo of Connery's James Bond - dapper, casual, with a hint of capacity for incredible violence. The Conservative politicians look like echoes of the type who got caught in the Profumo affair; and the cars look just fabulously 1971. A Ford Cortina actually looks fresh on the London streets in this film. As period pieces go, this one is very nice with many laughable touches.

What's bad About It
I imagine English boys who know the terrain so well would actually object to this film. If you're far away from London as I am and live in an entirely different kind of corrupt town, the shenanigans of the underclass of London is actually quite amusing entertainment fare.

Also, I'm not really sure about the claims to truth. For instance, the film places Gale Ann Benson as an MI5 operative undercover - which may be true, but there are indications to the contrary - you only need to dig around with Google. I guess I'm left wondering about the facts and in so doing I feel a little disappointment with the conception of the film.
Having said all that, if the worst thing I can think of is that it plays a little hard and fast with the facts, then what am I really saying?

True Story, Loosely Based On Fact
Well, there was a bank robbery, to be sure...

Films are suppose to be fanciful. To go watch a movie and then complain that it's fanciful is a little like going to a brothel and complaining that there's too much sex going on. One of the big myths about cinema and even cinema verite documentary making is that there is a literary 'Naturalist' representation of anything going on in front of the lens; or that this naturalistic representation survives the process where there is picture editing, sound effects added, music composed, and then colour-graded. It's just not feasible that any object can go through this process and be naturalistic or for that matter approach the kind of literary naturalism or realism.

Cinematic meaning is a lot more motile and fleeting than that, and we should all be aware that we could all be misreading the text - but that's all okay. Texts are there to be fundamentally misread. My year 12 English teacher Mr Lucas would spew, but that's the kind of world we live in now. So just because they say it's based on a true story, don't complain when it doesn't ring true. After all, we live in post-Post-Modern Times where authoritative texts are largely stripped of the said gravitas. There is no space for capital 'T' truths in the Dream Factory. The rest is just... entertainment.

Criminality, 1970s Style

If I were doing a 'movie double', the film I would pull out of the video store would be 'American Gangster'. Both feature a moment in history when Black activism crossed over into violence and crime as well as shed insight into the nature of how crime and policing inevitably seem to meet up, resulting in corruption. Simply put, the amount of money in crime grew so fast and far outstripped the capacity of police to pay enough to its own.

Indeed, revelations this week about the late Abe "Mr. Sin" Saffron in our own city of Sydney and his relationship with the police and politicians shows that there was a point in time in the First World that was totally vulnerable to this problem. It's actually a mystery if it ever really ended. Here's a dose of the SMH article:

THE disgraced former Liberal premier Bob Askin was not only on the payroll of the late crime boss Abe Saffron, but was the recipient of payments via horse races that were fixed as "a courtesy to premier Askin".

Askin and a police commissioner were among those who received thousands of dollars a week from Saffron, the crime figure's son has confirmed in a book on his father, to be released soon.

Saffron was also involved in loan sharking. One of his borrowers was Kerry Packer.

Despite Saffron's lifelong denial of involvement in criminal activity, in Gentle Satan Saffron's only son, Alan, 59, says his father controlled the vice trade, including illegal gambling and prostitution, in every state except Tasmania and the Northern Territory, and bribed a host of politicians and policemen to ensure he was protected.

At one stage, the American "Mob" tried to persuade Saffron to operate a casino in Las Vegas on its behalf, but his father declined, he said.

Mr Saffron details his father's "excellent business relationship and long-standing friendship" with Askin and the police commissioner of the day, Norm Allan, who died in 1977. Questions were asked about the size of Askin's estate, almost $2 million, when he died in 1981. Askin was knighted in 1972, while he was premier.

"There have been many accounts of my father's relationship with these two men but none realised the depth of his association and influence. Both were totally corrupt and my father's excellent business brain and complete integrity in his dealings with them allowed him to exploit their greed to its fullest," he writes.

It's really hard to stomach this sort of criminality where top elected officials are on the take, but there you go. The pay offs were $5,000 to $10,000 per week in 1970s money. Just think about the enormity of such sums. Why wouldn't a cop go on the take?
Compared to that, you sort of wonder why blackmail photos of Princess Margaret having an orgy in the Carribean is such a big deal.

A Nice Touch
At one point, Terry falls into a burial cavern that dates to 1665 - the year of the Great plague of London. It's poignant to recognise history is everywhere in a town like London.

The nice touch they missed is this: Sherlock Holmes' office was on the corner of Baker Street and Marylebone Road - something that was not missed by the real robbers who spray-painted: "Let Sherlock Holmes try to solve this."

Yankees Update

2008-07-31T18:02:00.006+10:00

Farnsworth For Pudge

The Yankees traded for I-Rod, sending Farnsworth in exchange. The outlook on an emotional level is it's a win-win-win.
Win 1. Subtracting Farnsworth and the attendant frustrations of Farnsworthness.
Win 2. Upgrading Catcher from a Molina-Moeller tandem to a I-Rod-Molina tandem.
Win 3. If the Yankees should contend against the Tigers for the Wild Card or even in the play offs, it's nice knowing their bullpen features Kyle Farnsworth.

Other than that here are some quantitative observations using Fangraphs.
Kyle Farnsworth is pitching reasonably well this year.
There are two features to his success this year, he's not letting them hit homers off him, and he has a high LOB%. Otherwise he's striking out a few more guys than league average, and walking about league average. This all translates into an ERA+ of about 113.
Looking roughly at the difference with League average, we're talking about 0.50 runs per 27 outs over average, unadjusted. If he makes 30 appearance of 1 inning each until the end of the season, we're talking about 3.3 x 0.50= 1.65runs saved above average. Hardly anything to write home about.
More importantly there are other pitchers in the Yankee system ready to step up to deliver that kind of pitching.

Ivan Rodriguez is having an all right year by his lofty standards followed by some years of less-than-stellar production.
He's been slightly lucky with BABIP, and even allowing for that, his RC/27 is bang on average. So as a hitter, he's kind of just on average with a OPS+ of 101. The big clue here as to why this exchange of average players is big is because of this graph:

The Yankees were getting way below average production from their Catcher position. With Jorge Posada out for the rest of the season, the Yankees have been gutting it out with Jose Molina and Chad Moeller, which has been detrimental to the run-scoring end of the game.
Thus, even if Pudge reverts to last year's level of production he's better than either one of them this year. That 2-run difference between Pudge and Molina in say, 150 games translates to about 30 runs, which is 3 wins better. So with about 1/3rd of the season left, the Yankees are now looking at a 1 win upgrade on what they had with Molina.

Tom Morello

2008-07-30T07:58:00.003+10:00

Rage Against The...?

These links came in from Pleiades. Check them out:

...and this is an interesting interview:

Movie Doubles

2008-07-27T09:17:00.013+10:00

Apropos To 'Rambo'...
The last 'movie double' I did stretched me (and credulity) a bit so I'm going to handle 2 films with at least a modicum of common concern. Today's movie double combo is 'Charlie Wilson's War' and 'Lions for Lambs'
Coming out of watching Rambo and reminiscing about the 1980s and the war in Afghanistan, it seemed appropriate to at least look at what other texts were floating around at the moment to explain the mess, so to speak.

The Fighting In Afghanistan

Afghanistan is one of those places where you grow up thinking one day they'll stop fighting. The problem is that the fighting has been going on for so long, it's become all they know. As demonised as it was at the time, the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan was fueled by the constant irritation of Afghan conflicts spilling over into mother Russia over the northern border. A little like how Chechens fight on so close to Moscow is still a irritant.

In a sense, the world jumped on the Soviets because they were communists and chose to ignore why they might drive tanks over the borders in the first place. Certainly, we would not expect the Americans to drive over the border into Mexico just because of the drug trade irritation, but in the 19th century, they did, and that's how they got California and Texas. The point is, the Afghan War for the Russians started in 1980. That's more than way over half of my life that conflict has ripped Afghanistan.

If what the 'Rambo III' movie showed was a naive pro-resistance, anti-communist posturing, 'Charlie Wilson's War' reveals that the US Government was operating with about the same idiotically simple schema. So great a perceived threat was the Soviet Communism, the US government showered the Mujihadeen with weapons with which to fight the commies. They didn't quite need John Rambo, but they sure sent a whole lot of special forces types to deliver these weapons to these people to fight the proxy war. Indeed, it was this kind of ex-military bravado of Congressman Wilson from the second ward of Texas, that culminates in the Russian retreat.

The film also covers the aftermath, where Charlie Wilson is unable to secure any money to rebuild the war-torn nation - thus laving Afghanistan to the dreadful civil wars of the 1990s.
By the time the story has moved on to the present day, it is America that is now stuck in Afghanistan fighting the war that the Russians had fought. Does this remind people of something? yes, it reminds us of the Vietnam War - ad this is where Robert Redford steps in with his film, 'Lions For Lambs'. What is clear from his film is that as well-intended as it might be, America has not really come to grips with the war it is fighting in Afghanistan.

Echoes of Vietnam - A Little Digression

Just to be a little pedantic I want to run past a pet theory of mine.
My theory goes like this: The greatest threat to the US in the 20th Century was ideology, and the two main ideologies it confronted were Fascism and Communism. In fact there are indications that FDR's long presidency fomented the conditions whereby World War II took the shape that it did. In part it pushed Japan in with the Fascists, and then aggressively blocked trade in order to provoke the attack on Pearl Harbor - yes, the Day that Lives in Infamy, that FDR worked very hard to produce. Admiral Yamamoto might have been the star villain of the day, but FDR pretty much produced that show.

The end result was Japan surrendering to the USA, and thus reverting to the Constitutional Monarchy that it was as late as 1930. Japan's problem was that after Russia it was the country with the most sold copies of Marx's 'Capital' - the Bible for Communists everywhere. So part of the reason Japan lurched to the right in the 1930s was the great fear of Communism as well as the Russian threat to the north. Which explains the Manchurian state as a project to create a buffer state.

Anyway. With the defeat of anti-communist, Fascist Japan in 1945, the USA had to become guarantor for Japan's security in exchange of Japan giving up arms 'forever' in its 'Peace Constitution' as written by MacArthur's GHQ. It was a very clever move by Shigeru Yoshida, because it produced three key results. Japan was able to be America's ally without providing arms or lives; Japan no longer had to confront Communism by itself in the Far East, that job fell to the USA; and Japan prospered economically as a result.

So the pay off of my big theory is this: the USA was fighting the Vietnam War on behalf of Japan.
That's it.
Had WWII not taken shape the way it did and Japan sided with the West, then Japan would have kept its military presence in South East Asia. It would have fallen to Japan to combat Communism in the wake of France pulling out of Indochina, not America. Instead, America got it self dragged into the slip-stream of the evacuating French, and ended up having to expand the war bit by bit - legitimacy be damned.

The logical extension to my theory is that the War in Afghanistan for the US is a war that it inherited from the Russians in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet State, just as it had inherited the Vietnam War from a vacated power in the Far East.

Still Fighting In Afghanistan

The natural question that begs to be answered is, "why are we still fighting in Afghanistan?"
Neither of these films actually come close to addressing the issue in any adequate way or form. It is clear that for both these films and film makers, Afghanistan is a phenomenon in the Husserl sense. It's out there and our cognition struggles to come to grips with it. It's just not manifestly real enough - instead it is understood through the distorted looking glass of the media. Afghanistan may as well be on Mars or in Narnia for most Americans.

'CWW' delivers on to the fact that the war in Afghanistan from the Afghan perspective is a religious war. It is Julia Roberts' Texan fundraiser character who believes in a crusade against the God-less Communists that lobbies Tom Hanks' rather sardonic, secular Charlie Wilson in supporting the Afghans against the Russians. It is also the Allah Akbar/God is Great chant that convinces Ned Beatty's Arms Committee chief to back Charlie Wilson.

Perhaps what gets lost in the shuffle is that the Afghans were willing to shake hands with the capitalist Christian 'Great Satan' in order to defeat the Godless Communists, and that alliance was never going to endure history. It's a little disconcerting that Charlie Wilson went to help these people and he reduced the help down to sending more weapons. The whole operation to Afghanistan has ballooned into the great black market for arms in Northern Pakistan, and continues to destabilise the region; but the film is incredibly *light* in discussing those issues.

In 'LFL', Afghanistan is like the surface of the meteor in 'Armageddon'. It is dark with blue light onto black edgy rocks, with deep snow. Two stranded soldiers US soldiers fight to the death with Taliban fighters we never get to see face to face. No glory-gore of Rambo IV here; just a prosaic tragedy. What's even sadder is that the best discourse the film has to offer as to why they are in Afghanistan is delivered by Tom Cruise, who says with the same Scientology-Stare to Meryl Streep "Do you want to win the War on Terror, yes or no?"
When Streep's character prevaricates, he thunders "It's a very simple question, Yes or No?"

It actually reminded me of the way he said "There'll be no more of this spectator-ism. You're either in the game or get out of the stadium!" in that horrible Scientology video that did the rounds. I think Tom Cruise's credibility as a human being took a huge hit with that interview.
Anyway, it's clear that 'LFL' is saying they don't really know why the USA is in Afghanistan, and that what it is trying to do there."

Let's face it, we live in a time when the First World is facing two ugly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as seeing the multitude of conflicts in Africa and elsewhere; and Tom Cruise's central metaphysical concern is building a five-panic-room house in Colorado for the day Xenu attacks Earth.
Err... right, Tom.

In any case, it's not entirely clear why the Americans are there but for repeated references to September 11. I don't think that is all there is to it, so I don't know why we choose to dumb ourselves down by thinking that is the case. By the same token, the film does a bit of disservice to itself there.

Cryptic Title

Just what does 'Lions For Lambs' Mean? you might ask.
It's a reference made in the film that explains it is how WWI Germans saw the English Army - that their soldiers were brave as Lions, but the Generals were like Lambs.
I'm not so sure the simile works at all. it's not that the USA command is meek. It's more like it's Blind to circumstance, Deaf to criticism and decidedly tactical when it probably needs to be thought more broadly strategic terms.
The film only delivers half the point. The big point it does deliver is that Tom Cruise really is an acting light weight when played against to Meryl Streep. He's simply awful in this film - a bit like a lamb sent out to face a lioness.

Hollywood Liberalism

The GOP always complains that Hollywood is pro-Democrat. This is from the party that boasts Clint Eastwood AND Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Still, you do kind of understand. Hanoi Jane and all that; the Hollywood mob seem incredibly keen to say no to war even though they keep making fiction filled with the stuff.

What's really galling about 'CWW' is how the film celebrates the Soviet defeat with innocent joy and yet totally fails to face up to the failure of managing Afghanistan after that moment. The film simply rolls up a quote from Wilson that says they "completely fucked up the End Game". It's a little disingenuous to leave it at that, given the size of the fiasco. And it's not something I'm willing to lay at just George W. Bush's feet, but also to his father George Herbert Walker Bush who did plenty for Gulf War I but failed to see the missed opportunities, as well as Bill Clinton who did mostly nothing of lasting importance.

The point is, it's a bit on the nose to say it was "their fault". It was collectively, all our faults we chose to look after our backyards instead of addressing real, serious problems that were emerging out there. The wide-eyed "Oh boy shucks" of 'CWW' is totally not what the doctor ordered.

'LFL' fares a little better in that it is willing to discuss the notion of winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, but it's spoken by Tom Cruise's character Jasper Irving, who thinks he's going o accomplish this through winning some battles. So in the end, nobody comes up with a concrete plan to do that; they simply disagree with more fighting. I can see why the GOP might object to Hollywood liberalism.

For my part, I'm not sure more fighting is the answer. If anything they need to come up with a strategy for demilitarising and disarming these people. And Armies can be handy for that. In any case, it's clear that the writers in Hollywood can barely get their heads around conceiving of the war in Afghanistan as an extension of "9/11"; what chance have they got of seeing the war as part of the great counter-colonial struggle in that part of the world? In neither film do the film making teams offer any concrete alternatives to the fiascoes going down in Afghanistan.

It's easy objecting to a war, and an unpopular war at that. It's another thing to conceive of how to extricate the First World from the mess that is Afghanistan. In that sense the Hawks are right to grumble about Hollywood for taking the easy shots without offering an alternative option. To date, it's been send in Iron Man, send in Rambo, send in a couple of young actors to play soldiers.

On Robert Redford

Before Tom Cruise was the pretty boy of Hollywood that could sell schlock with his smile, there was Robert Redford. Robert Redford the actor was such an All-American boy it seemed like he was caste from a mold. The blond, blue- eyed visage, the controlled, mellifluous voice, the bolt-upright posture, the glance, the smile, all added up to the definition of a Hollywood Movies Star.

Since then it's actually remarkable how few men have actually stepped into that mold. As it turned out, they really haven't been able to make another one of these guys. Perhaps America has moved on, and perhaps even the demographic has moved on. After all, how hyper-Aryan -looking could you get beyond Robert Redford?

An yet Redford has continually made films that are against the fascist impulses of America. My favorite performance by Redford is possibly his work in 'All The President's Men' where his understated delivery underlined the gritty realism of that picture. He never got histrionic with that role, while Dustin Hoffman was let loose on the Bernstein character like a hungry hound.

The most problematised role for me is actually his part in 'The Natural'. He was simply too old to have played that role of Roy Hobbs - he looks stiff and ungainly, and you never quite buy the time line of events as a result. In any case, I still like the film and it's not like he ruins it for me; but I do remember sitting alone in the dark watching the film thinking, "this is kinda wrong, no?"

I recall being at AFTRS, and they showed 'Out of Africa' as a case where a star can distort the script. The contention was that having cast Redford against Streep, they had to expand that role to accommodate his star stature, an that this resulted in a bad script. While I never liked the film all that much, I always thought it was a great move to have Redford in it. It was interesting to see he cast Streep to play the journalist. in 'LFL'. It certainly evoked a lot of memories. It even occurred to me that they sure haven't found more where he came from.
He means well, and he's shown spine, and that's a whole lot better than many who earn stardom in Tinseltown. The last Redford sequence in 'LFL' where he puts on the jacket and ushers out the kid almost seems like a goodbye note to the audience.

Yankees Update

2008-07-26T17:54:00.004+10:00

Yanks Trade For Marte & Nady
I always have a brush with Damaso Marte at some point in the season when a reliever goes down and/or I need to get my WHIP down. He's a a useful pitcher for strike outs and rate stats. I recently jetisoned him in favor of another pitcher but most seasons, I pick him up for a small period if but to collect on Holds or improve rate stats. In his good years, his K/BBis great, and his HR/9 is reasonably good. Unsurprisingly, the Yankees went out and landed him and Xavier Nady in a trade with the Pirates.

Xavier Nady is another player that I always flirt with at some point in the season. He has bursts of great hitting and then long patches of mediocre hitting, Having decided Pittsburg was not his thing, he started this season on fire, and made himself trade bait. It's sort of weird these players are around to be traded like this because they're both very useful pieces. Perhaps the question is, why did the Pirates have them when they don't need them? Whatever the case, Nady is having a career year with an OPS+ of 142.

The big caveat with Nady is that his BABIP is at a career high, and way above the average. This makes me nervous in the long run. His RC/27 is largely based on his BA of .330. He is to all intents and purposes, a League average hitter with a career OPS+ of 102 - which is a valuable commodity in of itself - but not terribly exciting. The really interesting thing about his last 3 years is that his LD% has been climbing steadily, which may be accounting for his spike in BABIP. His ISO is .200 the last two seasons so he has some pop. He's a valuable bat to pick up for the Yankees.

For such bounty, the Yankees gave up Jose Tabata, Russ Ohlendorf, George Kontos, Phil Coke. The interesting names in there are Tabata and Ohlendorf. Tabata was the Yankees' No.1 Position prospect coming into the season, but has been disappointing. He also developed some attitude/behaviour issues which probably hastened the exit. He still has potential, but the Yankees had to give up something good.

Ohlendorf of course came to the Yankees in the second Randy Johnson trade; which is to say, the echoes of the disastrous 2004 off-season are still reverberating in the organization. While Randy Johnson pursues his 300wins out in Arizona, the Yankees have somehow converted parts of that trade into more usable pieces.

UPDATE: The pieces going have been adjusted. It's now Karstens and McCutchen instead of Coke and Kontos. It's good for Karstens because he's really caught in the gridlock of RHPs in the Yankee system. Steve Goldman would be happy the 'scary fly-ball guy' is elsewhere.

So Much To Blog, So Little Time - Part 2

2008-07-26T08:42:00.006+10:00

The Credit Crunch
Pleiades has been sending in some interesting stuff relating to the film industry of late.
One of the more interesting side-effects of the current credit squeeze is that banks in Europe are pulling out of cinema.

A slew of film projects are expected to be forced on to the backburner because of tough new funding terms set by Wall Street banks.
One senior executive at a big Hollywood studio, who declined to be named, predicted that the increased cost of financing the film industry would lead to fewer films being made, particularly by smaller, independent companies.

“Deals are hard to get done right now,” he said. “This is just how the banks are dealing with uncertainty. They are being very cautious.”

Although a number of the leading studios, including Fox, Universal and Disney, managed to raise funds before the credit crisis began, many independent film-makers are believed to have had less luck.

The executive said: “Fewer films is not necessarily a bad thing - people have only so much money to spend - but what you will see, increasingly, is film companies going to India and the Middle East for their funding.”

New York investment banks have become a key source of funding for Hollywood only in the past five years. However, studios such as MGM, Fox, Universal and Sony quickly began to rely very heavily on Wall Street for the financing of new films.

Since the credit crisis erupted last year, investment banks have increased the cost of lending for the studios and, in some cases, banks have pulled out of film finance altogether.

The suggestion is that they will be back, once the market terms are right, but in the short term it augurs badly for the reformed Australian film bureaucracies' plans because they were counting on that money to be there.

Eulogies For Indie Cinema
Here's another one from Pleiades. It's in an e-mail so I'm just going to post it up whole:

"Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling."
Mark Gill , CEO, The Film Department
Keynote Speech
L.A. Film Festival Financing Conference
6/21/08

Good morning.
Last week, an old friend who is a director called to catch up. It almost seemed as if he was seeking reassurance. "You good?" he asked.

My answer was simple: "How good can I be? I work in independent film."

He laughed. And then he wondered aloud: "Do you think maybe Chicken Little was right—I mean, about independent film." Leave it to a director to hope Chicken Little might be a cinephile. And again, my answer was simple: "Yes, the sky really is falling."

The last thing I heard him say was "I have to go throw up now."
Unfortunately, he's not alone in that feeling these days.I know I don't have to repeat all the ways that the independent film business is in trouble. But I'm going to do it anyway—because the accumulation of bad news is kin of aweinspiring:

1: Picturehouse and Warner Independent have been shut down.

2: New Line's staff was cut by 90 percent, and the survivors were sent to hell…I mean… Burbank .

3: Paramount Vantage was folded into the mother ship (this one may not be all bad news, by the way, but it still scares the hell out of independent film people).

4: Sidney Kimmel shrunk his company in half.

5: ThinkFilm is being sued for not paying its advertising bills, even as the unions repeatedly close down their David O. Russell production with the prophetic title "Nailed" for failure to meet weekly payroll.

6: Another five companies are in serious financial peril. And those are only the ones I'm sure of.

7: The $18 billion that Wall Street poured into Hollywood over the past four years has slowed to a trickle, and shows no signs of being replaced at even remotely the same levels from any new source.

8: There's a glut of films: 5000 movies got made last year. Of those, 603 got released theatrically here. And there's not room in the market—as there used to be—for even 400 of those. Maybe there's room for 300. So everything else just dies. Most of these pictures are preordained flops from independent distributors who forgot that their odds would have been better if they'd converted their money into quarters and taken the all-nigh party bus to Vegas.

9: Advertising costs have radically outpaced inflation even as media delivery of audiences falls through the floor. So movie companies now enjoy the privilege of paying way more to be far less effective marketers.

10: Movies now routinely fight with really compelling leisure alternatives that nobody in the last great era of cinema—the 1970s—even imagined: from ipods to Xboxes to tivos to you tubes to the radically improved behemoth that is cable television.

11: The international marketplace may be growing dramatically, but all of that growth is eaten up by studio movies, a couple dozen top independent films, an burgeoning local language productions. Everything else we make in this country doesn't sellfor less—as it has for the past 20-plus years. Now, most American independent films don't sell at all overseas. I've never seen more depressed people in my life than I did in Cannes last month. The phrase "worst market ever" could be heard from every corner. a lot of film market veterans were musing about never coming back. It's that bad out there.

12: One entertainment industry banker I know believes another 10 independent film financiers will exit the business in the next year. I think he's low. And finally, just for bad luck:

13: The average cost of an independent film released theatrically in North America shot up dramatically last year (not as much perhaps as the 60% the MPAA reported for its member companies, but a lot nonetheless). And this of course makes it a hell of a lot harder to break even or squeak out a small return and stay in business. Aside from that, everything's great.

We've heard "the sky is falling" in the movie business before—notably with the introduction of TV, home video and DVD. On all three occasions, the business survived. And DVDs arguably helped grow the worldwide movie-viewing habit considerably—even as they threw off a ton of cash. But this time, at least as it relates to independent film, the sky really is falling.

The marginally good news is it won't hit the ground everywhere. The strongest of the strong will survive and in fact prosper. But it will feel like we just survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be overwhelming. Of course, it's fashionable to bitch in the independent film world. It's what we do. We brood. We wear black. We drink too much coffee, followed by too much alcohol. And we bemoan a future devoid of real culture, homogenized to death by unfeeling conglomerates, and increasingly determined by ADD-addled 14-year-olds with nothing but internet porn and Grand Theft Auto on the brain.

The Major Studios

Every now and then we get tempted to look over the fence to where the grass is greener. We're human. We can't help it. We see all that cash rolling into the major studio coffers,and we secretly covet it. But it's not so easy for the big boys anymore either. The average cost of a major studio production is $70.8million, and the average marketing budget in NorthAmerica alone is $35.9 million. In other words, there's an average of more than $100 million at risk every time they get up to bat. And if they're going to lose $75 million or more, they know it by 2 p.m. Los Angeles time on opening day.

As the press has chronicled ad nauseum, the major studios have been forced largely to embrace the world of the tentpole movie—the big budget spectacle that tries to be for everyone. In market research terms, they call it the four-quadrant film, meaning it appeals to all four demographic quadrants of moviegoers: men and women, over and under 25. In economic terms, this means a movie that invariably costs more than $100 million, and on occasion more than $300 million.

The amount of effort and cash devoted to these tentpoles—and the enormous rewards that follow when they work—has radically altered the focus of the big studios. And generally speaking, these films don't have to be great to work. They have to be just good enough. It's the last place in the movie business where the old habits still apply, where the phrase "execution dependent" doesn't matter so much. Hollywood has spent a lot of time and money making films that are at best mediocre and then hoping for marketing to save the day. We can blame a good movie for this very bad habit. "Jaws" ushered in the era of wide-release marketing-driven movies. It lasted for more than 30 years. A lot of bad films got made under the theory that quality didn't matter. But it's not working like it used to.

Here's why: fooling the audience is getting harder for the major studios in the age of blackberries, instant messaging and cell phone texting. Good buzz spreads quickly, bad buzz even faster.

A tentpole movie has to be truly atrocious to be victimized by this. But for any movie smaller than a tentpole, the bar has been raised. Good isn't good enough anymore. It used to be that a film with a nice performance, a cool look and a broken story could get through. Not any more. Unless you're making a tentpole, your movie now has to be very good—in the eye of its intended audience.

I may have liked "Juno" and "The Bourne Identity." My female colleagues loved "Sex in the City." And there was a big, happy audience for the last "Halloween" movie. In each case, the intended audience got what it wanted: a movie that satisfied them.

We're entering an era where the only films with any chance for success will be the $100 million-plus tentpoles, and reasonably priced films of some perceived quality.

I've had far too many fight-the-power wannabe filmmakers cheer this vision of the future, which they believe will usher out the bloated, soul-less big studio retreads and usher in a new democratic era of access to moviemaking fame and glory for all.

Lots of people are drinking this Kool-Aid. Fifteen years ago, the Sundance Film Festival got 500 submissions. This year, they received 5,000. Virtually all of these are privately financed. There's only one problem: most of the films are flat-out awful (trust me, I have had to sit through tons of them over the years). Let me put it another way: the digital revolution is here, and boy does it suck.

It's not enough to have access to the moviemaking process. Talent matters more. Quality of emotional content is what matters, period. In a world with too many choices, companies are finally realizing they can't risk the marketing money on most movies. Here's how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year—generally with budgets under $10 million—maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That's one-tenth of one percent.

Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure. OK, so now that I've battered you into severe depression, let's move on to the hopeful part of these proceedings. The famed film editor Walter Murch (of "Apocalypse Now" and "English Patient" renown) likes to say there are only two important elements of any movie: the beginning and the ending. And the beginning isn't really all that important.

With that in mind, I promise, by the end of this talk, you won't want to slit your wrists. There actually are some hopeful signs amid all the carnage. Those terrible odds for movies under $10 million? Ironically, they get far better if you spend more money. All the financial data I've looked at—and it's a lot—clearly shows that the sweet spot is between $15 and $50 million. But that has a lot to do with being able to pay professionals who know what they're doing to create quality emotional content that has a market. And it has a fair amount to do with the prices that international distributors can afford to pay in the top 12 countries, which is what gives financiers enough comfort to commit capital.

I can hear my nauseous director friend now: "So what are you saying: should we all just quit?Not at all. I'm saying we have to do better. Much better.

The sky may be falling, but in the end, it isn't going to hit the ground. We will be left with a little breathing room. And the question will become: what will succeed in this much narrower space? I believe that a fair number of people—call them what's left of the theatrical audience if you like—will always need to get out of the house: in part because they enjoy the benefits of a communal experience.

Clearly, only the better films will succeed in the theaters of the future. Certainly the number of releases will drop—by half or more. Probably everyone other than the folk who work on tentpoles will be paid less. The words "theatrical necessity" will take on greater and greater meaning. Probably a lot of theaters will close.
But I think the best theaters showing the best films will always have an audience. And the rest of the films will have their premiere in Walmart, or on your cell phone. Interestingly enough, in this Darwinian new future, there will absolutely be a premium

for good films on tv, pay per view, on-demand, internet—or whatever that large pipe that goes to all of our houses will be called.Why do I know this? Because one of the big research companies conducted a study recently which gave viewers on-demand everything. No more schedules. No more appointment television. Just tune in anything—any movie, any TV show—at any time. And guess what: the best stuff won out. Hands down. In a nutshell, the audience is sick & tired of the atrocious but all too familiar version of television on a schedule: 500 channels to choose from, and nothing to watch.

Some of this is purely a function of demography. There actually is a growing audience for quality. *It's not hard to figure out why: the baby boom is aging. And as they do,their tastes mature. But they don't behave like their parents at the same age. They are smarter, more active, have more disposable income. And because of pay cable, home video and DVD in particular, they've become much more movie literate — and more sophisticated in their tastes. *Traditionally specialized films accounted for 5-6% of tickets sold. In the last few summers, it's been over 10% on average. And that's the season when Hollywood is supposed to dominate and indies are supposed to cower in the corners, waiting for the arrival of fall.

*And to back that up, for the first time in the roughly 20 years I've been looking at this data, more than 10% of the audience now is telling pollsters they prefer independent films. We also know there's an opening for quality based on data from the good folks at Netflix. Yes, they rent plenty of tentpole movie dvds, just like everyone else. But they also have the most accurate collaborative filtering technology I've seen. Type in 50 movies you like, and Netflix will tell you—with remarkable accuracy—what other films you will like. This is how a relatively obscure film from 1974 became the most popular picture among Netflix's six million subscribers: because it's really good. The movie, by the way, is "The Conversation."

I keep telling the Netflix people they should start sampling audiences on Friday nights outside movie theaters, so we'll all know by Saturday if people whose taste we share like a movie. But of course they're probably rightly worried about their biggest suppliers, the major studios, who are terrified that the audience will find out even sooner just how bad "Speed Racer" is. Yeah, like we couldn't tell just from being forced to watch the trailer. The result of all these changes—especially the catalyzing effect of lower costs and high technology—is very good news for people who care about the quality of cinema, singularity of voice, resonant themes, and all the other things that today can rarely be found outside independent film.

It all comes down to what a former glove merchant named Schmuel Gelbfisz said more than 50 years ago: "Make Fewer Better." This isn't by any means the most famous Goldwyn-ism. In fact it isn't even on most of the lists alongside such classics as: "An oral contract isn't worth the paper it's written on"; "A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad"; and "Don't pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them!"

But for my taste, "Make fewer better" is the one Goldwyn-ism that should never go out of style. If we give the audience fewer and better movies, we might even create a virtuous cycle. People might start saying: "Hey, the movies are good again." They'll start going more often, tell their friends…you get the idea. So how do we get to "Fewer and Better"? The studios have already done it. Disney once released 47 movies in a year. This year: the number will be 12. Warner went from 35 to 20 in less than 10 years. The rest of the majors have also slimmed down. Now of course anybody can reduce budgets and the number of films they make. That part is easy. The hard part is quality of content—or, well, taste. How the hell do you improve that?

The cynic's view—encapsulated in the famous dictum of Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman—is: "Nobody knows anything." Meaning: Nobody knows what will work. It's hopeless to try to inflict taste on the movies. Give up immediately. If that were entirely true, we should just shut down the business right now. But of course this isn't entirely the case. There are changes we can undertake that will make a difference. Odds are that most of show business won't make these changes until they're in serious danger of going under—which is …any day now. Anyone who changes sooner will have an enormous advantage. The single biggest change should be to only make movies that we absolutely love. Not ones we like. Not ones we need to do as a favor. Not the ones we do because they seem like a good "piece of business." Not ones we do because we think, hope or wish that "the kids" will like them. Not the knock-offs of the ones that worked at the box office last year. In a word, we should only pick the films we're passionate about—and that have an audience. Another way of articulating this is: we need to thread the needle twice: once for quality, and then for audience demand.

Let's talk about quality first.

As simple as it sounds, it all comes down to a good story, well told. And that's a lot harder to do than it is to say. But not as hard as Hollywood would have you believe now—in an era where until very recently aiming high was considered an effete eccentricity. Or where, as the New York Times recently put it, "quality is considered a genre." It's a show business cliché that "it all starts with the script." This is usually uttered by some semi-literate, mouth-breathing, prada-wearing, 24-year-old hipster poseur who wouldn't know a good story if it hit him in the head. We could spend an hour or two just on the topic of what makes a good script.
But not today. In the most reductionist fashion: tere's the holy trinity of structure, character and dialogue, of course; the crucial if more ephemeral notions of authenticity, voice, theme, and tone; and the imperative for originality of utterance and perception. In the end, all of this has to add up (seamlessly if possible) to something that moves us — to the quality of the emotional content. It doesn't matter if we're talking about thrills, laughs, tears, or an adrenaline rush. What matters is that we are engaged and, ideally, emotionally transformed and satisfied.

In a world increasingly dominated by numbers—financial, technological and most importantly the finite number of hours in a day, our very human desire for contact, meaning and emotional transformation isn't going away. It's growing. Those who remember that will survive and most probably win. By the way, notwithstanding my 10-year-old son Jack's question: "Dad, why do movies suck so much?" our quality control isn't as bad as it could be, and this has enormous implications for our not following the music business down the toilet.

Here's why: when the music business went from tape to digital, they nearly doubled the wholesale price of an album, and proceeded to pump out albums that have very few good songs. Like one or none. When the movie business went from tape to digital, we dropped the wholesale price per unit from $65 to $10. And everyone said: "Oh my god, they're killing the business. Our profit margins are ruined." Well, the margin was smaller, but sales exploded. The studios made tens of billions of dollars on the difference. And consumers mostly like what they're getting. So much so that movies are the second-highest rated consumer value for the money. Behind only chicken. Not so for albums, which are so far down the list you can't find them.

The next big change will be when we start shooting movies to mobile devices in a big way. The wholesale price will drop again—probably to $3 per unit. But we'll sell so many more of them that revenue will explode all over again. This has very favourable implications for getting past piracy problems that helped kill the music business: the charge for downloading a film will land on your phone bill. And the moviemakers can hold the phone companies accountable (whereas now internet providers duck and hide when we try to pursue them for what amounts to transfer of stolen goods).

So now you're probably wondering: if all this money is going to flood into Hollywood in a few years, why can't we get some of it for independent film and just keep on doing what we do? The answer, in a word, is marketing. Or, how do you get noticed in a world of endless possibilities? And that brings us to the second crucial threading of the needle: for audience demand. The first and most important thing to remember is that two-thirds of the tickets are sold outside the U.S. now. So if you're making a film that only appeals to Americans, start cutting your budget now. Or better yet, make one that the whole world can embrace. This is mostly about subject matter. The rest of the world doesn't care about westerns or American sports movies. I've gone out of my way to tell people we won't make them. And yet, no matter how many times I say this, it still doesn't seem to stop some people with a passion to get their story told. Not too long ago, a producer called me up to tell me the true story, circa 1890, of cowboys and Indians in the Arizona territory who put down their weapons to play a friendly game of baseball. I offered to scalp him. After you get past subject matter, the next most important factor is "who's it for." Women of all ages. Men under 25? The dating audience 18-34. Please don't tell me "everyone" unless you have a $100 million budget. And then I like to think about the rest of the audience demand question in the way that we analyse titles. A good title should have many of the attributes that a movie needs to embody now: Succinct & Descriptive: the film has to lend itself to brief encapsulation. A high concept is no longer the thing that studio movies do and independent films shun. In this age of info overload, it's crucial for every picture to have this. Without it, your odds shoot through the floor. *Distinctive: not the same story we've heard five times before; something that at least takes the cliché and twists it; not something we get too much of somewhere else in our lives (Exhibit A: Iraq movies; who wants to see more of that mess? We already get too much of it every day in the news media).

*Provocative: something that cuts through the clutter, stands out, gets attention; not "So then Phoebe sat by her mother's bedside, suffering in silence for eight weeks." Give us incident, conflict, excitement, ideally something that hits a cultural nerve. *Memorable: this is essentially an accumulation of the other traits, or sometimes altogether separate. It's the avoidance of cotton candy. The possibility of resonance. Something sticky. *Not too dark: these are very dark times, for audiences the world over. Audience enthusiasm for dark films is as low as I've ever seen it. There are a lot of reasons for this, of course. But the one I hear almost nobody articulating and everyone feeling is this: in the western industrialized world, wages haven't even remotely kept up with productivity demands, and that stresses us out.

Will some films get made that defy all of these conventions? Yes. Will a couple of them go on to achieve enormous success and acclaim? Probably. The romantic in all of us hopes for David to triumph over Goliath, for the visionary individual to beat the system. Scratch a successful person in Hollywood , and they'll tell you about their movie that did this. I happen to have quite a few stories like this. The best is probably this: In its April 2005 issue, Premiere magazine famously intoned: "What was Mark Gill thinking when he paid $1 million for a French documentary about a bunch of penguins?" What I was thinking was very simple: "we can fix it, and it will be emotional." So we did. Yes, I did save that article. And yes, I am happy that the magazine subsequently went out of business.

Here's the problem with that brand of romanticism: the odds of it happening to any of us with any reliable frequency are extremely low—and getting much worse. As some famous wag once said: "You can die of encouragement in Hollywood ." I frankly don't want to be responsible for your death. Instead, let's just tell the truth… If you want to survive in this brutal climate, you're going to have to work a lot harder, be a lot smarter, know a lot more, move a lot faster, sell a lot better, pay attention to the data, be a little nicer (ok, a lot nicer), trust your gut, read everything and never, ever give up. If you're looking for a cool lifestyle, you're in the wrong business. If you want work-life balance, go get a government job.

But if you really want to make movies — even after all the unvarnished bad news I've dumped on you today—then by all means do it. For starters, by whatever legal and moral means necessary, come up with a great script. How will you know if you have one? That's easy. It's the day you stop chasing talent. Because everybody—from the directors to the actors to the editors and costume designers—starts chasing you, and will show up and make the film for a
little — or a lot — less.

And if we do it for less, we can afford to make something that's not a moronic, homogenized piece of lowest-common-denominator drivel. If we get all of that right, the sky might fall further than we like, but it won't hit the ground. And the independent film business—leaner, harder-working, but still wearing black and drinking too much caffeine—will indeed survive.

Thank you very much.

So there you go. On a related tangent, I want to briefly go over my own thinking on this phenomenon.

Some years ago, I got into a conversation with a guy who was the reader at Fox-Icon in Sydney. I explained to him that the whole Indie cinema thing predicated on screen numbers exploding (this was back in the late 1990s) was a crock. What I told him was that the market wasn't going to grow exponentially because the demographic wouldn't support it. There actually isn't the time for people to watch exponentially more films.
"You're crazy, he said. Build it and they will come. "
"Yeah but," I told him, "if everybody builds them, *they* can't go everywhere at once."

Imagine your average cineaste. In those days of being single and dating, I used to go see 2 new films in a week. I was in the business, and on some weeks, rent a whole bunch of DVD so releases I missed. So in any given year, I think I watched around 80-120 films without thinking much about it, and in some years I watched 200-300 - but that was during my time I was at film school. I had a lot of time to give to cinema back then. So in any given year I would watch 100 or so new films.

I'm anomalous. Most of the market watches fewer than 50. But let's be generous and say the way people watch is different , so the effective *reach* of the cinema is 100 films a year per cineaste - and I'm being extremely generous here. I think it's more like 20 movies per annum.

The thing about it is, if there were suddenly 1000 additional new product, people would still only physically have enough time for the 100 or so - short of going back to Film School. So in a sense, the market is competed for from the top 100 films, not from the bottom 500-1000 films. People don't work up the market, they pick the most prominent film and work their way down the list.

What this means is that the visibility of your film is probably more valuable than the actual content. Sure, there are variations and variance in individual viewing habits, but it really matters what is in the Top 100 marketed films, because that is what determines the shape of the market. (So far this decade, the shape it is in, is more comic book movies with recognisable, colorful, dynamic characters, but that's another story. )

If you applied the 80/20 rule, it's easy enough to see that 80% of the market is the 100 films each year. The other parts of the market will only ever account for 20% gross. So making an Indie film is always going to be a losing proposition knowing you're going in the latter bucket of films. In other words, you could duke it out all you like for the scraps, but the upside of an Indie film is a miraculous breakthrough by accident - which dos happen with the frequency of winning lotto. Otherwise chances are, it's going to remain unwatched.

The flip side of that is that the only game worth being in is going to be the top end studio product, and these films will always account for the 80% of revenue in all of cinema's forms.
When I explained all of this to the reader at Fox -Icon, he looked at me and said, "you're fucking crazy. People will ALWAYS watch GOOD movies."

I rest my case.