The Triumphant Return!

The Best Part 2.

Man it's hard to sit down and write one of these, but since I was in Baltimore just a few days ago we'll just all have to imagine dusty little seagulls* and get on with this, most likely awkward, stab at trying to sum up one of the most mind-bendingly irrepressible years I have yet had to float through. To paraphrase a bit, it certainly looked like there were two, options on the table, either we would live through a quite content and boring version of the past while sinking deeper into a murky, dank and disgusting swamp, or we could strive for something just beyond our reach while running the risk of devouring one another. The endgame of both would be unending trials of quiet desperation. At least at times, and in darkened rooms, it felt that way.

Certainly in Wall-e, we could hear these songs, but in the end Peter Gabriel sang neither, and Frank Rich decided any environmental platform should be based solely on this lonely robot. Even setting aside its biblical underpinnings – thematically, it's essentially Paradise Lost -- Wall-e's strength lies in its complete and utter disregard for how movies are supposed to be made. This tiny robot, certainly the oldest thing still fully working on planet earth, accidentally sets in progress, well, when you really think about it, not much of anything at all. He's completely oblivious to the fact that around him history is getting a healthy dose of methamphetamines, and here's the funny part, that dose has been the ultimate product of laissez-faire economics for close to a thousand years. All it takes to kickstart history again is some late night web-surfing** and a simple flick of a switch. Wall-e could have sat on the bench, and most of the film would have happened along the same lines, though probably with less enthusiasm in the end product. By the same token, however, when the movie opens, it is clear he holds the past as nothing more than a collection of otherwordly curiosities, as if this Kasper Hauser has no intention of finding the actual function of the things he collects but is completely enthralled by their mysterious forms. Shoot, come to think off it, he's Plato's concept of man and Rousseau's noble savage all rolled into a pathos-laden trash compactor.

For a second or so, Wall-e's ineffectiveness looks an awful lot like a scam of apathy. But it's a brief second, and rather than wandering down this road the movie swerves towards a deeper, more profound point. Before we get to that though, we owe it to ourselves to make a u-turn and talk a bit about Pineapple Express.

Very much like Vladimir and Estragon***, Dale and Saul live a life of chilling out. For them the past is reruns of 227, and the future is filled with half assed dreams and ambitions: there's practically no way Dale will be a talk radio persona, or Saul an architect. However, in a bizarre world where life follows both Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Tango and Cash in equal measure, pretty much anything that can happen will, if you want it to, and that's pretty far out. So while stuck behind a rock and a very large hill, these dudes happen upon the supreme plan for life: "Safety first, then teamwork." Which, as far as mantras go, happens to be just about perfect. As an axiom, these four words allow for much more than the football chant "Carpe Diem", or the paragon of self-centeredness, "Do unto others…"**** This phrase implies an understanding towards the listener, but also a hope for reciprocity. In other words "Safety first, then teamwork" presents a world where the love we have for one another is grounded upon the work necessary to continue that love. These four words allow for a world in which we all are responsible for each other, and liberalism actually works.

In short, both Saul's "Safety first, then teamwork", and Wall-e's "Directive" are the reasons the rock and the hill are smaller than they look. For Wall-e, life and living are about the ever passing moment and the connections that make those moments possible. For Dale and Saul, they are the conversations, over cold, disgusting diner food, recounting how great it really is to be alive and be with friends. These are the moments we live for.

In conclusion, Caitlin and I are engaged, and now you all know why.

Safety first, then teamwork,

--Jeff

* See what I did there GP?
** When do you think we'll get a voice activated wikipedia?
*** Though these dudes don't wear bowlers.
**** And they also allow for two of the most strikingly beautiful scenes this year (for those who are counting, the scene in the woods, and the scene in the tree).

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Top Ten Movies
1. Pineapple Express – Duh.
2. Wall-e – Even the kids know to be silent at that last bit.
3. Synecdoche – About as good an argument for the weight of solipsism, at least recently.
4. Encounters at the End of the World – We're all penguins now.
5. Cassandra's Dream – First of two Woody Allen greats this year
6. Vicky Christina Barcelona – Less visceral than Cassandra, still though, really mean.
7. Paranoid Park – Riding with the devil.
8. Milk – That whistle shot is devastating.
9. W. – Just 'cause.
10. Miracle at St. Anna – Take that Eastwood!

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Epiphanies
Happy Days and Endgame at BAM – Of all times, now is the time to have a dance with Beckett
Till the Casket Drops, Clipse – "Voted for Obama, McCain's my tax bracket."
The Wire – J-School:"Federal agents requested 457 wiretaps in 2007, a 14-year low. Meanwhile, state and local prosecutors requested 1,751 wiretaps, more than triple the number in 1993."
Clube da Esquina no 2, Milton Nascimento – What my mind plays all day long.
David Byrne singing "You Can Call Me Al" at BAM – You haven't lived man, you haven't until you've seen this.
Mad Men – I'm worried 'bout this year's season, but this one was just fine.
Lil Wayne – Even though that last mixtape sucked.
Obama – It's exhausting to have a year long collective epiphany, but man we did.

The Best. (Part 1, a Quickie)

Hands down the best song so far this year:

Jay-Z on iLike - Get updates inside iTunes

And, though it's I've only listened to it three times, this is a serious contender for best album.

Caitlin is the Best Part.

Amazing Marsheen from Shan Raoufi on Vimeo.

The Day After.

Charles.

This is what wonderful is.

It's a Good Day to Die.

Sarah Palin and the Language of TV.

Even well into the digital age, TV still dictates the popular cultural in our country. For all the CBS's growth on the internet, its website only attracts a million visitors a day. Enough to put it in the top 50 sites out there, but far fewer than the 23 million viewers CSI attracts each week.

This is a relatively mundane point, because for most of our lives TV dictated each of our roles in society through generalities and drab dictations of the national zeitgeist. Each and every sitcom is engineered and group-tested into oblivion so it will grab hold of the largest audience. These facts are hardly hidden, because this is how TV shines. TV's orders from the mount are to present us with the most overarching view of America possible in 21 minutes or less. Which is quite amazing, see, because in effect TV shows us not only how America sees itself, but also what we are as a nation.

To those who prefer to find this in books, TV's endless rehashing of common plots, characters, and themes seems to only lead to a dulling of the senses and a life of McDonald's Pies and Big Gulps. Books rely on far more investment in original, cohesive thought to be successful, but by definition originality and cohesion cannot be found in the blue haze's formulaic seas.

Television's appeal lies in its lack of rhetoric, in its insistence on feelings and its control of them. I'll say that again: TV disdains rhetoric, it speaks in pure emotion. Why else would Fonzi be a common household name today if not for his patterned nostalgia? Or, why on hulu.com is the Family Guy consistently in the top five, if not for its rapidfire demands for laughter? Each and every sitcom, drama, or comedy on TV succeeds to some extent by capitalizing on our feelings, and the more successful each becomes in the weekly ratings, the harder it is to quantify or atomize into distinct parts. Which in turn leads to a national feeling of déjà vu, for we've all felt these feelings before, so TV becomes roundly criticized as nonsensical, repetitive dreck.

These criticisms turn out empty though, precisely because they are searching for gerunds in an idiom that TV cannot speak. We may not know TV's precise point at any given time, but hot damn, we sure as hell can feel it.

Which brings us to Gov. Palin, specifically to her shining moment in the debates, and her feckless and inconsiderate use of the English language:

Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush administration.

Unless Gov. Palin meant to attack Biden with the securities trading term "preference," a sting to obtuse for basically anyone to pick up on, these sentences might as well be gibberish. But, see, what they convey or feel, is a hope for the future, "forgive those who trespass." And she continues:

Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education and I'm glad that you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?

Palin's jump to that last sentence exposes a way of thinking that rarely pauses for clarity (wait did she just threaten Biden's wife?), but instead barrels through points for effect (she's a fan of teachers!). TV's basic formula plays well under these conditions; if a scene doesn't work it is cut with little to no concern for narrative cohesion. What matters in both instances is the impact of what's felt (God exists, He's on our side, He wants us to win), what's said is hardly the point. Tally ho:

I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he's a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

And so, her painful paragraph ends with the most heartfelt bunch of feeling a politician can hope for, a family with kids, under God. Palin goes ones step further and emotes into existence a room full of concentrating young Americans, real Americans. Ones she can feel for, the nation follows along, and that's terrifying.

What is Kansas For?

Anyone?

Have a Looksy: the Fed Rate.

A head scratcher at the time, but ponder this:

"While there are many policy considerations that arise as a consequence of the rapidly expanding global financial system, the most important is the necessity of maintaining stability in the prices of goods and services and confidence in domestic financial markets," he said. "Failure to do so is apt to exact far greater consequences as a result of cross-border capital movements than those which might have prevailed a generation ago."(1995-Doubts Voiced By Greenspan On a Rate Cut)

While you stare at this (click to enlarge):

See that blip between 1985 and 1990 that's the S&L crisis, which caused 700 of those shops to close. But you can see the point I'm trying to make here, starting in 1995 the slope of the Down Jones industrial average starts accelerating. That is the change between 2 points on that graph is less than the next 2 points, until about 2005, but then the slope starts accelerating again.

That's what a bubble looks like, but how does Greenspan factor in here? First a word about what his job was. The fed controls the federal funds rate which sets the interest rate for funds banks can lend to each other. The fed sets this rate by requiring banks to have a certain amount of cash reserves at the fed in the form of Government securities -- which are basically numbers on a balances sheet that the government says are worth what it says. If, after the closing bell, Bank A doesn't have enough reserves it must find another Bank willing to lend money to it so it can bolster its government securities holdings. By controlling the supply of these securities, the Government effectively controls the target rate of these loans. Keynes dictated that when times are tough and economic activity is low the Fed buys a whole bunch of these securities from banks and the banks can then throw that money around. This raises inflation a bit but also opens the sphincters on Wall Street and releases a flow of trading, which, hopefully busies up the economy. When times are chill the fed is supposed to start selling these securities to banks which raises the fed funds rate.¹

All of which can make you a bit batty to think about: rather than just saying the rate is x and holding banks to it, the Fed pilots the boat by effectively locking the tiller and trying to control the wind. Greenspan and Milton Friedman's Neo-Classical nabobs at the fed in 1995, though, were all like "fucks to that, we care about inflation first and foremost, not controlling growth in a cyclical way," and set the federal funds rate at a stable level. Now, pause for a second, Keynesian economics offers a pretty straightforward way to predict what the rate's going to be at any point in time. If the economy's bad (and inflation's under control) it's safe to say it will be pretty low, and if the economy's alright it's safe to say that the rate will be relatively high. Ideally, in this system the rate is predictable, and banks like predictability, because it gives them a base income, and therefore a base to plan all their other bets around. This is called hedging, and for us nerds gives a root for "Hedging your bets".

If the fed funds rate is stable, however, and there is no way of knowing whether or not it will change, banks will lose their collective shit and start looking for safer bets to bolster their base. And out of Greenspan's backwards diction:

"While there are many policy considerations that arise as a consequence of the rapidly expanding global financial system, the most important is the necessity of maintaining stability in the prices of goods and services and confidence in domestic financial markets"

We start to see what he was thinking. Basically he removed a stable bet and forced banks to invest outside of Government -- on top of it all, the dude absolutely hated economic models and formulae -- by inserting a healthy goddamn dose of randomness and whimsy into a historically predictable vehicle. Here we go:

See 1994 to about 2001? Flat. So where do banks look? What has been, historically a pretty solid bet? What changes rates basically inline with the economy, the way the fed funds rate is supposed to? Ummm:

And, goodbye empire.

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1. I may be wrong about all this. I received a C+ in economics 101 in college. Not bad for the librul arts! Return.

For more reading about further economic fantods see:

• Cityphilia
• As Credit Crisis Spiraled, Alarm Led to Action
• What's in a Number?

Second Best Woody Allen Movie of the Year

Dailies are looking good, and while Javier’s idea to add a massive Martian invasion scene complete with a thousand costumed extras and elaborate flying saucers is not a very good one, I will shoot it to make him happy and cut it in the editing room.

Vicky Christina Barcelona, as you may have heard, is the second best Woody Allen movie of the year, and that means its excellent. The roar of the armchair critics (read: my friends) is already beginning to creep from the lowlands of Bushwick to the magnificent crags of Clinton Hill, so I'll qualify that a bit: while the characters in VCB are as narcissistic, self involved, and selfish as we all are in real life, something's missing, something, say, the -icide suffix and that most divine of adjectives, visceral.

Cassandra's Dream, all three -icides and both forms included, powerfully throws one's stomach into a never ending sink -- are these people? Are these people I like? Are these people me? Am I a criminal? -- until the only answer left is, yes, yes, I am. I am alone and a maniac. Which is precisely what's missing in VCB.

Perhaps one day we'll see Javier Bardem add ETicide to the list in Barcelona. I only hope Allen is at the wheel.

Whew! What a Week.

We're gunna have a new president, it's going to be great!

In other news, I'm tired and I think this song changed my life:

2222

Reason 2222 why Brazil is a place I want to move to: Gilberto Gil has a whole chunk of his music online. For the uninitiated, start with Tropicália ou Panis et Circensis (give batmakumba a whirl), and move to Aquele abraço. Once you have just try and tell me your life isn't any better.

Devourer of Worlds

Sweet. It looks like we all have 8 days to live.

Spoilers TK

Spoiled.

It's about damn time that someone bucked the trend, one of the worst on the internet in my opinion, of being careful about spoilers: Movie Review: 'The Happening' (side note: we should have more genius headlines like this where I work).

For the longest time now, I've been wary of movie/book reviews where the author intentionally resists spoiling the work for his readers. This practice not only capitulates to the audience -- as an editor of Time once said, "Keep the dog food where the dog is" -- it also presupposes the plot summary found in the worst examples of criticism. In both outcomes the critic is failing to do his job: the point of criticism is not to convey the plot or action in a work but rather to discuss the importance of the themes and messages in the work itself. The best criticism goes a step further and connects the art with it's context. Take for example this Manohla Dargis review of Children of Men:

Based in broad outline on the 1992 dystopian novel by P. D. James about a world suffering from global infertility — and written with a nod to Orwell by Mr. Cuarón and his writing partner Timothy J. Sexton along with David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — “Children of Men” pictures a world that looks a lot like our own, but darker, grimmer and more frighteningly, violently precarious. It imagines a world drained of hope and defined by terror in which bombs regularly explode in cafes crowded with men and women on their way to work. It imagines the unthinkable: What if instead of containing Iraq, the world has become Iraq, a universal battleground of military control, security zones, refugee camps and warring tribal identities?

Do you see what's happening there? There's no plot discussion, just themes and connections. Two of the best modern examples of these practices are Ed Rothstein's "Connections" columns and William Safire's "On Language" but both of those are hardly pure criticism. Perhaps more germane -- and older -- is Sam Johnson's Rambler series. However, my favorite example of good criticism comes from James Agee, in a review of that bender of a movie "The Lost Weekend":

I understand that liquor interish: innerish: intereshtsh are rather worried about this film. Thash tough.

I suppose this unfortunate trend against spoiling the ending of a movie arises out of the class who writes these reviews: journalists. The very nature of the journalistic pathos hinges on the practice of reporting the truth, and summaries are nothing but truthful. In addition, the hesitancy to refrain from discussing the ending and thus the movie, arises out of a kind of narcissism, and most likely stems from the increased voice readers have on the web. I didn't think I'd end on that note when I started, but the review of 'The Happening', while not among the ones I'll count great, is at least a step in the right direction. (I also have no desire to see 'The Happening'. Though I'm no fan of Mr. Night, due to masochistic urges I've seen all of his previous films, probably because I thought it was funny, but after Lady in the Water I don't have enough time left in my life to see another.)

Newer Noise?

I'm back after a bit of a hiatus. I'm hoping to put up something a bit more substantial soonish, but for now just a few uncontrolled thoughts on the state of music:

I just came back from a show featuring these guys: Wild Birds and Peace Drums, and I couldn't help but think what a sorry state popular music is in. See, Wild Birds and their ilk have forgotten that a fundamental part of music is experimentation, and pushing limits. It's not enough to grab a drummer and a mbira, and go to town. What we need, what we're crying for, is a newport festival, and the revolution of the plugged in guitar, we need two turntables and mile-high speakers, we need angular chords and blaring saxaphones. We need enthusiasm!

Stay tuned. We'll get back on track here soon. Back to more a bit more measured commentary, but with enthusiasm!

Keith Gessen Gives Up the Ghost.

In the newest edition of Titlepage.tv -- the always awkward new project from Daniel Menaker -- Keith Gessen describes his current book All the Sad Young Literary Men. Ever since I picked it up at a book grab at work, I've suspected that it's only the writings of a cowardly narcissist wondering why girls just can't understand him. In an act against the trend of literary memoirs, Gessen hid in his shallow and one-dimensional characters rather than collecting a list of personal essays. Maybe he thought fictionalizing himself and the cadre of n+1 editors would put a little gravitas in his gut, but a slip on Titlepage.tv, above, proves his Fall Out Boy listening inner self is as shallow as expected. Grow a pair, son, and we'll talk in the future.

An aside: congrats to Menaker for having none of it, and looking over his glasses at this shell of a man.

All You Have to Do Is Throw Money, Throw Money.

The end times.

Bear Sterns finally decided to offer the hat to the highest bidder after homeowners called their bluff. As always, the CJR posted the best roundup of the fall of the suspenders-and-cigars firm's newspaper coverage:

As far as government bailouts go, this one could be worse. We’re glad to see the government did not bailout Bear Stearns shareholders, who are already issuing “howls of protests,” the WSJ reports. The paper quotes one employee (Bear Stearns’ employees own one-third of the firm’s shares) who doesn’t get it:

“I’ve got to think we can get more in a liquidation, I’m not selling my shares, this price is dramatically less than the book value Alan Schwartz told us the company is worth,” said a midlevel Bear Stearns executive. “The building is worth $8 a share.”

The building may be worth $8 a share but the rest of the company is worth negative dollars a share, dude.

Turns out they were to busy playing bridge while their firm went to the poor house. Which brings us to the levity of the situation, the red portion in the chart above shows the difference in Bear Stern's stock price from last friday to this morning, and really drives home how dire the situation is. Basically, Bear Sterns went looking for buyers, found one in the historically philanthropic J.P. Morgan and sold for mere pennies (or $2 a share). Its scarier than this everyday story, though, because the fed threw $30 Billion at the merger to leverage debt effectively in the process nationalizing the risk. J.P. Morgan will win big in this deal because the risk is placed on the taxpayers -- the Fed's loan will most likely never be paid -- and it gets at the least a very prime piece of commercial real estate. And as we dig deeper we see a Fed bailout broadcasting a message of laziness about inflation, a message arguing for a company asleep at the wheel, and one too big to fail. Worst of all, the already stretched taxpayer, facing increased threat of foreclosure, just saved the fuckers who financed their debt in the first place.

Movie Tuesday.

Stylish long hair.

Over the weekend I saw two surprisingly great movies, and since I loved them so much I feel we should start a tradition you and I. We'll call it "Movie Tuesday". When I see a good one, I'll jot a few notes about it, and you, good reader, will use the comments section to dissect my purple prose. Sound fun? Here goes:

The first and most spectacular movie I saw this weekend was Gus Van Sandt's skateboard epic Paranoid Park. I won't try to review the whole movie here, just the most breathtaking bit. Needless to say, the story follows a young skateboarder who has committed the most heinous of crimes. Shortly after the act, in an effort to clean himself of the filth -- and guilt -- of the trainyards, he steps into a shower with his head hung in order to hide. As the water flows through his long hair, it collects the individual strands into streams of water running into separate shifting rivers of weight. The soundtrack, at this point, paints an audio collage of natural sounds of birds chirping and wind rushing through leaves. Slowly Van Sandt stops down the camera, the image darkens, and we hear more industrial and more unsettling sounds. At this point the rivulets become something sinister, a viper coat weighing down our young skateboarder. Near the end of the scene he has become a monster quite ephemeral and clearly unnatural, and at least a bit of our sympathy disappears and is quickly replaced by a feeling of revulsion, a sense of shock and awe at the terrifying apparition on screen.

Skateboarding culture as a whole exists in a state of constant exploration and gives its practitioners a sense of ultimate freedom. These urban reclaimers champion the hidden spaces of our devolving urban decay. In past years and centuries, explorers discovered unknown regions of the globe, now these modern day Aguirres find places where people have already been and constructed, but enjoy those most will never see. The very next scene repeats the themes of the shower scene and shows these youngsters gliding up and down a concrete drain tube in a state of bliss, but the camera reverses the shot and we see that the tube is enclosed in on both sides. Effectively, these men underground are less than explorers or heroes: they are trapped by the very freedom they champion. They have a complete inability to flee and escape from civilization's sewers. Spectacular.

The second of the two, Be Kind, Rewind wasn't so much a movie as it was an argument for movies. It follows two mentally challenged video store clerks -- actually everyone in the movie seems a little dim -- and, after one erases the store's entire library after a tragic accident with a power transformer, their attempts at abridging and remaking the movies we know and love. Chock full of references from 2001 to Ernest Goes to Jail, its a heartfelt appeal for the importance of movies, and since I'm such a sucker for shots of an audience lit solely by the flickering shutter of a projector, it had me in sentimental silly tears over the beauty of pretty much any series of moving pictures. Sappy, funny, silly and with a shred of a storyline, Be Kind, Rewind reminds us how completely awesome movies can be, especially ones made on a sunny summer afternoon.

Pop-Tarts is German for Little Iced Pastry O' Germany.

A short heads up: This article at the New York Review of Books by Nicholson Baker explores the hilarity of Wikipedia and I guarantee you will laugh until your sides ache. Way to go NYRB! Not so stuffy after all! (Don't worry, I'm working on something a bit more substantial, but I thought I'd tide all 4 -- or is it three? Hi mom! -- of you over until I've finished.)