I'm Working On...

A Novella For An Omnibus

I haven't done the sort of writing that gets you in literary journals for a while. Make that 14 years. I gave it away when I decided to concentrate on screenwriting, except the screenwriting market has dried up in Australia so it's off to doing something I can control - namely writing a project that ends in print as opposed to oblivion, which is the usual case with screenwriting in this country. It's a bleeding miracle anybody is a full member of the Writers' Guild under the age o 45.

I don't feel like I want to talk about what the novella is about but I do want to say it's going to take me away from this blog for a while. My posts will be more sporadic. I'll be back in full swing once I get the first draft done. By then I'm hoping the Yankees to have won the World Series. If they haven't, you WILL hear from me. :)

The Other 'W'

False Recovery

The world's markets aren't repaired. they're just being propped up. That is what John R. Talbott thinks. I can't quote the article in detail because it's privileged content but the link is here (and it's worth signing up for the Business Spectator).

Isabelle Oderberg: You’re coming out to Australia to promote your book, The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street. If you had to pick one, the biggest and most damaging lie told by Wall Street that helped get us into the crisis we're in, what would it be?

John R Talbott: I think it would be this lie that I think originated in the United States back in 1981under Ronald Reagan that free markets work best without any government interference and it was taken almost as a religion that if there was any government regulation at all, it interfered with the proper functioning of a market and the supply and demand curves and we ended up at sub-optimal levels of equilibrium.

What we found out is that that’s complete nonsense and if you’re a student of economics, you should’ve known it beforehand, because students of economics know that you can’t have a free market unless you have lots of regulation. You need to protect against fraudulent behaviour. You need to enforce contracts. You need to protect property rights. You need to have a very well developed judicial system and if you look at the countries of the world, this is what the poor countries of the world are lacking. They don’t have the rule of law, they don’t have good institutions and thus they don’t have strong markets and good economies.

Talbott's advice is to watch for commodity prices to fall next year when the stimulus runs its course. Also, this isn't the recovery you thought it was. This is merely the first drop and rise in a 'W' curve. And Obama's not doing enough to fix Wall Street.

Pricing Cinema

What It Looks Like From Outside The Biz

Here's an article that shares some insight from what the non-film making portion of the population feels about the pricing of cinema tickets in Australia.

Imagine what the cinema industry could do if it matched innovation within the core product - the movie - with a more innovative in-cinema experience. Yes, big cinema chains are adding “extreme” screens, “gold-class sections”, specialist 3D cinemas and better sound and seating.

They deserve kudos for their technical innovations. But there is more to the customer experience than that. Price and service, two areas cinemas are weak on in my view, play such a big part.

I reckon cinemas could do so much more on pricing innovation, an area many entrepreneurs overlook.

Of course there are “cheap Tuesdays” but ticket prices are generally the same. So cinemas are mostly empty during the early part of the day, and crowded at nights, especially weekends.

Why not offer more innovative pricing structures that encourage people to spread their attendance.

What about $10 an adult ticket before 5pm, and $17 after 5pm? Would that get you to movies you otherwise would have missed? Would it make cinema chains more money overall by helping them sell more fat-margin candy and drinks, the real driver of cinema profits?

And there's the crux of the biscuit right there. You understand that exhibitors want to get as much on the premium product and the freshest product, but at the same time not all products are created equal, not all seats are created equal, not all times are created equal.

If the common punter has noted this:

Cinema executives will probably cringe at the thought, yet a strategy of just lifting ticket and food prices each year - without a comparable lift in value - is not great either.

...then the game is up. People are (and have) adjusted their spending strategy accordingly.

Which also goes to problems the film industry is facing globally. The ticket prices go up to pay larger and larger fees for  stars. people like stars because it telescopes a whole pile of narrative issues, namely, figuring out who the story is about. It helps to be able to say, "Oh, that's Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise/Matt Damon, the leading man. It must be about his character."

Which is all part of the audience's willful suspension of disbelief. This phenomenon in turn feeds the need to procure an A-List star for your movie because the paying audience will on the whole prefer a star-driven vehicle over one that is an ensemble piece or a foreign film.

And for some time now the cost of the A-List talent has been soaring, and this has been passed directly on to ticket prices without much debate, and it has been evenly distributed across all movies, regardless of budgets and costs. So, an Australian film with a $5 million budget equally charges a $17.00 per ticket that an American film with a $250 million budget gets. In a sense, the Australian film is forced to subsidise the excesses of Hollywood movie's budget as well as the Exhibitor's real estate value - and nobody in the industry is talking about this!

W.

A Fable Of Fallibility

In a most inopportune way, Oliver Stone came out with a biopic of the last POTUS in the last year of his office. And as much as Oliver Stone's pictures intrigue me for their bombast and over-reaching claims, I couldn't bring myself to put myself through this movie in the cinemas. Bottom line, the story of 2008 was Barack Obama, The GFC, and how the Neo-Con vision for the future all turned to shit, and everybody could see it - except the usual cabal of micro-cephalic right-wingers.

Bottom line for me as a paying audience was that I really didn't want to go over the GW Bush presidency all over again just to understand why it was such a faulty presidency. Nevertheless, Oliver Stone was making a film that was perhaps a little too soon, rather than a little too late.

What I'll talk about here is all under the caveat that Oliver Stone and his researchers have gotten their facts about 85% right. I am totally open to the possibility the accuracy is much lower, but in order to discuss the film, you sort of have to take on board the claims at face value.

What's Good About It

It's a film that helps us understand how we were in the grips of an idiot in the White House for 8 years. Eight Years! EIGHT FUCKING YEARS!

It's a bit like picking at a recently formed scab, where the itch is the worst. You come to realise the serious intellectual and conceptual limitations of the people involved. If George W Bush is an overly eager frat boy who simplified everything into silly little dichotomies, the people surrounding him seem equally maxed out on the Peter Principle scale.

There's nobody in the room smart enough to frame the issue properly. Collin Powell, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, are all insufficient to the proper task of combating the terror threat, as George W Bush eagerly marches into Iraq, convinced of the long term benefits. Worse still, Dubbya is making fundamental assumptions about people and faith and ignoring what is known in order to bring his vision to fruition.

He is so pathetic when it all unravels, you feel sorry for the guy - which is as Oliver Stone intended, whatever that is worth - and that is a weird feeling. Considering just how much he fucked up the world, it seems weird we feel sympathy for how much he fucked up his own presidency. And this is without considering the GFC.

The performances in this film are marvelous. Brolin's W., Cromwell's Bush Snr, Toby Jones' Karl Rove, Elizabeth Banks' Laura Bush are all great portrayals - especially considering the real figures are so fresh in our minds.

What's Bad About It

Some of the scenes where they discuss policy remain deeply unconvincing. We get the arguments and we get the direction of the rhetorical positions of Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld, but because they're telescoping the story down to the bare essentials, they sort of miss the nuanced, very subtly inflected polemic that was at the heart of the Iraq invasion.

I mean, I get the ideas and what Oliver Stone wants to tell us about Oil and Iran and geopolitics, but these scenes are so ham-fisted you think was the world really given to such nincompoops to drive into the ditch? Was this really the tenor of these meetings?

I guess I'm left incredulous and this is why I think this is a bad aspect of the film. But I can't offer how it might have really gone, so I don't really know; and in the absence of that knowledge, maybe Stone' version of it is as good as it can be. Shame it looks like a parody of the war room scene in 'Dr. Strangelove' - and heaven only knows we've seen a tonne of those over the years.

I don't want to be mean about it, but Thandie Newton's Condoleeza Rice was the second weakest portrayal next to the dude who played Tony Blair. The problem for Newton however is that you never stop seeing Newton enough to see Rice, whereas Brolin's Bush is so good, you see GW right there as we know him.

What's Interesting About It

The amount of importance attached to faith by the characters is noteworthy. The film spends a lot of time talking about Bush's faith and it's understandable that it does, given what a born-again Christian GWB was. The creepiest type of Christians are the most zealous ones, and we see that zealousness in abundance.

Then there is the depiction of Tony Blair as somebody who was motivated by his own conversion towards Catholicism which motivated his riding shotgun with GW Bush right into the Iraq fiasco.

There's also a argument to be made (and is hinted at in the film) that the world might have been a better place had GW Bush become Baseball Commissioner instead of Bud Selig. it might have fucked up MLB, but it would not have killed so many people.

Bud Selig's tenure has been *interesting* to say the least, but I can imagine GW Bush as commissioner being a bit more helpful, bit more decisive, bit more quick on the draw with respect to PEDs and what have you. And no war in Iraq.

The film also wastes no time on the 2000 election which may or may not have been stolen in Florida. That's an interesting choice given how dodgy GW Bush' ascension was in the first place; but it also frees the film up to investigate the actual agenda carried in to the White House by George W. Bush and how it went all awry.

Like a lot of Oliver Stone's films, this one is deeply thought-provoking and leaves a lasting impression. I have to say I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

Dubya, Jeb And Dad

The singularly interesting thing about the dynamic between bush Snr and Jnr is the amount of disdain Dad has for his son. This is a disdain that seems to stem back decades and just might not be spent.I always assumed that the rise of GW Bush was a Bush family push to re-mount a second Bush term as such; but the film indicates that Bush Snr placed much more faith in Jeb and not W. Indeed,the Bush Snrs. try to talk W out from running for Governor of Texas, which is an interesting scene.

It's really hard to get a handle on George Snr.'s legacy because the man himself is strangely opaque. Interviews with the man yield remarkably banal observations, and his record essentially stands on war, whether it is his service during WWII or the war with Panama and the first Gulf War.He only went one term because his term was like an appendix to the Reagan administration - yet he was a very important President as time has shown.

The intractable Freudian struggle W. is forced to endure with George Bush Snr. thus may have been the greatest tragedy of our time. And I have to admit that I was largely unaware of how much of a gap existed between the two men. It may be the case that Jeb was always the better Presidential candidate but we may never get to find out thanks to W's legacy. There's something very strange about that dodged bullet.

Wayward Economics

Paul Krugman's Take

Here is a remarkable perspicacious article about how economists missed the onset of the GFC as we know it.

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.

It’s much harder to say where the economics profession goes from here. But what’s almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic “theory of everything” is a long way off. In practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy advice — and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all problems.

There follows a beautiful account of just how weird the economists' view of the economy itself got with their insistence on the rational market. This bit also caught my eye so I think it's vry pertinent for us all:

And it wasn’t just Keynes whose ideas seemed to have been forgotten. As Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, has pointed out in his laments about the Chicago school’s “intellectual collapse,” the school’s current stance amounts to a wholesale rejection of Milton Friedman’s ideas, as well. Friedman believed that Fed policy rather than changes in government spending should be used to stabilize the economy, but he never asserted that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment. In fact, rereading Friedman’s 1970 summary of his ideas, “A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis,” what’s striking is how Keynesian it seems.

And Friedman certainly never bought into the idea that mass unemployment represents a voluntary reduction in work effort or the idea that recessions are actually good for the economy. Yet the current generation of freshwater economists has been making both arguments. Thus Chicago’s Casey Mulligan suggests that unemployment is so high because many workers are choosing not to take jobs: “Employees face financial incentives that encourage them not to work . . . decreased employment is explained more by reductions in the supply of labor (the willingness of people to work) and less by the demand for labor (the number of workers that employers need to hire).” Mulligan has suggested, in particular, that workers are choosing to remain unemployed because that improves their odds of receiving mortgage relief. And Cochrane declares that high unemployment is actually good: “We should have a recession. People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.”

Personally, I think this is crazy. Why should it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada? Can anyone seriously claim that we’ve lost 6.7 million jobs because fewer Americans want to work? But it was inevitable that freshwater economists would find themselves trapped in this cul-de-sac: if you start from the assumption that people are perfectly rational and markets are perfectly efficient, you have to conclude that unemployment is voluntary and recessions are desirable.

Yes, and it's amazing how much of this stuff you hear. It's as if these economists in the ivory tower don't comprehend the pain and suffering of what they are saying. Anyway, it's worth the time of the read so do check it out.

Yankees Update - 05/09/09

Rolling Right Along

The Yankees finished sweeping the White Sox, swept the Orioles and took 2 of the 4 game set with the Blue Jays this week. More importantly, the Yankees are ahead 8.5 in the AL East and have a 7.5 game edge on the Angels for the Home field advantage in the play offs. They have a 0.640 winning percentage for the season. This may in fact be the best Yankee team since 1998, because they're on pace to finish with 104 wins.

Looking back, this past August was great.It was the month where this team put its signature on the season by all but eliminating the Red Sox from the AL East contention by going 21-7 scoring 175 runs and allowing 123.

All is good.

7 Guys With 20 Homers

The Yankees tied the MLB record for having 20HR guys on a team. The previous marks were set by the '96 Orioles, '00 Blue Jays and the '05 Rangers. If Derek Jeter (17) can hit 3 more, they'll be breaking that record too. He may not, but it's something to aim for.

This might be the best lineup since 1980 according to the RLYW. Signing Tex might not have been so much a stroke of genius as a stroke of excess, but if there's anything the Steinbrenner years have taught us, nothing succeeds like excess.

Not Relinquishing Leads

The Yankees are 59-1 in games going in to the 7th with a lead according to the NYT.

“It’s not often when you get to save games on the Yankees when your name’s not Mariano,” Hughes said after retiring the final four hitters Saturday to collect his third save of the season in the Yankees’ 6-4 victory over the Blue Jays at the Rogers Centre.

Hughes finished a relief relay that included Dave Robertson and Brian Bruney. They did not allow a hit in three innings and preserved the victory for Andy Pettitte, who had a rare second-half sluggish start.

“The bullpen again came in the game and did their job, every single one of them” Manager Joe Girardi said. “Sometimes you need a little bit more from your bullpen and we got it today.”

The Yankees (87-49) improved to 59-1 when leading after six innings. A day after they may as well have wielded white flags in place of bats during Roy Halladay’s one-hit gem, Mark Teixeira and Robinson Cano paced the offense with solo home runs.

The bullpen's been pretty amazing as of late. If there's one thing I like about Joe Girardi, it's the fact that he goes with the effective arm rather than choose the veteran guys like Torre did.

If I Had To Nit Pick...

... but Joba is not pitching well. Regardless of the Joba rules and all else, he's simply pitching like crap at the moment.

Briefly On Ted Kennedy

The Last Shards of Camelot

I wrote obits for Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett and Les Paul and Marilyn Chambers of all people but managed to not write one for Ted Kennedy. I thought about it, but I was left feeling strangely empty. He was important, he was the last remaining link to a mythical time, but I sort of shrugged and paid attention to something else instead.

So I feel a little stupid to be writing this today, but this bit got my attention:

Kennedy also writes in the memoir that he always accepted the official findings on his brother John's assassination.

He said he had a full briefing by Earl Warren, the chief justice on the commission that investigated the November 22, 1963, Dallas shooting, which was attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald.

He said he was convinced the Warren Commission got it right and he was "satisfied then, and satisfied now".

...which is really interesting at this point in time.

As the remaining patriarch of the Kennedy clan, I imagine that there would be no other recourse, even in the face of mounting arguments. I sort of wonder how he lived through that time in the early 1990s when Oliver Stone's film was sensationally making a case for a conspiracy.

I imagine if you were the last standing Kennedy brother who was at once a Senator of the United States of America, you wouldn't dare allow yourself to be swallowed up by that possibility;it would be too scary. What if Democracy was just a facade and the Military Industrial Complex really ruled America with a deft and bloody hand? What would he have done? What would it have meant? Surely a US Senator can't buy into that stuff, right? Although it would have been intriguing to have sat Ted Kennedy down and gone through the case bit by bit as Jim Garrison does in his book.

I guess the thing about Ted Kennedy was that he was remarkably disappointing in some ways when compared to the over-idealised brothers who were felled by assassins. That had he shared their imagination or idealism, he might have been a very different politician; but he wasn't. He was Ted Kennedy, the less inspiring brother.

Which in turn fed my own luke-warm indifference at his passing. I know that's a bit rough when you talk about a man who was a Senator for so long and got so many bills through. Yet it has to be said, he was no Jack or Bobby - for better or worse. I guess if he were that different guy, he might have seen the argument for the conspiracy that we all saw in the 1990s.

We still won't know until 2039.

That Election In Japan

The DPJ?

Here's a pretty cool article, thanks to Rasterfield.

When the great recession began last year, the fate of Japan was often held up as an awful warning to the west. If the US and the European Union failed to adopt the right policies, it was said, they too might suffer a Japanese-style “lost decade”, followed by years of feeble growth.

Now that the Japanese have used Sunday’s election to elect the Democratic party – breaking with more than 50 years of rule by the Liberal Democratic party – a new western narrative is taking hold. This is a political revolution; it is Japan’s big chance to break with the years of stagnation.

But both these stories are wrong. The Democrats are unlikely to shake things up hugely. Nor should they. For the story of Japan over the past 20 years is by no means as dismal as much western commentary would have it.

It is true that, since its asset-price bubble burst in 1990, the country’s economy has grown slowly, the stock market has slumped and national debt has risen to awesome proportions. But, despite these trials, it has remained a sane, stable, prosperous and exciting country. Politically, culturally and even economically, it offers not so much a warning as an inspiring example of how to deal with a long period of adversity.

The fact that, throughout the years of relative stagnation, the Japanese kept electing the LDP puzzled many outsiders. A few even saw it as evidence that Japan is somehow less than democratic. But it was willing to try and change. The country gave a mandate to Junichiro Koizumi, the flamboyant LDP prime minister, who pushed Japan in a more free-market direction from 2001 to 2006. Now it has turned to Yukio Hatoyama and the Democrats, who are less enamoured of the American model.

However, Japan has always gone for change within well-defined limits. Europeans and Americans worry that a deep recession could stoke political extremism – not without reason, perhaps, given the hysterical tone of politics in the US and the increase in the vote for far-right and far-left parties in Europe. But during almost 20 years of tough times, the Japanese have never flirted with political extremism.

Its a really cool article that illustrates some important points so I do recommend you have a read if you want to understand just what is going on with Japan.

I've been asked a bit about the election in Japan simply because the new guys are inscrutable to most observers including the Japanese media. The origins of the DPJ are as strange and strained as anything you'll read about murky backroom politics in Japan. One of the Democratic Party of Japan's architects is Ichiro Ozawa, who used to be a power-broker for the LDP, who then broke away from the LDP in order to bring it down.

At certain points in Ozawa's long tenure as architect of the second major party in Japan were the travails of the Hosokawa government that brought together a coalition of the most unlikely parties, just to temporarily oust the LDP. Since then, he's clearly been busily building the DPJ out of the tiny fragments of that coalition and other disaffected defectors from the LDP.

The LDP for its part played a historic role up to 1993, whereby they held power by being at once socially conservative, but instituting a welfare state that marginalised the Socialist and Communist Parties. So, basically people got the best of both worlds where socially values were kept intact as welfare was put into place that made Communist nations envious. Of course that system had to break down because it cost too much, and has made Japan less competitive in other ways. In short, the LDP were an amalgamated middle ground of Japanese politics which sat dead bang in the middle, marginalising the Socialists and Communists right out of the picture to the left, and squeezing the nationalists into the far right where they look decidedly retro and insane.

In other words, the '1955 system' as it came to be known is essentially a collusion of politicians in the centre to trade horses in order to hold on to power indefinitely. Which of course led to a whole weird synergy with the bureaucracy and General construction companies.

Ozawa's great accomplishment has been to forge a second party that could be - and has become - an alternative to the LDP that still is close to the centre of politics. The reason why the DPJ is inscrutable to even the media of Japan is that it's still yet to define the limits of how it will stack up against a LDP that is trying to couch itself as the 'conservative' party of Japan.The DPJ is still too new, fresh, and untested to be understood. The point of the election in a sense was to see if a two party system can replace the '1955 system' to better effect.

The position statement of the DPJ is not that different to the LDP in many ways, except they seem to be a little bit more on the welfare side of things. The proof of the pudding can only be in the tasting, and in a sense, this brings us to the present day. If the DPJ becomes a durable force in Japanese politics, thus ushering in a two party system, then this election will be come to be seen as a truly heroic event. If the DPJ gets ousted after 1 term and never gets back in, then we will likely see a reversion to the '1955 system' through lack of other models.

I tend to be a optimist in the sense that the DPJ looks like a possible stayer to me. Even though Ichiro Ozawa got kneecapped by a scandal and thus could not lead his DPJ to this election. The Japanese could have been given much worse alternatives in the re-packaged Socialists or the unflailingly ideological Communists.

One More Rambo Movie Says Sly

Last Blood?

It seems redundant, but I guess built in redundancy is the name of some sort of good design. Sylvester Stallone is talking about doing another Rambo movie.

Sylvester Stallone is to star in another Rambo movie.

The 63-year-old actor is set to reprise his role as Vietnam veteran John Rambo for the fifth time next year in a film which will see his character battling drug and people traffickers on the US-Mexico border.

Rambo, which was released in 2008, had initially been billed as the final instalment in the series.

A source said: “The character obviously fascinates Sylvester and he feels there's more life in him yet.

“This time Rambo will be taking on drug lords and human traffickers after the kidnap of a young girl. Like all the previous films it's bound to be very violent but the character always had big box-office appeal.”

Aiyah.  Maybe they should just re-boot the Rambo series/franchise with another actor and another director. I don't know what good it would do to have Sylvester Stallone whip his body into some semblance of shape to do this thing one more time. The last time he did it wasn't all that convincing.

The Oil Economy

Just How Does Crude Oil relate To All This GFC Stuff?

Here's a cool article courtesy of Pleiades. This bit halfway in got my attention:

During boom times, as we saw in the years leading up to 1973 and again after 2002, the rise in oil demand strengthens oil producers, which reap massive profits by intentionally underinvesting in oil-production capacity. Oil prices continue to rise, filling their treasuries with a sudden influx of capital that cannot be absorbed at home. Petrodollars flow out, seeking returns in already inflating financial markets and pushing bubbles to dangerous levels.

As the business cycle turns, the euphoria begins to wane. Investors assess financial risks more accurately. Interest rates rise, further feeding the downswing. The irrational exuberance that amplified the boom quickly reverses course, accelerating the bust. Demand for oil collapses, causing oil prices to crash. Petrodollar flows dry up, hitting financial markets and real-sector growth still harder. Then, reduced liquidity and credit prevent oil exporters from investing sufficiently in productive capacity during the recession, and our story eventually repeats, each time more dramatically than before.

The geopolitical component of this megacycle is equally insidious. As oil-producing countries amass substantial financial reserves, they tend to allocate investment and expenditure disproportionately less to oil-production capacity and more toward areas that benefit the ruling elites. In the Middle East, significant portions of oil receipts have been spent on arms purchases, which protect the ruling class from both external threats and internal challenges -- indirectly, by appeasing military leaders who might pose a threat, and directly, by stifling opposition through robust internal security spending. (Military personnel as a percentage of the labor force is a very high 3 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are also consistently high, for example 9 percent in Saudi Arabia.)

Oil-importing advanced economies such as France and the United States, which eagerly sell weapons as a means of recycling petrodollars, cannot escape their own complicity in this game. Middle Eastern arms races boost not only the arsenals of national militaries, but also of subnational militias and even terrorist organizations. Iran's long-standing support of Hezbollah, for example, is well documented. The flow of weapons increases geopolitical risks, once again increasing oil prices as fears grow that military conflict or terrorist threats will disrupt supplies. Put bluntly, a little bit of terrorism is good for oil exporters.

And the links between oil and terrorism don't stop there. As oil exporters mimic the consumption behavior of advanced economies during booms, young populations develop highly unrealistic expectations, premised on a sense of entitlement to oil wealth. It's these frustrated expectations that drive youth toward radical and militant ideologies, not poverty per se. In Saudi Arabia, for example, real per capita income in the early 1980s was higher than that of the United States. Saudi nationals were accustomed to free housing, guaranteed incomes, and subsidized electricity and gasoline until low oil prices caused budget cutbacks in the mid-1990s. The Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers, after all, were mainly educated middle-class men. They were undoubtedly influenced by the arguments of Osama bin Laden, who in the 1990s was raging against "the greatest theft in history," arguing that the real price of oil in late 1979 should have persisted for the next two decades.

Does anybody feel that gasoline/petroleum is actually under-priced give its value to our society? A bottle of water can cost more than the equivalent volume of oil. That's really weird - or it tells you that the next 'commodity' for us to run short of will be drinking water, and not oil. I'm not sure.

The last bit in the excerpt got me thinking about the nature of the hyper-angry Islamist Terrorist types who recruit from poor workers working in the oil fields, as depicted (in Hollywood style, that is) in 'Syrianna'.

It Was 70 Years Ago Today

Corporal Hitler Taught The Band To Play

And it's definitely gone more out of style than in, but all the same, today marks the 70th Anniversary of WWII, which commenced with Hitler's Germany invading Poland. Naturally there haven't been that many good jokes about it since then.

Bette Midler said about her marriage to a German: "at nights I dress up as Poland and let him invade me"

Then there's the 'Fawlty Towers' "Don't mention the war" gag that culminates in:

"You mentioned it first."

"You started it!"

"No, you started it"

"No, YOU started it when you invaded Polant in 1939!"

Then there's my favorite "Not the Nine O' Clock News" gag where they declared: "In 1982 Germany became the first nation to win the Eurovision Song Contest with a song about love and peace, having started two world wars."

In that spirit, I bring to you some interesting headlines.

This one's from the BBC.

This is Poland's take.

Relations between Poland and Russia are currently thorny, partly because of differing historical interpretations of events at the start of the war.
Mr Putin added that the pair should "rise above the problems of the past... and solve the problems of the future".
He went on to talk about trade and energy co-operation between the two.
Earlier, Mr Kaczynski and his prime minister Donald Tusk joined war veterans beside a monument to the heroes of Westerplatte at 0445 (0245 GMT).
The ceremony marked the exact time on 1 September 1939 when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire at point-blank range on the fort.
At the same time, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland from east, west and south. The attacks triggered Britain and France's declaration of war against Germany two days later.

Poles, though, have long seen the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty, signed a week before war started, as the starting gun for the German invasion, says the BBC's Jonny Dymond in Gdansk.

It's just as John Cleese thundered. Putin for his part condemned the Nazi-Soviet Pact. I don't really know what that does for anybody today, but there you go. A gesture by the man who tranquilises tigers.

"Our duty is to remove the burden of distrust and prejudice left from the past in Polish-Russian relations," said Mr Putin in the article, which was also published on the Russian government website.
"Our duty... is to turn the page and start to write a new one."

Memories of the 1939 pact - in which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany essentially agreed to carve up Poland and the Baltic States between them - have long soured Moscow's relations with Poland and other east European states.

Within a month of the pact being signed, Soviet troops had invaded and occupied parts of eastern Poland.
"It is possible to condemn - and with good reason - the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact concluded in August 1939," wrote Mr Putin, referring to the two foreign ministers who signed the pact at the Kremlin.
It was clear today, he said, that any form of agreement with the Nazi regime was "unacceptable from the moral point of view and had no chance of being realised".

"But after all," he added, "a year earlier France and England signed a well-known agreement with Hitler in Munich, destroying all hope for the creation of a joint front for the fight against fascism."

Yes, yes, peace in our time and all that guff. What a load of Bollocks. It all rankles with somebody at some point in the story. WWII must be one of the most gripes-galore moments in human history, some of which are still being worked through in the Middle East. This next bit, caught my eye:

Mr Putin added that Russian people understood "all too well the acute emotions of Poles in connection with Katyn".
In 1940 Soviet secret police massacred more than 21,000 army officers and intellectuals on Stalin's direct orders in the Katyn forest near the city of Smolensk.
Moscow only took responsibility for the killings in 1990, having previously blamed the massacre on the Nazis.

That's very grand of him, I think, but I imagine Poles still think the Russians are assholes who sold them out to the Nazis and then fucked them up the ass. At least if not in that language, we find these sentiments:

Speaking at the ceremonies, Polish President Lech Kaczynski called the actions a "stab in the back."

"This blow came from Bolshevik Russia, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact," Kaczynski said.

That view, widely held in Poland and elsewhere in Europe, has produced fury in Moscow.

In a newspaper interview on August 31, Putin called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact "immoral." But he said Moscow had no choice but to sign the agreement to postpone war after Western powers concluded their own agreement with Germany. He said the 1938 Munich Agreement ended "all hope of creating a united front against fascism."

In Moscow on September 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out against a recent resolution by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, equating Nazism and Stalinism, calling it "lies" and a "rewriting of history."

"Even during the Cold War no one ever tried to put the Nazi regime and Stalin's dictatorship on the same footing," he said. "It never occurred to anyone to equate the Nazi threat, which meant the enslavement and annihilation of entire nations, and the policy of the Soviet Union, which was the only force capable of standing up against the war machine of Hitler's Germany and in the end ensuring its defeat."

You know what? I don't think the Russians are ever going to get a pass out of the Poles on that one, just as the Japanese are never going to get a pass out of the Koreans and Chinese (and everybody else they fucked up), just as the Germans won't ever get a free pass from most of Europe (even though Hitler was Austrian - Austrians get an easier time of it, really), just as the Americans are never going to live down Vietnam, and England's never going to be let off the hook for her Colonial rule in India and Hong Kong, and so on.

There's a joke about a guy called Kosta who says, "I built all those ships in the bay. Do they call me Kosta the shipwright? No. I built all those houses on the hill. Do they call me Kosta the carpenter? No. I built all the tall spires in the town. Do they call me Kosta the architect? No. (pause) I fuck one goat!"

Well, I think these countries all fucked  at least one goat, and that's the story of WWII. It's really not as edifying as all the heroic tales you see and hear and read.  All those heroics are in the service of fucking metaphorical goats.

Speaking of fucking goats, you might be amused by this entry in the SMH today.

Opposition leaders have historically struggled to get on the front pages of newspapers.

Why else do you think they undertake listening tours, sit down with toddlers for cups of pretend tea, go on cabbage soup diets and go on Rove Live?

But in NSW, Barry O'Farrell's profile problem is a little more boutique.

He can't get on the front pages because he can't think of a human behaviour venal enough to displace the members of the Government.

Think about it.

What would O'Farrell have to do, exactly, to get a gallop in the media these days?

Intimacy with a goat probably wouldn't even do it.

Yup. WWII sure helped forge the world we live in today. Either that, or it's just that kind of day.

Yankees Update - 30/08/09

Getting There

Since the big series in Boston where the Yankees stamped their authority on the AL East, the last fortnight has been a process of working through the numbers. Their long road trip out west finished with a 7-3 record, and while they lot the series to Texas at home 2-1, they've won 2 so far of their 3 game series with the White Sox. While the tension has somewhat gone out of the AL East race, the Yankees still have to get through September.

Even losing 2 of 3 to the Texas Rangers was interesting in that, it makes it just that harder for the Red Sox to get their Wild Card berth; an while you wouldn't exactly accuse the Yankees of tanking it, it's actually a nice result given the context of the race for the post-season. The only time losing a series this season felt okay.

New Joba Rules

Joba came out of his 8 day break and sucked. So now they have new Joba rules. It's a case where the desire to limit the innings and the need to get him to stay effective as a starter are beginning to work against each other. Clearly he needs the routine, so they're going to give him the starts, just limit the innings. Fortunately the Sergio Mitre-Chad Gaudin combo of a 5th starter has begun to work. Today's combined shut out by those guys is actually very useful. So it might be the case where Joba will pitch regularly, just not that long into the game any more. Certainly not until the post-season.

Andy Pettitte Wants To Keep Pitching

Most people were assuming he was going to retire but he's now making noises about going a bit longer. Well, with the sort of money on the table, why wouldn't you? Well, I'd be okay with that if he takes a similar incentive deal.

Derek Jeter's Magic Run

Captain Intangibles is about to reach a Yankee milestone later this season. he is likely going to pass Lou Gehrig as the career hits leader for the Yankees. I'm sort of amazed he's passed Bernie Williams let alone Babe Ruth, but there you go. Today, I consider him to be the luckiest man on the face of this earth. :)

District 9 Review

What's Good About It

For some reason there's been a dearth of good science fiction lately. I lay the blame squarely on the un-intelligence of Hollywood executives because basically, they're the only ones capable of funding a good sci-fi and they seem to have lost the ability to pick them any more.

It's against this context we get 'District 9' thrown at us like so much meat to hungry animals in a safari enclosure. The animals I might add probably always feel there's got to be better than the meat that's being thrown at them.

I guess I have to say that at least it's a full-blooded sci-fi flick, an that counts as good.

The South African Accents are great. It puts you deep into the rhythms of Jo'burg and there's something very curious about that. Maybe I'm missing the South African emigres with whom I used to play baseball. It's actually quite a bit of fun, and it has the added advantage of the bad guys seeming like much worse guys than if they were white guys from America, being mercenary.

I guess I'm a product of my times.

What's Bad About It

The film doesn't really give you an indication what the central problem is until a good 20minutes in to the film. This isn't because there's not much going, but because there's just too much going on. We're busy trying to decipher the vast mass of signals springing off the screen that we miss that it's about some of the aliens wanting to go home. In other words, it's 'ET: The Extra-Terrestrial' but with better effects and uglier aliens.

The other problem is that the it doesn't make any sense. If the aliens have been on Earth for 20-odd years because they were stranded without fuel, they shouldn't be able to extract fuel from stuff in the junkyard. An the same substance shouldn't be turning the main character Vikus into an alien just because it splashed all over his face. There's just no rationale for this except for the expediency.

The other thing I didn't like was the pseudo-documentary style it took with the extensive hand-held camera that made me car sick. I think I spent the middle 40minutes or so feeling woozy and wanting to throw up. That's not a selling point or this movie.

What's Interesting About It

There a re echoes of apartheid that play out in this film. of course the question one could ask is, is it just repeating the structure of racism or is it inverting it in some new way? I'm not really sure if the film makers ever successfully address the nature of xenophobia, but they do show how apartheid would have been exercised under the guise of bureaucratic policy.  That part of the film is at least fascinating.

The ugly, bullying bureaucracy is carried out with a very forced, fake smile and a condescending attitude that embarrasses us as we watch.

The other idea that is interesting in the film is the idea of Bogan Aliens. These aliens that come to earth are workers and have no idea about anything. You can just imagine it. If you randomly sampled the human population, its probably not going to be a good representation of the human genome. They're certainly not a goo political representative.

Which all works in favor of the complexity of the film's theme. All this breaks down as the story progresses towards a simple action gun fight climax, and you realise you're watching a re-telling of ET. I guess you could do worse on a Thursday night.

Rachel Ward Wants Some Slack Cut Her Way

I Dunno Lady, But You DO Get Slack Cut By Being Rachel Ward

This article came in courtesy of Walk-Off HBP.

I have a film now braving the marketplace. It does not comply with the dictates of mass marketing. It is not trying to be "entertaining enough for mainstream audiences". It does not try to compete with the million-plus audiences turning on television for Packed to the Rafters and Underbelly. It cannot compete with the marketing budgets of US studio fare. But, I believe - and my distributors and funding bodies believe - that given a fair chance, there is a healthy audience for Australian films. Uneasy, complex, unsettling ones at that. Always has been.

If anything, Australian film made its name with them: Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and The Devil's Playground, Bruce Beresford's Breaker Morant, Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout. New Zealand did it this way, too, with the likes of Lee Tamahori's Once Were Warriors and Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures.

I don't know whether filmmakers from other years have suddenly felt this insidious wet blanket of negativity for making films that demand and confront and haunt an audience (which is certainly my idea of entertainment) rather than providing simple escapism and the ubiquitous ''feel good'' factor.

Feel-good films have their value and their place. Like a big, buttery box of popcorn, they have no trouble selling themselves.

But as the Herald's film writer, Garry Maddox, went some way to point out, niche movies are dependent on how well they are made. They are also hugely dependent on an accumulation of great reviews, multiple stars, inordinate publicity by deeply committed actors and filmmakers, inventive and passionate distributors, inclement weather and robust word-of-mouth recommendations.

Removing any of those things can spell disaster. In other words, such films are extremely fragile beings.

I am not bleating for insincere reviews or coverage. I don't need them. As with Samson and Delilah, The Black Balloon and Somersault, my film, my fragile, beautiful egg, is being propelled towards the try line (decent box office returns) by positive reviews and good word of mouth. Reviews are not the problem.

What I did not count on was a succession of last-minute spoilsports, dumping doom and gloom and threatening to squash my precious egg before those in the audience could make up their own minds.

Well, let's see now...

Nobody is saying Rachel Ward shouldn't be allowed to make her movie. It's just that every time a niche movie is made with government money, it's an opportunity lost to have made a movie that might have a wider audience appeal.

And every time a niche movie goes into the market place and doesn't make it's money back, it puts another nail in the coffin of the Australian Film Industry being viable as an industry. And frankly, we've had 30-odd years of that going on thanks to really strange choices made by the AFC, FFC the various State-based agencies, and most likely Screen Australia. These strange choices informed by non-market biases and a very strong sense of wanting to be seen funding the 'correct' projects, combined with the ATO's very strange rulings on what constitutes Australian films, have all but destroyed the creatives in this country. We're dead, we're fucked - so much so in fact that we're dead-er and fucked-er than ever before.

So I kind of think Ms Ward is pretty lucky to have been able to make her film, good or bad, hit or not. It most likely won't be a hit. It most likely won't make its money back, but she got her work out, and likely got paid to do it. I think she's been given way more of a fair crack of the whip.

Here's some sobering news for you all. 'Indie' is dead. That's straight out of LA. Don't even bother writing your small-time scripts with little actions tailored for small budgets. They're not getting made. The marketplace is rationalising itself around big pictures that are based on proven commercial properties - read comic books and toys - and the biggest demand outside of that scope is in the $20million budget picture.

The kind of films we make in Australia simply don't fit that category. It's time to accept that even the international market that used to exist for our films is rapidly disappearing with the GFC.

So do I think Rachel Ward is off-base? Yeah, I do.

Some Honest Words

Cinematically Speaking, We're Pacific Islanders

Today brings yet another critique of the sad world of the Australian Film Industry. A lot could be said about this article but frankly I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted with talking about the damn thing when nothing seems to change. Anyway, here's what George MiIller has to say:

Except for Luhrmann, George Miller and a handful of others, Australian filmmakers are not even playing the same game as Hollywood. It's no wonder they're not competing.

They're like painters and musicians politely showing their work rather than scrapping for ticket sales.

“It's a tough business out there,” says Miller, who is – with the Mad Max movies and Happy Feet – the country's most consistently successful filmmaker. “The big-event movies seem to soak up all the attention and all the box office. Unfortunately, that's what the cinema business is devolving to.

“The smaller, more intimate, more modest stories are probably finding their way better onto cable, onto television, onto DVD and onto the web ultimately.”

Miller believes the comparison he made a few years ago – that the film industry is like the Fijian and Samoan rugby teams, with brilliant one-off talents but not enough support to match the world's best – still applies.

A cinema-chain executive, who asks not to be identified, says recent Australian films have just not been entertaining enough for mainstream audiences.

"The box office [see "Dollar for dollar", right] indicates what the general public's reaction is to these films and, despite certain people saying that the industry isn't supporting these pictures, that's a fallacy," he says. "Except for Samson and Delilah, that bunch of films have failed to strike a chord with audiences on a large scale."

The film industry – fragmented, democratic and often justifiably unhappy about the way success is tied to box office rather than overseas sales or audience response – has many talented creative figures but not enough producers who say ugly truths such as "No one cares about this story the way you've approached it" or "Even if you execute this perfectly, it'll still open in a handful of cinemas and last four weeks".

There aren't enough hardheads who'll say, "If this doesn't make money, it'll be five years before you make another film" or "How can we broaden it?"

Yup. Plus Phil Noyce's input:

And we need to listen to director Phillip Noyce, who recently finished filming the Hollywood thriller Salt with Angelina Jolie. "All Australian filmmakers have to be aware (as Baz Luhrmann so obviously is) that making the film is just half the job," he says. "A much higher percentage of budgets need to be quarantined for publicity and marketing. We need less workshops devoted to refining our craft and a huge redirection of energy by funding and teaching bodies towards basic entrepreneurship.

“The classic economic rules of supply and demand do not apply to movies; demand to see a film has to be created."

It's a number's game. The most ardent cinema-goer who pays to see films will see 50-100 films. That's based on a weekend movie with friends plus a shot at Tight-Arse-Tuseday. Plus they might watch a DVD of a film they missed, but you're not talking thousands of films.

So if you're choosing to see a film, you're going to choose from the top 50-100 most visible and interesting films on offer. This would mean the most marketed films will find a way into view of the ardent cineaste much more readily than those without the marketing budgets. And really, Australian films simply do not have the kind of marketing budgets to crack the top 200 most marketed films in any given year. So why are we surprised by this outcome?

Why are we even bothering funding more films when we know we're sending those films to box office oblivion? Isn't there something more useful to spend this money on? Like better education and health? I keep saying this but Australians pretend to want an Australian film industry much more than they really do. It's no surprise the industry is to all intents and purposes, dead on the vine.

Today, I feel too embittered to continue with this shit. I really am. I've had enough.

JCVD

What's Good About It

You have to like a movie that decides to work in a self-referential frame, where the main guy playing Jean-Claude Van Damme is Jean-Claude Van Damme. The film proceeds under the fiction that the JCVD we see on the screen really is the Belgian film star, who happens to get involved with a bank robbery.

The non-linear narrative where we see JCVD's entrance into the Post Office twice is effective and the flashbacks to different points in time are more poignant as the story rolls on.

The pacing is good and at no time do you really feel "man, this is dragging on", but there really isn't much to the story anyway.

What's Bad About It

The guys who rob the bank are a trio of losers. They behave like something straight out of 'Dog Day Afternoon' with perhaps a lot less wit and as a consequence their demises are on the whole dissatisfying. Perhaps that's part of the script's theme as well where JCVD confesses his great disillusionment with stardom and life.

The trio are so bad that you just cannot see how they might get out of the situation, even with JCVD as hostage. Inexplicably, they make him take the fall for the job by making him talk to the police negotiator, but that is about it. One of them even has a hairstyle reminiscent of John Cazales' look from 'Dog Day Afternoon'.

The film might have been even better had the bank robbery villains had half the gusto of Johnny Depp's John Dillinger.

What's Interesting About It

Apart from the premise itself? It's surprisingly barren.

It's full of pithy observations like how most American movies bash up on Arabs and muslims except JCVD.

There's an observation made by one of the bank robbers that John Woo owes JCVD big time, but somehow let him down by forging ahead with his career. Without JCVD, he would "still be filming pigeons in Hong Kong". That was a funny line.

The jokes about Steven Seagal and his ponytail are mildly amusing.

The Reader

What's Good About It

This is a pretty weird picture. It has a NAZI SS camp guard as a leading character, and it's a woman - and she's pretty predatory about sex as as well when she seduces a young German boy after the war, which is essentially where it starts. The horrible past only comes to light later in the story. It's a good ploy because it forces the audience to reckon with the humanity of the woman played by Kate Winslet, before we have to reckon with the horrible past with the main character.

Turns out it is an almighty emotional that requires two actors to anguish their way through the film, one of the Ralph Fiennes who was of course once upon a time that other horrible NAZI on screen, Amon Goeth.

It's quite clever in that it captures a side of the historical taboo through the libido and carnal pleasure sort of angle. The Germans in this story have to struggle with the NAZI past to they break, but it's not clear what happens beyond such flagellation.

What's also good is that the post-war trials of former NAZIs are depicted in the film and you get the feeling that yes, if you know how such trials are going to go, then they likely are show trials no different to the kind of trials they have in say, Communist China or Burma under military rule.

What's Bad About It

This is a really, really good film except I'm not sure you can de-politicise the Germany-Nazi-Holocaust parts of history to the extent and pretend that only personal moral concerns remain. I'm sorry, but I'm just not that naive. Nazism is/was politics. They didn't do all the stuff they did for nothing - they were hyper-political about the how and why of the Holocaust and everything else they went and did that we disapprove of today. In the same vein, anybody who was a Nazi is/was political.

You don't just sidestep that. And politics does go to where morality cannot stomach, quite often. But then, so does the law.

That may just be my reading of it, but the film goes towards having Bruno Ganz's character mounting the argument that the law has limitations and we still thirst for justice. And yet we're left with the impression that there were good Germans and bad Germans and we'd all be all right if we can just lock up the bad Germans.

What's Interesting About It

There's something almost stupid about a film that has NAZIs and the Holocaust as a back-story and then the leading actress who goes extensively nude in the film ends up with an Oscar. The same actress who joked about such phenomena in 'Extras' to Ricky Gervais, that is.

I mean, are we that dumb? Are they that dumb? It's a good film and all, but come on people! Winslet's done better work than this. Isn't this like Holocaust-Porn, the worst of its kind since 'Life Is Beautiful'?

It's like they show the ciphers of NAZIs and Holocaust and everybody has to go running to praise the thing. It's silly.

BrisConnections Disconnenct Part X

A Mess Is A Mess Is A Mess

After ASIC went and got the verdict it wanted against the Hardie board of directors, I'm sort of wondering when they will go after the financial engineers who engineered BrisConnections. Here's the latest.

BrisConnections, meanwhile, disclosed Macquarie Group reaped $133.8 million in underwriting, listing, management and other fees. Deutsche made $44.7 million in fees.

The company reported a $24.4 million net profit, largely thanks to the interest it earned from cash held in the bank. BrisConnections stated it had spent $880 million on construction expenses and had $187 million on hand on June 30.

Reflecting the turmoil within the group, BrisConnections also disclosed it held 27 board meetings during the year.

Despite BrisConnections launching legal action against unitholders who defaulted on the second instalment, the group is not legally obliged to repay the underwriters.

Under a clause in the underwriting agreement, BrisConnections is obliged to transfer only units forfeited by 135 unitholders who did not pay the second instalment to the underwriters.

Does this strike you as odd? It seems that they foresaw there would be defaulters, and the defaulters would be pursued for their money, BUT the underwriters won't be held to the same price tag. Somewhere along the path, they didn't expect Nick Bolton but they did expect people would scream. Go figure that one out.

Scum Dog Paupers

Yes Mr. Sheridan, 'Australia' Sucks

...but Australian Cinema does not!

This article came to me from Pleiades.

After a brilliant rebirth in the 1970s, it has become steadily worse. Our individual performers conquer all in Hollywood and London, and even Bollywood, but Australian films are consistently and predictably bad.

Compare and contrast, as the essay topic-setter would put it, two recent films: the big-budget fiasco Australia, and the exquisite Slumdog Millionaire.

Australia cost at least $130 million, perhaps all up quite a lot more than that. It is one of the worst films I have seen for years. And it has been a commercial mediocrity and critical flop. It is not so much a failed epic as a ludicrous, camp pantomime. It features superb actors: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and the gifted and charming young Aboriginal star, Brandon Walters. But they cannot save it from its ridiculous plot confusion, its constant air of contrived unreality, its pretentious and worthless nods to other films and the fact that at no point does the viewer believe in or care about the characters or the situations.

It grossly defames our nation. The treatment of Aborigines is the most morally troubling aspect of our history and we are rightly exercised about it. But no Australian government ever sent Aboriginal children to a mission island near Darwin so that the Japanese would bomb them. Nor did the Japanese land on and take control of such an island in the 1942 bombing of Darwin.

Some critics have excused this by saying that Australia partakes of no reality and therefore this anachronism, along with all the others, doesn't matter. Australia claims to be dealing with a huge historical issue, the forced removal of mixed race Aboriginal children. It can't expect people to take it seriously if it then depicts eventsthat not only didn't occur, but could not possibly have occurred in the universe we happen to inhabit.

The script is a dog's breakfast. At one point the rough Aussie drover (Jackman) is driving the refined English aristocrat (Kidman) to her new home. Jackman says he's always wanted to crossbreed a wild brumby with an English thoroughbred. Kidman thinks he's propositioning her and reacts with shock.

This banal, pathetic attempt at a joke is important because it illustrates the script's disdain for the audience. Kidman's character is meant to be obsessed with horses in England, and with breeding her champions. It is inconceivable that she could have misunderstood Jackman's remark, so the misunderstanding, which is meant to be comic, has no plausibility. In other words, the actors are not delivering the dialogue of a joke, they are delivering the dialogue of a parody of a joke. The audience is being asked to laugh not at a comic situation but at a director's sly and knowing wink about the banality of comic situations in films. In which case, why make films at all?

Australia exhibits two of the worst characteristics of Australian filmmaking: excessive artiness, which prevents effective story telling and a didactic, dogmatic, unsubtle, hectoring tone of political preaching. It is a tragic waste of a unique opportunity in Australian filmmaking.

Aaaargh. Where do you start?

I think it's pretty damned unfair. The point is, you would be consigning to the dustbin all kinds of films on the basis that:

• 'Australia' is an Australian Film


• 'Australia' sucks as a film


• Therefore all Australian films suck.

That can't be right any more than 'Slumdog Millionaire' would somehow prove the superiority of British Cinema or Bollywood or whoever was invovled with that production by 3 degrees of association.

If all Australian Cinema got judged and hung on the basis of 'Australia' by Baz Luhrman,we should start judging everything by the worst example. What if Wayne Carey and Ben Cousins defined all Australian sportsmanship? What if Vince Sorenti proved why comedy in Australia was crap? What if Tracy Grimshaw (just to pull a name out of a hat, nothing personal here!) proved once and for all why Australian Television journalism was completely and utterly fucked?

Besides which, 'Australia' was more exceptional than a typical example of an Australian film production, what with its enormous backing from 20th Century Fox with a $200million or so budget. I mean, were every Australian film blessed with such Rupert-Murdochian Largesse!

It strikes me that everybody is kicking the dog now that it s down, and maybe in some ways it does deserve the kicks. However a long term outlook of cinema would tell you that there might not be an Australian Cinema in the decades to come if current trends continue.

It's really not a matter of talent or ideas or script or skill any more. It's the reality of the scale of economies involved in film production, distribution and just how many paying eyeballs are out there to be targeted.

In the global market, it may not matter what we produce or how we go about doing it, given what the global audience is looking for, which goes to our general inability to supply that demand.

By the way, this bit brought me a smile:

Some folks believe Australian poets achieve much more than our novelists because the poet mediates nature directly to the reader, whereas the novelist needs a complex society to work with.

But that doesn't explain why our films are so poor today. It may be that the culture of government grants that dominates our arts has deprived them of the drive to connect with an audience. On the other hand, maybe we're just better at cricket. Come to think of it, the Indians are beating us there, too.

Again, the production cost and risks of poetry are much smaller than for film. The relative successes of our poets essentially comes from the freedom they have in their mode of production.

But it's nice to see our poets are doing well in our own cultural estimation.

Quadraphenia

Can You See The Real Marketing Ploy?

I keep buying this damn product in its many incarnations.

• There's the double LP -Check.


• The double CD - Check.


• The Soundtrack version on double LP - Check


• The Soundtrack version on double CD - Check


• The Original Movie DVD - Check


• The new version of the movie DVD 2 disc set - Check.


• The concert DVD of the 1990s Who stage show of this album - Check.

And so it goes. Can't even remember the number of times I went to see it at the Valhalla cinema in the 1980s.

The entry on the original album is here. Nothing much I didn't know but this was funny:

During the 'Behind The Laughter' episode of The Simpsons, the cover of the Krustophenia record is a parody of Quadrophenia.

Anyway... Naturally, the Film has its own page.

At the time of its original release, the film was received mostly negatively by critics and was panned for its large amounts of sex, violence, profanity and drug use, which were then still fairly uncommon in film. It did acquire a large word-of-mouth reputation amongst teenagers too young to go and see it. Today it is considered a cult classic and is recognised as a realistic reflection of youth culture in the 1960s. Many have praised Phil Daniels' intense performance. The film currently holds a 100% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Sounds about right. What prompted this search of course is because I bought the 2 disc set and watched the second extras disc to find the thing was shot in 1:1.85 and not anamorphic. The production stills show Arriflex SR cameras, which doesn't negate the possibility it was shot on anamorphic, but it seems far more likely it was 1:1.85. Indeed, the director tells us so in one of the interviews. The transfer does seem to be anamorphic 16:9.

It's a bloody brilliant film, which together with 'The Kids Are Alright' and 'Tommy' prove that the creative vision of The Who extended favorably well beyond their own domain of Rock. I remember mounting a lone defense of this film at AFTRS back in the day.

A quick look at Franc Roddam's page reveals that he hasn't been spectacularly successful as a director since.

In 1977 he made his name by producing and directing a controversial, searing docu-drama called Dummy, which was watched by 14 million viewers. It told the sad, sordid story of Sandra, a deaf and mute girl who descended into prostitution and degradation on the streets of Bradford. She was portrayed by Geraldine James in a performance that won her the Prix Italia and established her reputation as a talented actress.

Roddam directed Quadrophenia in 1979, loosely based on The Who's 1973 album of the same name. It told the story of Jimmy, a teenager who was involved in the early 1960s mod phenomenon. There was a burgeoning mod revival at the time, partially inspired by the film. The film has developed a cult status, but unlike his near contemporaries Ridley Scott and Alan Parker, Roddam did not establish himself in the United States. His first Hollywood film The Bride was a commercial flop, and his work since has been sporadic. Roddam is credited with creating the series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet reflecting his roots in North East England, and devising the format for the television game show Masterchef.

As one of my colleagues told me once-upon-a-long-time-ago, it's better to be a has-been than a never-been. At least he will always have 'Quadrophenia' to his name.

Yankees Update - 16/08/09

Thank Goodness For Bad Teams

After the Sweep over Boston, the Yankees took 2 of 3 from Toronto and now 3 of 4 from Seattle. Seattle have been particularly futile with the bat and have scored the least runs in the AL, 7 runs shy of Kansas City's mark.That being said, the run differential for Seattle is a mere -57 compared to a whopping -127 for Kansas City. They are a good defensive club.

To be fair to Toronto, their run differential suggests they should be over .500, but alas they are 5 games under. While Yankees' only loss came in the game after the Boston series where they sent Sergio "Meat-Tray" Mitre to the mound to face the Blue Jays - a kind of come-down loss after an important series, Mitre managed to pitch well enough for today's 5-2 win.

That's Not To Say They're Not Playing Well

The Yankees' run differential as of today is +111, which just happens to to LA Dodgers' run differential as we speak. In the Al, Boston is in fact the closest with a +81, closely followed by LA Angels' +72 Tampa's +71. When you consider how lackluster the Yankees' April was, we're talking about a team that has carved up the competition since Mid-May.

And yes, their lead is now 7.5 games. If the Yankees simply played .500 ball the rest of the way they'll finish at 97 wins. In all honesty, you have to say the Red Sox are still pretty good, but the Yankees are just that much better.

I don't think there's been a Yankee squad this good since 2002 or 2003, and even those squads had suspect defense. This team might be better than those teams. Don't be surprised if this squad blows by 105 wins.

The Bullpen is Mightier Than Most

Peter Abraham notes that the Yankee bullpen has allowed only 1 run in 20.2 innings. 8 out of 11 outs were strikeouts on today's game.

With Brian Bruney coming back to form and Phil Hughes handling the 8th, and Mo being Mo, the Yankees are shortening the game to 6innings. This is without talking about David Robertson and Phil Coke who have been very serviceable this year. The current bullpen does not feature a single pitcher below replacement level. That's pretty remarkable.

I've stopped complaining some weeks ago. I'm just taking in all the glory of this team this year. My fearless prodiction is the they will be hosting the Dodgers for the World Series, facing Mr. Torre. Echoes of 1977-1978.

300 Spartans And Loose Change

I watched '300 Spartans', which is the film that inspired Frank Miller to do '300', which inspired Hollywood to re-do a film on the topic as a movie '300'.

As such, the content overlaps greatly. Here's the Wikipedia entry on 300 Spartans.

The 300 Spartans is a 1962 Cinemascope film depicting the Battle of Thermopylae. Made with the cooperation of the Greek government, it was shot in the village of Perachora in the Peloponnese. It starred Richard Egan as the Spartan king Leonidas, Ralph Richardson as Themistocles of Athens and David Farrar as Persian king Xerxes, with Diane Baker as Ellas and Barry Coe as Phylon providing the requisite romantic element in the film. In the film, a force of Greek warriors led by 300 Spartans fights against a Persian army of almost limitless size. Despite the odds, the Spartans will not flee or surrender, even if it means their deaths.
The picture was noted for its Cold War overtones,[1] referring to the independent Greek states as "the only stronghold of freedom remaining in the then known world", holding out against the Persian "slave empire".
Frank Miller saw this movie as a boy and said "it changed the course of my creative life".[2] His graphic novel 300 is about the Battle of Thermopylae, and was the basis for the 2007 film 300.

It's a pretty ghastly film by our contemporary standards. The writing and directing is totally out of date and I sort of wonder if it was considered any good even by its own times' standards. it's not clear from the Wikipedia page.

Here's the entry on the graphic novel. by Frank Miller. It has this interesting tidbit:

Renowned comics writer Alan Moore has criticized 300 as historically inaccurate, with particular reference to the characters' attitudes towards homosexuality:
There was just one particular line in it where one of the Spartan soldiers—I'll remind you, this is Spartans that we're talking about—one of them was talking disparagingly about the Athenians, and said, ‘Those boy-lovers.' You know, I mean, read a book, Frank. The Spartans were famous for something other than holding the bridge at Thermopylae, they were quite famous for actually enforcing man-boy love amongst the ranks as a way of military bonding. That specific example probably says more about Frank's grasp of history than it does about his grasp of homosexuality, so I'm not impugning his moral situation there. I'm not saying it was homophobic; just wasn't very well researched.[3]
Miller, in the letters page of the series, replied to accusations of homophobia from a reader regarding the phrase "Those boy-lovers":
If I allowed my characters to express only my own attitudes and beliefs, my work would be pretty darn boring. If I wrote to please grievance groups, my work would be propaganda. For the record: being a warrior class, the Spartans almost certainly did practice homosexuality. There's also evidence they tended to lie about it. It's not a big leap to postulate that they ridiculed their hedonistic Athenian rivals for something they themselves did. "Hypocrisy" is, after all, a word we got from the Greeks. What's next? A letter claiming that, since the Spartans owned slaves and beat their young, I do the same? The times we live in.[4]
Reviewer Aaron Albert notes that although "Miller does take liberties with the history", he considers it more of a "theatrical portrayal" rather than a "historical battle". He notes the passion evident in Miller's writing. He praised the visuals; especially the use of over-sized panels. Lynn Varley's painting was also commended. [5]

So there's that to ponder. The '300' film entry is here. This bit was interesting:

Reviews
Since its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 14, 2007, in front of 1,700 audience members, 300 has received generally mixed reviews. While it received a standing ovation at the public premiere,[58] it was reportedly panned at a press screening hours earlier, where many attendees left during the showing and those who remained booed at the end.[59] Critical reviews of 300 are divided.[60] Rotten Tomatoes reports that 60 percent of North American and selected international critics gave the film a positive review, based upon a sample of 214, with an average score of 6.1 out of 10.[61] Reviews from selected notable critics were 47 percent positive, giving the film an average score of 5.7 out of 10 based on a sample of 38.[62] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 51 based on 35 reviews.[60]
Variety's Todd McCarthy describes the film as "visually arresting" although "bombastic"[63] while Kirk Honeycutt, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, praises the "beauty of its topography, colors and forms."[64] Writing in the Chicago Sun Times, Richard Roeper acclaims 300 as "the Citizen Kane of cinematic graphic novels."[65] 300 was also warmly received by websites focusing on comics and video games. Comic Book Resources' Mark Cronan found the film compelling, leaving him "with a feeling of power, from having been witness to something grand."[66] IGN's Todd Gilchrist acclaimed Zack Snyder as a cinematic visionary and "a possible redeemer of modern moviemaking."[67]
A number of critical reviews appeared in major American newspapers. A.O. Scott of the New York Times describes 300 as "about as violent as Apocalypto and twice as stupid," while criticizing its color scheme and suggesting that its plot includes racist undertones.[68] Kenneth Turan writes in the Los Angeles Times that "unless you love violence as much as a Spartan, Quentin Tarantino or a video-game-playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated."[69] Roger Ebert, in his review, gave the film a two-star rating, writing, "300 has one-dimensional caricatures who talk like professional wrestlers plugging their next feud."[70]
Some Greek newspapers have been particularly critical, such as film critic Robby Eksiel, who said that moviegoers would be dazzled by the "digital action" but irritated by the "pompous interpretations and one-dimensional characters."[55][71]

It's been a while since I've checked the page and hadn't seen the reviews section had grown. The Controversy section also makes for interesting reading. I liked this bit:

The film's portrayal of ancient Persians caused a particularly strong reaction in Iran.[102] Azadeh Moaveni of Time reported that Tehran was "outraged" following the film's release. Moaveni identified two factors which may have contributed to the intense reaction: its release on the eve of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and the common Iranian view of the Achaemenid Empire as "a particularly noble page in their history."[103][104][105] Various Iranian officials condemned the film.[106][107][108][109] The Iranian Academy of the Arts submitted a formal complaint against the movie to UNESCO, labelling it an attack on the historical identity of Iran.[110][111] The Iranian mission to the U.N. protested the film in a press release,[112] and Iranian embassies protested its screening in France,[113] Thailand,[114] Turkey[115] and Uzbekistan.[116]
Slovenian philosopher and author Slavoj Žižek defended the movie, from those who attacked it as an example of "the worst kind of patriotic militarism with clear allusions to recent tensions with Iran and Iraq." He wrote that the story represents "a poor, small country (Greece) invaded by the army of a much large[r] state (Persia)," suggesting that the identification of the Spartans with a modern superpower is flawed. Instead of seeing a "fundamentalist" aspect in the Spartan identity, he stated that "all modern egalitarian radicals, from Rousseau to the Jacobins...imagined the republican France as a new Sparta."[117]

And Warner Bros' defense is, it's" a work of fiction" and "loosely based on a historic event". I think Leonidas and his 300 Spartans might want to say something about that.

The parody 'Meet The Spartans' has this page.

The film received almost universally negative reviews from critics. As of May 19, 2008, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 2% of all critics gave the film positive reviews and 0% positive reviews from top critics based on 41 reviews with an average rating of 1.8/10; citing consensus opinion on the title as "A tired, unfunny, offensive waste of time ... [which] scrapes the bottom of the cinematic barrel."[2] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 9 out of 100, based on 11 reviews — indicating "extreme dislike or disgust" and being the worst received film by the director on the site.[3]
One reviewer in Scotland's The Sunday Herald gave the film a score of zero, as did Ireland's Day and Night while an Australian newspaper review described it as being "as funny as a burning orphanage". In London, The Times reviewer Wendy Ide suggested that the producers of the film were not aiming for 'laughs' but "a simian grunt of recognition from an audience that must have been practically brain-dead to fork out £10 to see a film that can’t even master the concept of out-takes?". This film was the lowest-rated of the 2008 film season.

Ha.

Reviewing Reviewers

Or... Why I Hate Paul Byrnes

Here's an example from this week. The first paragraph of a review of 'Tyson' which reads:

FOR those of us who grew up watching Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson was always a disappointment. No matter how many boxing titles he won – and few have won more – he always seemed like a brutal thug, a street fighter rather than a graceful athlete. One of the surprises of James Toback's film about Tyson is that he comes across as much smarter than he looks. Then again, a man who has lost every dollar he ever won – somewhere north of $US300 million ($370 million) – and done three years for rape is possibly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, nor the most likeable.

Just how wrong is that paragraph?

No.1 The comparison of Ali and Tyson is a hackneyed starting point, but to measure Tyson by the Ali yardstick and calling Tyson's career a 'disappointment' is sheer nonsense and arrogance. There are but a select few who can be the kinds of World Heavy Weight Champions both these men became. As boxers, their accomplishments are astounding no matter what they were like as people.

But No.2, the implied message is that Ali was a better man than Tyson - which may be true, but that is a moral point. It's not a point about their respective boxing styles or their significance as boxers in history, who made their mark.

No.3 We'll never know what a fight between Ali at his peak and Tyson at his peak might have been like. But Tyson was no thug. If Ali was flamboyant and artful, then Tyson was machine like, relentlessly precise and sharp. He was most certainly not a thug of a fighter.

No.4 Even if Tyson were a thug of a fighter, he won a lot. So clearly how he won in his peak years it's not an aesthetic issue; trying to make it one is just sloppy reasoning. Such aestheticisation of the problem also leads to the kind of fascism that Paul Byrnes himself would complain about bitterly in other contexts.

But one would know all these things had one been paying attention in the 1980s. Mike Tyson the man was an enormous enigma behind the sensation of Mike Tyson the boxer. We all knew this. And even in the denouement of his career when he was reduced to a ear-biting circus freak show who just had naked aggression left, Tyson the man remained oblique and mysterious to his spectacular public persona.

We know he has a sense of humour. Only last night I watched him in the 'The Hangover' where he pokes fun at his own expense, doing the Phil Collins air drum roll like the Cadbury chocolate ad with the Gorilla. He's always had a very funny side, even at his menacing peak. So, even with the rape conviction the enigma of Tyson was that he was likeable in spite of all those moral transgressions. And if Byrnes didn't understand this about Mike Tyson, I really wonder if he watched a round of Mohammed Ali or Mike Tyson box at their peak. Really.

Is Tyson really the idiot bastard son of Muhammed Ali's legacy? This has been asked a lot by pundits and commentators alike, but if you are dealing strictly with Tyson the man, you have say he came at a particular time of history when all the promises about race relations seemed to have somehow gone awry. That the black man might not be allowed into the main stream of American cultural discourse.

When you watch Muhammed Ali in 'When We Were Kings', he seems to radiate with hope for the future of what will happen for the black population in America. It is as if he can see far enough ahead that a Barack Obama would come along and be POTUS.

Mike Tyson emerged in an era when all that promise was slowly being eroded in the Reagan-Bush years, the bitterness of which exploded with the Rodney King trial and riots as well as the racial politic of the OJ Simpson trial. In a sense, Tyson was the man who actually had to fight the damn battle for acceptance in its darkest hours, unlike Ali who bore the standard as the battle was announced. Yes, Ali is heroic, but Tyson is not the antithesis to Ali, any more than say, Reggie Jackson or Michael Jordan or Carl Lewis or Albert Belle or Michael Vick or Tiger Woods or Derek Jeter might be. Each and all of these athletes turned up at different points along the long road from 1960, and dare say laid the ground of acceptance.

Yet Paul Byrnes chooses to cast a blind eye to all of that, and wants to reduce it to a moral comparison, just to start talking about a film about Mike Tyson, the man. I for one don't need this kind of moralism masquerading as cultural critique. It's shallow, venal and crappy.

Paul Byrnes, you suck. And that is not a moral statement.

Perplexed With The Google-Plex

The Shoe On The Other Foot

It hurts when you can't manipulate the market like you used to. At least, that's the message I'm getting from this article in the SMH.

With nearly 10 million visitors a month Google is the most visited website in Australia. Nine out of every 10 searches made on the internet is through Google. Those eyeballs translate into an estimated 90 per cent share of search advertising - the fastest growing area in online advertising as the number of advertisers using the service soars close to 50,000 in Australia. Google's revenue is estimated to be $700 million and fast heading towards $1 billion as more advertisers divert their budgets into a medium that delivers them measurability and sales leads. Soon Google will have the ability to sell and serve richer display brand ads on 62 per cent of Australian websites. A suite of products from maps and mobile phone applications to computer operating systems, video traffic on YouTube and cheap telephone calls only helps rust consumers onto the Google brand.

The more time we spend on the internet, and hence on Google, the more money it makes. All of which is making the Australian media, already grappling with the structural changes the internet has wrought on it, deeply uncomfortable. Now it is plotting its revenge; how it goes about exacting it is another thing altogether. But while Google's monopoly of information is not in doubt, to date there is scant evidence of Google using its muscle to distort the market, only a fear that it might do so in the near future. That has not stopped a growing chorus of voices expressing concern at Google's dominance, but such is the might of Google, few are prepared to go on the record. Telstra's Sensis, News Limited, Ninemsn and Microsoft all declined to publicly air their grievances because some of them still do business with Google.

One that did, though, is the man who arguably has the most to lose from Google's continued dominance and the most to gain from its downfall: Rohan Lund, the chief executive of Yahoo7!, Google's main competitor in search.

He says all he can see is a future where the Google Death Star, as he dubs it, will reign supreme. "There needs to be a conversation in industry and government about Google's role in the market and what this means for business and consumers both now and in the future,'' Lund says, adding that Google may now be Australia's largest media company by reach and profit.

''Commentators in the US are concerned that Google has a 60 per cent share. Let's not forget that in Australia that climbs to nearly 90 per cent share, even after the Yahoo! and Microsoft search businesses join forces."

I'm going to digress a bit and talk about the example set by the music industry.

Once upon a long time ago, Robert Fripp the guitarist from King Crimson folded up his band in 1975. There were many reasons to his decision, but one of the ones he discussed was the nature of technology pointing in a different direction to the way the music industry was structured. Through 1975-1980, Robert Fripp expressed the view that the music business with big Rock bands going on tour was a dinosaur and only small intelligent units were going to survive the technological changes.

As such, he saw his own band as an unwieldy contraption that was not going to survive and proceeded to build a catalogue of albums as a solo musician working small partnership. When King Crimson returned, it was as a stripped-down 4 piece with a more technology-driven approach.

Since then, Robert Fripp has been shown to be right. As technology changed, the music industry was found to be a dinosaur as small intelligent units - mp3 players and pirated music files destroyed the business model of the record labels. The key of course was distribution. Which is why this bit caught my eye:

''Distribution is key. Once you start locking up distribution your reach gets bigger, then the revenue per search gets bigger and then as that gets bigger the more you are able to pay others to lock up distribution,'' says Lund, who has spoken out despite pleas from Google for him to remain silent on the matter.

It doesn't matter what you sell, whether it is advertising space or little discs that make music when placed in a player, distribution of your product and service is the most important aspect of any business.

If anything, the advertising industry should be in more shock than the media that provides competing ad space. If you had a small business providing a very specific service, then it is far more effective to place an ad through Google than it is to place it in any media outlet. If you had a meager advertising budget, the place you should put that money is Google. Everything else is relatively speculative compared to the certainty of Google Ads.

The fact of the matter is, there are numerous companies on the planet that do offer very specific goods and services that can now reach a wider target through the internet and especially through Google.

Another way of putting it is that the advent of technology has made sure that the media advertising space has been found out to be overpriced for the effectiveness they possess. The only good that advertising space in Newspapers and Free-to-Air TV can achieve would be branding and specific announcements, while carefully targeted adverting all takes place through the internet - and in particular through Google.

But even with branding ads, Google has something coming:

Google has yet more weapons in its armoury. Later this year when it turns on its DoubleClick ad serving platform - which it bought for $US3.1 billion in 2007 - it will be able to serve up display ads, such as banners, pop-ups and videos, to advertisers who are looking to do brand ads online. To date, Google's focus has been on selling search keywords to advertisers and text ads to small businesses. DoubleClick, which serves and measures the effectiveness of display ads to half the websites in the world with more than 1 million unique monthly visitors, delivers Google advertisers from the big end of town. It also pits it once more against its key customers; the publishers and the media-buying agencies who each year earn their bread and butter from a market worth $500 million a year. Google insists it is not about to cut their grass and that its priority in Australia is on building search advertising revenues. It adds that, even it it wanted to, it doesn't have the skill sets of either a publisher or a media agency to undertake such a task.

But, as one internet advertising veteran, who asked for anonymity, says: ''What worries them [the media] is the sheer volume and quality of data about customers that Google will own and how that can be used in other advertising models. There's a real danger that Google does everything that they do only they'd do it much better and more efficiently.''

I would hate to be in the print ad or TV ad business going forwards. It's like working for Kodak Film in an age of digital photography by the masses. And I keep thinking Robert Fripp had it absolutely right - technology has slain the dinosaurs.