The New New Album

Seasons Greetings

Got a new album out. It's a collection of 10 songs from before the chaos. 

God I miss iCompositions.

Don't miss the fun.

What You've Got

Falling In Love Too Late 

It's probably a very bad idea to fall in love late in life. Especially if you end up on the long end of the spring-autumn deals. At a certain point a man ought to hang up his hat. It's not like I have anything to share, but I do want to make the observation that when the opposite sex that floats into your orbit could be your grown daughter, you probably should exercise the discretion that gets described as the better part of valour - run the other way if you want to stay sane. 

That said, there are any number of circumstances where such common sense gets thrown out the window. There's no guarantee you will find somebody you need to be during your 20s any more than there is a  guarantee you won't. If you find yourself in those shoes, then the best you can do is to make the most of it. The things that happen in life are pleasantly surprising. You have to take every opportunity that comes your way. 

The nectar of the gods flows freely. If you stumble upon the stream late in life, well, all the more reason why you should respect that moment and run with it. Don't mind what the world says about it. 

Go join the fun.

Grieving Stages

Losing Friends To Time

If you live enough you find you can lose friends in the most surprising ways. They might just move away and you lose touch with them. Or they might simply grow apart from you in interests.They may even die of an accident suddenly or of an acute illness. Those are hard because they leave you with this surprising blank spot in your soul. You don't know what to make of the permanent absence of your friend, wrought by accident or illness. Yet one of the worst may be to lose your friend to clinical mental illness. Those are hard.

They might be there but they might be without continuity of thought. It's disconcerting, because they're physically present, but the mind you knew to be there is impaired. When you're young, you don't expect this stuff to happen to your friends. The sheen of youthful invulnerability can get pulverised by mental illness. Then mental illness drops on them and subsequently you spend years trying to gauge just how much is left of them, and which bits are the illness. And just as if they had died you go through the grieving stages, and come out the other end still wondering what's left.

Over on Spotify.

Is Our Galaxy In A Bubble?

Doom-scrolling In A Pandemic 

Sometimes you lose perspective on what to write about. That's at the best of times. During lockdown, you lose way more perspective than you realise. My Pandemic Lockdown Rock-down has turned out to have yielded some bonkers ideas for lyrics according to the Dude at Audio Darnok. 

I tend to think the whole galaxy being in a bubble is possibly the most emblematic theory of the universe that befits our time. After all, I'm convinced that we're all living in a financial bubble and nobody ever seems to notice it. If the whole galaxy were in a bubble of its own, who would care? 

There used to be a phrase about the economic bubble in Japan - they called it "that bubbly feeling". Even now when they refer back to that time, they say "that bubbly feeling era". The bubble, metaphorical and otherwise, is all around us. all the time. 

You've been warned!

Old Style Rockets

Going Back to the Moon

Old masters NASA have finally sent their Artemis rocket to the moon. Back in the day I would've been -pardon the pun - over the moon with joy that they were doing this kind of thing but of course Elon Musk and his Space X have stolen their thunder quite a bit. The Artemis is a single-use rocket unlike the fancy things Space X have built with their multiple launches. Dare I say, the thing is more of the mid-20th century than the 21st Century. Since being conceived during the Dubya administration, the project has been overtaken quite a bit by technological developments around the world. 

Elon Musk himself has launched himself into what might as well be the Moon for him with his Twitter purchase. It's all very messy right now, but lest we forget it's also the same dude that made rockets and electric vehicles viable. He may pull that one out of the hat as well.  

We sure live in interesting times. I wonder what Chuck Yeager would make of all this. 

Arguing Semantics

The Weirdness of Eastern Europe

I used to know a Czech at high school. He was always up for an argument. When I ran into him some years after high school, he wanted to take up on some argument that we had back at high school, as if only days had passed. He wanted to re-prosecute his arguments and then drive home some arcane conclusion that he wanted to push for back in the schoolyard.  

I knew another Czech. He played dungeons and dragons with us. He would drink quite heavily and by 8:30 pm, he would argue anything and everything. He once argued that there were no such things as medieval townships, just "potential cities". He wouldn't let that pass even when we begged him to. Like that guy in the meme who wants to be argued around a difficult point, he demanded we argue with him.

When I got to AFTRS, I kind of hit the motherlode of East Europeans. Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and so on - and they all loved a good argument. Even the laconic ones would be loquacious when it came to the true nature of Marxism or the unbearable lightness of one's libido. At some point you would find yourself in a deep argument with them. It just was the way it was.

What I did notice about the way they argued, was that they liked to argue semantics. In the English speaking world, we don't like to argue semantics. When somebody who is a native English speaker says "I'm not going to argue the semantics," it usually means "fuck off with your bullshit." However, if you ever found yourself in a surreal never-ending argument with an Eastern European, you usually found yourself arguing the nuances of semantics like they mattered. It doesn't to us, but to them, it seems to matter a lot.  

I don't know why Eastern Europeans love semantic arguments so much. Our disdain for semantics must seem barbaric or anti-intellectual to them, but there really is a divide in how and what we argue. My own theory about this is that Eastern Europe was so much more boring than the rest of Europe, so to devise some entertainment, East Europeans developed arguing semantics into an art form. To endlessly argue semantics is not only a virtue, it is also a great way to pass time living under tyranny and with no rock music, movies, or books. Arguing semantics endlessly is, a kind of performance art over there. I suspect that over time, Eastern Europeans have created a consciousness where arguing semantics endlessly is just the way life goes. It's a bit sad that this passes for philosophical thought in some parts of Eastern Europe. 

Take Alexander Dugin, the alleged ideologue of Contemporary Russia. He seems to be nothing but a demagogue selling tawdry race theory claptrap. And yet he lands in Vladimir Putin's orbit as a great thinker on the back of reams and reams of bullshit. And by bullshit I mean semantic crap woven into more semantic crap. Hardly any of Dugin's 'thought' would pass Philosophy 101 in the West, but there he is, advising Putin. It'a all semantics built up into something that it shouldn't be. 

And this phenomenon, more than anything else would explain Vladimir Putin's penchant for long speeches about nothing. They're "about nothing" to us exactly because a lot of what he's banging on about are semantic arguments which we dismiss instinctively, or as second nature. Putin on the other hand thinks he has crafted some incredibly intelligent argument arguing the most nuanced semantics. He would be dead wrong in thinking any of those semantics would persuade anybody in the West. And so he wonders why we don't understand him. It may well come as a shock to him one day when somebody explains to him that the great effort he puts into arguing semantics is totally meaningless to an anglophone world. 

The cultural schism is a lot bigger than people are giving it credit. 

Dinosaur Remains On The Moon

Guitar Synths

A couple of years before the pandemic, I obtained the EHX Syn-9 pedal which turns your guitar signal into synthesiser sounds. It's a cool pedal because it allows you to play synth runs as a guitar player, and suddenly your palette sounds like a mid to late 80s pop rock outfit. I've played with it live and people are taken aback when you dial it in and suddenly there's a fat Prophet IV sound coming out of the guitar amp. 

During work on Cosmic Orphans, I decided I would use the Syn-9 pedal as the backbone sound. I would use it to play all the sections that I would normally assign to keyboard or rhythm guitar during the basic outline of the tracks. Then, just before the pandemic hit, I managed to get hold of the Boss SY-300 pedal, and that fit right into the sound of Cosmic Orphans too. 

When I played early demos of those tracks to some people, I got the response "but why would you want to turn your guitar into a synth?" It struck me as odd that people would want to ask that. The same people are okay with the guitar signal going through overdrives, distortions, modulations, and so on. Somehow they drew the line at guitar synths. Why wouldn't you expand the palette of guitar sounds to include synths? It was weird.      

 

The Patient

Seems Over Now

The pandemic feels mostly in the rearview mirror. It was approximately 30 months of the most extraordinary government intervention to stave off a larger disaster by embracing the lesser disaster. You couldn't say we weren't warned because there have been any number of pandemic stories in the last 50 years. Some of them have made great movies. They all end up with overwhelmed hospitals and corpses piled up on the streets somewhere. It was shocking it happened in places like NYC, but that chaos is exactly what we all collectively lived through on this planet. 

The virus is still around but governments have now told us to go back to work and pretend like it's not there. Or to pretend it's like the flu - just another respiratory disease in the population. Of course we'd feel better about it if the thing didn't have the potential to mutate back into a killer. Governments are too keen to make out like the virus has gone endemic and become milder. The science of it says otherwise - it's much too soon for that to happen. Even the Spanish Flu epidemic 100 years ago took half a decade to wind down. We're only halfway trough year 3. Even with the amazing vaccines that have come into play so quickly, there's no statistical reason Coronavirus has evolved into a less harmful endemic organism. 

But for now, we're not going to do lockdowns any more unless you're in China. In some ways the lockdown and hitting the great pause button had its upside. I got to spend a lot of time re-mixing things and got 18 months ahead in the scheme of things. Going forwards, I will have less time to tool around with the music thing so it feels like it was a blessing to be able to just delve deeply. I guess if I were Robert Fripp, I would write something like "the drive to 2026 continues" or some such nonsense. In most part the schedule is intact in spite of the aggravations of this year. 

Come join the fun.

Is China Working At All?

Let's Talk China For A (Minsky) Moment

For over a decade now, there's been this talk about China being too indebted, and how its economy was built around real estate speculation, and how the property bubble was going to burst, and once that happened the entire Chinese economy was going to come down like a house of cards. For over ten years, I've been writing about how the wealth disparity, the education disparity, the income disparity, opaque and misleading government datas on its economy, and so on would eventually bring about a crisis. If the solution was evermore debt, there had to be a moment when China, with all its misapplied industrial might and ghost cities and multi-generational mortgages for unbuilt housing, and all the excess of their developers, would have to have its Minsky moment. 

I blogged about it a lot. And then some. In 2016 the share market bubble in China burst. Somehow the CCP government managed to stave off the inevitable once again and quarantined the fallout from bursting the property bubble. Nobody talks about it, but that's what they did. Otherwise world markets would have felt it. It worked so well and smoothly it made us all look like idiots for calling the China Bubble as having burst. And for over ten years, that Minsky moment that collapses debt-fuelled bubbles never seemed to arrive. Until earlier this year when over 300 regional banks faced bank runs. 

Now that it has, we've all got to be wondering the same thing: will Xi Jinping reverse course and let the free money flow? Because that's what they had done for most of the last decade; and after all, that's what they always do. It is possible they won't do so, and they let the whole shebang go? But then the social turmoil that would follow would become revolutionary. So if they want to stave off a revolution, they need to going back to delivering economic growth for everybody. 

Will they or won't they? Does anybody care? The weird thing is they look to be in policy paralysis when it comes to the economy. 

Not Your Daddy's China Now

The world needs a massive readjustment to China. Some parts of the world are re-orienting their stance faster than others. Certainly any time that Paul Keating pops his head up to tell us Asia is our future and China is our friend, he looks well and truly out of date. He was right between 1978 and 2012. Even with the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, we all collectively held our noses at the the Chinese Communist Party's predilection for violent control and did business with the Chinese because it was so clearly the greater good (if by 'greater good' you mean globalised greater profits). Somehow China went from a nation where everybody was wearing heir strange national uniforms to a country where designer goods and luxury items are consumed by a fully modernised populace. We languidly thought if everybody in China became consumers, democracy would follow. I don't know why we chose to tell ourselves that, but that's exactly what we did and we couldn't have been more wrong. 

All the same, China could be counted on to be a good participant in the global trade stakes, and it behaved like an economy-first developing nation. You could charge China as having been an economic animal under  Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, forever seeking export markets and flooding the world with cheap goods. Across that time they exported so much deflation, it allowed Central Banks around the world to run low interest rate regimes. China plugged itself into global markets for the first time in history - I don't say this lightly - and reaped the tremendous benefits of globalisation like no other nation. 

And having succeeded in doing so, Xi's China has decided it wants to be a political animal instead. In the last decade under Xi Jinping, Chinese labour has gone up. It has started to prosecute territorial claims aggressively. It has devised a strange policy of 'wolf warrior diplomacy" where their diplomats say undiplomatic things. It has left a lot of people wondering if they are even friendly. The most you could say about Xi's China is perhaps John Lennon's refrain about revolutions, "but when you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow". Xi Jinping's China is a very different animal to the China that existed before his leadership. 

Back To The Future?

The world is taking stock right now in the wake of Xi Jinping being made the lifetime dictator of China. Arguably, this was not supposed to happen. The rising living standards of China were supposed to bring about a gradual change where China would transition from a military Junta of communists towards a democracy. Of course this kind of transition happened in Taiwan, but Taiwan is not shackled with the curse of considering itself a great power. Just as Russia failed in its transition from the Politburo to democracy and ended up with Vladimir Putin, China too has utterly failed to make a transition out of its Politburo system. Laughably the CCP even argued the Politburo was democratic and therefor China had its own version of democracy - which just goes to show how little they understand of democracy. 

The strangeness of our times is such that we now have a leader of Russia with a view to turn back borders to 1955, paired with a Chinese leader who wants to go back to the leadership style of 1955. With both countries using their resources as bargaining chips, it's strange to watch these leaders try to bargain their way back to an imaginary glory in the past. The uneasy alliance between Russia and China certainly looks like a re-run of the uneasy alliance between Stalin and Mao. I imagine there are a lot of people waking up to a world with a cold war and belligerent Maoists, and feeling a bit of deja vu.  

The future of China led by Xi is distinctly unappealing. You wouldn't want to invest more capital there, and you wouldn't want to hire the labour there with its rapidly rising cost. The sovereign risk is no joke. The demographics are aligned in the direction of an ageing population with shrinking economy so it's not like there's much scope for the domestic demand to take over. The country is sliding towards an awkward 20th Century style of nationalism that may well get them into armed conflict with its neighbours and it's still a country with over a billion people with 37% food security. Now is not the time to ignore economics for their leadership, but here we are witnessing how they ditch economics in favour of nationalist ideology. 

It does make you wonder.

Social Media Turned Us Into Rats

Hungry Rats at That

I think the Great Pause of the pandemic gave us enough time to digest what just happened last decade. It's rare that you get to reflect on things in such a leisurely manner. The experience had some parts Boccaccio's 'Decameron' and some parts 'The Plague' by Camus.

One of the things that really struck a cord was how social media effectively turns us into hungry rats, addicted to the stimulus of other people's posts and news items. Indeed, there was a certain level of irony in all the doom-scrolling we did during lockdown. Now that the pandemic is in the "let's-just-ignore-it-and-it-might-go-away" phase, it's weird to reflect on the things we thought and did as we took cover from the unseen foe. As Genesis once pointed out in their songs, how does one fight a o deadly when you don't even know it's there? That in a nutshell is how dinosaurs went extinct. 

Anyway, here is a song decrying the horror that was the betrayal inherent in the Cambridge Analytica episode that gave us Brexit and Trump in 2016. 

 

Thor: Love and Thunder

The Haters Are Loud

Largely thanks to Covid I've stopped going to cinemas since December 2019. Almost 3 years on, I do miss it, but I have my subscriptions and I'm okay with watching these things on my TV at home. It's not because I have some fantastic home cinema (I don't) but because I've stopped caring too deeply about movies for a long while now. Sometimes it works for you, sometimes it doesn't. 

I watched 'The Batman' on the teev and fell asleep. I struggled to watch all 3 hours of that thing the first time; the second time, I fell asleep faster than you can say "Gotham sucks". Compared to that, the new Thor movie kept me watching right to the end. And I felt quite rewarded. I understand there's a cottage industry out there decrying the tone of the film and the mixed mimesis of the narrative. It appears there's a very set idea on how some people think these movies should go. 

For my time-and-money, I'm a lot more interested in the weirder ideas to do with these comic book characters, and if the character is also a Norse god, then maybe we should be looking at this through a wider prism than whether Marvel is handling this character well or not. Once upon a millennium ago, Thor was a mighty god to Vikings. Maybe there's an argument to be made that Marvel has never handled somebody else's cultural baggage all that well to begin with, so complaining about it is a bit daft. In that light we should be asking the naysayers just exactly what do they think lends legitimacy to the portrayal of a Norse god as a comic book character in film.

So... Spoiler alert. Don't read on if you're the sort that complains about spoilers. It has been out for months now. Seems crazy that somebody would complain about it today, but ... we live in that kind of world. 

What's Good About It

What's very good about the film is that it builds on the trauma Thor has sustained in the previous films across the 3 stand alone and the all the Avengers moments. Somewhere along the way he's had to abandon Dr Jane Foster - largely for reasons of Natalie Portman's unwillingness to keep playing Dr Jane Foster. But the film takes that absence and turns it into Thor's own trauma about a love that came to an end. At the core of the breakup is the vast difference in the scale of time between a God who lives thousands of years and the mere ephemeral human woman. A bit like what should have plagued Aragorn and Arwen's relationship.

And this problem casts Thor's problem as intrinsic to his own being as this Thunder God. The film then raises Jane to the same functional status as Thor himself. She now wields Mjolnir the hammer and does Thor-like things to help people. When placed on equal footing, Thor is very open to the relationship resuming. Except Jane only becomes Mighty Thor as an extension of the power from Mjolnir. She is still very much mortal, and this keeps the drama fully engaged with emotional turmoil for these characters.  

What's Bad About It

The early part of the movie is almost too silly. In order to extend the laughs from Ragnarok, Thor appears as a very dopy kind of wayward soul in search of himself. With Thanos defeated twice in time, and the universe saved, Thos is able to live in an idyl. The idyl is cut short by the arrival of Gorr, but not before a whole bunch of unfunny gags fly by. 

Some of the jokes and sequences are really dumb... 

What's Interesting About It

... But that's all okay because the film actually changes its presentation through out. What's remarkable is how it goes from a low mimetic comedy to a higher mimetic drama, then a romance, then an epic and ultimately a myth. It progresses in the opposite direction not Northrop Frye's 'Anatomy of Criticism' where the history of fiction moves down from myth into epic, then romance and then high mimesis realism and ultimately the bathos of low mimetic comedy. I'll go into more detail on that later. For now, just keep it in your mind that this movie has literary interest - and that's unexpected from 'content' that comes out of comic book fare. 

What's also interesting about it is, that the film is not all about Thor. It's about Dr. Jane Foster becoming the Mighty Thor as a reaction to having terminal cancer. This is mirrored against the ostensible villain Gorr the God Butcher who is possessed by a cosmic and evil sword that is determined to slay gods. Jane is facing her own demise and chooses - in a very existentialist way - to go out fighting. Gorr, loses his volition to become this god butcher but when the sword is broken and he is freed from its influence he is able to choose life instead of more death. It is against this dire emotional landscape that Thor is given his stage. 

As a result, it gets emotionally stark towards the end. It's downright existentialist and like something out of a Camus book.

Beyond Trauma

The film is very open about the nature of trauma. The early part of the film has both Jane and Thor in denial of the reality in front of them. Jane is destined to die of cancer and she is in denial about it. Thor is in denial he will lose Jane no matter what because he is a long lived god, and she is an ephemeral mortal. Gorr is utterly traumatised by the ordeal of losing his daughter to the harsh elements, only to meet his deity who refuses to help and laughs at his plight. If you have any empathy, it's more than any mortal ought to bear. You meet your god and he laughs at your life circumstances! One way or another, all three sleep walk into their trauma. 

The film takes place in a space that happens in the aftermath of trauma as the three characters try to make sense of what exactly is ailing their sense of well-being. A lot of critics have complained that Thor comes across as an oblivious idiot in the early part of the film, but it overlooks the very trauma he seeks to overcome. Even as a god, he is helpless but to let the process play out. In equal parts, the miraculous transformation of Jane into the Mighty Thor with Mjolnir is desperate attempt to deny the reality that she has stage 4 cancer. Together with Gorr's immense burden, the main characters of the film flail about under the weight of the trauma that they have sustained. 

Faith in Gods

The film then gets very ironic as it rises out of the early bathos and takes us to Omnipotence City where gods dwell. The party of characters go to Omnipotence City to plead their case with the gods who dwell there. The film is entirely aware of the irony of having Thor, Norse god of thunder meet Zeus, Greek god of lightning. It's funny because Thor steals Zeus's lightning which is like a conceptual pun of stealing his thunder, but he doesn't have to because he's already the god of thunder (haha). It also evokes Prometheus, and so the text veers in the direction of denouncing gods. 

This is interesting because Thor is angry that Zeus would not listen to his entreaties. Zeus even privately admits he is scared of the Necrosword. The gods are either indifferent to pleas, or they are otherwise preoccupied. And while we may share in Thor's disgust, it can easily be argued Thor himself is too busy to be listening to anybody's prayers to him. Just as all the gods are absentee deities to their peoples, arguably Thor is as well. The gods in the MCU at least, are neither omniscient, omnipotent or omnipresent. But we do get to witness Thor at least strives to be good. 

What the film does is quite Nietzche-an in that it kills the gods' credibility as gods - at least in the MCU - well and good for the audience. In the MCU at least, the gods are good as dead. Once the faith in gods is destroyed and there is nothing but the third act to play out, Thor is to all intents and proposes an existentialist entity. Contrary to the criticism levelled at the film that it doesn't go anywhere new, actually, it lands in a very weird  unique spot in the annals of comic book movies.  

Faith of Gods

And this leads us to the very thought provoking climax.

Let me re-iterate the spoiler alert here. Can't discuss this bit without the spoiler. 

In pursuit of Gorr, Thor and Jane/Mighty Thor arrive at the doorstep of Eternity. Eternity can grant a wish to the first person who turns up, which happens to be Gorr, but the Necrosword has been destroyed in the process. He is no longer under its control. He has two choices: He can wish all the gods dead as per the programme he set upon with the Necrosword, or he can wish for his daughter to be brought back. 

Thor, as a god that he is, has no power in this situation. He can only prevail upon Gorr to choose love over hate. That he has a choice to choose to bring back the one life that can make a difference, or fulfil his mission to slay all gods, which condemns Thor. At that moment, Thor make a leap of faith unseen anywhere else in the MCU. Maybe it's not seen anywhere this decade in cinema. This is remarkable because we don't know what exactly it is that Thor places his faith. Double more so because we spent the middle part of the film establishing how useless the gods are when it comes to listening to prayers and doing something.

At that moment, it's not about his godhood or wielding mighty weapons or summing thunder and lightning, or smashing his foes or any of the things we might attribute to MCU Thor. It's the transcendental faith he has in love and his acceptance of mortality. I mean, how profound is that? This isn't any old superhero character. This is the re-imagined Norse god of thunder at the end of the universe facing Eternity. And at that existential moment, Thor chooses love and accepts mortality. I'm telling you, I was deeply moved. 

Mimesis

Which brings me to this point about this profundity this film almost stumbles upon, and with which it ambushes us. The film travels backwards through the history of narratives as laid out by Northrop Frye in 'The Anatomy of Criticism'. Historically narratives have gone from myths to epic, then to romance to realism and then comedy. At each step, the protagonist takes on more human dimensions and leaves behind god-like powers and superhero status and our heroes become more human in dimension until we reach figures like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four who are heroic only in a defiant sense. Ultimately you end up with low mimesis where you can have comedy and the narrative deals with people with seemingly minimal power. 

What's curious about Thor: Love and Thunder is how it places a god at the centre of the text and travels back up the mimesis levels. At each step of the way, we follow the character of Thor, Marvel Superhero, trudge back into his ontology towards Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, and ultimately back to his mythic origins. As the narrative unfolds, the Thor from the Marvel Cinema Universe gives way to a contemplation as to the meaning of having a Norse God as a protagonist.  

The film starts off with a buffoon-like Thor. This low mimetic comedy gently gives way to a higher mimesis of Thor as the all-too-human failed romantic partner. Then the film edges up the mimesis ladder once more and addresses the romanticism inherent in the story of Dr Jane Foster and Thor, the Norse god of thunder, as both characters take on heightened powers. The text moves up another level of mimesis once more to edge higher than romance into epic. At the end, Thor ends up in a mimesis of myth where he is placed in front of an abstraction called Eternity and oblivion. It's the one true moment that I believed I was watching a film about a Norse god, and not the comic book. 

The Fractured Family

These films are in the end, very American. And as is customary, the formation of the family is important. Except Thor's family is him as a single dad, raising Gorr's daughter Love. The mother is absent. It is at once a Gen-X description of how sparse a family can be and still remain a functioning family. It's the sign of our times that the Norse god of thunder is a single dad raising somebody else's daughter when all is said and done. 

Across the films, Thor keeps making families only to have them broken up by fate. Even being part of the Avengers was Thor's need for family. Thor is forgiving of Loki because Loki is family. Thor adopts Korg, and summons back Scrapper 142/Valkyrie back into the fold essentially to continue filial roles in his life. 

The assemblage reminds us of the Gen-X upbringing where kids were left to piece things together on their own, making connections as they come. It may be the most Gen-X aspect of the entire MCU where characters come together in almost filial union to compensate for the absence of family in their upbringing. Distant fathers and absent mothers of the Gen-X creators seem to cast a long shadow over the impulse of these characters. 

Beyond The Twilight of the Gods

The complaint has been in each movie Thor seems to have this need to find out who he is and what his role is within the universe. That somehow Thor is being mishandled by the film makers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Thor necessarily has to reorient his identity in every film he has appeared. This is because the Thor of myth is immobile and fixed when it comes to psychological dynamic, but a movie character needs to be dynamic. A character 4 movies into their franchise and 7 movies in will have to embrace change within and without or be boring. 

All of the action in this movie takes place after the Twilight of the Gods, Ragnarok. To be sure, the events after 'Thor: Ragnarok' within the MCU include the events of Infinity Wars and End Game. In some ways it shares a lot with the myth of Ragnarok as told by the Scandinavians of yore. The living who endure the ordeal must make a new world and nurture it. This iteration of Thor has indeed endured the twilight of his realm and is close to being the orphaned heir to a lost people. 

In this film, more than any other previous movie featuring the Norse god of thunder, Thor has to process his trauma. To process the trauma, Thor himself has to change, and allow himself human vulnerabilities. He has to be willing to relinquish his godhood and life to embrace the experience of love. It's not a transformation we see through special effects, but a transformation we understand through words and deeds. It is most unexpected in a film full of special effects. 

When you flip that over, you come to see that the character of Thor comes down to us from the myths from the darkest depths of the dark ages. Somehow the myth has endured and even survived the suppression of paganism by the church. In a very strange way, the worship and veneration of Thor continues in our times. It would be passingly foolish to dismiss this film on the basis that Thor is portrayed a buffoon in the first act. Where the film arrives at is surprisingly existentialist and deeply profound.

The Royal Demise

 RIP Betts

The second Elizabethan Age drew to a close abruptly if a little unexpectedly. She did seem to have the genes and environment to get her to 100 years old and perhaps write herself a congratulation note. I don't want to be too flippant because there are plenty of royalists about and they are as sensitive as the bunch that complain that Disney Star Wars is too woke. 

Royalty is a weird business. There have been some harsh commentary to the effect that she didn't have such a difficult job given all the trappings. They ignore that she worked her job until the day she died at age 96. You wouldn't want that fate. With a lot of famous and successful people their defining qualities can be said to be either a gift or serendipity thrust upon them, or that they worked hard. And the joke goes there are the people who have their circumstances thrust upon them. It would be no joke to be thrust in to the role figurehead to the Commonwealth of nations with 35 countries all calling you their head of state. It would be a rather boring calling, even if you found much to be interested about in the world. 

To then do it for 70 years is seriously unfathomable for the common Joe that wants to complain about their lousy job. Most people in short, do not have the imagination to understand just how tricky being the Queen might have been. In that light, Her Majesty Elizabeth II get s a high distinction from me. Even if one is born to the job, the demands of the job are off the charts abnormal. And she made it look like it was all just fine. 

The Era As It Will Be Remembered

If the first Elizabethan Age is marked with the rousing win at The Battle of Gravelines and William Shakespeare putting on wonderful plays at the Globe, then the second Elizabethan Age will be remembered for the squib in at the Falklands and maybe Harold Pinter. Did we do badly? Absolutely not.

  Actually, at 70 years, the second Elizabethan Age had a tremendous amount of cultural output that dwarfs the first. If you just took Rock music alone, there is a tremendous volume of cultural output that could be attached in time to Elizabeth II. In many respects, not only was it the longest reign, it was also a reign that saw sustained prosperity for many. Even if you hated the monarchy - and by the way I don't but if you did - you still have to say that in history books, it is going to be written as a tremendous era in British history that encompasses the second half of the  20th Century and the early part of the 21st century. All the blemishes like the death of Princes Di and the underage sex trafficking of Jeffrey Epstein snaring Prince Andrew will become a footnote 400years from now. 

I am a little surprised nobody's stuck a mic under John Lydon's nose for his comment. He does seem conspicuously absent in all the wailing and eulogising and backbiting. 

All Hail King Chucky III, God Save the King

This is going to be Child's Play. 

Now that she's gone, we're left with King Charles III. 'Charles' is sort of inauspicious as King's names go in the UK. One got decapitated and the other was more a rogue than king. I would have thought he'd rather be a George VII than a Charles III, but I guess at 73, he can't be bothered changing his name. Given the history of kings in England, it sort of surprises me that Elizabeth II thought Charles was the go to name for the future king. 

A lot has been made of Charles' thing about architecture and concern for the environmental cause, but he's also told us he's abandoning those pursuits as king. This is disappointing because the world really could do with an environmentally active king. I guess it's all a discussion for another day. 

How I Became An Investor

It Wasn't By Accident, But It Wasn't Planned Either

I'm not a great investor. I'm no Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger. My portfolio would tell you that. At best, I'm a speculative kind of investor putting in small amounts to long shots and long positions. I do it the way I do it because it works for me. I came to this in the wake of the GFC like somebody taking up a craft . If you read back this blog all the way back to August 2007, you'll see the early inklings of me thinking about how low the market will go as a result of the unfolding financial crisis. I followed the indices all the way down to the bottom, which turned out to be March 2009, and it was then that I bought my first shares through my bank's website. 

Prior to that I only saw the Dow Jones and All Ordinaries and all the other indices on the news and paid scant attention to them, except for the big falls. The notable big falls in my youth were in October 1987 and 1989, and then the Dot-Com Bubble in 2000. Each time I would see the indices do a swan dive and wonder about the people with money in the markets and how they felt watching their holdings lose 20-30% of their value. Then I noticed something weird. A few months after the Dot Com Bubble burst and indices went south, the All Ordinaries in Australia were going for about 30% up from the previous peak. And realised a fundamental truth about markets - that they are volatile and if you can work around that, you could may be make some money. 

So when the GFC bottomed out in March 2009, I was able to pluck up some courage and start buying because I could easily figure the bottom was indeed the bottom. The rest of it weirdly, was all upside. 

All this happened a decade before Meme stocks, Robin Hood and Equity Bros and Spending the Stimmies on Stonks. Like the bros that started with USD600 stimulus cheques, I started with about AUD1000 and dicked around buying and selling stuff. I got to the first 10k on the back of a company called Boart Longyear and promptly lost half of it thanks to the end of the mining boom. I learnt a few tough lessons about the hot money that flows in and out of Australia on a seasonal basis, and I learned that no stock is safe from sudden turns in fortune.  

At the end of the day, putting money in equities as an activity is mostly about speculation. I might think I'm investing and there are moments where it looks like investing, yet in essence I'm placing bets on people, things, and money.  I'm not exactly gambling rent, but there are days I feel like maybe I am just gambling at the Casino Capitalism. 

The Speculative Impulse

I've had time to ponder the nature of my own spec-i-ness (so to speak).

When I was young I lived in Western Australia. We didn't play Cops and Robbers or Cowboys and Indians as we roamed the newly developing suburbs. Instead we played this game called Gold Miners. The idea was to find a mound of sand - these seemed to be everywhere where they were building a house - and we would "stake a claim", then start digging into the pile of sand. And at an appropriate moment somebody would yell "gold!" and hold up his hand holding some stone he found. We would all gather around him and slap him on the back and 'celebrate' with a big cheer. It's quite absurd when I look back on it, but we used to do it after school every day. Consequently I never really wanted to be a Cop or a Cowboy with a gun. But I always wanted to try my hand at a gold field. 

When I think about it, my whole life's been kind of speculative choices made, one after the other. I've never been in love with the daily grind of going to work to do the same thing day after day. I quit university to play in a rock band - and people don't do that unless they're speculating on success. Same with my time at Film School. I chucked in my regular paying job at the ABC to go be a film maker in the hopes that I'd end up successful as Steven Spielberg. My innate spec-i-ness has featured in all these bad decisions. Even today I think up harebrained ideas for start ups and angles on things. In a way, playing the markets is very tame as a preoccupation, especially since I only play with my own money. It has certainly cured me of wanting to play at casinos. 

I don't recommend these kinds of life choices to people. The share market is for a certain kind of fool. Some people are wired for the real estate market, others are for bonds, and others still are for cryptocurrencies or antiques or art or collectibles. Each to their own - I'm not arguing in favour of equities. For equities, you need a bit of optimism, intuition and an eye for a narrative. Details are important, but then, there's nothing on the planet where the details don't matter. I like equities more than real estate simply because your time frames are shorter and moving in and out of positions is easier. If you have a rental property and it turns 5% p.a., and you get your negative gearing going, sure that could be attractive with the ever-rising real estate market, but you don't really know how much that capital gain is until you sell it, and selling it is a pain in the ass. In some ways you're better off just having bank shares that pay a 5% dividend and ride the capital gains. At least you can see just how much the capital gains are every day as a concrete number. 

Where Are We Now?

The markets this year have been choppy. May, June and July gave me heartburn. Even then I had this stubborn faith that things would turn around simply because the flow of hot money does that. Every year, the hot money flows out of Australia in April, and then mysterious arrives back for the late year run towards a Santa Rally. After a while you get a feel for these things. Sure enough, things have been heading up again since the new financial year. That's a new pattern. The pick up used to be from mid-August or so. 

We're in a strange kind of race this year. One part of the race is to get through the reporting season with all the good consumer spending showing up as profits. That makes everybody feel good and shares go up. One part is this business in Russia and Ukraine. Thanks tot the war and the sanctions, supply chains have been screwed up beyond repair. This has led to a supply-side inflation that is prompting rises in interest rates so everybody is looking to see what the US Fed will do in October. The other race is to do with China and its bursting property bubble. They will try and re-inflate it with more debt but God only knows if that would even work. It's not a fix for what ails them. So after 13 years of everybody banging on about the Chinese property bubble, we'll finally see what impact the burst Chinese Bubble will have on the world economy. On the one hand there are reasons for bourses to go high well into later this year. On the other hand there are reasons why they could collapse. All those reasons seem to converge in late October. 

If I put on my realist hat, I would say the US markets will be good until it decides to freak out about interest rates; but then it freaked out abut inflation and how the Fed wouldn't move initially, so that's not saying much. The war in Ukraine will necessarily drag on into winter. There are no choices there, good or bad. And realistically Xi Jinping will win his third term as China's paramount leader, and probably turn on the money spigot to rescue his economy. When you add that together, we'll probably just muddle through. People are complaining it will be like the 1970s again with stagflation. If only. I'd take a Jimmy Carter Leonid Brezhnev kind of world over whatever the hell is happening with Biden, Trump, Putin, and Xi. I'm telling you, things were peaceful back then. 

Property Bubble Blues

Property And Me

Back in the day when I was young and dumb, I had this foolish notion that property was not something to sweat over. As crazy as it sounds I had my rationale and it went like this: Australis is a very big country with a low population density. Not matter how bad things get, I figured, property possibly couldn't get as expensive as New York as Tokyo in the late 1980s. Fast forward 30 odd years, and of course I was proven resoundingly wrong. It kind of begs the question how this might have come to pass - but I've already written a bunch on that topic so I want to discuss something else. What I do want to talk about is how incredibly contrived this housing crisis that is unfolding, and how it's still best to look at Australian property prices with the eyes of a cynic. 

The kind of money a family is being asked to fork over for a house in any Metropolitan area in Australia us now higher than what somebody might pay for a Greek island villa. It's been that way since the GFC however, even as villa prices have recovered, Australian residential real estate has climbed faster. Granted you can't commute to your job in say Parramatta from a Greek island, but I'm pretty sure any of these Greek villas would be nicer than the 3 bedroom house in say, North Parramatta. If I didn't have to earn a living, I know which one I'd choose at the drop of a hat - it's not Church Street Parramatta, walking distance to the Temasek restaurant ("and other amenities"). 

Yet cities the world over have this problem now, where thanks to the deflation exported by China for a whole generation, nobody's wages have risen enough to keep up with the inflation in house prices, and it just so happens rents and house prices don't factor into CPI. You pretty much have to wait for your parents to fall off the perch and share in the inheritance. And really, that's no way to live. If you're unfamiliar with it, maybe you should read 'Of Human Bondage' by W. Somerset Maugham.  The main character stands a good deal of the latter part of the book waiting for uncle William to die so he can get his money. It's grim.

The stark reality is that real estate is totally overpriced everywhere, and in a really weird way, everybody in the market is committed to the idea that sky high prices are normal, oblivious to the social effects this is having. Not to mention the old adage that a market will remain wrong and uncorrected a lot longer than you might think. The social process involved makes even the best of us somehow 'downwardly mobile' according to some. 

There's a part of me that thinks "you are not your house, you are not your farm, you are not your high-rise penthouse". In all honesty, you're not - but you need shelter. It's completely absurd that you spend your entire life working to pay for a place, you live in it til you die, and then somebody else inherits it. Surely one's life should be more important than to exchange it for a financial asset in one block. 

I did used to have a mortgage back when I started this blog many years ago. The run of events was a life lesson in of itself. I worked for a company that exported video content to the US Education market. When 9/11 and the War on terror got rolled out, the American government cut back on its education budget to pay for the military. Around the time of the Iraq invasion, it became evident that the company I worked for had lost revenue drastically, and so it was time to wind it up. My boss, the late John Davis sold out the catalogue and retired, which had knock on effects. For me, I had to sell out from my place because I couldn't find the next job fast enough. And just like that I was out of the property game. 

And I've been outside ever since. I've rented instead, and I invested the difference I'd pay if I had a mortgage, into equities. Now I have to move and I'm thinking I would like a modicum of control over that side of my life. So now I'm on the lookout for a place to buy - and boy they don't come cheap anywhere any more. When I tell my friends that's what I'm doing, they all have this enthusiastic response saying it's important to get into the property market, get on the ladder, and that ownership of a place is the be all and end all. Somehow I'm still ambivalent. 

There is a government report that says retirees who retire without property do it much tougher than those who own their own place. And at this point in history, I have to consider that factoid. Australia has become the land of landlordism. The gap between the haves and have-nots grows on the back of the absurd property market. No government has addressed this in the last 30 years because either the politicians are themselves invested in property, or because they're ideologically invested in inequality, or both. Even as I look for a place to buy, I have to say this all makes us all the poorer.  

Anyway, I'll write more on this later. 

    

Running With Scissors

The Old Life On The North Shore

Here's something. It features my best impression of Steve Howe's lead guitar style. 

It's also about growing up Gen-X on Sydney's North Shore and the odd characters you used to run into. They're all gone now. Scattered to the four winds. 

Last night I had a dream I made peace with somebody from my past. I think my subconscious is way ahead of my conscious self because consciously, I have no intention of making peace with said person. It's happened a couple of times lately and I wake up weirded out by my own generosity and magnanimity. In real life, there's no way I'd give an inch. 

View From The Couch - 07/Aug/2022

Six Problems Over Which To Lose Sleep 

As the war drags on in Ukraine, we're starting to see all kinds of problems poking their heads over the horizon. These problems were latent problems of the world, but thanks to the war, they have become blatant problems of the world. 

No.1 with a bullet for the Europeans is what they're going to do for heating in winter. Too many European countries are dependent on natural gas from Russia. This used to be a vague hypothetical problem, but this northern winter, it's going to be very real, front and centre. There are no easy answers for this because it's not like there are substitute sources, and it's not like there's an alternative fuel to replace it. 

No.2 is the grain export problem. Both Russia and Ukraine were major exporters of grains. Now those exports have been hampered by the war. The last time there were major issues with food in North Africa, it brought about the Arab Spring. That is to say, if you're a dictator in North Africa and your country is dependent on imported grains for food, then this is not a good situation at al. 

No.3 on the list is fertilisers. Russia is the biggest exporter of potash and now that's off the market. Agricultural inputs are pretty unforgiving so growers the world over will make changes to what they plant next year which means globally speaking, we might not have enough food sometime soon. China would be in the shit if that happens because, they are major food importers. And as with the dictators sitting on a hungry population in No.2 above, Xi Jinping's China stands to be in trouble the most over this problem, when it has the problems of its own (more on that below at No.6). 

No.4 is crude oil. We've already seen the oil prices sky rocket and with it inflation. While the immediate peak has passed, oil is going to remain high because Russia was the largest exporter of crude just before the Ukraine invasion. now with sanctions, Russia theoretically can't sell their oil. In practical terms, they're probably keeping their pipelines open to North Korea, but if they stop the oil pipelines, that's it. The pipeline is dead. Meanwhile the world without oil can try and accelerate towards alternative fuel sources but are we geared towards accomplishing that? If we're relying on China to produce the cheap solar panels going into the future, we might be in for a rude shock. 

No.5 is the new model of war that America seems to be trialling in Ukraine. After spending 20 years fighting in Afghanistan, trying to bolster any kind of state there only to see it fall in a week, it is clear the Americans were leery of fighting anywhere to bolster any state. If you add in the chances of a nuclear war, America has had the best reason not to engage in direct fire with the Russians. That said, unlike the Afghans, the Ukrainians have fought hard to keep their state and sovereignty, which has given the world a window to operate. What the Americans have opted to do is give arms to the Ukrainians to fight their war, but have decidedly kept their troops out. This may work well for Ukraine and in the end if they do defeat Russia, it will have worked very well with America. Because success in this model means America will have a new way of managing their wars - they don't send troops and ships, they just send the weapons. It signals a retreat from Pax Americana. 

No.6 is China. China probably deserves an entry all of its own but it can be broken down into three components. The first is political. The concentration of power Xi Jinping has managed to accrue makes China a dictatorship with no checks or balances. China might make the unfortunate call to invade Taiwan and if they do, it would be because one person wanted it, and not necessarily the polity of China. The second is its management of Covid where it is still in the Zero Covid method that was more common before there was the vaccine. China is still doing these because their Sinovax doesn't work. The third component is the property bubble bursting. It's so bad there have been bank runs. China is not going to be the growth engine of the world economy as it has been for the last 30 years. It's probably not even going to stay as the underpants factory of the world. Globalisation is retreating and the combination of the above three component problems mean it is leaving from China the fastest. In this global context, the rise of Xi Jinping, unreformed-Maoist-Totalitarian, is most unfortunate.  

On The Future of Popular Music

The Future Sound of Nothing-Nowhere

The future of popular music probably isn't too good. This isn't one of those music was better in my youth kind of rants because frankly even if that were true, it's not a point I exactly want to litigate here. While it might be seen as taking that same line, I would posit that there are far more technically accomplished musicians working in popular music than at any time in history. Even allowing for that, popular music's future is very bleak. 

The historical trend on artistic complexity seems to be that over time, complexity is reduced as the form of the music gets reified. In once sense, music is moving towards fewer players per ensemble - from orchestra to Big Band to quintets and quarts and then trios, and duos. The ultimate is the solo artist who accompanies themselves with a computer or karaoke device or looper pedal. As more contributing players are shed, the simpler the music becomes in structure. While there are plenty of jaw-dropping players working in this kind of format, it is still a lot simpler than music played in larger groups. 

Songwriters themselves have reduced the range of harmonic content in their songs. They are structured more simply than any time before. The proliferation of songs with just one chord progression with no variation has overtaken all the other kinds of songwriting. In that instance it is hard to tell if it is the retreat of complexity or the advance of simplicity. There is the information theory whereby if you want to reach more people, you have to reduce the complexity of your message, so it stands to reason songwriters have taken an axe to such concepts as a verse being different to a chorus, or that there might be a middle 8 in-between the verse and chorus. After all they are playing to a generation that fast-forwards through the guitar solo. 

And yes, there is the crux of the biscuit right there. What kind of hare-brained asshole fast forwards through the guitar solo? What kind of absence of mind does that? It is not a matter of taste - it's a matter of failing to understand what a guitar solo is. Yes, there are some terrible solos out there - some of them played by your truly right here - but you can't be fast forwarding through all guitar solos on principle without incurring the observation that it's not guitar solos that are the problem, but the people who can't appreciate them who are the problem. 

Contrary to all the amazing guitar players plying their trade on Youtube, guitar solos have been phased out of popular music. All these new songs without a change in chord progression from verse to chorus, also seem to come absent the guitar solo. 

Now don't get me wrong. It's not all about the guitar solo. It's that fact that there's a young audience out there that doesn't connect to guitar solos. Surprisingly there's a whole generation or two of kids who just don't view music the way the previous generations did, and this has turned into time bomb. As Rick Beato rightly points out, kids today have a whole eco-system of stuff to indulge themselves. Music simply sin't enough. So while there are some amazing players doing their thing on instagram and TikTok and Youtube, the general population is pulling away from music as fast as the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers ran towards music. If music itself is losing value in the discourse as we go forwards, then you can't expect it to be in better shape in the future. 

This Does Need A Bit More Explaining For Future Generations

Skip this bit if you're an old fart like me - older readers know what the hell it used to be like before the internet. The people in the future will have no idea. Hence my need to write it down here.  

So this is a sketch of the old world before the internet: Before the internet, information used to be hard to come by and when we got it, it wasn't cheap or free. And we accepted this condition as capitalism. So we paid for newspapers and we paid for books and subscriptions to magazines. We paid to find stuff out in most part. You would be lucky to find stuff in libraries. If you were looking for granular information on something of a minor field, your school library or council library was not going to cut it.  

It so happens music was one of those information formats. It wasn't clear to us growing up, but music was in of itself a kind of information - we only found that out when things went digital with compact discs. In one sense, we had to put our money down to obtain the information that was music, just as we did with everything else. The record store then, was sort of an information exchange, and you can see that in the loving portrayal in the movie version of 'High Fidelity'. In turn, music, was the communal space that connected a global audience. World tours by big bands, whether that be The Police or Dire Straits  were culturally significant moments.

As the format of the information evolved the vendors of the information saw fit to raise the prices on the information. Thus, in Sydney in the mid 1980s, LPs and Cassette tapes were priced around $10 but Compact Discs were $30. As a student working late night shopping and weekend jobs, you were making $12-15 and hour at best. The calculations would then go, do you exchange roughly an hour of your worked time with 1 album on LP or do you instead swap three of those for something with higher fidelity. Kids who were in to music were exchanging their blood sweat and tears into their music collections. 

And there was a cohort who grumbled loudly about the prices of Compact Discs all the time. 

Then the internet came along together with compressed data. Suddenly people were 'ripping' CDs and file sharing them in .mp3 format. Naturally this got record companies very upset and the rest of it is history. The internet devalued the entire music industry and denuded it of profits. A lot has happened since that moment in history but essentially there is music everywhere for free, if you just choose to look. Kids today don't have to necessarily exchange their blood sweat and tears for mere music.  In turn the monetisation of music has changed radically in response to the internet. 

The point of all this is that the music listener of the Boomer and Gen-X vintage had skin in the game. This is why they have the wrong opinions they have, and in turn this is why there's a lot of judgemental put downs by these people towards Millennials and Gen-Z. Is this fair? No - but you should know why this happens. The judgement is coming from a place of heavy emotional investiture. This is not to say Millennials and Gen-Z don't have heavy investment in music themselves. It's just that in the scheme of things, it most likely won't be their main emotional investiture simply because of where they are in history (and to be totally frank I don't judge the younger generation harshly for that fact).

The bad news for music and those with heavy emotional investment in music, is that the Boomers are finally dying out in droves. Even Gen-Xers are starting to pop off, kick the bucket and fall off their perches. This means that in the future, there are fewer people invested in all of this than there are going to be more. As the demographic changes, it is evident that things that hold meaning are changing hands. With the dead, goes the past. As ever, the living inherit a world they cannot fathom. 

Just what can be done about this for music?

Meaning As Social Construct

Back in my own formative years, something that got pounded into me by a philosophy major (read, Mr. Pharmakeus) was that a great man called Ludwig Wittgenstein said that 'meaning' is 'socially determined'. There are a lot of ways to come at this statement but one of the ways is that the more people who engage with a subject matter provides more meaning to the subject. 

This is evidenced by say, Wikipedia, where ever more people have come to add ever more knowledge and opinions across so many topics. You can probably rely on an article that has passed through the oversight of thousands of people, more than something with a short entry that was agreed upon by 5 people, but in most part Wikipedia represents the sum total of volunteered knowledge and opinions of internet denizens. While Wikipedia probably won't match the kind of epistemological reliability of a peer-reviewed study, it can get close in some matters. In turn, it has raised the curtain on the process whereby we can ask whether peer-reviewed studies are exactly what they're cracked up to be, and whether Encyclopaedias like the Britannica and Americana ever could have matched the breadth and scope of of Wikipedia. 

The point of the above paragraph is that the more people you have participating in a field, you have a way of achieving more and deeper meaning. The more people working a field and contributing to it, the more likely you are to achieve a higher granularity of knowledge as well as a greater pile of it. This in turn means the more people there are playing rock guitar, then, the better the chances are of rock guitar continuing into the future in a meaningful manner. Ultimately, an artist is not some point that exists in a sea of meaninglessness but a representative of a demographic of people working in an area. This is how you get not just The Beatles, but also The Rolling Stones and the entire British Invasion in the 1960s; and a generation later, not just Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but the entire Grunge movement. 

In once sense, if there isn't a critical mass of a critical, mass listenership, popular music is not going to gain the kind of meaning it once possessed. With the advent of the internet, it may never again reach the height of importance it once held. 

So What Happens Now?

Without the critical mass of the critical masses, popular music will fail to form the kind of meaningfulness it once possessed. In a sense, it is going to be more meaningless than meaningful - and there's going to be a lot of the meaningless stuff over the meaningful stuff. It's not exactly a joyous future, but there is an upside. Thanks to the same technology that destroyed social meaning, it is also now dead easy to make your own music. In as much as there will be people making their own music for their own meaningful experience, music will not die out. There will be meaningful music in a sea of meaningless music. People are just going to work very hard to find it and get to it. 

If you want meaningful music to exist in the future, then you'd better start participating in it.   

 

View From The Couch - 27/Jul/2022

EVs With Lithium Batteries For Everybody?

What's been on my mind a lot in recent weeks is this notion that our automotive transportation is going to change over to a fleet of EVs with Lithium batteries. Electric vehicles to begin with are commodity-metals-intensive. They use a lot more copper cable than an ICE vehicle would, and they use things like raw earth magnets for the motors. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation tells you that if you wanted to replace very gasoline/petrol ICE vehicle with Lithium battery EVs, there wouldn't be enough of a Lithium supply to fill the need. 

I hold shares in some Lithium mines in Australia so I'm biased - I think if the world decides EVs with Lithium batteries, I'll stand to make some money in the mid to long term. Yet the little environmentalist in me is a little uncomfortable with the prospect of crappy manufacturers filling the world with crappy lithium batteries in their crappy electric vehicles. It's the stuff of nightmares just as bad as global warming. Maybe the whole world should have a deep think about whether this is indeed the way we want to go in terms of vehicles. There's no point replacing one catastrophic global problem with another one. 

Toyota is apparently the world leader in patents for batteries. So you would think Toyota would be leading the way with EVs but they are not. If you listen to the corporate communications coming out of Toyota, they seem to think hydrogen fuel cells are a better option than Lithium batteries. Indeed, they're pretty big on hydrogen in general. It stands to reason that if we could connect up the hydrogen economy to renewables, and ran vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells, we would be lessening the overall impact of lithium mining on the world. 

Of course, Elon Musk thinks Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are a mind-bogglingly stupid idea. He's very deeply invested in Lithium batteries. All I'm saying is, there are real arguments for not going entirely with Lithium battery EVs. 

End of Globalism

There's a bit of talk lately about the end of globalisation. The salient argument being, America has been withdrawing from the world, and as it withdraws, it is leaving power vacuums on the world's high seas. The eventual picture maybe that there will be a free trade blocs built around NAFTA, EU, and CPTPP. Only liberal democracies need apply - because those blocs can and would trade with one another, but it deliberately leaves out China, Russia, Pakistan, Myanmar, the Middle East, and Eurasia, as well as Africa. 

Of course, the Middle East will likely hang on as long as oil is needed, but if the world moves on to running vehicles and planes without fossil fuels, the Middle East will likely lose its purchase on the economic relations involving these blocs. It's remarkable really - especially for us Gen-Xers because our generation was the one that felt globalisation was this inexorably, irresistible economic force that would wash away tariffs and protections and lower our standard of living (instead it imported deflation from China and we ended up with ore stuff than we need for dirt cheap, but that's another story). Naomi Klein was all over this space with her books and the big protests in Seattle in the late 90s was in opposition to globalism. Now we find less than a generation later that globalism is surrendering to history, and that our world is going to move back to trading blocs of the sort that existed pre-World War II. 

It's a bit sad that America's withdrawal from Afghanistan has been interpreted as America's weakness rather than loss of interest in global affairs. The invasion of Ukraine and the sabre rattling by China in the South China Seas is all a little disconcerting misreads. It's not the America is weak now; it's more that it doesn't care what the rest of the world does to beat itself up. It's still invested in the status quo, and more importantly, it will look after its allies. That said, it feels a little weird that we have to start building institutions like the Quad and AUKUS to fill in the power vacuum. 

In an ideal world, Russia and China come in from the cold instead of trying to impose their will on their surrounding countries. Nobody really shares in the grand vision of a Great Russia or a Great China if it means their sovereignty gets compromised. There is some level where the onus is on Russia and China to play nice instead of play these dominance games. The long term prognosis for both those countries is not good thanks to their ageing demographics. They are going to need more friends in the future, not less. Making the whole world your enemy is not proving to be a good move by Russia. You kind hope China gets the message but alas it's run by another dictator. 

If globalisation really is in retreat, you would think it would stop these countries dead in their tracks and make the reconsider their place in the world. The history where Russia had few friends or China had few friends were not good for either country. 

Quick Shots - 26/Jul/2022

The Reserve Bank Gets A Review

I guess there is some kind of informational osmosis going on. about half a decade ago I was complaining about how the Reserve Bank of Australia miscalculates inflation deliberately in order to suppress interest rates. After all, most central banks benefit from political support if they err on the side of lowering interest rates. Ben Bernanke totally missed the GFC coming his way but once it was underway, he dropped interest rates to maintain liquidity in the market and rode that to the cover of Time magazine. The next time there was a major threat to the economy, central bankers around the globe slashed interest rates and in the case of our own RBA, they made noises to the effect that they didn't see rates going up until 2024. 

Now, to be fair they didn't anticipate the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and also the supply shock of China which is still trying to fight the pandemic with a Zero Covid policy which has delivered unto the world a supply chain shock. These things combined have created the kind of inflation that not even the statistical gimmickry can hide. 

All the same it's been a solid decade of ultra-low interest rates, and house prices have gone stratospheric. In the same decade, the RBA has been struggling to see wages rise, and so there is an affordability crisis that has supplanted the Global Financial Crisis itself. You can understand that as the bill for the GFC has been handed to the Millennials and nobody is taking responsibility. And, as you know, I'm not a Millennial and even I think it kind of sucks for them.  

What really sucks in this turn of events is that the inflation in question still not a demand-driven inflation. It's not like people got massive pay rises and they've gone to spend their pay rises en masse. It's not even all the printed money of quantitative easing because the benefits of those tend to go to banking and other financial institutions and not the regular folks on Main Street. So much for the notion that the RBA wanted to wait to see wages increase before raising interest rates.  

Worse still, companies are using the inflation as cover to rase their prices exorbitantly. "oh there's inflation, our costs are up," they say and somehow they're turning in a truck load of profits in their announcements during this reporting season. It all seems like the central banks of the world rig the markets exactly so the ordinary Joe and Jane can't get ahead. It really is worth asking if the RBA really working towards making people's lives better if the outcome is out of control house prices and stagnant wages. If the exchange is that people have to lose jobs to tame inflation, you sort of wonder who exactly it is that is benefitting from this lowering of inflation through raising of interest rates. i.e. If I have to lose my job so interest rates can go up and then inflation gets beat, who is getting ahead here? 

In that light, it is unsurprising then that the ALP government has decided to review the RBA's role.  It's about damn time somebody looked into this racket. 

Russia Ukraine War Drags On Still

The dumb war without any hope of a Russian victory drags on in Ukraine. Still, the deposit in the Kremlin does not accept he doesn't  hold a hand resembling a winning hand. The world awaits for the penny to drop (maybe, maybe not), or for a coup to happen (less likely) in the Kremlin. A lot of people are needlessly getting hurt and killed all because Putin has lost touch with reality. Worse still he has insisted on his army proceeding with World War II era tactics and the casualties on the Russian side have been spectacular/ horrifying (depending on how you view it).

A basic comparison of the USSR army that invaded Afghanistan in 1978 and the Russian Army of February 2022 shows that the Russians are weaker now than then, and that they waded into a war with an opponent who is quantitatively and qualitatively much better than the Afghanis they faced in 1978. When you factor in the global first world support for Ukraine, there is not a scenario in the conventional war sense that Russia can win. 

None of this couldn't have been how the war was conceived in Moscow. Now that the Russians are finally culminating, it's worth asking if Putin actually has any kind of exit plan. Because staying on in Ukraine is going to kill a lot of young people, and Russia's demographic can't afford that. So really the only question that remains is when the hell is Putin going to realise what we've known for some time? 

I guess we're going to have to wait and see. Whoever replaces him is going to have to give up on they 'Greater Russia' horseshit just to get back to the negotiating table. 

Quick Shots - 24/Jul/0222

The Perils of a Republic

The damndest things occur to you in the shower. 

I was thinking mostly about the transition of power of Boris Johnson to whoever it is they're going to get next. The transition of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden of course was infamously terrible, resulting in the January 6 hearings where all the dirty laundry of democracy-in-strife has been getting an airing. Nobody is going to try and break into Parliament House just because Boris Johnson is being removed from office of Prime Minister. Equally, nobody rioted and pretended that Scomo had been robbed of a winning election night. Things might be dire in the UK and Australia when it comes to democratic values, but they're not as bad as they are in the USA.  

January 6 happened exactly because the transition of power between democratically elected heads of state turns out to be vulnerable to intrigue. This is the way of Republics and Presidents. The final authority of government is the President and there's a moment when one is vacating the seat for another - or is supposed to at any rate - and the other has to take that seat where there is a blank moment where authority goes to a metaphorical empty chair. The Constitutional Monarchy model only has that moment when one king or queen dies or abdicates and the crown moves from one head to the next, but because the royal personage wearing the crown is not a political figure it is not vulnerable to intrigue. Allegedly. 

The January 6 event then is merely another entry in the long annals of republics that have come under assault from authoritarians. This isn't ancient Rome, neither is the Senate in Star Wars episodes 1-3, although it bears some thinking upon just why it is that republics are so vulnerable to coup attempts. It is almost as if if you have a republic, then at some point in its history a coup will be attempted. Maybe it's not the system that's the problem but human nature. Even so, the frequency with which republics fall to coups is not something of which I am a fan. 

And then there's the Constitutional Monarchy which get a lot of attention thanks to the UK being the UK.   

The Downsides of a Constitutional Monarchy

There have been any number of politically motivated monarchs and princes, since 1800. All the same, it's not like democracy itself got torn asunder in the UK by a prince. It's interesting in that light that the Whitlam dismissal is a rare moment in history where a Governor General as representative of The Crown exercised the Crown's reserve powers to remove a democratically elected Prime Minister. Australian republicans have been clamouring since then to close that loophole by turning Australia into a republic. It has occurred to them that the problem isn't the structure so much as the person - Sir John Kerr in this instance - who was problematic. 

All the same, the Monarchy can be an all-too-fallible backstop - that much is true. I'm sure those born to the family business of the Monarchy do their best to fill their roles, but clearly some do it better than others. The net effect can be quite shambolic, as we've seen with the modern royals.  

The joke goes, there used to be a line between duchy and douchey. Prince Andrew obliterated that line. Prince Andrew, whatever the hell pervert that he is, is still the Duke of York. It's entirely a medieval concept made flesh, walking around, befriending billionaires and shagging underaged girls from Florida. The entitlement of the man is indescribably obnoxious and let's face it, this is kind of what the Monarchic system is about: Privilege bestowed upon random genetics through inherited processes of history, unquestioningly. So, well might we praise Her Royal Majesty QEII for all her good works and long-live-her-reign and all that, the metaphorical slip is showing with her second son behaving like a medieval aristocrat. That is to say, with the stability you get with a Constitutional Monarchy, you also get Prince Andrew, the Douche of York.   

The point is, to have that impartial final arbiter of officialdom, a king or queen is a very handy thing to have. After all, who can argue against the dumb random luck of somebody being born into one family and not another? The arbitrariness of it actually is weirdly fairer than the contests built on force and violence. And yet to have the one king or queen, you're committed to having a family of these people and the spare prince is always a problem figure. In the olden days, they would send the second prince off to the monastery to avoid him embarrassing the throne. And if the older brother should die, they would yank the spare back into public view. That's what happened to Henry VIII. Alas, no such luck for Prince Randy Andy who got to embarrass himself in public over and over again.

I'm not a big fan of the royal family as such but they do provide some back up to our fragile democracy - I'm willing to admit as much. You might be irritated by all the coverage of the royal family - and who isn't? - but on a broader view, it's all part of democracy. It's every bit as relevant as the idiots who stormed Congress on 6th of January last year. I never thought I would come to that conclusion. 

It could be worse. We could all be living in Russia. 

View From The Couch - 20/Jul/2022

40.3c In London

It sounds like it was worse than just bad. 

The UK has experienced scorching heat like it never has before, and it is causing all sorts of problems in a country built for cool, drizzly weather.  

For the first time since records began, temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius in the country, peaking at 40.3C at Coningsby, a small village in England's Midlands.
It is about 1.6 degrees warmer than the last hottest day recorded, 38.7C in Cambridge in July 2019. 

A new record was also set in Wales on Monday when the maximum reached 37.1C, beating a previous high of 35.2C, while Scotland topped its previous hottest temperature of 32.9C set in 2003, by reaching 34.8C at Charterhall on Tuesday.

The place is not built for this kind of heat. The footage of the fires outside London looked every bit as spectacular as the fires during the Black Summer down here in 2019. 

The grim reality of this heat wave is that you can sheet ALL of it to Global Warming, and it happens the way it did because we spent the last three decades voting in leaders who were in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby. 

And here we are. What can I say but, Told. You. So. 

Shinzo Abe, Bogey Man Even In Death  

Look, I really like Peter Hartcher's reporting and writing for the SMH. But this one had me scratching my head. 

Abe didn’t wait for formal revision of the constitution. He took a series of incremental steps. He increased the budget of Japan’s so-called Self Defence Forces. He broke the longstanding cap that held defence spending below 1 per cent of GDP to today stand at 1.1 per cent. He commissioned the conversion of two warships into aircraft carriers.
He pushed through parliament a law that allows Japan’s military to operate with US forces and those of other allies, including Australia. And he took the lead in the democratic world’s response to Beijing’s aggression with three policy innovations.

Yeah okay. Then Hartcher lists three ways in which Shinzo Abe tried to confront Xi's China, only to admit that Anthony Albanese is about to do the same kinds of things just to keep Australia secure against China's encroachment. 

Abe proposed that Japan consider sharing with the US responsibility for the “nuclear umbrella” that protects US allies. And he said that any “Taiwan crisis” would also be a “Japan crisis”. This was an encouragement to Japan to commit to the defence of Taiwan against any mainland Chinese aggression. 

Prosperity and pacifism seem no longer enough for the Japan of today. Increasingly, Japan is contemplating active defence of liberty and a liberal world order. More than any other Japanese leader, Abe has brought the country to this point. And Japan’s “martial qualities”? The ambitions of Xi Jinping’s China seem likely to test them anew.

I can't come at that closing paragraph. There's been this view that Shinzo Abe's time in power was all about remilitarising. This is hardly the case. Japan lifted its defence budget to over 1% of GDP, all the way up to 1.1%. Shock! Horror! Germany is moving to 2% and nobody's suggesting Germany's going back to the 1940s. It's not like Japan is suddenly capable of  - what, invading China? Bombing Pearl Harbour? Darwin? It couldn't be further from the facts on the ground. 

Shinzo Abe was in power for the longest period for as long as they hav had Prime Ministers in modern Japan going back to 1868. He did not bring a single draft for the rewrite of the constitution to the constitutional review committee, let alone the floor of the Diet for debate. He might have said he wanted to change the Peace Constitution but he hardly ever followed through on anything resembling what people feared he would do - and he had ample time and opportunity to do so but did no such thing. 

Now that the book is closed, I think we should get rid of these notions that Abe was about remilitarising Japan. It makes good copy for the Herald to sell their rag, but it sure sucks as writing about the history that we just lived through.

 

About Wanting Validation

What Are Humans Wired To Want?

I've been getting a number of calls from my old friend GMS from my AFTRS days. GMS had a weird brain buzz moment and wanted to share it. His insight about humanity, was that humans are all irrational beings that want to experience their emotionality and what gets the humans off is the sense of validation they get. And so according to GMS, humans say they want love but what they really want is the validation they feel from being loved. It's a weirdly Gestalt Psychology sort of observation that we're all players in our own life dramas, and we say we want X but in reality we want the feeling of validation. Essentially we cannot cease to project our emotional needs on to the world at our core, we're all craving for the feeling of validation.

Of course, as GMS tells it, we're all bunch of bunch of emotional babies. Carl Jung argued we were working toward self-actualisation but GMS calls hogwash on that notion. In GMS's view, we just want to feel validated. The reason religion never goes away in spite of its failings is because the one thing it can offer is this feeling of validation to everybody. And so religious people are on average a lot happier about their lot in life because they're likely walking around with more of this validation from their religious source. In a sense those people are happier not being self-actualised "as long as they gets their validations from God."

GMS is acerbic about humanity. Maybe he's downright misanthropic. In his view people are running around trying to collect on this feeling of validation when in reality there is no validation, they are undeserving of any validation and the whole thing is a cosmic joke because the reason they're doing it is because they're hard wired to do it thanks to evolution. Maybe there's something to all of this. I told him if Woody Allen were around, he'd probably say he didn't need any such validation - he'd probably just want his car parking to be validated. 

BTW

Just trying something new here...

This is the new single I've got out at the moment. Please check it out. You'd be supporting a good cause called me.

More On The Killing Of Shinzo Abe

Picking Up The Pieces

The picture we are getting about the slayer of Shinzo Abe is in some ways rather strange. From the first note that the perpetrator claimed his killing of Abe was not political, through to the alleged findings where he fired off a home made shotgun, to how he was making other guns from common parts found from hardware stores, all add to a very peculiar picture of a perhaps very sick man. This isn't your Lee Harvey Oswald claiming to be a patsy, this isn't even Sirhan Sirhan. It's more Travis Bickle from 'Taxi Driver'. 

Then again not all killings of men of history are the same. In the aftermath of an assassination you might feel bad about the lost potential - but Abe had probably fulfilled his historic mission already. This isn't about lost potential. And yet there is something very troubling - if anything what's most troubling about the killing of Shinzo Abe is that it wasn't really political at all, and thus fails to be an assassination - it is simply murder by a deranged madman. And if that is the case, we cannot ever find proper meaning to his passing. And maybe that's the point of the reportage. 

That's all to one side. Yet the whole episode demands we dig a bit deeper. More on that later. There may be a blatantly political reason why the police did not identify the organisation that is the target of the perpetrator's fury. 

Just for some context, I've also had discussions about political assassinations in Japan with some people. I myself have a distant relative who was a party too this thing here. My maternal; grandmother's great uncle was one of the 17 men from Mito who teamed up with the man from Satsuma Jizaemon Arimura. This is the guy, if you can read Japanese. After he was executed, he was later enshrined in Yasukuni. That's right. The Meiji government figured that the assassination of the Tairo Ii Naosuke was a patriotic act. That's the same Yasukuni shrine to which Shinzo Abe used to go for visits.   

So it's not like I'm personally holding to any kind of belief that political violence is completely foreign to the Japanese. However things have to be put into some perspective. 

The Meiji restoration essentially put an end to the Edo period, and with it went the Samurai. This essentially put an end to politics through violence from the general population. However, political violence carried out by military officers took their place, and Japan was plagued by political violence through the 1930s which led to World War II. It's really the end of World War II that brought about the current era where the average Japanese person is a peaceful pert, and political violence is unimaginable.

Gun laws are strict in Japan so any political violence this side of 1945 has involved blades or blunt instruments or hand-to-hand assaults. There was a prime minister who was assaulted with an ash tray in 1980. Gun violence is absolutely exceptional to ordinary life in Japan. And so to understand the outlier quality of this killer, you have to understand that somebody in this context where gun laws are strict, went and built their own guns to circumvent gun laws, and walked up to a political candidate on the street and opened fire. Does this really count as political violence of the same kind as the ones before World War II? If so, then just what the hell does this event portend? 

We can't know, because we can't understand the thinking the madman who pulled the trigger. Or is this some new kind of bullshit we've not really categorised? You can see right there that information control is letting the narrative move towards this being an act of a madman. 

What Was The Organisation The Perpetrator Hated?

All the same, it's starting to leak out slowly that the unnamed special organisation that was hated by the perpetrator is the Unification Church, a.k.a. the Moonies. The perpetrator Tetsuya Yamagami is claiming his family was sent bankrupt by a religious organisation, and somehow Abe was giving this organisation support. A little googling reveals Shinzo Abe was tightly linked with the Unification Church through political donations that came from the church. More importantly, his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was instrumental in bringing the Unification Church to Japan from Korea as part of his anti-communist stance. It is no surprise that Abe himself who inherited his grandfather's political apparatus through his father was well connected to the money from the Unification Church.

Was he a believer? Likely not. Shinzo Abe was a believer in whatever the hell form of Shinto that takes place at the Yasukuni Shrine. He spent a lot of political capital shoring up that one so it's hard to believe that he was also a closet Moonie. What is becoming apparent is that Abe and his faction took money from the Moonies, and in turn he offered his own support to them. He delivered some speech via video link to one of the Moonies' group wedding events and Donald Trump no less was also sending videos to this event. The speculation is running that Trump is closely aligned with the Moonies in America, and so, Abe was able to move closer to Trump upon his election through the Unification Church channels.

Money and politics have a way of going in hand. For a political party to look to a source for funding is par for the course (they literally make these deals on the golf courses). The traditional way this went in Japanese politics was through a 'General Construction Industrial Complex' that funnelled money into the LDP and then the LDP would parcel out general construction jobs from government. This old style landed quite a number of LDP politicians in prison in the 70s, 80s and 90s. As the 'GCIC' waned, so did its contributions. As the LDP went through a reformation in the mid to late 90s, it seems inevitable that they opened themselves up to religious organisations donating money to replace the GCIC. 

In the case of Shinzo Abe, it appears that he was very open to taking money from the Unification Church because of his family's own history in inviting them into Japan, but also a vague similarity in stated world views. Who doesn't want world peace as a stated objective? It's this kind of banal rhetoric that characterised Abe's speeches (and also invited much derision as if he was a retard). It is not irony or coincidence then that just as his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was the target of an assassination attempt, he too had become a target.

What is kind of terrifying is that Abe's second government - as early as Feb 2014 - was accused of letting the influence of the Unification Church into Cabinet. By 2019, he was being accused that the separation of Church and State was being blurred by having so many Cabinet members who had some kind of organisational involvement with the Unification Church. And this is no ordinary denomination of Christianity - let's be blunt, it's a cult from South Korea. The cult is highly exploitative and Yamagami's leaked statement says his family lost everything to this cult. If Abe was going to endorse this church, Yamagami explained he was fair game for his grudge. The greater irony is that Yamagami himself doesn't think his act is a political act. He has expressly said his murder wasn't about politics. That might be true in his mind, but unravelling all this shows it was totally, entirely, political. 

This means it wasn't just murder, it really was an assassination. I'm wondering if at a future date, Tetsuya Yamagami is going to be identified as a patriot and get enshrined at Yasukuni. Now that, would be ironic.