Record Hunting Blues

A Long Time Ago...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Dale Is My Hero

Staying In Touch (With Trivia, With Style)

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

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

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

The first is his observation about Nathan Rees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News That's Fit To Punt

Greenspan's Concession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CBD Metro to Rozelle?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Thought About Sydney's Public Transport System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Song Of The Week

Slave To The Original...

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

Check it out here!

Inflation Indexing Is A Scam

The Government Has Been Lying All Along

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This seems simple enough.

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

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

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

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

To make things more clear, check out this section:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presidential Debate - McCain v Obama

Actually Seeing These Candidates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McCain Supporters Boo Their Man

Ugliness Is Spreading

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

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

On Friday, McCain rejected the bait.

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

McCain shook his head in disagreement, and said:

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

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

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

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



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

Matsuzaka's Near-No-Hitter

The Weirdness of Dice-K

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yomiuri Giants Win The Central League

From 13.5 Games Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Obama-Hate

Which End Is The Rough End Of A Pineapple?

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

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

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

"When you have an Obama, [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the rest of the hooligans up there going to run this country, we have got to have our head examined. It's time that you two are representing us, and we are mad. So, go get them," one man told Sen. John McCain at a town hall meeting in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

It's almost a cry for help, with the GOP party faithful amazed McCain could possibly be losing.

"And we're all wondering why that Obama is where he's at, how he got here. I mean, everybody in this room is stunned that we're in this position," another man said at a rally.

"I'm mad. I'm really mad. And what's going to surprise you, it's not the economy. It's the socialists taking over our country," another man said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Crisis As Strategy

Pleiades Mailbag

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

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

Now they must do something similar on a global scale to be able to continue to dominate global finance, the heart of the power of the American Century.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW YORK - In a sign of the times, the National Debt Clock in New York City has run out of digits to record the growing figure.

As a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been switched to a figure - the "1" in US$10 trillion ($16.5 trillion). It's marking the US federal government's current debt at about US$10.2 trillion.

The Durst Organization says it plans to update the sign next year by adding two digits. That will make it capable of tracking debt up to a quadrillion dollars.

That's a lot of dough.

No More Political Discussions At iCompositions

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

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

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

Project Update (of Sorts)

Life In The Weird Lane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still Freaked Out

Can't Seem To Sit In Cars

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

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

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

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

News That's Fit To Punt

Bail Out Happens

In the end the House voted on the bailout.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Note About Oil

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

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

Damien Hirst's Big Haul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Nearly Died Tonight

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

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

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

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

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

Side Orders On The Second Bail Out Plan

Pleiades Mailbag

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

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

Senators attached a provision repealing a 39-cent excise tax on wooden arrows designed for children to an historic $700 billion financial-markets rescue that passed tonight by a vote of 74-25. The provision, originally proposed by Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith, will save manufacturers such as Rose City Archery in Myrtle Point, Oregon, about $200,000 a year.

It's one of dozens of tax breaks benefiting Hollywood producers, stock-car racetrack owners and Virgin Islands rum- makers included in the broader legislation in an effort to win support from House Republicans, whose defection contributed to a rejection of an earlier version of the legislation two days ago on a 228-205 vote.

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

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

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

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

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

The U.S. Senate approved tax cuts valued at more than $100 billion, including a host of alternative energy credits and dozens of breaks for businesses and individuals, as part of its $700 billion bank rescue bill.

The legislation, which the House likely will act on tomorrow, passed the Senate on a 74-25 vote. It would give the Treasury Department authority to buy troubled assets, chiefly mortgage- backed securities that are burdening financial institutions.

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

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

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

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