News That's Fit To Punt - 26/Oct/2012

The Currency War

The Australian currency has been stuck above parity for some time and not even the lowering of interest rates has provided any 'relief' for the export industries of Australia.Except there's no relief in sight.

Pleiades sent in this link today as a kind of heads-up.

According to (ANZ boss Mike) Smith, the Reserve Bank criteria for interest rate decisions should be dominated by the dollar. I pointed out yesterday that the currency wars and the money printing taking place in Europe and the US could send the Australian dollar much higher. Smith says that the huge liquidity in the system is going to start speculation on commodities and with the consequent higher prices will come an Australian dollar that goes even higher.

Interest rates become the only weapon the Reserve Bank has to prevent the further damage that is in store for our employment creating industries like tourism, education and manufacturing.

Mike Smith adds that central bankers are far wiser than he on these matters. I think Smith is absolutely right about everything except that last point. Smith is mixing in global markets every day and he is hearing concern around the regions about the repercussions of the US and European money printing and the currency war.

The contention there is that the Reserve Bank should probably cut interest rates in order not to  attract foreign interest in our currency. Forget the housing bubble, just go to near zero interest rates.

I've been pondering that on this afternoon, and I think this is a crock. The cost of living in Australia is so far out of line with the CPI that nobody believes the inflation figures any more - they think it's much higher. This suggests that the interest rates should be sitting much higher than where they've been for at least a good decade. Mike Smith asking for the interest rates to be lowered is effective asking for there to be so much cheap money, it should inflate the value of property once again. In other words, the ANZ Bank chief is asking for a Price Keeping Operation to be staged out of the RBA.

One imagines the hope there is that if there's so much cheap money around, surely it will get sucked into the property market and reignite those big gains in the banks' balance sheets. You have to wonder if this isn't just another vested interest mouthing off, because it sure sounds like it.

Hewson Slams Vested Interests

There's one thing about John Hewson we can all be certain about - he was Australia' Mitt Romney without the Mormonism but with Economic Rationalism as his religion instead. If nothing else he gave the Liberal Party some kind of ideological frame work from which to work, and some of it has worked out well for Australia.

It's interesting then when he pipes up and lobs a verbal grenade in the direction of the NSW government and its approval of Jamie Packer building a second casino for Sydney.

Dr Hewson said he wasn’t opposed to a hotel or a second casino license for Sydney.
However, the process had to be seen to be clean and above board, and the government shouldn’t give rise to concerns it was being compromised by vested interests.
‘‘This is sort of chipping away at the whole integrity of government process,’’ he said.

So, there's that phrase again: vested interest.

Small Arts Companies Get The Squeeze

Pleiades sent in this one as well, about how small arts companies are getting less money now that everybody is having to look for some austerity.

Exactly why these companies are called “small-to-medium”, by the way, is one of the mysteries of the sector. Most turn over less than $2 million a year, the threshold the Australian Taxation Office considers a “micro-business”. Organisations that the arts calls “medium-sized” are in fact small in any objective sense of the word. Nearly all of them are run on the proverbial smell of the oily rag, with perhaps three or four full-time administrative staff.

This diminutive scale makes many small arts companies vulnerable to the slings and arrows of artistic fortune. They have few assets and little in the way of cash reserves. If the funding disappears, most can’t survive in the long term. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Fremantle-based Deckhair Theatre wind up after 30 years of independent production, and Adelaide choreographer Leigh Warren “go freelance” to keep his dance studio afloat. Both companies have been defunded in recent years.

The problem for the small-to-medium sector is that the funding appears to be drying up. With the Australia Council getting squeezed by the federal government’s efficiency dividend, Commonwealth funding is actually falling in real terms. Nor is any extra pot of gold awaiting beneath an unexpected rainbow. Arts Minister Simon Crean appears to have conceded that he can’t get the National Cultural Policy up this year.

You feel for these arts companies. They have a tougher proposition than film producers for a start.

One of the things that the Liberal Party embraced gingerly toward the end of their time before the Ruddslide was the fact that a lot of people in the arts were small business as well; and that the conservatives' general disregard for the arts and arts funding had created a massive gulf between it and the arts community in Australia. Certainly, under most of John Howard's tenure as PM, the prevailing mood was that all arts participants were left-voting scumbag and deserved not one iota from the public purse. When you realise how many of these small arts companies are around, you wonder why and how a party in favour of small businesses could have treated them with neglect for so long.

In turn, you'd have to say that the ALP for its money has taken for granted that people in the arts are generally more socially progressive and have bred a variety of arts bureaucrats that form a crazy subculture of their own, and choke off the promise of the arts itself. You get the feeling that the ALP is a latter day Stalinist apparatus that seeks to ideologically constrain discourse through the arts by funding particular kinds of things that never makes any money.

So I guess it's not surprising they get slammed by the likes of John Roskam in the AFR:

The health of Australian democracy should not be measured by the number of students enrolled in gender studies.

In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding  published in 1748, David Hume described the work of a certain species of philosopher. What he said could apply to the academics in the humanities in Australia in 2012.

“Though their speculations seem abstract, and even unintelligible to common readers, they aim at the approbation of the learned and the wise; and think themselves sufficiently compensated for the labour of their whole lives, if they can discover some hidden truths, which may contribute to the instruction of posterity.”

The pity is that the majority who teach humanities at Australian universities are a long way from discovering any hidden truths or making a contribution to the instruction of posterity.

That's a bit mean. earlier in the column is a castigation about French critics who forged a path to an unbridled kind of relativism in the late 20th Century that continues to appall moralists the world over; but that's not surprising that a conservative think tank would take offense to Derrida and Foucault. Derrida, of course being that 'Obscurantist Terror' - and there's a war going against terror to this day.

Jokes aside, the two articles give you the distinct feeling that the arts really are not valued or are important in our cultural life in Australia. More to the point, we're a nation of hardened, committed, willful, fully ideological, philistines. It's a shame the arts as a vested interest holds absolutely no sway over the conscience of this nation.

 

 

 

An Odd Phenomenon

The Inflation That Wasn't There

I'm trying to wrap my head around how something like this can happen.

The IMF's database shows goods and services costing $US100 ($A97) to produce in the US now cost $US41 to produce in India, $US67 in China, $US105 in Germany or Britain - but $US161 in Australia.
Only Norway and Switzerland are more expensive to do business, or spend money in. Since 2002, the dollar has turned Australia from a relatively low-wage, low-cost country to a high-income, high-cost one outpacing even Japan.

Here's the graphic from the page:

To be frank, I just don' get this. For the last decade, the Reserve Bank of Australia has been pretty rigid in insisting on sitting on the inflation rate, keeping it under 3%. To that end, they've run their interest rates up when the inflation figure hated up. During that 10year span, there were plenty of moments when they insisted the inflation rate was not so high even though cost of living figures kept coming in higher than the CPI.

So when you get to the bottom of the article you find that Taiwan has been printing its money furiously to keep their currency in line with China - to keep their labour force competitive - and somehow have experienced a price deflation.

This is really curious. The RBA didn't print money, sat on the inflation rate hard, and somehow Australia's index prices have inflated from 77 to 161. Taiwan printed money and somehow its index lowered from 62 to 52. I'm sure there's a tricky economics answer in there somewhere, but if I were to swing my Occam's Razor, I'd say the RBA has been getting their inflation figures totally wrong for a good decade and the net result is this rather nasty bit of price inflation. The article attributes the rise to the Australian Dollar, but this seems arse-about. The Australian Dollar is high because everybody else is furiously printing money and we are not.

It would also go some way toward explaining the elephant in the room, the property price bubble. Because the RBA kept reading the inflation to be much lower than it really was, it ran interest rates much lower than it should have, which resulted in too many people borrowing money to buy property, contributing to the bubble. So in that way, it can be understood that Australia did "print money" without actually printing the dollar bills. - we simply re-calibrated our property prices to being too expensive.

Which brings me to this other article today...

So Do We Re-Inflate The Bubble To Save The Government Now?

Here's Michael Pascoe saying that he thinks Wayne Swan is betting on a housing recovery.

Treasury's MYEFO forecasts for the 2013-14 domestic economy  make grim reading with predictions of flat or declining performances in all but two areas: dwellings investment and farm product.

It's a very brave decision, Minister, to get into the long-range weather forecasting business, but that effectively is what Treasury is doing by predicting that farm product will rise by 6 per cent in 2013-14, an upgrade from a 1 per cent rise guessed in the May budget papers.
More important for the credibility of the government's outlook is the belief that the housing industry will finally turn the corner.

Says Treasury: “Dwelling investment is forecast to be flat in 2012-13, before growing 4 per cent in 2013-14. Dwelling investment declined 3.3 per cent in 2011-12 on the back of continued weakness in the detached housing market. Conditions across the sector are expected to improve gradually over the remainder of 2012, consistent with the solid growth in dwelling approvals and commencements seen in the June quarter.

“The recovery is expected to gather momentum into 2013-14, driven by a pick-up in home buyer demand, improved affordability following declines in house prices over the past two years and the assumption that interest rates will remain below average across the forecast period.”
It's only housing and farm product and what seems a marginal improvement in net exports that hope to maintain real GDP growth at 3 per cent next year.

This business of the diminishing tax revenue for the Government is pretty drastic. The ALP government is gunning for a surplus as the world economy slips back into a double dip recession, and the commodity price boom comes to a shuddering halt.

In the midst of all the financial problems of the world, Australia has somehow managed to dodge the most lethal bullets. That doesn't make us bullet proof, as the world's problems really have started to impact on our receipts.  There's no telling how property prices could unravel if unemployment should go up; and nobody is saying it's going to go down. The most recent report somewhere had it that 12.5% of mortgages were in negative equity - that's 1 in 8 mortgages out there, which is no small number. 3% were in serious mortgage distress, if not defaulting. Property prices are still falling if anything - and the RBA wants it to be a slow deflation rather than a big bursting of the bubble.

So you have to wonder how on earth there can be a housing recovery if there are all these bad mortgages and distressed assets all over the place. A lot of people are going to have to swallow losses and be pushed to the wall before the sector can really  improve. I don't think the RBA has the stomach for such an outcome - probably because all those bureaucrats have properties too and don't want to take the loss. You can chalk that up to being a vested interest all of its own.

 

 

Whither Oil Prices?

Not Feeling The Pinch In Australia

I just had a thought today that we haven't really felt the ups and down of crude oil prices in Australia as much as parts of last decade. I remember 2005-2008 being particularly painful for petroleum price rises, and oddly enough calls by the public to look at public transport a lot harder. Since then a few things have happened, namely, the Australian Dollar has appreciated to almost twice what it was, and the price of crude has come off the peaks. As of this writing it's siting at about US$115 /barrel, which is about 20% off the peak of US$ 145/barrel reached in 2008.

Of course during the GFC it fell down to $35/barrel, and yet the US$115 it is sitting at is above the price point that people in Australia started feeling the pinch. In short, we're being protected from this high price of oil by the high Australian Dollar. Judging from all the people driving their gas-guzzling 4WDs in Sydney, it's fair to say they're not feeling the price point of US$115 as they did in say, 2007. Also as of this writing, they're reporting record prices for gasoline in the USA.

This leaves me to ponder a) how soon will parity break for the Australian Dollar, b) how much it will go down, and then c) how soon we'll start hearing about oil prices and gasoline prices then.

At the moment, Nick Greiner and his cronies are pushing for WestConnex, a crazy tollway-driven project as part of their so-called Infrastructure NSW plan, which is mostly devoid of public transportation plans and seems to assume a great many things including the relative stability of oil prices, continuing for a long time in the future. A quick look at the crude oil prices and exchange rate tells you that this assumption is way off base, and that Nick Greiner and his vested interest cronies are asking the people of NSW to foot a massive bill to build roads that will maybe be too expensive to drive upon, and will in no way solve problems of congestion, for a future where car use may decline as a result of skyrocketing gasoline prices.

It is entirely possible that they build this crazy tollway and there won't be enough users to drive over it. It's possible this thing is going to be worse than a white elephant project.

Anyway, just some random thoughts watching the price of Brent Crude.

'Garni du Jour' Again

That Ain't The Music, They're Just The Lyrics

Here's good ole David Dale, frustrated by contemporary pop music's total inability to come up with a sophisticated lyric that tickles David Dale's fancy. The headline says 'the day the music died' but really, his complaint is about the poor abstraction and bad taste in the lyrics; and really can one blame him?

Australia's top-selling singles of the past 10 years (and typical lyrics)
❏ Party Rock Anthem, LMFAO (sold more than 800,000 copies): ''I'm runnin' through these hos like Drano, I got that devilish flow, no halo.''
❏ Somebody That I Used To Know, Gotye (700,000+): ''No, you didn't have to stoop so low, have your friends collect your records and then change your number.''
❏ Sexy and I Know It, LMFAO (600,000+): ''We headed to the bar, baby don't be nervous; no shoes, no shirt and I still get serviced.''
❏ Call Me Maybe, Carly Rae Jepsen (550,000+): ''You took your time with the call, I took no time with the fall; you gave me nothin' at all, but still you're in my way.''
❏ Moves Like Jagger, Maroon 5 (550,000+): ''You say I'm a kid, my ego is big; I don't give a shit and it goes like this.''

Admittedly, those lyrics look pretty bad. But if the group is called 'LFMAO' then maybe it's not quite right to be expecting lyrics of any depth or meaning. Or maybe the apparent banality is implicit to the times in which we find ourselves living? In which case, should we be surprised?

Still, the whole article brought me to think about the real death of music, and I have to say it is these reality TV singing contest shows like X Factor' and 'The Voice'. For the love of god, if there is one place music is being killed, it's on these TV shows where people who have no insight into the songs they're singing are judged on rather subjective, obscure, arcane performance points while session musicians pump out 2minute abridged versions of classic songs.

No, really, they're terrible, and they have nothing to do with the qualia that makes music good. It's freaking glorified Karaoke put to the service of TV stations and advertisers, dressed up as music, with semi-pro singers fronting for the execrable business. So if David Dale really wants to take a hatchet to the death of music that he liked, well, he can have a go at these awful shows, one of which produced Adele (to whom he gives a free pass). No, Mr. Dale, it's worse than that.

Once upon a time, there was rock music, and it had a shot at being something tat could really communicate something important. Then, the cultural mainstream bought into it and the record labels sold the artists down the river, ever in the search of wider profits. And to this end it was all about packaging and looks and style; not writing and performing - As Frank Zappa called it, the 'Garni de Jour' phenomenon. You slap a piece of burnt meat between two bits of bread, and it's a burger. You add a tired piece of parsley next to it, and that's 'Garni du Jour' - and somehow this dried bit of parsley is meant to make the whole dining experience better.

Frank Zappa also made the observation that people also hate music, but love the packaging. People say they like music, but what they really like is the 'Garni du Jour'; and if the mass market is saying that the music business is crazy to focus on the segment of the market that -*gasp*- is actually interested in music being music for the sake of music.

That's how music died - when the music business decided the 'Garni du Jour' was much more important than the quality of the meat in between the bread making up the burgers they were peddling. Similarly, all these reality TV singing contest shows are all judging on the 'Garni du Jour' elements of each of these singer's 'marketability'. If they win, they can go on to sing the incredibly insightful lyrics David Dale so detests. It's not about the music, it's not even about the lyrics. Truth be told, it's all about all those *stupid* performance notes handed out by the likes of Simon Cowell and the rest of those 'judges'.

In The Shadow Of PEDs

Lancing the Boil? I Don't Think So

This whole Lance Armstrong situation with his alleged PED use is getting much attention and I was going to write something about it yesterday when the USADA released the dirt it had on Lance Armstrong. The fallout from that report has been far reaching, and once again cycling is embroiled in a scandal about performance enhancing drugs. What's even more dramatic is how Lance Armstrong has had his seven Tour de France wins taken away from him in the record books, although you wonder if the guys who came second in those races automaitcally get declared winners; and whether they're going to get their big recognition in a group presentation event. I doubt they'll do that.

As with all these things, it's all circumstantial evidence, but a good mountain-load of it; meanwhile Lance Armstrong has quit the sport and won't address the issue at all. We can only conclude from this that he probably did PEDs, and now he's going to play the plausible deniability strategy right down to the line of utter, abject, total, improbability. You can only wish him luck in trying to persuade the world. Cycling is consequently in another one of its terrible turmoils, but in some ways this is no different to Major League Baseball. You could argue that at least the cheats are getting caught, even if it's too late.

I might have blogged this a long while ago, maybe in one of the earlier incarnations of this blog, but I'm basically a great sceptic when it comes to sports and the record book. I have no choice, given the times I have lived in.

It started with Ben Johnson at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and since then there have been a great deal many names who have been outed and hounded. Yet, Ben Johnson's record stood unofficially for many years until quite recently when Usain Bolt started running amazing times. Carl Lewis ended up with the gold medal from Seoul in that event as Ben Johnson was disqualified, but years later, Carl Lewis himself was linked to to PEDs. More recently, Car Lewis has cast aspersions on the Jamaican sprint team suggesting they were doping in an elaborate manner.  If you said that Carl Lewis' suspicions were credible, it would mean that Ben Johnson's time in Seoul can only be beaten with more PEDs. And that's just one example of how vexing the record book has become.

After Ben Johnson in 1988, I came to the conclusion that the PED problem was a problem of technological advancement, and that as new drugs were developed, there would have to be ever mew ways of testing for them. Whatever the case, no record book was going to be safe. I imagined a world where some sports would simply smash record after record with PEDs, while others stayed relatively inert, and with little excitement surrounding them.

Of course, the way this played out in the 1990s was that Major League Baseball's players embraced PEDs, giving rise to amazing historic seasons by the likes of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, all on the backs of PEDs. After a long dearth, suddenly these hitters were producing seasons that matched or broke the feats of Babe Ruth's greatest season. It was unthinkable if you exercised a rational statistical analysis, but suddenly McGwire and Bonds were not only smashing past Ruth's single season mark of 60 homeruns in 154 games AND Roger Maris' mark of 61 homeruns in 164games, they were posting 70+ homeruns.

Then, in the 2000s, they were all found out. Some said the record books were tainted, others argued that the record books were already tainted by 'Greenies' (amphetamines) in the 1950s and 1960s. It was worth asking, even if only rhetorically, what the hell did all of this mean? Consider for the moment that 3 out of the 4 members of the 40HR-40SB in a single season club Barry Bonds Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez were linked to steroids in their careers. The fourth member is Alfonso Soriano, and who knows if he was on PEDs that year that he accomplished the feat? It may come out yet.

And in some ways, this is the exact crux of the biscuit that Ben Johnson sits on in Seoul 1988, and Lance Armstrong with his 7 Tour de France wins, and the 70 McGwire homeruns and the 73 Bonds homeruns, and whoever else that won on the back of PEDs and got found out. The feats themselves cannot be undone. As per the joke, you cannot unfuck the goat. We may never know about Usain Bolt, but if we ever find out that he used PEDs, then it's him on the same crux of the biscuit as Ben Johnson.So now, Usain Bolt is in PED purgatory with Alfonso Soriano and other record-setting athletes. Is it even fair that they get suspected?

What can these accomplishments possibly mean? If Lance Armstrong didn't really win those 7 Tour de Frances because he was on PEDs, then what can it possibly mean to win the Tour de France?

It's a mess - And we're doomed to go through this again, some way down the track. Somebody is going to invent something that will enhance performances, and it will slip through the testing net; and as long as it's there slipping through, we'll never be sure that hat we're seeing is what we think we are seeing in sport. The old adage used to be that only the sport scores were the unvarnished truth and facts reported in the newspaper. We find ourselves that even that is no longer true. It's a fine mess.

So back to this Lance Armstrong thing. I can't offer up anything for fans of cycling as to how to digest this fact. Armstrong was on PEDs, and he did it so well and systematically, he never got caught red handed. By doing so, he won an un-Godly 7 Tour de France titles - and that is likely so off the charts that you will never witness that again if you lived to 100 in the absence of PEDs. It's so off the charts that even a non-cycling fan like me knew about it. It's going to take a long time to digest and understand what exactly all that means in the sport of cycling. I sure as hell don't know what to make of all these steroid tainted records I witnessed in the making. If there is one bit of advice I have, it is this: no amount of moralising is going to make this reality better. That much is most certainly sure.

'Dark Shadows'

American Gothic As Irony

You sometimes hear Australian intellectuals say that Americans don't get irony. I don't see how that is even possible given that they speak English and there is cause for much irony in the English language alone. What I think they really mean is that Americans are not into rhetorically couched irony the way the English - and by colonial extension - Australian and New Zealanders like to practice. There is certainly plenty of irony in 'Dark Shadows' and it is the more delicious for it.

The problematic in American Gothic as a sub-genre is that the Americas were not as we know it in the Gothic era, and so welding on the narrative traditions of Gothic story telling is that there is always going to be an underlying tension between the consumerist modern world and the Dark-aged murmur of an echo from Europe's deep history. New England with its Puritan settlement and witch trials and generally stuffy cultural sensibility is ripe for the ironic treatment.

I would venture to say that it would be next to impossible to mount a Gothic horror narrative in Australia without irony and still make it a good movie; but that's another discussion for another day. Today, we have 'Dar Shadows'.

What's Good About It

Gothic is hard for me to like. All that darkness and blood and gloom and white shirts wit fluffy bits just leaves me un-enthused. It's not a genre I go looking for and I certainly never looked forward to a vampire or werewolf movie except the one time I was a kid and tuned into some BBC adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Still, there are times when I don't mind the mannered style and narrative conventions. The nice thing is that this film turns the massive stodginess of Gothic into a laughable curio.

Tim Burton's oeuvre is bursting at the seams with Gothic style and motifs, and sometimes they work when the irony is right - like in Ed Wood - but sometimes they flop miserably in the absence of ironic distance. Of his films, this might have more ironic distance than some of his other work.

Eva Green as Angie Bay is the eye-opener in this film. She is at once, voluptuous, sensual, insane and frightening. She is at ease with both the melodrama and the comedic siting side by side. by contrast, I'm sure Johnny Depp really wanted to play Barnabas Collins, but there's something not quite right with his performance. it's a lot harder to forget we're watching Johnny Depp yet again in a Tim Burton movie. There seems to be no line between the acting and the schtick and the bizarre surroundings.

What's Bad About It

The climax is plain silly, even for this tongue in cheek film.

Tim Burton's always an interesting director with strong visuals, but in this film, it just comes off as his usual schtick with no added dimensions. A such the film seems a little tired in style and undercooked in the thematic department.

It's also trying to cram in as many of the subplot from the TV Series so there is something rushed about the story telling.

What's Interesting About It

The film spends a good deal of time trying to come at much of the melodramatic story from the old TV series. There's a whole lot of exposition going on seemingly at every turn, but it doesn't get too out of control. It mostly hangs on the Back story of Barnabas Collins and Ange, and what really keeps the intrigue of the backstory alive is Eva Green's manic performance as Ange.

One wonders why we keep on rotting out these story tropes - witchcraft in New England, vampires, werewolves, ghosts and crypts. Gothic as a style as one thing, but the narrative constraints of Gothic one would imagine would get tired. And yet here we are with yet another film, putting yet another spin on these tropes. Still, it's interesting to ponder what they are being thrown at.

1972, A Gothic Tale For You

The most joyous gag about the film is that instead of waking up today, Barnabas' far future is 1972, a good deal of history ago for us today; for 1972 comes replete with a sense of tired Americana, like the afterglow - or hangover if you like - from the swinging sixties, and a sense of waiting for the denouement of the Vietnam War. The cars, the clothes, the music, all work in wonderful sympathy to undermine the Gothic Horror until of course Barnabas simply has to kill people and suck their blood.

Still, the choice of 1972 proves to be quite interesting, as it offers up a mirror to us in unexpected ways. For instance, we in 2012 are awaiting the draw down of troops from Afghanistan, and that gives us an emotional parallel to the weary grim view of the world, where something is out there sucking out the life blood from our society. That something is called war.

1972 is of course merely two years into the "Big Now", which began at the inflection point when there became more people living than there had ever lived, which was 1970. It is the beginning of the process where age old customs, certainty, social stigmas all began unraveling - and in doing so exposed us to the metaphorical monsters. At least one reading is that the Big Now allows all the freaks to come out and be normal. After all, imagine being buried alive in 1972 and being awoken today. It might just be as big a gap as being buried alive between 1770 and 1972.

Eternal Love

Of course one of the institutions that completely broke down in the 1970s was marriage. Divorce, became mundane and created a whole generation - Generation X - of people who grew up with the forced, yet keen, understanding that love and relationship and the word forever do not mix as well as the old understanding might have presented them. Love is, fallible and ephemeral to Generation X.

And so we are given a very strange re-envisioning of an 'eternal' love. Ange's love for Barnabas in this film proves to be a great mystery. She loves him so much, she makes him into a vampire, so that he can be the undead and exist forever; and while he exists forever, Ange feels there is hope that he may love her (in spite of the fact that she turned him into a vampire). It's hard to argue that this is eternal love, but it actually presents it self as an odd thesis about the fallibility of love.

Equally, Barnabas banishes David's father Roger Collins from the family. Considering many American films have an impulse to forge families, Barnabas Collins is willing to re-engineer his descendants' family. It seems morally righteous, but it's also coming from a vampire who sucks the blood of unsuspecting hippies. The moral authority is undercut pretty hard by Barnabas' own actions.

Melodrama Re-Packaged

The tenor of what love is, within this text is actually a lot more strained; and by strained I mean restrictive and restricted by conventions of older horror texts where the monster has a secret love and yet it cannot come to be. It's a well-worn trope that got trotted out for 'The Mummy' for instance, and it seems to run in every story about the monster like Frankenstein or Dracula. In this context, desire itself becomes this very inflexible emotional problem because there simply is no cure for the broken heart in these stories.

Melodrama is a hard sell at times because the characters are set pieces. A vampire is entirely ascribed by what a vampire is and does, and so it has a way of limiting the options for the character. Similarly, having characters such as witches, werewolves and ghosts has a way of making the story inflexible at points where human - or more precisely more volitional - characters would exercise options.

So the tragedy that befalls Barnabas at the beginning in the long exposition is in many ways a ruse to set the stage for the melodrama to follow, but once the character is set as a vampire, there's a lot less for there to happen. The film loses quite a bit of narrative momentum when it dwells on Barnabas being a vampire. The story picks up steam when Barnabas is forced to make choices.

Speaking of Choices

Speaking of choices, apparently this is one of those films where Johnny Depp really wanted t play Barnabas Collins and that's how it got made. it's interesting that the other film he rely wanted to make was 'The Rum Diary'. Between the two films, it might be possible to tease something out that relates to Johnny Depp's aesthetic. Surprisingly, these two films are miles apart in their concerns, but now that I consider it, it seems apparent that both films centre around the schtick of the main characters.

A Quick Note About Anachronism Jokes

I was expecting a few more of these gags, but they weren't really plentiful. I guess poking fun at 1972 is hardly the stuff of comedic ideals. Still, the film sets up a nice opportunity with the double anachronism of us looking back at 1972 as Barnabas comes into 1972 from a deeper past. The gag about television and the people inside was nowhere near as funny as the gags involving Alice Cooper who does make an appearance as himself.

The best time travel anachronism jokes were in the 'Back to the Future' trilogy that exhausted the genre in the 1980s (as well as predicting the 1997 World Series), while 'Hot Tub Time Machine' attempted to recreate that magic by going back to the 1980s, so it seems there were other reasons in not coming into a date later than say, 1985.

The Gender Card

Julia Gillard, Feminist Superstar

You have to admit, the world moves in mysterious ways. Overnight, Tony Abbott became an international laughing stock as  result of Julia Gillard's big rant.

The most enthusiastic praise came from US women's site Jezebel, which described Ms Gillard as "one badass mother----er".

"In an impassioned 15-minute smackdown in front of the House of Representatives, the country's first female leader gave a scathing speech calling out opposition leader Tony Abbott's extremely misogynistic comments, actions, views on abortion and single women, all while pointing in his face."

Jezebel also highlighted some of her "choice quotes" including:
- "I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man, I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever. The leader of the opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the leader of the opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the house of representatives, he needs a mirror.
- "I was very offended personally the Leader of the Opposition said abortion is the easy way out."
- "I was offended when he stood next to a sign that described me as a 'man's bitch.'"

Online political magazine Salon said US politicians such as Todd Akin, who said "legitimate rape" did not result in pregnancy, and Allen West, who was blasted after telling a Democrat she was "not a lady", could learn something from Ms Gillard.

"If only the US could borrow Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard to take on Congress's misogynist caucus," Salon said.
"We wonder if Gillard takes requests: Todd Akin, R.-Mo., and Allen West, R.- Fla., to name just a couple, could certainly use a similar treatment."

And so it went. Germaine Greer, eat your heart out, the world has a new poster-child for Feminism. And yes, Tony Abbott looked a right git toward the end of Gillard's rant.

Shut Up 'n' Take Yer Medicine Tony

Of course today, Tony Abbott's trying to come back at the rant, trying to characterise it as 'playing the gender card'.

Mr Abbott said today he would not retreat from his criticism of the Prime Minister.
He called on Labor to stop playing the gender card.
''Just because the Prime Minister has sometimes been the victim of unfair criticism doesn't mean she can dismiss any criticism as sexism or she can dismiss any criticism on gender grounds,'' Mr Abbott said.

The staggering chutzpah of Tony Abbott is that he nary shows that he has to acknowledge he got beat by his own cudgel yesterday, good and proper. Maybe this kind of chutzpah is something admirable to a certain kind of conservative mindset, but I wonder if he's going to ever overcome the international PR damage of being 'that guy who had to sit there and take that 15minute rant from the first female Prime Minister of Australia'.

The sad (and decidedly ugly) point about the whole Peter Slipper affair is that Peter Slipper was indeed a one time friend of Tony Abbott, who got sold down the river by Tony Abbott. Peter Slipper - for whatever reasons of his own - made his move to accept the role of Speaker of House if for no other reason than the money and prestige. It certainly damaged the Coalition because it went against the overall aim of destabilising the fragile Parliament where the independents held so much power, however it really must be asked whether it was realistic of Tony Abbott and his front benchers to expect the apple of government to fall on their laps like some gift from the gods.

To this - mostly imaginary, partly mirage-like - end, Tony Abbott has bent his considerable effort at portraying the Prime Minster as a lying witch, bitch slut and whatever else, as well as hunted Craig Thomson into a kind of wilderness where he may never get a fair trial should he ever have to face charges. The utter lack of restraint and the most naked of blind ambitions has made him less of a candidate for the highest elected office of Australia.

Now, he might complain and call all this dressing down he got from Julia Gillard as Gillard playing the gender card, but no, no, no, Mr. Abbott, this is just the beginning. It is fairly clear that the polite, protective rubber gloves are off, and Julia Gillard has stainless steel fists.

Why Does Paul Sheehan Even Have A Job At The SMH?

I know he only writes opinion pieces but really, somebody should tell him the tone of his writing is as low as he accuses others of being.

After sending out two attack dogs, Gutter and Sewer, to do the dirty work, after hiding behind two political zombies, Insufferable and Unspeakable, to stay in power, after using the Minister for Innuendo and the Compromise-General to play the gender card, the mask has finally dropped away to reveal the driver of the politics of hate in Australia.

The mask fell at exactly 2.42pm in the House of Representatives. Looking on were the member for Gutter, Anthony Albanese, the member for Sewer, Wayne Swan, the Minister for Innuendo, Tanya Plibersek, and the Compromise-General, Nicola Roxon, and the independents who will do anything to avoid facing their electorates, Mr Insufferable, Robert Oakeshott, and his fellow regional zombie, Mr Unspeakable, Tony Windsor.

Someone had to set Gutter and Sewer loose. Someone directed Innuendo and Compromise to play the gender card. Someone paid the bill for Insufferable and Unspeakable. Someone's authority still rests on the vote of Craig Thomson. And someone had to approve making Peter Slipper the Speaker despite his being manifestly disrespected by either side of the house, a low point of political opportunism.

At 2.42 pm on Tuesday that someone rose to speak. The mask fell away. Julia Gillard came out snarling. The Parliament had before it a great issue, the dignity of the house itself, which had been traduced by the scandal that had attached itself to Slipper.

Instead of directly addressing the issue of a discredited speakership which had become engulfed in an expensive and degrading legal action that did no credit to anyone involved, least of all the Attorney-General, the Prime Minister wasted no timing in using misdirection and personal abuse.

That's all pretty vulgar as he is trying to paint the Prime Minister for daring to point out the blindingly obvious - the reason why the Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott cannot be taken seriously for his motion against Peter Slipper on the basis of misogyny and sexism is that the only way to interpret Tony Abbott's public utterances and prevarications and qualifications and babble-burble-bicker-banter is that he himself is sexist and a misogynist. And no amount of hauling Abbott's wife out into the limelight is going to fix that fact - not perception, but fact on the public record. Similarly, no amount of name-calling and belittling of the Prime Minster (for being a woman, I guess)  is going to add any moral authority to a man who has made hypocrisy a sport all his life and can't even tell when he's doing it.

Paul Sheehan then goes on to argue that Julia Gillard lied about the Carbon Tax.

"Lied"!

Now, regular readers of this blog will well know that I do not approve of Julia Gillard and will not vote for her or the ALP at the next Federal Election. My mind is made up; she cannot persuade me otherwise. This is between me and my political conviction.

All the same, even I know and understand and remember well enough, that what happened with respect to the Carbon Tax was that she had to go ahead with it in order to form government with the one Green MP and the 3 independents. It didn't matter that she campaigned against it and removed Kevin Rudd in order not to have the ETS. It was the hung Parliament that forced her to agree to the Carbon Tax. To argue that she "lied" given these circumstances is stretching the truth way beyond breaking point. It's one thing for idiot pundits like Alan Jones and other shock jocks to call this a lie: They're not smart enough to understand how things went that led up to that point in history. They're intellectual pygmies (and I'm being un-nice to real pygmies when I say that) preaching to the brain-damaged sub-literate morons who cannot read newspapers nor hold a thought long enough to understand history (but alas as citizens have the vote nonetheless).

However, a man who is paid to write opinion pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald website ought to have a better understanding than calling Julia Gillard a liar. It's willfully stupid and blind to the facts.

If I had Gina Rinehart's money to buy Fairfax, I'd make a point of sacking Paul Sheehan too.

As Ugly As It Gets

Just Ugliness To The Bone

I don't know how we came to this pass so quickly (or not soon enough depending on your cynicism), but as of this writing, Peter Slipper has resigned as House Speaker. This leaves the ALP government totally dependent on the support of former ALP independent Craig Thomson and now, former Liberal and renegade independent, Peter Slipper as well as the trio of Rob Oakshotte, Tony Windsor, Andrew Wilkie plus the lone Green, Adam Bandt.  That's quite a list of people to be counting on to maintain your government.

Then again, all these people are also saying they still won't swap sides and join Tony Abbott, so you have to wonder how bad Tony Abbot really is as a human being. Yes, adding to the ulginess was Tony Abbott, who may or may not have intentionally used this phrasing:

Mr Abbott said every day the government defended Mr Slipper would ''be another day of shame for this Parliament and another day of shame for a government which should have already died of shame''.

...and then promptly denied it had anything to do with Alan Jones' recent crack that Julia Gillard's father had died of shame. Would Mr. Abbott backtrack and apologise? Not on your life, and what did you expect?

Still, you do wonder at all the twists and turns tat led us all to this, the most strident horrible, nasty, and defiantly ugly sitting of Parliament. It's enough to make you wonder, have things ever been this bad?

Peter Hartcher recently penned an article saying we have short memories and that there have been other times when politics looked bad; but I will say this for both Julia Hillard and Tony Abbott alike, I don't think even the ugliest moments of Keating's insults or John Howard's xenophobia or Bob Hawke's ocker act or Malcolm Fraser's patrician act got quite as ugly as they have in this hung Parliament; and it wouldn't have been a hung Parliament, had it not been Julia Gillard who led the ALP to the last polls. It wouldn't have been a hung Parliament had the opposition put up a leader with more credibility than Tony Abbott. Whatever the swinging voters did, they squirmed and writhed as they tried not to commit to either Gillard or Abbott; and can you blame them for that?

Had it not been a hung Parliament, I don't know how far into the closet the Coalition would have reached into Craig Thomson's closet for skeletons or exposed Peter Slipper to be the warped human being that he is. Truth be told, as sordid as all these 'sexts' are, I think the exposure did little to make me think Coalition were on any kind of moral high ground in hounding these two members. I'm not a moralist enough to find their failings to be any worse than my own failings or for that matter Tony Abbott's failings - be they his odious, obvious, rank, misogyny and sexism. People do and say all sorts of crazy stuff in their privacy. Pulling it out under the light of courtrooms and parliamentary privilege just plain sucks.

Whatever you might think of all this, well, here we are today: Hung Parliament, much ugliness by the bucketful.

'Iron Sky'

Retro Punk?

I've wanted to see this film since the rumours and then news circulated that a bunch of Finnish film makers were crowd-sourcing to make an indie movie about Nazis on the moon, coming back to invade Earth in flying saucers. After all, the prevailing mythology to do with flying saucers is that they're not aliens at all, but Nazis flying around from their base in Antarctica.

Amazingly enough the film got made and did the circuit, and now it's available to watch on Fetch TV so I took advantage of that for a viewing and a chuckle.

What's Good About It
It's an indie sci-fi flick. Any time one of those gets made, you celebrate, regardless of quality. The production design is pretty good, an gives you a sense of what 1940 German military design might look like if extrapolated out 70years in isolation. It's got gobs and gobs of cheesy special effects. Some better than others.

What's Bad About It

Quite a bit. The writing is too loose. The black comedy isn't consistent in tone. Some times the gags are just slapstick Sometimes it's bad political satire of something that's already well in our rear vision mirrors. Bagging out Sarah Palin might have been relevant in 2008-2010, but in this year where there's another election, it's just ancient history. And none of those gags were remotely funny.

The directing is sloppy the editing is loose, the music is all over the shop in style with no consistent mimesis and the pacing overall is just too inconsistent to be enjoyable. The Nazi Bell UFO mythos got completely thrown out of the window for exposition, so there really was no explanation about how the Nazis got to the dark side of the Moon.

Maybe they proceeded with all that stuff being presumed knowledge, in which case they were overestimating their audience; and if they just dropped it for the sake of convenience, then they made their film less comprehensible than it needed to be.

What's Interesting About It

The Nazi Bell UFO story is exactly why you would connect the Nazis to flying saucers. Whether you believe it or not, the meme is out there. It certainly deserves better treatment and investigation than what this film gave it.

In fact what's remarkable about this film is how uninteresting and un-insightful it is, given the interesting and fascinating premise where the Germans had cracked some kind of alternative physics that allows for flying saucer technology.

If you really want to get a good grounding in the notion, here's a cool interview with one Dr. Joseph P. Farrell. It's a lot more interesting than this film.

The American Psyche?

Revenge Tragedies

Goodness, sometimes I really detest the opinion pieces the SMH puts out there. This one here by Waleed Aly about an episode of 'Newsroom', trying to anlayse the so-called psyche of America just takes the cake.

This episode isn't really about broadcast journalism at all. It's about America's relationship with bin Laden and the September 11 attacks. It's an artefact of our age that helps us define September 11 as a social, cultural and psychological landmark.

And if Sorkin's world is as accurate on that score as I think it is, the take-home message is this: that for Americans, or at least the American mainstream reflected here, September 11 was deeply personal. These characters are scarcely interested in bin Laden's death as some kind of strategic gain. They barely discuss anything that approximates the consequences of bin Laden's killing. But they very clearly exude a spirit of revenge finally being secured.

The newsroom cheers raucously when the news editor announces the news; news anchors jostle for the right to share the triumph with the American people in a manner that seems about more than professional ego; a peripheral character whose father was killed in the Twin Towers withdraws from the celebrations feeling hollow rather than elated, but even she agrees this is a moment for festivity.

And in perhaps the episode's cheesiest moment of patriotic triumph, a producer trapped frustratingly on a United Airlines plane stalled on the tarmac while his colleagues enjoy the exhilaration of going to air, looks the captain in the eye, then fixes on his badges and stripes, and declares solemnly that "our armed forces killed Osama bin Laden for you tonight".

Hmm. the article then goes on to argue that the killing of Osama bin Laden was mere revenge, and somehow this makes the act of slaying Osama bin Laden, somehow lacking in greater legitimacy. Well, I hate to break it to Waleed Aly, but the brokerage of revenge is actually one of the most important functions of state. The reason we have states and the judiciary predates the power of kings in Germanic tribes - and many of our law codes come to us out of those kinds of laws.

It pays to understand this a little bit more. Historically speaking, the need to broker the act of revenge exists so that society does not fall into a chaotic feud. If one reads Icelandic sagas such as Njal's saga, it is pretty clear the purpose of most laws in the Icelandic 'Althing' are to do with "making settlements" and by that, we mean brokering peace deals. Revenge is not condoned because going it alone without the wider understanding by society renders the act something that sets off a cycle of violence. This is why the law brokers settlements, and by way of brokering settlements, revenge is also brokered.

The more sophisticated our society has become through history, we have constructed elaborate narratives for what crime and punishment are, and what the point of the penal system might be; but at the heart of the function of the law in the state apparatus is to administer justice, and justice is in most part brokering settlements for grievances and revenge. This is why capital punishment still exists in parts of the world we consider otherwise civilised - like, say, America.

That the point of going after Osama bin Laden and killing him is revenge is not particularly insightful, given that we know how many perished in the 9/11 attacks (and I say this putting aside all the conspiracy theories for a moment). If the United States Government did not exact vengeance on the man who claimed responsibility for the attacks, it would be amiss in its duty of brokering the revenge. After all, it would be illegal for the aggrieved kinsmen to go after bin Laden on their own, seeking to kill him. That's called a lynch mob.

So it goes without saying that Waleed Aly is willfully misrepresenting what state-sponsored revenge actually is, in order to come at his pithy conclusion:

...Sorkin doesn't employ the explicit good-versus-evil terms that, say, George W. Bush did. There's no need. It's simply assumed. It's not in the content of the script because it's in the underlying grammar of American public culture. The Newsroom's treatment is an artefact because it does nothing more than faithfully reproduce the mythology of bin Laden that prevails amongst its audience.

That is to say, Sorkin treats bin Laden as an icon. Almost in the religious sense. As the show's star anchor Will McAvoy takes to the air to break the story, the production staff rise to their feet and look on in solemn reverence. Hereabouts it is clear this is not a news broadcast. It's a rite. A sacrament.
"For the first time in almost three decades the world has no reason to fear Osama bin Laden," begins McAvoy's eloquent monologue. It's powerful. It's moving. It's also wrong.

Bin Laden remains potent in death. He is more powerful as a symbol than a field commander, and as such lives longer than himself. That's the nature of icons.

Now, what is wrong with this? Waleed Aly is in effect complaining that Osama bin Laden has been made into a kind of straw man cipher for Islamists, while mounting his own straw man argument against America's satisfaction at having had Osama bin Laden killed.

The real complaint we should be leveling is that Osama bin Laden was killed and not captured alive; that his body was disposed at sea without so much as an autopsy. The physical being of Osama bin Laden was sent into the shadows of history pretty much the same way he came into our consciousness - through the murk of Afghanistan and Pakistan local politics and local history.  The real complaint that I for one have about the slaying of Osama bin Laden is how long it took, and the damage it has done in the mean time to our own cherished democracies. In fact it didn't get done during the tenure of George W Bush as POTUS, which leads us to wonder about all those conspiracy theories out there on the internet.

Be that as it may (as they say in Mafia movies), complaining that Osama bin Laden is understood to be 'not even political' but merely 'evil' is a bit rich coming from a muslim apologist (who only a couple weeks ago wanted to lend legitimacy to those rioting in Sydney's streets over some stupid Youtube video). The adage about living and dying by the sword fits Osama bin Laden perfectly - He chose to live by terror. That his death should be shrouded in the state sponsored terror of Navy SEAL Team 6 is entirely appropriate, and complaining about the meaning assigned to Osama bin Laden in the wake of the hit is a bit like complaining that the term 'monster' overstates the wrongdoings of say, Stalin or Idi Amin or Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il after they've done all their killing and repressing and torture and hell-making.

Somewhere there is a gallery of history's great assholes; and there is no doubt in most people's minds that Osama bin Laden has earned his spot in that gallery, well and proper. The only quibble about that is whether he was actually some kind of CIA Black Ops operative blowback asshole as per the conspiracy theories; or whether he was an autochthonous Islamist asshole; but an asshole of historic proportion, I have no doubt that's what he was. There really isn't much mileage in arguing that Osama wasn't an asshole but a projection of the embittered American psyche. You'd have more success splitting his beard hairs at the bottom of the sea where he sleeps with the fishes.

Quick Shot 01/Oct/2012

Mere Anarchy

I'm reading Woody Allen's 2007 book 'Mere Anarchy'. It's mostly numb chuckles except page 42 where there is a tour de force of comedy writing.  The set up is that the narrator Mealworm is contacted by a Hollywood type to write a 'novelizaion' (I leave that 'z' in there with all its Americanism). After much self rationalisation that it is a worthy task ,and that he could ennoble the genre, Mealworm embarks on a sample passage.

The style he parodies is 'In Cold Blood' by Truman Capote. The movie he is given, is 'The Three Stooges'. The ensuing passage is priceless.

Oakville Kansas, lies on a particularly desolate stretch across the central plains. ... What's left of it the area where farms once dotted the landscape is arid space now. At one time corn and wheat provided thriving livelihoods before agricultural subsidies had the opposite effect of enhancing prosperity.

...

The dilapidated Ford pulled up before a deserted farm house and three men emerged. Calmly and for no apparent reason the dark haired man took the nose of the bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted in a long counterclockwise circle.

And so the passage goes for a full page of gut-busting funniness, describing a typical Three Stooges sequence with the kind of high-toned literariness usually pitched for the high-brow-ed.

Living The Irony, Feeling The Irony

The Sydney Swans won a very Victorian championship. The Melbourne Storm won a very Sydney championship. The feeling on the Sydney streets at least are pretty surreal.

Speaking of football codes and surreal, there's good old Alan Jones!

Alan Jones, And Dying Of Shame

There's probably a longer note to be written about Freedom of Speech, but Annabel Crabbe's done a good job of it today in the SMH. Alan Jones apologised for his rather gauche remarks about the late father of the PM.

He said the same kind of "black-humoured comments'" were similar to those made in the trenches of Gallipoli.

The radio host said he had to "man up" and admit he "got it wrong" for adding to the hurt of a grieving daughter by making the comments during a 58-minute speech at a Sydney University Liberal Club President's dinner at the Rocks.

"There are days when you just have to concede and man up and say 'you got it wrong,'" Mr Jones told reporters at 2GB headquarters this morning.

"And on this instance these are remarks which I should not have repeated. It was wrong to offer any impression that I might seem to diminish the grief that a daughter would feel for her father. I was taught by my father that if you are going to eat crow you should eat it while it's hot and therefore I felt this matter should be addressed today."

Notice how he invokes Gallipoli. Good heavens Mr. Jones, certainly you know no shame, for truly those men did not die of shame, but bullets in another time in another war in another place in the middle east. To invoke them in an apology to the Prime Minster after having made the worst-of-taste remarks shamelessly seems a bit ironic given the original tasteless remark about shame and death.

It's a good thing he "manned up" and apologised as he did. Mr. Jones even invoked his father, saying his father taught him to eat humble pie while it was still warm. The gag I would have expected was that it was his father who as spinning in his grave for shame that his son would insult the Prime Minster in a most tasteless manner.

He then went on to say the horrible on-line people had said they wished his cancer would return and kill him and so, even he is a victim in all of this. Like... how? I'm inclined to say he brought the trolls upon himself and really, the vitriol was largely in proportion to the vitriol he's been spreading across the air waves from his Bully pulpit microphone.

Still, an apology is an apology, no matter how qualified and caveat-ed. He is fortunate the Prime Minster is not Chinese or Korean, for we know no apology is sincere enough for them :)

Which brings me to this next bit...

Senkaku Island Waterfight

You gotta laugh. No, really, you do. The trouble in Senkaku Islands stems from China's loss of face and actually losing a war with japan in 1895. it's trying to say Japan shouldn't have those islands - but that is at least 3 dynastic regimes ago, dating back to the Dowager Empress and the last Emperor. The argument from the People's Republic of China, the one that deposed the Republic of China and the KMT (who deposed the Ching/Qing Dynasty) is that it belongs to them because it used to be China a long time ago - and even these claims are pretty tenuous.

Well, a lot of things used to be Monoglia as well, but you don't see politicians in Ulan Bator demand that borders be returned to the best days of Genghis Khan. And, as with all these things, who cries for the Carthage and the Phoenicians?

As far as the USA is concerned, the Senkakus are part of the Okinawan archipelago and they've told the Chinese government that this is their understanding; which means if the Chinese try to occupy them it will invoke the US Japan Security Treaty. China has argued vociferously that it shouldn't but, it's really not for them to decide.

The protests in the wake of Japan 'nationalising' the Senkakus has been both elaborate, orchestrated and very vocal.  The ugly back story is that China is going to undergo one of its interesting Communist Party succession plans this month, and they're trying to divert their population's animosity to Japan (because let's face it, it's easy for them to keep lying). Japan for its part, nationalised it because if they didn't, the chief right winger in residence and Governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara was going to buy it for the City of Tokyo and administer it as Tokyo administers a whole bunch of small archipelagos in the Pacific. The subtext there is that Ishihara was going to build structures on the Senkakus like, a jetty and a lighthouse; and Prime Minster Noda forestalled those active plans by nationalising the islands with the full intent of doing nothing in particular with them.

Not that they understand these subtleties over in Beijing or ... Taipei. Taiwan has it's own election coming up; and it is helping the incumbent to look tough. So they sent a patrol boat out to the Senkakus and this led to a waterfight between Japanese and Taiwanese patrol boats. It's laughable, really.

 

 

 

 

George Bernard Shaw Shock

Not The Guy You Thought You Studied

The shock of the week for me this week was finding out a bit more about George Bernard Shaw. My experience of George Bernard Shaw starts and stops at high school where we studied 'Major Barbara', 'Pygmalion' and 'St. Joan'. They are to some degree coloured by ideology Shaw wanted to put across, so we had to study that George Bernard Shaw was a 'Fabian' socialist; and of course we learned that the Fabians didn't want violent revolutions, they wanted gradual changes towards adopting more socialist ideas.

Imagine my surprise then when I encountered somebody who vehemently argued that Shaw was a Nazi supporter who favoured radical eugenics by wiping out people he didn't like. Yes, I did a double take when he presented that information, and this quote:

“You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight, if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”

If you Google that entire quote, you find that it is most often quoted by a certain kind of right winger who hates socialism. It's also on his Wikipedia page, together with this description:

Shaw opposed the execution of Sir Roger Casement in 1916. He wrote a letter "as an Irishman"[70] to The Times, which they rejected, but it was subsequently printed by both the Manchester Guardian on 22 July 1916, and by the New York American on 13 August 1916.

Shaw was not necessarily better informed about actual conditions in other countries than other people were at the time, and tended to believe the best of people who professed similar principles to those he held himself. This led to him taking some positions that now seem grotesque.

After visiting the USSR in 1931 and meeting Joseph Stalin, Shaw became a supporter of the Stalinist USSR. On 11 October 1931 he broadcast a lecture on American national radio telling his audience that any 'skilled workman...of suitable age and good character' would be welcomed and given work in the Soviet Union.[71] Tim Tzouliadis asserts that hundreds of Americans responded to his suggestion and left for the USSR.[72]

Shaw continued this support for Stalin's system

Then, along came Hitler, and Hitler too got the nod of approval from Shaw, who by this time was more in favour of authoritarian regimes because of his disgust for liberal democracies, and probably the moniker where the Nazis were ostensibly National Socialist Workers Party, and the use of that word would have been a candle to the moth.

The most interesting read and probably the most relevant, quick, pivotal assessment of George Bernard Shaw the man can be found here. It's a depressing article in as much as the George Bernard Shaw presented there is utterly unlike the Fabian sociliast or progressive. It seems that in his old age, his cantankerous-ness and contrarian qualities led him deeper into espousing uglier and more outlandish sentiments:

And in lines even more extreme than his banned BBC talk, he again praised the failed Mussolini as “right” in describing democracy as “a stinking corpse”. As for Hitler, he added, “in the world war we claim to be fighting for democracy; and Adolf Hitler retorts unanswerably that British democracy is nothing but Anglo-Semitic plutocracy”. In other words, alleged capitalist injustice with a Jewish taint was an “unanswerable” fact. Had he lost his reason, or was he only remaining consistent to his cantankerous image?

He had had enough of liberal democracies; he preferred the austere, mean, authoritarians instead of the difficult compromises of democracy. By the time he is working on his play 'Geneva', he is utterly unlike the man we were led believe inhHigh school.

So I went around and asked a number of people who they thought George Bernard Shaw was, ans what kind of beliefs the man might have held. Predictably, people came back with answers that I had given - which sort of goes to show that the NSW Board of Education has somehow created this doxa (opinion) about George Bernard Shaw which is shared by many people, but is also utterly inaccurate.

Which brings me to my point. I've even asked teachers of English about this, and they didn't know about how George Bernard Shaw's intellectual life went after 1920 - after the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik coup.  All these teachers are probably still out there teaching that George Bernard Shaw was a Fabian. Yes, he was, but he was so much more than that, and in some ways, so much more despicable than somebody who sort of wanted society to progress. I'm a little upset at my high school teachers who presented me 'Major Barbara' and 'Pygmalion' who didn't go through with telling us just who Shaw was. It seems amiss, and almost malicious to withhold  such important information that contextualises the work. They might have taught in good faith, but the net result is that they were teaching misinformation.

How is this so? How could this have happened? I imagine there was at some point a strong desire to overlook these things in favour of presenting students with works they could take on board as ideological education of sorts. In hindsight, I feel quite strongly that the students were not served well by this - for want of a better word - coverup.

These books are still on the high school curriculum in Australia. There are many teachers out there teaching these texts, who grew up on being taught about Shaw, largely as I was, thinking that he was largely a benign playwright who had socialist ideals. They're probably rerunning the misunderstanding just as it was handed to them, and it seems to me a great shout out is necessary: "George Bernard Shaw didn't finish up the way he was in the middle of his career!"

I'm still trying to pick up the pieces of the shattered idol, trying to figure out which bits can be salvaged.  I've also had a little think about it and it occurs to me that Shaw's radical tilt towards an ugly embrace of authoritarianism might have something to do with the onset of his advanced age.

The years 1920-1950 not only represent the last 30years of Shaw's life, they also represent the era of the Bolshevik revolution, through the end of World War II and the re-establishment of  world order after World War II. In these years, Shaw was aged 64-94. He was still mouthing off to the press in his advanced age - at an age where most people bow out into retirement.

It is highly probable that a younger Shaw would denounce the position of the elderly Shaw; if we are to be fair to his work, then I can only suspect that in his old age, he lost his grip on his ideas and got a little lazy. Maybe he even had Alzheimers or some degenerative brain condition that we do not know about. Maybe he just got old and impatient and decided niceties were boring, and thus was happy to give into the inner fascist more often, and even in public. And maybe I'm working hard here to let him off the hook. Well, what do we know?

Today, with rigorous thinking, we understand that there's a gulf between Socialism and National Socialism as practiced by the Nazis; and that in the practical running of the 19th century socialist ideas and ideals in the Soviet Republics, how it created brutal injustices that were largely in line with what you would expect from 'absolute power' (as per George Orwell's dictum, 'absolute power corrupts absolutely'). Hindsight is 20-20 and better. Shaw lived through this stuff and could only be reasonably asked to digest it the ay we digest events in say, Afghanistan or Libya or Syria.

Anyway, I share this with you today, still shocked to find out George Bernard Shaw was nothing like the figure I was taught he was.

The China "Put"

China Bears

Here's an interesting article about where the Australian economy sits amidst the global network of capital.

Australia had its very own “put” based on China. No matter what went wrong in Gondwanaland, the industrialisation of the world's most populous nation would dig us out of a hole by paying us to dig more holes on its behalf.
All we had to worry about was a soaring currency that allowed us all to take cheap overseas holidays. When you're living it up in Barcelona, really, where's the problem?

The excitement this induced in the West quickly outpaced reality. In almost all industrialised nations, property rights and an independent legal system are central to the development process. Not in China – its path to prosperity remains a vast experiment.
The fall in the price of iron ore – by more than 50 per cent in the past year – has been the point about which the China Put turns, an excuse for all those long-standing concerns about Chinese growth to gain some air.

None of this is exactly unheard of. For a while we've been hearing stories from China where nothing is as it seems. Entire cities built with nobody living in them, massive public sector debt mounting up in the municipalities; how they can't just hand out the same kind of massive Stimulus as they did back in 2008 during the deepest trough of the GFC.

In most part, it is true that the Australian economy is tied in to the Chinese economy quite firmly, and that this nexus is providing Australia with the extra bit of economic strength. It is then a little more than worrying to find out that the Chinese are looking for an out because they can't see a soft landing.

On one level, the mining boom might have passed its peak, but there's still a lot of building to go in both China and India. Those mines are going to supply those hungry economies. On another level, there is no guarantee that China is going to remain stable, good customers given that they carry so many risks for political (and therefore economic) instability. It's hard to see how thse things are going to find their balance.

The big four banks are all indirectly exposed to a China slowdown, with their need to source funds from the wholesale money market their Achilles heel.

If funds dried up as they did in 2008, especially at a time when unemployment and mortgage stress was increasing, property values could tumble. That may quickly see a sharp increase in bad loans and pressure on capital adequacy ratios, which is where a banking crisis tends to start.

That bit there is the scary bit. The Real Estate part of the SMH is already spruiking a revival in the Real Estate market. It seems quite difficult to square such a revival with a scenario where the big four banks are going to get exposed to the China slowdown as projected.  You'd be a mug to take on a mortgage with China hanging off the sword of Damocles thread, so to speak.

News That's Fit To Punt - 15/Sep/2012

Q.E 3 - Infinity

The biggest news of the week for me wasn't the storming of the US Embassy in Libya but Ben Bernanke saying he's just going to leave the tap on until stuff gets better. Indefinitely.

''We are trying to create more employment … the tools we have involve affecting financial asset prices,'' Bernanke said at a press conference after the Fed's announcement. Companies felt there was not enough demand for their products, and if the value of homes, shares and other assets improved, Americans would be ''more willing to go out and provide the demand'', he said.

The open-ended nature of the stimulus is one measure of how hard the Fed is now pushing. Another is the fact that it has softened a focus on containing inflation that has dominated central bank thinking for decades.

Bernanke insisted yesterday that the Fed was not intentionally trying to raise inflation to a point where it more aggressively depreciated America's daunting $US16 trillion debt load, an option that has been there from the moment the global crisis began.

It was, however, ''not going to [be] premature in removing policy accommodation'', he said, adding: ''Even after the economy starts to recover more quickly, even after the unemployment rate begins to move down more decisively, we're not going to rush to begin to tighten policy. We're going to give it some time to make sure the recovery is well established.''

The success or failure of the ''do what it takes'' quantitative easing strategy that is being rolled out on either side of the Atlantic depends on whether companies and individuals respond. In the US at least, the capacity to do so has been demonstrated before.

That's some pretty drastic tap turning. They're already at 0% interests rates, and committed to that for a long time to come. now they're going to spend 40billion a month buying crap paper, printing money to do it. Tea Party types are going to have a stroke. Gold investors are going to have jism-spasms.  Commodities are going to rise again and save Twggy Forrest.

I've had a little l think about what all this means because since the GFC, central bankers and treasury officials from around the world have done this thing of trying to stimulate the economy. This includes things like the TARP bail outs as well as the Rudd Government's big stimulus package which staved off a nose dive into a depression (and the more time goes on, we have to give him credit for that decision lone).

The problem is, at this point we're having to wonder about the 'moral hazard' that was decried at the time by certain people who felt that bailing out bankers was one thing but bailing out everybody was a terrible thing because they might just keep doing what they were doing that got us all into the mess. Note, they weren't as hard on the bankers as they were on socialist governments that just gave out the money for people to pay down their credit card debts.

But 4 years removed from that chaotic time, the great danger seems to have been the possibility (or even probability) that asset prices might go into reverse and we have a deflationary spiral. The big fear, as it were, seems to be that if everybody ends up being foreclosed upon by their banks and are forced to sell their houses, then there would be all these homeless families who owe more money to the banks even after being forced out of their homes. And this seems to be the scenario everybody is furiously trying to avoid, both over in the USA and over here in Australia.

So we come back to the moral hazard bit. Just as a token of understanding, RBA boss Glenn Stevens was saying earlier in the year that it wasn't acceptable for people to be assuming that property only goes up; and yet we have governments around the world totally invested in making sure they never come down. You'd be stupid not to buy into the Property Ponzi scheme that gets bailed at the first sign of a crack. Nobody is willing to give up their houses. Should they be made to by market forces? It seems the Federal reserve in the USA says no and, - this is the amazing bit - What they're saying is that they're going to take the value off the house by stripping the value out of the price tag on your house.

Yes, you can still keep your $700,000 price tag on your house; you won' be foreclosed; but that $700,000 won't be worth the $700,000 you bought it at, because we're printing money to destroy the value faster than before. And it won't show up in inflation figures because people won't sell their houses often enough to make it matter.

In the long run, the property bubble in the first world racked up a certain sum of unrealistic prices, which has to be wound back. Rather than let the deflation give back those prices, they're going to switch on inflation so that the dollar value diminishes to match the real value.the point is, going forwards, there is nothing to say that Real Estate is a better investment than shares or bonds because they're going to inflate away any gains you make beyond the market. It's probably a good thing if it blunts property speculation, but judging from the news this week, overseas investors are piling into Sydney Real Estate, most likely because of the moral hazard or actual lack thereof.

Somewhere Steven Keane is laughing and crying.

Eying The Charging Bull

Are things really that bad in America right now? Don't look now but the Dow Jones finished at 13,593.57, marking a 5 year high. by which we mean, it's the highest it's been since the GFC started 5 years ago.

US stocks rose for a fourth straight session on Friday to close out the week at nearly five-year highs after the Federal Reserve took bold action to spur the economy, a move that could keep equities buoyed in the coming months.
Shares of Apple Inc, the largest US company by market value, ended at an all-time peak, and Exxon Mobil , the second biggest, hit a four-year high.

Equities are in a run-up that has pushed the S&P 500 to end higher for four consecutive months. The extended advance has come mainily from actions by Europe's and the United States' central banks to keep interest rates low and stimulate their struggling economies.

The Fed said Thursday that it would keep up its aggressive bond-buying until unemployment falls. Chairman Ben Bernanke said he wanted to see a convincing improvement in the economy that could deliver sustainable job creation.
Bernanke's comments are "going to create an artificial floor on the market, meaning that we could see higher prices over time," said Paul Nolte, managing director at Dearborn Partners in Chicago. "Any correction that we get will be no more than a few per centage points."

The Dow and the S&P 500 both closed at their highest levels since December 2007, while the Nasdaq ended at the highest since November 2000. The small-cap Russell 2000 index closed at the highest since April 2011.

The Dow Jones industrial average ended up 53.51 points, or 0.40 per cent, to 13,593.37. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index closed up 5.78 points, or 0.40 per cent, to 1,465.77. The Nasdaq Composite Index gained 28.12 points, or 0.89 per cent, to 3,183.95.

For the week, the Dow rose 2.2 per cent, the S&P climbed 1.9 per cent and the Nasdaq added 1.5 per cent.
The S&P is now just 6 per cent below its all-time closing high of 1,565.15 despite a relatively weak economy and economic risks around the world.

The Dow might set an all time high by the end of the year. The same thing goes with all the other American indices. This might all be 'irrational exuberance' as Alan Greenspan called the 2009 rally, but he doesn't seem to be saying it now.

I know there's a 'Fiscal cliff' coming later this year, but that is why Bernanke opened the sluice gates and let it rip. When it crashes over the all time highs, this is likely the start of a new bull run in US equities.

Lining Up For A Beating
Back  here in Australia, there's been another bit of Rudd-pronouncements and a round of "is-he-won't-he". This time Simon Crean managed not to go out there and slander Kevin Rudd. The election last weekend yielded some interesting results, all food for thought and the main dish on the food-for-thought degustation is that the ALP is likely to get bollocked hard in NSW at the next Federal election.

A second backbencher from western Sydney, John Murphy, spoke up. Murphy is especially vulnerable. He holds his seat of Reid by a margin of 2.6 per cent.

He agreed with Swan that the ALP performance had been ''patchy'' and cited two contrasting local experiences. The Labor mayor of Canada Bay council, Angelo Tsirekas, managed to win a 10 per cent swing in his favour.

But in Auburn, where Labor had long held an unassailable dominance, the party had been outpolled by the Liberals by a margin of two to one.
If that's not an alarm, Murphy said, I don't know what is. We've got to take notice and get into these communities, he urged. Canada Bay and Auburn fall within Murphy's federal electoral boundaries.

Swan offered a reassurance that things would turn around but again offered no strategy. A third MP, Stephen Jones, echoed the concerns of Hayes and Murphy.

It was a moment of ironic tang for some in the room. Some caucus members remembered hearing Julia Gillard justify her coup against Kevin Rudd by saying that she was not so much troubled by the Rudd government's difficulties but by the fact that he seemed to have no plan to get out of difficulty.

Well, that would be painful in the caucus room, but really, this moment was going to come on the back of February's big leadership spill that was supposed to put paid to Kevin Rudd and allow Julia Gillard to win the electorate. Except the electorate isn't listening. I don't mean any disrespect, but I will continue to say that I won't vote for Julia Gillard because basically if the ALP was happy to risk the future of Australia in the hands of Tony Abbott, then I am not doing anything worse by taking the exact same risk, by donkey voting for the Lower House at the next Federal Elections (I'm voting for the Australian Sex Party in the Senate).

It doesn't matter what Julia Gillard has done since February or will do on to the next election. The reasons for me not voting for her have been writ in history. The ALP can't unfuck that goat.

Speaking Of Terrible Tony...

Student politics on campus is an often silly, shitty, horrible, bizarre thing. You always wonder what the storm in a teacup is, but it's always nice to know that it can have real life repercussions, for 35 years one from some SRC arguy-bargy at the University of Sydney's SRC, we've been hearing what a prick and a hostile misogynist  Tony Abbott was at university.

Barbara Ramjan beat him hands down. She was of the left but her work as the SRC's welfare officer made her a popular figure on the campus. The night her victory was declared, the SRC offices saw wild scenes of bad-boy behaviour: flashing, mooning, jeering and abuse. Abbott watched all this. His loss was a very public disappointment. He approached Ramjan. She thought he was coming over to congratulate her. "But no, that's not what he wanted," she recalls. "He came up to within an inch of my nose and punched the wall on either side of my head." Thirty-five years later she recalls with cold disdain what he did. "It was done to intimi­date." Abbott tells me he has no recollection of the incident: "It would be profoundly out of character had it occurred."

Pure ugliness of his character on full display. Anyway, in the wake of that publication, we've seen a few other people pop up and corroborate the account and Christopher Pyne - the evil leprechaun of the right - say it's all water under the bridge and not important enough to be talking about.

It took Tony Abbott a full week to hide from the mushroom cloud, after which he emerged and denied it. Well it is a well known rule of blame-assignation that "he who denied it supplied it" so it must have been him to cause that stink on campus back in 1977. Then he finally emerged and  said a Labor dirt unit dug it up.

Fronting the media yesterday for the first time in almost a week, Mr Abbott sought to reconcile his previous statements that he could not recollect the incident and that it never happened. ''How can you recall something that never happened?'' he said.
He did admit to another allegation - that after Ms Ramjan became the SRC chairman and asked to be known as chairperson, he called her ''chairthing''.
''There were lots of silly, embarrassing, childish things done in student politics and I wasn't immune to that,'' he said.
Mr Abbott denied the wall-punching allegation and claimed the matter had been dredged up by a Labor dirt unit. ''There is a Labor dirt unit and it's feeding information to people left, right and centre,'' he said.
Ms Ramjan, who has been telling the story for years, told the Herald it was ''absolutely'' true and she rejected outright that Labor put her up to it. ''I have never been a member of a political party in my life,'' she said. ''He's a bully.''

I don't doubt that he is a bully for a moment. It's nice to know that student politics is of some consequence, when it comes back to bite Tony Abbott in the metaphorical arse - yes, the very same one he was hedging on offering Tony Windsor in exchange for being Prime Minister.

'Total Recall' (2012)

Total Reboot

I'm an Arnie fan and I like most of the films he's done on one level or another, but if there was one film that made me go "WTF?" as I walked out of the cinema, it was 'Total Recall' (1990). The main reason for my great disappointment back when that version was release dwas due in large part to how cheesy the film looked, but also, the shotgun marriage of the Mars scenario into the second half of the film that had nothing to do with Philip K. Dick's short story.

For quite some time my nickname for that film was 'Total Retard' until somebody pointed out the film could be read as describing the psychosis Doug Quaid falls into after he falls to take the pill from Dr. Edgemar. That is an interesting reading of the film, but I have to force myself to come at that interpretation - it's only a suggestion rather than an explicit plot point.

There are some good things about the 1990 Vorhoeven version with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it's hard to come at a film that fails to bring Philip K. Dick's vision to the screen and sells it out for cheap laughs and the special effects were pretty ordinary (amazingly it won an Oscar for SFX but it looks terrible today).  In most part, the whole movie left me dumbfounded and stupefied by the missed opportunity.

People have been asking why do 'Total Recall'  again when it's already been done. I don't know if it counts as having been 'done' when the old version so misses the mark. For me, it's a bit of a pleasant surprise and a joy to watch a version that at least takes the Philip K. Dick story seriously and plays it straight. This is a bit like the Daniel Craig 'Casino Royale' where the Arnie version is more the David Niven & Woody Allen version of 'Casino Royale. You could easily argue that 'Casino Royale' had been 'done'; but could you seriously argue it had been done properly?

What's Good About It

The Special Effects. Good heavens, I can't believe I'm saying this, but this film actually goes so far into the Philip K. Dick universe, it actually fulfills the promise of 'Blade Runner'. I don't say this lightly; but I do mean this wholeheartedly in a year where Ridley Scott has come out with his underwhelming 'Prometheus'. This version of 'Total Recall' completely lifts whole sections of the design of 'Blade Runner' and even Spielberg's 'Minority Report' and completes the vision of how 'all these films should have been - but more about that in a moment.

In the scheme of things where I've watched a lot of Science Fiction movies good and bad, it actually makes me happy to see the promise fulfilled. This film kicks butt and looks good doing it - which is the way it's supposed to be.  There's a certain kind of science fiction that appeals to the intellect and intuition and this film does that while providing the pounding action we expect in modern action films.

Kate Beckinsale's still got it; tight pants and all. I know she's the director's wife and she's on the wrong side of 35 for screen goddess terrain, but her Lori Quaid is every bit scary as Sharon Stone's Lori Quaid and if not even more so. I'd be much more scared of Beckinsale's Lori than Sharon Stone's and that's saying something.

What's Bad About It

The bit with the elevator shaft in the middle was too reminiscent of the tunnel way thumping machine sequence in 'Galaxy Quest' and it seriously went a bit too long there. Trap mazes are probably great for the computer game spin off, but they tend to look really contrived and silly.

The music is utterly forgettable. A film like this should have a great score and this score is just not that great. I couldn't hum you the main theme at all, even though I liked the rest of the film.

Also, the cinematography goes a little too flare-happy. Anamorphic lens flare is cool in the back light scenes but there are scenes in this film where the flare goes big when the back light is tiny. It's like the style is almost getting out of hand. It's only a little complaint.

What's Interesting About It

The most interesting thing about this version of 'Total Recall' is how deeply it embraces the other entries in the Philip K. Dick adaptations. the streets of the Colony (a.k.a Australia) are constantly raining like the Los Angeles 2019 of 'Blade Runner' - complete with the flood of Asian characters and writing. The United Federation of Britain is equally reminiscent of the white-on-white designs of 'Minority Report'. I guess some would call this derivative, but I don't see it that way. I see it more as completing the picture that began with 'Blade Runner' many years ago and it has taken until now for the movie business to catch up with the vision.

The best way to understand this film is in fact to see it as the successor to 'Blade Runner'. At one point Colin Farrell is running through a terminal with breaking glass falling everywhere. He holds a gun and sports an overcoat and the scene is most reminiscent of the poster logo for 'Blade Runner' with Deckard in a long coat holding a gun. The film has a feeling of massively layered textual references, all colliding in a furious spectacle - and a lot of the references are coming straight out of 'Blade Runner'.

The Rain

Everybody who does a lift of Blade Runner ends up spending a fortune on the rain machine. I imagine the bill on this one was pretty substantial as well. Why does it rain so much in these movies? It rains because in each instance they're trying to illustrate a broken climate, and thirty years on from 'Blade Runner', it's becoming more and more obvious on a day to day level just how much we have impacted the planet.

The Chinese umbrellas and crowd in the wet rainy streets with neon signs and back lit perspex signs everywhere completes the look. It looks exactly like the street scenes from the Los Angeles 2019 of 'Blade Runner'.

The rain is also a kind of cipher for the opacity of society. The rain actually obscures and nreaks up the image so we don't see everything clearly. The drops reflect the coloured lights without giving them form. The rain visual completes the sense in which the vision is fractured, and this is important because a sense of clarity is the very thing the characters are seeking.

The Flying Car Chase

There is a story recounted in the book about 'Blade Runner' how the test screen audience had come into the cinema with a rumour of a flying car chase. There are flying cars in 'Bade Runner' but they don't do a car chase in the sky. This lack (and the generally sombre mood of the film) led to the test audience hating the original cut. The trope of the flying car chase refused to die, and it makes its appearance in 'The Fifth Element' which also borrows heavily from the Blade Runner look. 'Minority Report' has a flying car chase of sorts but it's actually not been common in science fiction movies as much as you would expect.

There certainly weren't flying car chases in the original 'Total Recall', 'Paycheck' or 'Screamers'. So you take notice when a film cops the Blade Runner style and then proceeds to deliver a pretty hard core flying car chase. Does this make it a good film? I don't know, but it's certainly another instance of Len Wiseman fulfilling the promise of the earlier film.

Artificial Persons

If the original 'Total Recall' struck a pose of weirdness by having mutants, and replicants were the villains in 'Blade Runner', this film certainly covers that terrain by having artificial security force robots who are to supplant the humans.

The distinction between the real and ersatz was a great recurring motif in the work of Philip K. Dick. The collar that allows the holographic disguise and the security robots hark back to the artificial animals and rogue replicants and robots in Dick's oeuvre. You get the feeling Wiseman has spent a good deal of time reading his Philip K. Dick books.

The simulacrum, as the critical language calls it makes a number of appearances in this film. Indeed, the fact that memory is a facsimile of the experience seems to be quite a deep-seated anxiety in this film whereas in the earlier Arnold Schwarzenegger, the simulacrum was merely the bifurcated sense of reality that might arise out of the scene with the pill.

Don't Take The Pill, Kill The Woman!

If ever there was film that wanted to play with the notion of the simulacrum reality, that would have been the original 'Matrix', where Morpheus offers up two pills - one blue, one red - and advises one wipes the memory of the experiences, reverting to the norm by taking the blue pill, or experience the full fracture of the perceived reality by taking the red pill. Of course, that scene harks back to the original 'Total recall' where Dr. Edgemar offers a pill to Arnold Schwarzenegger's Doug Quaid. If Doug takes the pill, then he can go back to a reality where he is no longer the hunted.

This version of the film does not use the pill - most likely because of the ground covered by the Matrix. Instead, it simply sets up the drama to a moment where Doug's 'friend' Harry says he should shoot Melina to accomplish the same renunciation of the fractured reality.

What's interesting about this choice is that the film puts Doug in a position whereby in Freudian terms he has to kill his mother in order to achieve individuation; and in Jungian terms he has to kill his 'anima' in order to experience reality properly. ow, in both schools of thought, what is being asked is counter to what is natural. With Freud, he's supposed to want to fuck his mother, not kill her (unlike, say Norman Bates in 'Psycho') and with Jung, he's supposed to embrace the 'anima' to effectuate his spiritual journey. So when Colin Farrell's Doug Quaid shoots Harry instead, it makes total sense without going into motive.

The Absent Quips

One of the complaints levelled against this film is that it did away with the quips. There were two corker of lines from the earlier version of 'Total Recall' that resonated beyond the film. One was Arnie shooting Sharon Stone's Lori and saying "consider this a divorce." The other was having killed Michael Ironside's Richter, he says "see you at the Party, Richter" as he throws the two arms belonging to Richter that were torn off. They're some of the best moments in an otherwise uneven film.

This film does away with Richter, and the merciless pursuer is the evil 'wife' Lori all the way. It's a good move because the character gets an extended play and what we see of her is a lot more of the Philip-K.-Dick-ian despair at the feminine. What you lose in humour, you get more space for the richness of the Philip K. Dick universe, unadulterated by the tongue-in-cheek of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Indeed, the funniest moment may just be when Jessica Biel's Melina lets out an exasperated, "she's your wife?!"

As a man who got married five times, Philip K.Dick had a catalogue of crazy women in his fiction. One suspects they were all recombined caricatures of his ex-wives.  It's quite cool to see that side of the fiction, even if it means it's got fewer jokes.

Quaid, Not Quail

In the original story by Philip K. Dick, the main character's name is Doug Quail. Dick was an interesting writer when it came to his protagonists. He liked recessive characters and ordinary sort of men and women. Hardy anybody is the leading man type in his novels. In the name Quail, you get the feeling that he is both frail and bird-like. He's not supposed to be an action man, let alone the kind of action man to be played by Arnie in his heyday.

In turn, the Vice President of the United States back in 1990 was Dan Quayle, who was known for his many a faux pas. At one point there was a book doing the rounds filled with idiotic quotes from Dan Quayle. All of this probably prompted the renaming of the character to Quaid back then.

It's interesting that the name has stayed Quaid in this iteration. It probably goes to show Dan Quayle is still not that palatable even to this day, while Dennis Quaid is still considered pretty cool dude around Hollywood.

And The Critics Hate It!

I love it when critics hate on a good science fiction film. It just goes to show un-hip they are to what's on screen. this film is so hip for science fiction film, heck, it's a film I wish I made. :)

More seriously, as with other classic Science Fiction movies, the critics who hate it complain that it "doesn't touch (their) heart". They said it about 'Metropolis' in 1927, they said it about '2001: A Space Odyssey' in 1969, and about 'Blade Runner' in 1982 and they're saying it again. It's nice to see how some things never change.

I don't know if a generation of new fans are going to champion this film like Gen X championed 'Blade Runner', but it could happen; and if they did I would not be surprised. In many ways, there's a market starved for seriously cool Science Fiction - and believe you me, this is much more fun than 'Prometheus'.