Your Mother Should Know
I recently did a bunch of covers of side 3 of the Beatles' 'White Album'. What prompted it was a combination of coming off a 12 song set of fairly difficult and challenging tracks which exhausted me and the desire to just play a bunch of stuff I liked as a teen. After I posted them up, it occurred to me that the 'White Album' was recorded in 1968, placing it 45 years ago.
Now, I don't know about you, but that is actually an interminably long time in the timescale of pop music. Paul McCartney is about to come out with a new album (called 'New') so he's still going strong after the morbidly death-obsessed 'Memory Almost Full' album, but I sat and tried to figure out how music that old - 45years! - must look like to say, an 18year old today.
If I subtract 45 from the year I was 18, it goes firmly into the late 1930s. Now, I had no shot of owning any music from the late 1930s, let alone being more than passingly familiar with it. Quite frankly I - or my other music listening, record-buying friends- would have been extremely unlikely to be familiar with anything that old.
And yet, Walk-Off HBP went to see Ringo Starr earlier this year because his daughter wanted to see Ringo, so clearly the charms of music that's 45-50 years old is not entirely lost on kids of today. Obviously it's going to vary from person to person, household to household, family to family. Even so, you wonder about the distance of this time that separates one from the moment of recording.
Bono was saying in some interview someplace that each time U2 go into a studio there's a challenge of doing better than before but also an equally large battle to be relevant. So it can't be easy for anybody to be doing any recording 10years, 20years and 30years in. You sure don't see Led Zeppelin heading for the studio with Jason Bonham, you don't see a new album from the Rolling Stone every 2years, it just doesn't happen.
That being said recorded music has one advantage over literature and movies and it is the ability music has to be consumed over and over again. Even your most favourite movie can only be sat through a handful f times unless you want to make a total study of it. Your favourite albums will be by our side in decades to come, surviving multiple listens upon listens. I think the reason why music drags me back is that in the end I can control my output in a ay that is closed off to me in the cinema. I'm doing more and more recordings because I am able to complete thoughts, ideas, concepts; then execute and finish; and in finishing, I am able to move on to the next thing.
This is in stark contrast to the horrors of being a screenwriter and waiting for people to get back to you about your script; and in most instances, nothing gets made even if people tell you how much they like your writing. Frank Zappa certainly wasn't wrong when he said "music is best". There's certainly a lot of wisdom in that observation.
A Gen-X View of the Universe.
"The Issue Isn't Pussy, It's Monkey" - from The Right Stuff
Film, Cinema, Movies, TV, Music, Rock
2013/09/16
2013/09/08
A Terrible Year
And It's Only September
What can I say, Tony Abbott and the Coalition won. This is a terrible thing, but hey I'm with the guy that started this meme:
Talk about the mother of all disappointments. It reminds one of the joke about the little kid who is asked by a Latin American Generalissimo if he knows the difference between a disaster and a catastrophe.
The little kid responds, "Yes Generalissimo. A Disaster is when you and your cabinet are in a plane crash. A Catastrophe is when you survive that crash."
Well, this election is that crash and the winning survivor is... Phoney Abbott. That's it. I've decided to call him that because basically he never told his crackpot climate-change-denyin' loonie mob to take down the 'Ju-liar' tag, so here's serving up the same cold soup. From now on he is Phoney Abbott to me until he is ousted from office.
Actually, looking at how the ALP did this time, it seems like they did save the furniture so Phoney can't claim that he has some great mandate. The ALP are with a fighting chance to come back if they can just get their house in order. Still I imagine there's going to be quite a bit of recriminations and bickering in the days to come. Greg Combet was already winding up with a few spitballs on the ABC tonight.
I'm still stunned that the middle shifted ground back to these lousy conservatives. What idiots. I guess it's just a case of "they know not what they do". That's the problem with willful ignorance - it delivers conservative governments. I guess this horrible day had to come; but did this have to be such a terrible year?
What can I say, Tony Abbott and the Coalition won. This is a terrible thing, but hey I'm with the guy that started this meme:
Talk about the mother of all disappointments. It reminds one of the joke about the little kid who is asked by a Latin American Generalissimo if he knows the difference between a disaster and a catastrophe.The little kid responds, "Yes Generalissimo. A Disaster is when you and your cabinet are in a plane crash. A Catastrophe is when you survive that crash."
Well, this election is that crash and the winning survivor is... Phoney Abbott. That's it. I've decided to call him that because basically he never told his crackpot climate-change-denyin' loonie mob to take down the 'Ju-liar' tag, so here's serving up the same cold soup. From now on he is Phoney Abbott to me until he is ousted from office.
Actually, looking at how the ALP did this time, it seems like they did save the furniture so Phoney can't claim that he has some great mandate. The ALP are with a fighting chance to come back if they can just get their house in order. Still I imagine there's going to be quite a bit of recriminations and bickering in the days to come. Greg Combet was already winding up with a few spitballs on the ABC tonight.
I'm still stunned that the middle shifted ground back to these lousy conservatives. What idiots. I guess it's just a case of "they know not what they do". That's the problem with willful ignorance - it delivers conservative governments. I guess this horrible day had to come; but did this have to be such a terrible year?
2013/09/07
Fear Of The Unknown Unknowns
Sometimes 'The People' Are Idiots
The unthinkable is about to happen. No, not World War III, but an Abbott government is about to get in if the polls are to believed. This is about as swift a turn to the right as you can get and show what ingrates and opportunists the political middle ground of this country can be. But the bit that gets me the most is that the swinging middle of the electorate is about to vote into office a decidedly sorry lot who have refused to have their costings looked at until 3 minutes to midnight in the election. If their intellectual dishonesty doesn't stink to high heaven, their efforts in government surely will because these people are banking on doing some pretty stupid things.
A couple of days I ago, I pointed out that their policy on the internet and broadband alone should disqualify them from taking office, but close behind their idiotic NBN policy is their climate policy - their so-called Direct Action plan. I know it's late in the game and we're all past reading stuff, but here's a link from Pleiades that's worth reading: Part I & Part II. In Malcolm Turnbull's own words:
Which is to say, Malcolm Turnbull is saying Direct Action can't work. Certainly not in the way the Coalition have gone about selling it; and of course all of it suffers from the great credibility gap of Tony Abbott being an un-reformed climate sceptic global-warming denier. There's just no knowing how any of this Direct Action policy is going to work or if it's even viable.
Pleiades also wanted me to point out to you that the Coalition do not have an Arts Policy. At all. Not a sausage. This is probably not surprising in that the arts community of this country is entirely, reflexively hostile to the Liberal and National parties, so if anything they probably just want to abolish all arts funding. (And I admit there's an evil side to me that wouldn't mind seeing that because I find the reflexive progressivism of Australia's arts community to be pretty obnoxious. But that's a different issue altogether!)
Even the alleged strong suit of the Liberals looks pretty crappy today. Here's Michael Pascoe lambasting Joe Hockey yesterday after the Liberals gingerly released their costings.
After all the histrionic fuss and slanderous accusations about waste, the Coalition proposes to save a relatively speaking marginal 6billion. The way Abbott carried on for 3 years, you'd think that Australia was about to turn in to Greece (uhh, ...no) or go into a Great Depression Mk. II (uh... no again); but of course it's not like he's got any real savings on offer and is instead proposing a largely skewered-to-the-wealthy paid maternity leave programme.
And frankly, you'd have to be pretty dense to be voting for any of these claptrap policies thought up in the isolation chamber of entitled sectionalists hoping to scare the electorate into voting for them. But that's what really gets me. Middle Australia is saying to the pollsters that's exactly what they're going to do. Vote in the eminently unsafe, unhinged, reactionary monarchist, sectarian nutjob that is Tony Abbott as their Prime Minister.
I've been racking my brains as to who but those with expensive Private School educations, would be voting for this mob? The western suburbs of Sydney they say. But for the life of me I can't imagine why the people in most need of support would vote in the people who are going to kick them in the hip pocket.
Anyway...
...the scuttlebutt has been that the polls seem to indicate 53-47 to the Coalition. Even this has been disputed by some. It turns out the polls are collected by landline, so they skew heavily towards the retired elderly, who are in general more conservative-leaning than the young who do not bother with landlines and get about on their mobile phones. Pleiades tells me when pollsters conducted a poll that included mobile phones, it started to look more like 50-50, which is to say, a hung Parliament is once again on the cards.
Now that, would be cool because then Tony Abbott will chuck a hissy fit again and not deal, and that would leave us with another minority ALP government, just to stick it up the noses of all these idiot munchkin editors who claim stability is more important. (Only the editor of the Age had the good sense to argue in favour of the ALP based on policies; and based on policies, he had the NBN as the leading item followed by Gonski. I call that doing his job. What the hell are the other papers doing but playing cult of personality and personality politics?)
The most terrifying of them might have been the editorial on the SMH. Yes, the Sydney Morning Herald no less supports Tony Abbott. Now, I'd normally quote the most coherent part but amazingly the editorial presents very little coherence of argument about policy and mostly has knocks on how history has unfolded. Well Mr. Editor we've all been reading your paper and we can tell you your characterisation of the last 3years in this sorry editorial is mostly impressionistic nonsense not worthy of consideration, that somehow illogically ends up supporting Tony Abbott with a plea for stability.
Heck, Hosni Mubarak's Egypt was 'stable' for 28years. Saddam Hussein's reign was equally stable. Muammar Gaddafi too. I don't think stability in of itself is any good, and this is exactly the point where armchair political scientists go wrong. Niccolo Machiavelli argued in favour of a stable government, but the second condition a government had to fulfill beyond stability according to Machiavelli, was delivering the maximum benefits to the maximum number of people in the constituency. Somehow I don't think the Liberals and Nationals are capable of the latter. So, I don't know how we've come to this, but this election campaign period has exposed the editor in chief of the Sydney Morning Herald as an idiot munchkin - something I did not know until today. You sure can put that down to "you learn something new everyday".
This election is going to be a litmus test to see how stupid people are. In future people will be able to look back and ask which way you voted. If you say you voted for the Liberals and Nationals in 2013, you will be laughed at for your stupidity.
Just don't vote for the Coalition what ever you do.
The unthinkable is about to happen. No, not World War III, but an Abbott government is about to get in if the polls are to believed. This is about as swift a turn to the right as you can get and show what ingrates and opportunists the political middle ground of this country can be. But the bit that gets me the most is that the swinging middle of the electorate is about to vote into office a decidedly sorry lot who have refused to have their costings looked at until 3 minutes to midnight in the election. If their intellectual dishonesty doesn't stink to high heaven, their efforts in government surely will because these people are banking on doing some pretty stupid things.
A couple of days I ago, I pointed out that their policy on the internet and broadband alone should disqualify them from taking office, but close behind their idiotic NBN policy is their climate policy - their so-called Direct Action plan. I know it's late in the game and we're all past reading stuff, but here's a link from Pleiades that's worth reading: Part I & Part II. In Malcolm Turnbull's own words:
Because most capital equipment, especially in the energy sector, has lives running into many decades, the business is going to require assurance that the government subsidy will match the life of the asset – so running well beyond 2020.
Which is why a subsidy scheme which terminates in 2020 will achieve very little….
Having the government pick projects for subsidy is a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale and there will always be a temptation for projects to be selected for their political appeal.
In short, having the government pay for emissions abatement, as opposed to the polluting industries themselves, is a slippery slope which can only result in higher taxes and more costly and less effective abatement of emissions.
Which is to say, Malcolm Turnbull is saying Direct Action can't work. Certainly not in the way the Coalition have gone about selling it; and of course all of it suffers from the great credibility gap of Tony Abbott being an un-reformed climate sceptic global-warming denier. There's just no knowing how any of this Direct Action policy is going to work or if it's even viable.
Pleiades also wanted me to point out to you that the Coalition do not have an Arts Policy. At all. Not a sausage. This is probably not surprising in that the arts community of this country is entirely, reflexively hostile to the Liberal and National parties, so if anything they probably just want to abolish all arts funding. (And I admit there's an evil side to me that wouldn't mind seeing that because I find the reflexive progressivism of Australia's arts community to be pretty obnoxious. But that's a different issue altogether!)
Even the alleged strong suit of the Liberals looks pretty crappy today. Here's Michael Pascoe lambasting Joe Hockey yesterday after the Liberals gingerly released their costings.
After all the huffing and puffing, Hockeynomics is only proposing a $6 billion improvement in the budget’s cash bottom line over four years. In light of the past four years of hyperbolic fiscal posturing, this is genuinely astounding.
Even if you take year three and four budget projections seriously (and you really can’t, as everyone should now know), that works out to be an average improvement of $1.5 billion a year on a $400 billion budget – all of 0.375 per cent. It’s not even a rounding error. A half-decent Queensland storm can blow that away in half an hour.
By way of comparison, Tony Abbott is blowing $1.8 billion on reviving the novated lease/FBT tax lurk enjoyed by a minority of new car buyers, let alone an even smaller minority of voters. Consider the massive percentage increase in the Coalition’s budget improvement goal that could be obtained by implementing just this one tax policy based on principle and equity instead of subsidising a few salary packaging firms. Hey Joe, do the math.
After all the histrionic fuss and slanderous accusations about waste, the Coalition proposes to save a relatively speaking marginal 6billion. The way Abbott carried on for 3 years, you'd think that Australia was about to turn in to Greece (uhh, ...no) or go into a Great Depression Mk. II (uh... no again); but of course it's not like he's got any real savings on offer and is instead proposing a largely skewered-to-the-wealthy paid maternity leave programme.
And frankly, you'd have to be pretty dense to be voting for any of these claptrap policies thought up in the isolation chamber of entitled sectionalists hoping to scare the electorate into voting for them. But that's what really gets me. Middle Australia is saying to the pollsters that's exactly what they're going to do. Vote in the eminently unsafe, unhinged, reactionary monarchist, sectarian nutjob that is Tony Abbott as their Prime Minister.
I've been racking my brains as to who but those with expensive Private School educations, would be voting for this mob? The western suburbs of Sydney they say. But for the life of me I can't imagine why the people in most need of support would vote in the people who are going to kick them in the hip pocket.
Anyway...
...the scuttlebutt has been that the polls seem to indicate 53-47 to the Coalition. Even this has been disputed by some. It turns out the polls are collected by landline, so they skew heavily towards the retired elderly, who are in general more conservative-leaning than the young who do not bother with landlines and get about on their mobile phones. Pleiades tells me when pollsters conducted a poll that included mobile phones, it started to look more like 50-50, which is to say, a hung Parliament is once again on the cards.
Now that, would be cool because then Tony Abbott will chuck a hissy fit again and not deal, and that would leave us with another minority ALP government, just to stick it up the noses of all these idiot munchkin editors who claim stability is more important. (Only the editor of the Age had the good sense to argue in favour of the ALP based on policies; and based on policies, he had the NBN as the leading item followed by Gonski. I call that doing his job. What the hell are the other papers doing but playing cult of personality and personality politics?)
The most terrifying of them might have been the editorial on the SMH. Yes, the Sydney Morning Herald no less supports Tony Abbott. Now, I'd normally quote the most coherent part but amazingly the editorial presents very little coherence of argument about policy and mostly has knocks on how history has unfolded. Well Mr. Editor we've all been reading your paper and we can tell you your characterisation of the last 3years in this sorry editorial is mostly impressionistic nonsense not worthy of consideration, that somehow illogically ends up supporting Tony Abbott with a plea for stability.
Heck, Hosni Mubarak's Egypt was 'stable' for 28years. Saddam Hussein's reign was equally stable. Muammar Gaddafi too. I don't think stability in of itself is any good, and this is exactly the point where armchair political scientists go wrong. Niccolo Machiavelli argued in favour of a stable government, but the second condition a government had to fulfill beyond stability according to Machiavelli, was delivering the maximum benefits to the maximum number of people in the constituency. Somehow I don't think the Liberals and Nationals are capable of the latter. So, I don't know how we've come to this, but this election campaign period has exposed the editor in chief of the Sydney Morning Herald as an idiot munchkin - something I did not know until today. You sure can put that down to "you learn something new everyday".
This election is going to be a litmus test to see how stupid people are. In future people will be able to look back and ask which way you voted. If you say you voted for the Liberals and Nationals in 2013, you will be laughed at for your stupidity.
Just don't vote for the Coalition what ever you do.
2013/09/05
'Iron Man 3'
Marvel At The Sight
It's now been a good decade since I found myself being asked which movies I was looking forward to that year and counted up a bunch of movies with numbers after them and a good bunch of them were based on comic book content. The rise of Marvel as a movie studio has been spectacular as the decline in story-developing prowess of the traditional studios has been precipitous. Each year it gets harder to see cool movie with original content. The big winners are increasingly adaptations, and even the uncool ones that seem to win big at the box office seem to be increased on nothing more than a ride ('Pirates of the Carribbean') or a toy ('Transformers').
These movies of comic book and toy adaptations have eaten Hollywood alive like. Proper careers and talent has been consumed to turn out this furious Sturm und Drang of chaotic adrenaline-charged entertainment. It's driven Steven Soderbergh into retirement. So here we have Robert Downey Jr. in what is becoming his signature role of his career, well into the fourth movie of playing Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man. It's worth considering if this is worthy of his talents.
What's Good About It
They hired Shane Black to co-write and then direct this film. it's turned out to be an excellent choice as he brings a great sensibility to the Tony Stark banter. The action is crisp, the irony sharp, the dialogue is snappy, and the pace doesn't flag. Black also manages to engineer a way to keep Stark out of his suit, and thus more physically vulnerable. Black has also kept the Military Industrial Complex subtext of Stark's family business out of sight inmost part, which has freed up the narrative space for the movie to look to explore different aspects of the character.
What's Bad About It
Remarkably, the film being directed at kids, still can't shake the simplistic view of politics of the state or the monopoly of science by corporations. The concern is there in there somewhere, but you only see flashes of it before it goes back into a bit more of the biffo. As such, the notions raised so interestingly in the first film hardly get any development; and it's a shame because I think kids would be able to handle it - right up to and including the ambivalence about war, patriotism and violence.
Of course this being an American film, they douse the whole thing with comic book morality as Americans douse their hotdogs and hamburgers with ketchup. And it's a real shame because it just lets a golden opportunity go by.
What's Interesting About It
Once upon a time Shane Black was the young tyro writer director who penned such marvels as 'Lethal Weapon', 'Predator' and and 'The Last Boy Scout'. It took him a long time but his directorial debut was with 'Kiss Kiss bang Bang'. It's hard to figure out what happened, but between the time of 'The Long Kiss Good Night' and 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' there's nearly a decade of blank time. Still, his imprimatur is unmistakable in the wise-ass banter and dare I say a whole lot wittier than the banter that went around in 'Iron Man 2'. Here's hoping he gets to do more things. The world is a better place with Shane Black movies, especially now that Tony Scott is gone.
Four Movies Of Stark And Potts
Without a doubt Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow are the acting limelights, the premier talent of our day. Downey Jr. has multiple awards and Paltrow already has an Oscar for her efforts in 'Shakespeare in Love', a film that probably wouldn't have worked as well without her amazing control and insight. 50years from now, they are in danger of being remembered for their roles in the Iron Man movies and in Paltrow's case, the bit part she had in 'The Avengers'.
This is kind of disturbing. It's a wonderful thing that Marvel Studios has the nous and wherewithal to pull together these lavish productions where the villains are played by such acting luminaries as Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell, Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley. It's an amazing feat, a bit like a Las Vegas circus landing The Rolling Stones as their guests. I guess it's all about the money but it is interesting if you consider Ben Kingsley is hardly likely to be remembered as the Mandarin when he is likely to be remembered as the guy who played Gandhi, while Robert Downey Jr just might end up Iron Man forever.
The 'Big Now' In Fiction
I know I keep saying disparaging things about comic book content but what really is the problem? To tell you the truth, I don't know. It's just my own snobbery that prefers literariness; but I'm also contrarian enough to prefer comic book content to say, 'Australian Cinema'. You know you're going to have a much better time watching a bit of special effects spectacular with a bit of biffo.
I've been thinking that as we find ourselves deeper in the post-post Modern, we should accept the deep validity of anything that garners great crowd support. Cinema and film and movies are culturally significant. They might be even more important than other media such as photography or literature in that it can capture movement and present it as an aspect of the art itself. Marvel might have started with Comic Books, but they are now firmly in with the big boys doing cinema, and judging by the success, there's a case to be made that in fact Marvel speaks to our deepest needs in our civilisation. Take that scholars of Shakespeare - but that's what we have here. So I really shouldn't poo-poo these films as much as I do. There's something in them that speaks to us about the condition of our civilisation. You might be surprised at how morally needy and yet fickle with our affections we are in the eyes of our superheroes.
The fact that these comic book movies keep getting better suggest there's a long way to run yet on this genre of movies.
The Joy Of Repetition
Spoiler alert for this bit...
One of the things we discover about Iron Man in this film is that he is possibly suffering from PTSD from his near-death experience in 'The Avengers'. In fact the whole Iron man persona seems to have something to do with PTSD and manic responses to stress. I am beginning to wonder after 4 of these movies whether Tony Stark really ought to get some serious help rather than lying on a couch talking at Dr. Banner. a.k.a. The Hulk.
Anyway, one of the things that comes out of this is Tony Stark's insomnia and his need to keep building Iron Man suits of varying designs and it struck me as very insightful that his obsessive compulsive routines actually comes out of a combination of his insomnia and PTSD.
I mentioned in the crit for '42' that the number 42 keeps coming up in fiction for some reason and well, the main suit in this movie is suit Mk. 42.
It's now been a good decade since I found myself being asked which movies I was looking forward to that year and counted up a bunch of movies with numbers after them and a good bunch of them were based on comic book content. The rise of Marvel as a movie studio has been spectacular as the decline in story-developing prowess of the traditional studios has been precipitous. Each year it gets harder to see cool movie with original content. The big winners are increasingly adaptations, and even the uncool ones that seem to win big at the box office seem to be increased on nothing more than a ride ('Pirates of the Carribbean') or a toy ('Transformers').
These movies of comic book and toy adaptations have eaten Hollywood alive like. Proper careers and talent has been consumed to turn out this furious Sturm und Drang of chaotic adrenaline-charged entertainment. It's driven Steven Soderbergh into retirement. So here we have Robert Downey Jr. in what is becoming his signature role of his career, well into the fourth movie of playing Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man. It's worth considering if this is worthy of his talents.
What's Good About It
They hired Shane Black to co-write and then direct this film. it's turned out to be an excellent choice as he brings a great sensibility to the Tony Stark banter. The action is crisp, the irony sharp, the dialogue is snappy, and the pace doesn't flag. Black also manages to engineer a way to keep Stark out of his suit, and thus more physically vulnerable. Black has also kept the Military Industrial Complex subtext of Stark's family business out of sight inmost part, which has freed up the narrative space for the movie to look to explore different aspects of the character.
What's Bad About It
Remarkably, the film being directed at kids, still can't shake the simplistic view of politics of the state or the monopoly of science by corporations. The concern is there in there somewhere, but you only see flashes of it before it goes back into a bit more of the biffo. As such, the notions raised so interestingly in the first film hardly get any development; and it's a shame because I think kids would be able to handle it - right up to and including the ambivalence about war, patriotism and violence.
Of course this being an American film, they douse the whole thing with comic book morality as Americans douse their hotdogs and hamburgers with ketchup. And it's a real shame because it just lets a golden opportunity go by.
What's Interesting About It
Once upon a time Shane Black was the young tyro writer director who penned such marvels as 'Lethal Weapon', 'Predator' and and 'The Last Boy Scout'. It took him a long time but his directorial debut was with 'Kiss Kiss bang Bang'. It's hard to figure out what happened, but between the time of 'The Long Kiss Good Night' and 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' there's nearly a decade of blank time. Still, his imprimatur is unmistakable in the wise-ass banter and dare I say a whole lot wittier than the banter that went around in 'Iron Man 2'. Here's hoping he gets to do more things. The world is a better place with Shane Black movies, especially now that Tony Scott is gone.
Four Movies Of Stark And Potts
Without a doubt Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow are the acting limelights, the premier talent of our day. Downey Jr. has multiple awards and Paltrow already has an Oscar for her efforts in 'Shakespeare in Love', a film that probably wouldn't have worked as well without her amazing control and insight. 50years from now, they are in danger of being remembered for their roles in the Iron Man movies and in Paltrow's case, the bit part she had in 'The Avengers'.
This is kind of disturbing. It's a wonderful thing that Marvel Studios has the nous and wherewithal to pull together these lavish productions where the villains are played by such acting luminaries as Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell, Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley. It's an amazing feat, a bit like a Las Vegas circus landing The Rolling Stones as their guests. I guess it's all about the money but it is interesting if you consider Ben Kingsley is hardly likely to be remembered as the Mandarin when he is likely to be remembered as the guy who played Gandhi, while Robert Downey Jr just might end up Iron Man forever.
The 'Big Now' In Fiction
I know I keep saying disparaging things about comic book content but what really is the problem? To tell you the truth, I don't know. It's just my own snobbery that prefers literariness; but I'm also contrarian enough to prefer comic book content to say, 'Australian Cinema'. You know you're going to have a much better time watching a bit of special effects spectacular with a bit of biffo.
I've been thinking that as we find ourselves deeper in the post-post Modern, we should accept the deep validity of anything that garners great crowd support. Cinema and film and movies are culturally significant. They might be even more important than other media such as photography or literature in that it can capture movement and present it as an aspect of the art itself. Marvel might have started with Comic Books, but they are now firmly in with the big boys doing cinema, and judging by the success, there's a case to be made that in fact Marvel speaks to our deepest needs in our civilisation. Take that scholars of Shakespeare - but that's what we have here. So I really shouldn't poo-poo these films as much as I do. There's something in them that speaks to us about the condition of our civilisation. You might be surprised at how morally needy and yet fickle with our affections we are in the eyes of our superheroes.
The fact that these comic book movies keep getting better suggest there's a long way to run yet on this genre of movies.
The Joy Of Repetition
Spoiler alert for this bit...
One of the things we discover about Iron Man in this film is that he is possibly suffering from PTSD from his near-death experience in 'The Avengers'. In fact the whole Iron man persona seems to have something to do with PTSD and manic responses to stress. I am beginning to wonder after 4 of these movies whether Tony Stark really ought to get some serious help rather than lying on a couch talking at Dr. Banner. a.k.a. The Hulk.
Anyway, one of the things that comes out of this is Tony Stark's insomnia and his need to keep building Iron Man suits of varying designs and it struck me as very insightful that his obsessive compulsive routines actually comes out of a combination of his insomnia and PTSD.
I mentioned in the crit for '42' that the number 42 keeps coming up in fiction for some reason and well, the main suit in this movie is suit Mk. 42.
2013/09/04
Fear Of The Known Unknowns
Our Own Bloody Fault John Hewson?
Good Grief Charlie Brown part II is how Tony Abbott's Liberals are not releasing their costings until Thursday before the election. I keep thinking this is fraudulent on the part of Abbott, but John Hewson was on radio defending this bit of 'strategy' (it hardly seems worthy of the word, but there you go). Hewson, who was badly burnt in the 1993 un-losable election because he released his policy details sees that as a watershed moment when politicians realised that the electorate is easily scared and if you have policies, you're better off not telling the electorate during election campaigns. We only have our selves to blame, reasoned Hewson.
You gotta hand it to old John Hewson. He did lose in 1993 well and good and thank bloody goodness for that. Aah, memories of Paul Keating's "greatest victory of them all".
I'd have to say while it sounds like some kind of causal link to the state of affairs today, I don't think Hewson is right in drawing universals from his failed campaign. And all the same, it's still unprincipled for Tony Abbott to be withholding his costings given that he's been banging on about government debt and waste for the better part of 3 years and 9 months. Sure it didn't work for John Hewson, but nobody remembers Hewson as a fraudulent politician. He's accorded that much respect, which is why he gets asked by the media to commentate.
Tony Abbott on the other hand is firmly working with this notion that he won't let us know what he's going to cut to make his dumb figures fit. It's game, it's got chutzpah, but it's an utter lie to suggest that this is anything but deceitful. And you know, this is the same simpleton that spent the last 3years banging on about the Carbon tax being some kind of deception by the ALP when in fact anybody with a brain understood that it was the price the ALP had to pay to form Government with the Greens. characterising at as a deception as Tony Abbott has done for the last 3 years must be one of the biggest con jobs in Australian political history - what little of it there is. So as it is with the completely cockamamie 'Abbonomics' or 'Hockeynomics' or whatever austerity-tinged idiocy they plan on bringing in, you have this layer of Orwellian lies to keep it all greasy so it goes down easy with the gullible electorate.
If this man wins this Saturday, I guess Australia has got everything that's coming to it. Good Grief.
Then There's Gay Marriage
While I'm on this wicket of calling out Tony Abbott and his indecent sense of politics, I want to point out that his defiant "people know where I stand" remark gave me the shits today. I know he's a social convservative, a Catholic, an ethical midget and a moral munchkin from long ago but really Tony Abbott is copping out from answering why he holds to these socially conservative, Catholic views (views contradicted by the current Pope no less), and why there's anything good with keeping gay people from having the marriage rights.
I'm not the biggest advocate of Gay Marriage rights. I just quietly support it from the side. Mainly because on a personal moral scale, I'm a libertarian at heart. I don't think it's the business of the state to dictate who can form marriage unions with other human beings given what we know of humanity and sexuality and psychology and history. If Tony Abbott is really going to be a standard bearer for these 'conservative values', he really ought to man up and spell out why exactly he thinks it's in the state's interest to say no to Gay Marriage. Just something that shows his moral reasoning on this is something beyond "because God says it's wrong according to the Pope."
What's Really Going To Piss Me Off About An Abbott Government
I'll be honest here. What's really going to piss me off about an Abbott government is how he's going to sell us this crappy substitute for the NBN. His promise is that the people who've already got it can keep it, but the roll out will stop. So if you wanted the NBN, but if it hasn't rolled out to your area, then stiff shit you're not going to get it.
I just don't see how this is even remotely fair or as politicians like to say equitable. To use the Liberal Party's own logic on this, quite frankly, I paid my taxes, I expect to be treated equally under the law. I don't see how it is going to be equal for some part of Australia to have 100mbps bandwidth and other parts 10mbps bandwidth just because Tony Abbott says 10mbps should be enough.
Let me put this to you all another way. As good as it sounds, 100mbps only gets us to the level playing field of average around the globe. Google recently trialled 1000mbps =1 Giga-bits-per-second in Kansas city. 1 Giga Bits Per Second is 100 times faster than what Tony Abbott thinks is 'enough'. One Hundred Times!!!!
Google put in this network for free, and suddenly all these companies were starting up in Kansas City, trying to take advantage of this speed. Even if Australia got the NBN at 100mbps, it's still only 1/10th the speed of Google's 1Ggbps network in Kansas City; and clearly, there's a well-established correlation between high tech industry growth and internet speed. There's a tech boom in Kansas City just because Google put in this network. As the ghosts whispered to Kevin Costner in 'Field of Dreams', "build it and they will come".
This is a huge issue if Australia wants to become the financial hub in the Pacific rim. This is a huge issue if Australia wants to move on into the post-mining boom period, looking for next areas of growth. This is a huge issue if we want to have technological relevance and industries that can deliver in a post-industrial economy. We can't just be mediocre at this stuff, we have to be good to great. And all these things are challenges the RBA and the current ALP Federal Government understand. Does Tony? (Rhetorical. Obviously the answer is 'no'. *facepalm*)
Thus I find it incredibly hard to stomach the fact that Tony Abbott's Liberal Party claims to be pro-business but is in fact 3 buckets of Luddite and a sack of stupid when it comes to its internet policy. It's not surprising given their idiotic stance on climate change, but that is another issue. Yes, I'm pissed off about this more than just about any other aspect of their idiotic, as-yet-un-costed policy platform, and by extension I'm very angry at a middle Australia who want to vote in this lot. As Homer Simpson once asked the Guru on top of the mountains, "I mean, really? Really, really? Really, really, really?"
Seriously folks, if there's one - and only one - point of differentiation that matters to the future of the Australian industrial landscape, it's the NBN. Not the Carbon Tax, not Gay Marriage, not Industrial relations and not even the possible hiking of the GST. It's the NBN.
So save the NBN: Don't vote for the Libs. Everything else is either slamming the gate after the horse has bolted or fighting the tide of history. The NBN. Remember that when you go to the poll booths.
Good Grief Charlie Brown part II is how Tony Abbott's Liberals are not releasing their costings until Thursday before the election. I keep thinking this is fraudulent on the part of Abbott, but John Hewson was on radio defending this bit of 'strategy' (it hardly seems worthy of the word, but there you go). Hewson, who was badly burnt in the 1993 un-losable election because he released his policy details sees that as a watershed moment when politicians realised that the electorate is easily scared and if you have policies, you're better off not telling the electorate during election campaigns. We only have our selves to blame, reasoned Hewson.
You gotta hand it to old John Hewson. He did lose in 1993 well and good and thank bloody goodness for that. Aah, memories of Paul Keating's "greatest victory of them all".
I'd have to say while it sounds like some kind of causal link to the state of affairs today, I don't think Hewson is right in drawing universals from his failed campaign. And all the same, it's still unprincipled for Tony Abbott to be withholding his costings given that he's been banging on about government debt and waste for the better part of 3 years and 9 months. Sure it didn't work for John Hewson, but nobody remembers Hewson as a fraudulent politician. He's accorded that much respect, which is why he gets asked by the media to commentate.
Tony Abbott on the other hand is firmly working with this notion that he won't let us know what he's going to cut to make his dumb figures fit. It's game, it's got chutzpah, but it's an utter lie to suggest that this is anything but deceitful. And you know, this is the same simpleton that spent the last 3years banging on about the Carbon tax being some kind of deception by the ALP when in fact anybody with a brain understood that it was the price the ALP had to pay to form Government with the Greens. characterising at as a deception as Tony Abbott has done for the last 3 years must be one of the biggest con jobs in Australian political history - what little of it there is. So as it is with the completely cockamamie 'Abbonomics' or 'Hockeynomics' or whatever austerity-tinged idiocy they plan on bringing in, you have this layer of Orwellian lies to keep it all greasy so it goes down easy with the gullible electorate.
If this man wins this Saturday, I guess Australia has got everything that's coming to it. Good Grief.
Then There's Gay Marriage
While I'm on this wicket of calling out Tony Abbott and his indecent sense of politics, I want to point out that his defiant "people know where I stand" remark gave me the shits today. I know he's a social convservative, a Catholic, an ethical midget and a moral munchkin from long ago but really Tony Abbott is copping out from answering why he holds to these socially conservative, Catholic views (views contradicted by the current Pope no less), and why there's anything good with keeping gay people from having the marriage rights.
I'm not the biggest advocate of Gay Marriage rights. I just quietly support it from the side. Mainly because on a personal moral scale, I'm a libertarian at heart. I don't think it's the business of the state to dictate who can form marriage unions with other human beings given what we know of humanity and sexuality and psychology and history. If Tony Abbott is really going to be a standard bearer for these 'conservative values', he really ought to man up and spell out why exactly he thinks it's in the state's interest to say no to Gay Marriage. Just something that shows his moral reasoning on this is something beyond "because God says it's wrong according to the Pope."
What's Really Going To Piss Me Off About An Abbott Government
I'll be honest here. What's really going to piss me off about an Abbott government is how he's going to sell us this crappy substitute for the NBN. His promise is that the people who've already got it can keep it, but the roll out will stop. So if you wanted the NBN, but if it hasn't rolled out to your area, then stiff shit you're not going to get it.
I just don't see how this is even remotely fair or as politicians like to say equitable. To use the Liberal Party's own logic on this, quite frankly, I paid my taxes, I expect to be treated equally under the law. I don't see how it is going to be equal for some part of Australia to have 100mbps bandwidth and other parts 10mbps bandwidth just because Tony Abbott says 10mbps should be enough.
Let me put this to you all another way. As good as it sounds, 100mbps only gets us to the level playing field of average around the globe. Google recently trialled 1000mbps =1 Giga-bits-per-second in Kansas city. 1 Giga Bits Per Second is 100 times faster than what Tony Abbott thinks is 'enough'. One Hundred Times!!!!
Google put in this network for free, and suddenly all these companies were starting up in Kansas City, trying to take advantage of this speed. Even if Australia got the NBN at 100mbps, it's still only 1/10th the speed of Google's 1Ggbps network in Kansas City; and clearly, there's a well-established correlation between high tech industry growth and internet speed. There's a tech boom in Kansas City just because Google put in this network. As the ghosts whispered to Kevin Costner in 'Field of Dreams', "build it and they will come".
This is a huge issue if Australia wants to become the financial hub in the Pacific rim. This is a huge issue if Australia wants to move on into the post-mining boom period, looking for next areas of growth. This is a huge issue if we want to have technological relevance and industries that can deliver in a post-industrial economy. We can't just be mediocre at this stuff, we have to be good to great. And all these things are challenges the RBA and the current ALP Federal Government understand. Does Tony? (Rhetorical. Obviously the answer is 'no'. *facepalm*)
Thus I find it incredibly hard to stomach the fact that Tony Abbott's Liberal Party claims to be pro-business but is in fact 3 buckets of Luddite and a sack of stupid when it comes to its internet policy. It's not surprising given their idiotic stance on climate change, but that is another issue. Yes, I'm pissed off about this more than just about any other aspect of their idiotic, as-yet-un-costed policy platform, and by extension I'm very angry at a middle Australia who want to vote in this lot. As Homer Simpson once asked the Guru on top of the mountains, "I mean, really? Really, really? Really, really, really?"
Seriously folks, if there's one - and only one - point of differentiation that matters to the future of the Australian industrial landscape, it's the NBN. Not the Carbon Tax, not Gay Marriage, not Industrial relations and not even the possible hiking of the GST. It's the NBN.
So save the NBN: Don't vote for the Libs. Everything else is either slamming the gate after the horse has bolted or fighting the tide of history. The NBN. Remember that when you go to the poll booths.
2013/09/01
'The Company You Keep'
Robert Redford's Eulogy For 70's Radicalism
Robert Redford of course famously played Bob Woodward in 'All the President's Men', so if any star was identified with progressive politics in the 1970s, it was Redford. He continues to be that liberal voice through films such as 'Lions and Lambs' so it's not surprising that he has gone back to the well for one more look at the 1970s.
What's Good About It
It's solid entertainment. It's not exceptional film making. It's good fun to watch, but pretty forgettable because it doesn't really dig all that deep.
It's a fun romp tinged with a certain yearning and sentiment that somehow got buried in the 1980s, and it does make a strong appeal to our better side through out. That's a good film. A bit like watching 'the Seven Samurai' or something - but not as exciting or cathartic.
What's Bad About it
Robert Redford's just not holding up all that well in his dotage. It's not a bad performance, but it's not a great performance; and considering how much screen time he has, he might have done better casting somebody else - or getting somebody else to direct. It's just one of those instances where directing oneself didn't really help the film.
It's not a minor quibble either. It's evident he's no Woody Allen who can be directing and acting in the same movie. His scenes aren't as good, and all the stars he hired to play the bit parts are blowing him off the screen.
The only reason the scenes with Julie Christie towards the end works is because she's not much whack as an actress.
What's Interesting About It
'The Company You Keep' drags quite a few names out of the mists of time and across the era to tell its story. The star power deployed to tell this story is quite staggering. You have Susan Sarandon playing what turns out to be a 4 scene bit part; you have Nick Nolte making a cameo; Chris Cooper playing the brother of Redford's character in about 10 scenes at best; Sam Elliott and Richard Jenkins get about 3 scenes each, and Stanley Tucci plays a rather miserable editor for about 5 short scenes (the waste, the waste!). Oh, there's Terence Howard playing an FBI man with Anna Kendrick in tow but they're not big roles either. It's actually quite weird because you spend half the time going "wow they got this great actor to play this bit role?"
If anything the casting sensibility reminds one of an old Warner Brothers movie from the 1930s.
When The Party Is Over
The vexing issue in this film is what people did when the epoch ended. The radicals with blood on their hands all went into hiding, but this seems rather pat. The real world radicals who bombed things ended up in Jordan, in the case of say, the Japanese Red Army. They spent the 1970s getting into all kinds of trouble, and some even worked through the 1980s. That's the kind of radicalism the film is talking about and it seems it was really unlikely that they just took up jobs in the burbs to stay hidden.
Here's a list of things the JRA did from Wikipedia:
Does Robert Redford really think these kinds of people become suburban moms and dads? I don't even buy the glamorous smuggler played by Julie Christie. The end of the JRA was much grubbier and bloodier than that sort of thing.
Where Did That Activism Go?
When I look back on the activism of the 60's and 70's, I always wonder where all the money to do things came from. The driving, the fuel, the printing for posters, the megaphones and PAs at protests... or for that matter air tickets and materials for bombs. Who paid for all that? This isn't an idle question, but a deeper suspicion that maybe the student activism ended when Leonid Brezhnev decided that funding communist sympathisers in the west wasn't going to change the west.
When I was a student in the mid 1980s, you could hardly get anybody at university motivated to do anything radical/organised/political in Australia. There was simply nothing around except the ghost of student politics - which is essentially where chudly chumps like Peter Costello, Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard, Bill Shorten all cut their teeth - but it had very little money going around in comparison to the 1970s. So much so that the big argument was how the University Student Union money was spent and should the lesbian separatists of the day be getting such a huge share of it. (Well, seems to me those lesbian separatist types forged a fine career milking government funding in the arts since, so maybe that's how they cut their teeth, but that is by the by.)
The point is Gen-X often gets blamed for indifference and apathy but where the hell was the money to do anything in the 1980s? I've dug around this topic a bit with Baby Boomers a little bit and they've all said that there was always money to do these things in their day. So... why did it stop?
I've found out that the organised radical politics bodies in Japan were funded out of the Communist Party in Japan. And they got their "Org Money"funding out of the USSR; so it wouldn't be a stretch to suggest that even the radical student politics of the 60s and 70s in Australia had some communist money in it. So this is why I think Leonid Brezhnev must have hit a point where he thought, "Naaah fuck it. It's not going to work. Save that money and spend it on more nuclear subs".
Which is all to say that it's fine for Robert Redford to be idealising that time, but maybe, just maybe it was just unrest fueled by foreign powers that wanted that unrest? Maybe the gyrating mass that was the 1960s student radical politics was just another proxy war being fought by the Cold War powers? The proof of that pudding is that none of it amounted to a hill of beans. Greed was found to be Good and that was that.
Robert Redford of course famously played Bob Woodward in 'All the President's Men', so if any star was identified with progressive politics in the 1970s, it was Redford. He continues to be that liberal voice through films such as 'Lions and Lambs' so it's not surprising that he has gone back to the well for one more look at the 1970s.
What's Good About It
It's solid entertainment. It's not exceptional film making. It's good fun to watch, but pretty forgettable because it doesn't really dig all that deep.
It's a fun romp tinged with a certain yearning and sentiment that somehow got buried in the 1980s, and it does make a strong appeal to our better side through out. That's a good film. A bit like watching 'the Seven Samurai' or something - but not as exciting or cathartic.
What's Bad About it
Robert Redford's just not holding up all that well in his dotage. It's not a bad performance, but it's not a great performance; and considering how much screen time he has, he might have done better casting somebody else - or getting somebody else to direct. It's just one of those instances where directing oneself didn't really help the film.
It's not a minor quibble either. It's evident he's no Woody Allen who can be directing and acting in the same movie. His scenes aren't as good, and all the stars he hired to play the bit parts are blowing him off the screen.
The only reason the scenes with Julie Christie towards the end works is because she's not much whack as an actress.
What's Interesting About It
'The Company You Keep' drags quite a few names out of the mists of time and across the era to tell its story. The star power deployed to tell this story is quite staggering. You have Susan Sarandon playing what turns out to be a 4 scene bit part; you have Nick Nolte making a cameo; Chris Cooper playing the brother of Redford's character in about 10 scenes at best; Sam Elliott and Richard Jenkins get about 3 scenes each, and Stanley Tucci plays a rather miserable editor for about 5 short scenes (the waste, the waste!). Oh, there's Terence Howard playing an FBI man with Anna Kendrick in tow but they're not big roles either. It's actually quite weird because you spend half the time going "wow they got this great actor to play this bit role?"
If anything the casting sensibility reminds one of an old Warner Brothers movie from the 1930s.
When The Party Is Over
The vexing issue in this film is what people did when the epoch ended. The radicals with blood on their hands all went into hiding, but this seems rather pat. The real world radicals who bombed things ended up in Jordan, in the case of say, the Japanese Red Army. They spent the 1970s getting into all kinds of trouble, and some even worked through the 1980s. That's the kind of radicalism the film is talking about and it seems it was really unlikely that they just took up jobs in the burbs to stay hidden.
Here's a list of things the JRA did from Wikipedia:
- March 31, 1970: Nine members of the JRA's predecessor, the Red Army Faction (whose leaders had been a part of the Communist League before they were thrown out), conducted Japan's most infamous hijacking, that of Japan Airlines Flight 351, a domestic Japan Airlines Boeing 727 carrying 129 people at Tokyo International Airport. Wielding katanas and a bomb, they forced the plane to fly to Fukuoka and later Gimpo Airport in Seoul, where all the passengers were freed. It then flew to North Korea, where the hijackers abandoned the plane and the crewmembers were released. Tanaka was the only one to be convicted. Three of Tanaka's alleged accomplices later died in North Korea and five remain there. According to Japan's National Police Agency, another accomplice may also have died in North Korea.[13]
- May 30, 1972: The Lod Airport massacre: an assault rifle (Sa vz.58) and grenade attack on Israel's Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, now Ben Gurion International Airport, killed 26 people; about 80 others were wounded.[14] One of the three attackers then killed themselves with a grenade, although some believe this was an accident.[who?] Another was shot in the crossfire. The only surviving attacker was Kōzō Okamoto. It has been claimed that the PFLP was behind the attack.
- July 1973: Red Army members led a hijacking of Japan Airlines (JAL) plane over the Netherlands. The passengers and crew were released in Libya, where hijackers blew up the plane.
- January 1974: Laju incident: Red Army attacked a Shell facility in Singapore and took five hostages; simultaneously, the PFLP seized the Japanese embassy in Kuwait. The hostages were exchanged for a ransom and safe passage to South Yemen in a Japan Airlines plane.
- September 13, 1974: The French Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands was stormed. The ambassador and ten other people were taken hostage and a Dutch policewoman, Joke Remmerswaal, was shot in the back, puncturing a lung. After lengthy negotiatons, the hostages were freed in exchange for the release of a jailed Red Army member (Yatsuka Furuya), $300,000 and the use of a plane. The plane flew the hostage-takers first to Aden, South Yemen, where they were not accepted and then to Syria. Syria did not consider hostage taking for money revolutionary, and forced them to give up their ransom.[15]
- August 1975: The Red Army took more than 50 hostages at the AIA building housing several embassies in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The hostages included the US consul and the Swedish chargé d'affaires. The gunmen won the release of five imprisoned comrades and flew with them to Libya.
- September 1977: The Red Army hijacked Japan Airlines Flight 472 over India and forced it to land in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The Japanese Government freed six imprisoned members of the group and allegedly paid a $6M ransom.
- December 1977: A suspected lone member of the army hijacked Malaysia Airlines Flight 653.[citation needed] The flight was carrying the Cuban ambassador to Tokyo, Mario Garcia. The Boeing 737 then crashed killing all onboard after he shot both pilots and himself.
- May 1986: The Red Army fired mortar rounds at the embassies of Japan, Canada and the United States in Jakarta, Indonesia.
- June 1987: A similar attack was launched on the British and United States embassies in Rome, Italy.
- April 1988: Red Army members bombed the US military recreational (USO) club in Naples, Italy, killing five.
- In the same month, JRA operative Yū Kikumura was arrested with explosives on the New Jersey Turnpike highway, apparently to coincide with the USO bombing. He was convicted of these charges and served time in a United States prison until his release in April 2007. Upon his return to Japan he was immediately arrested on suspicion of using fraudulent travel documents.
Does Robert Redford really think these kinds of people become suburban moms and dads? I don't even buy the glamorous smuggler played by Julie Christie. The end of the JRA was much grubbier and bloodier than that sort of thing.
Where Did That Activism Go?
When I look back on the activism of the 60's and 70's, I always wonder where all the money to do things came from. The driving, the fuel, the printing for posters, the megaphones and PAs at protests... or for that matter air tickets and materials for bombs. Who paid for all that? This isn't an idle question, but a deeper suspicion that maybe the student activism ended when Leonid Brezhnev decided that funding communist sympathisers in the west wasn't going to change the west.
When I was a student in the mid 1980s, you could hardly get anybody at university motivated to do anything radical/organised/political in Australia. There was simply nothing around except the ghost of student politics - which is essentially where chudly chumps like Peter Costello, Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard, Bill Shorten all cut their teeth - but it had very little money going around in comparison to the 1970s. So much so that the big argument was how the University Student Union money was spent and should the lesbian separatists of the day be getting such a huge share of it. (Well, seems to me those lesbian separatist types forged a fine career milking government funding in the arts since, so maybe that's how they cut their teeth, but that is by the by.)
The point is Gen-X often gets blamed for indifference and apathy but where the hell was the money to do anything in the 1980s? I've dug around this topic a bit with Baby Boomers a little bit and they've all said that there was always money to do these things in their day. So... why did it stop?
I've found out that the organised radical politics bodies in Japan were funded out of the Communist Party in Japan. And they got their "Org Money"funding out of the USSR; so it wouldn't be a stretch to suggest that even the radical student politics of the 60s and 70s in Australia had some communist money in it. So this is why I think Leonid Brezhnev must have hit a point where he thought, "Naaah fuck it. It's not going to work. Save that money and spend it on more nuclear subs".
Which is all to say that it's fine for Robert Redford to be idealising that time, but maybe, just maybe it was just unrest fueled by foreign powers that wanted that unrest? Maybe the gyrating mass that was the 1960s student radical politics was just another proxy war being fought by the Cold War powers? The proof of that pudding is that none of it amounted to a hill of beans. Greed was found to be Good and that was that.
Fear Of The Known
They Believe In Their Own Bullshit
What really frightens me about the Liberals and the Nationals is no not just what they will do, but just how much they believe in their own utter bullshit about how they are better managers or that they are better managers of the economy. It's true that they're not going to come out and say "hey the ALP did a great job in riding through the GFC" but instead it's been this huge diatribe about government debt. Well, there are two things bigger and scarier than Federal government debt in Australia and that is local council debt and private sector debt.
Here's the vaunted Economist magazine's Global Debt Clock page. yes, that's Australia in red there, and the thing is Australia's public debt is high. Yes, it's true, but if you look at it, the figure sits at 27.1% of GDP. As of 31 August, the Federal Government component of it is 11.3%. It's not comparable to places where the debt is sitting at 78.3% of GDP (the USA) or for that matter 232% (Japan). You should check out what other countries in red are suffering. It is true that the Federal budget position is worsening as revenue drops, but it is hardly the kind of crisis the Liberal is talking us up into. If after all that spending and all that alleged mismanaging, the debt is 11.3%, then hooray to the ALP.
More to the point, there's something like 16% of GDP sitting on the shoulders of local councils - and nobody really knows how they're going to pay that back. But I guess that's not really a Federal issue to win votes so you don't see the Libs and Nats running around talking up that even bigger public debt.
Private debt is another matter entirely, and nobody wants to touch this because the economy is a house of cards built on confidence. Nobody wants us to lose the confidence we have in our economy but quite frankly we've not really made it through the property bubble and prices are heating up again in major cities. We're nowhere near digesting the debt tied up in mortgages across the country, and we've started to look at housing as the next engine of growth after the mining boom tapers off. Except you don't hear a peep out of the Libs or Nats about this too because they like the wealth effect of having inflated asset prices on people's ledgers. They won't be repealing negative gearing any time soon. They like inflated property prices, low disposal income. They like being asset-rich cash-poor, even if that ends up hurting growth prospects for the economy.
It's a joke that they're out in front with such shoddy economic thinking that even a novice can see is bullshit, but there they are believing in the self-flung shitstorm of bullshit. Somebody help us out here. We're about to vote in the party of the property bubble again. And they haven't learnt their lessons at all. They're coming at us with the same rhetoric they came at us in the first place. If it's the personal failing of Tony Abbott, that's one thing but it's not - the whole lot of the front-benchers are trotting out this bunkum. Their back-benchers? Staying out of the spotlight as much as they can so as not to put their foot in it.
So this is it. The inevitable moment when the born-to-rule club comes back into power to run their austerity program which will inevitably hurt the economy. Good grief Charlie Brown.
What really frightens me about the Liberals and the Nationals is no not just what they will do, but just how much they believe in their own utter bullshit about how they are better managers or that they are better managers of the economy. It's true that they're not going to come out and say "hey the ALP did a great job in riding through the GFC" but instead it's been this huge diatribe about government debt. Well, there are two things bigger and scarier than Federal government debt in Australia and that is local council debt and private sector debt.
Here's the vaunted Economist magazine's Global Debt Clock page. yes, that's Australia in red there, and the thing is Australia's public debt is high. Yes, it's true, but if you look at it, the figure sits at 27.1% of GDP. As of 31 August, the Federal Government component of it is 11.3%. It's not comparable to places where the debt is sitting at 78.3% of GDP (the USA) or for that matter 232% (Japan). You should check out what other countries in red are suffering. It is true that the Federal budget position is worsening as revenue drops, but it is hardly the kind of crisis the Liberal is talking us up into. If after all that spending and all that alleged mismanaging, the debt is 11.3%, then hooray to the ALP.
More to the point, there's something like 16% of GDP sitting on the shoulders of local councils - and nobody really knows how they're going to pay that back. But I guess that's not really a Federal issue to win votes so you don't see the Libs and Nats running around talking up that even bigger public debt.
Private debt is another matter entirely, and nobody wants to touch this because the economy is a house of cards built on confidence. Nobody wants us to lose the confidence we have in our economy but quite frankly we've not really made it through the property bubble and prices are heating up again in major cities. We're nowhere near digesting the debt tied up in mortgages across the country, and we've started to look at housing as the next engine of growth after the mining boom tapers off. Except you don't hear a peep out of the Libs or Nats about this too because they like the wealth effect of having inflated asset prices on people's ledgers. They won't be repealing negative gearing any time soon. They like inflated property prices, low disposal income. They like being asset-rich cash-poor, even if that ends up hurting growth prospects for the economy.
It's a joke that they're out in front with such shoddy economic thinking that even a novice can see is bullshit, but there they are believing in the self-flung shitstorm of bullshit. Somebody help us out here. We're about to vote in the party of the property bubble again. And they haven't learnt their lessons at all. They're coming at us with the same rhetoric they came at us in the first place. If it's the personal failing of Tony Abbott, that's one thing but it's not - the whole lot of the front-benchers are trotting out this bunkum. Their back-benchers? Staying out of the spotlight as much as they can so as not to put their foot in it.
So this is it. The inevitable moment when the born-to-rule club comes back into power to run their austerity program which will inevitably hurt the economy. Good grief Charlie Brown.
2013/08/31
Changed Habits
What Are You Buying On-Line These Days?
There's a bit of discussion about how soon consumers in Australia are going to head back to local retailers once they realise and feel the impact of the Australia Dollar having gone down.
Now, I don't know about you, but I was never really a shopper at David Jones or Myer/Grace Brothers so all of this is actually not an area I would dare to claim great knowledge. It seems to me that the impact on retailing of the parity period which we can roughly say was 2010-2013 was that it also coincided with the explosion of on-line shopping. The argument has always run that if the dollar wasn't so high, the customers would head back to retailers but clearly this isn't happening and Paul Zahra is clutching at straws as to explaining why they're not coming back... or haven't comeback "yet."
Which reminds one of course of the "yet" dialogue in 'High Fidelity'. If I said to you that you haven't felt the pain of the lower Aussie Dollar in your credit card statement ....'yet' ... do you think that will drive you to shop at David Jones? I mean, really...
Jokes aside, the reason I didn't shop at David Jones before was probably because they didn't have what I wanted. it seems what I want - judging from my recent purchase is guitar gizmos which I know are not sold at David Jones or Myer - are simply not on the shelves of Australian retailers.
Take this little valve Pre-amp that arrived from China today. It's a 12AX7 valve preamp for a guitar which I got for $40 including postage. I don't know if it's any good yet (there's that word!) because I haven't plugged it in, but it goes without saying nobody stocks it in Australia; nobody probably even knows about it in Australia, let alone a buyer; and there probably isn't a really big market for it in Australia. I can say two more things about it that are certain. 1) It's disposable income I didn't spend at David Jones or Myer or an Australian musical instrument retailer. 2) The opportunity cost of spending it on-line with some weird electronics goods seller in ShenZen China had nothing to do with GST considerations. Zilch. Nada. Absolutely none.
I suspect the real problem for retailers is that they can't get specialist enough to compete with the truly weird and bizarre on-line sellers. I mean, let's say on a whim I wanted a Derek Jeter rookie baseball card from 1992. Or a hand signed LP copy of Van Halen I by the guys in the band. Or one of Robert Fripp's guitars. There's no way a retailer in Australia is going to be able to meet that kind of demand from a random individual and simultaneously stock and sell enough of what sells to a wider, more general market, to keep trading.
And that's just me being idiosyncratic. I imagine many other people have experienced the same thing. That they can find parts and things and bits and bobs that were so hard to get through traditional retail that they'd given up - and suddenly the options are there. The world is getting weirder and wilder in its demands and there's not a shot in hell of keeping up with this change in demand.
So I don't think it's really a problem of relative pricing that is driving this move to on-line shopping. It's actually a qualitative shift in people's shopping preferences and they're not coming back any time soon.
There's a bit of discussion about how soon consumers in Australia are going to head back to local retailers once they realise and feel the impact of the Australia Dollar having gone down.
David Jones boss Paul Zahra said today that he didn't think consumers would fully register that their online purchases from, say, US rival Nordstrom, had gone up in price until they paid their credit card.
How this plays out for Australian retailers over the medium term will be interesting to watch, assuming the Australian dollar remains at this level or even falls further.
If, after the election, the government decides to impose a 10 per cent GST on online purchases under $1000, the competition game between Australian and offshore retailers will become more interesting. (The GST imposition probably isn't close. It costs the Treasury coffers $700 million to $1 billion a year - depending whose numbers you use - in forgone tax but the cost of administration doesn't make it compelling yet.
It certainly wouldn't provide a cure-all for retailers and the particularly challenged premium department stores. If you exclude the small improvement in the first quarter of 2012-2013, David Jones has been experiencing quarterly sales declines for almost two years.
Now, I don't know about you, but I was never really a shopper at David Jones or Myer/Grace Brothers so all of this is actually not an area I would dare to claim great knowledge. It seems to me that the impact on retailing of the parity period which we can roughly say was 2010-2013 was that it also coincided with the explosion of on-line shopping. The argument has always run that if the dollar wasn't so high, the customers would head back to retailers but clearly this isn't happening and Paul Zahra is clutching at straws as to explaining why they're not coming back... or haven't comeback "yet."
Which reminds one of course of the "yet" dialogue in 'High Fidelity'. If I said to you that you haven't felt the pain of the lower Aussie Dollar in your credit card statement ....'yet' ... do you think that will drive you to shop at David Jones? I mean, really...
Jokes aside, the reason I didn't shop at David Jones before was probably because they didn't have what I wanted. it seems what I want - judging from my recent purchase is guitar gizmos which I know are not sold at David Jones or Myer - are simply not on the shelves of Australian retailers.
Take this little valve Pre-amp that arrived from China today. It's a 12AX7 valve preamp for a guitar which I got for $40 including postage. I don't know if it's any good yet (there's that word!) because I haven't plugged it in, but it goes without saying nobody stocks it in Australia; nobody probably even knows about it in Australia, let alone a buyer; and there probably isn't a really big market for it in Australia. I can say two more things about it that are certain. 1) It's disposable income I didn't spend at David Jones or Myer or an Australian musical instrument retailer. 2) The opportunity cost of spending it on-line with some weird electronics goods seller in ShenZen China had nothing to do with GST considerations. Zilch. Nada. Absolutely none.
I suspect the real problem for retailers is that they can't get specialist enough to compete with the truly weird and bizarre on-line sellers. I mean, let's say on a whim I wanted a Derek Jeter rookie baseball card from 1992. Or a hand signed LP copy of Van Halen I by the guys in the band. Or one of Robert Fripp's guitars. There's no way a retailer in Australia is going to be able to meet that kind of demand from a random individual and simultaneously stock and sell enough of what sells to a wider, more general market, to keep trading.
And that's just me being idiosyncratic. I imagine many other people have experienced the same thing. That they can find parts and things and bits and bobs that were so hard to get through traditional retail that they'd given up - and suddenly the options are there. The world is getting weirder and wilder in its demands and there's not a shot in hell of keeping up with this change in demand.
So I don't think it's really a problem of relative pricing that is driving this move to on-line shopping. It's actually a qualitative shift in people's shopping preferences and they're not coming back any time soon.
2013/08/29
'Oblivion'
Forgetting Other Movies Exist
Spoiler alert.
No, really. In this one I'll definitely have to spoil it for you so if you hate spoilers, don't read on.
Okay now? Good.
You've seen this movie in many guises before. It's just been jumbled up and put together from parts of other films. It's a film that almost looks authentic and original and it's not. It's a clone just like the main character.
What's Good About It
Some marvelous cinematography and design. it's a rare film that takes you to a place you've never seen and show you a light that is new and refreshing. This film has it in spades.
The UTCC (The Ubiquitous Tom Cruise Character) isn't too annoying in this film, unlike say, in 'Jack Reacher'. In this one, he is playing a character imaginatively named Jack Harper. That should've been the give away that the main character was going to be some kind of clone. Perhaps it's even a kind of meta-textual irony, as in: "Hey look, all his characters are the same!"
It's hard to say because in most part the film takes itself pretty seriously. In most instances, that would be good except...
What's Bad About It
... this film is like an identikit science fiction movie. Post-Apocalyptic settings don't come more hard and fast than this movie. The New York City in ruins harks back to both 'Planet of the Apes' and 'A.I.'. The helicopter harks back to the sky-hover vehicles in 'Minority Report' and hey, Tom cruise was in that one too. There are scavengers on the Post Apocalyptic landscape, an they're like something right out of 'Mad Max'. Then these drones come around and attack people - and they're unrelenting like the robots in 'I Robot'. The Robot Drones have a POV shot, and lo and behold it's like the Termo-vision from 'The Terminator'. Weirder still, for a machine designed by aliens, it's conveniently got English text in the read outs. So Tom Cruise's Jack sets off to find one of these drones and finds himself in the library having a shoot out with the post-Apocalyptic scavengers in a defunct library in a sequence that looks like 'I Am Legend' and look, he gets his foot trapped and dragged across the floor by a trap pulley, just as Will Smith was catching monsters... Eventually Jack is talking to a wise old black guy who fills him in on the exposition and of course you'd swear that could've been Morpheus from 'The Matrix', but it's not, it's Morgan Freeman playing a version of a guy that could have been Morpheus. Then Jack meets his clone self and realises he is one of many clones all kept apart artificially, but sharing memory fragments, just like Sam Rockwell in 'Moon'. The memory fragments feature the moment he proposed to his wife on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and of course this harks back to 'Sleepless In Seattle' which took its cue from 'An Affair to Remember'. Finally, he heads up to confront the alien craft in the sky and is taken in by the big mothership, like 'Independence Day' there, he sees banks upon banks of himself as clones - a bit like Buzz Lightyear does in 'Toy Story'. Eventually, he comes to a platform, and confronts an alien AI, that speaks through a red singular eye (Machine Messiah!). the red singular eye is suspiciously like the red light of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Then, Jack blows them all up by flicking a switch, much like Bruce Willis does in the climactic moment of Armageddon'.
I'm sure I missed a few more. And it all could have been a wonderful film if you didn't know any of these other good films.
What's Interesting About It
If it weren't for all the bad bits mentioned above, it's probably an okay movie. You sort of wonder about the producers who let a director do this sort of thing. Talk about not having any original ideas, yet still managing to make a movie that went to market. It's a bit like if I made a car out of all these different bits of cars from different makes and then sold it as something original.
The Post-Apocalypse Fantasy
This sub-genre has been growing for a while. Maybe it started with 'On the Beach' where everywhere but Australia gets nuked and people quietly await their radiation death in Australia. Somehow I doubt it would go that way if it ever happened that Australia was the last outpost of civilisation remaining. It would be more like Satyricon or the last days of Rome. 'Planet of the Apes' and 'Mad Max' both couch their stories as after our civilisation has fallen. As the genre grows it seems we really like this idea that people would band together in paramilitary enclaves. So much so the survivalist fantasies seem to meld into one vision of huddled masses living in industrial buildings.
Somehow I don't think that's how it would go. We'd sooner become each man for himself and behave like the kids in 'Lord of the Flies' than turn into bands of resistance we see so often in these movies. It's almost worth doing a 'Lord of the Flies' for adults. I guess 'Lost' was meant to be that, but went off into a weird direction and lived up to its name.
All these films ignore just how much our lives are sitting atop the giant edifice of knowledge and structure of society built up over thousands of years. The survivalists are hoping that suddenly these restrictive laws and governments would suddenly vanish and leave behind these weird kinds of utopias but it won't happen that way for the simple reason that even the rudimentary of our lives depends on resources we cannot mine unless we have the great apparatus of civilisation. The more they make these films, the more hokey and silly the vision of a post-apocalypse becomes. When civilisation ends, it will be just that - the end of the world of homo sapiens. There won't be these heroic adventures. Just death.
Spoiler alert.
No, really. In this one I'll definitely have to spoil it for you so if you hate spoilers, don't read on.
Okay now? Good.
You've seen this movie in many guises before. It's just been jumbled up and put together from parts of other films. It's a film that almost looks authentic and original and it's not. It's a clone just like the main character.
What's Good About It
Some marvelous cinematography and design. it's a rare film that takes you to a place you've never seen and show you a light that is new and refreshing. This film has it in spades.
The UTCC (The Ubiquitous Tom Cruise Character) isn't too annoying in this film, unlike say, in 'Jack Reacher'. In this one, he is playing a character imaginatively named Jack Harper. That should've been the give away that the main character was going to be some kind of clone. Perhaps it's even a kind of meta-textual irony, as in: "Hey look, all his characters are the same!"
It's hard to say because in most part the film takes itself pretty seriously. In most instances, that would be good except...
What's Bad About It
... this film is like an identikit science fiction movie. Post-Apocalyptic settings don't come more hard and fast than this movie. The New York City in ruins harks back to both 'Planet of the Apes' and 'A.I.'. The helicopter harks back to the sky-hover vehicles in 'Minority Report' and hey, Tom cruise was in that one too. There are scavengers on the Post Apocalyptic landscape, an they're like something right out of 'Mad Max'. Then these drones come around and attack people - and they're unrelenting like the robots in 'I Robot'. The Robot Drones have a POV shot, and lo and behold it's like the Termo-vision from 'The Terminator'. Weirder still, for a machine designed by aliens, it's conveniently got English text in the read outs. So Tom Cruise's Jack sets off to find one of these drones and finds himself in the library having a shoot out with the post-Apocalyptic scavengers in a defunct library in a sequence that looks like 'I Am Legend' and look, he gets his foot trapped and dragged across the floor by a trap pulley, just as Will Smith was catching monsters... Eventually Jack is talking to a wise old black guy who fills him in on the exposition and of course you'd swear that could've been Morpheus from 'The Matrix', but it's not, it's Morgan Freeman playing a version of a guy that could have been Morpheus. Then Jack meets his clone self and realises he is one of many clones all kept apart artificially, but sharing memory fragments, just like Sam Rockwell in 'Moon'. The memory fragments feature the moment he proposed to his wife on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and of course this harks back to 'Sleepless In Seattle' which took its cue from 'An Affair to Remember'. Finally, he heads up to confront the alien craft in the sky and is taken in by the big mothership, like 'Independence Day' there, he sees banks upon banks of himself as clones - a bit like Buzz Lightyear does in 'Toy Story'. Eventually, he comes to a platform, and confronts an alien AI, that speaks through a red singular eye (Machine Messiah!). the red singular eye is suspiciously like the red light of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Then, Jack blows them all up by flicking a switch, much like Bruce Willis does in the climactic moment of Armageddon'.
I'm sure I missed a few more. And it all could have been a wonderful film if you didn't know any of these other good films.
What's Interesting About It
If it weren't for all the bad bits mentioned above, it's probably an okay movie. You sort of wonder about the producers who let a director do this sort of thing. Talk about not having any original ideas, yet still managing to make a movie that went to market. It's a bit like if I made a car out of all these different bits of cars from different makes and then sold it as something original.
The Post-Apocalypse Fantasy
This sub-genre has been growing for a while. Maybe it started with 'On the Beach' where everywhere but Australia gets nuked and people quietly await their radiation death in Australia. Somehow I doubt it would go that way if it ever happened that Australia was the last outpost of civilisation remaining. It would be more like Satyricon or the last days of Rome. 'Planet of the Apes' and 'Mad Max' both couch their stories as after our civilisation has fallen. As the genre grows it seems we really like this idea that people would band together in paramilitary enclaves. So much so the survivalist fantasies seem to meld into one vision of huddled masses living in industrial buildings.
Somehow I don't think that's how it would go. We'd sooner become each man for himself and behave like the kids in 'Lord of the Flies' than turn into bands of resistance we see so often in these movies. It's almost worth doing a 'Lord of the Flies' for adults. I guess 'Lost' was meant to be that, but went off into a weird direction and lived up to its name.
All these films ignore just how much our lives are sitting atop the giant edifice of knowledge and structure of society built up over thousands of years. The survivalists are hoping that suddenly these restrictive laws and governments would suddenly vanish and leave behind these weird kinds of utopias but it won't happen that way for the simple reason that even the rudimentary of our lives depends on resources we cannot mine unless we have the great apparatus of civilisation. The more they make these films, the more hokey and silly the vision of a post-apocalypse becomes. When civilisation ends, it will be just that - the end of the world of homo sapiens. There won't be these heroic adventures. Just death.
2013/08/27
News That's Fit To Punt - 26/Aug/2013
Mr. Rabbit On The Loose
I guess I'm not the only person a little perturbed by the polls suggesting a win by the Coalition on the 7th. Pleiades sent in this link that pretty much sums up the consternation:
The article goes on to say that climate policy is getting short shrift as a result of the major parties dumbing down their pitch. Well, climate policy itself is in danger of being obliterated if an Abbott-led Coalition wins. I'm a little surprised that the swinging voters who voted in Kevin Rudd with a mandate to put in an ETS, then turned on him when he couldn't get a deal in Copenhagen and decided to kick the can down, are now seriously contemplating voting in Tony Abbott who is clearly on record as a Climate Change Denier. I mean, really? Is that where we're headed?
But That's Not All! There's The Boats!
Here's another one from Pleaides... Out in Jakarta, they're a little alarmed that we're about to vote in Tony Abbott with his turn back the boats slogans.
When you spell it out like that, why yes, it is patronising and reeks of Colonialist Paternalism. Of course Tony Abbott would be tone deaf (pardon the pun) to such sensitivities. Though, it gets me that in this day and age that a leading politician from Australia basically has this kind of witheringly contemptuous outlook on Indonesia. How the hell is he going to get Indonesia to play ball with his idiotic plan if he's already starting on the "you're bunch of money-grubbing yokels" foot.
Not to mention that fact that the Coalition is going to do this on taxpayers' money having harangued the ALP government about bad management of funds. I guess that's Chutzpah for you.
The ALP's Just Losin' It All By Themselves
I'm sort of detached from the daily coverage of this election because a) I've made up my mind I'm not voting for Tony Abbott and the Coalition and; b) I hate being lied to so brazenly and c) I'm satisfied Julia Gillard isn't part of the equation; I'm happy not to go into the nitty-gritty of what's being said. Occasionally Clive Palmer makes me laugh with his handout of DVDs that has a bonus video of him wanting to make the Titanic II with people referring to him as "Professor Palmer". Yes, it's side-splittingly funny - so much so that I laughed so hard I hurt my intercostal muscles.
So it takes me by surprise that the ALP is doing so badly in the polls. What drugs are people on? Peter Hartcher's explanation is that Tony Abbott hasn't changed one bit; it's the ALP that's just going about losing support.
What a joke, and we're falling for it like the fascists we are.
I've been thinking a bit about this and I imagine that there are basically a lot of old baby boomers who are unhappy with being shackled with the carbon pricing in their old age, translating into higher power bills when they don't even believe climate change. One also imagines a lot of Gen X people who are neck deep in mortgage hell wanting to punish the ALP government for the GFC and its aftermath. And I can well imagine there are quite a few misguided Gen Y types who -being Gen Y - want a laissez faire arrangement and they don't care how much they pay for their education. I meet these types now and then and it always strikes me that democracy is wasted on the free world. They have the vote; the right to vote in a free country in the first world and they want to waste it on a sloganeering blowhard.
Of all the things people could do, the worst thing would be to vote for Tony Abbott's coalition. His government is not going to do anything but widen the gap between the wealthy and the poor and make us an even more hateful, self-possessed, mean-spirited country. He will be a Prime Minster you'd be ashamed to show anybody. But then, he did learn from the master of that sort of thing in John Howard.
I guess I'm not the only person a little perturbed by the polls suggesting a win by the Coalition on the 7th. Pleiades sent in this link that pretty much sums up the consternation:
The electoral atmosphere is surreal. We have a government on the back foot over its economic record - which has been outstanding when the global economic environment is taken into account.
And we have an opposition that appears to have successfully undermined the government's credibility, based on the government's record of fiscal debt and deficit, which has, in fact, been the foundation of the nation's success in avoiding the global financial crisis.
The Coalition tactic recalls the 1996 election. At every outdoor political event the opposition's debt truck would be lurking in the background, showing Australia's foreign debt ticking over at an alarming rate. Immediately after the election the truck was put way, never to be seen again. Nor was any policy - serious or otherwise - advanced by the Howard government to reverse this alarming growth in debt.
So it will be this time unless Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey are silly enough in office to ride roughshod over their advisers in Treasury, Finance and the Reserve Bank and impose austerity policies involving massive cuts in government spending. Such policies have proved spectacularly unsuccessful elsewhere in reducing deficits or unemployment.
The article goes on to say that climate policy is getting short shrift as a result of the major parties dumbing down their pitch. Well, climate policy itself is in danger of being obliterated if an Abbott-led Coalition wins. I'm a little surprised that the swinging voters who voted in Kevin Rudd with a mandate to put in an ETS, then turned on him when he couldn't get a deal in Copenhagen and decided to kick the can down, are now seriously contemplating voting in Tony Abbott who is clearly on record as a Climate Change Denier. I mean, really? Is that where we're headed?
But That's Not All! There's The Boats!
Here's another one from Pleaides... Out in Jakarta, they're a little alarmed that we're about to vote in Tony Abbott with his turn back the boats slogans.
The Australian opposition’s plan to disburse millions of dollars to Indonesian fishermen, which is partly to stem the flow of asylum seekers, is an insult to Indonesia as a nation, an international affairs expert has said.
Hikmahanto Juwana of the University of Indonesia criticized the plan and called it “humiliating” because it made Indonesian fishermen just “look like mercenaries who did dirty jobs.”
“I think the government should voice protests to the coalition’s very insensitive plan which clearly shows their poor knowledge about the situation in Indonesia,” he said in a statement made available to The Jakarta Post over the weekend.
The Australia’s opposition coalition has unveiled its plan for more regional action to stop people smuggling, pledging A$420 million for policy measures that include paying Indonesian villagers for information about smugglers and buying unseaworthy boats, according to Australian media.
When you spell it out like that, why yes, it is patronising and reeks of Colonialist Paternalism. Of course Tony Abbott would be tone deaf (pardon the pun) to such sensitivities. Though, it gets me that in this day and age that a leading politician from Australia basically has this kind of witheringly contemptuous outlook on Indonesia. How the hell is he going to get Indonesia to play ball with his idiotic plan if he's already starting on the "you're bunch of money-grubbing yokels" foot.
Not to mention that fact that the Coalition is going to do this on taxpayers' money having harangued the ALP government about bad management of funds. I guess that's Chutzpah for you.
The ALP's Just Losin' It All By Themselves
I'm sort of detached from the daily coverage of this election because a) I've made up my mind I'm not voting for Tony Abbott and the Coalition and; b) I hate being lied to so brazenly and c) I'm satisfied Julia Gillard isn't part of the equation; I'm happy not to go into the nitty-gritty of what's being said. Occasionally Clive Palmer makes me laugh with his handout of DVDs that has a bonus video of him wanting to make the Titanic II with people referring to him as "Professor Palmer". Yes, it's side-splittingly funny - so much so that I laughed so hard I hurt my intercostal muscles.
So it takes me by surprise that the ALP is doing so badly in the polls. What drugs are people on? Peter Hartcher's explanation is that Tony Abbott hasn't changed one bit; it's the ALP that's just going about losing support.
But most politically telling was the fact that Abbott's big speech was substantially the same one he gave on the same Brisbane stage at the same event three years ago. This conveys four central realities of Australian politics.
First, it tells us that this election is a case where the opposition is not winning, but where the government is losing. Australia is not rushing gleefully to embrace Abbott's Coalition but is instead rejecting Kevin Rudd and Labor.
You can tell because the main difference between the Abbott pitch of three years ago and his pitch on Sunday is that last time he wasn't winning the election campaign, and this time he is. Abbott is standing in the same place. The electorate is moving to him, not the other way around.
Second, it tells us that Abbott's Coalition has held its nerve, an unusual thing in a high-stakes contest. Instead of seeking to ingratiate itself by offering new goodies, the Liberal leader announced no new billion-dollar bonanzas, only some modest new help for apprentices, self-funded retirees and dementia research.
While John Howard's campaign launches were laden with billion-dollar offerings, the only billions in Abbott's speech were references to Labor deficits.
Third, this also tells us something about Australia. Abbott is appealing to a country disillusioned with politicians and their promises. The only credible promises are modest ones.
Abbott explicitly warns Australia ''don't expect miracles''. A Coalition government would ''respect the limits of government as well as its potential''.
At core, Abbott's promise is limited to uprooting much of Labor's legacy, while preserving work on a national disability insurance scheme and enlarging Australia's parental leave scheme.
Fourth, Abbott continues conspicuously to avoid the great, glaring problem at the centre of his policy structure: his budget. It was a mess at the last election, and remains unsolved to this day.
Be patient, and wait another week, the Liberals tell us.
What a joke, and we're falling for it like the fascists we are.
I've been thinking a bit about this and I imagine that there are basically a lot of old baby boomers who are unhappy with being shackled with the carbon pricing in their old age, translating into higher power bills when they don't even believe climate change. One also imagines a lot of Gen X people who are neck deep in mortgage hell wanting to punish the ALP government for the GFC and its aftermath. And I can well imagine there are quite a few misguided Gen Y types who -being Gen Y - want a laissez faire arrangement and they don't care how much they pay for their education. I meet these types now and then and it always strikes me that democracy is wasted on the free world. They have the vote; the right to vote in a free country in the first world and they want to waste it on a sloganeering blowhard.
Of all the things people could do, the worst thing would be to vote for Tony Abbott's coalition. His government is not going to do anything but widen the gap between the wealthy and the poor and make us an even more hateful, self-possessed, mean-spirited country. He will be a Prime Minster you'd be ashamed to show anybody. But then, he did learn from the master of that sort of thing in John Howard.
2013/08/26
'Emperor'
The End Of The End Of World War II As We Know It
The events leading up to the surrender of Japan on 15th August 1945 is an interesting topic. There was quite a bit of politicking carried out by the heads of the military in Japan. Some of the meetings were pretty dramatic and poignant. The angst and the pride of proud men on the line, trying to salvage the un-salvage-able, hit a crescendo in early August 1945. It's great fodder for an excellent movie. As it turns out (as Apple staff are told to say instead of "unfortunately"), this is not that movie.
What we have instead is a fairly ill-informed, loosely told crappy reconstruction of the earliest days of the MacArthur GHQ. For start General Bonner Fellers is the romantic lead. Why, they could have had Curtis LeMay as the comic relief!
What's Good About It
Somebody had to approach the topic at some point in time; why on Earth did MacArthur let the Emperor of Japan avoid going to trial a the Tokyo Trials? It's a worthy question. Of course, then they smother it in a bullshit romance flashback, but the film sort of gropes at a fairly interesting point about Japan between 1868 and 1945: Japan was a constitutional monarchy. So the immediate thrust of the film is try and pin the blame on the Emperor and the throne, only to find the Emperor as having been a sort of passenger of history who rubber stamped things.
All of this is handled in a very ham-fisted way, but the core of it is that they can't stick the Emperor on trial not only for reasons of realpolitik, but basically because the roles ascribed to the Emperor doesn't line up with dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.
What's Bad About It
The romantic subplot is terrible. It's just awful. And it takes up lots of screen time.
The directing is even worse. I don't know where they find these crappy directors. This Peter Webber fellow can't set up a scene without crossing the line over and over again. He's also a terrible director of actors, and seems to have no idea how editing works, so consequently seems to create scenes with no tension or rhythm. The sense of narrative is a mess and on the whole he seems to have been interested in all the wrong things, just so he can tell his crappy romantic story which probably has no basis in real life whatsoever. I thought Baz Luhrman was a particularly awkward, technically deficient director, but this Peter Webber is even worse. He has himself a really interesting topic and makes an utter balls up of it.
I don't know what else to say but this is a really crappy movie entertainment-wise as well as being a particularly shitty bit of film making.
What's Interesting About It
They keep making and remaking these Pocahontas stories where some white dude goes to another culture and falls in love with some local girl. Then the dude ends up being the meat in the sandwich of the story and well, you only have to look at successful examples like 'Witness' (the Amish) or 'Avatar' (aliens with blue skin) to see it's a ruse to get you an 'in' on the narrative about "the other". Of course the other painful one is 'The Last Samurai' which was preceded by 'James Clavell's Shogun' many years ago. You'd think that white people could get to Japan and just get on with whatever it is they need to do in the story instead having to spend 40minutes chasing skirt. But you know how it goes.
Some films are more deft at doing this insertion-of-romantic-hocus-pocus while films like this one stick out as a monument to the stupidity of the trope. Other films are worse on this count - like 'Dances With Wolves' where it turns out there's already a white woman who's gone native on the other side waiting or the white male hero to show up. It's the kind of narrative move that strains credulity but for the sake of getting on with the story, you grin and bear these bits. Sometimes there is what I like to call the 'Tatanka' where the white guy swaps vocab with the locals. Which sometimes has narrative bearing, but usually it's just another ruse to establish the white male hero is getting to see things form the perspective of the other. "our people think... blah-blah-blah."
The point being you'd think that sometimes sensible producers would say to their writers "look, that story trope has been done to death and it's harder and harder to do it better. If you don't have a good story angle, don't do it." The producers on this one, displaying an incredible naivety and possibly mediocre sensibilities, chose to go hard with the insertion-of-romantic-hocus-pocus, the Tatanka, and the obligatory "our people think blah-blah-blah".
Well, I point both my index fingers at the heavens by my temple and say "Tatanka" to you!
Sometimes It's Shrouded In Secrecy, Sometimes It's Shrouded In Myth, But Sometimes It's Just Coated With Bullshit
Western historians really don't want to hear this but the two atomic bombs didn't really figure that much into the thinking of the ministers meeting with the Emperor in the days leading up to the end of the war. The records of what was discussed is actually out there, published long ago. Plenty of historians have gone through this material and it's pretty clear that when they dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, the news merely dampened the mood in that room even further. You have to understand that Generals Anami and Itagaki were pretty keen to fight the Americans on land, hand to hand on the streets and inflict as much casualty on everybody and everything. That's what the generals wanted and were willing to repeat the Battle of Okinawa all over Japan.
You can just imagine the Emperor impassively listening to this tirade thinking, "what are these lunatics talking about?"
So what were they talking about? They were talking about the Potsdam Declaration. In particular they were particularly concerned as to how to interpret '...subject to...' and whether this meant that the Emperor would become the subject of the President of the United States or whether the people of Japan would become slaves. On the 9th the news of Nagasaki being bombed by the second atomic bomb came in and they were still arguing about what '...subject to...' meant. One can imagine remarks like the Clintonian "that would depend on what you meant by 'subject' and what you meant by 'to'" that would fit perfectly in such conversations.
It's painful to read this stuff. Whole cities were being laid to waste and the blowhard chiefs of the General Staff and Army minster Anami going on about how everybody in Japan was going to die in battle. Ascribing the end of the Pacific War to the 2 atomic bombs is incredibly optimistic reading of the impact of technology. If anything it was a bonus side show, as it didn't really sink into the retrograde heads of the General Staff and Army minister Anami.
One's natural inclination is to think there must be more to the end of the war and the two atomic bombs than this; we are often betrayed by just how banal and prosaic the actors are, on history's great stage.
Showa Emperor Hirohito And Culpability
The more things I read and see about the late Showa Emperor, the more I'm persuaded to think that he didn't speak up enough. he didn't speak up much at all from what we can gather, and when he was a young man, it's easy to believe he he was totally cowered and intimidated by the great admirals and generals that fought in the war against Russia in 1904-1905. Even in the 16th year of his reign as Japan stumbled along into war with America, one feels he could have spoken out a bit more than insist on peace.
Some western and Chinese historians have decided that the Showa Emperor had a sideline in being a villainous conspirator with the Army generals and gave them tacit support for the push into China and Manchuria, but this is contradicted by the extensive Kido diaries. The man was a lot more alone and isolated on the throne. The film comes close to capturing just how isolated the Emperor was from his people. What it doesn't do is fill the gap in between with any kind of explanation or meaning. There's just this sable black gulf of willful ignorance and Rumsfeld-ian unknonwn-unknowns.
From all accounts, he interpreted his position under the Meiji Constitution as being a ceremonious head of state who rubber stamped the decisions made in cabinet. He sat through his cabinet meetings, stony faced and impassive, but always keeping his opinions to himself and away from the ministers. During the 'February 26 Incident', when junior Army officers attempted to mount a coup in his name, he refused to lend any support to them, berated them for killing cabinet minsters, and threatened to lead the Imperial guard divisions himself to root out the young officers.
You sort of wonder why he didn't tell these crazy generals to get back in their box more often, in the lead up to the war.
The events leading up to the surrender of Japan on 15th August 1945 is an interesting topic. There was quite a bit of politicking carried out by the heads of the military in Japan. Some of the meetings were pretty dramatic and poignant. The angst and the pride of proud men on the line, trying to salvage the un-salvage-able, hit a crescendo in early August 1945. It's great fodder for an excellent movie. As it turns out (as Apple staff are told to say instead of "unfortunately"), this is not that movie.
What we have instead is a fairly ill-informed, loosely told crappy reconstruction of the earliest days of the MacArthur GHQ. For start General Bonner Fellers is the romantic lead. Why, they could have had Curtis LeMay as the comic relief!
What's Good About It
Somebody had to approach the topic at some point in time; why on Earth did MacArthur let the Emperor of Japan avoid going to trial a the Tokyo Trials? It's a worthy question. Of course, then they smother it in a bullshit romance flashback, but the film sort of gropes at a fairly interesting point about Japan between 1868 and 1945: Japan was a constitutional monarchy. So the immediate thrust of the film is try and pin the blame on the Emperor and the throne, only to find the Emperor as having been a sort of passenger of history who rubber stamped things.
All of this is handled in a very ham-fisted way, but the core of it is that they can't stick the Emperor on trial not only for reasons of realpolitik, but basically because the roles ascribed to the Emperor doesn't line up with dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.
What's Bad About It
The romantic subplot is terrible. It's just awful. And it takes up lots of screen time.
The directing is even worse. I don't know where they find these crappy directors. This Peter Webber fellow can't set up a scene without crossing the line over and over again. He's also a terrible director of actors, and seems to have no idea how editing works, so consequently seems to create scenes with no tension or rhythm. The sense of narrative is a mess and on the whole he seems to have been interested in all the wrong things, just so he can tell his crappy romantic story which probably has no basis in real life whatsoever. I thought Baz Luhrman was a particularly awkward, technically deficient director, but this Peter Webber is even worse. He has himself a really interesting topic and makes an utter balls up of it.
I don't know what else to say but this is a really crappy movie entertainment-wise as well as being a particularly shitty bit of film making.
What's Interesting About It
They keep making and remaking these Pocahontas stories where some white dude goes to another culture and falls in love with some local girl. Then the dude ends up being the meat in the sandwich of the story and well, you only have to look at successful examples like 'Witness' (the Amish) or 'Avatar' (aliens with blue skin) to see it's a ruse to get you an 'in' on the narrative about "the other". Of course the other painful one is 'The Last Samurai' which was preceded by 'James Clavell's Shogun' many years ago. You'd think that white people could get to Japan and just get on with whatever it is they need to do in the story instead having to spend 40minutes chasing skirt. But you know how it goes.
Some films are more deft at doing this insertion-of-romantic-hocus-pocus while films like this one stick out as a monument to the stupidity of the trope. Other films are worse on this count - like 'Dances With Wolves' where it turns out there's already a white woman who's gone native on the other side waiting or the white male hero to show up. It's the kind of narrative move that strains credulity but for the sake of getting on with the story, you grin and bear these bits. Sometimes there is what I like to call the 'Tatanka' where the white guy swaps vocab with the locals. Which sometimes has narrative bearing, but usually it's just another ruse to establish the white male hero is getting to see things form the perspective of the other. "our people think... blah-blah-blah."
The point being you'd think that sometimes sensible producers would say to their writers "look, that story trope has been done to death and it's harder and harder to do it better. If you don't have a good story angle, don't do it." The producers on this one, displaying an incredible naivety and possibly mediocre sensibilities, chose to go hard with the insertion-of-romantic-hocus-pocus, the Tatanka, and the obligatory "our people think blah-blah-blah".
Well, I point both my index fingers at the heavens by my temple and say "Tatanka" to you!
Sometimes It's Shrouded In Secrecy, Sometimes It's Shrouded In Myth, But Sometimes It's Just Coated With Bullshit
Western historians really don't want to hear this but the two atomic bombs didn't really figure that much into the thinking of the ministers meeting with the Emperor in the days leading up to the end of the war. The records of what was discussed is actually out there, published long ago. Plenty of historians have gone through this material and it's pretty clear that when they dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, the news merely dampened the mood in that room even further. You have to understand that Generals Anami and Itagaki were pretty keen to fight the Americans on land, hand to hand on the streets and inflict as much casualty on everybody and everything. That's what the generals wanted and were willing to repeat the Battle of Okinawa all over Japan.
You can just imagine the Emperor impassively listening to this tirade thinking, "what are these lunatics talking about?"
So what were they talking about? They were talking about the Potsdam Declaration. In particular they were particularly concerned as to how to interpret '...subject to...' and whether this meant that the Emperor would become the subject of the President of the United States or whether the people of Japan would become slaves. On the 9th the news of Nagasaki being bombed by the second atomic bomb came in and they were still arguing about what '...subject to...' meant. One can imagine remarks like the Clintonian "that would depend on what you meant by 'subject' and what you meant by 'to'" that would fit perfectly in such conversations.
It's painful to read this stuff. Whole cities were being laid to waste and the blowhard chiefs of the General Staff and Army minster Anami going on about how everybody in Japan was going to die in battle. Ascribing the end of the Pacific War to the 2 atomic bombs is incredibly optimistic reading of the impact of technology. If anything it was a bonus side show, as it didn't really sink into the retrograde heads of the General Staff and Army minister Anami.
One's natural inclination is to think there must be more to the end of the war and the two atomic bombs than this; we are often betrayed by just how banal and prosaic the actors are, on history's great stage.
Showa Emperor Hirohito And Culpability
The more things I read and see about the late Showa Emperor, the more I'm persuaded to think that he didn't speak up enough. he didn't speak up much at all from what we can gather, and when he was a young man, it's easy to believe he he was totally cowered and intimidated by the great admirals and generals that fought in the war against Russia in 1904-1905. Even in the 16th year of his reign as Japan stumbled along into war with America, one feels he could have spoken out a bit more than insist on peace.
Some western and Chinese historians have decided that the Showa Emperor had a sideline in being a villainous conspirator with the Army generals and gave them tacit support for the push into China and Manchuria, but this is contradicted by the extensive Kido diaries. The man was a lot more alone and isolated on the throne. The film comes close to capturing just how isolated the Emperor was from his people. What it doesn't do is fill the gap in between with any kind of explanation or meaning. There's just this sable black gulf of willful ignorance and Rumsfeld-ian unknonwn-unknowns.
From all accounts, he interpreted his position under the Meiji Constitution as being a ceremonious head of state who rubber stamped the decisions made in cabinet. He sat through his cabinet meetings, stony faced and impassive, but always keeping his opinions to himself and away from the ministers. During the 'February 26 Incident', when junior Army officers attempted to mount a coup in his name, he refused to lend any support to them, berated them for killing cabinet minsters, and threatened to lead the Imperial guard divisions himself to root out the young officers.
You sort of wonder why he didn't tell these crazy generals to get back in their box more often, in the lead up to the war.
2013/08/23
The Money That's Not There
Deficits? What Deficits?
A few weeks ago I made an observation over elsewhere on the interwebs which I forgot to note over here. Once upon a time in the 90's when Pauline Hanson was a tyro crank politician, she was much ridiculed for her views. They were in most part totally outlandish and powered by a kind of backward looking xenophobia that made your skin crawl, but in particular she had a solution for Australia's debt problem, which was "print more money."
The press went to town on this statement as a clear indication that this would not work because printing money wold cause a massive outbreak of inflation; the likes of which crippled the Weimar Republic, so clearly this was a stupid idea born out of a stupid person. So the narrative went. And who amongst us who bothered to study modern history didn't know of the crazy inflation that engulfed inter-war Germany as the Weimar Republic busily printed money to pay their reparations for World War I? Print money, you get Weimar Republic.
Fast forward 15 years and 5 years on from the GFC we find, in fact that is exactly the US Federal Reserve Bank is doing in its guise of Quantitative Easing, and even the Bank of Japan has joined the ranks of central banks 'printing money' with the celebrated 'Abenomics' in progress. The interesting thing is that inflation - the kind we read about in history books about the Weimar Republic - hasn't exactly broken out in neither the USA nor Japan. In fact the Bank of Japan is running the printing presses much faster than the US Fed, and it might not make its inflation target of 2%. Go figure that one out.
No Inflation. All that money printed, and still no inflation. If anything central banks in the advanced economies are scared shitless of a collapse in asset prices.
I hate to say all this because I really dislike Pauline Hanson, but if the amount of deficit of the Australian Government was the size that it was - such that it could be paid off by the selling of assets under John Howard - maybe the Hanson plan of printing money back then might have been better? That way, the Federal Government, and by extension we the people would still have those assets.
Or maybe government debt isn't as big a deal as the private sector is making out. What's really bad about Greece and the other distressed euro economies probably is the fact that they can't devalue their currency by printing their own money. But if we go by the - ahem, *gulp* - "Hansonomics", Greece ought to quit the Euro zone and just print whatever money it likes to pay its freaking debts. And as crazy as that sounds to educated minds the evidence seems to be the case. Stick that into your objectivity pipe and smoke it.
This brings me to this article here.
And that ought to give you a bit of a scare. If the polls are to be believed the incoming Liberal National Coalition Government is selling itself on being fiscal hawks and that 30billion will come out of something somewhere along the way in a fit of austerity worship. I don't know where it will come from, and by the sounds of it, neither does treasurer-to-be Jolly Joe Hockey, but knowing their political persuasion it's likely to come out of welfare cheques and education budgets.
Yet in a bigger picture sense, all this pain it will inflict on millions of people will basically hurt the economy anyway while doing not much good. It's almost enough for you to endorse Hansonomic Printing Presses and ask them to simply print the money to pay the freaking debt. It's what grown up countries do.
A few weeks ago I made an observation over elsewhere on the interwebs which I forgot to note over here. Once upon a time in the 90's when Pauline Hanson was a tyro crank politician, she was much ridiculed for her views. They were in most part totally outlandish and powered by a kind of backward looking xenophobia that made your skin crawl, but in particular she had a solution for Australia's debt problem, which was "print more money."
The press went to town on this statement as a clear indication that this would not work because printing money wold cause a massive outbreak of inflation; the likes of which crippled the Weimar Republic, so clearly this was a stupid idea born out of a stupid person. So the narrative went. And who amongst us who bothered to study modern history didn't know of the crazy inflation that engulfed inter-war Germany as the Weimar Republic busily printed money to pay their reparations for World War I? Print money, you get Weimar Republic.
Fast forward 15 years and 5 years on from the GFC we find, in fact that is exactly the US Federal Reserve Bank is doing in its guise of Quantitative Easing, and even the Bank of Japan has joined the ranks of central banks 'printing money' with the celebrated 'Abenomics' in progress. The interesting thing is that inflation - the kind we read about in history books about the Weimar Republic - hasn't exactly broken out in neither the USA nor Japan. In fact the Bank of Japan is running the printing presses much faster than the US Fed, and it might not make its inflation target of 2%. Go figure that one out.
No Inflation. All that money printed, and still no inflation. If anything central banks in the advanced economies are scared shitless of a collapse in asset prices.
I hate to say all this because I really dislike Pauline Hanson, but if the amount of deficit of the Australian Government was the size that it was - such that it could be paid off by the selling of assets under John Howard - maybe the Hanson plan of printing money back then might have been better? That way, the Federal Government, and by extension we the people would still have those assets.
Or maybe government debt isn't as big a deal as the private sector is making out. What's really bad about Greece and the other distressed euro economies probably is the fact that they can't devalue their currency by printing their own money. But if we go by the - ahem, *gulp* - "Hansonomics", Greece ought to quit the Euro zone and just print whatever money it likes to pay its freaking debts. And as crazy as that sounds to educated minds the evidence seems to be the case. Stick that into your objectivity pipe and smoke it.
This brings me to this article here.
In a 34-page review for clients of how a Coalition government might change economic management, Mr Eslake, chief Australian economist for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, also highlights the potential for "significant and ongoing tensions" in an Abbott government between its "genuine economic liberals", such as shadow treasurer Joe Hockey, and those who are "more sceptical about markets ... including in many cases Tony Abbott as Prime Minister".
He predicts that the Coalition will ultimately adopt all of Labor's proposed budget savings measures, except for ending the tax break for cars bought through salary sacrifice.
Even so, Mr Eslake estimates, the Coalition has so far committed to $28.4 billion of tax cuts and $14.8 billion on new spending in the next four years, a total of $43.25 billion. But he estimates the nine savings measures the Coalition has announced so far would save only $13.44 billion over the same period.
"By our reckoning, over the remainder of the election campaign, the Coalition needs to announce additional savings measures totally in the vicinity of $30 billion over the four years to 2016-17 in order to be able credibly to claim that it would produce better bottom line outcomes than those projected (by Treasury and the Department of Finance), he said."
"That is a substantial sum, although it is considerably less than the $70 billion 'black hole' suggested by the government."
And that ought to give you a bit of a scare. If the polls are to be believed the incoming Liberal National Coalition Government is selling itself on being fiscal hawks and that 30billion will come out of something somewhere along the way in a fit of austerity worship. I don't know where it will come from, and by the sounds of it, neither does treasurer-to-be Jolly Joe Hockey, but knowing their political persuasion it's likely to come out of welfare cheques and education budgets.
Yet in a bigger picture sense, all this pain it will inflict on millions of people will basically hurt the economy anyway while doing not much good. It's almost enough for you to endorse Hansonomic Printing Presses and ask them to simply print the money to pay the freaking debt. It's what grown up countries do.
2013/08/22
Intractable Mess
ALP In The Middle
Pleiades sent in this link today for a quick look. It's an article by Antony Green - famous for his election coverage and breakdown of numbers - talking about just how difficult the Asylum Seeker issue has become.
It's clear that the polarisation surrounding this issue is actually making things intractable. I've been thinking about this very point for some time in as much as I can't seem to find too many people who wanted to try the Malaysian solution when Julia Gillard and Chris Bowen had that project as the desired policy course. Most people I knew either wanted to go the Abbott way and send boats back forcibly, or they wanted to just let anybody in without so much as a due process.
Even ringers like Clive Palmer has a policy position on this, and his is immediate on the spot processing and if they are found to be not refugees, they get sent back immediately. Which is all very nice for Clive but the reality is that some of these people are destroying their paperwork as they get on the boats to make it harder for immigration officials.
And this sort of brings me to the next point. The people on the far left of the spectrum who vehemently criticise the also numerous other end of the spectrum don't seem to want to have any process at all. This is sort of interesting in as much as it seems those people want to do away with the department of immigration entirely. If you listen closely to the far left, they're saying, let anybody who comes to Australia by boat, stay. They don't seem to understand that this massively incentivises people to get on boats; and that the people getting on the boats are counting on a sizable portion of Australians to feel pity and just let them in ("and why the hell not?" I hear them say).
All of this is surprising because Australia probably is well-served by its immigration department in most instances. Why the department and its processes don't get the benefit of the doubt and aren't allowed to process the asylum seekers actually escapes me.
Antony Green also goes on to point out that lack of education and income (or the lack thereof) also correlates with support or opposition to the policy. This is understandable given that they would be the most vulnerable to added competition from a sudden influx of low-skilled workers. They're not dumb. They know it means more competition and lowering of their bargaining power. And while the term xenophobia gets bandied about readily, you'd have to give the lowly-educated low-income demographic a break for being anxious. After all, we're living in a hollowing out economy where their jobs are more likely to be exported to 'Chindia' than those of the white collar demographic.
Similarly, the opposition to letting asylum seekers correlates with age as well. The older you are, the more likely you are to object - which, let's be fair, is probably an overhang of the White Australia Policy so that one probably deserves the 'xenophobia' label.
In any case it's clear that the ALP has got a real problem on its hands because the issue sits exactly at the point where it splits the traditional blue collar voters from the varsity educated progressives. If the ALP ran on the most left-leaning policy of letting all Asylum Seekers that arrive by boats into Australia, they might feel better about themselves but the numbers say they will lose. So you can see how this necessitates the PNG solution. You wonder how the white collar ALP voter feels about this (seeing that they were the most likely Gillard supporters) on the day the ballot is cast. ...or will they donkey vote? it's 3 more weeks to wrestle with their consciences because like it or not, donkey voting will bring in Tony Abbott.
Pleiades sent in this link today for a quick look. It's an article by Antony Green - famous for his election coverage and breakdown of numbers - talking about just how difficult the Asylum Seeker issue has become.
With asylum seeker boat arrivals a very live debate in the 2013 election campaign, Vote Compass asked four questions on asylum seekers and immigration issues.
The results reveal a polarised electorate, but one where Coalition and Green supporters find themselves comfortably aligned with their parties' policy positions.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-21/vote-compass/4901844
---
The real division was among Labor voters. Overall 48 per cent of intending Labor voters oppose the new Labor policy while 40 per cent support it. Labor has made a major policy shift to ban asylum seekers who arrive by boat from settling in Australia, but either Labor supporters have yet to adjust their position on the new policy, or just as likely, there are differing opinions on the subject within Labor's support base.
Since 2001 the Labor Party has struggled to produce policies on asylum seekers that straddle the divide between being tough and being compassionate. This struggle is reflected in the Vote Compass data for intended Labor voters.
It's clear that the polarisation surrounding this issue is actually making things intractable. I've been thinking about this very point for some time in as much as I can't seem to find too many people who wanted to try the Malaysian solution when Julia Gillard and Chris Bowen had that project as the desired policy course. Most people I knew either wanted to go the Abbott way and send boats back forcibly, or they wanted to just let anybody in without so much as a due process.
Even ringers like Clive Palmer has a policy position on this, and his is immediate on the spot processing and if they are found to be not refugees, they get sent back immediately. Which is all very nice for Clive but the reality is that some of these people are destroying their paperwork as they get on the boats to make it harder for immigration officials.
And this sort of brings me to the next point. The people on the far left of the spectrum who vehemently criticise the also numerous other end of the spectrum don't seem to want to have any process at all. This is sort of interesting in as much as it seems those people want to do away with the department of immigration entirely. If you listen closely to the far left, they're saying, let anybody who comes to Australia by boat, stay. They don't seem to understand that this massively incentivises people to get on boats; and that the people getting on the boats are counting on a sizable portion of Australians to feel pity and just let them in ("and why the hell not?" I hear them say).
All of this is surprising because Australia probably is well-served by its immigration department in most instances. Why the department and its processes don't get the benefit of the doubt and aren't allowed to process the asylum seekers actually escapes me.
Antony Green also goes on to point out that lack of education and income (or the lack thereof) also correlates with support or opposition to the policy. This is understandable given that they would be the most vulnerable to added competition from a sudden influx of low-skilled workers. They're not dumb. They know it means more competition and lowering of their bargaining power. And while the term xenophobia gets bandied about readily, you'd have to give the lowly-educated low-income demographic a break for being anxious. After all, we're living in a hollowing out economy where their jobs are more likely to be exported to 'Chindia' than those of the white collar demographic.
Similarly, the opposition to letting asylum seekers correlates with age as well. The older you are, the more likely you are to object - which, let's be fair, is probably an overhang of the White Australia Policy so that one probably deserves the 'xenophobia' label.
In any case it's clear that the ALP has got a real problem on its hands because the issue sits exactly at the point where it splits the traditional blue collar voters from the varsity educated progressives. If the ALP ran on the most left-leaning policy of letting all Asylum Seekers that arrive by boats into Australia, they might feel better about themselves but the numbers say they will lose. So you can see how this necessitates the PNG solution. You wonder how the white collar ALP voter feels about this (seeing that they were the most likely Gillard supporters) on the day the ballot is cast. ...or will they donkey vote? it's 3 more weeks to wrestle with their consciences because like it or not, donkey voting will bring in Tony Abbott.
2013/08/21
'The Numbers Station'
Grosse Pointe Blunt
It was late on a Sunday night, and it was either this film or the Tom Cruise movie 'Oblivion' on offer. 'Oblivion' is over 2 hours long, while 'The Numbers Station' is a mere 1 hour 29minutes. That sealed the deal. Afterwards I was able to watch episode 3 of 'Vikings' on SBS catchup TV.
It's a film that came and went with nary a bit of promotion in Australia. It's hard to be heard in the din and clamour for more and more comic book superhero movies, but sometimes a film is simply too small to get any purchase on the zeitgeist. It's a bit of a shame because it means that the thoughtful little films that made cinema truly wonderful are more likely to be missed, and then become infrequent.
This film isn't one of those deep and meaningful little films, it just seems to be a little pot-boiler made by indies.
What's Good About It
It's a tense little thriller, mostly set in one location. So it must have been relatively low budget. Considering the relatively low budget, it was a credible little action thriller. A bit of shooting, a bit of fighting, a bit of tense stand offs, and all the other trappings. It has one good trick in it.
What's Bad About It
The political landscape that affords the story is left deliberately blank in this film. This helps to make the conflict rather abstract, but at the same time robs us of the ability to empathise with the cause. Without a cause there's no rationalising away the feeling of "why are they doing all this any way?" It's the dead opposite of 'A Few Good Men' where Jack Nicholson gets up and tells the court why he's such a brutal bastard. This movie progresses on the assumption the cause doesn't matter but having watched it, I sort of disagree.
Maybe part of the problem of the creeping fascism engulfing the West is that it really does not allow itself to be opened up for inspection and dissection. It's a lurch to the brutish side of life without nary an explanation. Plenty of films touch upon this as a problem but this film sort of blithely slips by, thus making it a more or less empty exercise.
What's Interesting About It
There's a bit in it where John Cusack's character Emerson describes his psychological profile. It's surprisingly similar to Martin Q. Blank's profile, as told by Martin Q. Blank in 'Grosse Pointe Blank'. I was thinking that maybe this film was the sequel to 'Grosse Pointe Blank'. It might have been, had it had a modicum of humour. Instead it's decidedly bleak and largely mannered - The affectations of the genre are a bit on the nose instead being turned on its head.
An Odd Look
It's not every day you come across a film that has a truly odd look,but this film has it. It is strangely grainy and under exposed in parts and yet some of the colours like yellows and greens seem to be saturated. So much so that it's hard to believe it was shot on 35mm. If somebody said it was a RED camera or some kind of digital format like the one used on 'Drive', I'd believe it.
2013/08/20
'42'
Finally Got To See It!
Australia is the land of cricket and vegemite. It's hard to get to see the best baseball movie of the year. I finally got to see it, so here's what I've got you guys.
A lot has been written about the film and a lot of it is mostly true. Yes, Jackie Robinson was a fine upstanding citizen as well as a fine ballplayer to take on the institutional racism within Major League baseball, and this is that story.
My own interest in Branch Rickey comes from a superlative article written about Branch Rickey by Gerald Holland in David Halberstam's 'The Best American Sports Writing of the Century' which goes into the man quite a bit. Some of that material gets picked up in the film.
What's Good About It
Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson is a standout. Not only does he look quite like Robinson, he looks great swinging the bat. The script is concise given so much that is said is like the tip of the cultural iceberg. The directing is also understated and yet has a good deal of flash.
I don't know if this is going to stay in my head a memorable movie like say, 'Bull Durham', but some of the scenes involving Harrison Ford and Chadwick Boseman are really good. Especially the scene where Branch Rickey explains his motivation for trying to push for change.
The CGI Ebbets Field looks good, if a little too pristine. The seamlessness of the period production is great but you get the feeling that cars and objects are just to polished. Still, production design is wonderful and there's a lot of value on screen.
What's Bad About It
Parts of it are a little too earnest and a little too sentimental - Though it's a matter of degree. In some ways it's not a film with a whole lot of philosophical depth, and the topic it is tackling is something that we sort of hope is way behind us in the rear vision mirror.
What's Interesting About It
The performances in this film are a little uneven and I don't think that Harrison Ford does a good job of being Branch Rickey, but there's something intriguing about the guy who brings Jackie Robinson to the Major Leagues, and Ford does a great job of presenting us with a very moral man. The greatest lines for Rickey come in the first act of the film, namely the observation that he's a methodist and Robinson is a methodist, and the admonition that he needs a man with the guts not to fight.
In fact, it's a funny thing about Harrison Ford hat he plays men with moral spine very well, which may explain his long tenure as the big star of the 70s through to the early 90s. Branch Rickey in this film is such a man, and there's nothing swashbuckling about a geriatric cigar-waving General Manager of a baseball team, there are some delightful to-and-fro with the dialogue.
Still, in some ways it's a very bland movie with very little to dissect. It's a film that is totally self-contained with its own meaning and messages. The film is a monument to a very definite moment in time; it's almost an attempt to freeze dry it rigid. As such the narrative never has a moving quality.
The Echoes Of Racism
In historic hindsight, America is a very weird place with its past with racial segregation. It is probably as weird as Australia under the White Australia Policy and South Africa under apartheid. The considerable double-think and cognitive dissonance that accompanied it must have been pretty substantial. It's even weirder when you look at the language used to describe Jackie Robinson's moment going into Major League baseball as "breaking the color line". You'd think that he broke the land speed record.
The film goes into some depth with the quality of prejudice and invective hurled at Robinson. It's ugly and stomach-churning. You wonder where all that energy for hatred and mean-spirited-ness went. I'm pretty sure it got repressed into the subconscious in a way that is thoroughly disturbing.
I Feel Sorry For
Alan Tudyk. Alan Tudyk plays the mean-spirited, nasty, racist, name-calling, abuse- hollering bastard of a manager of the Phillies, Ben Chapman. He's cast against type and he does his best mid-American dingbat hillbilly but he'll always be Hoban 'Wash' Washburn to me, and it just didn't sit right for me to be watching him go on and on with the 'n word'. He's a brave guy for taking on the role.
The Phillies and Pirates come in for a bit of stick - Phillies, and Philadelphia in general for being very resistant to accepting the Dodgers with Jackie Robinson. The Pirates get tick for being, well, from Pittsburgh, which is the running gag in the film.
The Number 42
Of course, the number 42 is also the answer Deepthought gives us as the meaning of life universe and everything - after which they must go and figure out the question. The number 42 just keeps accruing more meaning in the cultural space, with Jackie Robinson as well as this movie about Jackie Robinson; Mariano Rivera is the last Major League Player to be wearing 42, and the series finale of 'Buzz Lightyear Star Command; is '42'; not to mention the band Level 42.
I don't know what all this means, but the numbers 41 and 43 do not have as many references.
Australia is the land of cricket and vegemite. It's hard to get to see the best baseball movie of the year. I finally got to see it, so here's what I've got you guys.
A lot has been written about the film and a lot of it is mostly true. Yes, Jackie Robinson was a fine upstanding citizen as well as a fine ballplayer to take on the institutional racism within Major League baseball, and this is that story.
My own interest in Branch Rickey comes from a superlative article written about Branch Rickey by Gerald Holland in David Halberstam's 'The Best American Sports Writing of the Century' which goes into the man quite a bit. Some of that material gets picked up in the film.
What's Good About It
Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson is a standout. Not only does he look quite like Robinson, he looks great swinging the bat. The script is concise given so much that is said is like the tip of the cultural iceberg. The directing is also understated and yet has a good deal of flash.
I don't know if this is going to stay in my head a memorable movie like say, 'Bull Durham', but some of the scenes involving Harrison Ford and Chadwick Boseman are really good. Especially the scene where Branch Rickey explains his motivation for trying to push for change.
The CGI Ebbets Field looks good, if a little too pristine. The seamlessness of the period production is great but you get the feeling that cars and objects are just to polished. Still, production design is wonderful and there's a lot of value on screen.
What's Bad About It
Parts of it are a little too earnest and a little too sentimental - Though it's a matter of degree. In some ways it's not a film with a whole lot of philosophical depth, and the topic it is tackling is something that we sort of hope is way behind us in the rear vision mirror.
What's Interesting About It
The performances in this film are a little uneven and I don't think that Harrison Ford does a good job of being Branch Rickey, but there's something intriguing about the guy who brings Jackie Robinson to the Major Leagues, and Ford does a great job of presenting us with a very moral man. The greatest lines for Rickey come in the first act of the film, namely the observation that he's a methodist and Robinson is a methodist, and the admonition that he needs a man with the guts not to fight.
In fact, it's a funny thing about Harrison Ford hat he plays men with moral spine very well, which may explain his long tenure as the big star of the 70s through to the early 90s. Branch Rickey in this film is such a man, and there's nothing swashbuckling about a geriatric cigar-waving General Manager of a baseball team, there are some delightful to-and-fro with the dialogue.
Still, in some ways it's a very bland movie with very little to dissect. It's a film that is totally self-contained with its own meaning and messages. The film is a monument to a very definite moment in time; it's almost an attempt to freeze dry it rigid. As such the narrative never has a moving quality.
The Echoes Of Racism
In historic hindsight, America is a very weird place with its past with racial segregation. It is probably as weird as Australia under the White Australia Policy and South Africa under apartheid. The considerable double-think and cognitive dissonance that accompanied it must have been pretty substantial. It's even weirder when you look at the language used to describe Jackie Robinson's moment going into Major League baseball as "breaking the color line". You'd think that he broke the land speed record.
The film goes into some depth with the quality of prejudice and invective hurled at Robinson. It's ugly and stomach-churning. You wonder where all that energy for hatred and mean-spirited-ness went. I'm pretty sure it got repressed into the subconscious in a way that is thoroughly disturbing.
I Feel Sorry For
Alan Tudyk. Alan Tudyk plays the mean-spirited, nasty, racist, name-calling, abuse- hollering bastard of a manager of the Phillies, Ben Chapman. He's cast against type and he does his best mid-American dingbat hillbilly but he'll always be Hoban 'Wash' Washburn to me, and it just didn't sit right for me to be watching him go on and on with the 'n word'. He's a brave guy for taking on the role.
The Phillies and Pirates come in for a bit of stick - Phillies, and Philadelphia in general for being very resistant to accepting the Dodgers with Jackie Robinson. The Pirates get tick for being, well, from Pittsburgh, which is the running gag in the film.
The Number 42
Of course, the number 42 is also the answer Deepthought gives us as the meaning of life universe and everything - after which they must go and figure out the question. The number 42 just keeps accruing more meaning in the cultural space, with Jackie Robinson as well as this movie about Jackie Robinson; Mariano Rivera is the last Major League Player to be wearing 42, and the series finale of 'Buzz Lightyear Star Command; is '42'; not to mention the band Level 42.
I don't know what all this means, but the numbers 41 and 43 do not have as many references.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)