A Quick One While I'm Still Here

On The Move

It's been a while, partly because I've been looking to move. Sydney's rental situation is a bit apeshit to put it kindly so we decided to go buy something inexpensive instead, and that has turned into an epic journey through the underbelly of Sydney Real Estate.  

After months of looking and negotiating and things falling through and looking again and finding out terrible things, and pulling out of deals and all kinds of other weird misadventures, we're finally moving next weekend. The months-long process has had me thinking about the plight of people who can't secure a home in Australia. the back of the envelope numbers are a little nuts. Australis is one of the least densely populated places on the planet and yet our real estate value is sky high. It makes no sense for this country to be in a housing crisis, but we are. Interspersed in the news items about how some regular people with 100k p.a. jobs are finding it hard to rent, are the stories of overseas money laundering through real estate, and you get the picture that the market has been blown up by global interest in Australian real estate which has priced out the locals.

It's getting to be a world where you can't take for granted that you have a place to live, even in the first world. I know I lucked out in the circumstance stakes that I could opt to buy instead of rent, but I am struck by how dire the news is every day when it comes to housing in this country. It's not right, it's not who we are, and yet there doesn't seem to be a cogent political response. 

Anyway, I'm sure I'll blog more when I get the move done and we've settled in to the new place. There's a lot to be said, so I'll be saying them!

The New New Album

Seasons Greetings

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

God I miss iCompositions.

Don't miss the fun.

What You've Got

Falling In Love Too Late 

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

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

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

Go join the fun.

Grieving Stages

Losing Friends To Time

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

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

Over on Spotify.

Is Our Galaxy In A Bubble?

Doom-scrolling In A Pandemic 

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

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

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

You've been warned!

Old Style Rockets

Going Back to the Moon

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

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

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

Arguing Semantics

The Weirdness of Eastern Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dinosaur Remains On The Moon

Guitar Synths

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

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

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

 

The Patient

Seems Over Now

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

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

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

Come join the fun.

Is China Working At All?

Let's Talk China For A (Minsky) Moment

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

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

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

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

Not Your Daddy's China Now

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

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

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

Back To The Future?

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

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

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

It does make you wonder.

Social Media Turned Us Into Rats

Hungry Rats at That

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

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

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

 

Thor: Love and Thunder

The Haters Are Loud

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

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

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

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

What's Good About It

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

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

What's Bad About It

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

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

What's Interesting About It

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

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

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

Beyond Trauma

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

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

Faith in Gods

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

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

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

Faith of Gods

And this leads us to the very thought provoking climax.

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

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

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

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

Mimesis

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

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

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

The Fractured Family

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

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

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

Beyond The Twilight of the Gods

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

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

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

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

The Royal Demise

 RIP Betts

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

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

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

The Era As It Will Be Remembered

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

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

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

All Hail King Chucky III, God Save the King

This is going to be Child's Play. 

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

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

How I Became An Investor

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Speculative Impulse

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

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

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

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

Where Are We Now?

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

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

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

Property Bubble Blues

Property And Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I'll write more on this later.