You know, kids were very different then. They didn’t have their heads filled with all this Cartesian dualism
December 28, 2012 § Leave a comment
Why on earth would Washington deliberately throw the US into yet another recession when we haven’t even recovered from the last one? They are doing so because of the so called long-term costs of the debt. They (both the Democrats and Republicans, albeit to different degrees) believe that unless we reduce the debt and deficit now, we will pay a price in the years to come, a price that outweighs the higher unemployment their actions will cause today. They are, however, dead wrong. Not only are their fears either completely unfounded or irrelevant given current circumstances, but trying to cut the deficit now would actually leave us in a situation where we would need an even larger one to extricate ourselves from the deep economic slump it will create.
To explain this, let me briefly review the long-run costs typically used to support the current efforts at deficit/debt reduction and show how each is much ado about nothing:
1. Higher debt levels raise the possibility of US default
Let’s get this one off the table right away. The US cannot possibly be forced to default on debt denominated in its own currency. This is a cold, hard fact, not a theory or conjecture. This should not be any part of the discussion whatsoever.
2. Debt burdens future generations
Not true. Government debt is a private sector asset and government deficits create private sector surpluses. Think about it this way: if there were only two people in the economy and one spent more than she earned, giving her a deficit, what must be true about the other? He must have earned more than he spent and thus has a surplus. Now replace “she” with “federal government” and “he” with “private sector” and you’ll see. Nor is there a day of reckoning when federal government debt must be reduced to zero. Thus, it will NOT be necessary to tax future generations in order to finance today’s deficit. Reducing the budget deficit reduces the private sector surplus and reducing debt destroys private sector assets.
3. Debt makes us slaves to foreign interests
First, see point 1. We cannot be forced to default. Second, when a country has net debt with respect to another nation, it’s because of a trade deficit not a budget deficit. Note further that if China does not buy our financial assets, they will no longer have a trade surplus because they will not have provided the credit necessary for us to buy more than we sold. It is therefore in their best interests to do so. And, to reiterate, debt to foreign nations has nothing to do with the budget deficit. Lowering the latter will not lower the former. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: liluna
yes, we are possible to improvise a composed piece even if everything is looking fixed there
December 27, 2012 § Leave a comment
It is not often that the contradictions of Japan’s press club system are so nakedly exposed. But that’s the case of a recently shot video clip, in which two journalists clash in a parking lot, alternatively trading insults and arguing over the ethics of their trade.
Both cover the regular Friday night antinuclear protests outside the Prime Minister’s Residence in Tokyo. The difference is that Toshiyuki Saga can shoot video from his workplace in the Diet Press Club building just across the road, while freelance reporter Yu Terasawa is barred from even entering the building because he’s not a press club member. He can only shoot the scenes from outside.
On Oct. 13, he took his grievance to the site, demanding to be let in. “You do not have the right to block our right to report because this building is paid for by public taxes,” he says in the video. “A manager has the right to take care of the building,” retorts Saga, a former Kyodo reporter who oversees the press club. “You don’t have the right to report here.” Saga is then seen physically blocking entrance to the building.
The dispute is now the basis of the latest legal challenge to Japan’s reporting system. Terasawa, along with fellow freelancers Michiyoshi Hatakeyama and Yuichi Sato, filed a claim to the Tokyo Regional Court on Oct. 31, demanding they be allowed inside the Diet Press Club. Their deposition says the building housing the Club is the perfect vantage point for filming the protests, but that they have been barred from entering it since June.
Their claim is backed by journalism watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which calls the obstruction “arbitrary and illegal,” and another example of the press clubs’ “systematic contempt” for an “entire part of the reporting community.” The watchdog predicts that the “court will not provide legal cover for obstruction of access, especially given that the request for legal action comes from journalists themselves.”
That may be an optimistic assessment. Terasawa lost all four of his previous legal challenges, and he doesn’t really expect to win this one either. “The press club system has been going for 120 years, so we don’t think the court will overturn it in one sweep,” he told No.1 Shimbun.
“The courts don’t even recognize the right to freedom of the press, so that makes it more difficult to argue that this system is antiquated. But these lawsuits are expensive and time-consuming for everyone, so the aim is to put pressure on the system and change the attitude of all concerned.” read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Tania Shcheglova
Free your mind of the idea of deserving, of the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think
December 26, 2012 § Leave a comment
Okay. This will seem a bit random. However, after an overly indulgent Christmas meal I started thinking about the parallels between commodity inventories and human fat inventories.
So, im starting to think of obesity as a contango position.
In times of scarcity hoarding food surpluses internally, where they could no longer perish (or be stolen), made a lot of sense.
Thus being fat was a reflection of one’s wealth and prosperity. A desirable quality.
Think Henry VIII etc.
Of course now that we have most of our food demands met on an immediate and “on demand” basis, those fat inventories begin to look silly. In fact they become a burden.
Running minimal fat inventories is most desirable.
Thin is beautiful.
And this relates to a food availability forward curve. For as long as food is expected to be plentiful, it will pay to run your body in backwardation mode. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Scott Schuman
The dancers were circling rapidly with athletic elation, talking the way people talk when they are working. Their intelligences floated and flew above the waves of the valse, but with frequent drenchings as it were, and cessations
December 25, 2012 § Leave a comment
This feate cannot be performed at every time, but only in Winter, and at such times as snow may be had, and he that will shew it must have in readinesse an handfull of salt. The time serving, and the party provided, let him call for a joynt-stoole, a quart pot, a handfull of snow, a little water; and a short staffe or sticke. First let him poure a little water upon the top of the stoole, and upon it let him hold the pot fast with his left hand, and take the short sticke in his right, and therewith churne the snow and salt in the pot, as if one should churne for butter, and in halfe a quarter of an houre the pot will freeze so hard to the stoole, that you can scarcely with both hands pull it off from the stoole: there’s a naturall reason may be given for this, which he that is a Scholler need not be told, and for a common Jugler I would not have so wise as to know, therefore I omit it. read more
ART: [unattributed]
He wasn’t listening. That was the worst of people like that; they were a monologue – killers are like the army, dull and dangerous simultaneously
December 24, 2012 § Leave a comment
Late one Friday evening, my phone played the codec-out sound from Metal Gear Solid, and an email arrived. My stolen laptop had been taken online, and now — like a resourceful kidnap victim — it was phoning home, unknown to its captor. The laptop was beaming back all the information needed to rescue it. And so began one of the strangest episodes so far of my life with technology.
The laptop had been stolen the previous day. I was working in one of the non-public Reading Rooms of the British Library in London. As usual, I left the laptop at my desk when I went to lunch. But this time, when I got back to my desk, it was empty. Damn and blast. CCTV didn’t identify the malefactor, so I went home and changed all my internet-service passwords. I hadn’t lost any work (thanks to Dropbox), but the machine wasn’t insured, and it still felt like a violation — not just of my own distributed, semi-cyborg self, but of the Library as well.
And this wasn’t just any laptop; it was my laptop. It’s not uncommon for us to see personalities in objects, and many people develop a sentimental attachment to their tools. A cook might speak fondly of a particular battered pot, and reminisce about the pungent stews of goats’ feet or bleeding-edge foams made in it; well, this was the Macbook Air on which I’d angrily hammered out my new book, as well as writing tens of thousands of words of other literary and cultural spleen. We’d been through a lot together. Luckily, nine months ago, I had installed some eldritch security software, the open-source Prey. And that’s how, the evening after its abduction, my laptop began calling for help.
I clicked on the link. The Macbook had taken a photograph with its webcam, unknown to the person using it. I saw a young man in an ordinary-looking apartment, shot from a low angle (he was probably using it on his lap) and smiling to someone offscreen. My laptop also told me that he had bypassed my login and created a new user account. A screenshot showed that he was running Apple Software Update. (You don’t want out-of-date system software running on your stolen laptop. That would just be embarrassing.) Triangulating local wifi signals, the laptop reported a rough location on a Google map: a street in Stratford, east London. It told me its router’s IP address, and the name of the wifi network it was connected to. “Friendz.” That just added insult to injury. These clowns nick my laptop, and call their home network “Friendz”? With a Z? Seriously? I might have had some respect for them as criminals if they had called it “Raffles”. Or even “Hamburglar”.
To receive this report was both amazing and deeply odd. Thanks to Prey’s stealth technology, I was now engaged in an amateur police surveillance action, a voyeuristic keyhole-peeping. I forwarded the information to the law-enforcement professionals, the Metropolitan Police, but I couldn’t shake another weird feeling. I knew it was just a machine running instructions, but it felt as though my computer was sentient, and pleading in a faint but very precise voice to be liberated. It was, I decided, uncanny. More than that, it was a uniquely modern species of the uncanny that in Freud’s day simply wasn’t possible: spying in near-real-time on a thief, by means of the stolen object itself, which had, or so it seemed, come to life. Call it the cyber-uncanny. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Ron Galella
Lately I’ve become interested in the passage of time within a photograph
December 21, 2012 § Leave a comment
The largest banks have become too big to prosecute because of the impact criminal charges would have on confidence in them, Britain’s most senior bank regulator has admitted.
In a variant of the “too big to fail” problem, Andrew Bailey, chief executive designate of the Prudential Regulation Authority, said bringing a legal action against a major financial institution raised “very difficult questions”.
Mr Bailey told The Daily Telegraph that some banks had grown too large to prosecute. “It would be a very destabilising issue. It’s another version of too important to fail,” he said,
“Because of the confidence issue with banks, a major criminal indictment, which we haven’t seen and I’m not saying we are going to see… this is not an ordinary criminal indictment,” he said.
His comments come days after HSBC’s record $1.9bn (£1.2bn) settlement with the US authorities over money-laundering linked to drug-trafficking. US assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer said of the decision not to prosecute: “In this day and age we have to evaluate that innocent people will face very big consequences if you make a decision.” read more
ART [detail]: Alison Watt
The best way to rob a bank is to own one
December 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
“You da One” is a “sexy” video. I am employing scare quotes, because I have roughly as much erotic response to Rihanna as I do to, say, a Styrofoam cup or a slab of Formica. Rihanna’s private dancer show in “You da One,” however, got me to thinking of a video that had a pretty seismic effect on my young libido, released as it was when I was thirteen years old: The Breeders’ “Divine Hammer”.
The video is credited to Kim Gordon, that hip Zelig Spike Jonze, and Richard Kern—and I am willing to bet that the black-and-white segments in which Kim Deal is bending and stretching on a palette for the delectation of a camera perched overhead are the work of Kern. (There is another version of the video, hosted on YouTube by Breeders’ label 4AD, which replaces these segments with interpolations of the band playing. Needless to say, it is not nearly so interesting.)
Kern was one of those down-and-out Manhattan decadents who, along with Lydia Lunch and Nick Zedd, banded together under the rubric of “Cinema of Transgression” in the early ‘80s, all interested in exploring the outer limits of deviant sexuality. Watching Kern and Zedd’s Thrust in Me, in which Zedd throat-fucks his own cross-dressed doppelganger, was certainly a revelation of sorts to my adolescent self when it was rented from Alexandria, Virginia’s late, lamented Video Vault.
What was so enrapturing about the “Divine Hammer” video? What made it hot in a way that, say, MTV’s “The Grind” most assuredly was not? I would venture to guess that it was something to do with a bracing “realness.” Kim Deal looked like a girl you would see around—in fact, she’s from outside Dayton, Ohio, 40 miles as the crow flies from where I grew up—and there is something incredibly intimate and playful in her limbering up, as though she’s getting ready to take somebody—Please, please me!—to the mat.
The simulation of privileged intimacy in Kern’s bedroom shoots, a world away from music-video choreography and studio gloss, would in time combine with the aesthetic of porno from the shot-on-the-fly 8mm smoker era. The result was a popularized, deliberately-awkward amateur-smut aesthetic whose development can be traced through Mark Romanek’s 1997 video for Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” Vincent Gallo’s 1997 Buffalo ’66 (and the pederastic, paneled ’70s rec-room ads by Gallo’s sometime-employer, Calvin Klein), right up through to the adverts by American Apparel that grace the back cover of Vice Magazine, in which Kern’s pictures regularly appear today, supplemented by affiliated online television network VBS.tv’s “Shot By Kern” featurettes. The past decade has seen a concurrent boom in demographic-targeting alt-porn; while grand-dad was content to glance over his centerfold’s Turn-Offs, the contemporary hip consumer wants to know that the young lady whom he or she is about to watch have anal sex is a fan of Alkaline Trio, or, in the case of Sasha Grey—photographed by Kern!—is a card-carrying Existentialist. This is something like the erotic equivalent of conscientious farm-to-table dining, and may even constitute an ethical advancement of some sort. I have no idea. read more
STILL: Ann Hirsch
A man who looked like he might know how Sonny Rollins was supposed to sound waited for the train with his hands over his ears
December 19, 2012 § Leave a comment
Japanese government bond (JGB) yields have stayed exceptionally low since the mid-1990s, as can be seen in Figure 25. Contrary to the conventional wisdom — for example, the International Monetary Fund, credit rating agencies and so forth — Japanese government bond yields have stayed low even as the country’s fiscal deficits remained elevated and the government’s net debt ratio rose. The reasons are simple: 1) Japan’s debt is issued in its own currency, 2) the Bank of Japan can control government bond yields though its balance sheet and communication tools, and 3) the demand for government debt remains strong, as the country’s domestic private financial institutions hold the bulk of it.
The fear that bond market vigilantes or increased levels of government debt would cause Japanese government bonds to sell off suddenly and yields to spike sharply have proven to be spurious. In countries with sovereign currencies such as Japan, changes in long-term interest rates are fairly tightly correlated with changes in short-term interest rates; thus, long-term interest rates generally stay low when short-term interest rates are low.
Moreover, when observed core inflation and inflationary expectations are low, both short-term and long-term interest rates tend to stay low. Long-term interest rates are also driven by persistence, implying that long-term interest rates tend to stay low once they become low and stay high once they turn high. In sum, it would take a major shift in economic prospects to inspire a turnaround in long-term interest rates.
International credit rating agencies such as Moody’s have downgraded Japan’s government debt many times since the late 1990s (see Figure 26) based on the view that increased ratios of government deficits and debt to GDP entail increased credit risk. However, the evolution of Japanese government bond yields reveals that the downgrades of Japan’s sovereign ratings by Moody’s and other credit rating agencies have had no effect on yields.
The rating agencies seem unwilling to acknowledge that the credit risk profile of a government that issues debt in its own currency — such as Japan and the U.S. federal government — is very different from the credit risk profile of a government that issues debt in a currency that it does not control — such as the peripheral countries of the euro zone and U.S. state and local governments. Importantly, a central bank issuing bonds in its own currency can keep yields low for as long as it deems appropriate.
The Bank of Japan can and does control — and, indeed, may even target — Japanese government bond yields as appropriate through its overnight policy rates and other balance sheet tools, including large-scale asset purchases. Moreover, given its ability to issue its own currency, the government of Japan retains the ability to always service its yen-denominated debts barring some extremely low-probability but high-impact catastrophe.
Following Woodford (2001), as cited in Tcherneva (2010), it can be stated that for any sovereign government that issues debts in its own currency, such as Japan, its debt is merely a promise to deliver more of its own liabilities in the future. That is to say, a Japanese government bond is simply a promise to pay yen — which are merely additional government liabilities that happen to be non-interest bearing — at various future dates. It could perhaps be argued that a higher ratio of public debt to nominal GDP might under certain circumstances lead to inflation and a depreciation of the Japanese yen, but there are no operational barriers to prevent the government of Japan from servicing its debt. As such, Japanese authorities are theoretically free from obsessing about fiscal consolidation, and the country’s fiscal policy should focus on promoting public well-being and economic prosperity. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Bernhard Handick
Inability to tolerate empty space limits the amount of space available
December 18, 2012 § Leave a comment
You could say that The Master picks up where There Will Be Blood leaves off. By the Forties, long after the great religious revivals and reforms, after the land has been tamed and settled, the railroads and cities built, the gold mined, the oceans of oil tapped and the fortunes of the Carnegies and Dohenys and Vanderbilts made and ensconced in legend, a mounting standardization, desperation, and rancidness has set in, and another war has left men shattered. The only conceivable frontier is within: the liberation of the self from routines, possessions, and habits of mind, whether they’ve been inculcated by trauma or affluence.
From a purely movie history standpoint, Anderson begins in the land of film noir. We are placed side by side with the kind of troubled vet who populated those films; or, to put it more accurately, with the full-blown realization of what could only be hinted at with William Bendix’s Buzz in The Blue Dahlia or George Cooper’s Mitch in Crossfire, as if their largely unseen but implied actual existences were being opened up to the light of day, one painful section at a time. Freddie exists not in the tightly boxed-in compositions and poetically approximate pulp fictions of The Dark Corner or The Killers but in a series of grand ellipses, isolated stretches of behavior and activity made possible by the careful nurturing, cultivation, and harvesting of the unpredictable, in a gloriously breathable and expansive film image which stands in stark contrast to what we have grown used to seeing on movie screens over the past five years. Anderson remains profoundly inspired by the Seventies, by Altman, Malick, the best of Ashby, and the Polanski of Chinatown, but reverence has given way to authority. Those movies are no longer merely evoked, but understood by those who know them as components of what has become this artist’s proper language.
As Freddie tries and fails to fit in with his fellow sailors (in imagery that immediately recalls The Thin Red Line but reverberates with more unsettling overtones), plies his newly learned trade of department-store portrait photographer, seduces his co-worker, toils as a migrant laborer, and blends his own special alcoholic potions (the most intriguing of which involves paint thinner filtered through a loaf of bread), the question arises: what will become of this man who seems destined to fall through the cracks? By the time he sneaks aboard Dodd’s “borrowed” yacht, we might find ourselves expecting an epic of regeneration. But when Dodd and Freddie meet, we understand that something else is at work: namely, the sparking of a tension, both specific to these characters and general to the world they inhabit, that is finally unresolvable. This is not Freud and the Wolf-Man. This is more like Strasberg and Marilyn Monroe.
Freddie is not so much played as nuzzled, and jerked into being by Joaquin Phoenix. I’m Still Here aside, Phoenix’s Freddie seems like genuinely damaged goods. He and his director feel their way into this man-in-a-bind from the inside out, and they establish his estrangement from others in those opening scenes through awkward smiles and out-of-sync body language alone. A lot is made of Phoenix’s wiry physique and misshapen upper lip, which seems to direct the tilt of his head up and away from whoever he happens to be talking to through a clenched mouth as he feigns an air of skepticism which covers an urge to run. He handles objects with the fragile tentativeness of a child, and his gait is so furiously deliberate and imbalanced that he seems to be avoiding spastic convulsions. This is a performance with a difference, the behavioral creation of an actor and a director with a fierce devotion to the ragged, the unkempt, the authorless. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Gustav Willeit
The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event
December 17, 2012 § Leave a comment
In this programme our focus is on the long, thin bridge tunnel that crosses the Øresund between Copenhagen and southern Sweden, a link that connects two nations but also reveals their differences. listen
ART: Walter Sickert
my nerves are bad to-night 