Jon Stewart’s Defining Moment.

March 6th, 2009 14 comments or # link to posted by david

Sometimes truth is no stranger to fiction. America’s only serious news comes from a comedy channel.

US network and cable news are an embarrassment, a children’s view of the world based upon geographical and historical ignorance delivered by people who look like Long Island realtors and whose opinions should be deemed equally suspect.

In print form, U.S. newspapers make up for relatively poor coverage of world news with advanced level business news – this is capital C Capital-ism after all. However, the same sophistication does not apply to cable business news, and this is best exemplified by CNBC.

CNBC covers the industry that makes money, the industry that has recently lost 30% of the notional moolah created from everything humans have made, planet-wide, since Tutankhamun. It is watched by Wall street professionals from large screens which hang over trading floors, and during the collapse of Lehman, the employees were looking at CNBC to see what was happening in their own building. In other words, it is not just a consumer product but one used by the billionaire pros who can afford anything. Yet it looks and feels like a cheap toy.

The fact that this financial channel of record looks like a low-rent hybrid of a shopping channel and pro-wrestling match, with ads for gold coin collections and get rich quick books and set designs comprised of embossed metallic, swooshing titles and plasticky red white and blue, certainly does not spell money. And yet I am gripped by it.

For three years I have been going to the gym across the street from the stock exchange and pumped or, more accurately, schlepped iron in front of CNBC. I have nothing to do with manipulating money for a living, I have little of it and don’t understand how it works, but am overwhelmed by a morbid obsession with cable financial news while working out. It fires me up with primeval anger and makes my veins bulge like a steroid addled bodybuilder.

Sadly, I was in London, when the most egregious CNBC moment took place and the one that Jon Stewart takes CNBC to task over: Rick Santelli’s Mercantile Exchange uprising – at the least that was how it was pumped up on Drudge.

The Rick Santelli uprising comprised a televised football coach style rant. Santelli complained that home owners were being bailed out, and this was yelled from the floor of the Chicago Mecantile New York Stock Exchange, where his fellow libertarians, presumably working for financial institutions bailed out by tax payers, rallied round, failing to see the pitiful hypocrisy of it all.

London was a strange place to watch this, because there the libertarianism of ‘don’t let the government bail out the people’ would have been crushed, despite the fact that Britain’s endemic culture of home equity greed outstripped the worst avarice of the financiers. In the UK, the prevailing mood on TV was unanimously, ‘hang the bankers, don’t screw the home owners’.

I put this difference down to culture, but Jon Stewart has proven me wrong by bookending a relentless series of clips of CNBC editorial failure with the Rick Santelli uprising and an interview with the world’s second best conman, the sweaty, pie-faced, cricket playing Texan, Allen Stanford. It is a withering attack on CNBC but possibly more than that.

In fairness to CNBC, three of the clips concern reporting of other people’s mistakes, for example one shows Merril Lynch saying they were adequately capitalized not CNBC, and one shouldn’t shoot the messenger. But in the grand scheme of things both the originator and the messenger were at fault and there is evidence to prove it.

The degree of this financial implosion makes the once epic ambitions of Bonfire of the Vanities seem inadequate, yet to my mind the scale of the tragedy has ironically been best captured, to date, by a ten minute comedy piece.

Watch it in its entirety and see what Stewart has to say about Allen Stanford at the end. A must see.

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Kakabet

March 3rd, 2009 9 comments or # link to posted by david

Gelitin are Smashing Telly’s favorite pretentious artists because whatever they do is both stupid and remarkably thorough. Here we have a alphabet of shitted out letters in a gallery in Zurich.

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Naked City

March 2nd, 2009 3 comments or # link to posted by david

Hunter Gatherer has a great post about the classic 1948 film noir, Naked City, and the subsequent TV series which ran between 1958-1963, complete with a few choice clips.

Most so-called New York TV series were shot in studios. Friends, for example, was filmed in LA. In most episodes the only genuine NY image is of the front door in the West Village, and even this spells fake as an implausibly expensive location for its fictional occupants. Naked City is special because, befitting its title, it was filmed in large part, on location in New York and strips Manhattan bare to reveal an architecture that was far more coherent than today’s mixture of glass and steel modernism and pre-war masonry gothic.

This great opening shot from the movie shows how much bigger the downtown skyscraper cluster was relative to midtown, before the corporate center of gravity shifted. The financial district is dominated by the hypodermic needle like tower of what is now a focus of news half a century later, as the HQ of AIG with its injections of tax payer bail-out cash, while midtown looks relatively spartan revealing the since hidden laminated shards of the side facade of the Rockefeller Center.

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The Ascent of Money

March 2nd, 2009 comment or # link to posted by david

When three bodies spin around each other, their movements can be approximated if there is a dominant one such as is the case with the Sun, the Earth and Mars. If this status quo is disrupted, no super-computer can accurately predict the movement of three spheres revolving around each other under a simple force like gravity, a fact, whose implications, few people seem to register.

The economy has many more than three moving parts and the status quo has been disrupted, becoming temporarily unpredictable. No esoteric hedge fund model on earth will guarantee consistent short term gain until the system settles down, and you do not need to know anything about economics to be certain of this. It doesn’t make sense to look at wobbles, only past trajectories.

Although historians and academics as often perceived as quixotic theorists who are naive to the machinations of the real world, this is a period when the only reference point is the long term, where the strategists trump the tacticians and where short term speculation is largely pointless even if there are colossal opportunities based upon secular trends, because there is proven unpredictability coupled with massive social and political dangers.

This is a period when the people that smoke pipes and wear cardigans, draw modest salaries that are guaranteed for life and reside in collegiate ivory towers are suddenly in a relatively envious position and get listened to, perhaps for no other reason that people are fickle and don’t listen to ‘losers’.

Nevertheless, they should be the ones listened to for a bit. You shouldn’t be reading the newspaper every day (they won’t be around for much longer anyway), or watching the stomach churning lurches in the stock market, perhaps you shouldn’t even be looking at the weekly snapshot of the Economist magazine, but you probably should be reading the canny, non-hysterical analysis of someone like Niall Ferguson.

We’ve previously linked to clips of Harvard historian, Niall Ferguson’s excellent series to accompany his latest book, ‘The Ascent of Money’, which will sell much more owing to the descent of the latter. PBS have now put the whole series online.

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Koyaanisqatsi

February 28th, 2009 3 comments or # link to posted by david

When I was working for the architect, Norman Foster he came into the office after having seen Koyaanisqatsi and raved about it. Every sycophant, like myself, promptly went out and saw it.

In many ways its an architects film, with architect music by Philip Glass, repetitive and jerky like a Rotring penned plan. But there’s something that doesn’t quite fit, like the new age Hopi name and some of the more cliched imagery that looks like its from a stock library. These make it a flawed masterpiece but one which is a must see, nevertheless.

(Hulu, US only)

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