Kakabet
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.
Naked City
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.
The Ascent of Money
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
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)
When the Boat Comes In
Of all of Britain’s accents, Newcastle’s is the most unusual in almost every way, it is said that it is influenced by the cross fertilization of fishermen from the North East coast of England and from Norway, who shared the same waters and occasionally ended up in each others’ ports after storms. This classic fishing song illustrates the point perfectly and is also an obscure but sublime piece of nostalgia for the UK in the mid 70s having been used as the intro for a BBC program of the same name.
CNBC – House of Cards
The first batch of documentaries featuring analysis of the financial meltdown has started to appear on TV screens. Following Frontline, here is CNBC’s take, by David Faber.
Commentary cannot keep up with events, however, and as the crisis spreads globally and moves into the political unrest phase, these documentaries may eventually seem almost quaint by comparison with what is surely coming.
(Hulu video, available in US only)
Charles and Ray Eames: A Communication Primer
The Eames’ showed that films could be approached as a design exercise and as such were the forerunners to much of today’s information design, which has had a resurgence as a result of the Web. Their best known piece is Powers of Ten, but this is another little beauty.
The film is nicely self-referential since it deals with Shannon’s information theory. However, the astounding thing is that the Eames’ were savvy about Shannon’s groundbreaking work which was published only 5 years before. To put this in context, its as if Frank Lloyd Wright had written a book about Einstein’s Special Relativity in 1910, when it wasn’t fully endorsed by the physics community.
Via Kottke Via Infosthetics
Frontline: Inside the Meltdown
Frontline is the only documentary series on American television where the information density doesn’t leave you feeling you are watching something in slow motion. They don’t disappoint with this solid but uninspired piece on last October’s crash. It would be unfair to ask for more, however, so soon after the event, and this is a subject that will eventually require something truly epic in scope to capture. Even Bonfire of the Vanities seems tame in comparison with the magnitude of current events.
Nice to see that highbrow thinkers such as John Cassidy and Paul Krugman were core interviewees. Its also refreshing to see an officially endorsed embed, and one that works across countries, unlike the BBC iPlayer or Hulu. I’m putting this in the Smashing List.
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Breaking the American Oligarchs
External Video link – Bill Moyers Interviews Simon Johnson
America likes democracy and i’m quite fond of it too. But a portion of America’s interests are controlled by the equivalent of Oligarchs – the heads of financial corporations. This used to be a belief held only by idiots, but its now a reasonable way of looking at things, given the natural coagulation of banks into a too-big-to-fail sticky mess.
Bank heads like BofA’s Ken Lewis are not bad people per se, I like them more than politicians, but they are part of a web of interest with natural loyalty to give proceeds to the worker (bank executives) rather than the owner (taxpayer), they are communists, if you like. As a result, money will flow into these institutions, which will eventually return large profits benefiting workers with options and current losses will be picked up by future taxpayers.
This is Simon Johnson’s, former chief economist of the IMF, premise. His proposed solution is one that I’ve noticed has been gaining traction lately, to break up the big banks into smaller ones. This seems so obviously a good way to flush out bad assets, remove undue political influence and maintain what is good about free markets that I cannot see a downside. And politically you could even persuade the French left of something like this: instead of bad=capitalism, good=privatization think bad=giant bank, good=family boulangerie. In America, selling this to voters would be trivial: would you rather be in a Rock and Roll band (small private enterprise) or behind a desk at the DMV (public state bank)?
The problem is that nobody in elected government dares to suggest it, which does look awful like an Oligarchy.
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Goodbye Dubai
Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.
The opening shot of this clip shows 200 skyscrapers that were built in the last 5 years. It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolfe or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.
Dubai is a place for the shallow and fickle. Tabloid celebrities and worn out sports stars are sponsored by swollen faced, botox injected, perma-tanned European property developers to encourage the type of people who are impressed by fame itself, rather than what originated it, to inhabit pastiche Mediterranean villas on fake islands. Its a grotesquely leveraged version of time-share where people are sold a life in the same way as being peddled a set of steak knives. Funny shaped towers smatter empty neighborhoods, based on designs with unsubtle, eye-catching envelopes but bland floor plans and churned out by the dozen by anonymous minions in brand name architects offices and signed by the boss, unseen, as they fly through the door. This architecture, a three dimensional solidified version of a synthesized musical jingle, consists of ever more preposterous gimmickry – an underwater, revolving, white leather fuck pad or a marina skyscraper with a product placement name that would normally only appeal to teenage boys, such as the preposterous Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower.
But if there is one problem with the shallow and the fickle, its that they are shallow and fickle, they won’t put down deep roots and they won’t remain loyal to Dubai. The people who appear in People magazine need to be told what is cool by Wallpaper magazine who in turn will discover something after the hipsters have moved on. The problem is that Dubai was never hipster-cool and is no longer Wallpaper-cool. This realization will have the same impact as suburbanite bachelorette party in a Wallpaper-cool nightclub. It will spread like the sighting of a floating turd in a public pool, flushing people to the exits with silent panic, unacknowledged for fear of embarrassment.
As people scramble for the exits in Dubai, there is no ‘key mail’, like in America, where people can often mail back their house keys and walk away from a mortgage without the immediate threat of jail. People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?