Mediated

Lately I’ve been watching the HBO series Rome.  It’s got the fairly gratuitous nudity and violence to earn its way into the adult category.  I’m finding fun to watch, despite the fairly preposterous plot device of having two common soldiers seemingly trigger every major historial event in the time of Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian.  It is indeed a good history lesson of the days of Caesar, his assassination, the first triumvirate, Cleopatra, etc.  It also portrays a living, pulsing city full of graffiti and blood.

In Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, he writes, “Rome’s particular speciality, from its very first days until the end of its empire, was simply to plunder its provinces to pay for bribes, luxuries, triumphs and soldiers’ pensions nearer to home.”  This TV show basically backs up this argument.

I’m reading The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, subtitled ‘How Prosperity Evolves’.  On page 109 I came across a few lines that describe what I also find to be an interesting paradox:

Politically, as Brink Lindsay has diagnosed, the coincidence of wealth with toleration has led to the bizarre paradox of a conservative movement that embraces economic change but hates its social consequences and a liberal movement that loves the social consequences but hates the economic source from which they came. ‘One side denounce capitalism but gobbled up its fruits; the other side cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.’

The reference is to Brink Lindsay’s 2007 book The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture.

Ridley is in essence trying to convince both sides to see the bright side.

Saw the news yesterday that German artist Sigmar Polke passed at age 69.  Polke was an interesting character, whose work kind of took off from pop and spun out in many directions.  Here are a couple bits of interest from the NYT obit by Roberta Smith:

Tall, with a commanding presence and caustic wit, Mr. Polke was often fittingly called an alchemist. He had a long face that seemed to call out for a sorcerer’s pointed hat. In photographs, he often appeared to be on the verge of laughter; small, gleaming eyes behind wire-framed glasses and a sharp V of eyebrows added a sardonic if not demonic note.

For much of his life Mr. Polke made extensive use of recreational drugs. Mushrooms were a frequent motif in his paintings and photographs. Unpredictable behavior was his norm, elusiveness his everyday mode, and provocative answers a matter of course.

But in the 1980s Mr. Polke, along with painters like Mr. Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff, signaled a resurgence of painting that was heard around the art world. The experience bred into Mr. Polke a preference for the margins over the mainstream and a relatively modest lifestyle despite his success. He worked without an assistant and lived in Cologne in a warehouse surrounded by his books and his paintings.

Last night I made it to a good portion of the Tender Loving Empire‘s third birthday party at the Wonder Ballroom.  Enjoyed the sets from Jared Mees and Y La Bamba, thought Boy Eats Drum Machine was pretty entertaining, and I still don’t really get the appeal of Finn Riggins (but they seem to be popular with the kids!).  I’m hoping that an Y La Bamba full-length will come out sometime soon!

Continuing my review of Fellini films, I found the 1965 release ‘Juliet of the Spirits’ (or originally ‘Giulietta degli Spiriti’) to be quite good.  This was Fellini’s first film in color, and they are rich and beautiful. Juliet is a middle-aged wife (played by Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina) who is beset by worries that her husband is having an affair, and she often slips into a kind of dream world.  It is sometimes hard to tell what is meant to be ‘real’ and what is her internal world.

As I watched the film I found it to have quite a psychedelic aspect to it, without the usual campiness that came later.  This was given an extra twist when I watched the Fellini interview included on the DVD, first broadcast by the BBC on June 1, 1966, with actor Ian Dallas narrating & asking the questions.  Near the end of the 20 minute clip, we learn that Fellini tried acid (no date given for the experience, but probably before ’8 1/2′).  Here are some quick transcriptions of the interview, not exact but close enough.

Narrator: Once he let a doctor give him the hallucination drug LSD.

Fellini: It was a little bit disappointing, the experience. I don’t remember it to have proved a special sensation. The doctor give to me an explanation and I am agree with him, he says an artist lives always in the imagination, so the barrier between the sensational reality and the imagination is very vague. An artist is always here and there. This experiment gives a much more stronger result with, and this is a stupid way to say it, ‘normal people’ who are stronger in that barrier of conscious and unconscious. So this kind of drug opens a door in a different dimension. But an artist, this kind of door is always open. I remember I have some exultation about color. I see color not like they are normally, we see colors in the object, we see objects that are colored. In that case, I saw the colors just like they are, detached from the object. I had for the first time the feeling of the presence of color in a detached way.

N: This did affect ‘Giulietta’?

F: In a certain sense, yes.

F: Taking this drug, LSD-25, reality becomes objective. So reality is innocence, is pure, and is of divine beauty. In the same moment that the reality comes to you in this divine beauty, there is also the other side.

N: In ’8 1/2′ and ‘Giulietta’ you have gone into this world, you have shown this element of reality. Do you imagine in the future, say in your next film, that you will return to external historic reality, or that you will have the two aspects?

F: I think that even if this road maybe is dangerous, I think that when one has had the intuition, the feeling, one has opened that door, I don’t think you can go back. It is necessary to go on with the help of your intellect, with the protection of your intellect, but also with the faith, with the confidence in what can happen.

I first read Michael Lewis back in the 80s with Liar’s Poker, where he covered the initial bond trading explosion.  His new book, The Big Short, is back in the same territory, covering the subprime mortgage blowup in 2006-2008, and it’s a very readable story centering on a handful of traders who got the idea early that they should start betting against this market.  If only to have a quick reference for later, I want to jot down a few notes on the various trading vehicles.

First off, note that any cash stream can essentially be thought of like a bond.  A mortgage is a cash stream from the borrower to the lender.  The risk on a particular mortgage is that the borrowers won’t be able to re-pay, but since the penalty for not paying will be to lose the house, most borrowers with some skin in the game will try hard to re-pay.  Back in the 80s they came up with the idea of bundling mortgages together, and making bonds out of them, called collateralized debt obligation (CDO).  That worked OK for awhile, but in the 2000′s real estate boom, in part to keep the party going, we saw the massive increase of subprime loans (where there was little to no downpayment, and perhaps no income verification either).

But it wasn’t until about 2005 that some smart traders decided they needed a vehicle to bet against mortgage bonds, and in particular mortgage bonds on subprime mortgages.  Now it’s apparently very hard to short a bond, but bankers were able to come up with the next best thing, which was called the credit default swap (CDS).  The CDS is like an insurance policy on a mortgage bond – to hold a CDS you pay a yearly insurance premium (usually a percent or two of the amount of the bond) to the issuer, and if the underlying mortgage bond defaults (because individual loans in the bond are not being repaid), then the issuer pays out to cover the losses.  Note that the issuer of the CDS is potentially on the hook for the entire value of the underlying bond.

Now we can see that in fact one can look at the CDS as a cash stream of insurance premium payments, and since the chance of a pay out is the same as the chance that the underlying bond will default, it means that you can create a CDO made out of CDS policies (called a synthetic CDO). And if your assumption was that the underlying mortgages would always be repaid since real estate always goes up, then you’d be presumably happy to buy synthetic CDOs as well as regular CDOs, seeing them as equally risk-free.

The other important factor here is that as long as you can find an issuer, anyone can buy a CDS.  Thus the volume of trading of these things was not limited to the number of home loans being made!  For awhile AIG was a big issuer of CDS’s, but after awhile they saw they might run into trouble with them, and others stepped in. Also note that most purchases of these things were brokered by the big banks, and they liked the fact that there was not a transparent market – i.e. they could charge a nice profit for being the middleman.  They also, of course, had some of their own money in these holdings.

So, The Big Short tells the story of some investors who bought CDS’s, and what happened next.  Funny enough, while they were convinced that the underlying mortgage bonds would go bad, several of them were very worried that they would not be paid off, because they could see that the issuers would be losing a lot of money.  Thus typically they did not hold the CDS’s until the end, but sold them at a big profit to desperate buyers who had the underlying bonds and saw that they were in big trouble.

This books gives me some idea of why the banks are so opposed to regulations, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us need to listen to them!

Actually it’s 8 1/2, Fellini’s 1963 film about a director who’s not sure how to proceed, juggling a wife and mistress, producers and writers, and all the others who want a piece of his time.  I very much enjoyed the DVD of the film, watching it once with the commentary and then again without.  I think I had only seen it once before, and I suspect the first viewing is in fact pretty confusing; only a closer study makes sense of the pieces.  Here’s what Roger Ebert has to say about the film.

This morning I finished Jeffrey Eugenides’s 2002 novel Middlesex, and I’d say it’s one of the best novels I’ve read in recent years.  Just a pleasure to read a chapter at a time, no rush.  It’s pretty long at 530 pages hardcover, and is a great family epic as told by a hermaphrodite character born in 1960 who reaches a crisis point at age 14.  But much of the book is about the character’s grandparents and parents and their life in Detroit.  Highly recommended!

Here’s a bit from a Powell’s interview done in 2002 with Eugenides:

At the same time, it’s a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it. He might make claims that he has a genetic memory or that he knows things, but there are a lot of tip-offs to the reader that he’s making it up. He needed to tell the whole story to explain his incredible life to himself. He knew a lot about his grandparents — and perhaps he feels he’s been endowed with abilities to go into people’s heads who are long dead — but, to a certain extent, he’s making it up. It took me a long time to let myself do that.

Some recent views around Portland…

Made a quick visit to Seattle via train, here are some views as I toured around…

Found this interview at H+ between Erik Davis and novelist Jonathan Lethem, mostly on P.K. Dick but I found this Q/A on ‘the singularity’ interesting:

ED: For proponents of the Singularity, we are on the verge of massive technological transformations that involve some version of artificial or machine intelligence. Dick had a very particular take on intelligent machines, like Joe Chip‘s conapt or suitcase psychiatrists. While these devices are clearly fantastic and absurd, they also express some real insight and concerns about the cultural consequences of machine intelligence. Does Dick‘s take seem relevant now, thirty years later? What would he say to our contemporary gadget fetishism and addiction to information machines?

JL: My best guess about such matters is that each technological transformation, up to and perhaps including the Singularity, is going to work itself out vis-à-vis “the human” according to the deep principles of all media. Defined in its largest sense, as including things like cinema, theory, drugs, computing, moving type, music, etcetera, media is utterly consciousness-transforming in ways we can no longer competently examine, given how deeply they‘ve pervaded and altered the collective and individual consciousness that would be the only possible method for making that judgment. And yet -— we still feel so utterly human to ourselves, and the proof is in the anthropomorphic homeliness that pervades the ostensibly exalted “media” in return. We humanize them, shame them, colonize and debunk them with our persistent modes of sex and neurosis and community and commerce. We turn them into advertisements for ourselves, rather than opportunities for shedding ourselves. At least so far.

Follow this link to see some neat shots of vinyl records, up close!