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I may have mentioned this before, but if you’re not reading signandsight.com’s weekly magazine roundup, you’re really missing it. Wish there was more like this around the nets. 

at kosmograd

She’s just not street enough for the relentlessly now ny times:

On the Web page is a recording of what she describes as her latest track, “What We Want,” a hip-hop-inflected rhythm-and-blues tune that asks, “Can you handle me, boy?” and uses some dated slang, calling someone her “boo.”

George Will in the Washington Post today:

Having no market, which is an information-generating mechanism, communism cannot know what things should cost.

Hmmm……. hmmmm…..

(By the way, interesting stuff here….)

Cyprus goes reddish

The Left Party Gains in Germany

Simon Jenkins on nationalisation

The Nation on Chavez

Rodchenko Slideshow

Zizek Lectures for Download

Wallerstein, ?2008: The Demise of Neoliberal Globalization?

More on Rodchenko, The End of Art

Venezuela’s Medical Diplomacy in the IHT

Washington Consensus doesn’t apply to Washington

My wife and I have introduced a thing where each of us takes one night a week out by ourselves while the other watches the kiddo. (We’re late getting to this - it was suggested long ago - but what the hell were we going to do with our nights out in the old place, so the time is right…) On my night, I headed down to see the Rodchenko exhibit, but the damn place was closing (nice opening hours here, god). So I had to come up with something else to do with myself. Good movies were out - they’re reserved for some barely imaginable time when we can see them together. So I saw Cloverfield instead. I feel an obligation to see such things, which my wife definitely does not share, and so… 

(Parenthetically: $26 to see a fucking movie? Are you out of your minds? I saw the damn thing in the worst and likeliest of all possible places I guess, but back in the states there’s a constitutional right to affordable consumption of crap movies. I think it’s administered by the Dairy Board, whomever it is who gives the free milk and bread to the starving grad student moms… But I digress…)  

So. Not much to say about Cloverfield. Fun I guess. The genre’s looking very, very tired. But in the very fatigue of the form, I do think we’re seeing something new and interesting afoot. Semi-new anyway. The producers and writers of the thing are all at least my age, but the presumed audience, I guess is a lot younger. Young enough, in fact, to have the same relation to the attacks so heavily quoted in this film as my students are starting to have. For a few years there, we were all in it together. Now, it’s getting a bit strained. Shocking when it dawns on you that your youngest students weren’t even teenagers when the shit when down. In a year or two, when we’re dealing with kids that were seven or so in 2001, it’s going to feel even stranger - for them as much as for us, who somehow can’t stop threading it into our conversations. 

In Cloverfield, I think we see early signs of an anxiety not about terror, but about its absence. It is a movie tailor-made for a demographic that has grown up hearing about 9/11 but which has only vague, mostly false, memories of it. A generation who parents worried about shielding from the tv, even when they were far too young to distinguish the threat of annihilation from the threat of, dunno, the scary shit that lives in your closet. 

(Heard Bush mention the other day the “attack that occurred six-and-a-half years ago.” It’s been a long, long time. Wow…)   

The yupster parties in loft spaces (hahaha) on the Lower East Side (hahahaha) are going to feel something missing, are going to long for the crisping threat that something will happen downtown, that there will be a reason to run up to the roof, that their emotionally desolate choice (just for instance) to leave the girl behind to take a VP position in Japan (? - oh, i see, godzilla. Try Dubai…), the iron continuities in play behind that, will come to a sudden and abrupt end when some rough beast inaugurates another round of trauma sex, epiphanies of “what really mattes,” a war or wars to momentarily back and then, later, pretend that you opposed from the start etc etc etc. 

But unfortunately, this dystopian fantasy is positively utopian in its impossibility. The crows won’t come home to roost, not here, not anymore. The world, dearies, has moved on. The Time Warner Building ain’t the double-barreled omphalous of the world anymore - it’s in the wrong country to matter. No one’s going to expend good fissile material on a nation and an economy doing a great job fizzling out on its own. The catastrophes to come for the kids that were meant to see this film are going to be far less picturesque, and certainly won’t be available for videotaping. 

Anyway, wow. At least I’m blogging again, right?

One other thing, on a related note: saw this little number at the end of the extremely long strand of ads (mostly for cars and other new dystopian movies) that ran before Cloverfields:  Brilliant, and very very strange indeed. And strikingly beautiful! An ad for adlessness, if there ever was one. It may become the totemic youtube of this youtube intensive blog!

And even better, way better, is that the damned thing looks like the opening sequence of an absolutely incredible (and a good deal more horrifying, to many in the wider audience, than Cloverfields, which isn’t very horrifying at all) of a very different sort of speculative fiction, one about a specter lurching back from the place where dismissed specters go in order to decapitate the idols of the era, break open the walls of the buildings in the expensive neighborhoods, and leave most bedazzled and exhilarated at the sweep of violence that has rubbled so many things we thought could never go, that we believed, despite ourselves, that the world simply couldn’t live without.  

One day soon, each and every after-seminar-out-for-a-drink with visiting journalists or petty-intelligensia or minor-major academics will be covered in one of the society broadsheets and/or sanctioned niche blogs.

Glancing around McSorley’s, he smiled. “This place hasn’t changed a bit.” He had left England for America in the 1970’s. “At the time, things over there were bleak, to say the least.”

Mr. Hitchens reached for his coat. “I’ve got to meet a friend,” he said. “Martin Amis, he’s flying in tonight.”

I snapped a picture of Mr. Hitchens on my cell phone. He picked up more than his share of the tab. “America’s been good to me,” he said.

Ah, well. Glad to hear on all fronts. And even better to hear CH has started picking up even a share of the tab when he’s out with the kids. Back in the day, etc etc etc…

(BTW - “what’ll it be, ladies” was what the period-piece waiter guy greeted me and my friend with during my first and last time at McSorley’s Olde New Yawk Adventure Ride with Little Tiny Beers and Sawdust on the Floor That They Buy In Bags From Home Depot. Not recommended, especially when there are good ink-stained places to go…)

Jon Meacham’s Cri de Coeur: Why Do You Read The Economist Instead of Newsweek? | The New York Observer

After about an hour, there seemed to be no more questions for him, so Newsweek editor Jon Meacham turned to his audience—about 100 graduate students at Columbia journalism school—and said he had a question for them: Did anyone in the room read Newsweek or Time? There was a small, awkward rumbling before finally, a man shouted, “No!”

Mr. Meacham scanned the audience for his quarry and then asked the journalism student, clad in a black turtleneck, whether he read The Economist. Yes, he did.

“It’s the most talked about and least read magazine,” said Mr. Meacham.

Was just thinking about this today. I grew up reading Newsweek - it was the only quality news we received at home, besides the local papers for their sports sections. A lot of who I am and what I am interested in is likely attributable to that Newsweek subscription. But despite the fact that I’ve kept a Newsweek subscription for the, um, 13 or so years that I’ve been out of my parents house (it’s only like $25 / year, right?) its place at the top of my magazine stack was long since taken over by The Economist..

But, in my case, Meacham’s more or less right - I rarely read The Economist, even if I felt like I needed to have it. In the US anyway, it does have a fetishy omnibus sort of appeal - you get the sense that the world world is in there, even if you have to look past all the neo-lib libertarianism in the leaders.

And now that I’m, well, elsewhere (being shy with that, I know, but you must have figured it out by now….), I’ve noticed something interesting. If you’re wrapped up in the UK news cycle - say the Guardian and sometimes the Independent and always the Herald Tribune and the BBC, the Economist feels dead stale, just a recap of what it feels like you’ve read over and over again already during the last week. All the exoticness and world-stretching feel is almost completely evacuated.

On the other hand, I’ll be damned the European edition of Newsweek isn’t a hundred times better than its domestic version in the US. They’ve shaved out most of the cheesy-filling giving space instead to medium-form articles that actually tell you something new, something a bit too feature-y for the papers to take up. Politics aside, a really good issue of Newsweek abroad feels as close to a decent news mag as we might possibly ask for at this late day and age.

Before it melts completely away, for there certain are better places to read about stress-management and Why We Love to Hate Our Stars, Meacham should just let the Euro/Asia guys run the thing as a niche operation.

On a related note, can somebody explain to me why the LRB costs three times as much to subscribe to in the UK vs. the US? Actually, no need to explain. It’s totally par for the course. But it still hurts and baffles…

Seriously?

…. but I’m not quite there yet. Sorry I’ve been gone so long. Some of you who know me the flesh know that this has been at least a half-excused absence from the scene. But for the rest of you: wow, busy semester. Among other things, a big move - a really big one - is in the offing. Next couple of weeks. My books are in boxes - that always makes me nervous… and thrilled too. You’ll figure out where I’m headed once I start again on here. There’s been some writing too, and I’ll actually point you to some of that when it appears (though I won’t mention it’s me - you’ll just have to guess…) Even some blog-incubated material. There’s a certain sort of idea that I can only seem to work out on here, it seems. I like that sort of idea, and miss growing them this semester….

At any rate, thanks for not giving up on me and I’ll be back soon… Feels good even to type this in, so more to come I’m sure… And happy holidays if you’re so inclined….

Look, I get in over my head sometimes with the economics, even right out here in front of you guys, no doubt, but what follows is a remarkably shallow pool to drown in. Mark Steyn at The Corner on National Review Online, instructs his readers why using less gas won’t “hurt the Saudis”:

Well, you can say it all you want but people will just laugh at you. Americans will never accept that the way to make the world better is to drive smaller, less comfortable cars. And, besides, the premise is completely false: If you trade in the Expedition for a Honda Civic, that oil you save won’t stay in the ground and thus impoverish the Saudis; it will merely be sold to the Chinese and Indians and other fast developing nations who will replace America and Europe as buyers of the cheapest and most easily extractable oil in the world. So the sheikhs will be as rich as ever and funding as many Islamist nutters. But we’ll be driving worse cars and feeling virtuous.

Aren’t these guys all about market pricing as the One True Way, the answer to every ill? What do they think they mean when they talk about it?

(via Yglesias, who reads it so we don’t have to…)

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Playing ball, one way or another, with the hedge funds outfits, seems to be more or less mandatory for Democratic candidates today. One wonders what would happen to the expected Dem-demographic if the average american actually knew what a hedge fund is, who is allowed to pay to play, and the like.

First, from tomorrow’s NYT, we can be happy to see that Chelsea Clinton has made it to the top all completely on her own and with absolutely no consideration of the fact that her job might keep mom (and dad) on the right side of the capital-gains tax issue.

But after Oxford, Chelsea Clinton signed up with McKinsey, a consulting company known as an elite business training corps. She was the youngest in her class, hired at the same rank as those with M.B.A. degrees. Her interview was more like a conversation, said D. Ronald Daniel, a senior partner. “That’s why she was a good consultant, because we are professional question-askers and professional listeners,” Mr. Daniel said.

Because clients often prefer McKinsey to remain invisible, the work was quiet, allowing Ms. Clinton and her peers to pretend that she was just another freshly hatched graduate.

“When she was at parties with us, she was one of the group,” said Gautam Mukunda, whose office was a few doors down from hers. “From what I know of her father, he has never been in any room in which he was not the center of attention, starting from before he became president. Chelsea has a deeply admirable ability to yield focus.”

Last fall, Ms. Clinton moved on, taking a job analyzing investments at Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund run by Marc Lasry, a loyal donor to Democratic causes generally, and Clinton-related ones specifically. The company invests its $18 billion in the debt of troubled businesses.

Friends say financial independence is important to Ms. Clinton; she may improve on her low-six-figure McKinsey salary by hundreds of thousands of dollars at Avenue because of potential bonuses, industry headhunters say.

Next, we’ve got a piece from April 2007 about John Edwards stint as a “consultant” at Fortress Investment Group:

Two years ago, former senator John Edwards of North Carolina, gearing up for his second run at the Democratic presidential nomination, gave a speech decrying the “two different economies in this country: one for wealthy insiders and then one for everybody else.”

Four months later, he began working for the kind of firm that to many Wall Street critics embodies the economy of wealthy insiders — a hedge fund.

Edwards became a consultant for Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based firm known mainly for its hedge funds, just as the funds were gaining prominence in the financial world — and in the public consciousness, where awe over their outsize returns has mixed with misgivings about a rarefied industry that is, on the whole, run by and for extremely wealthy people and operates largely in secrecy.

A midsize but growing player in the hedge fund industry with more than $30 billion in assets, Fortress was the first hedge fund manager to go public, thereby subjecting itself to far more scrutiny. But it was an unusual choice of employment for Edwards, who for years has decried offshore tax shelters as part of his broader campaign to reduce inequality. While Fortress was incorporated in Delaware, its hedge funds were incorporated in the Cayman Islands, enabling its partners and foreign investors to defer or avoid paying U.S. taxes.

And finally of course there is the biggest hedge-fundraiser of them all, Barack Obama:

With $32.8 million in campaign contributions last quarter, Barack Obama, the Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate, easily surpassed his rivals in both parties. And it seems Wall Street money had something to do with it.

Employees of three big investment banks and one major hedge fund were among the leading sources of cash for Mr. Obama, according to data filed Sunday with the Federal Elections Commission. His contributors during the three-month period ended June 30 included Richard S. Fuld Jr., the chief executive of Lehman Brothers, and Kenneth C. Griffin, president of the Citadel Investment Group.

Citadel, a hedge-fund firm based in Chicago, was a wellspring of cash for Mr. Obama. In addition to the $4,600 he collected from Mr. Griffin — the maximum donation allowed from an individual — other Citadel employees donated a combined $147,550 to Mr. Obama’s campaign, according to the Associated Press.

Bulge-bracket investment banks also gave Mr. Obama a lift. Employees of Lehman contributed $160,760 to his presidential run (which includes $2,300 from Mr. Fuld), Goldman Sachs employees gave $103,550 and employees of J.P. Morgan Chase gave $101,950, records show.

Now, everyone seems to think that the dominant issue here that has the funders and fundees lining up behind candidates is the capital-gains tax issue (basically, when you make money on the appreciation of a good, including investments, you pay taxes at a much lower rate (15 vs. 33 percent) than someone who made their money the old fashioned way, by selling labor in exchange for a wage or a salary. “Strangely,” many of the Democratic candidates have been voicing support for capital-gains tax reform, even if it is, at times, of a cosmetic sort. So what gives? Given the recent chop in the market, and the dawning sense that some very shitty bets have been placed by these organizations, I’m wondering if all of those extremely wealthy Obama-Clinton-Edwards supporters aren’t thinking of something more along these lines…

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Well, we can’t have those types in our "world city," now can we:

Selling Berlin as a world city is hard. It has lots of renovated museums, theatres and clubs, plus 400 contemporary-art galleries. Artists, film-makers and some politicians have revived its big-city feel. But whereas London and Paris boast plenty of rich people, Berlin does not. One in two live on a pension or unemployment benefit; even those with jobs earn an average of only €32,600 a year. Well-heeled Germans pay the odd visit, but prefer to live in more opulent places like Munich or Hamburg.

For slightly less monocular reads on Berlin, you can check out sit down man and infinite thought…

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If you can’t make it to the theater (maybe you’re like me, maybe you have a kid and insufficient babysitting, or maybe you don’t have the cash for the movie, or maybe you live in a part of the world where you can’t see it) and you really want to get the full picture of what’s going on with this Sicko movie, I highly recommend this site. It has helped me to appreciate what a terrific effort this is on MM’s part…

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