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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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(Spoiler-warning - I’m talking here about the final episode of the Sopranos, which aired tonight…)

Wonderful, to think of the ten-million or so viewers shouting “fuck!” because their tv went out at once. (I know we did! “Fucking DVR! Fix it! Fix it!”… Until the credits started to roll… (The baby went down late tonight, so we watched on a 20 minute digital video delay…)

You can’t accomplish this sort of ending with most other media - the reader of the novel can see exactly how many words remain, always know as they read the final sentence of the work “this is the final sentence of the work.”

Chase and his writers, fully aware of the atmosphere they work in today in America, forced forward this season the theme of violence, the media, and audience complicity. The last two episodes have been marked by gross-out sequences that featured ooing and tonight barfing audiences

Phil’s death scene was a little masterpiece of the form. From the two kids in car seats in the back of the SUV, which echos Tony’s fixation on the demolished car seat in the back of Christopher’s car) to the way that the rolling vehicle forces us to make a decision between fixing on Phil’s head about to be crushed by the tires or the fate of the little ones in the back, about to roll into traffic, to the projectile-vomiting on-looker - and back to last week Altman-esque scene with the Bada Bing’s employees and guests admiring the collateral damage in the form of a crushed motorcylist on Rt. 17 - Chase was making a clear point about what it is that he is making, what it costs in terms of genre-mixing to make it, and our own relationship as viewers to the show…

(I’ve read on line that Phil’s death scene was filmed in my old hometown. Which wasn’t an altogether rough place, but wasn’t quite placid suburbia either. There was one night when my buddy and I rolled into a gas station / quickimart for some gas and cigarettes, when we noticed that there was a guy dead by gunshot laying on the tarmac of the parking lot. Being nihilistic (read: stupid) 17 year olds, we went into the quickimart anyway, where the clerk (whose demeanor suggested that he’d seen this sort of thing before) informed us that we couldn’t buy our Mountain Dews, nor our Marlboro Lights, as there was “an ongoing police investigation, dude”.)

Back to the final scene. I have to admit that I was hoping for one of the many variations on “discovery that Tony and Carmela are really only working stiffs / bourgie escapees whose fantasy of a more interesting life we have been viewing,” and in a weird way we almost get there with the end of the show. What are we supposed to take away from the locale of the final scene, all the workingclassers with their flannel and Members Only jackets, the frigging Weeblos with their creepy Scout Leaders, and the like. Where have we, with the family, returned to? No bling, no fancified mobsters - the end of the show takes us back down the hill that Tony’s subdivision is parked on top of, and begs us to paranoically identify almost every person in the restaurant as a potential murderer, while we simultaneously watch as Meadow painstaking parallel parks her Beemer.

Question: can anyone think of good literary or cinematic examples of this sort of ending, the abrupt stop right in the middle of things? I’ve seen a few in various comment threads, and I know there are some novelistic examples, but I’m wondering what all of you can come up with…

more to come…

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1) Somewhat refreshing to take a break from posting and even scrolling through the RSS feeds. Amazingly, I took this break despite having free internet access here in Amsterdam. For me, it’s been nothing but the IHT and the Guardian at night, and some hotel bar writing (on paper!) and that’s that. I think I have a slight case of nostalgia for pre-totally-immersive ‘net days, which I’m not sure what to do with. Surely the boredom of being back stateside in a week will take care of that.

2) Amsterdam has won me over. If it is possible for my wife and I ever to haul off and make it as independent intellectuals (she’s much further along on this than I am, what with her book underway and agent and so forth), I vote for right here. Paris is lovely. But Amsterdam, it’s something else. The magazine store alone, up in the little square along with the American Book Store, is reason enough.

3) Looking for a place to calm the kiddo down for a nap while in Paris (by “calm the kid down” I of course mean seriously overdue unweaned boobie action but whatever. STFU) we wandered into the Place Dauphine, which is the sort of thing that happens in Paris. See Andre Breton, Nadja, for the significance of the place, the “clitoris of Paris”…

4) All for now, but thanks for continuing to read… I’ll be back on regular schedule soon enough…

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I am a strange bird, when it comes to travel.

For on the one hand, the number one reason I crush the credit card to
go, and the number one deciding factor that informs the choices I
make in terms of where to visit, is that I am almost pathologically
addicted what we might call the banally exotic quotidien. Look, I go
to museums, I see the sights. Or at least I did in the past. But what
gets me out here is stupid stuff like street-signs and supermarkets
and the way people serve coffee and when they buy their newspapers
and where they buy them and what they look like. Laugh at me all you
like - perhaps you are a gourmand, or a sex-tourist, or you only go
where you’re likely to find, what, the best thriftstore buys.
Whatever. But in a certain way, my special preoccupation with the
everyday in my travels undoubted comes close to what travel for
pleasure and edification has always boiled down to…

People are always asking me, in the real world, if my work intersects
with that of Michel de Certeau, and the answer is always no, not
really. But, strangely enough, I am a practices of everyday life guy
through and through when it comes to those couple of weeks a year
that I’ve paid to remove from my usual activities and (at the moment)
incredibly bleak surroundings. Go figure.

But on the other hand, my little addiction to the small stuff is, in
a certain sense, something that my personality-construction is almost
categorically unfit for. Why? I am one of those people - I can’t tell
if we are rare or not - who is compulsively fearful of making little
mistakes in everyday performances. I hate not knowing, for instance,
whether it is appropriate or not to ask for a coffee à emporter at
this establishment or that. I hate not knowing how to use a subway
turnstile. I hate being baffled by menus, I hate not understand how
to hail a taxi, I fear running afoul of written or unwritten rules
about smoking in public. I am addicted to foreign newspapers, even
those I can’t read - but I am terrified of buying them, for fear that
the newsagent will wonder after I leave “Why the fuck was he buying
that if he doesn’t have the language.” It is ridiculous, I agree.

There are a few major factors that go into this personality defect
(and it is, for sure, a defect): my upbringing by fastidiously-
correct anglo-canadian parents, who made minor forms of impolite or
awkward behavior feel like, what, public urination. An pathological
need to “be in the know” about everything (this need is one,
obviously, that intersects with my internet compulsion, blogging,
etc…) doesn’t help. And with Paris in particular, it also has
something to do with my weird relationship to the French language,
which I really am supposed to know, both because of my education and
because, for chissakes, I write on and teach French authors
constantly… but even if I can read French authors in the original
at a level that has permitted me to develop, from what I can tell,
some very very insightful arguments based on microscopic close
readings of the language itself, I still cannot properly order a
fucking coffee in French, and I stand blankly stunned whenever anyone
says anything that I am not prepared for.

So I am, yes, a strange bird in my own quiet little way. (I wish my
psychokinks were more interesting - for your sake, as readers…) But
what I am wondering about today is what this combined fascination and
fear has to do with my work, the issues and texts that I am
interested in and the arguments that I am trying to articulate about
them. For one thing, it clarifies quite a lot of the backstory of why
I am so interested in a figure like (more…)

From n+1’s blog, a piece by Jana Prikryl that oscillates between the recent UNICEF report on the well-being of children in rich countries and the author’s recollections of the benefits and drawbacks of a childhood under socialism.

It’s a smart idea, the essay that vividly if ambiguously illustrates the dry but incredibly significant document, as this one does…

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Ugh….

Her reconnection to world events in part began on Boxing Day 2005. Following the tsunami in Indonesia, Björk recorded an album of fans’ remixes of her single Army of Me, donating the proceeds to Unicef. A year later, she was invited to visit the region and found “they were still just digging in the earth and finding bones and dresses of relatives”, an image that you suspect might have occasioned her desire for the dirty sound of the clavichord. She flew from Indonesia straight to New York, to a studio session with the producer Timbaland, and immediately wrote the song Earth Intruders. “It just came like a tsunami out of my mouth,” she says, sounding still faintly surprised, “and lyrically it’s probably the most chaotic song that I’ve ever written, it sort of doesn’t make sense.” It is a marching song, “Bundle of bombardiers,” it insists, “We are the canoneers/ Apache voodoo.” She shakes her head a little, rubs her nose. “I tried to edit it afterwards to fix it and make logic out of it,” she says, “but it’s just like chaos.”

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From Benjamin’s Work of Art essay:

The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc.–unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of rea1ity here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.

Even more revealing is the comparison of these circumstances, which differ so much from those of the theater, with the situation in painting. Here the question is: How does the cameraman compare with the painter? To answer this we take recourse to an analogy with a surgical operation. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patients body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician–who is still hidden in the medical practitioner–the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.

Now, take a look at this:

In Children of Men, it is the virtuosic resistence to montage that marks the most “thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment.” Can we be far away from the feature film in one shot? (Perhaps we’re already there - if so, enlighten me…) And, in light of this, what do we make of Benjamin’s aspect of this aspect of film? Is there a formal / revolutionary vectoring of the montage-free, the all in one shot?

More to come on this to be sure… I want to say something related but different about this….

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This is what a google search for “Karl Marx Beauty” yields me:

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(Xposted from Long Sunday…)

The first in a series of great moments in literature acted out by my daughter’s * Playmobil guys.

Bertolt Brecht, “Changing the Wheel”

I sit by the roadside
The driver changes the wheel.
I do not like the place I have come from.
I do not like the place I am going to.
Why with impatience do I
Watch him changing the wheel.

* I say “my daughter’s,” but others in my household might well disagree. I am, after all, taking pictures of them acting out moments mentioned in my manuscript in progress. There’s more to say - I really do feel like my time playing with this stuff when I was a kid might have had a major effect on my aesthetic and political bearings, the dissertation I wrote, the books that I am trying to write now. But that’s for another post…. The next one - spoiler warning - will do the montage sequence (”comices agricoles”) from Bovary…

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Forgive me, Jane Dark, but I am going to repost your entire post from tonight, all of it, even the picture, and then add a couple of comments.

From the annals of Anglophilia, this fantasia from the estimable Enid Starkie. Gathering momentum as it goes, it consigns Baudelaire’s talent to the paternalistic mercies so redolent of Empire, with an easy confidence that, had he only been heir to such management strategies, he could really have had a chance to straighten up and fly right, never doubting the desirability of this imagined outcome, a kind of starched quasi-achievement which is invested with more and more libidinal force with each clause before collapsing back down to the fleshpots of Paris.

In England Baudelaire, at this stage of his life, would have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge, as an undergraduate, where, under proctorial and tutorial supervision, he would have done himself no permanent harm. He would probably have made a name for himself in undergraduate circles, in artistic and literary clubs, and this might have satisfied his need for eccentric self-expression. In this simple and adolescent manner he would have grown out of his ‘green-sickness’, and, under tutorial pressure, might even have learned to work at set hours, in order to pass his examinations. It is, however, probable that he would have been a serious student, for, with his facility and felicity in Greek and Latin, he might have been a Balliol Scholar, and have read with distinction for Honour Moderations, while his taste for metaphysical and philosophical argument might have led him finally to Greats. But, in whatever manner he chose to spend his time, he would have been kept under kindly supervision during these critical years. Unfortunately the university system in France does not fulfil the same function as it does in England, and the life into which artistic and literary young men and plunged, on leaving school, is the Bohemian life of the Latin Quarter, the life of cafés, literary circles and student balls.

— Baudelaire, Enid Starkie

1) OK. When I clicked into the post in my rss reader, upon seeing nothing more than the portrait of Baudelaire by Courbet, it took only a second or two for me to realize, for the realization to surface, that I recognized the face. Not as Baudelaire’s, but as my own. The likeness really is uncanny - that’s me, my head photoshopped onto the fuzzy period wear. Me at 21, 22, 23. Not that long ago. The high brow, my hair wasn’t often cut that short but sometimes, yes. The beardlessness, no stubble even. Yep. I smoke cigarettes, not a pipe, and never (anymore) inside… If you read this blog and you know me in person, feel free to chime in. Am I crazy? That’s me, there, isn’t it? My nose has perhaps a bit more hook, and is slightly less bulbous at the tip. But the eyes - yes, just so. The mouth - exactly.

2) Unfortunately, damningly, however spitting the first image, the one in prose, Starkie’s rendition of the poete maudit domesticated fostered by, well, the tremendous support system that is the well-run anglo university, the portrait of the english Baudelaire puts the Courbet to shame in (pre)figuring yours truly.

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or so it seems. Good and bad news tonight on this theme.

1) So I got a Region 2 copy of La Chinoise. But apparently my Mac’s dvd player isn’t going to cooperate with any of the means available for playback. So I might have to break down and buy myself a region free dvd player.

Seems to me that this whole region-ing thing must be an infringement of international trade law, but that’s just a guess on my part. How annoying.

2) Holy crap. Have you noticed that Google Books now offers .pdf files of a lot of their public domain materials?

Go take a look…

3) Relatedly: I feel terrible that I’ve ordered the ($60+) Norton Anthology for my students in one class. From here on out, when I teach a survey that has enough available in the public domain, I’m going to make up my own .pdf / multilith for the students to use, rather than forcing this monster upon them. Besides saving them money - and this is a real issue for many of my students - compiling a personal anthology wil save me the huge time expense of tranfering my notes from one edition to another. (And the new editions come ever faster, don’t they?)

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(Cross-posted from Long Sunday)

Stanley Fish in the NY Times a few days ago:

All you have to do is remember that academic freedom is just that: the freedom to do an academic job without external interference. It is not the freedom to do other jobs, jobs you are neither trained for nor paid to perform. While there should be no restrictions on what can be taught — no list of interdicted ideas or topics — there should be an absolute restriction on appropriating the scene of teaching for partisan political ideals. Teachers who use the classroom to indoctrinate make the enterprise of higher education vulnerable to its critics and shortchange students in the guise of showing them the true way.

Sure, I suppose I agree. In practice even more than in theory. I certainly don’t "indoctrinate" in my classroom. But, on the other hand, I certainly do expose my students to the historical record, positions and representations taken with regard to and within the historical record, and in general a more sophisticated, probing way of viewing the world than the one they brought into the classroom, or so I at least hope. All of which is kosher under Fish’s rules, as everything is always up for argument and discussion, of course. I never, in arguments and discussion, take sides except for pedagogically productive purposes, a play acting of argument to move things along. 

But, I imagine, given the "ideas or topics" that I teach about, and the quality of my non-indoctrinary teaching, there’s a strong likelihood that the students emerge, on aggregate, further "left" than they entered the classroom. In fact, one might well make the argument that the non-indoctrinary approach that someone like me - or perhaps someone like Fish, who knows - takes is nothing more than a subtler, more efficient approach to political conversion - even indoctrination - than, say, the lame dork who shows Fahrenheit 9/11 to his physics class. What if I, in fact, have learned the hidden-in-plain-sight tactics of the mainstream media, constantly staging a debate that in fact is just a show trial, incessantly giving my students the illusion of autonomous participation, when in fact the game is rigged from the start?

It is tough to figure out what Fish would say to this, as he ignores the possibility that the free trade in ideas might itself be deployed in the service of ideological mystification. Is it simply a question of openness to the possibility that the students will truly find their own way? When I was a kid at Catholic school, I learned that the rhythm method was a permissible form of birth control family planning because it demonstrated an openness to pregnancy, whereas the Pill or condoms did not. Fuzzy logic, to be sure. Where does good old fashion coitus interruptus fall on the scale? The nuns didn’t go there, strangely enough.

Last semester, so effectively did I not-indoctinate my class that they found a book whose politics I find very intriguing indeed (William Morris’s News from Nowhere) entirely ridiculous. I couldn’t stop talking about utopia and the limits of fiction and they, almost as a one, took the position that Morris demonstrates through his fiction the absolute impossibility of anarchic socialism. I can’t help but think that they, following their teacher’s lead, underread the book… But perhaps that was just, for me, an acceptable risk, a write-off, in my grand campaign to have my beliefs metastasize through the student body… L’effet du réel, as it were…

In short, I think Fish too is underreading the situation. Or, perhaps, he’s writing in bad faith, fully aware that the free trade in ideas is not only a rhetorical trick, but is in fact the definitive rhetorical trick of our time. "We report, you decide," right? The piece would then be a brilliantly performative piece, engaging in the very tactic of manipulation-via-objectivity that it would be tacticly endorsing.  I wish it were the latter, but I suspect it’s the former. One might so easily imagine an entire army of leftist professors with Fish’s article in hand, bent on ideological domination of the student masses, all in agreement that the best approach is the one of least resistance. Stage debates, employ the silence and cunning of impersonality, shift the goalpost, and reap the ideological benefits in the end. This already, to my mind, is the case (but from a different ideological direction) in US economics departments, where reality itself is conservatively liberal and the price of admission is the acceptance of the status quo.

One other thing: I wonder what Fish would make of politically-polemical or at least engaged writing on the part of academics. Writing occupies such an ambiguous place in our work. The toughest part of my job for my father, who is distinctly not an academic, to understand is the fact that I need to write - that that is what, almost exclusively as I work at a research university, will earn me tenure. There is no way in but to write, and no way to stay but to write, but we are paid to teach. I have to write, but no one is required to read what I write. So where does this fit in his rulebook?

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