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Chromeo - it's a synth punk Michael Jackson x 2

45RPM » Chromeo - Needy Girl

Wow, this rocks.

The end of poverty

I'm convinced. We can end global poverty. Someone just has to offer enough money.

The corruption stuff is a canard -- at least half of the extremely poor countries are not very corrupt (democratically run, at peace, trying hard -- e.g., Ghana, Ethiopia, Mali, Malawi), while many very corrupt countries have developed handsomely (Bangladesh, Indonesia). If we don't give the money because of corruption, we are kidding ourselves.

The answer 1) stabilization (through things currency and inflation control through fiscal and policy measures, once unfavorably termed "shock therapy"), and 2) capability-development of infrastructure, capital, public health, etc.

The answer is pretty cheap too - $200 billion per year for 10 years. US contribution would be less than what we are spending directly on war costs in Iraq (if you included the cost of the $75 barrel of Brent, then the entire cost of the programs would be equal to 1 year of the Iraq war's impact).

African is still crippled by tropical diseases and AIDS (unlike colder climates). The technological investment hasn't been made to develop climate-appropriate crops (as it was made in Asia's Green Revolution). There is no capital asset base to drive productivity, since people are so poor everything they earn is consumed not saved. There is no public infrastructure since governments are too poor to build them. People are too sick and poor to be educated. Anyone who does get educated is immediately tempted away to foreign markets, so there isn't any pool of doctors, scientists, etc.

Plus countries are sinking under debt servicing loads from the last generation technocrats' bright ideas of World Bank-funded dams and airports, etc. The reforms the West insisted on to stabilize the markets (austerity) were designed only around starvig the beast of socialistic state industries, but not around funding the development of infrastructure, capital, etc. The US has massive centrally managed spending infrastructure, scientific R&D, public health and public education spending -- all to support the "free market" of private enterprise. By contrast, we have spent 50 years underfunding such programs in the developing world.

What do you get for $200 B a year? As far as I can tell from reading this book, you get a detailed plan of action for achieving the reduction of poverty on Earth by half in 10 years.

Corpse Bride, and Alfie

PS the new Alfie with Jude Law kind of stunk.

Fast Cheap and Out of Control

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

50 First Dates

Oldboy

Memoirs of a Geisha

Local Hero

Man - forgettable.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

What a great film! Defines the high school slacker genre, and connects the dots with Dazed and Confused, the John Hughes films (Better off Dead), Ferris Bueller, even Happy Days, and so on.

The California setting is especially crucial - the burger joint, the surfer Spicoli, the make out point, the mall. It's the quintessence of 1980s youth culture.

Murdoch

Outfoxed

Fellini's La Strada

Amazon.com: La Strada

This is an incredible film, but one of the most incredible things is Fellini's incredible sensitivity for narrative context of the Comedia dell'Arte and all the way on. Filmmaker as the latest European minstrel. There are these wonderful scenes of these characters living this otherworldly lifestyle in a largely pastoral, barely modern Italy. Here and there, in the strange settings we find ourselves watching, you get a view on what's to come in 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita.

Fast Cheap and Out of Control

It's All Gone Pete Tong

Tyler Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman

Saw the video of the theatrical version of this play by Tyler Perry. Moderately funny - apparently the movie is the thing to check out but the play really shows off Tyler Perry. Soon to be Martin Lawrence...

Harold and Maude

Very funny, very queer film. The textual source for all the Wes Anderson movies. The old lady romance definitely creeps me out though.

Buckley, Chomsky, Foucault, Pasolini

Watched these great Chomsky films (excerpted from the Manufacturing Consent DVD, I think; downloaded) .

It's pretty amazing to see Chomsky debating Buckley on Vietnam and chatting with Michel Foucault (Chomsky in English and Foucault in French). Is there any contemporary figure so well informed and brilliant on the day's main topics? Who do you want to hear debate Iraq - is there anyone anymore?

More impressive is the cool, reasoned way archenemies like Buckley and Chomsky can go at it. (And even so, the take down is complete. Buckley looks like a child.)

Two big observations though:
1. It's really implausible that the projection of American power is anything other than imperial politics. No great power has ever done differently and what we are doing has all the trappings of self-interested, realpoliticking domineering.
2. The coercive force of social and psychiatric norms in our world feel distant when you are "normal" but start chafing when you try to debate the ideals of a society on an idealistic campaign, or the artistic production of an avant-gardist filmmaker. That was Foucault's point to Chomsky on the potential for a future, free society (in the spirit of Chomsky's anarcho-syndicalist utopia). And it was the point of the Pasolini play I saw on Saturday night - those Italian courts were rather petty and tyrannical to the poor guy. Norms are the "tax fraud" of conservativism - you get Capone on tax evasion and you get Socrates on corrupting the youth.

Star Wars Episode 3 predictions - revealed!

A few years later, I have finally watched Episode 3.

Here were my predictions. Read them!

What I was right about: Palpatine = leader of the Sith = the Emperor from Jedi

What I did not predict: the way Annakin becomes Darth Vader does not involve chicken pox.

What more do you need?

Question: how many Jedi showdowns with light sabers does it take before the charm is lost? Apparently Lucas thinks the number is >15. (Isn't there some way to make a sword duel exciting without positioning the heros on some narrow bridge over a vast flaming chasm? It happens like 6 times in this film, and well, I remember it well from the first 3 times I pissed my pants to such a setting in Star Wars and Jedi.)

Truth be told, I watched this in horrendous quality mpeg. You would be shocked how bad it looked - much worse than a normal film does when compressed to the 700mb size. Mainly b/c the images are so rich and fantastic. I couldn't really make out what was happening those lightning fast action scenes -- did Dooku lose a hand or was it Annakin? Everybody's losing hands left and right, so to speak. Dramatic intensity.

There is a fascinating parallelism in the storytelling: Yoda and Obi-wan both do their death-struggles at once, the Jedi all fight the rebellion in many places at once, the OR scenes for Padma and Annakin are at once...why is this? Harmonies in the storytelling? Sometimes I felt rather that it was to pack in twice the story in the same 2 hour slot. Rushing, rushing, all the way through.

All the same, when Vader's helmeted head first appears...wow!

Kessler at PS1

I have serious reservations with all political content in art these days. Somehow I think the content is too dull for these guys. The Daily Show kicks the crap out of these guys in novelty and richness of observations on this subject.

Walking into Kessler's enormous, very impressive installations at PS1 is an incredible experience. It's about media. But all the flickering TV screens are streaming content being created right here, in the room, from an assemblage of crazy machines he has built to broadcast it. And what this local replica of the world media industry seems to be doing is regurgitating, filtering, skewing, re-re-broadcasting, etc. all from core content.

What all this media is covering, though, is "The Palace at 4am" - meaning Saddam's palace. And there are SUVs, US troops, bombs, fake Saddam's, and things like that. It's a rip on how little we really know about the conflict. And it's a "desert of the real" comment on what's out there really. And it takes jabs at the domestic US environment of indolence and overconsumption. For some reason there is this "Target: PS1" theme too -- is Bush aiming at art?

The great thing in all this stuff is the performance of the message about media and truth.

Batman Begins

Finally saw the Lord of the Rings/Kung Fu-variant of the first (Tim Burton) Batman. It was bad. Terrible dialogue. Predictable in many ways.

The one novel and interesting bit is the "Batman as ninja" origins story. I guess he had to get those moves from somewhere!

Kehinde Wiley at Deitch

Wow - big paintings, big band. Some whiff of overreaching in the production - lame interior decoration. But you can't argue with the paintings. "Heroic" as he said.

Hannah and Her Sisters

On a weeknight, tuned into one of the great Woody Allen stories and thankfully one where he is peripheral not central (one gets tired of his character over the decades).

It's a great comedy, structured loosely with the phrasing of a soap opera rather more than of a 90-minute, tightly-designed, narrative-arced classical 'romantic comedy'. As such, it picks up themes (love, death, ambition) and cultural drifts (literary culture in New York) here and there.

So it made me think of Woody's complaint, on the receipt of his Lifetime Oscar, that people don't take his movies seriously because they are comedies. He doesn't take his subjects seriously either, in Hannah and Her Sisters as an example. There are lots of natural and human encounters with the tricky aspects of life, but there are limits to what he can actually say in this form. We watch the players flirt with some serious issues, then drift along in their lives. Nobody had brian cancer; nobody ruined their marriage. They live their lives.

Entourage

The mirror image of Sex and the City -- set in LA, four guys, skewing young, movie business, living intertwined lives not "professional" ones, lower-brow/street fashion sense, hip hop -- Entourage is fun to watch. The guys are from Queens. It's not really about anything except the way the movies work, so that's fun. Kind of the way BBC's Extras is fun. Except with a great mix-tape soundtrack, more visually interesting content, and more relaxed comic pacing. And more cursing.

HBO: Entourage Music

Idlewild

Buy it

Been listening to Idlewild on Y! Unlimited. Verdict: REM with a dance beat á la Postal Service.

"Crack the code, solve the crime"

Is there a best episode?

It might be episode 4 of Twin Peaks - the funeral of Laura Palmer.

All the best themes of the Lynch epic are right there in front. Some favorites:
- science vs. the irrational, e.g., the psycho FBI special researcher who's pure-science approach grinds to a halt in the fuzzy-headed, mystical and folksy land of Twin Peaks
- the lurid, purple narrative of TVland "soaps" (and their language of fantasy and imagination) vs. the "traditional" narrative structure and expectations of film/writing. For example, when the soap opera on TV is rolling the opening credits at the Palmer house, showing an actress who plays both twins (a classic soap convention)...and in walks the character Madeliene -- the spitting image of Laura Palmer but in big glasses and goofy clothes. A twin...but Mr. Palmer is unaware.
- "crack the code..." is Dale Cooper's mantra after he explains the local cops his investigative method. He dreamt the solution, encrypted in his dream. "Sometimes my arms bend back" Laura told him in her dream. The episode reveals (right from the pure-science researcher's mouth) that she had been tied up with her arms behind her back. The dream was right. Cooper is onto something.

In the magical forest, in the quintessential small town packed with secrets, in the off-kilter methods of the federal agent we have the world of Lynch. Stories that look like real life superficially but wrap you up in the magic and superstition that oozes out. Just like on TV.

Scarface

Wow, this is a great Pacino performance. It's also a great story. All this exciting drum roll from this marvellous jerk with cajones ("You got the money and the yayo?").

This is the best image in the whole film. The "Say hello to my little friend" bit is memorable, but here is where the cinematographer and the set designer just hit it.

Tarantino's stuff from True Romance through the samourai crap is just open theft after you see this.

Also please note this scene from the Pan Am helicopter port in what appears to be...Long Island City. That is the Queensboro bridge right after he blows the hit in front of the UN. Beginning of the end. Or maybe early-middle of the end. Anyway, about the LIC context: don't ask me. I don't know.

Wild Style

Saw this movie after sitting on the download for nearly 3 years. Not sure why I waited so long.

It's an amateurishly executed movie - the plot is lousy, the acting is bad. I figured I would find it boring.

Thing is, it's overflowing with real live authentic old school hip hop: breakdancing, rapping and graffiti.

Look at these cool sweatshirts that the Fantastic 5 are wearing. The gothic lettering...I love it.

Fab 5 Freddy was the executive producer. (Debbie Harry from Blondie not only provides the soundtrack but also a terrible performance as the whitey reporter from the Voice). Freddy's fingerprints are all over it (his graffiti is in the background of some scenes). And in many ways it is his story: from the subway cars to the canvas dealers of Chelsea.

This guy was all over the place in the 80s. He was hanging out with Warhol, capitalizing on every major founding tradition of hip hop, making money, doing blow, launching Yo! MTV Raps, etc etc etc. Whatever happened to Freddy?

Wild Strawberries

Saw this one a few nights back as well. I guess I get the reputation for brooding, intellectual films from this example par excellence.

It's like a cinematic Melville or Proust - a philosophical novel. It devotes whole passages to contemplating directly the issues that other films might use "stories" merely to stir up. And it's so amazingly dated with the vogue for Freudianism in mid-century intellectual Europe.

Wild Strawberries

Dazed and Confused

Saw this movie for the first time since college, which -- amazingly -- was just a year or two after it first came out.

Having just seen Cinema Paradiso it's easy to connect some of the nostalgia themes from here to there. This one is sentimental as a kind of high school highlight reel. That's what makes it such a great film to watch with friends while reliving your own versions of the jock, stoner, etc.

Have to say though that it works in that context much better than straight-on. Stories make movies more gripping.

Dazed and Confused (1993)

Cinema Paradiso

What a great film. A story about nostalgia told through the dramas of the movie house and the projection booth. A clean, sharp construct: the great director looks back, on the occasion of his hometown mentor's death, on the theater where he became himself.

The scene when Salvatore comes back to visit his childhood bedroom is a moment of high nostalgic emotion that eludes that walks the line of sentimenal treacle beautifully. The film's entire narrative arc (father figure, return to roots, young love) and this scene in particular are total cliche. But shown here, in that setting, in that way, with Salvatore, his mother, his stuff, the music, the light and everything -- it feels fresh, authentic and real the way your own emotions do, when you experience them yourself.

Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1989)

Wow, Vice is a really good magazine

Wow, Vice is a really good magazine


Originally uploaded by asarva.

I had some time on my hands walking around in SF so I read every inch of Vice volume 12 #8. How can it be this good? It's been around a long time and it's actually authentically pissed off and hilarious. It's even really smart about its politics, so much that it can take on everyone self-righteously without falling into formulaic drivel. Even this: for a magazine full of "this guy is a total fucking loser" it manages to lay out a positive agenda at the same time for things that keep it "real". Anyway, it's pretty good.

A bout de souffle

A bout de souffle


Originally uploaded by asarva.

Bogart. Gangsters. Nouvelle vague.

Last Days

Last Days (2005)

Saw the Kurt Cobain movie with Matt, which he was kind enough to remark is all about "Kurt as Christ". Which I guess is an interesting if pretty straightforward way to treat the martyred rock star.

Why treat him that way, though? What does that connection illustrate about either one of those guys? Jesus was a drug-addled, lonely guy... Kurt Cobain had an important message of love for the world... not sure that either is true.

Here is my take: being a lonely, troubled, forsaken figure in the world is pretty ordinary. You can be a revolutionary religious leader or a neo-hippie spoiled American...and it looks pretty much the same. Walk through the woods, mutter, kind of be disconnected from the practical matters in the world. So to the 18-year-old viewership, you too can be a martyr to future generations. But it doesn't mean you mean anything.

Extras

Saw the first couple of episodes of the new Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant show from BBC: Extras. It's funny!

Cleaning out New Yorkers

Some things I'd like to come back to, after leafing through a stack of NYers on the flight over here to Austria:
* Where'd you get those? - sneaker culture in the 1970s and 80s in New York. Culture is apparently "stuff people do", and when people do stuff in NY then stop doing it -- well, it's as interesting as when an Eskimo language is lost
* Godel's proof - I used to know all about it but I feel the need to reacquaint after reading about his relationship with Einstein and the recent work on his theory of time. He's a titanic figure in logic (with popular derivative writings like Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach and Penrose's stuff on the mind). The Nagel book is probably what I will pick up.
* Technology's impact on music. There were a few cool new books on how the phonograph changed the way symphonies sounded (more precision, more horns/winds, more vibrato on strings than the old days). I think one of the most interesting topics on all arts disciplines is related to the impact of technology on seeing, hearing, aesthetics, standards, culture, etc. The camera destroyed painting then reconstituted it; the record destroyed music then reconstituted it (hip hop); the press destroyed language then... you get the idea. What about the latest technologies -- MP3s, Divx, Email, etc.
More to follow as I plow through this big stack.

Dancer in the Dark

Lars von Trier's film with Bjork as Selma is a gloomy film but thought-provoking, about film and also about life. Formulaic in a way that is often annoying in mass-cultural contexts, this film's formula is part of the message about how movies look and feel, and how they tell their stories.

"He needs his sight." "No, he needs his mother!" Should she pay for her son's eye operation before it is too late, or should she live. It's an amazing choice that becomes heavier and heavier as the narrative thumps the choice on Bjork's character repeatedly, backwards and forwards. She slaves away, she loses her sight, she kills a man, she takes a death sentence, she passes up an expensive lawyer that could save her...

Meanwhile, the movie is a musical. And Bjork's voice is incredible coming from that mousy character.

Farenheit 9/11

Returned to the movies after a long hiatus (during which I watched movies on my TV/computer but never in theaters) to see Moore's new documentary.

I bothered partly because people have been "talking about it", not because I expected to get breaking news or opinion from him. Broadly, I probably agree with things he has to say, so I don't really need to hear it from him directly.

Part of the spur was this one person's quite surprising line of criticism of Moore. He's dishonest or misleading or unethical, apparently in how he bends the truth, she said. From a left-leaning New Zealander who also happens to be a law professor, that's an indictment from about as far left as anyone gets. But she wasn't really criticizing Moore for being to soft on Bush (though she was saying that too, e.g., why not show the horrible violations of the Patriot Act instead of the goofy misuses to infiltrate hippie peacenik gatherings).

What she was saying is: a)this guy presents his movie as journalism, b)it's inaccurate, and c)therefore he has violated a code of ethics. Finally, d)that she'd expect better from the left because she knows the right does it regularly.

a)Is it presented as journalism? It's a documentary. They do have this air of being drawn from fact and I think any video or fact stated is true (or at least Moore thought it was, and I assume he checked to be sure). But it's a documentary and the whole point is to tell a non-fiction story. In this case, the point is polemical: why did Bush help the Bin Ladens run away instead of asking them if they'd seeen Osama lately? why did we send only 11,000 soldiers after Osama but 300,000 after Saddam? etc.

It seems to me well within the rights of the documentarist to make a point. The historian writes history to tell the story of what happened, sometimes it means people can attack the story as misleading or inaccurate. The goal of telling a story to make sense of events is different than the goal of presenting "all the facts". Someone may have that goal but neither the historian, nor the nightly news, nor the documentarist present "all the facts" ad nauseum. In any case, it's certainly not being presented on a news broadcast. It's a movie theater.

b)Even if presented as journalism, I don't really see gaping inaccuracies. I haven't read the criticisms of the facts that must be out there already. Maybe there are some. But it seems to me the main critique would be the use of strong insinuation toward vague conclusions.

"We are in Iraq for the oil." Does that mean Bush and his guys literally sat down with a Powerpoint presentation saying "How to get oil", went through the list, chose Iraq, launched a document called "misiniformation...". If it means that, then it's inaccurate. But he probably doesn't mean that.

What he means is something really vague. Something like....Bush and his cronies are oilmen; they see the world through this lens; they are buddies with the Saudis and have taken on their point of view over the years of mixing business/politics/pleasure together; they set themselves on an agenda that Saddam is bad; this caused them to see 9/11 through the Saddam lens; and by the way, the oil would be a great benefit too; etc.

If that's what he means, then it's not terribly inaccurate if you ask me. But it's hard to say for certain since the biggest conjecures are pretty vague.

The vague, big conjectures are at the margins though: the core of the argument is that there are inappropriate dealings, that the Saudis have been given special influence, that the Iraq agenda took precedence over Al Qaeda, that Bush was on vacation 42% of the days from his inauguration to 9/11, etc.

c)There should probably be a journalistic code of ethics but it's hard to see one out there in the world. The New York Times took Bush's lines on Iraqi WMD all the way; the Fox News network is unapologetically biased; the journalistic community has systematically ignored conflict and tragedy in parts of the world where Europeans don't live. There's a lot more. I find it difficult to object to Moore's movie -- even if it were presented as a 60 Minutes segment -- on the grounds that it is far different from the typical stuff you see. It's certainly no different from the Op-Eds in the newspaper, or the John Stossel-style pieces on the evening news magazines. And I think it's pretty much as slanted as the "ongoing coverage" of the NY Post or Weekly Standard etc. It's opinion plus fact and you can draw your own conclusions -- even when it's wrong part of the time.

d)On the right wing press, I don't think it's relevant. If the world can include them it's ridiculous to "expect better" from "our guys". Especially when practical results like elections and wars hang in the balance. In fact, it's the opposite. If you believe you are right, you have to do as much as you can to get the right results within the bounds of what is ethical or prevalent around you.

One of his best

"The World is Full of Crashing Bores" - now officially designated as one of his best. Get the new Mozzer album.

Morrissey's new album

Buy Morrissey's You Are the Quarry

Finally, finally I have my hands on the whole new Morrissey album, You Are the Quarry.

If you know anything about Morrissey, you know it's been a while since his last album. Problems with his self, his band, his producer, his label and even the United Kingdom stood in the way of this album. But now he is settled down in L.A., with Gary Day, with Sanctuary Records...some guy that plays sample sounds off his Mac and popular ambitions.

Measuring this year's press around the Moz (the Voice, the Press, the hip interview mags like Index, the TV shows like you-name-it...), he has orchestrated a powerful publicity campaign. His long repose (Achilles sulking in his tent?) and the maturing of his Smiths-era teeny-bopping fans have come together.

We, his fans, are grown up now and hungry for his greatest days and so is he.

But I didn't bother getting the album in any hurry and I barely made it to the Apollo show. I've heard some of the songs in pre-release, and I've even now seen him live in Harlem.

I wasn't too worked up because there are songs in this album which are lousy. There are Dido-like Adult Contempo tracks, boorishly uncomplicated lyrics, other panderings. I wonder what he has in mind. He used to have the strong partnership of Marr, Steven Lillywhite on Vauxhall or Stephen Street on Viva Hate. Listen to Morrissey at KROQ (or just look at the fucking picture on the cover!) and you will get the idea. Wow, the sound was fresh and original and entrancing. It was punk played through a rockabilly guitar setup, with Morrissey simply crooning his pop right over it. It was great stuff.

All that aside, there are a few great songs on this album too. "First of the Gang to Die", "Irish Blood, English Heart" -- they are great songs. Big, Vauxhall-period anthems about love, identity, heroism, authenticity. I also like "How Could Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel" (where he takes on his impossible-to-sing lyricism and demolishes it with his inimitable phrasing; turning prose into song, skipping the step of poetry). You should get these songs and listen to the rest of the album. And you should fire up your old albums again. You can see what we're all missing!

Sleep and art

Three other books I'm reading/finishing:

The Promise of Sleep

The Economics of Art and Culture

The Economics of Art and Culture

Paris 1919 (cont)

Read this book. Here are my four big conclusions:
- communism was a way bigger threat in 1919 than we like to remember. It affected every aspect of their deliberations. Hungary, parts of Germany, other areas had communists overthrowing local governments. They needed to contain Russian communism even back then, and this limited their options for sitting around and thinking everything through. It left the post-peace gameboard significantly in Germany's favor -- with all her rivals to the east cut up into pieces (before they had been an immense, powerful Russia and Austia-Hungary).
- the Allies didn't win very big; they barely won. And as the months passed in 1919, their clout to impose a peace was deteriorating fast.
- Keynes was wrong about the crushing burdens of the peace. It wasn't so bad. Germany didn't end up paying much.
- there was a fundamental contradiction in the approach: Wilson's "fair peace" vs. Clemenceau's more "practical peace". The practical peace would have gone further to cripple Germany forever. Wilson's made it possible for Germany to come back bigger and stronger. Neither fair enough to quiet the losers nor strong enough to weaken them permanently.

Buy Paris 1919

Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan

Reading this book about the post-WW2 negotiations. Amazing how doomed the whole enterprise was -- by Wilson's crazy scheme for perpetual peace, the ambivalence of the English, the single-minded security anxiety of the French.

Buy Paris 1919

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (continued)

Just a few more notes about this very interesting book. I want to tell you what the book is about.

The book is about trying to explain the big patterns in human history by scientific methods, and the biggest pattern is "why did Europeans go out and colonize the far reaches of the world rather than the other way around?" Why did Pizarro capture Atahuallpa instead of an Inca explorer capturing the king of Spain?

Diamond's thesis is that it's about environment, not about the particular peoples involved. Fundamentally, environment operated in these four ways:

1. Wild plant and animal species were very different on the different continents. There were 13 big domestic mammals in Eurasia, and only 1 in the Americas (and 0 in Australia). The plants in the Fertile Crescent were far more suitable for agriculture, and required less domestication. It took much longer to achieve the same results with the raw materials available in the Americas or Africa.

2. The continents are set up in ways to have dramatically different rates of diffusion and migration. The East-West axis of Eurasia made it easy to move farming along the single seasonal band. You cannot do this on the North-South axes of Africa and the Americas, where the plants had to be re-engineered as you moved into different growing cycles North and South. Same with the natural geographic boundaries that cut the continents of Africa, the Americas, and Australia into pieces -- the Isthmus of Panama, the many deserts of the US southwest and Saharan Africa and Australia. The mountain ranges. There were far easier barriers along the stretch from France through to China.

3. Total size is the third factor. Eurasia was big and the others small (especially including the factors of geographic boundaries), and so there were more inventors, more ideas shared, more technology built on other technology in Eurasia.

From these fundamental factors flowed everything: farming and increased populations densities, sedentary lifestyles and the time to develop technology, political infrastructure, domestic animals and resistance to their diseases, economic specialization, writing's ability to store experiences. And those bases ultimately supported Pizarro and his band of a few dozen as they overthrew the 100,000 Inca army and captured their emperor -- slaughtering them with disease, steel blades, professional soldiers, fast ships, etc etc.

The Divx Movie Collection

The Divx format movie collection I have amassed (you know how), and whether I have seen the film:
Animal House
Austin Powers 2 - good
Vanilla Sky - good
Fat Albert Xmas
Austin Powers - good
American Beauty - good
AI
Anti-Trust
Aliens
About a Boy - ok
Apocalypse Now - very good
Best in Show - very good
Breakfast Club - good
Bridget Jones Diary - ok
Boogie Nights - very good
Blade Runner - very good
Black Hawk Down
Crouching Tiger... - very good
Chicken Run - good
Chocolat - good
Casablanca - very good
Cinema Paradiso - very good
Das Boot - very good
Dead Poets Society - very good
Dude Where's My...
Eyes Wide Shut - very good
Four Rooms
Fight Club - very good
The Fifth Element - ok
Fast and the Furious
French Connection - very good
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
Hannibal
Hard-Boiled - good
The Hobbit (animated) - very good
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Harry Potter
High Fidelity - good
Goodfellas - very good
Johnny English
Game of Death
Just Married (french)
In the Bedroom
Gosford Park - good
Lord of the Rings 1 - very good
Kill Bill - ok
Legally Blonde - ok
La Strada
The Mexican
Meet the Parents - very good
Monsters Inc
Monty Python and the Holy Grail - very good
Midnight Cowboy - very good
Moulin Rouge - very good
Notting Hill - bad
Notorious
Princess Bride - good
Original Kings of Comedy - ok
The Rock - bad
Rush Hour 2 - ok
Ronin - ok
Reservoir Dogs - very good
Rat Race - ok
Requiem for a Dream - good
Seven - good
Shrek - good
Sling Blade
Scent of a Woman - good
Swingers - good
Shipping News
Pink Panther - good
The Man Who Wasn't There
Sixth Sense
This is Spinal Tap
Traffic - good
Tank Girl - bad
The Third Man - very good
The Man Who Knew Too Much - good
Tarzan (french)
Talented Mr. Ripley - very good
Transformers, The Return of Optimus - bad
Unbreakable - good
28 Days Later
3000 Miles to Graceland - bad
Max Headroom

And now, for the duplicates:
Rush Hour 2
Moulin Rouge
Transformers
AI
High Fidelity
Blade Runner
3000 Miles to Graceland

Plus, the two seasons of Twin Peaks, first two seasons of Sopranos and first three seasons of Sex and the City.

Whoa! That's a bunch of stuff to fit in one CD binder.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Realized that I haven't posted to the reading list of this blog in ages. Partly because I haven't been finishing books lately. Have a few open. And partly because I haven't had time to post on the smaller things -- movies I may happen to watch and like (e.g., Barton Fink).

Been reading this lately and it's extremely interesting. Some notes I took on what I think is the most interesting subject. Why have a state? Why not live in the "state of nature"?

Why big societies are needed to develop states:
-need food production
-seasonal pulses of agricultural society permit contrib to central authority
-stored surplus permits econ specialization
-sedentary--> tech,possessions,public works
why have a state?
-aristotle thought it was natural, but it's not in many early societies
-Rousseau thought it was product of a rational decision, but it's more gradual
-redistributive function of the state smooths incomes and manages risk
-conflict resolution between unrelated peoples
-decision-making for a collective
-denser living requires better division of resources

Movies from Netflix

We have been watching movies in a stream from Netflix lately, and here is what I think of them.

8 1/2

This movie is just sublime and it is a shame I waited so long to see it after loving Fellini's La Dolce Vita so much. It's a movie about being someone like Fellini, a director struggling to make another great film in a world of demanding women, restless film industry-types, and a relentless Catholic culture.

Viewing the voice of 8 1/2 in comparison to the dominant Italian film tradition of the 1950s--neo-realism--makes this all the more telling. A film about a film, dream sequences interspersed with reality and imagination, the moping hero overcome by his sentimental nature, and the potent symbolism of culture and art--those are totally familiar narrative modes by now. Set against De Sica and other greats immediately preceding the 1960s in Europe, it is startling.

But it's also a stylish and fabulous image of life and enormously appealing on just that count. Ditto for La Dolce Vita of course and worthwhile just to admire the sunglasses and haircuts.

Chungking Express

Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels is a better movie, though it is said to come from the cutting room floor of the better-known Chungking's production. The film is a collection of three compressed character portraits that sketch extremely narrow identities for a few charming figures in set pieces -- a fast food stand, a mysterious woman on the run.

It's interesting to see how you can develop a character without developing at all. Think of Melville's Bartleby - who is he? why is he? why exactly does he "prefer not to"? All we see is a dozen riffs on just one scene, over and over. Taking up just a few settings, as if a budget-constrained sitcom, Wong Kar-wai introduces impossible characters who hang around a bit - then vanish. On to the next sketch. All of them are human of course, and for their lack of dimensions have incredible affect and feeling.

The Thinker's Toolkit, by Morgan Jones

In pursuit of problem-solving books I decided to pick up this not-very-cogsci but very practical volume by "former CIA analyst" (a ridiculous way to promote this book nowadays).

The argument of the book is pretty much: we usually think in sloppy ways and for most problems it's fine. They are easy problems. But this sloppiness is systematic and very harmful as you tackle complex situations.

The key problems are:
- salience effects - the one strongest reason or most familiar item etc will have disproportionate impact on our thinking about something. From a list of ten options, we will find it easy to choose the best and worst, and will do so for one "salient" consideration rather than deliberating toward an on-balance conclusion.
- first answer rationalization - whatever you come up with first (for reasons of salience above, say) you will then start gathering evidence to support, so everything will look like it points toward your first answer
- early narrowing - when brainstorming is required and you should be generating many options, you'll often briefly consider than dismiss 2ndary choices without giving them a multi-aspect analysis
- connecting dots - if you get lots of details confirming a hair-brained proposition, you start believing it -- even when it is ruled out decisively by a negative fact or not confirmed at all. For example, people who hear that Melissa is a lawyer rule this sentence, "Melissa is a feminist", more likely to be true than this one: "Either Melissa is a feminist or she eats meat". The latter is more likely, since it's a disjunction. But people like connecting the woman + lawyer = feminist dots. You do too, I bet.

Buy The Thinker's Toolkit, by Morgan Jones

The way to solve these problems, this fellow suggests, is to rely on systematic methods of analysis that force you to think in a structured way. It's very convincing. And it's pretty easy to adopt a lot of these suggestions as procedural rules for group discussions or for independent work. It is tempting to say "screw it" and work directly from more familiar methods. But I think in groups especially this method is invaluable. They are, sadly, likely to sound like dorky management-speak when you offer them though. So watch out for lingo etc.

Plus-Minus-Fix. When debating options, first list all the benefits of the options, to avoid the natural tendency to dismiss stuff quickly. Then the negatives. Then debate ways to fix the negatives. Having compiled all that, evaluate.

Decision trees. Don't throw the floor open when multiple decisions needs to be made. See how they impact each other. Decide which should be made first, then let that choice constrain the next choice. Otherwise, you'll let a preference for one solution bias the whole way you decide, ignoring important and logically prior factors. You can also avoid discussing stuff that doesn't matter.

Write and draw stuff. People need the writing to scaffold their thinking or they can forget all the progress you've made in a flash.

Major factors. Looks for the big causes and ignore the details that don't make contributions on that scale.

Pair-ranking. When you need to sort large groups of data, don't just rank from 1 to 15 by preferences. It's too elaborate a task. 1 and 15 will be obvious, but 4 and 12 will be almost random. Instead, compare every one to every other to do "pair rankings" for each. Put a mark next to the winner of each pair ranking. The winner of the most pair rankings will be #1, then #2 etc. This focuses you a lot more. If you think there are multiple factors at play, do a pair ranking along ever relevant factor. Then weight the results by the importance of the factors, then take the total votes to each item. Seems long-winded but it is much more likely to reflect your considered view.

Brainstorming. To come up with lots of options before you whittle stuff down, you need lots and lots of ideas. Just list every possible idea, try variations and recombinations. Reverse the question, rewrite the question, imagine solving the opposite, imagine creating the problem, etc. This will help you come up with as many relevant ideas as possible. Later, you combine likes and eliminate silly stuff.

How to Solve It, by George Polya

I owe you my notes on this book:

Buy How to Solve It, by Polya

Influence, by Robert Caldiani

I owe you my notes on this book:

Buy Influence, by Robert Caldiani

Marxisme et La Gauche Francaise

Last month, on the plane ride back to NY, I dug into a topic that had been engaging me since my arrival in France: their politics. I saw a book by an author on European issues that I quite like, Tony Judt who writes for the NYRB, at a discount price: $2. Only "challenge" was that this thick tome was in French.

Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981, by Tony Judt - the english version

I read a few selected chapters fom the thing, which attempts to link together a trajectory for the French "Left" since the period following the post-Napoleon restoration of monarchy through 1981's election of Mitterand. A timeline, where you will be surprised to see just how turbulent French political history has been.

Tony Judt's big argument is that the Left in France has consisted of two distinct branches that were not always united: political liberals and economic egalitarians. The former wanted democracy and the rights of man, á la French Revolution and Robespierre. The latter wanted economic equalities in the socialist vein, and existed long before Marx.

The point is to argue that the steady ascendancy of the politically liberalizing motif in French political life since 1789 has not included a rise in the egalitarian political agenda.

Indeed, it's interesting to read that Mitterand's election to the Presidency in 1981 was an enormous turning point in French history: he was the first representative of a left-oriented economic agenda to ever be elected, the first socialist or left-leaning party member to win the presidency since Liberation, and the first to fall shortly into the trap of "co-habitation" with a hostile Prime Minister.

I made the mistake of waiting three weeks to blog this book, and so much of the really sensitive and compelling nuance that Judt deploys on two centuries of history is lost here. But it's a very good book, and worthwhile.

Competing for the Future, by Hamel and Prahalad

This book is a business school reading list stalwart. If you click through the link here, you will see that hundreds of used copies are available at Amazon. Its influence is obvious. Reading it is like leafing through the company playbook of the 1990s, big companies and small. Strategy! Growth! Future! Leadership!

Competing for the Future

The book is from 1994, and from this date you can infer many of the massive themes that color the context and argument. The 1980s were a period of deep self-loathing in American business, as the spectre of the Japanese supercompanies reached every aspect of American industry. Bruce Springtsteen and Michael Moore exist today because Rust Belt industries collapsed to their knees in competition with Toyota and Sony. The decline of American manufacturing ushered in a period in the late 80s and early 90s where "downsizing" was coined.

American business in 1993 was about the shockingly low overhead of Japanese manufacturing, its efficiency, its speed, and the message of the day was that American methods were bloated, old, complicated. TV news would often profile Japan's MITI (the ministry for innovation and trade, roughly) and its brilliant world-beating policies to encourage growth.

By 1994, people were tired of hearing these messages. Hamel and Prahalad charge in playing the "Ride of the Valkyrie" while everyone else is humming in the funeral march. They say, stop obsessing about cost shavings. Stop staring in the rearview mirror. Forget the mega-scale industrial supremacy of today's dominant players. Everything important is in the future and your ability to prepare for it.

Strategy over operations. Effectiveness is revenues/costs. Everyone has been staring at ways of shaving down costs by 5, 10 or 15%. What's needed is ways of doubling or tripling revenues.

Indeed, when cost is a problem today, because operational problems are dragging down effectiveness, it is because of a failure of strategy. Bad decisions yesterday are the outmoded production systems and supply lines of today.

Strategy is intellectual leadership. Strategy is very broadly construed as a future-orientation for the business and focus on the coming challenges. Developing strategy is about thinking and researching widely and sincerely. One or two geeks or research scientists can't do it. It needs to be done by everyone in every job at the company, and the thinking needs to filter all the way up so that the top management has an articulate vision of the future.

This isn't soothsaying; it's the product of deep thinking. Most people don't think about 2010 because they are worried about Q4. But if you don't think about it now, it will be too late next year.

Strategy is at every level, at every time stage. It feels costly to send the sales team to HQ for strategy sessions, but this is the only way to build a common, broad-based model of the future. Small groups are isolated, and lose touch with reality.

Incumbency is a disadvantage. Today's #1 is the least likely to work aggressively for the future; indeed, they are likely to think they already have what it takes. But size and share do not guarantee longevity.

Money is not a substitute. You can set up a VC arm to spread some investments or even buy in the missing breakthroughs. Strategy is not IP. Strategy is an intellectual perspective carried in the heads of every manager in the firm. You can buy a new factory. But you can't buy a 180 degree revision of your company's self-understanding. You don't hedge your bets across ideas; you develop a view and you work toward it.

Competence, not customers, not products. Companies traditionally think of themselves as producers of a portfolio of products. This is a mistake. Products get outdated. Then companies think of their customers and try to imagine ways of keeping them. This is a mistake also. Customers vanish, or have suprising alternate personalities. Instead, what is intrinsic to your business is your core competencies. (These guys invented this idea.) Companies should think about what they are good at, and focus on that. This may mean outsourcing or eliminating what you are bad at. Why should the marketers at Virgin build their own physical network? Or it may mean thinking about your competences as opportunities for the future. Canon thought about its skills in optics and imaging to move from photography into copiers (it became #1).

Home runs are instructive. CNN beats CBS News, Canon beats Xerox, Toyota beats GM, Komatsu beat Caterpillar, Sony beats RCA...Japan beats USA. All through forward-thinking, wily, blue sky strategies that shocked incumbents out of their slumber.

When you think about these ideas, you see 1999 written all over them.
- What if your "point of view" about the future is wrong? Bet everything on movies-on-demand in 1999 and you are toast (AOL).
- What about fundamentally inescapable uncertainty? Have all the workshops you want, but you won't know it all (IBM).
- When do you come back to work on costs?
- Is literally everything "strategy", making these exhortations rather trivial?
- What if your core competencies are useless?
- If markets are efficient, then money really should be enough.
- Customer lock-in makes life more difficult than it appears when its time to change markets.
- Gradualism of change makes clarity of foresight very hard.

Opus International No. 1

At the intersection of Rue Malher and Rue Pavée in the 4th (the Marais), there is a great book shop of discount art books. They have piles of old magazines. I found this (indubitably, collector's item) Opus International volume 1 from more than 30 years ago, in beautiful condition. In it, Alain Jouffroy writes a number of articles radically critiquing the art and culture of the late 1960s

I wanted to type out a translation (but didn't) of the article by Jouffroy that writes condeming Parisian art snobs for their short-sighted condemnations for American painting after the war. He was right, he says, to predict the rise of a New York-based guard of painters. The first half-century of creators were dying and losing relevance. Duchamps was right about this matter, like so many others, when was the first major European artist to go to America and work there.

Pierrot Le Fou, by Jean-Luc Godard

This is a brilliant film but let me mention just a couple of things briefly. It's Godard's first film in color. You probably remember things like Breathless, where Paris the gray city rustles in the background of our hero's dour path. In it you get a sense for the classic scenes of the nouvelles vagues. Pierrot is a visually shocking film, from this perspective. His recent film, In Praise of Love, may be on your mind, where he plays with digital. In Pierrot, he plays with color. What would you do if you suddenly had color? An early scene, when Ferdinand (the Pierrot character) is at a chic party, goes through whole shots cast under primary color lights. Some people walk by in a green setting, then pass into a red set, then a blue one. He's fooling around.

We meet the famous American director Sam Fuller who tells Ferdinand what film is, in his broad American accented english. A socialite woman standing nearby translates for him, word by word. Film is, in a word, "emotion". Godard takes this seriously, as the meanderings of the loosely narrative-driven sketches to follow demonstrate.

Ferdinand is bored to death at this party and escape on a romantic trip to the south. This is the heart of the film in the sun-drenched Cote d'Azur.

But this last momet, after the climactic unfoldings of the narrative, has Ferdinand completely crushed, gone from gay madness to despair, his face literally painted blue. The phone rings in the shed, he picks it up absent-mindedly. It's a wrong number. But in standing there, he sticks his finger in a pot of blue paint. Waiting for the caller to hang up, starts painting his face. And there you get this scene as Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) drifts out into the sunlight, face expressionless and blue. His skin white. Shirt red. The French tricolor in film, a moment for French cinema. A good film site's entry on Godard, for more about context.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs (2 of 2)

This followup post on the Jacobs book was intended to do my usual thing, where I just bullet-list all the important lessons I could remember from the book. I let it sit so long that I'm not really in the mood to do that anymore. (The original post, where I apply some of the principles to Paris.)

Buy The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

A short-list of that nature:

Commercial Culture

Looks like Clifford Geertz found some of the same flaws in Tyler Cowen's argumentative style. (Repetitiveness, that is.)

Commercial Culture

Looks like Clifford Geertz found some of the same flaws in Tyler Cowen's argumentative style.

In Praise of Commercial Culture, by Tyler Cowen

A topical interest lately is about the role of governments and corporations in the production of culture. There were the National Endowment of the Arts debates of the Gingrich Revolution. Globalization has spurred hand-wringing about how MNC entertainment conglomerates may damage local cultures in smaller countries. Consolidation à la AOL Time Warner has people worried about independent producers of programming. The CNN revolution has also unleashed powerful forces on news production and quality.

Buy In Praise of Commercial Culture

Cowen's book takes up the issue of commercialism's impact on culture. Is capitalism good for culture--music, painting, sculpture, theater, television, film, writing, sports, and so on?

One problem with putting the question this way is that the answer is obviously yes. Aside from some extremists who want to return our society to pre-Industrial conditions, nearly anyone can agree that capitalism is a good way to structure society. It creates wealth for everyone (though not with great equity), allows great freedom of choice and movement (though more freedom to the rich), efficiently produces what society needs and wants, and so on. Like democracy, when one is thinking about its flaws, capitalism is the worst option except for all the rest.

So the answer is of course, capitalism is good for the arts. You need wealth and leisure to do it.

The real question is whether the arts should be capitalist. Any capitalist will tell you we should not have free markets for everything. There are well-recognized economic structures requiring monopoly or non-free structures, like the funding of public goods such as militaries or telephone network construction. Many big-scale projects are better carried out by government or by regulated monopolies. Some things are better done through communist-style collaborative organizations, like "the family" that conservatives like to identify at the core of much social policy.

Reasonable people will draw the circle of non-capitalist institutions rather widely, to include all manner of economically non-optimal goods and services for which simple free market logic is badly flawed. Perhaps regulated medical care and/or insurance, investment in long-term technologies, redevelopment of cities, improvement of racial integration are all things that government and similar institutions should work to promote or regulate because these are the best ways to handle these issues.

The problem is that Cowen's book rarely addresses this manner of question. He's making pointless arguments: wealth is good for art; technological advance is good for art. These miss the key issue. Far too much energy is spent debating whether the arts of today are better than the arts of aristo-monarchist yesteryear, or whether artists like to earn money, or whether popular tastes tend toward the low and mean. (The other problem is that the book is 90% history of music, art or writing from papyrus to Internet. Not enough argument, too much summarizing of cultural history under a pan-capitalist historical revision.) He misses the most important objection, as a result, I think. That markets for art may be bad for art.

Some of the interesting parts.

Things were better then. The traditional thing that people say is "X was so much better way back when". News coverage was better, films were better, music was better....things are getting worse. A more extreme form is that popular forms like rock and roll are "worse" than baroque classical music. Wagner is better than Elvis. The important point Cowen makes is that this is almost always semi-ignorant fuddy-duddyism. The comparisons are pointless and it's impossible to feel like recent stuff can match the canonized masterpieces of old. But it usually does.

Diversity. The thing we can reasonable measure with respect to culture is diversity. How much choice is there? Is there the possibility of having many esoteric niches? Perhaps that is the objective test. Capitalism is said to provide this, on his view, since you can have niche record labels and such. Network television had low diversity. I actually doubt that a bigger market implies more diversity. This is sometimes true, but not always true. More buyers alone won't help -- lots of people watch TV but there were restrictions on broadcasters for a long time. For radio, a few companies are concentrating control of supply by use of market means. So that's a "big market" with reduced choice. The point may be that many buyers + many sellers implies diversity. Note that deregulation/free-marketeering do not guarantee that situation. Certain industries are not suited to it; maybe most are not suited to it. So I don't know that there is a natural advantage to the capitalist-themed argument on this point.

Economics of high and low. He makes the interesting point that low culture tends to be the stuff that is hard to make. An action-packed, special-effects-laden Hollwood film is expensive to make. High investment means it has to appeal to the largest audience. Lowest common denominator = low culture. If it's easy to do something, like write poetry, you can customize it far more. You can appeal to fewer and fewer people, and this process of increasing elitism is what makes the cultural form transcend into high culture. It's cheap to write a concerto or even perform one, all the hoity-toity stuff aside. You don't need a fancy hall or black ties. Just 10 young people and some instruments. Much cheaper than broadcasting anything on television or creating a national-scale sports league.

Cost disease. An argument from William Baumol and William Bowen which says that performing arts suffer from a cost disease. Over time, it gets cheaper to produce a car. Better technology and bigger scale, etc. But it takes the same human effort to produce an aria or a play. Therefore, such forms get relatively more expensive over time. Cowen's very good point is that "performing" arts artificially stacks the deck against the advance of technology. 99% of the music I enjoy is recorded, not performed. Technology has made the performance of that particular art obsolete, but it has not diminished the art.

Mass culture. Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is important on the point that one creator can now make stuff for millions of consumers. This makes it possible to concentrate supply in the first place; it wasn't like this before. It makes it possible for the logic of economic scale to diminish supply. That's more or less a QED against the age of mechanical reproduction, right? No -- because before the stuff that got produced also cost more. So it wasn't that all people used to listen to custom-produced operas, and now they all listen to a single recording produced at scale. Rather, opera used to be too expensive to bring to 100 million people. Yet that is what PBS did by televising the Ring in 1990. So that's more change not less.

Two funny quotes. Renée Descartes moved to the Netherlands and called Amsterdam "a great town, where everyone, except me, is in business."

Michelangelo, when told that this sculptures for the Medici family tomb didn't much resemble the family, responded, "In a thousand years, nobody will remember what they looked like."

Two trivia names. Matson Jones -- the nom de guerre used by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg when they collaborated arranging shop windows for Tiffany's before they were famous.

Kahnweiler -- Parisian dealer for Picasso, Derain, Braque and Gris in 1913. The classic master dealer.

Central Banking in Theory and Practice, by Alan Blinder

I figured I'd take a look at this book sitting on my brother's desk, and so I have. It's Blinder's lectures at Princeton upon retiring from the Vice-Chairmanship of the Fed, presented to a community of economists from the perspective of a man who has been both academic and policymaker.

Buy Central Banking in Theory and Practice

Most bits are interesting in the context of major debates that have taken place on the issues of monetary policy. So it's surely not an introductory account of central banks. But it's a quick taste of some views on questions that actually are interesting.

Policy decisionmaking. The way the Fed works with the Chairman + governors is an inherently conservative structure requiring consensus, and conservative is the way to run a central bank. This partly because the models available are not accurate. The best you can do is build many models and see where they are pointing. Then under-do the recommended path. Keep re-adjusting as you move ahead. It's probably a good way to live. So the polemical aim is to argue a)models are uncertain but the best we've got, b)lags exist in action/result, c)use forecasts to look into the sequence of developments and your own future actions, d)you don't have access to just any theoretical tools -- it's the practical ones that matter.

Real interest rates. Inflation/deflation affect the real interest rate, so whatever the bank sets needs to be sensitive to this. Which means modeling the economy and forecasting changes even though the "rudder" of nominal interest rates is steady.

Rules vs. Discretion. Silly to talk about rules. Not only that, the traditional focus on instruments is rather pointless since instruments themselves don't guarantee results. Most banks have aims that they ignore, as the Fed ignores it's M1 targets. It might be better to force the banks to target real economic results.

Independence, Markets and Democracy. More independent = better results, demonstrably so for inflation-fighting in particular. Interestingly, Blinder makes a technocracy argument here. Banks need to be isolated from short-sighted politicians and voters. Surely the same argument will work for the military, energy policy, transportation, education, welfare, etc. He wonders, bizarrely, why governments have not set up technocracies to govern taxation. I think I know the answer, though: because they like democracy!

Short book and lecture-format, so the thing was easier reading. But overall not hugely informative about the subject matter to the semi-novice like me. As indeed it is not meant to be, but there you have the judgment anyway.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs (1 of 2)

As I walk around Paris on these warmer days, I look at things and think about the life everywhere in the streets. There are so many bustling districts in Paris, literally everywhere you go. I can easily list two dozen areas where office works and tourists are jostling shopkeepers and schoolchildren as they zip along the streets, between stopped taxis and municipal workers, around the variously protruding cafe terraces and storefront grocery stands.

Buy The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

There are areas like this in New York. Think of the drag along Smith Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, or the main strip at Bedford Ave in Williamsburg. In Manhattan, there are many as well: Bleeker Street near West 4th Street and a number of streets in the West Village, or Prince & Broadway, or Chambers Street or Broadway in Spanish Harlem, or so many other districts.

There are far more in Paris, more evenly distributed, and less frequently punctuated by the enormous emptiness that stretches through places like NY's Financial District, or Upper East Side, or huge stretches of Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the many ghettos in Manhattan like Harlem or the LES projects, or the Grant Houses at 125th Street and Broadway or the Frederick Douglass Houses at 103rd and Amsterdam. These are big empty stretches of town.

As a tourist in Paris, one passes through so many districts with the vigorous life of Times Square or the West Village, supported in their extremely diverse and sometime tacky commercial activities by tourists. But one never passes through the many, many residential districts that simply have no identity on the maps except the nearby Metro stop by which Parisians know them.

Let me illustrate this with a case in point. Just a few minutes away by Metro from the center of Paris, you can find Rue d'Alesia in the bottom of the 14th Arrondissement. There are no monuments around really, but Paris is old and there was a church that probably had some significance that I passed.

This location is so remote, in fact, that several chic Parisian designers have their "warehouse" stores on this street. Here is Cacharel "Stocks".

From Metro exit down to the shop we passed a string of 40-50 shops over 3 blocks including clothing, grocery, bakery, cafe, newspaper and lotto, and half a dozen other varieties. The grocery store was a chain, but none of the others were anything I'd seen before. Every shop was the ground floor of a 4-5 story apartment house, so there were lots of people living in the area and walking around that Saturday afternoon. There was a primary school down the street, a post office, and some of the buildings we passed were actually 4-5 story office buildings, visibly indistinguishable in basic exterior design. Shops, housing, offices, government buildings all intermingled near a mass transit hub. The road itself was an ordinary 2-lane affair, so cars were slowly bubbling through the lanes -- it wasn't a high volume thoroughfare. But the sidewalks were wider than the sometimes-tiny Parisian sidewalks, about 15 feet wide like the ones you'll find in Brooklyn or Queens.

One of those shops was the Cacharel overstock shop (with some amazing stuff! and cheap!), and next door a rather uncool but apparently prosperous Sonia Rykiel outlet.

You don't need to be a great city's coolest neighborhood to bustle with life and activity, host a wide diversity of shops and activities, fill the streets with residents and visitors, and carry it off in the infrastructural confines of 19th-Century Haussmannian city planning.

I say all this in prelude, because Jane Jacobs' book is an absolute marvel, an amazing work and a breathtakingly acute and sensitive catalogue of observations from inside the links and flows of city life. It could not be more accurate as an assessment of everything that makes Paris tick marvelously and makes LA a mash of steaming effluvia. And it is advice for how to make New York marvelous all over. And it's my theoretical backgrounder on how to make my new home neighborhood in LIC a winner.

The Mating Mind, by Geoffrey Miller

To be fair, I sort of breezed through this book -- I didn't read it closely. It is so obviously written to be a copycat bestseller in the vein of Pinker's How the Mind Works -- How the MATING Mind Works. A problem, since Miller just doesn't write as well. Lots of forced anecdotal digressions. Really lacks the talent for turning popular culture examples (Dr. Strangelove) into deeply illustrative explanations for complicated subjects (game theory).

Buy The Mating Mind

Buy How the Mind Works, a masterpiece

He did undergrad at Columbia then his PhD at Stanford, so I felt some fraternity with him (and his book was in the discount box at the Stanford bookstore for only $6). Hence I picked up the book that I had in mind for a while.

Here's what I thought was interesting about the book: Darwinian theory includes, in addition to natural selection for survival, sexual selection. Yet not much has been said by evolutionary psychologists about it. So what does it imply?

Quite a lot of the book spends energy defending sexual selection as a legitimate theoretical instrument in understanding psychology. Maybe there are people who doubt this, but I'm not one of them and I found this stuff uninteresting. The interesting stuff is what implications it holds, right?

Essentially, the argument goes from the peacock's tail to human creativity (and many other higher-order psychological capacities). But it doesn't get a hell of a lot more detailed than that. And it's sort of dry going. I mean, the book is about sex; can't it be more exciting?

As a blog-editorial note, I just want to comment that this post goes in my "Reading List" theme. I've been neglecting it for a long time. So I want to make sure to post a little something about each book or other significant work I look at. That's what this blog is for, anyway -- a catalogued reminder to me about what I've been doing and thinking about. It now contains nearly 2 years of commentary, and over 225 posts. At this rate, I will put shame to Samuel Pepys.

The New York Review of Books - Call for subscribers

The NYRB editors have this week taken the cruel step of securing Tony Judt's new article behind their subscription wall. This is causing me great distress.

While it does not prepare me to pay $68 for their online subscription, it does prepare me to call for assistance. If you would like to share a subscription to the NYRB with me, please email me.

If we get 4-5 people, we can share one account with no trouble at a reasonable price.

As a special bonus, I'll give you my Economist and Salon logins. That's got to be worth something!

I mean, once the political and economic turmoil is over, who really wants to pay $68/year for articles by English professors on 17th century curiosity cabinets? Such is the prices of prosperity, I guess, as the issues of the day diminish to reviews of Mahler criticism. I'm not so boorish as some, but I'm somewhat of a boor. I have to admit the NYRB (sauf political and economic commentary) often bores me to death.

But in this 'season of cynicism'--war, plague, economic stagnation, energy instability, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, cultural crisis, and so on--I think it's worth having.

The Winner's Curse, by Richard Thaler - More

Quick summary of the most interesting results. If they intrigue you, follow up with the book or by searching the Econ literature (it's not all Thaler's work; indeed most isn't).

Buy The Winner's Curse

General Economics
* Interindustry wage differentials - some industries pay everyone better than other industries, including janitors and secretaries. These tend to be those industries that sell high-margin products, like the automobile industry.
* Unions do correlate to higher-pay industries - but they don't correlate to specific companies. An industry with many unions is a higher-pay industry. No proof of causality though. Bigger companies pay more too.
* In a world where *some* people are altruists ("nice"), it pays to be tit-for-tat. Be nice on the first meeting, and continue to be nice to those who are nice to you. If they are not nice, be mean/unfair/defect etc. This is the result of multi-round evolutionary models in mixed worlds (some nice people, some mean). If you think there are very few "nice" people out there, then don't ever be nice to anyone. The "all-nice" strategy is a bad one.
* Cooperation is often a good idea - So the classic economic mindset can make you a "rational fool". You torpedo common goals, but you may also get retribution from tit-for-tat players. (This may be a psychologically hardwired response in people, to punish you for being...cheap, or mean, or selfish, etc.)
* Talking improves cooperation - if people talk to each other, they will do things that may not be their ideal self-interest for the sake of each other. Just a few minutes is enough. Remember this when you go to the DMV or wherever.
* Group membership improves cooperation - if you believe for any reason that you are in a group (even totally arbitrary reasons), you will favor your groupmates over others. So think of common traits when you are negotiating for stuff.
* Dictators are often generous - when people have no reason to be nice to you at all, they will often be at least somewhat nice to you. Most people seem to avoid fully excercising dictatorial powers when they have the option on a given deal. Most people tip at highway diners, for example.
* Spite is powerful - people will turn down beneficial offers if they perceive them as being unfair or coming from people who are unfair. Even when they know they will never encounter this person again. This is pure spite, not rationality.
* Fair prices count toward this - "unfair" prices for products can cause people to avoid the products even though it is "worth" the price. Same as the spite point. That's why the Bulls-Knicks game tickets didn't retail for $500; the Garden would have lost future sales out of spite.
* Winner's curse in auctions - the winner of an auction for a product of unknown/uncertain value (basically, all products) will always be the most optimistic. But optimism can be ill-founded. So winner's of auctions almost always overpay. Watch out in the future.
* Defense against winner's curse is cartel behavior - if you want to avoid overpaying due to the built-in overpricing of auctions, you must collaborate with other bidders. Be careful on Ebay.
* The other defense is to avoid bidding - do a backwards-induction on the specific cases. You will often find that you should bid $0.
* Winner's curse applies to jobs and admissions too - the more applicants being considered for a specific post, the more likely that the one chosen will disappoint. When you see many applicants, you see two ranges: a) wide range of qualities, b) wide range of exaggerations. The winner of the admission (chosen person) is likely to be the one who has exaggerated the most. Not just the most qualified. So the result will be very disappointing to the hiring party.
* Status quo bias - everyone prefers today to anything else. Even bad stuff. Think of this w/r/t telecom or cable or electric deregulation. The incumbent has a huge advantage - everyone assume's that AT&T or ConEd is better.
* Loss aversion - losing something is considered worse than an opportunity cost (not getting something). That is an arbitrage opportunity. People value their stuff as more valuable than all other stuff, that is.
* Endowment effect - that is, what you give them as the default or as their current property will be worth more. So a $1 pen, if you say "it's yours", will only be given up for more than $1.
* Price hikes are unfair, but ending discounts is okay - if you are unsure about prices, always list prices as a discount. That way you can raise them by "ending the discount". Price hikes, though, are outrageous.
* Comparisons rely on compatible scales - people overweight evidence from a "compatible" measurement criterion. For example, "you need to get to the movies in 100 minutes. The trip usually takes 100 minutes, but there is traffic. Route A is taking 10 minutes longer than usual. Route B is taking 10% longer than usual." People would conclude that A is taking longer than B. That's illustrative of what this result means; not a real experimental question.
* Consider compatibility in particular when choices are based on two dimensions of reasoning, like price and quality. The comparison can force the customer to decide based on the more compatible of the two criteria if set up properly. If you offer confusing (but higher) pricing, you can attract the customer to the superior quality since they will not bother to "compute" the price comparison. They'll go for what is cognitively less demanding. It's not really laziness, but you can think of it this way. It will apply especially where there isn't a right answer -- so if the two characteristics are leg-room and warranty-length, for example. You can force the decision to rely on the criterion you choose by setting up the question/context properly.
* Discount rates (short term) - In the short term, now is way better than later. Same for small amounts, like $5. Delaying something from now to tomorrow, or delaying $5 payoff, is like destroying it's value. This is not how people behave with large sums -- they don't care if you give them $1,000 next week or next month; they apply much lower discount rates to it.
* Better for later, get the worst over with - people also save the best for last and move up the time of negative stuff. This is not logical. Putting off a $5 loss reduces the financially calculable present value of the loss. Yet people don't account that way.
* People want rising income, not lumps or otherwise. People prefer to get more income later, rather than more income now. That follows from the above too. But it means they'd rather make millions when 60+ rather than earn it all in the 20s.
* On all kinds of purchases, the costs NOW are more important than the costs LATER. Witness the cost-of-ownership of air conditioners or SUVs. People buy less efficient stuff because it's cheaper at the store. So you should always offer layaway plans.
* Delaying/Speeding Up follow the Loss Aversion rule - people are more frustrated by a delay than they are pleased by an acceleration. So avoid risking delays at all costs; the payoff of an early delivery is not valued highly.
* Life cycle consumption - People don't think of their lifetime earning. They only think of what they are earning *now*. This leads them to live poorly even though they will later have the funds for sure (think of pizza-eating Stanford MBA students).
* Mental accounts - people keep their accounts separate: income, cash, retirement savings, home equity. They do not spend enough of their savings or home equity or future income. They assume it is not available. On the other hand, people who only have cash or current income spend too much of those accounts relative to what they should.
* Risk vs. Payoff - people choose the sure thing, but value the higher payoff as better. Got that? 10% chance of winning $100 = $10 expected value. 1% chance of winning $1000 is the same. People will choose the 10% chance. But if you try to buy the 1% game off of them, they will want almost 1,000 dollars! It's clearly irrational. But it means you can play them by showing things to be low risk options, even if the expected value is lower.
* Langer effect - if you let them name their horse or pick their numbers, they actually think it's more likely to win. They value it higher if they have had some role in handling it.

Race Tracks
* Race tracks are efficient - the odds at closing are very high predictors of what will really happen. The #1 favorite wins 30% of the time. (Comes in 2 or 3 the rest of the time.)
* Longshot bias - people bet on the longshot too much. You should *never* bet on it, since the odds over-estimate how likely it is to win.
* Favorite discount - they don't bet on the favorite enough. You should be on this. You will lose the least money this way in the long run. If they favorites are 1:3 odds or better, you will actually make money in the long run. Read the papers by Ziemba and Hausch on this for lots of strategies.
* Complicated bets are less efficient markets, so there are opportunities. So things like trifecta or parlay or daily double. They are hard to understand so people don't exploit them properly.
* You can win on the exacta using this formula: (qi)(qj)/(1-qi) where qi is the probability that horse i is first; that formula gives the probability that horse j is second. So you can take qi and the formula to see the odds of i and j being 1st and 2nd. What are the odds of qi and qj? They are given by the betting odds pretty reliably. How can you use this? Compare it to the odds being given at the ticket window. If your formula says the odds are better, bet. If not, don't.
* Show/Place - Look at the bet pool for place or show. They are less efficient than "win". You will find the odds off from time to time from the real probability that the horse is 1 or 2 or 3rd. Basically, the market forgets that there is a good chance of the favorite coming in 2nd, so does not bet enough on "show". Using formulas like this, you can earn 11% or so. return on your investment.
* Late movers on the odds board - the smart money does seem to bet late. If you watch any late moves in the odds, go with it. It is 30% more accurate than the previous money.
* Lottery numbers - some numbers are really unpopular, making them much better payoffs when they actually win. Don't pick birthdays, for example. The unpopular numbers are: 32, 29, 10, 30, 40, 39, 48, 12, 42, 41, 38, and 18. That's the least popular twelve in order. They are 15-30% less popular than other numbers. This works for pick-6 games. These numbers are unpopular in all years and in all countries studied.

Stocks
* January effect - half of all returns on the stock market in the last several decades have come in January. If you only invested money on Dec 31, and sold on Jan 31, you would have made most of the money.
* January earns 3.5% on average. All other months only 0.5%.
* Small firms are the biggest winners, all year and in January.
* Fridays are the best day. The most value is lost over the course of Monday. (Sell on Monday mornings, then.)
* Months are positive through the 15th; they lose money on average through the second half.
* Lots more. I'm not going to list all the financial market stuff. There are lots of interesting anomalies but none so strong as to justify a trading strategy based exclusively on it. You can't really be a January investor or a currency-price-during-deficits investor, etc. Suffice it to say, though, that there are many interesting irrationalities.

The Winner's Curse, by Richard Thaler

Thaler's stuff on behvioral economics has been increasingly interesting to me. There was a cool profile of him a few years back in the NYT Magazine, and maybe that turned me on to him. Simultaenously, I was getting interested in the "irrationality debate" in psychology.

You see, people and philosophers think that people (and philosophers) are rational. We assume this sort of thing all the time: you know, people make decisions about what they really want. In elementary economics, one considers many of the defining criteria for rationality rather directly: if you like hamburgers better than hot dogs, and hot dogs better than steak, then we should know you like hamburgers better than steak.

The irrationality debate in psychology is in principle the deep, deep problem. It blows away foundational assumptions not only in economics but in philosophy and moral theory, political and game theory, concepts of sociality and government, etc. Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky are the two principal figures in this arena; they were named last year for the Nobel Prize in Economics. So their impact has been big.

It made me wonder if maybe Thaler had been left out. Anyway, I got around to reading one of his book.

He considers a long list of anomalous findings with respect to the theoretical predictions of economics. I don't want to comment too extensively; I'll just list what I think are the cool results.

[I'll do that in a bit.]

Travel Writing

Bill Bryson is a travel writer but here's something I didn't know he had written: The Mother Tongue (1991). A book about the english language and it's development. That is an arbitrary interesting topic; he researched it a bit, then wrote his own blog-like book about it. I think this is an attractive model. Pick a topic, tell some jokes about it, sell millions. That is, in the end, what Pinker's How the Mind works is about.

Even You Can Write in the Big Leagues

Not to be snobby, but this review of two very interesting (sounding) books is really, really boring. It appears in the Prospect, and it's written by an academically well-qualified dude. But really, it's terribly dull. And so I'd label it "poorly written". And for all that, it's little more than a valentine to the authors, pretty much saying "these guys are right to say X".

But to look at the bright side, even you can be published in TAP if you can write as well as this fellow has.

Actually, you should read The American Prospect. It's a pretty good magazine, the blog is interesting, and they are churning out young, liberal journalists by giving them early publication opportunities. It's one of a few good projects going out there.

What's Ahead: Chomsky v. Huntington 1970

We're in for it. The past is future. The NYRB was founded, apparently to fight the Vietnam War. Here are two greats duking it out. (I think Chomsky gets the better of Huntington, but then, I usually do.)

Slate: "No, it's not", and "Why it isn't!"

I'd like to register a complaint against the web magazine Slate, especially under the new Jacob Weisberg editorship. Contrarian and full of refreshing perspectives is a noble goal, but I have to say: it's just a lot of naysaying and nyah-nyah type stuff these days. In the NYT, you'll read "War is now inevitable". On the cover of Slate later that day, "Is war really inevitable?". You'll read that some philanthropist is founding a liberal talk radio show, and on Slate, "Why liberal radio will fail". The Black Hand takes out an Archduke, Slate: "No, he's not dead". Not so fresh when it's utterly predictable, is it?

Not to say that my beloved Salon is doing much better. There is an apparent effort to provide freshness and distinctive views via reporting (no reporting is ever done for a Slate piece). But the reporting is typically highly fringe, and is starting to feel rather politically fringe too. I mean, shrill in its leftyness.

And that's about it for web magazines, isn't it?

Hip Hop America, by Nelson George

Hip Hop America is an excellent if slightly mis-titled book. It is the most impressive thing I've read to survey the origins and development of hip hop culture and music in America.

There's a lot more than that in this book, of course. I haven't read much about the music business, for example, and you get a real sense for how the marketing operations are run, or their star system. If you want to be a record company powerbroker, you should go lick boots as an intern during college. The edgier the label the better; if they hit it big, so will you -- all the more if you are actually talented, like Sean Combs was at Andre Harrell's Uptown Records.

There's great stuff on the arc of basketball culture from the ABA days through Jordan up to neo-Afros and the ultimate rapper-style player, Iverson; the struggle of black feminism to contest the traditions of black male misbehavior without compromising race loyalty, as in the absurd support of many black women for OJ Simpson or bitch-and-ho rappers; the economic expansion of hip hop music businesses into areas like art, cross-promotion, fashion, and other areas. The impact of crack during the Reagan 80s on the ghetto. The decline of disco in the late 1970s as the environment for a new musical form. That is to say, this is a book about African-American culture and its dominant issues in the last 20 years. It's certainly very good on these issues, and Nelson George must like seeing the publisher's suggested filing under "African American Studies" on the back. College syllabus reading, and all that.

And of course, it is brilliant on hip hop, rap, and r&b music itself. The key originating players in the 1970's Bronx, like the MC called Cowboy who is the guy who coined phrases including "Throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care!" and "Clap your hands to the beat!" and "Somebody scream!". The dynamics of that scene, like the schoolyard parties with portable soundsystems or the technological advances of the crossfader that drove new innovations. The powerbrokers and the architects of the sounds that dominated eras. For example, Teddy Riley in the mid-1990s produced a number of top songs and enormously influenced the sound of the era (Kool Moe Dee's "How Ya Like Me Now", Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative", Bel Biv Devoe's "Do Me", etc. -- it was "hip hop smoothed out on an r&b tip with a pop feel to it"). Or Dr. Dre's p-funk sound, or we might as well consider the contemporary impact of producers The Neptunes crossing the rock sound back into hip hop (a la the 1980s pioneering influence of Rick Rubin on Beastie Boys albums or with Run-DMC). There's so much of interest here, and it has spurred me to a bit of academicism with respect to canonical hip hop singles -- the soul or funk origins of later hip hop songs are extremely interesting to look