Around the corner

Israeli shoot-around-corners laser gun

Recovery is just around the corner.  Announced these last days was the happy news that only 36,000 Americans lost their jobs the past month, which was somehow better than the 20,000+ some who’d lost their jobs the month before.  Less than a few months ago, but more than last month, is better than – whatever the fuck.  Spin spin spin.   Flush the toilet.  Watch the water spin.  Watch the Oscars.  Things are getting better, didn’t you notice.  Read this.

Now listen to this.

Oh, but that can’t be true.  You’d have to be a paranoid conspiracy junkie to believe any of that.  Just like you’d have to be nuts to think that WTC Building 7, 47 floors high, collapsed into its own footprint, from collateral damage while buildings adjacent to WTC 1 and 2, suffering far greater damages, stood.

WTC7  had sensitive offices in it (CIA, Guiliani’s “emergency room”).  It’s presumptive owner, Silverstein, was heard saying it would be “pulled” – construction language for “taken down” by demolitions, as in collapse on its own footprint.  No modern steel-skeleton building, such as WTC 7,  has ever collapsed owing to damages and fires far far more extensive than those which it suffered.

But we are counseled by our no-drama-Obama President that we should not look back.  That we should not have an independent investigation into 9/11 and its myriad questions:  why was the most heavily defended slice of American airspace left undefended for such attacks as occurred on Sept. 11, 2001?   Why was there an US Air Force “exercise” on that day, shifting fighter planes far to the north, in which hijacked planes would be attacking targets in the USA? (To sow confusion?)  Why did the Bush administration not want any inquiry or investigation into the 9/11 attacks?  Why, when it was forced on them, did they stonewall it, refusing to provide information?  Why did Bush/Cheney testify together under no oath when forced to?  Why was the “evidence” in the form of the remains of WTC1, 2 and 7 hastily shipped to China for scrap?  Why, why, why?

Or, why was  this report from the NIST, a US Government organization, delayed some 4 years?  And why does it look and sound like something that could have come from a Soviet institution, albeit wrapped in American rather than Russian style PR crap?

Which all makes the audio file above seem more than reasonable, however far-fetched it seems.  What could be more far fetched than the economic stresses America is now undergoing, and its warp into full-tilt militarism?  Did Germans feels the same kind of things not so long ago?

Official diagram of WT7 collapse

Jasper Johns, Target

Yonsei class

Classes started again at Yonsei, and need to post some information for classes, so here goes:

Undergraduate Visual Directing people:

The class got too big but yesterday we went to arrange to split it into two classes, one on Monday afternoons (1pm-4pm) and one on Friday afternoon (2pm-5pm), now located in the inD cinema room of the Grad School of Arts & Communications.  We’ll start doing the Monday class the week after this one.  So everyone come this Friday to the class.  Meantime please send me email with you name/email so I can contact you directly that way.

The assignment for this week is to shoot, as much time as you can give to it, with digital video camera, trying out every control and digital effect your camera has:

shutter speed, diaphragm, focus, digital effects (strobe, flash, trail, old movie, mosaic, solarizing – whatever your camera has, try it)

try to NOT do things right or “correct” – instead play like a child would with a first finger-paint kit, making a mess, experimenting, just seeing what happens when you use your camera like an innocent – overexpose, underexpose, shoot out of focus, wave the camera around, look up, look down, don’t look.

And then select the most interesting 1 minute and either cue up to it, or if you have editing capacity, select the most interesting minute and have it ready to go labeled LESSON ONE.

Educational rule #1:   HAVE FUN!  If you are not having fun, you are fighting and fighting doesn’t help you learn.  Learning should be fun and you should do it your whole life.

For those in Sublime Cinema, check here on Monday for some thoughts and things about Tribulation 99 and coming film.

안녕하세요. 존 조스트 감독님께서 부탁하신, Visual Directing 과제 및 분반 관련한 공지의 말씀을 올립니다.
참고하시길 바라구요.
다만 inD 상영관의 사용은 사전 허가가 있어야 하는데, 이 부분이 해결된 것인지 아직 확인되지 않았습니다.
만약 변경 사항이 있을 경우, 본 블로그에 다시 공지하겠습니다.

————————————————-

“수강생이 너무 많아서, 월요일 오후 1~4시, 금요일 오후 2~5시 수업으로 분반했습니다.
장소는 커뮤니케이션 대학원 3층에 위치한 inD 상영관 입니다.
수강생 여러분께서는 내가 연락할 수 있는 이름과 이메일 주소를 이메일로 보내 주십시오.”

여러분의 디지털 캠코더에 내장된 모든 조절 장치 및 디지털 이펙트를 시도하여, 충분한 시간을 들여, 촬영하십시오.
가령 셔터 스피드, 조리개, 포커스 맟 디지털 이펙트 (스트로브, 프래쉬, 트레일, 올드 무비, 모자이크, 솔라이징…) 등 여러분의 카메라가 지니고 있는 기능들을, 무엇이든 시도해 보십시오.

사물을 ‘정확하게 (=곧이 곧대로만)’ 보려 하지 마십시오.
대신에 노출과다, 노출부족, 아웃 오브 포커스 촬영, 올려다 보기 (하이 앵글?), 내려다 보기(로우 앵글?) 등을 통해 빚어지는 실험적인 이미지들을 얻고자 시도해 보십시오.

그리고 나서, 가장 재미있는 1분 가량의 활영분을 골라 오십시오.
(수업시 바로 시사할 수 있도록, 미리 해당 부분에 맞춰 오셔야 합니다)
편집이 가능하신 분은 가장 재미있는 1분 분량을 고르신 후 ‘LESSON ONE’ 이라는 라벨 작업까지 준비해 보십시오.

즐기며 작업하세요.
‘즐기지’ 못한 채 ‘싸워야’ 한다면, 그것은 배움에 도움이 되지 못합니다.

- 존 조스트 -

Translation thanks to Kim Hye-ran.

Roger Ruffin: Passing On

Roger Ruffin

May 18, 1927 – Feb 7, 2010

I first met Roger Ruffin at LAX, where he’d flown in to do a part in my 1976 Angel City.  I’d taken the suggestion of Bob Glaudini, who knew him from San Diego theater work, though Roger had moved to San Francisco.  I just took it on faith that Bob knew what he was talking about.  On the drive down to San Onofre, near Nixon’s hang-out in San Clemente. Roger read the text he was to do – a five minute PR spiel for a fictional Rexxon corporation.   After an hour we got to the beach, got the camera and recorder out, and doing a short dry-run of it, we shot.  Owing to a recent car rear-end incident I wasn’t doing camera, but rather Robert Schoenhut did that.  I handled the mike and Nagra.  I think we only did one take, with Roger fumbling a tiny bit with the text, but covering and making it all seem natural.  In the film he comes out perfectly as a friendly corporate con-man selling snake oil.  He was perfect.  He did it for free, and covered his airfare down from San Francisco.  Later on in the same shoot, on a Sunday morning in Culver City, dressed in his lawyer’s suit he managed to send 4 cop cars – who’d stopped owing to the huge crane I’d rented for the closing shot of the film – and send them on their way.  A 5th gave me a ticket for shooting without a permit, though the next day I called the office and told them I was just doing a home-movie and they tore it up.

Roger in Angel City

In 1982 I was in San Francisco, thwarted from making a film I’d planned, and in a week thought up Slow Moves, which was 95% shot in 3 and a half days.  I recruited Roger again, along with his wife Bebe, and his law-firm partner.  Visiting him a few days before the shoot I explained to him vaguely what I wanted to do.   It was early evening after he’d gotten home and he seemed already a bit juiced up on whiskey, a somewhat common state for him.  I recall on leaving wondering if he’d really heard what I’d told him, but when Saturday morning came he showed up at the shooting site and delivered a wonderfully droll comic scene, all in a rush, one take for each shot.  I never doubted him after that.

Slow Moves

A few years later, again in San Francisco, I asked Roger to play in another film, as an architect.  He of course said yes, and pretty much the same story, telling what I could (not much as usual in my case) about his character, him sauced, and then going to shoot and Roger doing an improvisation on the money.  It was as if I could do now wrong through him.

Rembrandt Laughing, Roger and Barbara Hammes

And a few years later I asked him to play in All the Vermeers in New York, for actual pay though I don’t recall if he actually took it.  He flew out to NYC, stayed in the Chelsea hotel, and had a great time.  And once again, this time playing a wealthy father dealing with his spoiled daughter, he delivered in spades.

Roger in All the Vermeers in New York

After Vermeers I saw Roger a few more times at his home in San Francisco, and then I moved for ten years to Europe.  Once he retired he moved with Bebe to Taos and then Costa Rica, and I lost touch.   I consider myself lucky and graced to have known him and to have worked with him.  A wonderful man and a magical actor.

Roger Ruffin; liberal judge also appeared in

films

By Blanca Gonzalez, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Roger Ruffin may have been the only San Diego Superior Court judge to have acted in movies, socialized with Andy Warhol and defended Marxist scholar Herbert Marcuse against local critics.

As a liberal judge in a conservative town during a tumultuous era, he was also a fierce defender of civil rights and spoke out against excessive bail. He was one of the youngest judges appointed to the Municipal Court bench when then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown named him in 1961.

Mr. Ruffin, a native San Diegan, was 34 when he became a judge. He was appointed to the Superior Court bench four years later but returned to private practice in 1971.

Not only a supporter of the arts, he later appeared in a few art-house films including Jon Jost’s “Angel City” and “All the Vermeers in New York.”

Mr. Ruffin died of Alzheimer’s disease Feb. 7 in San Diego. He was 82.

Friends and colleagues said Mr. Ruffin was brilliant, fair and progressive.

Mr. Ruffin was on the bench when Lowell Bergman was involved with the underground San Diego Street Journal in 1969 and had frequent run-ins with police, who regularly arrested the paper’s street vendors and staff members. Bergman, who went on to become an award-winning investigative journalist, said Mr. Ruffin became a defender and a friend.

“He was my get-out-of-jail-free card. He arranged for us to get ROR (release on own recognizance),” Bergman said. “He would go out of his way to mitigate harassment of people like us.”

Although risky for his career, Mr. Ruffin would often speak out for dissidents and minorities and appeared publicly with Marcuse, a leftist philosophy professor at the University of California San Diego who was the target of conservative critics calling for his dismissal. “Roger stood up and was willing to take a risk for his beliefs,” Bergman said.

Mr. Ruffin was recognized by his peers as a brilliant legal scholar, and in 1968 he was named to the faculty of the California College of Trial Judges. He also lectured on history and law at UCSD.

“He was part of the intelligentsia of San Diego,” longtime friend Richard Farson said. “A lot of people knew him as a teacher. He was smart, he had a good sense of humor and he was crazy about books.”

Friends said Mr. Ruffin’s second wife, BeBe, introduced him to an artsy, bohemian culture.

“Roger was the quieter personality and BeBe was the social one,” said Bob Glaudini, playwright and founder of Theater Five on Turquoise Street. “He was a delightful personality … very thoughtful; he loved to debate issues. He was open-minded and interested in the arts.”

Glaudini cast Mr. Ruffin in a Harold Pinter play at the theater. “He took to it like a duck to water,” the playwright said.

Parties at the Ruffins’ La Jolla home often attracted a diverse and lively group. According to friends, guests may have included Marcuse, Allen Ginsberg, Warhol, Jane Fonda and philanthropist Ernest Mandeville.

Roger S. Ruffin was born May 18, 1927, to Eula May and Roger Ruffin. He graduated from San Diego High School and served in the Army. He graduated with honors from what was then San Diego State College and earned his law degree from Stanford Law School in 1953.

He married Carol Haines in 1954. They had two daughters and divorced after 11 years of marriage. He married the former Beatrice “BeBe” Bright, and the couple lived in San Diego for several years before moving in 1975 to San Francisco, where Mr. Ruffin practiced law. When he retired in the 1990s, the family moved to Taos, N.M., and later to Costa Rica. After the death of his second wife, Mr. Ruffin returned to San Diego in 1996.

Mr. Ruffin is survived by four daughters, Lucia Bacon of San Diego, Margaret Harrison of San Diego, and Sara and Selene of San Francisco; one son, Tony of San Diego; and four grandchildren.

A private memorial service has been held.

Surveillance cinema

Part of Mossad assassination team

As a genre films about or using surveillance systems have a fairly long history.  I’ve seen a few of them, from Rear Window and Peeping Tom to some more recent “avant garde”  items.  However none I have seen previously matched this one, about a half hour of surveillance camera imagery from Dubai, in which we trace the seemingly complex choreography of an assassination team, presumably directed by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, as they go about killing Mahmoud al Mabhouh, a Hamas operative long wanted by the Israelis.

Whether the fascination of this derives from the dense interplay of some 14 or perhaps 26 players, some changing costumes and disguises, delivering messages, or from the furtive glances of the victim as he goes to his room where death awaits him, I am not sure.  Or perhaps it is from the frisson of knowing before the fact that one is observing the preparations for an actual murder.   Or perhaps it is from the sequence of unstated matters – the expense of all these characters being flown first to Dubai, checking into multiple classy hotels, coordinating via calls to an Austrian telephone exchange, leaving after the job was done apparently without checking out from the hotel, or leaving a long trail of evidence as shown in these images.

Mahmoud al Mabhouh’s picture held by his father at funeral in Gaza

The real “action” of the film is all off-screen – the entry into the victim’s room, the room opposite visited by a long string of accomplices, the actual killing.  One wonders why the hallway is not shown – surely there must be a surveillance camera that observed it.   Or such mysteries as how did they gain access to the room, and then how did they leave the room such that the internal latch was set to lock?  And why did Mossad hire a fistful of Irish, English, German, Australian and other non-Israeli’s to carry out this execution?  What is the political connection – IRA, RAF?  Or are these merely ideologically neutral assassins for hire?  Or are they all Israelis using faked or stolen passports?   And now, their cover blown, their pictures and names plastered across the internet, where are they going to spend the balance of their lives in hiding, for surely there will be attempts to even the score.

As cinema this curious piece is well-worth your time though it may make your next visit to a large corporate hotel a bit different in your mind.

Powell and Peeping Tom

For other thoughts on surveillance as cinema, see this, and for some thoughts on this assassination, see this.  Need we note that mainstream US media gave this matter scarcely a glance.

Postscript Malaysia

Tea plantation, Cameron Highlands

Leaving the lower elevations of Gua Musang we went in van on up to Cameron Highlands, the main town of Tanhah Rata being a tourist trap, with hotels and the usual claptrap of stores to sell local items. Our friend Chan, who was visiting home from her studies in Seoul, picked us up and drove us 18 km on to her home town, a small village near Ringlet.   Her father and mother run an apparently successful farm business located some distance away, perched on top of one of the hills.

Marcella in the tea leaves

Chan, her father’s farm

At a higher elevation, the Cameron Highlands are cool in the evenings, and less hot during the day, which I imagine is a large part of its tourist value, especially for Malaysians.  While beautiful, it is now a busy agricultural area, using hi-tech means of plastic covered greenhouses, drip irrigation and the rest of the rationalized modes of modern farming.  I was told most the produce is shipped down to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore, all having to thread a single very windy, mostly two-lane road.  It seems obvious to me that as the farming expands (which it appeared to be doing very aggressively) either some road-widening will be in order, or some other transport solution.   Along with the change in the climate also came an ethnic change – the Highlands are predominantly Chinese-Malaysian, with many Indian and Bangladeshi workers brought in to do the dirty stuff, originally by the English who started the tea-plantations.  Malays are a very clear small minority.  Which brings the matter of just what is Malaysia, or a Malay.  In KL on the metro, it seems akin to Singapore, a real mish-mash of South East Asian, from India and Pakistan, to Chinese, and of course, the local blood, Malays.  The latter are Muslim, and while representing about 50% of the population, they dominate the political scene, and with that, the economic sides of what politics does.  About 30% of the population is Chinese, and they dominate the economic side.  The remaining population is a mix of Indian, Pakistanis, Bangladeshi – they do the cheap labor for the most part.   Naturally such a division makes for frictions and a certain kind of racism:  socially there doesn’t seem to be much mixing, so the Malay Muslims stick with their own, the Chinese with theirs, and the various others their own communities.  On a national level this doesn’t make for the best situation and I gather there is a generalized resentment of the others:  Malays feel the Chinese are too rich and pushy; the Chinese feel the Malays are lazy, disorganized and parcel out via politics what properly should go to those who work; the others doubtless feel the brunt of exploitation, used for cheap labor – but still, better than back home.  And then there are other cultural things: Muslims don’t drink or gamble, the pray five times a day, don’t eat pork and many other specific things.  The Chinese drink, gamble, have other shrines and temples, eat pork and otherwise are themselves, quite different from the Malays.  The others similarly have differing beliefs, practices and looks.

Above I’ve been talking of the peninsular part of the country, and while we had a lay-over in Kota Kinabalu, I can’t say a thing about the Borneo part, which is larger though less populated, except that I’d think it is its own place, rather different from its population break-down, and with its own view on things.   To say that beneath the laid-back tropical languor there’s a silent tension, one which erupts periodically in lethal violence – last time in 1969 in Malaysia, though much worse cases have happened across the Straits of Malacca in Indonesia more recently.   As a vague generalization the Chinese are viewed across SE Asia as interlopers, and are envied for their work-ethic success.

Back in KL we had a last day with Azam and some of his friends.  He comes from a kampung about 3 hours to the south, near Singapore.  He’s doing the “back-stage” documentary on U-Weih’s film.  He let us know that for about 50 Ringit a month we could rent a normal kampung house (shack on stilts usually) in his village – that’s about 15 bucks.  Or he offered us his grandfather’s larger and now unoccupied traditional house for free for a year.  Once our crystal ball clarifies we just might take this offer up as both Marcella and I rather like Malaysia and kicking back to live on $5000 or less a year sounds like a good deal.  At least for a while.

KLAzam

No, not an Annish Kapoor, but Jon getting ready to slide down the tube in a children’s park near an Indian temple.  Shot by Azam, who went in with us, his first time to visit another religion’s place of worship.  About which more later.

Travels : Malaysia

Feb 18,  Gua Musang, Malaysia

A few days listless in Kuala Lumpur, during the begining of the Chinese New Year – Year of the Tiger, predicted by astrologers to be a lousy run around the sun – we took a bus to Kuala Lipis, a small town near the setting of U-Weih’s new film based on the Conrad book, Almayer’s Folly, where we visited with Sam, his Australian set-designer.  We saw some rudimentary roads gouged into the red earth, the basic foundations of a house, the river bank where in 8 weeks will – supposedly – stand an old-style house, another “palace,” a warehouse and a small local village, all circa 1880 or so.  It’s an ambitious production, aiming for an international presence, a first for Malaysia.  Given the torpid tropical heat and the habits of life that come with it, I found myself skeptical it will be, as planned, all there in 2 months when shooting begins.

One of U-Weih’s film settings

Told of the lead actor’s – some Aussie TV fellow – behavior of already beginning to twist the schedule I wonder how the prima donnas of the cast will take to the elemental amenities of Kuala Lipis, a small backwater town.  I suggested they dump the TV guy now.   Perhaps unjustifiably I smell problems and am glad I don’t have to deal with them.  Marcella may return, at their invitation, in May or June, to spend some days shooting a “back-stage” something.

[Little note: somewhere back 6 months or so ago I read in some film trade rag that Chantal Ackerman was making a film based on the same book.]

After a rickety local train ride in a car minus a window, nearly all broken seats, sounding as if a bearing or two were shot, noisily shunting over rough tracks we arrived at Gua Musang,  just outside a national rain forest park, where we checked into a very funky hotel to the tune of $9 a night or so. It was right next to a KFC, the distinct fumes of which invaded our room.  The KFC was the only evident sign of much not local – and I can’t comprehend why anyone here would eat there given the local places down the street with much better food for less – ah, the wonders of “branding.”

Outside, the town is eerily like an American western town: mainstreet, a few parallel streets, a vague similarity in the architectural forms if not the decor.  Further on there’s a place of shanties that gives way to a Chinese section of finer houses, street-front restaurants, a small park.  The Chinese homes open to the street, families haunched on their porches or sitting visible inside.  It’s just been the Chinese New Year, so banners and good luck placards grace their doors, red lamps hang across the streets and fireworks still explode .  From their looks, and the children who practice their “hello,” I gather foreigners are few and far between in their part of town.

Yesterday, a man and his wife and child approached me, warmly saying “Hello.  Welcome.  Where are you  from.”  He had his hand thrust out to shake and just as his hand slid into mine and a went to grasp, I said “America” and his had stopped, withdrew, and he promptly hustled his family away.  It was hardly the first time I’d noted a frosty demeanor once I said I was from the US.  On the train coming here I talked to the ticket taker, who likewise was less than friendly once I said the dirty word, but I confronted him with it, and let him know that many Americans do not like what their government does, and we managed to have a little talk in very broken English.  It is clear that among the Islamic population here – about 70% – America is not kindly seen.  Perfectly understandable to me.  While here I’ve read a book on Islam by Karen Armstrong (back a few years ago I read another at Maher al Sabagh’s request, preparing to write some things for his film The Arabian Dream). Still, it is disconcerting and for the rest of the stay I think I’ll be Italian along with Marcella.

We intended to go to the national park, a protected rain forest jungle, but we got waylaid during a late lunch in the Chinese district where a woman snared us into a restaurant, we had an excellent meal, and then she shunted us to her extended family’s table where my beer glass never emptied.  I stumble away a bit drunk and bedded down at 6:30 to awake at 8 am.  Hmmmm…

The train conductor who initially recoiled at my word I was American.  We had a nice if limited talk.  His job was to get on the train at Kuala Lipis, where he lived, punch the passenger tickets with an assistant, sit for the 90 minute ride, get off at Gua Musang, and catch another train back.   End of work day.

Limestone mountains jutting out around Gua Musang

Malay kids (Marcella’s foto)Alice Ho, from Kota Kinabalu, who got me drunk

Gua Musang seemed divided into 2 basic parts, though we learned on leaving there was another section.  One was downtown and nearby, with some rather dilapidated residential areas of shanties we walked through with the people there friendly but surprised anyone would walk through.  Very funky, dirty, ramshackle.  Downtown and these areas were clearly Malay (Muslim).  Then there was the Chinese area, laid out in a rectangular range of streets centered around a small park.  It was neater, clearly more wealthy, and alive with small restaurants, shops, the tail end of the New Year celebrations still going on.  In the Muslim area we had some nice street meals – one I had and liked a lot was a spicy soup of intestines.  Very good, very cheap.

Sign on the hotel ceiling pointing to MeccaWell-hung banana tree

On leaving we got a van that runs daily from Gua Musang to the Cameron Highlands town of Tanah Rata.  It picked us up at our ratty little hotel and proceeded to what seemed a classier suburban area of better houses, a little shopping strip of new stores, bigger mosque than the one near the center of town, and a “nice” hotel where we picked up 8 other passengers, all westerners (US & France) who’d all been to the rain forest park.  Some of them affected a hippiesque New Age mode and Marcella and I laughed at their need for this nice tidy hotel, and doubted they’d checked out the other part of town.  If prices were normal I’d guess the hotel ran $40-50 or so, a bargain to most western people, but then it isolates you from the place you are visiting.   While I’d have liked to go to the rain forest, I wouldn’t have liked to do so with these folks.   On getting left off in Tanah Rata most the others got out at a totally westernized New Agey place completely occupied by other folks from  all over Europe, Australia, etc., 100% white.   A “Lonely Planet” place.  Our friend from Seoul, a Malaysian Chinese, Chan, picked us up and drove us through the Highlands near Ringlet to her family’s house where we are now.  Of which more soon.

Tea plantation near Ringlet, Cameron Highlands

For more pictures of our trip see Clara’s blog

KL Check-In

Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur seems to leap each time I’ve visited – originally here five years ago, it felt like a “3rd world” place of dirt roads, shanties, with little eruptions of modernity, like the Petronas Towers breaking through the surface; last year’s visit showed a leap into the future, and in a mere additional year the changes are tangible.  A bit unnerving the rapidity of the shifts, with gleaming office sky-scrapers filling the valley, freeways (traffic jams), a sprawl of residential areas poking up high-rises all around.   We’re staying with U-weih, who is deep into preparations on a new film – a big budget one, based on the Conrad story Almayer’s Folly. (For more on U-weih’s film see this.)  It requires building some large sets – houses in the jungle, an old steam-boat – and has a cast of regionally famous actors, a famed Polish cinematographer, and the necessary office bustle to accomplish all this.  They start shooting in April and hope to finish in 9 weeks, just before the monsoon season.  To me it is all an alien world, far removed from the kind of filmmaking I have done which I think of as slightly overblown home-movies with friends and not much else, and which increasingly I find less and less interest in doing (or any kind of filmmaking).  Apparently this will be Malaysia’s biggest film, though you wouldn’t guess it from U-weih’s modest demeanor.  Or maybe he does that just for me!

We’re here another few days, and then wander north – we thought to Penang but now think perhaps to a rain-forest jungle area, far from the bustle of KL, though into another bustle of evolutionary wonders working from the same essential bifurcated forms we call “life.”  And then we’ll go visit a friend, Chan, at her family’s home in the Cameron Highlands, an area of civil landscapes of carefully terraced tea-plantations.  Then back it seems to shoot a little something for U-weih before returning to Seoul.  In the meantime putting things here is likely to be sparse.

Mysteries of the Market

NYT Feb 9 2010

“Investors and traders find solace in 10,000,” said Jeffrey A. Hirsch, editor of The Stock Trader’s Almanac. “While it may not be important technically, falling below that level indicates that the whole economic picture is not as rosy as everyone had thought.”

Jasper Johns, #2

“You can tell investors there’s no contagion, but it doesn’t matter, because people start to think there’s more than one cockroach,” said Thomas J. Lee, chief United States equity strategist at JPMorgan Chase. “Right now, it’s still a little wait and see.”

“People worry that this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back again,” Mr. Stone said.

So speak our wizards of finance, explicating the mystic qualities of the numbers, the flux of energies which animate that most sacred entity of our time, The Market, that most glorious expression of the most firm belief under our dim firmaments, Capitalism. Like other practices of the same kind, this one comes dressed in its own arcane language, which most of the populace does not and cannot and should not fathom, and hence is required to defer to mandarin experts the better to understand. Rattling off the long list of buzz-words and acronyms – LIBOR, derivatives, leveraged-buy-out, – the eyes glaze over, as if hypnotized, and the congregants move as told, signing up for their 401K’s, assured by the priests of Wall Street and their cohorts that nirvana will be theirs come retirement time, their modest bundle magically expanded by the one fish to millions by the mumbling of certain words better left to the experts of the priesthood. It is an old story, of course, derivative (!) in our culture of the long-ago much fabled Greeks who told of the Golden Fleece. Well, if you were one of those taken in by the smooth talk of Reagan and others who told you that it would be better for you if you put your trust in the market, and… well, you’ve been fleeced. Retirement time is here for many, and the little nest-egg, to stick to the clodded linguistic clichés that seem to govern those of the fiscal inclination, ain’t. Or actually it is, but it was long ago converted into some investment banker’s 3rd home or second yacht, and you can’t have it.

Occasionally I subscribe to things normally out of my interests – economics blogs and letters, right-wing rant screeds, other odds and ends. An effort to keep up with the wider world, whatever my tastes think about it. One newsletter I get is Money Morning, a tip sheet for investors, which reveals all one needs to know about the investor mentality: if it’ll make money, they say BUY! Period. So it recently counseled military-industrial stocks as a good bet. You bet. And likewise they’re game for a profit, whatever the morality, ethics, social consequences. Here’s the lingo:

Welcome to The Syndicate

Play alongside The Syndicate and you are playing with the House. My conservative estimate is that this will increase your money by 62% before the first crack of the bat on Opening Day.

But if you continue to play against The Syndicate, then your odds drop alarmingly. This is because, right now, The Syndicate has a plan. A story.

And this story – a massive short squeeze – will leave you poorer. Very quickly.

What no one is telling you about this NEW STOCK MARKET could make you 62% richer IF you act right now

Think of the market as a story being written by a tight Syndicate of wealthy, smart traders.

Money is essentially a social contract, and like all social contracts it assumes trust between the contracting parties.  When that trust frays or collapses, the agreements made falter and become meaningless.  It would seem that in America the social trust required – that between neighbors, between buyer and seller, between “citizens” – is getting rather ragged.  For me it became tangible some decades ago, when, having in my younger days hitch-hiked from Los Angeles to Montana (a few times) and elsewhere as well, I decided sometime in the late 1970’s,  just for the fun and pleasure of it (you do meet people, find adventures, etc.), to catch a ride from LA to San Francisco.  I didn’t have to, as I had the money to take a train or plane.  So I went to a once-favored spot just out of Santa Monica on Highway 1, the gorgeous Pacific off to the west, the tawny bluffs of Pacific Palisades to the east.  I stood in the California sun, thumb out, happy, periodically receiving the epithets of  kids in sports cars or classy sedans (doubtless bought by their Beverly Hills parents) who shouted “get a job.”   After a few hours of this abuse and the clear understanding that a ride was not in the cards, I packed it in, caught a bus to the airport and flew.

Thanks to myriad things – among them Charles Manson and others of his kind, as well as to the later Reaganite mantras – the social trust had and would evaporate.   It continued to decline rapidly as the social engineering of the late 50’s and 60’s was undone, greed became “good” and community, having too much of a kinship with “communism” became suspect along with its cousin, communication.  Not much later Limbaugh took to the airwaves, to jostle along with the hell-and-damnation preachers, and before you knew it, America was at war with itself, uniting only for trivial matters like Super Bowls and World Series, or by the traumatization of 9/11.  Soon our currency will be worth about as much as these North Korean pieces of paper.

And perhaps we’ll be led by this lady, the present paladin of the tea-party folks, who is clearly gunning for running in 2012, never mind the embarrassment of being caught cribbing on TV this week, reading her talking points off the scribbles on her palm.   And given the state of the nation, and the failure of Obama and his alleged political party to act in any way at all so far – save for pleasing the bankers for a bit (though they are apparently starting to place their future bets elsewhere, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall far earlier than most: they put him in there, they can take him out), it seems quite feasible that a woman considerably dumber than Bush could indeed take the mantle of American leadership, and perhaps drive us further apart and deeper in the hole of our own communal self-willed ignorance.

You go, girl!

DOW(n)

The Labor Department said the number of people filing first-time claims for unemployment increased by 8,000 to 480,000 last week, far above Wall Street’s estimates of 455,000.

And the other news, percolating up from the denser pages of the economics journals announces the imminent default of Greece on its debts, shaking the Euro zone like an earthquake, especially since also in line for defaults are those other places which, exactly as the US did, went in for a debt-fueled building boom in the last 15 or so years: Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and… and even the UK.  All the dominoes lined up to do an American-style swoon, for pretty much the same reasons – greed, fiscal folly, hubris.  And of course our All-American swoon has only just begun, despite the weekly encouragements about recovery emanating from the White House or Wall Street mavens, for whom keeping the shell game going as long as possible is either financially or politically necessary:  Americans are not to be trusted with the god-awful truth, and besides they’re already quite angry now.   Mollify them with happy smile lies while the credit card companies, caught in the liquidity squeeze jack up the interest rates, banks tack on new charges and goose the old ones, loans are on terms too costly for anyone but fools, and the economy – or what’s left of it – congeals and freezes.

Everyone on Wall Street is fixated on The Number.

The bank bonus season, that annual rite of big money and bigger egos, begins in earnest this week, and it looks as if it will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen.

So the DOW Jones dipped to 10K almost, having climbed back from 6.6K nadir of a mere 11 months ago.  Aside from the massive infusion of unaccountable TARP slush funds and other interventions to allegedly avert a Depression, nothing really fundamental has changed since then, except of course for more lost jobs, defaulted mortgages, closed businesses, nose-dived retail sales, and other less than happy-face matters.  However, also in the financial pages items is the most important matter of just how much Lloyd Blankfein, of the instantly turned-around profit-making Sachs Goldman, is going to reward himself for the year’s amazing work.  Will it be 100 million, or more or less.  This news is important because his cohorts in the Wall Street game will peg their self-chosen payout to what he does.  No cojones bigger allowed, but can’t be too much smaller or you’ll get notched down on the Big Board Balls game.

Pigs at the trough

Not to be outdone by the honchos of Wall Street, the arts world weighed in with its own bid for out-of-tune-with-the-times award, and at Sotheby’s auction a one-of-six copies sculpture by Alberto Giocometti went down with the gavel at a mere 96 million bucks, plus commission of another 8.6 mil, making for a grand total of 104.6 and the largest single sales figure at auction ever.  The previous record holder, trailing at only $100,000 less, was a Picasso.

The buyer was anonymous, rumored perhaps to be a Russian tycoon.  In a world of fast and loose money all this fits, though the morality of it all eludes some.  To some it seems all a particularly cruel form of, well, bullshit:

UPDATE Feb. 6 2010

Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, was granted a $9 million bonus on Friday, all in deferred stock, ending weeks of speculation about how he would be rewarded for his remarkable — and controversial — success in running the Wall Street giant over the past year.

The award is well below the $68 million bonus Mr. Blankfein received in 2007, even though 2009 was a record year for the Wall Street bank.

Note the phrasing here: “was granted” by – well, who does the granting? Lloyd Blankfein, CEO, who at the board meeting puts his balls on the table and says “kiss” and they do. And note the drastically diminished number, done as a momentary concession to the political moment wherein awarding himself the rumored 100 million would have seemed gauche. I am sure in the tiny print hidden in the paperwork there’s some manner in which the sum he was properly due, in the minds of Wall Street honchos, is accommodated. Appearances are everything, as these financial thugs know well, as do their tailors.

Take the Money and Run

A.I.G. Plan for $100 Million Bonus Payout Draws Fire

So reads the headline today, following the others about Sachs Goldman back in the profit column (in part because they got $1 on the dollar in their dealings with guess who – AIG – when they should have gotten a few pennies), which was issuing itself mere billions in bonuses.  As these things happen we hear the chorus of complaint – how could they do this when millions are losing their mortgages, their jobs, have they no understanding of what is going on.   They just don’t get it ! The answer, though, is yes they know very well what is going on, they “get it,” more than you or I, and they are out to get while the getting is still good.  They know the house of costly cards is already a heap on the ground and they’re extracting every last buck out of it that they can, and J.Q. Public, living down the street under a cardboard box be damned.  Those millions, stashed away out of reach to the tax-man will build a nice house in some warm clime, etc.

Edward Liddy, current CEO of AIG

Robert Benmosche, last year’s CEO of AIG

BofA Approved More Than $4 Billion For 2009 Pay

Brian Moynihan, CEO of BofA at Davos

Now do these guys look like some regular old Joe’s or more like a bunch of nut crushing thugs?  I can guarantee you there’s only one way you get to where they are, and that is by smashing whoever gets in your way.  Pin-stripes are no longer the banker’s uniform.  I once saw Mr Gotti on Elizabeth Street in New York’s Little Italy.  He dressed very classy too.

Meantime our well-intentioned President has produced the headline below, either showing the he really doesn’t get it, or he’s in for a final round of rope-a-dope before letting the hammer down.   You would think one didn’t really need any more evidence as to what the Republicans want – they want Obama to fail, at whatever cost to the country, and nothing else.  Perhaps he’s merely setting them up in case anyone didn’t get it yet.  Or perhaps he’s just a terminal nice guy.

Obama Acts to Engage G.O.P., Testing Party’s Intentions

Pence and Boehner