Dominating the news cycle this week, the people of Egypt rising up and taking to the streets demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak has been backed by the U.S. for the entirety of his 30 years in office and this country has embraced him as a moderate force in the Arab world.
The United States has a disturbing history of supporting rulers like Mubarak. There is always the suspicion that the U.S. will back anybody who can help its business interests but the relationship with Mubarak is much more about his moderate stance on Israel. We still get oil from countries we hate like Iran and Venezuela, but, if you have anything bad to say about Israel, diplomatic relations with your country will be terse at best. More on that later.
Mubarak has coasted through "elections" that the U.S. recognizes as being legitimate in order to keep the status quo in Egypt. He recently has begun the process of grooming his son, Gamal, to become vice-president, and, thus, heir apparent to the presidency. Not your normal democracy. Kinda like the Bushes and George's 2000 win despite the popular vote. Well, not really like that, just wanted to say it out loud.
So the people of Egypt, the poor ones mostly who are basically unrepresented in the government, have had enough and now, well, we'll see what happens. Sometimes these things just run out of steam. But this sort of thing happened last week in Algeria as the ruling family was ousted. It happened last year in Iran but on a much smaller scale as anti-government sentiment there is mostly fueled by outside forces. What's going on in the Arab world right now is home-grown and volatile. Yemen is steaming. There are rumors of potential unrest in Jordan.
Certainly, if he isn't actually forced to step down, Mubarak's future has changed. What will supplant him is a mystery. There is a pro-democracy movement being propelled by Nobel Peace Prize winner and former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. He has a degree in international law from New York University so I would assume American interests are at work getting behind him right now due to fears of the Islamic Brotherhood gaining more political influence in the coming vacuum.
At any rate, that's not really what this whole blog is about. I really wanted to address the question of why so many people in the Arab world seem to hate the U.S.
The conservative viewpoint is basically that Arabs are a bunch of player haters. They're jealous of the U.S. because of our freedoms, our Levis, our Hollywood stars, our burger joints. I think the actual answer is a little less stupid.
Egyptian crowds protesting in the streets of Cairo have been dispersed by tear gas. It's been noted that the tear gas canisters you can find littering the streets are manufactured by a Pennsylvania-based company called Combined Systems International. Here's a link from their online catalog: http://combinedsystems.com/less-lethal/Chemical-Munitions/Chemical-Munitions-Grenade-92-Series-Jet-Lite.aspx
So, here's the deal. The U.S. provides $1.3 billion a year in military aid to Egypt. Apparently some of this aid comes back to the U.S. each year in the form of the purchase of crowd suppression materials like tear gas made by Combined Systems. It bears mentioning that these same empty tear gas canisters are found in Palestine and other places around the world where people try to take to the streets to employ, as Barak Obama says, their natural right to free speech. Obama also said, "All governments must maintain power through consent, not coercion." Oh, and at the same time, our government is supplying the Egyptian government with the tools to coerce.
I'm not going to try to do a bunch of investigative reporting to figure out how Combined Systems gets their contracts. I'll just assume that there are lobbyists and that Combined Systems gives some nice political contributions to the right people in their district and to people who serve on the appropriate subcommittees overseeing military aid levels to places like Israel and Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But, basically, it's a win-win for American business. Their tax dollars, well, your tax dollars, go to Egypt and that money comes back to America where American tear gas craftsmen are rewarded for their skills and hard work.
So, if you're an Egyptian trying to express your freedom of speech but can't do much speaking because of the tear gas, what's not to like about America?
Now, here's where I get in trouble. Before I'm accused of being anti-Semitic, just let me say that I'm actually anti-Zionistic. If Judaism leads to nepotism I'm also against that. But, I'm not anti-Semitic. I don't believe that anybody has the right to a homeland based on race or religion or ethnic group. I don't believe Jews have the right to a homeland in the Middle East in the same way that I don't think that white separatists have the right to a homeland in Idaho.
Here's a scenario I like to imagine. Let's say it's 50 years in the future. America has declined to the point where it's no longer a global power. The U.N. has moved from the former capital of the world, New York City, to its new capital, Beijing. A bunch of Chinese philosophers bring to the U.N. the plight of the Native American. The Native American, slaughtered en masse and removed from their ancestral homelands, let's say the Cherokee. The U.N., despite the complaints of the U.S. delegation who used to sit on the Security Council, decides that the Cherokee deserve a homeland of their own in their former homeland of the state of Georgia. U.N. troops under the direction of the Chinese come into America and begin deporting the citizens of Georgia and moving in Cherokee from Oklahoma. Temporary camps are set up in Alabama to house those being displaced and the Cherokee in their new nation set up security at the borders.
This is something like how Israel came to be. The English came in after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and ruled what became Trans-Jordan like they have historically ruled all of their colonies. They decided they had the right to carve out a chunk of Palestinian land, move the people out, and move in Jews from all over the world to live on the land that had belonged to somebody else for a thousand years.
You'll forgive me if I don't buy the claim on a piece of land based on a book I don't even believe in. After all, it's not like the people of Israel just sprung out of thin air and began populating Palestine. They took it by force when they left Babylon in what is now Iraq. That conquest is documented in Genesis. I do actually believe in that part of the Bible just not the claims that the direction came from a God who preferred one group of people over another. The conquering of Palestine was the Israeli version of our Manifest Destiny in which we took all the land from the Native Americans and slaughtered them or displaced them.
This is why people in the Arab world hate us. Well, I'm sure they also hate the fact that we make TV shows like 16 and Pregnant and artists like Lil' Wayne and Lady Gaga, but, well, another blog there. That's the same reason why people used to hate the French. They were known for shipping their loose morals around the world.
Ultimately, if we want to be liked and respected on the Arab street, we'll need to decide whether we want to keep supporting repressive regimes. Saudi Arabia is one of our most respected allies and is also one of the most repressive regimes in the world. Somehow that doesn't get the play in the media that repression in North Korea gets. Maybe it would do us some good politically if Hillary Clinton had to go to Saudi Arabia, undercover in a burka, and find out what it was really like to be a Saudi woman. Maybe it would do some good if Sarah Palin, in a burka, was forced to live in East Jerusalem for a while.
I'm just getting sick of America talking all this democracy nonsense while supporting so many anti-democratic institutions around the globe. The hypocrisy isn't well-known to the average American but the average Arab on the street gets it rubbed in their face constantly. Oh, let me restate that. I don't believe that democracy is nonsense. Just saying that deeds need to match words and that's not what's happening right now.
Populist rants from a little blue dot in deep red Alabama.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
SOTU, Political Nut-Shots, Beck, Bachmann, Palin, Broun, STFU
Last night, President Barack Obama delivered his third State of the Union Address. What was novel about this one is that members of congress decided to mix it up a little and mix up the parties rather then sitting one party to a side of the hall as has been done for much of the event's history.
In a typical SOTU (State of the Union) one side or the other of the hall would stand and applaud, usually in a totally partisan or cynical fashion, several times during the speech and it had just gotten silly. Let me say that I think the whole thing is silly any way. The address gives the President an opportunity to lay out a path for legislation in the coming year but little of what gets laid out is ever accomplished.
Much of the purpose for mixing up the audience this year was in reaction to South Carolina's Representative, Joe Wilson, with his famous "You lie!" outburst during the 2009 SOTU and with the Democrats trying to make things more palatable after the huge losses of 2010.
President Obama was concerned to a fault with keeping promises of compromise with Republicans in the first two years of his presidency and, now, it's a legislative imperative. Thus, we got the political theater of Republicans and Democrats, in a Kumbaya moment, cats and dogs laying together. Surely the sign of a new era of cooperation. We all know it's pure show though. We know the routine. We'll get promises of cooperation, collaboration, and compromise and, not a week later, all that will be over.
So, knowing it's all a bunch of crap, I watch as a rubber-necker, like I'm watching for the car crash. The event I usually look forward to is the response from the other party. The Republicans have been amazing at this in the past years. In 2009 we got Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in his now famously Mr. Rogers as android response that basically killed his political career nationally. This year we got new Republican wunderkind Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan's response was a dry reading of economic figures delivered like he had a gun to his head off camera. It didn't clear any new path for Republicans trying to court independent voters in the run-up to 2012 and it didn't do anything to further Ryan's political ambitions.
What was seriously funny this year is that the Tea Party put up lunatic Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann to offer a further response to the SOTU. In all honesty, this is the moment I had waited for the whole night but I was watching on MSNBC and they didn't carry it live. What a shame! Bachmann is a religious zealot who usually has that kind of glassy-eyed cultist look going on and it only got better when she was looking into the Tea Party camera, not the pool camera that was carrying the actual feed. So, it looked like she was talking off into space.
Bachmann had said, famously, earlier this week, "We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." She honestly stated that the founding fathers of the United States abolished slavery. I don't know if she just misspoke or if the gist of what she was saying wasn't properly conveyed but, I suspect, she's as much if not more of an idiot than Sarah Palin. Bachmann got her degree in tax law from Oral Roberts University so ...... Maybe they didn't cover that history stuff in her tax classes.
But this is why I crave so much the potential of Bachmann or Palin to really get into the race for president in 2012. It's like George W. magnified. Palin and Bachmann both come off as ultra-conservative housewives from the 1960s when women couldn't worry their little heads about those heavy political matters men had to deal with and got all they needed to know about politics when hubby came home from work and they talked over dinner. They don't really know what's going on and they get all of their "information" from sources like Glenn Beck, the Drudge Report, and Newsmax if they actually bother to keep up with the news at all. So I can only imagine the fun if these women were to actually have to engage in debates. Further, what if one of them actually became president? Putting their glaring lack of understanding of real-world political matters under the spotlight for four years would be, in my estimation, a wonderful tonic for this country.
Now, Glenn Beck, there's a different story. I'm not sure if he's actually crazy or just a huckster taking advantage of people like my father and my in-laws who want to believe that Obama is the Devil. He pulled out the real chestnut of the evening. He identified that Obama would be addressing five pillars in the SOTU. So, what's the big deal? Five areas of focus in a speech isn't unusual. But he didn't say "areas of focus"; he said "pillars". That's right; five pillars.
As anybody with any knowledge of Islam knows, the Five Pillars of Faith are central to that religion's philosophy. As anybody who likes Glenn Beck knows, President Obama is secretly Muslim. Well, in public at least, but they all know that he's open about it around his inner circle of socialist muhajidin as they work to destroy the paradise devised by our founding fathers.
So Glenn Beck nailed him, right? Well, actually the word pillar was not used in the speech. Neither was the word five. But what if the word five had been used? Couldn't that also refer to the five points of the inverted pentagram used by Satanists in their socialistic rituals? Beck suggested that Obama was just rubbing our faces in it. That Obama was just daring us to call out the obvious Muslim propaganda begin foisted upon us. It just so freaks me out that people take this idiot seriously.
Then there was Georgia representative Paul Broun who is actually a medical doctor just to illustrate one problem with the level of health care out there these days. To bring you up to date on Paul Broun, here are some of his zingers on Obama from the past few years:
"We can't be lulled into complacency. You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential of going down that road."
"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."
And Broun on the Centers for Disease Control:
“Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said people in America are not eating enough fruits and vegetables. They want all the power of the federal government to force you to eat more fruits and vegetables. This is what the federal CDC– They (sic) going to be calling people and finding out how many fruits and vegetables you eat (sic) today. This is socialism of the highest order!"
So Paul Broun didn't even attend the SOTU last night. Rather, he sat in his office putting out the following on Twitter:
All children will be poor if we continue with Obama's policies #fb #SOTU #TCOT
Obama's policies kill free-enterprise #fb #SOTU #TCOT
Mr. President, you don't believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism.
Well ..... there's your daily feed from the lunatic fringe. I would hope that these people are just making political hay to further their political careers in parts of the country where the majority of voters don't know any better but I honestly think, well, with the exception of Beck, that these people believe what they say. I think these people get their information from sources like Beck and Newsmax and never bother to question what they hear and read. I don't feel comfortable calling people so intellectually un-curious anything less than idiots. As harmful as it is though, I still find it funny.
People like Beck, Bachmann, Palin, Broun, et al, take the political discourse to places of no relevance whatsoever and distract us and the media from legitimate concerns. But it's just too damned funny. I know I'm just rubber-necking. It's the political version of watching nut shots on those home video shows. The only problem is that it's like watching our country get hit in the nuts.
For a really good read on political distraction of this type, I highly recommend Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas".
In a typical SOTU (State of the Union) one side or the other of the hall would stand and applaud, usually in a totally partisan or cynical fashion, several times during the speech and it had just gotten silly. Let me say that I think the whole thing is silly any way. The address gives the President an opportunity to lay out a path for legislation in the coming year but little of what gets laid out is ever accomplished.
Much of the purpose for mixing up the audience this year was in reaction to South Carolina's Representative, Joe Wilson, with his famous "You lie!" outburst during the 2009 SOTU and with the Democrats trying to make things more palatable after the huge losses of 2010.
President Obama was concerned to a fault with keeping promises of compromise with Republicans in the first two years of his presidency and, now, it's a legislative imperative. Thus, we got the political theater of Republicans and Democrats, in a Kumbaya moment, cats and dogs laying together. Surely the sign of a new era of cooperation. We all know it's pure show though. We know the routine. We'll get promises of cooperation, collaboration, and compromise and, not a week later, all that will be over.
So, knowing it's all a bunch of crap, I watch as a rubber-necker, like I'm watching for the car crash. The event I usually look forward to is the response from the other party. The Republicans have been amazing at this in the past years. In 2009 we got Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in his now famously Mr. Rogers as android response that basically killed his political career nationally. This year we got new Republican wunderkind Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan's response was a dry reading of economic figures delivered like he had a gun to his head off camera. It didn't clear any new path for Republicans trying to court independent voters in the run-up to 2012 and it didn't do anything to further Ryan's political ambitions.
What was seriously funny this year is that the Tea Party put up lunatic Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann to offer a further response to the SOTU. In all honesty, this is the moment I had waited for the whole night but I was watching on MSNBC and they didn't carry it live. What a shame! Bachmann is a religious zealot who usually has that kind of glassy-eyed cultist look going on and it only got better when she was looking into the Tea Party camera, not the pool camera that was carrying the actual feed. So, it looked like she was talking off into space.
Bachmann had said, famously, earlier this week, "We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." She honestly stated that the founding fathers of the United States abolished slavery. I don't know if she just misspoke or if the gist of what she was saying wasn't properly conveyed but, I suspect, she's as much if not more of an idiot than Sarah Palin. Bachmann got her degree in tax law from Oral Roberts University so ...... Maybe they didn't cover that history stuff in her tax classes.
But this is why I crave so much the potential of Bachmann or Palin to really get into the race for president in 2012. It's like George W. magnified. Palin and Bachmann both come off as ultra-conservative housewives from the 1960s when women couldn't worry their little heads about those heavy political matters men had to deal with and got all they needed to know about politics when hubby came home from work and they talked over dinner. They don't really know what's going on and they get all of their "information" from sources like Glenn Beck, the Drudge Report, and Newsmax if they actually bother to keep up with the news at all. So I can only imagine the fun if these women were to actually have to engage in debates. Further, what if one of them actually became president? Putting their glaring lack of understanding of real-world political matters under the spotlight for four years would be, in my estimation, a wonderful tonic for this country.
Now, Glenn Beck, there's a different story. I'm not sure if he's actually crazy or just a huckster taking advantage of people like my father and my in-laws who want to believe that Obama is the Devil. He pulled out the real chestnut of the evening. He identified that Obama would be addressing five pillars in the SOTU. So, what's the big deal? Five areas of focus in a speech isn't unusual. But he didn't say "areas of focus"; he said "pillars". That's right; five pillars.
As anybody with any knowledge of Islam knows, the Five Pillars of Faith are central to that religion's philosophy. As anybody who likes Glenn Beck knows, President Obama is secretly Muslim. Well, in public at least, but they all know that he's open about it around his inner circle of socialist muhajidin as they work to destroy the paradise devised by our founding fathers.
So Glenn Beck nailed him, right? Well, actually the word pillar was not used in the speech. Neither was the word five. But what if the word five had been used? Couldn't that also refer to the five points of the inverted pentagram used by Satanists in their socialistic rituals? Beck suggested that Obama was just rubbing our faces in it. That Obama was just daring us to call out the obvious Muslim propaganda begin foisted upon us. It just so freaks me out that people take this idiot seriously.
Then there was Georgia representative Paul Broun who is actually a medical doctor just to illustrate one problem with the level of health care out there these days. To bring you up to date on Paul Broun, here are some of his zingers on Obama from the past few years:
"We can't be lulled into complacency. You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential of going down that road."
"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."
And Broun on the Centers for Disease Control:
“Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said people in America are not eating enough fruits and vegetables. They want all the power of the federal government to force you to eat more fruits and vegetables. This is what the federal CDC– They (sic) going to be calling people and finding out how many fruits and vegetables you eat (sic) today. This is socialism of the highest order!"
So Paul Broun didn't even attend the SOTU last night. Rather, he sat in his office putting out the following on Twitter:
All children will be poor if we continue with Obama's policies #fb #SOTU #TCOT
Obama's policies kill free-enterprise #fb #SOTU #TCOT
Mr. President, you don't believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism.
Well ..... there's your daily feed from the lunatic fringe. I would hope that these people are just making political hay to further their political careers in parts of the country where the majority of voters don't know any better but I honestly think, well, with the exception of Beck, that these people believe what they say. I think these people get their information from sources like Beck and Newsmax and never bother to question what they hear and read. I don't feel comfortable calling people so intellectually un-curious anything less than idiots. As harmful as it is though, I still find it funny.
People like Beck, Bachmann, Palin, Broun, et al, take the political discourse to places of no relevance whatsoever and distract us and the media from legitimate concerns. But it's just too damned funny. I know I'm just rubber-necking. It's the political version of watching nut shots on those home video shows. The only problem is that it's like watching our country get hit in the nuts.
For a really good read on political distraction of this type, I highly recommend Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas".
Monday, January 24, 2011
Hollywood Fun, Diluting Yourself, Anachronisms, and Blacklisting
Working in a video store has opened my eyes to a few little Hollywood oddities. One of these is what I had thought might be some kind of blacklisting. I know that Steven Seagal puts out a bunch of crap and I understand why. Seagal is a bad actor who thrives in the realm of low-budget action flicks that go straight to DVD. He's never been much more than that.
Some other actors currently find themselves in that sort of limbo when I thought they'd be on a different career trajectory ten years ago. Val Kilmer, Christian Slater, and Cuba Gooding, Jr. are three actors who enjoyed considerable success in the '90s but, now, are heavily into the straight to DVD thing. You might be surprised, just browsing through the Action section of my store, how many times these names pop up on movies you've never heard of.
I strongly considered, for a time, the possibility that these actors were blacklisted at some point. Maybe they had just pissed off the wrong people or pulled a couple of Mel Gibsons along the way that I hadn't caught wind of. But I think, maybe, they just made some very bad career moves.
I think, in the case of Cuba Gooding, Jr., the problem was with hubris. I remember watching the movie A Murder of Crows on some movie channel. I only watched because it was partially filmed in New Orleans. Turns out that this movie was Gooding's first foray into film production. It was a horrible career misstep. The movie had a very "made for TV" feel to it and was a chore to watch. Gooding was the star and I'm sure its failure put out some red flags. His star continued to decline as he continually associated himself with bad projects.
Val Kilmer was HUGE at one point in the '90s. His Jim Morrison in the Doors sort of cemented him as a force in Hollywood. Then there were missteps that probably looked like good moves at the time: The Saint, Batman Forever. Apparently, Kilmer had a high-flying lifestyle because he's in the news more these days for how much money he owes and problems he's having in selling a ranch he owns. In the past few years he has made a string of straight to DVD releases apparently just to get a paycheck and he continues to dilute his stock.
Christian Slater might just have been too much Christian Slater for his own good. These three actors, however, have been putting out tons of films and you can find at least two of the three together in several of the titles.
Adrian Brody, I predict, will be added to this list soon. At one point this year, on the new release wall of my store, he was in five titles. It's only a matter of time before the viewing public grows weary of seeing the same person in every other movie they view.
Moving on .... another gripe with Hollywood.
Movies are like little companies that pop up for a period to produce a product and then go away. A production company will hire a slew of workers, all with highly specialized roles, to pull the whole thing off. One type of worker they hire will be in charge of props, one in charge of continuity, the people who make sure an actress is wearing the same shirt from shot to shot and that sort of thing. Mostly these people are put in charge of paying attention.
I recently watched the film RED and was surprised to find that parts were filmed in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama as well as in New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida. I was horrified when one of the stars, Mary-Louise Parker, pronounced the word Mobile as MO-bul, the way you would pronounce the word if it were a piece of art suspended from a ceiling. Just a pet peeve I guess. The proper pronunciation is mo-BEEL. Bob Dylan famously took a swipe at this pronunciation by over-emphasizing the pronunciation MO-beel in his song "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again". I just don't see how people can be around a bunch of other people saying a word one way and just ignore it and say it another way. Reference nuclear vs. nuke-you-ler in a previous blog.
Similarly, last night I watched the movie Secretariat which was great. Highly recommended feel-good story. I remember the Secretariat phenomenon quite well from my childhood. So, my gripe, there's a scene in the movie set in a hotel ballroom prior to Secretariat's final race at Belmont in 1973. There's a band playing in the background, sort of a wedding band looking act in white dinner jackets. All's good unless you know anything about musical instruments. The guitarist is playing what appears to be an Ibanez Roadstar guitar that couldn't have been made prior to 1979. I made an attempt to find out more about that band but was unsuccessful. It gripes me that this could happen on a couple of levels. First, the guitarist in question should have known the date setting of the movie and at least borrowed a period-appropriate guitar. Second, the director, prop-master, somebody should have picked up on the anachronism. It's just sloppy.
I guess I envision myself as being able to do the job better. It always makes me wonder how the person in charge of a gaffe like that got their job in the first place and I always expect some sort of nepotism. I know that's horribly cynical and maybe it's a glaring character flaw, but it seriously messes with me.
I remember seeing the movie The Mummy in the theater. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the film, one scene screwed it all up for me. In the scene a group of Egyptian assassins appears, all of them carrying British made Sten guns. The film was set in 1926; the Sten gun was invented in 1940. I know that this was lost on the vast majority of movie goers and, big picture, it's not really a big deal. What irked me so much was that somebody was in charge of providing guns to the actors and they chose to provide them with a prop that was, at best, 14 years out of step with the film. This anachronism was such a glaring oversight that I thought about it for the remainder of the film. I had to look it up when I got home to make sure I wasn't in error and the discrepancy really floored me when I found out just how off it was.
So, I guess if anybody wants to hire me as a consultant on their movie project, I'm available and cheap and, although I'm not your nephew, I'll make sure that you have the right props on set.
Some other actors currently find themselves in that sort of limbo when I thought they'd be on a different career trajectory ten years ago. Val Kilmer, Christian Slater, and Cuba Gooding, Jr. are three actors who enjoyed considerable success in the '90s but, now, are heavily into the straight to DVD thing. You might be surprised, just browsing through the Action section of my store, how many times these names pop up on movies you've never heard of.
I strongly considered, for a time, the possibility that these actors were blacklisted at some point. Maybe they had just pissed off the wrong people or pulled a couple of Mel Gibsons along the way that I hadn't caught wind of. But I think, maybe, they just made some very bad career moves.
I think, in the case of Cuba Gooding, Jr., the problem was with hubris. I remember watching the movie A Murder of Crows on some movie channel. I only watched because it was partially filmed in New Orleans. Turns out that this movie was Gooding's first foray into film production. It was a horrible career misstep. The movie had a very "made for TV" feel to it and was a chore to watch. Gooding was the star and I'm sure its failure put out some red flags. His star continued to decline as he continually associated himself with bad projects.
Val Kilmer was HUGE at one point in the '90s. His Jim Morrison in the Doors sort of cemented him as a force in Hollywood. Then there were missteps that probably looked like good moves at the time: The Saint, Batman Forever. Apparently, Kilmer had a high-flying lifestyle because he's in the news more these days for how much money he owes and problems he's having in selling a ranch he owns. In the past few years he has made a string of straight to DVD releases apparently just to get a paycheck and he continues to dilute his stock.
Christian Slater might just have been too much Christian Slater for his own good. These three actors, however, have been putting out tons of films and you can find at least two of the three together in several of the titles.
Adrian Brody, I predict, will be added to this list soon. At one point this year, on the new release wall of my store, he was in five titles. It's only a matter of time before the viewing public grows weary of seeing the same person in every other movie they view.
Moving on .... another gripe with Hollywood.
Movies are like little companies that pop up for a period to produce a product and then go away. A production company will hire a slew of workers, all with highly specialized roles, to pull the whole thing off. One type of worker they hire will be in charge of props, one in charge of continuity, the people who make sure an actress is wearing the same shirt from shot to shot and that sort of thing. Mostly these people are put in charge of paying attention.
I recently watched the film RED and was surprised to find that parts were filmed in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama as well as in New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida. I was horrified when one of the stars, Mary-Louise Parker, pronounced the word Mobile as MO-bul, the way you would pronounce the word if it were a piece of art suspended from a ceiling. Just a pet peeve I guess. The proper pronunciation is mo-BEEL. Bob Dylan famously took a swipe at this pronunciation by over-emphasizing the pronunciation MO-beel in his song "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again". I just don't see how people can be around a bunch of other people saying a word one way and just ignore it and say it another way. Reference nuclear vs. nuke-you-ler in a previous blog.
Similarly, last night I watched the movie Secretariat which was great. Highly recommended feel-good story. I remember the Secretariat phenomenon quite well from my childhood. So, my gripe, there's a scene in the movie set in a hotel ballroom prior to Secretariat's final race at Belmont in 1973. There's a band playing in the background, sort of a wedding band looking act in white dinner jackets. All's good unless you know anything about musical instruments. The guitarist is playing what appears to be an Ibanez Roadstar guitar that couldn't have been made prior to 1979. I made an attempt to find out more about that band but was unsuccessful. It gripes me that this could happen on a couple of levels. First, the guitarist in question should have known the date setting of the movie and at least borrowed a period-appropriate guitar. Second, the director, prop-master, somebody should have picked up on the anachronism. It's just sloppy.
I guess I envision myself as being able to do the job better. It always makes me wonder how the person in charge of a gaffe like that got their job in the first place and I always expect some sort of nepotism. I know that's horribly cynical and maybe it's a glaring character flaw, but it seriously messes with me.
I remember seeing the movie The Mummy in the theater. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the film, one scene screwed it all up for me. In the scene a group of Egyptian assassins appears, all of them carrying British made Sten guns. The film was set in 1926; the Sten gun was invented in 1940. I know that this was lost on the vast majority of movie goers and, big picture, it's not really a big deal. What irked me so much was that somebody was in charge of providing guns to the actors and they chose to provide them with a prop that was, at best, 14 years out of step with the film. This anachronism was such a glaring oversight that I thought about it for the remainder of the film. I had to look it up when I got home to make sure I wasn't in error and the discrepancy really floored me when I found out just how off it was.
So, I guess if anybody wants to hire me as a consultant on their movie project, I'm available and cheap and, although I'm not your nephew, I'll make sure that you have the right props on set.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Guns, Blessings, Social Network Leg-Humping, and Disco Legends
Firstly, sorry for the absence the past week. I was in Anaheim, CA, USA, for NAMM 2011 which is like the biggest thing in the music industry for the year helping out at the Jammit booth. Had a cold the whole time, met Jake Busey, John 5, and Evelyn Champagne King, to name a few luminaries.
I fell asleep for a minute on a couch in a Starbucks not long after my arrival last Wednesday while watching some Native American shaman or something of that sort doing something with an eagle feather for the Gabriella Giffords memorial service and knew I had to do some sort of blog about the whole gun thing in America. The story of how the whole shooting went down was the backdrop to my sleep through the entire California adventure.
I remember hearing North Carolina congressman and former NFL quarterback, not a very good one, btw, Heath Shuler talking about carrying a concealed firearm with him and thinking how stupid that is.
Just for perspective, the actual text of the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights as added to the U.S. Constitution reads as follows, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Along the way, all of that militia stuff and well-regulated bits have pretty much fallen by the wayside and it's generally accepted that anybody should be able to pack as much firepower as possible just for laughs.
The whack-job responsible for the attack on Gabriella Giffords, Jared Loughner, was in possession of a Glock with a 30+ round magazine and he was only stopped when he had to halt his slaughter to reload.
I guess the 2nd Amendment was a good deal for the early Americans and their muzzle-loaders; I don't think they could have envisioned the automatic rifle or assault weapons, or 30+ round clips. It doesn't really matter though. The money from the NRA has scared off any political discussion on the matter.
There are something like 9 guns for every 10 people in the U.S. That should tell you enough. We're number one in gun violence, non-military death by gun, etc.
All I really want to say on this matter is that, if Heath Shuler had been attacked, and he had his concealed weapon on him, he would have hit the ground with his concealed gun still in its holster. There wasn't any warning that Rep. Giffords was about to be shot. If Shuler had been a bystander and had been given the chance to pull his own gun and open fire odds are more innocent bystanders would have been shot by him as well.
If everybody had the right to carry concealed weapons, that just means I'd be more likely to try to get the drop on you or shoot you before you had the chance to get to it than it would be to deter me from attacking you in the first place.
Second on my hit list this week is people behind a cash register telling me to "have a blessed day". I'm not sure how common this is around the rest of the country but it's pretty big in the Bible Belt where I am. I'm not sure what motivates people to tell me this other than to let me know that they're Christian. I should ask them to save their wishes for nine year-old children who are the collateral victims of gun violence as I'm doing okay other than being pretty broke.
It feels to me like something of a challenge when people say this to me. I want to ask them "blessed by whom?" If it's God, I don't believe in that. I'm not sure if it should be a financial blessing but that would be pretty cool. It seems like it's just a sort of in your face Christianity thing though and it's wearing on my nerves. Being Buddhist, I'd feel pretty stupid telling somebody to "have a Buddhariffic day!" Firstly, it would seem to be a little invasive. Secondly it would sound like I would be assuming that the addressee would be Buddhist. Thirdly, it seems to take for granted that I care. How about a nice "thank you"? I'd rather you not take the opportunity to try to tell me about your religion while I'm buying crap from you.
Okay, and finally, the lamest thing to happen in the past week is Trent Reznor winning a freaking Golden Globe for his score to The Social Network. If you read my blog regarding that movie, I already explained how I felt about that effort. Not only was it not worthy of an award, it was distracting. Yet he beat out some amazing efforts from Carter Burwell (not even nominated), Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, and Alexandre Desplats.
Maybe time will tell why Hollywood and the national press are pushing this freaking movie so heavily. I can't even believe Jesse Eisenberg was nominated for a best actor award. I mean, really, if you've watched Jesse Eisenberg act in any movie he's done previously, you know he was acting like Jesse Eisenberg.
I've seen critics call The Social Network the best movie of the new millennium and it's seriously freaking me out! They're calling it the Great Gatsby of this generation. No, really. I haven't seen a critical rating for the movie of less than an A-. At my video store, the overwhelming rating has been "it was okay".
I've seen so many movies in the past decade that blew me away. I don't watch many movies twice but I'm tempted to watch this one again to see if I didn't miss something. It certainly didn't move me like Lost in Translation or The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, or The Royal Tenenbaums, and yes, I do love Wes Anderson. The Social Network, if I were to make a list, wouldn't be in the top ten. So, what did I miss? I'd really like somebody to explain to me why this film has so much gravity other than the success story of Facebook being a big deal.
I promised myself I'd stop following awards shows when Roberto Benigni's performance in Life is Beautiful beat out Tom Hanks' in Saving Private Ryan for the 1999 Academy Awards but it's always fun to watch what bit of zeitgeist comes out every year. It's obviously no longer about the movies themselves. It's moved into some kind of political area where you guess the winner based on unrelated factors like who the director is rather than how well they directed a movie or whether or not it's time for a woman or minority to win an award.
Sofia Coppola should have won for Lost in Translation in 2004, not Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2009 but that was a "make good" as they say in sports.
I don't know whose leg the Social Network people humped to get what they're getting but I want to hump it too.
And, if you don't know who Evelyn Champagne King is, here's a reminder/introduction. She was amazingly nice and still looks pretty young.
I fell asleep for a minute on a couch in a Starbucks not long after my arrival last Wednesday while watching some Native American shaman or something of that sort doing something with an eagle feather for the Gabriella Giffords memorial service and knew I had to do some sort of blog about the whole gun thing in America. The story of how the whole shooting went down was the backdrop to my sleep through the entire California adventure.
I remember hearing North Carolina congressman and former NFL quarterback, not a very good one, btw, Heath Shuler talking about carrying a concealed firearm with him and thinking how stupid that is.
Just for perspective, the actual text of the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights as added to the U.S. Constitution reads as follows, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Along the way, all of that militia stuff and well-regulated bits have pretty much fallen by the wayside and it's generally accepted that anybody should be able to pack as much firepower as possible just for laughs.
The whack-job responsible for the attack on Gabriella Giffords, Jared Loughner, was in possession of a Glock with a 30+ round magazine and he was only stopped when he had to halt his slaughter to reload.
I guess the 2nd Amendment was a good deal for the early Americans and their muzzle-loaders; I don't think they could have envisioned the automatic rifle or assault weapons, or 30+ round clips. It doesn't really matter though. The money from the NRA has scared off any political discussion on the matter.
There are something like 9 guns for every 10 people in the U.S. That should tell you enough. We're number one in gun violence, non-military death by gun, etc.
All I really want to say on this matter is that, if Heath Shuler had been attacked, and he had his concealed weapon on him, he would have hit the ground with his concealed gun still in its holster. There wasn't any warning that Rep. Giffords was about to be shot. If Shuler had been a bystander and had been given the chance to pull his own gun and open fire odds are more innocent bystanders would have been shot by him as well.
If everybody had the right to carry concealed weapons, that just means I'd be more likely to try to get the drop on you or shoot you before you had the chance to get to it than it would be to deter me from attacking you in the first place.
Second on my hit list this week is people behind a cash register telling me to "have a blessed day". I'm not sure how common this is around the rest of the country but it's pretty big in the Bible Belt where I am. I'm not sure what motivates people to tell me this other than to let me know that they're Christian. I should ask them to save their wishes for nine year-old children who are the collateral victims of gun violence as I'm doing okay other than being pretty broke.
It feels to me like something of a challenge when people say this to me. I want to ask them "blessed by whom?" If it's God, I don't believe in that. I'm not sure if it should be a financial blessing but that would be pretty cool. It seems like it's just a sort of in your face Christianity thing though and it's wearing on my nerves. Being Buddhist, I'd feel pretty stupid telling somebody to "have a Buddhariffic day!" Firstly, it would seem to be a little invasive. Secondly it would sound like I would be assuming that the addressee would be Buddhist. Thirdly, it seems to take for granted that I care. How about a nice "thank you"? I'd rather you not take the opportunity to try to tell me about your religion while I'm buying crap from you.
Okay, and finally, the lamest thing to happen in the past week is Trent Reznor winning a freaking Golden Globe for his score to The Social Network. If you read my blog regarding that movie, I already explained how I felt about that effort. Not only was it not worthy of an award, it was distracting. Yet he beat out some amazing efforts from Carter Burwell (not even nominated), Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, and Alexandre Desplats.
Maybe time will tell why Hollywood and the national press are pushing this freaking movie so heavily. I can't even believe Jesse Eisenberg was nominated for a best actor award. I mean, really, if you've watched Jesse Eisenberg act in any movie he's done previously, you know he was acting like Jesse Eisenberg.
I've seen critics call The Social Network the best movie of the new millennium and it's seriously freaking me out! They're calling it the Great Gatsby of this generation. No, really. I haven't seen a critical rating for the movie of less than an A-. At my video store, the overwhelming rating has been "it was okay".
I've seen so many movies in the past decade that blew me away. I don't watch many movies twice but I'm tempted to watch this one again to see if I didn't miss something. It certainly didn't move me like Lost in Translation or The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, or The Royal Tenenbaums, and yes, I do love Wes Anderson. The Social Network, if I were to make a list, wouldn't be in the top ten. So, what did I miss? I'd really like somebody to explain to me why this film has so much gravity other than the success story of Facebook being a big deal.
I promised myself I'd stop following awards shows when Roberto Benigni's performance in Life is Beautiful beat out Tom Hanks' in Saving Private Ryan for the 1999 Academy Awards but it's always fun to watch what bit of zeitgeist comes out every year. It's obviously no longer about the movies themselves. It's moved into some kind of political area where you guess the winner based on unrelated factors like who the director is rather than how well they directed a movie or whether or not it's time for a woman or minority to win an award.
Sofia Coppola should have won for Lost in Translation in 2004, not Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2009 but that was a "make good" as they say in sports.
I don't know whose leg the Social Network people humped to get what they're getting but I want to hump it too.
And, if you don't know who Evelyn Champagne King is, here's a reminder/introduction. She was amazingly nice and still looks pretty young.
Friday, January 7, 2011
The Social Network - WTF? :D
Ahhhhh, here we are at another moment of supreme zeitgeist. The highly anticipated, for me, movie "The Social Network" comes out on DVD next Tuesday and I got to watch a preview copy of it last night. Highly anticipated because the critics, across the board and speaking in one huge, thumbs up, four star voice, gave the movie the highest marks they could. That sort of rah-rah proclamation makes for a watershed moment. This is one of those cultural events in which you must participate to feel like you were there for it.
In my video store, the trailer for the movie has been playing in rotation and that caused me to be more excited because the trailer featured a beautiful, choral rendition of the Radiohead song "Creep". The song is one of those covers that stands out so much that it comes close to transcending the original. I got goosebumps on first hearing it the way I did when I heard Gary Jules' version of "Mad World" in the Gears of War TV commercials.
Music, for me, is an important part of the movie-watching experience. A good soundtrack can make or break a movie for me and, when it works seamlessly with the film, it's frequently the tipping factor. Danny Elfman, Mark Mothersbaugh, Jon Brion, Carter Burwell, artists like these make you feel the movie. The soundtrack for The Social Network was done by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor so I was looking forward to seeing what he would bring to the table.
So, going in I was skeptical simply based on the overwhelming good feeling associated with this film. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I already knew the story of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. You'd have to be living in a vacuum for the past few years to have missed any of it. My expectations had been tweaked because I was expecting the critical reaction to be based on some amazing cinematography and a score that kept me enthralled. I guess I was thinking it would have some feel to it like what Sophia Coppola did with Lost in Translation.
What I got felt like a pat retelling of the story with unobtrusive camera work and a soundtrack that got on my nerves. Seriously, the Trent Reznor soundtrack was so irritating that I had to pause the movie to take a break from it. There are conventions in soundtrack music; there are ways the music is used to transition from scene to scene and to set up key moments through tension and release. I was thirty minutes into the Social Network when I realized that the, what I had perceived to be, five minutes of music I had been hearing and perceiving to be some sort of exposition leading into the movie getting into its groove was still just droning on in the mode typically reserved for transition. We weren't transitioning though. This is how it went through the whole movie.
The song I had wanted to hear in context, "Creep", wasn't even in the movie.
So this is one of those "social phenomena" that comes along every other year or so where you have to see it and you have to love it or you're on the outside looking in. Sort of parallel to how Facebook came to be so popular in the first place. But, ultimately, the movie is just a retelling of the story with nothing to make it stand out. The Social Network will win some Oscars over some much more worthy works as always happens. I'll have fun doing Oscar predictions this year as I always do, not based on how good a movie or performance is, but based on buzz and other external factors. You can reference Denzel winning for Training Day here. It's all a bunch of predetermined crap.
I guess the movie that stood out most for me in 2010 as far as being a complete success in direction, story, acting, cinematography, and soundtrack was The Kids Are All Right with Toy Story 3 being a strong second. I really fear the inertia that has been created by The Social Network though. I'm a little handicapped in that I don't go to theaters. I've grown to hate that experience so I wait for DVD releases. I'm really looking forward to seeing some other Oscar-buzzed movies like Black Swan, True Grit, and The Kings Speech; The Social Network for me, though, was a solid B- experience with Trent Reznor's soundtrack getting a firm D.
Ultimately, for now, Facebook has won the social network wars by a large margin. You'll have to remember that VHS beat out Beta and Blu-Ray beat out HD DVD and there's always something next. I'm not sure the guy that invented VHS deserved a bio-pic as pervasive as VHS was at one time.
Since it didn't get included in the actual movie, here's the amazing version of Radiohead's "Creep" performed by The Scala Choir.
In my video store, the trailer for the movie has been playing in rotation and that caused me to be more excited because the trailer featured a beautiful, choral rendition of the Radiohead song "Creep". The song is one of those covers that stands out so much that it comes close to transcending the original. I got goosebumps on first hearing it the way I did when I heard Gary Jules' version of "Mad World" in the Gears of War TV commercials.
Music, for me, is an important part of the movie-watching experience. A good soundtrack can make or break a movie for me and, when it works seamlessly with the film, it's frequently the tipping factor. Danny Elfman, Mark Mothersbaugh, Jon Brion, Carter Burwell, artists like these make you feel the movie. The soundtrack for The Social Network was done by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor so I was looking forward to seeing what he would bring to the table.
So, going in I was skeptical simply based on the overwhelming good feeling associated with this film. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I already knew the story of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. You'd have to be living in a vacuum for the past few years to have missed any of it. My expectations had been tweaked because I was expecting the critical reaction to be based on some amazing cinematography and a score that kept me enthralled. I guess I was thinking it would have some feel to it like what Sophia Coppola did with Lost in Translation.
What I got felt like a pat retelling of the story with unobtrusive camera work and a soundtrack that got on my nerves. Seriously, the Trent Reznor soundtrack was so irritating that I had to pause the movie to take a break from it. There are conventions in soundtrack music; there are ways the music is used to transition from scene to scene and to set up key moments through tension and release. I was thirty minutes into the Social Network when I realized that the, what I had perceived to be, five minutes of music I had been hearing and perceiving to be some sort of exposition leading into the movie getting into its groove was still just droning on in the mode typically reserved for transition. We weren't transitioning though. This is how it went through the whole movie.
The song I had wanted to hear in context, "Creep", wasn't even in the movie.
So this is one of those "social phenomena" that comes along every other year or so where you have to see it and you have to love it or you're on the outside looking in. Sort of parallel to how Facebook came to be so popular in the first place. But, ultimately, the movie is just a retelling of the story with nothing to make it stand out. The Social Network will win some Oscars over some much more worthy works as always happens. I'll have fun doing Oscar predictions this year as I always do, not based on how good a movie or performance is, but based on buzz and other external factors. You can reference Denzel winning for Training Day here. It's all a bunch of predetermined crap.
I guess the movie that stood out most for me in 2010 as far as being a complete success in direction, story, acting, cinematography, and soundtrack was The Kids Are All Right with Toy Story 3 being a strong second. I really fear the inertia that has been created by The Social Network though. I'm a little handicapped in that I don't go to theaters. I've grown to hate that experience so I wait for DVD releases. I'm really looking forward to seeing some other Oscar-buzzed movies like Black Swan, True Grit, and The Kings Speech; The Social Network for me, though, was a solid B- experience with Trent Reznor's soundtrack getting a firm D.
Ultimately, for now, Facebook has won the social network wars by a large margin. You'll have to remember that VHS beat out Beta and Blu-Ray beat out HD DVD and there's always something next. I'm not sure the guy that invented VHS deserved a bio-pic as pervasive as VHS was at one time.
Since it didn't get included in the actual movie, here's the amazing version of Radiohead's "Creep" performed by The Scala Choir.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Hot Doughnuts, Facebook, and Happiness in the Philippines
I was at the in-laws' last night and was watching a show with my father-in-law on the History Channel. To say my father-in-law is conservative is like saying the sun is hot. The show we were watching was a panel discussion where a group of futurists discussed the impending decline and fall of the United States. A comment was made by one of the panelists that there are poor people in the Philippines who are happy despite living in abject poverty and without all of the material stuff we enjoy as Americans. My father-in-law didn't think this was possible, that the poor could be happy.
The argument didn't surprise me. The need and the desire for more is taught to American children where it's probably not in the Philippines. In most cultures, once Maslow's Hierarchy is met, you can and should be happy. But satisfaction with having your basic needs met is anathema to capitalism. Not much money is made when people are happy with what they've got.
Particularly in the boom days of the '80s and '90s, Wall Street demanded growth. Growth was the model for everything. The idea that a company could reach some point where it was like a car on cruise control doing 70 on the interstate, was obsolete. The nice annual return, happy workforce, consistent payout of dividends model on which our economy had been based for decades was a dinosaur. No matter the business model, the ultimate goal was growth and dominance of market share.
Of course, this line of thinking is still in vogue. The new American economic model is a scorched earth policy of unabated greed and desire for more, and more, and more. To be satisfied is to be lazy. The quest is for the IPO and massive bonuses and mcmansions. The fact that we live in a world of finite resources and finite capital and finite potential is completely disregarded. To acknowledge the finite is to point out that the emperor is naked. For the new American economic model to hold, everybody has to believe.
I remember vividly in 2000 when Krispy Kreme, the Southern doughnut making institution, had its IPO. The boss I had at the time, owner through inheritance of a small trucking company, was spreading the word that it would be huge and, indeed, it was. The problem, I pointed out at the time, was that Krispy Kreme shouldn't be doing an IPO. It didn't make sense to me that a good steady business would risk everything to try to make itself into a McDonald's of doughnuts.
The trucking company owner was one of those guys who is wealthy because of the hard work of his father. In his mind, however, he was a self-made man of the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" variety. Very Republican and all that that entails, he was striving for the type of growth in his own company I'm discussing here. Taking out loans to expand the fleet and aggressively taking on old and established competitors by undercutting their prices at a loss, he was on a sort of business jihad. Of course I got caught up in the downsizing when the chickens came home to roost on his idiocy. Topic for a future blog: this is the type of guy who will benefit from the new estate tax cuts.
Krispy Kreme, though, now that's a topic dear to my heart and the hearts of Southerners for generations. The kitsch and the familiarity of the "Hot Doughnuts" signs are icons of my youth. Most school children had to do a Krispy Kreme sale at some point to raise money for a field trip or other project. You'd have boxes of the classic glazed doughnut and you'd stand at busy intersections and people would buy you out in an hour. My grandmother loved to take the old doughnuts, cut them in half, and fry them in a pan of butter. Luther Vandross, also known as a singer, was the inventor of the Luther. The Luther is a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut, cut in half and put on a grill cut side down, and used as a bun for a bacon cheeseburger. Believe me; it works!
Caught up in the market bubble of the late '90s, Krispy Kreme began its ill-fated romance with the growth economy. They wanted those doughnuts to be everywhere. They wanted stores all over the world and their doughnuts sold in other retail locations, gas stations, WalMarts, etc. Of course, now, Krispy Kreme stock is worth about $7 a share and a great many stores around the country have closed.
It never made sense to me to sell Krispy Kremes outside of their stores because it was like the company competing with itself. It's the same thing as Starbucks wanting to open locations every other block in addition to having Starbucks coffees in the refrigerated section of your local convenience store or being able to buy frozen White Castle hamburgers at my WalMart 500 miles from the closest White Castle restaurant. It all makes sense in some delusional PowerPoint presentation at some point. There are plenty of graphs and pie charts and focus group reports that showed somebody with money why it couldn't fail. Ultimately, it doesn't really make sense though.
It's the same thing I used to feel when I'd hear about housing starts as an economic barometer while I had just driven by a whole new subdivision of finished or half-finished single family dwellings uninhabited and for sale. At some point you have to realize that what you have is enough. New homes should be built as they're needed not on speculation. Krispy Kreme was a profitable and established business that had no need to expand out of the Southeast except to satisfy a belief in a bankrupt economic policy, the Zeitgeist of the boom market.
I'll probably be watching "The Social Network" this evening. The pervasiveness of Facebook is astounding and the DVD release of the movie version of its founding is surely some sort of tipping point. Company founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is Time magazine's man of the year. Jump the shark anybody? Goldman Sachs, those engineers of unfounded market speculation, recently valued Facebook at $50 billion. That basically means it's a more valuable company than Boeing; of course that's all on some PowerPoint presentation somewhere and I guess we're challenged to deny its validity without having the bonus-mad market analysts at our disposal that Goldman has to counter our claim.
I remember well when Facebook was the new thing. The band I was in at the time had done a lot of work getting set up on the, then, new thing MySpace. MySpace was a perfect vehicle for promoting bands. Then I began to see reports that MySpace was basically dead and was only being used by black and Hispanic kids. The portal of choice for white kids, our demographic basically, was this thing called Facebook. I remember checking it out and noting how much it sucked. It looked ugly, it wasn't intuitive, and there was nowhere to post my band's songs. Oh yeah, I use Facebook now; it's where all my friends go to connect with one another and share their thoughts, pics, video clips, etc. And it still lacks so many things that seem so obvious to me. If I want to find a post from a certain date I have to scroll and scroll and scroll until I find it, no searching posts by date. That's a small quibble but just one of many.
I guess envisioning and implementing Facebook's inevitable replacement would make me a billionaire. Yeah, I used the word inevitable. Mark Zuckerberg, has fought off the prodding to do an IPO, relying on private investment to this point. Unlike Google, another site whose popularity confounds me, Mark Zuckerberg seems to be more interested in the slow and steady growth of his company via its own inertia, aka the old business model.
I have no doubt in my mind that, in five years' time, Facebook will be on the way out. People are fickle and they want to be on board with the next new thing. It won't be Twitter or any of the dozens of other social networking apps and websites out there currently. Things like Facebook are replaced by quantum shifts but quantum shifts are always inevitable. All things related to entertainment and information are finite. The point is lost, however, on Wall Street. Like every bubble in the past, we'll look back on Goldman's Facebook valuation and easily identify the error in their thinking. It just happens to be obvious to some of us right now.
Until more people begin to put down the Kool-Aid, worry more about the long-term economic viability of our country than about making a quick dollar, the decline will only hasten. In my jaded world view, I honestly think the Goldman people are fully aware of the lie. I think they come up with valuations that defy logic in order to push companies like Facebook to an IPO in which Goldman's largest investors will make huge bank and the company being pushed will be killed off after the profits have been taken.
Unfortunately, Wall Street and its boom mentality goes on apace despite the hope held by people like me that Obama would provide some meaningful regulation to bring it in line with reality. That didn't happen and it looks like it won't. In fact, in a system where the potentially regulated are in charge, there is little hope for anything better.
The argument didn't surprise me. The need and the desire for more is taught to American children where it's probably not in the Philippines. In most cultures, once Maslow's Hierarchy is met, you can and should be happy. But satisfaction with having your basic needs met is anathema to capitalism. Not much money is made when people are happy with what they've got.
Particularly in the boom days of the '80s and '90s, Wall Street demanded growth. Growth was the model for everything. The idea that a company could reach some point where it was like a car on cruise control doing 70 on the interstate, was obsolete. The nice annual return, happy workforce, consistent payout of dividends model on which our economy had been based for decades was a dinosaur. No matter the business model, the ultimate goal was growth and dominance of market share.
Of course, this line of thinking is still in vogue. The new American economic model is a scorched earth policy of unabated greed and desire for more, and more, and more. To be satisfied is to be lazy. The quest is for the IPO and massive bonuses and mcmansions. The fact that we live in a world of finite resources and finite capital and finite potential is completely disregarded. To acknowledge the finite is to point out that the emperor is naked. For the new American economic model to hold, everybody has to believe.
I remember vividly in 2000 when Krispy Kreme, the Southern doughnut making institution, had its IPO. The boss I had at the time, owner through inheritance of a small trucking company, was spreading the word that it would be huge and, indeed, it was. The problem, I pointed out at the time, was that Krispy Kreme shouldn't be doing an IPO. It didn't make sense to me that a good steady business would risk everything to try to make itself into a McDonald's of doughnuts.
The trucking company owner was one of those guys who is wealthy because of the hard work of his father. In his mind, however, he was a self-made man of the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" variety. Very Republican and all that that entails, he was striving for the type of growth in his own company I'm discussing here. Taking out loans to expand the fleet and aggressively taking on old and established competitors by undercutting their prices at a loss, he was on a sort of business jihad. Of course I got caught up in the downsizing when the chickens came home to roost on his idiocy. Topic for a future blog: this is the type of guy who will benefit from the new estate tax cuts.
Krispy Kreme, though, now that's a topic dear to my heart and the hearts of Southerners for generations. The kitsch and the familiarity of the "Hot Doughnuts" signs are icons of my youth. Most school children had to do a Krispy Kreme sale at some point to raise money for a field trip or other project. You'd have boxes of the classic glazed doughnut and you'd stand at busy intersections and people would buy you out in an hour. My grandmother loved to take the old doughnuts, cut them in half, and fry them in a pan of butter. Luther Vandross, also known as a singer, was the inventor of the Luther. The Luther is a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut, cut in half and put on a grill cut side down, and used as a bun for a bacon cheeseburger. Believe me; it works!
Caught up in the market bubble of the late '90s, Krispy Kreme began its ill-fated romance with the growth economy. They wanted those doughnuts to be everywhere. They wanted stores all over the world and their doughnuts sold in other retail locations, gas stations, WalMarts, etc. Of course, now, Krispy Kreme stock is worth about $7 a share and a great many stores around the country have closed.
It never made sense to me to sell Krispy Kremes outside of their stores because it was like the company competing with itself. It's the same thing as Starbucks wanting to open locations every other block in addition to having Starbucks coffees in the refrigerated section of your local convenience store or being able to buy frozen White Castle hamburgers at my WalMart 500 miles from the closest White Castle restaurant. It all makes sense in some delusional PowerPoint presentation at some point. There are plenty of graphs and pie charts and focus group reports that showed somebody with money why it couldn't fail. Ultimately, it doesn't really make sense though.
It's the same thing I used to feel when I'd hear about housing starts as an economic barometer while I had just driven by a whole new subdivision of finished or half-finished single family dwellings uninhabited and for sale. At some point you have to realize that what you have is enough. New homes should be built as they're needed not on speculation. Krispy Kreme was a profitable and established business that had no need to expand out of the Southeast except to satisfy a belief in a bankrupt economic policy, the Zeitgeist of the boom market.
I'll probably be watching "The Social Network" this evening. The pervasiveness of Facebook is astounding and the DVD release of the movie version of its founding is surely some sort of tipping point. Company founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is Time magazine's man of the year. Jump the shark anybody? Goldman Sachs, those engineers of unfounded market speculation, recently valued Facebook at $50 billion. That basically means it's a more valuable company than Boeing; of course that's all on some PowerPoint presentation somewhere and I guess we're challenged to deny its validity without having the bonus-mad market analysts at our disposal that Goldman has to counter our claim.
I remember well when Facebook was the new thing. The band I was in at the time had done a lot of work getting set up on the, then, new thing MySpace. MySpace was a perfect vehicle for promoting bands. Then I began to see reports that MySpace was basically dead and was only being used by black and Hispanic kids. The portal of choice for white kids, our demographic basically, was this thing called Facebook. I remember checking it out and noting how much it sucked. It looked ugly, it wasn't intuitive, and there was nowhere to post my band's songs. Oh yeah, I use Facebook now; it's where all my friends go to connect with one another and share their thoughts, pics, video clips, etc. And it still lacks so many things that seem so obvious to me. If I want to find a post from a certain date I have to scroll and scroll and scroll until I find it, no searching posts by date. That's a small quibble but just one of many.
I guess envisioning and implementing Facebook's inevitable replacement would make me a billionaire. Yeah, I used the word inevitable. Mark Zuckerberg, has fought off the prodding to do an IPO, relying on private investment to this point. Unlike Google, another site whose popularity confounds me, Mark Zuckerberg seems to be more interested in the slow and steady growth of his company via its own inertia, aka the old business model.
I have no doubt in my mind that, in five years' time, Facebook will be on the way out. People are fickle and they want to be on board with the next new thing. It won't be Twitter or any of the dozens of other social networking apps and websites out there currently. Things like Facebook are replaced by quantum shifts but quantum shifts are always inevitable. All things related to entertainment and information are finite. The point is lost, however, on Wall Street. Like every bubble in the past, we'll look back on Goldman's Facebook valuation and easily identify the error in their thinking. It just happens to be obvious to some of us right now.
Until more people begin to put down the Kool-Aid, worry more about the long-term economic viability of our country than about making a quick dollar, the decline will only hasten. In my jaded world view, I honestly think the Goldman people are fully aware of the lie. I think they come up with valuations that defy logic in order to push companies like Facebook to an IPO in which Goldman's largest investors will make huge bank and the company being pushed will be killed off after the profits have been taken.
Unfortunately, Wall Street and its boom mentality goes on apace despite the hope held by people like me that Obama would provide some meaningful regulation to bring it in line with reality. That didn't happen and it looks like it won't. In fact, in a system where the potentially regulated are in charge, there is little hope for anything better.
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