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Die Another Day

As ever in a Bond film, the Americans get it wrong, and it's left to the Queen's loyal subjects to make things right. And in Die Another Day, the latest installment in the greatest moviemaking franchise of all time, the New Zealand director Lee Tamahori shows Francis Ford Coppola a thing or two about the waves off the coast of south-east Asian peninsulas. If Robert Duvall's Bill Kilgore thought he was being wild and crazy surfing off the coast of Vietnam, he'd have been put right in his place by the opening sequence of the new 007 flick: James Bond and two sidekicks surfing their way in to North Korea – at night, no less – on some of the biggest waves you've ever seen in your life.

The film never lets up from there. Tamahori seems a little over-reliant on the rush-cuts of John Woo: no need to explain how we got from A to B if you can simply make a whooshing sound, speed the film up a little, and jump straight into the action elsewhere. But it doesn't matter: he's got the gadgets, the punchlines, the cocktails, the banter, the girls, the exotic baddies down pat. He also has the attention span of a gnat. Die Another Day is 132 minutes long, but it never even thinks about getting boring: it passes in a rush of adrenaline, and you're shaking when you leave the theatre.

I have quibbles: although I love Judi Dench as M, I'm tired of her leaving her office the whole time and putting herself in harm's way. The virtual-reality jokes set in MI6's Vauxhall HQ are obvious, and the second one risks jeopardising the timeless relationship between Moneypenny and Bond. And although no Bond film would be complete without a gadget-filled car, I really don't see the point of having two gadget-filled cars face off against each other on some frozen lake in Iceland. Oh, and while I'm at it, the convention of having the baddies scream for a second as they realise their impending doom is getting very tired (although, conversely, the convention of having the baddies always choose the slow-and-spectacular death over the quick-and-easy is here gloriously revived).

Part of the problem, I think, is that although Bond films have always sent up a certain genre, they've now become that genre, and they've become reduced to sending up themselves. Bond plays with his old gadgets in Q's lair, and old Bond films are referenced more than once: a car chase in an ice palace which is a facsimile of one in a car park in Tomorrow Never Dies (I think); Halle Berry emerging from the Caribbean in a two-piece in an unmistakeable homage to Ursula Andress in Dr. No. I'd also like to think that that the horribly bad back-projection in the Icelanding surfing scene is some kind of a nod to Roger Moore's skiing sequences: I can't think of why else they did it.

But for all that it's becoming harder and harder to come up with something original, this remains one of the best Bond films in memory; indeed, it could well be the best since Sean Connery hung up his license to kill and disappeared off to start selling whisky to the Japanese instead. Bond shows his normal flair not only at surfing but also at fencing, in a fantastic scene which almost (but not quite) matches the swordfight in The Princess Bride; and Halle Berry makes a superb Bond girl, with attitude to match her high-diving skills.

The credit, I think, is to be shared equally between Tamahori and Pierce Brosnan. The keepers of the Bond flame have done extremely well by taking critically-acclaimed filmmakers (Tamahori directed the Maori film Once Were Warriors; Michael Apted, of The World Is Not Enough, is an acclaimed documentarist), giving them silly budgets, and telling them to go have fun. Tamahori has never directed an action film before, but he did do an excellent job with the underrated thriller Along Came A Spider, and he obviously loves Bond. This, for all its knowing references, is classic Bond, complete with '61 Bollinger and sleeper agents for Her Majesty running cigar factories in Cuba.

Brosnan, for his part, is at this point a master of the Less Is More school of acting. When he finds a Chinese secret agent in his hotel room, he merely hints at what he would do if he could be bothered to act: he knows that what we're doing is remembering Connery do the same thing, so he more or less fades into the background and lets our nostalgia take over. And when he's chatting up Berry on the terrace of a Cuban hotel, he basically lets his cigar do the talking, as though he's almost too sophisticated to actually deliver the lines.

As for the baddies, it's interesting that they're North Korean this time. It's also interesting that they're renegade North Korean: even the old general thinks it's all a bit much. For all that the Americans exist in this film mainly to perpetrate an all-too-plausible intelligence cock-up, they're still setting the geopolitical stage within which Bond operates. "The world has changed," M tells Bond at one point, "I don't have the luxury of seeing things in black and white like you do." Replies Bond: "Well, I haven't changed." For which we should all be grateful.

Posted by Felix at 0:58 EST | Comments (2)

Gay Talese in the New Yorker

This week's issue of the New Yorker is an excellent reminder of why it is the best magazine in the world. Who else would commission the great Michael Sowa to do a Thanksgiving cover illustration? (Talking of the cover, I have a rare early-print-run copy of the magazine which is missing the "The" in "The New Yorker" on the cover. Make me an offer and buy this collectible now, while you have the opportunity!)

Anyway, where but the New Yorker would this wonderful piece by Gay Talese ever appear?

Talese has revisited the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the most elegant suspension bridge in New York, 40-odd years after it was built. He covered the original construction of the bridge, and now, in his trademark style, has gone back to find the same people he talked to back then. Not all are still alive, of course, but one of them was still working on the bridge as recently as 1991. Here's Talese, with his limpid prose style:

Despite his advanced age and his occupational ailments, Edward Iannielli had drawn one of the most difficult assignments on the renovation project—that of removing rust from the highest points of the towers... After arriving at the top of the tower—a journey that took twenty minutes—he leaned out into the sky and went to work with wire brushes and scrapers to remove rust, and then, wearing rubber gloves, to smear a rust-resistant paste onto whatever corrosion existed along the flat surface and bolts of the tower. As he did this, he envisaged himself thirty years earlier, inserting these same bolts into the same steel, and once more he felt a sense of identity with the great structure. Tears came to his eyes, and, dipping his gloved left hand into a bucket of reddish paste, he reached out to touch an untarnished plate of steel which was secured by a row of bolts and, with his bent middle finger, he wrote as clearly as he could, in block letters, "Catherine"—the name of his wife of thirty years, who had recently died of cancer.

"Leaned out into the sky" – I love that. And Talese's a master of the comma: there are eight in that last sentence, but he uses an em-dash where 95% of people would use a comma. Most powerfully, there isn't a comma or any punctuation at all after "bolts", where the big break in the sentence occurs. It might be reading "bolts and braces" but in fact it's "bolts and now I'm on to something completely different". I've noticed this in a lot of writers, especially Updike; I don't know whether it's got a name. But I'm sure, again, that the vast majority of people would simply end the sentence at "bolts" and then begin a new one.

There's no real story to Talese's piece: it's episodic, moving from character to character, stopping along the way to remember how things were 40 years ago, and to compare how things are today. The attack on the World Trade Center features prominently, of course, this time viewed from a fresh perspective – that of the people who worked on its construction. (Naturally enough, there was a large overlap between the Verrazano-Narrows workers and those who built the twin towers.)

At one point the towers are described as "ninety-five per cent air". In that one phrase is encapsulated a whole world of difference – between the old world and the new, and between the blue-collar world and the white-collar world. Skyscrapers which predate the World Trade Center are big, solid buildings – think the Empire State. And people like Edward Iannielli, who worked on 50-odd skyscrapers in and around New York, like them that way. But things are different now: property developers want buildings to be as airy as possible, since that makes them more desirable to tenants and maximises rentable floor space. Even classicist architects, who might put columns or stone cladding on a new building rather than the standard modernist curtain wall, will still use modern construction techniques to keep the inside as column-free and airy as possible.

I think (and this is only a hunch) that people like – and classicist architects use – columns and their ilk in contemporary architecture precisely because they give the impression of support and solidity, even when they're purely decorative. While the architectural world continues to use state-of-the-art technology to create bigger and bigger open spaces, a lot of people still like to feel that they can see the way in which their building is being held up. In the World Trade Center, they couldn't: the interior columns were thrust out to the walls, and read to the eye simply as window-frames. What modernists considered genius made the likes of Iannielli very uncomfortable. But the modernists have won this war, and "flimsy", to use his word, is here to stay.

Posted by Felix at 17:46 EST | Comments (1)

Personal November 26: Montevideo-Falklands

I'm on the ship! It's great. Big ports, big boats, black oil on your hands, real people, really real people, gritty town, hot weather, bumpy seas. It's real and it's great.

Bought four cheap watches in Cambridge before leaving: two analogue, two digital. Daft really; didn't stop to think that the analogue will be only half helpful where we're headed. Two am or pm? Does it matter? There's still night and day here though... not even as far south as Britain is north. I have a cabin with a porthole (that even opens) and our own shower and loo. Height of luxury.

Twenty-one of us travelled from Heathrow to Montevideo and we only managed to lose two bags and a passport along the way. No-one went AWOL in Monte despite the local attractions and we're due to pick up another 10 or 20 in the Falklands. This is on top of the crew who number about 20 as well I guess.

The men are fantastic,- really nice. Mandy (personnel), Penny (dentist), Jo (senior scientist) and myself are the women aboard so far but that's going to increase too so it's not as biased as people imagine. And I've seen albatrosses (black browed), dolphins (or porpoises?), penguins and petrels already. Sunburn and seasickness allowing, I could stand on that bow forever. Over.

PS: The Shackleton's website is updated weekly... with pictures! You can also email me (make sure the subject line says 'personal') or leave a comment below. As for books, I've been drawn to two that aren't read-alongs, I'm afraid. Stupidly left Magnus Mills' latest on the plane but will hopefully get a replacement soon so that's the one to start with. Unless you can get your hands on the latest by Dave Eggers. Hope you're all okay.

Posted by Rhian at 19:22 EST | Comments (16)

Eliot Spitzer vs Sandy Weill

New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, stood up in front of a Wall Street crowd last week to give a 20-minute speech. He started with a joke: he was glad he'd been invited, because he really wanted to put faces to emails. The following morning, the assorted research analysts found outexactly what kind of emails he was talking about. The front page of the Wall Street Journal had a story which had clearly come directly from Spitzer, referencing a message that Salomon Smith Barney's star telecom analyst, Jack Grubman, had sent to an unidentified client.

For the next four days, that email was front-page news. It was a masterpiece of slow leaking for maximum damaging effect. First we learned that Grubman said he had upgraded his rating on AT&T as a favour for Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill; in return, AT&T chairman Michael Armstrong, who sat on Citigroup's board, would help Weill "nuke" his then co-head, John Reed. The following day, the other shoe dropped: never mind Weill v Reed, now Grubman had done Weill the favour in return for Weill getting his (Grubman's) twins into the 92nd St Y, a posh pre-school on the Upper East Side.

The revelations kept on coming: after the email, the memo; after the memo, the name of the person to whom the email was sent. Feature articles were commissioned about the competitiveness of pre-schools, and Spitzer announced he was looking into whether Citigroup's $1 million donation to the 92nd St Y – which even Citi officials didn't bother denying was linked directly to Grubman's twins – might have violated some regulations.

Even before the latest set of leaks, Citigroup had already had so much bad press that, in the words of a recent piece in Fortune, "in the public's mind, Salomon Smith Barney surely is regarded by now as the top villain among Wall Street firms." Last week's coverage, which was surely the worst yet that any bank has had to go through, by all accounts made Weill incandescent with rage.

But curiously, no one seems to have covered the reason why all of this is going on. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, it would seem, are so keen to keep their channels of communication to Eliot Spitzer open that they won't print any speculation as to why he's leaking all this stuff to them. Rather, they continue to print pieces which follow the Spitzer line slavishly: Gretchen Morgenson wrote last Sunday that "thousands of individual investors lost millions of dollars because of what appear to have been self-interested actions by Mr. Grubman and Mr. Weill".

In order for this to be true, thousands of individual investors would have had to have bought AT&T just because Grubman upgraded it, and then held on to that stock all the way down to its present level: that is, trusted Grubman's upgrade, but not the downgrade he made a few months later.

The thing is, there's no doubt that a lot of what went on at Citigroup during the bubble years was smelly. But smelly is not illegal, or not always illegal (although Spitzer has proved adept at using a dusty piece of New York State legislation, the Martin Act, to make it so). And it's now reached the point at which practices which banks used to be very proud of are being looked at askance. Fortune cites "tying", where banks make the granting of a loan contingent on investment-banking mandates. Under the names "relationship banking" and "one-stop shopping," this has been something many banks have been bragging of for years: the way that they're exiting their low-margin lending businesses, or at least trying to "add value" to them by converting them into high-margin client relationships.

So it's easy to see where negotiations between Spitzer and Weill might have become bogged down. Weill was paying Grubman $20 million a year: an extra $1 million donation to the 92nd St Y would be little more than a perk as far as he was concerned, not to mention a donation to a worthy cause. In Spitzer's eyes, of course, it looks like a quid pro quo. And for all that Weill has now embarked on a major spring-cleaning operation, including the defenestration of Michael Carpenter, the head of Salomon Smith Barney, he remains the man who spent $31 billion on Associates First Capital, a company which makes its money by charging usurous rates of interest to individuals with weak credit.

My guess is that Spitzer long ago confronted Citigroup with the Grubman email, and that Citigroup didn't react with the degree of remorse required to placate the crusading attorney general. After all, Grubman said immediately and publicly that he'd made the whole thing up, and both Grubman and Weill seem to be in full agreement that there was no basis in reality for the allegations in the email: it's likely that Citigroup wouldn't consider it worth however many tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars Spitzer wanted to get out of it.

So Spitzer made it public, in the most damaging way he possibly could. He wasn't just acting out of spite, either: he was getting public opinion on his side. The more angry the public is at Citigroup, the more pressure Weill is going to feel to make spectacular amends. Certainly, he now wants nothing more than to make all the bad press go away.

And in a weird way, the more spectacular the settlement the better, for Citigroup: the higher the dollar amount that Spitzer gets out of Weill, the more important Citigroup is seen to be. After all, if no one paid any attention to Grubman's recommendations, then the damage caused would be zero. And whatever the final sum works out to be, it's going to be negligible in the context of Citi's $16 billion in annual earnings.

Spitzer surely had another motive in dragging Citi through the mud, too: to persuade the rest of the banks he's got his eye on to be more cooperative in their own negotiations, lest they, too, end up going through the same process. Spitzer has neither the time nor the manpower to go after them all himself: by some quirk, Goldman Sachs is being investigated by the state of Utah. It's in everybody's best interest that negotiations come to a quick and clean end, and maybe Citi is being treated harshly pour encourager les autres. It's one of the downsides to being enormous: you're always the biggest and the juiciest target.

Posted by Felix at 15:21 EST | Comments (4)

Femme Fatale

Femme Fatale, the new film from Brian De Palma, opens with the heist of a bra. This bra is not particularly good at doing the sort of things bras are normally expected to do – support the breasts, shield one's nipples from prying eyes, that sort of thing – but it is stunningly beautiful to look at and extremely impressive all the same. Femme Fatale is really very similar. The actors can't act, the plot doesn't make sense, and the trailer is enough to put anybody with a brain off going to see it. But it's still enough to send the most highbrow of intellectuals off onto raptures about how watching this film is like reading Hart Crane.

De Palma has the wonderful combination of possessing an acute visual intelligence without having a pretentious bone in his body. So he'll cobble together any old script (Mission: Impossible, anyone?) because that side of filmmaking doesn't really interest him. He'll also cast, as he does here, for looks rather than acting chops: five of the seven leads have English as a second language, two of them are professional models, and no one has ever considered Antonio Banderas to be an actor of subtlety or range. Even the supporting cast is weak: while there is no shortage of great French actors, Eriq Ebouaney and Edouard Montoute aren't. The latter is such a bad baddy that he can't even convincingly throw a hot babe off a hotel balcony.

It doesn't take long for us to realise that the tissue-thin plot (heist, double-cross... stop me if you've heard this before) is really only an excuse for De Palma to set up little pieces of magic for us to be awed by. The eponymous lead (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) seduces the wearer of the aforementioned bra (Rie Rasmussen) in a Cannes bathroom, full of frosted-glass doors against which Rasmussen's mind-blowing body can be pressed and through which it can be opaquely viewed. When the heist goes wrong and the mastermind gets arrested in his blood-stained tuxedo, the authorities feel no need to spring for a dry cleaner, with the picturesque result that seven years later, upon his release, he's left in exactly the same outfit in what looks like the middle of the desert.

Where De Palma fails, however, is to create a great genre film. He starts off with the highest of ambitions, announcing that here we're going to see something which will rival – or at least approach – Double Indemnity, which is arguably the greatest film ever made. (I'm not sure I believe that it's the greatest film ever made, but I could certainly argue that it is.) But it goes without saying that Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is no Barbara Stanwyck – and not just because one can act and theother can't. Stanwyck had a magnetic draw when on screen: you couldn't take your eyes off her. Romijn-Stamos has sex appeal, and a great body which De Palma loves to show off in as many gratuitous ways as possible, but she doesn't have the sense that she's cold, capable of anything, which is necessary for any great film noir. (And you don't need to be filming in 1944 to have it, either: Linda Fiorentino had it 50 years later, in The Last Seduction.)

De Palma also doesn't seem able to bring himself to create a truly dangerous heroine. Romijn-Stamos's character takes a few bold steps into noir territory, but ultimately saves herself: there's even a happy ending, I'm distressed to say. The paparazzo-with-a-heart played by Banderas (a man who seemingly spends seven years stuck on the same balcony, taking photographs of exactly the same scene, and doing nothing else of note until Romijn-Stamos comes along) achieves neither the nobility nor the undeserved end that are his film-historical due. These aren't weaknesses of script, they're weaknesses of directorial vision – especially considering that De Palma wrote this film himself.

That vision is great in individual scenes. The steadicam exiting the elevator into the atrium of the Charles de Gaulle Sheraton; the camera, low down by the ground, watching in secret past an overflowing fish tank as a distraught girl places a loaded revolver to her head; Romijn-Stamos plunging naked, feet-first and in slow-motion into the depths, lit from above as though in a Bill Viola installation. But these moments never gel into a coherent whole: the film is less than the sum of its parts.

It's very clear that what De Palma was aiming for was some kind of grand vision, made up of precisely such carefully-framed individual scenes. The person we identify with more than anyone else in the movie is Banderas, and if he's done anything over those seven years, it's create a huge Hockneyesque montage on his wall, made up of individual shots taken over the years from the same balcony. The finished product is a coherent artwork in its own right, with a moment of transcendence standing out in the center from under a lowering sky. It's also the image that De Palma chooses to end his film on. We only wish that he, too, had managed to create a well-structured forest from his finely-honed trees.

So go see this movie if you're a Brian De Palma die-hard, or if you're in the mood for a masterclass in camera-slinging. Or go see this movie if, like me, you're simply in the mood for a diversion on a rainy Saturday afternoon. If you don't go in with high expectations, you won't be disappointed.

Posted by Felix at 22:47 EST | Comments (1)

The Fourth Sister

Over the weekend, I went to see a fantastic new play, which is running at the Vineyard Theatre on 15th Street: The Fourth Sister, by Janusz Glowacki. Full disclosure: I'm a friend of the translator, Eva Nagorski, and I went to a preview, since the official opening isn't until November 21. So consider this advance buzz, rather than any kind of official review. But I enjoyed the play so much I had to write about it.

The play is set in Moscow, in "the present", by which Glowacki means not some vague idea of post-Communist Russia, but rather a very specific place and time, with references to Chechnya and George W Bush. It opens with an old babushka (is there any other kind?) complaining about the fact that she's being charged $300 for the removal of her late husband's body from her second-floor walk-up. The amount is shocking not only for its size, but also because we're used, in the theatre, to shocked reactions to sums which today would be laughably small. Five pounds! Fifty kopecks! An amount which is actually shocking to us – in today's money, in the US – is a rare thing in theatre, and makes us sit up and take notice. I don't know whether this play is going to become obsolete in the future, or whether it's meant to, but the fact that it's so focused on the actual world as it is today, specifics and all, is refreshing.

The next thing we notice is that there's an equally refreshing headlong exuberance to the writing. Scenes rush straight into other scenes, with hours or even days elided as though they simply didn't exist. Tania (Alicia Goranson), who is the centre of the first half of the play, speaks in a beautifully-captured early-adolescent stream of consciousness, full of strange and wonderful jumps from astonishing solipsism to penetrating psychological insight. She's the youngest of three sisters, all of whom yearn for a romantic ideal we know they will never achieve. But we've come a long way from Chekhov: the buttoned-up manners of Russian country houses have been replaced by a world filled with gun-toting gangsters and Hollywood film directors.

Much of the comedy in this play is broad, in a crazy, exaggerated sort of way. When the gangsters kill the wrong man, they apologise to his mother and make over-the-top amends. A film of a blatant deception wins an Oscar for Best Documentary. A lot of people lose limbs, one of them the manager of a circus, whose leg is eaten by a starved tiger called Pepsi. (Another of the sisters has been taking half of Pepsi's meat home, to feed her family.) These are the sort of things we might be used to finding in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie, but they work just as well on stage.

If one author springs to mind more than anybody else, however, it's probably Zadie Smith, another talent who uses her out-of-control imagination to illuminate lower-middle-class life. And just like White Teeth, The Fourth Sister rocks about so joyfully that it pretty much collapses at the end. On the way there, though, there's a great deal of fun, interwoven with drama and tragedy. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, since the twists are delicious, but suffice to say that it includes defenestration, cross-dressing, drug deals with warlords, and a newborn baby toting a kalashnikov. (And if that sounds like it comes straight from a film script by Quentin Tarantino, don't worry, Glowacki and the director, Lisa Peterson, are one step ahead of you on that front, too.)

The acting is excellent, especially from the supporting cast. Rarely will anybody have relished playing Ganster No. 2 quite as much as in this play, and in return for some great writing, Glowacki gets some great performances. Goranson is particularly good in a very difficult role. (And I don't particularly want to say this, but if I don't, you'll spend half of the beginning of the play wondering why she looks so familiar: she was Becky in Roseanne. Don't let that put you off.)

Ultimately, however, the play is Glowacki's triumph. Peterson keeps it moving at a cracking pace, and Nagorski has done a great job, with Glowacki's help, in preserving the individuality of the voices. But it is Glowacki who has managed to take an important and depressing subject, and turn it into a grand and dark comedy. Go, and enjoy.

Posted by Felix at 20:41 EST | Comments (0)

Decasia

Old celluloid decays in a spectacular manner. Ricky Jay and Rosamond Purcell have just published a fine book on what happens to old dice (they start cracking up, quite literally, and quite beautifully), and Bill Morrison has made a film, called Decasia, made up entirely of old footage which is now falling apart. Both of these were on display last night at the Angel Orensanz Center on Norfolk Street.

The book is a pretty diversion, the sort of thing which will probably mostly be bought as a gift. (The price is right, too: just $12.95, or $10.36 at Amazon, for a hardback, albeit one of only 64 pages.) The film, on the other hand, is much more ambitious. It's Morrison's first feature: up until now, he's made short art films which get shown at the likes of MoMA and the ICA.

Decasia started life as a visual accompaniment to the premiere of a symphony by Michael Gordon. Last night, however, the symphony was reduced to a soundtrack, and the film itself was the center of attention. It's structured, in Morrison's words, "like an onion": the further towards the beginning of the film a certain piece of footage appears, the further towards the end more footage from the same sequence is likely to reappear. All of the footage has been slowed down, so that you see each frame two or three times, in order to make the decay visible to the eye.

It doesn't take long to get the general idea. At the beginning, the eye is naturally caught up by the scratches, abrasions and other signs of dying celluloid, but soon it notices the original picture remaining relatively steady even as the film stock itself erupts with random nitrate-based excrescences.

Celluloid does not decay in any kind of predictable way. Sometimes it gently warps, so that it looks as though we're viewing the original image through a veil of water, with drops falling down on to it at various points. Sometimes the film is completely scratched out in the middle or at the edges. Sometimes black becomes white and white becomes black, and the image looks irised, with edges emphasised and subtle shades of grey eliminated. (The final film is in black and white, although some of the original footage had colour in it.)

Most startling are the times when faces get stretched, as though they were rubber, in a manner very similar to what happens if you scratch around on a still-wet Polaroid with the cap of a ballpoint pen. A friendly judge can suddenly become an horrific death's-head mask, and then go back to normal a couple of frames later. The fact that the change is pure happenstance only adds to the feeling that we suddenly got a glimpse of ugly reality below the surface.

Other sequences linger in the memory: a crocodile of children, for instance, walking slowly towards the camera under a lowering black sky, overseen by a shadowy pair of nuns who have been transformed into ghoulish sentinels. Or a boxer, attacking something unseen in the middle of the frame, as though he's battling for the victory of something over nothing.

Two sequences form the centerpiece of the film, however. The first is a very short snippet from an old Eisenstein documentary, showing a baby, blackened by celluloid decay, being born by Caesarean section. The second, which is far too long, shows aeroplanes silhouetted against a dull grey sky, dropping dozens of parachutists who then descend slowly to the ground. It's at this point that Morrison is most hamstrung by the fact that he's working with an already-existent symphony, as opposed to the composer working with him. The music forms an extended climax, and so what we see must be extended as well.

At other points, however, the music is a saving grace: it gives the audience something to hold on to, and gives the dialogue-free film something other than a wholly abstract structure. The film is already too long, at 70 minutes; it would be completely unwatchable without music. The dark and looming symphony also gives the film its low center of gravity, as it were: makes the audience ponder questions about the connection between growing and decaying, rather than, say, thinking about the mildew on the inside of their shower curtain.

I do have a couple of questions about the influences on Decasia. The title (and the New York Times) seem to posit a link to Fantasia, which I don't see at all. Fantasia is one of the greatest films ever made, and I'd hate to think that anybody setting images to music thinks that they're working in the same tradition. I think a much more obvious influence is A Zed & Two Noughts, Peter Greenaway's meditation on the beauty of decay. But in a way, the films got made in the wrong order: there's so much more to the Greenaway than there is to watching old rotting newsreel. (And Michael Nyman is a better composer than Michael Gordon.)

The difference, of course, is that the films come from very different traditions: Greenaway from making movies for theatrical release, and Morrison from making artworks using the medium of film. And while Greenaway is big on constructing his own art installations, and Morrison showed Decasia at Sundance, the gap still remains. Art films are always too long, and artists working in film always slow down their films too much. If someone has paid a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a film, they're not likely to feel impatient while watching it. If someone has paid ten dollars to go see a film, on the other hand, they expect to be entertained. And no one really expects anything to happen in an art film, for better or for worse.

If you're interested in seeing Decasia, by the way, it's going to be on the Sundance Channel towards the end of the year.

Posted by Felix at 16:06 EST | Comments (1)

Bill Viola's Going Forth By Day

You wait years for a major piece of contemporary non-secular art to blow you away, and then two come along at once...

Back in New York after my trip to San Francisco to see Saint François d'Assise, I accompanied a couple of houseguests on their first trip to the Guggenheim Museum. The main exhibition there, Moving Pictures, is a chronological survey of photographic and video pieces from the permanent collection. It includes a lot of first-rate artists, but many fewer first-rate works. It's probably worth a visit, but it's certainly not the kind of show you'll remember for years to come.

At the top of the museum, however, is an amazing piece by Bill Viola, called Going Forth By Day. If you're one of the handful of people who consider themselves to be big fans of video installations, then I'm sure you've seen this already and don't need me to tell you how good it is. If, on the other hand, you're the sort of person who would rather eat nails than stand uncomfortably in a darkened room for 35 minutes while nothing much happens in videos projected onto the walls, then I would very much encourage you to go see this installation: it just might change your mind about the whole medium.

Going Forth By Day was commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, which has a pretty good English-language website devoted to the piece. The installation comprises five panels, representing a cycle from birth through to resurrection. In the original installation, in Berlin, one stepped into the room through the first panel: "To enter the space, visitors must literally step into the light of the first image," in the words of the website. For whatever reason, New York turned the installation around, so you enter between panels 2 and 3 and then exit through panel 1 into a little room with wall texts and sponsorship details.

I kind of see why Viola might have wanted people to "step into the light" in Berlin, but certainly the way the installation is configured in New York, I hate the way that the portal to the back room cuts a huge hole in the first panel. It's a bit like the huge Arthur Boyd tapestry in Canberra's parliament building: for all that people say it's meant to look like that, it still looks wrong. You can't ignore the hole: in that sense it's more like the Nasdaq Sign in Times Square. And Viola's videos are so luscious that you don't want large chunks removed from them.

In New York, then, you end up really looking only at the last four of the five panels. You occasionally glance over to the first one, but it's hard to make out what's going on, there's a bright room behind it which makes it difficult to concentrate on the video, and in any case nothing really happens: it's just a kind of amniotic underwater scene, filmed in orange.

The second panel is the most technically astonishing: long and thin, it uses three state-of-the-art RGB projectors, each not only perfectly aligned itself, but also perfectly aligned with its neighbour(s). I fear to think how long it took to set up this room. The upshot is an endless procession of people, walking from left to right in a forest. (The title "isolated elements swimming in the same direction for the purpose of understanding" springs to mind; Viola has gone for the more simple "The Path".) Each walks in his own way, at his own pace, although it looks as if Viola has also done his trademark slowing-down here. It would be fascinating to just sit and watch this line of individuals walking towards something unknown, but there aren't any seats in the room and there's too much going on elsewhere.

The third panel is the centerpiece of the suite. Called "The Deluge", it shows a stone building, and the people who pass into, out of and past it. It fits into Viola's recent rubric of making films where first you wait for something to happen, then something happens suddenly, and finally you watch the aftermath of the thing which happened. The temporal framing heightens the impact of the thing which happens – in this case, a flood of water which washes away those people who dallied too long. And the fact that you're forced to spend a lot of time looking at the high-definition video also serves to make you notice things you might normally ignore. Most good art gets better the longer you spend with it, of course, but that doesn't stop most of use from failing to give great paintings the amount of time they deserve. Viola forces us to give him time, and in return he gives us something genuinely transcendent.

Viola has done similar things with the fourth and fifth panels, called "The Voyage" and "First Light" respectively. He's timed them so that the main event in each panel happens sequentially: first in the third, then in the fourth and finally in the fifth, with the resurrection of a woman's son from under the flood waters. Viola is directing our attention to a certain place with both action and sound, but of course we're free to keep an eye on the other panels as well.

The crystal-clear images are deliberately designed to echo Renaissance fresco painting: they're projected directly onto the wall, with no framing mechanism. Viola is positioning himself as the heir to the non-secular masters of the past, although his vision is more broadly religious than specifically Roman Catholic or even Christian. (The title Going Forth By Day is derived from a literal translation of the title of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, "The Book of Going Forth by Day".)

After having experienced both this work and Saint François d'Assise in short succession, I'm beginning to see what it is that the likes of Kim Howells see missing in contemporary art. I'm a huge fan of conceptualism, and I think that works like Damien Hirst's shark and fly-zapper can raise deep and troubling questions about mortality. Other works, such as the spot paintings, can be very beautiful. But faith, an idea of deeply-felt conviction and artistic vision, is largely missing.

Religion is definitely uncool in the art world, and often when it does appear it's so nauseating that one can forgive the gallery-going public from being turned off it altogether. But occasionally an artist will have the courage of his religious convictions, risk ridicule, and try to create a work which touches the spirit as well as the mind. Even more occasionally, he will succeed – even in the case of those of us who don't even believe in the existence of the spirit in the first place. And when that happens, art reaches levels which even the most sublime of modernists could never hope to achieve.

Posted by Felix at 19:30 EST | Comments (1)

Why the Republicans won the election

I've avoided blogging these midterm elections because (a) I'm not nearly as much of a US political junkie as thousands of other webloggers out there; and (b) I was just too depressed at the result. But this is my website, and the elections were important to me, so here goes.

A lot of people are saying that the Democrats lost the election. They didn't have heart, they didn't have a clear position, they aimed for the marginal voter rather than laying out a big plan. All of which is true. Certainly a position of opposing the Bush tax cuts without proposing they be repealed is a little on the mealy-mouthed side. And the fact that not a single Democratic candidate voted against the war in Iraq (the late Paul Wellstone excepted) is profoundly depressing.

But I think that it's easy to miss the wood for the the intra-Democratic recriminations. Terry McAuliffe may or may not have made an error of judgement: certainly he left himself wide open to the last-minute across-the-board surge in Republican support which we saw over the past few days. Rather, much as I hate to say it, I think that the election result constitutes not a Democratic defeat so much as a Republican victory. Specificially, it was a victory for George W Bush personally.

What we saw yesterday was a vote for leadership in uncertain times. Bush might not be the sharpest tack in the drawer, but he makes decisions, sticks to them, and is unapologetic about them. As far as he's concerned, he knows what's best for the country, and he's going to do it. That is what's behind the unprecedented mid-term success for the party in the White House. And so long as times remain uncertain (which they surely will if the US invades Iraq) the same calculus will apply in 2004. The standard incumbent's advantage will also help, of course. And on top of that, the GOP will have a much larger war-chest than the Democrats, McCain-Feingold notwithstanding.

Bush has managed to identify himself with Freedom and Democracy, and his enemies with terrorism and evil, to the extent that even youth and vigor is going to find it hard to run against Bush without seeming unpatriotic. All wars confer an electoral advantage on the party in power; the advantage of a permanent war is that it confers a permanent advantage. That's the really depressing legacy of Florida: if it weren't for a handful of confused elderly Jews in Palm Beach, Al Gore would be the powerful President, the Democrats would have picked up the We Want Leadership vote, and the House, Senate and White House would all be under Democratic control.

But that's not the way it is. And now I think the chances of a Democrat wresting the presidency from Bush in 2004 are slim indeed: in order for that to happen, the economy will have to continue to deteriorate, the housing-market bubble will have to burst, and the US will have to fuck up in Iraq. Two out of three might just do it; one out of three won't be enough. I remember 1992, when a weak Tory party somehow managed to win a general election in the middle of a recession; and George W Bush is certainly a much more accomplished politician than John Major.

And if Bush retains control of the White House, the odds have to be good that the Republicans will retain Congress as well. So for the next four years, expect more tax cuts for the rich, more right-wing activists appointed to the judiciary, and all manner of other Republican mischief. The national debt will start to soar again, the dollar will weaken, the economy will get worse, and the stage will be set for Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008. Until then, however, the prospects are bleak indeed.

Posted by Felix at 23:47 EST | Comments (5)

Roger Dodger

We open on a conversation taking place between fellow workers in a restaurant, all seated around a table. One of them is on a riff, going into impressive amounts of detail with regard to a thesis he has regarding sex. The writing is razor-sharp.

After the opening scene finishes, however, so do any similarities between Roger Dodger and Reservoir Dogs. Dylan Kidd's first feature is not going to shake up the world of cinema in the way that Quentin Tarantino's did. But it does mark the arrival of a very assured talent, both as a director and as a writer.

Campbell Scott plays the eponymous antihero, in the kind of role which gets actors to sign on as producers and persuade the likes of Isabella Rosselini to join in as well. Roger is a self-loathing, womanising misogynist who barely succeeds in disguising his sourness with flashily aggressive patter. In the time-honoured tradition of Don Giovanni, we see many of this famous lothario's attempts at pulling women, but he never succeeds.

Where the Don loves women too much, however, Roger hates them: his pick-up lines are normally insults, and he ensures that his desire for sex always trumps any friendliness he might feel. His chauvinism also shows up in his attitude towards rejection: he can dump women, but no woman is ever going to get away with dumping him.

Roger's brilliant opening monologue is more than just flashy writing: it actually serves as an insight into his character. (Mr Pink's thesis about Like A Virgin, on the other hand, tells us more about Quentin Tarantino than it does about Mr Pink.) Roger maintains that men are doomed to obsolescence, and that women, in a few generations, are going to work out how to get on just fine without them. Whether he actually believes this doesn't matter: it is still revealing of his view that women are something which men want and try to obtain; men, on the other hand, are little more than devices which women use for certain ends. For all his bravado, Roger doesn't believe that he actually has anything to offer women: rather, he has to use his gift of the gab to talk his undeserving self into bed with them. He would be shocked at stories saying that girls are now more aggressive than boys when it comes to chasing the opposite sex.

Roger's insecurities help to flesh out someone who might otherwise be little more than a caricature. His job gives the character a bit of depth as well: Roger doesn't work in a macho environment such as a trading floor or building site, but rather as a copywriter at an advertising agency, who describes his job as "making people feel bad about themselves". But if Roger is a compelling and believable screen presence, the main reason is Campbell Scott's performance: nuanced yet almost out of control at the same time.

After creating such a monstrous central character, Kidd makes his movie palatable by placing Roger in the role of mentor to his 16-year-old nephew, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), who flatters Roger into taking him out on the town. They meet a pair of women out on the town on a Friday night (Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals) and astonishingly manage to persuade the sultrily-dressed duo to join them for the evening. In a rather predictable turn of events, Nick has rather more success with the ladies than Roger does, which brings out some very ugly jealousy in the latter.

The structure of the film is interesting. Roger and Nick's night on the town gets steadily worse, ending with a fight in a garbage-strewn alleyway. Then, in a rapid flurry of short final scenes, Roger first seems to achieve some kind of redemption, and then reverts to his old self.

It seems, although it's never spelled out, that Roger gets fired for his Friday-night antics, and that the realisation of how out of bounds he went sobers him up somewhat, both figuratively and literally. The film's subplot regarding drinking should probably have been made more important or dropped entirely: it brings up the heavy subject of alcoholism running in a family, but never addresses it face-on. Roger is a bad drunk, for sure, but it's not clear whether the film blames his behaviour on his drinking or not.

At the very end of the film, the (presumably) unemployed Roger visits Nick at his school, and shows no sign of having changed at all. It's an unsatisfactory ending: we don't know what's happened to Roger, we're not sure whether Nick has learned anything at all, and none of the plot's loose ends are tied up.

It seems as though once Kidd and Scott created the character of Roger, there was little creative energy left over for anything else. The camerawork is another case in point: most of the movie is filmed with a jittery hand-held camera, which has no particular effect except to irritate the audience. But Kidd deserves credit for going with film for his first feature, when it's so much easier to use DV these days.

He also managed to prevent Roger Dodger from being a New York Film. It's set in the city, but there are no identifying features, no sense of place: nowhere will a New Yorker experience the "I-know-that-intersection" feeling which is so common in New York indy flicks and Woody Allen films. Personally, I like that feeling, but I do recognise it as being rather self-indulgent.

Even so, I somehow doubt that Roger Dodger is going to do particularly well nationwide. It doesn't really appeal to any particular demographic, and Campbell Scott is certainly not capable of opening a film on his own. Dylan Kidd, on the other hand, could well be set for much bigger and better things.

Posted by Felix at 16:09 EST | Comments (2)

Krugman, Lewis and greed: an exchange

Although the entries on this website don't get nearly as many comments as those of other bloggers, I do occasionally get an intelligent note in response to something I write. Such was the case yesterday evening, when Matthew Rose responded to my piece on Paul Krugman and Michael Lewis.

After working out that he meant the second law of thermodyamics and not the first, we then entered into a slightly more substantive exchange via email. Here it is.

MATTHEW: just as a point of fact, you're wrong about stock market losses. unless you're talking about spectacular bankrupcies, of which we've seen fairly few, investments in stocks don't disappear. it's transferred wealth, from the buyer of a stock to the seller. even if you have a real liquidation, stock holders still have claims on any remaining assets, although admitedly small ones. but in general, money adheres to the financial equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: it simply doesn't disappear. the assets you hold can decline in value, but that's a different matter altogether.

FELIX: Thanks for the comment, Matthew.
You're right about investments in stocks not simply disappearing, but that wasn't what I was talking about. Let's consider a stock which I bought at $30, which rose to $100, and which now trades at $10. My $30 certainly went straight into the pocket of whomever sold the stock to me. But the newspaper says that $90 of "value" has been destroyed. Now that $90 was never transferred from anybody to anybody else: it existed, and then it simply disappeared. So I don't understand the distinction you're drawing between "value disappearing" on the one hand, and "assets declining in value" on the other. Just as much value disappears when a stock drops from $40 to $30 as when it drops from $10 to zero.

MATTHEW: Perhaps I should have been clearer. “Value” is terribly imprecise. Lewis, if I remember rightly, was countering the argument that somehow trillions of dollars simply disappeared. That’s patently untrue. As you said, your $30 is now held by someone else. At some point, the asset you held had a hypothetical cash value of $100, but the subsequent decline in the stock’s price to even below the $30 you paid didn’t hurt that initial $30. You lost out on the hypothetical cash value of that stock because no-one thought it was worth as much as you. Same with buying a car: resale value immediately plummets but no-one suggests that billions of dollars are destroyed each year on the second-hand car market.
You can argue about the “wealth effect” implications, the idea that you feel you had $100 in cash although you never did. But it seems people are increasingly poopooing that idea; well, as long as consumer spending holds up, that is.
Let’s say someone bought your stock at $40. You didn’t create $10 in value, although you personally are now $10 wealthier. It was just a transfer from someone who felt your stock was worth more than you did when you bought it. Logic works the other way around with a declining stock, too.
I don’t see the significance in pointing out that stock market value has disappeared. Something that people now think is worth X they once thought was worth 25X. That’s just basic economics and not particularly nefarious. People probably lost lots of their own money making bets that, but the actualy cash money wonga moola didn’t disappear.

FELIX: Yes, you’re right that “actual cash money” didn’t disappear. But when people say that $7 trillion has been wiped out with the stock market decline, they’re not talking actual cash money. They’re just subtracting the market cap of the stock market today from the market cap of the stock market at its height.
So when Lewis writes this: “About the trillions that have been shaved off the stock market in the past two and a half years, the more general question is: from whom did it come and to whom did it go?” he’s being disingenuous. Those trillions never came from anyone or went to anyone: they existed only on paper. As you say, stock market value has disappeared, but actual cash money moolah hasn’t either disappeared or been transferred.

MATTHEW: But those trillions weren’t cut from whole cloth. Someone else was BUYING your stock at $100 which meant actual wonga was being passed around at those levels. Then when the market fell, someone was left holding the $100 and someone else was left holding the bag.

FELIX: Only at the very margin. Most technology companies only sold a tiny proportion of their total equity as stock, and most people who bought it hold onto it, so only a tiny proportion of that tiny proportion actually got traded. And most of those trades didn’t happen at the top of the market, so only a tiny proportion of that tiny proportion of that tiny proportion was “actual wonga being passed around at those levels”.
So if you had a company with, say, 100 million total shares oustanding, and they traded at $100 at the top, then it had a market cap of $10 billion. If those shares are now trading at $10, then Michael Lewis and the New York Times and even – yes – the Wall Street Journal will talk about $9 billion of value being lost. But the company only ever sold 20 million shares in its IPO and subsequent offerings, and most of those are still in lock-up, and most of the rest are in buy-and-hold investment funds, which means that only 5 million actual individual shares were ever traded (albeit each one of those 5 million shares was probably traded many times), and of those 5 million shares probably only 750,000 were traded anywhere near $100. And of those 750,000 transactions at or near $100, probably 650,000 were unwound at some point on the way down. So the number of shares which were bought at $100 and are now still held at $10 – that is, the sum lost, in total, by people who bought at the top and never sold – is in fact 100,000 x $90 = $9 million. Which is 0.1% of the headline “value lost” figure.

MATTHEW: That’s an awful lot of simultaneous assumptions. I’d be surprised if you could find an example of any public company, other than one controlled by a family, for example, with two classes of stock, that has so many oustanding shares and such a tiny float.
It actually doesn’t matter. What we’re describing is the basic functioning of a market. Not very controversial. Fundamentally, I have greater sympathy for Lewis’s argument that the 90s in many ways spread the wealth over a vast swathe of society than I do for Krugman’s circular argument that rich plutocrats control the national debate to allow themselves to become, err, rich plutocrats.

FELIX: OK, fine, but even if my assumptions are out by an order of magnitude, we’re still talking a 100-to-one discrepancy between lost value and lost cash.
And even Lewis doesn’t say that the actual wealth – as in cash – was spread over a vast swathe of society. At best, it was spread over the class of mid-level and senior employees of recently-formed technology companies. I think that Lewis is also making an argument that vast swathes of society are better off now because of the equity capital which was invested in bandwidth infrastructure etc, in other words my life is better because of the internet, even if my income and wealth aren’t any higher. Which is another thing entirely. The fact is, as Krugman shows, only the very wealthiest in society really made money out of the 90s boom. But I agree with you that Krugman’s wrong that it’s the plutocrats who are controlling the national debate. It’s not just the rich who want to reward the rich: it’s the aspirational poor and middle-class as well.

MATTHEW: Actually, my one main beef with Krugman is that he didn’t prove that at all. To do that he needed to tackle two things, which I don’t think he did. 1) put the increase wealth at the top in context of broader growth in GDP or per capita income, or whatever and 2) talk about social mobility. The latter’s much more important, and in fact critical: if Krugman’s Rich of the late 1990s are different people from the Rich of the late 1980s, for example, then there’s something far more interesting going. Same at the bottom end of the register.

FELIX: Krugman on the broader growth in per capita income:
"Over the past 30 years most people have seen only modest salary increases: the average annual salary in America, expressed in 1998 dollars (that is, adjusted for inflation), rose from $32,522 in 1970 to $35,864 in 1999. That's about a 10 percent increase over 29 years -- progress, but not much. Over the same period, however, according to Fortune magazine, the average real annual compensation of the top 100 C.E.O.'s went from $1.3 million -- 39 times the pay of an average worker -- to $37.5 million, more than 1,000 times the pay of ordinary workers."
You’re right he doesn’t talk about social mobility. But don’t try pretending that Jack Welch’s grandchildren aren’t still going to have dynastic wealth.

MATTHEW: The comparison doesn’t make any sense. These aren’t the same people in the same periods. Chances are you’ll find some of those average salary folks from 1970 in the Rich CEO category today. I don’t know how much of a factor this is, but the fact that Krugman never addressed it makes me suspicious. At the very least, there’s more to these numbers than he ever let on.
Bottom line here is whether you think the increasing difference between the richest and the poorest matters. I’d argue it doesn’t, for a host of practical and theoretical reasons, and that’s what we’re really arguing here I think. That’s a bigger and more fundamental subject that Krugamn glossed. He’s a very clever man, but I wish he’s quit with the sloganizing.

FELIX: OK, I’ve been with you up until this point, but now you’ve lost me. What about Krugman’s comparison doesn’t make any sense? He’s comparing apples with apples and oranges with oranges: average pay and CEO pay thirty years ago and today. The fact that today’s CEOs had average salaries 30 years ago is completely irrelevant. The CEOs 30 years ago also had only average salaries 60 years ago. Nobody parachutes straight into a CEO position: they work their way up there, and all power to them. That doesn’t mean that they deserve the outsized pay packages they receive, though.
It seems to me now that your response to Krugman is basically “yes, you’re right about inequality, and it doesn’t matter”. But I’d love to hear your “host of practical and theoretical reasons” why.

MATTHEW: You can’t compare changes within an economic class, i.e. people with average salaries, to some other social subset and expect it to make any sense. What happened to other wealthy non-CEOs after the 1970s? What happened to the top income bracket as a whole over the same time? Why CEOs? Why not sportstars? Baseball salaries have gone through a staggering inflation since the introduction of free-agency in the early 1970s but no-one’s blaming the ills of society on overly aggressive pitching. It’s just a weasly comparison, that’s all, that doesn’t really show anything.
Here’s why it might not matter that the difference between the rich and poor now is greater than the difference between the rich and poor 30 years ago.
--social mobility. There are plenty of studies, and I can dig one up for you if you like, that show how few people stay within their economic group for more than a generation. The bottom fifth of society, based on income, is not the same bottom as it was 30 years ago. Immigration is a big reason behind that, as social mobility and the fact that the U.S. has been growing in wealth pretty constantly since WW2. That doesn’t take into account entrenched groups, such as black urban poor, for example, but it’s a pretty compelling idea that with constant upward social mobility, increasing wealth becomes a source of aspiration, not resentment (if that even matters).
--does relative income matter? As long as everyone’s getting richer, do people care that others are getting even richer? Its not clear to me that there’s a great deal of that kind of class resentment in the U.S. Note that the 1990s backlash has mostly come from people who lost money, not against people who made it. I know that’s a squishy socoiological idea, but it’s important, especially in this mercantile mecca, and something Krugman never considered. His conspiracy theory of the plutocrats is too silly an idea to replace that.
--what you going to do about it? Let’s assume you’re right, and that the same people ove time get richer at the expense of the same people getting poorer. What you going to do? Super-regressive taxation? Higher estate taxes? At some point, this argument hinges on whether you’re nozikian or rawlsian. I’m solidly the former. There’s a lovely chapter in his book talking explicitly about income equality; he argues that society will always divide itself based along individual differences and that if you equalized income and wealth, for example, people would develop other ways to distinguish themseleves, such as height, or sexual prowess.
For starters...

FELIX: Krugman’s anticipated you. He himself says that CEO pay is “only the most spectacular indicator of a broader story” which, yes, includes sportstars. Michael Jordan is indubitably one of Krugman’s new plutocrats. The top income bracket is getting a lot richer, whether they’re CEOs, sportstars, film producers, or whatever. Krugman finds a “C.B.O. study [which] found that between 1979 and 1997, the after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of families rose 157 percent, compared with only a 10 percent gain for families near the middle of the income distribution.” That’s nothing to do with CEOs per se.
To your points: There’s very little evidence that there’s significantly more social mobility in the US than there is in Krugman’s beloved Sweden. (Do please dig up a study which shows otherwise if you think there is one.) In other words, inequality is not a price you have to pay for social mobility: the correlation between the two is marginal.
If I point out a social ill, it’s not enough to respond that those harmed don’t seem to mind. Citizens of the USSR during Stalin’s reign of terror actually genuinely thought he was a great man. (Weird, but true.) They might not have bought in to all the communist rhetoric he spouted, but most of the worst excesses of the era can be placed squarely at the feet of Stalin personally rather than communist theory. And the populace actually admired Stalin personally, throughout, even those in the gulag. Now, I’m not saying that a welfare mother who says that welfare ought to be abolished is in the same situation as any of Stalin’s victims. I’m just saying that whether or not people are harmed by inequality is something which we ought to be able to measure objectively, rather than by resorting to opinion polling. And if you measure things like infant mortality and literacy rates in the US, it comes bottom among OECD nations. That’s a bad thing, and it can be chalked up, at least partially, to inequality and the fact that the rich don’t look after the poor.
As for what one can do about it, one can at the very least try not to exacerbate the situation. You’re right that in every society there are some people who will rise above other people. That’s true in Sweden, and it was true in Krugman’s 1960s. Krugman and I are not utopians who envisage a world where all people and incomes are the same. We’re just saying that the inequality in the US today has gone too far. Maybe a CEO really does deserve to make 40 times more than an average worker – that is, make more in a day than the worker does in a month. But now the ratio has gone into quadruple figures, the CEO makes more in one day than the worker does in three or four years. And I can see no justification for that. Therefore, don’t abolish the estate tax, which does a lot of redistributive good at the expense of a tiny proportion of the population. Don’t pass tax bills where 50% of the benefit goes to 1% of the population. Do concentrate on improving the lot of the poorest 10% of society before improving the lot of the richest 1%.
And don’t put words into my mouth: I’m not saying that the increase in the wealth of the rich has come at the expense of a decrease in the wealth of the poor. I’m just saying that the richer you are, the more likely it is that you’re going to get much richer very quickly, and the poorer you are, the more likely it is that you’re not going to any richer at all. And maybe we should seek to find ways of redistributing that marginal future excess wealth from the people who are already stinking rich to the people who actually need it.

MATTHEW: I think this is the point where we stop. Boiled down to too many fundamental differences. For example, “deserve” has nothing to do with it. There aren’t many breakdowns in how the market allocates wages, except when you start dicking around with it, such as minimum wages. And I don’t believe there is anything such as excess wealth and am uncertain about the notion of income redistribution for some undefined notion of fairness.

(At this point Matthew also pointed me to an old Wall Street Journal editorial, which, he says, "shows how income mobility renders moot a lot of the arguments about economic inequality.")

But of course I don't want to leave Matthew with the last word. Who do you think is right?

Posted by Felix at 17:25 EST | Comments (3)

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