Contango and backwardation

It's been just shy of 7 weeks since I've posted on this blog, and my only excuse is to say that I've been working so much that during the week I don't know where I am most of the time and certainly can't be bothered to put together full sentences, and during the weekend am in a state of relaxation so profound it can easily be mistaken for catatonia. But let's not dwell on that.

Summer for most people is a time to relax, sleep late and just generally loaf about with a sort of blissful frivolity that underscores the absolute open-endedness of it all. Not for me however. I am up and heading for the office at about 6:55, and am clacking away at the keyboard at 7:25. I step off the desk to end the day at 8:00, and in between I work very hard and learn some cool stuff. Look up the terms that comprise the title of this post and you'll see what I mean. I think finance is a cool place to be, and definitely being around a place where alternative investments get so much play means you can easily learn a lot if you are willing to read a little bit and not be afraid to ask stupid questions. This demanding work leaves little time for my friends, but I do what I can when I can. I am getting an idea of what my life will look like in about a year when I work full time--living for the weekend. But if you get to work around some cool people for those 12-13 hours you are in the office, it can be pretty great. My point is, don't pity the banker for all the work he does and how exhausted he is at the end of the day, because odds are that deep down he really likes it.

Moral Relativism Makes Good Television

As I try to soak up every drop of my last week before work, I find myself slowly dipping my toe into financial interests, almost to gradually reintroduce structure into my days. I start my internship in Private Banking in one week, and since Sunday have thrown myself fully into the DVD collection of a show from the mid 1990s called Profit.

I have no doubt that the deeply disturbing and villainous nature of the show's main character (even within the framework of his job in a conglomerate/acquisitions firm) is the reason it lasted only 4 episodes. He is an inveterate corporate climber, and the textbook definition of a bone chilling sociopath. The show is an incredibly well crafted piece of drama--the two hour pilot alone qualifies as a fantastic film--and was clearly ahead of its time, as today characters like Tony Soprano are accepted into our living rooms. But while The Sopranos is about moral ambiguity, Profit is resolutely amoral. Jim Profit, played magnificently by Adrian Pasdar, is a fascinating character precisely because he is blithely unconcerned with societal conceptions of morals in his pursuit of the position as President of Acquisitions. He freely uses extortion, bribery, psychological torture, and even murder to accomplish his goals, and the questions "Is this right or wrong?" are ignored. Profit doesn't consider or care about how others are harmed by his actions--it's simply not part of his calculus in decisions. There is something incredibly terrifying and Ayn Rand-ian about that. Profit's exterior--well mannered and groomed, Harvard and Wharton educated, seemingly sympathetic and compassionate--is equally menacing, precisely because it is an artifice. He has no actual personality, so he can exploit the full range of human emotion if the situation calls for it and it furthers his end game. If it suits him and his goals to be funny and charming, than he can be. But if he believes that he is better served by planting incriminating evidence and securing a life sentence for an innocent man, than so be it. I am amazed that a show with such a fundamentally scary character ever made it to air, but I'm very glad it did, as it provided me with some amusement and deep ruminations about morality over the past couple days.

Catch Profit on DVD if you can, although it will probably shake you up too much to sleep for a couple of days.

The Return of the King

Been a bit too long, but I had my 21st birthday and final exams to deal with, so sod it.

I'm done with another semester of college, and in the past 24 hours, I've watched three episodes of News Radio, two of The Thick of It, the last episode of Entourage, and one episode of The Larry Sanders Show. I've also started reading The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. This always happens when I come home--I consume a crazy amount of media. Probably because in that two to three week period before I start working for the summer, I get bored being home and by myself. At school, I can usually talk to one of my roommates or meet a friend for coffee(I also drink more coffee when I'm here). I don't mind it too much, as I've always been someone who is reading three books simultaneously and watching a tv show while I do it.

I also read more news online when I'm at home. So far today, I've read/browsed The New York Times, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and The National Review. I am always a little bit surprised when I find myself reading The National Review, because every once in a while I think it's a good magazine, but most of the time I think it is hysterical. I imagine that is a fun place to observe as a fly on the wall, because the clash of one's world view with reality is a staggeringly sad thing to witness.

Not my best, but I'm getting back into the swing of it.

Is that dude Indian?

There is some weird and profoundly unfunny show that I am sampling on ABC right now called "Notes from the Underbelly." I have no real defense for watching it for these past 10 minutes. I do find it interesting that there is one character who is Indian. There are no Indian characters that I know of in prime time comedy or dramas, and this is from a guy who watches a lot of television. I was sort of proud of this--Indians are a small part of America's population but seeing as most television shows take place in New York and California, where millions of Indians live, it is a bit weird. I mean, with the numbers of doctors and lawyers on TV, can I get a representative sample? Anyway, on this awful show "Notes from the Underbelly" one of the characters is Indian, but they named him Eric. What the hell is that about? You couldn't give him an Indian name? It's as if television producers don't think people can handle or understand Indian people unless they are called Eric or Chad?

Next Indian on prime time should be named Vijay. Or Sandeep. Make it real.

Art Is Not A Camel: The Perils of Creation By Committee

I've posted before about my man-love for Aaron Sorkin, the author of some of the best film and television work in the past 15 years. I was recently at a party talking about his recent show, Studio 60, when a fellow student seemed surprised that I liked the show. "It gets such bad ratings." I simply shot back "That just means a lot of people don't watch it, not that it isn't good." It seems so simple, but people forget it--television ratings and box office receipts are poor prisms by which to judge the quality of film and television art. I've never understood this metric, and Sorkin seems to agree. In an interview he gave to Charlie Rose in 2003, after quitting his show "The West Wing", he noted that the ratings of shows and box office figures of movies are regularly printed in the arts sections of newspapers. This is a oddity, because the ratings of a show are not really the purview of the arts section, which should be telling readers what the show is about and offering a commentary on the writing, direction, and story. The ratings, while supremely important to the multi-billion dollar companies that air the shows, are of no logical consequence to viewers. In fact, Sorkin asks if it is even more insidious that than--mentioning the ratings is in fact a corrosive factor. The implication of praising a show for having high ratings is that a program should be watched because other people watch it, and that you should avoid programs that nobody else is tuning in to see. This acts a powerful and dangerous self-fulfilling prophesy, as positive press coverage for a ratings success fosters more of it, and lambasting a show for its low ratings is the rough equivalent of beheading a prisoner already on his knees. I understand that there is fun to be had in a show being part of a larger public consciousness, but as a journalistic practice for newspapers it encourages a bizarre herd-mentality. The quality of a show, its story telling and acting, are not diminished by low ratings. And even more frightening, an obsessive tracking of it in the press discourages the networks who pay to produce these shows from creating bold and original programming. They instead spiral into efforts to endlessly replicate previous hit shows, in so doing homogenizing all television, and greatness rarely springs from monotony.

Today, I saw the movie "The TV Set", a savage and wicked satire of network television by Jake Kasdan, one of the writers of NBC's critically acclaimed but criminally unpopular "Freaks and Geeks." I think everyone who watches, and often laments, American television should see this film if only to see how the ceaseless quest for ratings leads to a paralyzing fear of interesting and thoughtful art. Sigourney Weaver plays the ass-kicking network president who says things "Originality scares me, you don't want to be too original" and "We've done the research, and suicide is depressing to, like, 82% of everybody." Her mindset is sadly typical in the landscape of television. The film is also brilliant in its depiction of how good drama or comedy has its edges blunted and its wit dulled by a series of small compromises instead of tectonic shifts--all in an effort make the final product a little more palatable to the under-35 demo, a little more appealing to suburban women in Missouri. If you make enough changes to please enough people, the resulting watered down soup pleases nobody--the ultimate moral of this film. David Duchovny plays the writer of a pilot being produced--a black comedy about the return of the prodigal son to his hometown after his brother's suicide. A desire to finally see his show made coupled with financial pressures lead Duchovny to acquiesce to his project's death by a thousand cuts. The final product is a barely recognizable whithered husk of its former self. This movie should be seen by as many people as possible as a look at how bad television is extracted from good television, and as an inspiration against the forces of compromise, mediocrity, and resignation. It is a good movie, regardless of its box office numbers.

(I suggest you watch the Sorkin interview on google video, you can find it by searching "aaron sorkin charlie rose" and click the link for Sorkin and Anthony Zuiker)

Sometimes, it's not even a shot away

This morning, I finished watching a movie I started about 3 months ago, Layer Cake, starring a pre-bond Daniel Craig. I can say it was one of the best gangster movies I've seen in a long time. London crime films are very satisfying, and psychologically gratifying to me, because London never strikes me as a crime city. Living there for a semester, I tended to view everything through rose colored glasses. I was besotted with everything I saw, and it probably didn't hurt that I am naturally drawn to the posh, elegant areas of the city and didn't hang out at The Blind Beggar or other underworld establishments. I lived between Hyde Park and Regents Park for god's sake. However, there has always been a thriving gangster culture in London, and you would be mistaken to believe that British gangsters are like an episode of Mr. Bean Goes to the Mafia. They are hard-bitten and control illicit industries with iron fists, even if they are sheathed in velvet. Never is this more clear than in Layer Cake, which has been praised for its realistic portrayal of drug dealing specifically and of crime syndicates in London generally. It is an very complex and engaging film that is only marred, albeit slightly, by the wholly needless presence of Sienna Miller. Miller plays a floozy of indeterminate purpose who catches the eye of Craig's unnamed character. Her appearances on screen serve chiefly to allow the film's producers to provide a paper thin pretext to have Craig expose his pectorals to the audience, and in so doing mesmerize every women (and most men) in an 8 mile radius. Even heterosexual men like myself cannot deny his magnetism that draws both on physical other-worldliness and the raw confidence he portrays--GQ does pieces on "man crushes" because of men like Daniel Craig. To describe the film's plot would risk giving something away, because it twists like an Italian Formula 1 course, but you should see it (but not with your girlfriend if you want to stay together).

This evening, I also watched the highlights of my other new favorite gangster film, The Departed. I've already written about this movie back in October, when I saw it, but I was reminded today how much Martin Scorsese loves the song "Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones. It features in Goodfellas, Casino, and at least twice in The Departed. The reason I noticed it especially here was because it is also featured in one of Miller and Craig's more amorous moments in Layer Cake. Something about this song attracts gangster filmmakers, good movies, or it is just a fortuitous confluence of events for fans of the song like me. I'm not going to look too deeply into it, because if you learn nothing from Layer Cake and The Departed, now this--If you go looking for trouble, you're sure as hell going to find it.

El Mundo Nuevo

Next week, I will be taking a vacation with my roommates to La Republica Dominicana for a seven day, six night tour of mayhem and debauchery. I never liked when travel advertisements do that thing where they compartmentalize the trip--it seems weird to me. But the real point is that I will be sitting in warm climates, relaxing with my friends, and exploring a native culture.

If I were not confident that my readers already knew that I am an enormous nerd, I would feel self-conscious about revealing my excitement at visiting one of the places that Christopher Columbus established as a settlement. As a corollary, I think if you are not enthused at that idea, you have either no appreciation for history or you're comatose. Either way, you would not make a good travel companion. I happen to think Columbus was a megalomaniac and his actions contributed to the deaths of thousands of indigenous people, but he is indisputably significant, and his voyages are worth knowing about, and the notion that I will be standing on land that was "The New World" makes me want to give someone a blanket of small pox. I'm kidding, I don't even think they make those anymore. After that we'll be luxuriating in a resort and enjoying all the trappings of wealthy foreigners. I'll be doing my best to pump money into the island at an alarming rate, as I'm fairly confident that the spending shock that will ensue upon our arrival will push so much money into the economy that we'll cause huge inflationary pressure that could ultimately destabilize the regime. That's how hard I'll be throwing down.

After we leave, you might want to look into the Dominican Republic--we'll make it cheap for you.