For Once In My Life, I'd Love To Be On The Inside

The first half of Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job  is a clear review of the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis-- the film explains collateral debt obligations, synthetic mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, highly leveraged banking, banking deregulation, the merging of investment and traditional banking, and sub-prime mortgages . . . if you haven't done your reading, it's a good primer on these subjects, and there is some excellent footage of Iceland as well-- but the second half of the film spirals into less focused frustration and anger (despite some inspirational and slightly cheesy narration by Matt Damon) and the big players either refuse to be interviewed (Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke) or hem and haw under aggressive questioning, which is satisfying in one sense, but really doesn't help to explain anything, and then the film explores high salaries and bonuses for Wall Street traders and the culture of excess-- there's some rather pointless gossipy chat with a high-end escort who serviced numerous Wall Street employees . . . but, honestly, as long as the system gets fixed, I could care less how the traders spend their money; despite these flaws, the movie is certainly a must see and I'm going to teach it to my students during the business ethics unit (I'll use it instead of the Enron documentary-- The Smartest Guys in the Room-- which, though it's a bit dated, has better music and a more insular and resolved story . . . though it also gets a bit off topic when it rather gratuitously explores Enron exec Lou Pi's fascination with strippers . . . I guess when you've got a documentary with a lot of numbers, you need to throw in some T&A) and another advantage of Inside Job is that it is relatively non-partisan: the film also criticizes the Obama administration for appointing the usual suspects to fix the problem (Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers) and the film claims that Obama's new banking regulations lack teeth, and as far as I know the facts are fairly accurate . . . or as accurate as you can be when you try to make a movie about something as complicated as this. 

Klosterman and I Agree About Madmen

It took me a day and a half to ingest Chuck Klosterman's new book Eating the Dinosaur, and though there were some new ideas for me to devour-- on Kurt Kobain vs. David Koresh and ABBA and Ralph Sampson and Garth Brooks and laugh tracks and the inability of Ralph Nader to lie and why this is a problem in politics and the paradoxical identity of football (which appears to be the most conservative sport-- think Brett Favre and Vince Lombardi-- but is actually the most dynamic and liberal in nature . . . as it has evolved from the forward pass to radios in quarterbacks helmets, from rugby-esque to the read option and the spread offense, etc.) but the scary and entrancing and ultimately annoying bulk of the book is about things that I already love, such as the time travel movie Primer and Werner Herzog and Erroll Morris and the Unabomber Manifesto and Stephen King and Arrested Development and David Foster Wallace and Weezer and Madmen and this is ultimately annoying because he feels the same way as me about these things (and many more) but his ideas about them are more clever than mine and they are better articulated, because he's a professional pop-culture critic, so while on the one hand I am fascinated by what he is saying, on the other, I'm annoyed that I didn't think of it myself-- it's about Weezer, for Christ's sake, not the human genome!-- and for me this was most acute in his essay entitled "It Will Shock You How Much It Never Happened" where he dissects a press release from Pepsi and then makes some comparisons to Don Draper and Madmen and he transcribes and analyzes Don's monologue about the Kodak carousel and nostalgia-- and this is my favorite moment in TV history . . . it's the end of season one of the show, and no one else appreciated it at my workplace, but at least Klosterman did-- but then it made me wonder about this whole other idea, which is: is Klosterman just predicting what the faux cool nerdy hipster types who also like athletics like to read and watch and listen to, and are we that easy to predict and thus he writes about those things because he knows this is what will sell?-- it crossed my mind for an instant, but if that's so then the joke is on him, because he has embraced these things so fully and thought about them so deeply that whether he's joking or not, he is sincere.