For example there is an extended riff on certain tropes that appear in more than one Spielberg movie: sudden crowd scenes, clotheslines with sheets blowing in the wind, lens flares, faces looking up agape. Well okay to all that, but is this not mostly a function of Spielberg just having made a heck of a lot of movies? You can’t so easily identify the ‘tropes’ of someone who’s made like 2 movies. A bad director doesn’t stick around long enough to generate identifiable ‘tropes’. And the razor isn’t even applied consistently: elsewhere Wyman appears to praise – as if by contrast – Kubrick, Scorsese, David Lynch. Not to take away anything from any of those guys, but you’d be hard pressed to think of three directors as prolific and whose visual and directorial style and themes repeat themselves more or vary less, from film to film – i.e. is full of and relies on ‘tropes’ – than those three. (The only worse ‘offender’ that comes to mind is Wes Anderson, but he’s really only made about 5 movies.) But they get a pass, because they’re ‘great directors’.

Wyman points out that Spielberg had some misfires (1941, Always), so of course he sucks. Those other directors apparently had no misfires or interesting failures, which I guess means I need to re-watch classics like Shutter Island and Inland Empire. Similarly, much as I kinda admired Baz Lurhmann’s cheesy, all-over-the-place new-age Western Australia, to praise how it ‘wove the threads of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz’ at the same time as trashing Empire Of The Sun for being ‘schlock’ just demonstrates no sense of proportion. Wyman’s complaint that some of Spielberg’s movies don’t have big stars is just weird. Or was Griffin Dunne [sic], the lead in Scorsese’s (great, non-misfire?) After Hours like one of the biggest stars of the ’80s without me realizing it?

Ultimately maybe the problem here is just that Wyman was tired:

But that noble and humanist worldview starts to feel thin when you watch all those movies in a row.

Note to self: never sit down and try to watch every single movie made by a director who’s made like 30+ movies “in a row”. It might make me grumpy, petty, and dumb.

By a dad and his two kids, via here

As a result, only just now did I hear “Catch Hell Blues”. I’ve been missing out on “Catch Hell Blues” all this time.

That would have never happened in the Album Era. Back in the Album Era, you’d take your paper route money every weekend, hope on your bike to Tower Records, peruse the “tapes” they had there, maybe 5-10 would catch your eye but you’d have to narrow it down to 1-2 (keeping the others in mind for next week), then after buying them from the pale-skinned girl with the The Cure “The Head On The Door” T-shirt, you’d put the yellow-orange bag on your handlebars and pedal back home as fast as you could.

Once home, you’d run up the stairs to your room, struggle with the ridiculously-hermetically-sealed cellophane, shake off the bits that were sticking to your hand due to static electricity, pop the tape in your “dual” “tape deck” (which was handy for “dubbing”), lie on your elbows on your bed, unfold the 7-page cassette sleeve, squint, and read the lyrics and liner notes all the way through, letting the album play all the way from start to finish, including the filler songs.

And then you’d do it a second time. Because it was unfair to judge a whole album after just one listen. Besides, you needed that second listen to truly appreciate the flow of the song order – the closing song on side 1, the change of mood for side 2, etc.

As a result, having an album without also knowing all the songs just would not have happened. You might not like all the songs, or even most of them, but you’d at least know them.

It’s harder to know music nowadays.

At least, that’s the solution, if you’re a Euroweenie.

I know this to be false. But I also always see B.I.E.P.’s regularly writing and speaking as if it is obviously true. So, I have no choice but to conclude that they don’t know what they are talking about, in a literal sense. They do know a lot of Economics, I am sure. But they don’t know a lot about the thing they purport to weigh in on, opine on, offering their regulatory advice for – i.e., trading. Something or someone, perhaps some textbook, has put the idea into their heads that there are two kinds of trading: “prop trading”, and the other kind. They took this at face value and have proceeded to formulate all sorts of theories based on this premise. There is one problem. The premise is false.

People who disagree with me will write back with non sequiturs such as ‘well howcome we had to bail out banks then?’ or ‘are you saying banks don’t take huge levered risk?’ Of course they do. Of course banks take risk. And of course they got underwater and were bailed out. None of that, however, speaks to the basic point about “prop trading”. None of that establishes that you can cleanly and neatly somehow separate “prop trading” from the other kind.

As I have said before, the main thing that got banks underwater was exposure to mortgages. Mortgages are not “prop trades”. Mortgages are bread-and-butter, your-grandpa’s-banking. Maybe you say “aha! so the prop trade was that they got too levered to mortgages”. Okay, but what is “too”? Where is the line?

You can make up a line, in your head, draw it, and call everything above it a “prop trade”. That’s what the government is effectively doing with its “Volcker Rule”. But I don’t know what you are accomplishing, other than setting up yet another arbitrary boundary that will need to be defined, evolved, monitored. What is the boundary for? To separate out the “prop trades” from the other kind?

But there are no “prop trades”. Like I said. There are just trades. Risk. Some riskier than others. Some more levered than others. Some more “exotic” (i.e. hard to understand/explain, I guess) than others. Where do you cross the line from an intelligent “macro hedge” into a “prop trade”? I guess that it’s when you lose money on it instead of make money on it.

This is not a real definition. It is not a real distinction. It is not a real concept. There are no “prop trades”. Or, to put it another way, all of banking is a “prop trade”. The essence of banking is to borrow short, and lend long. To sell 1-day rollable money and use it as collateral against which to buy, e.g., 5-year money. People seem to get confused into thinking that it is a non-risky activity because it is called by the dry term, ‘intermediation’. “That’s not risky! It’s just plain old intermediation!” Oh, okay, genius. But news flash: that is a BET. It could go in your favor, or against you. So by the (dumb) ‘definition’ most people seem to be have in mind, it’s a “prop trade”.

There are no “prop trades” unless all of banking is a “prop trade”.

Will someone please inform the Economics profession?

I just figured out the reason. I don’t know where Matthew Yglesias is.

He used to blog at, like, one place. (It was a relatively new place compared to the old place he used to blog at.) But I think what happened is, he moved on to blog at a whole new place. Cuz I haven’t seen any Matthew Yglesiases show up in my Google Reader feed from the old place lately.

And the new place? I haven’t found that place. Which has clearly deprived me of my daily Yglesias.

The reason this is bad is not obvious, you point out. How can the removal of an Yglesias from one’s life be anything but a positive. Well how shall I put this. It’s like how your immune system needs fermented foods to build up antibodies or immune-fighting prowess. Or how you’d put your kid in a day care with a bunch of other kids’ snot to play around with, so they’d get less colds. Like that.

Where oh where can Matthew Yglesias be?

Editor’s note: For those unfamiliar with the term, Matthew Yglesias is a professional ‘blogger’ of note. He, like, ‘blogs’ and that’s his actual job. His main qualification is that he is very Smart.

Actually, come to think of it, I’m going to boycott ALL academic journals. Screw you journals! Journals suck. Besides, I’ve got a blog.

Key facts about me, Sonic Charmer, and why I am qualified to be the next President of the United States:

• Spent a great deal of time in academics, thereby safely insulated from the real world.
• I have never worked for or been associated a private equity fund. I barely even know what they do.
• Wife count: < 2 (strict inequality).
• Would be cool with Warren Buffet’s secretary’s tax rate being lowered by special Act of Congress. (I’d overhaul the tax code to be flatter for the rest of us, but Warren Buffet’s secretary, she’s a special case, we’re all very concerned about her)
• Visionary. I think we should build a giant space station next to a wormhole. An AMERICAN space station.
• Can read aloud printed words placed in my field of vision into an amplifying device (aka speech-giving). I also bet I’d be adept at rotating my head left and right and back again in a creepily-robotic and regular-periodic manner to simulate looking at individual audience members, while doing so.
• Tall. (VERY important)
• Will pledge to close Guantanamo Bay, just like my predecessor pledged, if that’ll help.
• I believe the children are the future. (I really do.)
• Have implemented zero (0) state-level Obamacares so would lack Mitt Romney’s baggage vs. Obama in the general election.
• Willing to pretend to have a pet cat and/or dog who is very important in my life, and then have a ghost-writer write a “book” on his/her/its behalf, once in the White House.
• Have not participated in any debates, so the Obama campaign will have no clips of me saying something silly/reckless/’scary’ for their negative campaigning
• Finally: I am a natural-born citizen of the United States, which you will know solely on my say-so. (It would be racist to ask me to prove it)

There’s more where that came from, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise. You have to vote me into the Presidency to find out what I’ll do there.

But that’s why they call it DECISION ’12!

“Does that mean I’m visionary? You betcha,” he said.

I think it’s terrific that he has finally admitted how visionary he (Newt) is. Must have been difficult. But hey, facts are facts. Good on him for acknowledging his visionaryness.

In this case, his visionary vision reveals itself in the form of saying he’ll make there be a ‘permanent base on the moon’ within 8 years (but only if we make him be the President. I bet he could still do it without being the President though, like if we gave him some grants).

So that would be around 2020, which hey, you know, only 21 years later than I had been anticipating…

After that, Newt wants to go to Mars, back where the red-cold sun is sinking to the Channels of A’DAAR.

Yikes, sorry, my references are all over the place here.

Thoughts On The SOTU from Clark Judge