Take it to the bank

John Lanchester writes a book review in the New Yorker (of three recent books about the reasons for the current financial crisis, all of which sound well worth reading: Gillian Tett, Fool's Gold; Richard A. Posner, A Failure of Capitalism; and Shiller and Akerlof, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, although you may feel that just reading the excessively long title of the latter is sufficient). The book review itself is a model of clarity for those like me who find the wall of terminology deployed in banking frustrating and incomprehensible (it always seemed to me that obscure coinages and "in-talk" were as much of a self-protection methodology for financiers as they are for lawyers, mutatis mutandis: if no one understands what we're talking about, somehow that will really impress them, and not only that, our language will be a barrier to entry).

Lanchester writes: "At its heart, banking is a simple business. Customers deposit money at a bank, in return for interest; the bank lends that money to other people, at a higher rate of interest. This isn’t glamorous or interesting, but banking is not supposed to resemble skydiving or hip-hop; what recommends it is that it’s a good way of making steady money (and of creating credit in the economy), as long as the bank is careful about whom it lends money to."

But in banking, unlike the law, it's all about the short term (quoting Posner, who incidentally is a judge and legal academic): "The greater the gains are from taking risks that enable very high short-term profits, and the better cushioned the executive is by his severance package against the cost of losing his job, the more risks he rationally will take".

Temple of heaven

Sado Island, Japan, April 2009: the most peaceful and beautiful temple, absolutely deserted, long abandoned, and slowly decaying. These ancient trees flanked the stone steps leading up to the temple. The temple itself was half hidden by trees and covered in moss. My dad's friend Johnny and his Japanese wife Chieko met us from the ferry and took us straight here; we went through Tokyo at rush hour to catch the shinkanzen from frenetic Tokyo Station to Niigata, where we raced to a taxi and finally embarked on a two hour ferry journey, changing pace at every step, slowing, until finally we arrived here.

Prints of darkness

I'm in Tokyo, on a family fortunes trip with my father (two days in, and he has already introduced me to someone as his sister; analyse that!) where, to be sure, there is worse to be seen than this (Charlotte Olympia, Browns, GBP380), but not much worse: there is nothing attractive about this shoe. Its only redeeming feature is that it's a lot less expensive than the risible Chanel cage shoe. Do designers think women have no brains when it comes to buying shoes? (Don't answer that.)

Hypocrisy is the greatest luxury

In the South China Morning Post this week, news that the Hong Kong government is considering promoting Hong Kong as an environmentally aware city, and redesigning the dragon, Hong Kong's current logo, to reflect that (they will presumably engage a team of consultants at great expense over several months to come up with the innovative conclusion that the red dragon should be green, and perhaps have a plastic bag wrapped around one of its claws). This is, with unassailable logic, due to the high level of environmental awareness amongst the population due to the fact that, er, we live in an increasingly and unbelievably polluted city (see photographic evidence below) which the government is, also er, doing nothing about.

Not a lot of money these days

Thank God the US Treasury, in charge of resolving the financial meltdown, are using appropriate reference to the extent of the problem, cold hard logic and statistical analysis to identify the appropriate extent of the bailout:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure
Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

'It’s not based on any particular data point,' a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com [on] Tuesday. 'We just wanted to
choose a really large number'.

Dr Evil couldn't have put it any better.

I can see clearly now

The view from my office window of Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong, July 3, 2008. On my way in to work on the 260 bus, I saw islands in the distance I didn't know were there. The reason for this unusual clarity and excellent visibility? Depending who you ask, the factories in Guangzhou have been closed by flooding, so they aren't spewing out toxicity; and/or storms have cleared away the smog. Paddling on the water in the last few weeks, though, has been like navigating through a vast mobile junkheap of flip-flops, wrappers, branches, shoes, plastic bags, dead dogs (really) and empty bottles. So you can have either clear skies or clean water; never both.

Elementary, my dear

Much to the consternation of my fellow passengers (that 260 bus at 8am from Stanley to Central carries some heavy hitters, all of them on Blackberries and phones and laptops or talking about buying and selling gold) I laughed out loud on the bus to work this morning when I read the following email from my friend D, whom I’d challenged to use the word “lachrymose” in conversation:

“I felt pretty lachrymose at 2:00pm today when I read that Guy Ritchie will be
making a big budget Sherlock Holmes franchise, and that he will be ridding the
character of his ‘Victorian stuffiness’.
It all took place in seconds:
disbelief, denial, lachrymosity (starring Russell Crowe) and then a soul deep
need to push Guy Ritchie down a flight of stairs.
PS: Quite apart from
anything else, the character was never ‘stuffy’, or even particularly
‘Victorian’.”

And yes, a sense of revulsion and disbelief engulfed me too at the news that cack-handed Mockney Ritchie is to be entrusted with this pointless adaptation (“No Shit Sherlock”?) – no doubt plumbing the depths of the popular consensus and making Watson, and perhaps even Holmes himself, into some travesty of a Luvvable Cocker-ney into the bargain. Russell Crowe is part of the incipient farrago in the title role; as for Watson, is Michael Caine looking for work?

I'm a marionette

It's all too easy to mock Victoria Beckham, and this photo from the Marc Jacobs ad campaign, to be seen on an uncomfortably large scale on a building near you, tells you all you need to know: Marc Jacobs (presumably) thinks he's being ironic engaging VB for this ad campaign, and VB thinks she's being ironic doing it (apparently she "trusts Marc's vision", so happily at least one person does), and Juergen Teller is... being paid to take photographs, and so on and so on, fashion eats itself ad nauseam... The clear sighted view, however, is simply that these adverts are a joke. Not ironic: just a joke.

Decontextualised

An new trend has emerged in Japan, according to the New York Times, which is the text message novel: originally written on mobile phones, then uploaded to dedicated websites, and subsequently, in some cases, published in the real world, the country of purists which produced the first novel now has text message novels taking up 50% of its annual bestselling novel list.

I was astonished by the justification of one of the protagonists: 21 year old Rin, who sold 400,000 copies of her first novel, said that ordinary novels were not attractive to members of her generation because the sentences are too difficult to understand, the expressions are intentionally wordy and the stories are not familiar.

I can't resist the temptation to say that this is, surely, part of the point of the novel, and at the risk of sounding harsh, you have to conclude that Rin and her generation are simply illiterate.

The mobile blues again

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again...
Bob Dylan

As a twelve year old listening to this song I thought he was singing "stuck inside a mobile..." meaning a mobile home, meaning a trailer or caravan... Perhaps I ought to explain: it's not, or not just, that I led an unusually sheltered life; but because when I was twelve the mobile phone did not exist as a concept. Amazingly, for such a simple idea, and now so widespread, science fiction cinema of the 50s and 60s never posited that in the future, along with their Bacofoil suits, everyone in the world (or at least, Hong Kong) might be carrying a mobile means of communication. My word association with the word "mobile" as a twelve year old might also have had something to do with the gypsies who lived in a bus behind our house for a few months (AKA as "the Bussies"; and that's another story). Whatever the reason, being stuck inside a mobile was a genuinely sad prospect, and not just because of the way Bob whinged it. My friend Gordon once described a wild Highlands party which culminated in him waking up criminally hung over, "on the floor of someone's caravan, wrapped in a blanket, with my head on a welly". Amazingly, all those connections and that imagery spring unbidden to mind when I think of the word "mobile".

To the point, though: I will regularly, and have done so twice in the last couple of days, ask someone shouting in to a mobile phone to tone it down. I am, as my friend C, AKA La Grande Poobah says, assertive, or perhaps that's just disagreeable. In my view the mobile phone bawler lacks self-awareness and more importantly, consideration for others.

The reactions are varied: usually, and gratifyingly, they say sorry, and comply (I do ask nicely); but yesterday, I got a very aggressive response. There was a sign on the wall (in the spa, as it happens: a place where people go to relax), so I was within my rights; but this made no difference to madam, because she had to speak to her friend.

I think this problem may be particularly common in Hong Kong, where there's an obsession with answering, or being on, the phone come what may. People will routinely answer their phones in the cinema. Sadly, the Trigger Happy TV sketch where Dom Joly answers an enormous phone during a film screening and shouts into it "HELLO! I'M IN THE CINEMA! YES, IT'S SHIT!" is not that funny in Hong Kong: it's the normal state of affairs.