Note to self: Notion of clumsiness could be interesting to unpack.

I’ve read a lot about moral luck and agency the last couple of years. In the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about agency as it related to measures of financial capital and social capital. And how agency has a limit with both personal and societal budget constraints when it comes to tradeoff between personal liberty. I feel like moral luck is sort of the dark matter of notions of agency. It is sort of there in the background. Clumsiness is too but are there abstract notions of clumsiness that are useful to think about?

RIP Pope Francis. This chart jumped out at me. I went to Catholic school until I was 22/23. Very easy for me to forget that not everyone is Catholic. Very easy for me to forget that the south is not Catholic (despite Flannery O’Connor). Did not know NJ, CT, and RI were such papist strongholds.

Enjoyed this interview with Cormac McCarthy (Couldn’t Care Less). How do you assign good work to your nigh shift?

The night shift you know – you know you’re asleep and it’s busy working away. Well how does it do that it doesn’t have a pencil and paper it has to keep everything in mind. All that’s saying it can’t when you’re working a problem in math you put it down step by step and then if you kind of get stuck and go back over and see what you did. The unconscious can’t do this, got to keep everything right there right it doesn’t have a ledger that it can refer back. It doesn’t even have an eraser. Yeah that’s right and uh that’s baffling yeah I couldn’t do that but maybe it’s sort of the clue there is that it’s doing it completely differently that’s the point.

…

The unconscious will work on… it it doesn’t think of problems. The only problems it’s going to work under the ones you give it So to that extent yeah you do and influence it but but you don’t know how it works or how it goes about what it does. It’s it’s just really good at at figuring things out but it’s it’s like your own personal valet. It has no interest whatsoever in anything except you. It just works for you 24 hours a day it never sleeps it has no interest in anything except your welfare that’s that’s a pretty handy item to have

1:11:20 So I don’t think you can influence how it goes about its work but but it will only go about the work that you want done it it doesn’t come up with it doesn’t come up with problems and say uh David what do you think about this. Is this interesting it that’s the one way yeah having you where somehow we are asking it right so how so we’re presented with a mathematical problem that’s a problem in the world we have to then it’s a problem in the world but it’s not a but it’s not a problem for you unless it’s a problem for you right yeah and there’s this problem for you then it’s a problem for your unconscious because it’s interested in everything yeah it doesn’t want you to be puzzled about things if there’s something that you’re having difficult to do with yeah it will jump in and figure it out for you yeah yeah so we don’t know
another question that people don’t ask is uh it seems to have this vast horde of information and expertise and ways to do things I mean it just seems to have a huge vat of stuff that it can take things out of yeah and we don’t know we don’t know how huge it is or where it comes from yeah but it’s enough it’s enough to be a bit spooky I mean does it know things that um there’s no things that you just shouldn’t know

I mean I’ve I mean it’s interesting you say this because I’ve I mean I’ve always
had a very adversarial relationship to my unconscious I think you spoke to right yeah uh because it’s not always you it might be um interested in as you say it’s evolved to support us and and yet uh it’s its instincts aren’t always civilized right and so that I was interested in that idea that not only does nothing moderating right the the linguistic Dimensions is moderating also of that no

I think that I think it’s a good observation I don’t think it’s particularly interested in in manners right or how to how to it doesn’t really care about anybody but you right the only the only reason it has any interest in any of the people on the planet is to the extent that you interact with them yeah and that they influence you it doesn’t give a damn about anybody else. couldn’t care less

Random idea & question: Lots of things are similar to the taxi medallion system and are medallions systems ever good? Probably not but fun to think through!

My knowledge of the tax medallion system starts and ends with knowing that ride sharing disrupted it.

I was wondering what the current consensus view was on Uber/Lyft (I feel like this stopped being a finance twitter topics 5 years ago) and thinking about how incentives would change if drivers had a fixed cost commitment, which I realized is basically a medallion system. Based on my understanding of Uber’s economics, there would be less shocking things than Uber bringing back a medallion system for big metros. But this got me thinking about what else a medallion system can generalize to.

It’s obvious once you say it out loud but medallion systems are just another category of quantity restrictions. Medallions, franchises, occupational licensing requirements, zoning regulations, etc. all restrict quantity. There are quantity restrictions everywhere (and there must be a world of literature on it)! I vote for calling all these things “medallions” going forward. How many medallions does that Chipotle medallion group own? What was the pass rate for the law medallion exam this year? Should we increase the numbers of doctor medallions this year? Makes it more clear what is going on and more fun word to use.

So, are medallions systems ever good? Two terrible ideas come to mind.

AI stuff — Have the government issue model medallions. Economies of scale and AI economic stuff make everything wacky. Bring back price signals by restricting the output of these potentially unlimited output producing wunder-machines. *waves hands about details….*. What if there were a fixed number of medallions and each model (Sonnet, o3, etc) needed one to operate? This would obviously be terrible but would it bring benefits worth considering given how strange economics of all this might end up being?

BigCo medallions — An idea I’ve been wrestling with is how to reconcile the undeniable, easy to measure (but sometimes underrated) benefits Big Business with the large (I suspect) non-financial costs (loss of agency, aesthetic decline, weird political and religious disenfranchisement I’ve only recently started to think about how to articulate). I simultaneously love and hate anti-trust regulation: I read The Amazon Problem at an impressionable age and it blew my mind but I also recoil in disgust at the inefficiency and illogic of lots of recent antitrust stuff. Regulators are bad at regulating but regulations are important! What if the government issued medallions for BigCo industry (banks, airlines, grocery chains, big tech, etc). The interesting thing here would be using the price as a signal about impact of regulation. Big companies would obviously be able to pay whatever for these so issuing 50 big tech medallions wouldn’t really matter because the price the 50th marginal payer could pay would never impact FANG. But if a stated regulation is supposed to make an industry more competitive it would be interesting to see what a marginal player would pay to enter the market. This is an even worse idea than the one above (I think it kills startups?)! But I still like thinking through it.

Medallions system are probably (always?) bad but to the extent they create price signals in zero marginal cost industries or help recalibrate the valuation of modernly massive economies of scale of today global corporations, they are sort of interesting to think through. I think any price signal value they provide can always be provided more efficiently but alas, I thought about this so I wrote about it and I am grateful I do not need a medallion to post about it.

Great work requires innovating and copying. Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (the 1975 three hour costume drama) demonstrates this well.

Barry Lyndon is a classic in the Mark Twain sense that everybody wants to have read watched it and nobody wants to read watch it. It is the sort of three hour movie that compels you to watch hours of youtube afterwards in order to begin processing the beautiful and slow thing you just witnessed.

Two things come up frequently in discussions of the movie:

• The movie has many candlelit scenes. In order to capture the candlelight Kubrick used a lens that was designed for NASA for low light, deep space photography. Kubrick machined and tinkered with them until they were able to fit on a film camera. This was “revolutionary”.
• A different approach was taken when it came to the costumes. All of the costumes in the movie are either copies based on 18th century paintings or actual clothing from museums. [Aside: Watch Ulla-Britt Soderlund win the 1976 Oscar for Costume Design in this sweet video. Different time!]

I love that these two facts sit together. Kubrick was a controlling director and did everything in his power to make movies that last. Sometimes that involved buying 3 of the 5 existing made-for-NASA low light camera lenses and grafting them onto a film camera. Other times that means dusting off clothing from a museum.

Great work requires innovating and copying. Genius is knowing when to do each!

Other notes:

• The Beauty Of Barry Lyndon [3 minute video]
• BARRY LYNDON: Unpacking Kubrick’s Most UNDERRRATED MASTERPIECE [1 hour video and source of Mark Tawin quote]
• How Kubrick Achieved the Beautiful Cinematography of Barry Lyndon [15 minute video]
• Interview with Mark Bridges (Phantom Thread Costumes; really nothing to do with Barry Lyndon but…) [30 minute video]
• Criterion video 1: Achieving Perfection – The Cinematography of Barry Lyndon [15 minute video]
• Criterion video 2: Making Barry Lyndon [30 minute video]
• Reminded me of the Vasa ship in Stockholm (images) in so much that it feels like time traveling into a period of history you don’t normally see
• Movie feels like paintings: Could hang up stills of the movie on a wall. This reminded me in a weird adjacent way of Jeanne Dielman (which Filmspotting voted tied with Barry Lyndon at #59)
• Silent films, fate, cards, randomness, twist and turns as inevitable, miserable rich people, class
• “the cinematography is what gets all of the attention, but the story is the thing”
• Kubrick’s made this movie after failing to get a Napoleon biopic produced. Just in time for the Ridley Scott movie!
• Here is a good review of the movie
• Here is Scott Sumner (The GOAT Movie Critic) calling it the best costume drama ever
• Oh ya, and the music! I’m sure there are better connections but for some reasons the Schubert piano motif reminded me of Johnny Greenwood’s overtones piece for The Master. Not that they sound the same, just the impact.

Criterion details:

With his absorbing historical drama Barry Lyndon (1975)—an adaptation of a William Makepeace Thackeray novel that archly chronicles the fortunes of a scheming social climber (Ryan O’Neal) in eighteenth-century Europe—the famously exacting Stanley Kubrick set out to vividly evoke a vanished past. To create the authentic look of the film, which went on to win multiple technical Oscars, the filmmaker drew inspiration from the landscape painting and portraiture of artists of the period such as Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth, and went to unprecedented lengths during production. In particular, the film’s interior scenes—which Kubrick insisted on shooting primarily by candlelight—posed myriad challenges for cinematographer John Alcott and his team, necessitating not only the retrofitting of super-wide-aperture lenses but also various practical work-arounds on-set. In the clip above, taken from a supplemental program on our new edition of Barry Lyndon, focus puller Douglas Milsome and gaffer Lou Bogue recall the breath-shortening amount of oxygen consumed by the candles during shooting, and the crew’s eventual use of reflectors to amplify the illumination without also producing more heat and smoke.

I checked out Youssef Chahine’s 1958 Cairo Station as part of Filmspotting’s African Cinema Marathon. [Link to the movie on youtube here].

“In this beautiful classic film, Cairo’s main railroad station is used to represent all of Egyptian society. Youssef Chahine received international recognition when this masterpiece of sexuality and repression among society’s marginalized.”

This was a strange early movie that also felt ahead of its time. Here are some tidbits from my post-movie What The Heck Did I Just Watch diligence session:

• Director Youssef Chahine also played main character, Qinawi
• Chahine on his early years via Wikipedia: “”At the age of Eight, I discovered that 9.5mm films and projectors were being sold in stores. I saved from allowances enough to buy the projector and then became a regular for the Rabbani Bibi films. I used to gather the children of the neighborhood to show them these films. Some of them didn’t care for cinema and would come up with excuses not to attend. So I had no choice but to form a gang to beat up those who were late coming to the show.“
• The movie debuted in 1958 only 6 years after overthrow of Egyptian monarchy
• Egyptian film industry was nationalized only 8 years later in 1966
• Themes such as urban working class, gender-based violence and sexual repression were notable given year
• Associated with Italian neorealism and film noir
• “Pressure cooker” describes film well
• “The fact that Youssef Chahine, who both directed the film and stars in it, was initially trained as a painter before turning to filmmaking comes as no surprise” – another review
• Another good short review: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/jun/14/culture.peterbradshaw3
• Fun scene on youtube of Train Song: Mike & his Skyrockets (Funner footnote: “Mike Beshara was a student of rocket physics, which provided impetus for a local turn on Bill Haley and the Comets.”)

Take a look at the below album description (via Bandcamp). It’s hard to not enjoy this album (also on Spotify) with that kid of an introduction. Super cool. It is perfect groove while cooking music and/or something that belongs on the GOAT Spotify playlist. It also made me finally click through to investigate the backstory of Analog Africa which is unsurprisingly cool: https://www.analogafrica.com/the-story.html

In the spring of 1968 a cargo ship was preparing to leave the port of Baltimore with an important shipment of musical instruments. Its final destination was Rio De Janeiro, where the EMSE Exhibition (Exposição Mundial Do Son Eletrônico) was going to be held.

It was the first expo of its kind to take place in the Southern Hemisphere and many of the leading companies in the field of electronic music were involved. Rhodes, Moog, Farfisa, Hammond and Korg, just to name a few, were all eager to present their newest synthesisers and other gadgets to a growing and promising South American market, spearheaded by Brazil and Colombia.

The ship with the goods set sail on the 20th of March on a calm morning and mysteriously disappeared from the radar on the very same day.

One can only imagine the surprise of the villagers of Cachaço, on the Sao Nicolau island of Cabo Verde, when a few months later they woke up and found a ship stranded in their fields, in the middle of nowhere, 8 km from any coastline. After consulting with the village elders, the locals had decided to open the containers to see what was inside – however gossip as scintillating as this travels fast and colonial police had already arrived and secured the area.

Portuguese scientists and physicians were ordered to the scene and after weeks of thorough studies and research, it was concluded that the ship had fallen from the sky. One of the less plausible theories was that it might have fallen from a Russian military air carrier. The locals joked that again the government had wasted their tax money on a useless exercise, as a simple look at the crater generated by the impact could explain the phenomena. “No need for Portuguese rocket scientists to explain this!” they laughed.

What the villagers didn’t know, was that traces of cosmic particles were discovered on the boat. The bow of the ship showed traces of extreme heat, very similar to traces found on meteors, suggesting that the ship had penetrated the hemisphere at high speed. That theory also didn’t make sense as such an impact would have reduced the ship to dust. Mystery permeated the event.

Finally, a team of welders arrived to open the containers and the whole village waited impatiently. The atmosphere, which had been filled with joy and excitement, quickly gave way to astonishment. Hundreds of boxes conjured, all containing keyboards and other instruments which they had never seen before: and all useless in an area devoid of electricity. Disappointment was palpable. The goods were temporarily stored in the local church and the women of the village had insisted a solution be found before Sunday mass.

It is said that charismatic anti-colonial leader Amílcar Cabral had ordered for the instruments to be distributed equally in places that had access to electricity, which placed them mainly in schools. This distribution was best thing that could have happened – keyboards found fertile grounds in the hands of curious children, born with an innate sense of rhythm who picked up the ready-to-use instruments. This in turn facilitated the modernisation of local rhythms such as Mornas, Coladeras and the highly danceable music style called Funaná, which had been banned by the Portuguese colonial rulers until 1975 due to its sensuality!

The observation was made that the children who came into contact with the instruments found on the ship inherited prodigious capabilities to understand music and learn instruments. One of them was the musical genius Paulino Vieira, who by the end of the 70s would become the country ́s most important music arranger.

8 out of the 15 songs presented in this compilation had been recorded with the backing of the band Voz de Cabo Verde, lead by Paulino Vieira, the mastermind behind the creation and promulgation of what is known today as “The Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde”.

Just when I thought I knew all there was to know about passports I learn that the UN has passports. Red (diplomatic) and blue (service) ones! Country code is UNO. My desire for one is !!! USA should consider different colored passports sort of like airline status programs so people can flash there platinum passports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_laissez-passer

What a name for a musician poet (first last). I want the lyrics to Broken Again…

https://alabasterdeplume.bandcamp.com/album/come-with-fierce-grace

When we are boldly and sincerely requested to be ourselves – whoever we may be – we can, in response to one-another, naturally create things that no-one could have ever specifically demanded we deliver. In order to record the compositions in his critically acclaimed 2022 release GOLD, Alabaster DePlume instilled a culture of creativity by leading his ensembles in spontaneous composition and development. To allow them to be present, he kept them constantly creating. This resulted in an abundance of material that he has since produced and arranged, resulting in this collection. It is a piece made entirely of authentic, unstipulated – yet welcomed – human interaction. It is similar to how elements in nature contribute to shared work and beauty without conscious motive – a bee’s own motives result in the delivery of pollen. As Alabaster says himself: “The great thing wants to happen, let us allow it to happen.”

On his first trip to the US, Alabaster collected messages from individuals, to be delivered to the hearts of his audiences. One, who preferred to remain anonymous, encourages us to “come with fierce grace.”

I mean this album doesn’t need my praise but wow is it fun. Fun, groovy, lines that catch you while making your head bop. Telefone and Room 25 still rock too plus Tiny Desk!! Her “scramble think” really sings.