Jon Taplin's Blog

Gangsters and Populists

As I get down to the last movies before I mail in my ballot to the Academy for Best Picture nomination, I am struck that many of the great films of the year were centered in that weird space where capitalism gets distorted into criminality. My list so far: There Will be Blood, American Gangster, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men and Zodiac. And the performances of some of the anti-heroes are rather remarkable. Daniel Day Lewis (in Blood), to whom blood ties mean nothing in the pursuit of oil riches. Tilda Swinton (in Clayton) will go to any length to cover up her client’s crime. The incredibly menacing Javier Bardem (in No Country) has his own weird code of corporate conduct in the drug smuggling business, and uses new technology (a particularly lethal cattle slaughtering machine) to kill his victims. And finally, Denzel Washington, who reads the business pages and believes that he has brought productivity and new business models to crack distribution.

Hollywood has been fascinated by gangsters since William Wellman made James Cagney a star in 1931 with Public Enemy. Cagney’s relentless ambition was not sugarcoated and in the end he gets his just desserts, as the Hays office censorship board would demand, dying at his mother’s doorstep. American Gangster is of course an updating of the prohibition tale into the “just say no” world of Nancy Reagan and Drug Czar Bill Bennett. We the audience knows that even many of the cops are hypocrites; if not just corrupt. There Will be Blood and Michael Clayton peer into the belly of the Free Market Beast and reach the same conclusion: free markets are great for those who can pay to distort them. Zodiac and No Country for Old Menseem to be meditations on a cultural interregnum. Both Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac and Tommy Lee Jones in No Country seem truly bewildered by the savagery of the men they are pursuing. It is as if they both long to live in an earlier time where honor and decency were not so easily buried by the pursuit of money or fame.

We are about to go through a presidential election campaign where the fires of a populist revolt against corporate power will be stoked by Obama and Edwards on the Democratic side and Huckabee and Paul on the Republican side. Could it be that Hollywood really did sense this anger two years ago when these movies were being planned?

The Auto Business is Tough

With football comes auto and truck ads. The business must be very tough right now:

Dodge is promising “No down payment and no payments until summer” if you will just take one of their gas guzzlers off the lot. They can hardly give these babies away. Daimler Benz must be happy they unloaded Chrysler before the LBO market meltdown.

The “Toyotathon” is promoting ten varieties of insurance fraud to get rid of your old car so you can buy a new Toyota. People are pictured pushing giant boulders on to their cars, hiding them in snow drifts so the city plow will damage them, dropping steel girders on trucks. Who is thinking up these ads? For the last couple of years I’ve thought that there must be a schizoid aspect to Toyota’s American managers. Many of them have been recruited from GM and Ford and they still rely on old fashioned American car marketing techniques while their Japanese bosses just work hard to make the modest reliable and fuel efficient cars in the world. What’s worse, Toyota regularly lines up with the big three to sue California to keep our auto emissions law from being enacted, even though Toyota would be the only company that could presently pass the new tougher standards. Go figure?

The Art of the Obituary

I spent a good bit of time in London in the late 80′s when I was working in the Mergers and Acquisition group at Merrill Lynch. My hotel, The Savoy, used to deliver the The Telegraph as the default paper and I found the obituaries to be the funniest part of an otherwise stuffy broadsheet. Yesterday, the man that wrote those obits, Hugh Massingberd died, and the New York Times has published a tribute worthy of Massingberd’s peerless style. Here is a short sample:

But Mr. Massingberd also sought out eccentrics; having the good fortune to live in Britain, he found them.

One Telegraph obituary, from 1991, opened this way: “The Third Lord Moynihan, who has died in Manila, aged 55, provided through his character and career ample ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief occupations were bongo drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer.”

Another, on the passing of Liberace went as follows:

“The first sign that Liberace had embarked upon a road along which reticence would never ride came when he placed a candelabra on his piano. At this, the dam of discretion appeared to burst: first came a white tail suit, followed by stage patter about his mother and his philosophy of life, then a gold lamé jacket and a diamond-studded tailcoat.”

Most importantly, the Times provides a dictionary to decode Massingberd’s “carefully coded euphemisms”

Here, for the benefit of American readers, is an abridged Massingberd-English dictionary:

¶“Convivial”: Habitually drunk.

¶“Did not suffer fools gladly”: Monstrously foul-tempered.

¶“Gave colorful accounts of his exploits”: A liar.

¶“A man of simple tastes”: A complete vulgarian.

¶“A powerful negotiator”: A bully.

¶“Relished the cadences of the English language”: An incorrigible windbag.

¶“Relished physical contact”: A sadist.

¶“An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man”: A flasher.

God bless the English!

WTF-RIAA?

Someone at the RIAA just crossed “the bright red line”:

In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

Is Hip Hop Dying?

The New York Times estimable Kelefa Sanneh delivers a comprehensive “State of Hip Hop” article today.

Sales are down all over, but hip-hop has been hit particularly hard. Rap sales slid fell 21 percent from 2005 to 2006, and that trend seems to be continuing. It’s the inevitable aftermath, perhaps, of the genre’s vertiginous rise in the 1990s, during which a series of breakout stars — Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G. — figured out that they could sell millions without shaving off their rough edges. By 1997 the ubiquity of Puff Daddy helped cement hip-hop’s new image: the rapper as tycoon. Like all pop-music trends, like all economic booms, this one couldn’t last.

While he goes on to cite interesting new artists from the last year, no where does he even consider the idea that the genre may be running out of steam.  Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. are dead and P Diddy and Snoop Dogg are parodies who could fill in as guest hosts of Flavor of Love. The artful bravado of a Dr. Dre has given way to the trivial boasting of Project Pat, scraping by with live gigs in Anchorage, Alaska while he raps that he’s a “walkin’ bank roll”. Ten years ago the 16 year old white suburban thug wannabees who bought hip hop, might have believed Pat was the real deal. But now they know better. He’s just hoping to sell out to the big labels like Jay Z and Diddy before they realize the game is over. Its called the “greater fool theory” and even Universal Music, formerly the greatest of fools, knows that times have changed. Last week they declined to re-up Jay Z’s platinum coated exec deal.

The roots of hip hop are in Rhythm and Blues and one would only have to listen to Muddy Water’s Mannish Boy from 1955 to understand there was nothing new in Dre’s early braggadocio except the addition of a blunt full of the “Chronic”. I was once working upstairs in The Village Recorders in West LA while the good Dr. was recording The Chronic below us. Despite a state of the art air filtration system, we found ourselves too stoned to work from the smoke that came up from below. The Blues will continue to reinvent itself, just as it has since Robert Johnson’s earliest recordings in 1936 with another young white suburban kid named John Hammond. We are in a musical interregnum, waiting for the next big thing to happen. It inevitably does.

Brian Roberts is not happy.

At halftime, the fact that the Patriots-Giants game turned out to be so good is just gravy to the NFL Network in their two year battle with Comcast and Time Warner Cable. The telecast on both NBC and CBS is a three hour infomercial for the fledgling network to make its pitch to cable subs directly, much like the famous “I Want My MTV” campaign. Brian Roberts of Comcast cannot be happy that Congressional pressure led to the unprecedented roadblock of the game on two national broadcast networks.

Writers Guild Divide and Conquer Strategy

The guild deal with David Letterman yesterday will put increased pressure on the networks to get back to the table with the writers. For all Jay Leno’s charm, its going to be the emperor’s new clothes when he tries to crack wise without the aid of his writers. Even John Stewart is going to be reduced to talking heads interviews with craven authors pushing their latest tome and politicians not afraid to cross WGA picket lines. As the Times reported,

“We are a writer-friendly company,” Rob Burnett, the chief executive of Worldwide Pants (Letterman’s company), said in a telephone interview. “We don’t have a problem giving the writers what they are asking for. We think they deserve it, and we’re happy to give it to them.”

Last week primetime ratings for the five networks were down 9%, with only NBC salvaging an improvement thanks to Sunday Night Football and two reality shows (The Biggest Loser & Clash of the Choirs). Reality King Ben Silverman, who runs NBC may have arrived at the exact moment he is needed. Of course, starting next month, Fox will air American Idol and will enhance Rupert’s ability to prove out his long record of breaking strikes. As veteran New York reporter, Jerry Tallmer chronicled Murdoch’s takeover of the Bankrupt New York Post,

That bankruptcy ultimately enabled owner redux Murdoch to wipe out the paper’s contract with the New York Newspaper Guild, force the Postunit into a strike, break the unit, and fire all 287 Guild members — one of whom, chairperson Harry Leykis, a scrappy, ultra-loyal Post staffer for 25 years, died of a heart attack not long after. Harry, like all of us, had had many thousands of dollars in severance pay wiped out overnight, thanks to the corporate bankruptcy laws.

With the American Idol wind at his back, Murdoch can hold out until May, but I doubt that Les Moonves, running the only pureplay broadcasting company CBS, can hold out that long.

Obama's Closing Argument

Here are a couple of paragraphs from what Mark Halperin of Time magazine called “the speech of the campaign”. Obama at his daring best:

In the end, the argument we are having between the candidates in the last seven days is not just about the meaning of change.  It’s about the meaning of hope.  Some of my opponents appear scornful of the word; they think it speaks of naivete, passivity, and wishful thinking.

But that’s not what hope is.  Hope is not blind optimism.  It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task before us or the roadblocks that stand in our path.  Yes, the lobbyists will fight us.  Yes, the Republican attack dogs will go after us in the general election.  Yes, the problems of poverty and climate change and failing schools will resist easy repair.  I know – I’ve been on the streets, I’ve been in the courts.  I’ve watched legislation die because the powerful held sway and good intentions weren’t fortified by political will, and I’ve watched a nation get mislead into war because no one had the judgment or the courage to ask the hard questions before we sent our troops to fight.

But I also know this.  I know that hope has been the guiding force behind the most improbable changes this country has ever made.  In the face of tyranny, it’s what led a band of colonists to rise up against an Empire.  In the face of slavery, it’s what fueled the resistance of the slave and the abolitionist, and what allowed a President to chart a treacherous course to ensure that the nation would not continue half slave and half free.  In the face of war and Depression, it’s what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation.  In the face of oppression, it’s what led young men and women to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through the streets of Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause.  That’s the power of hope – to imagine, and then work for, what had seemed impossible before.

That’s the change we seek.  And that’s the change you can stand for in seven days.

The whole speech is here

A Video Link is here
Abandon your cynicism, hope is on the way

Bhuttto:An Unprotected Ally

Cooper and Myers of the New York Times reinforce my contention yesterday that the Bush Administration was pushing Bhutto into an unprotected position in Pakistan. She was our ally, but she was just as vulnerable as those Army grunts in Iraq with unarmored Humvees:

Administration officials continued to prod Ms. Bhutto toward an arranged marriage with Mr. Musharraf even during the emergency rule. Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte traveled to Pakistan in November, and spoke by telephone to Ms. Bhutto while Mr. Musharraf had her under house arrest. With both sides balking at the power-sharing deal — an agreement one Bush official acknowledged was “like putting two pythons in the same cage” — Mr. Negroponte continued to push Ms. Bhutto to agree to the plan, according to members of Ms. Bhutto’s political party

"No Hand" In Pakistan

George used to complain to Jerry Seinfeld that he had “no hand” in a relationship with his girlfriend. Meaning no leverage. The assassination of Bhutto is proof that George Bush has “no hand” in Pakistan. Bhutto originally returned to Pakistan under the protection of Musharraf and the ISI (security services), but when he declared Marshall Law and dissolved the Supreme Court, she couldn’t stay in the pact giving him the Presidency and her the Prime Minister role. Once she told him that, her protection was gone and there was no way that Bush could guarantee her safety.