margins of respectability?

Flying past Canary Wharf every day at the moment, I keep seeing the trader blocks in the distance.

I've already written about Wolf of Wall Street and although I'm not convinced it was part of the original plan for the movie, it's one that lingers because of some of the ideas.

There's the rampant sales culture about 'sell anything', the premise that the punters are fools, a totally unreliable narrative which we are expected to follow. There's fair warning right from the start when the Ferrari changes colour from red to white during a trip along a freeway in the opening scenes.

Then there's the almost entirely male wheeler-dealers and the women often regarded as little more than objects.

I'm reminded of a few of the other movies about the same era 1980-2008 which includes 'Wall Street', 'Boiler Room' and the tad more extreme 'American Psycho'.

One that has previously stuck in my mind (which even had a female Investment Banker) was 'Margin Call'. That's the one about the collapse of a Lehman-like bank.

Without it being a spoiler, and true to many Hollywood scripts, the character played by Demi Moore was the one who became the scapegoat.

The worrying thought in the back of my mind is that although this stuff gets made into movies it is probably still happening.

Who really knows what happens when the US prints another $40bn per month of QE? Or how this gets beamed around the planet and then every so often a currency in another country collapses?

In a few of the words from the amoral Margin Call...

John Tuld: There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.

Peter Sullivan: Look at these people. Wandering around with absolutely no idea what's about to happen.

Eric Dale: I run Risk Management. I don't really see how that's a natural place to start cutting jobs.

blurred vision

What with whizzing around London and working in various offices, I've really had to put the blog on the back-burner this week.

A few hasty iPhone grabbed snap-shots is about all I can declare.

No television, no external entertainment, pretty much head-down.

A blur, really.

the crane in rain

I said this would be a week of few words as I fly around docklands. The foggy iPhone picture of the crane from yesterday needs further development, so here's one of it around sunrise. Even the people punching the tickets on the Air Line were taking pictures of the bright early morning.

It wouldn't be complete without another one of the crane in rain.

London fog makes me feel so blue?

Of course, it's not always sunny around docklands, and this time we've some of the fog atmosphere, the way that London gets portrayed in old movies.

Pea-souper fog, umbrellas and bowler hats. As if.

counting the cars on the east London Air Way

Another week of commuting across the Thames using the cable car. It's interesting how much the view changes on a daily basis, from the sunshine of Monday, through rain and mist and fog. I don't have much blogging time this week, so a few snaps of the journey from my iPhone should suffice to keep things moving along.

I can remember the frisson of pleasure the first time I travelled on the New Jersey Turnpike out of New York. That song, obviously. And I was somehow drawn to remember it when I watched the cars on the east London Air-Way. Even without a gaberdine suit.

wolf of wall street

We went along to see The Wolf of Wall Street on Saturday evening. It's a film about excess. The Leonardo di Caprio lead character of Jordan Belfort leads us through boiler room scams making money initially from penny shares.

When I say excess, everything in the whole movie is writ large. There's expletives beyond count, partying that would fit well into scenes from those hangover movies, snow drifts of cocaine and bottles of the last Quaaludes left on the planet.

The sexual politics are (deliberately?) very dated and I did see a few people walk out of the cinema during the movie. It wouldn't pass the Bechdel test, for sure: many females; mainly love interests; or prostitutes; main roles involve men/sex/child rearing; often not fully clothed. Oh and did I mention the dwarf tossing?

Add noisy rows of leery barrow-boy traders at Stratton Oakmont extracting large sums of money from people ill-equipped to deal with share trading.

Pump and dump the chop stock, as the scam theory goes.

Buy the cheap share illegally, inflate its price, sell it to the ignorant and then sell your own now inflated price shares before the price tumbles. Easy money in the unregulated '80s.

Interestingly, we don't get to see the actual punters, except in the sense that the early recruits to the firm could have all been punters themselves. Tire salesmen*, furniture shop workers. Maybe it needed a postman as well.

The style of the movie remanded me of Goodfellas with lead character Jordan narrating his point of view, sometimes to camera, and even a drug addled scene reminiscent of the helicopter part when Henry Hill is cooking the ziti.

There's a helicopter in this movie too, at one time parked badly by di Caprio and later receiving a Titanic fate. Like everything else in the film, you just know that a boat trip from a glassy sun drenched Portofino to the 200km distant Monaco can only have one type of weather. Excess. Oh yes. 100 foot waves that would do the North Sea proud.

But that's to quibble. And they could always throw a party on the rescue boat.

I enjoyed the film for it's melodramatic portrayal of the excess. There were a few extemporised scenes that ran too long and could have sliced some time from the around 3 hour run time. There wasn't a lot to like about the di Caprio character, whose real-life counterpart makes a small appearance at the end of the movie.

It also illustrated the worrying sales culture trend to extract money from punters at all times. What's the business being bought or sold? Don't know, don't care. Gimme your money. Want to cash in? Don't care. Gimme some more of your money.

Boiler room scams persist to this day. They've just got the internet and ACD (Automatic call dialling) to ramp them up from those early days.

Oh, and the real Jordan Belfort to help get the sales lines right.

siri, samatha, cortana and clippy

Although it was first being discussed several months ago, the new Microsoft equivalent of Siri is getting recent attention. I know the code name was Cortana, but it seems that the implementation is to get that name as well.

It's one of those names that, when googled, can get *ahem* more than one expects. I guess it's because it was also used in that popular game Halo, as the VGH* avatar for the Artificial Intelligence.

Some may have seen that Spike Jonze movie 'Her' about a guy who falls in love with Samantha, his Scarlett Johanssen voiced electronic personal assistant. In the freeze-frame below, that's Samantha in Joaquin Phoenix's shirt pocket.

If you switch the American female voice on in Siri, it'll give 'Samatha' short shrift. I didn't find it works so well with the UK voice, which has more of a male butler's tone.

But I suppose there'll be fun to be had when both Siri and Cortana are available together. Start a conversation with one of them, keep the other one switched on and see what they make of each other. It has to be done

I guess it's all moved on from Clippy the annoying Paperclip.

wheeler dealers

Thursday and I'm still commuting by cable-car.

I couldn’t help notice the number of wheely bags around. The rumble of the big wheeled silver Rimowa and the skitter of colourful smaller rollers.

Clusters of dark clothed professional people checked out of hotels pulling their bags to their client sites, presumably before heading back to distant homes. It’s another variation on the road traffic move away from busy Friday to busy Thursday.

I suppose Friday has become work from home day, which I makes for wheely Thursday.

For me, as I headed back on the cable-car, Friday would still be another office day.

Multi Pass

Yes, a multi-pass moment.

gravity

I remember seeing the trailer for Gravity ages before the film came out. All jump cuts like most trailers with hardly a scene lasting more than a second.

Sometimes the trailers are so narrative-rich they there's no need to see the move at all. 'Atonement' was one that I always remember being in that category.

Gravity is different, where the all-action trailer missed the deliberately shaded dynamics in the film.

The opening scene to me is a great case in point, where we adjust our eyes to the dark of space, the earth and little else. Then notice something in transit, which we recognise as having activity around it. Suddenly there's a kind of ground rush effect as it gets bigger and we see the detail. All held on a more or less fixed camera position.

Of course, there's plenty more that happens later in the film, in what is actually a fairly simple 2-hander story or maybe a 3-hander if I count 'Space' as the third person. It's told in a way that gives a real sense of the scale and dynamics of space.

I don't think I'll be orbiting earth any time soon, so this type of movie on a massive screen and with a few 3D flying shapes gives the next best sense.

Yes, even with Gravity's simple story, I found myself being pulled in.

cable-car commuting

It had to be done. The weather is even sunny for it.

Yes, I've managed to find a reason to commute to work by cable car at the moment. It's the Air Line across the River Thames and it fits with my short term needs quite well.

It'll only be for a short time, but it certainly makes a change from the usual trains and cars.

I've used the route in the past, for what I'd describe as sightseeing views across London, so for the moment I will join the very limited number of actual commuters using this under-publicised service.

ye car parkes of olde England

Saturday, we headed to a different town for some stunt shopping. That's the type where there are particular, but unusual, items in mind.

Not knowing the area, we headed for the car park with the most likely name for a city centre.

This would be a combination of words like 'Gate', 'Abbey', 'Nunnery', 'Market', 'Cross', 'Friary', 'Wall', cardinal points, an old fashioned craft product and maybe the odd 'The'. Friary Wall, Abbey Cross, West Gate, The Lace Market. You get the idea.

We found one and drove in. "No spaces available", it proudly announced outside. Then another sign that said "no lifts working" or something similar. Then a really big sign that said "Pay and display or £80 fine". I was passenger as we drove ever higher around thin little turnings to try to find a space.

Soon enough we reached the upper floors. There were spaces. Another sign explained that the car park was not being maintained to the usual standard.

We descended the seven flights of stairs out into the shopping area's afternoon sunlight. I wondered if the condition of infrastructure was cause or effect of the demise of some central shopping areas?