Alex Burns

Ron Howard's film adaptation of Frost/Nixon (2008) adopts a thriller format in contrast with the Melbourne Theatre Company's stage production which I saw several months ago.  Salvatore Totino's cinematography turns David Frost's interview into a claustrophobic tit for tat whilst editors Daniel P. Hanley and Mike Hill linger on the emotional aftermath of Richard Nixon's elicited, emotional self-disclosure.

For me the MTC's version suffered from a first act which established the interview's circumstances, obscured the dual track negotiations between Frost and Nixon's advisers, and veered into comedy, before ratcheting up the second act.  Howard avoids this dilemma through taut pacing that has a semi-documentary feel heightened when the characters deliver their monologues straight to the camera.

The cast needs to be stellar for this ensemble film and it delivers.  Frank Langella's Nixon is a self-tortured leader with feet of clay; I have to now revisit Anthony Hopkins' portrayal in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995) for a comparison.  Michael Sheen's Frost adopts a chutzpah mask which hides a risk-taking gambit to avoid career demise and the compromises made to financiers.  Kevin Bacon's Jack Brennan is prepared to take the flak for Nixon.  Sam Rockwell's James Reston Jr. evokes how research can become an all-consuming quest when your beliefs and passions are on the line, deftly counterpointed by Oliver Platt's Bob Zelnick who zigs and zags between self-depracating humour and conscientious objector angst.  Matthew Macfayden's John Birt updates the role he played in Spooks (aka MI5) as a nuanced political operator who must counterbalance Frost's chutzpah and the resistance it creates for Reston Jr. and Zelnick with keeping the team together, and getting the interview planning, negotiations and logistics done.  Rebecca Hall's Caroline Cushing and Toby Jones' Swifty Lazar provide comic relief from the tension and function to advance the film's plot points.  Langella gets the spotlight for his Nixon portrayal yet the rest of the cast are vital because the plot needs everyone to be a coherent whole.

Playwright and scriptwriter Peter Morgan's previous films have explored weighty themes: self-willed blindness to the dark side of charismatic leadership in The Last King of Scotland (2006) and leadership judgment during crisis-driven events in The Queen (2006).  Set after Watergate and Nixon's presidential pardon, Frost/Nixon explores the commitment costs for a research group that sets out to achieve public justice and the ploys in a complex multi-party negotiation.  There's far more beyond the heart-to-heart phone call between Nixon and Frost, and Nixon's final self-disclosure, just as there was more to Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987) than Gordon Gecko's 'greed is good' sound-bite.  All sides use psychological tactics to gain momentary bargaining advantages and to leverage power imbalances, from Swifty Lazar's late night reply on Frost's opening bid to Birt, Reston Jr. and Brennan's interruptions of the interview taping at strategic points that are beneficial to their teams.  Frost opts to 'lure the tiger from the mountain' (36 Strategies) for Nixon to self-disclose, enraging Reston Jr. and Zelnick who want a front-on attack about Watergate and the Vietnam War.  Nixon uses sleight of mouth patterns to interrupt, stall and throw Frost off guard.  Birt is caught in a position akin to a consultant or line manager: responsible for logistics and having to persuade all parties to move forward.  Anyone who has had to raise money against the odds for a project will wince with familiarity at Frost's desparate meetings with television network chiefs and advertising agencies.  It's this pointillism which makes Frost/Nixon even richer than the interview's climatic revelations and why the film will be perfect for an MBA class on mergers and acquisitions, negotiation and game theory.

Now all I need to see are the Frost/Nixon original interviews . . .

Williams, Bill & Justine Gregory-Williams.  Trading Chaos: Maximise Profits With Proven Technical Techniques (2nd ed.), John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2004.

The father-daughter authors summarise a personal methodology based primarily on: (1) the technical analysis of oscillations in market securities; and (2) the opportunities for day traders and swing traders to appropriate value from institutional funds through 'countertrend' signals which occur in commodities futures and currency/foreign exchange (forex) markets.  The first (1995) and second (2004) editions coincided with the IT and subprime bubbles which created day trading subcultures and market volatility, so it would be interesting to see how the authors have fared during the 2007-08 global financial crisis.

The book's first half synthesises various ideas on formulating a trading plan and the psychology of market trading.  The ideas include a social constructionist view of money as a holder of value (John Searle); crowd psychology and rational herds in markets (Gustave Le Bon, Charles Mackay); the new paradigm of chaos theory in markets and how fractals and self-similarity create new trading perceptions about pricing and signals (Benoit Mandelbrot), and the popularity of Eastern belief systems amongst traders as models for skills acquisition and stress management (notably Western popularisations of Zen and Taoism).  Thus an awareness of broader intellectual trends can be useful to unpack the building blocks of a system and for comparative analysis with other theorists and models.

Ben Williams' original contribution is to explain how his background as a psychologist informs his trading approach.  Chapter 7 outlines a generic model of skills acquisition --- novice, advance beginner, competent, proficient and expert --- that was explored in the book's first edition, and can be integrated with Agile, CMMI and other frameworks for integrating operations and strategy.  Williams summarises exercises from autogenic training for stress control in the face of market volatility, symbolic interactionist approaches to align the trader's individual psyche with the market, and cognitive psychology techniques such as cognitive chaining for surfacing deeply held beliefs which lead to self-sabotage and trying to trade out of a losing position without stop losses.  The cognitive psychology approach reminds me of physician John Lilly's mid-career work on meta-beliefs and it also parallels recent work in behavioural finance.  However, some descriptions --- such as a section on Taoism, Zen and visualising the market as a river which follows the path of least resistance --- seem to be closer to New Age beliefs about zero point fields which integrate consciousness and matter than the original metaphysical systems.  I agree these systems can be applied to training however they need far more grounding than detailed here.

From the earlier material on trading approaches, the book's second half develops a trading system to anticipate the price movements in market securities through fractals and self-similarity which occur in volatility.  It's always interesting to see how traders justify their approaches and the example trades given.  I'm closer to the adaptive markets, event arbitrage and behavioural finance schools of investing and remain to be convinced about the validity of technical analysis that the Williams propose, beyond the obvious role of pattern recognition.  Actually perceiving nonlinear dynamics and turbulence can be very different to the language and paradigmatic thought that makes chaos theory a popular explanation.

I did experience some perception changes after reading Trading Chaos: (1) charts might be interpreted in a different psychological frame using fractal, self-similarity and volatility metaphors; (2) viewing charts at different timescales (e.g. 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week) might develop the cognition skills to quickly scan signals in a real-time environment; and (3) the juxtaposition of lead and lag signals for trading decisions and triggers has potential, particularly if combined with game theoretic modelling of the market and volatility effects from institutional investors, monetary policy and rational herds.  It remains to be seen if these perceptions are sustainable and verifiable in trading conditions, and not just subjective reactions based on past research about chaos theory models.

That said, the trading system may also have several criticisms and weaknesses. Finding signals in oscillations and nonlinear dynamics may be difficult in a volatile market.  Analysts can be subjective particularly if de-leveraging and other actions by institutional investors are not factored in.  Swing traders may be exposed to market sensitivities (aka the Greeks): Gamma (the rate of change in the underlying security's price), Vega (sensitivity to volatility), Theta (time-decay) and Rho (time-decay of interest rates).  Finally, modelling turbulence and uncertainty in a grey or white box system remains a major challenge for financial engineers in new market environments.

Threaded throughout Trading Chaos are the mix of useful insights and shibboleths in day trading subcultures.  CNBC, investment experts, and the plethora of courses and newsletters thrive on investor insecurity yet create noise (pp. 34, 42, 56).  Trading decisions, trading volume, and speed and type of momentum may be lead indicators of price volatility (p. 126).  Broad market knowledge purports to trump expert/specialist understanding (p. 135).  Market facts must be distinguished from opinions and beliefs (pp. 8-11).  Trader personalities shape risk tolerance, time horizon, the asset allocation process and types of controls (pp. 92, 155), a factor relevant to human resources consultants and the 'transition in' process for trading desks in investment banks.  Analysis risk involves emotions and perceptions of a signal (pp. 52-53).  The interest in Fibonacci numbers and Golden ratios are partly because they are iterative, geometric structures applicable to price movement forecasting (pp. 22-23).  Grey and white box systems with transparent, programmable rules are preferable to expensive, high-end black box systems which use artificial intelligence and neural net algorithms (pp. 53, 56).  A useful bibliography highlights the Santa Fe Institute's influence on chaos theory applications in finance and macroeconomics.  It suggests this area needs far more research to verify the claims and provisional findings in this book, to separate the gold from the dross.

Perhaps the most pivotal insight of Trading Chaos is buried in the text.  "We all trade our belief systems.  When some of you think about this, it produces a crisis," the authors assert.  Now that could be the basis for a 'contrarian' trading system --- probably the one that hedge funds with a short/event arbitrage approach use to scalp day traders in currency/forex and commodities futures markets.

My last email for 2008 at 11:56pm was to send a proposal to editor David Barker for the excellent series 33 1/3 which features 25-35k-word analyses of influential and important music albums.  33 1/3's reputation means David and his publishing team will probably be swamped with proposals.  On vacation, David is hopefully far away from a computer.

I've seen proposals from several colleagues, and they have chosen some really intriguing albums that I wouldn't have thought of.  So, whichever proposals David and his team choose to go with, you'll see some great 33 1/3 books by new writers in 2010 and 2011.

After the jump you can read an excerpt from my proposal, which reveals my album choice: I tried to go with something that is part of the recognised canon (both critical and commercial), which 33 1/3 has not covered before, and importantly, to try and suggest why the book would have significance to a broader readership.  Some of the album's themes are hot topics in the media's issue-attention cycle, and after sending the proposal in, I found David Cole's great article from The New York Review of Books' forthcoming issue.  The proposal doesn't hinge on this hot topic, it's just interesting to see changes unfold in the macro environment.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

Several weeks ago I noticed new graffiti on street signs in the Melbourne suburb Northcote from an unknown group: the Saracen Soldiers.  A block away from the most prominent graffiti two houses displayed nationalist flags in their front windows.  It could have been coincidence or maybe a signalling game to establish psychological turf.

At the time I thought of the ominous graffiti in Philip K. Dick's posthumously published novel Radio Free Albemuth (1985).  The grafiti also reminded me of the wanna-be teenage mercenaries in Leo Berkeley's film Holidays on the River Yarra (1990), who are recruited by a racialist organisation to engage in graffiti, brawls and other low-level politically motivated violence.

Two nights ago police fatally shot 15-year-old Tyler Cassidy during a confrontation in Northcote's All Nations park.  Earlier that evening, Cassidy left home after a family argument then stole two knives from Northcote's Kmart store.  Four police were called to arrest Cassidy and Victoria Police will now investigate what happened next.  As Rosie X observes, several media outlets speculated about Cassidys membership in the nationalist group Southern Cross Soldiers (SCS) and posed a 'suicide by cop' explanation for Cassidy's death.

There are a couple of interesting things to note about blogosphere and media coverage.

Journalists described Cassidy's online life as "subterreanean" - a mix of Sherry Turkle's theories about online identity fused with cyberterrorist fears - yet did not link to Cassidy's MySpace page or mention the SCS sites above.  In contrast, Richard Metzger observed to me in 1998 that Disinformation had a different strategy: it would link to white supremacist groups such as Aryan Nations so that readers would understand their ideological worldview.  This got Metzger into trouble with several anti-racialist organisations who confused him with Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance.

Anarchist and anti-racialist bloggers knew SCS for months before Cassidy's death as a white supremacist gang or youth network. The SCS band has copied Rahowa's white separatist music as a recruitment strategy.  The social network Bebo has pages for SCS recruitment and the SCS band.  Jacques Ellul would be proud: SCS (and perhaps Cassidy unwittingly) use a blend of Australian historical imagery for in-group identity and integration propaganda ("Aussie pride", the Southern Cross flag, conflation of national identity with ethnicity) with agitation propaganda that is aimed at specific out-group enemies (Italians, Lebanese, anyone who does not meet SCS's criteria for being Australian).

Several questions: How many other pages are there?  Who has been monitoring them?  What if any threat assessments were made?  Will anyone get an opportunity to conduct a sociometry analysis of SCS's online social network before the pages are pulled (Marc Sageman established a benchmark with his study of Salafist cells that may have had weak ties to Al Qaeda).

Bloggers and journalists alike noted that police might have de-escalated the incident if they were armed with a Taser electroshock weapon.  The incident captures why there is a tactical role under specific circumstances for law enforcement personnel to use non-lethal or less-lethal weapons that could have saved Cassidy's life.  The four police will likely receive critical incident debriefs and stress counselling.

A few days after Cassidy's death Northcote remains largely subdued apart from occasional police sirens in the distance.  In contrast. Greece has faced a week of riots after the shooting of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos which may spread to Europe.  As a 'paired study' - SCS's street gang violence, the shootings of Grigoropoulos and Cassidy, and the divergent reactions - illustrate the late sociologist Charles Tilly's distinction between individual aggression (Cassidy), brawls (SCS) and scattered attacks (Greece) as different types of collective violence.

Tilly's urban sociology in the 1960s foresaw how today's social network sites may be used to coordinate street violence.  Perhaps police intelligence analysts would benefit from a few hours with Tilly's masterful study The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003) to pre-empt any SCS revenge attacks for Cassidy's death.  SCS might then remain the purveyers of bad hip-hop/rock/metal hybrids (not exactly Australian), poorly designed web sites and street graffiti: the opportunist yet ineffectual extremists that Dick and Berkeley tried to warn us of . . . and that Greece and Europe may face again.

Australian comedian and raconteur Andrew Denton finishes his six-year running interview show Enough Rope.  Denton's production company Zapruder's Other Films announces Project Next for 2009: finding "the next bunch of original thinkers, movers, mischief-makers and cage-rattlers."

Chinese Democracy looks set to be the most delayed and expensive album in history: a rumoured $US13 million recording budget, 5 guitarists, 14 studios and a horde of Pro Tools digital editors.  I'm not exactly a Guns n' Roses fan but I bought the album anyway for the CD booklet: a list of production credits for the massively overrun project.  For the project's background see Wikipedia's CD history page and Jeff Leeds' article "The Most Expensive Album Never Made" (New York Times, 6th March 2005).

Interesting that Axl Rose augmented the Best Buy-only release with a MySpace streaming strategy and that Amazon.com's top search today for "Chinese Democracy" is Metallica's Death Magnetic (Elektra, 2008) . . . Rose's CD is ninth on the search algorithm's list.

I'm saving most of my thoughts on Chinese Democracy for a journal article. 

Former Gn'R co-founder Slash in his autobiography Slash (HarperEntertainment, New York, 2007), co-written with Anthony Bozza, has a prescient and interesting anecdote (p. 371) on Rose's decision to use Pro Tools in the recording studio:

There were rows and rows of Pro Tools servers and gear.  Which was a clear indication that Axl and I had very different ideas of how to do this record.  I was open to using Pro Tools, to trying new things--but everyone had to be on the same page and in the same room to explore new ideas.  The band managed to do a little bit of jamming and come up with some things.  A couple of the ideas I had come up with Axl apparently liked and they were recorded onto Pro Tools and stored for him to work on later.

We'd show up at different times every evening, but by eight p.m. generally everyone in the band would be there.  Then we'd wait for Axl, who, when he did come, arrived much, much later.  That was the norm; it was a dark, miserable atmosphere that lacked direction of any kind.  I hung out for a bit; but after a few days I chose to spend my evenings at the strip bar around the corner, with orders for the engineers to call me if Axl decided to arrive.

The Graeco-Russian philosopher George Gurdjieff argued in the early 20th century that humanity lives much of its life in a form of waking sleep.  This all sounds very theoretical --- Gurdjieff was the subject of one of my first four dossiers in 1998 for Disinformation and a 2001 undergraduate essay --- but the right circumstances can drive his point home with clarity.

This past weekend provides two examples apart from the Mumbai siege.  In the first, Jdimytai Damour an agency temp was trampled to death at a Wal-Mart sale in Long Island, New York, on Black Friday, 28th November 2008.  Associated Press coverage quotes Kimberly Cribbs that customers acted like "savages".  The New York Times blamed the media for creating unrealistic expectations about Black Friday sale bargains: the catalyst for a mania.  In the second, Sydney's Glebe Coroner's Court has held an inquest into Emma Hansen's death: Hansen was a pedestrian accidentally killed in 2007 by learner driver Rose Deng, who is still permitted to drive by Australian authorities.  Both incidents illustrate on a micro-scale Gurdjieff's Law of Accident or Law of Hazard ("when an event happens without the lines of the events we observe").

For two overviews of Gurdjieff's philosophy see Richard Smoley's introduction to Gnosis Magazine's special issue here and John Shirley's essay The Shadows of Ideas.  I also recommend Shirley's book Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Ideas (Tarcher, San Francisco, 2004) and his DVD commentary as co-scriptwriter for Alex Proyas' dark gothic masterpiece The Crow (1994), infamous for another Law of Accident case: Brandon Lee's accidental death during a film stunt.

Counterterrorism analysts search for answers as the official death toll from Mumbai's siege rises to 183 people.  We now enter Susan Moeller's second stage of post-terrorist attacks: the hunt for the perpetrators and seeking justice.  See my October 2001 analysis here on the September 11 aftermath and Henry Rollins' reaction in New York City.

Slate's Anne Applebaum observes that we don't yet know much about the group that carried out the attacks.  Applebaum's analysis echoes Walter Laqueur's 'new terrorism' thesis in the mid-to-late 1990s: attempts at mass casualty attacks, tactics from the guerrilla and insurgency playbook, an ideological mix, and groups that either do not claim credit or who are not on the radar of counterterrorism analysts.  Applebaum captures Gregory Treverton's distinction between solvable 'puzzles' and potentially unsolvable 'mysteries' in intelligence analysis.

"The particulars of the attacking group are unknown; the political-military equation from which the group has almost certainly arisen is not," notes The New Yorker's Steve Coll.  The most plausible hypotheses for Coll and other counterterrorism experts are: (1) Pakistan's intelligence services may have funded the group in a clandestine/proxy war with India; or (2) the group emerged as an autonomous cell that was ideologically motivated by the clandestine/proxy war.  Coll explains why at this early stage the Mumbai siege is closer to Treverton's 'mysteries':

If past investigations into such groups prove to be any guide, it may be difficult to find clear-cut evidence of direct involvement by Pakistani intelligence or army personnel. This is because Pakistan, knowing the stakes of getting caught red-handed, has increasingly pursued its clandestine proxy war against India in Kashmir and on the Indian mainland through layers and layers of self-managing and non-state groups. The Pakistani government and its domestic Islamist proxies, including nominally peaceful charities based in Pakistan but with operations in Kashmir, almost certainly pass through money and weapons on a large scale. They do so, however, in such a way that is very difficult to trace these supplies back to the government.

Applebaum highlights the epistemological challenges that counterterrorism analysts face; Coll offers some guidance on how to conduct an investigation on the basis of 'contingent' beliefs and alternative hypotheses.

Pakistan's government denies any role in the Mumbai attacks.  Perhaps forensic analysis of crime scene evidence will provide answers and shift the current speculation from Treverton's 'mystery' to 'puzzle'.  Or maybe not.

The next day Coll analyses India's claim that the group Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the Mumbai attack.

A few months ago publisher Ashley Crawford (of 21C and World Art fame) asked me to contribute to a Photofile Magazine roundtable about a mysterious bunny image.  I sent Ash a brief piece with in-joke references to the Discordianism movement, the horror author H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Adams' novel Watership Down, intelligent design, and the 1977 hoax Alternative 3 (in Photofile #84, Summer 2008, p. 60).  It was a lot of fun.  The image turned out to be Polly Borland's Untitled III (2004-04), and private collector David Walsh now curates a billboard version in Melbourne, Australia.

Actor Mickey Rourke is an Oscar favourite for his Method role in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008).  Press coverage focuses on Rourke's rise-and-fall: how his bad boy image led to onset difficulties in the late 1980s, a bitter breakup with model Carre Otis, and living humiliated, destitute and largely forgotten by the mid-1990s.  Arrogance, self-loathing, and rejecting offers for roles in later blockbusters all played a part in Rourke's banishment to straight-to-video films.  He has waited 15 years in the wilderness before a career turnaround.