Monthly Archives: August 2003

Iraq: postscript

Posted on by
Reply

I really am through talking about Iraq; at least for the foreseeable future. But I want to point you to this interesting post about the ‘not so hidden agenda’ in Iraq by Edward Hughes. He quoted from a fascinating document (In MSWord) that Barry Ritholtz wrote for his clients BEFORE the Iraq war started. Barry incidentally has a cool economics /market weblog that is definitely worth checking out.
Edward also speculated about the Iraq war in a post two days back in which he quoted Elliot Otti. Otti articulated much better what I now feel about the subject.

If the US public has been suckered into supporting the liberation of Iraq, then the big question is, how far are they prepared to go, and are there limits to that support? …..William Nordhaus estimated prior to the war that the first Gulf War damaged about $250 billion worth of Iraqi infrastructure; for both wars the costs of reconstruction to bring Iraqi infrastructure back to pre-1980 levels will be in the ballpark of $500 billion, and this is not including the costs of occupation, or of reparations for the first Gulf war. All in all, the US taxpayer could be looking at a total price tag of as much as a trillion dollars, spread out over 10 to 20 years. …..
The vision of Iraq as a shining beacon of democracy and prosperity in the Middle East is likely to remain just that, an illusion. I think Juan Cole nailed it when he said that the best scenario that can be reasonably hoped for is if Iraq turns out similar to the way India is now: corrupt, inefficient, flawed, but reasonably democratic, reasonably multicultural, and reasonably peaceful.
This is the best case scenario, and it’s going to take between half a trillion to a trillion dollars to achieve it, an amount that the US taxpayer is largely going to have to bankroll alone. Given that this was not a deal they signed up knowingly for, unlike the West Germans, how much will they collectively stomach? How deep will they reach into their wallets before they say “Enough is enough”, and vote in a new administration on a platform of withdrawal from Iraq? And what happens to Iraq in such a case? (My guess: look at Iran).
It’s easy to dismiss such concerns …. Unfortunately, liberation does not always bring a better future with it. Forty years after liberation from the British, oil-rich Nigeria has suffered a terrible civil war, numerous lesser insurgencies, decades of brutal military dictatorships, a few years of corrupt civilian governments, and the end result is that, sad as it may be, the standard of living of the average Nigerian is now lower than it was at independence. The collapse of the Soviet Union led not to prosperity in Russia, but the exchange of crony socialism for the worst kind of crony capitalism, and a drastic decline in living standards for Russians not fortunate enough to be part of the incrowd when the looting of State-held institutions commenced under Yeltsin.

I think there may be some light at the end of the tunnel. The shocking death yesterday of the UN envoy in Iraq demonstrates that Iraq is in danger of becoming a magnet for all sorts of loonies. It is actually in the interest of the international community now to clean up the mess that US is creating in Iraq. I suspect that the other western countries may now figure out some face saving way of entering the fray in Iraq. That may not make Iraq a ‘shining beacon of democracy’, but anything would be better than this.

Iraq: The end of the road

Posted on by

The WMD justification for war has been unravelling for some time now. The carefully worded, meticulously researched article by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Washington Post has destroyed whatever credibility that the US government?s original case for war had.
It is beginning to dawn on me that politics as it is practiced in the Western world is not very different from the way politics is practiced back home in India. The sleaze touches almost everyone. The politicos in US run a way more sophisticated operation, though if you dig deep as you make your way down south, you are bound to feel queasy.
I was not especially bothered about the disintegrating case for war on this side of the Atlantic. I don?t think truthfulness is this US government?s strong point. I also felt (and still feel) that the overthrow of Saddam was a good thing anyway. But what followed seems to be worse. I also had a soft corner for Blair. I believed that his support for war was based on his conviction and that the sleaze did not reach 10, Downing Street. It was of course my political naivet?.
The Hutton enquiry is giving tantalizing glimpses of the British government?s decision-making process (A more accessible Guardian coverage here). You see the footprints of Blair?s staff all over the place. That is what is so fucking sad. It is unquestionable that Gillian did a sloppy job of reporting the events. His credibility may never recover. BBC did not exactly cover itself in glory. It is now becoming evident that Alastair Campbell did not force anyone to insert the 45 minute claim into the dossier. But the crux of the BBC story was essentially correct; that the British government let questionable intelligence take center stage in their dossiers in order to sex up the case for war. The whole war of words by the British government against BBC over the semantics of their reportage distracted from that. Many people now suspect that Campbell may have feigned the outrage in order to distract attention from the story. (Whatever may be the case, you have to be impressed by Campbell as an operator!)
But if the case for WMD was completely manufactured and the relationship between iraq and Al Quaida never existed, we are bound to wonder why did the US and British governments decide to invade Iraq. At a simplistic level the answer is easy. If done right, it gives US a powerful military presence in the Middle East, a US friendly government in a country which has the second largest oil reserve in the world and allows them to alter the balance of power in the middle east. It also allowed the neoconservatives to play the fantasy game of bringing democracy to the middle east (I used to be a believer in that fiction, but looking at the chaos that the last few months of US occupation has created in Iraq, I see Beirut, not Japan.). I do think democratization of Iraq could have worked and it was possible to create in Iraq a role model for the entire Middle East. But Bush?s foreign policy team has neither the depth or maturity nor the cultural sensitivity to accomplish that. It was a right war, but wrong warriors. It was also a wrong call on my part.
At a deeper level, many people suspect that US did this in order to walk away from Saudi Arabia. There was a very persuasive story in FT a few days back. (I would try to look it up and quote from there). Commentators in Guardian also speculated about that.
The American people in the heartland, the people that this administration care about, don?t seem to care much about the innuendos and misrepresentations made in the case for war. And this government doesn?t care about international public opinion. But people obviously care about the deaths. They do care about the cost of waging this war. And the elections are coming.
Bush has a smart team of political advisers who would not let the daily trickle of deaths compromise his prospects for elections So whatever may had been the underlying reason for war, I now fear that in order to show a rosy picture back home and extricate itself before the 2004 election the US is going to continue to penny-pinch in Iraq and hand over the running of reconstruction and war to the private contractors of the kind that used run wars in West Africa. However, if the western world now washes its hands off Iraq, it would lead to its Beirutization, an exponential increase in religious fundamentalism, and a disaster that the future generations will pay for.

Guy Bourdin

Posted on by
2

There are interesting photography exhibitions going on in London this summer. Kimmelman made a detour to London on his way back from Venice to catch The Guy Bourdin exhibition in V&A and ‘Cruel and tender’ show in Tate, (arguably) the first photoography retrospective there. (The article was free when I first bookmarked it, but it is now priced. Unless you have access to the archive anyway, it is probably not worth the price of admission)
From whatever I have seen of Bourdin’s photographs (Link NOT work safe), I have always been curious about him. The current spate of coverages in art magazines following the V&A retrospective, gave me the opportunity to catch up. Pre-Bourdin fashion world was largely pictorial. It would navigate the safe territory of conventional female sexuality to sell products. But in the seventies, Bourdin’s spreads in Vogue alongwith those of Helmut Newton’s blew them away. using loud colors, metaphors drawn from the art world transposed into fetishistic images bordering on soft porn, Bourdin introduced the idea of staged narratives into the fashion world the reverberations of which are still being felt.
As the May/June issue of ‘Tate Arts and Culture’ notes,

His international campaigns for Charles Jourdan shoes (1967-81) were a milestone in the history of advertising, the first sustained effort at seducing the viewer with an image rather than the product it promotes. Jourdan ads turned magazine readers into witnesses: to uncanny scenes implying shoe fetishism and violence (often evoked withe the most elegant economy, through the absence of the victim herself), to enigmatic scenes with mirrors, snapshots, mannequins and other decoys, confounding our sense of reality ….
Both Gustav Courbet’s ‘Jo, La Belle Irlandaise’ (1866) and Bourdin’s image for Charles Jourdan in the summer of 1977 depict a beautiful redhead gazing at a reflection of herself, her flaming hair set off by a contemporary background….Bourdin adds his own signature touches – the high gloss materials, the provocative gamine pose -transporting the scene to the present day, while the contrasting light and darkness add surprising depth and wonderment.
“There is nothing so poetic in the world as the death of a beautiful woman” – Edgar Allan Poe (said). A model lies (nearly) nude in the semi darkness of a hotel room , her Charles Jourdan-sandalled feet overhanging the end of the plain bed. The door to the room is wide open; a small boy passing in the corridor catches a glimpse of her immobile figure. The model’s head and shoulders are violently cropped out of the image, and ‘replaced’ by those of a mime like figure on a television screen facing us, the viewer……”
The resemblance of this woman to a corpse is not imagined. Her position nearly parallel to the picture plane, her rigid, joined legs, the rumpled white bed linen and the pleated white loincloth are virtually identical to those of LE christ Mort by Philippe de Champaigne (1602-74) in the Louvre. The V&A exhibition reveals that Bourdin created a precise, full size drawing of this scene in preparation for the photograph: notably, the woman’s feet are bare, as are Christ’s.
The suggestion of autobiographical elements in the image – that Bourdin is picturing ‘his and our greatest fear’, the loss of the mother – is plausible. The boy in the picture is not a professional model, but the artist’s son.
Steeped in the works of Poe, Charles Baudelaire, the surrealist artists and those from their pantheons, not to mention Alfred Hitchcock and popular detective stories, Bourdin brought the taste for the macabre to his magazine work. The list of expired heroines he portrayed disguised as fashion models runs from Cleopetra and Snow White to Elizabeth Siddan posing for John Everett Millas as the drowning Ophelia (1851-52, Tate Bretain). Although conceived for supposedly superficial fashion magazines, we can read nearly all of Bourdin’s fashion and beauty work as memento mori, pointing to the vanity of the very glamorous world he represents.

Bourdin had a lousy personal life. His first wife is suspected of having committed suicide. His two girlfriends who followed her certainly did. Bourdin actually wanted to be a painter and used to paint at leisure. He did not think much of his advertising work and consistently refused permission for an exhibition of his photographs or publication in a book form. He was also very demanding. It was also the pre-photoshop, pre-digital era. He used to subject his models to rather horrifying ordeals in order to get the effect that he wanted. One model had pretty serious trouble getting stuff off her face after one her shoots. Another almost drowned while a narrative Bourdin was shooting went awry. Some refused to work with him. Others thrived and came back again and again. He maintained fanatical control over his finished image and is probably the only one from that era who did not let the magazine or the advertiser change anything in the photograph (Short bio here).
During the eighties, prudishness came back into vogue. Bourdin’s work lost favour with the advertisers. Once grunge took over the fashion scene, Bourdin’s name went off the public radar.
It is only now, over the last few years, that Bourdin is coming back into circulation again. Pictured magazine in their June 2003 issue said

“Nick Knight was among the first to reassess his relevance. In 1993 the prevailing grunge look – the thrift store clothes, little or no make-up was finally wasting away. Knight had been spending some quality time in the archive at Pentagram, nursing a growing sense of epiphany as he leafed through back issues of Nova and vintage French Vogue. In the photography of Bourdin, alongwith Helmut Newton and Chris Wagenheim, he had found the antethesis of neo-realism: “It wa so wrong it was right, and I thought I must do something with this.”
What he did ws reference it to the nth degree. “I thought I’d like almost to take the exact idea of the steak on the face, or the girl tied to the tree, or the hosepipe, or the water being thrown or the shiny green backgrounds and the shiny red red backgrounds, and the ring flas and everything …I wanted to bring it all back in one go, throw it all over the fashion scene and see how it looked.”
Re’mi Babinet, creative director of BETC Euro RSCG says “Bourdin was the first person in advertising to say that the image of a product is not just a picture, or a pack shot; it’s a whole universe, a whole world.
That concept is now so central to advertising and the milieu of fashion that it’s almost impossible to imagine a time before branding really got its claws into the hearts and minds of consumers. But it wasn’t just this that set him apart, it has his dedication to the idea that he could sell without ever having to sell out.
Charlotte Cotton (curator of the exhibition) singles out Steven Meisel as Bourdin’s most accomplished successor. “He’s the best. A huge proportion of the advertising you see is by Steven Meisel – Dolce and Gabbana, Prada, Versace, Valantino – and every campaign is so different.” The connections are there to be made; his current campaign for Dolce and Gabbana features model Gisele surrounded by CCTV cameras and monitors, each trained on a different part of her body. The sense of voyeurism, and the play on the act of looking are undeniably ‘Very Bourdin’. His advertisements for Valentino echo Bourdin’s image of a model with alarge photograph held in front to preserve modesty.”
…Perhaps closest of all in terms of artistry are Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. “Their production process strikes me as quite similar,” says Cotton “The way that Bourdin worked, he virtually invented a life story for a charecter or a kind of a scene before he took the photograph. Inez and Vinoodh do that as well and the fact that the emphasis is on everything before the shutter has clicked is something which I think puts them in the same league as Bourdin.” They too have worked the homage vibe, not least in a campaign for Patrick Cox shoes that recalls the tone of the Bourdin/Jordan advertising.”

Art Auction magazine in their last issue went further. It claimed that the cinematic images of Gregory Crewdson and Philip diCorcia or the staged narrative of Cindy Sherman follow directly in the tradition of Bourdin and what he accomplished. (I think Crewdson’s current work is more accessible than Bourdin’s, but it has the same edginess.)
Pictured quoted Knight as saying:

“I have always wrestled with the dilemma of whether what you do in a fashion photograph can be made to work in a film,” explains Knight. Bourdin’s early efforts appears to prove it can. “They have as much strength and they bring just as uch sense of unease and danger as his photography brings. It keeps the same tension …..His work has as much artistic integrity as any respected artist, as Jackson Pollack or Damien Hirst. And I think that makes people working in fashion slightly better about what they do. But that validity is something that came at great personal cost.”

Other links:
Excerpt from Exhibit A
Shine Gallery that manages sell of Bourdin prints
Other stories

India and China III

Posted on by

I really wanted to post about Guy Bourdin, but I am not done with it yet. So I would continue where I left off about Indian and Chinese economies.
Those who have read my last two posts (here and here) about India and China probably realize that I am not terribly optimistic about India’s prospect of shooting ahead China in terms of economic growth. Neither are most observers. However, Mr. Tarun Khanna, a professor in Harvard Business School and Yasheng Huang, a political science professor in MIT had recently written an article in ‘Foreign Policy’ magazine that sounded optimistic. It says,

“India has something that China doesn’t. “Companies that compete with the best that Europe and China has to offer”, such as software company Infosys Technologies Ltd. and pharmaceutical maker Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd. India lacks the physical hardware of a modern economy, but it has more of the software of a modern economy – courts, financial system and the like – than China. Their bottom line: India’s homegrown entrepreneurs may give it a long term advantage over a China hamstrung by inefficient banks and capital markets.”

For a Wall Street Journal story on August 28 called ‘India Could Narrow Its Economic Gap With China’ Mr David Wessel hinterviewed Khanna. Khanna claimed:

“China was sold to multinationals to allow it to sidestep entrepreneurs…you could be hardpressed to find a single homegrown Chinese firm that operates on a global scale and markets its own products abroad”

. WSJ noted wrily:

The argument, not surprisingly, is making them very popular in India. Their article has been widely described or reprinted in the Indian press, not always with permission. (Note to India: Intellectual-property rights matter). The Chinese, Mr. khanna hears, are translating it and distributing it discreetly.
..Joydeep Mukherji, who tracks India and China for Standard and Poor in New York, thinks the professors are on to something….He finds that Chinese miracle is less impressive than its press clippings. Shave a bit off the official statistics for exeggeration, China has grown probably 7% a year for the past decade of so. India has grown at 6%. But China as a nation saves about 40% of income and invests that plus what the foreigners invest. India saves about 24% domestically, and draws relatively little foreign investment.
So China to make it simple, is like a business that invests $40 and earns $7 a year. India invests $24 and earns $6 a year ( Ed: This back-of-a-paper-napkin kind of calculation is, to my mind, way too simplistic. But who am I to argue with Standard and Poor?)….
“India gets more bang for its buck”. Mr. Mukherjee says. Its banks have less than half as many bad loans as China’s. “The bottom line for me: If India can raise its savings and investment rate modestly, then it can raise its growth rate quickly”. That “if” ..is an important qualifier. Mr. Huang and Mr. Khanna may yet prove to be lousy forecasters.”

In my previous posts on the same subject, I also talked about slavery and its impact on world trade. I noticed that Edward Hughes had also weighed in on the subject in a fascinating e-mail that he sent out sometime back that. It had interesting insights:

“Paul Krugman has asked the interesting question: “why hasn’t indentured servitude made a comeback in the modern era”. I’ve a sneaky feeling that his interest in this topic may not be unrelated to the projected ‘relative personpower shortage’ there will be in the developed world in the coming decades, and thus the potential for shifting relative factor values. My own instincts are that Paul is barking up the wrong tree here if you want to think about the world as we know it ….
The best way to start looking for it might be by going back to the problem of “indentured servitude”, and asking why is this not being re-inevted. You see, my response would be to say that it already has. It already has due to the the existence of what is called ‘undocumented labour’. This is a strange anomally since it is precisely the absence of documentation which creates the servitude, and the servitude is based on an oral rather than a written contract, enforced either by some fairly nasty looking people, or by the permanent threat of recourse to official judicial procedures. It is a really strange irony this which leads our democratic ‘rule of law’ to become the infrastructural underpinning for the most extensive abuse of ‘wage labour’ since the time of feudalism.
I first started thinking about things in this way after a chat with Margy, Bonobo’s Sofia-based anthropologist. Regular readers will know we’ve been having some difficulties with the Bulgarian e-mail filters, and that the problem may relate to our use of the term ‘locutorio’ or call-centre (this is the place where the illegals send the money home). Now Margy asked me what I knew about Bularia’s Tsar (you see how I went straight to Krugman in my head) Simeone. Well the interesting detail is that he spent a good part of his exile in Madrid, his wife is Spanish, as are his four children. Now I don’t think I’ll make explicit what should be clear implicity, I value my health too much. The second little pearl that I got from Margy was her question: do you have a market in your village? Well I was slow, and didn’t understand, I think I was thinking about all those nice Proven?al village markets my wife so loves. No, she came back, a slave market. And my mind was suddenly down in Andalusia, in Almeria and El Ejido, with the images of all those migrants waiting on street corners for the ‘jefe’ to arrive and select the meat he needs for the day. I was born in Liverpool, and can still remember the humiliating rituals associated with casual labour (from Ireland, of course) on the docks. And then I thought of slave-slav, and a very interesting piece by the much under-valued Ronnie Findlay. The point here is that Findlay stresses the importance for the evolution of the European economy of the ‘white’ slave trade, of Slavs via the Netherlands down to Andalucia and North Africa. And then two little neurones suddenly fired-off together. History in a certain sense is repeating itself, only it’s tragedy both times, no comedy here. The indenturing system is in fact the nation state with limited legal right to movement. In parallel with this is an enormous modern ‘slaving’ system, which officially speaking does not exist (nor is its existence treated in any neo-classical model that I’ve ever seen).
So whole countries are literally converted into ‘people farms’. Remember some countries only have one known source of export earnings: their children. Pakistan and Ecuador immediately come to mind, but there are of course others. In the Philipines the topic is taken so seriously that the ministry of labour has a special department to handle ‘migrant labour’. Then there are the new countries from the East, the slav/slaves, or the undocumented Kurds in Syria (they have no legal status at all!). Well you can see where all this goes. Indentured labour has just been re-invented (if it ever died out) and on a massive and unprecedented scale. The consequence: a reduction in the relative price of unskilled labour (and incidentally one more reason why deflation is coming). This labour needs to move freely and legally. It is strange how all our ideologues are strangely quiet on one topic where market mechanisms really could work against vested interests. Wage levels would regulate the movement of free people, and equilibrate an unbalanced world. But as Paul says, oh never mind.”