Angela Merkel is visiting Beijing and traffic was more or less shut down on Chang'an Avenue this afternoon to allow her motorcade to pass. I loved this Beijing cabbie's pose as he waited. He's got it all: the wife beater, the gut, the combover, the omnipresent cigarette ... something timeless about him.
(Click to enlarge)
Another recording studio documentary, like Muscle Shoals, except Sound City was in California and Joe Gottfried seems to have worked only with white musicians. This one touched more on the technology side of things and how some software called Pro Tools? has changed the whole music business. Apparently people "make" albums on their laptops now and recording studios are obsolete. This one I also fast forwarded after an hour or so in.
About three brothers in Detroit who formed a band called "Death" in the 1970s. Here's a New York Times article about them: This Band Was Punk Before Punk Was Punk. I wasn't especially interested in this story and fast forwarded it after an hour in. A really fascinating movie about another unknown musician from Detroit was recently made: Searching for Sugarman ... that's one you should watch.
No changes this week. Another week like the last in the bonds (TBT) and they will reverse for sure.
This one was hard to watch and I stopped after 100 minutes (with another hour to go). Movie is about the death squads in Indonesia who murdered around a million "communists" in 1965-66. A lot of those killed were ethnic Chinese. There's a paramilitary organization called Pancasila Youth that still exists, has millions of members, specializes in intimidation, shakedowns (again of Chinese merchants), vote rigging, etc. Weird, I didn't know Indonesia is that screwed up.
The movie tried to mix in these strange performance art pieces, bizarre. Made an uncomfortable viewing experience ("the banality of evil") that much worse. It didn't help that the sidekick of one of the executioners (seen dancing on a former killing ground in screenshot below) looked exactly like Stephen Chow's sidekick in Kung Fu Hustle.
Told the story of a professional snowboarder named Kevin Pearce who suffered a terrible fall (see below) in 2009 and is brain damaged as a result. Documented his recovery which was pretty amazing ... he's a genuinely sweet kid, has a really nice, strong family behind him ... when they did play the crash reel of all these skateboarders and BMXers, and snowmobile and dirtbike jumpers, I admit I covered my eyes, couldn't watch it. 22 foot walls in the half pipe present a lot of risk. I had a childhood friend who was in a terrible car crash and is also brain damaged as a result ... he too made a remarkable recovery, but like Pearce, is not his old self. Good movie to show to someone who takes outsized risks, it might make them think twice.
No great surprise to those of us who have been following this stock: NQ Mobile Inc. Announces Changes to its Board of Directors and Provides Status Update of the 2013 Annual Audit. Can't wait to read Frederick Ziegel's next company update. He's an analyst at Topeka Capital Markets who has been bullish on NQ (Buy rating, $33 price target), even after everyone else (Piper Jaffray, Macquarie, Cannacord) wisely suspended coverage.
Spoilers ... the filmmaker tricks the audience by mixing real old family film footage with re-created scenes ... I wondered why there was so much old film footage at first .... anyway, the story of a Milkman's Child, i.e., the girl's father isn't her biological father and she doesn't learn that fact until she's in her twenties. The people who really suffered here, besides the girl, were her mother and real father who kept the secret, and the man who raised her, once he learns the truth. Her siblings are hurt too, but not as badly as the older generation. All the young people in this movie are really attractive and intelligent and articulate, despite being Canadian (a joke). I don't think I would have found the story as engaging if the people had been dumb and ugly.
Deutsche Bank keeps this kind of interesting chart:
They use the Liv-ex Fine Wine 100. They're not all French wines, there are a couple Italian wine components like Ornellaia and Sassicaia.
Sad to read that the SG$10,000 will be retired. Equivalent to around US$8,000, it's a favorite of drug dealers, coal barons, smugglers, property developers, gamblers, and day traders everywhere.