Going The Way Of The VHS and 8-Track

The Kodachrome is no more.

James Warren in The Atlantic:

So I beckoned the smartest photography person I know, Mary Panzer, former curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington.

Mary, please, tell photo-ignorant me, who never graduated past his Instamatic, what to think.

“It’s not like getting misty -eyed about  mono records,  rotary phones, or black and white television,” she said. Indeed, we’re losing two things.

First, there’s the quality of Kodachrome images, whether in the form of Super 8 movies or 35mm slides. “Kodachrome delivers a very distinctive range of colors (intense, saturated, slightly tilted to red and green), and a smooth grainless surface that simply looks more luscious than real life.  And all thanks to the fact that someone interrupted the seamless flow of time and sealed it onto a little square  piece of plastic in a cardboard mount (or onto a roll of film in a little round can).”

“Kodachrome is like make-up for the world, lips are redder, and eyelashes blacker, trees are greener, and fall colors are best of all, but no one cares that it all doesn’t look quite real, because everything and everyone looks so beautiful.”

“It doesn’t look real, but it definitely looks like Kodachrome.”

So, if you’re looking for hot and seductive, nothing beats it, she contends. Of course, it’s not perfect.  “Ektachrome give you the feeling of daylight, cool and quiet, a refreshing drink of water rather than a heady glass of champagne. And Ektachrome is still around, at least for the present.”

Camilo Jose Vergara in Slate:

But with Kodachrome 64, I went from being mainly a photographer of poor people to an urban photographer. The buildings I captured changed so rapidly that I decided to rephotograph them as often as I could. What had until then been background for my images became my main interest. Soon I was photographing from different vantage points to better show the urban fabric. (I became a photographer of public housing, since the poorest urban communities are often those with the tallest projects. ) In my photography, people became smaller and smaller. I was often asked: Why don’t you photograph people?

John Gapper in Financial Times

John Steele Gordon in Commentary:

Kodachrome film will soon be no more. It’s been around since 1935 and Paul Simon wrote a song about it in 1973. But it’s been dying along with film photography in general for nearly a generation now, as digital replaces George Eastman’s once wondrous technology.

I was thinking the other day of my grandmother, who died thirty years ago this month, and for some reason began to draw up a list of the technology she never knew because she died in 1979. My grandmother was hardly a technophile but neither was she intimidated by technology (or by anything or anybody else for that matter, but that’s another story). She was more than happy to adopt things (radio, TV, automatic transmission, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, Waring blenders, etc. etc.) as they came along and made life easier and more fun.

What has come along since her death at 89 and is now found in many, if not most, American households is a remarkable list. It’s a measure of how fast the world is changing thanks to what the microprocessor (introduced to the commercial world in 1971, with the digital calculator) has made possible. Just consider some of the stuff we couldn’t get along without and which she never encountered: flat-screen TVs, microwave ovens, cordless phones, ice makers, personal computers, laptops, fax machines, home copiers and printers, GPS, cell phones, Blackberries, Ipods, CDs, DVDs, Tivo, the Internet, Facebook and Twitter, e-mail, Kindle. The list goes on, but you get the idea. Some technologies have already come and gone (VHS, for instance).

Jim Merithew in Wired:

Kodachrome was the first color still film readily available to everyone, but it was widely regarded as the film for professional photographers. It was the film for the globe-trotting National Geographic shooters. It was the film referred to in movies and media, and its color was a visual stamp on the world’s retinas for almost 75 years. Kodachrome’s red was the hue that photographers using other films could only dream of.

You couldn’t process this film in your basement, nor could you get it processed at your local photography store. This special film had to be sent off to Rochester, New York, to the great yellow halls of Kodak headquarters to be processed in the secret Kodachrome soup.

When your copy of National Geographic hit the mailbox, you’d marvel at the richness, clarity and crispness of color those photographers captured. The film was synonymous with the early days of adventurous photographers in exotic lands, capturing photographs of things people and places few knew existed.

It May Be A Weird Institution, But It’s Our Weird Institution

Matt Y notes that Felix Salmon notes two posts. David Roberts at Grist (on cap and trade):

Republicans have settled on a strategy of blanket opposition to both the health care and climate legislation. This obviously isn’t in the best interests of the country; it’s not even obviously in the narrow self-interest of many Republicans. Nonetheless, a combination of increasing ideological rigidity, lack of new ideas, and sheer cussed habit has taken the Right completely out of these debates, except as rock-throwers and gear-grinders. They’ve decided that Democratic successes on either of these major initiatives could fuel further electoral losses, and that’s their worst fear.

It didn’t have to be this way, and many people I talked to evinced genuine surprise at how it’s turned out. The climate bill strategy, for instance, got rolling in December, way back pre-Obama stimulus plan. It was designed around the assumption that in the wake of Obama’s historic win and efforts to reach out across the aisle, a few Republicans could be peeled off.

That didn’t work out. And it can’t be overstated how much unified Republican opposition is shaping things. The debate is entirely between Democrats, entirely along regional lines, and “moderate” Democrats (i.e. those hailing from carbon-intensive districts) have been accorded enormous power. Witness Boucher’s triumphs in the House.

In the Senate, there are maybe two Republican yes votes—the last moderates standing, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins from Maine. That means to get cloture, Dems can lose no more than two votes from their own caucus. Meanwhile, there are far more than two senators on the fence (at best) or likely nos (at worst): Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), Evan Bayh (Indiana), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor (Arkansas), and several others.

And John Gapper at Financial Times (on financial regulation):

The US administration has clearly decided that it simply cannot get any large-scale consolidation of regulation through Congress, given the vested interests involved. But that makes its response to the financial crisis seem more like a whimper than a bang.

Salmon then says:

How did Obama manage to spend all his political capital so quickly? Did it all go on the stimulus bill? Wasn’t the whole point of bringing Rahm in as chief of staff that he could work constructively with Congress to pass an ambitious agenda? And isn’t Obama himself the first president since JFK to have entered the White House from the Senate? I’m not sure when everything went wrong here, but I fear that the damage is now irreparable — and that Obama’s agenda is going to be severely scaled back as a result.

To which Matt Y responds:

The American presidency is a weird institution. If Barack Obama wants to start a war with North Korea and jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not clear that anyone could stop him. If he wants to let cold-blooded murderers out of prison, it’s completely clear that nobody can stop him. But if he wants to implement the agenda he was elected on just a few months ago, he needs to obtain a supermajority in the United States Senate.

Josh Patashnik responds to Matt:

I don’t really see how this makes the presidency a weird institution–what it means is that presidential campaigns are very strange creatures. The reality is that we have a system of government in which domestic policy is by and large set by Congress. You might think this is a good thing or a bad thing–I tend to think it’s a good thing–but it certainly isn’t a new thing; it’s the way the system has always worked. In a more rational world, presidential campaigns would focus exclusively on questions of foreign affairs, judicial appointments, how to run the administrative state, and so forth. Voters would laugh off the stage any presidential candidate pledging to reform entitlement programs or labeling herself the “commander in chief of the economy,” and no campaign would bother putting out, say, detailed proposals for health care reform. It would be almost as ridiculous as a candidate running for the House of Representatives on a platform of overturning Roe v. Wade (though, come to think of it, I guess that happens a fair amount too).

Matt responds to Josh:

I think this goes a little bit too far, but I basically agree. In particular, when it comes to domestic policy we spend way too much time discussing the ins-and-outs of candidates “plans” and too little time talking about how they envision interacting with congress. During the general election, it was extremely difficult to picture what a McCain administration would actually look like given that a Democratic Congress was essentially inevitable. And during the Democratic primary, debates between the candidates often seemed to presuppose that sheer force of will could get a health reform bill enacted. Meanwhile, I don’t recall the candidates in either the primary or the general having anything interesting to say about minor things like China.

Big Tent Democrat at Talk Left:

Yglesias has this wrong. The American Presidency is only weakened on policy when Democrats hold the office. This is, in part, because the Left Flank of the Democratic Party is incredibly ineffectual.

I once thought that the Left blogs could help to change that. But it seems there is much more interest in being Charlie Cooks and Stu Rothenbergs or in engaging in food fights with the Right blogs and Glenn Beck than in shaping the policy of the country .

Between the two posts above, Yglesias has another post up about the American system:

Now of course Texas is also a big state (though at 7.81 percent of the population it’s a lot smaller than California) and there are small states (like Vermont and North Dakota) that have two Democratic Senators. So the point here isn’t a narrowly partisan one, though the wacky apportionment of the Senate does have a partisan valence. The point is that this is an unfair and bizarre way to run things. If you consider that the mean state would contain two percent of the population, we have just 34 Senators representing the above-average states even though they collectively contain 69.15 percent of the population. The other 66 Senators represent about 30 percent of the people. If the Iranians were to succeed in overthrowing their theocracy and set about to write a new constitution, nobody in their right mind would recommend this system to them.

James Joyner responds:

Probably not — but we might have been better off recommending something like that to the Iraqis.  Some form of strong federalism or even confederalism makes a lot of sense in cases where states are comprised of geographically bound subgroupings with a strong sense of separate identity and history of autonomy.

The problem in the United States is that our current system no longer reflects the reality on the ground.  Most of us are now highly mobile with no strong sense of place-related identity.  Most Californians or New Yorkers or Virginians probably just think of themselves as Americans and only incidentally as residents of their states. This is least true, however, in the less populated states, which tend to be comprised of residents with intergenerational roots and therefore much more provincial.

Everybody Open Your Hymnals To Section 363

Much debate in the blogosphere over the situation regarding Chrysler and the hedge funds, especially from the right side of the sphere:

Jim Manzi:

“How should we decide who makes what “sacrifice” when a corporation can not meet all of its financial obligations? In the U.S., we use bankruptcy court. Courts are effective for this purpose, in part because they are somewhat more insulated from immediate political pressures than are other agencies of the government. The reason that this matters is that investors require stability of rules in order to agree to put money at risk. This is Rule-of-Law 101. Given that a key political constituency that helped elect the President, unions, are a party to the Chrysler dispute, the potential for undermining the rule of law is obvious and severe.”

He links to both Seeking Alpha and Megan McArdle.

Noah Millman has a post up about the matter. He takes a different tact than McArdle and Manzi:

“So the government was at the table before the table was set. Before the hedge funds bought this distressed secured debt, they knew that the government was a major player in determining the outcome for the various stakeholders in the auto companies. Among the many factors in their investment decision, preeminent was the need to try to game what the government was going to do.

It’s very hard, once that context is established, for me to get terribly exercised about the Administration’s decision to play hardball negotiator on behalf of the UAW. Ever since the auto companies showed up on Capitol Hill begging for a bailout, they became political enterprises, and investors at every level must have understood that…

…Let me be clear about one thing. If allegations that the Obama Administration threatened to use the IRS to punish some of the hedge fund holdouts are true, then there’s been actual criminal activity and there should be a full investigation. But short of that kind of abuse of the government’s police power, I can’t get that excited about the government favoring this or that stakeholder. What did you expect would happen when you invite the government into your company?”

John Hinderaker at Powerline has two posts up on this, here and here. He also links to Michael Barone. In the second post, he discusses the story that the Obama administration threatened some of the creditors with the White House press corps. WH has denied that story. Michelle Malkin has a post up with audio from an interview with Tom Lauria, who represents some of the creditors.

Financial Times’s John Gapper also has a piece up defending the hedge funds:

“President Obama is trying to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to shove these investors into taking a worse deal than they could ordinarily expect under Chapter 11. The Tarp-funded banks that voted for the deal were no doubt aware of how they might by pilloried if they did not do so.

But there is a decent chance that the bankruptcy judge will ignore all of this poltical grandstanding in favour of longstanding legal principles, and so he or she should.”

From the other side, Naked Capitalism has a guest post up concerning the issue:

“In essence, section 363 gives the bankrupt entity, in this case, Chrysler, the right to sell assets to another organization, in this case Fiat, BEFORE creditors can challenge the Chapter 11 reorganization plan. This significantly reduces the collateral against which secured creditors can make claims in bankruptcy.

The long and short is this:

• Secured creditors might have gotten more in liquidation than they were being offered before Chrysler filed for bankruptcy.
• However, because of section 363 of the bankruptcy code, Chrysler can sell substantially all of its assets to Fiat without creditor approval and before it has a definitive reorganization plan
• This leaves the secured lenders out of luck. They could end up with less money than had they accepted the deal offered them earlier.”

The post links to this AmLawDaily post, which, in part, discusses Lauria’s past motions to the court.

“Lauria has been here before. In the contentious Adelphia Communications bankruptcy, Lauria led a group of creditors that filed late motions calling for a special trustee to investigate whether each group of note holders was getting what they deserved, according to this 2006 story from the New York Law Journal. A judge dismissed his motion, calling it a “nuclear war button” that threatened to disrupt the planned sale of Adelphia’s prime assets to Time Warner and Comcast for nearly $18 billion.”

Felix Salmon offers no love for the hedge funds. Neither does NYT’s Floyd Norris. Nor Andrew Leonard at Salon.

Ed Morrissey posts today that Lauria has filed a motion. He argues that the sale doesn’t meet the requirements of 363(f) on the Bankruptcy Code, the sale is not in good faith and the sale violate the 5th Amendment.

UPDATE: Daniel Gross in Slate.

Andrew Stuttaford at The Corner, linking to this piece by John Carney.

UPDATE #2: More from Ed Morrissey on the threats.

UPDATE #3: Post up from Steve Jakubowski at the Bankruptcy Litigation Blog. (h/t Calculated Risk.)

UPDATE #4: Ed Morrissey with an audio of Laura Ingraham and Chuck Todd.

UPDATE #5: John Cole has no sympathy for the hedge funds. The language is not safe for the children.

UPDATE #6: Greg Mankiw

UPDATE #7: More today from the left and right. Left: John Cole and TPM’s Moe Tkacik, Tkacik commenting on the motion to have the hedge funds’s names sealed to protect them from anonymous blog commentators. They were denied the motion.

From the right, we have John Hinderaker linking to Michael Barone:

“Left-wing bloggers have been saying that the White House’s denial of making threats should be taken at face value and that Lauria’s statement is not evidence to the contrary. But that’s ridiculous. Lauria is a reputable lawyer and a contributor to Democratic candidates. He has no motive to lie. The White House does.

Think carefully about what’s happening here. The White House, presumably car czar Steven Rattner and deputy Ron Bloom, is seeking to transfer the property of one group of people to another group that is politically favored. In the process, it is setting aside basic property rights in favor of rewarding the United Auto Workers for the support the union has given the Democratic Party. The only possible limit on the White House’s power is the bankruptcy judge, who might not go along.”

More from Jacob Sullum in Reason.

UPDATE #8: More from Ed Morrissey.

UPDATE #9: John Berlau at Human Events.

Another piece by John Carney, (h/t Naked Capitalism). NC says:

“Wall Street has gotten so piggy that up to a point, I’m not bothered by a show of force back. Without having a bit more detail, it’s hard to know whether Team Obama stepped over the line. Remember, J, Edgar Hoover supposedly had dossiers on everyone who counted in America (recall the public had more privacy than it has now), and Nixon had an enemies’ list. DC is more thuggish than we like to believe.”

UPDATE #10: Via David Frum, here’s a letter from a hedge fund managing partner in NYT’s Dealbook.

UPDATE:#11: We’ve got multiple posts from Frum:

One

Two, with a link to Mickey Kaus at Slate. (Or what should be, it doesn’t work right now, we’ve got what we think would be the link.) Actually, two links here and here

Three, a statement from Reps. Darrell Issa and Lamar Smith.

UPDATE #12: Malkin again.

UPDATE #13: A plethora of posts on Cliff Asness (see Dealbook link above), via Scott W. Johnson at Powerline:

Diana West

New York Magazine

I believe I linked to this John Hinderaker post before, but here it is again.

UPDATE #14: Scott W. Johnson at Powerline.

John Cole

And via Cole, The Epicurean Dealmaker