Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category
May 21st, 2011
Midnight in Paris
I saw ‘Midnight in Paris’ last night.
You should too.
Spoiler Alert.
It’s ironic that I should see it last night having just written my previous post about the importance of staying fresh. The movie is not just an ode to the beauty of Paris today, but of Paris of the past. The Paris of Fitzgerald, Picasso. Hemingway and not their ghosts but actually them. It is if nothing else an extended riff on the Woodman’s old joke about Gertrude Stein punching him in the mouth , (btw Hemingway steals the show). Because it’s comedy calling it a meditation would be a stretch but it is certainly an examination of the merits of the past contrasted with the values of the present.
And I saw the film through two lenses, one – the lens of the present – the one that I had just deployed in writing about the importance about not rushing into the past and saying ‘It’s better!’ but then my own deeply personal one. For you see, I wrote a novella (since abandoned) about a man traveling back to the 20’s with his wife to hang with the Fitzgerald’s and the Murphy’s during the ‘Tender is the Night’ years on the French Riviera. And the person that wrote, the 28-year old version of me was quite romantically in love with the time, the characters, and the notion of being terribly, terribly in love and drunk and LOST. But now, the older version, well, I’m just fine with how things are and the one two punch of writing yesterday’s post and seeing the film only cements that.
But see the movie. It’s not quite the Woodman at his best but it’s pretty freakin’ great.
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May 20th, 2011
On the Importance of Staying Fresh – the Sea Change is Past
A little over two weeks ago at the invitation of Duke Professor Cathy Davidson I attended the Milken Institute 2011 Conference at the Beverly Hills Hilton. Putting aside the easy potshots I could take at the audience made up predominantly of white men over the age of 55 and that the $5,000.00 a head ticket price that excluded nearly all people of interest – I was stunned by what I felt was the tenor of negativity on Professor Davidson’s panel.
The panel provocatively titled “The Attention Deficit Society: What Technology Is Doing to Our Brains” had brought together the right crowd, Nick Carr author of ‘The Shallows’, MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, and Clifford Nass of Stanford, to mull over and chew on what our hyper-connected world hat wrought, but it was stunningly one note, “It’s all bad.” (The entirety of their conversation can be viewed here ) Now, mind you I freely admit to being highly distracted, I even joked about it by tweeting from the panel that I was on my iPad. While I’ve been writing this I have been IM’ing with my friend Noah Brier in New York and odds are I’ll get an email and read it before I’m done with this post, but what stunned me about this panel, even accounting for everybody’s need to flog their POV to sell their book and then go to the next event, was the desire to go back in time to a seemingly more nuanced and deep-thinking era when we all talked to each other in person or on the phone.
It’s not that I don’t value the face-to-face or am equally fermished when I get a text vs. a phone call if I felt like connecting with somebody or making plans, but what Cathy’s fellow panelists kept insisting was that texting, IM’ing, or even Face-Time, Skype or iChat were all of lesser value or somehow had a deleterious effect on person to person communication. And moreover that by engaging in this form of communication people were forgetting what it meant to communicate, but that held true only if the only ‘true’ way of communicating is to meet in person. Forget for the moment that this may or may not be true, it just struck me that the collective position of her fellow panelists was the age-old if-I-stick-my-head-in-the-sand it isn’t happening. It was as if they were behaving much like the record industry did when Napster hit, as if you could turn back the tide, or that turning back the tide of connectivity is the answer.
To me, there’s two specific problems with this line of thinking, and it’s less the desire to go back in time but the way it was presented. One, you can’t stop change. The train has left the station. The cat’s out of the bag. The genie’s escaped the bottle. We are in the midst of a total sea change that fundamentally alters how we go about our daily lives and to swim against the tide is not only pointless but potentially hazardous. It is very much if you can’t beat them, join them. The other is assuming that which has come before is better, preferred the only way to be.
But what struck me most of all was Cathy’s willingness to partake in the developments of the Internet vs. a kind of Chicken Little ‘the Sky is Falling’ mentality illustrated for me the necessity of remaining open, of staying fresh to the possibilities of this world vs. clamming up, drying up and aging towards dinosaur status prematurely. I had the pleasure of meeting Norman Lear earlier this year and the twinkle in that man’s eye, he is 89 years old!, is amazing. He is to my mind younger than me for he has that rarest gift of being curious, of being engaged. It’s what Cathy Davidson has, it’s what I hope to have more of, it’s what we all need.
Sure. Fight the Power. But just be sure what Power you’re fighting.
Global Connectivity #FTW.
Here is a brief post-panel interview with Cathy’s own characterization of that morning’s discussion. Unsurprisingly we are on the same side of this one.
The Internet is Terrible from Todd Krieger on Vimeo.
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April 19th, 2011
James Murphy I Love You and I’m Okay With That
LCD's Final Show at Madison Square Garden
It’s been a glorious six+ months since the wonder that is James Murphy fully entered my life. I was at his concert at the Hollywood Bowl on a misty October night in 2010, an evening which for the 17,000 or so assembled smacked of magic. The mixture of Murphy’s obsessive sound-checking professionalism coupled with the outrageous acoustic potential of the bowl and my very low expectations (sure they sound great on my iPod but how could a group clearly so versed in the studio possibly do anything live) led to my having one of the most fantastic nights of my life.
The sound was lush. And no I must not hush.
As I floated out of the bowl with the rest of the dance-happy crew it seemed we had indeed seen something extraordinary but only in the days and weeks that passed as the blogposts got written, IMs exchanged and new friendships formed around that night did it become clear just how tremendous the impact of the show was, not just on me, but on nearly everybody who attended.
And so, I went deeper into the ’system. And read interviews, watched videos, beginning to understand a little bit more about the man they call James Murphy, the man behind the LCD. The picture which appeared was a totally pleasant one of a guy with some skills who had some ideas and just kept working at it and working at it and then when his moment arrived he said, “Sure. I’ll do that.” That he was a sound engineer made sense. That he threw massive (ecstasy) parties in New York suggested where his vibe may have been burnished. And that he was really pretty nonplussed about how great things were going for him, IF ONLY BECAUSE HE WAS HAVING SO MUCH FUN DOING IT.
That’s what got me. Inspired me. And kicked my own life into a whole different gear. I started running on the beach listening to LCD, which is perfect running music. I started writing more and believing that the dreams of a younger man were still accessible, that if James Murphy can achieve a certain kind of perfection, then honestly, so can I.
When Mr. Murphy announced that Madison Square Garden on April 2nd would be his final show I made sure I would get tickets. And then as the date approached my LCD-mania kicked into overdrive with facebook posts of lyrics that were running through my head and just laser-locked on the sound, the lyrics, the almost languid precision. I took my number one girl and we rocked the house with all our friends, I shook Aziz Ansari’s hand, I celebrated with friends old and new. I went all night, all 3′ 41″ minutes of it. And all I can say is “Thank you James Murphy.”
You’re a man. You’re the man.
Never change. Never change. Never change.
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January 6th, 2011
The Cape – A Launch Idea That Traffic Overwhelmed
I like comics.
I like smart thinking.
I thought teasing the first hour of ‘The Cape’ within the DC Comics iPad app was a great idea.
Except there was too much traffic and now it’s not working.
So all the good will that was generated, all the good will that allowed for how wretched ‘Heroes’ became in the end for no good reason. That’s kind of squandered.
Note to self. Stress Test when you try new things. Otherwise – it’s a failure.
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January 6th, 2011
A Wedding in Jerusalem – A University in the Desert
I went to a wedding in Jerusalem with my girlfriend this past month. It was a totally amazing experience and we had the good fortune to be on tours to such fantastic places as Masada and the Dead Sea, and the underground tunnels of Jerusalem.
There was tension in the air, as there is wont to be, and it was certainly made worse by an American tourist being killed while we were there. It was a tension that I recognized from a previous visit I had made to a tense region – that of Zimbabwe before Mugabe had destroyed the entire country. At that time the nation was still 90% owned by the 10% minority of whites but every conversation, every interaction had behind it the sense that the violence that was bubbling beneath the surface was about to erupt. The center could not hold as it were. And, a short 18 months after I visited Zimbabwe the whole nation did indeed begin to fall apart, perhaps irrevocably so.
I’m not saying that this is what is doomed to happen in Israel, but just that the tension in Jerusalem and in journeying to the Dead Sea and Masada was palpable. What was uplifting, in addition to my friends’ marriage with a view of the Western Wall, was the visit that we made to the Ben Gurion University in the Negev. It is one of Israel’s largest universities and the incredibly positive energy of the place, the staff, the students, the idea of terra-forming intelligently a swath of desert – it was all incredibly exciting.
And being an optimist by trade or by default, seeing such wonderful energy being poured into CREATING something NEW as opposed to rehashing arguments about something old – that was the way forward for me. That is the path of excitement. That is the path of rebirth.
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August 5th, 2010
Of Delusion and Other Madness
I logged into my Yahoo! mail for the first time in months – I was served this ad. Words cannot describe the disconnect.
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July 22nd, 2010
The Walking Man Walks
Cue James Taylor,
Moving in silent desperation
Keeping an eye on the holy land
A hypothetical destination
Say, who is this walking man?A local enigma passed last night. Marc Abrams who was simply known as ‘The Walking Man’ was found dead in a hot tub at the age of 58. I lived in Silverlake for two + years when I was coming back to LA after stints in San Francisco and New York and at first you see this guy walking in the noon day sun with his shirt off reading the paper, and you think, “Who is that guy?’ And then you see him and you realize he’s doing this every day, walking around the reservoir in the noonday sun each and every day and you have some silent admiration for his commitment, even if it seems possibly slightly unhinged.
Then you might meet him, or his lovely wife, and you discover that this man walking the streets in his small shorts with his shirt off is a family doctor. And you still have the same feelings about this man who walks on by, but you begin to sense there is an unspoken complexity to this man. You smile when a muralist cements his reputation with an homage…
And then you hear the guy on NPR start, “You may have seen him walking the streets of Silverlake…” And your heart sinks and you know what’s coming next.
I hope they are serving you some Johnnie Walker right now Walking Man.
Keep walking.
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July 20th, 2010
Bad Buddy Algorithms
This morning on Facebook I got the following message, “People who like Buddy Media like this..” This being “Nicorette.”
Is Nicorette a cigarette smoker’s buddy? Are Social Media experts recovering smokers who are fond of Nicorette? Personally I think if they had suggested that I like the below…
It would have made more sense.
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July 9th, 2010
Marvel Comics on the iPad – One Thumb Up
UI for the Buy
So last night I finally sat down with the joint iPad (belonging to me and my beloved) and rocked out to some awesome Captain America comic books. Here’s a few quick observations.
As a friend of mine put it, it is great for comics. The form factor and the four-color are a perfect match and the way you move through the comic is approximately the feel of reading the printed page. Of course it helped that I was reading the epic ‘Winter Soldier’ story arc by perhaps one of my favorite comic book writers Ed Brubaker featuring sexy spies in latex, cold war mind control and an oversized creepy psycho-analyst named Dr. Faustus.
However what didn’t work for me, or didn’t work enough to prompt me to write a blog about it is the manufactured transitions which are at the core of this manifestation of the digital experience. You can either read a comic page-by-page like below:
Dig the White Space
This for my money best replicates the off-line experience. Is this a good thing? I don’t know but a long time ago I read Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics’ and in that book he posited that it is the white space between panels where all the action is. A reader fills in the gaps – for example as the shield flies through the air and back into Cap’s hand.
Then there is the new way of reading, which is enabled by this digital experience. As opposed to reading an entire page and going from panel to panel on that page, you ‘read’ one image at a time causing you to have to preserve in your head more information in order to experience ‘action’. Over time this may work for me, but right now it’s jarring and is actually disruptive to the reading as opposed to making it more dynamic or more entertaining. It is nice to get to look at the art up close and personal but seeing one sole frame at a time as you do below, well it’s not the joint.
On the one hand it’s awesome and amazing that this works at all and it may extend the life of comic books by another 40 to 100 years, ensuring the possibility that my child will enjoy them as much as I have. On the other I’m still not sold on the presentation format and hope they keep innovating until they do find the right ratio of motion to still.
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June 14th, 2010
Intellectual Life Still Exists – A Rebroadcast…
This is a piece I wrote for a blog called – Vol. 1 Brooklyn. It is republished here – in its entirety.
I’m a Californian and that’s a confession and a truth all wrapped up in one. It’s pertinent as this is the lens through which I view a conversation with Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie at the 92nd Street Y, which may differ slightly than one who dwells in the Five Boroughs.
And while both boys most certainly did lay claim to be cunning linguists and there was the requisite literary name-dropping (though no mention of Kingsley), the marked characteristic of the evening’s conversation, in addition to liberal doses of sex, alcohol and ego, was a leitmotif of friendship, of the true-blue variety,
The packed house was greeted to a surprise introduction by none other than Hitch’s editor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, whose hair was as fabulously floppy as ever. In what would prove to be the first of many charming anecdotes, Graydon related how upon founding Spy ‘Hitch’ was the ‘very first person’ he called, and Mr. Hitchens promptly turned him down. And then some years later when Mr. Carter had ascended to Tina Brown’s throne at ‘Vanity Fair’ he placed the same call and this time Mr. Hitchens accepted, perhaps as the coffers and perks of the then still-great Condé empire were vast enough to accommodate for Hitch’s prodigious habits. Carter then listed off the innumerable war-zones to which Hitch traveled on behalf of the Newhouses all of which was upstaged by a recounting of Mr. Hitchens getting waxed, yes waxed, for a story for ‘Vanity Fair’. The waxing consisting of “The Back, The Sack and the Crack,” a notion that produced the requisite titters of laughter from the Upper East Side crowd.
Cue the heavyweights and in walked Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens. The amity between them was obvious and genuine and whatever had passed betwixt them in decades prior would not be put on display this evening. That Rushdie is most likely one of the few people who could put Hitch, the man that claimed to have been called a ‘Naughty Boy’, by Margaret Thatcher in his place, was most certainly a key to the evening’s entertainment.
From the onset Salman made it clear that there was a mix of respect and if not consternation or befuddlement, a wholly different kind of admiration for Hitchens’ commitment to his beliefs. His opening salvo being, “You liked Margaret Thatcher but disliked God.” Hitch then declared that ‘Hitch 22’ was designed as a ‘Paradox in a Minor Key’ and defined his current mood (as if it were a Facebook Status) as ‘Committed against the New Totalitarianism.’
As they moved from the personal to the political, discussing the Falklands war, Iran-Contra and then subsequently the invasion of Iraq it became clear that these men were perhaps from a different time, and without too much nostalgia, a time that smacked of betterness. For surely there are young men in cafes today debating the merits of freedom and conflicts with the State, but the depth and breadth of Rushdie and Hitchen’s knowledge, and their ability to converse had the feeling of a bit of a lost art. For now the salon is the Internet and the communication is often one of shouting, and if there is dialogue at all, the most celebrated form is one of 140 characters or less.
For anybody who has read the press, yes Hitchens did indeed talk about his relationship to Martin Amis and his fondness for the man. And yes, he did talk about visiting a brothel (which is now the home of Opus Dei) with Martin but his presenting of that tale in person was no different than reading the excerpt in the pages of ‘Vanity Fair’. Rather, the emotional highlight of the evening was when Hitchens spoke about his mother, her death and the secret he learned following her suicide.
Hitch, when discussing Amis, Bush, Thatcher or any of the assorted stops on his career of drinking and writing would talk quite fast and be nearly indecipherable but when the story of his mother came up he was clear, cogent and very nearly soft-spoken. The man with whom his mother died was one that Hitchens did not seem especially fond of, recalling that her suitor had followed the Maharesh Yogi because, “His sail was so raised as to be buoyed by anything which passed by.” Regardless his mother was under the man’s spell and they had some form of suicide pact resulting in her killing herself alongside her lover in a hotel room in Greece when Hitchens was just 23. As the investigation into the double suicide went on, Hitchens would learn his mother tried to ring him 5x prior to dying, and he is convinced that had she succeeded, she would have remained alive. “I am sure I would have steadied her.” It would be some 15 years before he would then discover that he was Jewish, something which his mother kept from him for he felt she, “…wanted me to pass.”
Before getting to the audience’s questions Rushdie and Hitchens let loose their drawing room wit beginning with a game whereby you change one word of a famous book – rendering it more pedestrian than epic. The examples they reeled off:
- A Farewell to Weapons
- Laugtherhouse Five
- Toby Dick
- Blueberry Finn
Rushdie then did his solo parlor game trick of turning Shakespeare’s plays into Robert Ludlum novels, which if you have not heard before is a marvelous merger of the High and the Low. Hamlet is ‘The Elsinore Vacillation’, Macbeth, ‘The Dunsinane Reforestation’ and Othello, ‘The Kerchief Implication.’
And so it went. Tales of warlords and presidents mixed with literature and alcohol, but the incendiary talk was light. There is still fire in Hitch’s belly but as the young contrarian moves into his sixties it may just be that the onetime enfant terrible has done what was once unthinkable and grown up.
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