One of the oldest jokes in the business is that when a studio head takes over he’s given three envelopes, the first of which contains the advice “Fire the head of marketing.” Nowadays, though, former marketers, such as Oren Aviv, at Disney, and Marc Shmuger, at Universal, often run the studios. “Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates,” one studio’s president of production says. “So at green-light meetings it’s a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross. No one is saying, ‘This director was born to make this movie.’”
I’ve seen similar articles in the past and the thing that always strikes me about the people who make movies is a) how much they love movies and b) how little they care about actually making good movies that people will love. So cynical.
NY Times food critic Frank Bruni notes that in this down economy, it’s easier to get reservations and deals at even the hottest restaurants as they struggle to remain profitable. And the service is less haughty.
“The attitude that a number of places used to have, they don’t have that anymore,” Ms. Rappoport said, her tone of voice communicating equal measures bewilderment and relief. “That attitude of ‘we’re doing you a favor,’ that frosty condescending attitude — I don’t find that anymore. And I’ve experienced that change over and over again.” Servers, she said, make double- and triple-sure that her table has everything it needs. Managers circle back to the table more often than ever to ask, with new urgency, if everything’s O.K.
For opportunistic diners, there are at least three big advantages to this trend.
1. Great food at relatively reasonable prices.
2. Dining opportunities at great but previously unavailable restaurants at good times.
3. The chance to become a highly valued regular at your favorite restaurant. If they’re doing things right and you support them when times are tough (visit often, tip well, etc.), they’ll gratefully reward you in better times with reservations at prime times, VIP treatment, and dishes “courtesy of the chef”.
The first time Phil Conners lives out Groundhog Day, he knows nothing about how events will unfold, and acts accordingly — self centered, short sighted and rash. But by the time Conners lives out his last Groundhog Day, he has perfect knowledge of how everyone around him will behave. He acts accordingly — maximizing his happiness and the happiness of those around him. The metaphor gets pretty loose, but in this interpretation, Phil’s last day is analogous to classical economics, where people act with perfect knowledge and rationality.
Hey Modern/contemporary furniture fans, that pair of beige chairs on the left side of the photo, anyone know what they are? Hit me on my burner or reply on Twitter.
This is Canada, right? So there’s plenty of nights when it’s snowing so hard that you can barely see, nights that you might want to stay home instead of going out to work,” he says. “But those are exactly the kind of nights where someone might just set something out beside the loading dock, instead of putting it into the compactor. Those are the nights where you make the big score. I’ve tried to apprentice people, but they never want to do it like I do, methodically, avoiding left turns and red lights, logging what you found in each dumpster and not wasting time on the ones that are never any good, going out when the weather stinks.
My own countercyclical hunch is that Internet use will rise dramatically over the year because a) it has become something that people need (even more than TV…you’ll see people scaling back on cable before they send back their cable modem) and b) spending more time using it doesn’t cost extra. Plus, unemployment = lots of time to spend online screwing around “updating your resume”.
Joe Ades, the gentleman vegetable peeler salesman familiar to all who roamed the streets of Manhattan, died on Sunday. He was 75.
Ms. Laurent said she sometimes went to look for him at the end of the day, but he would have packed up and left after selling out. She could tell where he had been. “He cleaned up really well,” she said, “but still there were these little shreds of carrots that said, ‘I was here.’”
None of this myth busting denigrates the fact that Ades was a charming and charismatic New York character. But if, in future, Ades is remembered as an aristocratic, fancy suited, upper-class English dandy that hawked vegetable peelers as an ironic hobby, that would be wrong and actually less interesting.
My opinion of Songsmith is shifting — while it’s generally presented as a laughingstock, catastrophic failure, or if nothing else, a complete embarrassment (especially for its developers slash infomercial actors), it’s really caught the imagination of a lot of people who are creating new things, even if all of them subvert the original intent of the project. (Where the original intent was to… create a tool that would help write a jingle for glow in the dark towels?)
It’s 2009. A generation of digital natives is careening towards college. The economy is rebooting itself weekly. We have new responsibilities now — as employees, citizens, and friends — and we have new capabilities, too. The new liberal arts equip us for a world like this. But… what are they?
The time is ripe to expand and invigorate our notion of the liberal arts. Is design a liberal art now? How about photography? Food? Personal branding?
My favorite description of the book is that it’s “the course catalog for some amazing new school”. The book’s focus dovetails nicely with my activities here on kottke.org; I can’t wait to contribute (hopefully!) and read it. In true Snarkmarket fashion, they’re looking for contributors to the project…details here.
BTW, my “liberal arts 2.0” description of kottke.org is generously listed as one of the seeds of the idea. I came up with the term a couple of years ago while concocting an elevator pitch for kottke.org. Liberal arts 2.0 seemed like the sort of thing that the site was about and that someone would understand a bit with little explanation…better than “kottke.org is about all kinds of stuff” anyway. I used the term in a talk I did at MoMA in 2007 with the following as “fields of study” in the new discipline:
Graphic design, freakonomics, photography, programming, film, remixing, video games, food, advertising, internet life skills, journalism, fashion.
The developing thread already contains many more interesting ideas than those, particularly Jennifer’s vote for the inclusion of home economics:
Home economics. Cooking for yourself. Growing food for yourself. Making clothing for yourself. Why are these things important enough to be included as a “liberal art”? One word: sustainability. We all need to do our part to shrink our footprint, but many of us have no idea how, and for most people born after 1960 (or so) it’s not something they learned in the home, either.
as well as Tim’s expansion of the concept:
Let’s put the “economics” back in “home economics”! Because it’s not really just about the home anymore — you have to think about the broader connections of the organization of your daily life to global operations, histories, labor, politics, geology and ecology. And that is home economics as a liberal art.
The current inactivity at Port of Long Beach is indicative of larger problems in the highly coupled global economy. Americans are buying fewer goods, including those made abroad, so no new goods are coming in to the port and those that have already arrived are sitting on the docks, including 165+ acres of Toyota cars. Because Americans are not buying foreign goods, China has slowed production. Slowed production means that they don’t need cardboard boxes for packaging. Since we ship our used paper to China for recycling into cardboard boxes, hundreds of tons of paper are sitting on the docks, unshipped. The strengthening of the dollar abroad means that American made goods aren’t selling and the ships hauling them are unable to leave the port. Nothing is selling anywhere so everything sits in the now-constipated port.
America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.
The child initiates and creates free play. It might involve fantasies — such as pretending to be doctors or princesses or playing house — or it might include mock fighting, as when kids (primarily boys) wrestle and tumble with one another for fun, switching roles periodically so that neither of them always wins. And free play is most similar to play seen in the animal kingdom, suggesting that it has important evolutionary roots. Gordon M. Burghardt, author of The Genesis of Animal Play, spent 18 years observing animals to learn how to define play: it must be repetitive — an animal that nudges a new object just once is not playing with it — and it must be voluntary and initiated in a relaxed setting. Animals and children do not play when they are undernourished or in stressful situations. Most essential, the activity should not have an obvious function in the context in which it is observed — meaning that it has, essentially, no clear goal.
He sees mobile as something of a super power device and described something he calls “bionic noticing” — obsessively recording curious things he sees around him, driven by this multi-capable device in his pocket.
people who are just back from a really awesome run people who are involved in “social networking” and optimizing the power of re-Tweeting and “computers” people who can’t figure out what their kids want to eat Shaquille O’Neal people who have never seen snow people who like Battlestar Galactica
With the exception of the two animated films and Year One, all of the above are either sequels or remakes. And Hulu, in a stroke of highly irritating genius, has inserted advertising before each of the trailers linked above. Advertising *in* advertising…the 20th century has officially ended. Welcome to the future.
Update: I’ve switched out the Hulu links for ones at Apple; they’re higher quality and can be seen outside of the US. I wish the Apple trailers would have been live last night; it would have made for a lot less whining in my inbox. I just go where the links take me, folks. Oh, and I added the GI Joe trailer. (thx, david)
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