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	July 14, 2003

TEN STRANGE AND WONDERFUL FILMS Anyone who reads How to Save the World knows that my aesthetic tastes are a bit eclectic, perhaps even a trace bizarre. That applies equally to my taste in film, which tends towards quirky romantic films. Herewith, in no particular order, ten of my favourite examples of the genre: Heureux Qui Comme Ulysse (1970) - A farmhand, played by the French master Fernandel, learns that one of the farm owner's old horses is to be sold to a bullfight operator, to be sacrificed to the bull as a preamble to a bullfight. Fernandel sneaks out and takes the old nag on a long adventurous journey to set him free in Camargue National Park to live out his life in peace. Extraordinary, funny, touching acting, and if you can keep from crying at the end you must be made of stone. The Neon Ceiling (1971) - Gig Young's last film before his suicide, an amazing made-for-TV movie shot almost entirely in a roadhouse, where owner Young's hobby is putting neon sculptures on the ceiling. He's visited by Lee Grant, a housewife fleeing her boring life, who brings along her daughter, and the movie slowly reveals their characters in brilliant and bitter dialogue. Wonderful writing, excellent chemistry between the actors. The King of Hearts (1967) - de Broca film stars Alan Bates and a cast of European heavyweights. A hilarious and heartwarming allegory about an explosives expert during WWI who sets the abandoned inmates of a French insane asylum free, so they can escape the advancing German army, but since they're too frightened to flee, they instead occupy the deserted town nearby and act out the occupations of the townspeople as the Germans arrive.  Innocent Lies (1995) - Moody mystery/thriller set in pre-WWII France starring Gabrielle Anwar and Stephen Dorff. Hated by critics and the movie-going public alike. Horribly confusing plot, which I haven't figured out even after watching it three times. But the acting is mesmerizing and the photography is sumptuous.  Mindwalk (1990) - A politician (Sam Waterston), a poet (John Heard) and a scientist (Liv Ullman), happen to meet in Mont St. Michel, and share philosophies of life. Brilliantly written, with understated acting that serves to highlight the dialogue and the extraordinary beauty of the setting, which are what the movie is really all about. Brother From Another Planet (1984) - John Sayles film stars Joe Morton as a mute alien with special healing powers who crash-lands in New York City. Morton is amazing at conveying the richness of emotion and culture shock without saying a word, and the 'brothers' who accept him as one of their own, send up various New York cultures in outrageous, wry fashion. To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday (1996) - Peter Gallagher mourns his dead wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) so much he's become a dysfunctional father to his daughter (Claire Danes) and a social invalid among his friends (an amazing ensemble supporting cast). A wonderful story of dealing with loss and what might have been, and how friends can, and can't help. First Monday in October (1981) - Walter Matthau as a liberal Supreme Court judge spars with new, first woman nominee Jill Clayburgh as an improbable arch-conservative. Funny, playful, clever, politically astute dialogue as the two trade barbs until they finally reach a rapprochement . If only the judges on the real court were this bright. Stealing Beauty (1996) - Bertolucci's film starring Liv Tyler in a stunningly beautiful Italian setting, searching for answers about a past love, her mother's recent suicide, and the true identity of her father. The other characters of the villa she is visiting are uniformly artistic, eccentric, hedonistic, and lovely to behold. An arousing masterpiece for the eyes, so much that you don't really care that the plot is silly. French Kiss (1995) - Kevin Kline in an acting tour de force as a French thief who ends up sitting beside Meg Ryan on a flight to Paris where she's headed to win back her lost boyfriend. Kline is perfectly over-the-top both in his accent and mannerisms, and the plot is light and charming and everyone ends up living happily ever after. Just plain fun. 4:05:54 PM  trackback []  comment []

THE FIVE ELEMENTS: REMAKING OUR CULTURE TO CHANGE THE WORLD Change is hard. It's counter-cultural. It only occurs on any large scale when the situation demands it, when there is no alternative . We are now living in a world where huge change is needed, but the awareness that there is no alternative has not yet reached public consciousness. Like the frog immersed in water that is slowly but inexorably increasing in temperature, we are unaware that we are dying a horrible death by tiny increments. To prevent this requires a fundamental change in our culture, in the prevalent behaviours that have defined us for thirty millennia. Culture change does not occur by revolution, it's not something that can be imposed by law or persuasion or even a massive shift in public will. It is evolutionary , it is viral, it occurs viscerally, instinctively in response to an external threat or extraordinary opportunity. The profound changes that brought about, and were in turn wrought by, human agriculture, animal domestication, mass-production and antibiotics are examples of this. Evolutionary doesn't necessarily mean slow. As the indomitable Freeman Dyson has argued, where there is awareness, even by a small but empowered minority, of the need for change, evolutionary changes can be introduced quickly and effectively, even in the absence of popular consensus, or even in the face of popular opposition. The abandonment of three million years of hunter-gatherer culture by our ancestors a mere thirty thousand years ago, in favour of the incredibly interdependent, fragile and sedentary culture that replaced it, was certainly viewed as horrific, unnatural, wrong, to most of those ancestors. It succeeded not because if was popular, or even acceptable, to those that adopted it, but simply because it worked, and the old culture didn't anymore . That's where we are now, again. We need the same degree of focused, subversive effort to build a new culture that works, and show this, as a scalable pilot, to the rest of the world. When the rest of the world sees that the old culture by contrast doesn't work, or, in today's language, is unsustainable, they will join the new culture. Build it and they will come. Don't tear down the old culture, create a new one that supplants, undermines the old, replaces it from within. The new culture this time around must have five features that are astonishingly different from those of today's prevalent culture: A New Business Driver: The driver for the new culture's businesses, its economic enterprises, must be the well-being of its members, not growth and profit for its shareholders. The old business model has become completely dysfunctional, pitting us as citizens against us as shareholders. It's now the tyrannical handmaiden of elite greed instead of the servant of common public interest, as it was originally intended. A New Population Ethic: We are naturally programmed to want to have many children, so that a couple of them  will live long enough to propagate the species. With new medical and reproductive technologies, we have changed the world to the point that having no more than one child is the best way to ensure the healthy propagation of our species. In educated societies we are already there, but massive immigration between uneducated societies and educated ones is preventing this ethic from taking hold quickly and broadly enough. We need to have the courage to make having more than one child socially unacceptable. Not illegal, and not unaffordable (that just makes it unacceptable to the poor). Never underestimate the power of social norms (just talk to any smoker). A New Energy Economy: The principles of the new energy economy will be renewability and self-sufficiency. Our present economy ties us to a power 'grid' and makes us utterly dependent on foreign energy supplies. The consequence of this has been excessive energy consumption and waste, military adventures strictly to protect oil 'interests', and massive political corruption in countries that rely utterly on other countries' insatiable thirst for their energy. The pioneers of the new energy economy will innovate and use renewable wind and solar energy sources, capture the energy using new hydrogen-cell technologies, and demonstrate the political and economic liberation that comes from freeing your community from dependence on the 'grid'. A New Trade Economy: The myths of 'free' trade and globalization are quickly unraveling. Unregulated trade, and the extraterritorial laws that diminish local authority that come with it, lead to a host of dysfunctional results: massive local unemployment as jobs are exported to countries with low wages, non-existent labour laws and dreadful environmental laws, the importation, with wasteful and unnecessary transportation costs, of shoddy foreign products made without standards into countries that used to make these same products locally (and better), the forced dismantling of progressive labour and environmental codes, the replacement of overt production subsidies and protections with politically-motivated, politically-extracted hidden subsidies and protections, and the absurd dislocation of local agricultural and manufacturing production in favour of inferior foreign 'coals-to-Newcastle, corn-to-Mexico' imports that the dislocated local workers can no longer afford to buy. The governing principle of the new trade economy is simple: Import nothing that can reasonably be produced locally. If we all refuse to buy foreign goods that could be made domestically, everyone will win.  A New Conservation Ethic: We currently make it hard for people to conserve. Recycling takes time and is awkward. Buying stuff in bulk is inconvenient. Bicycling to work in most of the world is not only uncomfortable, it's dangerous, and logistically impossible. 'Common' property is neglected, to the point no one takes pride in it, so it becomes unusable, and everyone has to have their own private everything , even though they use most of these things rarely. A conservation ethic means making it easy to conserve, not making it illegal or expensive to waste. That means investing big time in public infrastructure -- parks, transit, bicycle paths -- to ensure it is high-quality, efficient, and a pleasure to use. It means making the reuse and recycling of materials easier than throwing stuff out -- door-to-door pickup and delivery, reusable containers that are attractive, lightweight and convenient, hygienic, omnipresent 'refilling' stations that dispense products at a cost that is a fraction what over-packaged 'disposable' individual portions cost. And just as we need to make having many children socially unacceptable, we need to make unnecessary waste, excessive consumption and unwarranted private ownership socially unacceptable -- greedy, thoughtless, and antisocial. We need to make disposable a dirty word. All of these things are happening, to some extent, with varying degrees of success, and with almost as many steps backward as forward, today. But they aren't happening in a cohesive manner. We all live in several physical and virtual communities: the one we make our living in, our family, our neighbourhood, and our communities of interest. Because business is so pervasive today, I believe that what I call New Collaborative Enterprises (NCEs), which exemplify change #1, are absolutely essential to creating the new culture we need. If their business purpose is renewable energy production NCE's can also contribute to change #3. They can espouse the principle of change #4 in their purchasing decisions and the principle of change #5 in their production activities. In our families and neighbourhoods we can organize programs as citizens and consumers to advance change #3 (co-operative buying of renewable energy is now available to consumers in many areas), change #4 (by simply refusing to buy imported goods unless they're absolutely essential and can't possibly have cost local people their employment), and change #5 (by not only reusing and recycling, but agitating and lobbying and writing and talking to others about what needs to be done to improve public infrastructure and make conservation easier). And we can be a little more overt (not rude or confrontational) about expressing our view that large families, unnecessary waste, conspicuous consumption and extravagant private property are immoral in today's world. Each of these five changes will ultimately reach a Tipping Point . Our future depends on how quickly they get there. Each one of us, in how we make our living, how we raise our families, how we live our lives, and how we spread the word, can play an important role in getting us there faster. Together we can change the world. 2:26:11 PM  trackback []  comment []

THE FUTURE OF IT: A PESSIMIST'S VIEW Janal Kalis points out an exceptional article in the May HBR by the magazine's editor, Nicholas Carr, entitled IT Doesn't Matter . The article, which unfortunately is not available online, has this provocative thesis: What makes a resource truly strategic - what gives it the capacity to be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage - is not ubiquity but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something that they can't have or do. By now, the core functions of IT have become available and affordable to all. Their very power and presence have transformed them from potentially strategic resources into commodity factors of production. They've become costs of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none. Carr distinguishes between proprietary technologies, those that are embedded in a company's product or service, and infrastructure technologies which gain their power from interface with outside parties. The latter, including most IT, offer only a brief window of competitive advantage before the need for connectivity demands ubiquitous, open standards and hence the technology becomes a utility and a commodity. That window, he argues, has now substantially closed. At this point, the rules change, and 'first mover advantage' disappears, leaving only disadvantage to the serious laggard. The objective is to be in the mainstream, late enough to learn from pioneers' mistakes and buy at deflated mainstream volume prices, and early enough to avoid being left seriously behind. The new reality, in the words of Sun Microsystems' Bill Joy is that "[business] people have already bought most of the [IT] they need". Just as with railroads and the telegraph, heavy investment in the leading edge of such technologies now becomes excessive and reckless, "too much of a good thing", and the new rules become: Spend less Follow, don't lead Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities Some of the key applications of these new rules: Be rigorous in evaluation of new purchases, e.g. re-evaluate the need for automatic laptop upgrades especially when most of the existing fleet are under-utilized Look for cheaper solutions even if they sacrifice some unneeded benefits and functionality Eliminate excessive data storage space Delay IT expenditures as long as possible This is a very sobering picture for those whose living depends on IT, and specifically for those whose living depends on innovation and new product development. I have argued, for example, that business needs to introduce next-generation personal weblogs and Social Networking Enablement (SNE) software to replace their dysfunctional, centralized, disconnected intranets. How can this new software hope for acceptance in a 'spend less, follow, don't lead, focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities' world? First, this software needs to be sold to the companies that sell network hardware and software, not to the corporate end users, and embedded in their product offerings. You sell an improvement to the telephone switch to the phone company, not the phone user. And then the network product vendors need to appreciate and to show their customers how SNE software (a) can drastically reduce or replace the cost of intranet and database management, and (b) can dramatically improve employee productivity. If Carr is right, the golden age of IT is over, and in the next 3-5 years, most large enterprises will drastically cut IT expenditures. If that happens, whole applications, including intranets, will be scrapped if they lack a strong, measurable ROI. Vendors who can fill the void with low-cost standard, open-source, packaged solutions will find ready takers. IBM is now offering site licenses of its end-user office productivity software free with network servers. Perhaps we need to get Microsoft to offer site licenses of business-quality weblogs and open-source SNE software with its enterprise-wide IE servers and software. 1:47:08 AM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dave Pollard. Last update: 19/02/2004; 2:48:23 PM.