Criterion launches a social network for film geeks. One of the best implementations I’ve seen. Forums, reviews, friends, pay per view.
I like niche communities — a lot — and I like them seperate and not under a big tent like Facebook. Reel-Time for saltwater fly fishing. The Auteurs for art films. Chowhound for food. I know there have been an attempt or two at a rowing network — but it fell flat for me.
Anyway, I’m dying to figure out the engine under Auteurs. It’s a nice piece of code.
This morning, for the first time in my life I was impaneled on a jury, heard a trial, and rendered a verdict. This was perhaps the fifth time I’ve been called, the first time I’ve been selected.
The details of the case are inconsequential and I take the confidentiality of the jury room very seriously after today’s experience. What was interesting was the overwhelming sense of responsibility I felt to listen harder than I had ever listened before, to pay attention to the judge’s instructions, to separate fact from hearsay, and “discharge my duty” to the best of my abilities. The instructions were emphatically clear – was there a contract between the two parties? We weren’t to decide what was “fair” or what the “equity” between the two parties should be – that wasn’t the issue. The issue was simple: was there a contract or an agreement between the two parties?
I’ve followed trials as a reporter but the experience of sitting in a chair a few feet away from the defendant and the plaintiff, locking eyes with them because in the end we’re the only people in the room that matter, hearing their sad story (happy stories don’t go to Falmouth District Court on a Monday in March), was powerful and lot more engaging than scribbling shorthand notes in a steno pad in the back row thinking about lunch.
The dynamics of the jury during the deliberation was amazing. No straw vote kicked things off; the juror video made it clear that was not a smart idea. Instead there was a quick, frank, discussion where everyone listened respectfully to everybody else. I made a single point that the question had been set out by the judge, said everything else was extraneous to that question, and then listened as people complained about their lack of power in determining what was fair. We voted. We were unanimous. We returned to the courtroom, delivered our verdict, and five minutes later were saying goodbye to each other in the parking lot. Fair/unfair, right/wrong – it was pretty cool and I drove away feeling super-civic and pretty happy to be a citizen of a country where a jury of one’s peers is a fundamental right.
Oh, and the judge cracked me up when he said, “I don’t want to see any blackberries googling or twittering in my court or in the jury room. I’ve never googled anything in my life except for a few good looking dames.”
I went down a sidepath of digression while researching the history of the Elizabeth Islands and came across the Wikipedia entry for Cuttyhunk Island, the last of the chain and a very fishy place with a famous striped bass fishing club (which I have never visited, but hope to).
For that matter I have never set foot on Cuttyhunk, but also hope to. Anyway, while researching the history of Cuttyhunk I learned that the old bass club had once been purchased by one William Wood. His story is fascinating, and personally interesting because my life intersects his at a few common points. It’s one of the classic rags-to-riches stereotypes.
William Madison Wood Jr. was the son of Portuguese immigrants. He was born at home on Pease Point Road in Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, in 1858 – about the time of my great-great-grandfather’s last voyage from Edgartown as master of the whaling ship Massachusetts. Wood’s father was a whaler, a common occupation for the Portuguese, many of whom joined American whaling ships when they stopped in the Azores for crew and supplies on their way south to the Pacific fishery. He died at sea in 1861, when William Jr. was 12.
Wood found employment in the textile mills of New Bedford. During the Civil War, eastern Massachusetts’ textile mills were roaring to keep up with demand for woolen uniforms and blankets, and New Bedford was among one of the most robust textile towns, with the Wamsutta Mills dominating the trade there. Wood served his apprenticeship under a wealthy mill owner, Andrew Pierce, and rose rapidly because of his work ethic. He left New Bedford at the age of 18, moved to Philadelphia, found a job at a brokerage firm, and learned finance to the point that he returned to New Bedford and a job at a bank.
Wood made his fortune in Lawrence, Massachusetts where I was a newspaper reporter in the early 1980s. A hundred years before, the massive Washington Mill went bankrupt and was purchased by Frederick Ayer of Lowell, Mass. – Wood was hired and quickly rose through management, making about $25,000, a fortune for the the time. Wood’s smartest career move was marrying Ayer’s daughter.
Wood’s achievement was to consolidate a number of independent woolen mills into one massive trust, the American Woolen Company. He was no friend to labor, and was at the center of some controversial strikes after the turn of the century, including a trial for allegedly paying saboteurs to plant explosives in his own mills. These mills are pretty remarkable structures – massive brick buildings that run literally for a mile along the banks of the Merrimack River.
Anyway … third point of intersection for me and Wood was Shawsheen, Massachusetts, a village on the north side of Andover (the town where I grew up). Wood based his corporate offices for the American Woolen Company in Shawsheen, building a massive office building at the main intersection. When I was a newspaper reporter I rented a one-bedroom apartment in that building which had been converted into condos in the late 1970s.
Wood purchased the bass club on Cuttyhunk for his family and sold lots around the buildings to friends so his children would have some summer friends. That club is famous for being one of the most exclusive sporting organizations in the United States, formed in the 1860s by some New York financiers who used carrier pigeons to get reports from the stock markets, and who fished for striped bass from wooden causeways built on iron scaffolds drilled into the granite rocky shore. I would argue that Wood’s choice of summer retreats has to rank as one of the best in the world.
Wood suffered a stroke in 1924, moved to Florida in 1926, and a month after retiring went for a ride with his chauffeur. He asked the driver to pull over, got out, walked into the woods, and shot himself with a revolver.
I spent part of past Wednesday at the the New York Googleplex with some fellow digital marketers and agency people as part of Google’s Global Advisory Council. I consider the content and conversations as unbloggable/off-the-record, but wanted to share one excellent line from Scott McLaren at General Motors, who in the course of presenting how GM was able to centralize search marketing said:
“Centralize the science and localize the art.”
That brilliant insight goes into my collection of business koans along with McKinsey’s Dick Foster’s line: “Loosen control without losing control” and that anonymous jazzman who told another musician “If you don’t know what to do, then don’t do anything.”
What Scott summarized in that one-liner, is probably familiar to anyone in a global digital marketing role who has tried to evangelize a unified (credit to Carol Kruse at Coca-Cola for recommending “unified” over “centralized”) approach to planning, spending and executing a marketing discipline across many oceans and borders.
Decentralization is the rule in a massive global organization, a throw-back to the Roman Empire when the edges of the empire were too far away from the center of power in Rome and the Emperor had to divide c0ntrol between four Caesars. When I was at International Data Group in 2005 I felt the 1970s edict by owner and founder Pat McGovern that decentralization was the way the company would be organized and run was out of date and a worn out necessity born from a pre-fax/pre-email era, one that ignored the economies of scale of consolidating 300 websites onto a unified analytics and content management system.
Information Technology tends to consolidate and unify. The oldest story in the IT playbook is the hub, the router, the server, the data center. All discussions of mesh architectures and complex matrixed “edge” computing models have been speculative structures, but in the end, the men in white coats want the users to be on dumb diskless workstations, working in unity off of one central processor. But – IT aside — money likes to be decentralized. If you want “feet on the street” to take accountability for sales targets, then you have to push fiscal responsibility down to the regional and country level — otherwise there will be no accountability or insights into local markets.
Back to McLaren’s statement and why I think search engine marketing must be centralized.
What else can be centralized in global digital marketing?
What can’t be centralized?
More later, but it was good to hear two very global, very capable marketers confirm the issues I’ve seen the past three years. Digital marketing needs to be unified around IT, analytics, and discounted volume negotiations but localized around creative and customer/blogger relations.
Packing for Beijing this morning I check for my passport, thumb through to find the visa. Expired. I am an idiot. Trip cancelled.
Okay, I won’t talk about the last month’s nasal experience. Let’s just say the septoplasty thing is pretty much over — I still don’t have any feeling in the tip of my nose, aliens come out of my nostrils every morning, and the black eyes have sort of faded away. I would not recommend contracting a cold in the week following a nose job. No.
Anyway, in nasal distress, I decided to buy a “neti pot” — a teapot one sticks in one’s nose and then pours saline solution into one’s nasal cavity, which floods and drains out the opposite nostril. Very holistic. Just the ticket. It sort of works. It sort of doesn’t. Well, it mostly doesn’t, but it does loosen up the aforementioned “aliens” and produces some jetsam that brings to mind ancient honeycombs.
Then I found this wonderful demonstration of what to do and what not to do courtesy of toothpastefordinner.com
Twitter, Federated Media and Microsoft have launched an interesting aggregator of business people who use Twitter. I’ll play with it for a while — many of the people listed are already in Tweet Deck, but ExecTweets acts as a squelch knob, surfacing the exec level noise above the few hundred people I follow elsewhere. Not sure if a web-aggregator makes sense as I tend to like a client like Twhirl of Tweetdeck minimized and available.
update: I looked at my Twitter page and saw my first twitter-ad, courtesy of Federated calling attention to ExecTweets. Federated struck again today with a Marchmadness app for AT&T.
Monday-Wednesday – NYC
Thursday-Saturday – Cotuit
Sunday – Beijing
One of the benefits of a son attending NYU’s Tisch School of Cinema Studies is you get an introduction to cinema that the local Cineplex can’t deliver, and a critic-on-the-couch to give an amazing introduction to what is happening on the screen. As faithful readers know, I’ve been entertaining myself this winter with the amazing Criterion Art House collection — 50 films from around the world. This past week my son was home for a few days on spring break. He brought with him a Hungarian film released in 1996, but only released on DVD a year ago — Satantango — a 7-hour epic by Bela Tarr.
That’s right. Seven-hour hours. Three DVDs.
Plot: The final days of a Hungarian communist-era collective farm. I guess late 198os, early 1990s. The “savior” of the farmers, Irimias, is coming, but the farmers, living in utter mud and squalor, think of leaving with what cash they have. Ten minute static shots. Moody music. Chapters revealing one character after another. At first the whole thing has the feeling of Valve’s Half-Life 2 video game and the viewer feels like Gordon Freeman, a visitor to an unfortunate black and white Iron Curtain hell of crumbling plaster, leaking roofs, and incessant rains.
From there — well, no way I am blogging a synopsis of a seven-hour flick. Let’s just say you get into the groove, you take lots of breaks, every now and then you say, “Whoa” and every now and then you nod off. The late critic, filmmaker and novelist, Susan Sontag said, “”Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours. I’d be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life.”
You can see some clips on YouTube. The opening eight minutes of cows is pretty good. The actual tango scene (I want the accordion music as the ringtone on my new BlackBerry — single most annoying and infectious piece of music ever) is worth a few minutes.
The movie is controversial due to a horrific scene involving a cat (which Tarr swears was unharmed and became his pet). It was pretty rough.
So — I suspect I am like one of a few thousand people to see this. I’d recommend it if you are really into art film. This isn’t a marathon stunt like some of Andy Warhol’s weirdness — 12 hours of the Empire State building. But it is a long committment best savored over a few days. Good luck finding it.