Category: culture

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Profile: Yukio Mishima

It’s hard to discuss mercurial writer, playwright Yukio Mishima (January 14, 1925 -— November 25, 1970) without the spectre of his demise casting a pall on the dialogue.

From Wikipedia (edited for conciseness):

On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four cohorts visited the commandant of the Ichigaya Camp – the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. Once inside, they proceeded to barricade the office and tied the commandant to his chair. With a prepared manifesto and banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped onto the balcony to address the gathered soldiers below. His speech was intended to inspire them to stage a coup d’etat and restore the Emperor to his rightful place. He succeeded only in irritating them and was mocked and jeered. As he was unable to make himself heard, he finished his planned speech after only a few minutes. He stepped back into the commandant’s office and committed seppuku (ritual suicide).

Now that’s an exit.

The full story on Mishima is complex and troubling: a sheltered child raised by a temperamental and artistocratic grandmother (who came from a samurai bloodline), only to return at the age of 12 to his parents. His father was a strict disciplinarian and it is suggested that his relationship with his mother bordered on incestuous.

Writing in secret (so that his father wouldn’t find out), Mishima’s stories focused on recurring themes of death, obsession, dishonour, and the consequences of unexamined emotions.

Mishima was gay, yet paradoxically (considering the society he inhabited) became obsessed with martial arts and militaristic self-discipline.

Of his more popular works is The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea.The novel takes place in post-WWII Japan and concerns the blooming love between a sailor on-leave and a wealthy industrialist whose son is part of a devilishly manipulative cabal of disaffected local children.

His critically-praised work includes the semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask and the fiction tetralogy Sea of Fertility. Mishima submitted the final draft of the fourth novel in the series, The Decay of the Angel, to his publisher on the same fateful day he and his colleagues would drive to the military school.

Having read a selection of his work (Confessions, Sailor, and the short story collection Acts of Wisdom), it’s clear that Mishima was an individual tortured by his own demons. One may argue he was born into a society which could never support his dynamic shape. His narrative style is poetic and sensual, though often critical of society and soaked with the tragedy of characters misdirected by love and self-discipline. Beautiful though they are, Mishima’s stories are often dark and painful. It’s for this reason I would be lying if I said I read his work regularly – though I wouldn’t hesitate to describe them as rewarding (if not seminal) works for the fiction reader.

If you’re curious about Yukio Mishima – and while I would not call it a definitive example – you may want to check out Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a film by Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver). It blends the story of his untimely death with lusciously visual renderings of some of his short stories.

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Article/Review: Digital Maoism, by Jaron Lanier

[from the I Wanted To Write About This Article a Month Ago Department]:

Jaron Lanier is a contributor and member of edge.org 1 (which I have listed in my sidebar links). Specifically, he offers his perspective on the evolution of technology and the internet and is credited as a “computer scientist and digital visionary”. In an essay posted May 30th, Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, he tackles the rise of aggregator/meta-centric portals such as Wikipedia (which I also have listed in my sidebar links), where individual contribution he argues (and to this extent, responsibility) is obscured by an emphasis on a hive mind approach.

Lanier starts, appropriately enough, by sharing the fact that his Wikipedia entry refers to him as a film director, which is truthful only to the extent that he made one film, a decade and a half earlier. “Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected,” he begins, “within a day I’m turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie.”

And with this he sets his target. It isn’t, he insists, Wikipedia itself:

“No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.“

Lanier’s strongest point, as I see it, is his contention that the collectivist, hive-driven format of sites such as Wikipedia (and extended in his essay to meta-meta-meta aggregators such as Digg and Reddit) continue a troubling trend toward aggregated, impersonally edited content over… well, content curated and written by identifiable humans.

“The race began innocently enough with the notion of creating directories of online destinations, such as the early incarnations of Yahoo. Then came AltaVista, where one could search using an inverted database of the content of the whole Web. Then came Google, which added page rank algorithms. Then came the blogs, which varied greatly in terms of quality and importance. This lead to Meta-blogs such as Boing Boing, run by identified humans, which served to aggregate blogs. In all of these formulations, real people were still in charge. An individual or individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.
[…]
“In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.”

Lanier’s line of query unfolds to include the observation that the “meta” is now more popular and, in respect to Google News, more profitable than traditional media (newspapers in particular), yet no one standing next to the microphone is able to articulate the fact that popularity contests do not historically vet the best, but rather, what the collective believes is safest. And of course, nobody seems to want to say that the collective is just as culpable – in some ways more powerfully culpable – as individuals.

I highly suggest anyone interested in the social internet, its architecture and direction, give this essay a good read. Lanier’s observations move from the immediate suspects above to commentary on analogous movements, such as Linux 2, the “open” software movement, and the ever-ubiquitous MySpace. In many respects, it’s about time somebody spoke eloquently about the collapse of the human face behind these efficient portals.

However, I do have some issues. For one thing, the tangents never really weave into a comprehensive whole, making it feel much too cumbersome (and a page too long) to concisely support Lanier’s provocative thesis. There are many arguments using the financial marketplace as a comparison tool which, although in theory an applicable analogy, is probably the last example I would use if I were arguing for a more humanistic approach. In fact, for someone arguing for this approach, Lanier’s language sometimes bares the same technocratic opaqueness which I would argue obscures a better understanding of the debate.

For example, leading to his summary:

“Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.”

I realize the term “feedback loop” is an applicable simile when discussing communication, but it’s disconcerting when a term normally applied to specialty occupations – namely, software programming and audio engineering – should somehow become the standard upon which we seek to inspire a better world. Is this not, to some extent, asking a less-predictable society to be like a more-predictable tool?

Please read the essay for yourself and feel free to share your feedback in the comments section.

Please note: there is a discourse on the essay on the edge.org site here.

1. From their site: “Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world. The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.”

2. There is no official site for “Linux” (outside of linux.org, which looks exactly as it was when first uploaded many, many years ago…and no this is not a compliment). The link I provided goes to Ubuntu, which is the flavour of Linux I use at home. There are others.

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Comment: There is nothing inherently masturbatory about film

Eric Bogosian wrote in 1995 :

It’s a truism to say that movies, TV and canned music are all dead media. In fact, they are machine-made. Might as well have electrodes sunk into my gray matter as a pair of headphones and some house music. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like a blasting boom-box as much as I love jerking off and I’d be sad if I couldn’t slink into a refrigerated movie theater in the middle of a hot, stinking New York afternoon and sedate my self with greasey [sic] salted corn while watching illuminated photos of people killing each other.

But it’s all dead. Which is to say, un-unique. Every one the same as the other. The movie (or TV show or record) is the same whether I’m there or not. That’s why it’s like porno as opposed to sex. Good theater is like having sex. It’s different depending on who you’re with.

I originally read this in a newspaper article, though paraphrased more succinctly: theatre is like sex while film is like masturbation.

So as to not give the impression that I’ve withheld a decade’s worth of disagreement, this is not the first time a theatre actor has publicly pissed on filmmaking (in general, no less) whilst implying theatre as sacrosanct. More recently, a local theatre actor with a sizeable list of TV/film roles had done the same in a local weekly. And every time someone takes this approach it’s hard not to view them as precious ideologues.

Arguments like this are easy to make, especially when you opt to side-step the reality of that which you are criticizing. To be fair (some may say too fair), I like to think Bogosian was championing theatre (specifically New York’s scene) as opposed to condemning film, seeing as he was distressed at the brain-drain occurring at the time (and I’m sure continuing to this day).

The truth is that there is nothing inherently masturbatory about film or filmmaking, or at the very least the threshold is no greater than in – dare I say it – theatre. If I may borrow Bogosian’s turn of phrase, it’s a truism that there is more to filmmaking than the inflated mediocrity we see passing through our cinemas on their way to the DVD shelf. How difficult would it be for anyone to use the same argument about theatre: Mama Mia, anyone? Is it fair to base an argument about theatre on Tarzan? Truth is, every artistic medium has its share of sequined fluff and it is patently unfair to point to the worst (or, in the case of LA, the home of the worst) for validation. It’s an argument which ignores the power (abetted, I argue, by actors also) of such a wide array and long history of great filmmaking that tallying a list (as I’ve attempted for the last 20 minutes) seems as asinine as Bogosian’s comment.

Every artist works with the bells of his pursuit’s downfall ringing in the background. This is part of the very thing which pushes artists to do their best work: namely, being pissed-off (or, depending upon your local caste system, “outraged”). Being pissed-off gives us the plays, films, and yes – television – we as a society need to have around us (if not to watch). So, if Bogosian was simply sounding a pro-theatre rallying cry, I can understand. What I can’t understand is when reasonably intelligent people denigrate perfectly analogous pursuits for sake of expressing their petty love of another.

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The Not-So-Great Debate

With every year, particularly since 9/11, it’s harder and harder to find reasoned debate. By ‘reasoned debate’, I mean a discussion where arguments are backed up with reason, a bit of logic, and some semblance of research/understanding of history. What doesn’t pass for ‘reasoned debate’ – what we currently have before us – is hyperbole, name-calling, grand-standing, and ridiculously partisan follies paraded in all forms of media.

Before I go any further, I encourage you to look at the dictionary definition of debate. The important word repeated throughout is discussion. I don’t think this word needs defining, though some days I think it should be printed on t-shirts and handed out to school children so that it’s not forgotten. But I digress.

Two reasons for the lack of true (as in useful) debate come to mind, although I’m sure there are more:

1) The replacement of individual thought with self-invested group-think.

2) The perversion of language and its subsequent use as a weapon.

– – –

The first point is as clear as it is demonstrable. Increasingly, individual citizen input (from either the public or private sector) is bypassed in favour of specialists from advocacy groups and so-called think-tanks. Some examples: in Canada, The Fraser Institute, the C.D. Howe Institute, and the Canadian Taxpayer Federation. In the U.S., examples include the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.

Whether leaning towards a particular side of the political spectrum or specialising in a particular avenue of advocacy, all of these groups have one thing in common: self-interest. In corporatist style, think tanks and advocacy groups have been propped up as representatives for a discussion which should take place within the public arena but doesn’t. It doesn’t because the public arena is seen as messy; in an increasingly corporatist society, messy doesn’t compute. Messy needs to be streamlined. The rise of advocacy groups, think-tanks and (increasingly) NGO’s often has nothing to do with the public and everything to do with establishing each group’s predominance in their field. Indeed, the first and last thing both the Canadian Taxpayer Federation and the CATO Institute have in common is making sure their organisations keep running – certainly not fostering independent thought.

One thing you can count on is that advocacy groups and think-tanks are consistent: everyone tows the line, everyone knows the script. Their facts, usually half-sided, are provided-for internally and what research they do is with the sole intent of reaching a pre-conceived conclusion that suits a pre-defined format, whether it be economic, social, or political.

When these organisations are inserted in place of the citizen’s voice, democracy becomes Kafka-esque. Often, one ideological think-tank is pitted against another, and what is discussed has no relation to truth (as either the citizen sees it or would like questioned) but to the safe consistency of “staying on-message”. Thus, there is very little debating in lieu of ideological advertisement.

It’s tempting to admire projects like Media Matters for America, which can be very effective at spotting media bias, but my frustration is that its interests are inherently one-sided: attack Republican bias, but support/protect Democrat initiatives. Indeed, it would be daunting for an organization devoted to highlighting media bias if it was looking at all sides of the media paradigm – and this comes to my concluding point: vested interests are easy to finance. Complexity is not.

– – –

The second blockade to real debate is the perversion of language. Media pundit Bill O’Reilly is probably one of the most accomplished when it comes to the distortion of language. His polemic style, his bullying aggression towards dissenting opinion, and his partisan hatred are broadcast every weekday to an audience of millions. He begins and ends most of his addresses with the well-worn cloak of false common-sense: everyone wants to protect freedom, everyone is concerned about terrorism, everyone knows that there are far-left extremists among us. Everyone. His consistent target is a group known previously as liberals, but most recently goes by the moniker secular progressives. In O’Rielly’s words, they are elitists and only Bill O’Reilly can identify this imminent threat to our safety. Obviously this is all very partisan and prejudicial and not dissimilar to what has been said and demonstrated throughout the 20th century by both fascists and Communists – but everything about O’Reilly and FoxNews is paradoxically draped in the opposite: his show is called The No-Spin Zone and his channel’s mantra is Fair and Balanced. The paradox continues the more attention is spent on their language: leftists are compared to Nazis…actually, that’s wrong: everyone who takes a different side ends up being portrayed as a Nazi…or alternately a Communist. (I suggest FoxNews create a doll that, on cue, devotees could raise and shake towards the TV screen at opportune times, whilst shouting “Ooogey boogey ooogey!”.)

A less outraged sentiment is echoed by newspaper columnists such as the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente, who habitually tut-tuts those who question authority (save for when she decides to). Her approach, albeit certainly less vitriolic than O’Reilly’s, is to portray dissenters as part of a privileged latté-sipping middle-class elite. Her motto seems to be: shut up and live with it – ostensibly the antithesis of debate itself.

Again, we come back to the word elitist. Elitism is, we are told, our enemy. It’s an easy way to cast aspersions on dissent – let’s face it, there are always going to be a smaller percentage of people who ask disinterested questions (that is, questions that are not self-serving but serve the ideals of the community). In her book, Prisons We Choose To Live Inside (reviewed here), Doris Lessing is philosophical about the word elitism and it’s accusatory usage. She goes so far as to determine it a necessary evil if it means the freedom to ask important, if unpopular, questions aloud. In other words, if painted an elitist – so be it.

– – –

From a local perspective, the debate disconnect was driven home – literally and figuratively – when in 2000, Toronto broadcaster CityTV refused to hold an election debate between the incumbent mayor, Mel Lastman and his opponents. This was the first time CityTV had decided to do this since they began hosting televised mayoral debates*. While it was arguable at the time as to the feasiblity of any of Lastman’s opponents winning (and it should be noted that Lastman won with 80% support), it was shocking to see a local broadcaster that wraps itself in a mantra of street-level community-building refuse to even go that simple distance. I remember watching an evening call-in show on CityTV, hosted by Lorne Honickman, whose guest was mayoral hopeful Tooker Gomberg – this took place after the announcement that there would be no debate. I clearly remember the disbelief, bordering on contempt, that Honickman displayed as caller after caller phoned-in to simply ask: why? Why no debate? His retisence to discuss the subject was as obvious as his clear disdain for his guest.

– – –

Debate is inclusive, not exclusive. Its aim is perspective – not the promotion of canned answers or unmovable positions. The object of debate is not disgracing dissent, but putting forth reasoned arguments. I think there’s a long road ahead as regards our ability to communicate, to argue respectfully, and to share ideas. These things happen at a smaller scale all the time in our communities, but I think we’ve forgotten how important they are, thus it’s going to take a while for citizens to feel attached to it again; to take command of their own voice, as it were.

The responsibility to restore true debate falls on civilians – when the citizenry abdicates responsibility for public discussion, we shouldn’t be surprised when the gap is filled by self-interested interest-groups. When societies forget about their social responsibilities those responsibilities are often annexed as anachronisms, and replaced by the empty comfort of technology (ie televised think tanks). The Internet is a good tool for the restoration of debate, but it’s only a tool and not in and of itself anything more. What’s needed is the will to reform, reason, and a sense of responsibility to society as a whole.

* (I can find no record to refute this, but I’m open to correction)

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Context: Reality-TV

I was reading Theresa C’s comment, and felt inspired by her saying how “Un-Reality TV is mind numbing”. I largely agree, and thought that people should know where this medium came from.

Let’s start with some history, because reality-TV, currently trickling down from the peak of its popularity, neither came about accidentally nor without reason.

In 1988, two of the largest television-industry unions went on strike: SAG (Screen Actors Guild of America) and the WGA (Writer’s Guild of America). With a long and protracted labour action underway, television producers (whose job it is to raise money, oversee production, and sell their shows to networks) were left potentially without any means to do their job: produce. They were seemingly hog-tied by the fact that they couldn’t hire actors or writers.

There were three means that evolved by which producers (and networks) could work around this: the newsmagazine program, the daytime talk-show, and the so-called “reality show”. The former was a variation based on existing (and relatively successful) programs such as “60 Minutes“, only with a stronger emphasis on real-time/ENG-style aesthetics (which evolved from the increasing portability of video cameras and the emergence of the one-man newsgatherer technique pioneered by such TV stations as City-TV in Toronto). Utilizing a stronger visual style rather than talking-head interviews, with an emphasis on flow rather than a strict focus on content, both CBS and ABC rolled-out “48 Hours” and “PrimeTime Live” respectively. Eventually, this verite style merged into existing and new 60 Minutes-Lite programs such as “A Current Affair” and “Inside Edition“.

The second way producers diverted the use of actors and writers was creating more daytime talk-shows which, unlike the comparatively tame examples set by Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue, focused on live conflict and on-stage humiliation. Shows like “The Maury Povich Show” and “The Jerry Springer Show” lead the ground in a confrontational and largely exploitational style, utilising supposedly real everyday people as their guests. Of course, real everyday people aren’t consistently exciting, so often the focus was on Neo-Nazis, domestic family conflicts, and, well, idiots.

The last format was the “reality tv show”. The difference between this and the newsmagazine/talk-show formats was utilising a day-in-the-life-of style, where the camera (usually just one) was always on, following its subject, hoping to capture excitement. The progenitor of this was “COPS“, which aired on the FOX network in 1989. COPS, ostensibly a means for producers to side-step using actors and writers, turned into a phenomena from which much of the current streams of reality-TV can be drawn from: intense, outrageous, cheap to produce.

(Note: almost every show mentioned above – with the exception of “A Current Affair”, a show which soon devolved into the same scare tactics and exploitation of its brethren – started as a direct result of the SAG and WGA strikes, circa 1988.)

In other words, aesthetics aside, what started as a way for producers to produce during the labour-action ended up as a cost-efficient way to create cheap programming which the public took to very quickly and the networks gobbled-up: it was engaging, often enraging, and allowed the audience to peer into the seamy side of society from a safe (if voyeuristic) distance.

It was only until recently – ten years after the SAG and WGA strikes – when any modicum of creativity was injected into the medium, when programs such as “Survivor“, “Blind Date“, and “The Apprentice” took the elements of all three of the above mediums and went primetime against ensemble dramas and sitcoms to astounding success.

Of course, every fad must die, and slowly this newest generation of the reality-TV mould is fading away into obscurity, reminiscent of the last days of Jerry Springer when even the most outrageous bullshit didn’t get the ratings it used to. Too many shows, too little fresh ideas, the medium has devolved into self-parody with the likes of “The Simple Life” and “American Idol“.

Reinvigorated by the success of harder-hitting dramas on HBO (like “Six Feet Under“) the public is coming back around to ensemble drama and network television has responded with a better-than-average crop of programs in response. So what will the next metamorphosis for reality-TV be? Possibly a return to live performance on television, in the style of the great Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason. Ironically, what television started out with in its infancy – an extension of vaudeville and theatre – may come back some 50 or so years later to reclaim our attention. That I would look forward to seeing.

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Article: Telefilm in the Hotseat

In the latest Maclean’s magazine, Brian D. Johnson writes a perfect summation of what is wrong with English Canadian filmmaking: not one thing, but several – and most paths lead back to the government-backed, taxdollar-fuelled funding agency, Telefilm. The article in question isn’t available online, so I suggest you purchase your copy at the local store.

Titled “The Lost Picture Show”, Johnson articulates exactly the frustration amongst established and independent filmmakers who’s goal is to shoot commercially accessible films; this stands in contrast to the long line of edgy/anti-hero ridden/low-key releases which have largely gone straight to video with little mainstream acclaim and fewer people who could vouch to have seen them.

As Johnson notes in his interview with Paul (Due South, Men With Brooms) Gross:

‘English Canadian cinema is wedded to an auteur model based on the early festival breakthroughs of some “really terrific filmmakers like Atom Egoyan.” Then [Gross] adds, “It’s been stuck in that mode for a while. Festivals are composed of audiences that you never see replicated in a normal theatre. We’ve hidden behind this intellectual rampart. And we end up in this perverse situation where we assign to any failed film a great deal of intellectual integrity.”‘

As much as I love/support/appreciate the dark, edgy and ultimately hard-to-market work of filmmakers such as Guy Maddin, I admit that it cannot be our only cultural sustenance. We cannot survive soley on a meal of dark introspection (though it makes for such a wonderful – somtimes necessary – dish from time to time).

The thrust of much of the article is the war between producers, distributors (roundly accused by many of taking the money and running), and the English-language arm of Telefilm – whose opaque methods and logic would astound even The Knights of Templar.

As would be predicted, the producers want distributors to take more risk (to discourage the habit of flipping their investment by selling broadcast rights to films and then spending a fraction of their profit on a weak/token theatrical release that no one will see), the distributors want everyone to take more risk, and Telefilm, recently headed by semi-autonomous robot Wayne Clarkson, can only field the disgruntlement by reacting not like the head of a company (as we would expect) but like your typical corporate lackey:

“Is there any issue? Absolutely. Is the present system working? Not to the degree that we all wish it would. Do there have to be changes? Absolutely.”

Great stuff, Wayne.

Some modest suggestions of my own:

1) Non-Quebec film exhibitors must be obligated to devote 10-15% of screen time to Canadian-made features (English and/or French-language). If Can-Con (Canadian content regulations) can apply to radio and television, it makes perfect sense that theatres should shoulder this as well.

2) Telefilm should drop the “envelope system” (whereby a successful film’s producer is granted a no-strings $3.5 million each year for three years to invest as he/she wishes). It only leads to the anemic creative impasse we’ve been stuck with for the past 10 years: the same people support the same people and there is no incentive towards quality or success.

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Article/Review: The Man Who Said No To Wal-Mart

I caught a great review on Slashdot for Charles (Fast Company magazine) Fishman’s book The Man Who Said No To Wal-Mart. Although it seems a little lame to link to someone else’s review, I thought the review itself was very well written (kudos to Hemos). The subject matter itself is quite fascinating as it profiles a philosophy of doing business that seems…well…old-fashioned in the best possible way: doing what’s best for everyone from a long-term perspective. When was the last time you encountered that?

Excerpt:

—————-

Review – The Man Who Said No To Wal-Mart

Charles Fishman, senior writer for Fast Company magazine has recently published a book entitled The Man Who Said No To Wal-mart. It’s an excellent book (Yes, I’ve read it) that talks about the intersection of making good stuff, the commodization of products, and the changing world that we work in; not exactly high tech, but tech nonetheless.

Every year, thousands of executives venture to Bentonville, Arkansas, hoping to get their products onto the shelves of the world’s biggest retailer. But Jim Wier wanted Wal-Mart to stop selling his Snapper mowers.What struck Jim Wier first, as he entered the Wal-Mart vice president’s office, was the seating area for visitors. “It was just some lawn chairs that some other peddler had left behind as samples.” The vice president’s office was furnished with a folding lawn chair and a chaise lounge.

And so Wier, the CEO of lawn-equipment maker Simplicity, dressed in a suit, took a seat on the chaise lounge. “I sat forward, of course, with my legs off to the side. If you’ve ever sat in a lawn chair, well, they are lower than regular chairs. And I was on the chaise. It was a bit intimidating. It was uncomfortable, and it was going to be an uncomfortable meeting.”

It was a Wal-Mart moment that couldn’t be scripted, or perhaps even imagined. A vice president responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of business in the largest company in history has his visitors sit in mismatched, cast-off lawn chairs that Wal-Mart quite likely never had to pay for.

The vice president had a bigger surprise for Wier, though. Wal-Mart not only wanted to keep selling his lawn mowers, it wanted to sell lots more of them. Wal-Mart wanted to sell mowers nose-to-nose against Home Depot and Lowe’s.

“Usually,” says Wier, “I don’t perspire easily.” But perched on the edge of his chaise, “I felt my arms getting drippy.”

Wier took a breath and said, “Let me tell you why it doesn’t work.”

Read On…

—————-

Not the usual Slashdot fare, but it’s certainly nice to see.

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CopyWrong

I once watched a PBS-televised lecture featuring writer Clifford Stoll. He wrote one of the first true-life hacker books, called The Cookoo’s Egg (ISBN: 0671-72688-9), about his efforts to track a “telnet” hacker who was using the Berkeley University server hub as a means to tap into the Department of Defense. A very, very good book.

In the lecture he was discussing copyright issues and how it is becoming harder and harder for people to express themselves due to large corporations buying-up the rights and then registering patents for everything from Mickey Mouse to mere phrases/ideas written on cocktail napkins. He said the following (note: I’m paraphrasing due to the fact that it was over 5 years ago that I watched it):

“If we had the same copyright protection rules historically that we have now, you know who the richest people on Earth would be? The League of Greek Mathematicians; because every time you used the Pythagorean Theorem you would have to pay a fee.“

I cannot have chosen a better way to convey how utterly stupid and self-destructive the current copyright laws have become. I’m not arguing against someone protecting the fruits of their invention, however I neither support legally protecting a concept nor extending the patent protecting an invention for more than a reasonable fixed period of time. Historically the reason for patenting an invention was so that the originating inventor would have unabated means (in the marketplace) to collect the rewards of their work/investment – but it wasn’t meant to last forever.

Strangely, this was thwarted by a man who will probably go down in history as “Cher’s first husband”, Sonny Bono. He involved himself in politics and fought (until his death) to extend copyrights indefinitely. One can only speculate that he was concerned “I Got You Babe” wouldn’t net him any more proceeds. Details of this law (amended and passed) are here.

My reasoning is this: the evolution of an idea is often the result of a collaboration of thinkers over a long period of time. When the Principia Mathematica was published, Sir Isaac Newton – when asked about his breakthrough idea of gravity – said that he was only “standing on the shoulders of giants”, namely the likes of Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus: those who had come before him and provided the necessary groundwork to provide Newton with the tools to complete the picture.

The current environment is simply bad capitalism: dramatically limiting competition and the free evolution of ideas for short term profit. Sad.

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Context: cultural protectionism vs. indigenous identity

An interesting article on The Guardian today highlights an interesting question regarding cultural protectionism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1734778,00.html?gusrc=rss

Excerpt:

 

Ministry bans export of Spanish writer’s manuscripts

 

Dale Fuchs in Madrid
Monday March 20, 2006
The Guardian

Signed manuscripts by one of Spain’s most influential novelists and philosophers of the 20th century, Miguel de Unamuno, have been declared “not for export” by the culture ministry, days before they were due to auctioned in Madrid.

The decision is part of a mounting effort to keep Spanish cultural treasures at home and follows a move earlier this month to get Interpol to prevent the sale of five 10th-century wooden beams from the historic Great Mosque of Cordoba.

On March 27, the Sala Durán auction house in Madrid plans to sell nine lots of letters and other documents by Unamuno, the author of Fog, Abel Sánchez and Teresa, some of them written during his exile from 1926 to 1930 in the Canary Islands and Paris, during the dictatorship of Primo Rivera. Other letters up for sale were written to his wife, children and other intellectuals and writers of his times, such as the poet Rubén Darío.

News of the sale, however, sounded the alarm at the culture ministry. It said it had declared the Unamuno manuscripts off limits to foreign buyers as “a cautionary measure” to “guarantee this assembly of extraordinary interest for Spain’s documental heritage” remains in the country.

It is the first in what will be a series of legal measures to preserve Spain’s cultural patrimony, the statement said. The Sala Durán told Spanish news agencies the auction would proceed as planned.

An interesting predicament (and I’d be curious to have people who live in Spain give more context to this). I suppose the chief conflict is whether cultural artifacts/icons should be freely subject to export or mandated to remain in-country. Although it isn’t clear who would be bidding on the works of de Unamuno (private sale, museum, university, etc.), there is a strong argument that by allowing fragments of ones heritage to be exported you are also exporting articles of cultural identity which could arguably serve a greater good via public access in an international setting (again, assuming the auction tilts towards public institutions). The world would be allowed to understand aspects of Spain’s culture that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to when these elements are available to them.

One of the problems with cultural protectionism is that the benefits tend to be short-term; if you refuse to allow cultural artifacts to be exported then you deny your culture a necessary life. Culture can neither be created nor destroyed by man; it is an ecosystem unto itself. Logically then, if you close the free export of culture (and I understand there may be very persuasive arguments for holding back) you are effectively cutting off a vine which should necessarily thrive unheeded. I generally feel that the only cultures which require protection are extinct/demised cultures – the Aztecs, for example. There is no way for the remnants of their culture to thrive without artificial means, thus it makes sense to take a protectionist stance.

My question is thus: what is the state of Spanish culture? Is there a need for protectionism? Am I totally off-base (probably)? Has Spanish culture, like Egyptian, been raided by foreign interests?

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