Category: Videos

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Daniel H. Pink: 9-to-5ers Anthem

Daniel H. Pink has been exploring the way we work for over a decade now. From Free Agent Nation (Warner Books, 2001) to A Whole New Mind (Riverhead, 2005), he’s been unearthing the intricacies of the working world from the abstract to the concrete. His latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko (Riverhead, 2008), is a career guide written in the Japanese graphic-novel style of manga (a trailer for which is embedded below). As the world of work continues to get more and more confusing, we need all the help we can get.

Roy Christopher: Your work has made an interesting shift from the nomothetic to the idiographic, from the working trends of the masses to the career of the individual. Has this been an intentional change in focus?

Daniel Pink: A little bit. I’ve tried to write all my books from the perspective of the individual. As I write, I really think about an individual reader going through the pages and trying to glean some information and guidance. The big change with Johnny B. is that I decide to do a pure narrative — and, of course, I decided to tell that story in the picture-based form that is manga.

RC: Tell me about Johnny Bunko, “the first American business manga.” Where’d you get the idea to present your business writing through the Japanese graphic novel format?

Johnny BunkoDP: It was a bunch of factors. I spent a couple of months last year in Japan studying the manga industry. One of the things I discovered that manga is ubiquitous in Japan — 22% of all printed material is in comics — in part because it’s a form that’s for adults as well as
kids. In any Japanese bookstore, you can find manga to help you manage your time, learn about Japanese history, find a mate, etc. But as popular as manga has become in the U.S., we still don’t have that genre of manga for adults. What’s more, when it comes to career
information, people today get their tactical information online — what keywords to include in a résumé, info about what a company does, etc. What they want from a book is what they can’t get from Google: strategic, big picture advice. That’s why I’ve organized this book around the six broad principles about satisfaction and impact at work that I wish I’d known 25 years ago.

A Whole New MindRC: A Whole New Mind goes a long way to reconciling the brain-hemisphere bias we’ve all been trained to accept. The book is definitely full of solid insights, but did you ever feel like you were reaching a bit?

DP: No. If anything, people have told me that I went overboard in the book repeating that both hemispheres — or, more accurately, both left-brain and right-brain style thinking — are important.

RC: There seem to be two sides to the whole-mind concept: one is an opening up to new ideas and influences so that one doesn’t become stale, and the other is a narrowing of stimuli just so one can get one’s work done. How do we find a balance in this?

DP: That’s one of the most central questions of personal productivity. And there’s no simple answer. It seems like it’s less about balance than about being able to toggle back and forth between those two modes. The key, of course, is figuring out when to shift. I have a tough time with that myself.

RC: I’ve been primarily freelancing for most of the last decade. Looking back, how prescient were your ideas in Free Agent Nation?

DP: I let others decide the prescience. What I see is that this form of working has become more prevalent and more socially acceptable. And perhaps more interesting, Corporate America itself is becoming more free agent-like. Job tenures are shorter; companies hire people without extending any expectation that new hires will be there for a long time. Organizations are extending much greater flexibility over time and work style. And, of course, they’re shifting responsibility like health care and pensions to the individual. In some sense, whether we’re getting a 1099 or a W-2, we’re all free agents now.

——

Here is the trailer for Daniel Pink’s Johnny Bunko (runtime: 1:46):

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Southland Tales: Not with a Whimper, but with a Bang

Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales finally hit DVD this week, and I’ve been soaking it up ever since. It’s a lot to take in and a lot to decipher (as Salon put it, “It’s filled with so many references and so much self-conscious irony that it’s nearly impossible to make sense of it all.”), but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it’s worth it. I agree with Steven Shaviro that it’s “not only a brilliant film, but an extraordinarily important one.”

Southland TalesLike Donnie Darko, this is another absurdist eschatological fairy tale, albeit on a much grander scale, with a Pynchon-esque sprawl and a large focus on politics. Where Donnie Darko shows remarkable restraint whenever the plot threatens to spiral out of control, Southland Tales just pushes that much further, reveling in its own chaos and spectacle. It’s a carnival, a war, an end to humanity, a social comment, a political satire, a science fiction romp, and a laugh-out-loud comedy — it bends and blends genres so much as to be “as radical as reality itself” (to borrow a phrase from several sources). Not that it doesn’t have a plot or a focus, it does, but a single viewing will not provide one with all the clues to its many secrets.

This is the way the world ends.
Not with a whimper, but with a bang.

The full story spills over from the film into three prequel graphic novels and borrows liberally from The Book of Revelation, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Jane’s Addiction’s “Three Days,” T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Man” (quoted in its adapted form above), Kiss Me Deadly, Repo Man, the writings of Karl Marx, and many other places. The full scope of the story is ridiculously vast. As Richard Kelly explains, “I spent the last four years of my life devoted to this insane tapestry of Armageddon,” adding that this was about “getting the apocalypse out of my system once and for all.”

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The centerpiece of this “insane tapestry of Armageddon” is a drug-induced music video sequence featuring Iraq veteran Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake) recontextualizing “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers (embedded above; runtime: 2:56). Like the rest of the movie, it’s over-the-top delirious, but its delirium eventually disintegrates into head-hanging melancholy and the beginning of Part VI, “Wave of Mutilation,” the final act, ridden by the motif of “friendly fire” and self-destruction. This movie must have the highest incidence of characters putting guns to their own heads in the history of film-making. It also must have the highest incidence of cameras: They’re everywhere. This movie is nothing if not panoptic.

Southland Tales is rich with metaphors and self-reference, and it breaks harshly with conventional story-telling and film-making. I think it is the latter that resulted in its wholesale dismissal by critics and abysmal box office performance. Southland Tales bucks the traditional narrative paradigm that audiences are used to, and in doing so, leaves viewers lost in its hallucinatory haze. This is not to say that I got it the first time through, because that certainly isn’t the case: I’ve watched it three times in as many days, and I’m just scratching the surface. I just think that the film is not only a bit too ambitious but also breaks with form to its financial detriment. Its layers of reality (e.g., a reality TV show, a prophetic screenplay, time-traveling doubles, the musical piece — all constantly surveilled and recorded) — often reminiscent of those in Scream 3 — only add to its surreal ontology and unorthodox narrative presentation.

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There are so many jarring non sequiturs throughout the film that when Boxer Santaros (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) dropped his signature line from the film (“I’m a pimp, and pimps don’t commit suicide.”), I was surprised that I was surprised. Absurdity is the rule here, not the exception. In one scene, Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott) makes Martin Kefauver (Lou Taylor Pucci) put on his seatbelt, just after stopping him from blowing his own head off! Some of the lines that seem to come from out of nowhere are a part of Southland Tales‘ “self-conscious irony,” as after “officer” Bart Bookman guns down two performance artists he utters, “Flow my tears.” On the side of his police car is the Latin phrase “oderint dum metuant”: “Let them hate, so long as they fear,” which was a favorite saying of the Roman Emperor Caligula. These are only a few examples of the film’s many references and absurdities.

With that said, I also think this movie is worth the investment it takes to unravel. Maybe, like Donnie Darko, Southland Tales will find its cult audience. Here’s hoping Richard Kelly is on his way to becoming the next Kubrick and not the next Gilliam, because with only two movies, he’s proven that he has the chops to share their company.

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Commercial Art: Belvedere Vodka

Something about this Belvedere Vodka commercial has haunted me since its constant airing during the holidays last year. I must’ve seen it fifty times. I’m not shilling for Belvedere here. Hell, I’ve never even tasted the stuff, but I can’t get this ad out of my head.

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Directed by the chronically flannel-wearing fashion photographer Terry Richardson, the spot is set in a self-consciously “downtown” party featuring Richardson himself snapping pictures of fellow party-goers, including actor/director Vincent Gallo and graff artist Earsnot. The soundtrack, which sounds drunk itself, was composed by Gallo and The RZA.

It’s obvious by the parties involved that Belvedere is trying to position itself as the hippest vodka at the party. So obvious in fact, so over-the-top, that it ceases to matter. The ad-overdosed cynic in us all sees Gallo greet guests and scrawl a face on a painting with a marker, Earsnot saunter in with a hottie on his arm, Richardson blatantly snapping his point-and-shoot, Gallo under the piano with some woman, RZA mumbling over a drunken bassline, and it’s all so contrived…

…but, it’s also so cool. there is something qualitative about this ad that nails exactly what I think Belvedere was shooting for when they conceived it. Somehow all of this pretense, all of this obvious posturing, gives us a thirty-second glimpse into the world of cool. Somehow, the ad works.

The problem with advertising in general is that it’s ineffective. That’s why it’s everywhere. As much as the industry tries to quantify and coordinate dollars to sales, theirs is a qualitative enterprise. Did Belvedere sell more vodka because of this commercial? No idea, but it’s rare occasions like this that we see the art of advertising shine.

Here’s the commercial in question (runtime: 0:30):

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How We Became Post-Rock

There seems to be very little consensus on exactly where Rock crossed the line and became Post-Rock (a term popularized by Simon Reynolds), but most people agree that the two bands that galvanized the movement in the last two decades are Tortoise and Mogwai. The roots of the genre run deep and in many directions (e.g., Prog, Brian Eno, Jazz, CAN, PiL, Industrial, Jim O’Rourke, et al.), but for our purposes, we’ll start roughly with those two.

Mogwai live [photo by Leif Valin]Mogwai is consistently one of my most-listened-to artists. This is partly because they make great sleepy-time music, but also because their blend of mellow prog, raging guitars, and soundtracky drama has held my attention for years. Where Tortoise tends toward a shuffle and strum, Mogwai has a propensity for rumble and roar. Structurally, if the former were a lattice partition, the latter would be a brick wall. Simply put, there’s just a lot more tension and release with Mogwai.

With that said, the brand of Post-Rock that I am drawn to owes more to Mogwai than Tortoise (Explosions in the Sky and Kinski, for example), but this is not to paint Tortoise (and their brethren, June of 44, Rodan, et al.) out of the picture. Each of the new crop of these bands owes a great debt to the mathematics of Tortoise and Slint, the guitar textures of My Bloody Valentine and The Cure, the orchestrations of Radiohead, and the experiments of electronica. But they’re each taking this loose foundation in new directions. Hood, 65daysofstatic, The Notwist, and 13 & God all slouch toward electronica; Isis, Cult of Luna, The Ocean, and Jesu all lean on the metal; dälek blast Hip-hop through their wall-of-sound; Explosions in the Sky, God is an Astronaut, Caspian, Saxon Shore, and This Will Destroy You all play the middle ground, holding the core of instrumental post-rock together with fervor.

Thanks to a series of tips from longtime music friend Wayne Wambles, these last few bands are among my recent most-listened-to artists. I’ve been listening to quite a lot of Explosions in the Sky over the past year or so. Wayne caught wind of this and recommended several bands to me, all of whom toil similar musical soil to Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai.

These four bands are the logical heirs to the Post-Rock torch. Their compositions wax and wane in a similar emotive fashion to their forebears, building tension and releasing it in flurries of guitar noise. There’s not much more to say by way of description, but here are brief synopses of each.

Caspian often starts off with near silence but builds into a wailing wave of guitar. They’re the most organic of this new crop, careening off the rails and staying at the edge of control at all times.

With vocals sometimes employed, but used as not much more than another instrument, God is an Astronaut flies somewhere between Sigor Ros and Mogwai. With four great records out, they’ve been around seemingly forever (see one of their videos below).

On the flip-side, Texas’s own This Will Destroy You has had a brief but successful history, having only been a band since 2005 and having blown up right out of the box. The youngest of all of these bands, they’ve already proven themselves worthy of the post-rock mantle with 2006’s Young Mountain EP (Magic Bullet) and their recent self-titled full-length.

Saxon Shore remind me more of Mogwai in that they seem to rely on electronics more, and, like Mogwai, they’ve worked with David Fridmann (who is best known for his pioneering work with The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev). Fridmann produced their last record, The Exquisite Death of Saxon Shore (Burnt Toast Vinyl, 2005), and his influence is heard in its epic drive and many climaxes (They’re currently working on new material).

Here’s the video for “The End of the Beginning” by God is an Astronaut from the record of the same name (runtime: 3:43):

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Amen, Brother

V. Vale sent this out in his most recent newsletter (thanks, Vale). It’s a mini-documentary of a six-second drum break from the B-side of a Winstons’ record, a track called “Amen Brother,” that’s been sampled, looped, and reapproriated — by everyone from N.W.A. to car manufacturers — since its release in 1969. This is Nate Harrison’s meditation on that break, the “Amen Break.” It is “Amazing Grace” to his Bill Moyers, and this is a deep monologue on the ownership of cultural artifacts, the legality of sampling, and this six seconds of recorded history. Continue reading “Amen, Brother”

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UNCONSUB by Mark Lewman

My friend Mark Lewman sent me this video clip a few years ago. It’s sort of a video zine called “UNCONSUB” that he made with a digital camera. At the time, one couldn’t share such things as freely as we do now (he sent it to me on a CDR via the regular mail), but now that we have the bandwidth, I thought I’d share it. Continue reading “UNCONSUB by Mark Lewman”

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Blade Runner Redux

Just when I thought I’d missed it, The Laurelhurst Theater here in Portland brought Blade Runner: The Final Cut back around (I wasn’t here when it first played, and somehow, I missed the movie’s original release, though during that same time I managed to see all three original Star Wars movies as they came out). Thankfully Ridley Scott’s upgrades are subtle. He didn’t feel the need to George-Lucas it up with obvious and jarring new scenes and CGI. The changes are relatively seamless. Continue reading “Blade Runner Redux”

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Recurring Themes, Part Six: Sleeper Artifacts

“The essence of culture is found in all its artifacts.”
— Pete Robinson in Donald Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

During one of our mid-session chats at the skatepark recently, my friend Greg mentioned that a lot of the older guys he skated with at various parks, guys who’d skated back in the late 70s and early 80s, started skateboarding again after seeing the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary. I don’t know why, but this struck me as an odd phenomenon. I guess because it was a halo effect I hadn’t thought about.

Similarly, in Doug Pray’s 2001 movie Scratch, in interviews with a lot of today’s prominent turntablists, one of the questions was, “What made you want to be a DJ?” A large majority of the interviewees named Herbie Hancock’s 1983 hit “Rockit” as the defining impetus for their becoming DJs. This also struck me as odd since the main thing that stuck with me about that song was the video’s disturbing robotic mannequins (see below). “Rockit” is also a total anomaly in the Herbie Hancock canon, but it brought scratching to the mainstream with its infectious hook, based on the frenetic but rhythmic scratches of GrandMixer DST alongside Hancock’s catchy keyboards and mechanized vocals. Unbeknownst to me, it also had a major role in setting off what would become the turntablism movement — the DJ as musician.

RadI read a similar series of interviews with professional BMX riders a few years ago, and the same question was posed to the day’s top pros. Again, a large majority cited one cultural artifact as their starting point. This time, it was the 1986 Hal Needham movie Rad. Given my age, and the fact that I was already deep into BMX when Rad came out (I clearly remember going to see it the night it opened in my town in Alabama), I never thought that it would affect the sport the way it obviously did.

Along the same lines, Duane Pitre claimed Back to the Future (1985) was the reason he started skateboarding, and I’m guessing he’s not the only one.

These few examples demonstrate clearly to me that culture is about our relationships to cultural artifacts, and not necessarily their intended purposes. It’s about the effects of artifacts, and not the artifacts themselves. It’s about the ripple, not the rock.

I always cite James Gleick‘s Chaos as a turning point in my adult life. Reading that book turned me back into a reader and set me on my way to graduate school.

What cultural artifacts changed your path or had a deep impact on you?

Here is the aforementioned video for Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” (runtime: 3:25):

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