I’ve long been fascinated with movie reviewer Jeff Craig of Sixty Second Preview, a man who seems to love bad movies. About “Swordfish,” he said, “One of the most breathlessly entertaining releases of the summer. You’ll be pinned to your seat by Swordfish.” “The Chamber” was “an explosive, gripping drama!” And “Free Willy III” was breathtaking.
So who is Jeff Craig and what is Sixty Second Preview? NPR tried to track him down but couldn’t.
The Kevin Pollack/Sheryl Lee Ralph vehicle, titled “Deterrence,” wasn’t one of the top ten of the year, it was one of the most important films of our time. Now, there’s a movie lover. So we naturally wanted to speak to him, but we couldn’t find “Sixty Second Preview” — not any trace of it anywhere we looked. We don’t even know what medium it is.
Roger Ebert also asked, “Has anyone ever actually seen Jeff Craig of ‘Sixty Second Previews’ at a movie? For that matter, does anyone know what ‘Sixty Second Previews’ is? I ask in all sincerity.”
Little Rock native Ron Breeding has an answer:
I once worked for a radio station that aired “Sixty Second Previews,” a daily modular program one minute in length. Jeff Craig is the host of the thing, but since the program comes on CD a month at a time, he apparently hasn’t actually seen most of the movies — thus “previews,” not “reviews.” Still, his gushing about an upcoming movie he hasn’t yet seen ends up being used as blurbs in movie ads.
800 Very Unsquare Feet describes Free City Supershop, an unorthodox Malibu retail space, as “a new shopping experience equal in its fun and sense of surprise to that of Whole Foods or Apple.” Owner Nina Garduno’s mantra is “make things with the simplest elements with the highest of possibilities.” She differentiates the store from larger competitors by emphasizing attention to detail, authenticity, and faith.
According to Ms. Garduno, Free City is profitable. It took her eight days, working with a shoestring budget and a small team in her workshop in Hollywood, to create the store’s interior, which features redwood shelves and blowups of album covers. Like everything else about Free City, the design follows Ms. Garduno’s mantra to “make things with the simplest elements with the highest of possibilities.”...
“The big companies were taking the importance of fashion away, the craft, and making it about price,” she said…For something to be perceived as authentic, that value has to be communicated cleanly through every detail — from the quality of the wash, if it’s a T-shirt, to the integrity of the physical environment. This is the almost visceral sense you get when you enter Free City. Not to sound crunchy, but you feel the love.
“Well, go look at the Gap. They claim to not want to rip you off, but the fact is they do. And it’s not working for them — not even lifting my ideas, and with all of their money and art direction. They still don’t have faith. They don’t have faith in themselves, and it comes out instinctually in the product. I think people know the difference.”
More on tees and details
And speaking of tees and communicating quality through detail: Threadless, dissatisfied with existing options for blank tees, recently decided to start manufacturing its own.
These shirts are based on our experience as a tee shirt company, and the feedback we’ve gotten from our community since the beginning of Threadless. Imagine a tee that is less boxy than a Fruit of the Loom, but not as skinny as an American Apparel. Imagine a tee whose fabric is softer than American Apparel but not as thin.
Great example of paying attention to core detail (people may like the designs but if the shirts don’t fit right, it’s all moot) and knowing what your community wants (Fruit of the Loom = too boxy, American Apparel = too thin). Plus, there’s something Apple-esque here in the way Threadless didn’t just accept the limits of existing manufacturers and decided to find their own (better) solution.
Related:
7 reasons why Threadless rules [SvN]
The man behind Apple’s design magic [SvN]: “Apple’s efforts to discover new materials and production processes enables them to build things no one else can build.”
De Honnecourt’s architectural sketches
13th century French architect Villard de Honnecourt is known for his sketchbook of drawings and writings on architecture compiled while he travelled in search of work as a master mason. His sketchbook collection is viewable at The University of Newcastle’s site. Some examples:
Related: Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt [Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon] and The Golden Ratio in graphic design [Bridgewater Review].
Renaissance typography
Web Design is 95% Typography offers the design shown below and says, “The argument that we do not have enough fonts at our disposition is as good as irrelevant: During the Italian renaissance the typographer had one font to work with, and yet this period produced some of the most beautiful typographical work.”
Minimalist Euclid
Oliver Byrne’s edition of Euclid: “An unusual and attractive edition of Euclid was published in 1847 in England, edited by an otherwise unknown mathematician named Oliver Byrne…What distinguishes Byrne’s edition is that he attempts to present Euclid’s proofs in terms of pictures, using as little text — and in particular as few labels — as possible.” Sample page below.
Warren Buffett: Clear thinking leads to clear words
U.S.News & World Report has a special feature on America’s Best Leaders. In it, Warren Buffett gives good quote [via GE]:
“Be a nice person…It’s so simple that it’s almost too obvious to notice. Look around at the people you like. Isn’t it a logical assumption that if you like traits in other people, then other people would like you if you developed those same traits?”
“You’re thinking that the investors, bankers, and regulators are the people you need to survive. Put them all aside, and give priority to talking to your people and your customers about what is wrong and what you have to do.”
“Our favorite holding period is forever.”
“Berkshire is my painting so it should look the way I want it to when it’s done.”
“You don’t need to play outside the lines. You can make a lot of money hitting the ball down the middle.”
Personals that poke fun
Taking the piss of yourself is a good way to disarm your audience, show you’re confident, and prove you can take a joke. Book Lovers Seek Lovers, Buttered or Plain talks about the personals column in the London Review of Books and how people there intentionally present themselves in a negative light.
The magazine’s lonely hearts have described themselves over the years as shallow, flatulent, obsessive, incontinent, hypertensive, hostile, older than 100, paranoid, pasty, plaid-festooned, sinister-looking, advantage-taking, amphetamine-fueled, and as residents of mental institutions.
They have announced that they are suffering from liver disease, from drug addiction, from asthma, from compulsive gambling, from unclassified skin complaints and from reduced sperm counts. They have insulted prospective partners. As one ad starts, “I’ve divorced better men than you.”
Kate Fox, a cultural anthropologist and author of “Watching the English,” compared the London Review personals to an advertising campaign several years ago that showed people recoiling in revulsion from Marmite, the curiously popular gloppy-as-molasses yeast byproduct that functions as a sandwich spread, a snack or a base for soup (just add boiling water).
“An advertising campaign focusing exclusively on the disgust people feel for your product strikes a lot of people as perverse,” [Kate Fox, a cultural anthropologist] said in an interview. But when Britons exaggerate their faults, she said, they are really telegraphing their attributes. “It does speak of a certain arrogance, that you have the confidence and the sense of humor to say these things,” she said.
Continued…
Jordanians protest Jason Santa Maria’s favicon in Amman, Jordan, today. (AP photo)
James Surowiecki’s In Praise Of Third Place discusses Nintendo’s success and offers an interesting look at arms races, simplicity, and why companies should focus on profit over market share.
Sony and Microsoft’s quest to “control the living room” has locked them in a classic arms race; they have invested billions of dollars in an attempt to surpass each other technologically, building ever-bigger, ever-better, and ever-more-expensive machines.
Nintendo has dropped out of this race. The Wii has few bells and whistles and much less processing power than its “competitors,” and it features less impressive graphics. It’s really well suited for just one thing: playing games. But this turns out to be an asset. The Wii’s simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells—even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars. Similarly, because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it’s been able to focus on its core competence, which is making entertaining, innovative games…
Nintendo’s success is not an anomaly, either. The business landscape of the past couple of decades is replete with companies that have flourished as third wheels, and with companies that have struggled to make money despite being No. 1 in their industries. (Today, would you rather be Honda or G.M.?) And while it’s true that in many industries there is a correlation between market share and profitability, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.
A recent survey of the evidence on market share by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green found that companies that adopt what they call “competitor-oriented objectives” actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focusses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do. And a study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.
Markets today are so big—the global video-game market is now close to thirty billion dollars—that companies can profit even when they’re not on top, as long as they aren’t desperately trying to get there. The key is to play to your strengths while recognizing your limitations.
Related: Build Less: Underdo your competition [Getting Real]
An excerpt from How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick:
Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new…
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
[via DL]
BibliOdyssey blog is a neat collection of eclectic, old school book illustrations.
If you only read one post there, check out Dr. Alesha Sivartha’s Brain Maps.
There’s also lots of other good random stuff at the site…
[tx RP]
"If you want to change big things, you pay attention to small things."
-Rudy Giuliani on C-span talking about the Broken Windows theory
The Broken Windows theory was the catalyst for solving NYC’s crime wave in the 80’s and 90’s. NYC’s administration had been focusing on major crimes, like murder, and overlooking smaller crimes along the way. But it wasn’t working. So the city started going after petty crime that it had been overlooking: turnstyle jumpers, squeegee men, public drunks, etc. The result: All crime rates fell suddenly and continued to drop for the next ten years.
Giuliani says, “The idea of it is that you had to pay attention to small things, otherwise they would get out of control and become much worse.”
In a lot of our approach to crime, quality of life, social programs, we were allowing small things to get worse rather than dealing with them at the earliest possible stage…So we started paying attention to the things that were being ignored. Aggressive panhandling, the squeegee operators that would come up to your car and wash the window of your car whether you wanted it or not — and sometimes smashed people’s cars or tires or windows — the street-level drug-dealing; the prostitution; the graffiti, all these things that were deteriorating the city. So we said, “We’re going to pay attention to that,” and it worked. It worked because we not only got a big reduction in that, and an improvement in the quality of life, but massive reductions in homicide, and New York City turned from the crime capital of America to the safest large city in the country for five, six years in a row.
Building momentum
One key component of Broken Windows is that it shows progress. It’s not about miracles or heroic solutions or solving massive problems overnight. It’s about building momentum. It’s showing your audience that you’re headed in the right direction. It’s making visible changes, even slight ones, that show you’re doing something. Someone is on the case. People know that you haven’t abandoned them. You’re giving them a reason to trust you. You’re building faith.
Continued…
