In Deep Geek through his Middle Earth playlist goes in depth into the world that JRR Tolkien built around The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings. Christopher Tolkien added to the world through his work compiling and editing his father’s manuscripts. Keeping track of it all is a huge undertaking and Tolkien fans often disagree over nuances. Hence, the Middle Earth playlist acts as a sort of audio CliffsNotes analogue to all things Tolkien-related.
Ahascragh races
The Ahascragh of my memories is a one-road town with a petrol station slash local garage and tractor repair workshop, pub and one or two general stores. It was the local market town closest to the farm where my Dad grew up in Galway. By comparison it barely merits the name of town compared to the local urban centre Ballinasloe. This TV news section is from 1977. This seems to be encouraging child jockeys and raising money for the local GAA club.
Big Trouble In Little China
Big Trouble In Little China has a number of problematic aspects to it, but is saved by its efforts to honour the Chinese and Hong Kong cinema that went on before. It’s one of my guilty pleasures as I am a big John Carpenter fan.
Cadbury Lunch bars
Cadbury South Africa promoted their Lunch Bar using a character called Tumi who is the ultimate side hustler.
According to Dan Parmenter who was the creative director on the project
So, we created the story of Tumi, a streetwise hustler who has a couple of different vocations and even owns his own small business. His streetwise nature means that even though he’s managed to snag a part as an extra in a war film, he’s still not shy of a bit of his own shameless self-promotion.
Using StableDiffusion algorithm to create a video that explore our past, present and future. It has a charm to it that reminds me of old stop motion animation.
Alan Dulles
Alan Dulles talks about the role of intelligence and regime change in foreign states in this old film. It is interesting that the film starts off with a modern Soviet tank that the CIA managed to acquire through theft. Dulles was the head of the CIA during the early cold war. He was responsible for coups in Iran and Guatemala. His career finished with the Bay of Pigs.
I worked peripherally on And1 early on in my career, but it didn’t catch fire in Europe than it did in the US. I hadn’t known the full extent of the buzz marketing campaign that backed up the brand in the US. Here’s the early versions of their ‘mix tapes’, which did for street football what skate videos did for skateboarding in the 1980s. They blew up street basketball in the US, in a similar way to the X Games blowing up extreme sports. ESPN got on board with a sports related reality TV show with players competing for an And1 team contract.
But all the buzz marketing didn’t get the cut through that Wieden + Kennedy’s Freestyle TV advert did, effectively depositioning And1 from its street ball territory. Then there was a tie-up show on MTV2 that was similar to the And1 | ESPN show of the previous year. The lesson I took away from And1 was that product and reach both matter. Nike could buy reach and And1 didn’t have any product of note after the Tai Chi.
Opinion: Intel’s ‘smart capital’ is a warning from the past | eeNews Europe – the author considers the rise of private equity to fund new silicon fabs as a warning of peak semiconductors. Similar things happened in the 1980s and 1990s when large businesses like Coca-Cola helped fund manufacturing facilities. The key difference this time is how globalisation has been thrown into reverse by ‘Made in China 2025’ and hostile moves against Taiwan
Loss of Chinese tourists forces Europe’s luxury retailers to rethink | Financial Times – A recent surge in Middle Eastern tourists, as well as US visitors buoyed by the strong dollar, has helped fill stores. Eduardo Santander, CEO of the European Travel Commission, said the lack of Chinese tourists left the many luxury retailers that relied heavily on them with “a huge feeling of loss”, but had spurred “a huge effort to diversify”. Retailers have personalised their services. During Europe’s Covid lockdowns, shop assistants contacted customers via WhatsApp with tailor-made recommendations. Berg sees a “possible return to the old idea of service and store management from the 1990s, the little black book with all the customers’ addresses and preferences in it”. “You have to do much more to attract local customers,” Berg said. “They can come back, they have more time to spend, versus an international customer that was determined and straightforward.” – A few thoughts on this: The article asserts that Chinese tourists are straightforward and not picky. I think Chinese tourists are very picky by comparison, although the diagou’s supplying lower tier cities or buying to order might appear to be ‘luxury hoovers’. Secondly, luxury brands have treated non-Chinese customers abysmally (in particular the watch makers like Rolex and their retail partners like the Watches of Switzerland group) and they deserve all the problems that they get. Only focusing on the Chinese market has allowed the Chinese customers to blow up the secondary market. A straw poll of people that I know who have a Rolex from the past 10 years or so:
All of them had to buy their watch on the secondary market
About 80 percent of them had original warranty cards with Chinese family names, which is far higher than the 30 to 40 percent share that Chinese consumers make of the global luxury market
Finally, I don’t see the market coming back in the same way given Xi Jingping’s focus on common prosperity which will make luxury consumption increasingly problematic.
This New Study Reveals How Brand Loyalty is On the Decline / Digital Information World – I see this as more indicative of economic recession rather than any major change. Gallup showed that traits such as preference for green products decline in a recessionary environment, it would make sense if brand loyalty took a similar battering in favour of private label brands and substitute products
I have had my head in PowerPoint presentations and market research reports so haven’t paid much attention this week until I read in this weekend’s FT about the Korean drama trade.
The premise of the Korean drama trade is a paradox, that while Netflix as a business isn’t doing well with investors and has experienced a lot of short selling, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the companies who produce content for the platform.
In many western and developing world media markets, consumers have been used to international content. Media industries that more closely match their own values tend to do better. For instance, there has been a brisk Korean drama trade in Middle Eastern countries because there was less sex and violence on display than American media.
Cracking foreign language markets
In the English speaking western world, foreign language media has had a tougher time to gain mass market acceptance. Things opened up a bit with the popularity of Scandinavian media, in particular ‘Scandi-noir’ dramas. The ironic thing is that prior to 1964 the films available to broadcast in the UK were either old b-movies, pre-war pictures from smaller studios or foreign-language films. Hollywood saw television as competition, so there was an informal blockade. This ended in the UK when Samuel Goldwyn and MCA began selling films as packages to the BBC and ITV. This wasn’t necessarily a good thing however.
Netflix then became the world’s entertainment broadcaster*. This meant that over time Netflix had to build up a body of content for lots of different markets. And if you want to be successful in Korea, you need Korean dramas and movies.
Freedom through the Korean drama trade
One of the standout aspects of the Korean dram trade has been that it has allowed Korean writers and directors to push the limits of the genre. A classic example of this is Hellhound. Hellhound gets to explore interesting questions around religion, morality, hysteria and power.
Or you have the nihilism of Squid Game.
This meant that Korean dramas have got a bigger creative palate and become exposed to a far larger potential audience than previously possible on niche streaming platforms like Rakuten’s Viki or Kocowa. Warners must be kicking themselves, having bought and then shut down early K drama streaming service DramaFever in 2018. Bob Cringely talked about innovation in terms of surfing waves and the danger of wiping out by being too early was as big as missing the wave altogether.
Back to the Korean production companies that have made these films. June Yoon over at the FT noticed what is now a well trod short term investment play
See what K-drama performs well when launched on Netflix
Buy shares in the production company if it is listed on the Korean stock market
Hold shares and then sell before the price starts to decline to a more reasonable level (after four weeks or so)
According to Yoon, this is the Korean drama trade. You have seen a similar bounce in the entertainment agencies of K-pop bands with international success already. So this surfing of the wave in Korean stocks makes sense.
Zurich
The reason why I hadn’t been paying much attention is that I had a workshop in Zurich. The preparation was all-consuming. This all sounds very glamorous but it wasn’t. I flew in and went to the client office near the airport. Co-hosted a workshop and departed via Zurich airport after seeing next to nothing of the city. It was a long 19-hour day of work and travel. No Instagrammable moments or even shots grabbed by the departure gates. The few observations that I did have:
The pound now almost has parity with the Swiss Franc, which gives you an idea about how much Sterling’s depreciation since Brexit must be driving inflation
Mars had a really strong presence in the duty free shops. Which was really strange given the strong association of Switzerland with chocolate. It was a major win for the Mars brand that manages to associate its brands with the Swiss country brand in the minds of travellers
Switzerland still has a strong presence for tobacco advertising and promotion. The Marlboro chevron was on view in the duty-free store and there was a Winston smoking lounge for the nicotine addicted. I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at this 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. But it caused cognitive dissonance on this visit. (Disclaimer: I grew up around tobacco advertising, having had Uncles who ran cigarette machines in Ireland and were wholesalers to Irish bars, shops and petrol stations. I still have somewhere a few packs of Jordan B&H playing cards, a couple of Carroll’s Number 1 ash trays for keeping change in and a Reemtsma-branded Maglite torch.)
*With the exception of China, given that the media industry is one of many sectors that China views as being central to its state interests. This has meant that Taiwanese dramas and documentaries on the Hong Kong democracy movement have been given a platform on Netflix.
Over the weekend, Darya Dugina was blown up in a car bomb under the Toyota Landcruiser, her newsworthiness was down to her being the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin. News stories covering the bomb blast described Aleksandr Dugin as a political commentator close to the Putin regime. But that descriptor doesn’t really tell you that much.
Aleksandr Dugin is a political philosopher, published author and commentator. But most importantly he is the founder of the Eurasian Movement. This movement supports neo-Eurasianism. This means opposing and rolling back the Atlanticism of western nations and having Russia to rebuild its influence through annexations and alliances, underpinned by an ultranationalist and neo-fascist ideological logical world view that considers America and liberal values the scapegoat for every ill.
https://flic.kr/p/2nFvPwm
Dugin’s written work
Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russiapublished in 1997, outlined in how Aleksandr Dugin saw the future of Russia. it would form an alliance with Iran in the middle east. Reassert control over former Soviet republics, dismantling some completely like Ukraine and Georgia.
Dugin on re-engineering the world’s borders
It would look to address what it perceived as a threat from China, encouraging China to look south to its neighbours on the South China Sea rather than north to the former Qing empire lands now full of natural resources. This would allow China to solve the Straits of Malacca problem in its favour. The constraint to its move west would be India inside the Eurasian empire.
Aleksandr Dugin wanted the UK was to be isolated, as he viewed it as an aircraft carrier of the US, (echoes of Orwell’s 1984 in that viewpoint). Europe is to remade an anti-Atlanticist Franco-German bloc, that would affect a ‘Finlandisation of Europe’. Countries like Poland, would become a vassal like state of Russia. Orthodox countries would look towards Russia as the home of their mother church and cultural lodestone. Finland would be absorbed into Russia. Eventually, due to an over-reliance on Russian commodities, Aleksandr Dugin hoped to engineer an economic shock. Germany’s dependancy on Russian gas and oil would ultimately allow Russia to pick up the pieces in Europe and create an empire stretching from Dublin to Vladivostok
Aleksandr Dugin maybe at a distance from the Putin administration, but his political ideas have influenced Vladimir Putin, Russian foreign policy and military thinking.
Uneasy Euroasian detente
One can only see Russia’s relationship with China as reminiscent of the von Ribbentrop – Stalin detente of the interwar years, based purely on timing and mutual convenience.
Demographics
Aleksandr Dugin’s ideas are challenged by demographics. In the Middle East, Iran and Shai Muslim community are outnumbered by their Sunni counterparts. Russia’s own population growth is in terminal decline and not a match for China should it decide to go north. Which probably explains why Dugin tries to shoehorn India into part of the Eurasian empire.
The current war in Ukraine is as much a product of Aleksandr Dugin as it is of Vladimir Putin. President Putin is merely implementing Dugin’s vision slavishly. It is also interesting that the attempt on the life of Aleksandr Dugin seems to have given new ideological impetus to the invasion of Ukraine in Russia.
Is Dugin’s Eurasian ideological purity a threat to the Putin administration?
Marx and Lenin were dead by the time that Mao came along, so the Chinese communist party was never threatened by the legitimacy of their thought leaders with a higher authority ideologically pure voice. If they were alive today, it would be impossible for Xi Jingping to accuse Marx or Lenin of being guilty of hstorical nihilism. But Aleksandr Dugin exists outside of the Putin administration, he could be a natural rallying point of Putin’s support basis as the philosophical centre. He could be even considered a rival leader to Putin, drawing support from believers across the military intelligence and political classes. Making Aleksandr Dugin into a martyr just at the point when Russia has been suffering setbacks has some obvious benefits for the Putin administration and arguably less benefits for the Ukrainian government.
From Drugs to Corruption: The Growing Presence of Chinese Organized Crime in Latin America – In 2021, China’s policy banks — the China Development Bank (CDB) and Export-Import Bank (Exim) — made no loans to Latin America for the second consecutive year. Beijing is now essentially focused on financing Chinese companies to operate in the region. This shift in strategy and the resulting proliferation of Chinese companies in Latin America will increase the circulation of people and money that are no longer under the direct control of local governments. Based on current trends, Chinese criminal organizations will likely thrive in this new economic environment. Extortion, money laundering through front firms, and smuggling are already increasing, posing a severe threat to the population’s safety in the region. Worthwhile reading in conjunction with: Will Kenya’s next president follow through on China contract promises? | South China Morning Post – William Ruto campaigned on threats to deport illegal workers and make big contracts with Chinese companies public. But politics and the reality of government are two different things, observers say
Interesting dive into what’s causing the ‘great resignation’ and what it will mean for productivity
Culture
Guy Ritchie talks about Snatch – as a film, its interesting, but I won’t bother buying my own copy of Blu-Ray. A few things of note:
The direct influence of Sam Peckinpah’s western films on Snatch was not a connection that I saw coming at all
Ritchie talks about directing a Jason Statham film remotely via iPad, rather than being on set. I presume that this was done during COVID but still very interesting
His use of amateurs as actors because they were the right kind of characters
The folkloric nature of pub stories. The bit that chimed with me is how I knew of similar characters growing up at a similar time to Ritchie and some of them I knew personally. As I moved in more middle class circles my exposure to that world declined
Design
Big Car have a great documentary on the development of the Renault Scénic including an interview with Renault’s head of design at the time Patrick le Quément.
Economics
Why Mexico is missing its chance to profit from US-China decoupling | Financial Times – While foreign companies have borne the brunt of López Obrador’s attacks, the handful of big Mexican businesses that control large parts of the economy have been less affected. When the president wanted to tackle inflation, his government invited Mexican business leaders for private conversations to agree an informal pact limiting price rises on basic groceries. “It wasn’t a big sacrifice,” noted the owner of one large Mexican group. Mexico’s oligarchs have reinforced the impression of a cosy relationship with the president by making supportive statements in public and confining any criticism to conversations behind closed doors. “All the Mexican business leaders complain about Amlo,” says the chief executive of one big foreign company. “But when they meet him, they all appear afterwards in public saying how wonderful he is . . It’s a circle of collusion.”
I hadn’t realised that 8-track cartridges were used as a karaoke medium in Japan. I thought that they had gone from vinyl to cassette and then on to laser disc. Vinyl based karaoke is what gave use the Technics SL-1200 series of turntables, which is why the speed control on the right hand side of the deck was called a ‘pitch fader’.
The reason why these karaoke featured have a common design with the US 8-track cartridge players is likely down to the relatively high tooling costs to create the plastic mouldings. You can see the ’round polished marks in the recessed section where the inputs and outputs are that show a tools has been amended and quickly cleaned up.
Samuel Bickett had some really good insight into why Joshua Wong and several other people pled guilty to charges under the national security law : The Hong Kong 47 Committed No Crime…So Why Are So Many of Them Pleading Guilty? – Bickett points out that their actions were legal under the Basic Law article 52, but the National Security Law seems to supersede and reinterpret the basic law to anything the authorities want it to be.
The Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region must resign under any of the following circumstances: When he or she loses the ability to discharge his or her duties as a result of serious illness or other reasons; When, after the Legislative Council is dissolved because he or she twice refuses to sign a bill passed by it, the new Legislative Council again passes by a two-thirds majority of all the members the original bill in dispute, but he or she still refuses to sign it; and When, after the Legislative Council is dissolved because it refuses to pass a budget or any other important bill, the new Legislative Council still refuses to pass the original bill in dispute.
At the moment, this will be of most interest to more political types. Now if you apply that interpretation to short sellers like Muddy Waters Research, punchy buy-side equity analysts or a brief that an advertising planner like me might write where a client is competing against a connected Hong Kong or Chinese company – then legal, reputable and ethical commercial activities can result in national security charges at the whim of the Hong Kong government. This is something that many multinational companies seem to be sleep walking into. Work for a multinational like a VPN provider? That looks like colluding with a foreign power, subversion or even terrorism under the National Security Law.
The use of the term “national security” is particularly objectionable because the concept has frequently been used in China to criminalise the peaceful exercise of the rights of expression and to persecute those with legitimate demands like democracy and human rights. Its inclusion raises fears of extension of such Mainland Chinese practices to Hong Kong especially in the light of Article 23 of the Basic Law.
Hong Kong already had substantive security laws in place since British rule. Notably the 1971 Criminal Ordinance which remains on the books.
Then there is the way that the judiciary in Hong Kong has been shaped by the National Security Law. No defendant has won any points with regards the law and judicial decisions have allowed the law to be used in a retrospective manner in concert with older colonial era laws.
A film produced by a German film crew in 1966 to try and bring to life Japanese life for a European audience. I am sure that some of the manufacturing scenes are b-roll footage, but it is fascinating nonetheless. There is a style to the car and light truck designs which is a lovely aesthetic.
Vintage Studio 1 tracks mixed by Japanese sound system veterans Mighty Crown
1/ Chinese consumers overstretched themselves on luxury goods
2/ China is going through straitened financial times, 6 percent GDP growth feels like zero growth in developed markets. I have heard growth being described as being closer to 3 percent. Government control and intervention means that you won’t see the kind of collapse you saw in the west during 2008 and 2009 and internal security would stomp all over any ‘Occupy Wall Street’ analogue. Security forces are already suppressing depositors who have lost their savings in regional banks. There are also a lot of investors in property businesses: China Evergrande Shares Are Worthless, Top Fund Manager Says
Russia Holding Its Arms Expo With Weapons That May Be A ‘Hard Sell’ Now. | SOFREP – it is interesting that the Russians took steps to make sure the captured American gear on display was spotlessly clean, right down to the tyre paint. Who is to say that some of the gear came in by being bought or traded with the Taliban rather than from the Ukraine battlefield? I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia did a ‘homage’ to the M777. Russia has a wealth of experience in titanium fabrication from submarine hulls to aircraft, so the M777 carriage shouldn’t be that hard. The challenge would be the digital tools used to facilitate a higher degree of accuracy.
ViewSonic lays out plans for education metaverse – ViewSonic, which marks its 35th year of establishment in 2022, has been actively promoting digital transformation in recent years, shifting from a hardware company to a solutions company. Looking towards the future, company chairman James Chu has laid out the key development strategy of “ecosystem as a service,” announcing the Universe education metaverse software. Chu pointed out that ViewSonic has transformed in response to the rapidly changing environment. The company will focus on assisting the digital transformation of the education market. In the third quarter of 2021, ViewSonic’s electronic whiteboard was already no.1 in global market share, Chu said. Its Universe education metaverse software aims to level up the traditional 2D digital education into a 3D interactive virtual education platform. The goal is to solve the lack of interactivity and participation and make online education feel as if it is in-person. The proposed “ecosystem as a service” is about the integration of hardware, software and service, it said. Regarding software and hardware, ViewSonic will integrate its ViewBoard, a smart interactive electronic whiteboard, with myViewBoard, a digital teaching platform, to provide a complete education technology solution.
Warriors of the Future is a project of Hong Kong star Louis Koo. Koo has been almost single-handedly keeping the Hong Kong film industry in existence. A lot of Hong Kong‘s directors, cinematographers and stars go to work on ‘mainland co-productions’. Koo spent ten years getting Warriors of the Future off the ground. All the special effects that you see rendered in the film have been done by Hong Kong effects houses. The three years that the film spent in post-production seems to have been partly down to problems in accessing sufficiently large render farms for the CGI. The film cost just over 48 million pounds to make, but made only 39 million pounds in Chinese box office takings so far.
About those box office takings, on the face of it Warriors of the Future looks like just the kind of film that would do really well with Chinese cinema goers. They love Marvel, Transformers and the film adaption of Liu Cixin’s Wandering Earth. There are rumours going around that the box office takings for Warriors of the Future were spiked.
The usual scam goes something like this and has affected foreign films in the past. Cinema goer goes to the cinema. Wanders up to ticket office and asks for a ticket to Warriors of the Future, instead gets ‘Yet another remake of some made up chapter on the role that the Chinese communist party played during the great patriotic war against the Japanese’ – plot spoiler: the ‘heroes’ die. Cinema goer says ‘But I want to see Warriors of the Future‘. Ticket seller tells them to take that ticket to screen three where they can see Warriors of the Future.
Cinema goer gets to see Warriors of the Future, propaganda film gets the box office gross and cinema makes the quote of tickets that they have to sell in order to not get a visit from the security services. Given the high degree of support that the film enjoyed from stars like Daniel Wu who rented out screenings so that their fans could go and see the film for free; it seems like the Chinese government wants to stamp on the wind pipe of the barely alive Hong Kong film industry.
The film opens in Hong Kong cinemas on August 25th, and will hopefully make up for some of the lost revenue in the mainland alongside a sale of film related NFTs.
One Way
One Way is a documentary film that captures the ups and downs of Ah Man and Fiona who move with their two children to the UK from Hong Kong. Fiona is a teacher and Ah Man earns half of what she does. There is already a lot of stress in their marriage before they even plan to emigrate. There is naivety to them, which I also see mirrored in many of the other Hong Kongers I know who have been making the move recently. I am genuinely worried for how many of them will cope with the harshness of UK life.
In my experience, the British could learn a lot about civility and community from these new Hong Kong arrivals.
The bonesetter
Growing up in rural Ireland and an Irish household in England as a child I occasionally heard of a ‘bonesetter’. A bonesetter is part way between a chiropractor and a mystic. It was passed down through families and was considered to be a miraculous power. Doctors and medicines were expensive, so someone who could solve a slipped disc, trapped or a dislocated shoulder was highly valued.
You would hear around the dinner table tales of neighbours who were ‘crippled’ with pain, they were driven by a relative to a bone setter and were cured by the bonesetter. The bonesetter was said to have a ‘gift’ rather than medical training. It is generally thought of as a relic of Ireland past, like cocks of hay, cutting turf down the bog with sleán, tea made up in a recycled mineral bottle like a large Lucozade bottle, reading the Blondie comic strip the Sunday Press and getting covered with newsprint, The Old Moore’s Almanac and Ireland’s Own.
Jimmy Heffernan featured in the film, was a name I heard as a child. He was a farmer who gradually built up a reputation via word-of-mouth across the country and amongst the Irish diaspora in the UK, US and Australia. Heffernan is no longer with us, he died in 2003. Another member of the Heffernan family continues on the tradition to this day.
