Gossip magazine group buys newspaper rival RCS Mediagroup – FT.com – looks like a professionalisation of Italian media ownership on first impression. Since the new owner seems to be less interested in political influence and more interested in profitable titles. Is this what Italy will look like post-Silvio Berlusconi? (paywall)
When Yahoo Ruled the Valley: Stories of the Original ‘Surfers’ – The New York Times – When the Grateful Dead musician Jerry Garcia died in August 1995, Yahoo searches on him spiked immediately. The surfers put a Garcia link on the home page. “That was the birth of Yahoo News,” Ms. Srinivasan said. Today, it remains one of the most popular online news portals – whilst the internet has become The Man. The historic link between counterculture and online culture was extremely strong
(Yahoo! corporate account on Flickr: Yahoo! billboard Holiday Season 2009)
I had a late evening in the office so decided to stay up late and follow the Apple event where they unveiled the Apple iPhone 5c and the iPhone 5s. Here are my thoughts from the launch permeated through a couple of days thoughts.
Evolution rather than revolution
The Apple share price declined 5 per cent by the end of trading after the announcement as Wall Street hadn’t been blown away by the new products. The expectation of continuous revolution is unrealistic, innovation is lumpy. The relative low-key approach should have been a clear sign; Apple held the event on campus rather than the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Secondly if one looks at the launch of the Samsung Galaxy 4 one could see the lull in innovation.
Unfortunately consumers didn’t get the message here is a couple of sentiment curves I took a picture of during the first 24 hours after the launch:
iPhone 5c
iPhone 5s I was shocked to rate in the 10 percent most positive sentiment group.
They may not be buying iPhones, but they are interested them
What Apple doesn’t have in market share it more than makes up for in terms of defining the direction of the smartphone industry.
It’s about experience
The smartphone industry seems to be marketed on speeds and feeds, from Apple going to VLIW (very long instruction word) processor architecture or MediaTek and Samsung going to eight-core processors. It is getting progressively harder to compare devices on paper even with the same operating system.
Where the performance does show out is in the experience. Xiaomi have done a lot of work in terms of not only redesigning their fork of Android but also optimising the code to run faster on the hardware they select. Which is the reason why they can sell a decent handset at a lower price point. This increases the disruptive nature of their direct to consumer model.
Why 64-Bit?
There are a number of aspects to that answer, the big part is that one is not sure which is the the most relevant:
OSX has been 64 bit since 2006, there is the opportunity for more underlying code share. Knowing Apple, I would expect this to result in a leaner OSX rather than a bloated iOS. Expect to see speculation of Apple equivalents of the Microsoft Surface tablets, and then promptly discount them. People like to keep their hands on the keyboards too much.
Reducing processor cycles by taking in more data per cycle and reducing power consumption. This only works if applications are designed to work wtih 64-bit, there is likely to be some work required on applications to make them work.
Addressing a lot of memory is something that made 3D popular in the desktop computing world, allowing for more programmes and information to be held in RAM for quicker access but there is no indication of what this will be used for.
The M7 co-processor
The M7 co-processor has been heralded as a way to do indoor mapping, or a boon for the quantified self. All very fine utopian visions: data is collected, what happens to it after that is both a work of wonder and of the darkest imaginations as the Edward Snowden affair has demonstrated. What I find more interesting is that Apple opted for a discrete component rather than putting this on the die of the A7. It would have probably made more sense, given Apple’s focus on computing power per Watt since Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in 2005. It’s not like it couldn’t have multi-core sleep mode.
Was it because:
They didn’t have time to architect it into the processor?
They didn’t want to telegraph what they were doing to Samsung? (It’s interesting that Samsung said straight away that they were dong a 64-bit processor next year, especially as they fabricate Apple’s chips)
They want to use the M7 in non-A7-powered products?
The 5c is about the supply chain
Probably the most debated aspect of the phone line-up is the iPhone 5C industrial design, specifically the steel reinforced polycarbonate chassis. Moving the iPhone 5c down the Apple food chain would mean lots more milling machines churning out even cheaper phones and would be likely to act as a bottle-neck for Apple trying to get significant numbers of the iPhone 5s out into the marketplace.
The mistake that pundits made was the association of plastic as a cheap material. If it is done well with the right blend, the right tooling and the right design plastic isn’t a cheap material but a great material. In modern parlance it has been associated with disposable throwaway products, but it’s like thinking of wood as a cheap material because we associated it with tooth-picks.
Despite working as a digital strategist and creative thinker (whatever the hell that means) agencyside, I have a very pragmatic relationship with technology both past and present from the iPhone to my original Mac. I have had Macs since 1989, primarily because they were the closest thing I found to a computer that just worked.
I had analogue mobile phones from my time DJing and having friends who worked in cell phone service centres. My first phone that I had to buy was digital, the mobile phone was a Motorola; mainly because One2One (now Everything Everywhere) sold a package where you paid just over 100 pounds and had a phone for 12 months, with a small amount of inbuilt local call time. At the time I used it as a more reliable version of my pager. Even back then SMS proved to be more reliable than the pager that I had used previously
I went from Motorola to Ericsson, mostly because Ericsson handsets were really well made and then moved to Nokia when Ericsson merged its handset business with Sony. I moved from Nokia to the Apple iPhone and a Samsung feature phone for two reasons:
Apple had an address book that worked. My address book didn’t brick the phone. I haven’t had that bad problems with data corruption and it syncs with my computer. It has all the productivity applications I enjoyed on my Nokia phones like MetrO and QuickOffice. The iPhone also has major flaws. For instance, the browser isn’t great, but I put up with it because I can sync my bookmarks for it across from the Safari browser on my Mac. The biggest think that I miss was the Nokia keyboard and laptop layout on the Nokia E90 Communicator
My Samsung phone could take two SIMs which is a boon for traveling. This is something that most phone manufacturers don’t provide for markets outside the developing world
My iPhone was also expensive, like the price of a cheap laptop kind of expensive, which means that I look at it in a different way to previous smartphones. Instead of getting rid of my phone every 18 months, I am thinking closer to three years, just like my laptop. An additional factor is that whilst the first iPhones were a radical leap forward, the iPhone 4 and 4S don’t have sufficient must-have value for me to move on until my current phone dies or the next iteration of the iPhone comes out.
Now I wouldn’t say that I am an everyman for the iPhone using population; but this has to have some effect on sales. For every iPad that Apple sells there maybe at least a few iPhone upgrades put on hold as an opportunity cost.
I read through the Apple press materials following the iPhone 4S and iCloud services launch the other day. There was a lot of disappointment out there when the phone revealed wasn’t a massive step-change forward which is probably massively unfair for example Carnegie Mellon University professor or computer science David Farber posted the following message on his Interesting People mailing list:
After yesterday’s announcement by apple I decided to explore changing phones and/or carriers. I am specifically interested in the most advanced smartphone with “4G” capability.
Any suggestions?
Having done my own research, I ended up coming away with questions rather than forming opinions.
Firstly, iCloud; I read and saw nothing that altered my initial perceptions and concerns when I wrote about the service back in June. So rather than repeating myself it is easier to link out to my earlier post.
As for the iPhone 4S itself; the updates to the device compared to the iPhone 4, felt as much about feature catch-up as about innovation. The improved camera matched features in top of the line Nokia and Samsung phones. The much-lauded speech recognition application Siri was as much about matching the voice activated features in Android software.
Unlike many online who were looking for a new thinner form factor, I was glad that the new phone kept the iPhone 4 size as there is already an unhealthy focus on size zero design at the expense of battery life, product performance and ergonomic design.
When Steve Jobs talked about the transition to Intel processors for the Macintosh product range, the rationale was mostly around a new focus on processors moving from computing power to computing power per Watt. I’d like to know what effect that Apple’s new electronics design for the iPhone 4S has on power consumption and battery life. Does the faster video transitions come at the expense of usability due to declining battery life?
Only time will tell if the aerial changes and new electronics have improved the iPhone performance in areas such as call quality and dropped calls. After the initial rush to buy from completists and early adopters the word-of-mouth around these issues are going to be important for iPhone sales. More information about the iPhone.
My love of films by Wong Kar wai came at a time of changing media. In the early 2000s I watched the films the first time after I got a portable multi-region DVD player and there had been a massive surge in video labels including Artificial Eye and Tartan publishing arthouse titles. This provided a great cost-effective way to explore and experience world cinema and I gravitated towards Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.
I was already familiar with traditional martial arts films and the ‘gun fu’ of John Woo. Wong Kar wai was Hong Kong’s answer to French new wave auteurs.
Around the same time, I ended up dating someone who lived in Hong Kong when we bonded over Faye Wong’s performance in Chungking Express. In a moment of delicious irony, I got to watch Wong Ka wai’s one ‘western’ film My Blueberry Nights while staying in Hong Kong.
While Wong Ka wai’s filmography wasn’t the reason why I moved to Hong Kong, but it was a reason why I moved to city and had the privilege of living there for a while.
This time around I was working my way through Criterion’s World of Wong Kar wai boxset which had been bought for my birthday during COVID time.
The Wong Kar wai boxset contains:
As Tears Go By
Days of Being Wild
Chungking Express
Fallen Angels
Happy Together
In The Mood for Love
2046
As Tears Go By
As Tears Go By was released in 1988. It is one of Wong Ka wai’s most conventional films from a Hong Kong perspective. Andy Lau plays the protagonist Wah, a triad soldier. Wong borrowed from the plot line in of Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets in terms of the story revolving around dynamic of two friends, one of whom is irresponsible. It’s a great stylish film, but if you told me that it had been made by Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark or Johnnie To, I’d have believed you. Hong Kong cinema audiences loved it and it would be another 25 years before Wong made another film as popular with local cinema goers.
Days of Being Wild
1990’s Days of Being Wild is often considered by some to be part of an informal trilogy, the others being In The Mood for Love and 2046. Stylistically it features love, loss, similar pacing, the use of inner narratives and experiments with colour. Thematically they are sensitive to the passage of time and have a vice-like hold on emotional memory. But the threads between the characters aren’t really bought together until the next film in the trilogy. Tony Leung’s character and is given the name of ‘Gambler’ is only wordlessly introduced right at the end of Days of Being Wild. He only becomes known as Chow Mo wan in the next film: In The Mood for Love.
Leslie Cheung was ideally cast as a lost, rootless, self-absorbed drifter Yuddy in the film. Yuddy has a hole at the centre of his being that he is unable to fill. Like many dislocated Chinese in Hong Kong between the civil war and the cultural revolution he drifts.
Yuddy is described as a legless bird, only touching down with death. Critics have interpreted this as pre-1997 handover anxiety. An article published on the Hong Kong Film Critics Society website described it for me best
At the time, they were echoes of Hong Kongers’ sentiments under the looming 1997 deadline. Leslie Cheung, who has a love-hate relationship with his foster mother and after a failed mission to find his biological mother, drifts in self-imposed exile, is a metaphor for the city caught between the two sovereign states of China and England.
Set in the 60s, the film is filled with signifiers of nostalgia (props, costumes, music, scenery). Reminiscence is but a lament that the good of the present will not last. And Days of Being Wild is but an elegy for a Hong Kong caught between 1989 and 1997.
The film follows Yuddy and the trail of emotional wreckage he leaves in his wake as he looks to track down his biological mother.
Secondary threads follow Su Li zhen, played by Maggie Cheung and Carrie Lau’s performance as Leung Fung ying. Both of whom where Yuddy’s transient love interests.
There is a scene where Yuddy looks to obtain an American passport and something about Cheung’s movement and the casual violence reminded me of Michael Madsen’s Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs released three years later. While Mr Blonde is nihilistic, he lacks the duality of Cheung’s character.
Leslie Cheung gives a fantastic performance on screen and his tragic death 13 years later was a serious blow to Hong Kong film-making.
Days of Being Wild wasn’t well received by Hong Kong cinema goers at the time, despite being well regarded by film critics everywhere. This adds to Wong Kar wai’s reputation as an auteur streets ahead of the local audience. Which was a view I bought into the first time around.
Having watched it again years later, I have some hypotheses as to why it didn’t do well.
While the dislocation and drifting reflected life for many in early 1960s Hong Kong, it didn’t match the go-go economy and Lion Rock can-do spirit of Hong Kongers in the following three decades. Younger audiences wouldn’t be able to relate to it in the same way. Cinema audiences tend to be younger than the general population, so that disconnect makes a degree of sense.
After the Sino-British joint declaration was signed in 1984, a pre-handover anxiety hung over Hong Kong. KMT supporting newspapers gradually closed down or pivoted their editorial style. Astronaut families became commonplace with upper middle class children based outside the city in Vancouver or Australia while their parents made money in the run up to handover due to the go-go environment of the time. The second passport, gave the family a bolt hole in case things went wrong after China took over. Local Hong Kong cinema goers wanted the escapism of action films, gambling movies and comedy.
It is very different in pace as a film compared to its high-octane peers at the time from the likes of John Woo. This time I got to see the original Hong Kong trailer of Days of Being Wild – and could understand how you could go into the cinema expecting something with much more pace rather than the dream-like experience much of Days of Being Wild gives you.
The ending came abruptly and without context.
Chungkung Express
1994’s Chungking Express is two locations and views of modern Hong Kong. Trading hub Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui and the Midnight Express takeaway restaurant in Lan Kwai Fong. While it is a romantic comedy of sorts and varies in pace, it also has the qualities of what we now expect in a Wong Kar wai film. The focus on time, distance and emotional memory – but with a much lighter touch than Days of Being Wild.
The film is anthology of two stories with retail worker Faye being the one serendipitous point of connection that holds both stories together.
Takeshi Kaneshiro plays alongside fellow Taiwanese actress Bridget Lin in the first story. He is estranged from his girlfriend May relying on calls to her parents and tins of pineapple which is her favourite food.
In the second story tells of how Cop 663, played by Tony Leung is left by his air stewardess girlfriend and acquires a stalker while getting over his old love.
Both stories caught the urban energy of 1990s Hong Kong and resonated better with audiences. What is more remarkable is how fast the film was made in an improvisational way with guerrilla film making techniques. Its looseness was by design as Wong tried to mirror Haruki Murakami’s writing style on screen. The film was shot in a two-week break from editing Ashes of Time.
The film brought Faye Wong to an international audience and cemented Wong Kar wai’s arthouse credentials.
The film feels very now in terms of its style and even the use of old technology like camcorders and pagers on screen doesn’t pull you out of the film in the way I might have expected.
Fallen Angels
1995’s Fallen Angels was a surprise to me the first time I watched it. In some ways it goes back to As Tears Go By in its exploration of Hong Kong’s organised crime world. You have Wong Kar wai’s use of loose narrative, colour, tight spaces and urban energy.
Compared to As Tears Go By it’s a slower paced film. It makes what now comes across as innovative use of close up wide angle photography that makes it look as if its shot on an iPhone decades before the modern iPhone came out. It also feels computer game-like in the action sequences. I can also understand why it has been compared to music videos in terms of style. Parts of the action sequence reminded me of Point Break in terms of the camera viewpoint. While it feels ‘intimate’ because of its claustrophobic shots, local cinema audiences didn’t relate to Fallen Angels.
There is a duality to the film. Takeshi Kaneshiro plays Police Officer Ho Chi moo badge number 223 in Chungking Express. In Fallen Angels he is Hoo Chi moo, convict number 223.
There are wider Wong Kar wai touches, in mid 20th century artefacts from 1960s Hong Kong architecture to the Enicar illuminated wall clock in the assassins base.
(Enicar was a historic Swiss watch brand that was best known across Asia and China. The brand name is now owned by Wah Ming Hong who had been their distributor in China since the 1930s. One of my first memories of Hong Kong was giant building wrapping adverts for Enicar and another former Swiss, now Hong Kong watch company Solvil et Titus).
Watching it this time, I had a nagging feeling that something had changed and sure enough when I searched online. I found out that the film had been extensively cropped shot by shot and recoloured by Wong Kar wai in 2020, not always for the better.
Happy Together
Happy Together was released in 1997 and is still a highly regarded example of New Queer Cinema alongside the like of Querelle.
As a work out of Hong Kong it’s remarkable. Hong Kong as a society is conservative and there is a don’t ask, don’t tell aspect to the treatment of the LGBTQI community in Hong Kong. Legislation is more advanced than Hong Kong society at large.
Leslie Cheung was an ideal protagonist known for being a champion of the avant-garde and having on-screen characters that experimented in different forms and levels of masculinity.
Happy Together‘s themes of displacement, exile, and the repeated line “Let’s start over” mirrored loneliness, heartbreak, the collective uncertainty and “fretful wanderlust” of Hong Kongers at the time. The film came out in Hong Kong just two months prior to the handover of Hong Kong to China.
Happy Together was released with a Category III rating, meaning only those 18 and above can watch it. Primarily this was down to Hong Kong’s greater latitude for violence rather than sex on-screen. Wong Kar wai’s eye and treatment on camera means that Argentina feels rather like Hong Kong in the film.
In The Mood For Love
For many people, 2000’s InThe Mood For Love is the gateway drug to Wong Kar wai films. I think that the Cantonese title ‘Flower-like Years’, ‘the prime of one’s youth’ suits the film better. It’s the second film Wong’s informal trilogy, after Days of Being Wild.
The contrast in pacing between In The Mood For Love and the previous film mirrored the move from frantic kinetic energy of colonial Hong Kong living on borrowed time to an oppressive study in stillness focused on longing for the past post-handover. Wong admitted in interviews that the hotel room number, 2046, where the protagonists get together to write represented the final year of Hong Kong’s ‘guaranteed‘ autonomy. The Shanghainese dialect spoken, outfits and food reflected Hong Kongers nostalgia for the post-civil war era of migration to Hong Kong as time of pain and hope.
We are properly introduced to Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-wan character. Su Li zhen, played by Maggie Cheung adds the real line of continuity. We know it’s 1962, and probably at least a few years since Days of Being Wild. On one level their fortunes have improved, Su now works as a secretary for a shipping company; Chow is a journalist. They are both unhappily married and find solace in each other’s company.
It’s like David Lean’s Brief Encounter but with the colour and latent emotion dialled up through copious amounts of hallucinogen. The loneliness, missed connections, the weight of time, regret, longing and rootlessness feel even more intense in this film than any of Wong’s previous films. The also a sharp contrast with the licentious and violent elements in Wong’s previous films.
I remember watching it the first time and being blown away by it visually without taking in the plot, performance and nuance layer throughout. I then revisited my old DVD copy several times later on.
Wong lays out their collective journey of discovery in finding out that their respective partners are having an affair. This builds the closeness and tension them, as does the martial arts serial that they write together.
(This always struck me as a nod the popularity of Hong Kong based authors like Liang Yusheng and Louis Cha who worked as newspaper journalists, before going on to write serials published in newspapers and magazines. Eventually their works would be adopted in Hong Kong films including Wong Kar wai’s own The Eagle Shooting Heroes and Ashes of Time; and TV series in Hong Kong, Taiwan and communist China).
In The Mood For Love redefined the way male main actor roles were portrayed in Hong Kong cinema allowing greater character depth than was previously the case with gun fu, wuxia and action comedies. It gave the post-handover Hong Kong film industry a much-needed creative shot in the arm before the ‘China-Hong Kong’ joint ventures finally bled it dry.
In The Mood For Love seemed to be the ground zero for Hong Kong mid 1960s nostalgia, such as the G.O.D ‘Bing Sutt Corner’ redesign of the Starbucks branch on Duddell Street in the central district of Hong Kong. Others got in on the act, 7-Eleven released a set of ‘Old Hong Kong’ phone charms.
Writing this post, I went back to find out what I had written about the phone charms.
There is a wider trend of nostalgia in the city which 7 Eleven Hong Kong is tapping into.
It is interesting because it reflects a widely held view that the bright new future offered by mainland China isn’t bright, attractive or desirable. This will likely cause trouble in Hong Kong for China in the future; if it rolls out from the cultural zeitgeist into political aspects of Hong Kong life.
There are times when I wish I was wrong.
Nothing jarred from memory when I rewatched In The Mood For Love, but I had forgotten the documentary footage of President De Gaulle visiting Cambodia near the end.
2046
After In The Mood For Love, 2046 follows Chow Mo wan as he attempts to get Su Li zhen out of his system. The story also connects with Days of Being Wild with Carina Lau’s character still being heart-broken over the death of Yuddy, years later.
There is a line in Tony Leung’s monologue that encapsulates 2046 the central plot premise really well.
“Love is all a matter of timing, it’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. If I’d lived in another time or place then my story might have had a very different ending” – Tony Leung’s character Chow Mo-wan in 2046
2046 captured post-Handover disillusionment, a community that realises its own ephemeral nature. Hong Kong’s specialness appears as suffering according to Stephen Teo – and I think he got it right.
…a visually ravishing work that’s downright apocalyptic in its suffocating sense of dread and despair. – David Pountain, Little White Lies
I finished the boxset, drained in a good way, but also disappointed, not in Wong Kar wai’s work but in the Hong Kong it now exists in. As it was once my home, I felt broken.
