Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.
Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.
Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.
Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.
Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.
More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.
China has had a run in English literature at the moment. Cixin Liu has overturned the world of science fiction with his Three Body Problem trilogy of books. Zhou Haohui’s Death Notice promises a similar shake up in crime fiction.
Death Notice takes place in 2002, the internet was changing Chinese society and the government hadn’t yet rolled out a consistent approach to online services and content. You had the first generation of Chinese internet giants, Google was available to trawl content worldwide. The world was your oyster if you were curious enough and had sufficient English skills. Forums were transformative, attracting participants who shared a passion to connect in ways previously impossible within China.
It was also a more open time in terms of the government’s attitude to public freedom and discourse. The book is set before the implementation of Golden Shield project, which started to censor Chinese access to the web. The Golden Shield project also helps shape online consumer opinion through content deletion on social platforms and gaming trending items. Which is why it is the ideal time to set a complex serial killer that relies on the internet. It is also a China that longer exists. I was surprised that the book has been published and lauded in China as it begs comparison with the less open Xi regime.
The death notice of the title refers to a crowdsourced list of wrongdoers who escaped justice and end up being dispatched in creative ways. I don’t want to say any more that would give away more of the plot.
Death Notice leads you on a twisted exploration of who the killer could be, dragging in to suspicion even members of the investigative team. And this is apparently the first in a series of books. If you enjoy Scandinavian fiction like Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson, then Zhou Haohui offers something that provides a similar sense of innovation in crime literature. More books reviewed here.
The Sacco Gang is an easy to read dramatisation of a true story about a family in Sicily during the rise of fascism. Andrea Camilleri is better known as the author of the Montalbano series of crime novels. With The Sacco GangCamilleri takes the original source material about the Sacco family and then filled in the spaces to provide clarity to the narrative.
The Sacco’s were a family on the rise in Sicily. They got their advantage through a mix hard work and good luck. They realised when it was luck rather than convincing themselves that it was their won skill. The Sacco’s managed to move above the hand-to-mouth existence of indentured farm labourers; a common existence in pre-war Sicily. Sicilian society was essentially feudal in nature, grinding poverty and injustice gave rise to the mafia and allowed it to turn into something malignant.
The family’s deeply ingrained sense of natural justice meant that they were not going to give into the mafia’s attempt to ‘tax’ the family back into poverty. Their socialist leanings meant that the family also became targets for the fascist government, even as they crushed the Sicilian mafia.
Just when you think that Sesame Street can’t get any more awesome, you find out that they’re putting out content like this on how the characters of Sesame Street get through a storm
Jaguar Land Rover’s ‘Googly Eyes’ isn’t just a gimmick but a classic bit of human computer interaction thinking. The cars gaze passes important information to pedestrians in its ‘line-of-sight’
Hypebeast founder Kevin Ma plays blinder; offering to pick up the tab for every ticket to Hypefest.
Culture and learning shouldn’t have a price attached to it.
I will personally cover the cost of tickets to make Hypefest a free experience for all.
Over a decade ago, I began a website documenting the things we love. Next month we will be holding our very first festival @hypefest which will bring our culture to life. To celebrate this moment, I will be personally covering the cost of tickets to provide free tickets for everyone. All are welcome to come share this moment with use. Tickets available tomorrow 12PM tomorrow on hypefest.com
CHiPs ‘roller disco’ – the most Seventies bit of television ever. I’ve heard this being used as the intro track on some of Luxxury‘s mixes. It helps you get through a storm of a day with feelgood disco
Sit back and enjoy the spectacle.
Hollywood studios had to get through a storm. Television had led to declining cinema audiences. Cinemas hadn’t moved to the kind of multiplex higher comfort experience that we know now, so were closing in large amounts. Some fleapits in major cities were kept open screening badly dubbed martial arts films and pornography. It was around this time that Deep Throat, The Opening of Misty Beethoven and Behind The Green Door developed mainstream popularity.
At the time you had film stars making guest appearances on television; this gave them an invaluable boost to incomes that had dried up. The movie studio system hadn’t glommed on to blockbusters yet and was in the thrall of directors of the American New Wave. There wasn’t a lot of roles at the time for stars of the 1960s like Breakfast at Tiffany’s George Peppard. Others like Lee Van Cleef and Richard Harrison went to work in the Italian and Asian film industries.
They probably didn’t know that change was just around the corner the launch of the over budget and under-appreciated Heaven’s Gate put an end to the American New Wave.
Steven Spielberg and others brought in the rise of the blockbuster and the studio system was saved. But George Peppard never made another cinematic film; instead he lives on in the minds of many people as Hannibal Smith from the A-Team.
Finally a 1970 concert film of Miles Davis performing the title track from Bitches Brew
Pure mathematics is a framework for agreeing on things
Pure maths is a framework for how to think
Make progress rather than repeat things to make a better logical argument
Logic validity doesn’t equal morally valid in analogies
Interconnectedness is often erroneously simplified by blaming a single item as a cause
Its easier to change actions, than it is to change feelings. Feelings just are
Great feedback loops tied into obesity is fascinating
Relationships between things – media affects thinking by shoehorning natural geometry into one or two dimensions
Intelligence: reasonable – can be reasoned with, powerfully logical – not just using logic but using techniques to move an organisation further and being helpful: emotion
Merino wool producers assume that cyber punk is a synthetic dystopia, instead of thinking abut how wool is a technical fabric by its very nature. The ad was done for the Woolmark Company by TBWA Sydney. Do humans dream of technical merino wool?
Live footage of Talking Heads performing Once in a Lifetime in 1980. The performance encapsulates everyone that I expect Talking Heads to be.
Zegna’s radical reinvention | How To Spend It – great profile of Gildo and the fashion brand that he manages. The process of reinvention doesn’t seem to create a tension with the heritage – which is a great attributed to a luxury brand. There isn’t that much difference between Zegna and Stone Island in terms of innovation.
Jori Hulkkonen – Attack Magazine – he has a great back catalogue, so looking forward to his Simple Music for Complicated People album. Hulkkonen’s work goes from extremely emotive soulful house to minimal techno and everywhere in between.
If you work in marketing, you’d have had to hidden in a remote jungle outpost to avoid all the industry big opinion pieces and social discussion over Nike’s latest brand campaign. The outrage was over a social image of Colin Kaepernick supporting the video content below
Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.
Everything has become political. New Balance got the whip end of it from liberals during the early part of the Trump administration because of its domestic manufacturing plants and his focus on American jobs. The New Balance CEO made positive remarks about the president focusing on domestic manufacturing and liberals burned their sneakers on social media.
So from the beginning Nike was in the ‘not Trump camp’ because of its business model. The question would be should it put its head above the parapet or not? From a marketing history that has worked with directors like Spike Lee – this is almost a non question.
Nike also has demographics on its side, banking on the African American community and urban kids over aging Trump supporters. This will also play well in western European markets.
Nike has trends behind it at the moment. Hypebeast style is on the ascendency, even in preppy lookbooks you are likely to see the blazer and chinos paired with a pair of Air Max in a colour scheme that pops.
In my mind working with Colin Kaepernick was inevitable because it was such a Nike thing to do. Down the road Kaepernick is going to make a stylish articulate spokesperson, think Michael Jordan but with more of a ‘thinking man’ image. (Yes I know Michael Jordan is sharp as a button but he’s got more swagger).
From Nike’s perspective it was a good tactical move. The timing was ideal to get out ahead of the NFL season, rather than being seen as a reaction to it. Scott Galloway went as far as to call it the ‘gangster marketing’ move of 2018. But no it wasn’t particularly brave on the part of Nike. From a Nike point-of-view this kicks the inevitable liberal media cyclical discussion about Nike and children working in third-world sweatshops a bit further down the road. I guess Nike won’t have to worry about yet another set of shoe brands like Starbury, Patrick Ewiing or And1 coming up anytime soon. Commentators tend to forget that they emerged because Nike was seen to be using black athletes to gouge poor consumers out of excess cash and fuelling criminality to have the ‘right’ shoes. What a difference a president makes.
Secondly, there is an issue of has bravery become an overused word?
By using it to sell sneakers and track tops are you cheapening the sacrifices of fallen first responders, civil rights activists or military personnel?
Where do whistle blowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden fit into it?
And what does it say about America when you have to be brave to use your constitutional rights?
Everything has become weaponised, how do we step back from this? More on Nike here.
its a rare one of the columns when I am dealing with two pretty grim subjects in a week. The Register broke the news about western intelligence services declaring a new war on privacy – its a even more alarming when you think about how populist politics has blown up in the past few years. This is the best written reaction that I have seen to it. Schneier is a online security expert and I’d trust his judgement over any politicians: Five-Eyes Intelligence Services Choose Surveillance Over Security – Schneier on Security. Go and have a read, I’ll still be here when you come back.
As you can understand I’d like to lift the mood a bit. The reaction of Japanese people to western swear words once they are explained to them is priceless.
NASA on the Cray super-computers that they used in the mid-1980s
My former colleague Haruka is doing a daily illustration challenge, creating artworks on 1 inch x 1 inch paper square. (An inch is 25.4mm)
