Silk Road, China

"It's time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals."
Emma Watson's speech at the UN for gender equality. Beautiful, moving words.

heforshe.org

"Looking at the youthful friends around me, I find that their cycle and rhythm of ‘birth, age, illness and death’ are moving several times faster than those of my generation," says auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien about his sexy and transfixing Millennium Mambo, a departure (read: more techno music) of sorts for a director known for less youthful pictures like The Flowers of Shanghai and The Puppetmaster. The film is an ethereal, opiate-induced chronicle of a young girl (a flower of Shanghai if you will) whose life is preciously unexamined. Vicki (Shu Qi) lives with her abusive disc jockey boyfriend Hao-Hao (Tuan Chung-Hao); when she finally leaves him, she befriends a mobster, Jack (Kao Jack), who doesn’t bring her any closer to joy. The film begins at the end, with a noticeably free Vicki walking down a footbridge before she disappears into the dark shadows of a staircase below. The camera stops—or, more accurately, it lets go. Very little happens in the film (hence the Hollywood Reporter’s frustration) because Hou’s subject is (once again) stasis. Just as the forward momentum of Hou’s images seemingly summons Vicki toward a life of transcendence, the girl’s elegiac voice-over (positioned 10 years in the future) suggests that she did persevere the ennui and doping of her young life. Some of the most beautiful passages in the film evoke the paralysis of modern living and the promise of change: Vicki leaves an imprint of her face on the snow and an 80-year-old grandmother yearns for another 20 years (so she can see how much the world around her has changed). The second-person perspective of Vicki’s voice-over ravishingly intensifies Hou’s fixation with the disconnect between our past and present lives—that inexplicable, instantaneous moment in time when we leave a ghostly self behind.

Millenium Mambo

Hou Hsiao-hsien, the leading figure of the Taiwanese New Wave, is one of the most important and influential filmmakers to emerge over the past three decades. His sensuous, richly textured work, marked by elegantly staged long takes, largely static camera positions, and a radically elliptical approach to storytelling, is instantly recognizable in such widely acclaimed movies as Flowers of Shanghai, The Puppetmaster, Café Lumière, A City of Sadness, Dust in the Wind, and Flight of the Red Balloon.

Also like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien

Miu Miu has teamed up with artist and filmmaker Miranda July to create a new app, Somebody, which allows you to send messages to friends and have them delivered, verbally, by a stranger nearby (who also has the app). I know, I know... you're thinking 'but when would I actually use that in the real world?' I was too, but then I watched July's quirky film to go with the app and suddenly this seems the way forward for all communication...

Perhaps wisely, the app comes with a series of 'official hotspots', where users are particularly encouraged to use it. These are mostly galleries so far (including Los Angeles Museum of Art, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and The New Museum in New York), where one might expect something a bit unexpected to happen anyway or, if it's an opening, you might be a little bit drunk. Here's July's film though, which brings the app to life in entertaining fashion:(via)

somebodyapp.com

humansofnewyork:

"If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people, what would it be?"
"Change your mind about something significant every day."

Here's a great interview with Malcolm Gladwell about "Why You Shouldn't Hire for Talent"

Sam3

A beautiful short film.

SeeSaw Café

Gelincasa

 

Word of Mouth: Shanghai

Traditional textiles, boldly modern boutiques and coffee-geek cafés in our guide to China's most populous city

by Hart Hagerty

China’s global financial center, transport hub and stylish East-meets-West playground, Shanghai is the country’s largest city by population (23 million as of 2013), and the beating heart of the buzzing metropolis is Jing’An district, which has undergone a mind-blowing metamorphosis. The last decade has ushered in shiny new luxury shopping centers, high street fashion flagships, five-star hotels and LEED-certified skyscrapers housing HQs of a growing number of Fortune 500s.

The central hub of Jing’An is corporate minded and clean, at times verging on sterile. However, just a few blocks away is a world devoid of the bling and big brands, where smaller establishments march to the beat of their own gongs. Whether dishing out boldly modern designs or preserving elements of ancient Chinese culture, here are a handful of venues showcasing what Shanghai does best—blending the old with the new.

Help change the world. One Birthday at a time.

There’s A New (Old) Way To Think About Money. A short film by Ian Mackenzie.

Why Is The Middle Class Disappearing?

SAMO©

This is fu#@ing AWESOME

Have a great weekend, guys. Peace.

This is incredible.

BEN HOROWITZ ON PROGRAMMING YOUR CULTURE 

So what is culture? Does culture matter? If so, how much time should you spend on it?

Let’s start with the second question first. The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10x better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does. Very few products are 10x better than the competition, so unseating the new incumbent is much more difficult than unseating the old one.

If you fail to do both of those things, your culture won’t matter one bit. The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture does not make a company.

So, why bother with culture at all? Three reasons:

It matters to the extent that it can help you achieve the above goals.
As your company grows, culture can help you preserve your key values, make your company a better place to work and help it perform better in the future.
Perhaps most importantly, after you and your people go through the inhuman amount of work that it will take to build a successful company, it will be an epic tragedy if your company culture is such that even you don’t want to work there.
Creating A Company Culture
In this post, when I refer to company culture, I am not referring to other important activities like company values and employee satisfaction. Specifically, I am writing about designing a way of working that will:

Distinguish you from competitors
Ensure that critical operating values persist such as delighting customers or making beautiful products
Help you identify employees that fit with your mission
Culture means lots of other things in other contexts, but the above will be plenty to discuss here.

When you start implementing your culture, keep in mind that most of what will be retrospectively referred to as your company’s culture will not be designed in, but will evolve over time based on the behavior of you and your early employees. As a result, you will want to focus on a small number of cultural design points that will influence a large number of behaviors over a long period of time.

In Jim Collins’ massively successful book Built to Last, he wrote that one of the things that long lasting companies he studied have in common is a “cult-like culture.” I found this description to be confusing because it seems to imply that as long as your culture is weird enough and you are rabid enough about it, you will succeed on the cultural front. That’s related to the truth, but not actually true. In reality, Collins was right that a properly designed culture often ends up looking cult-like in retrospect, but that’s not the initial design principle. You needn’t think hard about how you can make your company seem bizarre to outsiders. However, you do need to think about how you can be provocative enough to change what people do every day.

Ideally, a cultural design point will be trivial to implement, but will have far-reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value. If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior. As we learned in The Godfather, ask a Hollywood mogul to give someone a job and he might not respond. Put a horse’s head in his bed and unemployment will drop by one. Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change.

Connecting...

Ai Weiwei's Christmas screensaver: let his Door Gods protect your home

Ai Weiwei says: 'Posters of the Door Gods are traditionally placed at the entrance to every Chinese ­family's home to protect them from evil spirits. This includes ­details from art works I have made, such as Sunflower Seeds and ­Watermelon; and internet ­memes such as Caonima [the red-nosed llamas in the foreground, and the title of Ai's Gangnam Style parody]. The caonimas represent the spirit of defiance against internet censorship in China. Each Chinese New Year, I ­create a different poster of the gods for ­netizens to download and post on their doors. I would like to share this with Guardian readers'