Lovely quote from the Economist.

I HAVE yet to come upon anybody in Britain who is remotely interested in the impending royal wedding, let alone excited by it, and I pride myself on the range of people I talk to. The newspapers keep trying to drum up some excitement (The frocks! The double-barrelled guest lists! The first commoner to marry a royal!), and the great British public responds with a yawn and a scratch.

The French had to resort to the guillotine to get rid of their royal family; perhaps ours will simply expire through lack of interest.

Personally, I hope to be out of the country on the day.

David Pogue has an interesting take on Cisco’s decision to kill the Flip.

Gizmodo puts it, “Cisco just axed Flip, yeah, but the blame should be aimed squarely at the smartphone in your pocket.”

Which sounds logical—until you realize there is a far more satisfying explanation.

First, app phones like the iPhone represent only a few percent of cellphone sales. You know who buys app phones? Affluent, East Coast/West Coast, educated, New York Times-reading, Gizmodo-writing Americans.

But most of the world doesn’t buy iPhones. Of the 1 billion cellphones sold annually, a few million are iPhones. The masses still have regular cellphones that don’t capture video, let alone hi-def video. They’re the people who buy Flip camcorders. It’s wayyyyyy too soon for app phones to have killed off the camcorder.

Second, it isn’t true at all that nobody’s buying Flip camcorders. So far, 7 million people have bought them. Only a month ago, I was briefed by a Flip product manager on the newest model, which was to hit the market yesterday. He showed me a graph of the Flip’s sales; Flips now represent an astonishing 35 percent of the camcorder market. They’re the No. 1 bestselling camcorder on Amazon. They’re still selling fast.

Look at it this way: There are plenty of Flip copycats, from Kodak and other companies. They have only a fraction of the Flip’s popularity, but you don’t see them shutting down.

So why did Cisco kill off the flip?

I’ve spoken to a bunch of people in the industry, trying, in my human way, to figure out the logic here. It seems clear that Cisco, whose primary focus is making networking equipment for businesses, was all excited about getting into the consumer electronics game; that’s why it spent $590 million on Flip. But then, as John Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive, put it, the company decided to make “key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy.”

Which, in English, means, “We had no clue what we were doing.”

All right, fine. Cisco bit of more than it could chew. But why is it killing the Flip and not selling it?

The most plausible reason is that Cisco wants the technology in the Flip more than it wants the business. Cisco is, after all, in the videoconferencing business, and the Flip’s video quality—for its size and price—was amazing. Maybe, in fact, that was Cisco’s plan all along. Buy the beloved Flip for its technology, then shut it down and fire 550 people.

And here’s something we didn’t know:

But there’s a second part of the tragedy, too, something that nobody knows. That new Flip that the product manager showed me was astonishing. It was called FlipLive, and it added one powerful new feature to the standard Flip: live broadcasting to the Internet.

That is, when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the entire world can see what you’re filming. You can post a link to Twitter or Facebook, or send an e-mail link to friends. Anyone who clicks the link can see what you’re seeing, in real time—thousands of people at once.

Think how amazing that would be. The world could tune in, live, to join you in watching concerts. Shuttle launches. The plane in the Hudson. College lectures. Apple keynote speeches.

Or your relative could join you for smaller, more personal events: weddings. Birthday parties. Graduations. First steps.

And the FlipLive was supposed to ship yesterday. April 13. The day after Cisco killed the Flip.

The pollen collector, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Have you ever wondered how bees collect pollen? I did–until the other day.

Two pictures that tell both sides of the story.

EXHIBIT A

EXHIBIT B: overleaf

Of course you will object that I’m foolish to insist on using a fountain pen. Why not use a pencil like any self-respecting author? My answer is that expensive notebooks (and Moleskines are damned expensive) ought to have really good quality paper.

Warren Buffett is warning investors to be careful about which social networks they friend with their investment dollars.

Buffett, the chief executive of the Berkshire Hathaway investment empire, warned investors Friday at a conference in New Dehli to be wary of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter–a sector that has recently generated great interest and anticipation on Wall Street.

“Most of them will be overpriced," Buffett said, according to a Bloomberg report. "It's extremely difficult to value social- networking-site companies.”

“Some will be huge winners, which will make up for the rest,” he said, without specifying which companies he expects to be winners and which will be losers.

This is news?????

[Source.]

Terrific cinematic critique of the Sorkin/Fincher film by Jim Emerson. Sample:

Since it came out last fall, I’d almost forgotten what an exhilarating information-overload experience David Fincher’s ‘The Social Network’is. Cut and composed and performed with breathless, jittery speed, it’s a movie that consists of virtually nothing but conversations in rooms (the attempted, missed, short-circuited, coded connections that struck me when I first saw it). It’s action-packed — enough to give you whiplash, watching all the elements interacting within the 2.40:1 widescreen frame — even though there are no ‘action sequences’ (car chases, shootouts, fist fights, acrobatic stunts, etc.); the filmmaking is charged with energy without falling back on today’s routinely frenetic, handheld run-and-gun/snatch-and-grab camerawork (the camera is generally mounted on a tripod; when it moves, it’s on a crane or a dolly — often for establishing shots or a shift in perspective that brings a new element into the frame). Smart, quick, efficient.

Because I’m not a film buff, I’d never come across this kind of criticism before. But I know this particular film well, and suddenly began to see it in a new light.

Here, for example, is Emerson’s analysis of the opening sequence:

The crunchy guitar riff starts over the Columbia Pictures logo and then the crowd noise comes up, the music drops down, and before the logo fades to black and the first image appears, we hear Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) speaking the movie’s opening line — a question that’s also a challenge: “Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?” What follows is a blisteringly fast-paced screwball comedy exchange (“His Girl Friday” through a 64-bit dual-core processor) between Mark and his girlfriend (not for very much longer ) Erica in which nearly every line is a misunderstanding (intentional or unintentional), a sarcastic jab, a leap of logic, a block, an interruption, a feint, an abrupt shift in the angle of attack, a diversion, a retreat, a refinement, a recapitulation (I’m sure there are many fencing terms that apply to the various conversational strategies employed here)…

The scene offers just a few variations on some simple camera set-ups, deployed at high speed. Erica (Rooney Mara) is always on the left, Mark on the right (even in their individual close-ups they’re slightly shifted to those positions in the frame). The cutting is as quick and nervous and aggressive as the dialog, ricocheting from volley to return (and reaction shot to reaction shot). Most edits are right at the end of each character’s lines — there are hardly any pauses between them — so that the effect is like watching an intense two-camera tennis match, cutting from one side of the net to the other.

Only once after the opening shot does Fincher offer a balanced two-shot, as Erica presents an opportunity to disarm the conversation/confrontation and take it in a neutral direction: “Should we get something to eat?” Superficially, Mark makes a similar counter-offer, but it’s really another challenge: “Would you like to talk about something else?” And then we’re back to the over-the-shoulder shots (moving into close-ups) as Erica dives back in: “No, it’s just since the beginning of the conversation about finals club I think I may have missed a birthday.” By the time Mark tries to circle back to this juncture — “Do you want to get some food?” — it’s too late to recover that balance.

It would be fun to do a line-by-line, shot-by-shot accounting of the dynamics of this scene (or this whole movie), but let’s get to the point: The style here is a modern variation on some pretty straightforward, classical Hollywood filmmaking principles, distinguished two things: the velocity at which the scene is performed and cut; and the amount of information packed into the widescreen picture. (The idea of cutting a CinemaScope picture like this — especially for a simple, two-person dialog scene — would have been unthinkable until recently. Audiences for early anamorphic pictures in the 1950s and 1960s probably would have thrown up.)

Great stuff.

Ida Kar, originally uploaded by jjn1.

I had an hour to kill one day last week before a meeting in London and took the opportunity to see the Ida Kar exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

She was billed as a “bohemian photographer”, which was intriguing, and her work was unknown to me. Turns out that she was an Armenian who went to study in Paris in the late 1920s and was much influenced by the artists she encountered there. She lived in Cairo for a while and came to London in 1945 with her second husband. She tried to set up as a theatrical photographer, but seems to have more success with painters and sculptors, and these are the basis for the NPG retrospective.

There are lots of memorable pics. A wonderful picture of Bertrand Russell, scribbling in what looks like a Moleskine notebook while sitting for a portrait painter. Marc Chagall, wistful in a ribbed sweater. Graham and Kathleen Sutherland, at home in front of fireplace and a table loaded with pre-lunch drinks: impeccably upper-middle class, don’t you know. There’s Stanley Spencer under his trademark black umbrella and a terrific 1954 picture of Fernand Leger in a heavy tweet suit and matching cap, looking more like a bookie or a farmer than an avant garde painter. There’s a shot of Man Ray looking dubious in a tartan waistcoat, and one of Le Corbusier in short sleeves and heavy round glasses. A particularly nice portrait of Eugene Ionesco, sheltering thoughtfully behind a pile of books comes before a shot of T.S. Eliot in 1959 looking like a triumph of the embalmer’s art, and one of Jean-Paul Sartre, boss-eyed and formal in front of tottering piles of files. Kar caught Iris Murdoch in 1957, sitting on the floor surrounded by the ms of The Bell, looking fey and somehow dangerous (the best — i.e. most revealing — picture in the exhibition, IMHO.)

Other images that caught my eye included one of Augustus John in 1959, looking fierce and slightly potty; a lovely wistful pic of Laurie Lee in 1956; Colin McInnes reclining full length on a bed; the painter Terry Frost captured in 1961 in his St Ives studio overlooking the beach; Somerset Maugham in the Dorchester in 1958, looking not just starchy but positively stuffed in a tightly buttoned double-breasted suit; and a lovely 1968 pic of Bill Brandt, perched on an antique chair in his Kensington flat.

The obvious comparison, of course, is with Lee Miller and her photographs of the surrealist painters with whom she and Roland Penrose mixed. But the abiding impression of the Kar show was its evocation of the 1950s: what a strange time it must have been; and how small and constrained London must have been then.

I was also left musing over the adjective “bohemian”. What, I wondered, had the inhabitants of that lovely part of central Europe done to deserve such raffish connotations. As ever, Wikipedia came to the rescue. The term bohemian, it seems, came to refer to “the nontraditional lifestyles of marginalized and impoverished artists, writers, musicians, and actors in major European cities – emerged in France in the early 19th century when artists and creators began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower class gypsy neighbourhoods”. Quite so.

Well worth a visit, if you have the time.

The elementary satisfaction of seeing a Tomahawk missile vapourising a Gaddafi-owned military installation may well turn out to be the only satisfying aspect of operation ‘Odyssey Dawn’, as the current UN-legitimised attack on Libya is code-named. (En passant, who thinks up these daft names?) And it is, of course, a relief to see that the brute’s progress towards the massacre of Bengazi residents and rebels has apparently been halted. It would have been terrible if we had sat on our hands while he and his murderous regime got on with it. But it’s also pretty clear that nobody has thought this thing through. And that the West’s approach to the whole business is riven with contradictions that will ultimately make a nonsense of the whole deal, because at the root of it all is our addiction to Middle-Eastern oil, and we have no escape route from that. Not in my lifetime anyway.

Yesterday, the Guardian carried a sobering OpEd piece by Abdel al-Bari Atwan, who is the Editor in Chief of al-Quds al-Arabi, an independent pan-Arab daily newspaper published in London since 1989 and owned by Palestinian expatriates. He makes six useful points.

1. What are the real motives behind Odyssey Dawn?

While the UN was voting to impose a no-fly zone in Libya, at least 40 civilians were killed in a US drone attack in Waziristan in Pakistan. And as I write, al-Jazeera is broadcasting scenes of carnage from Sanaa, Yemen, where at least 40 protesters have been shot dead. But there will be no UN no-fly zone to protect Pakistani civilians from US attacks, or to protect Yemenis. One cannot help but question the selective involvement of the west in the so-called “Arab spring” series of uprisings.

And what about the freedom protestors in the US’s valued ally, Bahrain, gunned down and/or beaten by a regime emboldened by tanks dispatched across the causeway by Saudi Arabia (ditto)? And then there’s the question of which Arab states actually support the action. “At first”, writes Mr Atwan, “the signs were good: the Arab League endorsed the move last week, and five member states seemed likely to participate. But that has been whittled down to just Qatar and the UAE, with Jordan a possible third. This intervention lacks sufficient Arab support to give it legitimacy in the region”. As I write (Sunday afternoon) we are seeing the Arab League backing away now that cruise missiles have started to fly.

2. Why are Libya’s two immediate neighbours — the ones that started this Arab Spring — not participating in Odyssey Dawn?

“Democratic countries helping their neighbours would have been in the spirit of the Arab uprisings”, writes Atwan,

“and would have strengthened the sense that Arabs can take control of their future. It could have happened too: Egypt gets $1.3bn of US military aid a year. Diplomatic pressure by Hillary Clinton could have brought that mighty war horse into the arena, or at least encouraged Egypt to arm the rebels. Instead, an Egyptian foreign ministry spokesperson stated categorically on Wednesday: ‘No intervention, period.'”

3. Gaddafi may be crazy, but he’s also shrewd and knows how to play to the Arab street.

At the moment he has little, if any, public support; his influence is limited to his family and tribe. But he may use this intervention to present himself as the victim of post-colonialist interference in pursuit of oil. He is likely to pose the question that is echoing around the Arab world – why wasn’t there a no-fly zone over Gaza when the Israelis were bombarding it in 2008/9?

Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, the uprising in Libya quickly deteriorated into armed conflict. Gaddafi could question whether those the UN is seeking to protect are still “civilians” when engaged in battle, and suggest instead that the west is taking sides in a civil war (where the political agenda of the rebels is unknown).

4. What will be the long-term impact of intervention on Libya?

Libya may end up divided into the rebel-held east and a regime stronghold in the rest of the country which would include the oil fields and the oil terminal town al-Brega. There is a strong risk, too, that it will become the region’s fourth failed state, joining Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen. And that ushers in another peril. Al-Qaida thrives in such chaos; it played a key role in the Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies and is based in Yemen – and it may enter Libya, too.

5. There’s no certainty that Gaddafi will not survive this.

What then? “Boots on the ground?” Whose boots?

6. There’s the possibility that the natural course of the Arab Spring will be derailed by this — especially if Gaddafi succeeds in persuading Arabs that Odyssey Dawn is really just another colonialist enterprise in which Britain and France are the glove-puppets of an oil-hungry US? In another thoughtful piece — this time in the Observer — Neal Acherson quotes the lines from W.B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

Everywhere one looks, one sees politicians caught between rocks and hard places. The West wants to crush the monster that it had, until very recently, assumed it had house-trained. But in other parts of the Arab forest, the autocratic kleptocracies who are its staunchest (i.e. oil-supplying) allies are getting ready to use any means at their disposal, including wholesale massacre, to prevent democratic uprisings in their jurisdictions. In that sense, Bahrain is a dry run for what comes next. If King Abdullah and his murderous entourage decide that the only way to put down a Shia uprising in Saudi Arabia is to gun down demonstrators in their hundreds or thousands, will there be an Operation Odyssey Dawn II to protect Saudi citizens from their own brutal leaders? You only have to ask the question to realise the absurdity of it.

The common thread which stitches up our hypocrisy is, as Neal Acheson says,

the world’s convulsive greed for energy – whether nuclear or fossil. It’s that greed which makes people rush in with cowboy repair solutions, failing to seek the real sources of a problem. Fukushima is only one example. Here we jump into Libya, after a dirty deal with Arab autocrats to win their support against Gaddafi at the price of letting them suppress people’s struggling for justice in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. And that’s another old story. Back in 1953, short-term lust for oil drove the British and Americans to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh’s democratic revolution in Iran, a fatal interference which ultimately led to the tyranny which rules Iran today.

So while I’m pleased and relieved if Gaddafi’s advance on Bengazi has indeed been halted, I can’t see the Libyan story unfolding in anything other than dangerous and messy ways. The only hope is that conclusive demonstration of the West’s resolve and military power might persuade those around Gaddafi that the time had come to dump him. In a way, that’s what happened in Egypt. But Libya looks very different, and all the bets are off.