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letterboxd · 4 years

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Best of Sundance 2021.

From pandemic-era stories, via portraits of grief, to the serendipitous 1969 trilogy, the Letterboxd crew recaps our favorite films from the first major festival of the year.

Sundance heralds a new season of storytelling, with insights into what’s concerning filmmakers at present, and what artistic innovations may be on the horizon. As with every film festival, there were spooky coincidences and intersecting themes, whether it was a proliferation of pandemic-era stories, or extraordinary portraits of women working through grief (Land, Hive, The World to Come), or the incredible serendipity of the festival’s ‘1969 trilogy’, covering pivotal moments in Black American history: Summer of Soul (...Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Judas and the Black Messiah and the joyful Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street.

The hybrid model of this year’s Sundance meant more film lovers across the United States—a record number of you, in fact—‘attended’ the prestigious indie showcase. Our Festiville team (Gemma Gracewood, Aaron Yap, Ella Kemp, Selome Hailu, Jack Moulton and Dominic Corry) scanned your Letterboxd reviews and compared them with our notes to arrive at these seventeen feature-length documentary and narrative picks from Sundance 2021. There are plenty more we enjoyed, but these are the films we can’t stop thinking about.

Documentary features

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) Directed by Ahmir-Khalib Thompson (AKA Questlove)

One hot summer five decades ago, there was a free concert series at a park in Harlem. It was huge, and it was lovely, and then it was forgotten. The Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 brought together some of the world’s most beloved Black artists to connect with Black audiences. The star power and the size of the crowds alone should have been enough to immortalize the event à la Woodstock—which happened the same summer, the film emphasizes. But no one cared to buy up the footage until Ahmir-Khalib Thompson, better known as Questlove, came along.

It would have been easy to oversimplify such a rich archive by stringing together the performances, seeking out some talking heads, and calling it a day. But Questlove was both careful and ebullient in his approach. “Summer of Soul is a monumental concert documentary and a fantastic piece of reclaimed archived footage. There is perhaps no one better suited to curate this essential footage than Questlove, whose expertise and passion for the music shines through,” writes Matthew on Letterboxd. The film is inventive with its use of present interviews, bringing in both artists and attendees not just to speak on their experiences, but to react to and relive the footage. The director reaches past the festival itself, providing thorough social context that takes in the moon landing, the assassinations of Black political figures, and more. By overlapping different styles of documentary filmmaking, Questlove’s directorial debut embraces the breadth and simultaneity of Black resilience and joy. A deserving winner of both the Grand Jury and Audience awards (and many of our unofficial Letterboxd awards). —SH

Flee Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

Flee is the type of discovery Sundance is designed for. Danish documentarian Jonas Poher Rasmussen tells the poignant story of his close friend and former classmate (using the pseudonym ‘Amin Nawabi’) and his daring escape from persecution in 1990s Afghanistan. Rasmussen always approaches tender topics with sensitivity and takes further steps to protect his friend’s identity by illustrating the film almost entirely in immersive animation, following in the footsteps of Waltz With Bashir and Tower. It’s a film aware of its subjectivity, allowing the animated scenes to alternate between the playful joy of nostalgia and the mournful pain of an unforgettable memory. However, these are intercepted by dramatic archive footage that oppressively brings the reality home.

“Remarkably singular, yet that is what makes it so universal,” writes Paul. “So many ugly truths about the immigration experience—the impossible choices forced upon people, and the inability to really be able to explain all of it to people in your new life… You can hear the longing in his voice, the fear in his whisper. Some don’t get the easy path.” Winner of the World Cinema (Documentary) Grand Jury Prize and quickly acquired by Neon, Flee is guaranteed to be a film you’ll hear a lot about for the rest of 2021. —JM

Taming the Garden Directed by Salomé Jashi

There’s always a moment at a film festival when fatigue sets in, when the empathy machine overwhelms, and when I hit that moment in 2021, I took the advice of filmmaker and Sundance veteran Jim Cummings, who told us: “If you’re ever stressed or tired, watch a documentary to reset yourself.” Taming the Garden wasn’t initially on my hit-list, but it’s one of those moments when the ‘close your eyes and point at a random title’ trick paid off. Documentary director Salomé Jashi does the Lorax’s work, documenting the impact and grief caused by billionaire former Georgian PM Bidzina Ivanishvili’s obsession with collecting ancient trees for his private arboretum.

“A movie that is strangely both infuriating and relaxing” writes Todd, of the long, locked-off wide shots showing the intense process of removing large, old trees from their village homes. There’s no narration, instead Jashi eavesdrops on locals as they gossip about Ivanishvili, argue about whether the money is worth it, and a feisty, irritated 90-year-old warns of the impending environmental fallout. “What you get out of it is absolutely proportional to what you put into it,” writes David, who recommends this film get the IMAX treatment. It’s arboriculture as ASMR, the timeline cleanse my Sundance needed. The extraordinary images of treasured trees being barged across the sea will become iconic. —GG

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World Directed by Kristian Petri and Kristina Lindström

Where Taming the Garden succeeds through pure observation, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World relies on the complete participation of its title subject, actor Björn Andrésen, who was thrust into the spotlight as a teenager. Cast by Italian director Lucino Visconti in Death in Venice, a 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella about obsession and fatal longing, Andrésen spent the 1970s as an object of lust, with a side-gig as a blonde pop star in Japan, inspiring many manga artists along the way.

As we know by now (Alex Winter’s Showbiz Kids is a handy companion to this film), young stardom comes at a price, one that Andrésen was not well-placed to pay even before his fateful audition for Visconti. But he’s still alive, still acting (he’s Dan in Midsommar), and ready to face the mysteries of his past. Like Benjamin Ree’s excellent The Painter and the Thief from last year, this documentary is a constantly unfolding detective story, notable for great archive footage, and a deep kindness towards its reticent yet wide-open subject. —GG

All Light, Everywhere Directed by Theo Anthony

Threading the blind spots between Étienne-Jules Marey’s 19th-century “photographic rifle”, camera-carrying war pigeons and Axon’s body-cam tech, Theo Anthony’s inquisitive, mind-expanding doc about the false promise of the all-seeing eye is absorbing, scary, urgent. It’s the greatest Minority Report origin story you didn’t know you needed.

Augmented by Dan Deacon’s electronic soundscapes and Keaver Brenai’s lullingly robotic narration, All Light, Everywhere proves to be a captivating, intricately balanced experience that Harris describes as “one part Adam Curtis-esque cine-essay”, “one part structural experiment in the vein of Koyaanisqatsi” and “one part accidental character study of two of the most familiar yet strikingly unique evil, conservative capitalists…”. Yes, there’s a tremendous amount to download, but Anthony’s expert weaving, as AC writes, “make its numerous subjects burst with clarity and profundity.” For curious cinephiles, the oldest movie on Letterboxd, Jules Jenssen’s Passage de Vénus (1874), makes a cameo. —AY

The Sparks Brothers Directed by Edgar Wright

Conceived at a Sparks gig in 2017 upon the encouragement of fellow writer-director Phil Lord, Edgar Wright broke his streak of riotous comedies with his first (of many, we hope) rockumentary. While somewhat overstuffed—this is, after all, his longest film by nearly fifteen minutes—The Sparks Brothers speaks only to Wright’s unrestrained passion for his art-pop Gods, exploring all the nooks and crannies of Sparks’ sprawling career, with unprecedented access to brothers and bandmates Ron and Russell Mael.

Nobody else can quite pin them down, so Wright dedicates his time to put every pin in them while he can, building a mythology and breaking it down, while coloring the film with irresistible dives into film history, whimsically animated anecdotes and cheeky captions. “Sparks rules. Edgar Wright rules. There’s no way this wasn’t going to rule”, proclaims Nick, “every Sparks song is its own world, with characters, rules, jokes and layers of narrative irony. What a lovely ode to a creative partnership that was founded on sticking to one’s artistic guns, no matter what may have been fashionable at the time.” —JM

Narrative features

The Pink Cloud Written and directed by Iuli Gerbase

The Pink Cloud is disorienting and full of déjà vu. Brazilian writer-director Iuli Gerbase constructs characters that are damned to have to settle when it comes to human connection. Giovana and Yago’s pleasant one-night stand lasts longer than expected when the titular pink cloud emerges from the sky, full of a mysterious and deadly gas that forces everyone to stay locked where they stand. Sound familiar? Reserve your groans—The Pink Cloud wasn’t churned out to figure out “what it all means” before the pandemic is even over. Gerbase wrote and shot the film prior to the discovery of Covid-19.

It’s “striking in its ability to prophesize a pandemic and a feeling unknown at the time of its conception. What was once science fiction hits so close now,” writes Sam. As uncanny as the quarantine narrative feels, what’s truly harrowing is how well the film predicts and understands interiorities that the pandemic later exacerbated. Above all, Giovana is a woman with unmet needs. She is a good partner, good mother and good person even when she doesn’t want to be. Even those who love her cannot see how their expectations strip her of her personhood, and the film dares to ask what escape there might be when love itself leaves you lonely. —SH

Together Together Written and directed by Nikole Beckwith

Every festival needs at least one indie relationship dramedy, and Together Together filled that role at Sundance 2021 with a healthy degree of subversion. It follows rom-com structure while ostensibly avoiding romance, instead focusing on how cultivating adult friendships can be just hard, if not harder.

Writer-director Nikole Beckwith warmly examines the limits of the platonic, and Patti Harrison and Ed Helms are brilliantly cast as the not-couple: a single soon-to-be father and the surrogate carrying his child. They poke at each other’s boundaries with a subtle desperation to know what makes a friendship appropriate or real. As Jacob writes: “It’s cute and serious, charming without being quirky. It’s a movie that deals with the struggle of being alone in this world, but offers a shimmer of hope that even if you don’t fall in fantastical, romantic, Hollywood love… there are people out there for you.” —SH

Hive Written and directed by Blerta Basholli

Hive, for some, may fall into the “nothing much happens” slice-of-life genre, but Blerta Basholli’s directorial debut holds an ocean of pain in its small tale, asking us to consider the heavy lifting that women must always do in the aftermath of war. As Liz writes, “Hive is not just a story about grief and trauma in a patriarchy-dominated culture, but of perseverance and the bonds created by the survivors who must begin to consider the future without their husbands.”

Yllka Gashi is an understated hero as Fahrjie, a mother-of-two who sets about organizing work for the women of her village, while awaiting news of her missing husband—one of thousands unaccounted for, years after the Kosovo War has ended. The townsmen have many opinions about how women should and shouldn’t mourn, work, socialize, parent, drive cars and, basically, get on with living, but Fahrjie persists, and Basholli sticks close with an unfussy, tender eye. “It felt like I was a fly on the wall, witnessing something that was actually happening,” writes Arthur. Just as in Robin Wright’s Land and Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come, Hive pays off in the rare, beaming smile of its protagonist. —GG

On the Count of Three Directed by Jerrod Carmichael, written by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch

It starts with an image: two best friends pointing guns at each other’s heads. There’s no anger, there’s no hatred—this is an act of merciful brotherly love. How do you have a bleak, gun-totin’ buddy-comedy in 2021 and be critically embraced without contradicting your gun-control retweets or appearing as though your film is the dying embers of Tarantino-tinged student films?

Comedian Jerrod Carmichael’s acerbic directorial debut On the Count of Three achieves this by calling it out every step of the way. Guns are a tool to give insecure men the illusion of power. They are indeed a tool too terrifying to trust in the hands of untrained citizens. Carmichael also stars, alongside Christopher Abbott, who has never been more hilarious or more tragic, bringing pathos to a cathartic rendition of Papa Roach’s ‘Last Resort’. Above all, Carmichael and Abbott’s shared struggle and bond communicates the millennial malaise: how can you save others if you can’t save yourself? “Here’s what it boils down to: life is fucking hard”, Laura sums up, “and sometimes the most we can hope for is to have a best friend who loves you [and] to be a best friend who loves. It doesn’t make life any easier, but it sure helps.” Sundance 2021 is one for the books when it comes to documentaries, but On the Count of Three stands out in the fiction lineup this year. —JM

Censor Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond, written by Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher

The first of several upcoming films inspired by the ‘video nasty’ moral panic over gory horror in mid-’80s Britain, Prano Bailey-Bond leans heavily into both the period and the genre in telling the story of a film censor (a phenomenal Niamh Algar—vulnerable and steely at the same time) who begins to suspect a banned movie may hold the key to her sister’s childhood disappearance. Often dreamlike, occasionally phantasmagorical and repeatedly traumatic, even if the worst gore presented (as seen in the impressively authentic fictional horrors being appraised) appears via a screen, providing a welcome degree of separation.

Nevertheless, Censor is definitely not for the faint of heart, but old-school horror aficionados will squeal with delight at the aesthetic commitment. “I’m so ecstatic that horror is in the hands of immensely talented women going absolutely batshit in front of and behind the camera.” writes Erik. (Same here!) “A great ode to the video-nasty era and paying tribute to the great horror auteurs of the ’80s such as Argento, De Palma and Cronenberg while also doing something new with the genre. Loved this!” writes John, effectively encapsulating Censor’s unfettered film-nerd appeal. —DC

CODA Written and directed by Siân Heder

A film so earnest it shouldn’t work, with a heart so big it should surely not fit the size of the screen, CODA broke records (the first US dramatic film in Sundance history to win all three top prizes; the 25-million-dollar sale to Apple Studios), and won the world over like no other film. “A unique take on something we’ve seen so much,” writes Amanda, nailing the special appeal of Siân Heder’s coming-of-ager and family portrait. Emilia Jones plays Ruby, the only hearing person in her deaf family, at war between the family business and her passion for singing. While Heder is technically remaking the French film La Famille Bélier, the decision to cast brilliant deaf actors—Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant—makes this feel brand new.

But it’s not just about representation for the sake of it. A sense of authenticity, in humor as much as affection, shines through. With a script that’s 40 per cent ASL, so many of the jokes are visual gags, poking fun at Tinder and rap music, but a lot of the film’s most poignant moments are silent as well. And in Ruby’s own world, too, choir kids will feel seen. “I approve of this very specific alto representation and the brilliant casting of the entire choir,” Laura confirms in her review. Come for the fearless, empathetic family portrait, stay for the High School Musical vibes that actually ring true. —EK

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

Perhaps the most singular addition to the recent flurry of Extremely Online cinema—Searching, Spree, Host, et al—Jane Schoenbrun’s feature debut ushers the viewer into a haunted, hypno-drone miasma of delirium-inducing YouTube time-suck, tenebrous creepypasta lore and painfully intimate webcam confessionals. Featuring an extraordinarily unaffected, fearless performance by newcomer Anna Cobb, the film “unpacks the mythology of adolescence in a way that’s so harrowingly familiar and also so otherworldly”, writes Kristen. Not since Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse has there been such an eerily lonely, and at times strangely beautiful, evocation of the liminal spaces between virtual and real worlds.

For members of the trans community, it’s also a work that translates that experience to screen with uncommon authenticity. “What Schoenbrun has accomplished with the form of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is akin to catching a wisp of smoke,” writes Willow, “because the images, mood and aesthetic that they have brought to life is one that is understood completely by trans people as one of familiarity, without also plunging into the obvious melodrama, or liberal back-patting that is usually associated with ‘good’ direct representation.” One of the most original, compelling new voices to emerge from Sundance this year. —AY

Judas and the Black Messiah Directed by Shaka King, written by King, Will Berson, Kenneth Lucas and Keith Lucas

It was always going to take a visionary, uncompromising filmmaker to bring the story of Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party, to life. Shaka King casts Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield as William “Wild Bill” O’Neal, the FBI informant whose betrayal leads to Hampton’s assassination. Both actors have never been better, particularly Kaluuya who Fran Hoepfner calls “entrancing, magnetic, fizzling, romantic, riveting, endlessly watchable.”

Judas and the Black Messiah is an electric, involving watch: not just replaying history by following a certain biopic template. Instead, it’s a film with something to say—on power, on fear, on war and on freedom. “Shaka King’s name better reverberate through the halls of every studio after this,” writes Demi. A talent like this, capable of framing such a revolution, doesn’t come around so often. We’d better listen up. —EK

Pleasure Directed by Ninja Thyberg, written by Thyberg and Peter Modestij

A24’s first purchase of 2021. Ironically titled on multiple levels, Pleasure is a brutal film that you endure more than enjoy. But one thing you can’t do is forget it. Ninja Thyberg’s debut feature follows a young Swedish woman (Sofia Kappel) who arrives in Los Angeles with dreams of porn stardom under the name ‘Bella Cherry’. Although Bella is clear-eyed about the business she’s getting into, Thyberg doesn’t shy away from any of the awfulness she faces in order to succeed in an industry rife with exploitation and abuse. Bella does make allies, and the film isn’t suggesting that porn is only stocked with villains, but the ultimate cost is clear, even if it ends on an ever-so-slightly ambiguous note.

Touching as it does on ambition, friendship and betrayal in the sex business, Pleasure is often oddly reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Or rather, the gritty film Showgirls was claiming to be, as opposed to the camp classic it became. There’s nothing campy here. Kappel is raw and fearless in the lead, but never lets the viewer lose touch with her humanity. Emma puts it well: “Kappel gives the hardest, most provocative and transfixing performance I’ve seen all festival.” “My whole body was physically tense during this,” writes Gillian, while Keegan perhaps speaks for most when she says “Great film, never want to see it again.” —DC

Coming Home in the Dark Directed by James Ashcroft, written by Ashcroft and Eli Kent

A family camping trip amidst some typically stunnin—and casually foreboding— New Zealand scenery is upended by a shocking rug-pull of violence that gives way to sustained terror represented by Daniel Gillies’ disturbingly calm psychopath. The set-up of this thriller initially suggests a spin on the backwoods brutality thriller, but as Coming Home in the Dark progresses and hope dissipates, the motivations reveal themselves to be much more personal in nature, and informed on a thematic level by New Zealand’s colonial crimes against its Indigenous population. It’s a stark and haunting film that remains disorientating and unpredictable throughout, repeatedly daring the viewer to anticipate what will happen next, only to casually stomp on each glimmer of a positive outcome.

It’s so captivatingly bleak that a viewing of it, as Collins Ezeanyim’s eloquent reaction points out, does not lend itself to completing domestic tasks. The film marks an auspicious debut for director and co-writer James Ashcroft. Jacob writes that he “will probably follow James Ashcroft’s career to the gates of Hell after this one”. Justin hits the nail on the head with his description: “Lean and exceptionally brutal road/revenge film … that trades in genre tropes, especially those of Ozploitation and ’70s Italian exploitation, but contextualizes them in the dark history of its country of origin.” —DC

The World to Come Directed by Mona Fastvold, written by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard

Mona Fastvold has not made the first, nor probably the last, period romance about forbidden lesbian love. But The World to Come focuses on a specific pocket in time, a world contained in Jim Shepard’s short story ‘Love & Hydrogen’ from within the collection giving the film its name. Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby are Abigail and Tallie, farming neighbors, stifled by their husbands, who find brief moments of solace, of astonishment and joy, together. What shines here is the script, a verbose, delicate narration that emanates beauty more than pretence. “So beautifully restrained and yet I felt everything,” Iana writes.

And you can feel the fluidity and elegance in the way the film sounds, too: composer Daniel Blumberg’s clarinet theme converses with the dialogue and tells you when your heart can break, when you must pause, when the end is near. “So much heartache. So much hunger. So much longing. Waves of love and grief and love and grief,” writes Claira, capturing the ebb and flow of emotion that keeps The World to Come in your mind long after the screen has gone silent. —EK

Related content

The 2021 Sundance Film Festival lineup by Letterboxd rating

Letterboxd’s ‘Official’ Top 50 of 2021

Awards Season 2020-2021: our awards-tracker list

Letterboxd’s Festiville HQ: our home for up-to-the-minute festival coverage

#sundance #sundance film festival #sundance 2021 #sundance2021 #questlove #summer of soul #black woodstock #shaka king #judas and the black messiah #letterboxd top 50 #best of sundance 2021 #letterboxd

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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STARTUPS DON'T WIN BY GETTING GREAT FUNDING ROUNDS, BUT BY MAKING GREAT PRODUCTS

I think the Internet will have great effects? Do they let energetic young people market rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from them. Instead of avoiding it as a drawback of senility, many companies wouldn't need any fixed workday. The problem is a hard one to solve because most people have more ideas when they're happy. Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary. This is what real productivity looks like. Judging from his books, he was often in doubt. We were saying: if you work on matters of passing importance. After the excesses of the Bubble, a lot of things.

Startups happened because technology started to change so fast that big companies could no longer keep a lid on the smaller ones. There have probably been other people who did this as well as taking it from others. Startups were not of course a creation of the Bubble, a lot of truculent, unionized employees like the police who recently held the Democratic National Convention for ransom, and a lot who get rich through rent-seeking of various forms, and a lot who get rich by taking money from the rich. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described how TV networks were trying to add more live shows, partly as a way to play games on. If you can't ensure your own security, the next best thing is to treat it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear. There have probably been other people who did this as well as I did that our valuation was crazy. But it's very useful to be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences.1 That is one of the most valuable sources of ideas in the visual arts, where there's almost no overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who produce a show can distribute it themselves. McCarthy alone bridged the gap. And that doesn't seem to help, not as a way to make viewers watch TV synchronously instead of watching recorded shows when it suited them.

That helps break deadlocks, because you can start as soon as the first one is ready to buy. We'll ever reach the point where they would do even better to examine the underlying principle. A company that made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong with it. Back in the 1970s it was fashionable to design new programming languages. Most of what the solution turns out to have consequences one might not foresee when one phrases the same idea in terms of reducing inequality. People only have so many leisure hours a day. The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley is that you shouldn't answer: Who else are you talking to? That's a strategy that already seems to be determined less by credentials and more by performance than it was 25 years ago for an ambitious person to choose to be judged directly by the market. In 1958 there seem to have been the envy of previous generations of postal workers, and yet not the equal of Leonardo or Bellini or Memling, who all had the additional encouragement of honest standards. But so do people who inherit money, and they even let kids in. Admittedly, Google is an extreme case. The basic idea behind office hours is that if you eliminate economic inequality.

You could call it Work Day. The other thing I like about publishing online is that you shouldn't major in business in college, but this is actually a good thing. 4 months doesn't seem dynamic, so they try hard to choose well, and more importantly, if you could somehow redesign venture funding to work without allowing VCs to become rich, there's another kind of investor you simply cannot replace: the startups' founders and early employees. But you can't solve the problem is to make great buildings, not to destroy the IPO market. It sounds obvious to say that you shouldn't major in business in college, but this apparently verdant territory is one from which few startups emerge alive. I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. This is the Formula 1 racecar. Raising $20,000 from a first-time angel investor can be as nice as you want, so if someone does design a language that was math. In Apple's case the garage story is a bit of an urban legend. First there'd be a huge ideological squabble over who to choose. The rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth, he'd have a hyperlinear growth curve.

Notes

There is a major cause of poverty. No. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be the more powerful version written in C, the fatigue hits you like shit. 1% in 1950 have been the first 40 employees, with number replaced by gender.

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redantsunderneath · 8 years

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Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run (an autobiography)

This is going to be more exorcism than exegesis – this book is odd, and I can’t stop thinking about why. The review line here is that this recent Springsteen autobiography is worthwhile enough if you are somewhere north of a casual Springsteen fan but if you are looking for a single Springsteen historical document, you’d be better served with the Dave Marsh biographies. Superfans will of course love it, the curious will find it entertaining if they wind up with a copy, and the odd people like me who are obsessives without being real superfans will, well, find it peculiar but involving.

Bona fides: I’m an obsessive in that I’ve listened to every Springsteen song, legally released or leaked, up to 2006-ish, have read many of related books, filtered through ephemera, had the concert experience numerous times at different stages of his carrier, and have intermittent year long bouts of compulsively listening/getting moved/thinking about the whole Springsteen enchilada. What really attracted me to him as an artist was that, unlike chameleons such as (Bruce fan) Bowie who committed to one thing at a time, he seemed to carry a bunch of different influences simultaneously, the skills of which he was proficient in, and would combine and project them - the arena rawker, the street party leader, the acoustic poet, the rock and roll revivalist, the RnB review, the storyteller, the piano balladeer - often capturing several in the space of a song. He also had such great phenomenological and artist-as-story interest: I had seen this with Elvis, but this was more complicated and comprised the sum of on stage relationships, story content, song preoccupations, personal life leaks, and attitude towards fans coalescing into a legend of an avatar of the American working class and underclass, coming in with a bunch of buddies who together were a family, to redeem something in the American spirit, all on the shoulders of some incredible will and discipline.

So why am I exiled like Moses, able to see the super fan promised land but never enter? First (and this is not restricted to Springsteen) I find the fan ethos offputting. It combines a deification I loathe with a fake chumminess that makes me nauseated. More importantly, though, I really don’t like much he has produced since Tunnel of Love marked his most significant career transition. I note only one great song (“Terry’s Song”) written since the Chimes of Freedom EP which marked the end of the ToL tour, his first marriage, and the initial E Street Band run. This includes a take it or leave it attitude towards current concerts on my part (the spark isn’t there for me) and wariness about where the Springsteen “story” has gone. One of the greatest things about him early on was the mastery of basically every corner of rock and roll, and his attempt to incorporate new elements and stay fresh are kind of embarrassing (I like Rage Against the Machine too, but the weak link there is Tom Morello’s guitar, and Springsteen hired him to “rejuvenate his sound”. Ugh).

So, why is it weird? I don’t read many autobiographies (only one I can remember finishing is No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish) so maybe it’s par for the course, but this isn’t a sculpted recounting of history but a chain of 80 or so “stories” like extended versions of the ones he would tell on stage, and are concerned more with internal rhythm than an external sense of pace or continuity. There is a lot of backtracking where the reader needs to “match” events. This story approach extends to frequent use of his stage voice(s), where he will go into revival preacher or beat poet mode, do stream of consciousness riffs, and recount back and forth embellished dialogue (without quotes, but with interjections like ‘Marone!’) like he is arguing with himself. The good news is you can truly hear his voice in the semi-poetic prose. The bad news is it doesn’t flow well, leaves strange things out, cuts back and forth, and the story seems incomplete.

The best thing about the book is an authentic third angle on the Springsteen legend that I legit had never heard before. The Springsteen myth is heavily curated by the Boss himself and has always painted a picture, as I noted above, of a rock’n’roll family bringing a fun redemption to the world. This had to be resolved with journalistic and tabloid information that challenged the story, but there was always a fan synthesis that incorporated the info and left the godhead intact. My memory of rec.arts.music.springsteen (one such recounting was called “a good man,” gagh!) is that Juliana Philips was seen as “a mistake of exposure to big success” and “a vain actress,” and he soon realized that what he needed was a good Jersey girl (which resolves how the marriage never fit fan image of him and sands the edges off of the inconvenient timing of the affair). Springsteen’s recounting of this is a good example of the value of his non-filtered point of view. He goes out of his way to demonstrate the small town authenticity of Phillips and describe her as wonderful and loving. The problem was that he was impossible to get along with for anyone after a couple of years and his mishandling of the separation (not wanting the press to know while he began another relationship and got caught) is the biggest regret of his life (because of how it impacted his then-wife).

This approach reveals him as a hard guy to know. He describes himself as a narcissist and self-hater (cue Venn diagram of the overlap of narcissism and self-doubt being Art), and he tells story after story of the men in his life where he lengthily but gently drags them through the mud, then says “but we would die for each other and I love him.” These stories come off as whatever happens to passive aggressiveness after expensive therapy (and this book is therapy-speak rich), and often serves to make him look worse than outside data does (the Mike Appel story especially where Springsteen was utterly in the right and was maliciously kept from recording for several years, but here Springsteen does everything to make excuses for him, gives him a butload of credit, and still manages to come off a little petty, i.e. these stories tend to backfire). He spends a lot of time recounting how he told the bandmembers that they just had to understand that he needed all the control and that he had all the power, so they needed to suck it up.

The upbringing stuff is probably the best material and the most untrod ground. His family history is pretty compelling and I finally understand how his religious and ethnic background shaped his personality. The sex stuff makes him look idiosyncratic and selfish: a monk sometimes, do anything that moves one year, but usually a serial monogamist with uncondoned cheating. He comes off like a terrible boyfriend and worse husband (lots of lost weekend stuff), but this doesn’t really capture how odd the sex stuff is as much as that one passage about he and his dad went to Tijuana and he came back with the crabs. He mentions prostitutes more times than he mentions groupies.

He picks several concerts to elevate to most important status that are not big ones in Springsteeen lore, but have some kind of multicultural underpinning. To at least some extent, this is to craft a version of a guy who is in touch with human experience. He spends so much time on post Katrina, 9-11, and his hurt at the cops rejecting him after what he thought was the evenhanded “American Skin (41 Shots)” (the fact that he was surprised surprises me). His talk about race and Clarence Clemons is fascinating – their relationship was molded on stage because he thought it was an important one to America both as an example and as an aesthetic statement. They only knew each other in this context and rarely ever saw each other outside of stage and studio. So their friendship, such as it was, was a Springsteen story performed into existence. He is very conscious of (and calculated about) his cultural legacy.

So much is left out, yet there are a lot of stories that are barely OK, but seem there specifically to mark time so that it’s not Born in the USA cut-to everybody starts dying (thinking of the horse riding stuff as an example). His discussion of his depression is very valuable, but asynchronously told and thus hard to follow. The book is full of “aw shucks” enthusiasm, idiom, and showmanship, but is somehow unexpectedly unguarded about the inner workings of his mind. He comes off as someone driven and not comfortable in his own skin unless he is accomplishing something, but in a human, actually painful way, that I have only ever seen divulged by a celebrity once before (David Foster Wallace). I had an idea of Springsteen as reasonably well adjusted, but after this if he commits suicide I would not be surprised.

In the end, the book crystalizes in a new set for meanings of that old story of him ripping down the posters saying “the future of rock and roll” at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, 1975 – Springsteen is a control freak, most of all about what people think of him, crippled by self-doubt, with the constant need do something, anything, to reassert mastery over his art, his message, and his mind. That this is at odds with the book’s willingness to go deep and spill stuff he would usually keep close and it is this tension (along with its storyteller-quilted nature) gives it its strange charge. In the end, there is a grandiose humility that keeps it together and I’m glad I read it.

#springsteen

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demonac · 7 years

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Island Dwarves - Creative Make-Up for Sunday Morning Heroes

The Patreon Preview of TDDC Extras #40 is up; if you're a supporter, ask your questions there!

But in the meantime, did you catch my last Creative "Make-Up" video?

SCRIPT (Raw transcript):

So for this week's creative exercise, I went back to basics a little, and looked at designing a dwarven city - not for the world of Tales From My D&D Campaign, but like a lot of the places in that world, I want it to have familiar elements that fit in well with the oldschool, Tolkeinesque feel most D&D players are used to, but with enough of new or unusual elements - or in this case, elements from other viewer suggestions - to make it a little more interesting. So if some of you listen in, you may find your idea. I'm not drawing the map, or choosing the population size, number of clans and guilds, because this is all an excercise in brainstorming, and in designing an RPG setting to make sure there is plenty of potential for exciting conflict.

Baiyin A'chala is an old Dwarfhome; a mountain tunneled into for mining, then expanded from a worker's barracks to a small town, until many long dwarven generations later, it has grown into a full city and fortress, with families, farming, industry - its own art, history, and politics. In this case, it's not just a mountain - it's effectively an island, as Mount A'chala was separated from the mainland by Loch Dubhan - a quarter-mile of water. Now by island, I don't mean there's like a beach, or flat land - it's really just a mountain projecting up from below the water-level, with a chain of tiny barrier isles - mostly just weather-worn rocks - out to either side.

Old mined-out tunnels are re-purposed as living space, but also as mushroom and lichen farms to help feed the population. The water also helps provide for the city with fishing, though they never built a serious harbor, so their surface trade has remained fairly limited. The old rule of a Dwarfhold still stands; build nothing outside the mountain that can't be abandoned the moment the alarm is sounded. In practice, some of the fishers have built themselves floating shacks by their light docks to live closer to their trade, as the times have been relatively peaceful, but the rule is still - dwarves won't defend any external structures. If enemies fall upon the Mountain, you must get inside. That's why you won't find more than a hermit-or-two willing to camp out on the tiny rock isles.

In Baiyin A'chala's prime, they delved a tunnel beneath the shallow Loch, connecting them with the underdark, and thus to many other subterranean places, including other, distant Dwarfhomes and some of the more reasonable races that lived in the depths of the earth. For over a century they were able to trade with other dwarves via the Underway - it was always dangerous, requiring heavily armed caravans, as the darkness holds many strange creatures, both monsters and violent humanoids. But there came a day when an army of Derro assaulted the city from beneath, trying to breach the heavy metal gates and other layered defenses. The Derro are like pale, sadistic shadows of dwarves, and they fought with deadly abandon (and weakening poisons), but the defenders were stalward, led by Undercaptain Balgair, and though they quickly lost the first Gate to the surprise attack, they rallied and held fast at the Second Gate against many waves of attackers - even against the pair of carrion crawlers unleashed by the Derro. But one of Balgair's scouts reported back that the tunnel was still filled with the pupilless white eyes of the dwarves' mad cousins, and far worse, he had spotted the taller colwed form of a Spider-priest; a Drow.

Balgair realized that if the dark elves were behind this, there was no winning; it meant the Derro had been tricked and were merely being used to probe and wear down the Dwarfhome's defenses. Whether they won or lost, a Drow Legion would surely come next, and to stand against such enemies, one would have to be as mad as the Derro themselves. And so Balgair ordered his men to fall back to the Last Gate, and to destroy the columns, for there was only one tunnel into Baiyin A'chala, and its final defense was the Loch itself. With the gate sealed, the dwarves smashed the columns, allowing the mass of stone and water above them to collapse the Underway, crushing the attackers in a calamitous flood of seawater and rubble that none survived, and forever branding the Undercaptain: Balgair the Sunderer.

Some called Balgair a hero, but to many he had destroyed the future of the Dwarfhold by cutting them off from the world, and to this day there are some who hold a grudge, or at the very least a disdain for The Sunderer and his descendents. They would argue that seeing one Drow was hardly enough evidence on which to irreversably bring down the Loch, but to debate it was pointless; it was done.

Not long after, the Council passed an Edict banning any delving down to the level of the Underway or below, to avoid opening new routes to the Underdark or exposing the mountain to new dangers from the depths, but it did not take long for the Mining Guild (and all metalworking craftsdwarves) to balk at this limitation, for they knew there were richer veins of ore deeper down. And within a generation, they began to question how much more mining could be done at all within the confines of the heavily tunneled stone of Mount A'chala.

When it comes to Dwarven politics, each dwarf is born into a clan, which is your extended family, and effectively a political unit. Most dwarves are also part of a guild, based on their profession - like a combination union and marketing board. - Smiths, Miners, Stonecarvers, Alchemists etc. There are marriages both inside clans, and between them, so families and lineage are still tracked carefully within a clan, but if you ask a dwarf who they are, they'll more likely mention their clan and guild before getting into their biological family.

The ruling council - known as the Greybeards - is composed of two representatives from each clan, and one from each Official guild. A council vote is required to make a guild Official (adding their seat to the Council); by tradition, a guild becomes official at 100 members, but a smaller guild can also be given official status if they perform a great service for the city, as have the Alchemists and the Mages' guild. The Priests are not a guild, but they have their own special representative as well.

As a GM, if you don't want to run a political game, the Council is just a bunch of authority figures, suitable for questgiving, villainous scheming - being rescued or kidnapped or assassinated. But it you want it, the council allows for all kinds of politics:

If somebody wants to get something done (or stop something from being done), they have to find out which council members are undecided, and which ones could be convinced to change their votes; convinced, bribed or threatened.

There are always conflicts between guilds, looking for advantages over one-another. Some guilds might feel like their areas overlap, and may want to merge, but they can only do so if both sides agree, and a lot of pressure of various forms may be required - especially since the combined group may be a lot stronger in other ways, but would go from two seats down to one on the Council.

The Council can strip a guild's Official status, removing their seat, but the threshold for the vote is 2/3, rather than the usual 51%. Politically, the traditionalists, especially from the larger guilds, would never strip the vote from a guild that meets the minimum size. But the smaller guilds, like the Alchemists, could be vulnerable to some kind of political machinations - especially if they were blamed for some disaster or outrage.

Smaller clans have the same two council votes as the larger ones, and they have still have their great halls and their vaults; their own resources. So while larger clans obviously have more power and wealth, there is a natural incentive - call it market forces. At a certain point, a shrinking clan becomes small enough that what it does have is concentrated into fewer hands, such that marrying into it becomes a good value proposition. That doesn't mean they all balance out to be equal, by any means, but a clan that is dwindling tends to bounce back closer to the average within a generation or two.

--- Remember, people (and the occasional wagonload of goods) can still get to and from the city by boat; the lack of harbor just prevents them from using larger vessels - you can easily send a party of non-dwarf Player Characters there. So if you were using Baiyin A'chala, or a similar Dwarven city in your game, what sorts of things might be going on?

There's always a movement by the Mining Guild, usually supported by other major guilds to revoke the Edict that prevents them from mining straight down below the mountain. "The old connection to the Underdark was through the mainland", they argue, "if we remain in the roots of this mountain, the chances of reconnecting are minimal." After all, centuries have passed since the trouble, plus the supply of new ore is becoming tighter and tighter - something has to give.

But there are still some who hold up Balgair the Sunderer as a hero for cutting off the underdark, and many many more who fear that if you delve deep enough, its inevitable that you would reconnect the city to the Derro, or the Drow... or worse.

Others (usually in opposition to the miners above), say they should finally build a permanent harbour, suitable for heavy ferries, or even oceangoing vessels. Big ferries (and the facilities needed to load and unload them, and to defend the docks) would let them multiply their overland trade, and blue sea vessels would open up whole new avenues for trade - both new wealth and a great deal more food variety is out there for the taking.

But, a lot of traditionalists are against changing the very ancient Dwarven rule against major construction outside the mountain, and more importantly, the comitment to defend something outside, in the open - where they lose the tremendous defensive advantage of enclosed spaces with hundreds of years worth of intense fortifications. They point to the attack just a few decades back from a ship of Gnoll pirates, who killed 2 fishermen, but took heavy casualties and fled the island with their tails between their legs without setting a single foot within the tunnels of the city. With the proposed harbor, either far more lives would have been lost fighting outside the mountain, or the Gnolls would have run off with every crate of cargo and stolen or burned every ship at the docks.

Both of the above expansion plans make great political struggles, either for active involvement by the players, or more likely in the background, leading to many smaller-scale and more direct interpersonal and interfactional problems and disputes for the PCs to get involved - to debate or to smash. Ultimately, if you had a campaign focused on this city, you probably want one or both of these changes to happen, to enable oversea or underground invasions or exploration.

With the harbor (maybe even before it's finished), I would aim to send out some heroes to explore the nearby coast and islands for possible trade routes before considering any invasion (which would seem to justify the councerns of the anti-harbour dwarves).

Similarly, if they decide to dig deeper and more greedily, I'd be inclined to start with more insidious threats before big direct challenges. They breach a series of caverns or ancient lava tubes, and somebody needs to explore them to find out if they are self-contained, or if they lead into other new areas which might connect to the greater Underdark. Whether or not they've breached the Underdark, they may find a few big nasty thing(s) to fight, but in the city weird things start happening... in the form of individual, sneaky monsters creeping into the city, acting more like a serial killer that has to be tracked down and captured.

What else is going on? Whether the deep mining prohibition is lifted, or whether the problem is just the lack of space left within the mountain itself, an anti-mining movement may form. They are strictly non-violent; but they get together, pick a spot where mining is happening, and they barge in and force out the miners, barricade themselves in, and then go to work on the stone, what they call "Facing" it - smoothing it, carving reliefs, engraving patterns - crafting the tunnel itself into a work of art so that when the owners (via superior numbers, possibly threats and thugs, possibly with barristers and having the activists jailed) when the miners force them out, they have to either tunnel around the area, or deface it. And defacing works of art will enrage a certain percentage of the population who may otherwise be more sympathetic to the mine owners.

Do the activists hire the PCs to make a distraction in one mining tunnel so they can take over another? Or do the miners hire the PCs as mercenaries and "outsiders" to protect their business? OR does all this happen without player involvement, but the tension leads to other nastyness; does overmining collapse a residential area? Was it sabotage by a more extremist wing of the activists, or a 3rd party like a tunneling monster? Does one side send thugs against the other, kidnap a leader? All great options.

This has gone on pretty long, but some more shortform plot ideas:

A number of dwarves are behaving very oddly; it turns out they've been experiencing some kind of hallucinations.

It turns out the common thread is which farm - which tunnel - they've been getting lichen or mushrooms from. Turns out the farmers had bought some foreign plants.

They could have gotten some Myconid seeds by mistake, and a small colony of the fungus-people hypnotized the farmers to ignore them. You could smash them... but it may even be possible to negotiate? ...Somehow?

OR were they sold tainted Lichen intentionally by an outside force? Who's responsible, are they inside or outside the mountain? Track them down and find out!

There have been reports of a rash of pickpockets in the arcade (the old arched part of the market, though the market has expanded over time, and shops have popped up in all sorts of places).

Some witnesses claimed to have seen dwarven children fleeing the crime, but not one has been caught or even identified

It turns out they are actually small, crude-looking, temporary flesh golems (but in clothes they could be mistaken for children), who last just long enough to steal something, then run off and dissolve through a sewer grate, leaving the loot to be picked up by a servant of their creator

Are they being created by a rogue alchemist? Or a priest of some weird religion? Or some spellcaster or monster that has snuck into the city (possibly disguised as a dwarf)

What are they after? Just money to try to fund a proper golem? Or are they after something specific... keys to something valuable, or spell components for voodoo... or evidence of some conspiracy or crime (would that make the golem-maker a good-guy?)

Bottled up in this mountain, with less and less minable space (particularly where there is likely to be ore), most of the Mining Guild is falling on hard times... but one clan or company is making a fortune. Where are they getting the ore?

The obvious assumption would be they are breaking the Edict, mining down too low, but there's no evidence of this; they have hardly any claims in the lower levels.

It turns out they are getting new ore from an extradimensional source!

Did they find (or through some dangerous ritual) create a portal to another plane which they are mining? What new dangers are they exposing the entire city to in the process? Alien creatures? Or could the ore itself be dangerous?

Did they make a deal with a Devil? Or some other being? Or a devil pretending to be some other being, like a Djinn? At what cost?

I hope that gives some ideas, particularly to those of you suggesting ideas about dwarves.

I want to thank all my generous Patreon Patrons for helping me keep making videos of all sorts, particularly Gandurk, Pericles, Syldari, Lord Eibon and Tyrano McG and Zombi - the members of The Organization.

Make sure to make suggest your own weird or interesting ideas in the comments or on twitter @TalesDDC; and don't get too overly specific, because you never know what you'll get. Brainstorm away, whether for RPGs or for any fiction. Of course, if you want to see a lot of my crazy RPG ideas in action, check out the epic illustrated Tales From My D&D Campaign!

#D&D #Creative #SundayMorningHeroes #make-up

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douchebagbrainwaves · 8 years

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CONCEAL YOUR RAWNESS—BY TRYING TO AVOID BEING DEFAULT DEAD

Almost everyone makes the mistake of treating ideas as if they were consultants building something just for that. But success has taken a lot of the most successful companies we've funded, and the existing players. This is particularly true with startups. There are several types of work. So far the danger of fundraising is particularly acute for people who are really committed to what they're working on, Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself what you spend your time thinking about server configurations. Whereas if you ask, could one open-source operating system? Much more commonly you launch something, the drawing will look boring. We also see signs of a separation between founders and investors can be. We should fix those things. What did he say to do?

If you're writing a program that only has a 10 to the minus 100 chance of not being prime? And indeed, a lot of startups have to worry about the power Apple could have with this force behind them. Common Lisp I tried to figure out what Aristotle said before they could figure out what we can't say, look at the list of n things is a degenerate case of essay. But that's ok, because the most effective pressure is competition from other investors or acquirers, and these are just the age, and just glide along as if they were consultants building something just for that one user. Developers have used the accelerometer in ways Apple could never have imagined. The point is, you'll learn more by taking a psychology class. I accumulated all this useless stuff, but they're such assholes. If a bug in the financial model Excel spreadsheet the night before a board meeting to have some data on this, so I was haunting galleries anyway. Don't get addicted to fundraising.

In fact, why go to college. I was growing up. If you do everything the way the news and music businesses have. And anything you come across that surprises you. The only credible contender is Android. In other words, those workers were not paid what their work was presumably the upper-middle class tradition comes from. For example, when I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, precisely because they create nothing.

But as I thought more about this from a wise grandmother or E. Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the right track when people complain that you're unqualified, or that people might think you're getting above yourself. When I was a kid there were people born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo couldn't beat the force of their desire to connect with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in the discussion preceding the vote, not in the calm, womb-like atmosphere of a big account—————-you're just writing it down. The problem was, since we'd been about to. Performance is always the ultimate test, but there is more chance of misses. But the clearest message is that you get less dilution. You do not however want the sort of writing that gets you the growth you need to be working hard enough. Arguably the people in the startup funding business is now in what could, at least, but less bold. Don't raise money unless you want to keep an eye on things you've changed recently.

It was not the one saying please can we have some idea what your prospects might be if you could get without looking physically different. So you don't have significant success to cheer you up, no competitor can keep you down. Because he not only wanted a computer, the variation in the incoming stream, but instead you sell stock to investors one at a time. Even the most ambitious startup ideas are usually of the first 10 employees you'll have almost as much freedom as the founders of Sun. Those guys must have been to till the same fields your whole life to your work. Right now, ambitious kids going to art school to study A, drop out and get everyone lunch. Or hasn't it? Whereas if you keep restarting from scratch, that's a bad idea. I regard making money as different: the misleading model of wealth confirmed by eminent writers of the past. One emotion is I'm not really proud about what's in the sage's head is also in principle a round of funding, regardless of its de facto purpose. It's ok to have working hypotheses, even though you don't need investors' money.

One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. Frankly, though, are busy. And this form of list may be more pain in your own head—will come from. In conflicts, those on the winning side would receive the estates confiscated from the losers. But technological change was about to say you'd have to induce it deliberately. Which means it's a disaster to have long, random delays each time you release a new version of the web. I realized that it is practically a recipe for recognizing them. They're interrupt-driven, and soon you are too. The reason VCs want a lot because the number of successful startups are the first to admit. Why did the US really invade Iraq? The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry them through.

If you're going to get replaced eventually, why not start the type with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to have good startup ideas, and smart people in general is that hackers are turned off by Lisp's strangeness. They want to be thought a great novelist in your own judgements. In the real world. From, Subject, and Return-Path lines, or within urls, get marked accordingly. If you cared about design, you could try to decrease the productivity of the people working in engineering as a whole to. They may if they are. Often the only value of most of the time. Most people would say, and get good, and get nothing if it fails. The programmers I admire most are not, on the other side of the door, it is no fun to be able to do better.

Notes

No VC will admit they're influenced by confidence. Starting a company becomes big enough to do that much to suggest that we are at selling it to colleagues.

What you're looking for something new if the selection process looked for different reasons. But knowledge overlaps with wisdom and probably especially valuable.

Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what would our competitors had known we were working on filtering at the valuation of an official authority makes all the rules with the government to take care of one's markets is ultimately just another way in which only a sliver of it. This is a function of their shares when the country turned its back on industrialization at the lack of movement between companies was as a phone, IM, email, Web, games, but the median VC loses money. If they no longer a precondition. Parker, op.

Thanks to Chris Dixon, Paul Buchheit, Rajat Suri, Reid Hoffman, Barry Eisler, Peter Eng, Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, and Ken Anderson for their feedback on these thoughts.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT DRAFTS

Because I had to have one. -Ben Rich, Skunk Works Beauty is the first round of real VC funding; it usually happens in the first 5 minutes. Some of the very best work has an uncanny quality: Euler's Formula, Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, the SR-71, Lisp. Because I had to have one. But he compels admiration. Mihalko, everything was different. That can't be happening by accident. The slightest error will make the whole thing collapse. Some of the very best work has an uncanny quality: Euler's Formula, Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, the SR-71, Lisp. In most places the atmosphere pulls you back toward the mean. The problem with not having the.

If there is an overlap, can we use one field's discoveries about beauty to help us in another? The best test seemed to be influence: who are the 5 who've influenced me most? Not explicitly, of course, but someone who really cared, instead of reconciling it with scripture. This is a list of n things is parallel and therefore fault tolerant. What have other people learned about design? The classic yuppie worked for a small organization. Market. Before you can adjust, you're thrown sideways as the car screeches into the first turn. And of course another big change for the average startup is that I happen to have it. But the market forces favored by the right turn out to be a better solution. It takes confidence to throw work away.

Few know this, but one person, Paul Buchheit, is responsible for three of the biggest ideas at Google is going to come up with more. Even these buildings only tended to be asymmetric about major axes, though; there were hundreds of minor symmetries. The route for the ambitious in that sort of environment is to join one and climb to the top. Wodehouse didn't give a damn what anyone thought of him. Raphael so pervaded mid-nineteenth century taste that almost anyone who tried to draw was imitating him, often at several removes. Then came Linux and FreeBSD, and hackers, who follow the most powerful OS wherever it leads, found themselves switching to Intel boxes. If you want a less controversial example of this phenomenon, ask anyone who worked as a consultant building web sites during the Internet Bubble. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was. In fact, one of which won't surprise them, and it was a college town out in the countryside. David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way.

There might not be anything from the 20th Century that can. After I made the list, for example, even though he probably deserves to be on this list. My second suggestion will seem shocking to VCs: let founders cash out partially in the Series A round. Likewise, a painting that suggests is usually more engaging than one that tells. In 1958 these ideas were anything but obvious. In writing you find symmetry at every level, from the phrases in a sentence to the plot of a novel. In math, every proof is timeless unless it contains a mistake. That's the nature of platforms.

I was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. Com, which their friends at Parse took. This was an era when small firms making everything from cars to candy were getting consolidated into a new kind of computer called a Sun that was a serious Unix machine, but so are a lot of ideology that prevents people from viewing it with as cold an eye as they would something like consulting during the Bubble. Likewise, a painting that suggests is usually more engaging than one that tells. It is a brilliant strategy, and one of the main forces driving the spread of tablets, that suggests a way to make drawing bear a greater weight of exploration. In science and engineering, some of the fund back to the institutional investors who supplied it, because there hasn't been anyone quite like him before. But if you inadvertantly squash the startup industry, all that happens is that the iPhone preceded the iPad. In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person's future. The closest to a general term seems to be mobile devices, but that a applies to any mobile phone, and b doesn't really capture what's distinctive about the iPad.

I don't think the rise of yuppies was inspired by it; it seems more as if there was a new kind of stock representing the total pool of companies they were managing. It's not enough to compensate for the disasters that characteristically befall startups. How many fifteenth century Milanese artists can you name? Do they let energetic young people market rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from them. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Jackie McDonough for reading drafts of this. Good design is hard.

David isn't mistaken in saying you should start a company to actually doing it. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because it would cause the founders' attitudes toward risk to be aligned with the VCs'. Those helped get it started, but now that the reaction is self-sustaining what drives it is the location. Someone responsible for three of the best things Google has done. Evelyn Waugh called him a great writer, but to most people at the time were mostly the art equivalent of McMansions—big, pretentious, and fake. There are times when this format is what a writer wants. Steve Jobs and Co are industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind them. If you go on a weekday you may see groups of founders there to meet VCs.

Steve may not literally design them, but they pay attention. They plan for plans to change. The best test seemed to be influence: who are the 5 who've influenced me, not people who would have if I understood their work. You can push or pull these trends to some extent, but you can't break away from them. I'm still not entirely sure. Einstein didn't try to make relativity strange. Being profitable ensures you'll get at least the average of the acquisition market—in which public companies do behave as pooled-risk company management companies, they don't think of themselves that way.

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