Self-Aggrandizement: January 2005 Archives

under the microscope
Filed January 31, 2005 8:12 AM.

For the past few years, I've had a running joke with my parents: they ask if I'm going to go to business school; I reply, absolutely, as soon as the school has my students ready.

Confirming my long-standing belief that, if you make dumb jokes about something long enough, it has to happen, a team of b-school students from Denver University's Daniels College of Business (which leapt this year to the top ten in several of the Wall Street Journal's b-school category rankings) is using the nascent Long Tail as a case study for their business planning class, and helping us flesh out the company's strategy.

After spending a couple of hours yesterday afternoon giving them a crash-course lecture on the economics of film distribution, I realize I'm yet one step closer to my eventual goal: reconciling my desire for an advanced degree with my distaste for that pesky 'going to class' thing, by getting some hapless institution of higher learning to simply grant me an honorary doctorate.

back to basics
Filed January 30, 2005 6:53 PM.

Came up to Boston for the weekend, to see one of my closest friends and his wife and to squeeze in a quick investor meeting. And, on the train up Friday afternoon, I started to write a post about the trip that also obliquely referenced my date the night before. What I started writing was short on detail because, I told myself, I didn't want to kiss and tell. But, in fact, it was short on detail because I was worried what my date would think if I wrote what I was really thinking, and worried what other people would think if I wrote what I was really thinking.

Realizing that's a long, long way from the sort of damn-the-torpedoes full-speed-ahead radical honesty I've been trying to stumble my way through for the last year, I instead - wisely or not - scrapped that post and decided to just lay it on the line. So:

I went on a drinks date Thursday evening that was good enough to become a breakfast date Friday morning and good enough to justify me totally violating my usual rule for minimum time between first and second dates by asking to see her again this Monday night. I've spent the weekend sort of secretly terrified that she's going to cancel the second date, which, on the one hand, I'm pretty sure she isn't, but, on the other, probably means I'm far more interested than my commitment-phobic conscious brain would otherwise acknowledge. And while, obviously, after just one date it's impossible to say where this might go, it's the first date I've been on for a while where I'm at least exceedingly excited to find out.

butterflies
Filed January 27, 2005 10:45 AM.

Usually, I stick closely to the Roadies' Rule: no heavy drinking on consecutive nights. I seem to have lost sight of that entirely this week, waking up and swearing off liquor each of the past four mornings.

And while that would normally leave me scrapping my evening plans, instead I'm heading out once again tonight, this time to one of my favorite tacky-chic bars, more nervously excited than I should probably admit.

full of advice
Filed January 26, 2005 10:28 AM.

Two nights back, an ex-girlfriend from college came down from Connecticut where she's now teaching high school French, to join me in taking advantage of Restaurant Week at nearby Vice Versa. And over altogether too much excellent food and wine, after catching up on life and talking through our various angsts and excitements, she somehow roped me into helping her revamp her marathon training plans.

Somewhere between when we dated and now, it seems, she discovered that if she starts running, she can pretty much just keep going. And, as a result, she's not only completed a number of marathons, but even placed in the top five runners for her age group in a handful of them. With another coming up in April, she was looking to speed up her mile split times, to do something in preparation other than just run as far as she could each day. By the end of dinner, I had somehow agreed to help coach her to that end.

On the one hand, as someone with a long-standing interest in sports medicine and fitness research, I might seem like a good choice. But, on the other, as someone who, after hitting about the one mile mark thinks "well, that's enough running for this month", I'm probably not such a good coaching choice after all.

I thought of the same thing last night, when another close friend came to my apartment to, over another bottle of wine, trade gossip and dissect her current dating conundrum. After hearing her full retelling of the sordid tale, I tossed in my guy-perspective analysis, which, it seems, my friend found dead on, and was apparently exceedingly grateful for.

But, here too, I felt a bit suspect in terms of qualifications. Certainly, as Edison once pointed out, the first thousand failed light-bulb prototypes weren't really failures at all, but discoveries of a thousand ways not to make a light-bulb. And, from that perspective, I'm undoubtedly a relationship pro, having discovered about an equal number of ways not to have a relationship.

But, really, if you're trying to run a faster marathon, shouldn't you seek advice from someone who's actually a marathon runner? And, if you're trying to figure out if your ongoing relationship has any long-term hope, shouldn't you talk to someone who's navigated the pitfalls of New York dating into a long a happy marriage?

Well, yes, you probably should. But, apparently it's easier and far more entertaining to talk to a smarmy generalist willing to pull elaborate theories about love and life and running long distances out of his ass instead. Which, come to think of it, is probably a pretty good explanation of how my life works as a whole.

unrelated
Filed January 25, 2005 12:21 PM.

I don't seem to do delayed gratification very well at all.

scrobbled
Filed January 25, 2005 12:20 PM.

People tend to assume that, since I spend much of my life immersed in one genre of pop culture, I must be, at least to some degree, hip to the world of pop culture as a whole.

Which, sadly, is not the case. While I do, obviously, follow the film world closely, I tend to follow it from the making movies side, rather than from the star obsession / People Magazine side, leaving me embarrassingly behind on whether Brad and Jennifer are together or not at any given moment.

Beyond my own industry, things go downhill quickly, leaving me clueless as to new television shows, recently released novels, or hot new indie bands. In the case of TV, I'm somewhat happy not to know the latest reality hit. With books, as most of my friends tend to be serious bibliophiles, simply watching what they're toting along for subway reading is enough to make sure I catch any fast-spreading paperback meme before I'm too distressingly behind the curve.

But music. That's a tough one. I do, I believe, know a number of people with really good musical taste. But unlike reading choices, the contents of their iPods aren't nearly as easily gleaned from casual observation. So, instead, I tend to follow the offhand comments of my most music-savvy friends, snapping up the names of bands and albums they mention like a dog hungrily collecting table scraps. Which works. But in a slow and haphazard way that leaves me to miss entirely bands and musicians I'd really like, and to search through the large number of mentioned groups that aren't even vaguely up my alley.

Here, as in so many other areas, it seems I may be rescued by technology. Rescued, in fact, by technology I discovered and installed several months back, but then promptly forgot about.

Like with most things in the world of music, I may be one of the very last to discover AudioScrobbler. But, on the off chance that some small number of you readers lag even further behind, I highly, highly recommend that you download the plugin for whichever audio player you use.

In short, AudioScrobbler watches what you listen to, compares it to what other people listen to, and make recommendations based on other artists people with similar tastes are playing frequently. Last night, on AudioScrobbler's advice, I downloaded a slew of Denison Witmer, Sufjan Stevens and Rufus Wainwright. And, frankly, I was shocked by how much I liked them all.

With those successes, I'll be checking in on AudioScrobbler's recommendations every month or two, and acquiring some new CDs. I may not be any hipper or better tied in to the indie music world, but, with a bit of help, it looks like at least I'll be able to fake it.

and also:
Filed January 24, 2005 9:35 AM.

"Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance."
- Oscar Wilde

today's quote
Filed January 24, 2005 9:35 AM.

"Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else."
- J.M. Barrie

thinking of you
Filed January 23, 2005 4:12 PM.

Read Strunk & White, Poynter or Zinsser, and you'll emerge with at least one common tip for improving your writing: know your audience.

Which, for most documents, is undoubtedly good advice. Penning a Sunday Style article (seriously, Barbara, it's almost finished), a business proposal or a birthday card, it helps immeasurably to keep the eventual reader firmly in mind.

With this blog, however, audience-focused writing is a much harder trick to pull off. Not solely because I have absolutely no idea who most of the thousand or two people who float through this site daily are, but also because the groups of people who I do know about are all looking for such divergent things.

Based on the posts that get linked on other blogs, or del.iciou.us bookmarked, it's pretty clear s-a's readership is composed of several, fairly distinct groups. There are the 43Folders-ites, thrilled by any mention of productivity hacks and Getting Things Done; there are the startup wonks, looking for entrepreneurial insights and tech business ruminations; there are the film folks, hoping to pitch Cyan (and now Long Tail) and looking first to unlock the secret that will get them cast or hired, or launch their screenplay into production; and then there are the large number of generalist voyeurs, the people hoping to live a bit of the disastrous New York dating life through my vicarious misadventures.

Since I know no single thing I write could make them all happy, I essentially don't even try. I don't balance out the flow of postings to make sure I cater regularly to each group, or even neatly section off one kind of writing from another. Instead, as they do in my brain, the thoughts all simply jumble up on the front page, intermixed, sometimes even within a single post.

But while I'm able to block from my mind (wisely or not) the varying groups of readers, I occasionally find myself writing to one single reader. I write, in short, knowing that I'm being blog-stalked by a potential date.

In my prior post, I said that I don't seem to have a type, a regular pattern that emerges from my dating past. Which, in fact, is only partially true. When I last tallied my kissing count, I re-discovered something that I've long, at least subconsciously, known: I tend to like writers, especially those that self-reflect mercilessly, that pour their inner life onto paper (or screen). Which makes me, in short, remarkably good at developing crushes on fellow bloggers.

I say this all to preface admission of my own potential-date blog-stalking. In the world of business, I tend to obsessively research investors, clients and hires. Which has carried over to my personal life, where, especially in the case of other bloggers, I tend to follow along with new postings, to pore over bits of the archive, looking less for the what and more for the underlying why.

And, projecting perhaps, I tend to imagine that potential dates are doing the same thing. The contents of my archives are fairly immutable. But new postings - over that I have some control. So I tend to second guess my own ideas, question topics on which I might typically hold forth. I look at potential posts and wonder how they make me sound. Too dorky? Too neurotic? Too excited about the companies I'm trying to build?

Fortunately, I rarely pause long, as, in fact, I'm at least as dorky and neurotic and excited as my writing might imply. That's just who I am. And while trying to hide that, even in the off chance that I could pull it off, might help me score a first, or even third, date, it certainly wouldn't bring me to the the thiry-first or seventy-third.

Frankly, that's a whole lot of work for a rather brief-lived payoff. So much of New York dating - the posing, the game-playing - it only works for that brief stretch when you have the interest and energy to put in the effort. Which is why, even during those stretches that I'm sure (rightly or wrongly) someone I'd really love to impress is reading along, I fall back on the same strategy for writing as I've gradually come to for real-world dates: stop trying so damn hard, stick to the truth, and hope for the best.

While, short-term, it's probably not the most effective strategy (either for keeping readers or for getting laid), in the long run, it's the only hope I've got.

typifying
Filed January 21, 2005 2:16 AM.

Though I may, through this site (or, plausibly, in real life) come off as an insensitive prick, in fact, one of the few things I do well is empathize.

I don't mean empathize as a synonym for sympathize, as in sharing someone else's pain, but rather empathize in its purest sense, as in divining what other people are thinking, seeing things from other's perspectives.

Tailoring a sales pitch on the fly to an audience, or searching out the perfect birthday gift, I'm grateful for this knack of putting myself in other people's heads. But, like most things in life, it cuts both ways. Given the weight I put on what other people are thinking, I inevitably end up worrying about what other people are thinking of me.

This manifests itself in small, bizarre ways. Hearing female friends mock the wall-eyed guy at the end of the bar, for example, I'll start to convince myself that perhaps I, too, have some horrible lazy eye and yet have never been told as much, even though it's been secretly discussed for decades by friends and family behind my back.

I can usually cast aside such fears with a moment of reflection. I've seen countless pictures and videos of myself, and I'm sure that in at least the majority of them both of my eyes are looking more or less in the same direction.

Which leaves me to fixate instead on the things I hear and deduce on a regular basis. Some of them ("has anyone ever told you that you look like Matthew Broderick?") don't imply much beyond their surface content (I apparently look kind of like Matthew Broderick). But others I can't keep from analyzing, from tearing apart for their loaded meaning.

One I've heard a lot recently is, "I'd be really, really curious to see who you end up marrying." I've gotten this one, even in just the last month, more times than I can count. I think what this actually means is, "you seem like a judgmental asshole with bizarre and inscrutable dating criteria that make it nearly impossible for me to figure out your 'type'".

I must give off this impression in spades, because if I comment on liking a girl I've just met, friends usually react with, "really? I thought you didn't go for [taller / shorter / thinner / curvier / blonde / brunette / smart / dumb / etc.] girls." As I don't think I say such things directly, I'm curious as to which obliquely snide comments or quirky reactions lead people to those strong impressions. Whatever it is, it's powerful stuff. When people make such comments, there's almost an air of helpful reminding. "Actually," they seem to say, "despite the comment you just made to the contrary, I'm pretty sure you don't like her after all."

Hearing this from enough people, I start to suspect they're right. Maybe I don't like smart girls. Or stupid girls. Or tall blondes or short brunettes. I have absolutely no idea. Looking back through the wreckage of relationships past, I can't quite make sensible patterns emerge.

Which is exactly the point. Perhaps the reason people so quickly rule out possibilities for me is that I'm so slow to categorically rule them out myself. My dating life, taken together, is an enigmatic, jumbled mess. Not a clear shape, but a muddy splatter.

Which makes what people tell me I am (or, more frequently, am not) looking for far more interesting, gives me license to listen carefully to friends' constructive critiques of my crushes. Not because it's likely to yield clues in my own search, but rather because it might give me a glimpse into theirs. Given the spattered mess of my own love life past, I seem to have inadvertently become a walking relationship Rorschach blotch.

what a tool
Filed January 19, 2005 5:56 PM.

In the past few years, I've become increasingly enamored with the voluntary simplicity movement, which builds on the idea that paring away from our lives - be it reducing possessions or reducing commitments - lets us more fully enjoy those that are left.

In some ways, this flies against my genetic code. My parents are such pack-rats that they converted their two-car garage into storage space, then overflowed into a rented storage facility as well. (My father often jokes that, if he and my mother were suddenly plowed down in traffic, my brother and I would need to take the next year off from work just to sift through the piles they've accumulated.)

But, contrary to upbringing as it may be, I've slowly developed the habit of ruthless de-stuff-ing. A few times a year, I try to view everything I own with a dispassionate eye. A pair of jeans I haven't worn for over a year? To Goodwill they go. A book on my shelf I realize I'm increasingly unlikely to re-read? Trotted down to the local library's donation bin.

Still, in moving into my new apartment last month, a process that involved carefully looking at literally everything I own as I boxed and unboxed it, I started to appreciate that the things I own are more than just things; they're behaviors waiting to happen.

Psychologists call this 'affordance': what an object suggests for us to do with it. A well designed door, for example, lets us know to pull rather than push it even before we read the 'pull' sign. As I unpacked item after boxed item, I started to realize that nearly all of them, by conscious design or otherwise, seemed to afford a specific set of behaviors. And while I'd previously accumulated and sloughed off 'stuff' with an eye mainly towards frequency of use, more recently, I've started to look at things in terms of type of use. If, at least to some degree, my behaviors are shaped by what my surroundings 'afford', can I change my behavior just by changing my surroundings?

In other words, does the right tool not just help get the job done, but spur on the job itself? I've found it certainly does, as in the case of the garbage can under my desk: for the past few years, I've had a small one that looked great, but filled up remarkably quickly. And, as it began to overflow, I found myself subtly slowing down my discarding of unneeded work papers. Inane as it may sound, I found that switching to a much larger desk garbage helped me suddenly clear off my often overflowing desk. The problem hadn't been that I didn't want to trash papers, but that my little garbage can didn't 'want' me to throw any more away.

Or consider the Look skillet my father (a fellow kitchen gadgeteer) recently sent me as a gift. While I had long meant to integrate scrambled eggs into my breakfast rotation (great, paleo-friendly source of protein that they are), I had somehow never stuck with the idea. The Look, however, with its flawless non-stick coating and slow, even cooking, just begs to be scrambled upon whenever I see it. I've taken to leaving it out on the stove, and suddenly scrambled eggs are a regular morning choice.

Thinking about affordance in cooking tools reminds me that this incredibly basic advice - how you behave is based, to some degree, on what you do or don't have around - is something I've long pointed out in the world of nutrition. My first tip for friends looking to eat more healthfully? Go through your cabinets and throw away all the junk. Don't buy any more. You'll naturally end up eating better when you only indulge those cravings that can motivate you to put your pants back on to head to the supermarket.

The new thought, for me, was how broadly this principle applies to everything else. In nearly every facet of my life, given a behavior I want to encourage, or a bad habit I want to break, perhaps by very carefully acquiring or discarding the right tools, the relevant 'stuff', I can give myself a boost well past will-power alone.

And, increasingly, I'm starting to think it works. Last week, I was having trouble falling asleep with the stress and excitement of starting Long Tail. Each time I found myself staring at the ceiling, I'd pick up some bedtime reading, and end up keeping myself up even later. Despite self-chastising, I didn't cut it out until I reasoned through affordance to a simple yet powerful solution: I took the bulb out of my bedside lamp.

kick start
Filed January 18, 2005 2:36 AM.

When I was in elementary school, my mother referred to me as the 'absent minded professor'. I lost jackets and umbrellas, couldn't keep track of school projects, and was generally an organizational mess.

Over time, I built up elaborate systems and anal retentive habits to counter my natural state. And, in the last few years, with the help of Getting Things Done and an endless array of trivial hacks, I've gotten to the point where I finally have a good sense, at any given moment, of exactly what I should be doing.

Unfortunately, at any given moment, I'm usually doing something else entirely. Even with a list of next actions in front of me, I have an awfully hard time sitting down and forcing myself to work my way through that list.

In part, I blame my job, which is enormously amorphous. There's very little in the way of procrastination that I can't somehow rationalize away as at least vaguely productive. Reading an old Malcolm Gladwell article on marketing khakis? Why, a deeper understanding of buyers' psychology certainly will come in handy selling Cyan and Long Tail's films!

In other words, the problem isn't that the procrastination expeditions I talk myself into are necessarily bad; it's simply that they're less good than what I should be doing instead. Still, knowing that, rationally, doesn't seem to help. For me, at least, 'integrity in the moment of choice' is tough stuff.

For the past year or so, I've tried to push my way through with logic and brute force:

"Listen," the smarter part of my brain says. "You'd be much better off if you put down that article and went back to drafting the script option term sheet."

"Absolutely," the less smart part agrees. "As soon as I finish this khakis article, I'll get right on it."

Very recently, however, I've discovered a way that I can trick myself into listening to the smarter part: I schedule, on the half hour, tiny little increments of work, then let myself go back to 'productively' goofing off as soon as I've done each little increment, at least until the next half hour mark chimes.

Let's say, as I did earlier today, that I have thirty theaters I need to call to check their base screen rental rates. I'll sit down and break the list into chunks of three or four theaters, and list them out over the afternoon. These four at 1:00, these three at 1:30, etc. I've found it works the best to set the first chunk about ten, fifteen minutes in the future.

So, 1:00 rolls around, I bang out the first four, and then get back to whatever I've stupidly escaped into doing, like rearranging a shelf of DVDs. Ding! 1:30. I make the three calls, then do another one or two to lighten the encroaching 2:00 load. Ding! Back to calling, so I crank through the remainder of the 2:00 list, then, with momentum building, hit the lists for 2:30, 3:00 and 3:30.

My brain spent, I go back to DVD re-arranging, until the 2:30 ding, when I get back to calling, and decide to just make the last eight or nine calls to be done with it. And now, thrilled to have finished the calling I'd been avoiding all weekend, I crank out a few pressing emails for good measure, and build effortlessly from there.

Holy reclaimed afternoon, Batman! Somehow I've gone from a day where my brain seemed permanently out to lunch to one where I'm startlingly productive.

The secret, for me, seems to be the safety of the worst case scenario: even if I'm not picked up by the surge of forward motion, I know I'll at least manage to slog through each of the small, on-the-half-hour actions. Which, for whatever reason, seems to take off enough of the pressure to perform that, about 95% percent of the time, I do get picked up by the productivity surge, pushing towards the best case scenario instead.

For the first time, I seem to have discovered my subconscious resistance to getting started: the inherent internal commitment to keep going past that first step. Take away that commitment, and the getting started seems far less terrifying. After which, apparently, the keeping going sort of takes care of itself.

recordame
Filed January 17, 2005 5:08 PM.

Spent most of the afternoon today listening on and playing audio tech to Michael Nickles and Nadia Dajani, the director and one of the leads, respectively, of Long Tail's first release, This is Not a Film, as they recorded a commentary track for the film. Which, while time consuming, was also a great warmup for the less fun work I'll be doing through the rest of the evening: harassing our cadre of potential investors about Cyan's next production.

And while I normally dread having to, yet again, pass around the hat, hearing Michael and Nadia talk about the ins and outs of their guerilla filmmaking reminded me that making movies, actually getting down and dirty with on-set production, is enough fun to make it almost worth that painful hat pass.

say what?
Filed January 16, 2005 9:36 AM.

Though 25 isn't exactly 'over the hill', I still, every so often, have pangs in which I suddenly and profoundly feel my age. Point in case: my nine year-old cousin Arielle has a blog.

today's quote
Filed January 16, 2005 8:50 AM.

"I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean."
- G. K. Chesterton

no sleep till park city
Filed January 12, 2005 1:45 PM.

When people comment that I seem to juggle an overwhelming number of interests and obligations, I usually joke that my secret is stopping sleeping and going to the bathroom to free up time.

And, frankly, I wish that were true. Some people seem to get by remarkably well on just three or four hours of sleep a night. Sadly, I'm not one of them.

Sure, for short stretches, usually during production on a film, I've gone entire weeks with less than ten or eleven hours of shut-eye. But, by and large, as I scale back from a solid eight hours a night, I start to feel increasingly off. Most people pour on the caffeine to push through, but I often find coffee hits me the hardest - and least helpfully - when I need it most. Perhaps it's my already manic, fast-talking personality, or my hummingbird metabolism, but several cups of joe after a few sleep-deprived nights mainly leaves me twitching, with jumbled thoughts and a tongue that can't seem to form sounds in time with the thoughts my brain is trying to push out.

The past week, which so far has featured evening drinks each night followed by breakfast meetings each following morning, already has me piling up the sleep debt. And, after just a few days, the effects are already starting to wear on me. I lose my train of thought in mid-sentence, find myself frequently looking up in the air as if perhaps what I'm trying to say might be written on a tele-prompter just over a conversation partner's shoulder.

This morning, though, in searching for a set of financials from an earlier company that I could repurpose into support material for Long Tail, I stumbled across an essay I had written a few years back for one of the slew of now defunct e-business trade publications. Reading it, I was startled by my own prior thinking. As Cyan and Long Tail are both undoubtedly long-hauls, perhaps it's time to start taking some of my own earlier medicine: sleeping through the night and trying to live with a bit more sanity.

The article:

A few weeks ago, I sat down to lunch with a long time friend and tech CEO to talk about how his company had faired since the market soured a year ago. For the most part, he said, life was business as usual. Except for one thing: he had begun sleeping eight hours a night.

In most circles, that might not seem unusual. But in the dot-com world, lack of sleep has traditionally been seen as a badge of courage. This very friend, for example, often went for days sleeping only in quick power naps on a mattress kept under his desk, and was famous for the time that he fell asleep while walking down a hall. Dozing off mid-stride may seem a bit extreme, but more entrepreneurs than not have similarly bizarre sleep deprivation stories to tell. Intrigued by my friends somnolent confession, I spoke with several more. The consensus: most of the entrepreneurs I know are sleeping several hours a night more than they had been twelve months back. In the past, they admitted, they were stockpiling sleep options for that post-IPO vacation. But with company building once again a long-haul pursuit, they now wanted to pursue a more sensible and sustainable pace.

Certainly, well rested execs are a change in the right direction. After all, according to a recent study by the National Sleep Foundation, sleeping five hours a night (versus the recommended eight) actually decreases productivity by a full 43%. And with sleep deprivation a factor in 60% of car accidents, one has to wonder whether as many companies were dragged down by sleepless CEOs. But more interesting to me is whether this increased sleeping is indicative of a larger trend. With the dot-com rush petering out, has the actual pace of business life slowed down?

Consider the intriguing case of the Slow Food Movement. The Italian organization, symbolized by its distinctive snail mascot, works, according to its manifesto, towards “a firm defense of quiet material pleasure… the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.” The group, which organizes local chapters across the world, has begun to take hold in the US, organizing vineyard tours, cheese tasting workshops and mushroom picking expeditions. Most tellingly, the largest US chapters of the organization have sprung up on entrepreneurship’s most hallowed grounds: Silicon Valley and New York City. More to the point, even the new economy rag Fast Company (a magazine boasting the tagline “everything fast”) ran a glowing feature piece on Slow Food. When the number one proponent of new economy fast begins to extol the virtues of old world slow, certainly major change is under foot.

The question, then, is where to go from here. Perhaps adding a midday siesta, taking Fridays off, and scaling back to banker’s hours? Certainly, none of those options seem particularly likely. Like it or not, the world of entrepreneurship is dominated by passionate, driven individuals who keep going for no other reason than they’re having too much fun to stop. Because at the end of the day, even the most sleep deprived exec is craving the endorphins that come from a solid pitch, a closed sale or a good contact at a networking event. Perhaps what we can expect, then, is a bit of sensible moderation. While entrepreneurs may continue to work and play hard, it seems they’ve begun to understand when even they need to take a break.

self-knowledge
Filed January 11, 2005 9:11 AM.

An email from my good friend Lindsey:

will do my best to phone this evening. this paper-a-day thing is killing me.

oh, wait, wait. actually, it's the lack-of-will-power-not-to- watch-the-bachelorette-for-two-hours that's killing me.

focked up
Filed January 10, 2005 6:09 PM.

In his excellent, if curmudgeonly, essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction," David Foster Wallace argues that TV "is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."

Which, frankly, is probably the best explanation of how, last night, three college friends and I ended up pigging out at Virgil's Real BBQ, then sneaking 40's of malt liquor into a screening of Meet the Fockers.

processed pork
Filed January 9, 2005 2:47 PM.

Like most internet users, I get spam. Unlike most, I get ridiculous, overwhelming amounts of it: on average days, upwards of a thousand pieces. Consider it an occupational hazard. To find the screenwriters, directors, actors, producers and slew of other collaborators on which Cyan's (and now Long Tail's) projects depend, I need my email address flung far and wide through the cybersphere. But, in that flinging, it inevitably ends up on junk mail lists everywhere.

For the past year or so, I've been getting around the problem using KnowSpam.net, a server-side challenge-response system. Which basically means that, every time someone sent me an email, if I hadn't previously received an email from them, KnowSpam would ask them to demonstrate they were human by answering a question on their website. And, on the plus side, it worked exceedingly well in cutting my spam down to zero. On the minus, it also started to increasingly piss off the humans whose humanity was being verified.

So, yesterday evening, I downloaded SpamSieve, a Bayesian filter for the Mac. Bayesian filters (near and dear to my heart from the neuroscience and computer science days back at Yale) essentially figure out the fuzzy overall similarity between two things - in this case, the similarity between an incoming piece of email, and the entire body of previously received email already sorted into spam and ham. Bayesian filtering, in theory, works remarkably well. But, like communism, it rarely seems to pan out quite as nicely in practice.

Which is why I was more than pleasantly surprised by SpamSieve; I was joyously shocked. After training the filters on a stack of old emails, it caught all but one of the 313 pieces of spam I received since midnight. Now, perversely, I'm taking pleasure not in the real email I receive, but in the flow of penis enlargement ads and mortgage refinancing offers, as they pile up, message by unmissed message, in my junk folder.

Finding happiness in watching good technology at work. Further proof that, hide out in the world of film as I may, I'm still pretty much 100% dork.

anti-lardass service journalism
Filed January 7, 2005 4:35 PM.

If your New Years resolutions included 'start going to the gym', I'd suggest you instead take the cost of two month's membership and pick up a kettlebell (along with an instructional DVD). Small enough to wedge away in even the tiniest New York studio, they give a remarkably effective strength and cardio workout in ten or fifteen minutes - less than the time it probably takes for you to get to the gym, much less start exercising.

And, for those of you who've been working out (more or less) consistently for the past year, head over to CrossFit and start following their Workout of the Day. Usually under a half hour in length, it will still convince you quickly that you're nowhere near as fit as you thought.

startup therapy
Filed January 6, 2005 8:28 PM.

With the first official week of Long Tail well underway, my life has been exceedingly, overwhelmingly hectic. Though in a good way. I've been inking partnerships, rolling ahead towards the release of our first film (This is Not a Film, out February 1st), hiring on a team of people vastly smarter and more talented than I, and generally gearing up to take the movie world by storm.

And, frankly, I'm excited. Wet-your-pants excited. So excited that, today, mid-way through adding a few new sections to the business plan, I literally got up and did a little dance, only stopping when I realized the people in the law firm across the street could totally see in through my window.

Sure, Cyan's a startup too. But, in its day-to-day operations, it's been completely different from any other startup I've ever dealt with. In movie production, everything you do, absolutely everything, is dependent on extensive collaboration with a slew of outside individuals and organizations. Which is part of what makes making movies fun. But also all of what makes making movies so frustrating. Unlike in most startups, no matter how hard we push, the vast majority of Cyan time is 'hurry up and wait.'

Having the ball, primarily, back in my court, with the responsibility and potential that implies, has made this week rather jarring. If things aren't moving ahead as quickly as I'd like on Long Tail, it's my own damn fault. Which, I realize, is what attracted me to the world of entrepreneurship in the first place: the chance to build something extraordinary, bounded only by my own ability to think of amazing ideas and then put them into action.

And while I knew, instantly, from that first night of staring up at the ceiling, running through plans, too excited to sleep, that I would feel different with Long Tail underway, I didn't realize how much that would bubble out.

So far this week, for example, on three separate occasions, I've had people tell me I was the best salesman they'd ever met. And, frankly, while flattered, I know that's not true. I'm not really much of a salesman at all. Having seen the pros at work, the people who could sell proverbial ice to Eskimos, I know I'm nowhere near that 'coffee is for closers' league. But, as the first of the three pointed out this Monday, it seems I'm starting to channel a Steve Jobs-esque Reality Distortion Field. By the end of our meeting, he commented, he felt ready to sell a kidney if that's what it took to partner his company with ours.

Reality Distortion Field? That I'll own up to. And that, I think, is what the kind 'best salesman' commenters really meant. I'm sure a better seller's pitch would be more eloquent, her responses to concerns more carefully reasoned. But I have trouble believing that anyone could be more excited, more thrilled to get down to work on fundamentally changing the way the movie industry works.

Will Long Tail succeed? In rational moments, I'd give it maybe 65% odds. But, given the will I'm ready to put behind it, given the passionate, talented people and companies ready to throw their full weight into the fray, it's a bet I'm 100% willing to take.

Starting a company: it may not be cheaper than Zoloft, but it's certainly more effective.

'rents
Filed January 6, 2005 3:51 PM.

The Doctors Newman:

Aren't they the cutest thing?

epiphany
Filed January 3, 2005 9:01 PM.

Today, I was briefly very happy after I bought some demitasse spoons at Crate & Barrel that perfectly match my espresso cups.

Then, about two seconds later, I sobered up, and realized that if I become the sort of guy who regularly thinks about things like matching demitasse spoons, I'll basically have to kick my own ass.

pick me up
Filed January 3, 2005 1:31 AM.

My friend Yoav is moving back to San Francisco tomorrow, so he and our mutual friend Colin met up for a last drink. As I stood outside the bar, waiting for them to arrive, an attractive young woman came over and started up a conversation.

A few minutes later, when Colin and Yoav arrived, Lina somehow invited herself to join us. And, when I left the bar, two or three pitchers shared between us all, I had lipstick on my collar and a phone number scrawled on my hand.

Which, frankly, struck me as more than a bit worrisome. Perhaps it's a sign of living too long in New York, where distrust of strangers runs a close second to public urination as a grand tradition. Or perhaps it's the the general effect of living in a society where guys are normally required to be the pursuers rather than the pursuees. Either way, as Colin's girlfriend Carrie later pointed out, if someone came up to me on the street to offer a free pizza, I'd similarly be a bit hesitant about taking a first bite.

escape fire
Filed January 2, 2005 7:36 PM.

Dan Berwick, one of the most influential thinkers in healthcare, is fond of telling the story of Wag Dodge, the commander of a Montana firefighters parachute brigade:

In 1949, Dodge and his men land a jump too close to the edge of an unexpectedly fast-spreading forest fire. With the blaze bearing down, the crew makes a run for a hill nearby, hoping to clear its 76% grade, getting over the crest before the fire engulfs them.

Dodge, however, realizes they aren't going to make it. So, thinking quickly and way outside the box, he pulls matches out of his pocket and sets the tall grass ahead of him on fire. The small new blaze quickly spreads and dies out, and Dodge steps into the middle of the burned out clearing, lays down, and calls for his men to join him.

Obviously, the men think he's nuts, and keep running. All but two of them die in the fire.

Dodge, on the other hand, survives unharmed. He's unwittingly invented the escape fire, now an industry standard in wildfire fights.

Most people, when asked, are sure they'd have joined Dodge in that burnt clearing. But, with the heat of the flames on our backs, I suspect we would all have had an awfully hard time evaluating such an unusual new idea. Instead, we'd panic and run, unwilling and unable to think through something that just might save our lives.

Which, essentially, is what my movie industry colleagues are doing today. Studio execs are scrambling for the crest, terrified to death of the blaze of digital technologies and innovative thinking that's changing the film industry and threatening companies' core businesses.

But, as you readers doubtless know, it's far too late. We movie folks can't put out a fire so readily embraced by our customers. We can't even make it safely past some legislative crest. Instead, we have to use that same fire ourselves. Only by leveraging technology, by tearing down the assumptions about how the movie business works, about how movies make money, and starting from scratch, does a film company have any chance of making it through.

So, to that end, and as a fitting start at the beginning of 2005, I give you the official launch of Long Tail Releasing, Cyan Pictures' new distribution arm. Our first film, This is Not a Film, will be released later this month. And I give you the official re-launch of Cyan itself (with corresponding new site), as we ever more tightly hone in on what sort of films we're trying to make, and how we're trying to make them.

Stay tuned. This should be good.

under the microscope Filed January 31, 2005 8:12 AM.

back to basics Filed January 30, 2005 6:53 PM.

butterflies Filed January 27, 2005 10:45 AM.

full of advice Filed January 26, 2005 10:28 AM.

unrelated Filed January 25, 2005 12:21 PM.

scrobbled Filed January 25, 2005 12:20 PM.

and also: Filed January 24, 2005 9:35 AM.

today's quote Filed January 24, 2005 9:35 AM.

thinking of you Filed January 23, 2005 4:12 PM.

typifying Filed January 21, 2005 2:16 AM.

what a tool Filed January 19, 2005 5:56 PM.

kick start Filed January 18, 2005 2:36 AM.

recordame Filed January 17, 2005 5:08 PM.

say what? Filed January 16, 2005 9:36 AM.

today's quote Filed January 16, 2005 8:50 AM.

no sleep till park city Filed January 12, 2005 1:45 PM.

self-knowledge Filed January 11, 2005 9:11 AM.

focked up Filed January 10, 2005 6:09 PM.

processed pork Filed January 9, 2005 2:47 PM.

anti-lardass service journalism Filed January 7, 2005 4:35 PM.

startup therapy Filed January 6, 2005 8:28 PM.

'rents Filed January 6, 2005 3:51 PM.

epiphany Filed January 3, 2005 9:01 PM.

pick me up Filed January 3, 2005 1:31 AM.

escape fire Filed January 2, 2005 7:36 PM.