Omnia Mutantur

I bought the 2000 paperback edition of Thomas L. Friedman’s book on globalization The Lexus and the Olive Tree on an acquaintance’s garage sale, as she was getting ready to head back to the United States and wanted to sell a bunch of books she felt would be too expensive to carry back.

The book consists of a series of examples of how what globalization is and how it’s changing the world, drawn out of both public news and Friedman’s own anecdotal evidence. I got it originally expecting it to be a semi-light description I could point my globalization-fearing friends towards – those that don’t understand that, to quote Eddie Izzard, their choices are or death – and while his focus on anecdotes make the book rather readable, they also infect it with a lack of depth that I find somewhat grating. That might make it a good fit for my friends, though, who are probably more interested in anecdotes they can quote that they are in nice crunchy numbers.

I’m only a third of the way through so far. While Friedman’s style is hardly heavy and easy to get into, the book’s relatively lack of depth makes my mind wander towards other books. Until now he has provided a balanced view, and while he cheers capitalism – he makes no bones about thinking that’s the best approach – he presents a clear picture that globalization isn’t some kind of Evil Mastermind Plot By U.S. Corporations, but that actually U.S. corporations are as afraid of the process (and as much a slave to it) as are third-world countries. Either you align yourself with the free-market, or you get crushed under the throng of people who did. Like Anatoly Chubais tells Friedman:

The Duma was also regularly denouncing Chubais as a traitor and foreign agent for submitting to IMF demands that Russia radically reform its economy along real free-market lines. I asked Chubais how he answered his critics, and he told me: “‘OK, I tell them, ‘Chubais is a spy for the CIA and IMF. But what is your substitute? Do you have any alternative workable ideas?’” Chubais said he never get any coherent answer, because the communists have no alternative.

Or as Friedman himself says while referring to communism, socialism and fascism,

There is only one thing to say for those alternatives: They didn’t work. And the people who rendered that judgment where the people who lived under them. So with the collapse of communism in Europe, the Soviet Union and China – and all the walls that protected these systems – the people who are unhappy with the Darwinian brutality of free-market capitalism don have any ready ideological alternative now. When it comes to the question of which system today is the most effective at generating rising standards of living, the historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.

It was half-amusing, half-annoying to watch a friend’s armchair socialist girlfriend (from a rich family, of course) attempt to dispute that fact in front of my girlfriend, who actually grew up under a communist regime. Ignorance is bold indeed.

More details to come in the next days, as I finish the next two sections.

Ricardo Books, music and film

I’ve just found out about Wikinomics, a new book exploring the power of collaboration and how it can not only add value to a company, but absolutely change the playing field. An example from the Newsfactor.com story:

When Rob McEwan became CEO of Goldcorp, he and company geologists knew that their property contained untapped resources “thirty times the amount Goldcorp was currently mining!”

But with 55,000 acres, nobody at Goldcorp could figure out where to look for the buried treasure. To avert a wild goose chase, McEwan shared on the Web Goldcorp’s geological data going back to 1948 and offered $575,000 in prizes to those who could come up with the best way to find and extract the gold.

Participants in the contest found 55 drilling targets Goldcorp had not identified. Eighty percent hit pay dirt. “In fact, since the challenge was initiated, an astounding eight million ounces of gold have been found” and in four years Goldcorp’s cost of production dropped 600%.

Tapscott and Williams say Goldcorp took advantage of a new economic paradigm they call wikinomics: a word combining economics and Wikipedia — the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute. This model of wealth creation is based on collaboration and sharing the authors call peering.

The book sounds appealing, especially since they discuss a process that applies to the open source model, and takes the concept well beyond development. There a PDF preview of the introduction and first chapter available on their site and, on something that’s half them eating their own dogfood and half stunt, the authors are starting a wiki for the Wikinomics playbook.

Ricardo Books, music and film

I’m not sure how much I can say about Girl in the Cafe, a great little TV movie I’ve had the pleasure to catch in cable a couple of times, without sounding like an infatuated schoolboy. Calling it Lost in Translation with a brain would be doing it a disservice, since it brings that other movie to the front, which had a lot of style and Bill Murray’s great acting going for it – but very little else. A better analogy might actually be Bridges of Madison County steeped into current issues. It realizes that romance will only get you so far, and manages to spends some time on matters that the filmmakers believe are important without letting these contentious topics overwhelm the movie.

To borrow a line from the film, it’s tender and true, and that’s unusual.

Perhaps its greatest realization, or at least the one that’s closest to me, is that the heart of compromise is being able to pick your own degree of failure. The fact that along the way they manage to tell a triumphant little love story with the always great Billy Nighy and Kelly Macdonald is just the icing on the cake.

If this movie just happens to to be seen by more people, it might be able to bring more attention to the real problems of the developing countries and the absurdities of government subsidies than all the red iPods in the world.

Ricardo Books, music and film

Merlin Mann shares, via Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, a quote from W.H. Murray (a mountain climber I’d never heard of outside the book):

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.

I read the book a couple years ago, and while I didn’t remember the specific quote is sums up the general tone of the book quite well: just get off your ass and do something, and things will seem simpler than you envisioned on the many hours of procrastination and worrying.

Ricardo Books, music and film

One of those interesting albums I found on Jamendo, Zywiolak’s demo 2006 is a sort of darker, slightly heavier Dead Can Dance from Polland.

Ricardo Books, music and film

People like to talk a lot about the power of the Internet to democratize content distribution and bring an audience to unknown little bands, right before they rush off to download the latest Madonna album from Kazaa.

Fortunately there’s a few sites like Jamendo, which are really focused on distributing albums of new bands and getting them paid directly. It works like this: a band goes to Jamendo and uploads their album, releasing it under a Creative Commons license (a sensible alternative to copyrights). License terms can vary from “you can only use it for non-commercial purposes” to “feel free to do whatever you want, including remixing it, as long as you give me credit“. You and I, as music consumers, come to the site and download the albums via BitTorrent, and if we like it, we can make a donation.

It’s already helped me discover new sounds like Silence and cool ideas such as the virtual band t r y ^ d, but mostly, it’s great to have as an example of the promises of the Internet finally being fulfilled.

Ricardo Books, music and film, Science and Technology

There was one Neil Gaiman story left on the shelf the last time: Signal To Noise. Probably out of print, it’s a tale of a dying movie director who’s trying to finish, in his head, a movie of the coming apocalypse at the end of the first century. Beautifully illustrated by Dave McKean, it’s a very poignant tale of how the things we love and give us purpose help us cling to life.

The Scene of the Crime: A Little Piece of Goodnight is a noir tale by Ed Brubaker, starring a detective called Jack Herriman who lives above a museum of photographs taken at crime scenes. The story follows the classic mold of cynic-attempting-to-do-good-and-getting-in-too-deeply, but the writing is alway engaging and the caracters feel real. It’s too bad that it seems like a first number in a series that was never continued.

I’m all for supporting small printing houses, so I took a shot on Serena Valentino’s Gloom Cookie. It doesn’t do it for me. Ted Naifeh’s drawing style is interesting and it’s refreshing to read someone attempting to write something different, but the goth-is-me bullshit got too tiring after a while. I guess I’m just not its target audience.

I’m a big Grendel fan, like I’ve mentioned before, but the stories in Matt Wagner’s Grendel: Black, White and Red vary too much in quality for me to be able to recommend it without qualifications. It’s great to have if you’re looking for a Grendel fix, but for a casual reader your money might be better spent someplace else. Wagner’s Doctor Mid-Nite is all too conventional as well, and the few times where he strays a bit from the norm don’t manage to make it rise to the quality of his Grendel: Batman.

For now, the only one left to mention is Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I probably don’t need to tell you that it’s on a completely different league from that piece of shit movie they put out, but detailing why I liked it will take longer than the paragraph I’m going for on these reviews. I’ll leave them for later.

Ricardo Books, music and film

After dealing with the serialized books for a while I decided to switch to something more concise, self-contained, and found just what I was looking for in Scott Morse’s The Complete Soulwind. A tapestry of interwoven stories, all dealing with a legendary sword whether directly or tangentially, it’s a wonderful fairy tale illustrated just perfectly in black and white by Morse himself. Amazon seems to be out of them, but if you’re lucky you’ll have a friend who has it.

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: Endless Nights left me mostly non-plussed. So much so that until now I didn’t realized that I had read it almost two years ago and never even bothered to mention it here. Whether that is because the high quality of the original series left me spoiled or because the writing was indeed lacking, I’ll leave up to you.

Fortunately, Matt Wagner came to the rescue with some more published books of Sandman Mystery Theatre (barely any relation to the previous Sandman). I was left with a serious craving after reading The Tarantula a few years ago, but just recently they published The Face & The Brute, The Vamp and The Scorpion, which I promptly ordered and devoured. Wagner has an excellent hand for creating perfectly human characters, with both endearing qualities and horrible imperfections, and that talent shines through clearly on these volumes. Add on top of that the willingness and skill with which he treats some very ugly topics, and the very tender, slowly developing relationship between the two main characters, and you’ve got yourself something that towers over any other graphic narratives currently being published.

And then there’s Dave McKean’s Cages. A beautifully illustrated book where the somewhat disjointed narrative is there more to elicit specific feelings than to convey a plot, Cages is a beautiful work of art that actually had me in tears in one specific point. This is the only book written by him that I know of – since he usually just focuses on illustration – it had me wishing that McKean wrote more often. But if everything he’s likely to produce is of this caliber, he can take his time.

There’s still a few odds and ends to take care of, books that didn’t quite fit even in the loose categories that these entries seem to have grouped themselves at. I’ll wrap those up on Wednesday.

Ricardo Books, music and film

Looking at my library, I realize that I’ve been reading a lot of graphic material – call it graphic novels, collected comics, or what you will. I hadn’t really commented on these lately, so here’s a few short notes on those that spring to mind.

Let’s take out the garbage first. Fabricio lent me – and insisted I read – Wolverine: Enemy of the State. I’m going to be a kind man and just say that it’s for Wolverine fans only, but honestly, I haven’t read a single X-Men story I enjoyed since God Loves, Man Kills (the Brian Singer movies are, of course, another matter entirely).

Brian Michael Bendis’ Powers is a well told series that examines a world where superheroes are common – so common, in fact, that there’s a special unit of the police department whose duty it is to just deal with crimes involving superpowered humans. It’s got some pretty interesting characters and Bendis’ sharp writing style – a lot more evident in Goldfish or Jinx – carry them through, but by the time I got to Anarchy (volume 5) the stories had begun to repeat themselves and it was pretty clear that if Bendis had an idea of where he was going, he was just going to act like he didn’t have a clue.

On a similar vein is Bendis’ own Alias series, which is set on the Marvel universe instead of a custom-made one. Bendis’ writing in Alias is a lot tighter, the storylines more mature, and the series never has the feel that it’s just bringing on the cliffhangers just to keep us suckers buying more books.

Which, by the way, is a problem I have with Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man. It’s got a very interesting story structure and man, does Vaughn know how to leave you wanting more. He’s a literary crack dealer and he knows it: reveling in the inevitability of the junkies coming back from more, he leaves plot threads hanging left and right just to see how long he can string us along. And by god, if it weren’t so damned entertaining, I would have stopped by now. I just wish I could convince myself that he’s going somewhere and not just aimlessly wandering.

Tomorrow: Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, Scott Morse and Matt Wagner.

Ricardo Books, music and film

When you start reading authors whom you had heard nothing of before you’re kind of playing a quality raffle: they open a bag, you stick your hand in, grope around for a while and eventually come out with a ticket. Rarely it’s valid for that perfect combination of an interesting idea with good writing, but at least often you can manage to get one of the two.

Mallcity 14 by Shaun A. Sanders is a not-too-sublte parable about our consumerist society, extrapolating it to a point where it got out of control sometime in the future and the measure of status is not even how much you own anymore, but how much you owe. Saunders takes the concept to its logical extreme, where even people who are conscripted into the army must get in debt and pay for their own weapons, armor and, eventually, medical care.

It’s a short enough book, which is a good thing considering it doesn’t have much to say, but its central idea is good enough that it warrants spending some time with it. Saunders unfortunately doesn’t propose any alternatives, but at least has the guts to admit that even in what he later portrays as an idyllic socialist village, someone always has to pick up the tab.

In the end it’s a book that likely won’t preach to anyone but the choir, but those in the choir that do read it will at least have a decent time.

Ricardo Books, music and film