I’m delighted to be interviewing Google’s SVP of Advertising Susan Wojcicki next week at ad:tech San Francisco 2013. She’ll make a brief presentation and then the two of us will sit down for a fireside chat.
So what should I ask her? What burning questions do you have for Google when it comes to their advertising plans? I have my own list, but would love to supplement via the wisdom of the crowd.
I support gay marriage unequivocally. There is no however. Gay and lesbian couples should have all the same rights as my wife and I do, and it’s a shame on the United States that this still hasn’t happened.
Right now, the Supreme Court is dancing on the head of a needle with two different cases that relate to gay marriage, and since the New York Times has done a good job of reporting this I don’t need to go into those details.
But I wonder why we don’t simply eliminate “marriage” as a legal concept altogether in favor of domestic partnership for all, regardless of who has what plumbing? (This is much the system in France and Francophone cultures today.)
Civil Rights taught us that separate but equal doesn’t work, so we shouldn’t create a separate “domestic partnership” legal entity that has the rights of marriage but not the name. Instead, we should eliminate marriage altogether as a legal entity.
Most of the arguments against gay marriage are religious ones– and we have freedom of religion in the country. So let’s just transform the notion of marriage into an exclusively religious concept on only one side of the Church & State divide, leaving both heterosexual and homosexual couples as domestic partners in the eyes of the law.
My wife Kathi would become my domestic partner — she has no problem with this idea, by the way, I asked — and I’d be hers, but socially we could still refer to each other as husband and wife. And this would hold for our gay and lesbian friends as well.
Same-sex couples who want a religious ceremony of marriage would find a friendly religious institution, as would different-sex couples– but all parties would trot down to the courthouse to get a “domestic partner license” rather than a “marriage license.”
We can avoid some of the legal wrangling by turning marriage into something akin to a religious confirmation or a Bar/Bat Mitzvah and render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s on both sides of the brouhaha.
I’ll end where I began: I support gay marriage unequivocally. I’ll vote for it. I have signed petitions, spoken about it, changed my Facebook picture, the works. And if for gay marriage to work all marriage must go away — including mine — I’m fine with that too.
There is more than one way to reach equality.
I’m Single-Dadding it for a few days whilst Kathi is teaching down in L.A., and our seven-year-old son just made me so proud that I must share.
Post school, post Tae Kwon Do, post dinner (pizza, because Dad’s a little under the weather and doesn’t want to cook), I offered him the chance to finish watching the movie “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.”
His response, “can I read instead?”
I paused, then said — like it was a concession — “Oh… Okay.”
Here’s what he looks like right now, in the last 200 pages of the seventh book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”:
So I will forever be grateful to J. K. Rowling because her books transfigured my video-game-obsessed son into a reader. Like he had chugged a vial of Polyjuice Potion, only if I’m lucky in his case the transformation will be permanent.
Not to pat myself on the back too vigorously, but I did the right thing by withholding the movies until significant progress happened with the books. He has seen movies one to four and is DYING to see #5, but he’s invested in the written story in a way that he wouldn’t be if he’d galloped past the reading point and watched them all.
But what waits after Harry? What series can capture his imagination so deeply and for so long? For his sister, almost 12, the transforming books were Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson” series (the first five), and therein lies a tale for another time. For me it was comic books, then Edgar Rice Burroughs, then Star Trek and then Shakespeare.
For a post-Harry boy, what works?
I’ll be eager for suggestions, dear readers.
I surfaced from a recent spelunking expedition through boxes in our garage with “Cathedral, The Game of the Medieval City,” a strategy game that I discovered at a Renaissance Faire somewhere between 25 and 30 year ago, bought, played, loved and eventually stuffed into a box during a move… probably to my first year in college.
So when I had a couple hours with afternoon with W, my 7-1/2 year old game-obsessed son, I distracted him from Lego Batman and other video games by introducing him to Cathedral.
Similar to Blokus in game play, Cathedral is for just two players (Blokus is ideal with four and bores with two). It has an urban metaphor in which space is constrained by a wall and the two competitors each try to commandeer as much space as possible. Good strategy calls for ruthlessness and spatial reasoning– both of which W has in spades. And, if I remember correctly, like Tic-Tac-Toe once two players get good at “Cathedral” you wind up stalemating every time. (We’re not there yet.)
W lost the first few games while he got used to the rules. After a stalemate at game five we decamped to the local fro-yo joint, then came back for a three game tournament.
He won, the little rat.
Rematch tomorrow after his play date.
Imagine the sound of my knuckles cracking.
References:
As I type these words I have reached page 160 of J. K. Rowling’s new novel, “A Casual Vacancy,” so I’m about one third done and have made enough progress to know that I’ll finish the book and that I can draw early conclusions.
Note: there are no plot spoilers here past the first five or so pages of the book, but you’ll get the sensibility.
It’s impossible to read this novel without Harry Potter in mind—nor would the “A Casual Vacancy” be so inescapably present in bookstores, airports and Costco without the Boy who Lived. It’s particularly true for me at the moment as my seven year old son is obsessed with Harry Potter, my eleven year old daughter is in the middle of reading the final book, and our idea of a great Saturday night is a bowl of home made popcorn and one of the Harry Potter movies—“Goblet of Fire” is on deck for my 45th birthday family celebration tomorrow night. We’re all in with Harry.
But Harry Potter is also a great way into what’s interesting about “A Casual Vacancy.”
If you take that series of novels and subtract the magic, you get a painful, grey story set in a British boarding school during one of the world wars. It’s “Dead Poets Society” sans Robin Williams or a British version of John Knowles “A Separate Peace.” Bleak is an understatement.
Take away the boarding school and you have a novel set on Privet Drive starring Vernon and Petunia Dursley and their disappointing brute of a son and ingrate, possibly psychotic, nephew.
And that’s the sensibility of “Casual Vacancy.”
The novel begins with the death by cerebral hemorrhage of Barry Fairbrother, a banker and town council leader in the picturesque British town of Pagford. We’re only in Barry’s head for a few pages before he strokes out, but in that time he comes across as dull– a caring but detached man, put upon by his wife Mary’s expectations and resentfully doing things because he ought to rather than because he wants to do them.
By any reasonable account Barry is a nebbish, which makes it all the more surprising when his death sweeps Pagford like an emotional earthquake, throwing relationships into conflict, destabilizing the Town Council, and wreaking havoc with the local high school.
The reader quickly learns that Barry was the best person in Pagford. He was a drab saint that the town is not ready to do without. This much is obvious 50 pages in, and by 160 – where I am now – Rowling’s deft ability to jump deep inside a character’s pain has me hooked. Unlike seven books in Harry’s head, we flit from character to character in free indirect discourse that is compelling and alarming. I don’t know where this is going, and I’m not sure that the sturm und drang about Barry’s open council seat will be enough of a spine for the book, but I’ll see it through.
But it’s hard to like any of these characters, as it was hard to like Harry in the fifth book, “The Order of the Phoenix” when he spent the entire 870 page book in an adolescent snit.
It’s almost as if “A Casual Vacancy” were a novelistic equivalent of those intolerably cruel yet can’t-stop-watching British television comedies like “Peep Show” or the original versions of “The Office” or “Shameless.” The closest American equivalent is “Arrested Development,” where there is nobody to root for.
The difference between a novel and a TV show, though, is that actors are charming. The charm of the performers in those shows cuts the cruelty like baby powder cutting cocaine. “Rain Man” was another famous example: director Steven Spielberg convinced screenwriter Ron Bass to make Raymond autistic instead of retarded because Dustin Hoffman was so charming that the audience wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from loving him, but if he’d been retarded there would have been no conflict.
In “A Casual Vacancy” we mainline the meanness as we read. There is no cushion of humanity.
The writer that “A Casual Vacancy” most reminds me of isn’t the Rowling of Harry Potter. It’s Graham Greene, the master of quietly embarrassing detail, pasty human skin layered on squishy human bodies, small worlds from which escape isn’t so much impossible as unthinkable.
In “Romeo and Juliet” a banished Romeo says with horror, “there is no world without Verona walls, but purgatory, torture, hell itself. Hence, banished is banished from the world, and world’s exile is death.”
That’s Pagford.
“A Casual Vacancy” is compelling, dirty, middle-aged and painful. But so far it’s worth it.
Postscript: A fine account of the Rain Man story can be found here.
Quick cross-post: I’m pleased to report that my latest post — “Don’t cold call me, Bro” –just went live on iMedia Connection. Hope it sparks some comment!
Oh ToodleDo, Oh ToodleDo, you know I love you for your sensuous tagging and sorting, for your alluring ease of task capture, and for your promiscuous spreading of my tasks across the cloud to computer, laptop, tablet and smart phone alike– you saucy service, you. I’ve trumpeted about my love for you here, and verily hath been the apostle unto the worthy and — lo! — the unworthy too about thy glory.
But why can’t I print out today’s tasks easily?
Why, oh why, ToodleDo, must I print out the entire first page of my tasks — and forsooth, ’tis a mighty list that spans many pages like a colossus in the desert — and then take to my hand a metal scissors like unto that which I first used in kindergarten and snip snip snip?
Why must I trim the paper like my great-great-grandfather did the Tsar’s trousers before the Tsar kicked my family out of Russia with less singing and more torture than in “Fiddler on the Roof”?
Why can’t this be easier?
This morning’s Wall Street Journal has a informative piece by Amir Efrati about how Everyday Health’s popular YouTube show “Recipe Rehab” is heading to syndication on ABC stations and how the YouTube and ABC incarnations of the show will cross-promote each other.
Most importantly, the Journal reports that YouTube is hoping that it’s $150 million original content initiative “will challenge the supremacy of TV and cable in the minds of advertisers.”
But today’s news does nothing to challenge TV, and that’s what the article misses.
While ABC grabbing a YouTube show — the way Cartoon Network grabbed “Annoying Orange” earlier this year — is a triumph for the content creators and (one hopes) an economic win for Google’s YouTube as well, it reinforces that the big screen in the living room is still the big daddy when it comes to advertising.
Right now, YouTube functions as an effective and powerful farm team for TV content producers and an incredible set of data for Google’s search algorithm, but the real win — the magical “I Love Lucy” moment for online video — will only happen when advertisers flock to a series of online video content that can be measured in GRPs and offer TV dollars… and without additional distribution of that content to TV.
Will a YouTube video ever hit TV impact?
Yes, but probably not the way we expect. As TV audiences continue to fragment (see UM exec David Cohen’s remarks on this in the WSJ article) and as YouTube’s ability to distribute its content to the big screen increases via widgets on Blu-Ray players and the like, we’ll see a glacial leveling of the playing field where TV and online disappear as categories and we just have video.
The advent of heads-up displays like Google’s own Project Glass might inflect how we watch video in ways I cannot predict.
And as DVRs slowly increase their penetration and use — which means that most content will become on-demand content rather than appointment viewing where lots of folks watch the same thing at the same time — the usage and advertising playing fields will level even more.
But that’s not what happened with “Recipe Rehab.”
Despite my sadness at the Aurora shootings and a little bit of anxiety about copycats, I went with a friend to see the 9:30pm “Dark Knight Rises” last night.
Warning: Massive Spoiler Alerts.
The movie held my attention and adeptly concluded the trilogy of Bat-movies. It’s compelling, well-shot, well acted and even has a vestigial theme that ties it to the Occupy movements of the last year.
But it’s not a superhero movie, it’s not fun, and the end wimps out.
It isn’t a superhero movie. You could remove Batman from this story and replace him with any vigilante and it wouldn’t structurally make a lot of difference until the last 20 minutes of the movie when we discover that Miranda Tate is really Talia al Ghul, and that everything happening in #3 is a recapitulation of what went on in #1… so the Batman part of the movie is only important because of another movie.
This was disappointing to me in a similar way to how “Return of the Jedi” disappointed me because we suddenly had another “Star Wars” movie where the end was all about destroying the Death Star. What, again?
It’s not fun. None of Christopher Nolan’s movies are fun. Comparing “Dark Knight Rises” to “The Avengers” is like comparing “Schindler’s List” to “When Harry Met Sally.”
And it’s fair to say that at the core of the character Batman isn’t fun– he’s a dark, possessed, driven, unsmiling psycho. But while Bruce Wayne / Batman is rarely fun, that doesn’t mean that the story — the movie — can’t be fun, or even have lighter moments. But there are no lighter moments. No smiles, no laughs, just one grim scene after another. “Macbeth” with the Porter scene and a bunch of classic stage business is like “Duck Soup” compared to “Dark Knight Rises.”
This latest Batman movie emotionally reminds me of Ang Lee’s 2003 “Hulk,” which also wasn’t any fun. “Amazing Spider-Man” had a million problems and wasn’t as good a movie as either “Dark Knight Rises” or the first Raimi “Spider-Man,” but at least there were a couple of laughs. Sheesh.
The end wimps out because (and here’s the other big spoiler) after we see Batman nobly sacrifice himself by flying the nuclear bomb out over Gotham Bay to save the city, after we see the funeral where Alfred breaks down, after we see the dedication of the Batman statue in City Hall, and after we see the guy who is to become the next Batman find the Batcave and all the toys… that’s when the movie should end.
Or, if Nolan wanted to pull another “Inception” he could have ended on an ambiguous note.
But he didn’t. He gave Bruce Wayne a happy ending. It turns out that the auto-pilot did work and it was an unoccupied plane that blew up with the bomb. We learn this when Alfred, on holiday in Italy, sees Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle (Catwoman) sitting at another table in the same cafe (a piece of business that pays off an earlier passage).
Bruce and Selina, we understand, have figured it out. They’ve escaped Gotham, restarted their lives under different names, and they’ve moved on. Bruce has conquered his demons and is living a fully integrated life for the first time since his parents were gunned down in front of him when he was 10. Selina has escaped her demons, too. They’re happy. Alfred and Bruce make eye contact, nod at each other, and Alfred leaves the cafe happy that his foster son has found happiness.
Yuck. What a depressingly, unbelievably sunny epilogue to a dark, turbulent movie. It’s unconvincing both within the trilogy and for Batman in general, and it feels like the sort of thing a movie studio would cram down a director’s throat: “we can’t kill Batman… how will we sell all those t-shirts?”
Back to the “Inception” comparison, Nolan could have conveyed to the viewers that Alfred might be seeing Bruce and Selina in reality or that he might be having a daydream… that still would have been frustrating, but at least it would have been truer to the ambiguities of the character.
I’m not sorry I saw it, but I’m not itching to see it again, as I was with “Avengers.”
But here are things about the new HBO Aaron Sorkin drama “The Newsroom” that are annoying me today:
Why are Jim & Maggie the junior varsity version of Will and MacKenzie? What is that parallel buying the viewers? And why is it that men and women can’t be friends on so many TV shows? Could they just be interested in each other as people, without all the romantic tension?
Why are the names of all the characters so boring with the truly peculiar exception of Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn)? Will, Mac, Jim, Maggie, Don, Charlie… even the Indian guy is “Neal.” Why?
We never get a hint at Charlie Skinner’s motivation for disrupting things at the show. It feels like we’re setting up the character to reveal that he has terminal cancer at the end of Season 1, which would be a sentimental cop out.
Will Sorkin ever give Will McAvoy a worthy adversary either on the show or off? Any debate that he loses, or that even makes him break a sweat?