fieldus

Ready-Made Rockefeller - NYTimes.com

The man with the eccentric accent, the tantalizing hints of family fortune and the impressive conversational knowledge of everything from physics to art to the stock market is actually Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who grew up in Germany, came to the United States as a teenage exchange student and never left, not even contacting his family back home for the last 20 years.

MyBusiness | Full Story

And instead of requiring his employees to spend hundreds of hours of their time developing products, Fried obsessively controls the scope of projects. One key to his “Getting Real” approach (see below) is scaling back the number of features on a product so that it isn’t bogged down in unnecessary bells and whistles. “If you have all the time and money in the world, you become Microsoft,” Fried says. “And now, even Microsoft can’t deliver new products: There’s no urgency.”

Back to the Basics: How to use your (lack of) size to your advantage

Jason Fried, creator of some of the industry’s most successful new Web applications, is the champion of an approach he calls “Getting Real.” While developed with software companies in mind, Fried’s principles can apply to any small business that strives to do more with less.

• Underdo your competition: Businesses get caught up in a cycle of adding more features and services. Great opportunities exist for those who create the same products, but with more simplicity and ease of use.
• Create services you would use: Few great product and service ideas come as a result of groupthink and committee meetings. Democracy is great, Fried says, but in the product-development arena, it rarely leads to great results. Great products are the result of solving problems for yourself—and then offering solutions to others.
• Fund yourself: The more money you have, the more you’ll waste, Fried says. He admits that outside funding is necessary for capital-intensive businesses, but for many service businesses—especially those utilizing technology or operating online—being able to turn your business concept into reality is getting less expensive by the day.
• Take half: List all the features you’d like on your product and cut them in half, Fried advises. Then, cut that list in half. Being driven by time and budget rather than by your dream list of features will result in a much more solid, workable product that won’t break the bank.
• Call off the meetings: Fried is not a fan of endless meetings or documents filled with specifications and details that no one reads. He’d prefer to focus on the essentials—and those don’t require a lot of meetings.

article 46 Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Claudio Magris

HUO: …A beautiful conclusion. One last question I always ask at the end of every interview: could you tell me about an unrealised project.

CM: It risks getting long, but let’s say I have always been fascinated by cinema. After secondary school I was unsure for a long time whether to go to Turin to study literature, as I did, or to Rome to the experimental centre of cinematography. I would have loved to narrate with things, with colours, with faces and with gestures. But then there are numerous other unrealised projects, many omissions. In catholic catechism, in the list of sins, where it says that we can sin with words, with thoughts, or with actions, it also says that we can sin by omission: and I believe this is the most serious sin. But this is not about projects, but about a lack of generosity or charity. In many cases what I have not done weights on me more than what I have.

Interesting - a different rationale for doing.

LRB · Benjamin Kunkel: Men in White

…there is, after all, just the one world or, for the individual, the one life. We also know that originality, in realist fiction, comes not only from capturing what’s historically new but also from correlating novelty with persistent inherited ways of acting, thinking and feeling. But the challenge posed to fictional representation by even the most ordinary contemporary life in New York City (or anywhere similar) may not yet have been met.

Anywhere similar… the London in David Szalay’s LONDON AND THE SOUTH EAST (see more @ amazon)? A small life unconnected to what Kunkel calls ‘finanicalisation’, MBA cosmopolitanism and technology, but certainly contemporary.

More?

PJ Harvey interview on the official website of writer, Laura Hird

“I read a wonderful quote by Leonard Cohen not long ago where he was talking about how sad songs mean so much to people because everybody suffers defeat in their lives in some way, whether it’s they didn’t get the job they wanted, or when you’re younger you imagine all these things about how your life’s going to turn out and ultimately that doesn’t happen to anybody, and so a sad song is incredibly touching because it connects us all to that sense of loss in some way.”

Leonard is of course an infamously early riser, operating in the pre-dawn hours when it seems as though there’s a semi permeable wall between the dream-state and lucidity. ‘White Chalk’ occupies a similarly liminal space: songs about the proximity between life and death, madness and inspiration, the conscious and the subconscious.

“That’s very interesting that you picked up on that. I’m not somebody like Leonard who rises at 4.30 to start writing at 6.30, but I do always find my most creative side in the morning. But also when I am writing, the nearest state of being I could compare it to is the dream state, when you’re coming out of the dream, and you wake. I’m a very deep dreamer, I mean I dream every night, two or three very vivid dreams which I can remember very easily, some of those dreams become songs actually. But when I’m writing just lyrically with a pen and paper or whether I’m at a piano or a guitar, the state of mind becomes such that it is very similar to that feeling of being between unconsciousness and consciousness, really no sense of being in the body at all, but just completely open to being informed.”

More information at the LA Times.

A discussion of John Updike’s ‘pointilist description’ of raindrops on a windscreen (see below) at Paper Cuts.

Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would
abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window
screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly
solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of
rain.

Pictures of Fritz Hardenberg (Novalis) and his Sophie. Inspired to re-unite them after reading THE BLUE FLOWER.

Sunday drama? Stop messing about | Review | The Observer
Kenneth Williams: Michael Sheen carries on his camping - People, News - The Independent