This Is Colossal - "A Technicolor Basketball Court Emerges in Paris"
Related,
KAWS LES Basketball Courts
Manhattan Pool by Minneapolis Artist Hot Tea
Monday, June 26, 2017
Parisian Basketball Court
This Is Colossal - "A Technicolor Basketball Court Emerges in Paris"
Related,
KAWS LES Basketball Courts
Manhattan Pool by Minneapolis Artist Hot Tea
Saturday, June 24, 2017
Robert Del Naja is Banksy?
Wikipedia - "Robert Del Naja"
Daily Mail - "Is THIS the real face of Banksy? Investigator plots appearances of artist’s graffiti around the world to create new theory that it’s really a group of artists led by Massive Attack star"
High Snobiety - "Did Goldie Just Confirm Banksy’s Identity: Robert Del Naja?"
The Telegraph - "Has Goldie fuelled theory Banksy is Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja with slip of the tongue?"
The Independent - "Who is Robert Del Naja? The Massive Attack singer everyone believes is Banksy"
The Independent - "8 signs Banksy is Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja"
Jimmy G. Buckets
Wall Street Journal - "The Minnesota Timberwolves Won the NBA Draft"
ESPN (Zach Lowe) - "What was behind the Butler trade, and what each team does now"
The Ringer - "Tom Thibodeau Is a Vengeful God, and He Just Extorted the Bulls in the Jimmy Butler Trade"
Zach Harper - "Timberwolves get their veteran star to guide the young guys"
The Foreigner
October 13, 2017
Screenplay by David Marconi
Directed by Martin Campbell
Starring Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan
Justice League
November 17, 2017
Screenplay by Chris Terrio
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa
Sunday, June 18, 2017
"Find something you love"
New York Times - "Chip Bergh on Setting a High Bar and Holding People Accountable"
Q. What were your early years like?
A. I grew up in the suburbs north of New York City. My life was a little bit like “Mad Men.” My dad worked for NBC, in sales. He was out the door at 6 every morning and would roll back home at 8 at night.
I played sports in high school, baseball mostly but also basketball. I still run and swim and do triathlons. Sports has contributed to me always wanting to be a winner. I’m competitive. Not a stab-you-in-the-back kind of competitiveness. I like a clean fight, but I always like to come out on top.
Q: How have your parents influenced your leadership style?
A: Parts of the story aren’t necessarily the best parts of my life. My dad was an alcoholic, and the family was somewhat dysfunctional until about the time I got into high school. One night, my dad came home very drunk, and my mom threatened to throw him out, change the locks and never let him back in the house again.
That day, my dad sobered up and never had a drink the rest of his life. As the oldest, I shouldered a lot of that family dysfunction.
My mother was a preschool teacher at the Presbyterian Church. She was diagnosed with cancer when I was in college, and the doctors told her she had six months to live. She lived for 20 more years. She was tough.
The fact that my family was a bit broken in my younger years is part of what drove me into sports, and team sports especially, where you’re surrounded by friends and constantly supported.
I put on a face that my family was normal and I was going to get good grades, persevere and be disciplined to push through, despite everything. I’m still very disciplined about how I manage my time.
Q: Early leadership lessons for you?
A: I was at Procter & Gamble, which was a promote-from-within company that placed a huge emphasis on the role of the manager to develop their people. In fact, it was part of your performance review.
My first hire was supersmart, but he really wasn’t performing over time, and I felt pressure to get this guy promoted. I basically carried him and got him promoted. But about four months later, he was gone for performance reasons.
The big lesson for me, and it stuck with me forever, is that you’ve got to be really transparent and straight with people, and if they’re not cutting it, you’ve got to tell them where they’re not cutting it. Hold the bar up high, and if it’s not a good fit, call it.
Being extremely transparent builds trust over time. I’m not a big fan of organizations where people backstab or talk behind others’ backs. So when I’ve led teams, it’s always been about how we work together to get the best results.
But politics can creep pretty quickly into any organization.
I’ve got some trusted people who will tell me if that stuff’s going on behind my back. If I see it, you’ve just got to squash it like a bug as soon as it happens and not tolerate it.
You have to be really clear about how we’re going to operate, and if you can’t play that way, then you should probably find another team to play on.
Q: It sounds as if you’re pretty comfortable having tough conversations.
A: It comes from a couple of things. The first is recognizing that people really do make the difference. Even winning teams are going to pare their rosters in the off-season. Where do we need different skills?
You have to look holistically at the people on your team and constantly look for ways to strengthen the team. I’ve never regretted moving too fast to let somebody go. I’ve had times when I’ve regretted waiting as long as I did to make a move.
That said, I also have some great turnaround stories where people were coached and showed they could raise their game. It’s a fine line on when you make the call, but rarely, looking back, did I move too early.
Q: What are some things you’ve done in terms of the culture?
A: When I first got here, I interviewed the top 60 people in the company, and I sent them questions in advance, including, What are the three things you think we have to change? What are the three things that we have to keep? What do you most want me to do? What are you most afraid I might do?
I had an hour scheduled for each of them, and by the end, I was really clear about the company’s DNA, and the values that were really important to everyone who works here.
Q: How do you hire?
A: When I’m hiring for the executive team, the first thing I’m looking for is leadership. I’ll ask them to tell me about a specific leadership challenge they had and how they worked through it.
Second, do they have a clear track record of success and winning? The best way to do that is to go through the résumé and talk about their biggest wins. I want to know if they’re naturally wired to be competitive. And are they intellectually curious? Would they rather ask questions or tell somebody what to do? How do they learn?
I’ll also ask them to tell me about their biggest failure and what they learned from it. What did they take away from it? How did it change them?
Q: What career and life advice do you give to new college grads?
A: Find something you love because you might be doing it for the rest of your life. Passion is worth 10 index points. If you really love what you’re doing, it’s not work.
And you’ve got to have more to your life than your career. You’ve got to have other things that drive you beyond just climbing the ladder and reaching your career aspiration. The rest of life is just as important.
Friday, June 16, 2017
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Purpose
The Ringer - "The Warriors Are Unstoppable, and They’re the Best Thing That Could’ve Happened to LeBron"
By Jonathan Tjarks
"In The Myth of Sisyphus, existentialist philosopher Albert Camus reimagines the ancient Greek tale of a man forced to push a boulder up a mountain for all eternity, only to see it roll to the bottom every time he reaches the summit. Camus argues his fate is a blessing, not a curse. Sisyphus has a purpose in life, no matter how absurd it may seem. LeBron has one too: “I think it’s just part of my calling to just go against teams in the midst of a dynasty,” he said before Game 4. A thousand years from now, no one will care who the greatest basketball player of all time was. Who was the greatest chariot racer in Roman history? The best Mayan to ever play pitz? All any of us can do is find some meaning in our striving, some goal to get us out of bed every morning and go to work. LeBron James has the Warriors. One must imagine him happy."
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Traveling with Diplo
GQ - "Travel Advice from Diplo, Who Takes 320 Flights a Year"
Q: Quick guessimation: many airplanes have you been on in your life?
Diplo: I’d probably say 320 a year. Multiply that by 10 years of my career... Maybe, like…5,000?
Q: What do you look for in a hotel?
Diplo: I’m pretty picky now. I like open spaces. And no carpet.
Q: What do you have against carpet?
Diplo: I don’t like smoking at all. If the hotel room has carpet you can smell the smoke from back when it was ok to smoke inside of buildings. I have a really sensitive sense of smell—any smells I smell right away. I also need a great gym and ideally, a swimming pool that you can swim laps in. But that’s really rare. One out of every 20 hotels have that probably.
Q: Best hotel on the planet?
Diplo: I really like the Soho House in Chicago. It’s kind of perfect. It has one of the dopest gyms ever, with everything you need. But I don’t really spend enough time there to take advantage of it. China has some awesome hotels, too. I don’t even want to leave when I’m at some of them. They have everything right there in the hotel.
Q: What’s your least favorite part of traveling so much?
Diplo: I don’t really get jetlag anymore. I just kind of work until I’m too tired to move. At this point, jetlag isn’t really a thing for me. It’s actually hard for me to go to sleep. Especially after a show, ya know? It’s hard to relax.
NYT's 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far
New York Times - "The 25Best Filmsof the21st Century So Far"
By Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott
1. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
"The film offers a profound and deeply unsettling vision of the country, but it’s also a testament to one of this nation’s sublime achievements: the movies. The story creeps alive in 1898 with Plainview digging in a hole like a primordial creature, a sequence that invokes the dawn-of-man opener in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” A brilliant two and a half hours later, “There Will Be Blood” closes around 1927 by making good on its ominous title (it’s a gusher!) and nodding at “Citizen Kane,” a masterwork that ushered in a new American cinematic age."
2. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)
3. Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood)
4. A Touch of Sin
5. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
6. Yi Yi
7. Inside Out (Pixar)
8. Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
9. Summer Hours
10. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
11. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Brothers)
12. Timbuktu
13. In Jackson Heights
14. L'Enfant
15. White Material
16. Munich (Steven Spielberg)
17. Three Times
18. The Gleaners and I
19. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
20. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
21. Wendy and Lucy
22. I'm Not There
23. Silent Light
24. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
25. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Black Panther
February 16, 2018
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Screenplay by Joe Robert Cole and Ryan Coogler
Starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Martin Freeman, Forest Whitaker, Andy Serkis
Thursday, June 8, 2017
Saturday, June 3, 2017
Leaving the Paris Agreement
The Atlantic - "Did Donald Trump Just Make the Planet Hotter?"
By Robinson Meyer
"The politics of climate change requires constantly comparing the very small and the very massive.
On the one hand, the carbon-dioxide molecule: three atoms, bound together by electromagnetism, that in sufficient quantities can reflect heat energy back to its source. On the other, the whole planet, our island in the sky, Earth: a medium-sized rock orbiting a medium-sized star, veiled in a thin layer of gas that determines when it rains, when it snows, whether it is a good home."
...
"If solar and wind companies in the United States falter—and if this country hunkers down into a fossil-fuel-dominated economy in the 2020s—then it may permanently deprive the American economy of a massive global opportunity. It could also undercut the U.S. claim to a century of global leadership on scientific research and technological development.
And perhaps most importantly, it will allow Germany and China to lead the world diplomatically on other issues, as well. At best, a Democratic president negotiating an international agreement which a Republican president then abandons will be interpreted as instability; at worst, it will throw other U.S. diplomatic commitments into doubt.
“Global statecraft relies on trust, reputation and credibility, which can be all too easily squandered,” has warned George P. Shultz, the U.S. secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. “If America fails to honor a global agreement that it helped forge, the repercussions will undercut our diplomatic priorities across the globe.”
Which is to say: Trump’s decision to withdraw from Paris matters insofar as it causes other systems—Indian participation in the treaty, the American solar and wind business, and U.S. diplomatic leadership in the world—to collapse. And it lets us glimpse what this spinning world will look like in the decades ahead: hotter, more erratic, politically fractured, and facing toward Beijing."
The Atlantic - "'America's Pledge': Can States and Cities Really Address Climate Change?"
By Robinson Meyer
Murder on the Orient Express
November 10, 2017
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Screenplay by Michael Green; Based on the Novel by Agatha Christie
Starring
Kenneth Branagh, Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi, Leslie Odom Jr., Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley
Thursday, June 1, 2017
Logan Lucky
August 18, 2017
Screenplay by Rebecca Blunt
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Seth MacFarlane, Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Katherine Waterston, Hilary Swank, Daniel Craig
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