Cape Town at Sunrise
Table Mountain in the background. May 7, 2018 (Click the photo to enlarge.)
Author: vcrosbie
My Guilty Pleasure of Zatoichi
This post is for the benefit of my local friend Rob the Screenwriter whose knowledge of contemporary (say, after 1990) films is broad, but who hasn’t yet discovered most films from the 80 years earlier. Film Comment, the magazine of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, has long had a feature called ‘Guilty Pleasures’ in which famous people from the film industry list favorite films that they’re embarrassed or shy to admit that they like (such as Martin Scorsese love of ‘The Ten Commandments’). Although I’m not inside the film industry, merely work for a media school, my ‘guilty pleasure’ is Japan’s 26-film ‘Zatoichi’ series produced from 1962 to 1989. I’m sucker for extreme ‘high-concept’ films, movies predicated on so simple a concept that explaining it isn’t an ‘elevator pitch’ (i.e., something that can be said in no more than 30-seconds), but what I call a ‘stepladder pitch’. For example, when I heard that the concept of the film ‘John Wick’ was simply that a retired hitman wants revenges after thieves steal his car and kill his dog, I knew I wanted to see that film! Likewise, the ‘Zatoichi’ series, which is based upon the ‘high concept’ idea that the best swordsman in medieval Japan happened to be a blind masseuse. Yeah, you got that right! Except that concept is embellished a bit more than just the dozen words I mentioned. The ‘high concept’ is that the best swordsman in medieval Japan happened to be an itinerant blind masseuse who liked to drink and gamble and was always failing at love. Got it now? Zatoichi is an ‘easy come, easy go’, affable sort who just likes a good meal, good drink, good dice game, and good conversation, but woe be those who exceed his patience (as this video shows) by double-dealing or oppressing people! Based upon a character created by novelist Kan Shimozawa (born Umetani Matsutaro in 1892) who was inspired by an actual blind yakuza swordsman from centuries ago, and played for 27 years by the wonderful actor tor Shintaro Katsu (born Toshio Okumura in 1931), Zatoichi (‘low-ranking, blind person number one”) wanders medieval Japan, getting entrapped in intrigue arising from his good nature and love of sake and dice games, requiring him to right wrongs, save kids or kimono-clad damsels in distress, and fight samurai and assassins in the pay of corrupt aristocrats or corrupt bureaucrats. He never gets the girl, […]
18 Alumni Instructing 18 Students
This week I’m in New York City sitting-in on a 39-hour (nearly non-stop for five-business days) course in which 18 alumni of my New Media Management master’s degree program at Syracuse University will teach 18 of my current students in the program. The 18 instructors this year from among the program’s more than 200 alumni: Edward Alcide, graduated in ’13, Media Manager, 605; Dylan Beyer, ’12, Brand Manager, Whiskey Division, Proximo Spirits; Robert Bierman, ’16, SVP, CBInsights, Founder Tiny World Media Brittany Campbell, ’10, Global Business Development Partnerships, Google; Ashley Christiano, ’11, Senior Marketing Manager, Reuters TV; Nick Cicero, ’10, CEO, Delmondo; Bethany Devendorf, ’12, Sales Engineer, GeoEdge; Lisa Dodd, ’15, Strategic Marketing and Development Manager ARK Investment Management; Andrea Jacob, Syracuse ‘10, Manager Business Operations, Viacom; Rania Kouadjia, ’16, Digital Account Manager, Complex Networks; Jennifer Krist, ’15, SEO Analyst, 2U; Nathan McAlone, ’15, Entertainment Editor, Business Insider; Edward W. McLaughlin, ’12 Manager, Integrated Planning, UM Worldwide; Lisa Scheinman, ’12, Product Manager, SIMMONS Research; Tom Staudt, ’13, President, ARK ETF Trust / Chief Operating Officer ARK Investments (a +$4 billion fund); Meghavaty Suresh, ’15, Director, Consumer Strategy, Guardian News & Media; Xiaowei Wang, ’15, Manager, Automated Solution, PadSquad; Sydney Yarnell, ’14, Digital Marketing Analyst, Stony Brook University; Shuai (Suya) Wang, ’14, Principal & Co-Founder, WestOeast (Toronto); If you’re one of my many Facebook friends in the media business whose company seeks talented holders of postgraduate degrees in New Media Management (a fully-accredited dual New Media/Business master’s degree from a major university), you won’t find that talent from schools. Contact Steve Masiclat or me.
Along Longevity Hill
The Summer Palace, Beijing. March 2000.
Mont Saint Michelle
April, 1972.
My Family Ending 140 Years as Daily Newspaper Publishers
With nostalgia and some sadness, my family today announced that after 140 years, it’s leaving the newspaper business on May 1st. The daily Chronicle of Willimantic, Connecticut, founded by my step-great-great-grandfather John A. MacDonald in 1877, will be sold at the end of next month to Central Connecticut Communications, the owners of the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press, two other Connecticut dailies. Following John MacDonald, my great-grandfather George Augustus Bartlett, grandfather G. Donald Bartlett, mother Lucy Bartlett Crosbie, brother Kevin Bartlett Crosbie, and my sister-in-law Patrice Pernaselli Crosbie have in turn, generally after the death of their predecessor, published the paper every day since that week when John founded it — during which Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, Chief Crazy Horse was fighting the U.S. cavalry, and President Ulysses Grant was ordering home the last federal troops occupying the former Confederate states. We have been the oldest newspaper family in New England. My father Arthur W. Crosbie was the newspaper’s general manager during the middle of the 20th Century. I worked there during the 1970’s, and had grown up in a multi-generational household where the news business and substance of newspaper editorials were dinner table conversation. When I started in the business, we still melted lead to make that day’s printing type (a slug of which, pictured above, I’ve kept from those days) and the newspaper received international and national news via rolls of one-inch (2.5 cm) wide paper tape punched in teletype code. Fire and police radio monitors sat besides our TV. The daily deadlines made it both a satisfying and frustrating occupation. One hard to let go. Yet Facebook friends who have known me as a news industry futurists/consultant from 1996 onward (and as well since 2008 as Syracuse University’s postgraduate instructor in the New Media Business) will know from my professional and trade journal writings and speeches during the past 15 years that newspaper publishing, with quite rare exceptions, is now an unsustainable business due to epochal changes in how and why people consume news, entertainment, and other information. Times change. Business life cycles end. And we’re closing our 140-year story. #
The Best Brewery in America?
At 3:59 p.m. on a former farm 20 miles (32 km) into the woods of rural Massachusetts, 150 people, most between the ages of 21 and 40, and from at least a half dozen U.S. states, queue in the dirt swept by winter winds behind a large, green aluminium shed no more than a decade old. Its door opens for the day at 4 p.m., but only for four hours. By 5 p.m., the queue outside the opened door will be 350-people long. This is the Tree House Brewing Company of Monson, Massachusetts. Hundreds have traveled to this unlikely location because Tree House is arguably the best artisinal brewer in the United States. In BeerAdvocatecom‘s ranking by thousands of people of the top 250 beers brewed in the U.S., three of the top five ( indeed, seven of the top U.S. 20) are from this shed, including the top beer. Tree House doesn’t distribute its products to pubs, restaurants, or stores. Its beer can only be gotten here. Yet none of its beer can be drunk here because the brewery doesn’t have a pub license. The first few hundred people waiting in queue will be allowed to buy a limited number of cans of beers (I bought two six-packs for $43), although those towards the back of the queue might be too late. An hour after the door opens, one of three of that day’s fresh-brewed varieties has sold out. By 6 p.m., a second is out. And by 8 p.m., no matter what, the door closes for another day.