Thanks to streaming video websites such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel, I’m enjoying many of the best films in the world, not just those few available at my local ‘art house’ cinema. Last night’s was Kesari (‘Saffron’), this year’s Bollywood film about the 1897 Battle of Saragarhi, in which 21 Sikhs fighting for the British Raj held off 10,000 to 12,000 Afghan warrior attacking their small fort. As an American, I wasn’t aware of that battle, for which all 21 Sikhs were posthumously award the Indian Order of Merit, that nation’s equivalent of the British Victoria Cross or American Medal of Honor. Kesari, is one of this year’s top ten box office films in India, is reminiscent of other ‘hopelessly outnumbered’ war films, such as the 1964 film Zulu (starring Michael Caine in his first major role) about the 1879 Battle of Rorke’s Drift (150 British soldiers vs. 4,000 Zulu warriors) or the 1962 film The 300 Spartansor 2007 film 300, both of which were about the ancient Battle of Thermopylae (in reality a few thousand Spartans against 70,000 to 100,000 Persian warriors). Good war film, yet with a minor romantic subplot. (And being a Bollywood film, at some point in the 21 Sikhs must dance and sing!) Starring the Canadian Akshay Kumar, India’s highest-paid actor, the fourth highest-paid in the world. Available on Netflix, in Hindi with English-subtitles.
Although I’m scheduled in late August to start my eleventh consecutive academic year teaching New Media Business, a required course which I wrote and for which I am the sole instructor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication’s master’s degree in New Media Management curriculum at Syracuse University, I’m seeking either a supplemental or else full-time academic position closer to New York City area. Or in any U.S. or foreign major city having a hospital that can provide excellent outpatient care for my disabled wife.
When my wife became disabled in 2010, doctors at the three hospitals in Syracuse told her that the she required specialized care that only hospitals in New York City, Boston, or other larger cities could provide. So, she and I moved to the New York City suburbs, where we’d lived before each taking teaching positions at Syracuse, and I began commuting weekly back to Syracuse (a 500-mile/800 kilometer round-trip) to teach postgraduate New Media Management.
But I am now almost a decade older and have grown fatigued of that eight-hour weekly round-trip, even to job I love. I would like to teach either closer to where I now live or else move to a new major city with a shorter commute. I’m enthused to teach more graduate students in Syracuse this autumn; yet I think that, either this coming academic year or during the 2020-21 one, I should begin teaching elsewhere rather than continuing so overly-long weekly commute. Moreover, as my wife and I have ‘downsized’ our household as we’ve grown older (and because she is a dual citizen of the US and the EU) we’re open to the possibilities of living and teaching elsewhere in the U.S. or abroad. If you know of anything apropos, please let me know.
I’m shocked by news that Matthew Buckland, Africa’s leading expert about New Media, died today after a short battle with an apparently fast-acting cancer. Shocked because during May in Cape Town, when I last saw Matt, he apologized because his speech to a conference we were attending had been held later than scheduled and he couldn’t have lunch together because he was entered in a competitive bike race elsewhere in the Western Cape that afternoon. So, I walked him to his car, his off-road bicycle mounted atop its roof, and he went off, strong, determined, as he always was. That’s how I’ll ever remember him.
As I recollect, I first met him during 2007 at the IFRA ‘Beyond the Printed Word’ newspaper New Media conference which was held in suburban Dublin that year. He was attending it with his fellow South African friends and competitors Elan Lohmann and Colin Daniels who (along with Vincent Maher and Lukanyo Mnyanda) I sometime light-heartedly refer to as the ‘Rhodes Mafia’. Each of them were journalism students at South Africa’s Rhodes University who were the first generation of their countrymen to be born ‘digital natives’; each becoming a leader with global renown for their continent’s unique forms of New Media.
In Matt’s case, that involved a few years after graduation working as a web producer at the BBC in London, a job which soon led to seven years working as the general manager for online operations at the Mail & Guardian in Johannesburg, post-apartheid South Africa’s major weekly newspaper. After that, he headed the New Media lab for Naspers, South Africa’s major media company, for whom he became general manager of Publishing and Social Media at age 36.
In 2010, he founded and became managing director of Creative Spark, a +70-person digital marketing agency that he last year sold to the London-based M&C Saatchi PLC global advertising & marketing agency for a reported 50 million rand (US$3.5 million). Since then, he’s been entrepreneur-in-residence for the global Media Development Investment Fund (disclosure: one of my former clients) where one of his roles has been to teach online publishing and online marketing to media in poor countries or those arising from repressive governments.
Matthew Buckland had a rare combination of knowledge, drive, and integrity. My relationship with him during the past dozen years had gone from mentoring to instead referring my former graduate students to him (“I’ll write you a letter of introduction to Matt Buckland. He knows far more about many of these subjects than I do”.) To hear that he’s been cut down by a fast-acting cancer at age 45 is not only a loss to those who practice New Media worldwide, but a catastrophe for his wife Brigit and their two young daughters! As recently as mid-March, Matt had been teaching workshops in Ecuador and vacationing with his wife in Portugal. Everyone who knew him will miss him.
Singapore Airlines Flight #21 (SQ21) at 16,500 feet (5,030 m) flying 465 (750 kph) mph over Stamford, Connecticut, 11 minutes into its 18-hour flight from New York City’s Newark International Airport to Singapore’s Changi International Airport, Wednesday, March 6, 2019. Photographed from sea level, using a Sony A77 camera equipped with a Rokkor f/8 500mm with a 1.5X extender, 125th of a second shutter speed at aperature priority, ISO 800.
[If the color photo that heads this post doesn’t appear on you smartphone, click here to view it.]
Each morning at approximately 10:15 a.m. New York time (15:15 UTC), I can gaze upwards from my home a watch a jet airliner pass three miles over me and heading northeast. While that’s not unusual because I live 30 miles (48 kilometers), 40 miles (63 km), and 50 miles (96 km) respectively from the New York City area’s LaGuardia, John F. Kennedy (JFK), and Newark Liberty airports, this daily airliner is special. It’s approximately six minutes into the world’s longest non-stop airliner flight.
Even without binoculars, I can see the stylized gold dragon against a blue background on the tail of this mostly otherwise white aircraft: a new, twin-engine Airbus a350-900 ULR (Ultra Long Range) model. It’s Singapore Airlines’ legendary Flight SQ21 and will be aloft some 18-hour before it completes its 9,534 mile non-stop flight from Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR). Singapore Airlines flew this route, setting the all-time record for a scheduled jet airline flight, from 2004 to 2013, then relaunched SQ21 this past October. (By the way, Cable News Network covered the relaunch of the route as if no airliner had ever flown that far before. Didn’t anybody at CNN know that Singapore Airlines had flown it from 2004 to 2013?)
The earlier version of SQ21 used a long-range version of the four-engine Airbus a340 aircraft and carried a mix of coach and business class passengers. However, the route perennially lost money because these a350s had to be fitted with fewer than normal seats in coach due to the extra weight of the fuel needed to fly that long. By 2010, Singapore Airways had converted the a350s on this route to carry only 100 business class seats. Nonetheless, that wasn’t economical.
The airline revived the route after Airbus Industries designed for it this special model of the new a350, which can carry both coach and business class while using less fuel than the a340s did. The a340 versions of SQ21 usually headed due north from New York City, flying over the North Pole, then south across Siberia, China, and Southeast Asia to Singapore. Depending upon the jet stream in the northern hemisphere, the a350 new versions of this flight will use that same route or follow a much more divergent route: using the jet stream to give the aircraft a tailwind throughout much, if not most, of this extremely long flight. For example, today’s a350 will fly from New York, across the Atlantic to Europe, then across the Middle East to the Arabian Sea, then across India and the Bay of Bengal, and south down Malaysia to Singapore. When I see it pass overhead at 10:15 a.m., I know it will be over London when my clock says 3:20 p.m., near Istanbul around 6:00 p.m., Tehran at 8:30 p.m., Mumbai at midnight, and land in Singapore at 5:00 a.m. the next morning according to my New York watch.
While SQ21 is the world’s longest schedule airline flight by duration, its return leg (at least from New York perspective) Flight SQ22 is the world’s longest scheduled airline flight by distance. Using the same a350 ULR aircrafts, it flies 10, 357 statute miles (16,600 km) in 17 hours and 45 minutes non-stop from Singapore’s Changi Airport back to Newark Liberty Airport. SQ22 heads from Singapore northeast across the South China Sea along the coasts of China, Japan, and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, turns eastward across the Bering Sea, then gradually southeast across Alaska and Canada and upstate New York before landing at Newark. In other words, the combination of SQ21 and SQ22 travels around the planet in little less the 36 hours.
Because most of the world’s airline passengers fly coach (economy) class and many on discount airlines, they’d think that a 17 to 18 hours non-stop flight would be torture. Not at all! For four of the past ten years Singapore Airlines has been ranked the Number One among the 334 airline in the world by Skytrax in its poll of 20 million air travelers; and during the past 20 years, Singapore Airlines has never been ranked less than fourth in the world among those 334 airlines. Its superb cabin service and comparably huge seats endear it to frequent travelers. I’ve been fortunate to have flown SQ21 & 22 thrice between 2006 and 2010. A few days before those flights, the airline contact me and ask if I’d like to select ahead of time from a menu my many meals during the two 17-18 flights. How many other airlines offer lobster thermidor with silverware?
I look forward to flying SQ21 and SQ22 again. I hope you have an opportunity to fly it, too.
I’d only 45 minutes to visit la Basilica de Sagrada Familia after speaking at conference in Barcelona on the afternoon of September 14, 2018. It had been 20 years since I’d seen the world’s most audacious church, which back then hadn’t yet a roof. My wife was with me, there were hundreds of tourists there, and I’d carried with me a single camera (a Sony a77 mirrorless DSLR) and two lenses (a Sony-Zeiss 24-70mm and a Sigma 8-16mm). Yet the warm, angular light was nearly a late summer sunset, and those two lenses are nearly perfect for photographing architecture of such scale. I knew that I’d have just enough time to do justice to the colors of this wondrous building still under construction. What do you think? (Click here to see the individual photos.)
[Viewing this on a smartphone? If you don’t see the video referenced, here is its hyperlink: https://youtu.be/jGc-K7giqKM ]
Finally, here’s a third video comparing the comic book superhero action movies of today against action movies of the past. Again, I’m using Akira Kurosaw films the 1950s to contrast with current movies.
[Viewing this on a smartphone? If you don’t see the video referenced, here is its hyperlink: https://youtu.be/jZSRxp-dJ-Q ]
Here’s a second video comparing the comic book superhero action movies of today against action movies of the past. Again, I’m using Japanese films from the 1950s. In this case, films from director Akira Kurosawa. Hear how the narrator of this video, a different narrator and writer than from my last example , contrasts action films of today versus then.
[Viewing this on a smartphone? If you don’t see the video referenced, here is its hyperlink: https://youtu.be/jZSRxp-dJ-Q ]
No, sorry! My young friends, the films about Marvel or DC comic book superheroes or the past five ‘Star Wars’ films aren’t — unlike what some of my under age-30 (or even some under age-40) friends tell — me “the greatest action movies ever made!” I’ve given up watching those films, with their leaden plots, chaotic actions sequences, and think characterizations. And because approximately eight out of the ten top box office hits last year were sequels of those films, this means I no longer go to the cinema as much as I had for decades. You want great actions films, go online and look to the past.
Here is the first of three blog posts I’m posting that compare today’s comic book superhero or ‘Star Wars’ films with better actions films of the past. Because the ‘Star Wars’ films themselves are based upon 1950’s Japanese samurai films (known as Jidaigeki films in Japanese, a term borrowed in ‘Star Wars’ as “Jedi”), let’s start there. Compare how the master director Akira Kurosawa directed action in Seven Samurai (1954), considered by most serious critics as the best action film ever made. The narrator of the YouTube video above is himself a little dull, but his points aren’t when comparing the direction of today’s comic book superhero or ‘Star Wars’ films with that of this Japanese classic action film.
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, the cash, or the thanks that he deserves. But he’s a good masseuse and, unknown by anyone except those who know him on sight, the most lethal man with a katana sword in the world. The Wikipedia page about ‘Zatoichi’ will give you more details. The ‘James Bond’ film series recently exceeded the number of ‘Zatoichi’ films. However, besides the 26 films, there are also an even 100 later TV episodes of ‘Zatoichi’ starring Katsu. Imagine if the same actor had played Bond in every film plus 100 episodes. That’s longevity! And Katsu would later go onto also star in the three ‘Hanzo the Razor’ film series.
Several of the ‘Zatoichi’ films can be viewed for free on YouTube. However, the entire 26-film series is now part of the famed Criterion Collection of great films (a ha! ‘Zatoichi’ is no longer a ‘guilty’ pleasure), which sells the series in DVD format, and the series is available online with a subscription to FilmStruck.
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.
