#interviewer: ‘what’s neil’s worst quality?’ | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

samnyangie · 3 years ago

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Since people liked rsl interview on dps, I’d like to share one of my favourite interview by him. I think it’s one of those rare interview where he wasn’t joking around that much but discuss acting quite seriously haha

So enjoy:DD

(Credit)

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1990 New York Times

Young Actor's Life Has the Makings of a Movie

by Lynn Mautner

New York Times

May 20, 1990

It would make a good movie. A 15-year-old sophomore at Ridgewood High School is playing the Artful Dodger in the musical ''Oliver'' with the school's theater group, New Players, when he is discovered by a casting agency secretary and whisked off to Broadway and the movies.

That's exactly what happened to Robert Sean Leonard, now 21, and a star of the 1989 film ''Dead Poets Society,'' which received an Oscar for best original screenplay.

''My mother took me to New Players' summer performances when I was 10,'' he said, ''and I loved the camaraderie of people, rehearsing and singing. I began spending more time there, painting signs and moving furniture, and soon became an element of the company, with small roles in 'The Miracle Worker,' 'Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,' 'Barnum.' ''

Starting as an understudy for three roles at the New York Public Theater (he never got on stage), Mr. Leonard amassed credits that include ''The Beach House'' with George Grizzard for the Circle Repertory Theater, television movies, ''Brighton Beach Memoirs'' and ''Breaking the Code'' on Broadway, plays at the West Bank Cafe on 42d Street and the recent ''When She Danced'' at Playwrights Horizons.

He has just completed a part as Paul Newman's and Joanne Woodward's son in the movie ''Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,'' filmed in Kansas City, to be released in August. ''I age from a 15-year-old Eagle Scout to 22, coming home from World War II with a mustache,'' Mr. Leonard said.

Mr. Leonard, who received a general equivalency diploma when he was 17, lives in New York City and attends Fordham University between performances. Soon to return from the Cannes Film Festival with his fellow actors in ''Dead Poets,'' he is next scheduled to go into rehearsal for the film ''Married to It,'' a romantic comedy.

Q. Do you remember when you decided on an acting career?

A. I never decided to pursue an acting career. It just has happened. I still think it's going to stop and I'll have to get a real job soon, but I'm afraid to question it because if I do, it will disappear.

Q. How do you think your theater experience in high school has helped you?

A. It was a great teaching experience that prepared me in a lot of ways. We did 10 shows in 10 weeks, so there was no time to think about method. It was running for the stage, hoping you'll make it in time for your entrance. In Steven Soderbergh's new book of his diaries when directing the film ''Sex, Lies and Videotape,'' he said that on a film set there should always be a chain of command, but never a chain of respect.

At New Players, those three to four years, everyone was given the same respect. You had to, because you'd be the lead one week and painting sets the next. That's a luxury that is not available in New York, unfortunately, because of the unions. You're an actor and that's it.

Q. Have you taken any acting lessons? Do you recommend them for others?

A. I've taken two classes - a video acting class to help me get from stage to film, with Marty Winkler, currently my manager, and an acting class at H. B. Studios.

Acting classes are tricky. It's like asking someone in therapy if they'd recommend going to a psychiatrist. For some people it's great; for some it's not necessary; for some it's harmful. The best way to learn acting is just to do it.

There's a danger to the classroom, because it's safe, and you can get addicted to it. The clique of people are there, and you might tend to remain with them and never go out on your own. So it can give you the safety net which can eventually strip away your courage to go out and really try. On the other hand, you can get a wonderful teacher who brings out the best in you and gives you the courage to go out and dazzle everybody.

Q. You went from high school to Off Broadway. What were your feelings and fears during your first professional performance?

A. The first time I performed in New York - in ''Sally's Gone, She Left Her Name'' - I played Michael Learned's son. I think I was too young. I wasn't even aware of reasons to be afraid. I was just there for the fun of it. Fresh out of New Players, I knew it to be fun. I've never worried about lines. In ''Brighton Beach'' I should have been tense, because it was Broadway. I was nervous, but not racked - more excited.

Q. What do you enjoy most about acting?

A. The people, and opportunities to learn, to travel, both physically and emotionally. To look at people other than myself and try to figure out what makes them tick.

Olivier said you never play a villain; you play a man considered to be a villain; that you have to justify everything he does first; you have to know that what you are doing is right and find a way to make it right - even murder.

I just played a conceited piano player in ''When She Danced,'' and I had to figure out what would make a person be conceited and make that O.K. with me. I learned where conceit comes from - from confidence and talent.

Worst thing you can do is play someone and judge him at the same time, saying: ''Here I am. I am so conceited.'' First you have to understand why you're that way so that people interpret you as conceited.

Q. Do you consider acting an escape?

A. I don't look at performing as escaping, as really becoming another person and leaving my problems for two hours, so I don't have to deal with me, because I don't become another person. I work, so that when I am working, in a way it is me at my best. I'm not leaving myself; in fact, I'm more focused on myself than ever. I don't become that person, but I fully understand him, fully explore him, as to why he does what he does and justify it.

You can't play a fool to play Bottom, who's the opposite of fool in Shakespeare's ''Midsummer Night's Dream.'' What makes people fools is that they're completely confident in what they're doing. They don't think they're fools; they think they're right on track, which makes them so funny and makes them look like fools.

Q. Who influenced you the most?

A. I have not had one person or experience that stands out that's a turning point. Every step in acting relies heavily on the one before. Everything I've learned colors everything I have known before, and suddenly changes it.

I have learned a little bit from everyone I have known, whether about acting itself, or living and working as an actor. Like a good detective novel, for every clue that is solved, two more appear. Every time I learn something, it opens two other doors. In ''Dead Poets,'' the rooftop scene, where I throw the desk set off, was improvised. Are instincts then a part of acting?

Q. Are there desirable qualities to have as an actor?

A. Concentration, perseverence, lack of inhibitions. There's no room for self-consciousness on stage. Also, there is an element in acting that is not fair. Whatever talent is, part of it can be learned and part can't. There are people that audiences like to watch or don't. In Soderbergh's book, he says that talent plus perseverance will equal luck. But I don't know what talent is; it is beyond definition.

Q. Do you learn by watching other films and plays? Your own? Other people?

A. Sometimes I watch for directing; sometimes for performing. There are lines in ''Dead Poets'' I would do differently, if given the chance. For example, Todd said: ''You talk and people listen to you, Neil. I am not like that.'' I answer, ''Don't you think you could be?'' I think I could have made it clearer. I don't get much from observing strangers, because although I see what they do, I don't know where they're coming from.

Q. What are the main differences between stage and film work?

A. I feel that as an actor, you should start in theater, to learn the process of creating a character, in rehearsal. Film is an arena for people who already know that, because on the set they expect you to know the character inside out.

Film work is harder, because this tangible part has to happen in your head before filming takes place. And it's more solitary. You create your character alone, without the give-and-take of other actors.

Q. What tips would you give young, aspiring actors?

A. Read plays aloud with friends at home; do any work you can do in high school. Hang out with jocks, leatherheads, and see what makes them work. Don't be a theater rat and only talk to actors. Read a lot. You really have to feel it; really want it; then take it. Don't take no for an answer. Seize the day.

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There’s another one I really want to share as well, I’ll bring it with me at some point:))

#robert sean leonard #rsl #theatre #acting #interview #I love how he ended the interview with seize the day

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agir1ukn0w · 6 years ago

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My favorite parts from the SFX Good Omens issue:

“Perhaps surprisingly, our destination is the Garden of Eden...Here in the midst of the spectacular Atlantis Dunes and the worst drought in Cape Town’s history, is a little oasis of green that will be expanded later by the magic of CGI. This is where Adam and Eve eat (possibly) the most important apple in human civilization, and where angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and serpent/demon Crowley (David Tennant) begin an unlikely millennia-spanning friendship as the representatives of their respective factions on Earth.” - Richard Edwards, SFX

“23 September 2010 was a red letter day in the history of Good Omens...After many years of trying to get the book made into a movie - most notably with Terry Gilliam at the helm - it was on this day, in a Cardiff restaurant, that Pratchett and Gaiman agreed that TV might have a better home for their story. ‘The Terry Gilliam one should have happened,’ recalls Gaiman...‘They had a really good script. Johnny Depp was going to play Crowley and Robin Williams was going to play Aziraphale, Madame Tracy and Hastur...[But] this was February 2002 - 9/11 had only just happened. He went around and said that it’s a funny film about the end of the world, and people said, “Go away,” and it died.’” - Richard Edwards, SFX

“Indeed, when streaming giants are throwing seemingly infinite quantities of cash at TV shows, we’re at a point where the only limitations to what goes up on screen is imagination. That’s exciting in many ways, but when you’re adapting a novel as beloved as Good Omens, it brings its own unique set of challenges. Just think about all those fans who feel like they know stuffy bookshop owner Aziraphale and his not-quite-as-cool-as-he-thinks BFF Crowley better than anyone else - and feel any deviation from the pictures in their mind is an aberration.” - Richard Edwards, SFX

“‘Good Omens absolutely belongs to the world,’ admits Gaiman. ‘Terry and I wrote a book that was 100,000 words, and that’s probably not more than 1% of the wordage of the total fan-fiction generated about these characters - even excluding the pornography. And I think that’s great. I love that. I’m pretty proud. When we started shooting, I did a post on Tumblr, and said, “Look, your head canon is your head canon. Nobody’s trying to fuck with that. We’re not coming in and saying ‘Our Crowley and Aziraphale is your Crowley and Aziraphale.’ You can still have a platonic Hamlet in your head after seeing five different Hamlets, with thin Hamlets and fat Hamlets and black Hamlets and white Hamlets and old Hamlets and young Hamlets. Your Hamlet can still be your Hamlet.” And that’s how I feel about Crowley and Aziraphale. We are lucky to have Michael Sheen and David Tennant,’ Gaiman adds, ‘the finest Welsh actor of his generation, and the finest Scottish actor of his generation. Watching them acting is like a fucking masterclass. I write something that I think is pretty good dialogue. I hand it to Michael and David, and it becomes better.’” - Richard Edwards, SFX

“Gaiman explains, ‘When I write a scene, the first thing I’m going to do is go to the book, and go, “Okay, what did we do? What are the great lines I need to keep in here? What’s key? What matters?” That’s occasionally been really weird - there’s at least one place where I found a huge goof in the book that I’m planning to quietly correct on future editions, without ever pointing it out to anybody, including you in this interview! You find that kind of thing when you get that deep into it. So there are a few jokes that I lost, where I went, “This is a thing of its time.” Or there were some lines that I looked at and went, “You wouldn’t let this line go through now. Therefore I feel no compunction in losing it.” And then there are other places where you go, “The book is our bible!”’” - Richard Edwards, SFX

“Neil Gaiman had never been a show runner before Good Omens and he says he’s unlikely to be one again. ‘I’m very much looking forward to retiring from show running,’ he admits. ‘I have promised my wife that I will go back to being the novelist that she married. And I look forward to that.’...‘I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve made,’ Gaiman adds. ‘Some bits are better than I could ever have dreamed. So it’s probably been worth it. On the other hand, I also look back at 20 months of not writing, no family life and all these ridiculously long work days, and I go, “Would I have done this for anything other than a promise to Terry to make it?” I don’t know. I might not have done this. It’s been work, you know? I occasionally remind myself that one reason I love being a writer was that you don’t have to get up too early in the morning!’” - Richard Edwards, SFX

“On paper Crowley’s the bad guy because he’s a demon. Do you see him that way? I don’t really see him as a villain. He would very much identify as a villain because that’s the team that he works for, and that’s what he’s supposed to be doing. And yet he keeps confounding that, because actually I think what’s the great charm of Crowley and Aziraphale is that they are not very binary. And that’s their great tragedy: over the thousands of years they’ve lived on Earth, they’ve sort of slipped from their primary mission. That’s, of course, what makes them such good friends. Although they wouldn’t even admit to being friends, and that’s what makes them the yin and yang for each other. Aziraphale is actually a bit of a bastard, and Crowley is quite kind-hearted at the end of the day. There are bigger villains in the piece than Crowley, and some of them are supposed to be the good guys!” - Richard Edwards Q&A with David Tennant, SFX

“What’s it like playing in a world of very personal beliefs and philosophies while also looking at these characters from a human point of view? Crowley’s very much within the infrastructure of Hell. Part of what I think is glorious about the way Neil sets these characters is, it’s supernatural but at the same time, it’s like an episode of The Office with the politics and the mundanities and the small-mindedness of the characters. From an acting point of view, that’s very easy to key into. Crowley is very much about his corner of existence, and protecting it.” - Richard Edwards Q&A with David Tennant, SFX

“How did you tap into Aziraphale’s personality? I decided that he’s someone who has an appreciation of craft and quality. Because he’s been around for so long, that’s something that he really responds to. Whereas Crowley just manifests his clothes, and is very much of the moment. Aziraphale has worn items of clothing over the centuries that he likes. And then if he’s an angel, and therefore a being of love, how does that affect his relationship with Crowley, someone who supposedly on the opposite team, but who he can’t do anything but love? What are the specifics of that in terms of how he relates to Crowley? You start to develop a very real person with very real qualities.” - Richard Edwards Q&A with Michael Sheen, SFX

“Did you approach playing Aziraphale and Crowley as if they were a kind of odd couple? I can’t imagine Aziraphale without Crowley. More than anything I’ve ever done, I can’t think about this character on his own - he only exists with Crowley. So from the very beginning, when we sat down at the table read, my Aziraphale was totally shaped by what David was doing as Crowley, and vice versa.” - Richard Edwards Q&A with Michael Sheen, SFX

“Does Aziraphale want to be Crowley a little bit? I think there are things about Crowley that he really admires and covets, but I don’t think that he wants to be Crowley. I think he just loves Crowley. He would never admit that, and Crowley would never admit that about Aziraphale. He admires certain qualities about him - he would like to be a bit more rock ’n’ roll, but he knows that it doesn’t really suit him. He also really enjoys being Aziraphale, I think.” - Richard Edwards Q&A with Michael Sheen, SFX

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itwasanangryinch · 6 years ago

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3...2...1... Happy New Year!!

For the first (?) time, I’m actually going to make and complete a New Years meme, because fuck it, I had a good year. I’m also going to put much shorter answers for last year since I had wanted to do this then, but then... didn’t.

Favourite new (to me) band: Against Me! 5 favourite songs:

The Ocean

White Crosses

True Trans Soul Rebel

I Was a Teenage Anarchist

Norse Truth

I’ve known about Against Me! since lead singer Laura Jane Grace since she came out as trans in 2012 with her Rolling Stone profile, but I hadn’t heard any of their songs until a couple of years ago. This year was the first year I really got into her music (both here and with The Devouring Mothers) after reading her biography Tranny while on vacation in Melbourne.

Runner up: Miss Guy and the Toilet Boys, seen for the first time at Wigstock 2.Ho

2017′s answer: Ataru Nakamura, the very, very talented trans performer who played Yitzhak to JCM’s Hedwig in Japan (and because of the staging, also played Hedwig for the non-singing part of the script.)

Favourite new (to me) city: Melbourne, Australia.

If you had asked me last year, my answer would have been Tokyo, Japan and this year’s is my favourite for much the same reasons: Melbourne is very easy to get around, very fun to walk around, and I got to see the wonderful John Cameron Mitchell perform there.

Melbourne is absolutely beautiful with so many shops to explore and a free (within the few square blocks I mostly kept to) public transport system.

Runner up: Sydney, Australia. Very similar to Melbourne and might have been the favourite if I had been able to stay there longer, but.... schedules.

2017′s answer: Toyko, Japan. For the reasons listed above. I could actually see myself moving to Tokyo at some point. Not right now, but possibly eventually.

Favourite concert: John Cameron Mitchell: The Origin of Love, Brisbane

This year I have seen this concert seven times in addition to one very abridged show in Portland, Oregon to go along with a double header of Hedwig and How to Talk to Girls at Parties.

On this particular date, the band gelled really well; John was in a great mood, great energy; the crowd was incredible..... Everything just... Worked. (Even tho this was the concert I had the least amount of interaction with John afterwards, lol.)

Definitely looking forward to seeing where John takes the performances for his upcoming stateside tour and at a later, yet to be announced, time in Japan.

Runner ups: (aside from the rest of the OoL tour), Rocky Horror with Mason Alexander Park, Taboo 15 (with Mason), Alice Cooper, and Wigstock 2.Ho where I finally got to see NPH performing as Hedwig.

2017′s answer: Hedwig and the Angry Inch: October 14th, evening. Tokyo, Japan.

In my estimation, this was the best of all of the Hedwig concerts. By this point, everyone had performed this in front of an audience twice before and the show from beginning to end gelled really well. Again, there was an incredible energy between the band and the two lead performers and the audiences for all of the Japan shows were great. From beginning to end, this one was the best.

From about the Tommy monologue til the end, the final Tokyo show (Oct. 15th) was the best because there was this crackling, alive, angry energy that had an almost dangerous feeling to Exquisite Corpse and was the only show (surprisingly!!) where I cried at the delivery of my favourite line “Then love the front of me.” On that show, with the exception of Exquisite Corpse, I cried from that line til John started the encore song, ‘The End of Love’ and I had only stopped there because I had completely forgotten he was doing an encore song.

Favourite movie: Black Panther

I’ve been waiting literal years for this movie to be made and there was not one thing to be disappointed in in its final rendering in my opinion. I realize that unlike a large portion of the audience, this movie was very much not reflective of my experiences and at no point would I claim to be represented by it as anything other than a nerd and a comic book fan.

Being a fan of the Black Panther for years has meant having tone deaf comic lines, sidelined animated stories, and much less content, merch, and even cartoon adaptation than some of his paler counterparts. So to see a film that was technically and narratively perfect being rendered so beautifully and taking the box office for many, many weeks was a wonderful way to start this year.

Runners up: Deadpool 2, Bad Samaratian, and does How to Talk to Girls at Parties even count for this year if I saw it last year in Japan??

2017′s answer: a strong tie between Transpotting 2 and HtTtGaP. T2 because it was so much better than I could have ever hoped it to be. It married themes and footage from the first film perfectly to the characters’ lives 20 years on. It gave me hope for an eventual Hedwig sequel in terms of quality because based on interviews, they share a similar tone in terms of ageing characters. Plus Danny Boyle’s cinematography was truly beautiful with the use of shadows, call-backs, foreshadowing.... A true equal to the most iconic of Scottish films.

HtTtGaP because well.... John Cameron Mitchell’s direction mixed with an alien invasion set against punk rock and the Queen’s jubilee? How could I not love it? To me, it’s a strong second to Hedwig in terms of quality and netted my absolute favourite review via the BBC (‘This is one of the worst films ever made’, trust me Beeb reviewer, if that were true, cinema would be a far more enjoyable art form.)

Favourite vacation: Australia

Long story short: I met my favourite actor five times. It’s very rare in this life that you can actually tell an artist who influenced your life in a very meaningful way just how much their art and they as a person mean to you. This year, after seeing JCM perform live eight times and on video, no lie, thousands of times, I had the chance to actually do this. And unlike how I was worried about for the past three years, I wasn’t actually nervous to talk to him at all. Part of that is that he is a very easy person to feel at ease with, very comforting presence.... And part of it was that during the first Australian show I went to where I’m dressed as the very first Squeezebox Hedwig, John lay on top of me as part of the final number. How could I be scared to talk to him after that introduction??

Runners up: going to see Taboo 15 in New York with my best friend and touring the David Bowie Is exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (March), going to see Wigstock with Risa. Technically, I ditched work to be able to go, but.... 10/10, I would do it again. I saw a lot of amazing performers for the first time, had a chance to chat with Mason again, and saw the tour de force that is Neil Patrick Harris as Hedwig and Lena Hall as Yitzhak.

Hopefully next year, the Hedwig section will be able to be longer. (Or maybe Yitz will perform by himself. Or multiple Hedwigs. Or just the entire Hedwig script delivered at the end of a seven hour drag festival pre-show.)

2017′s answer: Hedwig in Japan. Not only did I get to meet my friend @miyacantdecide for the first time in person, I was able to see the wonder that is JCM as Hedwig live. Even when he’s not delivering the script, his presence as Hedwig is truly something else. And having seen him perform as himself (but in a version of her makeup) this year, I can honestly say that She has a completely different stage presence to Him and how incredible of an actor to be able to deliver such radically different interpretations of the same material and songs??

Outside of Hedwig, I can honestly say that I came back from Japan a changed person. Better in so many ways than I was a year previous. Almost completely made whole again after past traumas (and completed a year later on a different trip.)

2017′s runner up: seeing RENT 20 live. I had a blast hanging out with my mother most of the days and the RENT 20 cast? Holy shit. What talents. Cried from ‘I’ll Cover You (Reprise)’ til the end of ‘Finale B’. Just goes to show: it doesn’t matter if the show’s set in December and it’s hot As Fuck outside if you have a talented cast bundled up in sweaters for 75% of the script.

Favourite album: Golden by Kylie

Not only does pop’s most talented princess talk about her recent breakup with Joshua Sause (sp?), there’s themes of her ageing as this year our princess turned 50. While I agree with reviewers that this isn’t her best musically or vocally, I find myself replaying this one over and over on my stereo and headphones more than almost any other album this year. Favourite song: a toss up between Shelby ‘68 and Low Blow.

2017′s answer: Pollinator by Blondie. It had been two years since the release of 2014′s Ghost of Download, but unlike Ghost’s offerings that went largely unnoticed by me at the time, every single from Pollinator got me more and more hyped not only because of the excellent music evident on songs such as Fun, Long Time, and Doom or Destiny, but collaborations with artists such as Raja (on the video for Fun) and Joan Jett (the aforementioned Doom or Destiny), the honey-thick entrancing song Fragments, and the wonderful Love Line.

This year has been weirder, queerer, and more wonderful than any year yet on record. I’ve been to a number of technically-but-not-really drag shows, revisited some of my favourite artists in concert, met two of my favourite Hedwigs, and saw four total Heds perform.... I’ve read and learned more about the queer experience that not only deepened my understanding of my larger community, but of my own experiences and how they fit within the community. I’ve become more confident being out to coworkers and customers at my job....

I had the pleasure of meeting two of my close friends @hedwig-in-a-jukebox and @fdelopera in person (with plans to meet up again early-2019) as well as making some new friends.

Here’s to an even better 2019! Onwards and upwards.

#about me #new years meme #((let's see if I remember to complete this before it posts))#((cos I'm writing this when the year's not even 75% of the way done!))

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talabib · 3 years ago

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Do You Know What it takes to be a CEO?

CEOs are often portrayed as highly intelligent people who wear fancy suits and have a real knack for business. However, many of them neither hold a higher-education degree nor come from a wealthy background. In fact, corporate success often has little to do with book smarts or a massive bankroll.

Experts ran several extensive studies to pinpoint what is truly needed to become a leader of a successful company. These are skills that anyone can learn, and the steps to acquiring and implementing them are clearly outlined in this post. Supported by examples of eminent CEOs across an array of industries, you’ll see that there’s nothing stopping you from becoming the next Elon Musk or Indra Nooyi.

CEOs aren’t born, they’re made.

Many of us believe that CEOs are somehow special and entirely different from the average employee. Furthermore, we believe that wealthy parents or exceptional intelligence is necessary to run a large company. However, the ghSMART project surveyed over 2,600 CEOs and what they found contradicts these beliefs.

The majority of CEOs are just regular people who have developed leadership qualities over the course of their career.

More than 70 percent of the CEOs surveyed claimed that they had no intention of becoming a CEO when they first started working.

Let’s take Don Slager, for example. Slager is the CEO of Republic Services, a $9 billion company and one of the top-500 wealthiest companies in the United States as rated by Fortune magazine. He never went to college but was ranked the number one CEO in the United States by the website Glassdoor. In fact, he started out as a garbageman for the company. By working his way up the ranks, Slager eventually became the head of one of the most well-known companies in the American waste-services industry. It was his knowledge of and familiarity with the general public, as well as the insights he’d gained from working in all areas of the company, that made Slager the best candidate for CEO.

What’s more, the survey showed that you don’t need to be a genius to become a CEO.

Indeed, those who put forth complicated ideas or use long words are typically viewed as bad CEOs. Moreover, they’re less likely to be hired at all. To give you some stats – only seven percent of CEOs graduated from an Ivy League school. Though Fortune 500 companies usually have Ivy League graduates among their leaders, the smaller, less-known firms don’t. But Ivy League schools aside, consider this: like Don Slager, eight percent of CEOs have never attended any college, so, clearly, lacking a formal higher-level education is no hindrance.

You also don’t need to be an exceptionally outspoken person to be a CEO. Egoistic people make the worst CEOs since they’re too focused on their individual success. And, in fact, 30 percent of CEOs are introverts.

Make fewer and thus faster decisions.

Previously, we’ve shown that a college degree isn’t necessary to become the CEO of a lucrative company. But being highly intelligent is not a prerequisite either.

In fact, CEOs who have a high IQ typically experience information paralysis. They are required to make important choices every day. There are many different avenues by which to arrive at a decision, such as being thoughtful, impulsive, logical or decisive. Out of these options, high-performing CEOs often opt for decisiveness, meaning the ability to decide quickly and with conviction. Indeed, experts found in a study that decisiveness made CEOs 12 times more likely to be top performers.

In addition to being quick, an overarching decision is usually better than one that’s detailed.

To illustrate this argument, let’s take a look at Steve Gorman, who took over the bus company Greyhound Lines in 2003 when it was $140 million in debt. After being advised to either divide up the regions and sell off the company’s business in them, or to increase fare prices, Gorman had to decide quickly. Instead of consulting sales figures, he looked at a map of America. Gorman compared this map with the Greyhound route map and made the bold decision to stop all of the routes that serviced low-density populations. Thanks to this decisiveness, after four years, Greyhound Lines was making an annual profit of $30 million. So, like Gorman, find a winning formula for your specific business, and to stick to it.

This is what Doug Peterson, CEO of McGraw Hill Financial, did. He succeeded by following the policy of Jack Welch, legendary CEO of the gigantic conglomerate General Electric. According to Welch’s rule, the company had to have the potential to become a number one or number two player in every new sector it entered, or he would turn down the opportunity.

By following this formula, Peterson simplified decision-making throughout his entire organization and enabled his staff to make quicker decisions about market opportunities by themselves. The company sometimes turned down potentially lucrative takeover deals, but the simplicity and speed were worth more than any single buyout would have been.

To get favorable results, you need to understand your stakeholders.

As mentioned earlier, a surprisingly large number of CEOs are introverts rather than extroverts. This is because, in order to be an effective CEO, you’ve got to be able to consider other people’s perspectives. Company owners need to understand what motivates customers, board members and stakeholders, which means that CEOs need to listen and have empathy. Introverts tend to be particularly adept at this.

By truly listening to people, you avoid making assumptions, which is important. When it comes to other people’s perspectives and outlooks, you shouldn’t assume you know what they think. Instead, you should show genuine curiosity and pay attention when they’re talking about themselves.

One CEO who employs this tactic particularly effectively is Neil Fiske. Though he is mainly known as the man who rescued the surf company Billabong, his biggest achievement came when he worked for a lingerie brand. Fiske interviewed women about their opinions on clothing, and he was mindful not to make assumptions. By listening and gathering as much information as he could, Fiske managed to turn the previously small company into a billion-dollar business.

As the example illustrates, it’s important for CEOs to spend time getting to know their customers.

Jim Donald has had leadership roles in many well-known successful brands, including Starbucks and Safeway. He attributes his success to spending half of his time out of the office and in the shops themselves. Donald’s strategy stemmed from advice given to him from his former boss at Walmart, Sam Walton, who said that the real business occurs among the customers and employees on the shop floor.

Similarly, it’s vital to know the motivations behind the company’s board members.

The benefits of getting to know board members shouldn’t be underestimated, and you should be aware of their individual aspirations and hopes, as well as how your company fits into that vision. Some key questions to be addressed include: How did they become a board member? Are they obligated to an investor or founder? What’s driving them to stay on the board? Is it money, prestige, intellectual stimulation? Finding the answers to these questions could help you achieve your goals for the company, because you’ll know what kind of decisions board members will be likely to back.

People will rely on a consistent and committed CEO.

If two candidates are competing for a CEO position, the one who appears most reliable will get the job. In fact, CEOs who are known to be reliable are twice more likely to be offered a position than those who don’t have that reputation.

To present yourself as a reliable person, you must always follow through on your commitments.

The Genome Project studied the personality traits of thousands of CEOs and found that 94 percent of them scored very high in the category of following through on commitments. Furthermore, those who displayed discipline, thoroughness and conscientiousness were highly favored, unlike the “mad geniuses,” who were less favorable due to their erratic behavior. So if your main argument for getting the job is that you can come up with crazy ideas and schemes, you may wish to rethink your strategy.

Board members want leaders who they know will follow through on promises, even if the promises aren’t extravagant. They prefer a guaranteed modest outcome over an outlandish promise that has a low probability of being delivered. Thus, you can build your reputation for reliability by promising small things, but ensuring that you deliver on those small promises.

You can also appear reliable by behaving consistently. To do so, you should not let yourself be swayed by mood swings or emotions. The CEO of Timberland, Jeff Schwartz, argues that your staff rely on you to be consistent so that they can approach you professionally. Whether you are consistently serious or always friendly, you’ll seem more approachable to your colleagues and employees if your moods are predictable.

Additionally, preparing anecdotes about your prior experiences will help you sell yourself as a reliable CEO.

When in an interview for a leadership position you can prove the fact that you’re a reliable choice by sharing a few anecdotes from the past. Think of previous situations in which you’ve overcome a mutual problem, highlighting how you’ve learned from those hardships and redeemed yourself. This will help you come across as someone who can be relied on to work through common problems should they arise in the future.

Avoid mistakes by building repeatable, well-planned systems.

When you’re leading a big organization, it’s almost impossible to micromanage everything. Therefore, you need to implement self-sustaining systems that have easily repeatable steps to ensure employees work efficiently.

To do so, imagine yourself as a conductor of an orchestra. Rather than playing music, a conductor watches over everyone else from afar. To pull off a spectacular show, the conductor must work with the performers during rehearsal and ensure that everyone knows their role. Together, they work through the piece multiple times in order to reduce the likelihood of errors. On the big day, the conductor doesn’t need to do much, since the performers know what to do, having practiced the same pattern hundreds of times. This is what you should aim for as a CEO, too.

In addition to envisioning yourself as a conductor, it can also be helpful to think like a Navy SEAL. Imagine you’re in a fight. You might think that the best thing to do would be to rely on your instincts, fight back hard and hope for the best. But this is exactly what Navy SEALs don’t do. They are taught to build a strong foundation beforehand so that in the face of rising pressure, they can call upon their repetitive training and avoid making any mistakes.

Lastly, creating a well-planned system can also help prevent errors. In some cases, a reliable system can mean the difference between life and death. For example, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia sometimes encountered errors in their treatment system. Not only were doctors and nurses making mistakes with dosages and treatments; they also tried to cover them up.

Then it was revealed that it wasn’t the mistakes themselves that were causing most of the errors; it was the attempts to cover them up. So the hospital changed the system and decided to rename the errors, or near misses, as good catches. The staff member who disclosed the most near misses – either their own or somebody else’s – was given an award. As a result, medical errors fell by 80 percent.

Forget the past and focus on adapting to future trends.

What do Blockbuster Video and Kodak have in common? Both are businesses that failed because they didn’t adapt to the future.

One important aspect of planning for the future involves making room for new ideas by letting go of old ones.

Though Kodak invented the first-ever digital camera, they waited 18 years to pursue the opportunity further. This missed opportunity was fateful for the company, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Similarly, video-rental company Blockbuster passed on all three opportunities to purchase Netflix, because it didn’t see the potential of an online business model. We now know that this was a big mistake, and Blockbuster, too, filed for bankruptcy.

Both Kodak and Blockbuster failed because they weren’t able to let go of their old practices and adapt to the changing business landscape fast enough.

In contrast, when Intel saw that Japanese companies had begun to produce memory chips at a lower cost, it knew it needed to act quickly. This new competition led to a drop in Intel’s profits, from $198 billion in 1984 to $2 million just a year later. So Intel decided to focus wholly on producing microprocessors and drop its memory-chip-manufacturing business. The company’s willingness to adapt resulted in their market cap rising from $4 billion in the mid-1980s to $197 billion today.

Clearly, then, staying on top of upcoming trends is vital for a company’s sustained success, but how can you manage that in an increasingly information-loaded world?

The answer is to become a trendhunter. Jean Hoffman, CEO of pharmaceutical firm Putney, is a great example of a trendhunter. Hoffman was able to stay ahead of the game by studying the trends in human pharmacy and applying them to better forecast changes in veterinary medicine.

But looking into the trends that lie outside of your industry is helpful, too. For instance, Disney World didn’t look at other theme parks to find a trend that they could adapt. Instead, they compared themselves to any case that involved family entertainment, meaning games, films, sports and toys. From their research, they learned that it would be beneficial to incorporate trends such as the Harry Potter phenomenon and trampolining into their operations.

You need to get noticed to advance to the top.

If you think you’re more important than the company you work for, then the chances you’ll get hired as a CEO are pretty slim. Employers look for team players who will act according to the company’s best interests, rather than those who act out of self-interest.

So how do you show what you’ve got, if you’re not supposed to brag about your talents? To get there, try to be a big fish in a small pond.

Experts carried out a study of 2,600 CEOs and found that 60 percent of those who had climbed the corporate ladder quickly – also known as “sprinters” – did so after having taken a lower position at a smaller firm.

Smaller companies are more likely to accommodate change and ideas faster than big corporations, which usually have no time or room for your personal opinions.

Furthermore, in a smaller company, it’s easier to get noticed. If you become recognized as the one who saved or expanded your company or department, you’ll find yourself being thrust into the spotlight in no time.

For example, Damien McDonald declined a managerial position at Johnson and Johnson, a $50 billion firm, and chose to lead the $250 million spine division of Zimmer, a medical-device company. Under McDonald’s leadership, Zimmer saw growth of 12 percent, while the most he could have achieved at Johnson and Johnson would’ve probably been between one and two percent. Then, in 2016, LivaNova, another medical-device company, impressed by McDonald’s success, offered him the role of CEO.

You also need to make sure you get noticed for the right reasons and by the right people. The first way to get noticed is by asking people at your company for advice. Everyone enjoys giving guidance, and by doing so, they’ll become invested in and support your success.

Alternatively, you could offer skills that the company is lacking, which is typically computer and technology expertise. Everyone will notice when you become the go-to person for such areas.

A third way to get noticed is to become a staff member of an important figure in the company. As a personal assistant to a senior manager, you’ll be granted access to high-level meetings. This will provide you with key insights into company operations, as well as connections to the top brass, thereby creating a competitive edge for you.

Once people recognize your talent, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a CEO.

CEOs aren’t superhuman. In fact, they’re just regular people who’ve developed certain skills that allow them to climb ranks in the workplace. Being decisive, consistent, committed and reliable are all fundamental traits of a CEO. Having a well-planned system in place is also important, as is understanding stakeholders and being able to adapt to the future.

#Do You what it takes to be a CEO?

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meadow-dusk · 6 years ago

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LONG LONG LONG

a music survey from livejournal days…

- TO TAKE THIS SURVEY, SIMPLY PUT YOUR MUSIC PLAYER ON SHUFFLE AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS WITH THE TITLE OF THE SONG THAT COMES ON - [it’s better if you don’t cheat and don’t skip any songs.]

What is your name?: Moby Dick • Led Zep

How is your life going?: Get on the Right Thing • Paul McCartney

What is your nickname?: The Day the World Gets ‘Round • George Harrison

What is your theme song?: Little Games • The Yardbirds

What is your best friend’s theme song?: Wait • The Beatles

How is your life going to turn out?: Communication Breakdown • Led Zeppelin

Will you get married?: Four Sticks • Led Zeppelin

Will you have kids?: For What It’s Worth • Haley Reinhart

What will your job be?: Rattled • Traveling Wilburys

Did you/will you finish school?: Good Times, Bad Times • Led Zeppelin

Who is your best friend?: Behind that Locked Door • George Harrison

Who is or will be your significant other?: Think Pink! • Beyond Pink

Who do you like?: We’re All in This Together • High School Musical Cast

How will you die?: Stairway to Heaven • Led Zeppelin (YAAAAAS)

How do you feel right now?: Sentimental Journey • Ringo Starr

What is your favorite song?: Matilda Mother • Pink Floyd

How could you describe your parents?: Pilate and Christ • Jesus Christ Superstar (you can’t make this stuff up yall)

Your best friend[s]?: Postcards from Paradise • Ringo Starr

Your teachers?: She’s Not There • The Zombies

Your significant other [or crush…]?: Riding on a Bus • The Beatles (an interview)

Yourself?: Brian Bathtubes • The Beatles (taking requests)

What is your best feature?: The Riddle • Five for Fighting

What will you be/should you be, profession-wise?: Desire • U2

How could you describe this survey?: I Told You So • Randy Travis

What makes you angry?: Moanin’ • Chris Farlowe ft. Jimmy Page and a random sitarist (this song is so interesting)

What makes you sad?: Everything I Know • Mandy Gonzalez

What makes you happy?: One • Bee Gees

What makes you dance?: I Still • Backstreet Boys

What is your favorite color?: Sundown • Gordon Lightfoot

How would you describe yourself?: Heart Attack • One Direction

Who is your worst enemy?: Little Soldier Boy • The Yardbirds

Who do you hate?: No Me Diga • In the Heights

Who do you love?: I Started a Joke • Bee Gees

Who do you lust after?: What Do You Want? • The Yardbirds Finish the Sentence I wish: Rainy Day Women #12 and 35 • Bob Dylan I want to: We’re on the Road Again • Ringo Starr I want to kill:. Money • The Beatles I want to eat: Spring Musical Medley • HSM3 yall with Kryan duet to open My head: Sometimes I’ll Be There • Naked Brothers Band (accurate) I am: Movin On • Rascal Flatts My best feature is: The Sad Bells of Rhymney • Fifth Avenue My eyes are: Safest Place to Hide • Backstreet Boys My hair is: Who Can See It • George Harrison My face is: Baby Come on Home • Led Zeppelin You should: Not This Time • 3Lw

Random Words of advice: And Here We Are Again • The Beatles How do others see me?: Rhythm of Love • Plain White T’s How do I see myself?: Knowing Me, Knowing You • ABBA *** For this first section, put down the first ten songs that play, and then rate them on a scale of 1 - 5 (5 being the best) in the next column. 1. I Have a Dream • Abba 2/5 2. Sounds of Silence • Simon and Garfunkel 5/5 3. In The Flesh • Pink Floyd 4/5 4. Ya-Ya • John Lennon (ft. Julian on drums) 4/5 5. Magic Bus • The Who Live at the Isle of Wright 4/5 6. Stomp • Steps 2/5 7. KICK DA DUST UP • Luke Bryan 4/5 8. Your Mother Should Know • The Beatles 5/5 9. Photograph • Ringo (2017) 3/5 he sounds great but it isn’t exciting also who’s the chick I didnt sign up for this 10. Piggies • The Beatles 5/5 good one George Now for a little fortune telling… 1. Who am I?: Tug of War • Paul McCartney 2. Why am I here?: Bet On It • Zac Efron (skittles and steak) 3. What’s my theme song?: American Beauty/American Psycho • Fall Out Boy 4. How’s tomorrow gonna be?: Behind Blue Eyes • The Who 5. What does ______ really think of me?: Let’s Go to Vegas • Faith Hill 6. What’s this school year going to be about?: Man on Fire • Andy Gibb 7. Is something bad going to happen in the near future?: Little Bitty • Alan Jackson 8. What’s the government going to do next?: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band/The End • Paul McCartney Live at Citi Field 9. What’s my best friend doing right now?: Inutil • Carlos Gomez 10. What does my iPod/MP3 think about me?: American Girl • Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Last section! These next questions are all about music 1. I absolutely LOVE this song!: The Look of Love • ABC Comments: This was in Start the Commotion and there was a clip art of eyes as the O’s in look 2. I have no clue why this song is still on my music player: Steppin’ Out • John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers Comments: It’s saved because I occasionally really try to get into Clapton 3. This song has AMAZING lyrics: Love Will Find a Way • Pablo Cruise Comments: I remembered his initials but not his name

4. The band that does this song is one of my favorites: Most Peculiar Man • Simon and Garfunkel Comments: I would not say favorites but I give them their due 5. My dad loves this song: Songs About Rain • Gary Allan Comments: he bought the CD and took it on road trips so probs 6. My mom can’t stand this song: The Hook (All My Love) • Led Zeppelin Comments: she probably can stand it more than me 7. I have a sibling who enjoys listening to songs by this band: When You See a Chance • Steve Winwood Comments: fair to say that cause once she asked me what the name of Valerie was 8. One of my best friends hates the band that does this song: Like Nobody’s Around • Big Time Rush Comments: NO FRIEND OF MINE! 9. I got this song off a mix CD: Got My Mind Set On You • George Harrison Comments: I learned how to do the mashed potato to this song 10. This song is on a movie soundtrack: The Freedom Song • Jason Mraz Comments: could definitely be but don’t hold this one down

11. Share a memory involving this song in comments: Friday On My Mind • The Easybeats Comments: running to it - how was there this much good music at one time 12. I’ve played this song on repeat before: You’re My Number One • S Club 7 Comments: Try this ALBUM back when we used to play S Club and have choreography 13. This song is on the band’s Greatest Hit’s CD: Ramblin’ Man • Allman Brothers Band Comments: if it isn’t they screwed up 14. I love dancing to this song!: If You Wanna Do a Dance • The Spinners Comments: seems like that was the idea 15. This song gets me every time I hear it: Bathroom Sound (Out on the Tiles early take) • Led Zeppelin Comments: I prefer the final version with vocals and silly quips but this version does just as well for Bonzo Appreciation Time 16. This song is great to listen to when you’re angry: Farmer Refuted (Instrumental) • Hamilton Comments: OH MY GOD tear this dude apart 17. I love the music video for this song: I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band) • Moody Blues Comments: if there is one it’s probably psychedelic so I’d dig it I bet 18. I’ve seen the band that performs this song live: The Boxer • Simon and Garfunkel Comments: I have not. This song is beautiful. 19. Is this song better to listen to at night, in the morning, or in the afternoon?: Let’s Get Rocked • Def Leppard Comments: morning, running. 20. I haven’t listened to this song in so long!: That’s the Way (Live Paris 1971) • Led Zeppelin Comments: not true it came on on the way to the gym barely a few weeks ago *** What were the first words to Abe Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address?: What ya gonna do when it’s cold outside? (Keep It Hid • Robert Plant) What did Martin Luther King have a dream about, anyways?: You’ve got a cute way of talking, you got the better of me! (You Make Me Feel Like Dancin’ • Leo Sayer) Tomorrow’s newspapers will all have the major headline of: Out in the Rain Looking for Sunshine (Permanent Stain • Backstreet Boys) If someone offered you some free drugs, how would you respond?: Lord almighty, feel my temperature risin’...(Burning Love • Elvis) What kind of higher power do you believe in?: You need coolin, baby I’ ain’t foolin (Whole Lotta Love • Led Zeppelin) What do people really notice about you?: There’s a girl I know who makes me feel so good (Valleri • The Monkees) What do you notice first in the preferred sex of your choice?: Hey fellas, have ya heard the news you know that Annie’s back in town (Heartbreaker • Led Zeppelin) What do you look for in reading books?: They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town, with political connections to spread his wealth around (Richard Cory • Wings) What’s a must-have quality in a friend for you?: Meeting people along my way, seemingly I’ve known one day (Happenings Ten Years Time Ago • The Yardbirds) What scares the shit out of you?: Gat Kirwani • George Harrison (this has no words it’s just a sitar jam) How do you laugh?: Anna, you come and ask me, girl, to set you free girl? (Anna (Go To Him) • The Beatles) Why do you do these surveys?: When the night returns just like a friend, when the evening comes to set me free (If You Know What I Mean • Neil Diamond) Do you have anything you’d like to confess?: I can see you in the window waiting for my call (Untouchable • Big Time Rush) How do you feel about the person you cannot stand the most?: If ever you’ve got rain in your heart, someone has hurt you and torn you apart, am I unwise to open up your eyes to love me (Run To Me • Bee Gees) The best date ever, in your book, would consist of…: Dear Theodosia, what to say to you?(Dear Theodosia • Leslie Odom Jr. & Lin-Manuel Miranda) If you sent a random Hallmark card to a friend, you would write to them: Are we growing up or just going down? It's just a matter of time until we're all found out. (Sophomore Slump or Comeback of the Year • Fallout Boy) If you had the chance to speak to (a) God, what would you say?: Every time I see her, she don’t even look my way (Just My Style • Gary Lewis and the Playboys) Finish the sentence: “When the going gets tough…”: My friend came to me with sadness in his eyes and told me that he wanted help before his country dies (Bangla Desh • George Harrison) How do you deal with your stress?: I can almost remember their funny faces (Jet • Paul McCartney) What is your biggest burden in life?: Somebody’s knocking at the door, somebody’s ringing the bell (Let Em In • Wings) What’s the coolest thing about your best friend?: Hands, put your empty hands in mine (Stand By You • Rachel Platten) Why do you love the one you do?: Sweet, wonderful you. You make me happy with the things you do (You Make Loving Fun • Fleetwood Mac) If a friend broke their arm and got a cast, what would you write on it?: Gonna build myself a castle high up in the clouds (Dance the Night Away • Cream) You see a stick and wet cement. What do you write?: It feels so right now hold me tight (Hold Me Tight • The Beatles) A guy just stole your (purse, car, etc)! What do you yell at him?: Welcome to the camp, I guess you all know why you’re here (We’re Not Gonna Take It • The Who) You pass a crack addict on the corner one day. Solemnly he tells you: Well now we’re respected in society, we don’t worry bout the things that we used to be, we’re talkin heroin with the president (Respectable • The Rolling Stones) What will your baby’s first words be?: He knows about you in every way, he's memorized every part of your face (Does He Know • One Direction) You are at your wit’s end, and decide to write a suicide note. It begins: The pound is sinking, the peso’s falling, the lira’s reeling and feeling quite appalling (The Pound is Sinking • Paul McCartney) Why can’t there be peace in the world?: Let’s talk about one, bay-bay, ya gotta hear me out (Get Another Boyfriend • Backstreet Boys)

How do you think people see you?: I walked in the band just started, the singer couldn't carry a tune in a bucket (Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo • Tracy Byrd) Inside, though, what kind of person are you really?: well the rain was a-fallin’ and the ground turned to mud, I was watchin’ all the people running from the flood (Deliver Your Children • Wings) If you wanted to comfort a friend, you’d say: Anytime, any day you can hear the people say that love is blind, well I don’t know but I say love is kind (Listen to What the Man Said • Wings) When you want to cheer someone up, you say: *I just make series of nonsense sounds* (Pow R. Toc H. • Pink Floyd) You’re unbelievably depressed because your friend just told you…: people say we’ve got it made, don’t they know we’re so afraid? (Isolation • John Lennon)

When you are incredibly bored, you start thinking about…?: I drive all alone, at night, I drive all alone, don’t know what I’m headed for. (Dead End Friends • Them Crooked Vultures) You’re a classy person, so instead of cursing when you’re mad, you yell…?: I met a gin-soaked, bar-room queen in Memphis (Honky Tonk Women • The Rolling Stones) you’re writing a love letter, but what are you going to begin it with?: The theater’s so obsessed with drama so depressed, it’s hard to sell a ticket on broadway! (Keep It Gay • The Producers) If you were to write a letter to the President of the USA, it would say…?: It’s a boy, Mrs. Walker, it’s a boy (It’s a Boy • The Who) What would someone have to tell you to make you really angry?: No no no no, don’t phunk with mah haaahrt (Don’t Phunk with My Heart • Black-Eyed Peas) …To make you really depressed?: Cars and girls are easy to come by in this day and age, laughing joking drinking smoking til I spend my wage (Over Under Sideways Down • The Yardbirds) ...To make you sexually aroused?: Catch a star if you can, wish for something special (Are You Ready for Love • The Spinners) Your first thoughts waking up were…: Life is just a bowl of All-Bran, you wake up every morning and it’s there (Happydaystoytown • The Small Faces) Your last words before falling asleep will be…: the sun is shining in the sky, there ain’t a cloud in sight (Mr. Blue Sky • Electric Light Orchestra)

#music survey #wow that only took me half a month #kari

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judaphotography · 5 years ago

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An exploration of who has the right to judge art

Art is a vast topic that can span across different mediums, context, and expression. It is equally a form of expression as it is execution, which makes it seemingly subjective. However, art does have guidelines and patterns, which create what people class as good or bad art. This creates an apparent correct way art should be viewed and how it should be judged. This essay will be exploring who has the right to make those judgments.

When judging art and it's worth and quality there is a consensus of what to evaluate. When looking at judgement criteria from art competitions like LightSpaceTime’s we can see that the standard for art being judged is “Interpretation and the clarity of the theme to the viewer. Creativity and originality of the depicted theme. Quality of artistic composition and overall design based on the theme. Overall impression of the art.” With looking at other competitions, criteria art critiques use and educated views of what makes good art, for instance examples from the art of education university and interviews with artists, we can see an emerging pattern that context, technique, concept, and originality are the qualities in which we base art. Li Hongbo has said “My artistic creation has lots of themes… I want to change the image, change how people see things so they think in another way, and more deeply.” In response to what makes good art, supporting the idea that good art needs to be original and have meaning.

However, John Baldessari’s photographic series “Wrong” challenges the idea of what art needed to be to be good. He took the traditional “rules” within the art world and decided to create pieces that challenged them. The series is a collection of images paired with text, the most famous being entitled wrong, which is an unfocussed poorly composed image of a man with text that says wrong underneath. Baldessari created these pieces because he wanted to convey that we do not have to conform to traditional qualities in art for it to be good; art doesn’t have to be judged, and when talking about work he has said “You don't want anyone to say 'You can't do that!' But you do get a lot of that in New York. One of the healthiest things about California is - 'Why not”.Baldessari made his art for himself and because he wanted to, but through that has become a renowned conceptual artist. From the series we can see there are exceptions to what people class as good art and although Baldessari’s series is not technically good it still meets the criteria of being original and being rich in context.

The museum of bad art is a place showcasing “bad art” “since 1994,The museum of bad art has been dedicated to bad art… our mission; to bring the worst of art to the widest of audiences” Obviously the art which they showcase is bad; like the painting Eyes see you by F.W Covington which is paired with the interpretation “The artist has effectively portrayed life-sized pairs of disembodied eyes on a flame-red background; some staring straight ahead while others glance left or right. They are realistic and iconic in their simplicity.” by Holly Maxson. By this description alone we can estimate the technique is not good with use of effectively as a descriptor conveys a standard skill level. Also the meaning wouldn’t appear complex or profound, as they are just eyes. Perhaps art that lacks these two characteristics are what we as a collective deem bad art.

The difference between these two works purely lies on the intent behind them. Both are technically bad, however Baldessari’s piece was created for the intent to challenge why? So as people judging art it is not all about the physicality of it but equally the context. Without context both would be seen as bad art, but this idea of contextual knowledge revises its worth, causing the idea of elitism within art as you need to have context to fully enjoy it.

Antonio Houmen, former art director of the Sonnabend Gallery has said “The definition of art will change and who it can be judged by will change also.Video art was popularised in the 1970’s but made people question if it was art. Every time art takes a form people don't recognize, they ask ''Is that art?”. Houmen expostulates the idea that art is one thing, the idea that art is stagnant is incorrect and the idea that the merits of what art is and who judges it needs to be inconstant. The idea that art is really integrated into current culture and is ever changing is not a new premise, and how art can also influence and change society around us.

The recent social isolation is proof of how integrated art is into mundane things, as many people have been turning to comforts like television and video games, subtly depending on the artists which have created them. “ That is just the reason why art is so valuable! While art may not be vital to fulfill our basic needs, it does make life joyful. When you look at a painting or poster you’ve chosen to hang on your living room wall, you feel happy. ...These varieties of art forms that we are surrounded by all come together to create the atmosphere that we want to live in, which is personable to us.” Due to art having a natural comfort, it becomes every day.

In Neil Gaiman's book “Art matters” he talks about how art is created to challenge the current system and possibly change it, ““I believe you have the absolute right To think things that I find offensive, stupid, preposterous or dangerous, and they have the right to speak and write or distribute these things ”.If art is so integrated into society it should be those who have the right to judge it.

Some believe that it is only the right of an artist to judge their work. Many artists themselves believe that only they have the right to judge their own work, such as Jenny Holzer, an neo-conceptual artist. “The artist is someone who can judge the art as they are the only one that truly knows the art.” “I think you can rely on the artist's representation; he or she would have no reason to lie.” showing us that the intent is what artwork is truly about not the finished content, and by this only the person that created the work can know the true meaning. Carrying on from this Robert Hughs, an art critic said “As far as I am concerned, something is a work of art if it is made with the declared intention to be a work of art and placed in a context where it is seen as a work of art. That does not determine whether it is esthetically rich or stupidly banal.” Anyone can have an opinion on a piece and see it how they wish, however, the process of art relies on the artist having intent and judgment, and therefore can be the only opinion that matters.

The case of Beau Stanton’s Eva Gardner mural, shows the two sides of an artist being responsible for the art. Many people found the artwork offensive and wanted it removed from Koreatown L.A, as the background offended korean activists as the sunray pattern is similar to the japanese imperial flag. Stanton has said he created the mural as “ a homage to the Cocoanut Grove’s Hollywood history” artists like Shepard Fairey have said “ It’s not the same color scheme. It’s not the same focal element. It’s stupid to me.” and he finds it a form of censorship and threatened to remove his mural of Richard F Kenedy. Eventually the mural was removed showing that people see the judgment of others and how they see work, is more important to the public than the intent of the artist.

Many people within art academia believe that to truly judge art you need to be educated within it, for example Robert Rosenblum, former Professor of art history, New York University; curator at the Guggenheim Museum said “But there has to be consensus about good art among informed people -- artists, dealers, curators, collectors. Somebody has to be the first to say something is good”, and William Rubin former Director emeritus of painting and sculpture, Museum of Modern Art said “There's a consensus as to what is art in most periods, but it's not made by the man on the street. It is formed by those deeply concerned with the substance of art.” “There is no single definition of art that's universally tenable. Cultures without even a word for art nevertheless produced great art”. Implying art is more than an aesthetic but also a history and something deeply contextual, so for a person to truly be able to judge art and see what it is you must be educated and know these histories. Regardless, some people and artists see this as a classist belief that to be an artist means you need to be educated and pay for that right through education.

“ Art has landed in many more households and in the awareness of many more people than ever before. You could argue that because art is so ubiquitous it is even harder to make judgments.”Philippe De Montebello former Director, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Undeniably art is a part of everyone's lives, especially with growing use of social media, and as everyone has access to art they have the right to judge it, and every opinion is correct, as art is an experience that can only be felt by oneself. When forming an opinion on art we look at our past experiences with the outside world, as well as other art we have viewed,due to the omnipresence of art through televisions, phones and even mundane objects like tea towels there is such a diversity of experience, which no two people would share. Combined with the independent experience of living no two people would see art as truly the same. Therefor claiming one to be more important holds judgements of others, and arguably holds ideas of classism.

I created a survey of my peers, many of which are artists from different backgrounds, which use different mediums. As in theory any question can be asked but that doesn’t take into account the reality of theoretical questions, and that there are artists who will all have a say and view on art judgment. When asked “Do you feel your art practice and art knowledge has grown with more experience creating or with education?” 50% of people said it was a mixture of both creation and education. “My art knowledge has grown through education, but my art practice has definitely just grown through creating” artists can see that there are two sides to art: a creative and educated side, which both can grow over time and make people better artists. Assumably there is the belief that some art knowledge is inherit, as 100% of the artists believed that they can judge art and 50% unprompted said that it is possible for everyone to judge art. While others say they have bias’ to certain art but can still judge it, however, it is just as possible for the bias’ to come from education therefore making the judgment more correct, which is highlighted by one of the responses when asked if they can judge art; “ Everyone can. Its a visual platform and everyone is going to have a response. But there is a moral line where some people either have no knowledge or too much and their opinions can be a bit out of place” implying that everyone can judge art but some people have more of a right to judge.

When asked if they believe if art has a set meaning, all of those questioned said no. Clearly showing that art is meant for other people to view and not just the artist “I don't think so, even if the artist makes it with an intended meaning, whenever it is viewed the meaning is shaped by the viewer's life experience and perspective. It can also vary with context”, “There's an intended meaning but unlimited meanings beyond that”. Many artists are open to the idea that their art can have multiple meanings, as the context of the viewer is what really creates the meaning of an image; supporting the theory that everyone can bring judgement and meaning to art.

Seemingly artists tend to view art as something anyone can find meaning and context in and rightfully so if the piece brings emotions. Yet see judgment as something different but still crucial to the process. Overall “It is in the sense that every time someone views art that are making some kind of judgement or critique automatically, but I don't think it always has to be formalised, or that certain judgements should be considered more important than others just because of someone's status.” summarises the view on art judgment from practitioners. Judgment is a part of art, or judgment is a part of humans, either way it will naturally occur when looking at a piece of work. The judgment is not what we should be questioning but, who and why and what are people judging and being able to see people's views without the elitist ideology of certain people having a more correct opinion, but rather an equality of views.

When looking at “Who can judge art” we do not take into account the process of art and the fact that judgment is a part of it. When deciphering “what is art?” in his book “How art can be thought: a handbook for change” Desouza argues that art can be whatever the artist makes. He proposes that art is created by two things, prior to the art being made. There is a proposal then an action and then an object.Then after the art is created it has to create a conversation, not for it to be art but for it to be profitable art. “But more importantly art is a conversation.” If we look at art as a non verbal form of communication, then the judgment and perceptions are a part of it as a language, the nature of art is to talk about it. Which can be related to the idea that educated and experienced artists could be held to higher regard in their opinion as they can “speak art” better as they have a richer context and understanding. However, the idea that art should or can only be judged by a certain type of person rather than everyone, is absurd as judgment is clearly a part of art,as much as it is a part of humans.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html

For those of us that are of the age to have experienced the 'Golden Age' of vinyl records, 'Rock N Roll' and coming of age during 'Woodstock' this is a must read article. It will bring back wonderful memories!!!

It also touches another heart ♥️string reaching those with disabilities through music!!! ��🎶

🔈🖤💜💙💚💛🧡❤️🎶🎼🎵🎷🎹🎺🥁🎻

"In that moment, talking about our sons, I realized how all of Young’s obsessions fit together: They are centered in a common understanding of experience and how it shapes us. Human development is led by our senses. Our senses exert a formative and shaping pressure on our brains. So if our experience of the world around us can damage our brains and our souls, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that music can also help us feel better. Every musician, and every music fan, believes that."

Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music

He says low-quality streaming is hurting our songs and our brains. Is he right?

By David Samuel's | Published August 20, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 20, 2019 1:31 PM ET |

Neil Young is crankier than a hermit being stung by bees. He hates Spotify. He hates Facebook. He hates Apple. He hates Steve Jobs. He hates what digital technology is doing to music. “I’m only one person standing there going, ‘Hey, this is [expletive] up!’ ” he shouted, ranting away on the porch of his longtime manager Elliot Roberts’s house overlooking Malibu Canyon in the sunblasted desert north of Los Angeles. The dial thermometer at the far end of the porch indicated that it was now upward of 110 degrees of some kind of heat. Maybe the dial was stuck.

When you hear real music, you get lost in it, he added, “because it sounds like God.” Spotify doesn’t sound like God. No one thinks that. It sounds like a rotating electric fan that someone bought at a hardware store.

No one in their right mind would choose to live in the canyons outside Los Angeles, especially in the summertime between noon and 5. There isn’t enough water or shade. After a few months of summer heat, the scrub on the mountainsides is baked dry. Then someone gets sloppy with a stray cigarette butt or a campfire or the power company fails to maintain a power line and a spark accelerates into a terrifying wildfire that sends up pillars of thick smoke that from a distance hovers over the canyons like an illustration from an old Bible. News crews record burning mansions, which are intercut with the winsome llamas of the rich and famous that have been safely removed to Zuma Beach. Stragglers are incinerated in their cars.

The view was incredible, though. Young has been living up here on and off for decades. At one point, he owned more than 1,000 acres of much-coveted Malibu real estate, where movie producers and actors and billionaire tech tycoons build mansions with supersize swimming pools, grotesque advertisements of corruption and hubris, which are some of the major sins that Young rails against.

I enjoyed listening to Young rant on about the modern condition. We were vibing. He is passionately opposed to global warming, genetically modified seeds, corporate greed-heads who are despoiling Mother Nature and an assortment of other sinners who interfere with our God-given right to happiness. His ire this afternoon, directed through me and my notebook and my Sony digital recorder, was focused on the engineers of Silicon Valley, against whom he has been zealously waging war for decades. Silicon Valley’s emphasis on compression and speed, he believes, comes at the expense of the notes as they were actually played and is doing something bad to music, which is supposed to make us feel good. It is doing something bad to our brains.

The same goes for everything else that Silicon Valley produces, of course: the culture of digital everything, which is basically a load of toxic, mind-destroying crap. It’s anti-human.

“I’m not putting down Mark Zuckerberg,” he continued, his voice taking a turn. “He knows where he [expletive] up. Just the look on his face,” he said, wagging his finger toward a television screen inside Roberts’s living room, where the Facebook chief executive was giving sworn testimony before a panel of lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. “You know, he came to me in a dream the other night, and I felt really sorry for him,” he said. “He was just sitting there sweating and kind of didn’t know how to talk, because he [expletive] up so badly.” There he was, Zuckerberg, on the large-screen TV, sweating bullets.

Young was no longer the righteous wandering hippie avatar of his early album covers. He’s an old man now at 73. He’s fleshy and jowly and red-faced, with long, stringy hair. He looked like a prosperous prairie farmer (hogs or cows, some form of livestock) minus the overalls. You can imagine Farmer Neil attending church every Sunday and preaching manic sermons from the pews. What’s still the same are his eyes, smoldering like two hot coals stuck beneath his overhanging brow that featured so prominently on the cover of “After the Gold Rush,” his third album, released in September 1970, back when young people, stoned on primitive weed, might plausibly spend an entire weekend listening to his visions of a lone wanderer adrift in a lost Eden.

As we went back and forth about the dynamics of digital sound-compression and the general evil of big tech, Young got mad about his Facebook user agreement, which not even his high-priced lawyers can untangle. “I’m pissed off about my user agreement,” he says. “I’m pissed off about my privacy policy.”

Yet I could tell that this wasn’t what he wanted to be talking about. Young doesn’t want to be a downer. He is passionate about music. The point of music, and of Young, is to make people feel less lonely. I had taken him to a dark place that he didn’t want to go.

“I really wish this interview hadn’t happened,” he later said, seeming more downhearted than angry.

“I feel horrible,” I answered, and I did. I was hoping to soothe the old rock star, who spoke to me through the headphones of my Sony Walkman at the moments I felt most isolated and alone. The last thing I wanted to do was make him feel bad. It felt awful. What I wanted was to hear him play music and to write more songs. “I mean, the worst thing I could have done is to make you feel defeated,” I told him, “and now that’s what I’ve done.”

Neil Young has always been a little too hot to handle, so passionate and smart and always a little bit off his rocker, which might be part of the glory and also the downside of being Neil Young. Yet what weirds me out most about his emotional weather patterns, which are superfamiliar to me from my teenage Walkman years, is the new sense that each of his individual miniflights and tantrums was being processed by a tiny hyperaware control freak who lives inside Young’s personal control tower. The little man charts every little fragment of new meaning or awareness and what its trajectory might potentially signify on a giant whiteboard. Young hears you listening, and he is hip to that angle, and he incorporates that in his next riff. Polite conversation under such conditions can be a baffling and frustrating type of experience. After an hour, we agreed to turn the tape recorder off, and Roberts orders pizza. But the little man in the control tower was still up there, watching.

My diagnosis, after a lifetime of listening and an afternoon on Roberts’s porch and a couple of longer off-the-record interviews about his life and work, is this: Neil Young is trapped in a cycle of second- and third- and fourth-guessing, which is an affliction that is not unique to his brain. To escape from this cycle, he is continually forcing himself back into the moment and then trying to capture that feeling and energy, which is a specific kind of artistic choice. That larger cycle, combined with his magnificent control over his art, is what makes him such a uniquely vital and generative artist, at an age when peers like Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger have become skeletal holograms of their former selves. When he looks back, which is something he did often during our conversations, it is toward the specificity of what some younger version of Neil Young did in a particular moment when he really nailed it. The latest live album he released was recorded at a gig in 1973, in Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama; it is part of an archival series, and they are all miracles. As Young once put it, “I’d rather play in a garage, in a truck or a rehearsal hall, a club or a basement.” What he is after is not some ideal sound but the sound of what happened. The missed notes and off-kilter sounds are part of his art, which is the promise of the real, but also, even mainly, of imperfection.

The idea that big technology companies are engineering all that back-and-forth out of his music just kills him. It’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t want to write music anymore, he admitted. I tried once again to console him.

“The songs always came to you in bunches,” I said. It’s an encouraging thought. But Young was only willing to meet my optimism halfway.

“I’ve got great melodies, and the words are all profanities,” he answered. “I was just telling Elliot the other day, I’m not interested in making any more records,” he insisted, plunging us down once more into the void. “They sound like [expletive].”

Young’s belief in the saving power of music couldn’t be any more personal. In 1951, at age 5 in Ontario, he got sick with a fever, which turned out to be polio. His father, the hockey writer Scott Young, chronicled the Toronto Maple Leafs and wrote young-adult novels about stouthearted boys on ice that were a staple of Canadian boyhood. Neil was not meant for hockey. His mother, Rassy, was a sharp-witted panelist on the popular weekly Winnipeg television show “Twenty Questions”; she was always intensely protective of her son. When I asked him about what it felt like to be a sick child and to grow up lonely, he said: “I loved playing music, and I wasn’t that alone. You know that’s what I wanted to do, that’s what I wanted to do with my life, and that’s all I paid attention to.”

Maybe Young could have become a big rock star without that childhood illness, without being so complicated. His peers talent-wise, at 19, included genius musicians like Stephen Stills, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix, the last of whom was the greatest American popular musical talent maybe ever. What set Young apart from that company was his sustained refusal to bend to anyone else’s idea of what audiences wanted to hear. His signature move was to accomplish something amazing and then blow it up, in the pursuit of something that would sound even more real.

“Neil Young,” his first solo album, recorded in 1968, at 22, after his departure from the supergroup Buffalo Springfield, showed off ageless melodies combined with clever, wised-up lyrics (“I used to be a folk singer/keeping managers alive”). The album failed to sell. The sound was too pretty and too clever at the same time. His second studio album — and first with his longtime band Crazy Horse — “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” is my personal favorite Neil Young record, and was also Elliot Roberts’s favorite (he died two months ago). It introduced what became Neil’s defining edge, i.e., the sound of his ruminations, distortions and mistakes. The album made it to No. 34 on the American charts, and included the hit “Cinnamon Girl.” He wrote much of the album while running a fever of 103.

Young joined with Stills, David Crosby and Graham Nash (my personal ordering of talents) in the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with Young positioned as the defiant outsider against the gorgeous harmonies of the latter three. CSNY turned Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” (she watched the festival on TV) into a generational anthem, and then imploded. (Side note: The year after Neil Young got sick as a child, Mitchell — then a young girl living in Fort Macleod, Alberta — contracted polio during the same outbreak of that disease. She also found herself in writing songs. Maybe something about that childhood illness, which left both children weakened for several years, altered the way that Young and Mitchell processed the evidence of their senses. The dreamy harmonics both favored, and the way that the music and the words shade into each other, suggests both the wooziness and the emerging clarity that a child coming out of a fever might experience.)

Young’s fourth solo album, “Harvest,” distilled his songwriting gifts, which had been given broad exposure through the supernovalike appearance and implosion of CSNY, into a collection of Southern California-inflected hits like “Heart of Gold,” “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “Old Man” and “Words (Between the Lines of Age)”; it became the best-selling American album of 1972, despite critics labeling the raw vulnerability of the songs as off-putting, self-pitying or as one critic put it “embarrassing.” The AM radio success of “Harvest” cleared a path toward the stratospheric levels of commercial songwriting success and luxury-hotel-suite destruction enjoyed by the Eagles, a supergroup of superbrilliant songwriters who, unlike Young, preferred highway driving.

In response to the success of “Harvest,” Young switched up his style again, obliterating his hit radio melodies with epileptic seizures of dissonance and feedback. (Young himself suffered from epilepsy, to the point that he would have seizures and sometimes black out.) “Heart of Gold,” as he explained it in his liner notes, “put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.”

For the time being, there would be no more pretty melodies and note-perfect guitar playing. Instead, Young’s music centered on a distinctive alternation of melodic beauty, earsplitting feedback and passages where he seemed to be playing his guitar with his fist. On a third or fourth listen, these passages often revealed themselves to be part of larger, deliberate, gorgeous patterns that bent the listener’s ear in the directions that he wanted it to go. You had to listen to the whole albums all the way through to really hear the songs. Young’s own guitar playing sounded too deliberate to express the fullness of his own sound, so he often featured the rhythm guitar playing of Frank Sampedro, who played loud rock ’n’ roll in his garage, which was the sound that Young was after in perfecting imperfection.

Within his own specific lineage of deeply melodic rock-guitar playing, incorporating infinite branching possibilities and a taste for soulful, aggressive dissonance, Young is great to listen to. But a better pure player than Young would be a guy like, say, John Frusciante, the former guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who is wildly talented. Give both men 30 seconds to solo, and Frusciante would blow Young off the stage, just as Duane Allman would blow Frusciante off the stage. Young is something else, though. He’s a genius, a word that can be usefully defined as the ability to create and realize an original style that, in turn, can for decades generate its own genres of music containing the DNA of deeply original songs by other extremely talented, original songwriters and musicians, all of whom owe something to him. His music helped shape the melodic-depressive post-Beatles catalog of Pacific Northwest angst, which was brought to its songwriting peak by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Elliott Smith, the Irving Berlin and Cole Porter of suicidal ideation and addiction. Cobain committed suicide on April 5, 1994. Smith, who was an even more intimate songwriter, in the same catchy, brilliant, self-pitying vein, stabbed himself through the heart and bled to death on Oct. 21, 2003, in an apartment in Los Angeles. While the circumstances of both deaths are disputed by conspiracy theorists, Neil Young is indisputably still here.

But he is stumped. Let’s take a moment to look at the future of recorded sound, the topic that has got him so overheated. The invention of the phonograph in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison, a k a the Wizard of Menlo Park, and one of the great visionaries in American history, marked the culmination of several decades of attempts to capture the magic of sound in physical, reproducible form. Early sound recorders used a large cone to capture the air pressure produced by sonic waves created by a human voice or an instrument. The cone directed sound waves against a diaphragm attached to a stylus, which thereby inscribed an analog of those waves onto a roll of paper or a wax-coated cylinder. The use of electrical microphones and amplifiers by the 1920s made it possible to record a far greater range of sound with far greater fidelity.

Magnetic tape, which was pioneered in Germany during the 1930s, propelled another giant leap forward in fidelity, while also beginning the process of freeing sound from the physical mediums on which it was recorded. Tape could be snipped and edited and combined in ways that allowed artists, producers and engineers to create symphonies in their own minds and then assemble them out of multiple takes performed in different places and at different times. The introduction of high-end consumer digital-sound-recording systems by companies including Sony and 3M further loosened music’s connection to a physical medium, thereby rendering sound infinitely plastic and, in theory, infinitely reproducible. Then came the internet, which delivered on the mind-boggling promise of infinitely reproducible sound at a cost approaching zero.

At ground level, which is to say not the level where technologists live but the level where artists write and record songs for people who care about the human experience of listening to music, the internet was as if a meteor had wiped out the existing planet of sound. The compressed, hollow sound of free streaming music was a big step down from the CD. “Huge step down from vinyl,” Young said. Each step eliminated levels of sonic detail and shading by squeezing down the amount of information contained in the package in which music was delivered. Or, as Young told me, you are left with “5 percent of the original music for your listening enjoyment.”

Producers and engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks, like making the softest parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. This flattened out the sound of recordings and fooled listeners’ brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn’t there anymore, i.e., the resonant combinations of specific human beings producing different notes and sounds in specific spaces at sometimes ultraweird angles that the era of magnetic tape and vinyl had so successfully captured.

If you want to envision how Young feels about the possibility of having to listen to not only his music but also American jazz, rock ’n’ roll and popular song via our dominant streaming formats, imagine walking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Musée d’Orsay one morning and finding that all of the great canvases in those museums were gone and the only way to experience the work of Gustave Courbet or Vincent van Gogh was to click on pixelated thumbnails.

But Young hears something creepier and more insidious in the new music too. We are poisoning ourselves with degraded sound, he believes, the same way that Monsanto is poisoning our food with genetically engineered seeds. The development of our brains is led by our senses; take away too many of the necessary cues, and we are trapped inside a room with no doors or windows. Substituting smoothed-out algorithms for the contingent complexity of biological existence is bad for us, Young thinks. He doesn’t care much about being called a crank. “It’s an insult to the human mind and the human soul,” he once told Greg Kot of The Chicago Tribune. Or as Young put it to me, “I’m not content to be content.”

I was surprised to find myself talking with Young at all. He only really agrees to speak with the press, or to the press, to publicize something new and weird, like his 3,000 square feet of miniature Lionel train track that he housed in his barn or the experimental film he recently made with his wife, Daryl Hannah. For years, Young also put on a benefit concert for the Bridge School, which educates children who have cognitive and sensory disorders. Young’s sons, Zeke and Ben, both have cerebral palsy.

That’s another thing about Young that rescues him from nihilism and self-pity: He does stuff, even if what he does sometimes seems loony. He made a documentary and a YouTube channel about converting his 1959 Lincoln Continental to operate on alternative fuels, and he has been known to distribute unlicensed non-G.M.O. seeds at his shows, from which his fans can grow their own, uncontaminated grains. A few years ago, he appeared on David Letterman’s show to introduce his PonoPlayer, which was his first attempt to right the wrongs that streaming music is doing to our brains. “It means righteous in Hawaiian,” he told Letterman, who seemed both impressed by the device and thoroughly perplexed by the need for it. “Is this a digital way of recording analogous sound?” Letterman asked. “I’m struggling here to find something I can understand.”

His next remedy, which is why he invited me out to Roberts’s home, is a website that he calls the Neil Young Archives: a digital repository of his recorded work that he introduced last summer at considerable personal expense. (“Let’s say, ‘Well over a million dollars,’ ” Roberts suggested to me later, with a sigh.) The interface for the Archive looks like a set of old file cabinets that might have been heisted from an old-time bail bondsman’s office. By clicking open the various cabinets, you can stream every song that Young ever released and a growing portion of his unreleased songs in information-rich file formats and play them back through a DAC, which is a digital-to-analog converter device that approximates the sound of good vinyl.

“What I do with my life now is I try and preserve what I did so that decades from now it will still be there,” Young said. “I wish I could do this for Frank Sinatra. I wish I could do it for Nelson Riddle. I wish I could do it for all of the great jazz players. I wish I could do it for all the great songwriters and musicians and everybody who recorded during the time and before the time that I did. But I can’t.”

There are audiophiles who mutter politely but approvingly about Neil’s crusades. And there are the non-gear-heads who remain passionate about American popular music and the miracles it contains. Ooooh-la-la-la, la-la-la-la. That’s the harmony on “Down by the River,” and it’s glorious, right? Your whole brain relaxes in a warm bath of sound. Now try to feel that pure glory and relaxation, that sense of wide-open spaces, the unique confluence of cultures and sounds that together make up America’s purest and least-expected gift to humanity and all the history and pain and loneliness and satisfaction behind it, in a lo-fi digital stream.

At the center of Young’s efforts are his own engineers, who are at least as important to him as Old Black, his favored Gibson Les Paul. “He wants the honesty of what went down, not some pasted-together overdubbed representation that’s not the truth,” Jon Hanlon, one of his favorite engineers, told me from the modest beach house where he takes breaks from recording and remastering miles of Young’s tapes. When we met, he had just completed mastering a 1973 live performance at the Roxy of “Tonight’s the Night,” which is one of Young’s finest and most harrowing records. The rawness of the anger and the sorrow and the joy that are all mixed up together on that record transcends any particular cut. “The truth is that the human condition is imperfect,” Hanlon says of that record. “He captures that imperfection. He wants to capture it in its birth, at the moment that it happens.”

Hanlon has spent years working his way up the Young recording hierarchy, at the topmost rung of which lived an engineer and producer named David Briggs, whose driving, funny, off-kilter personality is best captured in a photograph that shows him in a cowboy hat holding a long black rifle; the gleam in his eye suggests that he wouldn’t mind shooting someone. “That’s the guy that I wanted to find out about,” Hanlon recalls. When Briggs died, Tim Mulligan, who had been mixing Young’s live shows since the 1970s, inherited some part of Briggs’s mantle. Then came Hanlon, who was brought up to the ranch in 1990 to engineer “Ragged Glory.”

“He’s a control freak,” Hanlon says, in a tone of complete approval. “If he wants your opinion, he’ll ask for it. If he doesn’t, it’s foolhardy to wade in. He’s 10 steps ahead of you in his thought process.”

Young’s favorite place to listen to his own songs isn’t the studio, Hanlon says. It’s behind the wheel of his car. Consciously, you’re driving the car, which leaves your mind more open, which is a trick that Briggs taught Young. “We get on the two-lane blacktop,” Hanlon explains. “There’s something that happens when you drive, without trucks. You hear what comes to the top without focusing too hard.”

The physical condition of 40- and 50-year-old master tapes from the golden age of rock ’n’ roll depends on how they were recorded and stored and on what kind of tape, which is why remastering old recordings is such a pressing necessity and why digital-recording technology, as opposed to low-quality streaming services, can be a gift to musicians, properly deployed. While some types of tape, like Scotch 250 tape, are usually fine, even after decades in storage, other forms of analog tape haven’t fared as well. “Ampex 456 half-inch, quarter-inch tape,” Hanlon says, when I ask about the worst offender. Run it through a pinch roller to play it, and the backing comes off as an oily gunk. You need to bake it in an oven at low heat to reconstitute the backing and make the tape usable. With Young’s old Buffalo Springfield stuff, you could see right through the Mylar, Hanlon says, which means that the music on those tapes, or some of it, is simply gone.

Tim Mulligan has worked together with Neil since “Harvest,” in 1971. His first session was a remote in the old hay barn where Young recorded “Words,” along with “Alabama” and “Are You Ready for the Country.” The guy who knew how to bake Ampex tape, he tells me, was George Horn, a mastering engineer who worked at CBS San Francisco and later at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. “George had a crude setup using a hair dryer and cardboard box,” Mulligan recalls. “We then upgraded to a convection oven with a candy thermometer and timer.” The tapes were carefully rewound, then cleaned, lubricated and repaired until they were playable again and could be rerecorded. After a few precious days, the old tapes turned back into gunk.

The master tapes for “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” were in particularly bad condition, Mulligan recalls. So it’s important to get the work done right and get it done now.

Even engineers in Silicon Valley can hear a difference in the stuff they are selling and what Young’s team is so desperately trying to preserve. As Tim Cook, the head of Apple, recently told a reporter, without any evident trace of humor, “We worry that the humanity is being drained out of music.”

Steve Jobs, Cook’s predecessor, was also a big music fan. “He listened to vinyl in his living room because he could hear real music,” Young told me. “ And he loved music.” When I ask if he ever spoke directly to Jobs about turning Apple’s iTunes into a platform for music that didn’t sound bad, Young nodded.

“Oh, yeah,” he answered. “He said, ‘Send us your masters and I’ll have my guys do what they can with them to make them sound great.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s impossible, your iPod won’t play anything back.’ ”

Jobs disagreed. “He said, ‘Well, our guys can make it so that your music can play back through it.’ And you know he was right,” Young said. “It does play back, and you can recognize it.” He pauses. “But it’s not my music.”

When Jobs’s biographer asked him about Young’s offer, as related in the biography “Becoming Steve Jobs,” Jobs snapped, “[Expletive] Neil Young.”

All of my life, I had never rid myself of the preposterous idea that someday Young would vouchsafe to me some life-altering truth, until one day it happened. My younger son, Elijah, I told Young, has a great ear for music, but his ability to process sensory information is off, which means that he has been drowning since birth in an ocean of sound. This has led to problems with language and balance and nausea. From the time he was born, his hands were also clenched into tiny fists, and they remained that way for over a year. He seemed to be in some kind of pain.

Otherwise, he is a bright, intensely curious child, who is fascinated by the workings of cause and effect and understands language at a normal 5-year-old level but repeats words with great difficulty. To compensate for his deficits, Elijah was blessed with a rock-star smile that can light up a room — a smile so bright and warm that he learned to use it to distract people from his obvious physical discomfort, in a world that was always wobbling and flipping over, and from his inability first to talk and then to pick up small objects or insert a screw into a bolt. Instead, he smiled at people. When they asked him his name, his inability to produce intelligible sounds made him turn away quickly in frustration, which was usually interpreted as shyness. He would try to build a tower out of blocks, then knock down all the blocks. Then he would turn back to them, laugh and flash that smile.

A child in pain is a tragedy and a burden that can be all-consuming, but that’s not how I experience Elijah. He is my friend. He is a source of joy and love and warmth, who has also been the cause of several hundred sleepless nights, which can in turn be the source of soaring anxiety. Thanks to Elijah, I have become aware that speech is a conscious act that requires the coordination of 32 muscles in the mouth, 16 of which affect the shape and positioning of the tongue.

It could be cerebral palsy, a light case, perhaps, Young replied, in an oblique reference to his sons. It is something like that, but it’s not that, so I wasn’t sure exactly how to answer. It’s not genetic. It’s not fatal. Something was inflaming his young brain, disrupting the formation of healthy neural connections; the cause might be historical, or ongoing. Either way, there were kinks in the channels through which sights and sounds flowed. Either those channels had to be ironed out or new ones had to be opened up.

I asked Young what it does to a marriage to have a child like that. Neil has been married three times. His ex-wife, Pegi, Ben’s mom, was a singer-songwriter and environmentalist but died on Jan. 1, 2019, of cancer. She had worked with Young, to whom she was married for 36 years, before divorcing in 2014, to establish the Bridge School.

“It’s good for the marriage,” he said firmly. “If it’s a good marriage, it brings the marriage even closer together. It’s one of life’s great experiences. It’s an enriching thing because it teaches you the value of love.”

Young’s immersion in a program of intensive therapy for his son Ben led him to become obsessed with new ways of hearing and modulating sound. His album “Trans” was a monument to his attempts to communicate with Ben and to find a musical language that could convey what Ben was hearing — and perhaps even serve some therapeutic purpose. As Neil put it to his biographer Jimmy McDonough, the album was “the beginning of my search for a way for a nonoral person, a severely physically handicapped nonoral person, to find some sort of interface for communication. The computers and the heartbeat all have to come together here — where chemistry and electronics meet.”

In that moment, talking about our sons, I realized how all of Young’s obsessions fit together: They are centered in a common understanding of experience and how it shapes us. Human development is led by our senses. Our senses exert a formative and shaping pressure on our brains. So if our experience of the world around us can damage our brains and our souls, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that music can also help us feel better. Every musician, and every music fan, believes that.

It was this belief that led me to the work of a French doctor named Alfred Tomatis, who, in the late 1940s and ’50s, began manipulating sound in the hope of healing people. Among his patients were opera singers and fighter pilots, whose brains had stopped processing sound correctly as a result of work-induced auditory trauma. Because our fight-or-flight response is connected to our auditory system, any disturbances can cause a host of physical symptoms. Tomatis came up with a treatment that involved decreasing or emphasizing specific frequencies of what he believed to be particularly salient forms of music — including Gregorian chants and the music of Mozart, which is perhaps the most perfectly structured and at the same time most effortlessly fluid sound that human beings have ever made (at once the most human and the most perfect music on the planet). These interventions helped retune the muscles that control the auditory pathways through which sound makes its way to the brain.

In the 1950s, Tomatis successfully used his techniques to help opera singers whose prolonged and eventually traumatic exposure to their own vocal extremes left them unable hear high and midrange sounds. After graduating from medical school, he worked for the French Air Force, where he noticed that prolonged exposure to certain ranges of sound produced by factory machinery and jet engines produced a range of negative physiological and psychological effects, in addition to hearing loss.

But Tomatis’s methods languished in relative obscurity for the second half of the 20th century in part because they didn’t align with the then-dominant machine model of our brains, which suggested the organ contained a set of parts that performed specific functions. Once broken, those functions could not be restored.

The machine model of the brain “has been a disaster clinically,” says the psychiatrist Norman Doidge, who over the past decade has popularized much of the pioneering work in the science of neuroplasticity in two best-selling books. “We now know that mental and sensory experience and activity actually change the brain’s ‘wiring’ or connections,” Doidge told me. As Eric Kandel, one of Doidge’s teachers at Columbia, defined it, “Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change its behavior as a result of experience.” In 2000, Kandel was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology.

At dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant in Toronto, I told Doidge about Elijah. What particularly interested me, I said, was that his symptoms mirrored those of a child to whom Doidge had devoted a case history in his second book. Could he help us?

Maybe, he said. With proper reshaping of his auditory cortex, Elijah’s balance might get better and his nausea might stop, which would in turn make it possible for him to develop more normally. Doidge suggested that we take Elijah to the Listening Center in Toronto for an assessment. The center is run by Paul Madaule, who was first Tomatis’s patient in France, then his assistant.

Coincidentally, I added, Young experiments with masking and distorting sound contained some similar ideas. He had two sons with cerebral palsy. “He was probably on to something,” Doidge said.

Spending a day and a night in downtown Fresno, Calif., is like walking into the dreamscape of a midperiod Neil Young album, with once-glorious movie palaces taken over by churches that minister to addicts and drunks. The signs along the way advertise Aladdin Bail Bonds, the Mezcal Lounge and the Lucky You Tattoo parlor. One of the messages of Neil Young’s music has always been that flat spaces are lonely, and the people who inhabit them feel small.

In the next year, Young would announce that he was releasing a book about sound, “To Feel the Music,” written with Phil Baker, who helped developed the PonoPlayer. He also found enough new inspiration to record an album with Crazy Horse, his first in seven years, called “Colorado.” While I was in town, I was able to catch a show.

Fresno’s sizable vagrant population was distinguishable from the concertgoers clustered outside the Warnors Theater mainly by the amount of dust on their shoes. The concert had been announced only a week earlier, which meant that pretty much everyone there was a local — the kind of audience that Young likes best. The inside of the Warnors Theater has been perfectly restored, with a high gilded ceiling and gorgeous acoustics.

“I’m still living the dream we had/For me, it’s not over,” Young sang onstage, facing his band, Crazy Horse, with Nils Lofgren on guitar. There was something clumsy and vulnerable in the way that the men faced each other onstage, bowing back and forth as they soloed in a show of old-school male competitive affection.

“Thanks for coming out,” he told the crowd when he was done. “We appreciate it. Glad you could get those tickets. I like seeing you people here.” A cigar-store Indian hovered over his shoulder. I counted only four people in the audience who were holding up phones. He played “Tired Eyes,” then “Powderfinger,” flailing away at his big old guitar laid across his bouncy gut. “You are like a hurricane/There’s calm in your eye/I wanna love you but I’m getting blown away.”

“God bless you, Neil,” an old hippie lady in a blowzy floral dress shouted. Maybe he only looked cranky. He finished another song and gazed up at the ceiling in wonderment, admiring the great cathedral of sound in which he was standing.

I don’t know if the evils that Neil Young is warning us about will come to pass. I don’t know if G.M.O. seeds are truly killing us or if all the missing information that Silicon Valley is engineering out of music and the rest of our lives is doing something truly evil to our brains or whether these are simply the latest obsessions of a habitually cranky, inventive, restless man.

There are plenty of neurologists who remain skeptical of the idea that sound can help rewire people’s brains. What I can also tell you is this: I listen to rich audio files through a decent-quality DAC and I hear more, and it makes me feel better. Also: I don’t know when or how or if certain parts of my son’s brain will get unstuck. I don’t know whether he will learn to talk in a way that his friends or teachers or people besides me and my wife and his brother and sister can easily understand. I’m not even sure what degree of change is desirable. Some brains, like Neil Young’s and Joni Mitchell’s, are just wired differently.

That said, I will never forget watching Elijah during the first week of his therapy in Toronto, as modified Mozart was piped into his brain and he just suddenly looked down at his little fist and started opening and closing his hand for the first time — because suddenly, he could. After the second session, six weeks later, his reflexes and fine-motor skills had markedly improved, to the point where he could catch a ball or slap his mother across the face when she says “no” to his request for another marshmallow. He isn’t nauseated anymore. He can walk and even run, while continuing to be a joy to be around. Just the other day, in the bath, waiting for his mother to come home, he looked at me and said, “Oh, me home, Mama!”

I listened to the tapes that Elijah was hearing, on which Mozart’s perfect sound was continuously interrupted by filtering that sounded like static, before it then reasserted itself — an effect that is familiar to any Neil Young fan. The filtering effects had helped in whatever way to heal Elijah’s brain. So what is the effect of engineering so much complexity out of the music we listen to, and replacing it with fake, jacked-up sounds, doing to my brain and to yours?

It’s strange to imagine that Young might be a prophet of sorts — but maybe not. His lesson is that everything human is shot through with imperfection. Filtering that out doesn’t make us more perfect; it is making us sick. He’s a great artist, which means that he sees and hears more, which may make him a loon, but is also why he is still worth listening to.

“These places are so great,” Young said onstage in Fresno. “We’re so lucky they’re still here.” He sang, in fine voice: “He came dancing across the waters/With his galleons and guns.” At 73, he is still a man walking through a hurricane, which begins inside a perfect melody that dissolves into dissonance and feedback, inside of which there is something wonderfully, miraculously whole.

David Samuels is the author of “The Runner” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” He last wrote for the magazine about Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s foreign-policy guru.

#tech #technology #musica #music #musicians #must reads #pop music #tech news #news #latest news #entertainers #arts and entertainment #entertainment #u.s. news #u.s. politics #woodstock

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charlesjening · 6 years ago

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He Made the American Dream Real: From Foreign Lands to Big 4 Auditor to a Leader at an Advisory Firm

Does your accounting job have you trapped in an accrual world? Do you ever want to ditch it all and travel down a different career path? You could go back to school to become an orthopedic surgeon, but then you’d have to re-learn the phases of mitosis. You could be an English teacher, but that would require figuring out whether a gerund is a part of speech or a made-up word created by the government to destroy children’s dreams. (A word that’s a verb and a noun? Right, and Neil Armstrong really landed on the moon.) Or you could use the accounting and business skills you’ve already acquired to transition into a much more rewarding role.

Pavan Satyaketu

That’s exactly what Advaion’s Pavan Satyaketu, a managing director, did when he left the Big 4—arguably at near the top of his field—to enter the world of advising jobs and become a leader at an advisory firm in 2004. Despite his initial success in accounting, the 20-something immigrant realized his passion lay elsewhere, and took a career gamble at a time when the Office Space “Bobs” and Dilbert were still accountant synonyms. We recently caught up with Satyaketu and asked him about his start, career switch to advising jobs, path to success, and words of wisdom to those accountants looking to make a transition into more of an advisory role.

Adolescent to accountant

Going Concern: First off, tell us a little bit about your background. Where’d you grow up, and how’d you get into accounting?

Pavan Satyaketu: I grew up as one of five boys in a three-bedroom house in the West Indies. We were a working-class family. My father suggested an accounting path, as he knew it would be a career with high demand. I started my career at Price Waterhouse, as they offered tuition loans in a position that allowed me to work full time and go to school part time, nights, and weekends.

GC: Where’d you go from there?

Satyaketu: I eventually followed my parents to Fort Lauderdale—moving to Miami in the late 1990s to work at a large pharmaceutical company. I soon realized I couldn’t stay there if I wanted to build my career, so I decided to go big and moved to New York without a job. After cold-calling, I landed interviews at a number of firms and ultimately decided to join KPMG.

From the Big 4 to advising jobs

GC: You rose quickly through the Big 4 ranks, but ultimately left after 10 years. What prompted the switch to the world of advising jobs?

Satyaketu: I think by the end of 2002, I started to see a shift in what I was doing. While I loved the company and team I worked with, my work kept me focused on numbers and away from business operations altogether.

GC: And you knew then you were ready to move?

Satyaketu: In the summer of 2003, I went on vacation with my younger brothers, and I saw that my daughter was more comfortable with them than with me. I realized then that I couldn’t take on a lot of travel and long hours at the office and have quality time with my daughter at the same time. My grandfather and uncle both died in their early 50s, and I knew I didn’t want to wait until I got older to start enjoying life with her.

Does Pavan sound like the type of guy you’d like to work with? He works at an advisory firm, Advaion, which is currently hiring. Scroll to the bottom of this post to apply for an open advising position.

GC: How were you able to successfully make the transition from the Big 4 to advising jobs

Satyaketu: After a decade of watching and helping great companies—nationally and internationally—and seeing just how passionate people were with their work, I found that my view was only from the outside as an auditor. I wasn’t part of the team that was growing a company. I wanted to be part of the team and drive success instead of just being the auditor who gave them an audit opinion on their financials.

Advice to the future advising jobs seeker

GC: What advice would you give to someone working at the Big 4 or another firm who is looking to transition into something else?

Satyaketu: It all depends on what they are trying to transition into. The Big 4 has so many smart people, and because those people work with so many different clients, they develop a lot of skill sets they use daily—project management, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, and analytical skills, to name a few. I think they really need to sit down and evaluate their skill sets to see what they do well and see where they fit in. A lot of times those skill sets fit into an advisory role.

GC: What are some mistakes people make when trying to transition from a big accounting firm

Satyaketu: Knee-jerk reactions. When you encounter something you don’t like—be it financial regulations or something in life—our human nature tends to cause us to react a little extreme. That’s the worst thing we can do to ourselves and our careers. Fortunately, I got a call from someone who needed help to get financials together, and I realized I had a lot of other skill sets people valued as a resource. When we try to get away from something, doing the opposite to the extreme is not often a good thing, and it can result in a disservice to ourselves.

Advaion: The perfect place to transition from accounting to advising jobs

Does Satyaketu’s story sound familiar? Can you relate to his frustrations with accounting jobs? Maybe it’s time you followed his path and made the switch from accounting to an advisory career.

For more than a decade, Advaion has served as a trusted advisor for clients in several industries. The independent consulting firm’s staff is comprised primarily of former Big 4 business professionals—so if you’re currently working at one of the Big 4, you may be exactly the recruit Advaion is looking for. At Advaion, you’ll provide your clients with the most up-to-date information related to regulatory, compliance, management, and technology trends. You’ll foster a relationship of trust with your clients, helping them make smarter financial decisions and grow their businesses. If you’re still reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve decided you don’t want to go to medical school to learn the difference between anaphase A and anaphase B, and are looking to make the transition from accounting to advising jobs. And just like Satyaketu, if you possess the skills and drive to succeed, Advaion may be a great fit for you. Click one of the links below to apply for open advising jobs at Advaion now.

Advising jobs in New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Financial Audit Consultant (New York City)

Financial Audit Consultant (Fort Lauderdale, Florida)

The post He Made the American Dream Real: From Foreign Lands to Big 4 Auditor to a Leader at an Advisory Firm appeared first on Going Concern.

republished from Going Concern

#Technology #Finance

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mikemortgage · 6 years ago

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Goldcorp’s Ian Telfer rode the gold highs — but exits on a low note

After helping to build what was once the most valuable gold mining company in the world, Goldcorp Inc. chairman Ian Telfer is planning to exit on a low-note — albeit $12 million richer.

Earlier this year, Telfer cut a deal to sell Goldcorp for US$10 billion — a 78 per cent hair cut from its peak valuation of US$45 billion back in 2011 when gold prices were soaring.

On Thursday, in a sign of how far the company has fallen, Goldcorp shareholders voted nearly unanimously to approve the deal. Proxy advisors have recommended Newmont shareholders do the same when they vote April 11.

That means Telfer, 73, who does not hold a position at any other gold company, could officially be jobless next week, having opted to take a $12 million severance pay out despite shareholder objections, and to give up the chance to serve as Newmont’s deputy chairman.

If he does leave the gold industry — although some friends and acquaintances doubt he will sit still in retirement — the departure comes at a time when Telfer believes the gold mining industry is headed for a period of decline, as he made clear in interviews with the Financial Post conducted during the past year including an extended conversation last May before his induction into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame.

Convinced that the major gold reserves in the world all have been discovered and the industry must shrink, Telfer has been bracing for a wave of consolidation. Unfortunately, it arrived last year as his company was trading at its lowest point in decades.

“One thing you learn in our business, is sometimes they put you in the sunshine for awhile, sometimes they put you in the shade,” he said last May. “Right now we’re in the shade.”

At the time, Goldcorp had been riding a years-long decline in its share price from above $50 in 2011 down to $13.47 in May 2018, and the worst hadn’t even come.

Last autumn, after reporting disappointing third-quarter results including higher than expected costs, Goldcorp shares went on to drop an additional nearly 20 per cent, to less than $9. Since 2017 it has had negative free cash flows, according to Morningstar Research.

By the beginning of the year, the whole company was being sold to Newmont Mining for US$10 billion, whose chief executive Gary Goldberg would criticize Goldcorp’s strategy as one focused on “volume” rather than profits.

If the Goldcorp sales goes through, it forms a remarkable ending for a company that as recently as 2014 was worth more than either Newmont or Barrick Gold Corp. — currently the two largest gold companies in the world.

In 2001, Telfer started Wheaton River Minerals, the company that eventually became Goldcorp in 2005. The combined company, which took the name Goldcorp, hit a high point in September 2011 when its market cap exploded to US$45 billion — a value that then exceeded Newmont’s US$32.5 billion market cap.

That year, gold prices peaked above US$1,800 per ounce. These days, gold has been trading around US$1,300 per ounce and has not gone above US$1,400 since 2014.

Telfer is quick to point out that nearly all gold companies that were around in 2011 have declined by most measures since the price of gold dropped. But compared to Barrick and Newmont, his company has recovered the least — amid operational challenges, rising costs and questions about how it will maintain its pipeline of gold production.

The way forward seemed to puzzle even Telfer.

“We started this company from scratch and a few years ago we were bigger than even Barrick,” Telfer said last May. “We’ve now dropped back behind Barrick and behind Newmont by a fair bit.”

He added that the entire industry has changed in one key way: “It’s shrinking for the first time in my life, and I’ve been in it almost 40 years.”

Goldcorp’s Porcupine mine in Ontario.

He’s not alone in seeing the industry decline. At the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference earlier this year, Mark Ferguson of S&P Global Market Intelligence said there’s been a steady decline in gold grades since 2012, and a “dearth of really big deposits” discovered.

Telfer became convinced that when any industry shrinks, consolidation always comes next.

So last September, after Barrick Gold announced its US$6 billion acquisition of Randgold Resources, in a deal that was roundly cheered by the investment community, Telfer said he felt pressure to find a merger partner for Goldcorp. He compared it to a game of musical chairs, in which fairly quickly, the handful of other eligible companies would link up with someone and the last company would be stranded.

Originally, Telfer spoke with Australia’s Newcrest about a no-premium deal late last year.

But in a one-month time span that began in early December, Newmont negotiated to buy Goldcorp in a deal primarily structured as a share exchange that gave Goldcorp a 17 per cent premium on its then-trading price.

That deal almost fell through when Barrick chief executive Mark Bristow made a hostile US$17.8 billion bid for Newmont, which he conditioned upon the cancellation of the Goldcorp buyout — whose assets he disparaged.

Instead, Barrick dropped its bid for Newmont last month.

Telfer says he likes to golf, and read about business, and doesn’t have any business plans beyond his role as a director at Renaissance Oil Corp. — a small onshore energy producer in Mexico with a market capitalization of less than US$40 million.

Neil Woodyer, chief executive of Leagold Inc. and a close business associate of Telfer, said his friend has always been able to parlay one job into the next, starting out looking for gold in Brazil and Venezuela, and finally moving to the global stage with Goldcorp.

Now, the well is dry, but Woodyer said he doubts Telfer will retire quietly.

“He’ll pop up in some sort of capacity, maybe in a chairman capacity,” said Woodyer.

In interviews, Telfer has said he doesn’t pay attention to other commodities and believes gold is poised for a massive run up, much like the spike rise he said he predicted in 2001, which motivated him to start the company that became Goldcorp.

In a short film made before his induction into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame, Telfer described himself as a gold bug, fascinated by its “mythic qualities.” He said he doesn’t fear failure and that he likes to create businesses.

“The financial markets love a comeback story,” Telfer said in the film. “So look forward to your comeback story.”

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: GabeFriedz

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2KhjAs3 via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

#IFTTT #Financial Post

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mayramoss-blog1 · 7 years ago

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'I'm surprised that football fanzines have survived'

Image copyright Paul Gilham

The purchase of a fanzine remains part of the match-day routine for many football fans, who value an independent, sideways and often light-hearted take on the state of their beloved clubs. The BBC has asked the editors of five publications that are still in print - despite the competition from online offerings - to choose their favourite covers.

"In some ways I'm surprised that fanzines have survived," says Malcolm Clarke, chair of the Football Supporters Federation.

"You might have thought with the rise of social media and the internet they would have vanished years ago, but they haven't.

"I think it is partly due to in some cases a sense of great loyalty... but also because some have very high-quality writing."

The Gooner - Arsenal

Image copyright The Gooner

Mike Francis admits that he was pretty much goaded into forming The Gooner, one of the country's oldest fanzines.

During a trip to a bookshop on Charing Cross Road, he picked up a Chelsea fanzine for his then boss, a Blues supporter, and was given the reply: "That just proves we are a bigger club."

London rivalry also features in one of Mr Francis' favourite covers.

"Around the time that that cover came out we were on a run where we were beating Spurs every time we played them," he remembers.

"Clearly, as Arsenal fans that was a high point of the season.

"We'd probably beaten them five or six times and that was how that cover came about because we were asking: 'How are Spurs ever going to win a derby?'

"We then thought of the most famous Derby winner, Shergar, and that was how the two came together."

Despite its popularity, Mr Francis admits he still "cringes" at his "amateurish" drawing of a horse in a Tottenham shirt.

Image copyright The Gooner

The fanzine has become more polished in its appearance over the years.

The idea for the cover of Issue 235, which featured manager Arsene Wenger in style of a Roy Lichtenstein portrait, came about during a trip on the London Underground.

"I think I just saw an advert on the Tube for a Roy Lichtenstein exhibition and I just thought that it would make a great style for a cover.

"Darren was always keen to try new things so I suggested it to him and that is what he came up with."

At the height of its popularity, Mr Francis estimates they were selling 7,500 copies of each issue, but that figure has dwindled to about 2,000.

The Gooner will cease publication at the end of this season.

The Square Ball - Leeds United

Image copyright The Square Ball

"Some of the best fanzines have some of the worst owners," says one of The Square Ball's co-editors, Paul O'Dowd.

First published in 1989, the fanzine has covered league titles and Champions League football, but also the lows of administration and relegation to English football's third tier.

Mr O'Dowd, who runs the fanzine with three others, says one of his favourite issues they have produced is the "Kenopoly" edition.

Produced during the 2009-10 season, it was what Mr O'Dowd describes as a "sarcastic and satirical" look at the way then Leeds owner Ken Bates ran the club.

"We were working on it for a couple of months... it just seemed to sum up Ken Bates," he says.

"He would use everybody else's money for whatever business he was doing.

"It was just our way of being sarcastic and having a go at Ken Bates in a very artistic way."

Image copyright The Square Ball

Mr O'Dowd says another of his favourite covers was the "Hoof" edition from 2012-13, mocking the "horrible" style of football played during Neil Warnock's tenure.

He says that when the editorial team saw the photo of Michael Brown, it perfectly encapsulated the topic that they wanted to cover.

The headline, written in the style of an Oxford English Dictionary entry, helped to get their simple message across, Mr O'Dowd says.

He explains: "It was to the point, very matter of fact.

"It just summed up the football at the time that was just horrible, and we were paying top dollar to watch it which was the annoying thing."

United We Stand - Manchester United

Image copyright United We Stand

United We Stand has been following the fortunes of Manchester United since the fanzine was a created by a 15-year-old Andy Mitten in 1989.

He says its focus on original content has kept it popular through 275 editions.

One of the publication's early editions gained notoriety, when it wrongly called the outcome of the 1991-92 First Division title race, the last campaign before the introduction the following season of the Premier League.

United We Stand's headline read: "Champions at Last," a nod to the fact that they had not been champions for 25 years.

But the Red Devils then lost three games in a row to hand the title to arch-rivals Leeds.

Image copyright Getty Images

"I'd had 4,000 copies printed and I was stood outside Old Trafford making an absolute fool out of myself," Mr Mitten remembers.

"I was getting loads of abuse because of it, and quite rightly so."

Perhaps luckily for Mr Mitten, a recent house move means he can no longer locate that particular cover, but its notoriety endures.

He is more fond of the June 2017 edition, a tribute to Wayne Rooney before the club's record goal-scorer left to rejoin Everton.

"At the time, most United fans online saw him as persona non grata," he says.

" was our way of saying... he has clearly dipped as a player but he has been a fantastic player here.

"We've put him all of these different shirts because Manchester United change their shirt every five minutes, because they are a commercial beast like every football club.

"But there was nothing commercial about that goal - it was just pure beauty."

Blowing Bubbles Monthly - West Ham United

Image copyright David Blakemore

Blowing Bubbles Monthly is the brainchild of David Blakemore and has been entertaining West Ham fans since 2012.

The fanzine was initially going to be online only, but a test print run proved so popular it is now produced monthly.

Its editor, David Blakemore, says their September 2016 edition (pictured above) is one of his favourites.

"In a season full of highs and lows... it just captured one of the brighter moments, that first goal at the London Stadium," he says.

"We also had an interview with David Gold in there which set the tone for the rest of the season.

"We just felt page after page it was one of our stronger issues."

Image copyright David Blakemore

The September 2017 issue is one Mr Blakemore says feels significant because they "stuck their neck out" and questioned then manager Slaven Bilic's position.

He says the decision was not taken lightly.

"I think most knew that Bilic was on the brink at that time," Mr Blakemore adds.

"That vocal minority who were calling for his head had gathered momentum and by September it was starting to go full power."

Given that the Croatian would be sacked just a few weeks later, it appears Blowing Bubbles, picked their moment perfectly.

Bandy & Shinty - Nottingham Forest

Image copyright Bandy & Shinty

The team in charge of the unusually named Bandy & Shinty, a relatively new Nottingham Forest fanzine, freely admit they are not "traditional fanzine sellers".

Born out of a meeting at a pub to celebrate the club's 150th anniversary, the four-man team behind the publication tend to send out their fanzine via post.

The appeal? The chance to still enjoy match-days with family.

The fanzine's name is a nod to the two hockey clubs that met to form Nottingham Forest in 1865.

History also is an important part of each issue's cover.

"The Brian Clough one (pictured) was extremely popular," says Sean Hockett, one of the team behind Bandy & Shinty.

"I like the fact that a fair number of Forest fans will just be able to identify that image.

"It is based on a photograph when he is sort of laissez-faire.

"He has got his thumb to his nose and he is almost irreverent about the fact he is having his photograph taken.

"It just encapsulates Brian Clough as a character."

Image copyright Bandy & Shinty

Mr Hockett says issue six is also a personal favourite, because it features their most detailed piece of cover art.

"It has taken us out of that zone of just using a silhouetted image," he adds.

"I like the fact you have got the image of John Robertson in the middle of the passport instead of the Queen.

"As a piece of art I just think it's lovely."

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#fanzines #football #im #surprised #survived #mainposts

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talabib · 6 years ago

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Do You what it takes to be a CEO?

CEOs aren’t born, they’re made.

The majority of CEOs are just regular people who have developed leadership qualities over the course of their career.

More than 70 percent of the CEOs surveyed claimed that they had no intention of becoming a CEO when they first started working.

What’s more, the survey showed that you don’t need to be a genius to become a CEO.

Make fewer and thus faster decisions.

Previously, we’ve shown that a college degree isn’t necessary to become the CEO of a lucrative company. But being highly intelligent is not a prerequisite either.

In addition to being quick, an overarching decision is usually better than one that’s detailed.

To get favorable results, you need to understand your stakeholders.

As the example illustrates, it’s important for CEOs to spend time getting to know their customers.

Similarly, it’s vital to know the motivations behind the company’s board members.

People will rely on a consistent and committed CEO.

To present yourself as a reliable person, you must always follow through on your commitments.

Additionally, preparing anecdotes about your prior experiences will help you sell yourself as a reliable CEO.

Avoid mistakes by building repeatable, well-planned systems.

Forget the past and focus on adapting to future trends.

What do Blockbuster Video and Kodak have in common? Both are businesses that failed because they didn’t adapt to the future.

One important aspect of planning for the future involves making room for new ideas by letting go of old ones.

Both Kodak and Blockbuster failed because they weren’t able to let go of their old practices and adapt to the changing business landscape fast enough.

Clearly, then, staying on top of upcoming trends is vital for a company’s sustained success, but how can you manage that in an increasingly information-loaded world?

You need to get noticed to advance to the top.

So how do you show what you’ve got, if you’re not supposed to brag about your talents? To get there, try to be a big fish in a small pond.

Smaller companies are more likely to accommodate change and ideas faster than big corporations, which usually have no time or room for your personal opinions.

Alternatively, you could offer skills that the company is lacking, which is typically computer and technology expertise. Everyone will notice when you become the go-to person for such areas.

Once people recognize your talent, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a CEO.

#Do You what it takes to be a CEO?

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berlijn2017uva-blog · 8 years ago

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Nord Neukölln: State-supported gentrification in Denial

Author: Cody Hochstenbach Originally published in ProtoCity (2014)

A widely felt dissatisfaction with and anger about gentrification exists among Berlin’s residents. Furious debates about the touristification of residential neighbourhoods and massive protests against rent increases are just some of the ways by which this is expressed. Outside the Anglo-American context, there are few cities where gentrification is as contested as it is in Berlin. Conversely, gentrification arguably forms a key component of Berlin’s urban growth strategies inspired by the so-called promises of the creative city and city marketing strategies aiming to promote the city’s image as hip, creative, and ‘poor but sexy’.

During my stay in Berlin in 2012 I studied whether and how local policymakers and relevant policy documents deal with these heated debates about gentrification and criticisms about their role in promoting it. From the international scholarly literature we learn that public policies pursuing gentrification are often, in the words of the late Neil Smith, ‘sugarcoated’ with the more positive sounding vocabulary of social mixing, revitalisation, regeneration or urban renaissance. This would allow stakeholders to avoid the negative association of the term gentrification with displacement and class struggles – allowing gentrification policies to be installed ‘by stealth’. Is such a strategy possible, however, in a context where the term gentrification fills the newspapers and criticisms are often voiced and heard?

After having swept through Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, gentrification has in recent years arrived and settled in the district of Neukölln – or more specifically the quarters Reuterquartier (38,000 residents) and Schillerpromenade (30,000) – and made it a travel guide highlight. Reuterquartier has been subject to most gentrification pressures as it borders an already heavily gentrified part of Kreuzberg. Schillerpromenade is located directly east of the former airport Tempelhof, which now functions as a huge public green space. This has substantially enhanced the susceptibility of the quarter to gentrification. As a consequence these quarters currently show the steepest rent increases of the whole of Berlin. It is important to note here that the city is dominated by private-rental housing.

Map of Berlin. Reuterquartier in red, Schillerpromenade in blue. Source: OpenStreetMap

Not so long ago though, these areas of Neukölln were considered some of the worst off in Berlin, and falsely represented as ghettoes by media and politicians (most notably Thilo Sarrazin). Therefore, both Reuterquartier and Schillerpromenade came to be targeted by a range of policy initiatives to address the spatial concentration of disadvantage. Most importantly, both neighbourhoods were – along with 32 other quarters in Berlin – designated as areas with ‘special development needs’ to be addressed by Neighbourhood Management teams.

Although the broad range of policy initiatives show important differences, most do mention goals to attract and retain upwardly-mobile or middle-income households. Also, policies aiming to upgrade the quality of the housing stock and public space and attract more artist galleries, higher-end gastronomy and higher-end shops are in place. Hence, these policy examples potentially provide some evidence of state-supported gentrification being pursued.

However, rather than to avoid or sugarcoat the term gentrification (as the Anglo-American literature suggests) or to explicitly mention it as a positive policy tool (as in the Amsterdam context), policy documents and policymakers attempt to deny gentrification currently takes place already. For example the Neighbourhood Management team of Reuterquartier speaks of ‘gentrification on hold’. Furthermore, in a subsequent policy document, a distinction is made between local residents’ perceptions and fears of gentrification, and an ‘objective’ judgement that gentrification does not yet take place. Instead policymakers and policy documents highlight an actually existing reality of poverty concentrations and structural decline.

In this regard, policymakers and policy documents routinely refer to a study on the changing residential composition of Nord-Neukölln. This study found that the majority of more recent in-movers into Reuterquartier and Schillerpromenade only possess income levels slightly above both neighbourhoods’ averages. This creates the idea that residential composition change is one of the poor displacing the very poor rather than full-fledged gentrification where high-income residents move in:

“What happens here is something different. For us, it has nothing to do with gentrification. The residential structure is changing, but young residents are moving in” (quote from interview with policymaker, author translation).

This is a remarkable conclusion: Even though recent in-movers indeed possess comparatively low incomes, they are relatively small households such as students, childless couples and other upwardly-mobile young people. Nevertheless, referring to the marginal status of recent in-movers is one of the main strategies to downplay the extent of gentrification or to deny it occurs at all. Furthermore, some policymakers argue more mature forms of gentrification are not to be expected, given the large share of comparatively small apartments and the availability of still relatively affordable apartments in higher status neighbourhoods.

Consequently, policymakers emphasise they are not involved in gentrifying the neighbourhood or displacing residents. After their local office was vandalized in November 2012, the Neighbourhood Management of Schillerpromenade posted a message on their website which stated:

“To repeat it once again: We do not renovate, we do not sell or buy houses; we do not cast out, displace or repress anybody” (author translation).

Furthermore, next to downplaying the current extent of gentrification taking place, interviewed policymakers often create a false choice between either pursuing future gentrification or else having to accept further decline and slummification (see Tom Slater’s recent criticism of what he terms false choice urbanism):

“I have invested millions […], everywhere the streets and squares have been improved. I have worked together with the neighbourhood’s residents. What do they want? We have made it more attractive, […] the landlords will notice this and demand higher rents” (quote from interview with policymaker, author translation).

“When we act against bad landlords and bad living conditions it is called gentrification and when we don’t do anything we are blamed for these bad conditions” (quote from interview with policymaker, author translation).

Or as one policymaker puts it: “a few more Kollwitzplätze [in Neukölln] would be good”. The point of reference, Kollwitzplatz formst the heart of Prenzlauer Berg and is one of the most gentrified parts of the whole of Berlin. This false choice – resembling the ‘there is no alternative’ slogan of neoliberalism – can be considered a strategy to make gentrification look like a good alternative to decline, in effect ‘displacing’ all options in between.

Thus, to conclude, we can derive some strategies of how policymakers deal with criticisms of promoting gentrification. We see that policymakers refer to reports and official statistics to stress that in-movers are relatively low income themselves, and that high levels of poverty and structural concentrations of disadvantage continue to exist. Relatedly, although policymakers argue their influence is relatively benign, they do present gentrification policies as a suitable way to treat existing issues, in effect accepting displacement and rent increases as a logical side effect.

Now, some two years after this research was conducted, we can see the extent and pace of gentrification occurring as Nord-Neukölln has seen a 54% increase in rents for new renters between 2009 and 2014 outpacing all other districts of Berlin. It appears the result of a toxic mix of market and policy, with the market moving towards reinvestment and gentrification in Neukölln and policies happy to support these developments in their attempts to reduce poverty in the area.

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