Time oozed through the dark like a lead weight in a fish's gut. I read the print on the aluminum beer cans. I stared at my watch. I looked at the refrigerator door. I turned the pages of yesterday's paper. I used the edge of a postcard to scrape together the cookie crumbs on the tabletop.
Murakami is great a creating mystical atmospheres and leaving his stories unsatisfyingly unresolved - one of the reasons I am drawn to his short stories more that to his novels. This one from his collection The Elephant Vanishes, written sometime in the 80s, is a mix of funny wit and his signature sense of mystery and magic.
Print did not go extinct, but ebook sales slowed down. This is the context for the Times’ triumphant assertion that “print sales are rising while e-book sales are declining.” Both facts are true, but the former doesn’t necessarily follow from the latter.
A review of how publishing has changed over the last decade, the rise and waning of ebooks, resurgence of local bookstores (reminiscent of hipster coffee shops) and how the incumbents of previous brick-and-mortar decades are catching up.
A look at where venture capitalists came from, what good and bad they do for business (which is religously debated from both sides in the tech industry) and how it has affected society as a whole.
The Good
A thriving society needs moon shots, and, in the absence of a literal space race, only venture capitalists have the mandate to throw cash at an improbable success.”
however
The Bad
One trend in Venture World has been growing valuations [..] another has been undesirable treatment of employees.
The Uncanny
It’s nice that we’re able to get cheap or free stuff from wildly scaled-up unprofitable startups with venture backing. [..] But how healthy is this norm?”
This reminds me of a talk DHH (creator of rails, CTO of Basecamp) gave in 2015, a satirical criticism of venture capitalist backed startup-izm, titled “Reconsider”.
Don’t just accept this definition of “success” because that’s what everyone is cheering for at the moment. Yes, the chorus is loud, and that’s seductively alluring, but you don’t have to peel much lacquer off the surface to see that wood beneath might not be as strong as you’d imagine.
We were venture-funded, which was like playing a game of double-or-nothing. It’s euphoric when things are going your way — and suffocating when they’re not.
An account of a venture funded startup that delivered value to its customers and generated revenue - but failed to become the next unicorn. Most interesting is how that affected the life and mental health of employees and founders.
Every year before 2016, there was an improvement in my expectations — in the team, the product, or the company. This was the first time in my life when the present year felt worse than the last.
The anxiety and alienation shows, how truely horrible the feeling of failure is. Failure to meet the externally dictated goal of building a billion dollar company.
There were months where I worked 16 hours a day, but there were also some months where I worked four hours a week. Here’s one way to picture that time:
Can you tell which is which? I can’t. We had a sales team for a few years, then we didn’t. Can you tell when we made the switch? I can’t.
Tom Waits is an iconic character. A weirdo. A freak. Who embraced himself, his idiosyncrasy over decades.
It's really hard to describe this piece, just peak into these exceprts:
Dumps, salvage yards, rummage sales, junk shops - these are his special retreats. Waits loves to find strange and resonant objects hidden deep in piles of garbage, objects he can rescue and turn into new kinds of musical instruments. “I like to imagine how it feels for the object to become music,” he says. “Imagine you're the lid to a fifty-gallon drum. That's your job. You work at that. That's your whole life. Then one day I find you and I say, “We're gonna drill a hole in you, run a wire through you, hang you from the ceiling of the studio, bang on you with a mallet, and now you're in show business, baby!” Sometimes, though, he just goes searching for doors. He loves doors. They're his biggest indulgence. He's always coming home with more doors- Victorian, barn, French… His wife will protest, “But we already have a door!” and Waits will say, “But this one comes with such nice windows, baby!”
He remembers the time his daughter helped him write a song. “We were on a bus coming to L.A. And it was really cold outside. There was this transgender person, to be politically correct, standing on a corner wearing a short little top with a lot of midriff showing, a lot of heavy eye makeup and dyed hair and a really short skirt. And this guy, or girl, was dancing all by himself. And my little girl saw it and said, “It must be really hard to dance like that when you're so cold and there's no music.'”
I've never met the woman, and I know nothing for certain about her, except what her husband has told me. Which means that she is a person thoroughly composed, in my mind, of Tom Waits's words. Which means she's the closest thing out there to a living Tom Waits song. He has called her “an incandescent presence” in his life and music. She's “a rhododendron, an orchid and an oak.” He has described her as a cross between Eurdora Welty and Joan Jett.” She has “the four B's. Beauty, brightness, bravery, and brains.” He insists that's she's the truly creative force in the relationship, the feral influence who challenges his “pragmatic” limitations and stirs intrigue into all their music. (“She has dreams like Hieronymus Bosch(5) …. She'll start talking in tongues and I'll take it all down.") He says “she speaks to my subtext, not my context.”
