I don’t normally do plugs on here, but my good friend Ella has just recently completed her first novel: Blood, Sex and Coffee. It’s a mammoth achievement, weighing in at a good 700 pages, and is a campy vampire novel bringing in more themes than you’d think could be fit in such as a size – although is fundamentally a huge tract of story crossing space and time. I haven’t yet had a chance to read it – and I’m not normally a big fiction reader – but I have a 12 hour flight to Cape Town at the weekend, so maybe be burning through some of it then. I hope to post a review sometime soon.

You can download it for free or buy a paper copy for £13, either of them via Lulu.

Black Snake Moan is rich, thick, and satisfying, like a good film should be.

Samuel L. Jackson plays a strong role as the Good Samaritan with an unusual method. Christina Ricci is unashamedly raunchy as the object of his ‘caring’ (which makes for slightly uncomfortable watching when you remember her first major role in The Addams Family aged eleven). Surprisingly, even Justin Timberlake does a passable job as the third wheel in the film.

Back in the 70s, this film might have been labelled sexploitation, and there’s certainly an undercurrent of something weird going on, with Ricci’s character so obviously consumed with lust and yet chained up. A lot of this is explained away by the plot, which justifies much of her behaviour by drawing on the abuse she suffered as a child, but it’s still an interesting choice of presentation by the film-makers in today’s politically correct climate.

It’s definitely a fun watch, a funky film with a blues soundtrack that perfectly matches the dry Tennessee setting, some good jokes thrown in, a decent helping of emotion and humanity, and a well-honed plot with direction that fools you into believing the whole ridiculous thing could actually happen. A good way to spend two hours.

The political arguments around government and business are well understood. At one extreme are people who despise profit-making businesses, considering them a necessary evil at best, and who’d prefer to see governments take more action to protect their and society’s interests. At the other are those who’d prefer to see governments scaled down significantly and businesses given more freedom.

People with my political opinions often make arguments for the latter based on either practical or moral arguments. Richard and I had a online discussion about this recently. But maybe there’s another, more silly, question that’s missing: which is sexier: business or government? A quick look at the primary US government portal compared to Wal-Mart’s homepage leaves me in no doubt who hired the better web designer, at any rate (and Wal-Mart is hardly an example of glamour). Which corporate body makes you want to interact with them? Anybody who’s spent any time at a UK local council, with their cuppa-and-rich-tea-biscuit image, will know what I mean (that’s an example of non-sexiness, if it’s not clear: not that I have anything against rich tea).

I’m semi-serious, actually – this does matter – it’s an issue of marketing. Clearly a company cannot actually be sexy – only people can be that. But the Virgin family of companies gets pretty close – and not just because of the suggestive naming. It’s an image that has been carefully cultivated by the folk at Virgin. Virgin is a company that you want to like (well, I do, anyway), irrespective of the fact that their trains don’t run on time.

I think the reasoning behind this is simple. Companies have to be sexy – or at least, they have to project an image which is aligned with values their customers want them to have. Sometimes this is sexiness – and Virgin is a prime example of a brand that’s attacked several markets with that technique and won some new custom. Sometimes, to be fair, there’s another image to be conveyed (UPS brown vans and brown uniforms are not alluring; but they do project an image of reliability). Conversely, government has no such motivation to project an image of anything – or at least the vast majority of unelected officials don’t. There’s no requirement to improve, no motivation to act like a marketer, because there’s no competition. Thus, government will always continue to project an image of dull and incompetent, whether that be the case or not. As Seth says, ‘[people] lose their jobs because of boring marketing’ – except in government they don’t, because they rarely lose them at all.

It’s probably not the most pressing problem the world faces right now, but wouldn’t it be nice to stop worrying about global warming for five minutes and think about how to make the institutions we deal with on a daily basis more appealing?

Economists approach things in weird ways. I’ve noticed several posts on the more popular economic blogs recently discussing marriage, relationships, and sex: Are Husbands Really Like Potatoes? being a good example, as well as a discussion of polygamy. Tyler Cowen has even briefly looked at how nudity affects human behaviour (arguably not directly related to relationships, but it’s a fun read anyway).

Given that I like the economic way of thinking (given my limited training), I thought I’d take a look at dating, something close to my heart as a bachelor. This arguably makes me so far unqualified to discuss the subject – but I’ll give it a go anyway.

Most relationships go through three simply described phases:

1. Establishment – the fun part – getting to know a new person.
2. Established – the sometimes fun, sometimes not part. Most couples are in this phase right now.
3. Break-up – the not-so-fun part – upsetting, perhaps anger-generating. At the very least, not fun.

Successful long-term relationships, one hopes, never reach phase 3.

Most people enter relationships, I would assert, because they want a piece of phase 1 – it sounds like fun. Phase 3 is far away, and hopefully not going to happen anyway, so they downplay its significance. The question is – if phase 3 could be time-adjusted – expressed in the immediacy of today’s hurt rather than 3 years’ time – would people, on average, assess the situation any differently?

In fact, this comes down to a question of rationality. Economists like to assume that everyone is rational (or at least more rational than most people would). This means that people make optimal decisions, given the information they have. Without this, it’s hard to make markets make sense. Commonly expressed sentiments from friends after a break-up include: ‘at least you learnt something; remember the good times; it’s good you went through that relationship’. If cynical, one could dismiss those as simply statements designed to console and soften the blow. But the presumed implication of those words is that your choice was rational – it was worth the emotional upset in phase 3 for the enjoyment in phases 1 and 2.

I’m deliberately not going to come to a conclusion – I find rationality to be one of the hardest parts of economics – whilst I can understand people making rational choices about where to buy cornflakes from, it’s much harder to map it onto emotions. But it’d be nice to think that we do make sensible choices when it comes to dating, and that we do learn from our mistakes. I wonder if that’s so?

(NB: I know I’ve oversimplified the situation. But I think the same principles hold even if you develop dating into a more complex model)

Midnight Cowboy is a hard film to call. It’s a slice of film history, with some well-known visuals, well-known music, and well-known scenes:

“Hey! I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!” – Ratso

But it’s a confusing film, with plenty of montages, flashbacks, fantasy scenes, and a drug-induced party. I wasn’t expecting any of that, and it doesn’t exactly help carry the plot (that which there is) forward. The sex scenes, despite being notorious (Midnight Cowboy was the only X-rated film to ever win an Oscar – it’s since been downgraded to R-rated) are tame by modern standards: although there’s a strong theme of ambiguous sexuality running throughout the film, with Joe Buck (Jon Voight) – the cowboy of the title – being pretty indiscriminate about who he sleeps with, even in his role as a hustler.

Fundamentally, though, it is a film about friendship – between Ratso (Dustin Hoffman) – and Buck. In that, it does succeed. Both Voight and Hoffman have plenty of chance to assert their acting range also. It’s perhaps not the strongest buddy film ever, but it still has a powerful poignancy enhanced by the last touching scene.

I’ve written about synchronicity vs. asynchronicity before, but I wanted to revisit the subject because it seems to be so key to modern services; as more and more communication mechanisms evolve out of available technology and entrepreneurs’ imagination, understanding customer’s usage patterns will be important when developing businesses around them. An excellent article by Gregor Hohpe, Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit (included in Joel Spolsky’s Best Software Writing Vol. 1), is an examination of why understanding computer science concepts such as 2PC (and, I would argue, synchronicity) is important when engaging in business process engineering. There’s a large overlap between business and software engineering here, and this is why IBM sells products like WebSphere Process Server together with business consultants to help customers implement them. There are a number of other essays in Spolsky’s excellent book which also discuss related subjects.

Clay Shirky, in his essay A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy (also included in the same volume; the online copy is edited slightly differently from the printed one), notes how online (synchronous) discussions frequently descend into talk about sex – and that sexual banter is much more common in synchronous communication than asynchronous (how often have you flirted with someone over the phone compared to email? – please, no anecdotes in the comments section). I’m not a psychologist, but I assume that this has something to do with it being hard to retain the thrill of adult banter over the course of a (potentially lengthy) asynchronous discussion. The same arguments probably apply in a less dramatic fashion to non-sexual communication.

There’s a related observation to be made about the perceived economics of people’s time. In general, most folks implicitly value synchronous time as higher than asynchronous – if I ask advice of a mentor over a half-hour coffee, I feel more indebted to him than if he spends half an hour hour answering my email. I suspect the reasons are a combination of my having accurate information (I know exactly how long he spent drinking the coffee), the start-up and tear-down time (he actually took 5 minutes to get to the coffee shop), and knowing that I have his undivided attention (he wasn’t multi-tasking). Nevertheless, we still continue to rate synchronous time more highly than its opportunity costs compared to asynchronous time.

To relate the two assertions, wouldn’t you rather spend half an hour in person with your spouse / significant other / other politically correct phrase than an hour writing and exchanging emails with them? Synchronous communication has a strange attraction than its poor cousin doesn’t – despite all of asynchronicity’s time-shifting advantages. This is going to be a big challenge for a multi-time-zone world.

I’ve noticed that my blog’s been splogged – unsurprisingly, using one of my film reviews that contains some ‘adult’ words (see here for the NSFW copycat). Does this mean I’ve made the blogging bigtime? I’m still only at Technorati rank 147,804 – although (in a not-at-all-sore-loser fashion) I feel the same about Technorati as Richard does about Sun – what exactly is the point?

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a murder mystery. It’s sexy, witty, and fast-paced. Lead actors Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer (the latter as the superbly sarcastic Gay Perry), are a fabulous duo and perfectly cast. Michelle Monaghan adds a saucy touch. The plot is intricate and has more twists than a pretzel, just like any decent murder mystery. It has car chases and guns. Downey Jr. breaks the fourth wall all over the shop – and the icing on the cake is his aside about the poor ending to the last LoTR.

Executive Summary: You are missing out if you don’t watch this movie.

‘What’s sex?’ – Betty

Pleasantville is a favourite film of mine. Powerful on many levels, it manages to captivate the attention as well as entertain and give pause for thought.

The premise is simple; David (Tobey Maguire) is given a remote control that allows him to enter the TV set and the programme of Pleasantville with his sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon). This mysterious start to the film is a well-trod one (Gremlins and Back to the Future being well-known previous examples), but it works without too much tedium. The world of Pleasantville that they enter is a black and white sitcom set in the 50s with bland, inoffensive content. David loves this programme, but, egged on by his sister’s behaviour in having sex with one of the town’s other teenagers (in a place where holding hands is risqué), he soon begins to encourage the townspeople to rebel and investigate their adventurous side. Apparently too much sex means poor quality basketball the next morning, but as each townsperson’s innocence is challenged, the town begins to turn from black and white to colour, piece by piece, in a most beautiful manner, as they realise their greater potential.

The film is a superb parody of conservative social values: everything the townspeople hold dear is challenged by David and the growing band of ‘coloreds’. There’s more than a nod towards the segregation in America of that period, with a separation of the coloreds from the non-coloreds as the more conservative folk (led by mayor Big Bob – played the always excellent J.T. Walsh – sadly his last film) try to resist the growing awareness of beauty and variety. There are some truly touching scenes, such as where Bill Johnson (Jeff Daniels) sees an art book for the first time – his reaction looks like Newton’s would if you showed him a 747. The film also investigates Pavlovian response, as George (William H. Macy) highlights in a humourous scene where he seems incapable of understanding why his dinner is not on the table.

Ultimately Pleasantville is not only great fun, and funny to boot, it’s also deep, meaningful, and has a happy ending. What more could you want? This is a film to be enjoyed.

Rated X is a film about the (ahem) adult film industry, so sensitive eyes might want to stop reading this review now. It stacks up well against other films of the genre, such as Boogie Nights (although it’s not as funny), and The People vs. Larry Flynt (although it’s not as political). The film tells a frequently unfulfilled dream: two brothers (well played by real-life brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen) want to make porn that isn’t just cheap and tacky, but tells a story.

The film initially portrays a glitzy and glamorous world, with one of the brothers snorting coke in virtually every other scene, and (surprise surprise) beautiful women at every turn. It isn’t constantly hilarious, but some scenes – such as their mother being shown their directorial efforts or them having to negotiate IP issues over their films with New York mobsters – nevertheless put a smile on the face.

The brothers fight often – such as over the directorship of the now-classic film Behind the Green Door – but the story doesn’t start to fall apart until the second part of the film, where market forces push them into the sleazier world of running a strip club, and their relationships start to strain. The film’s end sequence – a confrontation between the brothers – is a little self-indulgent on the part of Estevez (who also directed), but is moody and adds an interesting touch.

Rated X isn’t a film you’ll enjoy if you’re disapproving of the adult industry, but it is a real-life tale that reflects the lives of some trailblazers, and holds the attention fairly consistently.