Stray signals are important to people who want to keep track of contemporary culture.
Here’s one from today’s Wall Street Journal.
Nordic noir, the chilling, realistic Scandinavian crime fiction that has taken movies and books by storm, is coming to American television. The Killing, premiering April 3 on AMC, comes from the hit Danish drama “Forbrydenlsen.”
It is not intuitively obvious why there should now be so much Nordic noir in our world. But to be sure there’s lots. And I think we can see it moving swiftly, from page to big screen to little screen, signs of its ability to command larger audiences.
The question for the Chief Culture Officer and the rest of us: why? What is it about Nordic noir that makes it appealing. Why should this cultural form now threaten the standard police procedurals (Law and Order, CSI, etc) that have dominated TV for so long? What does the rise of Nordic noir tells us about the state of American culture now?
I am not making this an official Minerva competition, but if someone comes up with a dazzlingly good answer, there’s a good chance they will get a statue!
Reference
Chozick, Amy. 2011. Something’s rotten in Seattle. Wall Street Journal. March 25. (subscription required)
At the invitation of Bob Barocci, I gave a presentation at the ARF meetings Monday. For reasons that are still not clear, I came to the aid of the creative industry, to the defense of the traditional 30 second spot.
Naturally, my timing was appalling. This meeting probably marks the first in which virtually everyone in attendance “buys” the social media proposition. So just when the late adopters arrive, yours truly stuns them with a defense of the old media. Grant, fine work!
You can see the Volvo ad in question, by going to YouTube. Click here.
Hats of to the team from Euro RSCG Worldwide: Global Chief Executive Officer: David Jones, Chief Executive Officer, NY and San Francisco: Ron Berger, Executive Creative Director: Jeff Kling, Creative Director: Nick Cohen, Art Director: Julie Lamb, Copywriter: Risa Mickenberg, Contributor: Sharoz Marakechi, Jackson and Amy Richardson. Business Manager: Deborah Steeg, Talent: Dawn Kerr, PRODUCTION CREDITS, Production Company: Furlined, Director: Pekka Hara, Director of Photography: Joaquin Baca-Asay, Executive Producer: David Thorne, Producer: Rob Stark
For more on this approach to advertising, see McCracken, Grant. 2005. Culture and Consumption: markets, meaning and brand management. Indiana University Press. (and especially the last chapter)
From the Wikipedia entry: Psych is an American detective comedy-drama television series created by Steve Franks and broadcast on USA Network. It stars James Roday as Shawn Spencer, a young crime consultant for the Santa Barbara Police Department. […] The program also stars Dulé Hill as Shawn’s best friend and reluctant partner Burton “Gus” Guster, as well as Corbin Bernsen as Shawn’s captious father, Henry.
See my post today at the Harvard Business Review on how Psych can help us build new complexity into branding and product development.
I am sitting in a restaurant in New York City. And who should come in but Tyra Banks? She is more tall and less imposing than you’d expect. Many people don’t seem to know it’s her. This ended abruptly when I stood up and shouted, “Tyra, I love you.”
Ok, not really. Some of you will have seen the 60 Minutes piece that identifies Tyra Banks as a Harvard Business School student. The interviewer worked very hard to get Ms. Banks to say how lucky she was to be at HBS. But the model would not be baited. She was happy to be at HBS but it was clearly just another part of her apotheosis.
I got to think about how many paths there are to celebrity, how many ladders they’re are. For awhile there most of our actors seemed to have started in stand up: Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, Ray Romano, Roseanne. Wanda Sykes, and all the people who have come pouring out of SNL. Other celebrities have been birthed by sit coms, reality TV and soup operas. J. Lo came up as a dancer. Oprah got her start as a newscaster. Some people event started as martial arts instructors and hairdressers.
Clearly, the trick is to take whatever the world gives you and go from there. And how nimble you have to be. I was just at the ARF conference. I was acting as the chair of my session. And because I was in Brazil until 48 hours ago (and before that scrambling to get ready for Brazil) I had not reached out to panel members to prep them for the forum. I felt badly about this for about 15 seconds and then I thought this people, all women, all CMOs for large and mighty corporations, can handle anything on the fly. That’s how all of us live these days. The world hurls vexing problem at us and we dispatch them in real time. None of my panel members had a hair out of place.
Mind you, a gift for intellectual improv is not the first requirement of modeling, I shouldn’t think. In fact, this profession may well select for the opposite of intellectual improv. No, I don’t know this. And of course it is exactly what a stuck-up outsider would, glibly and stupidly, suppose. On the other hand, that Ms. Banks might it out when so few have done so, is perhaps so measure of her gifts.
The name of the ascendancy game is to listen very careful for the way of this new world. Talk show host. Business school. Enterprise. And then quietly and with no fanfare, to separate the signal from the noise, and with real aplomb to engage. It’s a miracle of in-fill. Other people at the table have been nodding a little stupidly and while they’ve been thinking, “I like that tie,” or “I wonder what’s for dinner,” you the former model has filleted the conversation, found the assumptions that really matter, assessed where the opportunity and danger lies for you, and formulated a response. Some people can make 3.5 seconds go a long way. Others are pretty much just sitting there.
I gather all the celebrities we care about have been tested in this way. These are the few who are chosen. It is because they can sus out what is happening in every conversation, and participate as if to the manor/manner born that it is they and not some other aspirant who gets to rise to greatness.
And this is a way of saying that the people we lioness are miracles of adaption. The odd thing is we don’t lionize them for the adaptation. This is the secret they keep from us. And really it is the most important thing they can pass along. And this is perhaps one of the features of her celebrity, that Tyra Banks is manifestly a work in progress, inspiration for the rest of us who are also, somewhat less grandly, works in progress, too.
Ain’t no going back. You can’t get unfamous. You can get infamous. But you can’t get unfamous. Dave Chappelle
I was reading the Entertainment Weekly coverage of Charlie Sheen, and thinking about how many stars flame out. The head shaving, the shop lifting, the outbursts, the throwing things, the ranting and raving.
There must be as many reasons for this behavior as there are celebrities. But what if there’s a secret motive?
Maybe some of these people want to stop being famous.
It’s hard for the non-famous to imagine this. Wealth, glamor, adulation, media coverage. What’s not to like?
But of course the costs are high. You give up your privacy. You give up amiable for adulation. You take on a team that must be fed, a lifestyle that must be maintained. But the real cost might be: you can’t leave. Fate has claimed you. You have lost your mobility. You can’t go home again. Actually, you can’t even leave the house.
This would explain how strange these outbursts are. Celebrities believe themselves to be as gods. So when they tire of celebrity, I expect they believe they can just up and go. And it’s here that they begin to glimpse the truth of Dave Chappelle’s comment above. They are struck.
This is why it goes steadily from bad to worse. They begin with small acts of rebellion. Attempts to scale the wall. And those don’t work. They try a little more bad behavior and this too leaves the door closed. It’s not very long before they are using their talent for drama and very considerable ingenuity to see if they can just get the f*ck out of here.
This would explain why the crisises are so public. I mean, celebs have the money and the staff to contain or conceal their moments of difficulty. Things find there way into Entertainment Weekly precisely because eventually that’s the very point of the exercise: is to evade the controlling power of this money and this staff. Celebs are looking for anything that works.
The Chappellian revelation must be a moment of pure terror. This beautiful garment is actually a trap. It went on so easily. It looks so stunning. It became you until you became it. Now it won’t come off. Now it’s time to panic. All that wealth, profile and adulation you worked so hard to get…
In their heart of heart, celebrities continue to believe in their talent and their ingenuity. Surely, they just have to work a little harder. There has to be some way out of here. What if I steal this piece of costume jewelry. That should do it. No? What if I go on top of a building with a megaphone. No? Ok, what if I …
By the time we get the news, the celeb is deep into the Chappellian cycle. They’ve tried A and B and are now working their way to M and N. It looks to us like they have boarded the crazy train, but in fact this is merely the last stages of a rational undertaking. Celebrities are producing crazy behaviors only because the rational ones will not pan out. And they are trapped.
In an interview with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio. Rebroadcast on Bravo, December 18, 2006.
We are traveling at speed. And we move faster and faster.
That’s the assumption.
But a little voice in my head says, "but is this just the thing we like to think about ourselves? What’s the proof, actually?"
Well, here’s some proof.
This is from Jony Ive, Senior Vice President of Design at Apple.
In the event that announces the iPad2, Ive says
I can’t think of a product that has defined an entire category, and then has been completely redesigned in such a short period of time.
As Steve Jobs points out in the opening moments of the event, the iPad2 redesign comes as the competition is just now struggling to catch up to the first iPad.
I think the conventional wisdom was to exploit the advantage, especially when you are a category-creator (and not merely a successful innovator).
So, at least for this player, at least in this category, the pace of change is extraordinary.
References
The Apple event video is here. Mr. Ive’s comment comes at the 62:53 mark.
My world rocked recently when it was revealed that Barbara Lippert was leaving Adweek for Goodby, Silverstein where she has been made “curator of pop culture.”
Yes, of course, I would have preferred that she be called a Chief Culture Officer. But it’s enough that the appointment was made.
As readers of my blog will know, I was a fan of Lippert’s weekly Adweek column on advertising. It was superb.
Stuart Elliott’s announcement of the event was marred slightly by two of the reader comments that followed it.
[I have removed these comments at Barbara Lippert’s request]
Assumptions, assumptions!
Assumption 1: that Lippert was hired as a trend spotter.
Jeff Goodby doesn’t say anything about trend spotting. In fact, Lippert has been hired as an expert on pop culture. God spare us, Goodby and Silverstein, if she fulfills her duties by spotting trends. Culture is only about 20% trends. Agencies and corporations that spend their time spotting these trends lock themselves into an endless game of catch up. Lippert is responsible for the whole of the water front of our culture, and here her age becomes an advantage.
Assumption 2: that you have to be one to know one. (Specifically, only someone who is 18-34 can report on this demographic group.)
This notion was dispatched during the political correctness debates. When members of excluded groups insisted that only they could report on these groups, the world had to remind them that the argument would cost them the right to report on any other group. They stopped.
Assumption 3: that it’s ok to trade in stereotypes about [removed at Barbara Lippert’s request].
If you were generalizing about gender, race or ethnicity in this way, the world would have put you in a small room with John Galliano, the fashion world’s ranking anti-semite.
The real question:
Is Barbara Lippert old enough to be a curator of pop culture? Has she lived, studied and observed enough to make good on the responsibility with which she’s been charged?Studying ads and the ad business for 20 years is actually an excellent perspective from which to study our culture. And she is, to judge her by her column, a real talent. My plan: wait and see.
For the ancient Greeks, muses inspired the creators of poetry and myth, whispering deathless prose and immortal truths.
My muse are a roller derby team, the Dock Yard Derby Dames. The brunette scowling is called Mytai SmashYa (aka Might I Smash You). I met them at the Bob Rivers show on K-ZOK radio in Seattle when I was on tour for Chief Culture Officer. I have never been the same.
The Dock Yard Derby Dames are a source of constant inspiration on the present book. They keep up a ferocious pace around the track, sometimes pushing, sometimes clearing the way. And when I completely run out of ideas, they pull up beside me, lift me by the elbows, and fling me into the crowd. This has a way of getting my attention and I return to the track with a firm resolve never to run out of ideas again.
This post is my way of apologizing for my absence here. I just have to keep at it. Because, well you know. The dames.
I am working on the new book and with a deadline looming, every word I can put to paper goes to that.
I did have a chance to bang off an essay for the Harvard Business Review blog.
It asks why engineers can’t take culture more seriously.
There’s a lively discussion there. I would be grateful if you would have a look at the post and offer a comment. (Because This Blog has the best commenters.)
The post went up yesterday, but I only found out today. My apologies for being slow to let you know. I just found out this morning.
Larry Harvey and Jerry James took an 8-foot wooden man to San Francisco’s Baker beach on June 21, 1986 and set him on fire.
The reaction was spectacular.
People came sprinting up the beach to have a look. A stranger began improvising a song on his guitar.
And when the winds drove the flames to one side, a woman rushed in to hold the Burning Man’s hand.
It’s this last part I can’t get out of my head. She tried to hold his hand?
What can we say about this?
That some women have terrible taste in men?
That tragedy makes a guy more appealing?
Well, if there were a simple explanation, this image would rush out of my head, instead of just sitting there. So why is it just sitting there?
It’s something to do with the way she is seizing the moment, the sheer opportunism of what she does. She can see that this is fleeting. The wind will change. She must act now and she does. And of course there’s the sheer daring. Because the wind will change. And suddenly. Whatever she’s doing matters extraordinarily to her.
I picture her holding the Burning Man’s hand and facing out to the crowd. (This might be wrong.) As if to say, "look, we’re together." And in this moment, she turns him from a collection of wood scraps into, well, yes, something like a man. (Hey, if he can pull chicks, the Burning Man’s claim to personhood just went up a notch or two.) With this gesture, she goes into the spirit of the occasion and helps make burning wood a burning man. (As ritual transformations go, this is the sort of thing bound to impress an anthropologist. No, but really anyone, no?)
And when she faces out to the crowd (if she did), it’s as if she is striking the portrait pose. It could even be a wedding portrait pose. "With this gesture, with this daring, I thee wed." "Look, we’re together. We’re a we." We’re, as Goffman would have said, a "with."
And now she’s playing with paradox or just playing. After all, every portrait stakes a claim to permanence. It is as close as an ordinary person ever gets to asserting some official truth about themselves…for the record.
It’s standard sociological stuff. We are showing that we, this person, belong to this formally assigned identity, this role. We are stapling ourselves to a social meaning. We are consenting to a shared, collective definition…for the record.
And she is doing this in a fleeting moment with a burning man! It’s astounding…even if merely playful. A claim to permanence that takes and lasts a couple of seconds? Lady, you’re a genius.
The Burning Man has always been a work in progress. Their official account is this: "Burning Man is about coming together is a beautiful yet unforgiving environment to celebrate radical self-expression." And here she is helping define the man just seconds after he appears on the beach. She forges a relationship for the two of them, and an identity for the Man. She’s made her own, instant, origin myth. Blimey.
Some tickets for the 2011 Burning Man are still on sale. here.
Really last thoughts
Speaking of blimey, you really have to see these mug shots taken in Australia a very long time ago. You will not believe your eyes. Thanks to Very Short List for finding this treasure and letting us know. here.
My apologies. I have been writing all day every day and this means I have been neglecting the blog.
I have assembled my own little work bench and I thought I would share with you the tech in question.
Upper right hand corner of desk
This is my iPad now serving as a time keeper. I am using Clock Pro, specifically the Count Down function that shows that I have 5 hours, 22 minutes and 19 seconds till the manuscript (this version of it) is due in the hands of my editor. That means I will be writing til 5:00 today.
Upper left hand corner
This is Molly, a grumpy Siamese cat. Cats are not optional. You must have one if you want to write well. Strictly speaking, you should have several. I do. Vivienne and Zsa Zsa are asleep somewhere. When they wake up they will want me to make breakfast and throw things for them to fetch. So the idea is to see how much work I can get done before all hell break lose.
Pile of magazines
This is a pile of magazines, each of which represents a blog post I have not written. This is the only paper that allowed on the desk. (Well, except for the letter you see between Molly and the iPad. This was type written on antique stationary. So an exception is made.) Sitting on the pile of magazines is a little Canon camera which serves as an excellent paper weight (and camera).
Coffee cup
This is caffeine that enters my body in the form of coffee that begins in the kitchen as the Starbucks whole bean "house blend" which the package tells me is "lively and balanced" but I prefer Dark Roast because this is, the package tells me, X – Bold, and I am pretty sure my prose needs every little bit of momentum it can get.
Book on desk
This is the LiveScribe system. It captures anything written, stores it in your computer where it becomes searchable. I have the bad habit of writing on anything that handy and then I can’t ever find it again. Now I have everything in one place and it is finally findable! Highly recommended.
Computer on desk
This is a MacBook Air. I just converted from a Windows ThinkPad and boy am I grateful I did. I recently had to fire up the ThinkPad and it reminded me of an occasion some years ago when I had to go from my computer based word processor to an IBM Selectric II. Talk about time travel. On the Air, I am running Google Chrome, Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, Zotero, Things, Gmail and assorted other programs.
Schedule
This is invisible but it is the biggest thing in the room. The idea is to write for as close to 12 hours a day as I can manage. I never get much more than 8 hours done, but if I don’t aim high, I get, like, 4 hours done. The trick is to keep distractions at bay. Email, Twitter, Blogging! I just try to keep my head down and write as much as possible. Oh, I do take a walk.
Your assignment
Every writer has his or her own system. Please share yours!
A friend of mine writes to say she is looking for someone who writes well and can help her "communicate creative projects."
This would be an interesting assignment because a) this person has an extraordinary cultural knowledge, b) she works for an international organization which extraordinary cultural reach, and c) there is a good chance she will end up as a Chief Culture Officer somewhere and,God willing, there. On all accounts, this would be a great assignment.
Here’s the deal. If you are interested, send me an email with a one page CV attached. I will pass the email along to my friend unopened and unread. Please don’t ask me for any additional information. I know only what I’ve told you. And please don’t ask me for the secret password for this assignment. It’s secret!
On other matters to do with the Chief Culture Officer, I was thrilled to hear that Goodby, Silverstein and Partners have appointed Barbara Lippert as their pop culture curator. Readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of the work that Barbara did on advertising for Adweek. (And I remain convinced that if the New York Times did not harbor a contempt for popular culture, they would have hired Barbara as their advertising critic long ago.) I owe news of Barbara’s appointment to a friend of this blog (and mine), Rick Liebling. See Rick’s treatment here. As Rick points out, Goodby, Silverstein also employs Gareth Kay as their head of planning. This gives the San Francisco firm two powerhouses in the cultural field.
References
Elliott, Stuart. 2011. Longtime Ad Critic To Curate Pop Culture. New York Times. January 28. here.
Portlandia (IFC, Fridays, 10:30) is funny, but mostly it’s daring.
Cultural innovators, like the ones who live in Portland — bike messengers, locavore chefs, and assorted others with nose rings — usually get a pass. The satirists leave them alone. The notion: if you are a rule breaker, you’re above reproach.
Satire, that’s for poor, rule-bound schmos. For them, satire is a mixed blessing from the avant-garde: a punishment for schmo-ish-ness, and an opportunity for liberation.
Making fun of a rule breaker — especially rule breakers who are so disarmingly earnest and serious? This is actually very rule breaking.
This is exactly what Portlandia means to do. SNL’s Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein take aim at the rule breakers of Portland. The reward is comedic riches. After all, no one’s working this territory. There’s satiric opportunity just about everywhere.
In one skit, Armisen and Brownstein scrutinize a restaurant menu to see if it is Kosher according to Alice Waters and the artisanal movement. Brownstein’s character wants to know, for instance, precisely how large the range is in which the free-range chickens are kept. The joke here is that restaurants are completely unsurprised and not even a little exasperated by this. They present a little dossier for the chicken-who-would-be-dinner. (His name is Colin.) But this is not enough for Armisen and Brownstein, who insist that the restaurant hold their table while they drive 30 miles to check out Kevin’s farm for themselves.
This the best kind of comedy, both broad and cunningly detailed. In the Adult Hide and Seek League skit, there are lots of little grace notes. Brownstein is completely preoccupied with the after party. Armisen tries to make “SEEK” into an acronym, and can’t think of a word for the second “e.” Armisen does a brilliant little Spider-man thing while hiding in a hall way.
The best piece takes place in a bookstore charmingly named Women and Women First. Steve Buscemi commits an error — he uses the bathroom that’s clearly reserved for customers only — and Armisen and Brownstein, the proprietors, have him. He must pay for his error with a purchase. But no, it turns out, Armisen and Brownstein are not going to let him make this purchase: he is not worthy. So he can’t actually leave. It’s a little anthropological study of what happens to commerce when freighted with morality. The anonymity, the choice, the freedom we look at with some suspicion actually begins to look OK. At least you can leave.
Armisen and Brownstein have managed a small cultural miracle. They found a way to make fun of those who are normally the agents, not the objects, of ridicule. They found a way to set up shop, comedically speaking, in a place more avant than the avant garde. Good going! Who knew there was a there there?
The big question: will Portland see the humor of Portlandia? The Women & Women First skit suggests not. The proprietors have no sense of humor. (And this is too often true of cultural innovators. They gorge themselves on moral certitude and righteous indignation.) And if Portland does not see the humor of Portlandia, well, there’s always hide and seek.
You might wonder what a post on Portlandia is doing at HBR.org (where it was originally published), instead of at Entertainment Weekly’s website or my own cultureby.com. Most corporations simply do not pay enough attention to contemporary culture — they react instead of respond. But corporations need to know about the slow food movement and why the hot color this season is a particular shade of blue — and about shows like Portlandia — because such intelligence matters for how they shape their products and interact with their customers. They need to see the early warning of changes taking place in American culture. (Plus, if nothing else, this gives you fodder for small talk at your next dinner party.)
Daniel Saunders won a recent Minerva for his answer to a Minerva essay contest. It’s a really good answer but for some reason I forgot to post it.
Here, then, is Daniel’s answer to the question: "JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon, compare and contrast."
I’ve figured out what’s special about JJ Abrams: he’s the master of taking things away. He makes the kind of stuff I love most, which is genre fiction that is not stupid and childish. Of course genre’s roots are in the simple-minded and child-oriented, e.g. pulp magazines, comic books and action movies, so the first thing you have to do is to clear out a lot of the crap that comes with it. This usually includes racism and sexism, depending on how far back you’re going, but also the crushing repetitiveness of genre that makes it easy to parody. JJ Abrams realizes that if the audience knows exactly whats going to happen next, why not skip it?
I really noticed this skipping past the boring in a clever scene in MI:3 where Tom Cruise is going to do a complicated, time dependent heist in a building. I could feel myself start to go to sleep, but then was grateful to realize we were just seeing the outside of the building from the van – and then Tom Cruise sprinting the hell out of there. And there are countless other examples of that in Abrams’ stuff. Not only does it make you feel smart, and not deadened, but you’re more engaged, because your imagination is doing a lot of the work. You do get quite a few glimpses of the monster in Cloverfield, but most of the time you’re imagining what it’s up to and what it’s like – things are rarely overexplained. This is closely related to JJ Abrams devotion to creating a sense of mystery, that is earned, which he talks about in his TED talk, something that has led to great rewards in his non-franchise works like Lost and Cloverfield.
The limitation of JJ Abrams is that when you clear all the boring the crap from old cornball genres, you should have something to replace it with. You should be doing more than they tried to do. In fact, you should use that free space to create art: something that expresses a little of your worldview and ideas about life. I’m not convinced that JJ Abrams has those. Lost is actually, scene for scene, very sharply written, largely avoiding cliches and letting us connect the dots. But it’s a failure (as of partway through season 3) because it doesn’t have much to say. This is especially clear in the flashbacks that occupy half of an episode, which are a perfect storytelling venue in a way: peek into the soul of someone, learn the secrets of their background they don’t want you to know. But in practice, though they are well acted and all have little twists and surprises, they are stultifying, because they don’t add up to anything, they have no perspective on human nature. Some broader themes are emerging in the series, to do with authority and control, but they’re out of focus, and the flashbacks rarely contribute to them. Those flashbacks are truly just killing time. And the emptiness is extremely apparent in Cloverfield and MI:3 whenever they slow down for a second (which, fortunately, they rarely do)
So I will never care about JJ Abrams half as much as I do about Joss Whedon. Whedon clears out the crap, and in its place puts in urgent convictions about the world. Buffy is about growing up, Angel is about guilt and vengeance and negotiating with evil, Dollhouse is about desire and the desire to control others. Among many other things. Everything he’s done is packed full of rich themes, even the 45 minute Dr Horrible. I just read this today about Speed, by David Edelstein:
"Remember: Jack and Annie are on a runaway subway train heading for the end of the line, and she’s handcuffed to a pole. He tries to free her but can’t. Instead of leaping to safety, as she pleads with him to do, he settles down and hugs her tightly as they hurtle towards certain immolation. This might be the most romantic moment in any action picture, and it’s only because Jack is a risk-taker who faces death with stoicism."
Could this also be the cause of the other obvious difference, that his characters are far more loveable and memorable? Maybe it’s not enough for a character to be "well written"; maybe there has to be a point to them. Even Jack – even a Keannu Reeves character! – expresses something interesting about how you might approach life.
JJ Abrams might actually have the edge on some measures – the lack of heart might make it possible to be more streamlined and surprising. I will certainly check out everything he makes, as one of our few incredibly talented and successful genre writers. And I’ll bet there are themes out there that he could speak to deeply. James Cameron doesn’t understand people very well but made some of the best films ever about technology and the techno-warrior mindset, two things he does understand. Until then I doubt JJ Abrams movies will be more than skillful and creative amusement park rides.
Daniel Saunders grew up in Victoria, B.C., studied Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and he is now a graduate student in Cognitive Psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
