Tag: Lennon

Time to take stock

So this is Christmas, what have you done? Year-end review and future projection.

Cloud strategy? Hiring and firing decision? Productivity squeeze and cost cutting? (female shoppers said they planned to spend 1% less as compared to last year).

Time to take stock, at individual and institutional level.

New calendar.

Hollywood is going to Detroit (greener pasture).

And the Ark finally found its home in Kentucky (Noah or Colonel Sanders, your choice).

Fund raisers are targeting public buildings and venues (Verizon stadium etc….).

There will emerge new industries (cloud system integrator , google glasses, google cars, google scanners ….).

Thanks to Social Media, I watch more of YouTube .

Meanwhile, not a day goes by without us seeing something coming out of China (reverse engineering Russian weaponry, Shanghai Math and Science champions, huge increase in its Africa’s raw materials and South-South global strategy.)

When John Lennon left us “standing here”, he couldn’t have seen the “long winding road” ahead. 30 years was a long time. Enough to turn BRIC countries to where they are today. “Imagine” the world 30 years from now.

We are so used to annual review, not decades in review:

(war is still raging on because men are still with that strand of evil –  albeit the Genome project could account for most of human DNA) “So this is Christmas, What have you done?”

Because of Lennon’s commemoration, 1980 feels like just last year.

In taking out an icon, the fame hitchhiker inadvertently immortalized his victim.

In her NYT piece , Yoko wrote “ours – our family – was one of giggling, teenager-like”. She mentioned laughter but I read it through a veil of tears.

J.L. would have been 70. Yet he still is “on the cover of the Rolling Stone“, just as a line in a song. You just never know. To musicians and artists (Lennon and Van Gogh) taking stock goes beyond the grave. In fact, it’s the long tail of a winding road.

 

the Me in a changing We

NYT columnist sums it up and I have nothing to add to it, maybe except the cross-cultural angle about change or perish.

I hear Yesterday’s lyric ” I am half a man I used to be”. ..

Technological leap forward (surround sound, anyone?). Star Wars itself has to keep up with its own 3-D version.

Google Eric Schmidt says “there is always the OFF button”, implying that we, human, are still in control (or IQ>AI).

Yet, how many of us even want to turn it off, just to again boot up.

Semantically, “friend” is a new definition for “contact”.

Acronyms are too long. We speak in short bursts “3-D”, “4-G” , “Hi-def” etc…

Stephen Cannell, Hollywood prolific screenwriter, recently passed away. The obituary shows him sitting  next to an IBM Selectric (not I-Pad).

That generation (Norman Mailer, Andy Rooney …) has passed away.

Raw meat, raw man (BTW, Bruce Willis appeared on David Letterman, wearing a raw-meat toupee. He even dared Letterman to taste it).

Talking about paradox: the more society changes and moves on to the “cloud” somewhere, the more likely we long for the real and raw stuff of “yesterday”. (as of this edit, there is an op-ed in the NYT about French’s Bonjour Tristesse).

I never understood people who collect antique, until I put on Lennon’s Dream # 9 (he might be dead, but his dream is still alive).

Yesterday, I waited for an oil change.  So I sat with my second of the Tatoo-girl trilogy (adult version of Harry Potter). Next to me was a gentleman immersed in his Sony E- reader. And here I was, still in paperback version.

Change or perish. It would be ironic to read “A La Recherche du temp perdu” by Proust, on a Kindle.

And the best book, according to Amazon’s Bezos is The Remains of the Day.

Thank you Mr Cohen of the NYT for a beautiful summation about where we are: at the crossroads of change. And the streets are now paved with conveyor. So even if we stand still,

it still carries us forward, no matter what.

The more we want to stay in place, the more we will have to change.

It is so true of what John Lennon said “life is what happens when you are planning  something else”.