Category: Uncategorized

#DailyDriver San Francisco Edition

Ang Lee: A Never-Ending Dream

BY IRENE SHIH 

Following Ang Lee’s second Best Directing win at the Academy Awards last night, this beautiful essay resurfaced. Here is my translation of Ang Lee’s words, written in 2006 (post-Oscar win). Please credit the translation to Irene Shih (and to this blog), thank you!

In 1978, as I applied to study film at the University of Illinois, my father vehemently objected. He quoted me a statistic: ‘Every year, 50,000 performers compete for 200 available roles on Broadway.’ Against his advice, I boarded a flight to the U.S. This strained our relationship. In the two decades following, we exchanged less than a hundred phrases in conversation.

Some years later, when I graduated film school, I came to comprehend my father’s concern. It was nearly unheard of for a Chinese newcomer to make it in the American film industry. Beginning in 1983, I struggled through six years of agonizing, hopeless uncertainty. Much of the time, I was helping film crews with their equipment or working as editor’s assistant, among other miscellaneous duties. My most painful experience involved shopping a screenplay at more than thirty different production companies, and being met with harsh rejection each time.

That year, I turned 30. There’s an old Chinese saying: ‘At 30, one stands firm.’ Yet, I couldn’t even support myself. What could I do? Keep waiting, or give up my movie-making dream? My wife gave me invaluable support.

My wife was my college classmate. She was a biology major, and after graduation, went to work for a small pharmaceutical research lab. Her income was terribly modest. At the time, we already had our elder son, Haan, to raise. To appease my own feelings of guilt, I took on all housework – cooking, cleaning, taking care of our son – in addition to reading, reviewing films and writing scripts. Every evening after preparing dinner, I would sit on the front steps with Haan, telling him stories as we waited for his mother – the heroic huntress – to come home with our sustenance (income).

This kind of life felt rather undignified for a man. At one point, my in-laws gave their daughter (my wife) a sum of money, intended as start-up capital for me to open a Chinese restaurant – hoping that a business would help support my family. But my wife refused the money. When I found out about this exchange, I stayed up several nights and finally decided: This dream of mine is not meant to be. I must face reality.

Afterward (and with a heavy heart), I enrolled in a computer course at a nearby community college. At a time when employment trumped all other considerations, it seemed that only a knowledge of computers could quickly make me employable. For the days that followed, I descended into malaise. My wife, noticing my unusual demeanor, discovered a schedule of classes tucked in my bag. She made no comment that night.

The next morning, right before she got in her car to head off to work, my wife turned back and – standing there on our front steps – said, ‘Ang, don’t forget your dream.’

And that dream of mine – drowned by demands of reality – came back to life. As my wife drove off, I took the class schedule out of my bag and slowly, deliberately tore it to pieces. And tossed it in the trash.

Sometime after, I obtained funding for my screenplay, and began to shoot my own films. And after that, a few of my films started to win international awards. Recalling earlier times, my wife confessed, ‘I’ve always believed that you only need one gift. Your gift is making films. There are so many people studying computers already, they don’t need an Ang Lee to do that. If you want that golden statue, you have to commit to the dream.’

And today, I’ve finally won that golden statue. I think my own perseverance and my wife’s immeasurable sacrifice have finally met their reward. And I am now more assured than ever before: I must continue making films.

You see, I have this never-ending dream.

Irene’s Note: If you liked Ang’s essay, you might also enjoy this older essay I wrote: A Dream Deferred (Link).

Original text (in Chinese):

文 / 李安

1978年，當我準備報考美國伊利諾大學的戲劇電影系時，父親十分反感，他給我列了一個資料：在美國百老匯，每年只有兩百個角色，但卻有五萬人要一起爭奪這少得可憐的角色。當時我一意孤行，決意登上了去美國的班機，父親和我的關係從此惡化，近二十年間和我說的話不超過一百句！

但是，等我幾年後從電影學院畢業，我終於明白了父親的苦心所在。在美國電影界，一個沒有任何背景的華人要想混出名堂來，談何容易。從1983年起，我經過了六年的漫長而無望的等待，大多數時候都是幫劇組看看器材、做點剪輯助理、劇務之類的雜事。最痛苦的經歷是，曾經拿著一個劇本，兩個星期跑了三十多家公司，一次次面對別人的白眼和拒絕。

那時候，我已經將近三十歲了。古人說：三十而立。而我連自己的生活都還沒法自立，怎麼辦？繼續等待，還是就此放棄心中的電影夢？幸好。我的妻子給了我最及時的鼓勵。

妻子是我的大學同學，但她是學生物學的，畢⋯⋯業後在當地一家小研究室做藥物研究員，薪水少得可憐。那時候我們已經有了大兒子李涵，為了緩解內心的愧疚，我每天除了在家裡讀書、看電影、寫劇本外，還包攬了所有家務，負責買菜做飯帶孩子，將家裡收拾得乾乾淨淨。還記得那時候，每天傍晚做完晚飯後，我就和兒子坐在門口，一邊講故事給他聽，一邊等待”英勇的獵人媽媽帶著獵物（生活費）回家”。

這樣的生活對一個男人來說，是很傷自尊心的。有段時間，岳父母讓妻子給我一筆錢，讓我拿去開個中餐館，也好養家糊口，但好強的妻子拒絕了，把錢還給了老人家。我知道了這件事後，輾轉反側想了好幾個晚上，終於下定決心：也許這輩子電影夢都離我太遠了，還是面對現實吧。

後來，我去了社區大學，看了半天，最後心酸地報了一門電腦課。在那個生活壓倒一切的年代裡，似乎只有電腦可以在最短時間內讓我有一技之長了。那幾天我一直萎靡不振，妻子很快就發現了我的反常，細心的她發現了我包裡的課程表。那晚，她一宿沒和我說話。

第二天，去上班之前，她快上車了，突然，她站在臺階下轉過身來，一字一句地告訴我：”安，要記得你心裡的夢想！”

那一刻，我心裡像突然起了一陣風，那些快要淹沒在庸碌生活裡的夢想，像那個早上的陽光，一直射進心底。妻子上車走了，我拿出包裡的課程表，慢慢地撕成碎片，丟進了門口的垃圾桶。

後來，我的劇本得到基金會的贊助，我開始自己拿起了攝像機，再到後來，一些電影開始在國際上獲獎。這個時候，妻子重提舊事，她才告訴我：”我一直就相信，人只要有一項長處就足夠了，你的長處就是拍電影。學電腦的人那麼多，又不差你李安一個，你要想拿到奧斯卡的小金人，就一定要保證心裡有夢想。”

如今，我終於拿到了小金人。我覺得自己的忍耐、妻子的付出終於得到了回報，同時也讓我更加堅定，一定要在電影這條路上一直走下去。

因為，我心裡永遠有一個關於電影的夢。

Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase. Here’s a chart (from this excellent book by Carlota Perez via Fred Wilson) showing the four previous technological revolutions and the first part of the current one:

Each revolution begins with a financial bubble that propels the (irrationally) rapid “installation” of the new technology.  Then there’s a crash, followed by a recovery and then a long period of productive growth as the new technology is “deployed” throughout other industries as well as society more broadly. Eventually the revolution runs its course and a new technological revolution begins.

In the transition from installation to deployment, the bulk of the entrepreneurial activity moves “up the stack”. For example, in the installation phase of the automobile revolution, the action was in building cars. In the deployment phase, the action shifted to the app layer: the highway system, shipping, suburbanization, big box retail, etc.

This pattern is repeating itself in the computing/internet revolution. Most of the successful startups in the 90s built core infrastructure (e.g. optical switching) whereas most of the successful startups since then built applications on top of that infrastructure (e.g. search). The next phase should see startups higher in the stack. According to historical patterns, these would be ones that require deeper cultural change or deeper integration into existing industries.

Some questions to consider:

– What industries are the best candidates for the next phase of deployment? The likely candidates are the information-intensive mega-industries that have been only superficially affected by the internet thus far: education, healthcare, and finance. Note that deployment doesn’t just mean creating, say, a healthcare or education app. It means refactoring an industry into its “optimal structure” – what the industry would look like if rebuilt from scratch using the new technology.

– How long will this deployment period last? Most people – at least in the tech industry – think it’s just getting started. From the inside, it looks like one big revolution with lots of smaller, internal revolutions (PC, internet, mobile, etc). Each smaller revolution extends the duration and impact of the core revolution.

– Where will this innovation take place? The historical pattern suggests it will become more geographically diffuse over time. Detroit was the main beneficiary of the first part of the automobile revolution. Lots of other places benefited from the second part. This is the main reason to be bullish on ”application layer” cities like New York and LA. It is also suggests that entrepreneurs will increasingly have multi-disciplinary expertise.

– Chris Dixon http://bit.ly/XTjW6Z

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”

There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.

Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.

Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.”

– Michael Chabon on Wes Anderson’s Worlds

http://bit.ly/12EstOD

“In juxtaposition to couture fashion Margiela’s concept of luxury appropriates only the element of workmanship, not the preciousness of the raw materials. The labels of such creations indicate only the number of hours of labour invested in the production of a garment, as the new criterion of luxury. Such a designation celebrates the standard of the craft at the same time as it critiques the value of excess of such labour-intensive investment. By the same token the exhibition, and the collections, are making a stand with regards to idealized standards of perfection, which, together with luxury, make up the fantasy of glamour. The Martin Margiela team is not celebrating the new or the perfect (all the core values of the fashion industry). Instead the collection references the aging process as a creative ingredient (not as a problem to eliminate). Second-hand materials are worked into the designs, dark clothes are painted with silver paints that do not quite cover completely, and crack with use, revealing the origin and creating an old patina- even with new clothes.”—Efrat Tseëlon, “Outlining a fashion studies project”

“My design process never starts or finishes. I am always hoping to find something through the mere act of living my daily life. I do not work from a desk, and do not have an exact starting point for any collection. There is never a mood board, I do not go through fabric swatches, I do not sketch, there is no eureka moment, there is no end to the search for something new. As I live my normal life, I hope to find something that click starts a thought, and then something totally unrelated would arise, and then maybe a third unconnected element would come from nowhere. Often in each collection, there are three or so seeds of things that come together accidentally to form what appears to everyone else as a final product, but for me it is never ending. There is never a moment when I think, ‘this is working, this is clear.’ If for one second I think something is finished, the next thing would be impossible to do.

“Often the elements are completely disassociated in time and dimension. One might be an emotion, the next thing a pattern image, the third thing an object or a picture I have seen somewhere. I can never remember when and from where the elements come together in my head. I trust synergy and change. For fall 2012, I was thinking about no design being design, about very ordinary fabric (wool felt) being strong. Somehow, the two-dimension level of thinking became apparent.

“I do not feel happy when a collection is understood too well. For me, White Drama was too easily understood, the concept too clear. I feel better about fall 2012, because it wasn’t too clear, and some people assumed things it had nothing to do with, like the Internet age.

“The struggle to find something new gets more and more difficult with time and experience, so this time, for fall 2012, my feeling was to try to make a collection by doing very little.”

– Rei Kawakubo

In the last ten years, we’ve discovered two previously unknown species of human. We can film eruptions on the surface of the sun, landings on Mars and even landings on Titan.

Is all of this very boring to you? Because all this is happening right now, in this moment.

Check the time on your phone, because this is the present time and these things are happening. The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.

Use the rear view mirror for its true purpose. If I were sitting next to you twenty-five years ago, and you heard a phone ring, and I took out a bar of glass and said, sorry, my phone just told me it’s got new video of a solar flare, you’d have me sectioned in a flash. Use the rear view mirror to imagine telling someone just twenty five years ago about GPS. This is the last generation in the Western world that will ever be lost. LifeStraws. Synthetic biology. Genetic sequencing. SARS was genetically sequenced within 48 hours of its identification. I’m not even touching the web, wifi, mobile broadband, cloud computing, electronic cigarettes…

Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.

Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky.

Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.