The picture above depicts how vehicular traffic is regulated on the road heading into China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region: plastic “dummy” cops standing sentinel adorning the soft-shoulder, meant to resemble the genuine article to deter traffic violators, wanton drunken driving, and reckless acts behind the wheel across the wide, flat expanses of the barren steppes of the wind-battered Mongolian plain.

Well, yesterday afternoon I finished off native-Missourian Peter Hessler’s third installment in his “angels abroad” China series, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, and I’m giving the book a very tall two thumbs up. This is 424pp of lean and mean non-fiction prosaic gold which you’re going to regret not reading. Did I mention you should go out and snag a copy today?

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I’m happy I listen to people when they strongly suggest titles to read. In the case of Lawrence L. Allen’s Chocolate Fortunes: The Battle for the Hearts, Minds, and Wallets of China’s Consumers, this was a particularly sweet suggestion and many thanks to Dan Harris of Harris & Moure Law, the perennial award-winning blogmeister and commentator at China Law Blog, or as we Generation Xers like to call it, CLB.

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If you haven’t picked up your copy of Seth Godin’s latest primer, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable yet, you might want to have a run on over to your local bookstore.

With strong recommendations from both Chris Brogan and Todd Sattersten, my hardcover arrived in the mail on Friday, and by Saturday evening I’d polished it off.

So here’s the nutshell: The world’s changed forever. Social media networks and the deepening financial crisis have destroyed the former secure economic foundations of the corporate world and remaining a mere silent cog in the big wheel, biding your time behind the scenes isn’t cutting it anymore.

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I’m trembling…

Well sort of. It’s because my post arrived yesterday from the UK and in it came a little white parcel bearing just about the best gift I’ve received in months.

Yep, there it is: Scorsese On Scorsese. The title’s been on my near-permanent Amazon Wish List (been there for about three years) and I inexplicably never got around to snapping it up until about a week or so ago. Fancy that, eh? Read the rest of this entry »

I spent Sunday evening flipping through Winter 2010’s edition of Filmmaker Magazine, fresh off the press for January. I stumbled across two excellent DIY articles, one called REMIND (p84) penned by its aspiring editor, the filmmaker Scott Macaulay that reported on several hot do-it-yourself trends from 2009, some of which set to become the norm for the coming decade and beyond. The second was by the excellent guest editor Alicia Van Couvering (“SLUMPDAYS,” p90), who gave a clever summary of five Sundance-entry films  that recently shattered the independent funding sound barrier using innovative crowdsourced fundraising approaches which helped catapult these titles all the way to Park City.

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If you haven’t seen Ben-Hur yet, you’ve likely checked out of society for a spell or harbor a deep-seated resentment for epic period dramas of the 1950s, which, if you ask me, are some of the best pictures Hollywood has ever produced. The Golden Age of the Studio System, or so the legend goes.

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I sat jaw-agape through Eastern Promises last night, another star-studded meticulously intricate Steven Knight screenplay about the rise of the Vor v Zakone (Thief-In-Law) Russian mob substrata on the lightning-quick rise in the UK. In keeping with the M. Butterfly auteur’s signature style of turning the looking-glass towards society’s substrata of subcultures, Promises didn’t fail to deliver on this score once more, with the probe going places in the mob scene where no director has gone before. Read the rest of this entry »