Knowledge Mosaic Announces KM PolicyWatch: Relief from Manual Labor

We'll be launching a major new product called KM PolicyWatch on Monday, June 9. KM PolicyWatch will benefit any banking or broker-dealer department managing Policies and Procedures Manuals to conform to their industry's constantly shifting regulatory landscape.

KM PolicyWatch provides relief from "manual labor". It automates and consolidates what has often been a tedious, error-prone, and complicated exercise for compliance professionals in the financial services industries. The platform synchronizes an institution’s own data — especially its policies and procedures manuals — with Agency and SRO rules and regulations. KM PolicyWatch removes the need to search the Internet for rule changes; it brings those changes to you and tracks them in relation to specific sections of your manuals, while alerting those responsible for sections of your manuals when changes occur and what follow-ups may be required. KM PolicyWatch also features on-demand reporting and search functions, and future versions will deliver robust workflow and audit trail capabilities.

We developed KM PolicyWatch using feedback from some of the world’s leading investment and banking firms, which have in recent years been forced to devote increasingly large amounts of resources to their compliance departments. Numerous factors have contributed to this need, including the growing complexity of the regulatory infrastructure and recent legislation aimed at making the financial industry more accountable for its practices. In such a climate, traditional methods of compliance are being exposed as inadequate, and the industry seems eager to explore alternatives can offer superior accuracy and efficiency.

The release of KM PolicyWatch represents only one aspect of our commitment to developing an integrated suite of alerting services, research platforms, and task management environments for business and financial regulation professionals. By the end of 2008, we will be integrating our existing products and a variety of new data sets and tools into a broadly based business and financial regulation research platform called KM Law. We will keep you posted on the progress of both KM Law and subsequent versions of KM PolicyWatch.

Please send me an email (pschwartz@knowledgemosaic.com) if you would like more information about KM PolicyWatch. As always you can also post comments directly to my blog.

More on "Whither Westlaw and Lexis"

I received feedback on my post, "Whither Westlaw and Lexis," all of it from law librarians who largely agreed with my assessment of the situation.

The crux of the matter in their minds is the asymmetry of the relationship between law firms and the large publishing vendors. A 2006 article by Michael Ginsborg - which draws on the wisdom of Yogi Berra ("A nickel isn't worth a dime today") to analyze soaring legal publishing costs - emphasizes the bargaining inequities that arise when three foreign publishing conglomerates (Thomson Reuters, Reid Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer) control 84 percent of the legal publishing market (as of 2003).

In a nutshell, prices go through the roof.

Librarian response to my post mirrored this frustration. At a time when budgets are on the chopping block, the prices for publications that attorneys deem essential continue to rise steeply. From the perspective of librarians caught in the middle of this squeeze, a tragicomedy reminiscent of Groundhog Day plays itself out on a routine basis. The large publishers buy up smaller companies that are doing fine on their own. Key employees - those in possession of the most intimate knowledge of the product - often leave. Prices increase dramatically.

On a larger scale, these acquisitions occur within what sometimes seem like endless rounds of reorganizations and restructurings and bloodlettings. This flux leaves librarians and attorneys bewildered about what products belong in what product groups and makes rational pricing and budget calculations that much more difficult.

Westlaw and Lexis might argue that this is a biased and misleading perspective on both the acquisition cycle and the dynamics of product pricing. They also might argue that the market in its current state is highly competitive and that they are pricing purely in relation to what the market will bear. The fact that they negotiate confidential licensing agreements with customers would seem to support the idea that there is flex in the market and that some (presumably larger) customers possess significant bargaining power.

It is also true that the market remains open to younger, more agile companies that want to exploit the opportunities for both creating smarter, better, and less expensive research products and for building stronger, more symmetric relationships with customers. These small companies can also take advantage of the fact that Westlaw and Lexis cannot really compete with them, constrained as they are by the innovator's dilemma. The only option remaining to these large publishers is to acquire the small companies. They cannot compete on price or customer responsiveness or, in many cases, in product innovation and product quality. Speaking for myself, I respect and like our compatriots from Westlaw and Lexis, but I have never been terribly concerned that they could put my company out of business.

Are there any third parties looming on the horizon that could enter the legal publishing market and displace Westlaw and Lexis? There are two scenarios. A collection of young companies could arise in different segments of the industry (case law, corporate law, etc.) and peck away at Westlaw and Lexis until they suffered death from a thousand cuts. Alternatively, a large financial publisher might enter the fray and disturb the legal publishing universe.

Has anyone heard of Bloomberg? More to come.

Once again, anyone who would like to post their thoughts on the competitive dynamics of the legal publishing market can write me (pschwartz@knowledgemosaic.com). You also can post comments directly at my blog.

Whither Westlaw and Lexis?

I spoke last week at a LLAGNY (Law Librarians of Greater New York) event on "Current Awareness Tools for the Law Librarian". Joining me were representatives of Portfolio Media (Law 360) and LawyerLinks Advantage.

NOT joining me were representatives of Westlaw and Lexis. I thought this was of profound interest, and offered some thoughts on their absence at the event as a preface to my remarks.

Westlaw and Lexis are multi-billion dollar companies that dominate the legal publishing landscape. Both companies employ thousands of people, and are known for their comprehensive legal publishing offerings, high prices, and aggressive service - which includes free access for law students, the awarding of points redeemable for awards for frequent searching, and a prowling omnipresence within the libraries and corridors of major law firms.

The day before, I attended an open house for lawyers at a major New York firm where my company and Portfolio Media sat alone amongst the big trees in the forest. Westlaw Business was there, alongside brethren from the real Westlaw, and RIA (another Thomson company). Lexis was also there (with three sales people!). So was Bloomberg - that's a story for another day - and Wolters Kluwer (CCH and Aspen).

Not many attorneys actually attended the event, and those who did were there with specific questions. I did not notice that the big guys received any more attention than we did. In fact, they may have received slightly less notice.

At the LLAGNY meeting, I noted the absence of Westlaw and Lexis and suggested that it was meaningful that they were not invited to address "current awareness tools for the law librarian". There are several issues at stake here. Thomson just bought Reuters and it would make sense for them to use Reuters news to build-out a world-class news and current awareness product for legal professionals. Lexis has made good use of Ozmosys to deliver and channel its sophisticated array of news and current awareness materials. So why weren't they invited to speak?

I think there are two forces at work here, neither of which bodes well for the future growth of these two companies. One is political. Despite their omnipresence, and the generally high quality of their products and services, for many users, Westlaw and Lexis seem to be tolerated, not loved. As large and powerful organizations - easier to respect than to cuddle - the reasons are not difficult to identify, and they probably parallel ambivalence about a powerful software company that inspires mixed emotions with which we are intimately familiar out here in Seattle.

I can certainly imagine how, in the minds of many librarians, who have to manage budgets and deal with vendors, Westlaw and Lexis would be viewed as necessary evils. Borg-like in their capacity to absorb and assimilate all other legal publishing "life forms", their market power has survived numerous antitrust challenges. Their prices - in many instances for information that largely exists elsewhere and possesses commodity status - are very high. And the two companies can be difficult and complicated to deal with. So librarians, knowledge managers, and attorneys may suffer from a lack of influence and control in vendor relationships that are largely asymmetric.

From my experience at the LLAGNY event, however, the other major force in play, however, is cognitive, and it may cut against the grain of the political, "resistance is futile" Borg analogy. If LLAGNY invites three tiny companies, but not Westlaw and Lexis, to present at a session on "current awareness", it may only be a gesture of politesse, in which smaller entities are singled out for consideration out of a commendable generosity of spirit on behalf of "the little guy".

On the other hand, it may also represent some recognition that the future of legal research and current awareness products (which will increasingly be merged) may not belong to the large players, and that the Internet presents new options for flexible, lightweight, reasonably priced products that obviate the need or requirement to use Westlaw or Lexis. In other words, a cognitive shift may be taking place in which Westlaw and Lexis increasingly are not the default options when it comes to legal research.

Here is the situation in a nutshell. Westlaw and Lexis currently face the classic “innovator’s dilemma” associated with established market leaders that find themselves pinned down by commitments to overdeveloped, overpriced products in rapidly changing markets. When faced with the emergence of vibrant new companies in this legal publishing and tools markets, both companies historically have employed an aggressive acquisitions strategy that (Borg-like) has allowed them to both incorporate the latest publishing and technology advances and fend off new competition, leaving a strangely barren and misshapen ecosystem in which two towering redwoods absorb the roots system of any sapling that threatens to surpass knee-high stature.

Will this change in the future? My guess is a qualified "yes." Westlaw and Lexis are both very profitable enterprises, and they can obviously afford to throw enough money at any company whose business they want to essentially "make resistance futile". And yet, there is a point at which the complexity of their businesses, and the pressure of the "innovator's dilemma" may present more nimble competitors with growth opportunities to which Westlaw and Lexis are simply unable to respond. Their position is not unlike that of Microsoft around 2004, just before Google went public. People knew change was in the air and that it would deeply impact Microsoft, probably in a negative way. The form it would take remained unclear, however.

While still very profitable, Westlaw and Lexis revenue growth rates now hover in the range of only 8 percent to 10 percent annually. Both companies face serious competition across many business fronts. I predict that in the next 3-5 years, new companies and business models will arise in the world of legal publishing and legal practice that will directly challenge the central position of Westlaw and Lexis in the online publishing ecosystem.

What to you think? Please send your thoughts and responses to me at pschwartz@knowledgemosaic.com, and I will be sure to publish them on the Blogwatch in the next few days.

By the way, I was very taken with the idea of mellifluously titling this post Whither Wexis, but given that Reed Elsevier (parent company of Lexis) slapped a court case and a permanent injunction against TheLaw.net for referring to "Wexis" in its marketing literature, I decided that would not be advisable. This is another fascinating story. For the sordid details.

Jazz and Law and Love

I was privileged this past weekend to be in New York for the Essentially Ellington Festival at Lincoln Center. This remarkable annual event caps the tireless jazz education efforts of the irrepressible Wynton Marsalis. Selected jazz bands from 15 US and Canadian high schools train under mentors and clinicians and then assemble for a two-day competition judged by Marsalis and three other jazz luminaries.

I am not so devoid of local pride to avoid boasting that 3 of the top 4 finishers hailed from Seattle, nor that my son played guitar for the Garfield High School jazz band, which finished second in the competition, nor that the award for outstanding piano performance went to the prodigiously gifted son of one of my co-workers at Knowledge Mosaic. However, one cannot avoid experiencing an event this rich on many different levels, and the level that concerns me in this post concerns analogies between jazz and law.

Wynton Marsalis is the self-appointed guardian of the "classical" jazz legacy associated with Swing, Big Bands, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. A highly accomplished classical musician, Marsalis applies similar principles of formal artistry and adherence to a traditional "canon" in the world of jazz. And this is where things get interesting. I am no student of jazz, but I do know a thing or two about the "canon" wars in the academic world (as in what's up with all of these books by dead white men).

I also have given more than passing thought to the place of canonical thinking in the legal world. Theorists of Originalism cross swords with both Common Law conservatism (shading into Living Constitution advocacy), and Legal Realism (particularly as it has shaded in recent years into the Critical Legal Studies movement). In the background lurk adherents of the influential, yet self-marginalized, Law and Economics movement.

While these intellectual battles are largely confined to the academy - particularly in quarrels between the University of Chicago and Harvard - and hence retain a certain parochial quaintness, there is also no doubt that these positions on the meaning and interpretation of the law spill into the court system and the nation's regulatory bodies and hence demand more than idle or theoretical attention from us.

The parallels between the canon wars in jazz and arguments about precedent, tradition, and the law are striking. While one can hardly label Wynton a political conservative or a racially blind or racially neutered musician (at the Ellington Festival, he teased one of the small number of African-American students in attendance about his "Halfro"), his efforts to preserve the jazz forms and traditions in a somewhat unmodified "classical" mode have earned him the reputation in some influential music circles of being a reactionary and even a betrayer of his race not unlike Clarence Thomas (or, in jazz/cultural criticism circles, Stanley Crouch).

Here, for example, is the brilliant pianist Keith Jarrett: "Wynton imitates other people's styles too well. You can't learn to imitate everyone else without a real deficit. I've never heard anything Wynton played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high-school trumpet player to me. He plays things really, really, really badly that you cannot screw up unless you are a bad player. I've felt embarrassed listening to him, and I'm white. Behind his humble speech, there is an incredible arrogance. And for a great black player who talks about the blues - I've never heard Wynton play the blues convincingly, and I'd challenge him to a blues standoff any time. He's jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty."

Keith Jarrett can have it both ways, of course, given his talent, and a range that carries him from the free-form moaning of The Koln Concert to, more recently, the unspeakably beautiful (and formal) melodics of Shenandoah. No matter what authority his chops confer upon him, Jarret's bile - and his playing of the race card - is jarring. But this is how the world works in any artistic medium. Standards and tastes evolve. Artistic expression is an enunciation of freedom. Confinement within forms and traditions and technical routines stifles.

The debates about "truth" and "beauty" in art grip the soul, and often lead to battles and hatreds that are decidedly "unlovely" and "unartistic." And so let us consider the Law as Art, pulled between various poles of thought. The Originalist fundamentalists apply a literal standard of interpretation to the meaning of the Constitution, no matter how anachronistic the original texts may be in the 21st century. They appeal to the Constitution as an original standard of authority, as the foundation of our being as a nation, as the starting point and a framework for any debate of significant judicial import.

I am loathe personally to associate Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas with Wynton Marsalis, and there is the clear distinction in their approaches between rigid, ideological fundamentalism, on the one hand, and an artistic certitude that is primarily formal and aesthetic, on the other. In other words, I am loathe to attribute artistic meaning to the Constitutional opinions and interpretations of Scalia and Thomas, whose politics I despise and whose intellectual honesty I question.

And yet, there is clearly a sense in which - if one generously takes them at their word - the Originalists seek meaning from foundation texts because these texts contain a spiritual, sanctified significance for the political and philosophical "specialness" of the United States. In other words, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the letters of the founders to each other, as well as the early opinions of the Marshall Court - all of these embody authority, as in authorship. They give us identity. They give us voice. Without them, we would lose our way. And so we must always keep them in our mind's eye. They are our touchstone, our compass, our destination and our destiny. Without these documents, and the meanings they contain, there is literally no United States of America.

In a similar way, Wynton Marsalis cannot see American jazz without its crystallization in the works, techniques, and styles of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Carter. Jazz is a tradition with deep roots in African-American musical rhythms. However, it would obviously be a mistake to ignore the influence upon it of classical forms and styles inherited from European Baroque and Romantic traditions, as well. And this is what Marsalis appreciates. Even with its nod to soloists and its reliance upon a rhythmic backbone, the Big Band sound clearly embraces a structured, neo-symphonic musical architecture that extends across the Atlantic to European classical music traditions.

This mirrors in many ways the debt to European constitutional theorists such as Locke and Montesquieu that Originalists in law will freely acknowledge. From one perspective, these traditionalist approaches are clearly reactionary in their suspicion to change that in any way threatens to break the thread of continuity to the past. And artistic innovation, in both law and music, cannot exist without pulling at that thread. Creativity demands thread-pulling! Building a future often demands the sacrifice of the past.

Reading the early works of Roberto Unger - with interpretations of legal textual "standards" and a new legal "fusion" that would be largely unrecognizable to any traditionalist - makes it clear that legal experimentation (judicial activism!) can be a witch's brew. In the same way, jazz faces challenges from new forms - rap comes to mind - that speak to a younger generation without seeming to offer coherence via any solidarity with or debt of gratitude to the musical past. Upon the shoulders of what giants do rap musicians stand?

And yet, like Roberto Unger, rap is clearly incredibly synthetic and creative, with a rhythmic commitment that fully acknowledges African origins while extending its reach to create a pastiche of sounds drawn from across the full spectrum of classical, blues, jazz, and popular American music. So I would argue that "new" or radical forms - even as they flay the fathers - are indebted to the fathers.

From one perspective, the jazz classicism of Wynton Marsalis is in trouble. Applications to the Ellington competition have fallen by more than half from recent high points. The musical traditionalists in jazz are aging - Marsalis's own Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is, for the most part, not populated by young men (and it has no women).

While the tendencies of the Supreme Court and the political appointments to the bench and to the regulatory agencies of Republican presidents may suggest otherwise, Constitutional Originalism may also be in trouble. Conservatives often now favor a Law and Economics approach that is technical and empirical and pays no debt to tradition. In fact, viewing itself as (or at least aspiring to be) a science, the Law and Economics movement falls entirely outside any artistic and historic perspective on American constitutional law.

For Wynton and the legal Originalists, the jazz and legal "traditions" possess an almost fugue-like status. The Music and the Law are harmonic and dependent upon a succession of imitative derivative variations on a foundation theme. For this reason, Wynton may not fully view as insulting the claim that his music is imitative and not original.

At Ellington, Wynton spoke - Lion-King like - about the circle of life, the circle of love. The commitment to a foundation event, and founding heroes - in jazz and in constitutional law - animates our world with sounds and poetry and rhythms that carry us through life and connect us to others. The connection is love that transcends personal ties and is essentially cultural. It is a bond of togetherness that comes from what is unspoken yet sacred in our identity. 

n the end, Wynton would say, classical jazz is the container for our musical identity as a nation, just as, for the legal Originalists, the Constitution is the container for our legal identity as a nation. The connections these containers create between us - the love that spills forth from that recognition - confer sacred meaning upon both American Jazz and American Law.

The Origin of Brands: Darwin, Advertising, and Google

I just read The Origin of Brands, by the enthusiastic father-daugher duo, Al and Laura Ries. The Origin of Brands takes Darwin's other important idea - regarding the link between special prosperity and species diversity - and applies it to product development and brand proliferation.

I won't go into the flaws of the book. They will be obvious to anyone who reads it. But the central message pierces the bulls-eye for those interested in what separates successful companies from mediocre (or crummy) companies. This is the gist:

1) Go where no man or woman has gone before.
2) Don't compete within existing product categories.
3) Create new categories.
4) Don't worry about market size.
5) The most successful companies created markets (categories) where the market size was zero!

That's it. End of story.

And it's a true story. And as an extension of my bloviations last week about Google and Microsoft, the story carries extra-special resonance. Here is Google, which has created an entirely new - and a phenomenally successful - business by inventing and then populating a new category of online advertising. With its pay-per-click text ads, Google offered a substitute for the appallingly intrusive, annoying, expensive graphical banner ads. It created this advertising category and now it owns this category.

Microsoft (and Yahoo!, for that matter) will never displace Google in the online advertising category. By golly, Google is a now a verb! Is Microsoft a verb? Is Yahoo! a verb? No. Microsoft is an adjective these days, and normally a pejorative one. And Yahoo! is an exclamation point. Or, from a different perspective, a spear to the vitals of the business.

So read The Origin of Brands (which, ironically, given Google's success, spurns advertising itself as a fool's paradise). In many ways, The Origins of Brands is a conventional "new marketing" book, similar to Blue Ocean Strategy and The Purple Cow. Hit the edges of the market, define your market so you have no competitors, don't worry about market size. None of these approaches are for the faint of heart. They embrace risk. They require leaps of faith. It is far more comfortable to do what everyone else is doing, as in "no one ever got fired for buying IBM."

But even for large and successful companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft, you can hear the death rattle of the business when it becomes too obsessed with its competitors. These are not companies that will go away. But AOL has not gone away either. And does anyone care about it anymore. Does anyone think it is remotely relevant as a business?

At Knowledge Mosaic, which is a very tiny company, we also think about these questions on a daily basis. We face the dilemma of being stuck in a market with entrenched competitors, a market that, truth be told, is no longer growing very rapidly (although at our size there is still significant room for us to grow). But we are tired of this little pond. And while we respect and love our competitors, we are tired of them, too.

So we are embarking on our own adventure in the coming weeks and months. An adventure involving taking everything we have learned in the past five years about legal research and legal practice and reconceptualizing both in the creation of a new product platform that will be different from anything ever before seen in the market for legal, regulatory, and compliance news, research, and tools.

More to come.

Advertising - Phooey!

Five or ten years from now, we will remember Microsoft's failed bid for Yahoo as the last, creaking gasp of a company out of ideas, running on fumes. How do we know this? Two words: online advertising.

Online advertising has become the last refuge, not of scoundrels, but of nitwits. If you don't have an idea for a product that offers something tangible for which people will pay real money, you create a website that generates revenue from advertising, from eyeballs. Why does this sound so familiar?

Generally speaking, the online advertising business model amounts to a fool's paradise, in which companies and investors assume they can continue to throw good money after bad to build products that will generate revenue without actually offering significant value.

That Microsoft is so desperate to build an advertising-driven revenue model, and that the company sees this business model as the future, might rightly be viewed as a sign of the apocalypse, if not for all of us, then for Microsoft itself.

Of course, the newspaper, magazine, network television, and radio businesses have all been built on advertising revenue. Google certainly makes ungodly piles of money from its text ads - and truth be told, they are so successful that the "nitwit" accolade can only be provisionally applied to them - although Google's success reinforces the aptness of this designation for those who think they can compete with them. The collapse of advertising-supported print businesses is, of course, also largely the result of Google's success (and Craig's List).

In its 2007 10-K, Google reported online advertising revenues of $16.41 billion, accounting for 99 percent of of its total revenue of $16.59 billion. Between 2005 and 2007, Google advertising revenue grew 171 percent. Interestingly, its much-touted Google Search Appliance did not generate material revenue of any sort.

And here is Microsoft. In its 2007 10-K, Microsoft reported online advertising revenues of $1.84 billion, representing growth since 2005 of only 43 percent. Online advertising represents only 3.5 percent of its total revenue in 2007 of $51 billion. Perhaps reflecting the lack of focus and coherence in its advertising strategy, the Microsoft 10-K makes it significantly more difficult to pull out and analyze advertising revenue numbers.

So we have a situation in which Google generates nearly 9 times more revenue from advertising and this revenue supports its entire business, where Microsoft online advertising supports only 3.5 percent of its business. Even though it is starting from a significantly larger base, Google's advertising revenue is growing more than 4 times faster than Microsoft's.

There is something weird going on here. At this point, Google is nothing more than an advertising company, arguably the most successful in history. The advertising revenue model drives all of its technology efforts.

By contrast, Microsoft is an operating system and software applications company that has never understood well the Internet, is late to the game of online advertising, and is outrageously deluded in its belief that it can ever compete with Google in the advertising market. Its desperation to enter this game is a bit odd, and only reinforces both its insecurity about the future of its core businesses and its incoherent grasp of the meaning of the Internet.

The reality, however, is that online advertising may not forever be the golden-egg-laying goose that Google's success might indicate. The market for online advertising is slowing, its promise in social networking sites seems overstated (to judge by current success), and economic cycles will influence the return on advertising investment and the willingness of businesses to spend more money on advertising (certainly enough to sustain Google's current rate of growth).

So here is a suggestion. We may be in the midst of an advertising "mania", rooted in the success of the brilliant birth of Google's text ads (which, frankly, I often prefer to normal, unpaid search results with which they are paired), but also fueled by the the takeoff of video on the Internet and the alleged promise of local advertising. These opportunities are real, but they are driven by the assumption that growth of Internet use will only continue to accelerate, that people will spend more of their time each day on the Web and that they will want to spend more of their money on purchases stimulated by Web (or phone) advertising.

As my son might say, "Dude, I don't see it happening."

Introducing the BD Law Blog

I am happy to introduce our readers to the latest member of the Knowledge Mosaic Blogwatch family: the BD Law Blog, authored by Joel Beck of The Beck Law Firm. The BD Law Blog publishes regular news and opinion on broker-dealer law, regulation, and enforcement, and is a great addition to the Blogwatch as we begin to expand our coverage into financial services regulation.

The Beck Law Firm was founded by Joel Beck, after a ten year career with NASD, including six years as an Enforcement attorney. Working in the Enforcement Department, Joel handled cases involving violations of NASD Rules, MSRB Rules, and federal securities laws. His cases included penny stock fraud, unsuitable recommendations, unauthorized trading, improper supervision, anti-money laundering, misrepresentations and omissions, research analyst issues, and others.

Joel has been designated a Certified Regulatory and Compliance Professional by the NASD Institute at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Joel earned his law degree, magna cum laude, from John Marshall Law School, Atlanta, Georgia, where he was also a recipient of the West Publishing Award for Academic Excellence. Joel earned his Bachelor of Business Administration degree at Georgia Southern University. He is a member of the State Bar of Georgia, the American Bar Association, and the Compliance and Legal Division of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Joel and his family live in Lawrenceville, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. Joel serves on the Board of Directors for Family Promise of Gwinnett County, an inter-faith organization providing support, care and training for homeless families, moving them towards permanent housing. Joel is also active in his church.

There Will Be Blood

I watched There Will Be Blood twice over the weekend, and found it to be an astoundingly, devastatingly accomplished movie. The film defied conventional cinematic conventions and presented itself less as a story and more as a series of character-driven events. The movie worked because of the beautiful writing, the haunting and jarring music, and, above all, the extraordinary performance delivered by Daniel Day-Lewis in the role of Daniel Plainview.

There Will Be Blood transcends its individual moments - each finely wrought and beautiful in its own terms, but otherwise isolated from any conventional narrative arc. The cumulative weight and momentum of these discrete moments is less about storytelling and more about an accretive weight of Biblical judgment that befalls characters, innocent and guilty alike. The power of There Will Be Blood derives from its assumptions regarding the absence of grace and the weight of human sin in a world empty of any divine blessing. If grace and redemption is about truth, in There Will Be Blood, all is false.

At a midpoint of the movie, consider the parallel constructions of two cathedrals - the aspiring reach of the framing for Eli Sunday's new church and the cut to the barely indistinguishable perspective on the soaring wooden derrick, the temple for worship of a different false idol - black gold. In There Will Be Blood, all objects of worship are false idols. Faith is empty.

One of the the climactic moments of the movie occurs in the revelatory instant in which a gusher of oil ignites, depriving Daniel's son H.W., of his hearing while also confirming the wealth that sits below the surface of the ground. The fiery inferno that topples the derrick represents an eruption of hellfire and damnation tightly yoked to Daniel's own self-exaltation fueled by his moment of triumph.

There Will Be Blood is, similarly, both pointed and duplicitous in its association of blood with family - the ties of family provide crucial credibility for Daniel Plainview in his efforts to seduce and swindle poor landowners in Little Boston (the Puritan City upon a Hill) whose crusty, alkaline land sits atop an ocean of black gold. And yet, of course, Daniel's own family is a fabrication. His son is not his son. His brother is not his brother.

A final thought. Females, and meaningful relationships with females are almost entirely absent from There Will Be Blood. In a subversion of the tradition of all-male frontier "romance" that underpins the American epic of territorial discovery and appropriation, the absence of women stands in for the absence of grace. Consider the ultimate fate of H.W., whose loss of hearing - on the surface a tragic deprivation - ultimately frees him from the soul-destroying drumbeat of his father's words. H.W. is the only male character who develops a meaningful relationship with a woman, and his separation from the father who denies him at the end of the movie counts as a liberation. In There Will Be Blood, almost all speech is false. Deafness becomes the only path to truth.

Kentucky Derby Picks

Even though I no longer bet, I did glance at the past performances for the Kentucky Derby tomorrow. For what it is is worth, these are the horses I believe have a chance to win, with program number/post position and morning line odds. I see one of the following three horses winning:

6 (15/1) - Z Fortune

19 (15/1) - Gayego

20 (3/1) -Big Brown

Here are some facts. In the 133-year history of the Derby, only 1 horse has won from a post position of 19 or higher (of course, many Derbies have had fewer than 19 horses running - nonetheless). It also has been 93 years since a horse has won with only 3 starts (Big Brown). So I think we can throw out Big Brown as the winner particularly as he will be going off at pretty short odds. He is a remarkable horse, and he could win, he just is too risky at the price he will return.

If I had to pick one horse, I would pick Z Fortune, who has a favorable post position. He can drop in on the rail and close, which typically favors Derby horses. There is a lot of early speed in this field, and they tend to wear each other down, opening up opportunities for a closer down the long stretch at Churchill Downs. Z Fortune will go off at a nice price and is peaking at the right time.

If you want to play an exacta or trifecta, I would put Z Fortune 1st and 2nd with the 19 and 20 horses, and then put 2,5,9,10,12, and 18 for 3rd place.

So if someone had a mythical $100 to bet, I would do it this way:

$40 Win - 6

$5 Exacta - 6 with 19,20 ($10)

$5 Exacta - 19,20 with 6 ($10)

$2 Exacta - 6 with 2,5,9,10,12,18 ($12)

$1 Trifecta - 6 with 19,20 with 2,5,9,10,12,18,19,20 ($14)

$1 Trifecta - 19,20 with 6 with 2,5,9,10,12,18,19,20 ($14)

Of course, this does not represent any recommendation that anyone else bet on this race. Horse racing is not for the faint of heart. I am mostly just opening myself for ridicule when Z Fortune finishes last.