The Parallel Universe of Leadership Events
(Cross-posted from Market Movers)
The World Business Forum is a two-day event; I only made the second afternoon. But even that was enough to almost make my head explode. I knew in theory that there's an almost insatiable appetite for motivational speakers and leadership tips from boldface names. But seeing the event in real life, at Radio City Music Hall, only served to bring home to me the reality of this whole parallel universe.
Before each session, the lights would dim and the audience -- thousands of us -- would be subjected to a full-frontal audiovisual assault of extremely noisy ads for various conference sponsors, including Fox Business News. And just in case the message wasn't hammered home enough, Fox had placed promotional antimacassars on the backs of all the seats, advertising the fact that it broadcasts in HD. Which presumably is the kind of thing which gets conference attendees to watch it.
Then the speakers would come on: a parade of successful men in expensive suits walking purposefully around the stage while talking about vague concepts like Greatness or Leadership or Success. In a sense, I can see why that's necessary: the audience was so broad that anything more specific would risk being irrelevant to many. But no one ever seemed to credit the audience with any extrapolation skills: the speakers made sure always to do all the necessary extrapolation in advance. Rather than being able to map X's experience directly across to their own situation, attendees were instead only able to apply the simple principles which X had generated for them from his own experience.
Indeed, the whole thing felt very much like television: the same ultra-low signal-to-noise ratio, the same feel that everything was targeted to the lowest common denominator, the same need to intersperse the serious stuff (Mohammed Yunus and Tony Blair, yesterday afternoon) with a StrongManager™ who was great at peppering his slogans with jokes.
Most depressing of all, the event had television's astonishing ability to take reasonably smart people and turn them into blabbering morons. Jeremy Siegel came on for a few minutes, to talk about the credit crunch; here's a verbatim sentence.
We need to substitute illiquid mortgage-backed treasuries with high-quality US treasury bonds known as tier 1 capital to get the banks lending again: if we do that, we will get to a point where we can liquefy these deposits.
This isn't Jeremy Siegel, Wharton professor; it's Jeremy Siegel, the "wizard of Wharton", and a man who is utterly unafraid to make a complete fool of himself so long as he gets paid lots of money for his appearance.
Of course, he didn't make a complete fool of himself, because the audience wasn't really paying attention to what he was saying. The idea isn't to write down Siegel's wizardly words and then puzzle over them later, deciding that they make no sense at all: the idea is to get the impression of having been exposed to Very Important People -- people whose Importance presumably will rub off in some manner onto the members of the audience.
For me, the whole experience was like being an atheist in church. The president of Cadillac came on stage, and talked about how "as leaders, our job is to unleash our teams' strength" -- and no one so much as giggled at how ridiculous it all was. One of the organizers of the conference, sitting down to interview Tony Blair, actually asked him: "What are the main three or four characteristics of a successful leader?"
Blair played gamely along: I'm sure he was being paid an astonishing amount of money to do so. But in the pause before his answer, you could feel his frustration and brief twinge of self-loathing. There's only one correct answer to that question, and it's the one answer you're never allowed to give.
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Del.icio.usDavid Foster Wallace is dead
and even the Gawker commenters are snark-free. A truly great loss, and a very sad day.
Metablogging Sunday
The war in South Ossetia is a great example of the power of blogging. On Friday, which was pretty much the day it started, Doug Muir posted a generally anti-Georgian explanation of the whole thing, while Svante Cornell posted a generally pro-Georgian explanation of the whole thing. For anybody trying to understand what on earth is going on and wanting to put the war in a big-picture context, these two fast blog entries are as good or better as anything the MSM has managed to come up with over the weekend. The combination of the two of them gives anybody the talking points they need to bluff their way through dinner parties for the next few weeks, I'm sure.
So are The Blogs beating the MSM in South Ossetia? No: the MSM is irreplaceable. The NYT isn't even close to being out on front in this war, but just check out the byline on its story today:
Andrew E. Kramer reported from Gori and Tbilisi, Georgia, and Anne Barnard from Moscow. Reporting was contributed by Michael Schwirtz from Gori; Ellen Barry from Moscow; Matt Siegel from Vladikavkaz, Russia; Steven Lee Myers from Beijing; and Katrin Bennhold from Paris.
These are people who aren't doing anything but reporting: they're all dedicated to finding out the facts on the ground and communicating them as clearly and quickly as they can. For all that blogging is useful, such resources are invaluable.
Incidentally, it's now been over a year and a half since I was fired by Roubini Global Economics. I wasn't there very long; while I was there, I got my blog a relatively small but pretty high-end and influential readership. Eventually I popped up at Portfolio.com, and I've been very happy there indeed.
But when I left RGE and started talking to Portfolio, I was convinced that "name" blogs would nearly always outperform blogs like mine in terms of traffic and other econoblog rankings. People like Nouriel Roubini and Barry Ritholtz and Paul Krugman have credentials, and are much in demand as TV pundits. I, by contrast, am a lowly hack; I hate appearing on TV, and I've never taken an economics course or traded the stock market or worked in a bank or anything like that.
At a dinner party on Friday I was talking to a German blogger about the reasons why the blogosphere hasn't really taken off in Germany: he said it was basically that Germans have no interest in reading or paying any attention to people without credentials, while the people with credentials have no interest in blogging. Both are actually perfectly sensible attitudes to take, and it would be interesting to examine the mechanisms by which those obstacles were overcome in the US.
In any case, I recently had occasion to revisit a couple of simple comparisons that I remembered from my RGE days. First there was a googlefight between myself and Nouriel Roubini: he used to utterly trounce me, but now I edge him. (It's useful that both of us have names which aren't shared by anybody else who's got much of an online presence.) Then there's the technorati rankings: I have an authority of 695 and a rank of 4,312 with 5,033 blog reactions, while Nouriel has an authority of 588 and a rank of 5,500 with 2,113 blog reactions.
Now I hasten to add that I couldn't have done this on my own. Being part of an MSM website was very important for three reasons: firstly, it gave me a bit of that valuable credibility: people at places like the WSJ, it turns out, are much more comfortable linking to other MSM blogs than they are to small DIY sites like felixsalmon.com. Second, Conde Nast has put a lot of time and effort into building Portfolio.com's traffic, and a bunch of that must have helped me, along the way. And most importantly of all, Conde was paying me the whole while, which allowed me to put all my efforts into the blog without having to go off and earn real money elsewhere.
Still, I feel that I've achieved something which, honestly, a year ago I would have thought impossible -- especially given that Nouriel's doomsaying has all pretty much come true over the course of that year, making him much less wacky and much more respectable and mainstream. Over at Aaron Schiff's economics blogs ranking, I'm now in 13th place, above even Brad DeLong, which is crazy. (I think that's because Brad has a lot of different URLs, which makes it hard for Technorati to track and aggregate him properly.) Nouriel is #24, which is too low, I'm not sure what's going on there. Historically, I've compared myself to other MSM blogs: MarketBeat, Alphaville, Free Exchange. Now, I feel like I'm up there with the likes of DeLong and Thoma and VoxEU. And that feels great.
Great Food on the Basque Coast
I had a little holiday last month, and discovered what might well be the greatest food city in the world: San Sebastian. Just, wow. The jamon iberico on the beach was, far and away, the greatest ham I've ever eaten -- and it cost almost nothing compared to what you'd pay for it in Berlin. (In the US, it's almost impossible to find at any price.) But in terms of sheer gastronomic heaven, I have only one word to say to you: Gandarias. Go there for breakfast, go there for lunch, go there for dinner, and then come back the next day and do it all over again. You will be blown away.
Gandarias is, first and foremost, a pintxo bar -- that's what they call tapas in Basque country -- with the best little appetizers you'll ever have: the freshest, most delicious local ingredients placed lovingly on a small slice of baguette, €1.50 apiece. (€2.25 for the cooked-to-order foie gras, which I highly recommend.) Ask for a copa of white wine, and you'll get a high-end wine glass containing wine just as fresh and delicious as the food -- for just €0.95. The place is permanently, and justly, packed, and the atmosphere of crowded and infectious food-lovers is heady.
At the back is a small sit-down restaurant with menus, where you can -- and should -- really go crazy. The food is very reasonably priced for its stratospheric quality, and each dish is better than the last. San Sebastian is famous, of course, for its seafood -- make sure you eat hake cheeks there, they're a revelation -- but on our last night we decided that we should try the steak, too. It's typical of Gandarias, which is all about the food as opposed to the cooking, that all you do is order the steak. You have no choice of preparations -- it comes one way only, simply served with nothing but sea salt. And like it or not, it's going to come very, very rare. I loved it: I think it's the best steak I've ever had outside Argentina.
Gandarias is the kind of restaurant I love more than any other: simple, unpretentious, friendly, and extremely high quality. It also has a magnificent wine list, and a clever wine-vending system using inert gases which means that they have an astonishing range of magnificent Spanish wines by the glass -- not that their house wine isn't magnificent itself.
For visitors, Gandarias -- and the many, many pintxo bars like it, it's far from unique in San Sebastian -- is the way to go. Yes, there are higher-end places too: San Sebastian has more Michelin stars per capita than anywhere else on the planet. But given the quality of the "low" end, there's no need to go high end to eat fabulously well.
On the other hand, if you find yourself on the other side of the border, in Biarritz, I can definitely recommend Sissinou. It reminded me very much of Annisa, in New York: clean, simple, punchy, idiosyncratic, and utterly delicious. This is cuisine, rather than food, done extremely well -- and not cheap.
You'll want somewhere to stay, too, and that's when you head up into the hills outside Biarritz and visit Hegia -- which is talked about in this article along with Sissinou. We didn't go ourselves, but we have it on good authority that the food is outstanding, cooked in an open kitchen by the chef-owner, who will also put you up for the night in his old yet minimalist farmhouse. For what you get (deluxe accommodations, a multi-course dinner, and a fabulous breakfast in the morning), the price (I think it's €650 for two, or €750 with lunch) is not exorbitant, although it was out of our budget.
As for me, I just want to get back to San Sebastian, somehow. It's a beautiful town, with great beaches, friendly people, and the best conceivable food. What's not to love?
Lush Life
Matty's cell rang.
"Excuse me," half turning away.
"Got a pen?" It was his ex.
"Yup." Making no move to find one.
"Adirondack Trailways 4432, arriving Port Authority, four-fifteen tomorrow."
"A.m. or p.m.?"
"Guess."
"All right, whatever," glancing at Billy. Then, "Hey, Lindsay, wait." Matty lowered his voice, his head. "What's he like to eat?"
"To eat? Whatever. He's a kid, not a tropical fish."
One of the great things about Richard Price's novels, as opposed to his screenwriting for The Wire, is that you can read the dialogue slowly, savor it, if you're so inclined.
I might read this one again, to do just that. But the first time through, I was too overwhelmed. Not by the strength of the plot, which, a bit like The Wire, is barely enough to fill the vast amount of space available. And not by the three-dimensionality of the characters, either: they're all maybe a little too glib, Matty and Yolanda in the novel being rather too close to McNulty and Kima in the TV series; Keith McNally and Schiller's being a bit too obvious a center for the novel if you're going to be writing about the yuppifying Lower East Side.
No, for me it was the wealth of Lower East Side detail, everything specified down to the street corner: the number of blocks it takes to get from Broome and Pitt to Eldridge and Stanton, that kind of thing. When you're a New Yorker, and someone specifies an intersection, you can't help but bring up a mental image of that corner in your mind. And when you've lived on the Lower East Side for the best part of a decade, and you've seen all these corners hundreds of times, and the novel is set deep into the real-world geography to the point at which even I had difficulty at times distinguishing the fictional from the real, that alone can be enough to distract somewhat from the artistry of the prose.
In any case, go and read this book: if you don't know the LES quite as intimately as I do, it might be even better. On the other hand, if you do, and especially if you're any kind of a fan of The Wire, then it's simply a must-read.
You wait years for a great literary detective novel to come along, and then two arrive at once: this one, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I've read them both in the past couple of months, and there are some uncanny similarities between them. I'm not going to play favorites, but if you like your fiction noirish and realistic and dirty, go for Lush Life. If you like it a little more magical, read the Chabon. And if you like it both ways, read them both.
RSS update
Lots of problems with the felixsalmon.com RSS feeds right now. To be sure of getting all of my Market Movers posts, Portfolio's RSS feed for them is http://feeds.portfolio.com/portfolio/marketmovers?format=xml. It doesn't include any felixsalmon.com content, but given the frequency of posting here of late, that won't make a lot of difference.
How to stop websites from resizing your browser window in Firefox
I wish I'd known this years ago...
- Point your brower to about:config.
- Where it says "Filter" at the top, type in "resize". Or just scroll down to "dom.disable_window_move_resize".
- It probably says "false". Right-click on it, and select "toggle". Now it says "true".
- You're done!
This is for OS X, but I'm pretty sure it's almost identical in Windows and Linux. No more seeing your carefully-constructed desktop hijacked by evil websites insisting that you view their content in a full screen! Yay!
Poder Column
I've started writing a monthly column on art collecting for Poder, a magazine in Miami. Here are the first four. I love the art direction on them, it makes a refreshing change from the blog format.
When a Balloon Looks Like a Bubble:
727-727 vs 727
A curious postscript to the post below: both the NYT and Slate have slide shows about the Murakami show. Both of them talk about 727-727, and attempt to illustrate it, on slide 10 of the NYT slideshow, and slide 8 of the Slate sideshow. And both of them use an illustration of a different painting, 727, rather than 727-727. Both paintings are on show in Brooklyn right now, but they are definitely distinct: 727-727 is more expressive and painterly. It's not that hard to tell them apart, you'd think that a professional art critic could manage it. (See here, or below, for what 727-727 really looks like.)
Incidentally, I emailed the NYT on April 6 to inform them of their mistake, on their inform-us-of-errors email address of nytnews@nytimes.com. I got a form reply saying "your e-mail will reach the appropriate editor promptly," but so far there's been no correction. I'm trying the same thing with corrections@slate.com, we'll see if the response is different. Who knows, maybe this blog entry will prompt a correction. Probably not.
A Masterpiece from Murakami
I went to the Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum last night, it's well worth seeing. For me, the highlight is the painting above, 727-727, which unfortunately just doesn't work very well in reproduction. In real life, it's enormous – each of the three panels is 3 meters high (that's 9'10", for Americans).
Now Murakami has been painting (or getting his assistants to paint) very large paintings for a very long time, and many of his installations are significantly bigger than this: the scale of this piece is nothing new. But often the size of Murakami's pieces works only to overwhelm, to bludgeon the viewer with sensory overload. In this case, Murakami creates a complex and stunningly beautiful ground of worked and reworked paint: he mounts his canvas on board, puts on a layer of acrylic paint, sands it down until there's almost nothing left, puts on another layer, sands that down, and so on and so forth until the end result ends up looking like a cross between a Gerhard Richter squeegee work and an Andy Warhol oxidation painting.
The result isn't incoherent from afar, as some Murakami paintings can be; instead, it's one of those paintings which works perfectly at any distance from far across the room all the way up to right against the astonishing surface of the canvas.
The content of the painting could easily fill a very large catalogue essay, from the DOB mascot to the flattened and stylized wave forms and the carefully-applied drips at the right-hand edge: intellectually, this is a very complex work. But it also marks the point at which Murakami starts becoming a bit less conceptualist and more of a pure painter: the colors are gorgeous, the formal structure is extremely strong, and there's a pitch-perfect interplay between the flattened areas of abstract color and the more representational elements. In short, I feel comfortable calling this a 21st Century masterpiece, maybe the first I've seen. And frankly I'm a little annoyed it's wound up in the collection of Stevie Cohen; I hope and trust he'll be lending it out a lot, since it really deserves to be on more or less permanent public view.
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