April 2001 Archives
Notes on reading the New York Times personals section
1. There are ten columns, and five categories. "Women seeking men" takes up 8.5 columns; "Men seeking women" takes up slightly less than one; "Men seeking men" is about half a column. "Women seeking women" and "Recreation and hobbies partner" are both so far blank. "You can find the type of person and relationship you are looking for by placing your ad in this category today," they say, hopefully.
2. None of the personals include email addresses: the only way to respond is by phoning 1-900-370-9656 at $5.98 for the first minute and $2.99 for each additional minute. Or you can phone a toll-free number and pay $3.49 per minute on your credit card. Just for the sake of comparison, AT&T's basic international rates range up to $1.97 a minute for Burundi, $2.42 for Cambodia, and $2.57 for Chad. You can phone North Korea for less than it costs to call the New York Times personals. The highest rate I could find was $3.72 a minute to Mayotte Island. (Apparently it's part of the Comoro Islands, northwest of Madagascar at the north end of the Mozambique Channel.)
3. Before we even start reading the ads we have to read the "legend", which, along with the standard abbreviations (J-Jewish, F-Female) includes "A-African American". Quite a few of the ads include "P-Professional," which seems pretty redundant in this context.
4. If the New York Times deliberately set out to confirm all of the stereotypes held against it by Texas Republicans and others, it could hardly have done a better job. We start out with a Jewish teacher, 52, and carry on in that vein for most of the rest of the page. "CULTURE VULTURE Loves classical music, opera, film, theater, some art. Seeks male, 55 to 65, with mutual interests." "STUNNING BLONDE Vivacious, accomplished, statuesque, multilingual, author, lecturer. Desires extremely cultured and deeply intelligent equal (except for the "statuesque" part!) male over 50 of any race for intellectual companionship." "LOVELY MANHATTANITE 5'7", fit, green-eyed, spirited, warm, Jewish, enjoys the arts, dining out, travel. Seeks tall, professional, non-smoking, good looking, energetic, 53 to 63, giving man, similar interests." "IVY LEAGUE GRADUATE SWJF, 61, loves opera, art, concerts, theatre, dining, outdoors, family. Good-natured. Seeks refined, thoughtful gentleman. Non-smoker."
5. The general age seems to be in the 50s, although it does range down to "30s". The only younger advertisers are two incredibly obnoxious men, "ELITIST Socially liberal, elitist, atheist, decaffeinated, non-smoking, rugby playing, swimming, PHD, 28, seeks equal or superior," and "ENGLISH ARTIST 25-year-old WM seeks whatever. I'm financially secure, gorgeous, live in Manhattan and ready for a surprise."
6. Most of these seem to have cost around $100, plus the $20 which everybody seems to have paid for inclusion on the website.
Posted by Felix at 1:53 EST | Comments (0)
Sleaze in the UK and USA
The USA is the world's greatest democracy, right? It has a written constitution incorporating all manner of checks and balances which largely preclude the sort of sleaze allegations which have plagued Cabinets both Tory and Labour in recent years. As if.
The New York Times runs today with an astonishing investigative piece about New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli which would automatically result in his resignation were he a UK MP. The interesting thing about it is that it's really not that investigative: it's obviously based on the findings of a federal investigation into the senator which began more than three years ago and which only recently has looked into the obviously sleazy relationship between Torricelli and David Chang, one of his largest campaign contributors.
The evidence in the Times piece is damning: Torricelli wrote effusive letters on Chang's behalf to senior members of the South Korean government, including the prime minister, in an attempt to help him buy an insurance company he was ill-prepared to run; he even brought Chang along to a meeting with the finance minister which was meant to be about foreign relations with North Korea, something which forced a formal apology from the US Ambassador.
But Torricelli is still blithely continuing as a senator. Has he no shame? Well, he is an American. But compared to the sort of activity which forced the resignation of Peter Mandelson, he ought to be long gone.
I have a feeling that in the final analysis, the degree of political
sleaze, and the degree of acceptable political sleaze, is directly
proportional to the amount of money floating around parties and politicians.
America has more money than anywhere else, so it's got more sleaze
as well.
Posted by Felix at 1:55 EST | Comments (1)
Lulu at the Met
I've just come back from a performance of Berg's Lulu, at the Metropolitan Opera. It's a great piece, of course, although weirdly much of the audience didn't seem to think so: it was noticeably thinner by the end than it was at the beginning. I don't really understand this: it's not like people buy tickets to Lulu thinking they're getting Puccini. And the crowd was definitely younger than normal at the Met, something else I found surprising: I don't see why Lulu should attract a particularly younger audience than, say, Moses und Aron or the newly-commissioned version of The Great Gatsby I went to see there.
I also had a piece of luck; whether it was good or bad I wasn't sure to begin with. The eponymous role was meant to have been sung by Christine Schäfer, who got rave reviews. But she was ill, and instead her golden stilettos were filled by Cyndia Sieden, someone I shouldn't imagine one audience member in a hundred had heard of. I did a little web search on her when I got back home, and as far as I can make out she's a coloratura Mozart specialist who has never done anything like this at all.
And this wasn't just outside her natural Mozart turf, it was also her Metropolitan Opera debut: imagine walking out onto the stage of the Met, a nerve-racking experience in the smallest of rôles, and then having to sing Lulu! Understandably, she was a bit shaky to begin with, and even towards the end she found it quite hard to project in the spoken parts. Also, while Lulu is certainly romantic, it's not mushy, and she did have a tendency to heap on the syrup a little bit when it came to the high bits.
That said, however, Sieden grew enormously in confidence over the course of the evening, and by the harrowing end she was Lulu.The cast, the audience and James Levine all gave her an enormous round of applause, which was very well deserved.
It's at times like these that you remember that opera is a theatrical art, and that the audience and the performers really do connect. Especially in this production, which had a fair few Brechtian touches such as the singers referring directly to the Concertmeister Levine, by the end the successful staging of this performance, with this lead soprano, was an individual triumph.Sieden might not be one of the world's great Lulus, but she touched us, here, tonight.
Posted by Felix at 1:56 EST | Comments (0)
How the mighty are fallen
What do Goldman Sachs, CSFB, and Salomon Smith Barney all have in common? They all came in somewhere below Rothschild's in the European M&A advisory league tables for the first quarter of 2001. The Guardian knows where the story is: the really quite satisfying schadenfreude of Goldie's falling from first to eleventh place. (You've gotta love the ordinal, don't you: it's the league-table equivalent of the Vauxhall Conference.) Reuters leads with Morgan Stanley taking the number one spot, but still gets Goldman in its headline.
But for me (and this may only be because my Dad used to work for them) the Rothschild's story is in a way even more interesting. (Caveat: This league table is based on one quarter's figures, and a quarter which was exceptionally weird in the M&A world at that.It's certain that Goldman will go up and Rothschild's will go down the league table over the next few quarters. Even so, it's worth examining.)
Thompson Financial, who generate the league tables, and who I'm not going to link to 'cos their site makes my browser crash, have simply put Rothschild, not ABN Amro Rothschild, in the Number 6 position. Seeing as how they carefully credit the bizarre entitiy known as Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, I think we can chalk this one up to the Last Remaining UK Investment Bank, without even giving the Dutch so much as a look-in. (Besides, ABN Amro is hardly a major player in European M&A advisory.)
Now the received wisdom in recent years has been that you're either big or you're nothing; that balance sheets are everything. There's always been room for "boutiques," but room only in the sense of making lots of money for their founders, not room in the sense of overtaking SSB and Goldman Sachs in league tables. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (or should it be Allianz Dresdner Kleinwort... oh, never mind) might have made number four, but Wasserstein Perella certainly never did.
And hell, Rothschild's is English! Everybody knows that English banks are little more than takeover fodder. All the important investment banks these days are American, Swiss, or German. There are big and important Dutch, Swiss and Japanese banks, but they're all basically lenders at heart.There are important Italian boutiques, but you know, that's Italy for you. The English banks all got bought (Morgan Grenfell, Kleinwort Benson, Flemings) or died horrible deaths (BZW, NatWest Markets). And don't even think about mentioning HSBC.
So what on earth is Rothschild's doing on this league table? Total volumes might be pretty low so far this year, but $38.5 billion is nothing to be sneezed at in anybody's book. Could it be that large corporations are finally getting sick of arrogant, overpaid American whizzkids and are finally seeking a bit more maturity and a bit less smoke-and-mirrors? Could it be that without the implied promise of lots of positive research reports from the bank's analysts, the American M&A teams seem rather diminished? Could it be that corporations are now deciding to pay for the best advice, rather than the biggest name? Could it be among the cacophony of bursting bubbles in recent months, few people have been alert to the collapse of the myth of the bulge-bracket M&A titan?
Probably not. But it's good to hope.
Posted by Felix at 1:58 EST | Comments (0)
Twisted ankles and jerking knees
Not exactly known for sensationalism, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has just published what sounds like a very interesting study showing that among amateur basketball players, those who wore shoes with air cells in the heel (that'll be Nikes, then) were four times more susceptible to ankle injuries. This was reported by ABC News, which immediately called up a number of doctors who hadn't read the report to rubbish it.
There was a Dr Jon Shriner of the Michigan Center for Athletic Medicine in Flint, Michigan, for instance, who said that "the air-soled shoes, like those in the Nike basketball line, do not contribute to ankle injuries," without giving any reasons for his beliefs. Of course, the fact that Centers for Athletic Medicine probably get a lot of money from Nike, or at the very least from athletes sponsored by Nike, would never influence Dr Shriner's opinion -- or get reported by ABC News.
The article continues: "A major way recreational players can protect themselves from ankle injuries is to tape their ankles for more support and to replace their shoes after a month or two of constant wear. The shoes wear out and so do their support systems." Ah, yes, of course. A couple of months after buying my new $150 Air Shoks, I'm going to go out and replace them. I don't think.
Oh, and I was going to link to the Nike Air Shok page, but the site is so horrible, with Flash 4 and pop-up windows and no URLs, that I can't. Sorry.
Posted by Felix at 2:01 EST | Comments (0)
Sourcing
Noticed two extremes in anonymous sourcing in daily newspapers today, both annoying. The first comes from the Guardian:
A source close to Mr Smith said he understood that the museum, which incorporates the South Kensington Museum, the National Museum of Art and Design, the Theatre Museum, the National Museum of Childhood and the Wellington Museum, had "unique difficulties" because of the sheer spectrum of its exhibits and its duty to encourage scholarship. But he said the institution, which was founded in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and pioneered the drive to bring art and design to working people, had to be able to repeat the trick for modern visitors.
"The fact is that most people are unsure what the V&A is supposed to be for, and what they are likely to see there, and that puts them off."
Mr Smith does not want the "serendipity which is a major part of the joy of visiting the V&A sacrificed". But he believes that anyone who has ever tried to find their way through the museum's maze of galleries will know there is "ample room for improvement. The labelling is also often less helpful than it might be," the source said.
That was by Fiachra Gibbons, the Grauniad's Arts Correpsondent. She makes no attempt at all to conceal who her "source" is, to the point where inistence on anonymity becomes a joke.
At the other extreme of the spectrum, take a look at Keith Kelly in the New York Post:
Said one media observer, "There is no way to view Powerful Media as anything less than a colossal failure. Brill is essentially getting paid to take this thing over. He gets to spend the venture capitalists' $10 million."
This is New York, ferchrissakes! Everyone is a "media observer". This is editorialising, plain and simple, in the guise of reporting. If we knew anything at all about this source, it would be interesting. But the "media observer" is so vague that the whole thing becomes meaningless.
Posted by Felix at 0:04 EST | Comments (0)
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