July 2002 Archives

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Monday, July 29, 2002

Number portability: The craven FCC caves in

Pop along to the Federal Communication Commission's website, and buried in the "Headlines" you'll find something saying "Verizon Wireless' Petition for Partial Forbearance from the Commercial Mobile Radio Services Number Portability Obligation and Telephone Number Portability." Click on one of the links (it's available in text, pdf or Word format, but not in basic HTML) and you'll find yourself in a 27-page thicket of legalese. It's not a petition at all, it's the FCC's response to the petition, and it makes for incredibly depressing reading.

In a nutshell, the FCC has given Verizon (and every other wireless company) an extra year before they need to introduce number portability - the ability to change your cellphone provider without changing your phone number. The decision is in no way atypical. A quick timeline might be in order here:

July 1996: The FCC tells the operators that they need to have local number portability (LNP) by June 30, 1999 - three years away.
September 1998: The FCC grants a nine-month extension, to March 31, 2000.
February 1999: The FCC grants another extension, this time all the way out to November 24, 2002.
July 2002: The FCC grants yet another extension, to November 2003.

So we're now six years away from the original order, more than three years past the original deadline for compliance, and we're still 16 months away from the earliest that this is going to happen, assuming that the FCC doesn't come up with reasons to push it back yet further.

It must be really tough, this LNP, eh? Six years of work and the wireless operators still can't make it happen! Of course, that's not the case at all. The wireless operators could do it in a month or two if they needed - in fact, they shamelessly admit that they haven't even started getting to work on this yet. Basically, all they've been doing for the past six years is paying lobbyists to push the deadlines out, rather than making the relatively modest technology and staff-training upgrades needed to implement LNP. (Number portability has existed for wireline telephony for years now, and Verizon has no problem implementing it in that context.)

Verizon et al complain that LNP is far too expensive, although even their own estimates only work out at 20 cents or so a month on the average cellphone bill. Sprint, for example, estimates that LNP would cost $26 million, compared to total capital expenditures last year of $3.327 billion. Coincidentally, my monthly Sprint PCS phone bill is roughly $33.27, so adding on LNP would bring that up to $33.53, assuming that Sprint is being completely honest here and not exaggerating the costs at all. That I can afford.

For LNP doesn't just bring costs, it brings savings, too. One third of America's cellphone customers will "churn" in 2002 - will switch from one provider to another. When they do so, and change their phone numbers in the process, they not only need to send out those mass emails we're all so used to getting, but also need to get websites edited, business cards and letterheads reprinted, and inevitably never receive an unknown number of phone calls from people who didn't get the message. The cost of all of that is certainly more than the extra buck or two that customers may or may not need to pay in annual phone charges.

(Astonishingly enough, the cellphone companies actually use the one-in-three figure in an attempt to buttress their own argument. The fact that churning is so common, they say, is proof positive that people don't mind changing their phone numbers, so there's no point in spending money to let them keep them. What they mean, of course, is that given the choice between a customer spending $200 on new business cards and themselves spending $2 on LNP, they'd choose the former any day.)

What the phone companies won't tell you is that far from increasing your phone bill, LNP is more than likely to decrease it. The cost of switching providers at the moment is artificially high, due to the expense and hassle involved in changing your phone number. If that goes down, mobile companies will have a huge incentive to start poaching disaffected cellphone users who can't stand their present provider but who are presently daunted by the obstacles to switching. A consulting company called Instat estimates that churn would increase by 25% to 50% in the year after LNP was introduced - more than 20 million people who are presently unhappy but who feel locked in to a bad relationship.

A good cellphone company would consider those 20 million customers as an enormous opportunity: now that the wireless market is maturing, they represent a tsunami of potential new subscribers. But evidently none of the major national cellphone companies are nearly that confident: they all feel that they have more to lose from LNP than they have to gain. They're probably right: whatever they might gain in new subscribers they'd probably need to lose in terms of all the discounts and whatnot needed to attract those new subscribers in the first place. But that just goes to prove that cellphone bills will go down and not up - quite the opposite of what the telcos claim in their petition.

A word about regulation, too, for the all-regulation-is-bad types out there: LNP is almost an axiomatic case of a market inefficiency which requires regulation. If all providers have LNP, then the market becomes more liquid, consumers benefit, and the better cellphone companies find it easier to outperform the less good ones. In other words, you have something much closer to a classic free market. But left to its own devices, the market will never get there: if any company institutes LNP unilaterally, then it can be poached from, while remaining unable to poach from its rivals. There's a downside without any upside. In order for everybody to benefit, a regulator has to mandate that all companies implement LNP at the same time.

The FCC understands this, but is proving amazingly spineless in making it happen. LNP might exist in November 2003, or it might not: no one knows. The commission has managed to justify its latest decision by saying that the wireless operators are already overtaxed by something called pooling, and that it's probably unfair to make them implement pooling and LNP at the same time. It's the sort of thing which makes experts in the field guffaw. The whole point about having LNP and pooling kick in on the same date was that they're essentially two sides of the same coin: they're based on exactly the same technology. If you've got LNP, you've got pooling.

And in fact most of the ruling does read like a brief for the consumer. The FCC knows what the right thing to do is, and lays out the arguments for LNP in compelling detail. It then, unfortunately, caves in at the end. Once again, the lobbyists have won and the general public has lost out. Some day, perhaps, you'll be able to switch your land line number to your new cellphone, and do away with your home phone entirely. (Imagine: cellphones with 212 area codes!) It was meant to happen this November; it's worth hoping that it will now happen at the end of 2003. But I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by Felix at 11:50 EST | Comments (2)

Sunday, July 28, 2002

Tadpole

The first thing we're told at the beginning of Miramax's much-hyped new film, Tadpole, is that it's "a film by" Gary Winick. (He also, of course, gives himself a "directed by" credit a couple of minutes further on.) Later in the film, our young hero, Oscar Grubman, is feeling upset. We know this because he's filmed staring moodily out over the East River, first in long shot, then in medium shot, then in close-up. We then see him staring moodily out past the Rose Planetarium, before watching him walking moodily through an autumnal Central Park. Meanwhile, the soundtrack is "The Only Living Boy in New York". Oscar Grubman himself could have done better.

Suffice to say, this film, for all its witty writing, is not a directorial triumph, and the pretentious opening credit is far from justified. Winick's success in selling this film to Miramax and getting nationwide distribution is largely despite his efforts and not because of them: in that he mirrors his protagonist, who finds himself in bed with the stunning Bebe Neuwirth not because of his obnoxious behaviour but rather because Bebe sees right through it to the eager puppy underneath.

The film is certainly eager to please, and Neuwirth relishes her role even more than she does her dinner at Cafe Boulud. But other major characters, including the lead, are less well drawn: why would a boy with a French mother and American father insist on speaking French the whole time in New York? And why would his square American father barely react when he finds out his wife's best friend has just seduced his 15-year-old son?

Of course, Tadpole is not a meditation on bohemian Upper East Side adolescence in the manner of Six Degrees of Separation or even Everyone Says I Love You. Rather, it's a comedy about a kid who, for all his ability to quote Voltaire at will, knows nothing of love. Tadpole's problem is that it's so lightweight it doesn't let anything bad happen to any of the characters: everybody ends the film happier than when they started. To turn the film's beloved Voltaire on his head, all really is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

There are other weaknesses, too. Multiple quotations from Voltaire in the form of white-on-black intertitles are a grave mistake. And the film quality is appalling, despite Miramax reportedly spending about five times the budget of the film in attempting to get a workable print from the DV original. Films shot on DV never look particularly good in theatres, but with enough love and a high enough budget, they can rise to the level of OK. (For example, The Anniversary Party or Dancer in the Dark.) Unfortunately, the success of these films seems to have given aspiring filmmakers license to scrimp much more than is acceptable: just because it's possible to shoot DV in low-light conditions doesn't mean it's a good idea.

If you still feel that you really want to see a good comedy with Sigourney Weaver, my advice is that you get the underrated Heartbreakers out on video or DVD. The picture quality will be just as good, and you'll get a rollicking good story with a great cameo from Gene Hackman. In the snobbish world of New York media, Tadpole gets respect just for being a low-budget independent film, while Heartbreakers is ignored as Hollywood fodder. Don't make the same mistake: there's no doubt as to which is the better movie.

Posted by Felix at 11:52 EST | Comments (0)

Thursday, July 18, 2002

Why the Department of Homeland Security is a Really Bad Idea

There is no one more boring than the person you get stuck next to at dinner who expounds at length on the subject of his or her treatment at the hand of the Department of Motor Vehicles. We know it's a nightmare. In fact, we've been there ourselves. Tell us something we don't know.

Well, how about this. An English journalist who's lived in New York for over five years needs to do the following just to get a learner's permit:

Go through the same hassle of taking the written test that everybody else goes through;
Get two original letters (not copies) on official letterhead from the editor of his publication, addressed to two different people and saying two different things;
Persuade the British Consulate to write him a letter as well;
and, last but not least
Get a fourth letter, this time from the Foreign Press Center (a branch of the State Department, for crying out loud - I'm sure they have better things to do at the moment) which can then be taken to the Herald Square office of the DMV (not any other branch) and somehow redeemed for the permit.

All this ridiculousness, needless to say, has only been implemented since September 11. (And, of course, none of this information is available on the DMV website; you have to get shunted around four different desks at the DMV office to find all this out.) The Foreign Press Center even still has a welcome note on its website saying that 'The United States has no central office responsible for journalists, no "Ministry of Information." Generally, journalists work without need of official permission.' Well, unless they want to drive, of course.

Posted by Felix at 11:54 EST | Comments (1)

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Rebuilding Lower Manhattan

No one seems very impressed by the six plans which have been put forward for the redevelopment of theWorld Trade Center site. The pretty much unanimous view seems to be that they've been hamstrung by the requirements to include 11 million square feet of office space, as well as 600,000 square feet of retail space. Even the man who unveiled them, John Whitehead, said almost apologetically when he did so that he would change his plans if none of these ones worked.

My initial reaction was pretty much along the same lines. All of the plans of necessity include five or six huge new skyscrapers, which are represented only in the most schematic way, and read visually as opaque blocks turning the site into an office park. Certainly, at first glance, the plans' similarities far exceed their differences, and none of them comes close to the bold and imaginative (yet, of course, completely impractical) plans which we've all seen in art galleries or the New Yorker.

But look more closely, and I think the Memorial Square plan has a lot to be said for it. Why?

It preserves the "sacred footprints". Personally, I don't think this a necessary part of an effective memorial, but a lot of people, including George Pataki, do. If we can come up with a good plan which keeps them inviolate, then so much the better.
The area south of Liberty Street is much more successfully integrated into the rest of the plan than it is in the other proposals. Because of this, the plan effectively manages to enlarge the 16-acre site to include Liberty Square Park, which is untouched and unrelated in the other five plans. In Memorial Square, there's a green space running from 1 World Financial Center all the way to Broadway, which opens up the total perceived area of the memorial plan impressively.
I really like the promenade which enables people to look down on the memorial space without having to make quite the emotional commitment involved in actually going into it. A large part of the rebuilding plan is involved in revitalising Lower Manhattan: this is going to be an area where hundreds of thousands of people live, work and shop every day. They're going to want to be able to go about their daily lives without feeling the need to stop and reflect every time they approach the memorial.
It's the only plan with an opera house: something new for downtown which will bring high culture to what used to be little more than a downmarket shopping mall with office blocks on top.
The entrance gates to the memorial, built into the wall which surrounds the memorial site and which supports the promenade, will be visible from a lot of places, most importantly from all the way up Greenwich Street. There's an approach to the memorial here: you don't just stumble across it on your way to the "transit hub".
The plan doesn't rely on raising lots of office buildings for its impact. The office towers could come along a lot later; indeed, they could never come along at all, and the sightlines etc would only be improved. This is true of most of the plans, of course, but I think the Memorial Park is the most versatile in that respect.

I certainly hope that something more imaginative than Memorial Square will eventually be built on the site. We have here an opportunity for amazing new memorial architecture, and nothing we've seen so far really seems to open up that possibility. But even if all these plans are ultimately discarded, I think it will still be worth remembering some of the lessons learned from what the Memorial Square proposal has brought to the table.

Posted by Felix at 11:56 EST | Comments (0)

Friday, July 12, 2002

Built-in obsolescence

Over the past few years, I've been slowly developing a theory of what I call built-in obsolescence in art. It's still far from fully formed, but in a nutshell it says that all art becomes obsolete eventually, and that there's something to be said for art which not only accepts, but actually celebrates and depends on the fact that, at some maybe not-so-distant point in the future, it will have lost its original aesthetic content.

Of course, art can be repurposed over time. Most African tribal sculpture in the west is collected and admired for distinctly different reasons than those for which it was originally made. And probably not one visitor in a thousand has the ability to read the average cathedral's stained-glass windows in the manner in which their designers intended. So art can still be great, even after it has fallen into obsolescence.

What I've always had a soft spot for, however, is art which deliberately plays off evanescent cultural touchstones. Andy Warhol's portraits of B- and C-list celebs already have lost all but their purely formal power: we no longer know or care who these people are. Warhol, however, was on more solid ground when he took as subjects people who really changed the culture: in celebrating Elvis or Marilyn, he also memorialised them and helped their memory live on, in much the same way as Picasso did with Guernica.

Brett Easton Ellis's Glamorama, however, is a different kettle of fish. It was published in January 1999, and featured lists upon lists of the hottest models of the week, the coolest bars of the month. It was out of date within six months, and I remember thinking at the time that it would probably be incomprehensible within a couple of years. (It's certainly well past its sell-by date: the hardcover is 97,136th on the Amazon.com bestseller list, despite being 72% reduced to just $6.99.) I loved it, though, precisely because of its very deciduousness: loved it the way we love the cherry-blossom all the more in the knowledge that it will soon be gone.

Last weekend, however, I read Turn of the Century, by Kurt Andersen. It came out just four months after Glamorama, and sought to capture the feverish dot-com millenarianism of New York City in a future one year away. It, too, is now on the scrap-heap of literary history: a new hardback can be bought on Amazon for $2.54, while a used one goes for 84 cents. I bought mine from the New York Public Library, which had no more use for it, for a buck.

For the first couple of hundred pages of this supposedly out-of-date book, however, I was laughing out loud most of the time. Even now, long after we're all meant to have moved on from such things, it's an incredibly funny satire of what New York was like only a couple of years ago. Andersen's skewers are just as sharp as always, but now we see them puncture their targets through a tincture of, if not nostalgia, at least a certain wry remembrance of how things were.

It's almost as if a good artist can't help but make timeless art, even if he's trying not to. Scenes from Glamorama still stay with me, vividly: the book has had an ironically lasting effect for such a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon.

I'm not saying that Turn of the Century is great art. There's a very long middle section with lots of pointless plot, and the satire of the financial world isn't half as cutting as that of the meejah lifestyle in general. But all the same, it's worth exploring those books you bought a few years ago and never got around to reading: they're probably just as good now as they were then. Maybe even better.

Posted by Felix at 11:57 EST | Comments (0)

Monday, July 01, 2002

MoMA QNS and Minority Report

Yesterday I went to see two much-hyped recent openings, both drawing capacity audiences. Both, I have to say, were disappointing, although only by their own very high standards.

Michelle, Stefan and I were not the only ones attracted to a particularly insalubrious part of Queens by the prospect of free admission to MoMA's home for the next three years. The museum strictly limited the number of people inside, which resulteda round-the-block queue. I've encountered such things at the 53rd St location as well, but there it's a lot easier to shrug and decide to come back some other day: once you've made the schlep out to 33rd St and Queens Blvd, you're not likely to simply turn around and go back.

The much-vaunted approach on the 7 train, by the way, is very disappointing. The theory is that painted black-and-white blocks on the roof of the museurm slowly form the famous MoMA logo as you near the station; the practice is that you glimpse it for a couple of seconds before it's hidden behind the station wall. (And we even made sure to stand right at the front of the train, looking out through the forward-facing window, to get the best view.)

Inside, MoMA's gone for the White Cube approach with abandon. Not only is every wall in the gallery a bright, flat white, but the lighting is perfectly even throughout: no spotlighting of masterworks here. The space used to be a staple factory, but unlike other conversions (the Saatchi gallery, Tate Modern) very little of its former state remains. There's no exposed brick, no poured-concrete floors with markings betraying the recent removal of old light-industrial machinery. Rather, there's a big, versatile space perfect for displaying outsize contemporary art: Richard Serra, say, or Ilya Kabakov.

The problem, of course, is that MoMA already has a very good space for displaying contemporary art in Queens: it's called PS1, and it does its job extremely well. MoMA QNS is meant to be the home-away-from-home of the greatest collection of modern art in the world, and indeed the schedule of exhibitions lined up for next year starts off with Matisse (b. 1869), Picasso (b.1881), Max Beckmann (b. 1884) and Ansel Adams (b. 1902). These are not artists who need huge white walls: all of them benefit from intimate settings.

MoMA QNS is showing "Collection Highlights" at the moment, which I think is basically all the postcard bestsellers from the 53rd St shop. The Desmoiselles are here, of course, along with Starry Night and Cezanne's Bather, and all of them, even the huge Picasso, are dwarfed by their surroundings. MoMA should have been more sensitive: while the contemporary art here was, as a rule, made to be displayed in such a setting, the 19th Century paintings feel as though a string quartet was trying to play Wembley Stadium.

The problem is actually worse, interestingly enough, when it comes to the Abstract Expressionists, and particularly the pair of De Koonings on show. Abstract Expressionism, of course, was all about bringing painting up to an unprecedented scale: when these works were painted, they would completely dominate any room or gallery in which they were shown. Here, however, they're stuck in a corner, almost as an afterthought, and have lost all their ability to dominate through sheer scale.

And while I applaud the death of Alfred Barr's Reithian Olympianism, the pendulum seems to have swung far too far in the opposite direction: the first exhibit you see here is half a dozen dusty cars. It's Guggenheim programming, but without Thomas Krens's magical populist touch.

The magical populist touch of Steven Spielberg, meanwhile, is something we are increasingly having to take on faith. It's been nine long years since the last time he directed one of the truly great escapist films with which he made his name, and his attempt to get back on form with Minority Report is only a partial success.

Spielberg is too self-conscious now. That was excusable in A.I., because he was chanelling the great Stanley Kubrick, one of the most self-conscious directors ever. But if I'm watching a sci-fi Spielberg actioner starring Tom Cruise, I don't want to sit back and admire the cinematography or the artful use of classical music: I want to be on the edge of my seat, enjoying the thrill ride. In short, I want Spielberg to rise to the challenge set by John Woo in M:I-2. But he doesn't, and I suspect he can't.

There are a couple of exciting sequences near the beginning, although the first relies far too heavily on the old man-against-the-clock trope, and the second is often visually incoherent. But then we leave the action behind and far too quickly get bogged down in plot and exegesis which fails even to explain what's going on. (Stefan's right: although we learn that Cruise has been set up, we never learn how. And the whole film seems to be predicated on the assumption that if you live in DC and want to murder someone, you will go to astonishing lengths to murder them in DC, where murder has ostensibly been eliminated, rather than simply getting away with it elsewhere in the country, where it hasn't. And there are half a dozen other huge plot holes I could enumerate if I cared.)

"Everybody runs," says the film's tag line, and Cruise helpfully repeats it here. But it doesn't mean very much, and in fact he doesn't do a lot of running. (One of the great Spielberg touches, and there are a few in the film, is the point at which Cruise evades detection from dozens of police officers looking for him in a shopping center by standing still right in the mall's single most visible point.) What Cruise does do is switch dizzyingly backwards and forwards from being Tom Cruise Supercop to being Troubled Druggie Dad. The whole subplot about how he has never recovered from the loss of his son adds nothing to the film except an excuse for Spielberg to get all schmaltzy on us and show off some clever special effects when Cruise starts doing drugs and cueing up 3D recordings of his beloved Sean.

I didn't buy Tom Cruise as Tormented Soul in Eyes Wide Shut, and I don't buy it here, either. More to the point, there's no need for tormented souls in this kind of film in the first place. What I want is suspense, and there's precious little of that: after all, we know what's going to happen. The only time the precogs are wrong happens right at the end of the film, and it's jarring: the wrong person dies, and we segue straight into an almost comically happy ending. Spielberg has been given props for making a sci-fi dystopia which doesn't look like Blade Runner, but that's no reason for an ending of quite such nauseating schmaltziness.

Posted by Felix at 11:59 EST | Comments (0)