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The new New York

New York is changing. It's getting smaller, friendlier, less corporate, less ostentatious and maybe even a little bit more geniune. The stock-market bubble has burst, the economy is turning rough, and people are less interested in what you do, more interested in who you are. That's my take, anyway. Others are less upbeat, with the New York Post declaring that my neighbourhood has been "jolted" by a crime wave of late.

I, however, feel just as safe here as I always have, and certainly the boutiques, restaurants, bars and other signs of gentrification continue to open up apace.

One of the more recent such additions to the East Village scene is Sen, a new restaurant on Avenue C which Michael Blowhard calls "nouvelle-Asian". I don't really know what that means; as far as I'm concerned it's Vietnamese, but mercifully free of the formica tables and fluorescent lighting that most Vietnamese restaurants suffer from. There's not even any bamboo!

On the other hand, seeing as how the people behind this place also had a hand in the likes of Sushi Samba and BondSt, Sen is blessedly attitude-free. You can come in here not wearing black and feel perfectly comfortable; the waitstaff is friendly and not oppressively beautiful; you don't need to navigate your way around doormen or Blahnik-clad maitre d's. Now, if only they'd put their name somewhere on the restaurant, it would be perfect. Like Smith (RIP), the only time you ever see the name of the restaurant is on the credit-card slip.

Actually, Smith's demise is another indication of the new New York. Its replacement, Starfoods, remains a little bit fashionista but has lost a lot of Smith's attitude. The food is meatloaf, not rabbit ravioli; the waiters wear t-shirts, not designer duds. Local tagger Pork has done a mural on the front wall. Most importantly, the diners are having a good time on a relatively tight budget, rather than attempting to be seen on an enormous one.

Sen's the same. I ordered a whole curried fish for $19 which was pretty much the most expensive thing on the menu. That would get you a couple of bites of (exquisite) sushi at BondSt. The fish (red snapper, the day I went) was perfect: crunchy on the outside, deliciously tender on the inside, and covered in the kind of spices which make you wake up and tingle.

Sen has a certain amount of fusion food on its menu too: I'm particularly fond of the frogs' legs and the quail, both of which are available either as starters or mains. On the more traditional side, there's ironpot chicken or some great curries. And the restaurant certainly has fun on the sake front: three different infusions, including lemongrass and passionfruit, as well as an extensive menu of excellent cold sakes. (Beware: these can be very expensive indeed if you have a few of them: I can highly recommend the Masami, but it's $11 for a pretty small glass.)

The one thing I'd avoid is the desserts, even if a pastry chef from Jean Georges did consult on them. As in nearly all Asian restaurants, they simply don't work: avocado ice-cream is not a good idea.

But if you live in the East Village, you don't go to restaurants for your ice-cream: you go to Il Laboratorio del Gelato on Orchard Street. You knew that, right? It's one of the few success stories south of Delancey Street: the big six-lane road coming off the Williamsburg Bridge is a formidable barrier to have to cross, but we'll do it for ice cream this good.

Is Il Laboratorio the new New York? Very much so. The owner, Jon Snyder, founded Ciao Bella and then sold it before it became the huge business it is now; his latest project is much smaller, and even more artisanal.

There's lots of this sort of thing going on: the road on which I live, Rivington Street, is filling up with small art galleries showing interesting work without Chelsea attitude. (That said, it's also home to a monstrous new hotel, which is definitely, and defiantly, Old New York. For what it's worth, my sources say the same as Lockhart Steele's: that it's not going to be a W, it's going to be a Standard. Either way, it's going to be extremely yuppie.)

Even websites are getting smaller and cooler. The latest must-visit New York weblog is Gawker, a veritable cornucopia of guilty pleasures which was started on a shoestring budget by Nick Denton and Elizabeth Spiers, both formidable bloggers in their own rights. Lockhart Steele makes frequent appearances, as does Aaron Bailey. But Gawker's more than just another blog: it's actually an attempt to make money. It has a cool and pared-down listings section every day (just one or two things really worth knowing about) and tries to keep up with media gossip. (Today, for instance, it managed to link to Radar magazine's website long before Romenesko did.)* It also has some original reporting of its own, such as the truly great interview with a drug-addled Wall Streeter entitled "The Quest for the Perfect Coke Dealer".

Gawker is the new New York, then, in the way that dead old websites like New York Sidewalk and New York Today were the old New York. Or look at alt-publishing: Russ Smith, the founder and proprietor of the New York Press, sold out to a couple of gay-press publishers who fired two editors in as many weeks and brought in someone who was last seen editing an expat rag in Prague. I doubt we'll be reading much about Smith's Concorde flights any more.

I hope the new New York lasts, that my adoptive hometown can become somewhere amenable to non-millionaires again. The city is going through a very nasty budget crisis, and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of negative equity in this town when the housing bubble bursts, but every cloud has a silver lining. Look at Buenos Aires: I'm told that in the wake of the economic crisis there, the city's cultural life has only got more vibrant. People who used to be obsessed by making money are now unemployed and making art instead.

Here's to the Small Apple!

*Actually, I'm wrong about this. Romenesko had a link to Radar on Thursday, almost a full 24 hours before Gawker. Sorry, Jim!

Posted by Felix at 17:37 EST | Comments (3)

Bush on Iraq

After the build-up, the speech. And, against all my expectations, Bush played a blinder: he actually lived up to the hype. The awkward Bush of the Presidential campaign, with his bizarre pauses in the middle of sentences and omnipresent smirk, has disappeared entirely. In his place is – finally! – a true global statesman, someone at least on a par with his father.

The beginning of the speech was tough for a liberal like me to sit through: the disingenuous statistics about the size of the tax cut, the claim that the repeal of the dividend tax would help "nearly 10 million seniors". But it was delivered with strength and conviction, and, at least from where I was sitting, was received more with sorrow than with anger.

Then came the humanitarian stuff: $450 million for mentoring at-risk children, $600 million for treating drug addicts, and – the big one – an extra $10 billion, on top of $5 billion already pledged, for fighting AIDS in Africa. The AIDS passage, especially, was genuinely moving, both on an emotional and on an intellectual level. Bush obviously feels compassion for Africans with AIDS, and he also realises that this kind of gesture does an enormous amount of good for the image of America in the eyes of the rest of the world. $10 billion is a tiny sum compared to what the coming war will cost, and I'm sure that a lot of that money will go straight to US drug companies and will do very little for African economies. But it will do wonders for African lives, and that's a great thing.

Using the humanitarian programmes as the segue from the domestic to the foreign part of the speech was a good idea. But it didn't really work in practice: the jump from fighting AIDS in Africa to fighting terrorists around the world was abrupt and painful. Suddenly the compassion was gone, and the cowboy was back:

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way, they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

This kind of talk goes down very will in Middle America, but the audience in the Wash-Bos corridor and in Europe was not half as impressed. Osama bin Laden was conspicuous by his absence: rattling off a list of "a key Al Qaeda operative in Europe, a major Al Qaeda leader in Yemen" is going to convince nobody that the war on terror is being won.

But then came the grand finale of the speech – the moment we had all been waiting for – and Bush was good.

Today, the gravest danger in the war on terror, the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. These regimes could use such weapons for blackmail, terror and mass murder. They could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them without the least hesitation.

This is sterling stuff, in a speech. We all know, intellectually, that Pakistan and North Korea are both much more likely to sell weapons of mass destruction to terrorists than Iraq is. But that's no reason in itself not to act against Iraq, and in terms of rhetorical ramping-up, Bush was doing a very good job indeed. His words were slowing down, and his seriousness showed: no smirks here.

In an implicit acknowledgement that the "axis of evil" phrase that he used last year was counterproductive, Bush addressed North Korea and Iran with the statement that "different threats require different strategies." There was nothing interesting or useful on North Korea: he seemed to be threatening them with "isolation, economic stagnation and continued hardship," which is something they've surely grown used to by now. But he didn't dwell on Iran or North Korea. Rather, he moved swiftly on to Iraq. The naive, angry and somewhat inchoate post-9/11 Bush of 2002 has become a focussed and determined Bush in 2003:

A brutal dictator, with a history of reckless aggression, with ties to terrorism, with great potential wealth will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States.

Yes, Bush is saying, this is a war about oil. (That's what "vital region" means.) But just because it's about oil doesn't mean we're wrong to wage it. After all, Saddam has a lot of chemical and biological weapons which he can give to terrorists at any time. We in the US even believe he's still trying to operate a nuclear weapons programme.

And then came the nut graf of the whole speech:

Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks, to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation, the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate or attack. With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East, and create deadly havoc in that region. And this Congress and the American people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody, reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda.

Actually, Bush kind of rushed through that last bit. I heard it, wondered if he'd really said what I thought he'd said, and kept on listening. I don't think Bush really punched it with the weight it needed. But maybe that's because it's a bit of a fudge: Congress and the American people must recognise that Saddam is protecting Al Qaeda, but the US isn't going to actually divulge any evidence that that might be the case.

Many in Europe, and some in America, will be skeptical: we remember Nayirah from the first Gulf War, tearfully telling of Iraqi soldiers brutally pulling babies from incubators and leaving them to die – all of which, of course, was completely made up.

This time, however, we have proxies, people who can demand to see the evidence themselves. For, in the shock announcement of the evening, Bush declared that

The United States will ask the UN Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world. Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraq's illegal weapons programs, its attempts to hide those weapons from inspectors and its links to terrorist groups.

I sincerely hope that this means the US has some serious goods on Saddam Hussein. If it does – if Powell can convince the French, at least, that Saddam has been hanging out with Al Qaeda, and can give them weapons of mass destruction at any time – then maybe the war, which now seems inevitable, could be waged with international backing, rather than simply being taken by the rest of the world as yet another example of US imperialism.

Bush wasn't done at this point: he needed a neat rhetorical flourish ("As we and our coalition partners are doing in Afghanistan, we will bring to the Iraqi people food, and medicines, and supplies. And freedom") and some militaristic drum-banging (the "America believes in you" message to the armed forces got the most applause of the evening). He also ended on a religious note which sounded horrible to this atheist, but which I'm sure played very well in most of America.

But in toto, the speech was a resounding success. Bush built on the hawkishness of Wolfowitz, and the internationalism of Powell, and came up with something bigger and better than either: a sense of strength, resolve, and (we hope) global leadership. I still don't want a war in Iraq: nothing that Bush said could make me change my mind on that. But at least I can hold out some hope today, which I didn't have yesterday, that Bush might be able to rally his European allies around to his cause. And a war with Europe's backing is vastly preferable to one without it.

Posted by Felix at 1:56 EST | Comments (5)

personal: atmospheric antarctic science

So you're all asking about science, I get the hint!

Not my favourite topic (especially amongst friends), as you know, but, just this once, I'll try and tell you what I'm doing here. Or meant to be. For those of you who haven't already been put off by the title of this blog.

It's actually been very humbling being here and seeing the degree of support and infrastructure that is dedicated to Antarctic scientific research. There are whole huge debates, I know, about whether Antarctica should be dedicated to "peace and science" as it is or whether tourists, artists, musicians, adventurers etc should be allowed more access. And I wouldn't be arguing in support of the scientists necessarily. Still, this is the way it is right now and I certainly am glad to be working in the area that has enough clout in today's world to keep a military presence out of Antarctica and, for now, to be hindering the exploitation of mineral resources here. Had this continent been dedicated to "peace and the arts", who knows, I may have studied drama after all.

So it's really important to be doing 'good' science. The people who work here: the chippies and sparkies and plumbers and steelies and chefs and genny-mechs and vehicle folk... their jobs all exist in the name of science support (although yes, I know, we're ultimately here for political reasons). And although they are all here for their own personal reasons, just as I am, they also need to believe in the work that is happening here, just as I do.

Which is where I struggle since although I'm a scientist (or perhaps because of it) I struggle with the moral high ground that science often pulls, not to mention many of the very suspicious experiments that have been justified 'in the name of science'. I know, you'll tell me about electricity and medicine and bridges and vehicles and all these other things that have evolved through scientific investigation and without which we wouldn't do very well these days. Plus I am a bit daunted by the idea that this 'good science' is being entrusted into the hands of people like me. Those of you who know me may well also worry.

So how do I justify my science? It all goes back to climate change. Really. For a long time ice cores have been used to try and gain some understanding about past climates. If we know about past climates, then we might be better able to predict future climates or, at the very least, appreciate whether recent dramatic changes in the climate are likely due to man's influence or merely are part of a cycle that has ancient timescales.

Snow falls on the ground. It is light and fluffy and full of air. As more snow falls, this earlier snow settles and becomes more compacted. With time, the weight of snow above it becomes so heavy that it starts turning into ice. Any air that is mixed in amongst the snow becomes trapped in bubbles in the ice. Centuries later these bubbles become even more compacted and the ice is totally translucent, ancient, a memory, like fossils and lake sediments, of days when dinosaurs walked this planet. (A pilot was telling me just the other day over tea about one place in Antarctica covered in whole fossilised dinosaurs.)

Unlike dinosaur fossils, the ice has a timescale, depth, which can be used to understand not only what ancient climates were like but also how it has changed with time. The ice is not just water, the trapped air is not nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and argon. There are other chemicals and particles that might suggest the presence of forests or deserts. More recent ice shows a record of lead from petrol, and then it reducing again when unleaded fuel was introduced. And around the time of industrialisation it looks like methane and carbon dioxide concentrations soar. And so, it seems does the temperature of the planet. Obviously, temperature can't be measured directly from the ice..but the ratio of different isotopes of oxygen trapped in air can tell you about temperature. It's all proxy data you see,– it's all theories and assumptions but it does also seem to be in agreement. And this is the basis of a sound scientific theory.

The problem is, we are making a massive assumption that once the snow falls to the ground, all light and airy, the chemical compostion of the air doesn't change. It just gets pushed deeper and deeper and eventually trapped in bubbles in ice until thousands of years later some random scientist drills a very deep hole, takes a slice of ice and analyses the air that is trapped within it.

It's a fairly sound argument once the air is trapped. However, you and I know full well that no small layer of snow is going to stop air from diffusing upwards and downwards and, quite frankly, wherever it's warmer (if it's cold) or colder (if it's warm). And on its travels it might pick up molecules from the clouds and deliver them to the snow or molecules in the snow and free them into the open atmosphere. It's all physics. And chemistry. Maybe maths. It doesn't really matter what it is, it doesn't care even if we do. I'm no glaciologist as you know so the above story is a massive simplification. And I'm not patronising you,– I really know little more than this (but I'm learning).

What I do know is that to truly understand the record of molecules trapped in air deep, deep down in the ice, we need to understand what happens to air, and more importantly, the various molecules in it, between the surface and the trapped bubbles. Which is why I've been employed as an atmospheric chemist. And why I'm drilling holes (to probe chemistry in the snow) and flying blimps (to probe chemistry in the air). Oh yeah, and why, next year, we'll be firing a laser out of the east window of the CASLab,- the one with the stunning view. That's to monitor absorption of light from different molecules in the air. Not as star-trek as earlier blog-readers might hope but still pretty cool. I was peering out that window just the other day when I'm sure I saw a morris minor kite contraption heading off to the pole....

More details on that stuff, if you're interested, anon... hope you're all well, and thanks for keepiong the emails/blogs aflowing.

Posted by Rhian at 0:29 EST | Comments (7)

Zakaria on Iraq

Fareed Zakaria, one of the best commentators on international affairs, has now written a very peculiar column in favour of a war in Iraq. He runs through all the reasons why it could be a disaster (Saddam torching oilfields, provocation of a terrorist attack with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction) and then says "The risks are real. But so are the potential benefits."

After listing a few of these benefits, Zakaria concludes that "There are always risks involved when things change. But for the past 40 years the fear of these risks has paralyzed Western policy toward the Middle East. And what has come of this caution? Repression, radical Islam and terror. I’ll take my chances with change."

There are two major problems with this line of argument. The first is that Zakaria's list of "potential benefits" is incredibly overoptimistic. Consider this one:

The cause of radical, violent anti-Westernism—the one ideological trait that is shared by both Saddam and the Islamic fundamentalists—would be dealt a severe blow. Osama bin Laden once said that when people see a weak horse and a strong horse, they naturally want to side with the strong horse. No one will want to side with a dead horse.

Huh? Is Zakaria saying that the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center considered the USA to be a weak horse and Saddam Hussein to be a strong one? If they were going after weak targets, why didn't they attack Belgium? It seems much more likely that anti-Westernism would be bolstered by the unprovoked US invasion of an Arab country than that it would be "dealt a severe blow".

Or this:

If oil prices stay low, over time the pressures for reform could build even more. The regimes of the Middle East—most of which are nondemocratic and nonperforming—will find it increasingly difficult to stay in power if they don’t open up. In short, if oil goes to $10 a barrel, the Saudi monarchy goes to Majorca.

True, oil prices could drop in the wake of an Iraqi invasion – provided that Iraq's oil wells haven't been torched, and that the new Iraqi regime doesn't join OPEC, both of which are far from foregone conclusions. And it's also true that a plummeting oil price could deal the death blow to the Saudi monarchy. But what basis has Zakaria for assuming that some kind of people's regime in Saudi Arabia would be any less dangerous than the one we have right now? The Saudi monarchy are allies of the US, while most of the population hates the Great Satan. If Islamists can win elections in Turkey, what kind of hardliners would end up running Saudi Arabia? Who's to say that they wouldn't use their petrodollars to develop their own WMDs on a timetable much faster than the likes of Pakistan and North Korea could ever dream of?

Zakaria's point is that democracy and economic vitality are good things, that they might be consequences of a war on Iraq, and that the Middle East has suffered too long under the current repressive regimes. But even if he's right, and change would be destabilising in a good way rather than in a bad way, he still hasn't really made a case for a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.

There are lots of places where change would be a good thing: nearly all of sub-Saharan Africa for starters. In Venezuela, the stand-off between the democratically-elected president and his ruling-class opponents has almost destroyed the economy. In North Korea, the totalitarian regime really has destroyed the economy. Yet in all these places, the US accepts that it does not have a mandate for enforcing change.

In fact, as recently as 1991, the US accepted that it had no such mandate in Iraq. Back then, Saddam Hussein was a much greater threat than he is now: as Nicholas Kristof points out in the New York Times today, the UN destroyed much more Iraqi weaponry during the duration of the inspections regime from 1991-98 than the US did during the Gulf War. Yet even with Saddam Hussein being months away from having a nuclear weapon, George Bush the elder did not push for regime change, accepted the norms of international law, and left the Iraqi government in power.

The decision to stop the war with Saddam Hussein still in power was, says war skeptic Norman Schwartzkopf, "probably the only decision that could have been made at that time." Yet now, we are told, everything has changed, and the American imperium has conferred upon itself the right to go barging in to one of the most geopolitically fragile regions on the planet with its fingers crossed that everything will turn out all right in the end.

But the US plainly does not have the support of the international community in this endeavour. Zakaria makes the good point that in the case of the countries of the Middle East, that's probably because the ruling elites have the most to lose from any growth in democracy and freedom. But that argument doesn't wash in the case of Europe. And without European support, a unilateral US action would only redouble the anger and resentment that the rest of the world feels towards America.

It is entirely possible that invading Iraq will be a good thing, with positive consequences. (Of course, the opposite is true as well.) But the ends do not justify the means. Sometimes we must stop short of doing good, just because we're not allowed to.

Posted by Felix at 15:01 EST | Comments (2)

Powell on Iraq

It's obviously the season for major speeches from the Bush administration. Last Thursday, Paul Wolfowitz gave a very hawkish address to the Council on Foreign Relations, and tomorrow George W Bush himself will give his State of the Union address, which Elisabeth Bumiller says is "the most historically important State of the Union speech that any [former White House speechwriter] can remember".

In between, yesterday, we had Colin Powell at Davos. Certainly, when it came to Iraq, it was hawkish, and that was what was picked up on by the headline writers. "Powell, in Europe, Nearly Dismisses UN's Iraq Report," says the New York Times, with sub-heads reading "Says US Can Fight Alone" and "He Sees It as Useless to Give More Time to Inspectors". The Wall Street Journal takes a similar stance: "Tough Message," it leads, followed with "At Davos, Powell Pushes Back Against Resistance Over Iraq", and "Secretary of State Says US Deserves Trust of World, But Nation 'Will Lead'". Then comes a full-colour list of "Powell's Punches," quotes from his speech:

• "When we feel strongly about something, we will lead. We will act even if others are not prepared to join us."
• "Multilateralism cannot become an excuse for inaction."
• "We continue to reserve our sovereign right to take military action against Iraq alone or in a coalition of the willing."

This attitude makes sense, in the light of Powell's position. He has already been very publicly undermined by France, Germany and Russia, all of whom have indicated that they would veto any UN Security Council resolution authorising war on Iraq. At the same time, the White House and the Pentagon are making it crystal clear that they intend to go to war, with or without the support of the "Axis of Weasel".

Powell is generally seen these days as a beleaguered internationalist in the Bush administration, working alongside Tony Blair in a desperate attempt to bring the rest of the world in line with what Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush have already decided they are going to do. But he is also an old soldier, and the author of the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force. He knows that war is going to happen, it would seem, and he knows that if you're going to wage war, you can't do it half-heartedly. Hence the speech in Davos, the Iraq portions of which can basically be summed up as "You don't like what we're doing? Well, screw you, we're right, you're wrong, and we're going to do it anyway".

But what's this? The WSJ story is continued on page A6, where we see the headline "At Davos, Powell Tries to Mend Rift with Allies". And although you won't see a lot of evidence of that in the Journal's own story, you will see it in the speech itself. Most of the speech, it turns out, wasn't about Iraq at all. First of all he rattled off a list of places – Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, even the whole continents of Africa and Latin America – where, he said, "we seek nothing for ourselves other than to help bring about security for people that have already suffered too much". Indeed, America did the same thing for Europe in the aftermath of World War II, he said.

Then, after the Iraq passage, he moved on to North Korea, and said something it's hard to imagine coming out of the mouth of the president: "the United States has been the world's biggest donor of humanitarian assistance to North Korea and we will continue to contribute to their humanitarian requirements and needs".

He even tried to strike an optimistic note with regard to the Palestinian question, saying that "the creation of a democratic, viable Palestine is possible in 2005". (Although seeing as how he asked the impossible from both sides – a "new and different leadership" for the Palestinians, and economic aid for them from Israel – I'm not holding my breath.)

And he ended on an internationalist note which would have been boilerplate in the Clinton years but which is welcome coming from the Bush administration:

We understand full well that whatever we can do, whatever we can do as one nation, is nothing compared to what we all can do if we unite, if we become part of a great partnership of freedom-loving nations, nations that are committed not only to our own development, but nations that are committed to the hungriest, most desperate people anywhere in the world.

For sure, this kind of grandstanding is not going to change anyone's mind on Iraq, and indeed it's not going to convince anyone that the US is actually committed to strengthening any kind of international institutions. But it does go down well with the assorted internationalists at Davos, and does help create a feeling that although Europe and America might disagree strongly on Iraq, they're still ultimately allies, committed to the same ends if not the same means.

That's something which has been in doubt in recent months. As US imperialism and unilateralism has expanded, Europe has seen America – and America has seen itself – as a global hyperpower, a hegemon above international law, a country with a worldview at odds on many levels with that of Europe. Robert Kagan's Power and Weakness is just one of many essays which have been appearing of late, trying to examine a phenomenon which Timothy Garton Ash characterises in the latest New York Review of Books as America's "Anti-Europeanism".

Whatever else you might say about Powell's speech in Davos, it was internationalist in tone, and showed no hint of anti-Europeanism. It took issue with Europe's stance on Iraq, but more in the spirit of friendship than enmity. Here's the key passage:

Henry Kissinger, decades ago, wrote a book on the Atlantic alliance, and he called it "The Troubled Partnership". I am told that later Henry had second doubts about the title when he found that some bookstores were placing it on the shelf reserved for books about marriage counseling. But maybe the bookstore owners knew what they were doing, because problems with some of our friends across the Atlantic go back a long time, more than two centuries by my count. In fact, one or two of our friends we have been in marriage counseling with for over 225 years nonstop, and yet the marriage is intact, remains strong, will weather any differences that come along because of our mutual shared values.

In the same speech as some of his most hawkish statements to date, then, Colin Powell went out of his way to try to keep the marriage together. That's important, considering that from all their public statements, the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz would be perfectly happy with a divorce. Let's see what Bush says about Europe tomorrow: this really could set the tone for transatlantic relations for the foreseeable future.

Posted by Felix at 16:03 EST | Comments (0)

AOL Time Warner and publishing

Once upon a time, business visionaries could look at companies as diverse as AOL and Time Warner and see synergies there. One provided content; the other the means to drive that content to consumers. But those days are long gone now, and the new bosses of the merged company are saying that they are "committed to selling noncore businesses". The question is what, exactly, AOL Time Warner's core business is.

Evidently, as Daniel Gross points out in Slate, it still includes AOL. A spin-off of AOL would make a much bigger dent in the company's $26 billion of debt than what seems like a rather desperate attempt to sell off the book publishing business for somewhere south of $400 million.

The weird thing is that if you believe that big media conglomerates make sense at all, then you would presumably believe that publishing operations have a place within them. Gross points out that Time Warner has done a pretty bad job of finding synergies with its book department, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. The New York Times, for instance, under its new editor, Howell Raines, is making a much more concerted effort to make sure that its publishing arm publishes its own journalists' work. And although Talk magazine didn't work out in the end, there was surely some substance in the idea of finding synergies between a magazine (Talk), a movie studio (Miramax), and a publishing house (Talk Miramax Books). Time Warner has the magazines and the movie studio: why not keep the books?

I hate to even float the idea, because authors have a hard enough time as it is, but it would make perfect sense for Time Warner's publishing house to automatically write the film rights into every contract it signed with a new author. Since most first-time authors are happy to get picked up with a major publisher at all, it would probably cost them very little. But Warner Bros would then have a huge number of film rights which it could either develop or sell: every time it had a bestseller on its hands, it would make money not only from the book but also from the film.

What's more, the synergies run both ways: books can become big films, but films can become big books as well. Look at the New York Times paperback non-fiction bestseller list this week. Three of the top six books are film tie-ins: Catch Me If You Can, The Gangs of New York, and the Antwone Fisher book. Talk Miramax is far too small to turn films into mass-market paperbacks, but Time Warner isn't.

As Michael over at 2Blowhards never tires of pointing out, the general public doesn't like what he calls "contempo lit". And people are conservative when it comes to books: that's why so few authors ever make a living by writing fiction. Readers only buy books by authors they know, and (of course) they only know the authors they read. So a handful of writers benefit from a virtuous circle, and the rest are largely ignored. Film offers publishing houses a way out of this dilemma. Once I've spent a couple of hours watching Frank Abagnale or Antwone Fisher on screen, I feel I know and like them enough to go out and buy their books. These books are review-proof: look at the way that none of them has a link to a Times review. Antwone Fisher could be the worst writer in the shop, and people would still rush out and buy the book.

But my point is more about AOL Time Warner than about the nature of paperback bestsellers. Publishing houses obviously have a place in a media conglomerate, in the way that dial-up internet service providers don't. But AOL Time Warner, flailing around for cash, is selling its books division even after all the AOL guys have left senior management. OK, books are a low-margin business, and maybe there are good reasons for putting up the "for sale" sign. But it does leave me wondering whether AOL Time Warner has anything approaching a strategy. For ever since Time Warner was bought out by the dot-com cowboys, the indications have been somehwat to the contrary.

Posted by Felix at 19:34 EST | Comments (4)

Wolfowitz on Iraq

I went to the Council on Foreign Relations today, for a "policy address" (I guess that's one notch up from a common-or-garden speech) by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. It was obviously part of a concerted effort by the White House to fight back in the War on Public Opinion: national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had an almost identical (if shorter) argument on the New York Times Op-Ed page this morning.

There's no doubt that the US is losing momentum in its drive to war in Iraq: Russia, China, Canada, France and Germany have all now come out as unambiguously opposed. Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer's list of possible supporters seems rather less imposing: Britain, Italy, Spain, unnamed eastern European nations, and Australia. So with the anti-war demonstrations reaching Washington in force last weekend, it was clear that the administration needed a rhetorical knock-out blow were it to regain the upper hand.

Wolfowitz certainly had a large and important audience for his speech: I was seated in the overflow room, next to Harold Evans and Tina Brown. But he signally failed to deliver that knock-out blow.

The main thesis of the Wolfowitz and Rice arguments is that Iraq isn't really disarming. Look at South Africa in 1991, they say: there's disarmament for you. Which is all well and good, but does rather leave one waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think the world can probably agree that Iraq is not South Africa. But the rest of the Wolfowitz argument is rather more difficult to sign on to.

In Iraq's hands, says Wolfowitz, weapons of mass destruction are better termed "weapons of mass terror", a designation which didn't go down well with the audience, the vast majority of whom, I'm sure, have read Politics and the English Language. The renaming recalled the White House's rather pathetic attempt to rename suicide bombers as "homicide bombers": haven't they learned their lesson?

Actually, Wolfy slipped once, at the end, and had to catch himself – "weapons of mass d... terror". And his argument for the renaming was even weaker than the renaming itself: "In the hands of terrorists, what we often call weapons of mass destruction would be more accurately described as weapons of mass terror," he said, and then immediately started talking about "Iraq’s weapons of mass terror". He didn't even attempt to demonstrate that Iraq's WMDs are, or ever will be, "in the hands of terrorists". He just made a vague hand-waving reference to "the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime is linked", which could, really, mean anything.

The rest of the speech was not much more persuasive. Once he'd got over his initial hump of trying to rope Iraq into the War on Terror without any evidence, Wolfowitz basically rehearsed a lot of the old stories about how Saddam Hussein is hiding weapons from the UN inspectors. OK, Paul, we believe you there as well.

But in between the lines of the speech was an astonishing arrogance, which was both picked up on and amplified in a pathetically short question-and-answer session following it. In the speech, it's very hard to work out what is accepted fact (from UN sources) and what is simply US assertions, based upon intelligence that they may or may not have but in any case cannot divulge.

The first question came from former director of central intelligence William Webster. The US obviously had a lot of intelligence, he said: when could it be shared with the rest of us, so that more of a case for invasion could be made? Wolfowitz's answer was unclear, but it sounded as though the answer was, to all intents and purposes, "after the war is over".

One questioner characterised the tone of the speech as "trust us, we know things we can't tell you, but if you knew them you'd be with us too". Surely one of the fudamental principles of a democratic and free nation, he asked, is precisely that government shouldn't, and can't, be trusted – hadn't we learned that in Vietnam? Wolfowitz barely deigned to answer. Who do you want to trust, he basically said, us or Saddam Hussein? "Neither", it seemed, was not an option.

He gave a similar non-answer to a woman who tried a slightly different tack. Surely you've shared your intelligence with the French and others, she said: if it's so compelling, how come they're not on board? Wolfowitz's answer was breathtaking. France has a misguided but "well-intentioned belief that the key to preventing war is to persuade us that we mustn't act," he said. He was sorry, but there was no persuading to be done over here: if France wanted to prevent war, it should concentrate its efforts on persuading Iraq to disarm. (Since we had already been told by both Rice and Wolfowitz himself that their idea of disarmament was basically to make like South Africa, this didn't seem an especially promising tack.)

Wolfowitz is not a particularly good speaker. He peppered both his speech and his answers to questions with the phrase "time is running out," without ever clarifying what he meant by the phrase. Maybe he just likes its menacing tone. He certainly alienated a lot of the audience when he took only five questions, and didn't really answer any of them.

In general, the speech seemed designed as an attempt to reframe the debate over war: to move the crucial question over the UN inspections away from what they may or may not have found, and towards whether what Iraq is doing counts as disarmament. But it seems unlikely that either domestic or international public opinion will rally behind a war which is predicated on the idea that Iraq hasn't been as helpful as South Africa was.

With three of the five permanent members of the Security Council now opposing war, there seems to be no chance that the US is going to attempt to get another resolution before invading. So the only hope we have that the US will not invade is that it will start listening to what the rest of the world is saying: a pre-emptive war would be illegal, would polarise the Arab world against the US, and could radically destabilise Saudi Arabia, among other possible negative outcomes. Of course, it would also cause the deaths of thousands of UK, US and Iraqi soldiers, as well as Iraqi civilians and possibly foreign "human shields". But based on the behaviour of Wolfowitz today, America is in no mood for listening to anyone.

Posted by Felix at 18:01 EST | Comments (4)

January 20th already!!-personal-

My goodness! Has a week gone by already?! Where did it go?! How can it be that the days are so long, so very long that this morning feels at least two months ago, but the weeks are so short? Answer me that, o riddle master. The days, well, they are years, they are a whole lifetime and a blink. Maybe it's because we work eleven hour days, fairly long by most people's standards, but it's still light outside so your mind at the end of the day is saying "take me outside to play, look it's still daytime, we have hours before bed!" while your body is saying "nooo, not more, I've been out there all day, where were you then, o off-with-the-fairies playmate of mine?!" And so it goes on. Sometimes one wins, othertimes the other. Tonight, I think it shall be early to bed. But then, I say that every night...

Yesterday was a Sunday, our day off, and I slept all day. Well, most of it, and then went outside to see friends here kite-surfing. What a wonderful sport that is! So silent! so fast! Whoooosh, like the wind. Pulled along at great speeds while your feet are bound to skis or a snowboard. They look so graceful, it looks so natural.

Have you ever tried surfing (in the sea)? I did once. All I remember is feeling like I was inside a washing machine that was stuck on the spin cycle. Occasionally allowed to gasp for air before another horrific onslaught of eddies removed my sense of gravity and orientation entirely.

Kitesurfing is not that different. It's wonderful, believe you me, when the wind picks up the kite. It's exhilarating when you get pulled along faster than a skidoo, it's predictable that you will soon be flat on your face. Again. But the snow is soft and the day is long so I came home a bit soggy, a little bruised, very windswept but with a big grin across my face.

Last Sunday we went on a trip to visit a nearby emperor penguin colony. The chicks were hip height but still fluffy. Bizarre proportions. The parents, so sleek and slender didn't fit in really. The entire bay was made up of strange formations of snow and ice. Like stalactites or stalacmites (whichever are the ones that grow upwards?). How did they form? The wind? The sea? The salt? The antarctic katabatics? No, of course not. Penguin poo. What else?!

Without being too graphic, snow is white and reflects sunlight exceedingly well. Anything darker than snow absorbs light and heat... and so melts the snow underneath. At one point there were 10,000 penguins in this not overly-large bay so do the mental imagery for yourself.... however it formed, the final effect was surreal. And this is what you have: waist high formations of ice (or rather waste deep melting spots, but anyway...), hip high baby penguins, adults of the same size but looking out of place, and to top it all off, head height humans in dayglo polar gear dangling multiple cameras within reaching distance of the lot. The penguins seemed much less bothered by us than we, them. It was actually quite sad too as the stronger chicks had already left for the sea and many of these that were left will probably never make it. But they had such strong characters! They huddled in creches of about 10 chicks per adult and made the most extraordinary coo-ing call that is individual to each and the way that parents find their kids. These parents aren't returning now though,- it's up to the chicks to shed their fluff and seek out fish. It was all very odd and then we left.

But that's not what people have been writing to me about. Jim asks: "How are the living accomodations, food, people, wildlife, weather, your work etc.", Vanessa asks why I'm digging a big hole anyway, Steve, of course, wants to know about sewage and fresh fruit (not related), Kirsten wants to hear about the 'humdrum', Toni the community and when the ship will be returning and Chris, bless him, asked about the view from my window.

The best news is that I now have a window! Until last week I was living in a windowless room that wasn't conducive to much except sleeping. Now, Mandy and I have a wonderful bright north facing window that brings us much joy every time we walk through the door. The view is of the sky and the snow but also of a few buildings, a handline and the vehicles, all lined up in a row (at night time). Bulldozers and snowcats and skidoos and cranes. Lots and lots of big toys that we all love. This is the biggest playground in the world! The weather has not been that cold, hovering around freezing or a bit below. When it's calm, it's beautiful, not more than a couple of warm layers needed. When the wind picks up however, it can bite. But it's a fresh bite. The air so clean. And the water! the water we drink and wash in and cook with and make ice from (!I know, odd!) tastes so...well...so pure! This week I'm on melt-tank duty which means that at 6:45pm every evening I go out to the melt tank with three others and shovel snow down some pipes for about 20-30 minutes until it is full. The same happens in the morning (a different four people) and from this little act we have sufficient water for all the washing machines, kitchen requirements, bathroom and drinking needs for 40 people. Not bad, eh?! I love the showers. They are brief, but to be bathed in fresh antarctic snowmelt....

From there I don't feel I should move to sewage although I guess it's all plumbing....let it just be said that it either gets combusted or poured into the ground to form a great big frozen mass. This is hopefully changing in the future.

Fruit we do still have, most notably apples, pears and oranges. They haven't been frozen, just carefully wrapped in paper and stored in a coolroom on both the ship and base. Stay amazingly fresh. I remember a similar method happening in Nepal when the apples lasted for months if they were buried deep in the earth where it was cool. More fruit will be arriving on the ship in a couple of weeks so we are encouraged to help ourselves to as much as we like which is fantastic.

The people and community are still a lot of fun. Everyone's working hard so it's no more the party atmosphere that was on the ship...but everyone wants to be working hard and working here so there's a certain joy and helpfulness that I don't think you get on your average construction site. Even the grumpy old gits, whose character it is to be a grumpy old git, wink at the end of a grumble.

The ship has just left the Falklands again and is due back here in a couple of weeks. After relief #2, she sails off for a science cruise for two weeks and then picks those of us up who aren't staying for the winter at the end of February. I believe that I am due to be back in the land of roads, trees and nights mid-March sometime.

I'm losing the plot, the flow has petered, my tired body is asking for rest and the daylight outside can't be hidden from my mind's eye for much longer. For now, I leave you for another week or so, to my daydreams, to the wonder of ice and beautiful skies. Search out a star for me tonight.

Posted by Rhian at 23:24 EST | Comments (6)

The IHT is dead! Long live the NYT!

Last November, the New York Times played hardball with the Washington Post and forced the Post to sell its 50% share in the International Herald Tribune. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the Times wanted to create what was essentially an international version of itself (first New York, then America, now the world!). And that's precisely what has been confirmed by the rather sad letter of resignation sent out to all IHT journalists today by Peter Goldmark, its outgoing chairman and CEO.

Goldmark obviously would like this letter to be taken as a courageous stand against the monolithic powers on 43rd Street ("Believe me, I will pay dearly for this, both financially and in other coin"). But in fact it reads more as the death rattle of an anachronistic dinosaur.

Bemoaning the news that the IHT's journalists will now report "exclusively" to New York (what? there won't be any editors in Paris?), Goldmark laments the fact that "I am the last publisher of the IHT as an independent newspaper with its own voice and its own international outlook on the world."

According to Goldmark, the IHT's independence is a valuable commodity: "The world needs more independent voices, not fewer. And at a time when the world is growing to mistrust America, it needs thoughtful voices and independent perspectives that see the world whole and are not managed from America."

But the world never considered the IHT to be an independent voice. It was owned and run by Americans, and filled largely with copy from the two most important American newspapers. It was indisputably an American voice – sometimes with the slightly crusty air common to expats all over the world, but always American.

There is, of course, no shortage of thoughtful voices and independent perspectives that see the world whole and are not managed from America. France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Spain, the UK – even Canada – all of these countries and many more have a vibrant press with an independent and international perspective.

What the world lacked, ironically enough, was a truly American perspective on world events – a generalist counterpart to the Asian and European editions of the Wall Street Journal. CNN International is a very different animal to CNN in the US, and for all that the New York Times sets the agenda in the States, very few people read it in Frankfurt, London, Paris or Tokyo. The IHT, with its stale news and parochial fustiness, was no New York Times.

Even Goldmark admits that the status quo ante was untenable. Underfunded and unloved, the IHT was an artifact of the 60s and 70s, when international travel was still something glamourous and American expats appreciated a means of keeping up with goings-on back home. When the baseball results were not available immediately with the click of a mouse, it served something of a purpose. In the 21st Century, it was little more than a resting home for Times journalists of a certain age, curmudgeonly pipe-and-slippers types who were too fusty for anywhere else.

The Times has taken the obvious and sensible decision to leverage its unrivalled editorial machine in New York and use it to beef up the IHT. With an increase in investment and greater competitive drive, perhaps the Tribune will once again become a newspaper that people read, rather than fondly remember. That won't "leave a big hole", it will fill it.

Posted by Felix at 12:00 EST | Comments (1)

Felix's guide to using MetroCards

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, better known to New Yorkers as the MTA, is proposing to abolish subway tokens as part of its drive to help close a budget gap of $2.8 billion (or $951 million, depending on whom you believe) for 2003 and 2004. You won't have seen this, but according to the dreadful Clyde Haberman in the New York Times today, only 9% of bus and subway rides are now paid for with tokens, and so it seems a sensible economy to make.

(The reason that you won't have seen the statistic is that no one in their right mind would ever have read past a third paragraph which begins thusly: "These details — so fascinating that you may already be turning the page — are mentioned to make a point about nostalgia. It isn't what it used to be.")

85% of all rides are now paid for with MetroCards, so it's obvious how New Yorkers like to pay for their public transportation. MetroCard is the way of the future, and, if the MTA gets its way, it's going to be the only way of the future. (On the subways, at least, you can't pay directly in cash, which accounts for the final 6% in the statistics.)

But MetroCards are not completely understood, even by those who use them on a regular basis. As a public service, then, I hereby present Felix's guide to using MetroCards: eight rules it's useful always to keep in mind.

1. Know your balance. There are two ways in which MetroCards are inferior to the tokens they replace, and this is one. If you have half a dozen tokens in your wallet, you have half a dozen rides. If you have a MetroCard in your wallet, you have, um, anywhere from zero to 50 rides. Every time you swipe your card, the remaining balance comes up on the little screen. Pay attention! If the number is low, remember you need to refill it or buy a new card.

2. Discard empty cards. If the remaining balance is zero, throw the card away. The one way to know for sure whether you have at least one ride remaining is to only hold on to cards with at least one ride left on them. This is not environmentally friendly, since one of the good things about MetroCards is that they can be refilled. But walking around with a zero-balance MetroCard is a very bad idea, since you'll forget it has nothing on it, and end up getting annoyed trying to pass through a turnstile just a train is pulling in to the station.

3. Keep a spare. When the balance on your MetroCard gets low, don't refill it, get a new one. Keep the old one as a spare: that way if you exhaust the new one before you've had a chance to replace it, you'll know you've got an emergency ride or two left. If you do replace the new one in time, then keep that one as an extra spare. Trust me, you'll use it.

4. Never spend less than $15. Why lose out on a free bonus? Every time you spend $15 or more, you get a 10% bonus automatically added on to your card, worth at least one free ride.

5. Be careful with the exact amounts you're spending. If Mr Colman's profit is in the mustard left on the side of the plate, then a good chunk of the MTA's cashflow comes from 50-cent or $1 fragments of rides which sit, unusable, on MetroCards. This is going to become a lot easier to work out if the fare increases to $2 from $1.50 – but much harder to work out if it rises to $1.75. But in general, make sure that the amount of credit on your card is a multiple of the standard fare.
   This is not an easy rule to comply with, especially if you've taken rule #4 to heart. $15 will get you 11 rides, and $30 will get you 22 rides, but there's no amount which will get you any whole number of rides in between. If you wanted 15 rides, say, you would have to pay $21, which you get you a card with $23.10 of credit on it. After those 15 rides, you'd still have 60 cents of useless credit left over. Even if you spent $20.50, there would be an annoying 5-cent overage at the end.
   I will, however, tell you the solution to the common problem of what to do with the change left over on a $10 MetroCard. After six rides, there's $1 left on it: how much do you refill it with, if you're going to comply with rule #4? Answer: $25. The 10% bonus makes your $25 worth $27.50 of credit; add that $1 and the total on the card is $28.50, or 19 rides. If you think of yourself as buying 19 rides for $25, that comes out at just under $1.32 per ride.

6. Remember the 1-Day Fun Pass. Many New Yorkers who don't buy unlimited-ride MetroCards on a regular basis are losing out by not buying the one-day card. Last Thursday, for instance, I took the subway up to 57th Street for a panel discussion I wanted to see, took another ride down to 33rd Street for a lunch meeting, and then a third one back home again. Already, by this point, I would have been better off buying a "fun" pass rather than swiping my pay-as-you-go card. By the time I went up to 23rd St and back for another meeting in the late afternoon, I'd used up $7.50 of credit on my MetroCard (which cost me about $6.80 because I follow rule #4) when I could have gotten it all for $4.
   This rule might not be in effect for long, however. Even if the standard fare goes up from $1.50 to $2, that 33% increase is dwarfed by the proposed 75% increase in the price of the one-day pass, from $4 to $7. And it's rare indeed, outside the realm of tourists, that someone knows before their first ride in the morning that they're going to be making at least half a dozen subway or bus journeys that day (not including free transfers).

7. Buy your card when you get to where you're going. Because you're following rule #1, you'll know when you get on the subway that it's time to buy a new card. When you get off, you'll often have a minute to spare before you have to be where you're going. Or maybe you're going home, and you're not in much of a rush. This is the perfect time to buy your new card, since there's no chance that the time you spend buying it will make you miss your train. The only time it's completely safe to buy a card when you go in to the station is when you're at one of those smaller stations where the train tracks are easily visible from the MetroCard machines, and you can see if your train has just left. Take your anger at missing your train, and turn it into happiness that you now have the opportunity to buy a new card!

8. Beware double-charging. When MetroCards first came out, there was a rash of complaints from people saying that they had been charged double – $3 – for their rides. If the first avantage of tokens is that you always know how many you have left, then the second advantage is that they're completely reliable: you put your token in the turnstile, and walk through. With MetroCards, on the other hand, it often takes multiple swipes before you get admitted. Many people, when they see the message saying "please swipe again", simply try a different turnstile. That's fine. The problem is when the message says "please swipe again at this turnstile". For reasons which are rather complicated and hard to understand, the swipe system means that your $1.50 gets deducted from your card before the turnstile lets you through. If your swipe is too fast, or too short, or something like that, then you can end up on the wrong side of the turnstile with $1.50 already deducted from your card. If you stay at the same turnstile, it recognises the card, and doesn't deduct another $1.50. But if you move to a different turnstile, you get charged twice over.

Learn all these, and you're pretty much there. You still have to master the swipe action, of course, but that can only come with practice: I can't help you on that. Just remember: your subway ride won't often be pleasant, but it can be efficient.

Posted by Felix at 15:41 EST | Comments (9)

Charlie Kaufman films and digital video

I've been to a lot of films recently, and I don't have the time, I'm afraid, to write about them all. But I would like to try to correct what seems to be a general misconception that the cool new film to see is the one written by Charlie Kaufman – Adapatation. The fact is, Charlie Kaufman did write the cool new film to see, and it is an adaptation of a popular book. But the book isn't The Orchid Thief, it's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Let's get Adaptation out of the way first. Every columnist, it is said, is allowed precisely one column about how hard it is to write the column, how he has nothing to say in his column, how he needs to turn in something but can't think of anything to write, that sort of thing. Even when it's done well, it reeks of desperation. Adaptation is the filmic equivalent of that one column. Charlie Kaufman has got away with it, mainly because he's Charlie Kaufman, and in the wake of the success of Being John Malkovich, he and Spike Jonze could do pretty much anything they wanted. But insofar as Adaptation represents a whole new genre in filmmaking, it only does so because it's a genre which shouldn't exist, and which should never be repeated.

Tortured-writer films, of course, are nothing new: think Barton Fink. But the idea of writing yourself into your movie, as well as the author of the book you're adapting, doesn't raise interesting questions about the difference between fiction and reality: it's really just a po-mo pain in the arse. And it doesn't help that Kaufman turns out to be not so good at writing writers: of the four leads (counting Nicolas Cage twice), three are writers, and only the fourth (John Laroche, played wonderfully by Chris Cooper) is either sympathetic or believable.

To see what a good adaptation should be like, one only needs to go see Confessions of a Dangerous Mind instead. It's a rollicking yarn, which purports to be the true story of Chuck Barris, a man responsible for many game shows on the telly. Barris wrote a memoir in which he claimed to have led a secret life as a CIA hitman, and the film, ingeniously, is completely faithful to the book: nowhere does it indicate that Barris made the whole thing up.

At the same time, the director, George Clooney (!) has saturated virtually every frame of the film with various cinematographic effects: the real-life interviews are blown out, with a few high-impact colours, while the scenes set in the golden era of network television are as stylised and appealingly artificial as anything in Catch Me If You Can. Clooney hired Newton Thomas Sigel as his cinematographer after working with him on Three Kings, but this time brought a much more coherent directorial vision to Sigel's tricked-out talents.

Clooney loves his virtuoso shots: my favourite was one set in the lobby of NBC, when Barris (Sam Rockwell) joins an official tour of the building, peels off to ask where he can get a job, is pointed off screen, and then is next seen in the very same shot leading a tour himself. It goes on: the camera zooms in on a conversation between two employees, one of whom is the girl we first saw leading the origional tour, and then zooms out to include Barris in his third incarnation, listening to them swoon over the prospect of meeting a man in middle management. I'm not sure why it made me think of Alfred Hitchcock, but it's certainly look-at-me filmmaking, and Clooney pulls it off with aplomb.

Clooney stars, as well (natch: when was the last time you saw an actor making a directorial debut in which he didn't star?) as deadpan CIA agent Jim Byrd. As Ricky Jay says in Heist, this motherfucker is so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him. In fact, Clooney is almost too cool for his own film: his still, central presence is so magnetic that our supposed hero seems little more than a flailing doofus by comparison, even when he's sparring with his cold war femme fatale, Patricia (Julia Roberts). They quote Nabokov at each other: "All the information I have about myself is from forged documents". It's a quotation I haven't been able to verify, although it sounds plausible enough – maybe Pale Fire? – and it's about as close as the film comes to admitting the rocky basis of its own foundation.

The other major character in the film is Penny, in a performance of beautiful openness and freshness by the underrated Drew Barrymore. It's very rare for the women in biopics of men to be fully-rounded characters, but here we feel if anything that we understand Barris's girlfriend more than we understand him. In a world where even biopics about women directed by women (Frida) end up with the guy getting all the glory and the interesting exposition, it's very good to see Clooney and Barrymore creating a strong, memorable female character.

One alternative to strong, memorable female characters, of course, is weak, memorable female characters. Rebecca Miller has created three of these, in Personal Velocity, a film subtitled "Three Portraits".

The three women – Delia (Kyra Sedgwick), Greta (Parker Posey) and Paula (Fairuza Balk) are not actually weak, although one could be forgiven for getting that impression from the omniscient male narrator who irritatingly insists on telling us what's going on in each of the three episodes.

The first episode, Delia's, is by far the weakest. Sedgwick plays a battered wife who gathers up her kids and runs away from her husband to try to find a new life for herself upstate. Um, that's it, really. It's worthy, and artfully allusive, but I couldn't really fault the man who walked out of the movie theatre after it was over, thereby missing a wonderful performance by the always-excellent Posey.

My problem with Posey's story is not that it is badly told, but that it carries with it the vaguest smell of anti-semitism. Posey plays a content downtown bohemian book editor, toiling away on cookbooks while her boss (Wallace Shawn) ignores her. She's estranged from her father, a successful Jewish lawyer, and very close to her husband, an unsuccessful WASP. Over the course of the film, she starts turning those two relationships around, renewing her relationship with her dad while drifting apart from her husband.

The problem is that the catalyst for this change in her life is when she suddenly gets a high-profile editing job, out of the blue, on the recommendation of the latest hot author's ex-girlfriend, who knew her at Harvard. (If you're not following, don't worry, it's not important.) Before you know it, she's consumed with ambition, jumping ship to other publishing houses, thinking of hitting up her father's friends to start up an imprint of her own, that sort of thing. At the same time, she's rediscovering her Jewish roots, with a digression about a rabbinical student she had an affair with shortly before her marriage, who complained that her fiancé wasn't even Jewish. It's hard to see why Miller makes such a big deal of the religious aspects to the affair, unless it's to somehow imply that a Jewish husband might somehow have been more in tune with the avaricious monster that Posey eventually turns into.

In the final story, Balk plays a confused former runaway who, after a nasty accident in downtown New York, heads upstate in her car for no particular reason that she can think of. On the way, she picks up a kid who's standing in the rain by the side of the road. There are lots of big issues here: abuse, pregnancy, runaways, and again none of them are addressed face-on: you just watch the film, see Balk struggling with her issues, and then, as in the previous two stories, see everything end on a grace note which doesn't really tie anything up but at least gives the impression that our protagonist has reached some kind of self-realisation.

It would all make for a vaguely good film, if it wasn't for the fact that it was shot on digital video (DV), and is therefore nigh-on unwatchable. Much has been made over the past few years of the way in which DV lowers the costs of making films, thereby removing the monopoly which Hollywood has over what we see in theatres.

The fact is, however, that DV is still a very, very long way from producing pictures of the sort of quality which would be even halfways acceptable to Hollywood. The magic of the movies – the reason why so many people love them so much – is up there on the screen somewhere, in that cone of projected light. At any point in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, it is possible to just forget everything about the structure of the film, and simply bask in the images, in a pure This Is Cinema kind of way.

With films shot on DV, however, the opposite is true. You constantly have to try to stop yourself from being distracted and irritated by digital artifacts in the image, by nastily pixellated light sources, by supposedly straight diagonal lines which look more like jagged ladders. Flesh tones are appalling, as a rule, and there's no sensuousness on screen, even in the most high-budget of DV features, like The Anniversary Party or Dancer in the Dark.

DV isn't even up to television quality yet. Or rather, if you watch a DV-shot film on DVD, it's obvious that it was shot on DV, even when you're watching it on a perfectly ordinary television. I'm not all that surprised, if you compare the size and sophistication of the average television studio's cameras with the cheap hand-held numbers that are used by most people shooting films on DV.

I've found that most of the time, reviewers and festivalgoers deliberately overlook the weakness of the medium when they're rating movies. That's how films like Tadpole come to get big theatrical releases: they're a huge success at Sundance, where everybody's well versed in ignoring the elephant in the room.

When I spend my $10 to go see a movie, however, I'm looking forward to the full cinematic experience. However touching a story might be, a film shot on DV is never going to give me that. (With the possible exception of Dancer in the Dark.) I think that it could be for that reason alone that I much preferred Igby Goes Down and 13 Conversations About One Thing to Tadpole and Personal Velocity. So if you want to make a movie that people will really love, make it on film. Whatever the extra expense is, it's worth it.

Posted by Felix at 17:31 EST | Comments (8)

Why Bush should ignore the stock market

To keep my mind sharp, I like to spend a certain amount of time reading bloggers with whom I disagree, such as the estimable 2 Blowhards and the slightly less estimable Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan's not so hot on rhetoric, but he is good on links, and a few days ago he managed to find what he called "the best explanation I've yet read of the rationale behind the Bush economic proposal".

Since I've read a lot of very cogent attacks on the Bush plan, and no good defenses of it, I followed the link (you might need to go through a tedious registration process, I'm afraid) to a piece by Ryan Lizza in The New Republic. All I can say is that if the Republicans have to rely on friends like these, then they will have very little need for enemies.

"Conservatives inside and outside the White House fervently believe that the key to economic health (and Bush's reelection) is a booming stock market," says Lizza, explaining why the centerpiece of the Bush proposals is the abolition of the income tax on dividends.

It's as though the White House is the last place on earth where the 90s-bubble Kool-Aid is still flowing freely. What Bush and his advisers want, it would seem, is to recreate the Clinton years, where a booming stock market and its attendant "wealth effects" drove up consumer spending and boosted the economy. In the 1990s, GDP grew at an astonishing pace for a mature economy, but stock prices grew much, much faster still. In the short term, that combination does indeed create wealth effects and higher consumer spending, but it's not a combination which can either be legislated or sustained. Corporations, collectively, can't grow faster than the economy as a whole, and share prices can't grow faster than companies indefinitely.

But what happened in the 1990s is that a lot of very rich people became exceedingly rich people with very little effort. And far from having learned their lesson – that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is – they just want to do everything they can to recreate those days.

The fact is, a booming stock market is by no means necessary for economic health. If you look at the golden age of the 50s and 60s when countries like the US and Germany were growing much faster than anyone dares to hope these days, their respective stock markets might have been going steadily north, but they weren't booming. What Bush is attempting here, it seems, is a short-term goosing of the stock market, which in turn will create enough of a wealth effect that the economy will continue to grow into the 2004 election, and he will get re-elected. But the cost of his re-election (which would probably happen anyway, given the disarray in the Democratic party and the respect that Americans have for a Strong Leader with Moral Clarity) will be soaring deficits stretching indefinitely into the future.

Once upon a time, it was quite easy to find deficit hawks in the Republican party. It's easy enough to see that every extra $500 billion which the federal government has to borrow is $500 billion which can't be lent to and invested in the private sector. It's no coincidence that the 1990s stock market boom coincided with the era of balanced budgets: if Bush really wanted to set the stage for a sustained rebound in equities, he wouldn't be spending $360 billion he doesn't have on this dividend-tax abolition scheme.

More profoundly, however, the Bush administration doesn't seem to understand that the stock-market-led economic growth of the 1990s had big problems, which are clear with hindsight. The shenanigans at Enron, WorldCom and the like have been blamed on a culture of stock options, in which managers are rewarded much more greatly the higher-risk their strategy. But they were also the fault of the equity culture generally, where the distinction between companies and shares was almost completely erased. If company X reported that it had managed to double its profits over the past year, the press would lead on what happened to the stock price. If it went up, the news was good; if it went down, the news was bad.

In the case of IPOs, things were even crazier still: a very strong case can be made that the main reason for eBay's success is that it got a huge market share very early on, based on all the priceless publicity following its IPO.

Everything became turned upside down: any sensible method of valuing a stock was thrown out the window, and any sensible means of going public was also discarded. Before the bubble, any bank who lead-managed an IPO which went up two, three or ten times on its opening day would never get another mandate again: look at all that money they left on the table! But now, such jumps were signs of success, not of failure.

Now that the bubble has burst, it's easy to see the excesses of the recent past, and to realise that sustainable economic growth should come from well-thought-out investment decisions made in an economy where risks and returns can be quantified and managed. But if you're a multimillionaire, as most of the decision-makers in the Bush cabinet seem to be, it seems that you're more likely to be blinded by the dazzle of the riches you made in the Clinton era. And so rather than fixing America (in the good sense of the word), they are trying to fix the stock market (in the bad sense).

Most of us realise now that the stock market should reflect the fortunes of companies, not drive them. Any market where the key driver of a stock is not the underlying company but rather that very stock's own performance will always find itself riddled with feedback loops and crazy valuations. Meaningless numbers like the percentage by which a stock has fallen from its 52-week high should play no part in investment decisions: either the stock is a good buy at its current levels or it isn't. Where it was in the past is irrelevant.

Yet the White House still chases after its hoped-for 10% rise in the equity markets, just like a CEO trying one more gimmick to boost the value of his stock. Never mind the underlying fundamentals: look at the frothiness of the asset price! If this is what happens when CEOs take over the country, give me back the politicians, please.

Posted by Felix at 17:27 EST | Comments (1)

Personal: January 10 2003!

Okay, Okay! I hear you all! Thankyou for the wonderful emails that have been coming in..and sorry for my laziness in replying. I shall try to do better next time!

And the questions, I'll try to answer. It's difficult though. It's been busy, very busy...but also very of-another-planet-like and I don't really know where to begin. Relief, Relief is when I wrote last I think..and that was a fairly poor attempt I admit. As of New Years Eve we've been off night shift, off relief and onto more of a normal schedule, if anything here can be described as normal. The days, the working hours, the food, the people I can all describe to you. But that doesn't bring across the feeling like I'm on the moon.

The working days are 8am-7pm with various tea, coffee and food breaks in between. The food is outstanding. Yes, fresh fruit still! Fresh veggies! Amazing vegetarian options being delivered three times a day. Stir-fry, spanakopita, cheesecake, strudel, curry, quiche, ...I haven't eaten this much diverse and good food so regularly..um...ever probably. (And that's no offence meant to my mum...it's hard to beat two new desserts every day!)

The people are still the same as the ones on the ship, plus those who came in early and, of course, those who have been here all winter (or two). Thankfully, the latter group are amazingly sane and normal. In many ways they're my favourite of the lot as they have a certain comme si, comme ca about them that the ever-rushing summerers cannot enjoy, the season being very limited in time. So much to do! Labs to build, buildings to jack up so thy don't get buried, generators to install, fuel drums to be brought in and out, carpentry, electrical work, mast erecting, cable lying, plumbing... plus, ofcourse, the science. From my side of things I've started drilling a 20m hole with a hand drill (that I've been dreading). It's comical but coming along. Next comes blimp flying and then after that, moving into the New Lab.

Aaah yes, The Lab! It's Up! Hurrah, hurree...amazing of most mazing days... three shipping containers hoiked on a platform. Take off the middle walls and kaboom! here's a ready to rumble lab. Well, almost. We still need power, and floors, and some work on the platform, and wiring, and plumbing... but in principle, it's ready to go. And what a lab! State of the Art stuff this. My favourite bit? The electropolished tubing? The high-volume air flow filters? The window that the laser will fire through? No, of course not.

The view from the window.

What a stunning job all the workers have done at not setting a toe, boot or snowball in the Clean Air Sector to the immediate East of the lab. It's as if the lab was flown there. Looking out the window, there is white. Expansive, infinite, flat...but not flat. Look at the sastrugi! Look at the wind patterns. A solitary bird. The Clouds. Of course, the clouds. The Sky. Always different.

Out there, out there is Antarctica. Silent, apparrantly empty, essentially untouched by human hand. No life even.

People relate to saving trees, saving whales, protecting living things. What are we protecting here? There is no life out there. Except the whole of the Earth and all the life it supports. That blows my mind.

Posted by Rhian at 0:39 EST | Comments (5)

Apple's new objects of desire

Steve Jobs, Apple's $1-a-year CEO (not including the 10 million shares and $90 million corporate jet that the grateful board gave him for turning the company around) excelled himself in showmanship yesterday. He was giving his annual keynote address, which everybody expected to be pretty boring, and after an hour and a half the most exciting announcement was that Apple had developed a new web browser.

Safari, for that's what it's called, isn't, it turns out, all that exciting after all: once the übergeeks at Mac OS Rumors got their hands on it, they rapidly decided they were going to stick with Chimera. Personally, I hate the "user-friendly" bookmarks system. And the name's silly, too: surely Jaguar should run in Safari, rather than the other way around?

But then, just when everybody thought Jobs was running out of time, he announced the arrival of his new baby: the 17" PowerBook. Immediately, every Mac lover in the world wanted one. It's bigger and faster and thinner and sexier than anything else in the world, and Jobs kept on piling on the added extras. FireWire 800, Airport Extreme (with a vastly improved base station retailing at $100 less than the old cost), Bluetooth, even a glow-in-the-dark keyboard – the Apple faithful were lapping it up.

It's the sort of announcement which makes you immediately forget all the sensible advice along the lines of "if all you're going to do is X, then you don't need Y, you only really need Z". Just before Christmas, for instance, Walter Mossberg wrote a column saying that

While tweaking every last bit of speed out of a PC may matter for techies and heavy game players and people doing things like professional video or audio production, it doesn't make sense for average consumers doing typical tasks. You won't be able to type, or print or surf the Web any faster with a bunch of technically faster components in your PC.
The biggest jargon scam involves the speed of the processor chips that drive PCs -- Intel's Pentium 4 and its competitors. The most prominent number in many computer ads is the processor clock speed -- 2.0 Gigahertz, or 2.53 or whatever. But this doesn't really translate into improved performance for the user, especially for mainstream users whose typical PC tasks wouldn't tax the capabilities of far slower processors. If you're doing e-mail, Web surfing, digital-music playback, simple photo work, word processing and other office-type tasks, a 2.53 GHz processor won't make those things noticeably better or faster than, say, a 1.5 GHz processor.

What Mossberg wrote about PCs goes for Apples as well, although Apple's architecture means that a 2GHz Intel processor could be slower than a 1Ghz Apple chip.

But Apples have always been luxuries, rather than necessities: it's always been possible to get a Wintel machine which basically has the same functionality (but with less beauty and less user-friendliness) for less money. And given how much time most of us spend at our computers, these particular luxuries are, in my opinion, well worth it. It's a bit like the way in which even relatively low-paid people will shell out quite a lot for their spectacles: they wear them every day, they create the face they present to the rest of the world, and so it's important to get it right. Similarly, people feel better when they're sitting using OS X than they do in front of Windows.

And what the 17" PowerBook offers is something even frugal PC users have been wanting for a long time now: a huge, flat screen. Even when you look at desktop computers, consumers in general have been pushing hard for flat screens in general and large flat screens specifically. While the ratio of laptops to desktops remains about 1:2, flat-screen systems in general (including laptops) have already overtaken systems with big and clunky old-fashioned monitors. And with its 1440x900 screen, the new Apple screen shows almost three times as much information as an old-fashioned 800x600 screen.

With a nice wide screen like that, you can set up a whole new way of working in side-by-side windows, rather than having to switch back and forth the whole time. And there are obvious advantages for anybody who ever does desktop publishing or any kind of video editing, where you want to be able to see two TV-shaped screens next to each other, or a whole magazine spread.

So I think that Paul Boutin, in Slate, was being a bit rude when he called Apple's new beauty an iSUV, "half computer and half Cadillac Escalade". He's right that gigabit data jacks are a little bit on the over-specced side for the vast majority of users, at least for the time being. But the first rule of computers is that they always go out of date, and anybody who's still dealing with an external USB hard drive knows what it's like to feel that it just takes far too long to transfer large amounts of information.

Boutin says that "Among the rows of jaded industry journalists at Jobs' feet, two things were obvious: Nobody, but nobody, really needs this computer. And everybody wants one." The second thing is certainly true. But I'm not sure about the first. This computer could be the first laptop which is good enough to replace a desktop machine at, say, video or magazine production companies. It has the new Airport Extreme built in, which means that a single $199 base station could service a whole office, with people being able to move around to wherever they're needed, without being stuck at a desk. And the distinction between a desktop at work and a laptop for travelling would be lost: you'd just use the same machine for everything. And any time you needed a truly ultra-fabulous screen, you'd just plug it in. (With those screens costing $3500 a pop, going laptop could actually save money: rather than buying a screen for everyone who ever needs one, you only need as many screens as will be needed at any given time.)

It's important to remember that $3300 is not much money in a corporate context, where the annual cost of supporting computers nearly always exceeds the sticker price on the machines themselves. You'd need to buy 30 of the new PowerBooks just to reach the $100,000 that a single tech-support person easily costs.

The computer which genuinely "nobody, but nobody, really needs" is not the new 17" PowerBook but its little brother, the 12" PowerBook. This bizarre little computer is basically a slimmed-down 12" iBook with an imperceptibly faster chip, a shiny metal casing, and a slightly bigger hard drive. The screen is exactly the same, 1024x768.

I can see why the PowerBook is better than the iBook, but I can't see why it's 80% better: the price of the new, small, PowerBook, is $1800, compared to $1000 for the iBook. (OK, the iBook costs $1300 if you want the same CD-burning drive that's in the PowerBook, but that's still a $500 savings.) The natty gadgets in the 17" PowerBook are mostly absent: there's no Airport Extreme card, no FireWire 800, no backlit keyboard. And in terms of weight, the newer model saves a whopping 100 grammes: it's 2.1kg, compared to 2.2kg for the 12" iBook.

And for the sake of being able to launch this utterly pointless computer, Apple wasted acres of space on its lovely new 17" PowerBook. Believe it or not, the keyboard on the two machines is exactly the same size: Apple's gone and put huge stereo speakers on the 17" model where it could have had a desktop-style extended keyboard, complete with number pad, forward-delete key, and all the other things those of us who used to have desktops miss when we move to a laptop.

But I'm sure that Apple's not counting on the 12" PowerBook to drive its sales of notebooks in 2003. It's the big one which everyone wants, and I have a feeling that a lot of people will somehow be able to persuade themselves to buy it. Hell, it's only 6% of the price of that Cadillac Escalade.

Posted by Felix at 17:20 EST | Comments (2)

Catch Me If You Can

I saw Steven Spielberg's new movie, Catch Me If You Can, last night. Today, I went back and watched it again. I never do that. It's a fantastic film, I urge you to see it, and I urge you to take it seriously. Yes, it's a light comedy. But it's also a master class in filmmaking, and I sincerely hope that Spielberg will be the first director since Billy Wilder to force Hollywood to give comic films the critical attention they deserve. 2002 was not a great year for films, I'm afraid, and Catch Me If You Can stands out as one of the very few which is both popular and first-rate.

It's superlative from the opening sequence on. The titles, by, I think, Kuntzel and Degas, are magisterial: this is one of the best title sequences in years. They do a fantastic job of evoking the 1960s and encapsulating the whole story of the film to come, all to the accompaniment of a self-contained piece of music by John Williams. They're much more than an homage to Saul Bass: they're a genuine overture. (Note the absence of a pre-credit sequence: these titles alone are enough to grab your attention.)

Since I've mentioned John Williams already, I might as well say right now that he's done an amazing job on the score of this movie. It's light but strong, catchy yet unobtrusive, and, as the final credits roll, Williams even starts tipping the hat to Aaron Copeland. It's a great piece of American composing – and it really pains me to say this, as I make it a point of hating John Williams and all his works, which are usually derivative and overblown.

Catch Me If You Can also has finally managed to break the First Law of Tom Hanks: that he's never appeared in a really good movie. He's not great in this – he just about does what's asked of him, that's it – but finally I've found a Tom Hanks film I can actually really like.

That said, Hanks is acted off the screen by an excellent cast. Leonardo DiCaprio leads with a performance of wit and subtlety, ably supported by Christopher Walken (who's just Christopher Walken, really, I'm not sure where all the superlatives for his performance came from, unless it's simply shock that he should ever play a character with all-too-visible weaknesses) and some wonderful cameos. The two which really stick in the memory are Jennifer Garner as an opportunistic model-turned-hooker and, most wonderfully, Martin Sheen as a southern lawyer with seemingly twice as many teeth as the average man, and impeccable comic timing.

The lion's share of the credit, however, must surely go to Spielberg. It is he who has really pulled off the directorial juggling tricks required: keeping the action moving while developing the characters, wowing us with the production design while at the same time spinning a gripping yarn. Most of all, he manages to keep DiCaprio's character both sophisticated con-man and naive boy at the same time: someone who, when he phones the FBI to taunt them, does so with a glass of milk by his side.

DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale Jr, whom we first see suffering in a hideous French lock-up, but who not much later is back to the final glory day of his youth, watching his father (Walken) collect some meaningless gong from the New Rochelle Rotarians. As Frank Sr goes up to recieve his award, his son manages to pull the label, whole, from one of the bottles on the table in front of him, and allows himself the briefest of self-congratulatory smiles. The moment is caught en passant by Spielberg's camera – the father is the center of the action – but in that smile, in Frank's pleasure at pulling something off, the next three years of his life are presaged.

Labels torn from bottles become something of a recurring motif for the rest of the film: it's as though Frank is obsessed with possessing them, being able to switch from brand to brand whenever he likes. His wallet contains nothing but labels, his life is little but a successful exercise in making people miss the boy for the label with which he presents himself (pilot, physician, lawyer). As we're told twice in the film, once by Frank Sr and once by Frank Jr, the Yankees keep on winning the World Series not because of Mickey Mantle, but because their opponents can't take their eyes off the pinstripes.

When Frank Sr falls on hard times, his son gets sent to public school, and quickly demonstrates his quick wit, sharp eye for detail, and general ballsiness. After being bullied before even getting to his first class, he quickly takes over French lessons, deciding that being a subsitute teacher has got to be a better life than being a bullied kid. The scene where the headmaster sorrowfully explains to Frank's parents that their son has just called a parent-teacher meeting to plan a school outing to the local baguette factory is a masterpiece of comic filmmaking: for all the solemnity on screen, everybody in the cinema is in stitches. But the real genius is the way in which Spielberg cuts back and forth from the headmaster's office to DiCaprio, outside it, advising one of the girls at school that she should really fold that note from her mother if she doesn't want to be found out as a fraud. In the very next scene, he espies a pin on a couch which shouldn't be there: Spielberg is showing us Frank's acuity in the most unobtrusive way, weaving it in to the rest of the plot.

When his parents divorce, Frank runs away from home, and has something of a Damascene conversion on the street outside a hotel when he's been turned away from yet another bank where he's tried to kite a bad cheque. A shaft of sunlight suddenly illuminates the side of his face, and in a glow of pure slow-motion 1960s joyousness, a pilot leads his gaggle of giggling stewardesses through adulatory throngs and on to the reception desk. It's not long before the very same bank manager who turned Frank away just a scene earlier is eagerly shaking his hand, awed by his purloined pilot's uniform.

This is a movie full of uniforms, not only of pilots but of nurses and stewardesses too, and even of FBI g-men. The latter, true to type, wear black suits, white shirts, black ties, and black hats. The production design is a dream: the 60s in all their glory, with no sign of the counterculture or even of rock 'n' roll. Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal in New York has a starring role, along with countless co-eds in tight sweaters. It's all very 50s-innocent, for all that our hero is jetting around the world cashing millions of dollars in bad cheques.

Even the FBI is not spared the rose-tinted spectacles: for comic relief, most of its employees are bungling idiots, and even Tom Hanks, the agent who finally catches his man, has to endure more than his fair share of flashing-his-ID-backwards and seeing his shirts stained pink in the launderette by a misplaced red top.

All the same, however, Spielberg does manage to imbue Hanks with a certain amount of fatherly gravitas: when Frank Jr loses Frank Sr, he also gains a new father-figure in the shape of the cop who caught him and who is going to spend the next four years trying to get him out of the jail he put him in to. Both Hanks and Walken are divorced men who still wear their wedding rings: the symmetry is almost too pat, but it's done artfully enough that it barely registers consciously the first time around.

There are some lovely Spielberg touches in this film, not least the scene where the FBI raids Frank's Atlanta apartment. A gun, looking like nothing so much as a sea-horse, enters the screen from the left, silhouetted against the swimming pool in the background. Another follows it, and then a third cuts across from the right: it's a truly beautiful shot. There's another when DiCaprio is caught red-handed printing blank cheques, and he stands in his wifebeater with the evidence of his crime fluttering down all around him, even landing on top of his head. And Spielberg can swing from comedy to pathos in an eyeblink, too: when Frank is running away from the FBI for the last time, he has to leave his fiancée, who still considers him to be a doctor and a lawyer. When he comes clean to her, her first reaction – "you're not a Lutheran?" – draws a laugh; her second ("why would you lie to me?") draws sympathy.

Spielberg is also lucky (or clever) enough to have the services of Janusz Kaminski as cinematographer, who turns the film into a sunny delight without ever making it sickly or camp á la Far From Heaven.

Friedrich, over at 2Blowhards, says that Catch Me If You Can could be Spielberg's best-ever film. It's up against some very stiff competition, but I'm inclined to agree. It's certainly better than his other film this year, Minority Report, and is also better than the last film for which he won an Oscar, Saving Private Ryan. I hope that this film gets a nomination too: not only because it's so good, but also because comedies in general, and light comedies in particular, deserve better treatment from the drama-obsessed Academy. There could be no better way to remember Billy Wilder.

Posted by Felix at 23:50 EST | Comments (0)

Personal Exupery

My mum sent a few gifts with me to open as and when. One of these was my childhood copy of The Little Prince.This morning, having celebrated throughout the midnight sunlight, I greeted the new year in with this treasure. I'm sure you've all read it before but do yourself a favour and read it again.

A new year's excerpt, on lamplighters on Earth:

Seen from a slight distance, that would make a splendid spectacle. The movements of this army would be regulated like those of the ballet in the opera. First would come the turn of the lamplighters of New Zealand and Australia. Having set their lamps alight, these would go off to sleep. Next, the lamplighters of China and Siberia would enter for their steps in the dance, and then they too would be waved back into the wings. After that would come the turn of the lamplighters of Russia and the Indies; then those of Africa and Europe; then those of South America; then those of North America. And never would they make a mistake in the order of their entry upon the stage. It would be magnificent.
Only the man who was in charge of the single lamp at the North Pole, and his colleague who was responsible for the single lamp at the South Pole – only these two would live free from toil and care: they would be busy twice a year.

Posted by Rhian at 14:47 EST | Comments (5)

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