February 2003 Archives
Libeskind wins
It was a close-run thing, but Studio Daniel Libeskind has won the competition to design the new World Trade Center site. Today was probably the biggest day of his career, but he got there not through shameless self-puffery, as some rival architects have been sniping in the press, but rather through a tireless commitment to New York and its people. No matter what you think of the plan, there's no doubt that Libeskind's heart is in the right place: everybody from the family members of the 9/11 victims to New York state governor George Pataki has been impressed by Libeskind's dedication to genuine dialogue.
Even if the genuinely revolutionary plan was not, in the end, chosen, the process by which Libeskind's victory was achieved was exemplary, and will surely set the standard for any kind of major urban planning commission, anywhere in the world, for the foreseeable future. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the WTC site and which is notoriously opaque when it comes to development decisions, ended up being an integral part of the most genuinely consultative and democratic architectural process any major city has ever seen. Given the very high standard of many of the shortlisted plans, I think that the ultimate reason that Libeskind won was that he was most attuned to the process, and most willing to present his ideas as a work in progress, something which could and should reflect the views of all the stakeholders in the site, and not just his own ego.
As Lou Tomson, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said during the announcement ceremony today, the plan was "born out of tragedy but forged in democracy". The LMDC painstakingly sifted through tens of thousands of comments from members of the public, not in lip service to the ideal of public consultation, but as a necessary part of the process for deciding what would ultimately happen on the WTC site. New Yorkers now have ownership of the winning plan, which was definitely one of the most popular.
The fact that so many people really like the Daniel Libeskind plan is surprising to me, an Englishman who well remembers the furor over his proposed addition to the Victoria & Albert museum in London. But, of course, this is different: Libeskind is not destroying anything that anybody loves, and bold new buildings have much more of a place in New York than they do in London. As mayor Michael Bloomberg noted today, the construction of Libeskind's spire will mark the tenth time in history that the tallest building in the world has been built on the island of Manhattan.
What's more, the Libeskind plan is one which repays careful attention to detail – something New Yorkers have been giving all of the proposed designs. Look at the way, for instance, in which he neither buried West Street nor allowed it to interfere with the memorial setting on which it borders: by bringing the memorial down 30 feet below grade, the cars on the highway are both out of sight and out of earshot to those in the memorial zone.
Libeskind also understood something which was lost on Norman Foster: that this was a site-use competition more than it was an architecture competition. Lord Foster spent most of his presentation in December talking about his new skyscraper – something that would probably never be built. Libeskind, on the other hand, concentrated on site use, articulating a powerful area for a memorial (to be designed by others) and placing key buildings along reconstructed Greenwich and Fulton streets.
The center of his plan – and the new epicenter of Lower Manhattan, once the plan is realised – is the crossroads of those two streets. It will be one a great public space, ranking alongside St Mark's in Venice, rather than the grey and windswept Austin Toobin Plaza that most of us remember from the World Trade Center of old. John Whitehead, the LMDC chairman, called it "one of the world's most majestic crossroads," and the Wedge of Light, to its northeast, "a 21st Century piazza for New York City and the world". Opposite the Wedge of Light, to the southwest, will be the memorial museum and the Park of Heroes: something Libeskind has glossed in his plan as green space, but something which the designers of the memorial have a lot of room to play with. To the northwest will be a gleaming new cultural center, with a 2,200-seat auditorium, abutting the great 1,776-foot spire. To the northeast will be a hotel and convention center, while to the southeast will be a grand new transit hub, which will eventually link lower Manhattan directly to airports to the east and west.
The transit hub will be a Grand Central Terminal for the 21st Century: filled with light, even well below ground. The low ground level of the memorial will help immeasurably here, as will Libeskind's ingenious idea of building the memorial's north wall out of glass. It might be stained, it might be etched, it will certainly play a central role in the memorial, but it will also act as an illumination for commuters on the other side. (To the south side of the memorial zone will be a second wall, this time opaque, which will also be part of the memorial competition. And the western wall will be the great slurry walls of the original World Trade Center, which withstood unimaginable trauma and still prevented the Hudson River from flooding Ground Zero. Part of them will be excavated to Libeskind's originally-proposed depth of 70 feet: bedrock.)
The
plan is centered on the memorial square. The photo at left, looking northeast
from more or less the Wall Street Journal offices in the World Financial Center,
is of the new model, and shows the memorial museum cantilevered over the "memory
foundations", as Libeskind calls them. A series of skyscrapers spirals
up from the foundations, up the ramp which descends parallel to West Street
(the big road nearest us) and around the south, east and north edges of the
site to culminate in the large spire holding the "gardens of the world".
On its 110th floor (the height of the original WTC) is a restaurant and observation
deck, but the memorial and the museum are down at ground level, where no one
needs to worry about being high up in the sky. Libeskind said he was aiming
for "places with intimacy and places with grandeur," and that's what
he's given us.
Most of the skyscrapers, it's worth noting, are not going to be designed by Daniel Libeskind. And since the lower floors of the signature tower are going to have some tenants, there could be a lot of changes made from how the buildings are envisaged right now. "It is now our task to make sure that the plan you see becomes a reality," said New York governor George Pataki today – but of course this plan is not exactly what will be built.
Libeskind said that within four years we should have the major public components – the memorial site and museum, the cultural center, the transit hub, and the restored skyline. Personally, I believe all of it except for the skyline: I just can't see this economy being healthy enough to support the construction of the tallest building in the world.
I don't see the federal government stepping in to help, either: the representative of the president today was a minor functionary called Alfonso Jackson, the deputy secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He gave a horribly tone-deaf speech, wherein he basically tried to claim credit for everything, as well as to imply that this plan was somehow integrally connected with both the war on Iraq and Bush's proposed tax cut. It's clear that the White House doesn't really care about New York, and that the city and state – both of whom are horribly in debt right now – are going to have to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to reconstructing the public areas of this site. With the best will in the world, I don't think they'll quite manage the skyscraper within four years, although I hope I'm wrong.
But even without the skyscraper, I'm heartened that New York now has a vision for rebuilding which is both bold and popular. Not everyone will like it, of course: there isn't a major new building in the world that someone doesn't hate. But this site is going to be a powerful destination, and I predict that it will, finally, be responsible for turning lower Manhattan into a vibrant residential neighborhood. People are really going to want to live here!
Finally, a word about the decision. I have to admit I am a little disappointed: I wanted the Think plan to win. Where Libeskind is 1990s avant-garde, Think was genuinely futuristic, with a vision of a vertical city which had never been attempted anywhere before. But it was watered down over the past couple of weeks, with fewer buildings inside the latticework towers, and the memorial museum lowered to the 30th floor or so rather than being up in the 80s. The latticework was also made lighter and cheaper, which would have meant it would have been much more difficult to build new cultural elements as and when the funding for them became available. In short, it was not entirely clear that the Think plan would really work, and the rebuilding of a large part of the most important city in the world isn't the sort of thing which can be embarked upon with less than 100% certainty.
So I'm happy for Daniel Liebeskind, happy for New York, and happy indeed for Rafael Vinoly and the other members of the Think team, who have surely got as much of a profile boost from their unbuilt proposal as they could ever have got from a finished building anywhere else. I can't wait to see this plan become reality.
Posted by Felix at 22:04 EST | Comments (5)
Personal: End of season
It's the end of the season at Halley. You can feel it in the air. The 14 people who are staying for the winter want us to leave. They want their home back and the job to begin in earnest. They want the solitude returned, the politics removed and these lightweight jokers to climb on the ship and sail off, armed with plenty of photos and stories of antarctic hardship to tell their loved ones back home. They don't know the half of it! The summer crew are also ready to leave. It's been a long season, a busy season and, I think, a very productive one. The base has been resupplied, a lab has been built, masts erected, buildings jacked, field campaigns pulled off, ice cores drilled, rocks collected and thorough maintenance been carried out in every building. Halley will be good for another winter now. We're tired and it's time to go home. The ship has left and returned. The Weddell Sea science cruise is over and cargo has been loaded. They're ready to take us back to the North, anxious to leave the antarctic oceans and terrible seas. But we are stranded. The weather is the most brutal I have ever seen in my life. It is the stuff in movies about the poles. Fifty knot winds and blowing snow, 10m visibility. Howling gale I would call it. I've been banned from visiting my lab. I got knocked over a few times just trying to walk to a nearby platform earlier. Coming home, I think I flew! I got frostnip on my cheek yesterday,- most exciting, like a lump of ice under your skin. And then you realise it is your skin. But recovers very quickly once a warm hand is put on it. Even past winterers can't remember such unyielding winds for days. Frostnip in February! Imagine! And it was only two days ago that the the sky was calm and beautiful. No, you don't understand, words can't express it. Like a cheesy airbrush poster from Athena. Pastel pinks and blues and purples in the sky, light blowing snow on the ground so you can't tell where snow meets air, desert gusts. Better yet, the sun has started setting and rising again. It is utterly magical. Lingers for so long on the horizon, moves around a bit and then reappears. The whole sky dances with colour. With the sunset, and reduced light, I saw the moon for the first time in months. Still no stars but the moon, hanging in the red and orange sky, large and round, rising upwards in synchronicity with the sun as it set. And the sky so calm. So calm that Mandy and I slept in a tent on Thursday! Imagine that now! I can see nothing out of the window next to me. Nothing but white. Which way is up? Oh yes, and mirages! I haven't told you about them. When there is a strong variation of temperatures with altitude, light is refracted and reflected within the air layers and moves in mysterious ways. The result is, and this is no optical illusion, you can see further. (I always thought that mirages were false, like water in the desert.) You can see the ocean surrounding this ice shelf that Halley sits on. You can see huge ice bergs and cliffs. Sometimes, you can see the ship. Now that I think about it, perhaps it is an illusion. But I guess that depends your definition of reality. The mirages are real. I see icebergs that do exist. I see the edge of the ice shelf. Sometimes these things are upside down: reflections within layers in the air of what is below them. Like a great big mirror in the sky. So I guess it is an illusion. But it's real too. Like the way a dream is real. And more! I've been flying! I sat in the cockpit of a Twin Otter airplane and flew above this Antarctic continent! Do you know how many times in my life I have dreamt of doing that? We went on a jolly around the base, everyone who hadn't been flying had the chance at some point, and put this place into some perspective. The weather was dingle as they say here, perfect. We flew to the creek where the ship dropped us off, and up the coast. Huge cliffs of ice being eroded away by the sea below. Waves come flying out from under the cliffs,- exactly opposite to what they do at home on rock. And so blue. Bright, light, crystal blue below the water's surface. And then we flew further up the coast to the 'Rumples' that I mentioned before. They're so small!! The only significant feature on the horizon of Halley, I thought they were huge mountains! No. Just a small little rumpling of ice over ice over ice, stretching and compressing around some fixed feature below. And we saw the ship from above as well. "Hellooo Shackleton! We'll be there soon!" Then we flew inland, to the Hinge Zone: where the ice shelf meets the mainland. Here we see mountains. Crevasses! Vertical structure! It's glorious. Between all these places streches ice and ice and ice, flat, covered in little patterns of sastrugi. Immense. So expansive. So...so BIG! Following the line of crevasses and mountains of ice, we make our way back to the coast again. I have no idea how; my face is glued to the window. Ice moves so slowly but you can SEE it moving. You can see it flowing, opposing flows meeting and fighting or pulling away and breaking, making crevasses. Huge jaws, openings, cracks in the ice. Movement in three dimensions. This is ice we are living on. It's huge. It's like a snapshot, a still, of wild water. Back at the ocean, we're above Precious Bay. This place has everything: ocean, mountains, penguins..and so close to Halley, the place with none of this. Flat, white ...but we did have a couple of emperor penguins visit. I wonder how they're doing outside today. It's amazing any living things survive here at all! And back to base. There it is. A little, odd, randomly placed collection of structures on steel stilts in the middle of an ice shelf that's moving closer to the edge every day. I don't know how long I'll be here. We're meant to leave any day now. Held captive by the weather. Helps to put some perspective on this thing we call life.Posted by Rhian at 16:26 EST | Comments (4)
American Airlines sucks
I haven't had a lot of luck with air travel of late. My flights always seem to be delayed – and for some reason, when a flight is delayed more than half an hour, it always turns out to be six hours at least. You lose a whole day, your sleep patterns get completly screwed up, and, of course, any vague hint of a bug you might have had getting on to the plane gets turned into a full-on raging cold by the time you've spent 12 hours in a metal tube breathing stale, fifth-hand, dry-as-dust air.
I'm in Argentina now, and my trip down here is a case in point. The kind of people who say "you're lucky" to someone with a terrible injury would probably say the same thing about me: I was on the last plane out of JFK as a major snowstorm was blowing in to New York, and who knows when I might have been able to leave had the flight been cancelled.
That said, however, the American Airlines experience left a very great deal to be desired. On an evening when all flights out of the airport were significantly delayed due to weather, they insisted on boarding us right on time, only to sit at the gate... and sit at the gate... and sit at the gate a bit longer. The announcements from the captain were mumbled, short, and unhelpful: something about engines, power, de-icing, it was not clear at all.
After about an hour, finally a coherent message from the captain. The good news: we were finally able to leave the gate. The bad news: a couple of standby passengers who were meant to be on board turned out not to be, and so their luggage would have to be removed. Of course, they had all the relevant information an hour earlier, when we were waiting around twiddling our thumbs, but somehow failed to act on it until the point when we were hopeful we might finally be able to take off.
Eventually, the bags were found, the plane left the gate, and – I think, nothing was made very clear to us – we started the first phase of de-icing. Apparently there are de-icing "stations" at JFK: this is not a procedure, like refuelling, that can be done at the gate. So various bits of the plane got de-iced, and then we headed off to station number two, where the wings and fuselage would get done. Except we never got there. What with heating and lighting the cabin, and de-icing whatever they de-iced, they'd somehow managed to run out of whatever battery power they needed to actually move the aircraft. So we had to wait for another hour while someone could, in effect, give us a jump-start.
Then, the second phase of de-icing took at least twice as long as it should have, for similar reasons to do with power. First one side of the plane got de-iced, then the other, instead of them both being done at the same time.
More profoundly, the way we were running out of power created a big problem: there now wasn't enough fuel left to get us all to Buenos Aires. The captain had three choices: cancel the flight, which no-one wanted; lose 60 passengers to lighten the load; or refuel in Miami. In the end, the choice was made for him: the crew had spent so long sitting on the ground that under union rules they weren't allowed to work the whole 11 hours to BA. So Miami it was.
It was exactly at this point that things really started to go wrong. Once the flight had been sitting on the tarmac for a certain amount of time, Miami was a certainty. In fact, the pilot more or less admitted we would have to refuel there in one of his earliest announcements, while we were still stuck at the gate. But let's be charitable and say it took them a couple of hours to put two and two together. The plane was meant to leave at 10:20, so by 12:20 American Airlines should have been getting on the phone to Miami, organising a new crew to replace the JFK crew, and generally attempting to ensure that we wouldn't need to spend any more time in Miami than we needed to refuel.
We finally took off, five hours late, at 3:20. The flight was fast and uneventful, and we landed by 5:15. The crew, by this point, was very annoyed: rather than working 22 hours New York – Buenos Aires – New York, they would get paid for only nine or so, for the time spent idling in New York and the flight to Miami. Still, they told us, not to worry: the American Airlines agent would be waiting for us at the gate, along with the replacement crew, and we should be on our way in no time.
Of course, when we get to the gate, there's no agent there: no one in Miami seems to have the foggiest notion what's going on. Eventually, at 6:00, roughly when we were expected to be leaving, an agent arrived, and seemed most surprised to see us at the gate. After a bunch of scrambling around, it's determined that our nine-person crew from JFK is going to be replaced by a five-person crew from Miami – they should be here any time. And, indeed, they all turn up relatively quickly, except for the one who doesn't. An extra crew member must be found, which is likely to take an hour or so, and so at this point it's decided that maybe we should be let out of the airplane after all. We'd been cooped up for eight hours, no one knows how long we'll be stuck in Miami, and the flight on to Buenos Aires is another nine: even American realised that it might not be smart to make a 767 with more than its fair share of small children stay in its seats for something over 18 hours at a stretch.
So we're told that we can stretch our legs for half an hour. No longer will groups of no more than four people at a time be accompanied to the phone booths and back; rather, we can all enjoy the splendours of the American Airlines departure lounge in Miami at our pleasure.
The departure lounge is a pretty grim place, outfitted with little more than a Nathan's hot-dog stand staffed by the surliest people I've ever seen in Miami (although the fact that they were working at 6:00 on a Monday morning might explain that bit). All the same, it's an improvement over the interior of our airplane's fuselage.
Actually, scratch that. The surliest people I've ever seen in Miami weren't the hot-dog vendors, they were the gate Nazis. What no one bothered to tell us when we were deplaning (yes, they really used that word) was that once we were off, they wouldn't let us back on again until they were good and ready. No, they never said why. For me, it was no great hardship: all it meant was that I couldn't read my book, which I'd left safely tucked in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me. But for others, especially one woman who had just got up to make a phone call and who had left two children on board, including a four-year-old, this petty decision had huge consequences.
Everybody was cranky, remember: it was now 7 in the morning, and no one had got much in the way of sleep. An 11-hour flight is pretty hard work at the best of times, but now that another seven or eight hours were being added on to that, most of them spent on board the airplane, people were getting angry. No one at Miami knew anything; the only thing they told us was that they'd simply arrived at the airport at 6:00 and really had no idea what was going on, where the crew was, how many of them there had to be, when we might be taking off, when we might be landing, or anything else.
At this point, understandably, various passengers decided that they'd had enough. They were in Miami, which has many flights down to Buenos Aires each day, and rather than stick around this accursed airplane, they were going to hang out in Florida for a day or so and then, somewhat rested, continue on to Argentina. After all, for the elderly or the very young, an 18-hour plane journey is the last thing you want, and if you can avoid it, you do.
I don't know whether anybody actually got off at Miami, whether their bags had to follow them, or what. No one saw fit to tell us peons what was going on: all we knew was that the 7:00 deadline for us to get back on to the plane had come and gone, and there was no sign of anything happening. Communication was nil. The American staff started playing the sorry-we're-clueless card a bit too often: sorry, I don't know. I don't know anybody who knows. I can't help you.
On the plane, it was the same story: people who'd missed dinner on the grounds that it had been served at 4 in the morning when no one wants to eat were told that no, they couldn't have anything to eat, and that actually, I, your flight attendant, haven't had anything to eat since last night either. Oh, and no, I can't get you immigration cards for Argentina or anything like that, because the JFK crew put them somewhere and we have no idea where. And in general, sorry if you have no service on this flight, but you have to understand: we're very understaffed.
On arriving at Buenos Aires, we just got the standard "welcome to Argentina and thank you for flying American" message: no apology for being eight hours delayed, and certainly no attempt to make things up to us.
This general unhelpful attitude is something I've come across before with American (and I've only flown them on two other occasions). I had an American flight from Los Angeles to New York once, which involved a change at Dallas-Fort Worth. All flights in and out of DFW were delayed for some reason, but we were assured that because everyone was delayed by pretty much the same amount of time, there shouldn't be any difficulty making our connections.
Of course the story changed when we got to DFW. Sorry, your flight to LaGuardia has left already: for noise reasons, planes aren't allowed to land there after a certain time, so it got bumped up the list. Again, a failure of communication from one airport to another: while on the Argentina flight it was New York not communicating with Miami, on the New York flight it was DFW not communicating with Los Angeles. Of course, if we'd known in LA that we wouldn't be getting to New York that evening, we would never have left at all, and rather spent one more night in California, catching an early flight back to New York the following day. But because of information failure, we were stuck in Dallas-Fort Worth overnight.
It got worse, though: American decided/decreed that the reason we were forced to stay in Texas overnight was weather, not general incompetence on its own part, and that therefore they weren't even going to put us up in a hotel. If we liked, they could procure some army-style cots and maybe a blanket or two and we could sleep on the floor of the departure lounge.
Cock-ups, of course, happen on all airlines, through their fault or otherwise. But where other airlines seem to genuinely want to make things better, American seems to be as unhelpful as possible. Virgin once gave me a voucher for being delayed, even though they'd phoned me in advance to tell me that the flight was late and I could turn up a few hours later. Even the low-cost airlines in Europe, like Buzz, or in the US, like JetBlue and SouthWest, are known for their customer service. But American seems to have a completely different mindset.
I think that the problem could well be the aftermath of September 11. American has been inflicting wave after wave of job cuts, and evidently a lot of the lost jobs have been the people coordinating its different operations around the country. I worry, too, that others have been in more vital areas: I don't think it's coincidence that the Rockaway crash happened so soon after September 11, when morale in the airline industry was at its lowest and thousands of jobs had just been cut.
People are nervous about flying these days, and maybe they ought to be, although their reasons for nervousness (war, terrorism) are, I think, misplaced. The chances of an airline passenger being the victim of a terrorist attack are minimal. But the chances of the same passenger falling victim to incompetencies which are a result of downsizing following general nervousness about a terrorist attack are much greater. It's almost as though being scared of a flying is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more people that are scared of flying, the fewer people flying, the more layoffs the airlines need to make, the less safe flying becomes, and the more justified a fear of flying is.
Still, I'm going to continue to fly American, just because of their leg-room. I'm telling you, once we were airborne, I actually managed to stretch out and get some sleep – in economy! That doesn't mean I like them, though.
Posted by Felix at 0:00 EST | Comments (314)
The Oscar nominations
I haven't seen much in the blogosphere over recent days on the subject of the Oscar nominations. I'm a little surprised, since the big news is the way in which New York has triumphed over Los Angeles. Every Best Picture nominee was produced wholly or in part by a New York studio, while no LA-based studio received anywhere near the astonishing number of nominations garnered by Miramax.
The big winner, at least at this stage, is Harvey Weinstein. Whatever happens on March 23, the Miramax honcho has certainly proved himself the master Oscar wrangler. That New Yorker profile is rapidly becoming little more than a historical artifact: nothing succeeds like 40 – count 'em – nominations, including a virtual lock on Best Picture.
Chicago got 13 nominations alone – that's only one less than the all-time record held by Titanic and All About Eve. And while those two films are old-fashioned dramas, Chicago is what the Golden Globes call a "comedy or musical" – something Oscar rarely rewards. Since Annie Hall won in 1978, the only Best Picture which falls into that category has been Shakespeare in Love, in 1999.
But Chicago is in with a good chance for a fair haul of statuettes this time around, including the big one. Unlike Lord of the Rings, which got 13 nominations last year and virtually nothing in the way of actual awards, it doesn't smell of spotty adolescents, and doesn't seek to dazzle with computer-generated imagery. (Titanic used a lot of CGI, but in a relatively subtle way, designed so you wouldn't notice it, rather than so you would.) Chicago is more old-fashioned, dazzling with lots of glitz and look-at-me camerawork.
Moreover, the slow roll-out for Chicago means that by the time Academy members are voting, it's going to be at the height of its box-office success, stuck front and center in the national consciousness, with a gross easily into nine figures. Meanwhile, none of the other nominees (except for Lord of the Rings, of course) will have got anywhere near the critical $100 million mark – something a film really has to achieve if it's going to win Best Picture.
The best comment I've seen about the nominations so far came from Greg Allen, of greg.org. "Chicago is to movies," he said, "what painted cows are to art." It's a great line, but I think what Greg misses is that much the same can be said of most Oscar winners. It's not just the embarrassments like Braveheart or Dances with Wolves which fall into the category of big-but-superficial. Look at Gladiator: if it can win, then surely Chicago can.
And if the Academy is too quick to reward actors who turn to directing (see Braveheart and Dances with Wolves again) it's also quick to reward old theatre hands who are making their way into film (see The English Patient and American Beauty). Chicago is just such a picture, directed by Broadway veteran Rob Marshall, who has never directed a feature film before. The Hours is another, directed by Stephen Daldry.
The fact is, however, that neither Marshall nor Daldry is going to win Best Director. The Academy has been waiting a very long time to give Martin Scorsese his long-awaited and long-deserved Oscar, and this is its opportunity. Scorsese's latest, Gangs of New York, is everything Oscar loves: a big, sprawling, much-hyped labor of love, with star power (DiCaprio, Day-Lewis, Diaz) to die for. It got a very impressive nine nominations, including the bizarre Best Original Screenplay (surely it was adapted from the book, which has a big star on the cover saying "now a major motion picture"). And so there's a chance it'll sweep, and pick up more than a buggins-turn gong for Scorsese. But even if it doesn't, Scorcese is going to get exactly the same award that Al Pacino got in 1993, when he finally got his Oscar for Scent of a Woman, which nobody thought was a particularly good film or a particularly good performance.
The acting awards, on the other hand, are wide open. I have a funny feeling that the Academy is finally tiring of giving Jack Nicholson Oscars, and that this year the award will go to someone else, quite possibly Adrien Brody. My hunch is that the excellent Julianne Moore will win Best Actress, beating out Nicole Kidman. Wouldn't it be wonderful if she won Best Supporting Actress as well? That would really make my evening. It's possible, if Catherine Zeta-Jones and Queen Latifah split the Chicago vote.
The one thing I know for sure is that the second installment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy has precisely zero chance of winning any major award. Anybody who would like to reprise the bet I had with Stefan last year is more than welcome to get in touch!
Posted by Felix at 13:19 EST | Comments (0)
A cruise around the New York blogosphere
You probably didn't notice, but I recently restructured my website. Entries which used to have unwieldly URLs like http://www.felixsalmon.com/mt-blogfiles/archives/felixsalmon/000067.html now have nice simple addresses like http://www.felixsalmon.com/000067.php – a change which has more than simply cosmetic benefits. Now, I can check my referrer log for who loves me and who doesn't.
And it turns out that although I do get a few clickthroughs from friendly people like 2Blowhards and Lockhart Steele, the majority of referrals come from search engines – often search engines which seem to have a very weird idea of what's on my site.
An MSN search for "flashing co-eds" brings my site up as number 4 on the list, and a Hungarian Google search for "grumpy gits" brings felixsalmon.com up in first place, thanks to my sister's use of the phrase in her entry of January 20. (Why Hungarian Google brings me up where US Google doesn't, I have no idea.) There's even a site called mamma.com ("the mother of all search engines") which considers my blog the fifth-best result for someone searching on "look for companies in kuwait and environs".
The problem is, I'm a New York blogger, and I'd much rather have visitors from New York blogs than from people looking for flashing co-eds or companies in the Persian Gulf. The New York blogosphere is particularly vibrant at the moment, especially since the launch of Gawker, a site I described on MemeFirst as "an inside-baseball New York nanopublishing site". (That, in turn, was enough to get MemeFirst its third listing on Gawker: the first linked to a story of mine about Herbert Muschamp, and the second was about tall buildings. Since I'm one of the three editors of MemeFirst, that makes me happy: we could use the traffic.)
It's thanks to Gawker that I rediscovered Supermodels Are Lonelier Than You Think, a wonderful fashionistablog which is running a story today about an "ethical infraction" by W magazine. Now I've written before about the crazy levels to which Americans will go when they get bitten by the "media ethics" bug, but this is ridiculous. I don't know how serious SALTYT is about this, but here's the relevant bit:
Apparently W got a lot of ads from companies using Gisele because it had a giant ed with her -- or maybe vice-versa. To neophytes in the magazine trade: asking advertisers to take advantage of their own model's appearance is sort of OK; to decide upon a model's appearance only by the advertisers contributions is not. It is an ethical infraction.
The whole piece is so crazy on so many levels that one barely knows where to begin. For one thing, Gisele is the hottest model on the planet: I hardly think that W needed any prodding from advertisers to put her on the cover of their bumper March issue. For another thing, part of the reason that Gisele is so hot is precisely because she's doing these scorching spreads for Dior and Dolce & Gabbana. (Although the Dior spread is actually only 6 pages, not 10 as SALTYT reports.) Advertisers spend insane amounts of money on their shoots, and it shows: why do you think Gawker illustrated their story with a picture of the Dior ad, rather than a picture of the W cover? Because the cover, by Ines van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, is simply not in the same league as the Dior ad, which I assume is by Nick Knight.
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Editorial and Advertising: Which
would you buy the magazine for? |
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The editorial story with Gisele is perfectly good, and has some pretty sexy shots (as well as some extremely peculiar ones). But flick on for a few more pages and you get to the 8-page voyeur-porn Dolce & Gabbana sequence, which includes one shot of Gisele pointing a video camera straight at her spread-open crotch while her left breast falls out of her top. There used to be a time when editorial shoots were more daring than advertising: now it's the other way around, and real fashionistas buy magazines much more for the ads than for the edit.
Besides, the whole premise of the SALTYT story is ridiculous. "How came the Vogue issue with Natalia is full of CK ads, while the W issue with Gisele is full of Dior, D&G, Balenciaga?" we're asked. Answer: it ain't. W's D&G and Balenciaga ads (8 pages in total) are buried at the back of the book, while Calvin Klein has 10 pages right at the front, in prime real estate before the first contents page.
In any case, there are much more interesting things to worry about right here on the Lower East Side: namely, That Hotel, as helpfully blogged by Gawker here. For the past year now, a huge 20-story monster has been rising on Rivington Street between Essex and Ludlow, and finally the Wall Street Journal has revealed today what it is to be. The original rumour was that it was going to be a W (hotel, not magazine – really, can't you tell the difference between a hotel and a magazine?) but then people started hearing that actually it was going to be a Standard, or at least owned or operated by Andre Balazs.
The truth? It's going to be a Surface. As in Surface magazine. (Evidently, no, we can't tell the difference between a hotel and a magazine.) Lockhart Steele had his own take on the article up in double-quick time, saying that those $250 rooms will probably be selling for $79 on Orbitz. I doubt it, myself: we're in something of a hotel desert down here, and I think it will do pretty well, both as a trendy high-design destination and as a useful place for the visiting parents of LES yuppies to stay.
What Lockhart missed was this bit of the WSJ article:
Mr. Stallings wanted to build a hotel with larger rooms and panoramic views. But late last year, he met Will Candis, a publicist and former manager of Hotel 17, a one-time welfare hotel in New York that marketed itself as a down-and-out experience for young artist-types.
In other words, the vision for the hotel has been scaled down significantly. Those "larger rooms and panoramic views" are gone; in their place are smallish "studio-style rooms" which are more affordable in the present economic climate and which will be sold not on the strength of their luxuriousness but rather as design destinations with possible marketing tie-in opportunities. Maybe if Hotel (The Mercer) is the Old New York, then Surface (The Hotel) – as the new place is rather cheekily naming itself – is the New New York after all!
Posted by Felix at 18:11 EST | Comments (5)
City of God
At the beginning of City of God, the critically-acclaimed new movie about the slums of Rio de Janeiro, a young thug in the eponymous neighborhood is showing off his footwork to some younger kids. As he kicks a football from foot to foot, the kids count along with him – "11! 12! 13!" – until his friends run up with the news that a gas truck is approaching. He boots the ball up into the air, pulls out a gun, and shoots a hole through it as he turns to run off for the hold-up. The director, Fernando Meirelles, freezes the football in mid-air, a hole bulging out at its top where the bullet escaped along with the compressed air inside.
The scene is shocking: the casual violence and gunplay, the way in which an older hood nonchalantly scuppers a football game by deflating the ball, the conflation of playful sport and serious crime. But guns are everywhere in this film, from the very beginning, when a hood pulls a pistol on a runaway chicken, to the blood-soaked ending. I can't imagine that five minutes pass at any point when we don't see someone brandishing a gun, be it a hardened sociopath or a six-year-old delinquent.
The anti-hero of the movie, Li'l Zé (Leandro Firmino da Hora) starts on his life of crime by committing one of the bloodiest atrocities in Rio de Janeiro history – not an easy task. What's more, he does it just for fun, laughing hysterically at the corpses in front of him, men and women who had already given all their money to his accomplices. Oh, and did I mention he's barely into his teens?
But it's not just Li'l Zé who acts like a character out of some dystopian comic-book. At times, it seems that a scene can't end without another character being killed off, be it by hoods, by the police, by a jealous husband, or just by sheer bad luck. At the beginning, the violence is shocking, even when all that's being shot is a football. By the end, we're numbed senseless, and the climactic all-out running street battle barely registers. Many more people die than in the equivalent scene in, say, Michael Mann's Heat, but the sequence is so predictable that by that point we've given up caring. Boy becomes hood, dies: it's a story we see over and over again, with the only differences in the details. Not one of the hoods escapes, not one is redeemed. Insofar as there's a narrative structure to the film, it exists only to provide enough space to make sure that everybody dies at some point.
Everybody? Not quite. One boy does make it out of the slums and into a proper job, due to a string of incredible coincidences. He's Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), our narrator, who miraculously avoids ever committing a crime, and whose love of taking photos on the beach turns out to be his ticket out of the ghetto. He's the boy who can walk into the City of God with a camera and walk out in one piece, unlike any of the middle-class journalists on the local daily. Armed with his street savvy, he knows where the dirty deals are going to go down, and parlays that knowledge into a magazine cover.
At the end of the film, a new generation of hoods is growing up, plotting its own senseless killings, filling the vacuum left by the dead. We, the audience, meanwhile, are not exactly filled with a missionary zeal to go down to Brazil and save these poor children from their dog-eat-dog upbringings. (They don't even have hot running water, you know!) The omnipresent violence in the film has turned it from an exposé into an exploitation flick, or at best just another sub-Guy Ritchie gangster movie. (It doesn't help that the lead villiain looks astonishingly like one of the big drug dealers in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.) None of the characters are really developed, with the possible exception of the lead, and the female parts are woefully few and underwritten.
Part of the problem comes from the fact that the script was adapted from a sprawling 500-page memoir, covering 30 years in the history of Rio de Janeiro. In order to turn it into a film, it would seem that everything was cut but the most violent parts, giving an impression of a slum so anarchic that it's a wonder anybody survives it at all. The hoods in this film get into arguments with each other occasionally, and after a while one's generally surprised if no one is dead at the end of a disagreement over the relative merits of marijuana and cocaine. The idea that there is a community, a life beyond crime, in the favela is completely lost.
That said, City of God has been a very successful and important film in Brazil. It's brought the plight of the slum-dwellers to the population as a whole, and by telling their stories rather than simply demonising them as evil criminals, it has changed the nature of the debate about how to deal with the country's rampant poverty. For that, it should be praised. The acting, too, is first-rate, mostly from non-professionals plucked from the slums. Would that many Hollywood actors had the naturalism of these kids!
But as an art-house film in cinemas in north America and Europe, City of God is a failure. The director bangs too frequently on the same note; the script has little shape, substance or subtlety; and the dispassionate, documentary-style nature of the filmmaking leaves us unmoved. More worthy than it is good, City of God is the type of film whose subject matter makes it hard to criticise. Everything from the subject matter to the use of untrained actors makes us want to like this film. But as entertainment, it's not up to Hollywood standards, as documentary, it's too cavalier with reality, and and art, it simply lacks depth and beauty.
Posted by Felix at 0:08 EST | Comments (2)
personal: Feb 8th, 2002
I haven't written for a while; the Halley summer season is nearing an end and I've finally been able to start work in the CASLab. Plus, a huge storm is spiralling above us and the weather has turned truly antarctic. I still love it though. Howling winds, blowing snow, the snowscape like sand across a desert, flying past, so dry, not sticking or stopping for anything. Windtails appear, skidoos are more effort than walking, walking is an adventure in itself. The horizon occasionally appears as a darker region in a vaguely horizontal smear across the otherwise white world that starts at your feet and continues around the sky.
All the bizarre Halley rituals start making sense: pointing vehicles to the east, building elevated depot lines, tying things down and marking really obvious huge containers with X's of wood all around. Today, no-one can see much beyond the next post in front of them. It's fantastic. Really wild. I'd love to take more photos (I did get a couple of penguins shivering up here this morning) but that involves carrying a camera and removing gloves. It's hard enough carrying myself and getting all my clothes on in the first place! This is nothing compared to the Winter weather, I know, and that's not putting me off at all. Bring it on! It's wild and white and, well, yes, this IS what I came here for even if it does make doing anything twenty times more complicated.
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| Rhian and friends manhauling equipment to the CASlab |
What can I tell you about this week? I dunno. I feel much more tired writing this than I have for past entries because I've finally started working on the stuff I came here to do. It's a good feeling although it was bliss to have few cares in the world.
Now I get to install machines in the new lab, check flow rates on the pipes, wonder why fans aren't working, build whole systems to pull air out of the snow and capture it in a cannister. It's a far cry from the land of the faeries where I've been these past couple of months but I still enjoy it immensly. And the faeries are still there,– flying past the window at ridiculous speeds with the snow.
I did see some ice crystals last week. Growing on the walls of tunnels that are 20m under the snow surface. These tunnels were first laid on the ground (well, ice shelf) when the base was first built, ten years ago. One of this year's winterers in fact was here at the time, he built Hally V and has come back to see how the place has worn over the years I think! (I think the next Halley web entry will be by him so could be interesting. The most recent was written by the doctor and should be up for your perusal now I think. There's a bit in there about the blimp that involves some blatant plagiarism from my last blog so it'll be easy reading for you..have a look for those of you who want more science (Jim)!
Anyway..these crystals,– it was pure Narnia. Picture the scene. A hatch. A harness. Wearing harness, open hatch, clip onto ladder and open trap door beneath. Start climbing down the ladder. Down and down and down. (Be thankful for harness.) People had told me about the ice crystals so I had my eyes open. Until the power cut (only a litttle one). Lights back on again, eyes wide open, I see tiny crystals covering the walls of this metal tunnel. Very sweet. Snow seems to fall from above. I reach the bottom of the ladder at last and unclip. Look around. A tunnel to the left, a tunnel to the right, and a few rooms going off to the sides. Now this really is adventure story stuff. Famous Five? Scooby Doo? Winnie-The-Pooh? I'm down a tunnel, I wouldn't go as far as calling it a labyrinth of tunnels, but it's exciting anyway. (I went down there because that's where I store the cores of ice drilled from the hole way back when,– remember?Down there it's minus 17 so they're not likely to melt.)
Anyway, here I am, looking for ice crystals. Yes! All around me, tiny little crystals all over the walls. As I walk away from the entrance point, the individual crystals start forming clusters on protruding points like nuts and bolts and joins in the metal. Little ice flowers, perfect symmetry, growing outwards. Like rosettes. But more cubic. Walking further away the flowers start growing into each other and now there are fans pointing towards me, all around me, fans of ice, perfectly straight shards of ice surrounding my head. The tunnel is probably about six foot in diameter.Or was. I'm crouching now. Why am I crouching? Oh my, I'm really having to bend my head down to walk through the tunnel..look around, all around, huge crystals, perfect but crazy and getting longer all the time. Octagonal spirals, cubes, straight edged fans, trapezoids, you name it, they're growing. The occasional weak orange sodium light reminds me of a streetlamp in Narnia.This is Narnia.
Walked through a little door and found myself in another world, a world of snow and crystals underground! Reaching to the edge, one single crystal starts at my finger and reaches past my wrist. How long has it been here? Feels like an age, must be a century a least. But no, only a decade! The continent that freezes time. I forget, the buildings I live in are moving at 2m/day! We are on a moving ice shelf here,- there is no ground, there is no 'here'. Watching the GPS change while you stay still is just wierd. Listening to old-comers returning and exclaiming, "What are the Rumples doing over there? They always used to be to the North!" The Rumples are a fixed feature where sea-ice meets the main land, I think. Or where there is land below the ice. Whatever they are, they don't move and they are most definitely to the north-west.
I have digressed too many times to bother returning. That's my signal to sign off. The ship might sail away from here, with me on it, in as little as two weeks now so I probably won't write until then. In the mean-time I'll be working in the lab, loving the storm and helping the close-down and packing-up of base. The winterers can't wait for us to leave now and us summerers can feel it's time to head North. Even if we could all do with just a little more time...
More from the ship. Love from Antarctica. And love from the SNOW.
Posted by Rhian at 0:59 EST | Comments (2)
The two WTC finalists
The cliché about things designed by committees is going to have to be rethought. The committee in charge of deciding what's going to be built on the World Trade Center site today announced its two finalists – and they were about as bold and visionary as you could get. And it wasn't a committee of avant-garde architects, either: it included representatives from New York City, New York State and even that epitome of unimaginative conservatism, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The decision, it's worth mentioning, was unanimous.
The committee, in fact, has chastened me into taking one of its finalists seriously. When I first saw it, I said that the Think plan for a World Cultural Center was "a crazy idea." Just for good measure, I added that "This is a flight of fancy, it could never happen."
Well,
I was wrong. It turns out that the plan, for all that nothing like it has ever
been seen before, is actually eminently practical. The idea behind the World
Cultural Center is to separate culture from commerce: to build around the footprints
of the World Trade Center, but this time filling the space with theatres and
libraries rather than salarymen and offices.
Two latticework towers, the tallest structures in the world, will rise where the World Trade Center once stood – surrounding, but never touching, the twin towers' footprints. At ground level, there may or may not be reflecting pools, but there will certainly be memorials below grade. High up in the sky, at the points where the planes hit, there will be another memorial.
The innovative ideas in this project are breathtaking: the fact that wind passes straight through the latticework, for instance, allows Think to install wind turbines which will generate enough power to run the whole elevator system. The engineering is extremely solid, and is designed to stay standing even if large chunks are vaporised; furthermore, because the latticework is made of huge steel beams, it's more likely to break anything crashing into it, rather than be broken.
These towers are light, in many senses: open to light and the air, they are tall, but don't cast oppressive shadows. They also keep the towers of light which so touched New Yorkers last year: beams can be sent up through the latticework and up to the heavens, this time exactly where the World Trade Center once stood.
Best of all, this plan, uniquely among the nine shortlisted proposals, would restore the skyline almost immediately. The latticework towers would start going up as soon as their foundations were finished, without having to wait for the New York real estate market to pick up and anchor tenants to be found. The response I've heard most often to the idea of putting towers back on that site is "who would ever want to work there?" – here, you have the towers, but precious few workers.
What's more, even though the concept emphasises the triumph of art over commerce, there's still lots of land left over for offices and retail. In fact, the Think team has kept very much to the spirit of the competition, and simply indicated where the offices are going to go, without even vaguely trying to show what they might look like. Larry Silverstein can build what he likes: because the memorial and the heart of the redesign is concentrated within the area bounded by Greenwich, Fulton, Liberty and West Streets, everything else in the 16-acre site can be very close to New York real estate development as usual.
What that does mean is that this plan, almost uniquely among the leading candidates, has relatively little in the way of parkland or open space. Think has taken city streets and made them vertical: piling buildings (to be designed by a variety of architects) on top of each other rather than alongside each other. The space is up in the sky, not down on the ground. It's a radically new vision for the new century, and New York would be the envy of the world were it to play host to it.
Daniel
Libeskind (I guess I ought to be spelling his name right now he's a finalist:
I always thought it was Liebeskind), on the other hand, is now in the rather
unusual – for him – situation of being the conservative choice.
I loved his plan when he first announced it, and I still do: it will create
one of the world's great public spaces, at the center of which will be a very
powerful memorial descending into the ground.
Just how far the memorial will descend is not entirely clear, however. Many family members appreciated the raw nature of the space, and the fact that the memorial site would be down in the foundations of the towers, 70 feet below ground. But that might be impractical, for engineering reasons: the slurry wall, which is a vital centerpiece of the Libeskind design, was not designed to hold back the Hudson River without heavy foundations on its eastern side. So the base of the memorial might have to be moved up a bit, something Libeskind is fine with.
Either way, the Libeskind design is one of the most coherent and stunning. The passage out from the bottom of the memorial to the top of the Gardens of the World, 1776 feet up in the air, will be a magnificent and moving journey. Moving around the site is intuitive and easy, and the transport hub is extremely impressive.
Choosing between these two designs will not be easy. I strongly urge you to check them both out and let me – and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation – know what you think. Ultimately, however, I think the final choice is going to be determined by how much ambition the public sector has.
The Think design is far from being a waste of money. West Street remains just as it is: for the amount of money that other plans spend on either burying or covering it, Think can build its towers. And in fact, in many respects the two proposals are the same: the site and size of the memorial, what to do with West Street, where to put the transit hub, that sort of thing. As far as land use goes, the decision has pretty much been made. Nevertheless, the Think proposal is a lot more expensive than that of Libeskind, who calls his proposal "bargain basement".
While there might be some private-sector sponsorship of cultural institutions inside the Think latticework towers, they will still have an up-front cost to the public sector of many hundreds of millions of dollars. And while the Think towers would go up very quickly, the Libeskind spire wouldn't rise until Phase III, which could be a decade hence, if it happens at all.
So while my original reaction to the plans was to prefer Libeskind to Think, I've now changed my mind. Libeskind is architecture we know: modern, avant-garde architecture, which can be very good but which isn't going to change the way that people think about what's possible and what buildings can be and represent. The Think plan, on the other hand, turns whole groupings of buildings into a living memorial, with books and theatre and dance and vibrancy, something visible from all over New York, and something which, if it's chosen, will actually get built.
Be bold, I say. Think Think.
Posted by Felix at 23:47 EST | Comments (8)
Space exploration
Anybody with an interest in space exploration has known, pretty much ever since the Columbia first launched in 1981, that the space shuttle was, scientifically speaking, a white elephant. It was designed as a workhorse capable of taking large loads into space on a regular basis, but it never came close to fulfilling that destiny. Desperate to justify the shuttle's existence, NASA started getting its astronauts to perform scientific experiments in space. On the Columbia's last mission, the experiments included taking photos of dust and watching how bugs get on in zero gravity. None of this was interesting or important, and no one even pretended that it was.
So when people say that the space shuttle ought to be scrapped because unmanned space flight is cheaper and more scientifically useful, they're basically doing little more than repeating what's been said for decades. They're also missing the point: the shuttle was never designed primarily as a scientific research device. Whatever scientific knowledge that can be gleaned from spaceflight is an ancillary benefit. I'm reminded of my sister, sunning herself (24 hours a day) in Antarctica right now, on a hugely expensive scientific project which, while useful, is only funded because of the UK's geostrategic claims on the continent. Britain needs a presence there, and scientists are a great way of establishing that presence without any kind of belligerence. Remember that just as most astronauts come from the military, Antarctic bases are usually run by military officers.
The reason why the Columbia disaster was huge news all over the world was not because seven people died, and it was certainly not because the disaster might have marked the end of any project of scientific research. Rather, humanity identifies with the desire to conquer new territories, to explore our world and its environs to the very limit of our abilities. That a man has walked on the moon causes wonder even today; that a man hasn't walked on the moon in decades is evidence of the fact that doing so is of only the most marginal scientific interest. When Columbia broke up on re-entry, the dreams of millions of people around the world crashed back down to earth with it. (Think of when Lady Di died: people mourned not an individual death, so much as everything she stood for.)
But just because the space shuttle is a powerful symbol of America's strength and humanity's quest for the heavens is no reason not to scrap it. The best piece about the shuttle written in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster is a short essay in Time magazine by Gregg Easterbrook, titled The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped. Easterbrook clearly lays out why the shuttle is a flying anachronism, worth billions of dollars to what used to be called the "military-industrial complex" but fundamentally an answer without a question. You want manned space flight? Fine. Safer, cheaper space vehicles could be built if the space shuttle programme were scrapped, but it's got so much political and economic inertia that its abolition and replacement is almost impossible.
It's pretty hard to imagine a bigger waste of money than the space shuttle. Each launch costs half a billion dollars, a hundred times more than the launches were originally meant to cost once the programme was up and running. Its primary purpose is to build the International Space Station, whose own primary purpose is to provide something for the space shuttle to do. The space station has already cost $35 billion; the cost of its crew's bottled water alone is almost half a million dollars a day.
The really annoying thing is that all of this money-burning is actually hindering, not helping, space exploration. If we're interested in exploration at all, what we need is an easy, cheap and safe way of getting into orbit. The shuttle, of course, is none of the above. If the US government were to put its efforts into developing such a transportation system, then it's even possible that the private sector would step in and help take things to the next level. But the space shuttle and the space station are like huge vacuums, sucking up all available government funds, and leaving nothing left over to modernise or rationalise humanity's adventures in space.
The US, it seems, learned nothing from the Challenger disaster in 1986. It kept on running the shuttle programme regardless of its obsolescence, and has essentially spent the last 17 years marching down a dead end. It's time to stop throwing good money after bad, and to start asking why we're doing this at all. The half-finished space station can be kept as a memorial to the hubris of the USA and the avarice of its contractors; the shuttle itself, like the Apollo programme, can then be remembered as something which sparked the imagination of billions rather than as a white elephant with a nasty habit of killing astronauts. The quest to put men into space is noble. The desire to keep the space shuttle flying is not.
Posted by Felix at 16:02 EST | Comments (10)
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