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Blog timeliness (for Terry Teachout)

Back when Slate first launched, its editor, Michael Kinsley, fresh from the New Republic, was still in magazine-metaphor mode. Do you remember his welcome note?

We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to "flip through" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents.
SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays.

Well, the page numbers didn't last long, and neither did the conceit that Slate was "basically a weekly". Without a printing schedule or the US Postal Service to worry about, such things largely cease to have any importance. But still, when bloggers migrate to the web from print media, they often like the idea of a publishing schedule, and get a bit agitated when it goes out of kilter. One of the best new bloggers is the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout, who worried on Tuesday that

For the rest of the week, I'll be posting entries not in my usual exqusitely well-organized magazine-type style (i.e., five or six items posted shortly after midnight), but whenever I can grab a few spare minutes to write and publish something on the fly.

Today, however, he started thinking that even though people read their WSJ first thing in the morning, they might not necessarily want all of Terry Teachout's material then as well:

I'd be interested in knowing whether you prefer the old magazine-style package of early-morning posts or are equally happy with intermittent postings throughout the day, so long as they add up to a daily diet of comparable caloric value. Your thoughts?

Well, my thoughts, Terry, are that the whole point of blogging is to put up material as and when you write it. felixsalmon.com, for instance, is not a "weekly": if you came here today and tried to read everything from the past week, that would come to more than 7,600 words of material – which is way more than anybody wants to read on one website at one time. On the other hand, it's not a "daily": most days it's not updated at all. What I do have is an RSS feed which lets people know when the site's been updated, and which solves all the problems. I get to publish irregularly without worrying that I'm disappointing return visitors who will find nothing new, and my readers get all my content when it is hot off the presses.

Now, that said, RSS is a very young technology, and most people have yet to adopt it. So while weblogs should all have an RSS feed (yes, even yours), it's probably reasonable to go on the assumption that most of your visitors are simply people who have bookmarked your site or followed a link to it.

I can definitely see that the diurnal cycle is a natural one, and that some people might well have a list of weblogs that they check every day. But for these people, it doesn't matter when you post your material: when they come at a certain time of the day, they'll see the last 24 hours' content, read it, and move on.

There is one blogger in particular that I can think of who used to regularly post exactly one piece every day. (Recently, that schedule has changed, because he's been on the road; who knows whether or not he'll return to it.) He might well want to try to post at roughly the same time every day, because his pieces are often very topical, and because he would want a daily visitor to always see something new. But neither of those considerations really apply to you. In fact, posting in a clump just after midnight makes your postings less topical, not more so: you have to save them up in order to post them at a later hour.

I also note that you are quite keen to increase the number of visitors to your site. Well, I can tell you that if someone knows for sure that there won't be any new content, there's no chance they're going to go back a second time. An irregularly-updated weblog, on the other hand, will often have much higher visitor numbers, because people check back when they have a spare minute to see if anything new has appeared. (And a lot of us have a lot of spare minutes, I can tell you: I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the vast majority of blog surfing is conducted by bored office workers.)

What's more, one of the greatest things about blogs in general is that they're much more personal than, say, the Wall Street Journal. Updating a website shortly after midnight every day is not personal: it's mechanical. It also mitigates against the kind of impulsive postings which might not go down in internet history but which help to build community: the things which give your audience an idea of who you are and what makes you tick. "Ohmigod I just heard George Plimpton died," maybe followed by a personal anecdote, is not exactly newspaper material, but it's perfect for a weblog. I put something up on MemeFirst the minute I heard Edward Said died, for instance, which certainly helps to identify the kind of things that the site is interested in.

But it's not just newsy stuff which I'm talking about here. Just a week ago, Virginia Postrel used up her devoted readers' precious bandwidth with a posting asking "Why are the trash cans in hotel rooms so small?". And her devoted readers loved her for it, just like Andrew Sullivan's readers like it when he talks about that bloody beagle of his. That kind of thing – in moderation, of course – helps build a following, but our own self-censorship mechanisms start to kick in if we try to save something like that for posting after midnight. It might be what we're thinking at the time, but it certainly doesn't look, on second reading, like something worth publishing for posterity.

So the upsides to publishing on an as-and-when basis are many: your site stats increase, your readers become more loyal (if only because they visit you more often), your blog becomes more blog-like and less like a daily newspaper column, and it also, when it wants or needs to, becomes more timely. What are the downsides? For you, I'd say the main one would be that blogging would become more of a full-time occupation. At the moment, you might be doing your regular job during the day and then settling down in the evenings to do the blog, maybe after having mulled a number of different possible topics in the back of your head over the course of the day. If you change posting habits then you might find yourself blogging during hours of the day in which you had intended to do something else.

That said, no-one's going to mind if you don't update between the hours of nine and five, or if you do so only very occasionally. Do what works best for you, because that, I can guarantee you, is going to be what works best for your readers. I would only urge you not to sit on blog postings for hours after you've written them, just because you want to wait until a certain hour before you post. I simply cannot see why that does either you or your readers any favours at all.

Posted by Felix at 22:47 EST | Comments (0)

Music videos on DVD

DVD is a great medium: there's a virtually limitless list of films available, they look much better than they do on VHS, and you can do things like freeze-frame much more effectively. But until now, the market has been dominated by the major theatrical distributors. If you want to rent a movie which came out in theaters for a couple of weeks and then bombed, that's easy. Everything else, on the other hand, is almost impossible to find.

There are three types of DVD I've long wished to be able to find, with very little luck. The first is art films, ranging from short pieces by Bill Viola or Bruce Nauman to feature-length films by Andy Warhol or Rebecca Horn. It's understandable why these films would be difficult to find, however: they're sold at extremely high prices in very small editions through art galleries, and a generally available perfect copy would severely dilute the edition.

The second is made-for-TV material, especially documentaries. There are amazing documentaries out there, but most of them appeared once or twice on television and have since become all but impossible to see. Much more effort goes into making a good feature-length documentary than goes into writing a magazine article, but future researchers on any subject are generally confined to the latter, because the television material is stuck, inaccessible and unindexed, in a basement somewhere.

The third is music videos. On a dollars-per-minute basis, these are probably the most expensive films regularly made, and enormous amounts of effort and creativity are put into them. Yet very few make it onto television, and even fewer are available once the single in question is no longer in the shops. Real classics, like Michael Jackson's Thriller or Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer (now there's a song no one would remember if it wasn't for the video) exist largely in our memories these days: we can't rummage around among old DVDs for them in the same way that we can with our music collection.

(I could add a fourth category here, of television commercials, but while they can be very clever and funny, I personally have no particular desire to watch a whole DVD's worth of them.)

I have friends in Los Angeles who are very plugged in to the music-video production scene, and who collect pirate copies of such things in much the same way as people in the art scene have illicit collections of art videos. But these copies are invariably on VHS. It's also possible to get DVDs featuring collections of an individual recording artist's work. The problem with going down that route, of course, is that it's the music which drives the video selection, and not the other way around, meaning that a lot of the videos are very average in quality. (One exception can be found here, and another here).

But now, thanks to Spike Jonze, there's a whole new company, The Director's Label, devoted to releasing the best work of the best music-video directors. Better yet, the first three releases, coming out at the end of October, also happen to be the best three music-video directors working today. The press release, complete with trailers for each of the DVDs, can be found here.

The subject of the first DVD, of course, is Jonze himself. Jonze first appeared on the scene making skateboard videos, but his unique visual imagination soon made him one of the most celebrated and accomplished music-video directors ever. The Beastie Boys started hiring him on a regular basis: they're the kind of artists who really care about making their music videos into self-standing artworks in their own right.

This DVD features all the Jonze classics. The Beastie Boys' Sabotage is a hilarious send-up of 70s cop shows, while Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice is probably the best place in cinematic history to see just how good a dancer Christopher Walken really is. The cover features a still from Wax's California, a slow-motion sequence of a man on fire, running, which once seen is impossible to forget.

Jonze stands apart from the other directors in the series in that he isn't really known for his cutting-edge use of technology. That said, he spent a lot of effort inserting Weezer into the Happy Days TV show for Buddy Holly, and did their Undone video entirely in one take.

The second DVD is Michel Gondry. Gondry has come to fame more recently, largely thanks to Björk, who has used him in half a dozen videos. Their first collaboration was on Human Behaviour, a video which singlehandedly made Gondry's name with a wonderfully skewed fairy tale featuring Björk as a hunter who eventually winds up inside a bear's stomach.

Gondry also directed the wonderful Kylie Minogue video of Come Into My World. Shot in a Parisian suburb, it shows Kylie dancing and skipping around a crossroads again and again – and each time she circles, another Kylie joins her, until there are four Kylies in all. And it's not only Kylie who replicates, it's also the townsfolk, each of whom is a small little story unto themselves. It's the kind of video which can happily be watched over and over again for the dozens of small things you miss the first few times.

But Gondry is more than just a high-tech wizard: consider probably his most celebrated video, for the White Stripes' aggressively low-tech Fell in Love With a Girl. Done entirely in old-fashioned Lego, the very rawness of the animation pefectly echoes the stripped-down nature of the song, and deservedly makes it to the cover of the DVD.

Finally, there's Chris Cunningham. The fact that he's part of this series at all is particularly impressive, because he's considered an artist in his own right, and sells his work through art galleries. His longest and most expensive piece of video art, Flex, is actually featured on this DVD, which bodes well for the wider availability of other artists' work.

If the American Jonze is associated with the Beastie Boys and the Frenchman Gondry is associated with Björk, then the Englishman Cunningham is very much linked with Aphex Twin. There's a problem here, in that Aphex Twin is not particularly commercially successful, which means that Cunningham's videos have even less chance than most of being seen. What's more, Cunningham's vision in his Aphex Twin videos is genuinely shocking, disconcerting, and scary: these aren't simply clever and imaginative works, they're also the kind of thing which can give you nightmares.

So it's Björk who makes it onto the cover of this DVD, since Cunningham's video for her All is Full of Love is probably the most-watched thing he's ever made. It's technically flawless, especially considering the technology which went into it way back in 1999. It's also stunningly beautiful, with a white porcelain Björk robot building another one and falling in love with her.

I can't wait for these DVDs to be released, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing who Jonze will choose to be the next director tapped for a retrospective. Still, between the three DVDs, there's 20 hours of material here, so that should be enough to keep me occupied for the time being.

Posted by Felix at 17:58 EST | Comments (3)

PowerPoint

Who will stick up for PowerPoint? It's always been the subject of low-level grumblings, and Lance Knobel points out that the World Economic Forum, in Davos (usually), has long had a "deep-rooted aversion" to allowing it into presentations. But ever since Edward Tufte came out with his 24-page jeremiad on the subject of slideware generally and PowerPoint specifically, it's got even worse press than usual.

The New York Times chimes in today, with an article centered on Tufte's criticism of the use of PowerPoint within NASA. Tufte points to a PowerPoint presentation which was given to senior managers while the Columbia was still orbiting, on the subject of whether or not the famous piece of foam had caused serious damage.

Among other problems, Mr. Tufte said, a crucial piece of information — that the chunk of foam was hundreds of times larger than anything that had ever been tested — was relegated to the last point on the slide, squeezed into insignificance on a frame that suggested damage to the wing was minor.
The independent board that investigated the Columbia disaster devoted an entire page of its final report last month to Mr. Tufte's analysis. The board wrote that "it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation."
In fact, the board said: "During its investigation, the board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports. The board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA."

In a recent issue of Wired Magazine, Tufte recapitulated his message in a short article, but the editors had a harder time finding anybody who would stand up for the accursed software. They ended up alighting on David Byrne, who's been playing around with PowerPoint for a while now, and who has just released a book and DVD called Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information. The title, of course, is direct nod of the head to Tufte, whose second book is entitled simply Envisioning Information. Byrne's Wired article is whimsical, showing a few slides from PowerPoint presentations he's put together, with sardonic commentary on each:

I began this project making fun of the iconography of PowerPoint, which wasn't hard to do, but soon realized that the pieces were taking on lives of their own. This whirlwind of arrows, pointing everywhere and nowhere -each one color-coded to represent God knows what aspects of growth, market share, or regional trends -ends up capturing the excitement and pleasant confusion of the marketplace, the everyday street, personal relationships, and the simultaneity of multitasking. Does it really do all that? If you imagine you are inside there it does.

Wired magazine, which is now part of the Condé Nast empire, went crazy over Byrne's PowerPoint pieces. They put up huge flat-screen multimedia presentations in the lobby of their magnificent office building in Times Square, and then sponsored a talk between Byrne and Lawrence Weschler at the 92nd Street Y. (They also had a dinner at Lever House and a big after-party in Byrne's honour, but I wasn't invited to those.)

The effect of all this attention was to make Byrne's work seem very important – a groundbreaking new direction in visual art, perhaps, or maybe even an effective counterpoint to Tufte's grumblings. The headline on the article, after all, is "Learning to Love PowerPoint".

But at the 92nd Street Y, it rapidly became apparent that Byrne basically agrees wholeheartedly with everything Tufte is saying. He started off with a series of PowerPoint slides designed expressly to make us laugh at the medium and its limitations, and then went on to explain how it was those very limitations which attracted him to PowerPoint as an artform.

At the unveiling of the pieces in the Condé Nast building, he said, one of the building's tech-support types went up to him and asked why he hadn't created his pieces in Flash rather than PowerPoint, since using Flash would have been so much easier. The answer, Byrne said, was precisely that using PowerPoint was hard and that the software was decidedly buggy: when you run a series of slides together with music in a slideshow, as Byrne does, you can't be entirely sure how the slides are going to morph into each other, or exactly at what point in the show the music is going to kick in. There's an element of chance there: the same presentation, run on a slightly different computer, can create a significantly different result.

I can see the attraction of that kind of thing to an artist, and in fact the best bits of Byrne's slide presentations are precisely the bits where PowerPoint proves buggiest: the jerky dissolves from one frame into another, say, or the bizarre points at which the presentation freezes for no obvious reason. But even Byrne admits that the whole thing is a bit of a con, really: the main reason that some people find the presentations artistically interesting is that moving images combined with music are nearly always compelling enough to hold attention. That's why music videos are so successful. We can't watch one on mute for very long, and much of the music might not be to our taste, but put the two together, and we'll happily watch.

Byrne once described his music as a way of forcing people to listen to his lyrics, and in these works he's doing much the same thing. He uses a Ligeti piece, say, as a way of keeping attention while putting together an allusive series of slides on the subject of phrenology.

In the real world, of course, almost no one uses music in their PowerPoint presentations, and the only sound in the room is usually the presenter droning on monotonously, laboriously reading out every last word on every last slide. And as the NASA investigative board – as well as the journalists covering the story – found out, a lot of the time PowerPoint presentations are simply printed out or emailed in lieu of distributing a conventionally-written report.

Every few months I give out various awards in my guise as the Latin America correspondent for Euromoney, and I get dozens of submissions from banks who think they deserve a gong or two. If I didn't put my foot down on a regular basis, nearly all of these submissions would be in PowerPoint form: 3MB or 4MB files which, if they don't crash my computer completely, certainly slow it down and make reading the submission a painfully laborious process.

Banks like sending PowerPoint submissions because they can insert all manner of pretty corporate logos and country maps, but a lot of what they're doing is simply inertia: "submission" is more or less synonymous with "PowerPoint presentation" these days.

Of course, there should be a world of difference: PowerPoint was never designed to convey information on its own. The most interesting part of Byrne's appearance at the 92nd Street Y, for instance, was not his PowerPoint pieces, but rather the presentation which he put together expressly for the talk. He had a series of slides, some interesting, some funny, but he made sure that they complemented what he was saying, rather than reflecting it. He understands that PowerPoint is a tool which can be used as part of a presentation and that it is emphatically not the same as the presentation itself. In fact, I would go as far as to say that a good PowerPoint presentation (and such things do exist) should be pretty much incomprehensible to anybody seeing only the slides and not listening to what the presenter is saying. (Of course, there are always exceptions.)

The best example of a great PowerPoint presentation that I can find on the web is this one by Lawrence Lessig, which can also be reached from this page if you're having any difficulties with audio or video. But Lessig is not the only high-profile master of the medium: Steve Jobs has long been legendary for his Stevenotes, one of which is online here.

What Lessig and Jobs have in common is that they talk with conviction and enthusiasm for their subject, and give carefully-written speeches which are more or less free-standing. Have a look at Lessig's lectures: they read like speeches, and are clearly written in a very different manner to his academic papers. Those speeches are then enhanced with PowerPoint's visuals, which can be used to drive home a message even as Lessig himself is saying something a bit more subtle.

Unfortunately, the tens of millions of people with PowerPoint generally aren't good speechwriters, and invariably don't have any speechwriters available to construct their presentations for them. So they resort to PowerPoint's helpful content wizard. There's a whole default presentation called "Communicating Bad News", for instance, which includes slides like this.

Never mind the fact that the graphics are appalling, this kind of hand-holding is almost guaranteed to end up producing presentations of astonishing superficiality, with, as Tufte would put it, "a rate of information transfer asymptotically approaching zero".

No content wizard is ever going to be able to make people sit down and work out an interesting and compelling way of communicating information, and no gussied-up graphics are going to turn a bad presentation into a good one. (That's why Keynote, Apple's competition to PowerPoint, is not going to do much good for anyone.) And yet PowerPoint can still, very occasionally, be a powerful tool for enhanced communication. I'd just make a few (bullet) points, with a tip of the hat to Hasan:

• A series of slides will never turn a bad speech into a good one. So start with the speech, and then use the slides to illustrate it, rather than the other way around.
• If you're reading your slides, they have too much information on them.
• Graphs and tables are perfect material for slides. Just remember what you learned in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and avoid Excel or PowerPoint defaults.
• It is not necessary for every slide to be self-explanatory, but, on the other hand, you do not need to go out of your way to explain every slide. The slides and the speech are parallel and complementary information streams: use each to convey the information it's best suited for.

Finally, and most importantly,

• Write out your speech in advance, and think about how it will be received: place yourself in the position of a listener. Jokes are always good, and remember that now you have the extra option of throwing in visual jokes as well as verbal ones. Enjoy yourself, and the chances are that your audience will enjoy themselves too.

Posted by Felix at 14:07 EST | Comments (5)

The WTC backlash

I promise – promise – that this will be absolutely, positively, my last WTC post. This week, anyway. My piece yesterday was in response to some good questions which were asked back in January and which I felt I could take a stab at answering. But today there's a whole new slew of WTC pieces, which are extremely disparaging and skeptical about the Libeskind plan, and which deserve a considered response.

Clay Risen, Greg Allen, and Megan McArdle have all written variations on a theme: basically that the WTC site has been hijacked by the forces of commercialism and is doomed to become a horribly commerical real-estate development with nary a thought for the greater good.

Much of what they write is sheer rhetoric: it's hard to argue with a bald assertion like Risen's statement that "because of the fast-waning public interest in the rebuilding, the entire process is at risk of disaster." But there are a few misconceptions in these pieces which are worth correcting.

Risen, for instance, says that

Last week Westfield, the Australian mall corporation that held the retail rights to the World Trade Center, took a cash settlement and pulled out, throwing a screwball at the rebuilding negotiations.

This is completely topsy-turvey: Westfield had been adamant that it wanted contiguous retail space – it is a mall operator, after all – and that shops on streets were unacceptable. With Westfield's departure, the rebuilding negotiations become a lot easier, not more difficult. It's hard to see how Risen can think otherwise, unless he's so blinded by prior conviction that automatically all news must be bad news.

Risen also says that the Port Authority, the city, and the federal government are at fault for refusing to force Larry Silverstein "into a cash settlement or demanding that he agree to trade for a lease on similar properties elsewhere." He's echoed by McArdle:

In the event that more office space is needed in lower Manhattan, there are other places to put it. There are several underutilized sites in the area, such as the lot which before 9/11 housed a tiny Orthodox Church and a large parking lot, both destroyed in the collapse. If the city wanted to, it could use its power of eminent domain, and an expedited approval process, to give Mr. Silverstein enough land to replace all the office space he lost.

Is it really possible that McArdle hasn't even looked at the plans which she decries as silly and incoherent? The lot she's talking about is smaller than one of the footprints of one of the WTC towers. Each tower had about 4 million square feet of office space, and that was building much taller than the 70 or so stories which is the practical maximum for a new office building. Silverstein would find it very difficult to get a building of much more than 1 million square feet out of that site, and completely impossible to get anywhere near 2 million square feet. What he's entitled to, on the other hand, is 10 million square feet. The kind of land area needed to reach that total is simply not available in Manhattan's business districts, eminent domain or no. The only place it exists is at the WTC site.

Now, Risen's right that, in theory, Silverstein could be bought off with a cash settlement rather than office space. But he doesn't seem to understand the cashflow situation here: far from the taxpayer giving money to Silverstein to go away, Silverstein is actually the central, necessary source of funds for rebuilding the WTC site in the first place. It is Silverstein who held the insurance contracts on the World Trade Center, you see, and without those insurance proceeds, nothing is going to get built on the site at all.

McArdle would like that: she just wants the entire site grassed over, with nothing there at all. It's one of those proposals, a bit like building the Gaudí tower or rebuilding the original towers just as they were, which has a certain amount of conceptual appeal but is completely unrealistic. For one thing, Silverstein has a contractual right to his office space. For another, the Port Authority simply can't operate without the income from the site – and that doesn't mean just the PATH trains, it also means JFK and LaGuardia airports, as well as Brooklyn's ports. The financial cost to New York City and the states of New York and New Jersey would be in the high billions – this is not money which is in any sense available.

McArdle is also unhelpful when it comes to defining exactly what she means by "the site". From what she writes, it would seem to be the 16 acres bounded by Vesey, Church, Liberty and West streets. But the very existence of that site is testament to everything which was bad about 1970s planning: the only urban site in Manhattan which is nearly as big is Rockefeller Center. Steets like Greenwich and Fulton were idiotically destroyed when the World Trade Center was built, and it makes all the sense in the world to bring them back and help restore street life to lower Manhattan. Leaving the entire 16 acres as empty space would be a huge "fuck you" to the residents of Battery Park City and the inhabitants of the World Financial Center, who, trust me, do not appreciate being stuck on the wrong side of a major highway without any real interaction with the rest of the city.

It would also be an act of desperation and unbridled pessimism. McArdle declares that "it seems we can't" have a great new building, without explaining why we can't have a great new building, why Libeskind's plans preclude one, or what buildings in the world actually are great and new. Is there something about Santiago Calatrava she doesn't like? After all, he's been commissioned to design one of the greatest of the new buildings on the site, and certainly the one which virtually all visitors to the area will enter at some point. But no, McArdle is so certain that we can't have something good that she'd rather have nothing at all. For me, that is not the way that New York City, the capital of the world, should behave or believe.

It's also worth pointing out that the area bounded by Greenwich, Fulton, Liberty and West Streets is enormous in and of itself, and that if a large chunk of it is going to be green, then it will be much larger than any other park downtown. A memorial competition is going on right now to design the area in the best possible way, completely untouched by Silverstein or any commercial considerations. The only buildings in that quadrant will be cultural, and will be carefully incorporated into the plan by whomever wins the memorial competition. McArdle can't criticise the winner of the memorial competition, of course, because it hasn't been announced yet, but why not have a little bit of faith that we'll end up with something better than nothing?

Libeskind's plan does lots of things which will be great for New York. It will unify neighborhoods which currently have almost no interaction with each other, from the area south of Liberty Street all the way up, via Battery Park City and Tribeca, to Chinatown. It will provide a crucial new transportation hub, and much-needed new cultural facilities – more than 100 cultural organisations have applied for homes there. It understands that New York City is the ultimate urban environment, and that skyscrapers belong here – and to that end, it will restore the skyline and give this town the tallest building in the world for the ninth or tenth time. It also allows for the construction of new office buildings – something which you'd think would be unexceptionable in New York, but which all the critics seem to consider prima facie deplorable.

Writes Risen:

The rebuilding of the World Trade Center site is of singular importance in the history of America’s urban environment. It is the moment when the world of private development, in the form of Larry Silverstein and his dreams of profit-maximizing skyscrapers, invaded the public realm. It is up to the city’s political leaders, then, to do something before Silverstein’s actions set a precedent.

He's wrong: the whole reason that Silverstein is involved in the World Trade Center rebuilding to begin with is precisely because it was a commercial development. New York City has always had an enormous amount of private development, and it is private development which is responsible for it being one of the greatest cities in the world. The only reason that the site is in the public realm at all is because the Port Authority is a state-owned organisation, and that the destruction of September 11 affected the public as a whole and not just a couple of tall commercial buildings. But to take a 16-acre site in the middle of the USA's third-largest central business district and to use it either for nothing or for purely public works would be lunacy of the highest order.

Posted by Felix at 15:37 EST | Comments (3)

WTC: Your questions answered

Back from a long weekend, there's lots of fabulous new stuff I want to blog about, but first I want to get the last of the WTC stuff off my chest. My last post, on the design revisions, got a lot of inbound links, largely, I think, because the mainstream media isn't giving this story the detailed coverage it deserves. Part of the problem is that the news trickles out slowly, and there's no real news hook to hang a big WTC story on.

Anyway, the excellent World New York linked to me on Thursday, and pointed me back to some questions he'd asked back in January. They're good questions, so I'm going to try to answer them here. He's particularly keen on what he calls the "six-foot view," something he says which seems to have been overlooked in the site plan so far. Never mind what the buildings are going to look like from the Statue of Liberty, he says: what are they going to look like from six feet away?

This is a very good question, and one that no one can answer, largely because none of the buildings have been designed yet. The site plan is basically just that – a master plan for the site as a whole – and only two of the buildings even have architects: Santiago Calatrava for the train station and David Childs for the Freedom Tower. I'm a much bigger fan of Calatrava than I am of Childs, who's responsible for the AOL Time Warner monstrosity currently being constructed at Columbus Circle. But I'm also cautiously optimistic about the six-foot view in general, and can answer some of the questions posed in January.

When you stand a body’s length from the skin of the building, what do you see? What is happening at the street level? Are there windows to peer in? Are there newsstands? Benches? Bike racks?

At street level, the office towers are going to read largely as retail space. The idea is to surround the core of the buildings with shops, which enhance street life. The towers themselves are largely set back from the street, so they'll be very hard to see without craning your neck. Obviously, shops nearly always want as many windows as possible, so yes, there'll be lots of those. And as for street furniture like newsstands, benches and bike racks, I'm sure they'll be there too. Libeskind is adamant that this become a vibrant new residential neighborhood and not a soulless central business district. The absence of things like bike racks is usually a result of no one taking responsibility for such things. In this case, contrariwise, everybody from the Port Authority and the LMDC to the city and state of New York is falling over themselves to make sure that the district works as a pleasant place to live, work, and visit. You're much more likely to get bickering over the kind of bike racks to install than you are to have their necessity overlooked entirely.

Can five tourists walk abreast and still leave room for accelerated New Yorkers watching their Bostonians?

Insofar as this is possible anywhere in Manhattan, it will be possible here. The new streets – Greenwich and Fulton – are first and foremost for pedestrians, with wide sidewalks and lots of trees. There's a lot of greenery, too, on the revamped Liberty Street. Even West Street will be great if it gets buried, although I have to admit I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Are there shops visible from the street—local shops, preferably?

The first part of the question is an easy yes, but the second part is tougher. The WTC site is not going to grow organically like most of the rest of the city: it's going to be built by developers who are going to market it as a hot new retail destination. Westfield America, the mall operator who ran the shops in the World Trade Center, is no longer involved, but someone else will surely take over responsibility for the retail part of the site as a whole. And given that there's going to be 600,000 square feet of retail to fill, I have a feeling that the chain stores we had there before are likely to come back, maybe with a big department store anchor. The new site won't feel like a shopping mall in the way the old one did, but it probably will feel like a shopping mall in the way the Upper West Side does at the moment. I think that a large number of national chain stores is an inevitability, if only because – obviously – there can't be any small local shops who have been there for generations. Judging by the World Financial Center, there might be a few independent restaurants, but the shops are likely to be pretty bland and corporate. Still, Century 21 is still going to be right there on Church Street, and a walk up Fulton Street to Nassau Street will bring you back to the realm of unique New York retail.

Have piss corners been avoided? Piss corners: you know, those uncomfortable places where the grand façades come together like wrinkled wallpaper in a room’s corner, barely hidden, but magnets for dirt, like derelicts and drunks and trash itself, corners which are inevitably doomed to become pissoirs. Have windowless and doorless walls been avoided?

Since virtually all the street frontage is going to be retail, I think you're ok on the piss-corners and blank-walls front. While you do occasionally see rubbish in a storefront's doorway, the kind of thing you're talking about usually happens in business districts without a retail presence.

Have delivery bays and trash areas been made as small as possible, and placed on the least active side of the building? Better, have they been placed inside the building, in a courtyard or basement?

They've been placed underneath the buildings, off a subterranean road which can only be accessed by trucks which pass a special security area to the south of Liberty Street. The solution is pretty much ideal from a street-life perspective: there should be no trucks on Fulton or Greenwich at all.

Have the trees been given room to grow? Or will they forever be saplings, replaced in their tiny basins when they grow too large? What does the space look like at night? Is it dead? Is it safe? Or does it become just another passing-through area for those who have to be there rather than want to be there?

I'm sure the trees have been given room to grow: the LMDC has the best consultants in the world on such matters. At night, the idea is that the area is going to be a cultural center, with a performing arts center, restaurants, and all the other things which will make people want to go there in the evenings, rather than simply get out of there once the work day is over. The financial district always has been pretty bleak at nights and weekends, but I'm hoping the new WTC plan will change all that.

Are the public spaces contiguously external and internal?

Yes: Cortlandt Street, which becomes a pedestrianised internal shopping precinct when it crosses Church Street, is a good example. There are multiple levels to the plan, and a lot of what you call contiguousness between external and internal: for instance, you can walk from the World Financial Center through to the new train station along wide pedestrian pathways which continue all the way up to Broadway and beyond. It's hard to say for sure, because much of the detailed design work hasn't been done yet, but the idea is very much to have a light-filled and pleasant walk around the non-memorial areas of the site which makes it very easy to get to, say, the World Financial Center or the various PATH and subway lines. The 600,000 square feet of retail is on many different levels, from below ground to above it, and no one has any interest in recreating the fluorescent nightmare that was the original shopping mall. The retail presence, indeed, is likely to provide another easy way of getting from the below-ground areas to street level and back, just as you used to be able to walk from the subway to the street through Borders rather than going up the public staircase.

Are the memorial areas level with the street? Are all the public areas entered through wide, welcoming gateways?

The memorial competition is ongoing, and no one will know for sure what it's going to look like until the results are announced. But at the moment, the memorial area is sunk about 30 feet below street level, so that it's separated from the bustle of the street life. The slurry walls and a new waterfall will give it auditory isolation, so that you don't feel like you're in the middle of a city while you're there, and people on the street will probably be able to go about their business without feeling that they're intruding on an important spiritual experience. As for the gateways, again, that's unclear. They won't be there at the beginning, but as the site plan progresses and more of the buildings get built, they should start appearing.

It's certainly the case that architects like thinking big, and that if you're designing the world's highest building you might not spend quite the optimum amount of time thinking about whether people are going to be able to chain their bikes to lampposts. Some people are mistrustful of all grand plans, and are much happier if neighborhoods are just left to develop on their own, but that's impossible in this situation, and the LMDC is surely the next best thing. For the time being, I'm confident that these questions are being asked and that we'll be pleasantly surprised by the results as they begin to appear. The problem is one of timing: since everything can't be constructed at once, what will the streets be like when they first open? My fear is that they'll be a little too pristine, too much like the new piers in the Hudson River Park, without any New York City grittiness. I don't want to see the suburbanisation of downtown New York spread from Battery Park City to the WTC site, but I have to admit I don't have any bright ideas about how to prevent that.

Posted by Felix at 17:16 EST | Comments (2)

The refined WTC site plan

It's been over seven months since Daniel Libeskind was officially chosen as the architect in charge of the World Trade Center site, and a lot of us have been wondering what, if anything, has been going on. Well, today we got our answer: a lot, and it's pretty much all good. Contra Eward Wyatt's alarmist reporting last week, the changes which have been made since February are nearly all for the better, and we have now moved, as Kevin Rampe, the CEO of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said today, "from a great vision to a great plan".

The most important element of the revised plan –I took a photo of the model, which you can click on for a bigger version – is the fact that the fate of the Deutsche Bank building (formerly the Bankers Trust building) is no longer in question. That land is needed and will be taken – negotiations with Deutsche Bank are ongoing, but it was made very clear today that the bank will be forced to sell by eminent domain if necessary. Added to that, a small parcel of land next door, which used to house St Nicholas' Church, faces the same fate.

The new land gives Libeskind a lot more breathing room, opening up an L-shaped parcel which, it turns out, is vital for all manner of reasons. At the moment, the Deutsche Bank building runs all the way from Albany Street to Liberty Street (the southern boundary of the World Trade Center site), obliterating Cedar Street between Greenwich and Washington. In the new plan, the L will be cut the other way, with Cedar Street restored, creating a large park to the south of the World Trade Center Site bounded by Cedar, Greenwich, Liberty and West Streets. Washington Street, which currently runs all the way to Liberty Sreet, will now stop at Cedar.

The plan at the moment – although this can change – is to build a new Saint Nicholas' Church more or less where the old one used to be. Otherwise, however, the new two-block-long site will be largely empty: called Liberty Street Park, it will be a place to sit and relax near the new office towers, close to but not part of the memorial across the street. The really interesting stuff goes on below the new park – both in terms of up-down and in terms of north-south.

For the reintroduction of Cedar Street creates a new city block between Cedar, Greenwich, Washington and Albany, all of which will be taken up with a new tower (Tower 5) housing some 1.7 million square feet of office space. The 10 million square feet of office space which now need to be rebuilt in total can be spread out over much more space, giving the new towers a bit of breathing room, and allowing small floor plates. What that means in practice is that the towers are more commercial, since it's easier to rent out more smaller floors than it is fewer big ones; it also means that they don't read quite so much as a wall of buildings separating the World Trade Center site from the rest of lower Manhattan.

The initial spiralling design remains; indeed, the addition of a fifth tower (which was actually in Libeskind's plans all along, albeit not quite as far south as it is now) only serves to emphasise the visual path along the towers' rooftops, from the 57-storey new building slowly up to the 70-storey office block which makes up the base of the new Freedom Tower. The Freedom Tower (Tower 1) itself remains unchanged in Libeskind's imagining, although there will surely be a lot of negotiating between him and the architect, David Childs. Everybody is adamant, however, that the symbolic 1,776-foot height will remain, as will the off-center spire designed to echo the torch of the Statue of Liberty.

Now that the two towers on the south-east corner of the site can be made much smaller, the revised design has much more freedom to play with their placement on their city blocks. They can now spriral out, away from the recreated Greenwich Street, with Tower 4 taking up the south-west corner of the block between Greenwich, Liberty, Church and Cortlandt Streets.Cortlandt Street actually plays an important role in the new plan: it now extends, as a pedestrian shopping precinct, all the way to Greenwich Street. The narrowed-down Tower 4 leaves a lot of space in the rest of the block for a major retail presence – enough for a big department store, or any other kind of anchor tenant that the new retail developer might want.

The new plan takes full advantage of the fact that Westfield America, who had the rights to run the new retail space, has now pulled out entirely, being bought off, essentially, by the LMDC and the Port Authority. Westfield specialises in mid-Western shopping malls, and was adamant that it wanted large amounts of contiguous retail space much like the dingy mall which was destroyed on September 11. That was never going to happen, but Westfield was always a major thorn in Libeskind's side, and its departure from the scene is a great relief to everybody who has high hopes for this project. Now, a lot of the retail space is arranged vertically rather than horizontally: going down to the concourse level of the new train station, and going up two or three stories from street level.

To the north of Cortlandt Street, Tower 3 is nestled next door to just that train station, basically on the corner of Church and Dey. While Tower 4 sits on Greenwich Street, Tower 3 sits on Church Street, giving a bit more west-east movement to the spriral. Again, there's space for large-floor-plan retail between Greenwich Street and the new tower, which should be easily incorporated into the station, which is being designed by the great Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

The north edge of the train station is the southern edge of the Wedge of Light, which is now actually slightly larger than it was in February. On the other side of this great public plaza, Tower 2 stands right on what should be one of the greatest crossroads in the world: the corner of Fulton and Greenwich, September 11 Place. Because Greenwich Street is not north-south so much as northwest-southeast, Tower 2 is well to the west of Tower 4, and brings the spiral back towards the great Tower 1 over on West Street.

But back to Liberty Street Park: what's going on underneath it is actually more important than what's going on to its south. Office buildings need truck access, you see, and there simply wasn't any way to build secure truck ramps and parking facilities within the confines of the World Trade Center site – especially if the wishes of the families of the September 11 victims were to be upheld, and nothing – not even an underground truck ramp – could be built on the footprints of the Twin Towers. So now Liberty Street Park is essentially a pretty, green roof for a massive truck-security operation which then leads to an underground road which has access to all five towers in a big loop. It's crucially important infrastructure, and an elegant solution to a seemingly intractable problem.

It's very clear that a lot of very driven people are working extremely hard to get a visionary plan built – at least in its initial stages – within a very compressed timeframe of just four years from now. It's also clear that the Port Authority is a central player in this process: while in general increasing the number of cooks tends to spoil the broth, no one's really talking any more about removing the Port Authority from the rebuilding by swapping its World Trade Center land for the land which New York City owns under JFK and LaGuardia airports. Indeed, New York City and Michael Bloomberg seem quite content, at the moment, to take a back seat and let the LMDC and Port Authority do most of the heavy lifting. That's probably wise: the single most important person in the whole scheme remains George Pataki, and there's no point stepping on his toes and telling him how to do things at this stage.

With the departure of Westfield America and the clear determination to take control of the Deutsche Bank site, this plan really looks as though it is actually going to get built. It's expensive, of course, and the chances are that West Street will not be buried underground despite desperate attempts by Libeskind and the LMDC to get the funding to do that. The Freedom Tower will be on West Street, where it makes architectural sense, and not next to the train station, where Larry Silverstein wants it; the rest of the towers, so long as they're basically the right height, shouldn't pose much of a problem.

We have yet to see even the most preliminary ideas of what the memorial might look like, of course, and if that turns out to be a big and ambitious scheme then chunks of the site plan as it presently stands could well change substantially. Especially in the area of the footprints, the present scheme is extremely vague, to give as much freedom as possible to the memorial designers. The exposed slurry wall will certainly remain; the waterfall on the south-east corner of the site probably will; and the rest is completely uncertain.

But even ignorant of what's going to go in the middle, it's clear that New York is going to have a vibrant new downtown, complete with a set of new skyscrapers which actually work – instead of compete – with each other. Anybody who's been to the Toronto Dominion Center knows what can happen when office towers work in unison: it's pure architectural poetry, and elevates the space and the spirit. Today, I'm more confident than ever that such a thing can happen in New York City.

Posted by Felix at 23:30 EST | Comments (16)

Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation is a film about loneliness, featuring two individuals drawn to each other partly by the pull of genuine attraction but mainly by the push of having no other respite from their loneliness. Sofia Coppola, who wrote and directed, tries as hard as possible to maximise the isolation of her two central characters: she holes them up in a featureless luxury hotel in Tokyo; disorients and alienates them with jetlag and the screaming, flashing, neon world outside; confuses them with incomprehensible Japanese culture, and annoys them with dreadful fellow westerners in the hotel.

Most devastatingly, however, Coppola gives both of them wedding rings, and sees to it that their loneliness comes not despite their married status, but because of it.

Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is a young bride with rather too much time on her hands, married to a successful photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) who is so busy that at first he doesn't pick up on her despair. Later, he simply disappears altogether to a photoshoot elsewhere in the country, leaving his wife alone in the Park Hyatt Tokyo. Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a film star with a wife back home who's far to preoccupied with interior decoration and school runs to be able to lend him a sympathetic ear. While she's better than he is at methods of communication – she's a master of the fax and the FedEx package – she's miles away, both physically and emotionally, from hearing his desperate cries.

The hotel itself is a main character in the film, providing comforts and annoyances in equal measure, and it's not clear which is more alienating. The self-propelled curtains and whirring fax machines are bad, and the elliptical trainer with a mind of its own is worse, but the double glazing and enormous bathtubs have a much more deadening effect on anybody who – like the protagonists in this film – is doing little more than hanging around the hotel killing time.

Bob is an American film star who has travelled to Japan in order to pick up an easy $2 million for endorsing Suntory whiskey. He hates himself for selling out, he's repulsed by the Suntory people he has to deal with, he's being forced to stay an extra couple of nights in the hotel so that he can go on a dreadful Japanese talk show, he can't sleep, he can't have any kind of conversation with his wife; hell, he can't even go for a swim in the hotel's pool without having to watch some ridiculous aquasthenics class. It's got to the point where the annoyances are even self-inflicted: he's set his cellphone to the most annoying conceivable ring, maybe on the grounds that feeling angry is better than feeling nothing at all.

Murray's performance is about as good as screen acting gets. His face is one of the most versatile instruments in Hollywood: most of the time, in this film, there's really no need for him to talk at all. Here is a man who can turn a bland advertising slogan into an angry and yet hilarious denouncement of what he has become, filled to bursting with sarcasm and loathing, just by using his eyes. Johansson can't compete, but luckily Coppola doesn't ask her to: the role of Charlotte is a lot softer, and the 18-year-old actress does an excellent job in presenting Murray with a yin to his yang.

It takes a long time for Bob and Charlotte to befriend each other. Both have found a certain measure of miserable solace in their solitude: Bob sits drinking whiskey at the hotel bar, while Charlotte, a Yale philosophy graduate, has been reduced to listening to cheesy cod-philosophical spiritual self-help CDs through world-excluding headphones. When she stumbles across some kind of shinto ceremony, she's reduced to tears by the fact that she feels nothing at all.

But because they have nothing to do and no one else to turn to, Bob and Charlotte end up spending a lot of time together, especially those long sleepless nights in a strange and foreign land. Tokyo, here, is a noisy, colourful, exotic place, somewhere it's nice to be able to have a fellow westerner with whom to escape from your Japanese friends with a predilection for lap dancers or the vapid Hollywood actress singing in the hotel bar. The city is shot, by Lance Acord, with an intensity not seen since The Pillow Book – but here, unlike in the Greenaway film, there's chaotic real life, running in the streets, crazy Japanese youth.

In the midst of all this, something starts to bloom between our protagonists – something precious, fragile and beautifully doomed, like a cherry blossom. Thrust together by circumstance, the friendship moves inexorably in the direction of romance, the very artificiality of the situation intensifying desire while denying any possibility of a real-world relationship. If you could love someone deeply, just for one night, without even having sex, would you? And how would you feel in the morning, when you had to end something which in many ways never even existed in the first place?

Seeing this very state of affairs approaching, might you get drunk and have meaningless sex with someone else? While it was happening, would you say that you never wanted to leave the hotel, the last place on earth you would ever want to be? Watching it receding, would you go for a walk in the city of your fugue-like adventure, tears forming in your eyes? Going back to your wife and children, would you feel impossibly torn between your family and your only hope for happiness?

These beautiful, painful episodes are expertly interspersed by Coppola with hilariously funny set-pieces involving Murray at the height of his comedic abilities. The masseuse, the commercial director, the hotel gym: ask anybody who's seen the film about these scenes and they'll start smiling, if not laughing out loud, just by remembering them.

But the scene which sticks the longest in the mind is the one where Bob watches Charlotte get into the elevator as he's leaving the hotel. Last year, Malcom Gladwell wrote a piece for the New Yorker about facial expressions, explaining that some, such as the one known as action unit 1, can generally only be formed involuntarily. We raise our inner eyebrows all the time, without thinking, when we are unhappy, but only a handful of people can do it deliberately. Woody Allen is one; Bill Murray is another. Allen uses his frontalis, pars medialis to make us laugh; here, Murray uses his to break our hearts. On screen, shot with an unflinching camera, is a picture of emotional paralysis to pierce the soul. It's probably too subtle and art-house a film to garner Murray an Oscar, but there's no doubt he deserves it.

Posted by Felix at 21:17 EST | Comments (70)

Center aisles

Terry Teachout, arts blogger extraordinaire, reported Thursday on Zankel Hall, the new 650-seat auditorium at Carnegie Hall. I would link to its website, but I'm allergic to horrible Flash pages, so I shan't. I was fascinated to read Teachout's piece, which was much more useful than the coverage by Tommasini and Muschamp in the Times. But I was brought up short by one comment:

In the seating setup used at the media preview, the parterre level of the auditorium had no center aisle and each row was about 20 seats long, meaning that latecomers will have to stumble over earlycomers, just as they do in the New York State Theatre. I hope the managers of the hall will try out a center aisle at some point.

Well, I hope they won't – or at least, if they do, that they will decide it was nothing but an unsuccessful experiment. To be sure, bobbing up and down as an earlycomer is a bit annoying, and it would be wonderful if we could all be magically teletransported directly into our seats. But no reputable concert hall will allow latecomers to try to reach their seats once the concert has started, so it doesn't affect the experience of listening to the music. On the other hand, the presence of a center aisle certainly does affect that experience, and it does so adversely.

The main reason, of course, that concert halls don't like center aisles is that they obliterate the best seats in the house as surely as a Robert Moses expressway: this does huge damage to their revenues. But there are very good aesthetic reasons to oppose center aisles as well.

For a concert is more than a group of people listening to musicians – it is equally a group of musicians playing to the public. There's something about the presence of an appreciative audience that brings out the best in a performer, and there's something rather dispiriting about playing to empty space.

This weekend marked the finale of the greatest music festival in the world: the BBC Proms. I've been to hundreds of Proms in my time, and there's no doubt that part of what makes them so great is the audience. Ask any member of the Berlin Philharmonic: they'll tell you that they play better at the Proms because the audience has the perfect combination of rapt attention and enthusiasm. The Albert Hall probably has the worst acoustics of any major concert hall in the world, but it doesn't matter: it's still the site of most of the greatest concert performances I've ever been privileged enough to attend.

Now that which makes the Proms great, audience-wise, cannot really be replicated elsewhere. For one thing, the best seats in the house are also the the cheapest seats in the house – and they're not seats at all, since in the arena, the audience stands. For another, the Albert Hall at full capacity holds some 5,000 people: even the monstrous Carnegie Hall doesn't break the 3,000 barrier. Never will someone at Zankel Hall experience the intense, amazing silence of 5,000 people almost holding their breath as Claudio Abbado lets the final notes of Mahler's Ninth Symphony echo around the circular auditorium, until you're not sure if it's the Berlin Philharmonic's music you're hearing any more or if it's just your memory of it. Neither will a New York concertgoer get caught up in the kind of endless, exilharating applause which follows, the kind of foot-stamping riotousness that continues even once the orchestra has left the stage, and which brings Abbado back, alone, for one final bow.

But at the very least, New York audiences can hope that the best seats in the house exist, and that in a medium-sized venue they will be filled with music enthusiasts rather than corporate junketeers. A center aisle, while not as bad in a concert hall as it is in a theatre, is still a void which puts a damper on any musical performance – not to mention screwing up the acoustics, which are generally designed on the understanding that any sound reaching ground level will be absorbed by soft bodies, rather than bounced back by hard flooring.

And Zankel Hall is going to be home to a very eclectic range of music, from all over the world: we're not just talking chamber orchestras who mainly stare either at their sheet music or at the conductor. Just about all the rest of the music which is going to be performed at Zankel Hall has a much more direct bond between performer and audience: we're moving towards theatre here, not away from it. I'm looking forward to world music gigs at Zankel Hall which follow the lead of the Proms and take the seating out of the parterre entirely: let the audience stand, move and dance! Why should it be that when a musician plays downtown, at Tonic, say, or the Knitting Factory, the audience stands, but when the same person plays uptown, the audience is always seated? And of course, the only thing worse than having an audience sitting down is not having an audience at all – having a whopping great empty space where people should rightly be.

I have not yet been to Zankel Hall, but I am sure that the idea behind its design was to have a relatively intimate shoebox: I'm thinking something along the lines of the original Glyndebourne here. Center aisles destroy intimacy, especially when the auditorium is deeper than it is wide. They should be avoided as much as possible.

Posted by Felix at 15:35 EST | Comments (0)

A Brief History of Elizabeth Spiers

Before Gawker, before ElizabethSpiers.com, before freelance gigs for everybody from the New York Post to Radar, there was Capital Influx. A blog dating back to when Spiers was still a drone working for a venture capital company, Capital Influx was everything you might want from such a site: eclectic, well-written, interesting, personal enough to be compelling yet not confessional enough that it descended into turgid meblogging.

Fancy an interesting exercise? Go read the Capital Influx archives for September 2002, exactly one year ago. It's easy to see what Nick Denton saw in Elizabeth Spiers when he needed an editor for Gawker: a smart, funny, urban voice with wide-ranging interests and an intuitive understanding of the blog medium.

Fancy another interesting exercise? Go read Denton's original manifesto for Gawker, back in December 2002.

Gawker is an online magazine for Manhattan launching in January 2003. It's target audience is the city's media and financial elite. Think of it as the New York Observer, crossed with Jim Romenesko's MediaNews. The publication will be supported by advertising, primarily from real estate brokers and luxury goods retailers.

At the beginning, Gawker, as edited by Spiers, worked pretty much along those lines. The first advertiser was Corcoran, there was a whole category of postings called Real Estate, and a What Is Gawker page was posted, saying that

Current obsessions include but are not limited to, Tina Brown, urban dating rituals, Condé Nastiness, movie grosses, Hamptons gauche, real estate porn, Harvey Weinstein, fantasy skyscrapers, downwardly mobile i-bankers, Eurotrash, extreme sport social climbing, pomp, circumstance, and other matters of weighty import.

Gawker took off quickly, propelled by Denton's media contacts and Spiers's editorial voice, which combined insidery snarkiness with outsidery, well, gawking at the inherent ridiculousness of the Manhattan lifestyle. The best piece came at the very beginning: an interview with an East Village yuppie on the quest for the perfect coke dealer. Spiers simply let this ridiculously entitled Wall Streeter talk into a tape recorder, hanging herself: a perfect piece of journalism. It's a devastating take-down of Manhattan culture, but with only the lightest sprinkling of irony.

Once Gawker was properly up and running, however, things changed. Spiers would issue, say, a 1,500-word report on her trip to the Condé Nast cafeteria, but already the irony was slathered on so thick that she seemed to be laughing at her own persona much more than she was saying anything interesting about either Manhattanites or their titanium gastronomic epicenter.

Then came April 21, the beginning of the end of Gawker as it was originally envisaged. That was the day that Spiers and Denton introduced their new feature, Gawker Stalker. A celebrity sightings service, it was basically a clearing house for which celebs had been seen that day in Manhattan. This was quite a departure: while sightings of Anna Wintour or James Truman might always have made it into Gawker, they would do so because only Manhattanites care about such things: they gave Spiers the opportunity to give people what they wanted while simultaneously pointing out that such a desire is both silly and exclusive. Gawker Stalker, on the other hand, appeals to the kind of people whom Spiers would otherwise ridicule as "baby boomer divorcees who drive matching Astrovans in Sapulpa, Oklahoma".

Come July, Spiers was using up her Gawker vacation days in order to freelance at Page Six, and clearly started seeing herself as a gossip columnist first and foremost. While Gawker's daily gossip roundup was usually entertaining, it still managed to retain a certain amount of ironic distance: isn't it funny that Page Six thinks that Paris Hilton's former chef is newsworthy? But with Gawker Stalker, that distance collapsed: it was reporting sightings of C-list television stars willy-nilly.

Corcoran was gone from the advertising roster at this point, to be replaced by Gawker personals: an irony-free zone leagues away from the "luxury goods retailers" Denton had originally wanted. At the same time, Spiers herself was losing her stranger-in-a-strange-land view of Manhattan as she spent increasing amounts of time with the very media insiders she would formerly ridicule.

In her Gawker bio, Spiers, referring to herself in the third person, writes that

she resigned herself to a lifetime of abject poverty and decided to write professionally. Or maybe she decided to write professionally and in the process, resigned herself to a lifetime of abject poverty. Chicken and egg, really.

This was always annoying, especially the "abject" bit: Spiers was never in abject poverty, and she knew it. She had a great life on the Lower East Side with broadband internet access, an email address at endgameresearch.com, a white-collar job, and no family to support. There was nothing abject about it, especially once the success of Gawker started to accelerate the rate at which freelance gigs came rolling in.

The general flavour of Gawker was changing: movie grosses and real-estate porn were out, breathless announcements of the new editor of the New York Times magazine were in. Gawker was becoming an insider breaking news, rather than an outsider aggregating it and layering a bunch of snark on top.

So when the news broke yesterday that Spiers was likely to take a full-time position at New York magazine, it came as little surprise. Spiers flatters herself that there would be "Conde Nast-wide peals of laughter (or a resounding "fuck you") if I ever send a resume or query letter to Vogue," but in fact she's been much ruder about New York magazine than she has about the Condé Nast flagship.

Of course, such attitude doesn't really hurt one's chances of landing a job: all it does is open Spiers up to charges of hypocrisy if and when she finally does jump ship. But since she'll probably land in some kind of gossip capacity at the magazine, that's the least of the charges that's going to be levelled at her: she's going to have to grow a thick skin very fast.

The past year has been charmed for Elizabeth Spiers: she's managed to parlay a low-paying blogging gig into media celebrity and what looks like a good job with benefits and a healthy expense account. Nick Denton doesn't seem particularly upset about the imminent departure of his star editor: if anything he's proud of acting as a launchpad for her "high-profile media gig". Maybe he's even secretly relieved that his Gawker brand isn't going to be overshadowed by Spiers personally. Gawker could become a bit like Doctor Who: changing principals but remaining essentially the same thing.

Meanwhile, Spiers shall move, onwards and upwards. Or else she'll become just another editorial employee at a New York City magazine. What's unclear is what's going to happen to her blogging. Spiers has been a great blogger for years now, and she obviously loves doing it. Maybe her new employer will put her talent to work on their website; maybe only ElizabethSpiers.com will remain, updating a couple of times a week with the kind of stuff she used to post every day at Capital Influx. It'll be hard to return to pre-Gawker blogging, though: after all, she's a celebrity now.

Posted by Felix at 14:53 EST | Comments (13)

Depuy Canal House

Onwards with the Californification of the Hudson Valley! Last weekend, I visited a small out-of-the-way food fair there, but still the local cheeses were $20 a pound, and you really don't want to know how much the goat sausages cost. I also managed to catch most of a speech on community supported agriculture – which, as far as I can make out, is basically a bunch of arriviste yuppies paying a large sum of money to a local farmer in the hope that he will return their largesse with some nice fresh food at some point later on in the year. Of course the local farmer will have seen where the money is, and will be growing organic produce, which means that he gets to treble or quadruple his prices and the arriviste yuppies have to make do with a couple of heirloom tomatoes and an artisanal apple or two.

CSA is a bit like the global agricultural system writ small. The small Hudson Valley organic farmers stand to large US agribusiness in much the same way as large US agribusiness stands to global agriculture: much more expensive, and looking for subsidies. On a national scale those subsidies come directly from the federal government, while on the local scale they come in the form of free risk capital from guilt-ridden liberals who would never admit to buying groceries at a supermarket. It's a great scheme: if the crop fails, the farmer gets to keep the money, while the investors end up having to spend extra at the supermarket to make up for the veggies that weren't delivered. And the big usnpoken rule is that no one, ever, even thinks about saying that prices might be a little steep. After all, we're Supporting Our Communities here: do you really need that extra few bucks more than the farmer down the road?

So prices continue their steady climb, and Hudson Valley apples will soon be like California wine: perfectly good, to be sure, but insanely expensive. This is what happens when everybody tells you how wonderful you are: you start believing your own clippings, and pretty soon ego becomes the driving force behind local business.

Who has the biggest ego in the Hudson Valley? It's a tough call, but John Novi has to be high up the list. An extraordinariliy talented chef who has run the Depuy Canal House in High Falls since 1969, he likes to cite references to himself as "the Father of New American Cooking," and is well known in the region for both his ego and his prices.

I turned up at the Depuy Canal House on Saturday night, completely oblivious of its reputation: I simply happened to be staying in the town, and needed somewhere to eat. I've stumbled in a similar manner across great restaurants in the past, and it's a fabulous experience: you automatically wildly exceed your expectations, if only because your expectations were so low to start with.

But looking at the menu, which changes daily, was certainly eyebrow-raising. Under the appetizers, for instance, the was something called a SCALLOP and SALMON SOUFFLE UNDERGLASS with MANCHEGO CHEESE (yes, all that weird capitalisation and italicisation was on the menu) which helpfully added that "Underglass is a unique product patented by the executive chef John Novi". (Yes, those quotation marks were on the menu, too.) Turns out that Underglass is not much more than baking your soufflé in glass rather than china, although the dish was very good.

The dish was also $18, for a starter, which gives you an idea of the prices involved. The model menu on the website doesn't have a single main course for less than $32, and even the soups – the cheapest thing you can get – are $14 each. The restaurant also is less than transparent when it comes to pricing: the four course prix fixe for $60 turns out to be equivalent toordering a starter, main course and $10 dessert a la carte, along with and some fruit, bread and salad. Even with $16 starters and $32 mains, you're not saving any money. The seven-course menu for $75 is no bargain either.

Astonishingly, going by anecdote, these prices are actually significantly lower than they were not so long ago, when the prix fixe ranged into the triple digits, and Novi would charge for everything, even bread and butter. But we're still talking high-end Manhattan prices for a restaurant in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.

To be fair, you do get high-end Manhattan food. My duck confit was divine, even if it didn't go particularly well with the calves liver it was paired with, and most of the other dishes were very good. Still, there were weak points: the hors d'oeuvres, which you get automatically as an amuse-bouche if you order a main course, looked great, but tasted a little bland. And the desserts were utterly unimaginative.

And then there was the service. The waitstaff is basically students from the State University of New York working their way through college: professional waiters these are not. They're cocky, and while I'll take friendliness over stuffiness any day, these guys were overly familiar, and didn't provide particularly good service. It would have been fine at a $25-a-head restaurant, but when you can drop that much on a foie gras appetizer, you want a notch or two better. Twice our waiter complained about other diners, which I really didn't appreciate, and at the end of the meal he hovered over me as I worked out how much of a tip to leave. Just in the past week, I've had infinitely better service right here on Rivington Street, both at Schiller's and at 'inoteca.

All that said, Depuy Canal House is a wonderful place to have a blow-out dinner in a beautiful old setting: not only is the 1797 building lovely, but the town of High Falls is gorgeous as well. Afterwards, rather than drive for three hours back to Manhattan, any self-respecting hedonist, high on great food, should retire to a suite at the Mohonk Mountain House, just a few minutes' drive away. I can guarantee you that the food at the hotel can't hold a candle to the stuff here.

Posted by Felix at 17:03 EST | Comments (5)

Topic Magazine

Magazine subscriptions are to households like cars are to roads: no matter how much space or time is available, they always fill it up and then some. Across the country, New Yorkers pile up reproachfully on bedside tables, Foreign Affairs lies unread under a pile of bills, and topical articles of enormous interest in the New York Review of Books grow staler by the day, eventually being tossed into the recycling bin with yesterday's equally-untouched business section of the newspaper. So the last thing that anybody needs is a new journal of ideas filled with fascinating articles and expert voices, a magazine that will only add to the guilt complexes of media junkies across the US and UK.

Tough. It's here, it's called Topic Magazine, and it's a great read. Think of it as a younger, hipper, closer-to-the-streets version of the New York Review of Books, only without the book reviews or topical essays. Hm, that doesn't help much, does it?

At first glace, Topic looks and feels a little bit like The Believer: a squarish, perfect-bound magazine run by a bunch of enthusiastic kids. David Haskell, the editor, has recently moved to Brooklyn on the grounds that New York is the center of the media universe, but even he is unpaid and having to make ends meet by waiting tables.

Topic is really nothing like The Believer at all, however, even if it shares a certain amount of faith in the existence of a large number of young, intelligent readers who are willing to spend roughly $10 an issue on a journal of ideas. For one thing, it is resolutely uninterested in fiction, either as content or as something to be written about. For another, it doesn't have a manifesto or any kind of general editorial voice or vision: the idea is to devote each issue to a certain topic, and then let the experts on that subject take over with interesting and quirky views of their own.

For much the same reason, Topic is really nothing like Granta, the other magazine to which it is frequently compared, largely on the grounds that both were born at Cambridge University. Topic, indeed, isn't moving to New York entirely: it's keeping a large portion of its masthead in Cambridge, in an attempt to ensure that it retains its internationalist outlook and doesn't succumb to the New York worldview.

Topic has lifted Granta's idea of turning every magazine into a theme issue, but again the difference is in the writing: while Granta wants the best writers it can find, Topic is more interested in finding people who might not make a living from writing, but who do know what they're talking about. So far, no one has contributed more than one article to the magazine, and most of the masthead has never been published in it.

The themes of the magazine generally alternate between big and small. The first was War; it was followed by Fantasy, Cities and Fads. Next up are Prison, Food, and Family.

Topic generally does an extremely good job at finding writers who both know a lot about their subject and who have an interesting and unusual take on things. In the Cities issue, for instance, Brian Gallagher descends into New York's subway tunnels to follow the trail of a legendary graffiti artist, while a bit later on the great Alex Garvin has a fascinatingly revisionist take on Robert Moses. And don't expect denouncements of institutional racism in the Prison issue, or profiles of celebrity chefs in Food.

What you should expect from every issue is a very international group of contributors – Africa, for instance, is if anything overrepresented here, which makes for a refreshing change. You should expect articles which present hackneyed topics in refreshing and eye-opening ways, often by people who, after reading their pieces, you're astonished you've never heard of. You should also expect a small amount of photography, printed, in stark contrast to Granta, on paper which actually does it justice.

Visually, Topic is nothing special, although the design is very much a work in progress, and future issues might well have rather more pizzazz. And as a magazine, it's pretty homogenous: there's no front-of-the-book material, and all of the articles seem to hover in the 1,500 to 4,500-word mid-length feature range. But Topic's a quarterly, so it can get away with that sort of thing: you have three months to get through it, after all, before newer issues start arriving and the chances of your ever reading it begin to diminish substantially.

Topic 5: Prisons should be out pretty soon, at a quality newsstand near you. Check it out, and tell me what you think: my guess is that there's a good chance you'll find it well worth ten bucks, and decide to splurge on a $35 subscription. That's $30 less than The Believer, and although you'll get fewer issues, you'll also get no holier-than-thou ads-are-evil philosophy, and you'll get much more food for thought. Assuming, that is, you ever find the time to read it.

Posted by Felix at 15:44 EST | Comments (1)

Schiller's Liquor Bar

(Warning: this posting assumes a pretty detailed knowledge of bars and restaurants on New York's Lower East Side. If you don't either live here or frequently visit Below 14th, large chunks of it might well make very little sense.)

Keith ventures where Brian failed. The opening of Schiller's Liquor Bar marks the second attempted McNally assault on the Lower East Side. The first was Brian's Smith, on First Street, which closed ignominiously not long after opening. It was replaced by Starfoods, which replaced the glitz with grot and was rewarded with enormous popularity. Keith seems to have learned his lesson: he's set the bar for Schiller's extremely low. Main courses hover around the $15 level, and the wine is cheap, in tumblers. You can order Cheap, Decent or Good: $4, $5 and $6 a glass respectively, or $12, $15 and $17 a carafe.

Schiller's website does the ironic slumming thing: it calls Keith McNally a "beauty salon expert" and proclaims itself a "low life bar and restaurant". Evidently, low life includes the likes of Anna Wintour and Nicole Kidman, both of whom were spotted there in its first week. And there's nothing low life about the space, a gorgeous former pharmacy on Rivington Street which has been decked out in trademark McNally mirrors and tiles. Anybody who likes the front room at Pastis will feel immediately at home here.

The menu, however, is almost aggressively unambitious. McNally might be attempting a move away from the French bistro feel of Balthazar or Lucky Strike, but he's replaced it with nothing: the only interesting things on the list are the rotating daily specials, which the kitchen hasn't got around to actually cooking yet. ("We've only been open for a week," apologises the cute and friendly waitress.) The choice at Schiller's is basically what you'd expect on a post-midnight bar menu anywhere else: burgers, steak frites, a toasted cheese sandwich. Um, sorry, a Welsh Rarebit. See? It's not a French bistro: if it were, it would offer a croque monsieur instead.

All of these things are done very well: after setting the bar low, McNally then clears it with oodles of room to spare. But beyond the initial rush of gawkers coming to check out the hot new restaurant, there's nothing to bring anybody from outside the neighborhood back for a return visit. Unless you live here, the Lower East Side is on nobody's way anywhere, and the number of nightlife options you might want to try out before or afterwards is definitely limited compared to what's available in, say, a three-block radius of Pasits. Personally, I'm over the moon that there's a local place to get an excellent burger at 2am, but that's not the sort of thing which is going to turn the corner of Norfolk and Rivington into the hot new buzzy spot.

McNally's made a mistake with the exterior design of the restaurant, which sits on the ground floor of one of the grottier Lower East Side tenement buildings. Schiller's sister restaurants, even when they opened, had a feeling that they'd been there for years: the antiqued mirrors, the old-fashioned menu items, the way they largely blended into their surroundings gave the spaces the feel of the comfy leather armchairs at Pravda. There's a timeless quality to somewhere like Lucky Strike: it really could have been opened at any time in the last 60 years.

With Schiller's, however, McNally has tarted up the tenement out of all recognition, plastering the outside in white subway tile and slapping on a couple of extremely bright neon signs. They're not cute retro neon like at Odeon, either: they're in-your-face shine-all-the-way-to-Houston-Street neon of an intensity utterly unprecedented on the Lower East Side. Katz's this place ain't.

Inside, on the other hand, Schiller's is a warm and friendly place to sit in, and will become even more so if and when the weather ever clears up, the French doors get pulled back and the restaurant starts spilling out on to the pavement. The newspaper racks already feature the requisite European imports, and I'm sure that Schiller's will be a welcome addition to such places as Cafe Lebowitz, Teany and Paul's Boutique for those of us looking for a pleasant place to while away a large chunk of afternoon with a coffee and maybe a friend. I certainly didn't feel rushed in the slightest as I sat at a corner table working my way through a seemingly endless Philip Gourevitch piece on North Korea in the New Yorker. Schiller's is not a huge restaurant in the way that Balthazar is, and the way the tables are curved around the bar means that even when you're the only diner in the place you feel cozy rather than alone.

As for the evening crowd, I'm pretty sure that Schiller's is going to be a bar first and restaurant second, rather like Salt Bar or Essex – or Pravda, for that matter. The small tables are perfect for small groups meeting up for drinks, the bar is well stocked, and if people fancy some garlic shrimp with their cocktails they can always order it.

My guess is that Schiller's is not going to do all that much for Rivington Street, but that it's going to do wonders for Norfolk. The block between Rivington and Delancey now has Schiller's, Tonic and Lansky Lounge, and is going to get another restaurant very soon. Luise, the grotty coffee shop opposite Schiller's, has already revamped itself into something cool and sleek, and there's another excellent coffee place a few doors down the street on the east side. With WD-50 already feeling stale, I have a feeling that Norfolk is going to be the new Clinton. And for those of us who like to sit quietly in the back garden of 1492, that's no bad thing at all.

Posted by Felix at 2:02 EST | Comments (4)

Making money from intellectual property

Most journalists are pretty receptive to arguments about the importance of intellectual property: after all, we make a living producing just that. But at the same time, it's often clear when things go too far. I've yet to hear a cogent defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act, for instance, which was passed by Congress in 1998 basically to ensure that Walt Disney retained copyright over Mickey Mouse, who first appeared in 1928. (Never mind that Walt Disney himself created Mickey from an already-existing out-of-copyright character.)

As I've mentioned on MemeFirst, the best introduction to IP issues I know is a PowerPoint presentation by Lawrence Lessig which I can't recommend highly enough. Listen to the first part, at the very minimum, before he gets all geeky about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

This isn't just about what Dan Gillmor calls our dwindling heritage: old books not being available because the copyright owners won't print them and no one else is allowed to. The IP zealots would have copyright last "forever less a day" (in Jack Valenti's formulation) and would certainly not allow Brazil, say, to manufacture AIDS drugs which neither the sovereign nor its population could conceivably afford to buy from the large pharmaceutical companies. Millions of lives are potentially at stake here, and while Saturday's development at the WTO is a step in the right direction, it's still not clear just how much good it's going to achieve.

What I find interesting are the cases in the middle. We can all agree that someone selling pirate copies of the latest Harry Potter book is doing wrong, whereas posting a couple of clearly-labelled fake ads is not a criminal offense. Marty Schwimmer, the lawyer who helped me out in the Puma case, has his own weblog, and he's much more of an IP zealot than I am: take a look at this entry of his from Friday.

Firstly, Schwimmer praises a Washington Post article about a Herman Miller marketing campaign called Get Real. It's an attempt to get people to buy authentic Herman Miller furniture rather than cheaper knock-offs, and it centers on two designs which Herman Miller has managed to get "trade dress" protection for: the Noguchi coffee table of 1944 and the Eames lounge chair and ottoman of 1956.

"Inferior manufacture means less value to the customer," says Schwimmer, loyally, but I'm not at all sure. Take the table, for instance, which has already been Herman Miller's intellectual property for 59 years. Herman Miller is perfectly free to continue to manufacture this item for as long as there's demand for it, but how much longer should it be able to do so exclusively? After all, part of the attractiveness of the design is its incredible simplicity: two identical pieces of wood, held together by nothing but gravity, with a simple glass top.

The Herman Miller table, according to the Washington Post, has a "signed, 3/4 -inch glass top and 'flawless' finish on the wooden base," but those features are ultimately secondary to the conceptual beauty of the piece's design. I'm sure that Herman Miller puts a lot of effort into getting those wooden base pieces beautifully buffed, but I'm not sure that any number of other companies and individuals couldn't do an equally good job. Why not let the people who want a signed tabletop go to Herman Miller, and allow everybody else to choose among Noguchi tables made by all manner of artisans and cheap importers?

Herman Miller is at its least convincing when it says in its press release that imitation "inhibits future investments in innovation" – while this might conceivably be true in the case of drugs, which can cost billions of dollars to develop, it's hardly true in furniture, where thousands of designers are working every day on new designs. Furniture design is not a capital-intensive business, and large sums of money flowing to the Noguchi estate aren't going to make the design world any more innovative.

Good design should be as accessible as possible, and keeping the Noguchi table at $1,000-or-you-can't-have-it doesn't help that cause in the slightest. Besides, Herman Miller specialises in "authorized reproductions": most of the time, the only real difference between a Herman Miller piece and a high-quality knock-off is that the former is "authorized" and a lot more expensive. Originals – the battered old pieces you see in museums – are another thing entirely. Unless Herman Miller can convincingly explain why these designs should remain its intellectual property forever, I think it's time for the company to stop litigating and start releasing some of the older ones into the public domain.

Schwimmer doesn't stop with the Get Real campaign, however: he then embarks on one of his own, to enact some kind of censorship on the Rocky Mountain News. That newspaper ran a column on Thursday about fake handbags, explaining that while the Louis Vuitton's Takashi Murakami "Alma" style bag goes for $1,030 and has a wait list of 700 people in Denver alone, copies can be found on the internet quite easily.

This will come as no surprise whatsoever to anybody who's done a web search for such a thing: it's very hard to find on louisvuitton.com, impossible to find on eluxury.com, the lvmh online store, and incredibly easy to find if what you're looking for is a copy. But apparently no newspaper should be allowed to report that: Schwimmer seems to think that knock-offs are so illegal that even mentioning them, or saying where they can be found, should be a criminal offense. "I will be surprised if the Rocky Mountain piece stays online past the weekend," he says: "They are likely to hear from LVMH, Burberry or Dooney and Bourke by then."

Does the Rocky Mountain News piece constitute irresponsible journalism? Perhaps. The authors are bringing a great design to a readership that they know could never afford the real thing: I can guarantee you that no one read the article, discovered that there were knock-offs avaialble, took her name off the Louis Vuitton mailing list, and bought a copy on the internet instead. The irony, of course, is that if you want the real thing, the copies make it more, not less, attractive: they're the ultimate arbiter of which designs are the hottest right now.

Of course, advertisers in the Rocky Mountain News would be well within their rights to boycott the Lifestyles section if it continues to run articles like this to which they object. But I see nothing in the article which overrides the newspaper's First Amendment rights to publish it in the first place, and in fact I find it refreshing that something like this can appear in print. There's a lot of hypocrisy in journalism: all that's happening here is that a couple of women are publishing information which they've been telling their friends for months.

We'll see how long the story stays up. But in the mean time, as you've probably noticed, I'm experimenting with a new way of generating revenue from my own intellectual property. This website has been a help to my freelance career: magazines will sometimes approach me after reading what I've written on certain subjects, and it's now a lot easier for prospective employers to get an idea of what my writing is like. But I would like it if the website could actually make money (just a few dollars would be fine) on a stand-alone basis, so I've started running ads down the right-hand side.

The ads are served by Google, and I have no control over what they are: I do not endorse the websites they're advertising, and I do not ask that you visit them. If and when someone clicks on one of the ads, I'll receive a few cents: I'll need about 400 clickthroughs a month to cover my web hosting fees. I'll keep you posted as and when I get any money; I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments box if you find the ads too intrusive. My hope is that they simply make the site look more professional. I don't suppose there's any chance that's the case.

Posted by Felix at 16:41 EST | Comments (5)

American Splendor

I'm not entirely sure what the "dog days of summer" are, but if they exist, then surely these are they. The papers are already running summer-movie post-mortems, but the big, serious autumn films have yet to be released: in the middle, around this Labor Day weekend, lies a dreadful doldrums where nothing of interest seems to be showing at all.

Still, especially on hot, wet and dreary weekend evenings, a lot of people still want to go to the movies. Thus did Michelle and I find ourselves at the almost-sold-out 5:30 showing of American Splendor at the Sunshine. This is a film which is gathering a lot of steam and looks set to do very well: it's already showing in no fewer than seven places in Manhattan alone. Whether that's because it's very good or because everything else is very bad is not clear, however.

Michelle wasn't easily sold on the idea: we wound up basically going by default, our only other option being Northfork at the Screening Room. "I'm not sure I want to see a comic book movie," said Michelle, instantly creating a genre which would probably include The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys and might or might not include Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World as well.

The main nod of the head in American Splendor, however, is to Zwigoff's Crumb, the documentary about the doyen of the underground comics scene. It's fitting, since American Splendor, true to its source material, is just as much documentary as it is feature film.

Paul Giamatti plays Harvey Pekar, the author of American Splendor, the comic book which brought real, working-class life in Cleveland to a world previously characterised by superheroes and adolescent fantasies. Since Pekar is the main character in all of his comics, he's necessarily the main character in the film, as well. And since Pekar-the-comic-book-character is drawn by all manner of different artists, looking very different every time, it's perfectly fine for us to see Pekar-the-actual-man up on screen, once even sharing the frame with Giamatti.

American Splendor (the comic book) purports to tell true stories about real life, but it does so through the curmudgeonly eyes of Pekar. Pekar's wife, Joyce (played in the movie by Hope Davis) is interviewed in the film, and talks of episodes which make it into print only after being shorn of all their upbeat characteristics: the comic strip has a decidedly pessimistic view of life. Pekar is a glass-half-empty kinda guy; he even takes some kind of wry pleasure in Joyce's misapprehension, when they got engaged after knowing each other for barely a week, that he had a sense of humour.

The problem with American Splendor (the film) is that it's constantly torn between being a portrait of Pekar the man and being a representation of Pekar as Pekar sees himself, both in real life and in the comic book. Some of that conflict turns up in the subject matter: while the minutiae of working-class Cleveland existence can make for great material in a comic book devoted to detailed observations, they are much less compelling when they appear on screen. So in the movie, we get a lot of emphasis on Pekar's career as a comic book artist – something which is ultimately peripheral to the comic book itself.

More importantly, the filmmakers clearly don't have faith in the audience to be able to see through an unreliable narrator. For all that Pekar is a miserable old grouch, they want to show us that he actually has a loving wife and adopted daughter, as well as appreciative friends: the film ends with footage of his retirement bash at work, and a horribly saccharine hug with his family. Even if this is a genuine slice of real life and not something created mainly for the cameras, it still violates the spirit of the comic book and of Pekar's outlook on life – which must be the driving force behind creating the film in the first place.

The film uses a lot of comic-book devices, especially in framing its scenes. Sometimes, drawn characters interact with the people on screen; often, comic-book-style headers will announce where we are in the action. Giamatti is shown in profile a lot, with a hangdog expression, looking for all the world like a drawn character as opposed to a three-dimensional person. But the similarities between the original and the adaptation seem to stop at the surface level: deeper down, the filmmakers clearly felt that it would be in some sense helpful if they could provide the objectivity which Pekar's work never even aspired to.

Filming reality, however, means losing a vital part of why the movie was made in the first place. The eureka moment – the point at which Pekar becomes a comic-book writer – is straight out of the pages of cliché: he's standing behind a little old lady at the supermarket who insists on paying with a pile of coupons. It's the kind of observation which was stale back in the 1950s, and it gives us no idea about what it is that really made Pekar's work so popular. And although there are a couple of episodes with Pekar's colleagues which do touch on the appeal of the work, they're rare, crowded out of the picture by the demands of a narrative. Pekar takes up comic-book writing, gains a wife, gets cancer, gains a daughter: the kind of beginning-middle-end which is really pretty dull.

To be fair, a lot of the narrative part of the film is in fact based on a comic book: Our Cancer Year, which was written by Pekar and his wife, thereby getting both of them writing credits on the movie. The book even performs some narrative heavy-lifting of its own: rather than us seeing Pekar at his low point during the treatment, we cut from scenes of Giamatti and see instead the way the book portrays Pekar feeling as though he's got ants crawling under his skin.

But all of the parallel story of the book – which has to do with the 1991 Gulf War – is lost, and in general it seems that the appeal of Pekar and his comics is exactly the thing which has been jettisoned by filmmakers desperate to inject some structure into what is basically unstructured source material. Pekar's a trees man, while the filmmakers are more about forests, and the result is a slightly unhappy neither-one-thing-nor-the-other.

That said, the performances are excellent, and the film is surely infinitely better than other recent attempts at adapting comic book material for the screen. In those cases, however, you could see how the source material would lend itself to Hollywood. In the case of American Splendor, one exits the cinema wondering why, exactly, anybody thought this film was a good idea in the first place.

Posted by Felix at 19:20 EST | Comments (0)

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