October 2003 Archives
Rhian leaves Immingham
It's blogtime again! I'm sailing on the RRS Ernest Shackleton from the UK to Antarctica via Uruguay, Falklands, Signy and South Georgia. We left yesterday and are due to arrive at Halley around Christmas. And that's just the journey to get there! We all have different terms to serve on the base but mine is for 16 months, followed by another month or two to get home, which brings me back to the UK in a year and a half: April 2005. It's not that long really, considering all that I'll see and do along the way, but I know that others in the outside world think I'm crazy. Fair enough. A long as we're all happy with our own lives.
So Felix, my brother (for those of you new to the site), is nagging me for news from Immingham. He's quite right: best to document the lows as well as the highs!
It was actually really exciting for Mum and me as we drove around, dwarfed by Huge Lorries, past lots of Big Ships and Big Cranes next to the Big Train Carrying Coal and other Real Things that I have only ever heard about in history lessons about the Industrial Revolution. It was all so real, and made so much sense compared to the gazillion office jobs out there. If you worked here you could answer the question 'but what do you actually DO all day?' with a clear conscience and simple response. But Immingham itself is fairly barren and grey and I'm sure not at all exciting to a seasoned visitor. So we went out to Grimsby for our final pints on Monday night instead.
There were several delays to the ship's departure meaning that we were summoned for Friday, and then Monday, afternoon but didn't leave until Tuesday at 4pm. The main dissapointment with this, of course, was that no-one was waving us off as we left. As it turned out, that was probably a good thing since it was cold and dark and rainy when we did finally leave and it took an age for us to move from the quayside to the open water. I was glad that my mum wasn't still waving an hour and a half later (as I know she would have been) when we finally got out of the lock.
I had been surprised at my lack of excitement with the lead up to departure. Even when they raised the glang plank my tum was calm. As we pulled away from the concrete wall, however, and saw a gap between Immingham quay and the side of the ship, a surge of excitement flodded through me. WE'RE OFF! WE'VE LEFT! HURRAH! GOODBYE IMMINGHAM,GOODBYE UK* goodbye Mum, waving me from her garden in Cambridge, goodbye Granny, good bye friends and family and 30th birthdays and weddings and babies and other events I'll miss, goodbye shops for my favourite food, goodbye long walks, goodbye anonymity, goodbye phone, goodbye independence. Goodbye everything.
It was exciting, yes, but we have months to enjoy the future and that moment was a mix and a muddle, then it rained and got colder and we all decided that above all, we were glad to be leaving Mingingham.
If you want to email me, leave a comment below and the email response you get will give you my email address. Otherwise, write to rhian(at)felixsalmon(dot)com. NO ATTACHMENTS OR PHOTOS PLEASE!!! I can also get POST if you write to Rhian, Halley Base, Antarctica c/o BAS, Stanley, Falkland Islands, South Atlantic. Look forward to hearing from you! Rhian.
Posted by Rhian at 0:01 EST | Comments (2)
Reporting simple news
Howell Raines, the former editor of the New York times, recently said that the biggest threat to US journalism was news pieces which betray a political point of view, the way things are done in Britain. (The story was reported by the FT, which now requires a subscription to read it; if you have one, you can find it here.)
Raines was brought down by the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg affairs – the two were both star journalists who were deft at purple prose and who therefore got their pieces on the front page without the scrutiny their work deserved. And one of the things which I think Raines should have spent much more time doing – and which his successors ought to be doing as well – is thinking about the very American idea that front-page stories should be long and elaborately written, rather than simply reporting the news.
Look at a front-page story today, about the fact that the official death toll from the World Trade Center attack is now 2,752 rather than 2,792. It's an interesting fact, and I can certainly see why the Times put it on the front page. But once that decision was made, it seems that they needed to gussy it up a lot, since a just-the-facts-maam approach would have been too boring.
The headline – "A New Account of Sept. 11 Loss, With 40 Fewer Souls to Mourn" – is portentious, and the article itself is worse. It starts with this:
The sun inched across a cloudless sky yesterday, the breath of October rustled trees, and the number of people killed in the World Trade Center disaster dropped by 40. Just like that: 40 fewer souls to imagine rising from the dust; 40 fewer people to include in nightly prayers.
Eight hundred and eighty words later, it ends with this sentence: "The fewer the better, perhaps; the fewer the better."
Of course, since the story is so long, it can't all fit on the front page. Most people, it is well known, don't read past the jump, especially when, as in this case, the rest of the story is on an inside page of a completely different section of the newspaper. So the last thing that most people will read of the story is this:
But what do we do with this information — this 2,752, down from 2,792? Do we grieve less? Are we happy? What does it mean?
"The question is, does it make it any less tragic?" said Jonathan Greenspun, the commissioner of the
Five questions, no answers. One assumes that Greenspun goes on to answer his own question, but many of us will provide our own answers – mine would be "yes, about 0.18% less tragic, assuming that the degree of tragedy is proportional to the log of the number of victims".
By that point, we're 268 words into the story – more than enough space to put the whole thing on the front page if you're anybody but the New York Times. But given all that extra space, the writer, Dan Barry, actually contrives to add literary ambiguity to a very simple story. Look at that first sentence again: "the number of people killed in the World Trade Center disaster dropped by 40".
This is the kind of reporting you'd never find in the business section. If the US government thought that the economy grew at 2% in 2002 and then gets new data showing that in fact the real figure is 1%, you'd never find the Times saying that "the 2002 US growth rate fell to 1% from 2%". But in order to accommodate Barry's extravagant riffs, the front page is perfectly happy making it sound as if the number of people killed that day has actually changed.
What's more, Barry is a lazy writer. Most accounts of September 11 start off with a description of the beautiful cloudless sunny day that morning, and so today we have to slog our way through suns inching across equally cloudless skies. It's a completely random and pointless way to begin a feature; it has no place whatsoever in a news article.
This week, the Times appointed its first ombudsman, Daniel Okrent. Speaking to the New York Observer, Okrent said that "I’m not going by whether those people are good journalists, whether they write well." This, I am sure, is a failing, and I would urge Okrent to change his mind.
If Okrent takes his job description this narrowly, he will end up skirting some of the most important questions about how journalism is practiced at the New York Times. At the moment, it is clear, there is very much a culture of overwriting front-page stories. Since a byline on A1 is a key sign of success at any newspaper, there's a strong incentive to follow in the footsteps of Bragg and Blair, writing stories which read like cheap literature rather than simply giving us the who what when why where how. It is that incentive, and not opinions finding their way into news stories, which is the real threat to journalism at the New York Times.
Posted by Felix at 23:02 EST | Comments (4)
Applause between movements
Terry Teachout chimed in yesterday on one of those low-level debates which never seems to get resolved one way or the other: whether it's a good or a bad thing to applaud an orchestra between the movements of a concerto or symphony. Teachout finds a 1959 interview with maestro Pierre Monteux to bolster his case, which is that such applause is "the most natural thing" and that anybody who sneers at it is a "spine-starched prig".
I'm not sure if Teachout realised, but his comment came less than a week after a minor fiasco at the Sydney Symphony. The piece in question was Tchaikovsky's Pathétique, which I'm sure has received more applause between movements than any other symphony ever. (It's got four movements, but the third is the one which ends with huge bangs and crashes.)
Sydney's conductor on that Thursday was Alexander Lazarev, who is firmly in the no-applause camp. When the audience started clapping after the first movement, "he asked the musicians to return the applause, mocking the ignoramuses in the audience," according to a report on the web. The audience had no idea they were being mocked, of course, and when the inevitable thunderous reception greeted the third-movement finale, things got rather out of hand. Lazarev, very pissed off at this point, asked the orchestra to stand up, and some members of the audience took their coats and left, thinking it was all over.
Now I'm sure that Teachout will think that Lazarev's behaviour was abominable, and I would agree with him. Conductors are, of course, within their rights to get angry at rude audiences who let cellphones ring, talk over the music, or decide to leave their mid-row seat in the middle of the performance. Simon Rattle once stopped in the middle of a New York concert to berate noisy concertgoers, earning himself the heartfelt thanks of most present. But ultimately it's the audience which is paying the conductor, and the maestro should not sneer in public at the lack of sophistication of his patrons.
Besides, as Teachout and Monteux point out, it's not only hicks who like to applaud between movements. An increasing number of sophisticated classical music lovers are coming around to their way of thinking, and while standard advice is still to keep schtum, some pretty high-profile symphonies seem fine with the practice.
Certainly, it's easy to think of times when applause would be both warranted and harmless. Teachout uses the image of "obviously excited concertgoers shamefacedly sitting on their hands," while, in the best article I could find on the subject, Stephen Johnson, in the Guardian, cites the end of Mars, the first movement in Holst's Planets suite, during a CBSO performance at the Proms.
Johnson immediately notes, however, that the audience, emboldened by their applause of Mars, felt that once they'd started they couldn't stop, and went on to clap at the end of the second movement, Venus, as well. Venus is a slow and quiet movement, and anybody who was genuinely responding to the performance would have kept their hands by their sides. This is the problem with being too all-inclusive: it inevitably results in the same kind of grade inflation which gives virtually every Broadway show receiving a standing ovation every night. People might start off clapping between movements because the performance demands it, but it takes no time at all before they feel obliged to applaud every movement, whether they liked it or not.
I'm sure that neither Teachout nor Monteux wants a world where there are six breaks for applause during a single performance of the Planets, or, to use Johnson's example, where the conductor has to stop and wait for the clapping to die down 12 times during a single operatic act. Audiences these days can't be trusted only to applaud the good stuff: give them half a chance and they'll cheer the downright mediocre as well. And there's no doubt that too much applause in the middle of a symphony, opera or concerto can definitely break up its drive and flow.
Besides, if people get the idea that it's fine to clap at the end of movements, they'll start clapping at every false ending as well, with disastrous consequences. I'm having visions here of people bursting out enthusiastically half a dozen times within ten minutes at the end of a Haydn symphony: something I'm sure no one thinks is a very good idea.
If asked, then, I'll continue to tell novices to classical music that, in general, one doesn't applaud until the end of the whole piece – and even then, one stays still until either everybody's applauding or the conductor lowers his arms. I won't get annoyed with them if they don't follow my advice, but the fewer people clapping, the more quickly the conductor can get on with playing the music, and the less disruptive the applause is.
On top of all that, of course, there's also the question of respect for your fellow concert-goers, the majority of whom still subscribe to the notion that applause between movements is always wrong. They might be mistaken in their belief, but it's genuinely and firmly held, and you should know that they will be annoyed at you if you clap. It's a bit like splitting infinitives in a newspaper: while you're more than welcome to go ahead and split away, you should be aware that there's a lot of Bufton Tuftons out there who will start fulminating at how ungrammatical you are, and there's no particular reason to gratuitously aggravate them.
So yes, if there's a particularly fabulous aria or movement, and other people are already clapping, and I know I'm not going to make a habit of it, and the mood takes me, then I'll join in the applause. And I'll always clap at the end of a performance: I vividly recall being completely flummoxed once after a long ovation following a concert of Rachmaninov's Vespers, when the woman to my left turned to me, disgusted, and said that no one should have clapped, because it's a religious piece. It's certainly possible to be too high-minded, and I do disapprove of such an exclusive and unhelpful attitude. Equally, however, I don't think that encouraging more intra-performance applause at concerts is a very good idea.
Posted by Felix at 16:33 EST | Comments (5)
Credit counselling services
The New York Times fronts a story today on not-for-profit credit-counselling services. Here's the nut graf, which comes very high up for a NYT piece:
The investigation could jeopardize the agencies' nonprofit status and upend the industry just as a proposed change in federal bankruptcy law stands to steer many thousands more people to debt counseling. As nonprofit concerns, the agencies are now exempt from dozens of state and federal regulations.
The investigation is long overdue. The industry is huge, and almost certainly achieves more harm than good. While it's necessary in theory, in practice it's a disaster, and needs a radical shake-up.
A lot of the blame for the present state of affairs can be laid at the feet of the people who first decided that these companies could be eligible for non-profit status. Of course, a lot of very rich and successful institutions have such a status, like Harvard University or the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. But in the case of the credit counselling services, the people who benefit are basically only the owners and senior employees. Meanwhile, as nonprofits, the services are essentially unregulated.
It shouldn't be like that, of course. The level of consumer debt in the US is skyrocketing, helped along by record-low interest rates and a negative or extremely low savings ratio. At the same time, the economy is decelerating sharply from the 1990s boom. The entirely predictable result is that the number of credit cards which are 30 days past due is at an all-time high, while – more seriously – the number of home equity loans in default has doubled in just nine months.
The interesting thing is that credit-card defaults, while high, don't seem to be accelerating. I put that down to two factors: for one, credit-card companies, which went after people lower and lower down the credit spectrum during the boom years, are now becoming increasingly picky about their customers and how much money they'll lend them. Second, when credit-card debts start spiralling out of control, consumers are likely to take out some kind of home equity loan in order to pay them off and bring down interest payments. In effect, they're jumping out of the frying pan of credit-card debt and into the fire of potentially losing their house.
Such consumers are easy targets for the more unscrupulous end of the financial-services industry. The IRS's official warning gives a good idea of what many such firms get up to:
Beware of high fees or required “voluntary contributions” that, with high monthly service charges, may add to your debt and defeat your efforts to pay your bills. It is illegal to represent that negative information, such as bankruptcy, can be removed from your credit report. Promises to “help you get out of debt easily” are a red flag.
In the New York Times article, one of the biggest such services, AmeriDebt, justifies its practice of asking for a 3% "voluntary contribution" from its clients. Yes, that's 3% of their entire debt, upfront, on top of any recurring fees they might charge, which start at $20 a month. AmeriDebt says that it'll happily do the same job without the voluntary contribution, but if there's one thing that nearly all of these services have in common, it's a lack of transparency.
The IRS encourages prospective clients of such firms to ensure that any deals they sign include the company's name and address: it's often very difficult to find out exactly who you're dealing with. Companies change their name frequently, and payments must be put in the mail to a post-office box somewhere: no easily-traceable automatic-payment plans or direct debits allowed. If you're trying to sign up, the toll-free number will put you straight through to a sales agent, but if you have any questions about where your money is going once you're already on the plan, expect interminable hold times and less-than-forthcoming customer service representatives.
In an ideal world, these companies would have good relations with major creditors, such as credit-card issuers, cellphone companies, and the like. They could then negotiate deals with them much more easily than an individual could: "Hi, we've put this person on a strict payment plan and they've torn up all their credit cards. In return for a much higher probability of payment in full, can you reduce your interest rates to something slightly less eye-watering?"
In practice, while that happens in a handful of cases, it's very unlikely to happen with all of an individual's creditors, and in fact many are downright hostile to the prospect of dealing with a credit service rather than the individual. It's not uncommon for one or two creditors to fall through the cracks, with the debtor falsely believing that the credit counselling company is taking care of the debt – and that can devastate someone's credit report.
What's more, most of these services are very bad at providing any kind of statement. The idea is that you send them one monthly payment, which they then divvy up and send out to all your different creditors. And since the individual credit card companies still have you as a client, you can usually see what's going on with those debts. But a universal statement, with all the debts and payments clearly listed along with any extra fees charged on top, is extremely rare.
Worst of all, many of these non-profit organisations are run by or closely associated with the owners of predatory lending companies. Rather than pay off umpteen different bills and credit cards, they say, why not simply consolidate all your debt into one simple loan? Inevitably, there will be an upfront fee, and the rate of interest probably won't be very clear, and any property assets will be at risk. But since the lender was referred by a non-profit credit service, a lot of people's defenses are down, and they just take what they're offered without shopping around.
The fact is, that most of these services provide very little in the way of value beyond allowing their clients to make only one payment a month rather than many. Needless to say, the total amount of money spent per month doesn't usually go down, and sometimes goes up, thanks to the fees charged. What the clients really need is to talk to a financial adviser who can lay out their options, from simple household budgeting to declaring bankruptcy, in an impartial manner. Local community-service centers are good at that sort of thing; faceless billion-dollar nonprofits are not. Unless these companies clean up their act and agree to be regulated by someone like the SEC, they shouldn't just lose their nonprofit status: they should lose their right to exist altogether.
Posted by Felix at 16:55 EST | Comments (3)
2 Columbus Circle
Sunday is clearly the day for long-windedness in the New York Times. The paper leads with a 9,500-word investigation of the Lackawanna terror case (don't ask me), complete with a 1,300-word kicker. And on the op-ed page, we're subjected to 2,300 barely-coherent words by Tom Wolfe on the subject of 2 Columbus Circle, complete with a note mentioning that this screed is only "the first of two installments". (Update: The other shoe dropped today, Monday.)
Tom Wolfe, of course, is the author of From Bauhaus to Our House, the favourite architecture book of the kind of people who have only ever read one architecture book, or of people who don't know much about art but know what they like. Still, the book is deservedly popular: while Wolfe can be wrong-headed a lot of the time, he's also a great writer, and lots of fun to read.
He was a great writer, anyway. Back in the day, he could construct 265-word sentences which were masterpieces of virtuoso journalism. Nowadays, as his op-ed shows, he seems to be of the opinion that any 265-word sentence of his must, perforce, be a masterpiece of virtuoso journalism, with the result that he rapidly degenerates into into little more than "coherently challenged" babble, to use his own favourite term of abuse.
Wolfe is also much better when attacking architects than when defending them. The point of the op-ed, one assumes, is for Wolfe to throw his weight behind the preservationists seeking to restore Edward Durell Stone's 2 Columbus Circle and keep it more or less as is, albeit both occupied and safe – neither of which it is at the moment. The alternative, against which Wolfe spends much time wailing, is a plan by Brad Cloepfil to basically rebuild the structure as a new home for the Museum of Arts and Design, completely revamping it inside and out.
Here's the building, as it looked when it was first built, as it looks today, and as it is proposed to look after the refit.
Clearly, Stone's gleaming white marble isn't gleaming any longer. But the fact is that the building was never all that good, and the arguments for its preservation are generally pretty weak. Here's Robert A M Stern, of the Yale architecture school:
New York is where orthodoxies are challenged by new ideas. Two Columbus Circle was just such a challenge, and it clearly challenges us to this day. Its provocations are as important now as ever. It was and is a pot of paint flung in the face of the high Modernist establishment. For this reason, if no other, Two Columbus Circle must be preserved intact for future generations to enjoy, consider, debate, and learn from.
The building must be preserved, if only because it's provocative? This is the height of silliness. Preserving great buildings, and even merely good buildings, is one thing. But preserving provocative buildings is another thing entirely.
The fact is, the kind of people who love From Bauhaus to Our House are exactly the sort of people who look at 2 Columbus Circle and consider it a hideous eyesore. This building is one of the few things on which both die-hard Modernists and most anti-Modernist laymen can agree: very, very few people actually like it.
What's not obvious from the photographs is the way that 2 Columbus Circle makes you feel when you look at it in real life. It's a tall building, even if it's not as tall as the skyscrapers which surround it, and the vast majority of its height is simply a vast expanse of crumbling blank stone, with no features at all, redeeming or otherwise. The lack of windows gives it the feel of a prison: you imagine yourself stuck inside, unable to look out. It is an exercise in claustrophobia, and the new design constitutes a vast improvement.
Wolfe's op-ed appeared on the weekend of Open House New York, the annual and incredibly popular event where interesting buildings around the city are opened up to the public. I went to a few, and would loved to have gone to more, except a lot of them were booked out very early and in any case I was busy on Saturday with a wedding to go to.
But what is clear from the popularity of OHNY is that New Yorkers have a genuine enthusiasm for new architecture, and that there's lots of very cool and interesting stuff going on at the moment. Now New Yorkers love old architecture as well: some of the best bits of OHNY are where they open up an old lighthouse in Fort Washington Park, or the Tweed Courthouse, or the Washington Square arch.
Still, I'm pretty sure that the mood in the city these days is that brand-new buildings are usually pretty good. Places like the Hayden Planetarium are instant classics, and although there are certainly some dull office buildings under construction, the knee-jerk public reaction against nearly all new architecture is a thing of the past. Think to yourself: if you heard that your local train station or airport was being rebuilt, would you be happy or sad? Happy, I think: such projects are nearly always improvements, these days, in contrast to the days when the old Penn Station could be razed to make way for Madison Square Garden.
It takes a particular type of pessimist to look at something like 2 Columbus Circle and decide that although it has many failings, it must surely be better to preserve it than attempt to create something better. To have that mindset you basically have to work from the assumption that nearly all new architecture is crap, and that as a rule the past is going to be better than the future, architecturally speaking. That kind of defeatist attitude is not the kind of thing which built the Chrysler Building, and it's frankly unNew Yorkish. Wolfe should retreat to his wood-panelled study on the Upper East Side, and leave the rest of the city to the people who will inherit it with enthusiasm.
Posted by Felix at 2:07 EST | Comments (13)
Schwarzenegger wins
In the end, the election wasn't a farce. Everyone thought that Arnold Schwarzenegger would win with fewer votes than Grey Davis, and that didn't happen. In fact, it looks as though he got an outright majority of the votes, despite running against more than 130 opponents, a large number of whom were members of his own political party. An impressive showing by any measure.
The knee-jerk reaction across the pond (and, indeed, in many liberal enclaves in the US) will be to start talking about how the US is a laughingstock once again – this crazy so-called democracy where the president got fewer votes than his opponent, where the election was decided by the Supreme Court, where Clint Eastwood and Sonny Bono and Jesse Ventura and now Arnold Schwarzenegger win elective office.
But in fact there were good reasons to vote for Schwarzenegger, and a lot of those who bemoan the fact that Davis wasn't allowed to serve out his term are the same people who would desperately love to see the same fate befall Hugo Chavez, in Venezuela.
For me, though, the most interesting parallel is with Argentina. Schwarzenegger was clearly the beneficiary of a general disgust with politics as usual – a sentiment which will resonate strongly with the vast majority of Argentines. In California, as in Argentina, politics is dominated by two enormous political parties, both of whom are desperately constrained due to their debts to special interests. And in California, as in Argentina, the voters shunned a once-in-a-generation opportunity to elect an independent candidate.
I'm not saying that Arianna Huffington would have made a better governor of California than Arnold Schwarzenegger, although it's entirely possible. And I'm not saying that Elisa Carrio would have made a better president of Argentina than Nestor Kirchner. But I am saying that both of them got comprehensively steamrollered by political machines which were, by all accounts, completely discredited.
The people who voted for Schwarzenegger yesterday are the same people who voted for John McCain the Republican primaries in 2000, or who are going to vote for Howard Dean in the forthcoming Democratic primaries. They're protesting against the status quo by voting for candidates who talk tough yet still stand firmly within the two-party system, and who will do nothing to change it. For the two-party system is much bigger, and much stronger, than any candidate, and it will outlast them all.
That, of course, is a Very Bad Thing. The special interests will continue to rule Sacramento (and Washington, for that matter), and the prospects for meaningful reform are distant at best. But the irony is that the alternative is even more chilling: the only thing worse than strong political parties is weak political parties. A large part of the problem in Venezuela is that Chavez used popular hatred of the political parties to tear them down and construct a new system where there basically isn't any coherent political opposition to him at all. And one look at the list of Italian prime ministers since the war tells you everything you need to know about a system where everybody spends their entire time fighting everybody else: after decades of chaos, you end up electing a spectacularly corrupt businessman who is so rich he can buy an entire country.
The ideal, I think is somewhere in between. I'm no expert on Canadian politics, but I have a feeling that they have it pretty much right. An entire political party (the Conservatives) can self-destruct and it doesn't seem to matter very much; meanwhile, for all the craziness and shouting, Quebec is still, somehow, part of the country.
Plus, of course, Canada had the most dapper premier that north America has ever had. I can't imagine Arnold in a tuxedo, doing the tango.
Posted by Felix at 1:23 EST | Comments (1)
Blogging is hard
Publishing on the internet has never been as easy as the technoütopians would have it. (This week, I've decided to maximise my use of the diaeresis: see this MemeFirst entry if you want to know why.) And after fiddling around with felixsalmon.com for a few hours yesterday, I'm more pessimistic than ever about the prospects for the web becoming the great democratic leveller which it looked set to become when I first got online.
The problem is that every time a difficulty is solved and the road onto the web becomes easier, a new development takes place somewhere else which only serves to make life more complicated than it was before. What used to be an easy publishing system with high barriers to entry is now a much more complex publishing system with lower barriers to entry. As a result, web publishing remains largely confined to the overeducated urban elite – precisely the population which had the greatest access to more old-fashioned media.
While I was tweaking this site (more on that later), Oliver Willis was at BloggerCon in Boston, and had this to say:
During one of the Saturday sessions a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as "utopia". Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don't want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities. I'm not whining about that, but simply stating the fact that a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males does diddly to change the real world.
I don't think Oliver is right: there are many technologies which are mainly the pursuit of upper middle class white males and which have undoubtedly changed the world. Space travel is one obvious example. But he does make the excellent point that blogging is essentially giving a voice to the kind of people who were not exactly muzzled in the past.
The depressing thing is that the barriers to web publishing at this point are not cultural so much as they are technical. Most people are capable of sending an email or posting on some kind of web-based bulletin board. Most people are not capable of setting up a halfways-decent weblog. I'm hoping TypePad (which officially launched today) will help change this, but the fact remains that if you want to do any real messing about with how your website is put together, you need to essentially become a coder.
When I first started browsing the web, on a Sun workstation running Mosaic, it was really incredibly easy to understand. You would write text, basically, and then put <h> tags around headlines, <strong> or <em> tags around things you wanted to emphasise, and so on. Images were a little bit harder, but not much. You basically just marked up your text to show whch elements were which, and let the browser do the rest.
But it wasn't long before the designers got in on the act. They didn't care about making sure that text was correctly marked up – they cared about what it looked like when it was rendered in a browser. From demand came supply, and it wasn't long before rogue tags like <b>, <i> and, of course, the dreaded <flash> started turning up in HTML. These things said nothing about the text itself, and attempted instead to dictate how it was seen by the reader.
Now while all these developments were OK in and of themselves, the problem was that most websites wanted to be one step ahead of everybody else. The browser makers, led by Netscape and Microsoft, rushed to support all manner of increasingly recondite code, and web pages became more and more complex, to the point where the vast majority of commercial websites are completely incomprehensible when viewed as source code. A lot of the markup was automatically generated by software like FrontPage which generally erred on the side of specificity rather than simplicity, with the inevitable bloatful consequences. And we've long since passed the point where the markup actually takes up more bandwidth than the content, which I'm sure was something that Tim Berners-Lee never envisaged.
By this point, your own personalised website was a pretty easy thing to get: rather than having to provide name servers yourself, you could pay a for-profit company to do all that kind of thing for you. But once people started having to pay for domain names, the internet, fueled by the dot-com bubble, became a corporate playground, further and further removed from its original inception as a democratic network. The vast majority of us were lurking viewers, and the vast majority of web traffic went to a handful of sites with enormous market capitalisations.
The advent of blogging, which coincided with the bursting of the stock-market bubble, was meant to change all that. Easy web publishing tools put everybody on an equal footing, and we could all have our own place where we could print whatever we liked.
The problem was that web publishing technology had moved on, and a plain-bones HTML site simply wouldn't hack it any more. I can think of one reasonably-trafficked site which is bog-standard hand-codeable HTML, but if anybody less famous were to go down that route I can't imagine that anybody beyond their friends would come back very often. Besides, the presence of things like " " in the source code betrays the fact that even this ultra-basic blog was actually generated not by hand but by computer.
If you want something a bit sexier, then you start running into an alphabet soup of what are, essentially, programming languages you need to learn. XHTML, PHP, RSS, CSS – all of these things are very, very user-unfriendly. On top of that, if you use a blogging tool like MoveableType, you need to deal with all of their idiosyncratic coding as well.
What I'm talking here is infinitely more complex and counterintuitive than old-fashioned markup. It does wonderful things, of course – I can change the whole look and feel of this site without having to reënter any of the content, for instance – but it also comes at great cost. There's been a kind of arms race when it comes to web-based tools, and anyone using only HTML is essentially using a penknife to compete with a laser-guided cruise missile. The thing is, penknives are easy to understand and control, while cruise missiles aren't.
Take felixsalmon.com as an example. It's powered by Moveable Type, which had to be installed on my server. Even MT themselves admit that's non-trivial: I got my techy friend Stefan in Sweden to do it. Then you have page templates, which the brave toss out and rebuild anew, but which I just tweak to try to get things vaguely as I'd like them. That involves looking at code like this, and working out what it does and how I might want to change it.
<div id="banner">
<h1><a href="<$MTBlogURL$>" accesskey="1"><$MTBlogName$></a></h1><p></p>
<span class="description"><$MTBlogDescription$></span>
</div>
That's real code from the template for this homepage, by the way. See those <div> tags? I half-understand what they do; I have no idea what the <span> tag does.
But that's not the half of it: in order to really change the look and feel of the site, you need to mess about in something called the Stylesheet. That's written in something called CSS, and looks a bit like this:
.blogbody a,
.blogbody a:link,
.blogbody a:visited,
.blogbody a:active,
.blogbody a:hover {
font-weight: normal;
text-decoration: underline;
}
Of course, all those curly brackets and full stops and spaces and colons are absolutely vital, and it takes quite a bit of chutzpah to go in and try to change stuff, especially when you don't really have a clue what you're doing.
Yesterday I decided that since I'd already changed my blog to php from html (don't ask: I don't really understand myself), I might as well make use of it and include links to recent stories I'd posted on MemeFirst. The results are up in the top left hand corner of the page. This took about three hours, altogether, first of all googling around the web trying to find the right tool to do what I wanted, then trying to install it, and then getting it to look like what I wanted it to look like. If you're interested, I used a set of PHP functions written by Jason of the Trommeter Times, and the instructions for installation, in full, are "it's really pretty simple and should be self-explanatory."
Without Stefan, I could never have done it; with him, it was still very difficult. Here's some of my PHP code, to give you an idea of what I was dealing with:
if ($tagName == "ITEM") {
printf("<li><a target='_blank' href='%s'>%s</a><br /></li>\n",
trim($link),htmlspecialchars(trim($title)));
if (strlen ($description) > 0) {
printf("%s<br />",htmlspecialchars(trim($description)));
}
Trust me, it's just as forbidding as it looks. And yes, the type of people who come up with this stuff really do think that it's self-explanatory. (I might add that they're also the type of people who think it's really funny that PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Yes, it kind of recurses infinitely back into itself.)
We're living in a world, as Virginia Postrel likes to point out, where cleaning ladies advertising their services compete largely on the strength of the graphic design on their flyers. Anybody with a PC can come up with something pretty beautiful pretty easily, and many do.
But when it comes to web design, there's nothing easy about it. If you want complete control over your flyer for janitorial services, you've got it. If you want complete control over the look and feel of your website, you have to either jump straight into the deep end of geekdom, or get a geek to do it for you. Of course, geeks often like to throw all manner of horrible bells and whistles into websites just because they can and because it means they can charge more, so most people like to do the web-designing themselves if they possibly can.
Given all that, it's hardly surprising that bloggers tend to be overeducated urban graduates, who are less likely to be intimidated by all those $'s and =='s, and who in any case have relatively easy access to web designers and the ready cash with which to pay them. But it doesn't bode well for the future growth of blogging.
I am convinced that just as the web-publishing revolution is supposedly going full speed ahead, it has ironically never been harder to publish your own stuff on the web. Blogging is not going to include very many genuinely marginalised voices unless and until someone writes some powerful and yet easy-to-use software which makes things like setting up templates as easy as formatting a document in Word. To be honest, I don't think that's possible: there are so many variables now in the code for web pages that you really can't just keep things simple any more.
For that reason, then, I think that bloggers are going to remain an elite subset of the already-elite group of web users for the foreseeable future. It's just too bloody difficult to ever become really popular.
Posted by Felix at 19:09 EST | Comments (11)
School of Rock
OK, it hasn't been the best year for movies. But it's still worth noting that the two best films of the year thus far have been PG-13 romps aimed at children and their parents. After the box-office phenomenon that is Pirates of the Caribbean, we now have School of Rock, the fabulous new film from Richard Linklater and Jack Black.
Upon reflection, it's not exactly surprising that filmmakers sometimes create their best material when they're working under the constraints of the children's genre. Certainly Robert Rodriguez, whose latest film is a complete disaster, has never come close to the triumph of Spy Kids. Or compare E.T. to The Color Purple: 'nuff said.
I've had a hell of a time trying to persuade my friends to go see Pirates: they have no interest, they say, in seeing a Disney film – one based on a theme-park ride, no less – which is mainly famous for starring a scenery-chewing Johnny Depp. And I can see what they mean, when they put it like that. But it's their loss, since the film is one of the greatest action-adventure movies since the Indiana Jones franchise reached the end of its natural life.
Somehow I have a feeling that pushing people to see School of Rock will be less difficult. For one thing, it has the Linklater name attached, although weirdly he's absent from the branding of the film – maybe Paramount reckons that the Linklater fanbase will simply come out through word of mouth alone. Then, of course, there's Jack Black, someone who's retained a large quantity of street cred despite selling out about as much as it's possible to do.
In any case, the thirtysomethings most definitely turned out for this film. I saw it on a Sunday night without thinking twice about whether I might be able to get a ticket, but the theatre was people-sitting-in-the-aisles sold out. And not a kid in sight.
The opening credits alone are a masterpiece of comic filmmaking: Jack Black on stage, channelling every rock god from Jimmy Page to Mick Jagger, eventually swan-diving, stripped to the waist, into the outstretched arms of his imaginary fanbase. Not the kind of fanbase you ideally want to crowd-surf on, it must be said.
Amazingly, things rarely flag from there on in. The ridiculous plot is just sturdy enough to carry us through: our stout hero blags himself a job at a posh school, where he sets up a crash course in Sticking it to The Man for his coddled 10-year-old charges. The kids, of course, carry the day, and by the end everybody's happily riffing together as the long list of music featured in the film scrolls its way up the left-hand side of the screen.
Just as Depp carries Pirates, Black is this film. He's working with some excellent actors, from Joan Cusack to the extremely talented children in the band, but it's his genuine and infectious energy which keeps the audience rapt – and in stitches. He's the overgrown adolescent we all flatter ourselves to think we are still in touch with inside ourselves, and he manages to paper over crater-sized plot holes through sheer force of personality alone.
Whether he's quoting Whitney Houston in a desperate attempt to construct an educational philosophy, or improvising a "Math is good" song in order to explain away the electric guitar in the corner of the classroom, Black has a natural's comic timing. But this film couldn't work with any old comedian: Black gives it genuine rock credibility as well. True fact: while Linklater couldn't get Led Zeppelin to let him use their eponymous song in Dazed and Confused, Black managed to persusade them to allow "Immigrant Song" to be used in School of Rock.
I urge you to grab some friends, have a couple of drinks, head down to your local multiplex, and whoop it up in this movie. You will have a fantastically good time, and come out with a renewed appreciation for both Black and Linklater. Linklater actually starred in Spy Kids: he knows at first hand that what might look at first glance like selling out can in fact be the catalyst for innovative, first-rate filmmaking. Here's hoping that more people follow his lead. Failing that, we might at least have a revival of air guitar.
Posted by Felix at 1:11 EST | Comments (2)
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