November 2003 Archives
New York Stories
Firstly, many apologies for not updating this blog in a little while. I would use the excuse that I was in Uruguay for most of the time, but that would be disingenuous, since I had (a) laptop; (b) internet connection – albeit dialup and spotty; and (c) lots of spare time while I was down there. It's just that the drive to blog was missing.
So instead, I decided to use that spare time to catch up on some reading. The main course was The Fortress of Solitude, the hugely ambitious new novel from Jonathan Lethem; for dessert, I read The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts by Colson Whitehead. It's an unoriginal combination: not only are they both about New York City, but they even share a publisher. And browsers looking at the latter book on Amazon are encouraged to buy it in conjunction with the former for a combined price of just $29.57.
My advice is to save your pennies, or at least the $13.97 that Amazon wants for the Whitehead. It's a small and slender volume, with very little substance. If you want to get 90% of the benefit for free, wander into your local bookshop and simply read the first real chapter (after the introduction), called The Port Authority. It's eight short pages long, and turns acute observation into allusive, almost epigrammatic prose. Unfortunately, the book only goes downhill from there, and since there's no kind of narrative arc, there's really no reason to read on.
As the book continues, you're bound to have an emperor-has-no-clothes moment at some point. And once you've had it, there's no going back. Would-be profundities become silly at best, idiotic at worst, and reading any further loses all of its appeal. Whitehead loves switching points of view, from first person to second to third. But he also anthropomophises everything, from grains of sand to the entire island of Manhattan, with less than happy results. Take the Coney Island chapter, for instance:
Naturalized styrofoam bits recite pledges and names of presidents at the slightest provocation.
The number of house keys lost this day will fall within the daily average of lost house keys.
Their castles rise proudly from soggy plots of real estate, yet despite their enthusiasm a very small percentage of these children actually go on to careers in construction, it's very strange.
The unseen infrastructure of waves. Events a thousand miles away find their final meaning in these gentle little consequences begging at the shore.
Underneath the boardwalk is where they store failed mayoral candidates.
Never mind that you can't fall within a daily average. None of these sentences – and they're a pretty representative sample of what you'll find in the rest of the book – means anything at all. They're held together by nothing but grammar: our minds desperately scramble to find some kind of meaning in them, as though confronted by "colourless green ideas sleep furiously". But the real response is much more simple: no, styrofoam bits don't recite anything. No, it isn't strange that kids building sandcastles don't all grow up to become Donald Trump. No, underneath the boardwalk is not a store of failed mayoral candidates.
This book is Whitehead's first since he won a MacArthur genius award in 2002, and it seems that the praise might have gone to his – or his editor's – head. If he's a genius, he doesn't need to worry about whether he's making any sense, right? It's the same thing that happened to Jeanette Winterson after she got praised to the skies for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Bourgeois extravagances like plot and meaning got jettisoned, in favour of Art. Well, excuse me, but I'd rather have comprehensibility.
So there's no doubt that The Fortress of Solitude is much better suited for someone like me. While there are no shortage of digressions and passages of beautiful observational writing, there's still a plot, something to keep you turning the pages.
Once again, however, there are good reasons to stop turning at the end of the first chapter. In this case, I hasten to add, the first chapter, called Underberg, is 292 pages long, and makes for a wonderful and self-contained book in and of itself. It tells the story of a kid called Dylan Ebdus growing up in Gowanus/Boerum Hill in the 1970s, and is full to bursting with wonderful riffs on popular culture. From the games children would play on the slate sidewalks of Dean Street, through the birth of cultural phenomena from rap to graffiti to crack, Ebdus experiences it all.
Every so often, this comes across as slightly boastful. Ebdus, who is clearly modelled on Lethem himself, shows us his streed credentials at every opportunity: all of us who didn't grow up in a black neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 70s have to concede that Lethem has one over on us. And because Lethem seems to feel that Ebdus has to personally witness just about every important cultural development of the time, the character sometimes loses versimilitude. Is it really possible that a kid whose father spends all his time holed up in the attic, whose pothead mother abandoned him at an early age, whose friends rarely turn up to school at all, whose teachers barely notice him, who displays no signs of academic ambition, whose only reading material seems to be comic books – is this kid really likely to make it into Stuyvesant High School by dint of sheer natural intelligence and/or whiteness?
It is at Stuyvesant, we assume, that Ebdus learns how to write, and once he graduates, the third-person first chapter ends and we move into the first-person second chapter. (There's also a brief intermission, where you can get up, stretch your legs, and go to the bathroom.) Ebdus moves on to a Camden College which is entirely familiar from Less Than Zero, where he becomes popular by wearing a Kangol cap "long enough before the Beastie Boys made it widely familiar". He loses touch with his best friend from Brooklyn, a black kid called Mingus Rude to whom Lethem shows no mercy at all in terms of plot. No miraculous tickets out of the ghetto for Rude: instead, we see a textbook descent into drug addiction and worse.
Lethem's very good, actually, on the mechanisms which reinforce the class and race divide in America. While Rude never has a chance, Ebdus's friends from Camden almost have too many:
"How's Karen Rothenberg?" I asked, shifting to safer ground.
Euclid goggled. "She quit calling when she came back from Minneapolis – rehab. Now she's got this custom hat shop on Ludlow Street. They look like hemorrhoids, if you ask me. But Dashiell Marks – you remember Dashiell?"
I lied and said I did.
"Dashiell got Karen's hats listed on the Best Bets page of New York magazine, so everything's hunky-dory."
There's a lot of such good observation where that comes from, although most of it's in the first half of the book. The second half spends too many pages tying up loose ends from the first, as well as helping to explain why we kept on running across a character called Robert Woolfolk rather more often than seemed plausible. Turns out Lethem has something in store for him: a baroque revenge fantasy involving a magic ring which gives its wearer comic-book superpowers.
In general, the first half shows and the second half tells. Confined mostly to one block in Brooklyn, the childhood portion of the book manages to raise the largest of themes (race, class, drugs) while keeping its feet on the ground. Once Ebdus moves to California in Part II, everything is viewed through a distorting veil of self-knowledge which the third-person narrration of Part I happily avoids.
Both parts, however, suffer from a surfeit of specificity. Most of the time, this book says a lot more about a very specific part of Brooklyn at a very specific point in time than it does about America or life more generally. People who aren't intimately familiar with Brooklyn's geometry are going to get hopelessly confused by the constant refrains about which streets divide which neighborhoods, while readers who don't particularly care about the evolution of popular music from the mid-70s to the early 80s will find their eyes glazing over at the endless musical references.
This novel was almost designed, you might say, to be read by an overeducated thirtysomething New York-based book reviewer – such a person has all the background knowledge and interests necessary to really appreciate it. Had it been set in Detroit instead, then I daresay the reviews would have been less numerous and less positive. The Fortress of Solitude doesn't so much transcend its setting to make larger points: rather, it relies on that setting to provide a foundation for the whole project.
Lethem's still a long way from the Great American Novel, then. But in this book's first 292 pages, he might well have written the Great Brooklyn Novel. And that is no mean feat.
Posted by Felix at 15:09 EST | Comments (1)
Jeff Jarvis is pro-American
Read this. It's an unexceptional, and unexceptionable, article by Stryker McGuire, the London bureau chief of Newsweek. The subject is anti-Americanism. It's fading, he says: Bernard-Henri Levy recently won a debate in London arguing the proposition that 'The American Empire is a force for good'. There's a whole America out there which isn't Bush and his policies, and it does great things, from encouraging competition and entrepeneurial practices to separating Egyption conjoined twins.
Now read this. That selfsame Observer article has turned überblogger Jeff Jarvis into some kind of crazed jingoist, calling McGuire a "cultural traitor" and posting a series of blog entries, each more frenzied than the last. The final (at least so far) is this "I am pro-American and I'm goddamn proud of it" screed. (At one point, Jarvis conflates McGuire and the 9/11 terrorists into one "anti-American" lump, and then compares them to Hitler. Very useful.)
Never mind, for the moment, that Jarvis accuses McGuire of saying that all Americans are ammoral (sic) – something McGuire never came close to saying. (Has Jarvis forgotten that bloggers are pretty good at checking out original sources, especially when you link to them?) What interests me is the comments on Jarvis's blog entry. Read them, and you'll find a long series of Americans basically saying "Yeah! You go, guy! I'm a pro-American, too!" It's weird: it's as though the comments section of this particular blog entry has become a support group for the poor, beleaguered pro-Americans in America. First it was white males who claimed victimhood, now it's patriots?
When a Newsweek journalist can't even bring up the subject of fading anti-Americanism without being bitch-slapped by soi-disant liberals like Jarvis, I think it's pretty clear how difficult it's going to be to successfully oppose Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Reading the comments on Jarvis's blog, one is struck by the way in which "I'm pro-American" serves as a kind of trump card, successfully squelching all attempt at reasoned debate.
Let me just single out one theme from Jarvis's post. "When people attack my countrymen so readily, as if it is the accepted wisdom of the age, I have no choice but to defend myself," he says. "This is a very serious point. It is a warning: Keep attacking America and Americans -- not just American policy -- and beware of the hands into which you play."
It goes without saying that these kind of threats go down very badly with foreigners and anti-Americans. But it would seem that they go down very well with the man on the street, the average American voter. And after starting two wars, there's no way that Bush is going to lose out to his Democratic opponent on the let's-be-tough-with-those-who-hate-us front.
Jarvis's moral certitude – he makes this quite explicit – is born of the fact that he came close to being killed himself on September 11. I can see how someone in that situation might have a pretty black-and-white view of the world. But it's not just New Yorkers who feel this way: it's the the whole Bush administration. And black-and-white moral certitude plays well at the polls. Just ask Reagan, or ask just about any American what they think of Clinton's foreign policy. If it's hard to soundbite, it's hard to admire.
So at the moment, I'm decidedly bearish on the Democrats' prospects in 2004. They can't win on domestic policy, because the economy is finally turning around in the wake of Bush's fiscally-insane tax cuts. They can't win on foreign policy, because their vision is more nuanced and subtle than that of the Bush administration, and therefore more open to being attacked on grounds like Jarvis's. And they certainly can't win the fund-raising race. It seems to me that their only hope is narrowly psephological: if they can carry California and Florida, they might be able to squeeze a win, maybe even with a minority of the popular vote. But the nation will remain bitterly divided.
Never mind, though. At least Jeff Jarvis will always stand up for himself, his countrymen, his country's ideals, and the only heritage he knows.
Posted by Felix at 0:25 EST | Comments (3)
Pledge a bald head!
Dear friends, strangers, kind people out there in the ether....
We have had over SEVEN AND A HALF THOUSAND POUNDS in pledges for my hair to be shaved off! Thankyou so much,- I had no idea you felt so strongly! We have been amazed and very touched by the generosity that has been shown this last week,- thank you all for your pledges. Below is my blog about the head shaving extravaganza, and there will be a slightly more official version here pretty soon.
Payment methods for those of you who pledged, or meant to....
If you are a UK taxpayer, whatever your payment method, it is possible for the charity to claim an extra 28% of your donation. If this applies to you, please include in your email or letter a statement that this is intended to be gift aid for the The Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital Charity Fund. Please also state your name, address and amount being donated. This might sound a bit silly, but we also need to know that 28% of your pledge is actually a smaller amount than the total amount of tax that you pay. If you really want to know more, you can download the official inland revenue PDF file (360k).
Wherever you are, if you can read this website, the simplest way to pay (in any currency) is probably to use a secure on-line system called PayPal, which is now a part of eBay. If you already have a PayPal account or feel comfortable setting one up on your own, you can simply send your donation to charity@felixsalmon.com. Otherwise, send an email to the same address and we will then reply with a personal weblink allowing you to authorise the payment and give details of your account.
If you use telephone or internet banking, you can transfer money directly to this account in the UK; all of its contents will then be transferred to the charity. The account details are:
Nat West Alsager Branch
2 Crewe Rd, Alsager
Stoke-on-Trent ST7 2ER
Account name: Mr P J Clarke & Mrs E L Clarke
Account No : 91939461
Bank Sort Code: 60-01-12
Alternatively, you can send a cheque made out to: The Philippa Clarke Malawi Appeal Fund and send it to:
The Philippa Clarke Malawi Appeal Fund
c/o Philip Clarke
Cooksgate Farmhouse
Church Lane
Betley
Crewe
CW3 9AX
UK
Thankyou all once again. That was the most expensive haircut ever and worth every penny!
Posted by Rhian at 11:32 EST | Comments (5)
Crossing the line
It's been quite a week. Quite a surreal week. But great too. There are all sorts of things I want to write about and they don't have much coherence except that they all occurred this week and were experienced by me. It's gonna be a long one I'm afraid so print it off and put the kettle on. Or pour yourself a drink.
There was some gag about headshaving to start with. It really did start out jest-like and then escalated like nothing I have ever experienced before. Every time I turned on my computer there were another ten or twenty pledges rolling in. Ben would pop by, "you've never guessed, someone I've never met has just quadrupled their pledge!" What's going on? What did we tap into out there? It's not just about hair and it's not just about the charity, somehow when the two were combined they were squared, or cubed. Or maybe, like marzipan, when you combine sugar and almonds you get something out that is altogether another experience. Yeast and hops, bubbles in fermentation.
Talking of fermentation, the slops bucket made me want to wretch. That morning I was on 'gash duties' which means you clean the public areas and wash up after meals. "Where do you want the beans and tomatoes, Rich?", I ask after breakfast. "Yup, they're good." "What?" "In there, in the bin." He is pointing to a hip-height yellow bin full of yuk-yellow goo. That's bubbling. O no. O no no no no no. Here I draw the line. "I refuse to be made to mix my own slops bucket. That's too much." "Fair enough,- just put it on the side there and I'll do it." Five minutes later, his thick Geordie accent calls out "eh, Rhiannon, you like gorgonzola don't ya?" As I peer around the corner, he is crumbling, no chucking great lumps of the stinky stuff, into the bucket, "it's vegetarian, like". Wink.
An hour later, they added the yeast and left it out in the midday sun. By the time we saw it, it was a bubbling, curdling, vomitous slop, fish heads and potato chunks swimming around in it, and it was going to be poured on our heads.
Where next? Ah yes, painting. That's been my main activity this week, leaving little time to attend to the multitude of emails rushing in or look for hiding spots. Painting the white bits whiter. And believe me, there are a lot of white bits. We start at nine, end at three and have two smoko breaks and lunch at exact hours in the middle. Woe betide anyone who turns up late or, worse yet, works into a break. "You won't catch many seamen taking a crap during smoko". Of course, none of us wanted to piss the crew off, this week particularly. Neptune's court would punish us accordingly. I was pretty happy on deck with my paintbrush but others got worse jobs. Stripping floors, polishing brasswork, peeling potatoes, scrubbing walls – at least I got the waves and the sun all day long to keep me company. And there's something very satisfying about painting over grubbiness, not to mention much of myself. Later on in the week Charlie gave us a real treat: we got upgraded to GREEN! I could have kissed him. Charlie the bosun: "If it don't move, paint it. If it moves, paint it 'til it don't move".
Back to the Line Ceremony. We had a fair inkling by this time when it was going to happen and had hatched a Cunning Plan. First-timers usually scatter and hide, trembling alone in a dark and uncomfortable hole until the policemen find you, which they will, eventually, beat you up with batons made from duct tape and drag you to Neptune's court. Not an exciting prospect for a sunny afternoon in the mid Atlantic.
No, a few too many of us had seen 'Pirates of the Carribbean' before we left and the group decided to team together and Take the Moneky Island. Oh yes, this was going to be a daring and dastardly event. For two days beforehand, people started sneaking ammunition up there,- 25kgs of flour, sloppy burns bandages past their sell-by date, marmite(?!), condoms, cutlesses made from cardboard and tinfoil, earrings sneakily soldered from copper tubing and, the piece de la resistance, an enormous bucket of water. There is no water point up there so two anonymous pirates hauled up large plastic bags filled with water in the middle of the night,- lower a rope, tie on the bag, three tugs, up you go. A true stealth mission. They would never get us! Heck, we could take the conning tower too and then the ship! But none of us know how to drive a ship, maybe not such a good idea after all.
After lunch on the fateful day, eight pirates all appeared on the Monkey Island from various angles. Wigs, make-up, ripped t-shirts, tattoos, fake teeth, fake blood, ooo arr, shiver-me-timbers, bandanas, skulls and crossbones and a great big banner pronouncing 'FID ISLAND: Cross at your own risk". Photos will appear on the Shackleton website soon I'm sure. Then the production line: condoms filled with water, flour and water, marmite and water. We were ready for them.
The next bit is a blur. The captain welcomed Neptune and his wife on board, policeman got hit with balloons (they looked angry), lots of people shouted "oo arrrr, oo arr", more ammo, water, water, we were doing well... and then, aaaa, the FIREHOSE. They attacked with a FIRE HOSE! Up the ladder, up onto the island. There was a mighty battle, hotstages were taken, struggles, scars, bruises, screams of pain as those great big duct tape batons thwacked and thwacked and thwacked. What was going on, where was our ammo? The police were sodden as well, we were all soaking. They had taken us, but not without a struggle. Dripping and forlorn, we were forced to climb down the ladders, wrists cable-tied together, and marched to the Court. One pirate was pulled by a dog lead, another flung into the court, I tried to run but there was no escape. A sorry looking lot we were. Ooo arrr.
By the time I arrived, some of my fellow criminals had already been sentenced. Another was just having his verdict called out. The one before him was,- no, no, NOOOO, ooo, yuk, please, no, yup... o god, you guessed it. The Slops. The Slops and The Medicine. Ooo, I really did want to wretch. Anything but The Gorgonzola Slops!
Two before me and then it was my time. Pushed into the box for sentencing, a judge read out my crimes. "Rhian Salmon, You are hereby charged with the following heinous crimes against the state, against the Monarch of the Seas, and against mankind in general.
The charge laid before you is that you have more excuses for avoiding the FID duties of painting and soogying than anyone else on board. 'Taking sunsights' is an old device and frankly wearing rather thin. You are charged with 'skiving in the greatest order." It's true, I have been skiving off to learn how to use a sextant.
It didn't stop there. I was subsequently accused of pestering the chief officer about cargo within 5 minutes of coming onboard and repeating the offence (all true, I'm afraid) as well as 'blatantly coveting ship's property' known as the Monkey Island and being in possession of particularly wild and offensive hair. How did I plead? GUILTY I'm afraid. Very, very guilty. It didn't help. I was dragged to the slops (trying my very best to escape, a la Capt'n Jack Sparrow) but there was no mercy. Slops on the head, I screamed and a doctor adminstered the Pink Medicine from a syringe straight into my mouth. Spit, splutter, in the hair, down the shirt, in my face. I still shudder and cringe to think of it.
A long blast with the firehose (this time, welcome), a cold beer, five showers and a cuppa tea later, there was a barbeque. And as if the day hadn't had enough excitement already, my fate still awaited. There's not much I can say about this bit,- the photos will speak for me once they're on the web. Suffice to say, it's all gone, and it was emotional.
I now wake up with a fuzzy head and a fuzzy feeling. The wind outside, the rain, people stroking my hair, is fuzzy. Head on a pillow,- fuzzy. Shower,- fuzzy. It's all fuzzy. Fuzzy, but good. Funny, like funny haha, when I look in a mirror. I get a surprise and then I laugh out loud. It's really easy to look butch but the minute I open my mouth people still don't take me seriously. I like it, it makes me laugh. It's almost liberating. All that fuss about hair (75 dreads by the way for those of you who pledged per dread), I'm exactly the same. And we raised over seven and a half thousand pounds. An astonishing amount, in less than a week.
I still don't know what we tapped in to, I'd love to understand it more but maybe it's just one of those miracles of humanity that don't want too much analysis. It's like everyone out there is just waiting always, for an opportunity to do a good thing, to be nice, to contribute somehow to the world.. but we don't know how. We have so much cynicism and bitterness built up from everyday experiences that we no longer know how to channel that desire. Take away the barriers, offer an opportunity, demonstrate your belief in the cause, show people that it's ok, they won't be ripped off, and hearts and pockets seem to flood open. I almost don't want to write about this as it's so precious and delicate that if I advertise it, the cynic in me says, this channel will surely also be abused like so many others before. But I don't know how else to tell you all, thankyou. Not just for the hospital donations which will make an enormous difference, but also for the experience. This was the most expensive haircut that I'm sure I shall ever have but I shall cherish the memory forever.
(If you pledged on this website, you should have got an email explaining how to pay by now. If you didn't, there will be more details in Rhian's next blog entry, but you can always send money via PayPal to charity@felixsalmon.com. Thanks for all your donations, big and small!)
Posted by Rhian at 0:35 EST | Comments (3)
Windowless buildings
When I posted an entry on 2 Columbus Circle last month, I said that "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 [with lots of glass and light] constitutes a vast improvement." I also said that "the mood in the city these days is that brand-new buildings are usually pretty good".
Maybe
I spoke too soon. Lockhart Steele has gotten
himself a press kit for the new New Museum building, which is going up on
the site of what is now a parking lot across from Prince Street on the Bowery.
And far from being a "pretty good" improvement on the brutalist nightmares
of the past, it seems determined to make every old mistake in the book all over
again.
Lock quotes the New Museum describing its new home as "a dramatic stack of rectangular boxes, each with a different height, shifted slightly off axis in different directions and clad in textured, galvanized zinc-plated steel".
The point of all this architectural cleverness, it would seem from reading the New Museum website, is to ensure that the building doesn't have to bother with windows at all. After all, they explain, "SANAA's concept for the site proposes a series of shifting sculptural boxes that allow for skylights on every level". And who needs windows when you've got skylights?
Of course, art museums need wall space; they don't need windows – although places with great views, like the Tate Modern or Dia:Beacon, use their windows to fantastic effect. The problem is not so much how things feel on the inside, since with sunlight from above and intelligently-designed lighting, the spaces will probably work perfectly well. Rather, my issue is with the way the museum presents itself: it looks to the world like a dark fortress.
Added to the windowlessness is the problem of scale: the museum is going to tower over its neighboring buildings without any attempt to integrate itself in terms of either the street wall or the vernacular of the downtown tenement building. There is no chance that the local residents are going to embrace this building; rather, they are (rightly) going to consider it an eyesore and a bad neighbour.
Here's what the architects have to say on the subject:
We wanted to be as consistent as possible with the scale of the existing surroundings. However, our building has to accommodate a much bigger program than its neighbors do. By shifting the different levels of the structure in relation to one another, we are also diminishing the bulk and establishing a more effective, dynamic relationship with the buildings in the area. On the other hand, because this area is in transition, we believe the New Museum building should have a strong identity of its own in order to survive, especially on a street as tough as the Bowery... To us the Bowery is less a boundary than a neutral "demilitarized" zone between neighborhoods that have very distinctive personalities—Nolita, the East Village, Chinatown.
This is gruesome stuff. I can't for the life of me think how the shifting levels establish any kind of effective or dynamic relationship with the buildings in the area, none of which have any shifting levels at all. As for the idea that the building "should have a strong identity" because it lies on a "tough" street without a "distinctive personality" – this is simply crazy. Architecturally, Nolita and the East Village are very similar, characterised by low-rise, brick-built residential structures with retail on the ground floor. The Bowery is much the same, enlivened by the Bowery Mission and by the competing signage of the restaurant-supply and lighting shops. It has a very strong and distinct character, none of which is reflected in this design at all.
You might remember that when the New Museum bought this site and announced that it was moving there, it made a big song and dance about how happy it was to be remaining downtown and helping to revitalise Lower Manhattan in the wake of September 11. Of course, Prince and Bowery is a world away from Lower Manhattan, and many of us, at the time, thought that the New Museum was clearly trying to come up with reasons to push the site after they'd already decided to move there.
The rhetoric surrounding this building is similar: a Japanese architectural firm comes up with a "bold" design, and then pays lip service to the neighborhood, despite the fact that they obviously couldn't care less. This building would be equally ugly anywhere, but it certainly doesn't belong in residential downtown New York, where commercial high-rise structures are unheard of.
In fact, it feels like nothing so much as Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum, complete with windowlessness and cantilevered upper stories. The only difference is in the cladding: zinc-plated steel as opposed to concrete. No, I have no idea how or whether zinc-plated steel will age on a street full of belching trucks rumbling to and from the Manhattan Bridge. Breuer's building is not well loved, and even architects generally admire it more as an important piece of avant-garde 1960s architecture than as a perfectly-formed art gallery. It's squat, ugly, and generally pretty depressing; it certainly can't hold a candle to Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim a few blocks uptown.
I have a feeling that the New Museum got sick of people walking straight past its present location on Broadway without even noticing them, and decided that in their new digs they were going to make a splash. But it would have been nice if they did so by commissioning something beautiful and interesting, rather than sentencing their new neighborhood to cower under a teetering pile of metal boxes.
Meanwhile,
in Birmingham, the new
Selfridges has opened, and it, too, has no windows. Here, rather than a
neo-brutalist tower we have a biomorphic alien spacecraft. Both, however, are
primarily illuminated by skylights, and utterly fail to even try to fit in with
their surroundings.
Now I'm no curmudgeon who hates all new buildings unless they look old and hates them even more if they try to do something interesting. But if you're open to the possibility that contemporary architecture is good, you also have to be open to the possibility that it's bad. And as a rule, buildings without windows are bad buildings. (Of course, there are truly great exceptions to the rule.) So just because a department store don't need windows, doesn't mean it shouldn't have them. Indeed, department store windows can look fantastic – just consider Peter Jones in London, whose undulating curtain wall still feels very contemporary despite the fact that it's almost 70 years old.
It's a psychological thing. When we look at a building, we naturally imagine ourselves inside it, and no one wants to live in a building without windows. The fact that no one does live in a museum or a department store is irrelevant: when we're simply looking at the outside of the structure, we want to be able to look in, and, more importantly, we want the people inside to be able to look out. It takes some kind of architectural genius to make us get over that initial repulsion, and neither of these two buildings – nor 2 Columbus Circle, for that matter – has it.
Posted by Felix at 18:50 EST | Comments (6)
Misinterpreting Greg
It's the battle of the ArtsJournal bloggers! Taking a perfectly good Boston Globe editorial as their jumping-off point, Terry Teachout and Greg Sandow came to different conclusions about what National Public Radio (NPR) can and should do with its $200 million windfall from Joan Kroc, wife of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc. Now Teachout has responded to Sandow directly, in an interesting piece which addresses the whole raison d'être of what Teachout calls "public entities".
Here's Teachout today:
The difference between us—as I understand it, and I may be misinterpreting Greg—is that I don’t start from the assumption that National Public Radio has an a priori obligation to exist, and thus should ensure its survival by any means necessary, even if that means scrapping musical and other cultural programming in favor of Car Talk... The whole point of subsidizing a radio network is to ensure that it will do things that commercial broadcasters won’t do.
Well, of course he's misinterpreting Greg. It's a cute piece of rhetoric: by spending most of his time expounding on Lord Reith and the role of a public-service broadcaster in an otherwise commercial medium, Teachout essentially is saying that the main difference between himself and Sandow is on the question of whether NPR should compete at all with commercial radio stations.
In reality, I'm sure that the one thing that Sandow, Teachout and the Boston Globe editorial board can all agree on is that NPR should do things which aren't already done elsewhere. Teachout thinks this means more cultural programming, the Globe thinks it means more documentaries, and Sandow thinks it means the kind of popular music (whole Neil Young album, for instance) which don't get airplay anywhere.
Teachout, meanwhile, is slyly pushing his reactionary views with a studied nonchalance. Let's say you want to persuade people that B. One way would be to attack B directly, looking at the arguments for an against. Another way, however, is to present a syllogism saying "A, and B, therefore C", and then spend most of your time concentrating on A. Since you just throw in B at that point, your readers are likely to assume that it's relatively uncontroversial.
Here's the genuinely controversial (and wrong) part of Teachout's essay:
Between them, Big Media and the new media provide 24/7 news coverage in every imaginable flavor. In what way does NPR's news department do something that isn’t already being done?
In other words, there's no point in having loads of news on NPR, since there's already loads of news everywhere else and NPR, by definition, shouldn't replicate what you can get from FoxNews on the telly.
This is erroneous on two counts. For one thing, radio news is a very different animal to news in print, on television, or online. Radio news is usually consumed by people actively engaged in something else – driving, say, or ironing. That means that it can give its listeners news in more depth than they get from other news sources: while the average news consumer might not devote a full 10 minutes of their time to a TV news item or a newspaper feature, they don't mind listening to the radio for 10 minutes while stuck in a traffic jam.
Consequently, radio also has the ability to draw people in to subjects they never knew were interesting. Most of us, I'm sure, have had the experience of suddenly realising that we've been listening intently to a story about Bolivian sewerage systems or Wisconsin filing-cabinet manufacturers – the sort of subjects which would never make the television news, would never be sought out on the internet, and which would be glossed over with one glance at the headline in a newspaper. To paraphrase Reith's formulation once again, radio is uniquely placed to give us the news we didn't know we wanted, and therefore cannot be replaced with other news sources.
There are other great advantages to radio news as well: for one thing, it can pull together expert commentary over the phone if needs must, since it doesn't need to set up cameras. That means it has access to a much deeper pool than television, and that it can be more immediately responsive to events. It's not reliant on visuals in the way that TV is, and it doesn't ignore other newspapers' scoops in the way that print can. It's also very fast: it can be faster than the wires on reporting big local news first.
So Teachout is wrong to cite "Big Media and the new media" as reasons not to support NPR's news efforts. But even if he restricted himself to radio news – which there is a lot of – he would still be wrong. For NPR provides not only a different political slant to most other news programs – it's left where they're right – but also a range of features and documentaries which are expensive to produce and therefore nonexistent elsewhere on the radio dial.
A similar argument can be put forward against Teachout's dismissal of Car Talk and All Things Considered. While commercial radio stations do have talk-based shows which are superficially similar, they have very little, if anything, of comparable quality. Teachout says that NPR's talk-based shows cannot "justify the continued existence of NPR as a subsidized public entity," on the grounds, it would seem (he's not entirely clear on this) that commercial stations have talk-based shows too. Would he treat music-based shows in a similar manner? No: he would differentiate between the high-production-value programming he would like to see, and the lowest-common-denominator stuff churned out by the likes of Clear Channel Communications.
I suspect that Teachout is, in this case, simply a curmudgeonly old right-winger who objects in principle to NPR's lefty programming getting public subsidy. He's just using a new approach to achieve an old end: rather than complain about bias (yawn), he simply says that having any news at all on NPR constitutes a dereliction of its public-service mandate. I'm not buying it.
I also note that Teachout has no ideas at all when it comes to addressing Sandow's point that the public – the very people NPR exists to serve – have no desire for the kind of cultural programming that Teachout so desperately desires. Here's all he has to say on the subject:
Here’s where I agree with Greg: if NPR’s listeners won’t listen to the cultural programs it does broadcast, then NPR should change those programs, or create new and better ones. Do them creatively, do them imaginatively, do them with an ear toward appealing to more than a handful of listeners—but do them.
Surely Teachout is not so naive as to think that some magical injection of creativity and imagination is going to start sending the audiences for such programs soaring. Very creative and imaginative people have been working for many years on precisely this problem, with no visible success. Of all the things which Kroc's $200 million could be put towards, a desperate attempt to buy widespread popularity for cultural programming would probably be the most quixotic. This money represents an enormous opportunity for NPR; it shouldn't be wasted on pipe dreams.
Posted by Felix at 16:24 EST | Comments (5)
Ten miles an hour around the globe: travelling through a meteorology text book
We have crossed the equator! I still have my hair (the ceremony is sometime this week but we won't know when until it's too late to run) and the fish are still flying. Birds have now joined us as well, boobies they're called, that soar above the ocean, watching the fish and then, in the blink of an eye, turn upside down and sky rocket downwards into the ocean. In, deep in, maybe a metre or so, grab a fish and bounce out again. It's incredible to watch. The concentration, the energy... if only we could apply that to our daily activities!
As much as I love staring at infinity, it's nice to have some activity happening in the foreground as well, it keeps you alert I guess. Soaring, soaring, flying with the ship, flying at 10 knots. Mindboggling. No, not the birds speed, but ours. Our slow speed. You can ride a bike at 10 miles an hour can't you? OK, I know it's nautical miles but still, not far off. I am travelling around the circumference of the Earth at ten miles and hour. From Britain to Antarctica. Ten miles an hour! Doesn't anyone else find that utterly bizarre? That we get there at all, let alone in as little as two months.
A common reaction when I left was, "two months on a ship?! That's crazy". We are so time oriented. On the ship, it doesn't feel long at all. It feels, appropriate, I guess. I mean, it's a long way we're going and we're on a not-massive ship with an awful lot of Stuff on it. And we keep going. Ten miles an hour maybe but no traffic lights, roundabouts, jams, meetings. this is way beyond commuting, or even going for a Sunday drive.
One of the most remarkable things for me has been to watch the world go by, underneath us, past us, as it were. The weather hasn't improved, we've moved into better weather. We are the ones doing the moving. Leaving Immingham, cold and dreary, the first few days were cold, windy and wet. Then, in the Bay of Biscay, they were rough. Rough Seas. It's all about ocean circulation and wind systems and how they all meet and create this amazing chaotic regime right there. And there we were, right there, feeling the chaos in our stomachs. Somehow, the energy circulating around our bodies at that time, unpleasant as it was, had been sourced from the sun and the sea and the turning of the earth. I am sailing through a meteorology text book.
After the Bay of Biscay, we moved into calmer seas, warmer, gentler wind, past the Meditterranean, the Canaries, the east coast of Africa. It wasn't sweltering, it was perfect. The mid-latitudes. Of course! Then, as we sail further south the air has become hotter, the direct rays from the sun more intense and the weather, stormier again. Nothing like the Bay of Biscay but we're definitely rocking and afternoons have sen some ominous dark clouds. We must be near the equator!
I hadn't thought if it before, I'm desperate for my old notes on earth weather systems, but it makes sense, in my very amateur perception of what's going on. Imagine the earth, a round ball, with the sun above the equator. For now, neither are moving. Hot air at the equator rises and travels to cooler areas, the higher latitudes, towards the poles. So you have air rising from the middle and the separating, like a T-junction, at around cloud-height, some going south, some going north. This happens to air all around the Earth. From the side, two donuts: air rising at the equator, travelling high up towards the pole, sinking when it's no longer less dense than the surrounding air, and travelling back along the surface of the earth, this now-cold air seeking warmer climes. At the equator, therefore, you have winds from the south and the north converging and rising together, starting the whole circulation system again.
Now, add spin. Make the Earth spin. All that air that is moving up, out high, down and back low, is trapped within the spinning earth -system but not fixed to the earth. It creates a circulation system of its own in response to the spinning of the world. Like the ripples that happen in water when you skim stones. The combined effect of air flowing from the poles to the equator at the surface, and the spinning of the earth, makes the trade winds. At the equator, hot, damp air flowing from both poles meets and rises upwards. So there's your low pressure zone. As the air rises, it cools, water vapour condenses and clouds form. The waterless air then continues its way, high up, back towards the poles. Round and round and round and round. It's amazing. And that's not even mentioning what's going on in the oceans. The more you think about it, the more you realise how great, and complex, this place is, this Earth. And I'm honoured to be travelling around it, learning from it, at ten miles an hour.
---addendum: this is straight from distant memory as I haven't consulted any books recently, please, please, correct my misconceptions and broad generalisations!------
Posted by Rhian at 0:21 EST | Comments (0)
Stefan Geens on the New York Times
Stefan Geens, once a journalist himself, really ought to know better. He's just published a bizarre essay on his website, which alternates between bog-standard European superciliousness ("Go ahead," he tells the New York Times, "become openly slanted, crusading, editorial, the way that European papers are") and utter idiocy (the Wall Street Journal "is clearly thriving where the NYT is stagnant").
It's not entirely clear what Stefan's point is, beyond the fact that he likes the Journal more than the Times. But his arguments are ridiculous. "How is a newspaper supposed to compete these days?" he asks, apropos of the World Wide Web. "The New York Times a while ago decided to compete by becoming more like that other unquestionably compelling toilet read, The New Yorker, with long meandering articles that go in-depth in ways that Reuters and AP do not." He says this in response to my article on reporting simple news, but he gets his chronology completely wrong. The long meandering articles predate the rise of news websites, and are much more the product of American journalistic self-importance than they are of a need to compete with cyberjournalism.
If Stefan can trot out tired old canards like the one about the way in which American newspapers should embrace an editorial viewpoint, then I can rehearse the old observation that most American newspapers don't, in fact, compete with anybody at all, and that this is why they're often so dry and puffed-up. European newspapers are nearly all national, while US newspapers have metropolitan monopolies: the New York Times in New York, the Boston Globe in Boston, and so on. Very, very few cities have real competition between newspapers, which means that both readers and advertisers are stuck with one paper. This is not, quite obviously, a recipe for innovation.
What does happen, on the other hand, is that journalists start to write not with their readers in mind, but looking more towards higher notions such as Posterity and the Fourth Estate. Only in America would a major motion picture be made about a scandalette in which a magazine journalist was caught inventing stories. I shan't belabor the point, as Anthony Lane has made it much better than I ever could. But in a nutshell, American journalists, at least in their own minds, are a pillar of the constitution, while the Brits are writing tommorrow's fish-and-chips wrapping.
In any case, for what it's worth, I agree that there's no such thing as objective journalism, and that it's better to embrace that fact and be opinionated than it is to fight it and desperately attempt to tread an inoffensive middle ground at all times. But that's where I part ways with Geens. For one thing, he seems to think that it would be a reaslly good idea were the Times to write long-form articles: he even tells the mandarins on 43rd Street "to poach some of those editors at The New Yorker". In order to back up this assertion, he points to the popularity of the Journal's Middle Column.
This is simply confused. For one thing, the Middle Column is closer to the New Yorker's short-but-perfectly-formed Talk of the Town pieces than it is to the heavier, longer features. There's one Middle Column story per day, and it provides an oasis of light relief amidst the relentless dullness of the rest of the paper. While the New Yorker rises or falls on the strength of its long-form journalism, the Journal's strength is its business reporting, which is generally written in a very straightforward manner.
So it's ironic, then, that Stefan says that "writing short straight news is a recipe for decline into irrelevancy" at the same time as praising the very organ which does short straight news better than anybody else.
But that's not the only way in which Stefan is dreadfully confused. His statement that the Journal is "is clearly thriving where the NYT is stagnant" is linked to a story in the Wall Street Journal about the newspaper industry's twice-yearly circulation report. In it, we find that daily circulation for US newspapers was up 0.2%. The New York Times outperformed, rising by 0.5% – more than twice the average – while the Wall Street Journal underperformed, rising by, um, 0.002%.
What the Journal did do, however, was start adding 290,412 of the paying subscribers to its website to its circulation figures; it was this one-off statistical sleight-of-hand which gave the surely completely objective Matthew Rose the ability to lead his story with his own paper's "16% circulation gain".
Of course, those 290,412 subscribers at $79 a year for the website only – or even the 686,000 people with access to the Journal's webiste at all – are a mere fraction of the 9,109,000 unique visitors that nytimes.com got in September. Stefan's all over himself praising the Journal for being "merely a record of the state of the newsroom's reporting efforts at the end of the day," when in fact many more people read the Times on an intraday basis than keep abreast of what the Journal is reporting to its select group of subscribers.
By this point, Geens has pretty much lost the plot entirely. He criticises the vaguely-liberal Times editorial page for being more strident than it should be, in the same breath as saying that the Economist "smudges the line between informing and opining in ways American media should emulate". Surely, the Belgian is the only person on the planet who thinks that the New York Times editorial page is more strident than the editorials which constitute the beginning – and the front cover – of every issue of the Economist.
We shall pass over without comment Stefan's discovery that "wifi plus laptop actually makes for great toilet reading". But at least today's newspaper can be dragooned into a vital secondary purpose in the case of emergency; Stefan's verbiage, unfortunately, cannot, despite being much better suited to the task.
Posted by Felix at 2:20 EST | Comments (1)
Flying Fish
I am more and more convinced of the necessity of ignorance in appreciating the world. One and a half days into a two or three day bus journey to Ayers Rock, I was dismayed when photos and postcards of our destination began to appear. I closed my eyes tight and tried desperately to not look at the image. I was probably the only person on that bus who had absolutely no idea what Ayers Rock looked like, or even what it was, and I didn't want my blank expectations to be ruined. Things are so much more startling when you discover them for yourself. I don't want you to think that I had deliberately hidden myself from images of this Great Wonder, saving myself in purity until I could behold it with my own eyes. No, I am just ignorant. There are lots and lots of things I don't know. It astonishes me sometimes how I can know nothing about so many things and quite often it astonishes my friends too. For someone with a number of years of formal education under her belt, you'd think I'd know something. At least in my own field? Nup. Most regular readers of newspapers or New Scientist are far better informed about environmental issues than I am. I suppose I know a thing or two about hydroxyl radicals and why you would never want to detect them using soluble aspirin, but that's not going to get me very far in the Real World. No, I want to know about knots and stars and sextants and ocean circulation and clouds and practical things like how to build things and make stuff. I am on a ship after all and I've just finished a truly great book, Tamata and the Alliance by Bernard Moitessier, that has had an obvious impact. Anyway. Flying fish. This was one thing that I was really looking forward to for this part of the voyage. Everyone told me about them and they were everyone's favourite thing, like penguins. They are fish that fly. Fish That Fly! Imagine that. What? Do they actually fly or do the just jump far and fast? No, they fly. They have wings that flap and glide and soar. They're big, these fish, like big, flat flying fish. I couldn't wait. Imagine! Fish That Fly! With Wings! Like a plaice, I imagined, or some other flat fish. Like a bat fish. Bat-fish, flat fish, flying fat bat fish. How excited was I?! And then they arrived. The flying fish. Have you seen the fish?, they kept asking me. No, I haven't, I'm so frustrated. Where are they? Usually I see everything. There, there's one. Where? There. What? There, over there, and another, o my, wow, a whole load of them. What?! I don't see anything. Do you need glasses? NO! WHERE? O. There's no more now. Maybe later. Grrrr. Later. They're out again, quick, look. What, those little specks I see fluttering in the distance? Yes, aren't the great? What? No, that's just ocean spray, surely. O my, a whole field of ocean spray. I guess you're right. You mean that's them, that's it? THAT'S flying fish? Yes, what did you expect? Great big batlike fish with wings that soar?! Well, um, um. Now, a few days after my initial dissapointment, I can see their attraction. They are lovely actually. On first sighting it looks like a blue bird flying above the sea. Or a hummingbird maybe. Definitely a bird, and a little one. Really sweet. Then you see it's jumped out of the waves. Amazing! Little fish they jump out of the sea, flutter wings, sometimes for really quite impressive distances, and then dive back in again. Someone out there can surely tell me what's really going on (Jim?!) but that is what I see. And then, there's a whole flock of them. A flock of fish. All, jumping out of the sea together and flying en masse away from some predator. Come on sharks, come on, where are you, I want to see the fish that fly! So that's flying fish for you. They're great. I really like them. Had I heard nothing about them, I'd be enchanted and raving: guess what, it's a miracle! As it is, I am enchanted, I understand the delight they bring, but I'm still on the lookout for big bat flat fish that can fly and fly and fly.Posted by Rhian at 0:24 EST | Comments (1)
Pledge-a-dread
Dear friends and friendly strangers,
It's true! The dreads are being pledged. What am I doing?!!! This week, the RRS Ernest Shackleton is CROSSING THE LINE and the eight uninitiated BAS employees on board are scared. Very scared. Especially me. For those of you unfamiliar with the rituals of the sea, you have a thing or two to learn. Crossing the equator for the first time is no trivial matter. If you dare to slip into the other hemisphere without permission from Neptune himself, you will pay for it. In hair. In my case, lots of hair. Hide where you may, Neptune's policemen will find you, will drag you kicking and screaming to Neptune's court, and will try and make you fit for his presence. You will have slops poured on your head, you will be scrubbed and shaved, you will be taken to see the King himself, and his wife. At his court, you will be tried and most likely found guilty of several heinous crimes. If you plead not guilty, you will have more slops poured on your head, and the crimes you are accused of will escalate. Then the verdict and punishment will be announced. This is all I have managed to gleam from the crew thus far. This time next week, I'll be able to tell you the truth of what happens. So anyway, what started out as an innocent joke in the bar has escalated beyond all proportion. 'What would it take for you to cut off your dreads?' turned to 'would you cut your dreads for charity?' to 'how much?' to 'what charity?'. They offered £300, I upped it to £500 and a swim in the sea (which I knew would never happen) and they upped it to £1000, no swim but compulsory donations from every member of the ship. Something had been started that couldn't be stopped. Ack! The cause we chose is for building an urgently needed intensive care ward for a children's hospital in Malawi. The dentist on board, Ben, grew up in Malawi and his mum, Prof Molyneaux, works in the hospital. She is on site to hand to deliver all donations directly into the project. As the crazy plan escalated, Ben found himself offering to match whatever the ship raised. We have already gone over £1000 from the ship alone. So now we're opening it out to the big wide world out there. Go, on, it's easy, for the click of a button you can see my dreads go. If we raise over £1500, we'll put the photos on the web. All you have to do is send me an email or write a comment below stating the amount you pledge. After the dreadful deed is done (sorry!), I'll send you an email telling you how and where to send your money to. Simple! Go on. Pledge-a-dread! You know you want to!Posted by Rhian at 0:06 EST | Comments (3)
Pledge-a-dread: Sponsored Head Shaving Extravaganza!
This week, the RRS Ernest Shackleton is CROSSING THE LINE and the eight uninitiated BAS employees on board are scared. Very scared. Especially Rhian.
In what started out as an innocent joke in the bar, Rhian has found herself committed to having her DREADS CHOPPED OFF for charity.
On the proviso that every one on the ship makes a contribution, Rhian has agreed to have her head shaved and Ben (the dentist) has agreed to match the sum they raise. The money will go towards building an urgently needed intensive care ward for a children's hospital in Malawi – see the attached poster, in either pdf (2.2Mb) or Word (260 Kb).
We're now opening bids to bases, ships and the world at large! How much would you give to see Rhian's dreads go? How much would you give to see the photos? All you have to do to pledge-a-dread is send an email, now, to Ben Molyneux or Rhian Salmon stating the amount you pledge. If an excess of £1000 is pledged, and the crew all sign up, the dreads go, photos will be published on the Shackleton website in a week, and you'll get an email explaining where to send your money to. We accept cash, cheque and BAS account transfers!
More details are in the poster, but this is a really good cause – the Philippa Clarke Hospital Wing (the children's ward) of the QECH hospital in Blantyre, Malawi.
So, please, send an email now to rasa@south* if you're within BAS, to rhian(at)felixsalmon(dot)com if you're in the rest of the world, or leave a comment below if you want to make your donation public and thereby encourage others.
Thankyou!
Posted by Rhian at 18:56 EST | Comments (29)
Chagall at SFMOMA
If you've picked up a reasonably highbrow magazine recently, chances are that you've seen a feature on Diane Arbus. She's all over the news because a major retrospective, Diane Arbus Revelations, opened at SFMOMA on October 25. It would be reasonable, then, to assume that the show, barely a couple of weeks old, is packed.
Reasonable, but wrong. It turns out that anybody going to see the Diane Arbus show between October 25 and November 4 – its first 11 days – more or less had the exhibition to themselves. Not because the exhibition is bad – far from it. But because of the incredible incompetence of SFMOMA.
The first 11 days of Arbus, you see, coincided with the last 11 days of Marc Chagall, a major retrospective of the Russian artist which was on show only in Paris and San Francisco. Chagall is a popular painter, and as the show started coming to an end, people flocked to the museum to catch it before it closed.
None of this, of course, should have anything to do with Arbus. But SFMOMA's reaction to the Chagall crowds was so idiotic that almost nobody ended up seeing anything else: the 5th floor, home to the Chagalls, was packed, while the rest of the museum was a ghost town.
The reason was that SFMOMA clearly has no idea how to ticket a blockbuster exhibition. The standard setup at the glitzy newish museum is to have two lines, one for members and one for non-members. The line for members is generally shorter: they can usually just turn up, get free admission for themselves and their guests, and walk in. The line for non-members is longer, since everybody has to pay to get in. Non-members can buy general admission, or pay $5 more to get into the big shows.
Obviously, with a really big show, this system doesn't work. Since there's no difference between the line for general admission and the line for the blockbuster show, the would-be blockbuster-goers form a queue so long that no one else would ever dream of joining it. Anybody wanting to see the permanent collection, or even the Diane Arbus show, takes one look at the length of the line and decides to come back another day.
Dealing with this sort of thing is not exactly rocket science: museums from the Tate in London to the Natural History Museum in New York have separate lines for the big exhibitions, as well as timed tickets which sell out when the show is full, preventing people for waiting unnecessarily long to get in. And when the crowds really start to metastasize, the museums stay open later – the Tate opened its doors 24 hours at the end of its Picasso Matisse show.
SFMOMA, on the other hand, had other ideas. Firstly, they never had timed tickets at all: the closest that they ever came was offering admission for a specific day, which meant that if lots of other people turned up at the same time, the queue to get into the show – even for ticket holders – could be the best part of an hour long.
Also, SFMOMA never saw any need to change its ticketing situation. The Friday I went, the members stood in a short line waiting for three employees to hand out their free tickets, while the non-members stood in a two-hour queue waiting for two employees to get around to serving them. Yes, that's two hours just to get into the museum, over and above the amount of time spent waiting to get into the show itself. I fear to think what the situation was come the weekend.
Even if you really, really wanted to see the Chagall show – say, because you were in town with your mother, who named you (middle name, at least) after him – the wait was daunting. The obvious alternative to standing in line was to phone up SFMOMA's ticketing agent, TicketWeb, and book a ticket for that or a different day. But here's where SFMOMA's unique brand of genius comes in to play: at the end of the Chagall show, when demand for tickets was higher than it had ever been, the museum simply stopped selling them through TicketWeb. No one was to be able to buy their tickets in advance: everybody had to suffer equally in line.
And even the one thing that SFMOMA did do right – expanding its opening hours – it still managed to cock up. For one thing, the only difference between Chagall hours and normal hours was that the museum stayed open a bit later on Friday nights. More germanely, however, the new hours were not well advertised: they were nowhere on the information line, and only on the special exhibition page (not the general information page) of the website.
SFMOMA sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, where sporting stadiums are named things like Network Associates Stadium and 3Com Park. It gets funding from Hewletts and Googles and everything. But it can't manage a basic technology like timed tickets, with the result that whenever more people turn up than can fit into the exhibition, the only mechanism it has to deal with the problem is to let lines grow to the size at which people give up and go home instead.
Here's what would have happened in a halfways-sensible world. We would have turned up on Friday morning and the show would have been sold out, certainly for the morning, and maybe for the rest of the day. Either by joining a queue or by buying tickets from TicketWeb over the phone or online, we would have got ourselves admission for a set time in the future. We would have gone off to enjoy one of the most beautiful cities in the world, come back when our tickets told us to, and entered with almost no wait: after all, with timed tickets, the museum can ensure that it has never admitted more people than can fit into the exhibition.
Here's what actually happened: we turned up on Friday morning and waited interminably for our tickets, then waited all over again to get into the show. Total time in line: two and a half hours, give or take. Children, pregnant women, elderly patrons, anybody without five hours to spare – all of these potential patrons were denied any entry at all. And, of course, the Diane Arbus show languished, all but unseen, a victim of the Chagall show's mismanagement.
Meanwhile, the Chagall show itself was packed insanely tight, as harried SFMOMA employees desperately tried to deal with the lines by letting in as many people as they possibly could. Here, in a nutshell, is the difference between a timed-ticket system and the lack of one. When you don't have timed tickets, frazzled patrons just want to be let in, with the result that so many people pack the galleries that you can barely see the art. When you do have timed tickets, patrons complain about the crowded galleries, with the result that the Royal Academy in London (to take one recent example) extends its opening hours and reduces the number of tickets that it sells for any given time, making life much more pleasant for everyone.
A free suggestion, then, for SFMOMA: get a tech-savvy donor to give you a timed-ticketing system. Your patrons will be happier, your employees will be happier, and when people talk about your headline exhibitions, they might even mention the art rather than just griping about how horrible they were to get into.
Oh yes, the art. How was it? Good, although the exhibition seemed intent on presenting Chagall as an Important Artist rather than as the more or less unchanging maker of beautiful paintings which he really was. There's no real need for a chronological approach in the case of Chagall, since his work from 1920 is not all that different from his work from 1970.
Biggest disappointment? The emphasis on large-scale spiritual works meant that my favourite part of his oeuvre – the heartbreakingly simple pastorals, with maybe a goat, a tree and a farmhouse – were glaringly absent from the show. Biggest revelation? The works on paper, stunningly preserved, with a wonderfully vibrant immediacy.
Was it worth a 160-minute wait to get into the packed galleries? No: I can't imagine any exhibition which would be. Art appreciation is a solitary affair, and tough enough in a popular exhibition at the best of times. When you're physically exhausted from the queuing process and mentally drained from trying to comprehend the paintings through the crowds, there's a limit to how much you can take from any exhibition. I'd recommend going to your local museum and checking out its two or three Chagalls instead. There won't be any crowds, you can go back as often as you like, and you can develop a relationsip with the specific pieces. In the case of Chagall, there's nothing bigger that you really need to know about the artist's life and work as a whole.
Posted by Felix at 20:41 EST | Comments (3)
Bay of Biscay to Madeira
It has been a most beautiful night imaginable. And day, for that matter. A perfect day. A perfect, beautiful day. I don't know where to begin.
The air, for starters, is gentle and the sea, calm. This means much more than you think I'm saying. The air is gentle, not grim and stormy, and the sea, Calm.
I had thought my next blog entry would be about the Bay of Biscay. Green faces, objects flying through the air all night long, walls, floors, mattresses creaking and groaning as the ship lurched yet again. Stomachs experiencing zero gravity for the nth time. It wasn't fun. The choice was one of drug induced technicoloured dreams that you-just-could-not-climb-out-of-however-hard-you-might-try* or the body's natural response to 3 days on an extreme rollercoaster ride. To think that people pay for even 10 minutes of this! I'm afraid I was feeling rather green already when I wrote the last entry and that would have rubbed off on my tone. It was pretty hard to be excited about anything except surviving another night, or day, without throwing up.
I didn't fare as bad as most of the passengers – one poor fellow was left in his cabin with just his pills and a stick of rock for two days! No one wanted to stomach anything, we just wanted it to end.
And it did!
Today, as I was saying, was a most perfect day. The seas were calm, but I now have infinite respect for the energy and potential held within. The air was soft, but we know our place now. We have been humbled.
Sunset on the monkey island (roof) was silent and eternal. Not a sunset to die for, not a picture postcard sunset, but a very real, "look at me, I happen every day and continually, why does it still surprise you?" sunset. Pinks and oranges. The moon. Mars. And between us and all of these things, the massive ocean. Water, water everywhere. Everywhere! I love it! We are sailing on the huge open water. I can't say it any more bluntly. Sailors will either roll their eyes or smile to themselves if they read these words. It's just,– the ocean. Like trying to describe mountains, I can't, but I think you know already. Like describing the ice last year – I didn't need to; it was exactly as I knew it would be before I saw it.
This morning we passed Madeira. The ship's crew are great – they're taking us past all the sights that are remotely en route. Cape Verde and the Canaries next. Somewhere else as we approach S. America. But it was Madeira this morning. Spanish? No, Portugese. Cake? No, wine, surely. Both? I think so. What else do you know about this place? Tell me! It was land anyway. And then, since I was up on deck already, I set up my hammock, pulled out my book and started gently swinging into the day that lay ahead.
Posted by Rhian at 23:02 EST | Comments (2)
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