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Sunset

Posted by Rhian at 16:37 EST | Comments (8)

WTC update

It's been two months since David Childs unveiled the Freedom Tower in a blaze of publicity. Since then, of course, most of the WTC attention has been focussed on the memorial, with a little left over for Santiago Calatrava's magnificent new PATH station. But work on the Freedom Tower continues, and I took the opportunity last week, when Childs presented the model for it at the Center for Architecture, to ask him how things were coming along.

Then, last week, I travelled to Washington on the train, and, purely by coincidence, ended up sitting opposite architects in both directions. It turns out that the WTC is proceeding apace, and that there's quite a lot of information I haven't seen reported. So, to keep you up to date, here's a bit of what I've learned.

¶It looks increasingly as though Daniel Libeskind has given up on his initial dreams of controlling the design of the entire site. He fought long and hard with David Childs over the Freedom Tower, to little effect, and has since waged almost no battles at all over the memorial or the PATH station, despite the fact that both of them essentially tore up his plan and started over from scratch. In return for keeping quiet and not kicking up a fuss, there seems to be a gentlemen's understanding that the LMDC is going to commission Libeskind to design the interpretive museum and cultural facilities on the site.

¶In terms of the tower, what you see when you look at the model is only vaguely related to what's actually going to be built. Childs told me that the model was "a diagram of an idea of a basic concept". Specifically:

• The heights as announced in December are far from set, and the tower might yet end up being significantly taller than the 1,500 feet plus a 276-foot spire that we were told would be there. There will be some kind of significant architectural inflection point at 1,776 feet, but the antennae could well go higher. That's certainly what the broadcasters want – and will pay for – while the FAA is happy with buildings as tall as 2,000 feet in total. So expect Libeskind's symbolic height to go out the window, as it were.
• The spire, as seen in the model and plans, is basically just a place-holder. Childs and his team thought of a number of different ways of doing it, couldn't agree on any of them, and just kind of plonked the thing you see now on top. Childs is very keen that the spire as finally designed will be (a) much more integrated with the rest of the the building, while (b) remaining fundamentally asymmetrical. He also said that he's very much working on integrating the antennae into the spire.
• At the moment, the spire is on the southern edge of the tower, while and the peak of the sloping roof is on the northern edge – which looks horrible, especially when the building is viewed from the west. It probably won't stay that way, partly because the spire hasn't been designed yet, but mainly because even the sloping roof is far from certain.
  The only reason for having a sloping roof in the first place is the Libeskind plan of a spiral of skyscrapers all genuflecting down to the memorial below. As we have seen, however, Libeskind is losing a lot of influence here, and it's increasinly unlikely that the architects for the other towers on the site – Silverstein has already named Normal Foster, Fumihiko Maki and Jean Nouvel – will sign on to the sloping-roof condition.
  Clearly, if they don't have sloping roofs, then Childs doesn't need to have one. And Childs doesn't want one: he told me that often the streets around the Citicorp tower need to be closed off, because snow and ice and water can shear off the sloping roof and come plummeting down onto the sidewalk below. So if he can unslope the roof, I think he will.
• There will be a second observation deck: Silverstein has signed off on this. It will be right at the top of the trellis, open to the elements, and therefore accessible only in good weather. It will be reached by a glass elevator, which would pause at the heights of the old WTC towers on its way up.

¶In terms of the rest of the site, the LMDC yesterday announced that they have finally reached an agreement with Deutsche Bank to buy up the former Bankers Trust building for $90 million and then spend $45 million demolishing it. This has long been crucial to the site plan, and it's very good news. That said, however, it's still far from clear what exactly is going to happen in that neck of the woods – generally, the southern boundary of the site. With the cultural buildings now clustered north-east of the memorial, the south-west corner generally is little more than a blank space – and south of it, Liberty Street, at the moment, dominated by a large truck ramp, looks like it's going to be far from beautiful. Apparently Michael Arad, the winner of the memorial competition, is pushing for entry to the memorial from the south-west, but that's just weird when the PATH station, most public transport, and nearly all the rest of the island of Manhattan is to the north-east.

¶The PATH station, while beautiful, is basically little more than an oculus at street level: most of the really grand stuff happens below grade. So, now that Dey Street has been reconstituted, what is going to actually go on there? One group, apparently, is pushing for a greenmarket, which sounds like a great idea to me. It can happen south of the PATH station, so that it doesn't interfere with whatever symbolism is going on to the north.

¶It's looking increasingly unlikely that New York City Opera is going to make it downtown. The hope was that an opera house could be attached to the eastern side of the Freedom Tower, maybe overlapping a little below grade. But now, I'm told, even that wouldn't create a large enough space for what the opera company wants.

Overall, the site plan is moving from grand visions to something rather more realistic, which is inevitable and not to be mourned overmuch. While many of us would have preferred something which cleaved much more closely to the original Libeskind vision, that was never very likely, and I do still have faith in the LMDC to do its best to create a vibrant new neighborhood.

Posted by Felix at 16:32 EST | Comments (3)

Photoblog

Greetings from Antarctica!

An Argentine helicopter

Two BAS ships at Halley

Me at my lab

Penguins messing up my clean air

And finally... manhauling stuff to my lab

Posted by Rhian at 23:10 EST | Comments (5)

Winter begins

If a mother's love could be shown in presents, I think my mum has just succeeded! The summer crew have left at last and it's time now to settle in for the winter. First we picked rooms out of a hat and, ironically enough, I landed the room that I first had last summer and hated. The windowless cell, the tiny pit. Now, it has been transformed. An oil burner, poems, photos, cards, shelves and beautiful things like conkers and crystals – I'm discovering the girl in me who I never knew existed! It's my den, my escape, my very own space for me and my stuff where no-one can come in without asking first.

Yes, it's tiny, yes, it doesn't have a window, but funnily enough, I don't mind so much this time around. The allocation was fair, the first community-spirited activity.. and, after all, I do have to brave the elements every day to go to work, unlike some of the folk here. The chef, the comms manager – if they didn't have windows they might never even have an inkling of what it's like outside!

And so it came to unpacking all the boxes I had stored away until now. How much stuff did I bring for a year! All so unnecessary. More books than I might ever normally read, a thousand photographs, creative supplies, food: chocolate, dried fruit, chewy sweets, teabags and rusks. Games. As I sit here and write, I can't imagine ever needing any of these things. But it's still light outside, everyone is enthusiatic about being here, there's loads to do and certainly no such thing as boredom. Ask me again in five months!

What I didn't bank on is the amount of time and effort my mum had put into wrapping little presents, finding cards, thinking of things I might need here. And it made me realise that a year away in the Antarctic sounds an awful lot longer to people outside this environment than the reality feels down here. As far as I can tell, it's going to fly. If I had no emotional attachments outside of here, and if my job were to exist, I think I would happily stay for a second winter. Thirty-three months sounds so long, it did to me as well, but once you're here, it seems just about the right amount of time to fit it all in, to take it all in.

It's wonderfully simple here but there's always something to be done. It's a pace of life that I like. The pace of the summer was too much: it smacked of bringing the city to the desert. This space wasn't designed for meetings and deadlines. It is perfect space, space for breathing, looking around, smiling and, of course, doing your work.

It is absolutely beautiful outside. I look out of the window next to me and see a blue sky, bright evening, flat calm snow surface, slightly icy, covered in shadows from sastrugi. It's like the ocean, frozen. It is the ocean, frozen! A snapshot in time. Endless white to the horizon. And on the horizon: mirages of icebergs. In three of four directions the strange effects of layers of stable atmosphere bounce light around and mean we can see far beyond the expected, we see the reflection of icebergs in the mirror-like atmosphere above it.

In the fourth direction, I see in the sky the reflection of the antarctic plateau. Out there, about 30km away, are four of our team members on their first winter trip. Mine is in three weeks – I can't wait. The Hinge Zone, where the ice leaves the plateau and there are large crevasses to explore. To sleep in a tent, to really take in the stage of the setting sun, to wake up to ice: that's something I came here for.

In the meantime, there are a hundred things I haven't told you,. The visit by the Argentinian helicopter, posh dinner on HMS Endurance, the return of the beloved Shackleton, the penguins who have set up camp outside my lab (damn them – this is supposed to be a Clean Air Area!), the sun setting and the increasing blue of the night sky, the flares we set off as the ship sailed away, the first dinner as a wintering crew, the normality of it all.

I know for sure that this is the right place for me to be right now. It's a special place and a shame it's so inaccessible. To me right now, it's not the harsh barrenness that everyone describes, it's actually quite friendly – and when the winds howl, they're only playing with you.

Ask me again in five months!

Posted by Rhian at 22:29 EST | Comments (10)

Q&A

I have so much to say that I almost don't know where to start! So here are some answers to questions from Stefan. Post your own, and I'll see if I can answer them too!

Does one have affairs? How do the guys (and girls) cope if they're not, like, getting any? Is there sexual tension? Are there fits of jealousy that get in the way of rational decision-making?

Yes, people do have affairs. There aren't that many women to go around though (as it were), and any woman with half a brain here will realise that if you're gonna, then stick with just one. Otherwise there might be social hell to pay. So no, most people aren't getting it. At the moment, to the best of my knowledge, no-one on base is. But we're only in our first week of the winter. There's months to go.

It's quite odd being a woman here, in that regard. Cos everyone's gagging for it on a very carnal animal level but we've (statistically) got more chance of getting it (it's fairly homophobic here), so there's almost a sense of inevitability and 'who will it be' in the air. It's not exactly flattering but it does put you on guard a lot of the time and give you a wierd kind of power at times. And the jokes and innnuendos are incessant. But quite funny. Usually.

The presence of women is definitely one of the potentially most dangerous things here to the social set-up. And note, I'm not saying that women are, but rather, their presence is. That is, their effect on men. But then, I would say that. If I was a bloke, I think I'd rather have an all-male base too.

'Potentially dangerous' makes it sounds like the only effect our presence might have is negative. Word on the street is that the feeling on base has also become more balanced since women started wintering. Either way, while everyone has the potential to have a massive negative or positive impact on base life, I guess we could make it or break it easier. And it's not a balance that's easy to find.

The main problem now is that the balance between men and women is so out of kilter. We have 2 out of 18, Rothera has 1 in 21, Bird Island 1 in 5... and the women who do winter tend to be younger (and therefore perhaps easier targets) than the average on base. It's a tricky one to answer as most of the jobs down here are typically jobs that more men are qualified for but I just saw a photo of the current german wintering team and they have five women to four men. The dynamic would be very different then I'm sure...

Are there cliques? Are some people considered lazy, or not pulling their weight? How are such matters brought to the general attention? Are there official bitching sessions? Is there an official government representative with the authority to marry, throw people in jail, judge who ate all the pudding last night, etc...?

There will almost certainly be cliques forming (as I said above, it's still early days yet) and there are definitely people considered to be lazy. This is the worst of all sins on base and a definite friend-loser. There is a structure to the base, with a 'base commander' who I guess such issues could be channelled through if it got really out of control, and monthly base meetings. The base commander has been sworn in on the ship as a magistrate and has legal powers, but, alas, we have no jail. We don't even have a gun or a straitjacket, although apparently the stretcher works quite well for tying people down..

Why aren't you being televised for a reality TV show? I think the BBC should run with it, they can pretend (and get away with) it being a science show. It'd be a thinking person's reality TV show, and we could have Cambridge psychologists and philosophers opine from comfy chairs in the shires as to why you did what you just did. Every show, one person gets voted off the base, and has to wander off into the -40C night.

One massive difference between us and Big Brother is that we all want to end up being friends. Quite boring watching most of the time – lots of people being nice to each other, watching videos, playing pool, eating, working and sleeping. Not a crowd winner.

Posted by Rhian at 15:16 EST | Comments (1)

FreshDirect on the LES: WTF?

Lockhart Steele is not much of a crusader, it would seem: he will fight for FreshDirect delivery on the Lower East Side only until they start delivering to him. Then, he'll just give up: his latest post completely fails to communicate the utterly illogical craziness of the new delivery area.

Let me illustrate, with the help of some extremely basic HTML, and using my own block (why not?) as an example. My street is a narrow one-way road: clearly, if FreshDirect can deliver to any of the buildings on any given block of Rivington Street, it should be able to deliver to all of them.

In fact, however, FreshDirect delivers to three of the buildings on the block: 106 Ridge, 206 Rivington, and 210 Rivington, all of which are walk-up tenements. It does not deliver to 203 Rivington, which is a nice deliveryman-friendly elevator building.

The situation gets even weirder when you realise that Rivington Street runs west, and Pitt Street runs north. In other words, in order to deliver to 206 Rivington and 210 Rivington, the only way that the FreshDirect trucks are going to be able to get there is by driving north up Pitt Street from Delancey. Yet none of the buildings on Pitt between Delancey and Rivington (like 65 Pitt and 67 Pitt) get delivery either. Meanwhile, all the buildings on Ridge Street get delivery.

I phoned up FreshDirect to ask about this on Saturday, and spoke to a friendly woman who agreed that it made no sense at all, and who said that she'd get a supervisor to look into it on Monday morning. But when I called back today, Tuesday afternoon, I got someone much less friendly, who simply said that the Marketing Department hadn't made the decision to deliver to my area yet.

I've been racking my brains to try and work out how you could possibly include 206 Rivington in your delivery area and yet exclude 202 Rivington, and have come up completely blank. If anybody has any bright ideas, do post them here. Meanwhile, FreshDirect people, if you're out there, do let me know what kind of person would single out individual buildings in this manner, refusing to deliver to them while happily delivering to their next-door neighbours. Don't you realise you're causing strife down here?

UPDATE: I eventually managed to speak to a very friendly chap called John in Marketing, and he told me that the official boundary on Rivington Street was Ridge. So how 206 and 210 Rivington got included no one knows. But he said he'd talk to somebody, and today I checked the website again... and FreshDirect now delivers to the whole block! Wahey!

Posted by Felix at 15:49 EST | Comments (6)

Gay marriage: Where's the backlash?

Anybody remember that in the wake of the Lawrence v Texas decision, everybody was talking about the anti-gay backlash which would only intensify if gay marriage started getting onto the agenda? Well, guess what: gay marriage is about to be made legal in Massachussetts, it's already happening in San Francisco, and the only people railing against it seem to be the professional haters who were railing against Lawrence when that happened, too.

The thing is, you really do need a heart of stone to look at photos like the one above and not feel happy that this is happening. Now the debate has come out of the law courts and op-ed pages and onto the streets, people are seeing what gay marriage actually looks like in practice, and I have a feeling that they like what they see. Elizabeth McElhinney and Siddiqi Ray are no imminent threat to America or Americans; they're just a very happy couple in love who are now, I presume, enjoying a fabulous honeymoon somewhere.

Meanwhile, President Bush has said as little as possible on the subject since the San Francisco weddings started happening, and his storm troopers, like California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, look increasingly silly when they assert that these happy loving couples constitute "an imminent risk to civil order".

Even if Bush does eventually come out in favour of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (and it will have taken him long enough), there's now essentially zero chance of it actually passing. Meanwhile, when paleoleftists like Chicago's Richard Daley also come out in favour of gay marriage, it's not hard to work out which way the wind is blowing.

But three years of being bashed by Bush has made some on the left overly cautious, it would seem. Josh Marshall ties himself up in knots, for instance, trying to explain why he doesn't oppose gay marriage, but, then again, doesn't support it, either. In an ideal world, he seems to be saying, we'd have gay marriage, but practically speaking, he's worried about the backlash. Just think what those nasty Republicans will do once gays start getting married!

Well, I'm sick of second-guessing what Republicans will and will not want to vote for. Michael Kinsley wrote a wonderful article about this a couple of weeks ago, poking fun at Democrats who supported Lieberman because they disagreed with him on everything, or fled Dean because "he was so appealing that he scared them".

Political activity is a bit like when government intervention in the foreign exchange market: it only really works when the momentum is with you, but if that's the situation, then it can work wonders. Right now, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is probably the most astute political activist in the world. He picked his moment perfectly –Valentine's Day! Genius! – and ran with his issue as hard as he could, picking up support from across the country. As Andrew Sullivan says,

Newsom is also entitled to act according to his conscience and to his own reading of the state constitution's guarantees of equal protection, just as (Alabama judge Roy) Moore was. If he is found guilty of violating his oath of office, he should face the consequences. Somehow I think one of them might be re-election in a landslide.

Now I'm not saying that the gay marriage issue might not be bad for the Democrats, net-net, in the presidential election. Massachussetts senator John Kerry will, I'm sure, have a hard time selling himself to the Bible Belt if his state is overrun at the time by gay couples from all over the world lining up to get married.

But it's also clear that the US public, in general, has reacted with markedly less horror to the marriages in San Francisco than it did to the half-second exposure of Janet Jackson's right nipple during the Super Bowl half-time show. It's slowly becoming clear, I think, that gays are not sexual deviants intent on undermining the institution of marriage: they're perfectly normal and ordinary people who fall in love and want to get married. The queue outside San Francisco's City Hall is not made up of the characters who populate Gay Pride parades – topless dykes on bikes, leather-and-chains bears, drag queens, that sort of thing. Instead, Middle America looks at the lovers waiting hours and days for the chance to get married and sees normal people, intent on fulfilling their own American Dream.

Three thousand married gay couples in San Francisco can't even come close to inflicting the kind of damage on marriage as an institution that Britney Spears managed to do in a drunken weekend. When given the opportunity of taking part in an institution as important and solemn as marriage, the gay community has come through with flying colours, treating it with the seriousness and joy it deserves. In return, I have a feeling that the self-appointed arbiters of public morality might just feel a twinge of hypocrisy if they rail too loudly about who can and can't get married these days.

Now, then, is not the time to pussy-foot around the issue. There's the smell of historical inevitability in the air, and we who care about civil rights should have no compunction in following our noses. Don't worry about what the Republicans might think: go out, celebrate gay marriage wherever it occurs, and fight for it everywhere else. Vermont might have blazed the trail with its civil unions, but already they're an anachronism: the institutionalisation of gay unions as different and unequal.

Gay marriage is not an issue which you can triangulate, Clinton-style, and end up in some wishy-washy John Kerry "civil unions good, gay marriage bad" unhappy compromise. If you don't believe me, look at the disaster that is Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Gay marriage is a civil right, which means that opposing it is, in a crucial way, un-American. It would be depressing beyond words if the left, through natural cowardice in an election year, lost the momentum on this one.

Posted by Felix at 1:07 EST | Comments (6)

Monet in Vegas, part 2

Joseph Clarke, over at unfolio, calls me one "of the blogosphere's great arts writers" today, which is more than enough reason for me to link to him. He also joins in the Monet debate, and adds some new arguments of his own as to why "it is wrong to think that a non-profit museum and a for-profit gallery can offer the same cultural service to the public".

Of course, the two types of institution perform different roles, both necessary in their own way. And you'll never find me saying that we might as well do away with the Whitney so long as Larry Gagosian's got his space in Chelsea. But in the context of the issue at hand, it's also worth pointing out that we're dealing with Tyler Green's hypothetical here, in which he asks why Boston's Museum of Fine Arts loaned its Monets to the Bellagio rather than to the Venetian, which houses the Vegas branch of the Guggenheim.

In this context, I really don't see that there would be much of a difference at all between an MFA Monet show at one and an MFA Monet show at the other. Might the Bellagio's audio guides come in slightly more languages? Might the Guggenheim's catalogue be more academically rigorous? Whatever. To all intents and purposes, the galleries in the two casinos would offer exactly the same cultural service to the public. After all, we're talking Vegas here: the presence of Dave Hickey notwithstanding, the audience for this show is not going to be the kind of people who read catalogue essays for pleasure.

Nevertheless, Joseph makes a couple of points which are worth addressing.

According to the MFA's mission statement, "the Museum's ultimate aim is to encourage inquiry and to heighten public understanding and appreciation of the visual world." By contrast, the raison d'etre of a for-profit gallery -- or any for-profit business -- is to make money. This means that while the MFA values Monet paintings in cultural and artistic terms, the Bellagio values them in dollars and cents.

This is true, and something the MFA should bear in mind when it enters into deals such as the one it has with the Bellagio. When the MFA loans its paintings to another non-profit institution, it can work on the assumption that both institutions have the same goals. If the paintings are going to a for-profit gallery, on the other hand, the MFA has to be sure that the show will advance its own goals as well as those of the gallery in question.

But it's easy to overstate this point. Even when the MFA is loaning paintings to a fellow museum, it should still examine the proposed show very carefully. Sub-par curatorial standards crop up in shows at non-profit and for-profit galleries alike, and it's up to the lending institution to ensure that its works don't get abused in an unbefitting setting. So long as the Bellagio show meets the MFA's standards, the fact that the Bellagio is a for-profit institution should be neither here nor there. Similarly, if a museum does not meet the MFA's standards, Boston would be wrong to part with its paintings anyway, just because they'd be going to a non-profit institution.

More importantly, though, the MFA and the Vegas Guggenheim are "public space" in a sense that the Bellagio gallery is not. The Bellagio did not choose the Monet paintings for the general edification of the denizens of Las Vegas; it chose those paintings--over millions of other works of art it could have sought to display--for financial reasons. A non-profit museum might have opted to show different paintings.

Different, maybe, although as I understand it the choice of Monets was largely left to the MFA, rather than to the Bellagio. But I have to admit I don't quite understand Joseph's point here. Is he simply saying that different galleries do their shows in different ways? That's true whether or not they're non-profit. Rather, he seems to be saying that a show which is driven by financial considerations will, prima facie, be culturally inferior to a show driven by purely cultural considerations.

I'm not convinced. The high-minded non-profit cultural institution across the street has spent most of its short life showing The Art of the Motorcycle, while the Bellagio has been showing Warhols and Monets. Could it be – could it possibly be – that the need to make a buck might actually make a show better? Look at all the stodgy old museums in the former East Germany. When they stopped sitting on their arses and started trying to attract a paying audience to justify their existence, standards went up, not down.

The art a gallery chooses to display will, in turn, have a direct effect on who comes to view it. We cannot really speak of different galleries' giving "the art-going public" equal opportunities to view art when the "publics" that may patronize them are different.

We can't? Why on earth not? If I didn't know any better, I'd think that Joseph was valuing the traditional museum-goer over the lumpenproletariat who might be attracted to a well-marketed for-profit art show. If the Bellagio succeeds in attracting a different audience from the kind of people who go to the MFA in Boston, so much the better! It would be genuinely shocking if the MFA were to turn to the Bellagio and say, in effect, "well, you might attract a lot of people to the show, but we're not sure they're the right kind of people, do you know what we mean?"

It is certainly part of the MFA's mission to ensure that its artistic treasures are seen by as wide a cross-section of the general public as possible. I can think of no better way to achieve that than to send a group of paintings (a) to a city thousands of miles away, where most of the visitors will never have been to Boston; and (b) to a small private gallery in a casino, from a large public gallery in a city. The audience will be completely different? Perfect!

It may be argued that the distinction between public and private galleries is, in this case, purely theoretical; that this specific rental does not, in fact, violate the public trust. This may be true. But given the dangerous precedent this arrangement sets, and given Rogers' seemingly flippant attitude towards the controversy, it is critical that we ask the questions Tyler has articulated, to see that Monet's trip to Vegas does not push us down a slippery slope of arts privatization.

Ah, yes. Dangerous precedents and slippery slopes. Thin end of the wedge, and all that. Malcom Rogers might just be toking on a cigarette right now, but before long he'll be freebasing cocaine under a railway bridge somewhere.

The thing is, in this case I'm far from convinced that the highly-addictive art-world crack cocaine in question – arts privatization – is necessarily a bad thing. I say this not because I think it's necessarily good, but because I think we've seen so little of it that it's far too early to tell whether it's good or bad.

Certainly, I can think of examples of for-profit organisations putting out culturally-dubious material in order to make money. It happens quite frequently in the classical music world, where classical radio stations play "bleeding chunks" rather than entire pieces, and the Three Tenors clean up with their accessible medleys while high-minded opera houses struggle to stay out of the red even after receiving large state subsidies.

On the other hand, it's easy to see how the private sector might be more efficient than the public sector in a lot of cases. For instance, Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gets paid $866,583 a year, while president David McKinney gets another $601,905. Beneath them are a staggering 1,800 full-time employees.

Now, I'm not saying the Met should be privatized. But there's no doubt that non-profits can be sluggish, bloated, and unoriginal. Just look at the New York Philharmonic (Zarin Mehta, executive director: $750,000 a year).

Anybody who's spent much time in any part of the non-profit sector will attest to rampant mismanagement, often linked to out-of-control egos and a sense of entitlement among the independently wealthy people who usually end up founding and staffing such places. There is no doubt in my mind that given a modest endowment and non-profit status, the Bellagio art gallery could start making substantial losses in no time at all. And would the quality of the programming there improve as a result? I doubt it very much.

Both the Guggenheim and the MFA have ventured into Vegas. The Guggenheim spent a fortune on a Rem Koolhaas art gallery which almost nobody went to visit; the MFA, if you will, outsourced its Vegas operation to the private sector. Financially and organisationally, the Guggenheim Las Vegas has been a complete disaster, while the MFA's Monet show is quite the opposite. Yet the cognoscenti remain happily ensconced in their prejudices, denouncing the MFA show just because it's making money, and asking whether it couldn't be shown across the street instead. Slippery slope? Slide away, Mr Rogers. We might just love what lies at the bottom.

UPDATE: This is almost too good to be true, but back over at Modern Art Notes today, Tyler Green links to a review of a new Rothko show, saying "This show is my early leader for best show of 2004". Click over to the review itself, and you find it starting thusly: "Among the many exhibitions of Mark Rothkoís paintings I have seen over the course of many yearsóand this includes major museum retrospectivesóthe two that have most profoundly defined for me the quality of his artistic achievement have both been organized at the PaceWildenstein Gallery." PaceWildenstein, of course, is the gallery which is putting on the Monet show in Vegas.

Posted by Felix at 20:09 EST | Comments (2)

Monet in Vegas

Tyler Green is, I daresay, the best art blogger in the world. But today he harshes, quite unjustifiably, I think, on Malcom Rogers, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Rogers' crime, in Green's eyes, is to have loaned 21 of his Monets to the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas for an exhibition there. In return, the MFA will probably receive a seven-figure sum. The Boston Globe has the story; Green says that the link will expire tomorrow, so I've mirrored it here.

The main critic of the arrangement seems to be Christopher Knight, of the LA Times, who wrote an article on February 3 headlined "A new low in the business of high art". It's behind a subscriber firewall, unfortunately, but the gist of Knight's complaint is that the Bellagio gallery – which is run by a subsidiary of art gallery PaceWildenstein – is a for-profit organisation. Writes Knight:

[The] MFA could have taken its paintings across Las Vegas Boulevard, ironically, to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, where Boston could actually be lending its Monet paintings to a fellow cultural institution. But it didn't... Context confers meaning. The Monet show's context is purely commercial. It teaches audiences that, for an art museum, financial worth is art's primary value.

Knight has also been widely quoted as saying that the Monet show "is without intellectual merit" and "is educationally corrupt". But those quotes are usually taken a little bit out of context: Knight was not writing a review, and has not seen the show. Rather, he was holding up the MFA's actions to the guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which say that the primary considerations that a museum should weigh before making any loan should be its "intellectual merit and educational benefits".

Let's ignore Knight's take on the intellectual and educational merits of the Monet show, then, since he hasn't seen it and really can't say. His substantive point is that if the MFA loans works to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the Venetian hotel, that's fine, whereas if it loans works to the art gallery at the Bellagio hotel across the street, then that's beyond the pale.

I don't see why there's such a clear distinction to be drawn between the two. Both hotels use their art galleries as tourist attractions, as a way to appeal to the slightly more highbrow gamblers in Vegas. In that sense, they're both for-profit, commercial concerns. One is run by a pair of museums, while the other is run by a commercial art gallery, but I've seen many excellent gallery shows and dreadful museum shows. It's entirely possible that taking an art gallery and moving it from non-profit to for-profit status could actually make it better. Knight says, in as many words, that the art gallery at the Bellagio is not a "cultural institution". Bollocks to that: of course it is!

Tyler Green, however, has actual questions for Rogers. Here they are, with my own answers.

1. In the Globe story, you conceded that there is a small "issue here." Could you outline the "issue" and explain why it is a small issue and not a big one?

The issue here is very similar to the issue of Charles Saatchi sponsoring the "Sensation" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In that case, the value of Saatchi's own paintings was likely to increase due to their receiving the imprimatur of a major museum show. Similarly, PaceWildenstein is a major dealer in impressionist paintings, and in Monets specifically. If this show is a huge success, they could benefit not only from increased admissions revenues (which are shared with the MFA), but also from increased prices for their stock of paintings.

Why is this a small issue and not a big one? Because the market in Monets is mature, and the chances of a Vegas show increasing the value of PaceWildenstein's Monets (assuming they have any) is very small.

Now, it is true that there is a very large chance that PaceWildenstein will make money from the show directly. But that's always the case with museum loans: the only difference here is that the operator of the exhibit is a private, rather than a public, organisation. And, of course, a public museum is benefitting as well: the MFA itself, which is getting a tidy sum.

2. Are there groups, people or organizations to whom you would not rent the art in your museum's collection? If there are not, please list a few of them and explain how renting to those groups are different from renting works to a private corporation gallery that is based in a casino?

A museum's works should be accessible to the public. If somebody wanted to rent an MFA Monet so that they could hang it in their front room or otherwise keep the public from seeing it, the MFA would rightly refuse. Now many art galleries charge admission – mostly non-profit art galleries, it must be said. Admission fees, while regrettable, are generally understood to be a necessary evil. If the MFA loaned out 21 Monets to a public art gallery, there would still be admission fees. But the fact that the admission fees go to a private rather than a public organisation does not change the degree to which the art is accessible to the general public.

3. In Edgers' story, he (apparently) paraphrases you asking how people can be so critical of a show they haven't seen? Why is it not fair to criticize the concept of a museum renting out work to a for-profit gallery in a casino, regardless of what the resulting show is?

It is fair to criticize the concept of a museum renting out work to a for-profit gallery in a casino. Knight wrote an opinion piece, and he's more than free to express his opinion that what the MFA did was wrong. Similarly, the MFA is more than free to defend its actions. What is weird is when Knight criticizes not the concept, but the show itself, calling it "without intellectual merit". How could he make that judgment without seeing the show? In fact, on the very same page of the newspaper, Suzanne Muchnic describes the show as "beautifully installed", and nowhere gives the impression that it is in any way sub-par.

4. The Guggenheim runs an accredited space at the Venetian Hotel. If this is really about sharing your Monets with culturally bereft Las Vegas, as you say, why not loan your Monets to the Vegas Guggenheim? Is it because they wouldn't pay you $1M+ and someone else would? Did you explore all available options regarding showing the Monets at an accredited, non-profit space?

As far as the art-going public is concerned, the benefit to them is more or less identical whether they pay $15 to see Monets at the Venetian or $15 to see Monets at the Bellagio. So the MFA was faced, hypothetically, with two choices:

• Give the Vegas public the benefit of access to the Monets; or
• Give the Vegas public the benefit of access to the Monets, and give the MFA – a cash-strapped museum in need of funds – a million bucks.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Where is the advantage to the Vegas public in seeing the paintings at "an accredited, non-profit space"? Does that make the paintings any better? Where is the advantage to the MFA in lending the paintings to such a space? The MFA certainly doesn't get more money. It's worth turning the question around: why should the MFA embrace the Venetian rather than the Bellagio? What is the non-financial value of this "accreditation" of which you speak?

In fact, since we're dealing in hypotheticals here, here's another one. Let's say the Horseshoe Casino in Vegas opened up its own gallery, accredited by the Kalamazoo Art Club, a non-profit organisation dedicated to showing pretty pictures to people. Would you prefer that the Monets went there, even if they weren't nearly as well hung, and even if the admission price was bumped to, say, $30? What is the magical value of non-profit status?

5. In talking with Suzanne Muchnic of the LA Times, you justified your decision to rent out your Monets by saying that you are always looking for "new funding source[s]." Museums do more than show art, a significant part of their mission is to preserve cultural legacies that are important to humankind. Is treating art as a "funding source" appropriate given a museum's mission? Can you give us some examples of what would be inappropriate funding sources for a museum?

All museums treat art as a funding source. Every time they sell a postcard, license an image, loan a painting, or charge an admission fee to see art, they receive money in return. Ultimately, it seems fair to say that every penny that every art museum has ever received is in some way leveraged off the art in that museum. So the question isn't whether it's appropriate to treat art as a funding source; the question is what types of uses of art as a funding source are inappropriate.

I've already said that loaning a painting to an individual who would not let the public have access to it would be inappropriate. More generally, selling art is something which museums should think long and hard about before doing, especially if they're selling to a private collector as opposed to another museum.

But more importantly, preserving a cultural legacy is in no way inconsistent with showing art to as many different people as possible. Ultimately, any cultural legacy is going to die out if nobody sees it, and the more people who see a body of art, the more of a cultural legacy it is likely to become. If the private sector is better at bringing art to people than the non-profit sector is, then all power to them, and may a hundred relationships such as the one between the MFA and the Bellagio blossom.

Posted by Felix at 13:58 EST | Comments (8)

The ethics of blogging

Over the course of the past year, I've had quite a lot of experience with the intersection between blogging and journalistic ethics. I have been accused, and have accused others, of blogging unethically. And yesterday, I said that one website was blogging too ethically.

So I've decided to outline my thoughts here, in the hope of starting a discussion. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is that there is really no consensus at all about the degree to which normal journalistic ethics (say, the rules governing what appears in an average US newspaper) apply to blogs. Now that the blogosphere is maturing into a news source in its own right, I think the time is ripe to have this debate.

1. Is there a limit to what blogs should and shouldn't publish?

Some blogs clearly think there is. Wonkette, part of the Gawker Media empire, even went so far as to publish a Statement of Principles yesterday, after I criticised her for not, as she puts it, "naming the name that's everyone's heard but no one's said". She's clear that she won't print the name, but that didn't stop her linking to a news article which did print it. Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review links to a number of different bloggers in a piece about who printed what, mentions the fact that Wonkette links to an article with the name, and then conspicuously denies her a link of her own. The obvious implication is that linking to Wonkette linking to the name would be unethical, while simply saying that Wonkette links to the name is OK.

Wonkette, in not printing the name, is actually following the lead of Matt Drudge. Drudge, too, links to stories which name her and even print her photo, but he has stopped short of printing her name himself. As for the press, no US newspaper has named her, as far as I know, but the Sun and the Telegraph, in England, have.

(Update: The Chicago Sun-Times, a major US newspaper, has now named her, in a column which uses the word "reportedly" five times in three paragraphs.)

When would it be kosher to name the girl? the New York Daily News fronts the story, but says that "The News is withholding her identity because there is no clear evidence of any relationship between her and Kerry." Wonkette, meanwhile, just says that "We're not going to post her name until she has a chance to launch her own handbag line just like any other scandal-plagued intern."

My take on this is that if the Sun prints her name and puts it on the internet, the name is in the public domain, and no material extra harm is done by putting it in a blog. Newspapers, especially big ones, can work on the conceit that they have all the news that's fit to print, and that their readers don't necessarily get their news anywhere else. Blogs are almost the diametric opposite of that paradigm. So "X has named her, why can't we" works much better as a defense for a blog than it does as a defense for a newspaper. Especially if you're going to link directly to X, you might as well print the name yourself. But clearly I'm in the minority here. After all, even Drudge won't print the name, and the CJR won't even link to a blog which links to the name.

I ought to mention one other wrinkle to this debate, and that's legal liability. Newspapers have expensive lawyers and can afford to defend themselves from libel suits; blogs don't and can't. That's a practical concern, and it can intersect with journalistic ethics. If you're going to accuse a notoriously litigous person of something bad, then you run the risk of being sued. You might feel comfortable on an ethical level making the accusation, but still feel uncomfortable on a practical level, especially if you live and/or publish in the UK. It's worth mentioning that anonymous bloggers have relatively little protection in this regard: if someone's really determined to find out who you are, they probably will.

But my main concern here is the ethics of the situation. As far as I know, no one has successfully sued a blogger for something they printed: the most clear-cut case, that of Blumenthal vs Drudge, ended with a clear victory for the blogger.

It's worth looking at Blumenthal vs Drudge, though, because I think many bloggers would consider Drudge's original accusation – that Sidney Blumenthal was a wife-beater – to be clearly unethical, even if it wasn't illegal. Bloggers often have many very influential readers, and once a rumour has been printed somewhere it's almost impossible to make it completely go away, no matter how outlandish it might be. So while the bar might be set lower for Drudge than it is for the New York Times, I think there's a very strong case that it ought to be set somewhere. Once an accusation about somebody is out on the internet, people googling that person will often end up at the accusing page, and many of them will believe what it says. The person printing the information bears some responsibility for what their readers go away believing.

Printing something about someone can also be wrong even if it's true. I noted in November that Fleshbot, another Gawker Media site, was (a) publishing extremely graphic stills from the Paris Hilton Sex Tapes while (b) refusing to publish her phone number, which was doing the rounds at the time. (It was actually left in a comment on my MemeFirst entry; I ended up deleting a lot of comments and, ultimately, closing the entry to comments altogether, just because I felt that publishing either the pictures or the phone number was clearly unethical.)

I've also noticed that since I started blogging, a lot of people have started inserting an "off the record" into their conversations and emails with me. They're obviously worried that, being a blogger, I might turn around and publish their confidences for all the world to see, and they're also worried that there isn't some kind of obvious ethical code that would preclude me from doing that. This despite the fact that in almost four years of blogging, I've only quoted people from what they've said online or in print – the single exception being Peter Kim, of Puma.

So there does seem to be a perception that blogs are an unfiltered, unedited news source, and that if you're communicating with a blogger, then you run the risk of having those communications published on the internet, even if that's not what you want. Blogs can undoubtedly invade peoples' privacy, by, say, publishing their phone number, or photographs of them naked, or simply betraying their confidence. My view on the ethics of blogging is that they shouldn't do that, although I'm conflicted on the subject of whether, if someone does do that, it's OK to link to them.

2. Should bloggers attempt to verify information before publishing it?

Whenever a newspaper prints a story, the reader can assume that if an accusation is being made against someone, the paper made an attempt to contact that person and ask them for comment. On the other hand, if a blogger links to an accusation against person X, most of the time that blogger will have made no attempt at all to contact X and ask them if the accusation is true.

I've done this myself. I am an acquaintance of Nick Denton, and he has always responded promptly to any emails I've sent him. Yet in December I linked to a web page accusing him of pilfering code, without trying to contact Denton or get his side of the story. (He did leave comments on the page in question, which I took into account in my entry.) I'm a professional journalist, and I would never dream of submitting the kind of thing I wrote to a newspaper or magazine – not without contacting all the principals and talking to them about the issue in question. Yet still I went ahead and published the item anyway, without talking to anybody at all. Did I behave unethically?

I can certainly see the argument that what I did was wrong. Blogs are a media outlet, as Denton and I were keen to assert in l'affaire Puma. If you're going to claim Media Outlet status, you should try to live up to the responsibilities such status confers upon you. But I also think that blogging is fundamentally different from most journalism. There's almost never any pretense of objectivity: a genuinely fair and balanced blog would be boring even if it were possible for such a thing to exist. And a large part of blogging is simply linking – I was initially pointed to the page in question by Anil Dash, who put it on his Daily Links page. I doubt many people would consider Anil's action to be unethical: his links are so short and plentiful that he can't be expected to go to work vetting each and every one.

In the Denton case, I never considered myself to be reporting the story: rather, I thought, I was simply linking to it, and adding my own personal opinion, clearly labelled as such. I consider that anything I publish either here or on MemeFirst should automatically be considered my personal opinion, but in this case I even threw a few "I think"s in just to make things perfectly clear. That said, it's generally a good idea to back up one's opinions with verified facts rather than web-based allegations. Even if I was writing the story for the op-ed page of a newspaper rather than the news page, I would still make sure to talk to the principals first.

Nevertheless, I felt no guilt when I published the story: I didn't feel that I was doing something wrong. Rather, I felt that I was simply adding my own two cents to the blogosphere's ongoing conversation about a certain allegation.

But part of the reason I didn't feel bad about writing such things was that, deep down, I didn't think that anybody really cared what I wrote in the first place. A newspaper is a powerful institution; I'm just a small-to-middling voice in a cacophony of blogs. Now, however, I've thought it over a bit more. Why is there a generally-accepted set of journalistic ethics in the first place? Precisely because newspapers are powerful institutions which can do significant damage to reputations and lives.

But so are blogs. Just ask Trent Lott.

Insofar as people care about blogs, then, we bloggers should probably be careful what we write, and even make some kind of attempt to check our facts and do a little bit of homework before rushing to publish. And the more popular your blog, the more hits and inbound links you get, the more this applies to you. In general, though, if you're writing about someone you know, then it's only polite to run it by them first. (After all, it's not like they're not going to see it once you publish.) So: apologies, Nick, and apologies, Elizabeth. My bad.

3. Should blogs maintain a wall between content and revenues?

One huge difference between blogs and newspapers is that with blogs, there's no difference between a journalist, an editor, and a publisher. Increasingly, blogs are making money – even felixsalmon.com has made the grand total of $159.17 since I started running Google ads in September. It barely even rises to the level of pocket money, but it does cover hosting fees.

Other blogs, however, really do make significant amounts of cash. Daily Candy, which has bloggy properties, recently got sold for over $3.5 million. Both Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis are setting up multiple weblogs with an unashamed profit motive. Andrew Sullivan, Matt Haughey (at PVRBlog), and Rafat Ali (at PaidContent.org) all now make more than the average American wage earner just from their blogs. And Drudge, of course, makes a lot of money.

When weblogs were just beginning, many of the most successful ones were set up by professional journalists who simply ported over to the web their ingrained journalistic ethics. When Andrew Sullivan was accused of a conflict of interest after he accepted advertising from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, he took those complaints very seriously, returned the cash, and stopped running the ads.

Increasingly, however, bloggers will not come from a journalistic background, and in any case many are more interested in making money than they are in adhering to Old Media rules. What is the point, for instance, in maintaining a strong distinction between editorial and advertising on a blog like Fleshbot? The types of sites that Fleshbot wants as advertisers are precisely the type of sites it wants to feature in its editorial content. If advertiser suicidegirls.com wants Fleshbot to feature a "Suicide Girl of the Week" in its editorial column, why on earth not? That's just the kind of thing that Fleshbot's readers want to see.

(Update: I have now been informed that the "Suicide Girl of the Week" feature predates suicidegirls.com signing on as an advertiser.)

Daily Candy is more of an ethical grey area, I think. The site became financially successful by sending out "dedicated" emails, in its trademark editorial voice, which were actually pure advertising. If you read the small print, it was possible to work out which emails were "real" and which were paid for, but it wasn't easy. Advertisers clearly hoped that the recipients of the dedicated emails would mistake them for unsolicited raves by the Daily Candy editorial team – and Daily Candy more or less gave them what they wanted.

Still, Daily Candy did make some kind of distinction between editorial and advertising. Other bloggers might not. Harry Knowles, for one, doesn't seem to care in the slightest about journalistic ethics or conflicts of interest, and neither do his readers, it would seem. In fact, the louder and brasher bloggers (Drudge springs to mind as another example) are doing very well indeed despite – or perhaps because of – their cavalier attitude towards traditional journalistic mores.

But again, I'm not writing about how to be a successful blogger, I'm writing about the ethics of blogging. And I think that it is unethical to accept payment for editorial content, especially if it's undisclosed.

4. What would adopting an ethical code mean for the blogosphere?

Clearly, there is no institution which can regulate or bully bloggers into acting ethically, even if there could be any kind of agreement on what constitutes ethical and unethical activity by bloggers. But if individual bloggers, especially the higher-profile ones, made it clear what kind of things they will and will not do, at least some kind of consensus might start to emeerge.

If that happened, would the blogosphere lose its appealing, free-wheeling, anarchic flavour? I very much doubt it. Would anybody still be free to publish anything they wanted? Absolutely. Would blogs still deliver the kind of content which is hard, if not impossible, to get from any other media outlet? I should bloody well hope so. I would simply like to think that, in aggregate, blogs might get taken increasingly seriously by the kind of people who naturally discount anything which isn't published on paper.

But there could be a downside, as well. If bloggers started censoring themselves in an attempt to stay on the right side of the ethical line, their blogs might become duller. If they started double-checking things before publishing them, they could lose both speed and volume of posting. If they refused certain forms of advertising, they could both lose money and hinder the growth of a whole new form of media.

What bloggers might consider doing now, I think, is ask themselves what kind of limitations they place on what they publish, and why. At least that way we will be able to get some kind of idea of where we stand, before asking whether that's where we want to be. Is there a role for ethics in blogs? If so, what? Let the debate begin.

Posted by Felix at 4:04 EST | Comments (2)

Urban retail

I've spent a lot of time on this blog writing about a big new Manhattan development. It features a landmark office building designed by David Childs, and is meant to be one of the most important new shopping and dining destinations in the city – augmented, of course, by cultural attractions. I refer, of course, to the World Trade Center site, although I could just as well be talking about the new Time Warner Center.

So, in an attempt to get a feel for what we might be in for, I ventured boldly forth to the Upper West Side this afternoon, to check out The Shops at Columbus Circle (for that is what this mall urban retail center has been called). As I walked down Central Park West towards the new building, I had my own prediction (about the World Trade Center) in the back of my head:

A large number of national chain stores is an inevitability, if only because – obviously – there can't be any small local shops who have been there for generations. Judging by the World Financial Center, there might be a few independent restaurants, but the shops are likely to be pretty bland and corporate.

It turns out that my invocation of the World Financial Center was prescient. Take a look at the photo to the left: it's basically the WFC with catwalks. Inside and out, the space looks and feels very WFC-esque: there's the same pattern of large square windows in steel and stone; the same antiseptic corridors lined in expensive marble; the same feeling that, basically, you're shopping in a high-end office building, or a luxury hotel. Which, of course, you are.

There is a reason why the best hotel restaurants in New York go to great lengths to disassociate themselves from their hosts – they have different names, different addresses, and their own dedicated street entrances. Large hotels and office buildings, no matter how high-end they are, basically work from the assumption that they have to be all things to all people. The blandness is not the result of a lack of imagination: it comes out of the necessity of not offending anybody.

New Yorkers, on the other hand, have very little truck with not being offended: if we were easily offended, we would have left this city long ago. What we want is something interesting, something with character. We'll try anything once; if we don't like it, we won't go back. But better to err on the side of the overly adventurous than to stick to the formulaic. In such a town, the most successful hotel restaurants don't look like hotel restaurants at all.

As it goes for restaurants, so it goes for shops. One of the hottest shopping districts right now is 14th Street between 9th and 10th, home to the likes of Alexander McQueen and Jeffrey. It's hard to get to, it's convenient for almost nothing, and it smells of rotting meat. New Yorkers don't just not mind a bit of inconvenience: they actively seek it out. Ever since the light-industrial wastelands of Soho and Tribeca were first populated by loft-dwelling bohemians, there's been a sense that grotty beats glossy every time.

This isn't just a downtown thing, either. New Yorkers love their quirky department stores, like Henri Bendel, almost as much for their limitations as despite them. When it comes to shopping, bigger is most definitely not better: while we might have one of the largest shops in the world, I'm pretty sure that Macy's customers are mostly tourists.

What's more, New Yorkers are finely attuned to what is unique and what is not. New York's most successful retail openings in recent memory were those of the Prada store on Broadway and Prince, closely followed, in time, geography, and sensibility, by the Apple store on Prince and Greene. Beautifully designed, light-filled spaces work wonderfully in Soho, where they contrast with the older architecture to create a lovely interplay between the industrial and the high-tech eras.

At Columbus Circle, there's certainly no shortage of light and space. But there are no objects of desire fetishistically displayed within the glass and steel enclosure: rather, all that you see upon entry is walls, escalators and store logos. Walking around the building, it's depressing to note that probably the most inviting part of it is the Thomas Pink store which occupies the 60th Street end of the arcade on ground level. Visible from the street, the shirts in the window attract passing foot traffic. At the main entrance, however, there's really nothing pulling the pedestrian in to the atrium, since there's no product to be seen. Instead, you're simply pointed to what is where: a bookshop upstairs, a kitchen-equipment store at the back, a supermarket down the escalator.

A word about that supermarket is probably in order. Yes, it's big, and yes, it's impressive. But it also seems to have been designed by a madman: at the bottom of the escalator, there's a food hall behind you, where you can't buy food, just sit down and eat it once you've bought it. There's a supermarket to the left of you, where you get your groceries. And there's a food court in front of you, where you get the food to be eaten in the food hall. Then – and this is the genius bit – there's a bunch of check-out counters, with a very incoherent queueing system, to your right. Everybody, whether they're buying groceries or ready-prepared food in plastic washable bowls, pays at the same place. I tried to get a chicken vindaloo, but rapidly realised that it was going to go cold by the time I was able to sit down and eat it.

The above-ground levels have similarly bad design: one would think that it was crucial, in a vertical mall, to have lots of stairs and other means of getting easily up and down from one level to another. Instead, escalators are placed at the ends of the arcades, and I didn't even bother trying to get to the top level.

At the ground level, things are even worse. Upstairs, at least, the shops seem to know how to present themselves. But down at street level, the same design plan seems to have been imposed on everybody, where you have to crane your neck and look up just to find the store logo and work out whose merchandise you've been admiring.

And nowhere is there any sense of surprise or joy. As Manhattan Users Guide says,

New York derives a lot of its energy from fresh, absurd, or delightful juxtapositions. But what do you get when you juxtapose J. Crew and Sephora? Crabtree & Evelyn with Godiva? (For how to do it right, the planners should have spent some time in Grand Central.) You could name most of the retailers without knowing a thing about the place.

Indeed, I might add, you could name most of the retailers just by looking at the type of shops in the World Financial Center, that epitome of Stepford-style blandness. And MUG is absolutely right about Grand Central, which is a masterpiece of well-edited retail and food outlets, with nary a national franchise in sight.

So what does this mean for the WTC site? I fear the prognosis is bad. The original WTC mall, after all, was truly gruesome: the only saving grace in the entire site was the Borders bookshop. Other than that, it was The Limited next to Sbarro next to... well, the fact that I can barely remember anything else, despite the fact that I used to walk through there every day, speaks volumes. It was home to commuters with thousand-yard stares occasionally picking up a birthday present for the kids on their way home.

The new WTC won't be as bad as the old one, of course. For one thing, most of the shops will be on streets, as opposed to being in a contiguous mall. But if Time Warner starts making money off The Shops at Columbus Circle, I wouldn't be at all surprised to start seeing vertical malls popping up in the WTC office-tower designs. And even without vertical malls, if the shops are just rented out to the highest bidders, we're going to see the same set of nationally-recognisable franchises, and no sense of character or individuality.

Everybody involved in the WTC planning process agrees that the site should be a vibrant new city district, with streetlife, nightlife and cultural life. But entire districts are hard to build from scratch: any new development will inevitably have a certain amount of sterility to it. What I hope is that someone smart will take MUG's advice, look at the Time Warner Center, look at Grand Central Station, and realise that a bit of central planning can go a long way in giving an area a personality.

For too long, the west side of lower Manhattan has been devoid of any kind of positive characteristics. A little slice of suburbia nestled next to the financial district, it stands in stark contrast to the riotous streets found east of Broadway. It desperately needs an injection of a little bit of New York attitude.

There are two things which could happen when the Fulton Street corridor is completed, and downtown becomes a coherent whole again. Homogenisation could creep eastwards from the WFC and WTC towards Fulton and Nassau, especially if lots of new retail is auctioned off as part of the subway station redesign plans. Alternatively, the reintroduction of Fulton and Greenwich streets, finding their rightful way back onto the map after a long and painful absence, could create a lively new civic center: think the Beaubourg in Paris, with Santiago Calatrava's gorgeous new PATH station playing the role of the Pompidou Center.

In order for that to happen, the designers of the new site are going to have to leave themselves open to uncertainty and a little bit of chaos. If everything is planned and profit-maximised, it'll just be like today's Upper West Side (complete with unimpressive David Childs monolith), only even more boring.

Posted by Felix at 2:36 EST | Comments (4)

Cities in the Snow

It seems to me that we create cities wherever we live, however much we try to escape them. And when we hate them, we go further remote just to repeat the same mistakes. At the risk of sounding overly deep and philosophical in an entry that has expectations of pure light-hearted escapism, why is this?

I had an amazing day recently. The hassle of Halley had been wearing me down a bit and I needed a break. We all need a break, we're working hard and have long hours, but it's more than that. It's impossible to be autonomous, independent. To move things, you need the vehicle mech, to build things, a chippie, to wire things up, a sparkie, and to seal things, a plumber. In addition, the steelies are jacking buildings, the field assistants providing safety guidance for all off-base activites as well as a lot of on-base ones, the genny mechs keep the place warm and comms managers work shifts to keep us in contact with the world and run radio scheds with planes and field parties. Met babes are also on shiftwork, taking air observations and launching balloons to add to the Met Office weather forecasting, electronic engineers are probing the crazy currents in the sky and data managers trying to look after all of our numbers. Plus, handovers are happening between last year's winterers and this, people are flying in and out so there are pilots and plane mechanics requiring support, and the various summer-only scientists are trying to get their tasks completed before the ship takes them out in February.

But that's not it either. I like hubub, I like buzz. It's the politics, the interdependencies, the rules and regulations, that's wearing me down. Every little thing every person does has an impact or demand on someone else. Usually it's a demand for time, expertise or advice. Even if it's a job I'm intending on carrying out alone, I need to ask advice on relevant safety procedures and standard protocol. There are forms and procedures and politics surrounding everything plus the necessity of keeping people in the loop so they know what's going on but not boring them with inessentials about your work that they don't need to know. Sometimes I even forget, for a moment or three, that it's great to be here, it's an honour, it's a dream come true. It doesn't feel like a dream come true, it feels like a job I don't particularly like. At times. It's exhausting. For everyone.

So then you have to be extra careful and extra considerate and extra nice because you know that everyone is as equally knackered as you are. Plus, you live with these people, and are due to live with them and only them for the next year or two, so you don't really want to piss anyone off, or talk behind anyone's back, or just VENT because they know the person or situation you're venting about and that then will influence their impression of that subject which is the last thing you want because really, really, it's not a personal thing, it's not even a big or important thing, you just want to go and talk to a stranger, or a friend, who knows none of these people, and talk shit all night in the pub.

So there you have it: it's not all roses. But then, I never said it would be. I just don't generally talk about that stuff on the internet! Anyway, it was time to get out of the big smoke and remind myself of where I was for a while. I'd been on standby for five days for a co-pilot jolly to Berkner Island where there's a deep core drilling project occurring that is very, very cool indeed. Every morning, 7am. And every morning, no, not today... or maybe, we'll check the weather again in 2 hours. And eventually the weather would get worse or they'd decide to go elsewhere and I'd get on with whatever it was I was meant to be doing that day. Or trying to get on with it until some other divergence came along that required more immediate attention. A day of divergences is, I guess, as productive as a linear path although the final arrival point often feels much closer to home, where you began, than the intention might have been.

Anyway, I got up at 6:30. 7am sched? Nope, we're going elsewhere. And so finally, finally, I made it out to my lab in the bondoo to start unpacking my final machine. Or penultimate machine. Well, one of the big ones anyway. And finally, finally, was on a roll, colleagues away at lunch, music turned up loud... and the phone rings. "The plane's leaving for Berkner, you're on it if you want it, how quickly can you get here?!" Never have I skiied so fast!!

And there I was, 40 minutes later, in a twin otter, flying high, flying away from Halley, away from the chaos, out over the ice, over the ocean, the waves, the icebergs, the reflections of the sun through clouds and onto the water below. It's ironic really: this is the driest place in the world but yet we're surrounded by water molecules, and only water molecules! I live in a giant frozen ocean! I love it! The clouds are water, the snow is water, the ice and its hundreds of forms, the ocean – it's all water, beautiful, wonderful, flowing, moving, dynamic, water.

Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink. But that's a further beauty: you melt it, and you can drink it! Immediate water supply wherever you care to pitch your tent. How amazing is that?! How convenient! I love it so much. And my whole scenery, the sphere in which I am flying, it is all composed of light from the sun interacting with water in various beautiful forms. That's it: fire and water. So simple, so incredible. So vast. Shimmerings on ice, crevasses, glaciers, ice cliffs, ocean waves, clouds, clouds, clouds. I was flying over Antarctica! Wow!

The flight takes two and a half hours along the coastline, across some frozen ocean and then onto the south dome of Berkner Island. Berkner is much larger than I expected; I don't know what I expected, but I'm sure there are countries in the world smaller than this island. When we arrive there, I see a few orange pyramid tents, some flags, skidoo tracks and some people. There's not much here at all. I breathe a deep, deep sigh of fresh, unpolluted air. I am here, in the middle of nowhere, far, far, far away from the politics of bases. This here is a field camp. It's great.

Genevieve, a friend from Cambridge, greets me. It's not at all odd to see a familiar face in the middle of nowhere although I know it should be. "Welcome to the city!" she says, and I laugh. And then I realise that she's only half joking. There are certainly people in the party who feel it is too luxurious for a field party. It's more comfortable than I was expecting, yes, but then, why not, they're here for three months every year for three years. And by luxury, what do I mean? There are a few pyramid tents dotted around, a couple of weatherhavens and a large drilling tent. That's it.

Two people share a pyramind tent so your personal space is essentially limited to the size of your sleeping bag. (In a tent with a relative stranger, that could get very claustrophobic.) The dome shaped weatherhavens provide a space to escape to. One has an eating and drinking area, a kettle, some chairs and, sacrilige for the field, a stereo! The other is an office space. There is also a toilet tent and a shower tent, again, luxuries of the modern era. The toilet is an oil drum covered by a sheet of foam with a hole in the top. The shower is one of those camping bags hanging on a hook holding melted snow. Chilly.

The drilling tent is incredibly impressive. The entrance is at the bottom of a long deep tunnel and there, inside, in the middle of nowhere, is state-of-the-art engineering equipment, retrieving ice that was first deposited 5000 years ago! The floor of the room is about 4m under the snow surface with walls of blue ice covered by a large dome tent that reaches maybe 3m above the surface. Spacious, blue, cold. And here they sit and work shifts, drilling, drilling, pulling, coring, cleaning, processing this precious ice. I saw a core being pulled out of the ice, carefully, lovingly handled by the ice chemists. This is a true jewel. It's so dense, so cold, so brittle, so old. The air bubbles inside are tiny, compressed under the weight of the ice above. As the ice relaxes to atmospheric pressure, it hisses and bubbles, you might hear a quiet fizzing and sometimes shards bounce. Amazing and beautiful to see.

We fly home along the coast and listen to the radio. The antarctic equivalent of driving home on the motorway tuning in to the stereo. Halley to us, Halley to field parties, Rothera to field parties, us to Rothera... when you get bored of one channel, tune into another! All the gossip on these airwaves! You can even get the world service up here!

And so we fly home and I stare at the ice, at the sea, at the waves and the clouds. I look around and see no human habitation, no human impact, no wildlife at all except a couple of birds above the sea. We are far away, this is a special place. Approaching Halley, I see a few boxes on matchsticks, a couple of masts, some flags, vehicle tracks and some people. That's it. There's not much here at all. It's miles from anywhere.

Very soon, only eighteen people will be here, living in these blocks on twigs. The scenery is huge and vast and dismissive of the human presence. There is no reason for us to be here. It's the furthest place in the world from civilisation. It's tiny. I breathe a deep, deep sigh of fresh, unpolluted air. I am here, in the middle of nowhere, far, far, far away from the politics of the world. This here is an antarctic base. It's great.

Posted by Rhian at 12:03 EST | Comments (7)

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