March 2004 Archives
Amanda Hesser
"Poor Amanda Hesser" has got to be in my Top Five list of Food-Related Things I Never Thought I'd Say, along with "Ken Friedman's music policy is beloved of both the New York Times and Charlie Rose" and "soy products can replicate to an uncanny degree the experience of eating meat" (from this month's Atlantic).
I still don't think anything of soy products. They make my teeth want to vomit. But I can certainly second Eric Asimov's rave review of the Spotted Pig, while remaining surprised that he also saw fit to write an entire separate article on Ken's prowess with an iPod and a volume knob.
And watching various bloggers pile on to Amanda Hesser today, I have to admit to feeling a certain amount of sympathy for the author of "Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes". (How anybody can even get past the title of that book without their teeth wanting to vomit, I have no idea.)
The line about teeth and vomit, in case you're not hooked in to the New York blogosphere, comes from Eurotrash, who eviscerated Hesser's latest restaurant review today, calling it an "unspeakable piece of codswallop" before getting really nasty. It's something of a baptism of fire for Hesser, who recently took over the job of chief New York Times restaurant reviewer – a very powerful position with a legendary expense account.
It's not just Eurotrash, either. Gawker snarked at Hesser before linking to Eurotrash, and Lockhart Steele inserted his own stiletto into Hesser as well, starting off a restaurant review with a sly parody of her opening sentences. Clearly, Hesser has an uncanny ability to rub people up the wrong way.
And making fun of Hesser is almost comically easy. "Howard Stern and a girlfriend amble by. You are in a James Bond movie, a high-end bar in Bangkok, a Vong to the 10th power." Rarely can Howard Stern have reminded people of James Bond, but I suppose that food writers' minds move in mysterious ways. Mysterious enough, at least, to cow Hesser's editor into leaving in that "Vong to the 10th power" line, despite its evident meaninglessness. Maybe it's what you get if you raise Vong to the 5th power and then square it by mentioning the headwaiter's t-shirt twice.
Still, it's clear what's going on here, and there's a clue, actually, in the fact, noted on Gawker, that Hesser is far from anonymous when she goes to these places. Historically, restaurant reviews have been just like any other kind of review: someone who knows what they're talking about telling the rest of us how good or bad the thing in question is. A great review can make a restaurant, as New Yorkers decide en masse to try it out; it can even change food culture more generally, as when Asian restaurants started receiving four-star reviews, placing them on an equal footing with the grand old temples of French gastronomy.
Rarely, however, have the New York Times's restaurant reviews been remotely interesting to read. By far the most important thing about them was the number of stars at the bottom: will Le Bernadin keep its fourth star, or, like Chanterelle, will it get downgraded from four to three? That sort of thing. The list of four-star restaurants is short indeed (just five, at the moment), and the first time that Hesser fiddles with it, she will attract huge amounts of attention.
But the fact is that these reviews don't always make for great copy. That's fine if they're simply service journalism: a reporter going out and basically telling you which restaurants to go to. But check out William Grimes's rave review of Alain Ducasse: after mentioning the $300 truffle menu, available to anybody who walks in the door, he then spends most of the rest of the review talking about dishes from "a tasting menu offered in the chef's room, a small private room just off the kitchen that regular customers can book". These include one pastry dish which includes not only four huge black truffles, but also "large coins of black truffle" in addition. The proportion of New York Times readers which will ever so much as see this dish, let alone afford it, is so tiny that they can't possibly provide the main reason for writing about it.
And now that the Times is branching out, trying to position itself as a national newspaper, service journalism is even less useful for its readers. Restaurant reviews have to do more than just help people decide if they want to try the new place that just opened up around the corner: they have to be interesting to a much broader cross-section of the national population.
This is something that UK newspapers have struggled with for years. They're based in London, but are distributed nationally, and it's very unlikely that a schoolteacher in south Wales really cares much about the quality of the coffee at the latest trendy bistro in Clapham. So they've turned restaurant reviewing into something of a spectator sport, helped on their way by novelist Will Self.
Self more or less started the ball rolling on the phenomenon of the modern British restaurant review. There's the lethal take-down, since perfected by AA Gill, where a restaurant is simply demolished with choice epithets. That hasn't made it to the US yet (one Vanity Fair review by Gill notwithstanding), and is certainly unlikely to appear in the New York Times any time soon.
But Self also realised that if his readers weren't going to eat at the restaurant in question, he didn't need to go into much, if any, detail when it came to the food. He could write 1,500-word reviews whose sole description of the food was "nice"; and, since he's a talented chap, he could do so in a wickedly entertaining way. Now, Hesser's not going to go down that path: most of her review is, indeed, about the food. But she's following in Self's footsteps in a different way: she's trying to sparkle up her prose a little, so that the review is more than a list of dishes with a star-rating at the end.
At this point, it's worth noting Adam Moss's comment in the New York Observer today, when he talks about a long tradition of mobility between magazines, newspapers "and things in between". Moss used to edit the New York Times magazine, before being promoted to an ill-defined "features czar" role overseeing the fluffier content in the newspaper, including the Dining Out section. Moss is a magazine guy, and the advertising-driven extra sections of the New York Times are very much in that grey area between newspaper and magazine journalism. They're feature-driven, rarely break news, and often read much more like magazine pieces than like old-fashioned reported stories.
And what Hesser is doing in this review is definitely close to magazine journalism. She writes in the second person, present tense: "A maître d'hôtel with carefully rumpled hair wearing a "Late Night With David Letterman" T-shirt and a sports coat takes your name at the door." If this appeared in the Metro section, an editor would have jumped on that, turning it into "took diners' names" instead. Third person, past tense, objective, reported.
The food editor at the New York Times is Sam Sifton, who certainly understands the need to sex up service journalism. He arrived at the newspaper from New York magazine, but he started out at the New York Press, writing annoying first-person-plural reviews which always referred to oysters as "bivalves" on second mention. The Press's reviews were closer in spirit to Will Self than the New York Times: they were anecdotal, often touched only glancingly on the food, and served to showcase the author's writing chops more than they served to help people decide where to have their Wednesday-night meal. I'm sure that when he sent Hesser to Spice Market, Sifton told her to come back with something evocative of the scene, rather than an objective, just-the-facts-ma'am report.
I think it's a bit unfair, then, to go after Hesser for spending the first part of her review not talking about the food. "What's the fucking food like?" asks Eurotrash: "Nice? Who fucking knows?" Well, we do, after a while: Hesser spends quite a few column inches on it. But especially when you're reviewing a hot new Meatpacking District restaurant, the general scene is at least as important as the quality of the food.
Still, Eurotrash does have a point: the writing simply isn't very good. A large chunk of the review basically consists of little more than concatenations of ingredients – here's one passage, verbatim.
...fat tapioca pearls loom large. They are simmered with Thai chilies, Sichuan peppercorns, cinnamon and chipotle, then paired with slivers of raw tuna in a cool coconut broth sharpened with kaffir lime. The dish is eaten with a spoon.
Fried squid is piled atop a salad of papaya, water chestnut and cashews. Sweet shrimp fritters are dotted with crunchy bits of long bean and tempered by a relish of peanut and cucumber cut into minuscule cubes.
Thai chicken wings are lined up on a plate, coated in a hot, sticky sauce, fragrant with chilies, soy, lime and fish sauce...
I count 21 ingredients there, in six sentences. The mind simply can't process all that information: it's hard to imagine what just a couple of things taste like, let alone a long list like this. And the whole thing is in a stultifying passive voice: pearls "are simmered", the dish "is eaten", squid "is pulled", fritters "are dotted", wings "are lined up". Nobody does any of this: it just magically happens. Eleven year-olds are taught that "the dish is eaten with a spoon" is horrible English, but somehow, again, star writers (and Hesser is certainly one of them) can get away with that sort of thing.
Hesser's review, coincidentally enough, was printed on the same day that New York media types were emailing each other the full 20,000-word text of Howell Raines's forthcoming Atlantic article. In it, he talks about how he wanted to "strip away the New York parochialism" of the paper; he also says that back of the book in general was underfunded and unimaginative.
Raines is long gone, thank god. Reading his article, you start by thinking "what an arsehole", then think "Christ what an arsehole", and then just throw up your hands when you come across insufferably pompous and self-serving drivel like this (you'll forgive me for digressing a bit from the restaurant beat, here):
I worked alongside James B. "Scotty" Reston in Washington, and came to know him well as an avuncular figure who was as tough as goat guts in his analysis of staff weaknesses. When a correspondent who had clerked for Scotty and later boasted of their closeness left the paper to protest a reassignment, Scotty dropped by my office. I was then the Washington editor, and I assumed he was going to chide me for not giving the fellow the prestige beat he thought he deserved. Instead Scotty blew out a cloud of pipe smoke and said, He never had it, did he? At its highest levels the Times operates by that kind of brutal managerial shorthand.
My favourite bit, though, is when Jodi Kantor is hired to take over a section of the Sunday paper: "Arts & Leisure readers definitely knew there was a new sheriff in town when Jodi beat New York's hip publications to the punch with a lead story on the rock group White Stripes."
I guess I'm saying that Hesser is a bit like Kantor: a talented journalist who somehow persuades stodgier, older editors that she's doing amazing stuff even when she's doing nothing special. I'm sure that Hesser focus-grouped well: she's popular among the kind of wealthy female demographic that advertisers adore. Go check out the cover of her book, here, and tell me if you can ever imagine a male walking out of a bookstore with it.
What I think happened is that the editors of the New York Times wanted a restaurant reviewer who would (a) be advertiser- and women-friendly, just like their star columnist Nigella Lawson; and (b) have a more discursive style than New York Times readers might expect. A foodie Selena Roberts, basically. It helped that Hesser had name recognition: Raines complains that the paper has "not had a dominating national voice in any area of cultural coverage since Frank Rich retired as theater critic", over 10 years ago. Parachuting Hesser in from the world of best-sellerdom could help punch up the food section somewhat.
Now that Hesser's in place, she's got a certain amount of tenure, and pretty soon, I hope, she's going to relax a little. She doesn't have the writing chops to pull a Will Self, even if the Times would allow such a thing. She started by showing off:
One-name restaurants took hold with a vengeance five years ago, after Babbo was a hit. Then followed Otto, Ilo, Tappo, Beppe, Gonzo, Pazo, Pico and Crispo. And, of course, Bread, Butter, Salt, Good, Taste, Fresh, Supper, Grocery, Canteen, Commune, District, Town, Craft and — how could New York be complete without it? — Therapy.
And she'll probably have to let off a little more steam ("order a Pattaya if you are feeling the need for discipline") before she settles into a voice of her own.What she really needs is a good editor, who can trim the excesses and tell Hesser that she should start bringing more of herself to her reviews. It was the autobiographical elements which made her previous columns such a success.
Hesser knows this, actually: in an interview last year, she said that "when you are writing personally, people, negatively and positively, make these connections and relate, because they have experienced these things in their own lives and feel strongly about them."
Then again, in the same interview, she actually said she didn't want the job she now has. Maybe it's just not going to work out:
The natural path that people try to follow at the Times is they become a reporter and eventually a critic. I never wanted to be a critic. I love eating and love dining, but I love cooking at home and being at home. I find that I have done stories where I have to go out four nights a week or to two or three restaurants a night. It's kind of grueling and unpleasant. You get jaded. You find yourself being super critical about what really is just a meal. There is definitely a foodie culture that's very competitive, and there are people who really just love going out every night. You know, good for them. I don't want to do it myself... I realized shortly after I arrived at the Times that I would like to eventually write about wine. Although, I still love writing about food. I knew that I didn't want to become a restaurant reviewer.
Tell us, Amanda! Why did you take this gig? Do you feel under pressure to deliver something you're not sure you want to be doing? 'Cos that could explain the missteps.
Posted by Felix at 21:14 EST | Comments (13)
Buying and selling bonds
Back in February 2001, Deutsche Bank was very bearish on a major US telecommunications company. In a credit review, the bank's analyst said that "per concerns/trends summarized above, [the company] will be downgraded,"adding that "we seek a cap at the current level. Risk appetite reduced."
Three months later, Deutsche Bank was very bullish on a major US telecommunications company. It was lead manager on a record-breaking $12 billion bond deal, talking up the credit in markets around the world. If you were to ask Deutsche Bank whether risk appetite for this credit was a good idea, they would respond with a resounding yes.
You can see this punchline coming a mile off. That's right, we're talking about the same company here: WorldCom. If you were cynical, you might even say that Deutsche Bank had a double interest in selling WorldCom's nuclear-waste bonds to as many investors as possible: not only did its fees go up as the deal got bigger, but its own loans to the company, which matured long before the bonds did, would be easily refinanced with the fresh billions pouring in from unsuspecting investors.
And it's not just Deutsche Bank, either: JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America are all in substantially the same boat, according to a New York Times article today. So, should you ever trust them again when they try to sell you bonds from major borrowers like WorldCom or Argentina? Unfortunately, you have very little choice. Since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, all the major bond underwriters (the investment banks, as were) are also major lenders (the commercial banks, as were). Citibank merged with Salomon Brothers, Chase bought JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank bought Bankers Trust.
Chances are, then, that if you're buying a bond from a broker-dealer, that institution probably also has a lending relationship with the issuer. In fact, the securities houses are very proud of this fact: they call it "one-stop shopping" or the suchlike, and quite openly buy bond mandates with large loans. In the case of WorldCom, an $800 million loan commitment from Citigroup directly resulted in a lead-manager position on the bond issue and a $20 million fee. Quid pro quo.
Meanwhile, Citigroup will have been regaling WorldCom with its prowess at "distribution". Since they bought Smith Barney, they will have said, they have access to an enormous number of stockbrokers who could deliver the retail investors that WorldCom desperately needed in order to diversify its investor base.
Once more in English? Basically, we've got millions of suckers who'll put their money wherever we tell them to. These aren't sophisticated institutional investors who do their own credit analysis before buying a bond, they're little guys with savings accounts who trust their broker to ensure that their fixed-income investments are relatively safe. (If they wanted risk, they'd be buying stocks.) Meanwhile, as the new guys are coming in, the bank itself is getting out.
With regard to emerging-market sovereign debt in particular, I've made the case (PDF file) that retail investors (that's you and me) should simply not be allowed to buy individual bond issues: if they want exposure to the asset class, they should buy mutual or index funds instead. I'm hesitant to extend that case to domestic bond issues like that of WorldCom, but most of the arguments apply.
In any case, this should be a lesson to any individual investors out there: yes, you should always have a certain amount of your portfolio in fixed income. But picking bonds is not like picking stocks: you're extremely unlikely to outperform the pros, even if you get lucky. And, as we've learned again today, you'd be foolish to trust your broker. So buy funds instead.
Posted by Felix at 0:09 EST | Comments (7)
Igloos, hot-tubs and jingly janglies
I had the longest bath of my life last night: eight hours in a steaming hot tub, to make up for all the baths I haven't had in the past six months and won't have in the next year. It was glorious. The hot, hot water, thirty degrees on my skin. The frozen hair, the beer, the wine, the rum and coke slushies. Outside, the temperature dropped steadily from about minus twentysomething to minus thirtysomething with windchill. It was cold.
We figured we'd last minutes out there on our own, wearing not very much, soaking wet. I managed to get outside, go for a pee and jump back in again within one minute and my toes were colder than I can possibly describe. My feet are raw today, a combination of the long, long soak and the freezer burn from occasional necessary jaunts onto the icy, sticky snow.
The party started around 5:30pm with a women's hour for the two of us. Oh, the luxury! Floating around in the melt-tank, we haven't felt water like that on our skin since. October? It ended around half one in the morning, a blurry memory: a mixture of steam from the tub, ice in the air, the sharp wake-up call of an antarctic blow and the hazy feeling you get after drinking all afternoon on christmas day. At its busiest, we packed twelve people into this five foot cube of warmth.
Photo by Frank Swinton
Why the celebration? It's the end of the summer, the base is being winterised, the summer residence in particular is being shut down, emptied, drained... and as a final reminder of the chaos that it was, the space it now is, our ownership of this corner of the ice shelf, we make a jacuzzi in their melt-tank, bubbles and all. Because we can. A final celebration of warmth: crank up the heat and jump in!
This evening we had a party to welcome the winter. I may be the only person here to see these as rituals, spontaneous as they both were, but the analogies are obvious once you start thinking about it. It's dark, it's cold, we're tired from the last night's festivities.
Where do we go? To the igloo that's just been finished of course! The opening night: the final block was placed but hours ago. There is a beautiful, pale blue glow, seemingly from nowhere, as you approach in the poor vis. It even looks like an igloo! Round, with a tunnel entrance. It's huge inside! We built it.
Photo by Jeff Cohen
It started as an afternoon jolly last Saturday ("I know", said Simon, "why don't we build an igloo tomorrow afternoon if the weather's good?") and turned into a week-long epic. Watching the technique developing as the week progressed, learning from mistakes. What began as a chaotic expression of creativity with snow turned into an art and science of igloo building. The pit from which the snow blocks were carved, the shaping of them with a saw, their placement, spiralling around the circle, the snow mortar that stuck them together. Hold the blocks in place, however precarious the angle, toss snowballs at them, gently, hold them for a couple of minutes, and watch them freeze. A couple of hours later they are set like concrete,- what amazing building material snow is! And now, this evening, we have had ten people in there reading poetry by the light of a tilly lamp. Let the winter begin!
Night and day. I've been feeling lately that this is a fairly ordinary place to be after all. I've been struggling with the predictability of night and day. Of sun in the day and the moon and stars at night. So strange, after so long. I hadn't expected it. Gradually, of course, the days get shorter and the nights get longer, the sun drops below the horizon for progressively longer stretches. Of course – that's what happens everywhere else in the world, isn't it obvious that it would happen here as well? I had expected something different. I expected to move from 24 hours of sunlight to 24 hours of darkness via 24 hours of dusk I guess, gradually deepening in colour. I had abstracted myself completely from the rest of the Earth system, this thing I'm meant to be studying.
I go to work, manhauling my solutions, bottles, boxes, clothes, lunch, on a pulk sledge. I work in a lab fixing, plumbing, fitting, hammering, building, tightening, checking, tuning, optimising, troubleshooting. I go home. Yesterday I came home by kite – well, by hanging onto Stephane who was hanging onto a kite. Both on skis. We all eat dinner together. I sit in the lounge and read for a while. We have a few drinks in the bar. Last week, the chef was away so we took it in turns to cook. It was a highlight, at the time as exciting and memorable as igloo building. This is my life: if you do anything for long enough it begins to feel normal. I guess 'normal' is just a reference to your usual existence?
I'm writing like I'm beginning to go a little mad. I'm not (going mad) – I'm just writing as the things come out. It's all a mess, a jumble, it's all so obvious and easy until you realise that it's actually very different from everyone else's experience at home. When you're sat in a hot tub with lots of people you don't actually know that well, surrounded by a very cold place where you can die very quickly, having a laugh... and then you realise that the only thing that is holding this place together is a massive social restraint. And what would happen should you dare to suggest that that restraint was loosened a little? We all came here to live, to experience, to do something different – but we all must conform as well to make sure we don't go mad.
We won't go to the South Pole en masse although we'll talk about it for the rest of the year, there won't be mass orgies, although you out there will keep asking and falsely assuming, there will always be food and heat and electricity and people will go to work and there will become a routine that feels normal and right because this isn't an intentional community designed to explore the boundaries of human interaction, it's a scientific research base peopled by those whose job skills suited.
The next day, after hot-tubs and igloos, we were practicing survival skills outside in preparation for winter trips. Wrap up warm, real warm, find a harness and your gear, and meet us outside, I was told. So I did. The last pair had just finished as I arrived so I was led to the rope, given various jingly janglies and told to go: up the rope with a jumar and then abseil down, just to check you remember what you're doing. I didn't think I could remember a thing. We were trained on this during three days in Derbyshire last September, tied to lots of safety ropes and thoroughly supervised. But it came back surprisingly quickly. Up and down. Next time I do this will be in a crevasse, on my winter trip, in a week's time. So I guess it's not that normal after all, being here. I like it, I like it a lot, even if there's nothing to reference ourselves against.
Posted by Rhian at 23:36 EST | Comments (4)
Irwin at the Guggenheim
It's Art Week in New York – a bit like Fashion Week, only bitchier. The Whitney Biennial's just opened, the Armory Show is upon us, and -scope is setting up shop on 9th Avenue. The upshot is that there's more new art on show this weekend than any human being could hope to comprehend: the only rational response, and one which is certainly going to be adopted by most of the international art-world types who are arriving in Gotham by the 747-load on an hourly basis, is to get exceedingly drunk.
If they have a little bit of spare time, however, I would actually recommend that they go to yet another art show. It's called Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), and it's on at the Guggenheim. My friend Geoff went to see it a few days ago, and immediately sent me a disgusted email: the words "quite an abomination" stood out among his grudging props for the Turrell.
I can see why he says that. The wall texts are dreadful: dull artspeak at its most banal. I gave up reading them halfway through the first one, when I reached the phrase "this exhibition posits". And the actual art is of highly variable quality, mainly because the cash-strapped Guggenheim basically cobbled the entire show out of its permanent collection. As a result, Frank Stella, one of the godfathers of minimalism, is represented by a rather incoherent early black painting, rather than by one of the great stripe paintings which more or less formed the historical basis for this entire show.
Neither novices nor experts, then, are likely to learn much from this exhibition, and it certainly won't change anybody's mind about minimalist and conceptualist art. And yet, I still reckon this show is well worth seeing, for a handful of individual pieces.
Firstly, there are some familiar artists who are interestingly tweaked in the context of the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral. Dan Flavin has a small sausage-chain of fluorescent lights running out and down along the floor, which looks fantastic. And a big Carl Andre floor piece is probably the best I've ever seen. All his floor works make you hyperaware of your own physicality and weight while you're standing on them: that's what makes them great. But when the floor is tilted and curved in the way the Guggenheim's is, that feeling is only enhanced. It's almost impossible to describe without resorting to hyperbole: you feel almost as if you're taking off, defying gravity, peforming twisting and looping stunts in space. Just by standing still. Or, to put it another way, stepping off the piece feels much the same as stepping off a fast-moving people-mover in an airport – which is quite impressive considering that the Andre isn't moving at all.
More importantly, however, the Guggenheim is showing some major works by major artists who don't get exhibited nearly enough in the normal course of events at contemporary art museums. The first is Brice Marden, who's represented by a series of his signature encaustic monochromes. These are lusciously gorgeous pieces, in deep and subtle colours, which put the lie to anybody who says minimalism is soulless. All the contemporary art experts I know revere Marden, but for some reason I rarely see his work exhibited in museums, and these are a real treat.
Best of all is a mind-blowing installation by Robert Irwin. It's called Soft Wall, and it was originally installed at the Pace Gallery in 1974, but I doubt it could have looked better then than it does here. Irwin's had an amazing career, and I would highly recommend anybody who likes either art or biographies to buy Lawrence Weschler's masterful book-length study of him, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. That book was written in 1983, however, and since then Irwin has gone downhills rather, doing things like designing the car park for Dia:Beacon.
The piece in the Guggenheim dates to when Irwin was doing his very best work, with light and scrims and exquisite subtlety. Irwin has done something which seems very simple: he's taken one of the Guggenheim's rectangular galleries, painted it white, put a white scrim in front of one of the walls, and added a white line running horizontally around the top of the gallery near the ceiling. That's it, really. But just walking into that room changes the whole nature of the way you perceive your surroundings, and the way you perceive yourself perceiving your surroundings. Not only that, but you're also filled with the utter certainty that this is one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen. I really can't recommend it highly enough.
I should also note that Irwin's work is just about the most unphotographable art there is: no photo of any of his gallery pieces can possibly do it justice. But just to add insult to injury, the photo on the Guggenheim website is of a different scrim piece entirely. Don't judge by that: go and see for yourself!
If you want to saunter past the Sol LeWitts, then, feel free: his wall pieces really don't work all that well in the rotunda's niches. If you don't want to walk all the way to the top of the spiral to admire thousands of Damien Hirst's dead houseflies, that's fine too. I would simply urge anybody who's in town for some serious Art this week to make sure they check out the Robert Irwin piece at the Guggenheim. I can't imagine that anything at the Whitney, the Armory Show or Scope is even going to come close – although I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Posted by Felix at 19:58 EST | Comments (1)
Really Silly Syndicators
Those of us who subscribe to the brand-new Slate RSS feed got an update this evening: a new story had been added to the website. Now Slate doesn't actually put the content of its stories into its RSS feed, but does give us the headline and the standfirst. The headline, this evening, was "Vox Populi", and the standfirst was "Lying down the rabbit hole." In other words, the RSS feed was no use at all. If you wanted to have the vaguest notion what on earth the story was about, you had to click through from your RSS reader to the website.
Slate celebrated the launch of its feed with a long article extolling the virtues of RSS, but it's clear that the powers that be at the magazine still don't get it.
In fact, for all the wars between different flavours of RSS (I have no idea what the substantive difference is between 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom, and I have no desire to find out), the biggest problem with it is not the technology itself, but rather the way that most websites use it.
Every so often, an RSS feed is actually better than the website: NewYorkish is a prime example. It breaks in my browser, with the middle column overlapping the main text, but it looks wonderful in my RSS reader. Much more frequently, however, it's the other way around.
For starters, most bloggers who don't feel comfortable messing around in the engine room, as it were, simply go with the default settings in Movable Type or TypePad. For reasons I've never been able to work out, the default setting normally gives you little more than the headline and the first 20 words, rather than the whole piece. Back in June, Lance Knobel guilt-tripped me into making sure everything I wrote made it into the RSS feed, quoting with approval a fellow blogger saying that "I get annoyed with sites that don't provide a full RSS feed and insist on offering snippets or headlines only."
But since then, the situation has only got worse. Gawker Media, for instance, has horrible RSS feeds, which never include images, links to other sites, or more than a tiny bit of text. ArtsJournal is even worse, providing nothing but a headline. And although the New York Times RSS feeds are excellent, good luck finding them from the nytimes.com homepage: they're all hosted somewhere else entirely.
In general, going down my list of feeds, the bad is much more common than the good. I limit myself to 39 feeds at any one time: beyond that I can't see them all at once in my aggregator, and in any case beyond that I'd never have time to get any work done at all. Of the 39, just 18 – Low Culture, MemeFirst, Davos Newbies, felixsalmon.com, Charles Stewart, The Trademark Blog, greg.org, Gothamist (a recent development: thank you!), Below 14th, Lockhart Steele, Bookslut, TMFTML, Anil Dash and his Daily Links, BuzzMachine, NewYorkish, Best Week Ever, and Belle de Jour – have full RSS feeds which duplicate the content on the website. And TMFTML's links often don't work from the RSS reader, for some reason.
I'm not going to name-and-shame the bloggers who don't serve nice pretty RSS feeds (Choire), because there are so many who don't serve any kind of RSS at all. The ones on blogspot we can excuse, but the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall and Daniel Radosh – not to mention Drudge – really should get with the program.
Then there are the corporate blogs – the ones which are meant to drive traffic to the sites on which they're hosted. Some, like The Kicker, serve crappy RSS (although to be fair, The Kicker's RSS feed is no crappier than that of Elizabeth Spiers personally), but most have no RSS at all. The Corner, Best of the Web Today, Altercation, Etc – none of these blogs seems to have realised that an RSS feed would increase, not decrease, their total traffic. In this category, too, you should include Romenesko, which, one would think, would be pretty much ideal for subscribing to.
The main reason not to put all your content into your RSS feed, of course, is if you're keen that your readers view the advertisements on your website. It's a bit like the old debate about newspapers putting their content online: they were worried that the website would cannibalise their paper sales, and now they're worried that the RSS feed will cannibalise their website. I'm not convinced, but I do see the argument, and therefore I don't have a problem with news organisations like the New York Times and the BBC which provide good, regularly-updated RSS feeds which give you the top headlines and a one-line summary of the story.
When that kind of attitude spreads to webzines like Slate, however, I get worried. Slate's RSS feed not only doesn't provide the full content of the stories: it doesn't even provide the same amount of information that's in the site's table of contents. There's a story with the headline "Vox Populi"? Um, great. Now tell me who wrote it, and I might be interested.
Slate is all about its franchises: Chatterbox, Ballot Box, Webhead, Dear Prudence. If something new is up on the site by Lithwick or Kinsley or Shafer, I'll want to read it. But the RSS feed, unlike the table of contents, tells me neither the department in which the story is located, nor the name of the author. All I'm left with is a headline, which means almost nothing. Why build up franchises only to ignore their very existence when you move to an RSS feed? Even the main image on the Slate homepage ensures that every story it mentions also comes with the name of the author.
RSS, I believe, has been around since 1999, yet remains something known only to a tiny minority of internet users. So long as the biggest and most important websites continue to treat their RSS subscribers with such disdain, this state of affairs is likely to continue. Really, I see little point in trying to fix whatever minor problems there may or may not be with RSS itself. Unless and until content providers actually bother to use what it's capable of right now, it's going to remain something used only by the blogosphere's nerdier types.
Posted by Felix at 22:06 EST | Comments (10)
Kerry's flip-flops
So. It's Bush v Kerry, and the battle lines have already been clearly drawn: flip-flopping Massachusetts liberal vs strong leader with moral clarity. And for all that Kerry might be leading in the polls at the moment, I agree with the collective opinion of the bettors on Tradesports: Bush still has something like a 62% chance of winning the election.
The liberal press has done a pretty solid job of glossing Kerry's about-faces. Michael Grunwald has a long table of them in Slate, while David Halbfinger has a front-page story in today's New York Times on the same subject. The general gist seems to be that Kerry is weak, indecisive: an all-things-to-all-people candidate.
George Bush has already been making hay along those lines. "Senator Kerry has been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue," he said after the Democratic nomination had been secured. Even earlier, he'd described the Democratic field as "for tax cuts and against them. For NAFTA and against NAFTA. For the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act. In favour of liberating Iraq and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts."
In the New York Times article, the defenses of Kerry partisans are pretty weak:
Some aides and close associates say Mr. Kerry's fluidity is the mark of an intellectual who grasps the subtleties of issues, inhabits their nuances and revels in the deliberative process. "He doesn't fit into any neat pigeon holes," said Mr. Kerry's younger brother, Cameron, his closest adviser. "He's complex. So what?"
And the story ends with an utterly self-defeating quote from Jonathan Winer, a former Kerry aide:
"Between the moral clarity, black and white, good and evil of George Bush that distorts and gets reality wrong, and someone who quotes a French philosopher, André Gide, saying, `Don't try to understand me too much,' I'd let Americans decide which in the end is closer to what they need in a president."
Um, right, Mr Winer. George Bush is going to paint himself as a war president, a strong leader who fights on the side of good (and of God, natch) against the "evildoers". Will Americans really rather elect someone who quotes a French philosopher? Er, no.
When you actually look at the list of Kerry's flip-flops, however, it's slightly more difficult to get annoyed at them.
On affirmative action and education reform, Kerry started off tacking against the Democratic Party, before being pulled back in to the liberal mainstream. This doesn't really worry me: a president's positions on such things don't really matter too much, and if a Republican-controlled Congress should pass a sensible bill on either issue, the chances are that Kerry is going to be able to see the other party's point. In that he's in stark contrast to Bush, who, for all his rhetoric about being a "uniter, not a divider", has never seen a Democratic policy he didn't hate.
On mandatory minimum sentences and welfare reform, Kerry moved the other way: he started off liberal and then triangulated. In that, he was simply following the path of intelligent left-wingers everywhere, as exemplified by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Kerry has been a politician since the Vietnam war, and anybody who has exactly the same opinions now that they had 30 years ago should, in my view, be disqualified from ever running for office. The Clinton/Blair Third Way hasn't had much press recently, but it remains the only realistic way for a Democrat to get elected president.
On the issue of the death penalty for terrorists, the New York Times actually makes a convincing case that his reason for opposing it (that no one would extradite terrorists to the US) doesn't really apply any more: the US has proved itself pretty adept at getting its hands on terrorists other nations have captured.
Which leaves, in terms of the Slate list, at least, economic policy: gas taxation, double taxation of dividends, and trade. These are issues where the president has a lot of clout, and we want someone who's getting it right. The bedrock of the Third Way was that the leftist parties in the US and the UK had become more fiscally responsible than the right-wing parties who had traditionally held that ground: Clinton balanced the budget, while Blair's first bill in Parliament gave independence to the Bank of England. Robert Rubin set the standard for finance ministers around the world, with Gordon Brown coming in a close second.
The trade issue is the most worrisome. Kerry seems to have caught a nasty strain of protectionism from his potential running-mate John Edwards – one which is only reinforced by the logic of triangulation. If you want to move from Democratic orthodoxy towards the Bush administration on such issues, you need to shift to the left by quite a large amount.
Double taxation of dividends doesn't worry me at all: it's one thing saying that it ought to be abolished in theory, at the corporate level; it's another thing entirely voting for a hugely fiscally irresponsible tax bill which abolishes it at the personal level, creating all manner of stupid tax inefficiencies and contradictions.
But the gasoline tax issue is yet another case where fiscal responsibility has been triangulated away. The Bush administration has been so fiscally insane that it's a no-brainer for the Democrats to run as fiscal conservatives. But when it comes to the grey zone between rhetoric and policies, I'm having an increasingly hard time believing that Kerry will be nearly as hawkish as he needs to be.
A registered Democrat, then, is likely to look at the list of Kerry flip-flops and not feel particularly aggrieved by them. Even Republicans won't see little to hate there. But on the issue of flip-flopping in general, it's clear that Kerry is a politician in the Clintonian vein, who worries all sides of an issue to death before making up his mind. Bush is the opposite: he just barges ahead regardless of the intricacies or subtleties in any situation. And in terms of electoral politics, that might not be such a bad thing. After the midterm elections, I wrote that
What we saw yesterday was a vote for leadership in uncertain times. Bush might not be the sharpest tack in the drawer, but he makes decisions, sticks to them, and is unapologetic about them. As far as he's concerned, he knows what's best for the country, and he's going to do it. That is what's behind the unprecedented mid-term success for the party in the White House. And so long as times remain uncertain (which they surely will if the US invades Iraq) the same calculus will apply in 2004.
Well, the US invaded Iraq, as we all know, and I stand by what I wrote back then. There are lots of reasons why it makes sense to have a rather more sophisticated president, but I don't think that those reasons are compelling to swing voters. Americans, I fear, will always prefer Rambo to Rimbaud.
Posted by Felix at 16:18 EST | Comments (1)
Art and technology
Arts bloggers love to get all techno-utopian about the way in which advances in technology, especially the internet, are wonderful for the arts. I'm far from convinced: I think technology can cut both ways.
Take recorded music, for example. The advance from LPs to CDs was an advance: you could put more music on a disc, you could store it a lot more easily, you didn't have to worry about warps and pops and scratches, etc etc. What's more, for the vast majority of the population, there was a large increase in sound quality as well.
Then, however, we moved from CDs to MP3s. An entire generation is growing up which listens to its music downloaded from the internet, in formats which are generally much worse than CD-quality. What's more, because it's stored on a computer it's normally played on a computer as well, through nasty computer speakers rather than through a reasonably good stereo system.
Even people who still buy CDs on a regular basis, like me, often simply rip them onto their computers and then play them, either on their computer or through their stereo, from iTunes or the like. It's a lot more convenient, but there's no doubt you lose sound quality. And if you're working on the computer at the same time as playing music, you'll end up with your stereo making weird pinging and clicking noises occasionally, which is definitely suboptimal.
Standards, then, when it comes to music at least, are certainly on the decline. For every audiophile upgrading from CD to SACD, there are thousands of regular people who are downgrading just as far by moving from CD to MP3. Just look at the enormous success of the iPod, which comes with rather nasty little white earbuds as standard. The vast majority of consumers don't seem to mind in the slightest.
What goes for music, it would seem, goes for art, too. Check out the article today by gadget reviewer David Pogue in the New York Times, on something called the Roku HD1000. This is a box, basically, which will "play" your digital photographs on your high-definition TV set. Pogue raves that "photos look spectacular, crisp and clear on a high-def set," and then moves on to the Classics Art Pack, which "cycles through 50 famous paintings by Monet, Manet and about 30 other dead guys whose copyrights have expired." Soon, Pogue has been transported to seemingly another planet entirely:
Hate to say it, but the vivid, glowing pixels of a TV do better justice to the color and texture of these masterpieces than dried paint.
Even better than the real thing, as Bono might say.
Suddenly, I have visions of technology billionaires founding a national franchise of art museums to be built in towns and small cities – hell, even big cities, for all I know – around the world. Kitted out with HD plasma screens, they'll be able to show whatever masterpieces they want: a Rembrandt retrospective one week, Van Gogh the next. The largest permanent collection in the world – all easily accessible to people thousands of miles from Vienna or Paris or New York.
The David Pogues of this world would love it: no inconvenient travel! No annoying crowds! And, to top it all off, pictures which glow!!!
It's easy to get sarcastic about this sort of thing, but we're talking a high-profile New York Times journalist here, judging paintings by how vivid their, um, pixels are. There are surely lots of Thomas Kinkade lovers out there who might share Pogue's enthusiasms, but they don't normally get staff jobs on 43rd Street, and if they do, they generally know better than to start parading their lowbrow prejudices in front of the entire planet.
In the case of technology, however, there seems to be a general idea that technology is, ever and always, good. You know those dioramas you see in Chinese takeaways, where a rotating light is placed behind the river so it looks like it's flowing? Well, you can get that in high-tech form now, and rather than laughing at it, Pogue embraces it wholeheartedly.
In the Nature pack, some of the photos have somehow been animated: brooks flow, flowers blow, clouds drift across the sunset sky. Only a handful of photos in each set are alive like this, but leaving even one of them "playing" on your wall all day is so majestic, powerful and calming, it will probably add two years to your life.
Trust me, that isn't sarcasm: Pogue's really into this kind of thing, and the Times seems more than happy for him to wax rhapsodic about it. Here's my theory: when art and technology intersect, all joined-up thinking generally goes straight out the window. Look at the way Terry Teachout extols the virtues of satellite radio, blind to the virtues of its old-school cousin. Look at the "internet biennial" at the Whitney Museum in 2000, where curators desperately competed with each other to get excited about Websites As Art.
As technology progresses, there's always a strong temptation not to appear Luddite, and therefore to give every new technology the benefit of the doubt. But it's equally important, I think, for art lovers to occasionally stand up and say the emperor has no clothes. In this case, that's easy: I doubt many museum professionals want glowing pictures on their wall instead of paintings. But when it's someone more important than David Pogue, it's harder. Remember when fax machines were new and special, and David Hockney started faxing his work to art galleries around the world? As I recall, the critics were pretty soft on him.
Posted by Felix at 18:30 EST | Comments (1)
RSS - All blog entries
Felix Salmon: Recent posts
Felix's del.icio.us links
Archives
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License