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Libeskind and the Freedom Tower

We can officially assume now, I think, that Daniel Libeskind and the Freedom Tower are barely connected any more, let alone in any kind of one-designed-the-other relationship. My guess is that when all is said and done, the name and the location – at the north-west corner of the World Trade Center site – will be Libeskind; the rest will be David Childs.

In the time since my last WTC update, a number of crucial court decisions have gone against Larry Silverstein, the leasholder of the original towers. They were insured for about $3.5 billion, but Silverstein spent untold millions of dollars in a desperate attempt to get double the amount that the towers were insured for, saying that he should be paid out in full for each of the two attacks. In the end, he failed, and now he simply doesn't have the money to start building the spiral of skyscrapers that Libeskind imagined in his site plan. I'm sure that Normal Foster, Fumihiko Maki and Jean Nouvel – the architects slated to design the other office towers – still have some kind of contract going, but if I were them, I wouldn't be holding my breath.

What that means is that the Freedom Tower is going to be a self-standing landmark for the foreseeable future, much more than a single element in a much larger scheme. There will be lots of interesting stuff going on at ground level, of course, but as far as the skyline is concerned, the Freedom Tower is pretty much the beginning and the end of what's going to rise at the WTC site.

As a consequence, it makes little sense for Childs to compromise his own vision overmuch in the service of a greater unity which might well never happen. (Even if the other office towers do get built, there's no guarantee that their architects will pay any more obeisance to the Libeskind master plan than Childs has done.) So the sloping roof is likely to go, the height of the tower is likely to increase from Libeskind's symbolic 1,776 feet to the CAA's maximum allowable 2,000 feet, and the spire could well be jettisoned entirely.

I haven't seen any new designs which make me say this. But I have seen the news reports, and it's clear that Libeskind and Silverstein are barely on speaking terms any more. Libeskind wants $800,000 for his work on the Freedom Tower; Silverstein has offered $125,000 and clearly has no interest maintaining a good working relationship with the avant-garde architect.

The difference seems to come down, at heart, to the question of whether the Freedom Tower is an integral part of the site plan, on which, there is no doubt, Libeskind has done a lot of work. Silverstein says that it's his building, he's got his own architect, and that insofar as Libeskind did work on the tower as part of the master plan, he was compensated for it out of his $2.25 million fee from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

Both the New York Post and Miss Representation are pretty dismissive of Libeskind's claims, which are backed up with no time sheets or other documentation. But I can kind of see where Libeskind is coming from: any officially-designated "collaborating architect" would feel he was owed something substantial from the building he was collaborating on, especially when that building was probably the single most important skyscraper to be built in many decades. Ultimately, however, I imagine that history will treat Libeskind's contributions to the Freedom Tower as even less important than Philip Johnson's contributions to the Seagram Building: Johnson is much more famous for designing the Four Seasons restaurant on the inside than he is for designing the building itself. Maybe Libeskind should angle for the gig as lead architect on the new Windows on the World.

Posted by Felix at 22:49 EST | Comments (3)

Postrel responds

Virginia Postrel has responded to my post of last week, on the subject of her take on federal highway spending. Basically, she doesn't believe the numbers being bandied around Washington on the subject of how many jobs are created when roads are built. Here's the heart of her argument:

This story is supposedly about net new jobs, not merely leaving people in other industries unemployed in order to hire the politically favored. The money has to come from somewhere, and if you're simply moving it around, some folks are going to lose their jobs.

Essentially, she seems to be saying, spending money is a zero-sum game, and every $1 billion spent on building roads is $1 billion not spent building factories, say, or something else entirely. In order to find the number of net new jobs created by a road-building program, you need to subtract the number of jobs that the same amount of money would create elsewhere.

I don't buy it. Remember, this is federal government expenditure, and it's not the federal government's job to build factories. If a new factory is a good economic proposition, then the private sector can raise the funds to build it – interest rates are still low, if not as low as they were a few months ago. The choice, here, is not between public investment and private investment: it's between the government building roads and the government not building roads.

Let's suppose that no new roads are built, or no new roads beyond the $256 billion that everyone seems to be OK with. This would be a great outcome: it would reduce government pork-barrel spending, reduce the deficit, save the environment from the impact of road-building projects, and reduce the total number of cars on the road at any given time. But it would also, quite clearly, reduce the number of jobs created by federal road-building projects, and also reduce the total number of jobs in the economy.

To see why, you just need to ask yourself where the extra money would come from. As a federal expenditure, the funds would come out of the federal budget, and the budget deficit would thereby be that much larger – no one's proposing any tax hikes to pay for all this. The marginal spending on roads will be financed by federal borrowing. And who lends money to the federal government? Asian central banks, to a large degree, and other investors who are much more interested in safety than they are in total return. It is simply not the case that those Asian central banks, deprived of being able to invest their money in Treasury bills, would fund venture-capital projects instead.

Now, there is a small "crowding-out" effect, as economists like to put it. As US government borrowing goes up, interest rates do too. (The Wall Street Journal and other right-wingers dispute even this, I might add.) The higher that interest rates go, the less likely that borrowing money is a prudent way of funding a business. And so some businesses which can only expand with very low interest rates might be hurt if federal spending continues to rise.

But there is certainly no credit crunch in the US economy: pretty much anybody who wants to borrow money still can. Federal road building doesn't stop anybody from pursuing their own economically productive activities: indeed, at the margin, it probably facilitates the business plans of people who need more or better roads in order to succeed, like those who want to build factories in rural areas off the present highway system.

In other words, I see no evidence that federal expenditure automatically reduces jobs in areas far removed from where the money is being spent, as Postrel implies. If the US economy was closed, and the budget deficit weren't largely funded from abroad, I might be more persuadable. And if there was some kind of limit to wealth creation – if the total size of the economy were somehow capped, and the money for road-building came out of the pockets of US citizens and businesses – then I would also be more likely to agree. But it's not today's Americans who are paying for these roads, it's tomorrow's. Today's Americans simply see the budget deficit increase, along with their chances of getting work building a new highway.

Quickly addressing Postrel's other points: I have no idea what she means when she says that "construction workers are pretty fully employed". Does she mean that a very large proportion of people who work in construction are working in construction? Seems tautological to me. I'm sure that if the government spent more money on road building, then more construction workers would be created.

And as for diminishing returns, I have no idea. But road-building is usually a very local industry; if the first $1 billion is spent in North Carolina and the 300th $1 billion is spent in Alaska, I should imagine that the returns, in terms of jobs created, won't have diminished all that much. But that's a question for Arthur Jacoby, the man in charge of creating the input-output models, and not for me.

Posted by Felix at 16:01 EST | Comments (3)

For Some, the Blogging Never Stops

TO celebrate four years of of writing about blogs, Kevin McKenna, the editor of the New York Times Circuits section, and his deputy, Henry Fountain, recently spent a week working wirelessly from Bryant Park. Early on the morning of their fourth day dodging pigeon droppings, Mr. McKenna saw his deputy get up and wander over to the lions guarding the New York Public Library. He stayed there for a long time.

"I didn't get any IMs from him for more than five minutes, so I wondered what was going on," Mr. McKenna said. When he finally walked around the library to find out, he found his deputy seated with his laptop balanced on his knees, his head balanced on his laptop. "It's desperate," Mr. McKenna recalls Mr. Fountain saying. "I can't think of a single new angle for a blogging story!"

Writing about blogs is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such people often feel compelled to commission new pieces several times daily and feel anxious if they don't keep up. As they spend more time hunkered over their computers, they neglect family, friends and jobs. They try to come up with story ideas at home, at work and on the road. They beg openly or sometimes, like Mr. Fountain, quietly so as not to call attention to their despair.

Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few parts of the New York Times have millions of readers, but never have so many freelance journalists written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 of the New York Times's online users read stories about blogs.

Where some editors might label themselves merely ardent, Mr. Fountain is more realistic. "I wouldn't call it dedicated, I would call it a problem," he said. "If this were beer, I'd be an alcoholic."

Mr. Fountain described the rush he gets from what he called "the fix" provided by seeing one of his ideas appear in print. "The pleasure response is twofold," he said. "You can have instant gratification; you're going to hear about something really good or bad instantly. You know what bloggers are like. And if I feel like I've commissioned something good, it's enjoyable to go back and read it. Sadly, that hasn't happened much recently."

Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, a company that builds Web sites for newspapers and magazines, and a blogging enthusiast, defended the fact that he is quoted in every single article about blogging ever written. "The addictive part is not so much extreme narcissism," Mr. Jarvis said. "It's that you're involved in a conversation. You have a connection to people through the blog."

The constant search for blog stories is what led Alan Krauss, a staff editor at the Times, to commission to the point of near-despair. Hounded by his boss, Mr. Rothfuss, 27, asked for 750 words that focused on technical topics. "I was trying to record all thoughts and speculations I deemed interesting," he said. "The obsession came from trying to capture as much as possible of the good stuff in the blogosphere in as high fidelity as possible."

Eventually, Mr McKenna recalled, he reached rock bottom: he sent a photographer all the way to Key West just to take a photo of a blogger. Still, he does not rule out running even more articles about blogs someday. Maybe even next week.

Posted by Felix at 23:10 EST | Comments (9)

Postrel, highways and jobs

One of the great things about blogs written by professional journalists is that they often contain a lot more information than gets printed. Newspaper columns, by their very nature, have to be a certain length and accessible to a wide audience. Blog entries, on the other hand, can provide lots of extra information which didn't make it into the paper. Daniel Radosh regularly regales us with things which got cut from articles of his in print; when Dan Drezner wrote his Foreign Affairs piece on outsourcing, he blogged all his sources.

Virginia Postrel is completely different. She has a column in the New York Times, and generally gives us much more information there than she does into her blog entries, which she uses basically for expressing opinions.

Recently, Postrel has devoted both her NYT column and many blog posts to the subject of federal highway funding. We first heard about it in this post, entitled "Gullible Reporter Alert", in which she excoriated the AP's Jim Abrams for printing nothing more than "propaganda" on the subject of road-building. The article was certainly one-sided, and seemed to accept as an article of faith that spending more money on US motorways is a Very Good Thing. But Postrel didn't really fisk it: she just complained that Abrams didn't provide any sourcing for the claim that 47,500 jobs are created for every $1 billion invested in federal highway and transit programs. Then, she told us to wait for her own article on the subject, forthcoming in the New York Times.

Right on schedule, the article arrived. It was headlined "Does Highway Spending Really Pay Off?" and it asked how much economic benefit the US actually receives from this expenditure. Based on an article in The Journal of Urban Economics, Postrel claimed that the rate of return on infrastructure investment has fallen from 15% in the 1970s to less than 5% today.

It's a good argument, and a good column: it provides ammunition for fiscal hawks on both sides of the political spectrum who hate to see government spending spiralling out of control even as the Bush administration continues to push further tax cuts.

It doesn't, however, say anything at all about jobs.

But Postrel was on a roll at this point, and soon published an email she received from a reader, bringing up that jobs number once again. The anonymous correspondent cited an even more anonymous "expert" at the Congressional Research Office, saying that "the figure was basically a garbage number that was cooked up for a DOT study in the mid-90s".

Then, yesterday, Postrel got an email from Arthur Jacoby, the alleged number-cooker. She blogged it, she said, "in the interests of fairness": not, one notes, in the interests of actually getting to the bottom of the jobs question. Jacoby attached a Word document which is precisely the source for the 47,500 jobs figure Postrel was complaining that Abrams didn't provide. It makes for interesting reading, and breaks the jobs down quite explicitly: in the first round, 12,453 jobs are created in the highway construction sector, along with 7,132 jobs in equipment and materials supplying industries. Then, in the second round, 6,939 jobs are created "because of the additional demand for inputs needed to expand output in industries that supply highway construction materials". Finally, in the third round, 21,052 jobs are created, reflecting "producer’s response to an increase in consumer demand for all types of goods and services".

Of the 47,576 total jobs created, then, a good 44% are connected to highway construction only in the most peripheral way. And, of course, all of these figure come from a computer program – something called the JOBMOD income and employment estimation model – which, like all economic models, will have internal weaknesses and may or may not reflect what actually happens in the real world particularly well.

But Postrel's response to Jacoby's email is fascinating: she doesn't really respond to anything he says at all. Rather, she snarks that "taxpayers paid experts to come up with the calculation" – er, yes, Virginia, would you rather that they hadn't? and continues with this gem:

But it still doesn't pass the smell test. Federal construction jobs pay more than $20,000 each, and this isn't the Great Depression; most people hired would be doing something else if they weren't building government roads.

$20,000, for those of you who are a bit weak on mathematics, is $1 billion divided by 50,000 jobs, and it's an utterly disingenuous figure. The fact that Postrel printed it at all makes me doubt everything else she writes: it's pure rhetoric, with a "la la la I can't hear you" relationship to the facts that Jacoby provided.

For one thing, Jacoby makes it clear that the $1 billion is not really $1 billion at all: by the time that state matching funds are added in, total government expenditures are $1.25 billion. Then, the number of jobs created directly when that $1.25 billion is spent on building roads is not 50,000, it's 19,585. So if you're going to do any division here, try dividing $1.25 billion by 19,585: the result is about $64,000. Which is much closer to how much jobs cost these days, and which does "pass the smell test".

Moreover, Jacoby is surely right to include more than just the first-tier jobs in his calculations. After all, if I'm spending billions of dollars on equipment and materials, it stands to reason that demand – and jobs – will be created in the industries which supply those materials. The third-tier jobs, which are far more trickle-down, we might argue about, but (a) Postrel doesn't; and (b) they're surely non-zero, in any case.

Postrel, however, doesn't buy any of this. Rather, her "most people hired would otherwise be doing something else" argument seems to imply that there can never be any job creation in an economy with a relatively low unemployment rate. If I'm hired by a construction company because they got a government contract to build a road, has my job been created? Not if you're Virginia Postrel, it hasn't: if I'd otherwise be flipping burgers or designing software, then my job laying tarmac somehow doesn't count.

What's more, there seems to be an implication in Postrel's argument that every job created building roads means one less burger flipper or software developer elsewhere in the economy. Let's say that I stop flipping burgers and start laying tarmac when the government contract hits town. OK, if you're just looking at me, I had one job before and I have one job now, so employment hasn't gone up. But when McBurgers hires my kid sister to replace me – and it surely will, given the $1 billion boost my local economy has just received – total employment has, in fact, gone up.

Postrel doesn't stop there, however. Check out her very next sentence:

Keep in mind that these job projections are not based on the assumption that highway spending is investment that increases productivity. (Her emphasis.)

This is just hilarious. The implication, to those people who haven't been following the story on her blog over the past couple of weeks, is that the "highway spending increases productivity" argument is better than the "highway spending creates jobs" argument. She neglects to mention, of course, that she's just written an article in the New York Times comprehensively destroying the "highway spending increases productivity" argument, while she hasn't, up until this point, addressed the quite obvious "highway spending creates jobs" argument at all.

So how does she do it? Any ten-year-old can see that if the government comes into town and gives thousands of people jobs building roads, then, well, jobs are being created. Only an economist could possibly disagree:

They assume that the spending is jacking up employment directly through the hiring of construction workers and indirectly through their spending. That Keynesian story only works if you assume lots of slack in the system.

It certainly looks here that Postrel is characterising "jacking up employment directly through the hiring of construction workers" as a "Keynesian story". Of course, it isn't at all. If I open one of Postrel's beloved nail salons, and hire half a dozen manicurists, then I have a feeling she would agree I've just created six jobs. She wouldn't tell me that those jobs are a Keynesian story which only exist if there's some mysteriously-defined "slack in the system" (I think she means unemployment, but it's far from clear).

When the government hires people, on the other hand, or gives money to construction companies who hire people, then suddenly the spending is "Keynsian" and therefore suspect. Yes, it's possible to argue about how much of a stimulus general government expenditure really gives to an economy and to the employment numbers. But you can't simply say that government spending never creates jobs in both the public and private sectors: just look at the economy of the Washington DC conurbation, where Postrel lives.

At this point, I feel I ought to say that, as an opponent of government pork in general, I think that Postrel is right about the highways bill. What's more, I particularly dislike federal roads spending, because it hides the real cost of America's car culture and does enormous damage to the environment. I daresay that spending $1 billion on the arts, say, would create even more jobs, with much less collateral damage.

Do I think that the government should increase employment? Yes. Do I think the government should do that directly, by spending money on programmes which are labour-intensive? No. But does spending money on labour-intensive projects create jobs? Of course. To think otherwise is to be blinded by idealism.

PS Virginia, if you're reading this, can you please date your individual blog entries? They're timestamped on the main blog page, but not on the permalinks.

UPDATE: Postrel has responded to this, and I've responded right back.

Posted by Felix at 18:04 EST | Comments (0)

Housing bubbles

Is the New York (indeed, the US) housing bubble going to burst? A look at the situation in the UK would suggest that it isn't. Interest rates have already started rising there – but a new report says that 25 or 50 basis points here or there is going to make no difference, and that rates will have to double before the mania is controlled.

What's going on? The average UK house price is now increasing at a rate of £1,100 a week: that's $2,000, near enough. Capital gains on housing are generally tax-free, which means that a worker would have to be earning a six-figure salary – in pounds sterling – just to match the amount that the average homeowner is making from just sitting in their property as it appreciates.

It's worth remembering, too, that all these numbers are UK averages: insert whatever insane multiplier you like to get the equivalent numbers for London. But to take Tony Blair's old house as an example, the PM sold in 1997, when he moved to Downing Street, for £615,000; it's now back on the market, listed at £1.69 million. In other words, if he'd retired instead of becoming prime minister, he'd've made £1.08 million – just under $2 million – from owning a six-bedroom in Islington. That's more than he's made as PM.

The bubble is being driven, it would seem, by people known in the UK as "buy-to-let investors" – basically, individuals who buy houses not in order to live in them, but rather to rent them out. Historically, this market has behaved rather like a bond market: given a set rental income and a set mortgage rate, it's easy to calculate how much a house should be worth. More recently, however, buy-to-let investors have been behaving more like equity investors, who treat rental income more like a welcome stock dividend than as the main reason for buying the asset in the first place.

Whenever there's a housing bubble, prices always rise faster than rents. We're seeing that in New York: it's been a long time since you could cover mortgage and maintenance costs by renting a place out. The UK is the same way, but the buyers don't care: even if they have to pay some of the mortgage costs themselves, they're making so much money in capital appreciation that it doesn't matter.

This kind of thing isn't really happening in the US to nearly the same extent. The housing market is something touted in late-night get-rich-quick schemes on the television, not a respectable way to build a nest egg. But consider a student who's just graduating from NYU. If that student, or her parents, had bought a place four years ago and sold it now, there's a good chance that the profit could cover not only the mortgage and maintenance costs, but tuition fees as well. If you start off rich enough, it would seem, you can essentially go to college in New York for nothing these days.

Just like any other asset bubble, the longer this kind of unsustainable situation goes on, the more people pile in, trying to get rich quick. It's easy: buy a $1 million apartment today, with $100,000 down and a 90% mortgage at 6%. Watch it go up by 75% in two years, and sell it for $1.75 million in two years' time. You've spent $108,000 on mortgage costs, say another $24,000 in maintenance costs, and a bunch more in legal fees – say $150,000 all in all. Your total investment: $250,000, including down-payment and costs. Your total return: $1.75 million minus $900,000 in mortgage equals $850,000. Net profit: $600,000, or $300,000 a year: call it $25,000 a month. Oh, and you spent nothing on rent the entire time. Sound attractive?

Of course, you'd make even more if the mortgage were smaller and you paid more of the upfront cost in cash. So you take your $600,000 and use it as the down payment on somewhere else – and so the cycle continues. Even if you allow yourself $100,000 a year for living expenses, you can rapidly make millions by flipping properties in a bubble economy.

This sort of behaviour is quite common in the UK; it's barely even beginning here in the US. Very few Americans buy property in order to become rich; most still do it for the old-fashioned reason of needing somewhere to live. The frenzy of apartment-buyers in Manhattan is not a slathering horde of speculators falling over themselves to get a piece of the property-market action: rather, it's a bunch of stressed-out professionals desperately trying to find somewhere they can afford to buy.

Look at those UK base rates again. They're at 4.25%, compared to just 1% in the US. Even if we get 325 basis points of tightening, we'll only be at the same place that the UK is now, and the UK's rates are clearly well below the level needed to decelerate house-price inflation. In other words, don't count on the Fed to precipitate a housing-market correction.

Sooner or later, of course, property prices will come down: they can't keep on running away from rental incomes indefinitely. But they're a bit like the US current-account deficit: unsustainable in the long term, but showing no sign of decreasing any time soon. So long as the economy continues to expand, my guess is that people will continue to feel comfortable putting their money into bricks and mortar – and increasingly, they'll be doing so as an investment. After all, we're four years on from the dot-com crash, and property is the only asset class which has done very well in good years and bad.

So, what would I do in this market? Buying property is very expensive – and, in the long term, I believe, it could prove to be extremely painful. Does anybody remember negative equity? Maybe the best thing to do would be to start a new blog, devoted to the excesses of the New York property market. That should be bound to do well. I'm not good at coming up with names, but curbed.com has a nice ring to it. I haven't checked it out, though: maybe someone else has got there before me?

Posted by Felix at 23:38 EST | Comments (4)

Ethics lapse at Time Inc

The blogosphere is all atwitter this afternoon about an article Greg Lindsay wrote about Nick Denton, and Denton's response. Blogfight! If you want to see Lindsay's response to Denton (and me), it's below.

The name-calling is fun: Denton calls Lindsay an "obsessed and confused" "gossip columnist", and gets off this zinger: "Greg Lindsay is about as reliable as a journalist who turns to an Iraqi exile for intelligence on Saddam's hidden nukes." (Funny: I have a suspicion that being compared to Judith Miller might not strike Lindsay as all that much of an insult.)

More interesting to me, however, is the email from Denton which Lindsay reproduces at the top of page 2 of his article:

"You didn't hear it from me"? It doesn't get much more off-the-record than that, and Denton confirms that "Yes, Lindsay reprinted an off-the-record email without permission." Lindsay, on the other hand, says that he "did not extend any off-the-record privileges to" Denton, and therefore is not bound by any unilateral declaration of confidentiality.

But it's not just Lindsay who reprinted that email, either: It's Business 2.0 magazine, published by the Fortune group of Time Inc. This is a big-time magazine, with a rate base of 550,000, and a page rate of $53,000. It's not a scrappy zine, and it surely considers itself bound by all normal conventions of journalistic ethics.

So what made this high-profile national magazine decide to print an explicitly off-the-record communication from a pretty important person in the new-media universe? The whole article is mildly antagonistic towards Denton, but this looks like a gratuitous attempt to break up whatever rapprochement he and Calacanis might have been moving towards. (Calacanis even went so far as to say that the two were friends, at the New York Bloggers event earlier this month.)

Worse, however, printing this email must surely do some serious damage to Lindsay, Business 2.0, and Time Inc generally, regarding their treatment of sources. Email is the number one method of communicating these days, and I'm sure that Business 2.0 reporters get off-the-record emails on a constant basis. As of now, any of their sources who pick up the June issue of the magazine will come to the eminently reasonable conclusion that the editors have no problem with reprinting such emails.

Will the flow of tips into Business 2.0 slow as a result of this article appearing? I don't know, but it seems entirely possible. The email from Denton to Lindsay was not particularly newsworthy in and of itself, and didn't even add much to the rest of the story: it could have been left out at very little detriment to the article. But Lindsay and his editors decided to keep it in, maybe in juvenile retaliation for not getting the long interview with Denton they'd been hoping for.

If I was running the Fortune group at Time Inc, I'd be asking some extremely pointed questions of Josh Quittner, the editor of Business 2.0, right now. What are your rules for printing off-the-record emails? When, if ever, is it appropriate? And what on earth made it appropriate in this instance?

Denton seems more concerned about broader errors within the piece, and, not knowing the truth, I have no idea whether he or Lindsay is right on that front. But journalists make mistakes the whole time, and if Denton wouldn't speak to him, one can understand why Lindsay might run with revenue estimates from someone else. Ethical lapses are worse, however, and redound not only on the writer but also on the magazine and its publisher. Maybe Denton doesn't care: he's been accused of worse himself. But Time Inc really should.

UPDATE: Greg Lindsay writes:

My editors and I have a reason and a reasoning for running Nick's email. The backstory to this, which Nick, of course, is not going to mention, is that he was actively hostile to this story throughout most of the process, stonewalling for weeks before relenting, unbidden, only a few days before deadline.
Nick was approached about this story in late March, at which time he unequivocally refused to work with me, despite the fact that it was pitched as a positive story. (And while Nick might rant at length about it on his site, even he admits on his blog that I make him "out to be more cunning than I am -- but that's kind of flattering." Which it was meant to be.)
But Nick said no. And furthermore, he flatly refused to grant me access to his writers and vowed to obstruct my access to his friends and figures in his past. That was fine. My editors and I resolved to write around him -- all this meant was that he couldn't spin us -- and I didn't speak to Nick while reporting most of this story.
Then, out of the blue, Nick sent the email that appears in the story.
The reason we published it: This story was about how "Nick ticks," to paraphrase the headline. His decision to send that email after freezing me out was indicative of Nick's business tactics and media manipulation. You or he or anyone can claim I'm just bitter that he wouldn't talk to me, but plenty of his embittered "associates" did, and sending that email reflected a cunning that I heard about at length while reporting this story. He was trying to take the heat off himself while potentially queering his competitor's deal. I know for a fact that he spread that information around -- in fact, I wasn't even the first person who asked Jason about it at Bloggercon. That was actually Rick Bruner, who Nick knows from their Budapest days. And I don't know what this talk is about a "rapprochement" between Nick and Jason. I know that Jason genuinely likes Nick, but their relationship is a one-way street when it comes to respect.
The reasoning behind our decision to publish it: Nick was not a source at the time he sent that email. He was an openly hostile subject whom I was not in communication with. I did not extend any off-the-record privileges to him -- he simply assumed I would be delighted to do so in an attempt to curry favor. I did later extend that privilege to him, and I'm not about to reprint our later emails, phone conversations, etc. But you're implying that I, my editors, and Henry Luce violated a source agreement with him. We didn't, because I made no such agreement regarding that email. He can't have it both ways.
I could go on -- this whole notion that I'm bitter because Choire Sicha repeatedly called me a metrosexual is absurd. It was a joke, people. And Nick's ravings that Josh Quittner and I are bitter because we missed out on the boom are hysterical too, Josh and I agree. Two points though: I assume the truth about Gawker Media and Kinja will appear in an upcoming issue of Wired, since Nick's friend and business partner Chris Anderson assigned a lengthy piece on Nick as well. Those relationships will be disclosed, I'm certain, but still. And I think it's funny that Nick grandstands to the NY Times that he and Wonkette are practically beyond good and evil but he's miffed about this.
Sincerely,
Greg Lindsay

Posted by Felix at 17:56 EST | Comments (0)

Timeless art

Is there such a thing as timeless beauty? I'm a fan of built-in obsolescence in art, but at the same time many great artistic creations can and have retained all their power and beauty for centuries. Look at Piero della Francesca, say, or Johann Sebastian Bach, or, even further back, the pyramids of Egypt.

When it comes to modern art, there are two very distinct strands, which take very different views of timelessness. The first approach, increasingly popular these days, is to follow the Tate Modern approach, and have exhibitions full of superficially improbable juxtapositions, in an attempt to get people to see new things in familiar pieces. The second approach is that found at Dia:Beacon, a museum and foundation dedicated to permanent exhibitions and the proposition that great art needs no curatorial interference, and should rather be left untouched for posterity.

Personally, while I couldn't live wholly on the high seriousness of Dia, I love going up there and seeing some of the greatest art ever made in its optimal surroundings. Wonderfully, since I was there last the Sol Lewitt area has been improved immeasurably with a second enormous wall drawing, and it's a magnificent sight to behold. And if you need a reason to visit now, as opposed to any time in the next couple of decades, here's a really good one: a temporary Agnes Martin show, with some very rare early works from the late 1950s.

Agnes Martin has always been a bit of a curious fish: the same generation as the Abstract Expressionists, she emerged on the art scene in her late 40s, along with artists a generation younger such as Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd. She's similar to both groups, but has never really been a part of either of them, and indeed has lived a semi-mystical life in New Mexico for the past 35 years, painting maybe 12 or 15 trademark square canvases per year, and sending them off to Pace in New York to get sold.

In fact, Martin has a new show up at 57th Street right now, of paintings dated 2002 and 2003 – in other words, entirely since she turned 90. Some of them recall the early works at Dia, with Martin finally jettisoning her lines and grids, and returning to more geometric forms. But all of them are large squares: whether the sides are 60 inches or 70, Martin has found her medium and she is sticking to it.

For all her consistency, however, there's no doubt that Martin was doing her best work in the mid-60s. One of the problems with Dia:Beacon is that it's necessarily weighted towards the most recent work of artists like Martin and Robert Ryman – Martin donated some paintings to the museum, but of course they're not the 60s paintings which she sold long ago.

This exhibition, then, is a very welcome opportunity to see the paintings which Martin is most famous for, in a small show which nevertheless exhibits them to their very best effect. Martin hasn't had a retrospective in over a decade: her paintings are often very fragile, and their owners are loath to lend them out. Here, however, the 1964 masterpieces "The Beach" and "The Peach" are proudly displayed, both now effectively part of the Dia permanent collection. They're shown as the culmination of a few years' worth of experimentation, during which Martin pared down her artistic vocabulary so as to emphasise only the subtlest and most beautiful of lines, colours and grids.

Meanwhile, timeless painting of a very different nature is up at GBE (Modern), Gavin Brown's lovely new space in the West Village. He's got a wonderful Elizabeth Peyton show up now, and everybody should really make their way to Greenwich and Leroy to check it out. Peyton is being shown alongside David Hockney at the Whitney Biennial at the moment, and you can see why: her beautiful paintings of youths recall Hockney's own tenderest work. I can't think of anybody who can paint in such a heartbreaking manner, and I'm quite sure that she's one of the few artists you can guarantee will still be collected centuries from now.

On the other hand, fashions do change, and even the strongest artistic achievements can fall foul of aesthetic winds blowing in the wrong direction. I had the great good fortune to eat at La Caravelle today, just a week before it shutters for good on May 22. I had never been before, and I'm extremely glad I went: I doubt I'll experience another meal like it ever again in North America. The dining room was light and beautifully decorated, without any of the stuffiness of many formal restaurants. The food was of the absolutely highest order: my softshell crab starter simply melted in the mouth, and came with a pile of other flavours. I have no idea what they were, but I could have eaten that dish all day. I'm one of those people who generally says that only the Chinese really know how to cook softshells, but La Caravelle had the best I've ever tasted.

But the fashion in restaurants these days, of course, is more towards trendiness: people care less about the food and more about the crowd, the design, the cocktails. The patrons of La Caravelle were definitely of a certain age: I'd say there were more facelifts than there were people under 40. And it's hard to see how the restaurant could attract a younger crowd without betraying all its finest principles of proper French haute cuisine. So it is destined to close, along with Lutèce and La Côte Basque, evidence of how the very best art can lose its cachet.

In France, at least, such cuisine lives on, and maybe La Tour D'Argent or some other restaurant in Paris will serve as a kind of culinary equivalent of Dia:Beacon – a place where you can always be sure to find the cleanest, purest expression of its own kind of art. Meanwhile, the crowds will flock to Spice Market or Tate Modern, picking and choosing whatever they desire that day. I just hope there's room for both approaches; in painting, food, or any other art form.

Posted by Felix at 4:43 EST | Comments (0)

Beleaguered editors

I readily admit that I live in an anglophone bubble, but I think it's probably fair to say that Piers Morgan is the highest-profile newspaper editor in the world. Make that was the highest-profile newspaper editor in the world: He has now been fired, and escorted out of the building without even having the oppportunity to say goodbye to his own staff, for refusing to apologise for running faked photographs purporting to show UK soldiers abusing prisoners.

The Mirror staff blame mysterious "faceless American shareholders" for the ouster, but even without elaborate conspiracy theories, it is clear that Morgan, for all his ethical misjudgments, was very popular in his own newsroom. The people clamoring for his head were in Westminster, not so much in the media or the public. In the UK, hacks misbehave the whole time, and their worst punishment is usually ridicule in the pages of Private Eye, rather than righteous defenestration.

In the US, on the other hand, editors should be much more afraid when newspapers attack them than when politicians do. It was media hounding, more than anything else, which resulted in the firing of New York Times editor Howell Raines, and now the New York Times and LA Times have both rushed to print today with stories saying that Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, might be a little too cozy with Hollywood; more such stories seem sure to follow. The articles are pretty weak – one of the reasons that readers like Vanity Fair is precisely because it oozes insiderism – but the defenses of Carter's apologists are weaker.

Kurt Andersen, Carter's co-founder at Spy, says in the LA Times piece that "the obligations of a reporter for the Los Angeles Times or New York Times are different from an editor at a magazine or other media entity," before sensibly deciding not to dig himself any further into that particular hole, and declining to elaborate.

Jack Shafer, in Slate, on the other hand, makes an attempt at a full-fledged defense, saying that what Carter did was not so different from the actions of Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone or Tina Brown at Talk. But there's a crucial difference: Carter is a hired editor, not a proprietor. Journalistic ethics, in real life, do not apply to publishers: if Piers Morgan had owned the Mirror, rather than merely editing it, he would have been untouchable. The distinction that Shafer elides is that Wenner is being accused of abusing his position for personal benefit, rather than for the benefit of the magazine or its owners.

And Shafer also buries the most damaging accusation so far down that you'd barely notice it. Here's his take on what Carter's accused of:

The two newspapers compile similar dossiers on Carter's extracurricular adventures in the movie business: He's produced pictures (The Kid Stays in the Picture; 9/11, a CBS documentary), worked as a paid consultant (Brian Grazer's A Beautiful Mind), partnered with screenwriter Mitch Glazer to pitch (unsuccessfully) a movie based on a Vanity Fair story, acted (the Alfie remake), and built friendships with Hollywood notables (Barry Diller, Jim Wiatt, Grazer again).

Do you see the smoking gun? No? Well, it's that bit about "worked as a paid consultant". Long after A Beautiful Mind was produced and distributed to critical acclaim, Carter started saying that he deserved some kind of reward for suggesting that the Vanity Fair article on which the movie was based should be turned into a film in the first place. And so it came to pass:18 months after the film came out, Carter got his $100,000. No-one was paying Carter to consult: he basically demanded cash from a successful Hollywood film producer, who knew better than to say no.

It seems corrupt on its face: a powerful magazine editor (the most powerful magazine editor in Hollywood, in fact) essentially extorting money from film producers. But Carter runs an extremely profitable book, and he's likely to keep his job, along with its hefty 7-figure salary, for the time being. Unless much more along these lines starts trickling out, of course.

Posted by Felix at 0:09 EST | Comments (0)

Hoolie

It is, as the title suggests, blowing an absolute hoolie outside and I fear I have been over-romanticising Antarctica in my latest scrawls. I have not seen the sun for a week. I have been outside, for more than five minutes, three times only. I have been lifted off my feet, fallen on my face, clung onto a handline for fear of never seeing a building again and have turned all the instruments in my lab off until the storm passes.

It is currently blowing 37 knots outside from the east. The average windspeed dropped to 27 knots Saturday morning and went as high as 59 last week. Gusts of 70 knots were not uncommon. To those of you unfamiliar with nautical miles, think ordinary miles per hour. That's a lot of air to go past your face. And a lot of snow being carried in the air. The building rocks and sways as though it were a ship, water gurgles in sinks and toilets, unidentified swinging things swing against the legs throughout the night. In my windowless pitroom, I hear the gale through the ventilation system and know there's no point hurrying to get out of bed.

This is a storm. This is the kind of storm you might have seen in films. It's all true. Handlines connect buildings to buildings, interspersed by poles roughly 10 metres apart. When you leave the building, you grab a handline. Within a minute or two, turn around and you can see nothing of the place you just left except perhaps, if you're lucky, a foggy suggestion of light coming from the normally piercingly bright search lights. Half way between buildings, look around and there is nothing in all directions. It's white but there's no sun so it's not even white. It's just opaque, in every direction. I wonder if this is at all like being partially sighted. As you get closer to things, they come into focus, but generally you survive according to your knowledge of the layout, your memory of any route.

When people come inside, they are flushed and exhausted. Every speck of skin must be covered to protect against the wind but it's not that cold (only -10C right now) so you're sweating as well. The cold days are the clear ones. Last Tuesday was a classic example. It was cold, it was beautiful, clear and bright. I got minor frostnip and cold burns on my arms – and yes, I was suitably dressed. Around 5pm, my colleague and I were trying to align a light beam emitted from the lab, projected 4km across the ice-shelf to a mirror, reflected back, focussed into a telescope and ultimately an optical fibre connected to a spectrometer which gives us an image. The conditions were perfect and we saw a lovely spot of light. Then it went. Completely. Within 15 minutes the clouds and snow had arrived, wind picked up and pressure was plummetting. We packed our bags and left the lab ASAP.

I wasn't able to return until Saturday, and that was in a 28 knot blow, to check on the state of the lab. It was fine but the walk out there was hard going. Perfectly safe (accompanied) but a bit of a slog. Took a good half hour. The return was quicker though as the wind was behind us!

I love this weather, it's howling outside and shaking inside. People still go to work but you don't go outside for fun. I'm not worried for anyone's safety as the general base procedure is designed exactly for weather like this. We sign in and out, we wear radios, we check up on each other and take ropes anywhere where there isn't a handline. We're all fine, part of me is loving it. But you wouldn't want to be down here with an idiot.

Posted by Rhian at 23:30 EST | Comments (5)

Globalisation's commandments

Lance Knobel lists today Martin Wolf's "ten commandments of globalisation," saying that "they make great good sense." I disagree:

1. The market economy is the only arrangement capable of generating sustained increases in prosperity, providing the underpinnings of liberal democracy and giving individual human beings the opportunity to strive for what they desire in life.

This sounds very grand, but on closer inspection turns out to be unfalsifiable, and therefore meaningless. Just think of what a counterexample would look like: clearly, you can't simply come up with a market economy which has not generated sustained increases in prosperity, since Wolf is simply saying it's a necessary, not a sufficient, condition. So you need to find a country which has generated sustained increases in prosperity and yet is not a market economy. My suspicion is that Wolf leaves "market economy" so vaguely defined that he can throw any potential counterexample (China, say) into that pot. Crucially, given the subject at hand, a "market economy" does not need to be particularly open to trade and foreign investment.

We can ignore the next three commandments, because they say nothing of substance whatsoever, and move on to

5. The World Trade Organisation has been enormously successful. But it has already strayed too far from its primary function of promoting trade liberalisation. The arguments for a single undertaking binding all members also need to be reconsidered, since that brings into the negotiations a large number of small countries with negligible impact on world trade.

Do you see how Wolf has shifted, here? He starts off talking about "generating sustained increases in prosperity", but halfway through his list he's already talking about creating a club of large, rich nations which can and should set all the rules of the game itself. If that were to happen, of course, the overwhelming temptation would be and is to rig the system so that the small, poor countries, which presently have "negligible impact on world trade", will remain that way.

Remember Cancun? It was an important rebellion about precisely this way of working. For too long, GATT/WTO negotiations have essentially comprised the US and the EU hammering something out behind closed doors, then emerging and telling the southern nations to sign on the dotted line, thank you very much. So countries like Brazil and Ghana are forced to sign on to stringent rules applying to intellectual property, pharmaceuticals, financial services and other things the north sells to the south, while the northern countries continue merrily doing whatever they like with respect to agriculture, steel, textiles or anything the south sells to the north. Wolf wants a return to precisely this way of doing things: let's hope he fails, for the poor countries' sake.

6. The case for regimes covering investment and global competition is strong. But such regimes do not need to be imposed on all the world’s countries. It would be better to create regimes that include fewer countries, but contain higher standards.

This is just a different way of getting to the same place. Once again, the rich northern countries will set the rules – now with added Higher Standards! – and the poor southern countries will be faced with a stark choice: join the northerners on their own terms, or be left out altogether.

7. It is in the long-term interest of countries to integrate into global financial markets. But they need to understand the need for an appropriate exchange rate regime, often a floating rate, and a sound and well-regulated financial system.

Translation: if you want to know what a country should do in terms of its financial system, first ask Citigroup what it wants you to do, and then just do that. Note what Wolf isn't saying here: that some countries (those with fixed exchange rates, say, or less-than-ironclad financial systems) shouldn't integrate into global financial markets. Argentina, for instance, has an extremely weak banking system, but I'm sure that Wolf would love to see it reintegrate itself into the international financial markets. Rather, Wolf is simply creating a list of what countries need to do in order to become good globalisationists: integrate this, float that, strengthen the other. That way, if and when the integration fails, he can simply point to some other weakness in the country's financial system, and tell them it's their fault for not doing everything he told them to do.

8. In the absence of a global lender of last resort, it is necessary to accept standstills and renegotiation of sovereign debt. A particularly strong case can be made for developing ways to write off ‘odious debt’ – debt contracted by politically illegitimate regimes.

This is hilarious, coming as it does after Wolf's mini-homage to financial markets and sound financial systems. Financial markets in general, and cross-border lending specifically, only work insofar as the lenders can be sure they're going to get their money back. What's more, it's the domestic financial sector which is inevitably the hardest hit if any country declares a standstill, which is a euphemism for a moratorium on any debt payments. This whole commandment would be a hell of a lot more convincing if Wolf could point to any country where a standstill and formal debt renegotiation actually worked. Most of the time, the market-based solutions seen in places like Ecuador and Uruguay have worked perfectly well – much better, indeed, than the interminable debt negotiations we saw in the 1980s, which were ended only with the intervention of the US government in the form of the Brady Plan.

As for odious debt, it seems to me to be a weird and somewhat invidious form of imposing an embargo ex post. If the US, say, wants to ban its companies from building hospitals in another country, then that's all well and good. But if those hospitals are built, then the company building them should be entitled to its money, even if the president of the country in question is an unpleasant person.

9. Official development assistance is very far indeed from a guarantee of successful development. But the sums now provided are so small, a mere 0.22 per cent of the gross domestic product of the donor countries in 2001, that more should help, if used wisely. Aid should go to countries with sound policy regimes, but it should never be large enough to free a government from the need to raise most of its money from its own people.

10. Countries should normally be allowed to learn from their own mistakes, even if that means that some make no progress. But the global community also needs the capacity and will to intervene effectively where states fail altogether.

So, we should help out countries who are on the right path – the ones with "sound policy regimes". What does that mean? Argentina, for instance, has admirable fiscal and monetary policies, but I doubt Wolf would consider it an example of a country with a sound policy regime. If countries fall off the One True Path, then aid should dry up, and they should "learn from their own mistakes", up until the point at which they "fail altogether", at which point "the global community" should "intervene effectively". What constitutes such failure? Just in my own Latin American beat, I can think that at various points over the past few years, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti could all have been considered to have "failed altogether", with Paraguay permanently hovering on the cusp. Which of these should learn from their mistakes, and which should be intervened? Such decisions are necessarily and always political in nature, and it seems a bit disingenuous to lump them under the general theme of globalisation.

In aggregate, it seems that Wolf's idea of globalisation is basically a benign global dictatorship of the north, wherein developing countries, if they know what's good for them, nod and smile and do whatever they're told, in return for crumbs from the rich man's table, and a certain amount of (ahem) "protection". In other words, it's precisely the sort of thing which gave globalisation such a bad name to begin with. Surely we can do better than this.

Posted by Felix at 16:27 EST | Comments (0)

The New York Times magazine

It is with no small degree of sadness that I have to report the death of the New York Times magazine. When I first arrived in New York, it was a vibrant and interesting book, and its editor, Adam Moss, was justly held in very high esteem. Moss was then bumped upstairs to an ill-defined role in NYT management, however, and the magazine suffered; he then left the Times altogether to go edit New York, and the magazine has now withered and died altogether.

Superficially, it hasn't changed. Moss oversaw excellent cover design: strong and simple, safe in the knowlege that he didn't need to shift copies at the newsstand – and to this day the magazine is probably as close as any US publication comes to the legendary Esquire covers of the 60s and 70s. The problem is that the magazine's ego is writing checks its body can't cash: the inside of the book simply doesn't deliver what the outside promises.

Take this week's cover story, on "The Tug of the Newfangled Slot Machines". It's well teased on the cover: "Neither TiVo nor the Xbox nor your Wi-Fi-ed laptop is remaking American culture the way this thing is." But the article itself never mentions TiVo or WiFi, and talks about video games only in passing; in fact, it doesn't really address the effect of slot machines on American culture at all.

Instead, what we get is the author, Gary Rivlin, spending 8,000 words wandering around a company which makes slot machines, marvelling at how rich, clever and happy the people there are, and how poor, dumb and unhappy their customers are. At the end of it, we've learned essentially nothing that we didn't know already, and we wonder, in fact, whether Rivlin really has a clue what he's talking about.

For one thing, he seems very uncomfortable around numbers. Here's Rivlin trying to explain how big the business is:

In its 14-year lifetime, ''Madden N.F.L. Football,'' from Electronic Arts, has made roughly $1 billion, making it one of the most successful home video games ever produced. ''Wheel of Fortune,'' by contrast, takes in more than a billion dollars each year. ... Every day in the United States, slot machines take in, on average, more than $1 billion in wagers. Most of that money will be paid back to players, but so great is the ''hold'' from slot machines that collectively the games gross more annually than McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and Starbucks combined. All told, North American casinos took in $30 billion from slots in 2003 -- an amount that dwarfs the $9 billion in tickets sold in North American movie theaters that year. (Emphasis added.)

We simply have to take it on trust here that Rivlin is comparing like with like, since there's no objective way of telling what he means with phrases like "takes in". In fact, the one thing we can be sure of is that he means at least two different things by the phrase, and possibly three. The first, I think, is profits from "Wheel of Fortune", although it's far from clear whether he's talking about profits for the casinos or profits for IGT, the manufacturer of the machine. After all, Electronic Arts keeps all its own profits, while IGT has to share the profits from its games with the casinos, and in fact might not keep any of the profits at all, preferring to simply manufacture and sell the machines rather than attempt to peel off its own percentage.

Next occurrence, "take in" refers to total amount wagered, and is contrasted to the games' "gross", which is left undefined, but is probably the same as what "take in" referred to the first time around. Finally, "take in" refers to some metric or other at casinos, which may or may not constitute the total amount of money that slot machines "take in" in total, since Rivlin never addresses the question of slot machines outside casinos, and whether he's including them in his calculations or not.

A bit further on, we find this astonishing passage:

The company has been so profitable during Kaminkow's tenure that if you bought $10,000 worth of stock in I.G.T. and Microsoft in the month of his arrival, January 1999, the I.G.T. shares would be worth more than $70,000 today and the Microsoft shares about $6,000.

This is a crazy comparison. IGT has a market cap of $13 billion and a profit margin of 18.52%. Microsoft has a market cap of $278 billion and a profit margin of 20.78%. Stock price, as we all know, is only marginally connected to profitability, and Rivlin's comparison seems deliberately designed to make IGT seem a lot more successful than it actually is.

But it's clear that Rivlin doesn't really like dealing with numbers, as we can tell when he sits down at a slot machine himself:

The showroom machine had 8,000 credits on it -- $400. It wasn't my money, so I played the maximum of $2.25 per spin. ... At first I seemed to be winning, gathering credits on every second or third spin. But after about 15 minutes, I was down nearly 7,000 credits. I was winning the virtual equivalent of 15 or 20 nickels every time I scored -- but I was spending more than twice that with every spin. After 45 minutes, I was down below 5,000 credits. If I were playing for real money, I would have lost more than $150.

This only makes any sense at all if by "down nearly 7,000 credits" Rivlin means not that he had lost nearly 7,000 credits, but that he had nearly 7,000 credits remaining. The fact that he uses "credits" interchangeably with "nickels" only serves to confuse things even more.

I don't actually blame Rivlin for all of this: he's a newspaper reporter, and it's the job of the editors at the magazine to make sure that his reporting – which seems to be very extensive – is then turned into a smart, clear, illuminating magazine article. They clearly failed, and in fact I wonder if they even really tried.

And the photography in the magazine is going the same way as the prose. This week's issue is heavy on the gays, featuring a Q&A with a transgendered biologist, as well as a long article about the lawyers who fought for gay marriage in Massachusetts. Here are the photos of the three; the one in the middle actually takes up a full page of the magazine.

I can understand how many New York media types would like to send a message that gays, lesbians and transgendered people can be perfectly normal and boring, but I really don't think that's any excuse for photography as dull and unimaginative as this. If it wasn't for a rather good portrait of New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, the magazine would be at serious risk of losing its hard-earned reputation as a venue for top-notch photojournalism.

In general, it's clear that the New York Times magazine needs a good kick up the keister. Its editor, Gerald Marzorati, needs to start getting seriously Tina on his mollycoddled employees, tearing up features which don't cut the mustard, telling photographers to go back and do better, and generally not accepting second-rate material any more. This is the one section of the New York Times which has long lead times and can be expected to be uniformly good. At the moment, however, it's uniformly mediocre. Must do better.

Posted by Felix at 19:06 EST | Comments (0)

Sundown

I've experienced a new dawn today. Seriously – my own Spring has sprung. I'm so relieved. Yesterday, the sun set for the last time until August and I think, in retrospect, that I have been feeling a bit down lately. Not depressed but definitely apprehensive.

May-the-first: a date whispered amongst friends for a few weeks, a day we have ritual and ceremony, a day we will party, the day when Winter truly begins. This is what defines the overwintering antarctic experience at Halley. From here on it will get colder and darker. The sun will set for the last time in 105 days.

Last week I was on night duty on the Laws platform. It was great – I'm a night owl anyway, and having the space and peace of an empty base was a delight. We overlapped in mornings and evenings, I was part of the activity but somehow an observer, an onlooker, a step slightly to the outside of the community bubble.

The main purpose of nightshift is to be on-call. To be alert, awake, sober and There, should any emergencies arise or, more hopefully, to prevent emergencies arising. There's also a little bit of cleaning and washing to be done as well as weather observations sent to the Met Office at 3am and 6am to help forecasting models. My favourite job, however, was bread-making. It's ironic that I have to come to the end of the world to appreciate simple joys in life that we can have anywhere. Making bread for your 17 compatriots is a contribution, a service, a nice thing to do, but also something that will be remembered, however the bread turns out. Thankfully for me, the only criterion for passable bread seems to be its toastability in the morning.

So the for last week of sun, I was asleep. When I woke up it was dark, when I went to sleep it was dark. Really pitch black dark. The sun was to set at the end of this week and I thought I had missed it forever. I started thinking about the sun, and how much I have enjoyed watching it circle my head. The summer days, perpetual light, circling, circling, so bright you need to wear shades at midnight. The first sunsets, skimming the horizon, beautiful reds at 2am if you're still awake for them. The segregation of night and day, our first planet, first star, the moon, auroras and the milky way. But days still light and bright. New atmospheric phenomena with each progression of the cycle. Mirages, sundogs, fogbows, sun pillars. I will miss the sun. I'll miss it a lot. I tried to convince myself that the moon and stars and darkness will hold new mysteries and wonders but that elation, that joy you feel when you see fresh sunlight, I can't believe they can fulfill this role.

This is the onset of darkness, of winter, of temperatures too cold to enjoy being outside when we have to create our own entertainment to keep spirits high. May will be ok, and June, as this is still the run up to midwinter: Festivities on Ice. But what about after that? July, August? What will we do then when the novelty has worn off, fresh food will have run out and there will be no new visitors until December? Did I not think about this before coming here?

I woke up today refreshed for the first time after shifting my body clock back to days. A lovely lazy Sunday feeling on base. People sitting around the table after a traditional Sunday brunch fry-up, laughing and cringing at photos from the night before. It's light outside. Folk on melt-tank duty get togged up to go digging. Someone looks out of the window and says there's a great sunset happening. He's right. I go outside to take some photos and go for a walk. It's beautiful. The sun might have set, but it's shining a stunning red light up onto the clouds with all its energy and they're reflecting that light back down on us. A red pillar of light on the horizon, held there for hours. The sun hasn't gone. The sun hasn't gone! There is still light, there is still laughter, there are still beautiful sights to behold. It's gonna be ok. It's going to be better than ok, it's going to be glorious.

I come inside for a cup of tea and see that my sprouted mung beans have gone nuts. They've grown leaves and roots and stalks and everything. They're huge! Where can all this matter have come from? Just from a little dry bean, some water and some light. There is life after sunset. Lots of life.

Posted by Rhian at 15:03 EST | Comments (2)

A waste of valuable space

The front page of the Sunday New York Times is probably the most valuable journalistic real estate in the world. It's where the Times puts its biggest investigative pieces, in the knowledge that people are much more likely to have the time and inclination to read long-form journalism on a Sunday than they are on other days.

Tomorrow, the Times is putting violins on its front page, in a story headlined "A Violin's Value, and What to Pay the I.R.S. Fiddler". It carries no fewer than three different bylines, including that of David Cay Johnston, the newspaper's tax-dodge expert. It even has a juicy news hook: Herbert Axelrod, who sold a collection of strings valued at $50 million to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, has now fled to Cuba, just before he was going to be indicted on federal tax fraud charges.

The story, however, is a complete and utter mess. The journalists' investigations clearly turned up nothing: there's actually no news at all in the whole piece. What we're left with is essentially three different feature stories, all of which are painfully incomplete, stitched together into a Frankenstein's monster of a front-page article.

First of all, of course, there's the Axelrod story. Apparently the tax fraud charges are "related to the sale of his publishing company," but we never learn anything about that. This piece is much more interested in his donations of string instruments, and how he may or may not have inflated their valuations for tax purposes. The donation we learn the most about is the one to the New Jersey Symphony, which paid $18 million for its 30 rare instruments from the 17th and 18th centuries. If Axelrod valued the strings at $50 million for tax purposes, then he could claim what the Times calls "a big tax deduction" on the difference. How big, however, we're never told.

Then there's a parallel story, about a previous Axelrod donation of four Stradivaris to the Smithsonian. Apparently that, too, was valued at $50 million, despite the fact that my own quick web search comes up with no records of any string instrument ever selling for more than $3.5 million. That's a factoid you won't find in the article either: there's no speculation at all about how much the Smithsonian Strads are worth, and in fact only the vaguest hand-waving when it comes to the true value of the instruments in New Jersey.

Encompassing both of these stories is a broader one about donations which carry inflated valuations for tax purposes. Apparently the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee is unhappy about the status quo, as is the person who reported Axelrod's donations to the IRS and hasn't received the $2.5 million reward he thinks he's owed.

But the IRS didn't comment for the story, and the only hard number that the reporters could come up with in order to help indicate the scope of the problem is that "about one in 11 reward claims is paid by the IRS," which apparently decreases any incentive to report suspicious activity. Since most reward claims are surely unrelated to overinflated donation valuations, however, the relevance of that statistic must be pretty low.

Then, to mess up matters even further, a completely different story is interwoven among the tax-fraud stories, all about how rare violins nearly always go up in value over time and how that "is leading players to consider newly made ones". Again, we get no hard numbers: no indication of what top violins are actually selling for these days, no idea of how fast violin prices are rising. Everything is anecdotal, and the piece ends with the story of "Christian Tetzlaff, 38, a German violinist regarded as one of the best of the younger generation of players," who used to play a Strad and now plays a Greiner violin built in 2001. This, of course, is completely irrelevant to the Axelrod and tax-fraud stories, but seems to have been thrown in just for the hell of it.

Reading the article is an exercise in frustration: it piques your interest with one story, then moves on to another, and another, and another, and never really cleans up on any of them. It's like reading a sentence where successive parenthetical comments keep on being opened up but never closed. What it is doing on the front page of the New York Times? I have no idea, but my suspicion is that a front-page editor somewhere had the bright idea that if you amalgamated three or four mediocre stories, you could get one really good one. Well, a good friend of mine is a front-page editor elsewhere, and I'd like to show this article to him as a prime example of how that simply doesn't work.

Posted by Felix at 17:48 EST | Comments (0)

Conductors under attack

First Simon Rattle, and now James Levine: it's been a bad week for hugely-admired conductors being sniped at in the press, all the more so for me personally, since these are both at the very top of my list of favourite living maestros. So what gives?

The attack on Rattle has been led by Axel Brüggemann, who wrote an article for Welt am Sonntag headlined "Simon von Rattle". The basic thesis seems to be that Rattle, despite starting off wonderfully, is now lapsing into the authoritarian excesses of his feared-and-revered predecessor Herbert von Karajan. The famous marriage between Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic seems to have hit a rocky patch, according to Brüggemann, who says in his wonderfully German way that "while Rattle romps expressively on the podium, the Philharmonic musicians sometimes tend to play as inconsequentially as if they were a wife reaching to the fridge to get out a beer for her husband".

The Guardian article also notes that the Rattle/Berlin Proms last year were "underwhelming" and "bland", while his Idomeneo at Glyndebourne also received mixed reviews. That said, he seems to be fighting back with the scheduling for this year's Proms: Beethoven's Ninth on the Sunday, followed by Messiaen's magnificent Éclairs sur l'Au-delà... on the Monday – the kind of piece which would have brought Karajan out in a cold sweat.

But it's certainly possible that the Berlin Philharmonic, despite loving Rattle as a guest conductor for many years before he took over as music director, is now having institutional second thoughts. Perhaps the two are more suited for a torrid affair than for a decades-long marriage. (And the relationship could conceivably last that long: Rattle is only 48, after all, and conductors are legendarily long-lived.)

While conductors do often get better with age, after all, it's only natural to expect the more mercurial conductors, like Rattle, to have some problems with consistency. And while Rattle did wonders with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, he was not burdened at the time with the sky-high expectations that accompanied him to Berlin, nor with the institutional inertia of a band as heavy and storied as the Berlin Phil.

My guess is that if Rattle is having some difficulties right now – and really I have little reason to believe that he is – he will not only overcome them, but turn the experience to his advantage. Something of a prodigy, his rise in the music world has been steady and largely obstacle-free, and as horn player Howard Howard (really) says of James Levine, "personal hardship tends to make more of an artist – I think you hear the difference between someone who has had a happy, secure life and someone who has had some misery."

I'm less sanguine about Levine, however. I'm glad I saw him quite a lot when I first moved to New York seven years ago, because thinking back to more recent performances, I've not felt the same kind of fire. And the complaints certainly have the ring of truth about them: that, conducting sitting down, he gradually slumps, over the course of long operas to the point at which players at the back of the pit can't even see the baton any more – which, in any case, he barely bothers to move.

To say that "my major communication tool always is my eyes" is all well and good, but that's true of Rattle as well, and he certainly uses his hands to great effect the whole time. I'm actually a fan of minimalist conductors who don't jump up and down and get all excited, but the one thing they all have in common is that they beat time very clearly. Levine seems to be using his orchestra's depth of experience as a crutch which allows him to put minimal physical energy into his performances, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Rattle and Levine both, of course, are greatly praised by the managers of their orchestras, but such praise can become self-defeating when you have the managing director of the Boston Symphony say that Levine's "energy level is still way beyond the norm". That's clearly not true: for one thing, he conducts even the shortest programmes sitting down. In general, praise only means something when it's conceivable that the person doing the praising could conceivably say anything else, and that doesn't seem to be the case with respect to the people quoted in these articles.

Now that Levine's contract has been extended to 2011, in fact, I'm a little bit worried about the future of the Met Orchestra – probably the best orchestra in the USA. Valery Gergiev has been getting decidedly mixed reviews of late: it seems he might have the same strain of Russian hubris that afflicts people like Yuri Bashmet, who start believing their own hype to the point at which they think they're above things like rehearsals and preparatory work. If neither Levine nor Gergiev is performing at the height of his abilities, there's certainly a risk that the Met Orchestra will start a long, slow decline into complacency.

Posted by Felix at 13:08 EST | Comments (0)

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