September 2004 Archives
Classical music criticism
One of the best things about being me is that I have a very cool grandmother who takes me to Glyndebourne every summer. (She herself hasn't missed a season since she first went at some point in the 1930s, I believe.) We have something of an annual ritual: every Christmas the booking form comes out, and together we work out which operas we want to go to, and when.
Recently, Glyndebourne's been a little bit boring: for the house which was always at the forefront of pushing new music in the age of Britten, we reached the point in 2003 where the composer list ran to Wagner, Mozart, Johann Strauss, Puccini, Mozart (again), and Handel. Not a hint of a Britten or Janacek, and certainly nothing new, unless you count Peter Sellars turning Idomeneo into a piece of anti-war agitprop.
This year, we're a bit more fortunate, with Rossini, Mozart, Smetana, Handel, Verdi, and the British composer Jonathan Dove. Dove's Flight is coming back to Glyndebourne, and if the reviews posted on his publisher's site are any indication, it could well be a great opera to go and see. That said, I'd love to hear from anyone who has actually seen this piece: is it really as fun and accessible as it seems? My granny, I'm sure, is going to be a little bit wary of going to any new opera, having been dragged along to one too many Stockhausen performances by her husband in the 70s and 80s. If she likes Britten but not Berg, will she be cool with Dove?
I feel I have to ask this because there seems to be something of a conspiracy in music-reviewing circles, where very difficult works are rarely outed as such in print. I'm not just talking about new music, either: I remember reading a whole stack of unanimously rave reviews for some rare Monteverdi opera at Covent Garden once, and actually going to see it as a result. Boy was that a mistake. It seems to me that reviewers get so excited at the fact that an opera house is doing something out of the mainstream that they censor themselves a little, refusing to give their readers the crucial information about why it's out of the mainstream. The Monteverdi in London was, I'm sure, one of the best Monteverdi productions the world has seen in decades, but the fact remains that the majority of music lovers will get nothing out of it except for extreme boredom. A responsible reviewer, I think, should bother to mention that between praising the artistry of the singers and the authenticity of the orchestra.
Or take the new production of Richard Strauss's Daphne at New York City Opera: the general critical reaction has been that the production might be seriously flawed, and the singers a little bit weak, and the orchestra maybe not quite up to the demands of late Strauss, but hell, this is a super-rare opportunity to see this work on stage, so we're going to praise it as highly as we can. The New Yorker's Alex Ross is an exception. "The Daphne left me feeling totally dispirited — it was miles away from what I'd hoped for," he writes on his blog, saying that therefore he wasn't going to review it at all. "I hope to write up City Opera on a happier day," he concludes.
I'm a little bit suspicious of the implied "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" philosophy behind this, but I feel that it probably follows from the necessarily evangelical nature of most music critics. If you spend your life listening to the sort of music which most people haven't heard of and most of the rest have no interest in, you're generally going to start feeling that part of your job is to help guide people to new music, to help enthuse them about the kind of stuff they might otherwise never encounter. Negative reviews won't do that, while "a quick round-up of recent CDs" – the thing which Ross wrote instead – just might.
The problem is that even fans of new music, like myself, will admit that most of it isn't very good. (I'm sure that most music of any era isn't very good, either, but the advantage of old music is that time has managed to do a reasonably good job of winnowing out the dreadful stuff which no one would ever dream of performing. If you commission a new piece, on the other hand, you're obligated to perform it, no matter how bad it is.) For every amazing performance of an amazing piece, there are half a dozen underrehearsed cacophonies which achieve little beyond making the audience feel proud of themselves just for making it all the way through to the end. But critics never say that, so it's very hard to tell what the really good stuff is.
Personally, I like taking risks, and if I go to a new opera and don't like it, no real harm is done. When it comes to my grandmother, however, I'm a lot more risk-averse. I want to know this thing is good and that she's going to like it, and failing that I'll probably fall back on the safety of Otello.
Posted by Felix at 14:57 EST | Comments (1)
Equinox
I am becoming a little bored of being electrocuted every time I open the fridge door. Or, for that matter, touch a handrail before climbing steps into a building. And then I get a shock, once indoors, when I hang my overalls on their metal peg in the boot room. The same happens when you pass someone a cup of tea and your fingers touch.
You know those blue spongey kitchen cloths that come flatpacked super brittle but go soft when you get them wet and then stay soft forever? Well here, they're always super brittle. Even when you use them every day. Pints of water are a must last thing at night and first thing in the morning, not just when you've been drinking. Moisturiser and anti-dandruff shampoo aren't just for girls. This is the driest place on Earth.
I've just come off a week of nights. Blissfully task-free other than the basic duties of bread, met obs and a little cleaning. My first night-shift in April was a big deal, I remember, would the bread be acceptable to the boys, whom do I wake if an alarm goes off, what is the fire drill procedure, how many octres of stratus cloud are there, is the mirror in the bathroom spotless? This time round, I remarked only on how easy and wonderful it was. No agenda, nothing to do but whatever I wanted to do in that moment. (That's something else I've learnt here,- to lose my fear of boredom. To overcome that guilt feeling associated with watching a film, reading a book, daydreaming a day away.)
Making bread has become almost normal for us and if it's rubbish bread, well, tough... or I'll make another batch. Met obs are a nice opportunity to go outside at 3am and 6am. My first few nights were beautifully clear, starry and dark. We even had a couple of auroras. By 6am, incredible layered clouds, pink, red, the morning sunrise colours emerging in stripes. Halley Haze. It's great when all the buildings look like they're floating. At the end of the week a storm was approaching, wind speed soared, snow blew past my face, it was dark and wild. That could well have been my last week of darkness here; soon it will be light most of the time, or at least most of my waking hours.
The storm is here now. Forty knots for the past few days but dropping soon I hope. I do enjoy the wild weather but it is a hindrance to everyone's work and you start feeling a bit cooped up after a while. Plus, three people have been stuck on base for the last week when they were hoping to be on a post-winter trip. On Sunday we decided to go ouside despite the weather. A couple of us helped dig melt-tank just for the hell of it, it gets you outside and moving after all, and then we tried putting a pup tent up in a gale. These are the emergency tents used if you're caught out in the field – so why not try them in more realistic conditions? I'll give it to BAS: they are ridiculously simple to erect, even in a storm. After that we rode Craig's bike around under the platform for a while. As you do. Not quite the weather for golf.
One of the funniest things I heard this week is that we're running out of tea bags. No, really, this is serious. Not just a serious fact, but a serious problem. I actually don't know what will happen if it's true. We have apparently got through over 13,000 tea bags and about 2 tins of instant coffee. Horlicks, Ovaltine and herbal tea are drunk, but it's not the same, is it? This is a very British base after all. During the winter months here, outdoor work is tiring purely due to the cold. After even 20 minutes outside, you have earned a cup of tea. And anyone else who's around will probably join you. Personally, I think if anything is going to turn us into crisis mode, this is it. I'll keep you posted.
It's very bitty. I am dredging my brains to try and think of something new to say, something you haven't heard before. A friend wrote to me recently and said she felt like she knew what my life was like thanks to these blurbs. In contrast, I couldn't really imagine hers at all. That's odd, isn't it? I could take it as a compliment about my writing but suspect it has more to do with the fact that life down here is incredibly simple and repetitive, there's only so much to say and then I have to start saying it all over again. In contrast, I can never know everything about anyone elses life in the 'normal' world. We don't even know that of our loved ones, nearest and dearest who we live with at home or work with every day. We share only a part of anyone's life. Home, work, school, office, hobbies, sport, recreation, films, families, friends from the past, colleagues, aquaintances, daily commute, thoughts, dreams, aspirations, the person you buy your milk from in the morning. Everything that makes up your day at home involves so many other people. Your life is a composite of so many lives. Even if I were to spend a month living with my friend, I'll only ever know the part of her life that she shares with me, and only ever know the person she is when I am around. In contrast, I share most of my thoughts here with the same people, watch the same films, discuss the same ideas, work with them, live with them, drink with them, experience the same storm and the same halo with them. I see them as they are with me, but also who they are with others as well. We see different things of course and have vastly different opinions and backgrounds, but we're getting to know these as well.
Thankfully, we still surprise each other and Halley still surprises me but my point is, it's simple. For me, it's a happy place, I am very contented here. There are others I know however who really just want to go home. But still I think it's odd that you can know so much about my dailyness and I know nothing at all about yours. It doesn't matter, I'll be back in yours before I know it and can re-experience it all over again. For now, let me indulge in this feeling of space and ease of living. It can't last forever but it's pretty goood for right now.
Posted by Rhian at 19:21 EST | Comments (7)
Public art
A few months ago, a series of blue boxes appeared in the World Financial Center marina. If you walked past them, you'd realise they were making funny noises. It turns out that they were a site-specific art work by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger called Blue Moon. You can read about it here (be prepared for artspeak about "the inherent temporal cycles of the broader bio-sphere"), or see pictures here: the installation clearly wasn't designed to be visually impressive.
I'm a big fan of Creative Time, the public art non-profit which organised Blue Moon, but this was everything that public art should not be. Most people encountering it wouldn't notice it at all; those who did generally had no idea what it was. The best-case scenario, really, was that someone might suspect that it was "meant to be art". In order to appreciate it, you needed to arrive armed with the foreknowledge that it was there, and of its deeper structure, involving strategically-placed "tuning tubes", tide-activated switches, and clever real-time harmonic sound mixing. In a gallery context, people might be expected to find out about this kind of thing; in a public space, you simply can't make such assumptions. This was not public art: it was private art – art for the cognoscenti – in a public space.
Creative Time is by no means alone in making this kind of mistake. I admire the work of public art organisation Minetta Brook, for instance, but when they take over a storefront in Beacon, New York, and convert it into a video installation by Matthew Buckingham, there's very little public about the art. The video is a long, slow, black-and-white silent film of the Hudson River: beautiful, to be sure, but also boring in the way that most video art installations are boring. The storefront might be open to the public, but there's nothing really to invite Beacon residents in, and certainly nothing to engross or delight them once they've entered. This, again, is art by an established member of the art world, designed to be viewed and appreciated by other such sophisticates.
The people who sponsor public art are normally – necessarily, even – art-world people. They have artists they admire, and they like to see what those artists can do in a public, as opposed to a gallery, setting. Few if any artists will substantially change the kind of work they create when they are given a public-art commission, so there's definitely an art involved in picking artists who will speak to the general public.
Many very good artists, it turns out, are also very accessible. Jeff Koons, with his hugely-loved Puppy, springs immediately to mind, as does the world-famous team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who are coming to New York in February. Other artists might seem more forbidding at first glance but are embraced by the public all the same: I'm thinking here of Rachel Whiteread's House, or Jonathan Borofsky's Man Walking to the Sky, which was so well received by the citizens of Kassel when it was exhibited there at Documenta in 1990 that it was bought by the city permanently.
Borofsky, of course, took his Kassel man and made first a female version, in Strasbourg, and now a group version, which has been installed at Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller Center has a great track record when it comes to public art: the Koons puppy looked wonderful in the space where the Christmas Tree goes every year, and subsequently there have been excellent installations by Louise Bourgeois, Nam June Paik and Takashi Murakami.
While some of these artists might be considered more serious than others, all of them are genuine art-world heavyweights who have managed to create large crowd-pleasing installations in midtown Manhattan. A bit further uptown, however, the story is very different. There, the Marlborough Gallery has joined forces with the Broadway Mall Association and the Parks Department to create something called "Tom Otterness on Broadway".
Here, the problem is not that an institution like Creative Time is foisting highbrow art on people incapable of understanding it: quite the opposite. Tom Otterness, his past association with the likes of Kiki Smith and Jenny Holzer notwithstanding, is a truly vulgar mass-market artist who appeals to the type of people who don't know much about art, but know what they like. His pieces are excruciatingly literal-minded: one, called "Marriage of Real Estate and Money", shows some money getting married to a house. Ha! Otterness talked to the New York Times:
I don't underestimate rich people's sense of humor either. You'd be surprised at the number of real-estate guys who have collected `The Marriage of Real Estate and Money.'
No, Tom, I wouldn't. Real-estate guys are precisely the sort of people I'd expect to buy (not "collect") this piece – and not necessarily because they've got a particularly well-developed sense of humour, either. The ultimate real-estate guy, of course, is Donald Trump, and he has just the kind of taste that the Marlborough Gallery is looking for in Otterness collectors. Here's James Traub, profiling The Donald last weekend:
Maybe it's an example of what Marxists call ''false consciousness,'' but Trump really is a populist plutocrat -- and not because he's philanthropic or even liberal-minded. It's the opposite: people seem to like him because he loves his money and spends it just the way they would if they had it -- as if he had just won a reality show himself in which the prize is absolutely everything.
What makes Trump Trump is not just what he has but what he doesn't care about having: status. Trump is not a patron of the arts; he does not sit on the boards of museums or universities or think tanks. His self-love simply will not brook the idea of a superior station to which you gain access by virtue of taste or values or behavior or whatever it is you might be supposed not already to have. Trump does not even recognize that some people look down on him; he assumes they must be looking up.
"Populist" is the operative word here, and in fact it comes up again in the Otterness piece:
Mr. Otterness, 52, is well suited to the diversity and commercial energy of Broadway. He is both popular and populist — an artist whose sculptures are intended to work everywhere and be understood by almost everyone.
Now that we are living in the era of the death of the middlebrow, it's hard for me to consider populism quite as benignly as that. Anybody genuinely populist cannot be admirable: Trump is admired by the ignorant public, not by fellow businessmen, and Otterness has created a huge business churning out sculptures of cute bears which has no more basis in the art world than does Thomas Kinkade. The Broadway Mall Association, here, is essentially throwing its hands in the air and saying that the only way it will be able to find something popular is by sacrificing all quality-related criteria. Given that Rockefeller Center has provided many obvious counterexamples, it's hard to see why Otterness was chosen, beyond the obvious fact that his gallery is funding the entire installation.
I'm hopeful, however, that the city's other public-art installations, like Mark di Suvero in Madison Square Park and Roy Lichtenstein in City Hall Park – not to mention Christo in Central Park – will show that good public art is not some kind of oxymoron. Even today, as Nicholas Serota will attest, you don't need to be populist to be popular.
Posted by Felix at 19:34 EST | Comments (2)
Blithe Young Tories
One of the funniest scenes in the new Stephen Fry movie, Bright Young Things, happens when one of the eponymous socialites, played by the fabulously-named Fenella Woolgar, fails to recognise the Prime Minister when he joins her for breakfast. It's a cheap joke, but it's effective: it manages to perfectly encapsulate the bubble of privilege surrounding posh youngsters in England between the wars.
The really shocking thing about the film (which is only new to Americans: it came out ages ago in Europe) is not how much England has changed since the 30s, but how little. The vile bodies of the book upon which the film is based are still out in force; the public still salivates over the excesses of the rich and famous, and the hypocrisy of the landed and monied classes is as egregious as it ever was. In England, as in America, we are living in what Paul Krugman calls a "new gilded age", and whatever lessons were learned during the war have evidently, by this point, been forgotten.
What's more, the clubby world of the Eton-and-Oxford privileged classes is very much alive and well. And as both the film and the book show, the superficially attractive life of its denizens is often very unhappy indeed in reality. The fact that rich people can be unhappy is, of course, nothing new, and certainly not unique to England. But the English public school system is, I think, particularly good at ratcheting up the misery for those who are for whatever reason not so good at playing the game.
This fact was hammered home for me recently, when I spent some time with a real world Eton-and-Oxford type: let's call him Carlton Fitzsimmons. He grew up, of course, in a wealthy family, with only the briefest exposure to those less well-off than he. He certainly sounds to anybody hearing his voice for the first time like an archetypal braying young Tory, but there's also the slightest touch of the nouveau about him: his father is a property developer who named his first-born son after himself. (Hence the Carlton: it's actually a middle name, used to distinguish him from his dad.)
Carlton did not have a happy childhood. Sent off to boarding school at a young age, he never really fit in with his peers, and spent most of his time at Eton bullied and friendless. A bit of a nerd, he was good at mathematics, and retreated into a world of maths problems and videogames. And his public school sheltered him: he never needed to leave its walls, never needed to practice human interaction with normal people – never even got much of an opportunity to meet girls. At school, he scrounged some measure of self-confidence from his high grades, while at home he learned contempt for the lazy poor from his father.
Today, then, Carlton judges people by how intelligent he thinks they are – a very narrow criterion, which mainly has to do with how good they are at mathematics. He has no interest in – indeed, very little comprehension of – the type of insights that other people might have and he does not: for him, being socially adept, for instance, is something to be envied, perhaps, but not admired. Carlton even has a certain amount of contempt for his mother, who, despite the fact that she's responsible for maintaining basically all his family's friendships, doesn't have the analytical nous of his father.
Eton persuaded Carlton that academic success was synonymous with intelligence, even as his family's wealth gave him an idea of how he was going to operate successfully in the real world. All he needed to do was stay on the right side of his parents, and he could end up running a fleet of flats in Fulham, making a very nice income – something, with his head for figures, which he'd probably do very well. Without his parents' wealth and property, on the other hand, he would be forced to fend for himself in a world in which he found it extremely difficult to interact with people or understand what they were thinking.
Carlton's entire future, then, was tied up in inheriting his father's properties. When he got accepted to Oxford to read mathematics, it was either the best or the worst thing that could have happened to him, depending on your point of view. He managed to go to the one place where he could remain coddled in privilege, and get through three years of university without being forced into unpleasant encounters with the real world. During the summer, his father got him an internship in the mortgage department of an investment bank, where he worked long hours in a testosterone-filled environment learning the virtues of hard work and the rewards of analytical thinking.
Carlton is an adult now, albeit far from grown up; he has had the best education money can buy, but doesn't know who Dick Cheney is. All the same, he has political opinions: "I'm a conservative," he charmingly says, "because my parents are loaded". Pushed on the subject, he'll go as far as to say that state education should be abolished altogether: if you can't afford an education, you shouldn't get one.
A moment's reflection, of course, would lead Carlton to realise what a stupid idea that is – but somehow his education hasn't trained him to think in that way. His world is almost unthinkably narrow: it doesn't include things like social mobility and economic growth, but consists mainly of video games and maths problems. In the ridiculously overspecialised world of the English university, that's not going to change.
Occasionally, of course, Carlton does meet people from outside his upper-class bubble of landed privilege. The problem is that it doesn't take most of them long to work out that they don't really like him, so he remains largely untouched by the outside world, and reinforced in his belief that, well, nobody really likes him. He's driven increasingly inwards, into a world where self-pity takes over from any idea that he might be able to change himself into someone that people get on with.
I have no idea how all this is going to end up. My guess is that the chances of Carlton seeing the world, opening his horizons, and getting some perspective on his family's place in the grand scheme of things are probably diminishing quickly at this point. The English public school system has failed him, and has created someone as well-rounded as a Donald Judd cube. What's more, his father was probably much the same, and if Carlton ever does find someone to marry and settle down with (probably by sheer force of pounds sterling), his son might well carry on the family tradition. Evelyn Waugh understood this, but so did Philip Larkin.
Posted by Felix at 18:26 EST | Comments (1)
WTC worries
I've long been a cheerleader for the WTC redevelopment. Even when others started griping, I was still optimistic about the prospects for the site and the likelihood that it could become a vibrant and world-beating neighborhood. In recent days, however, I've started getting a little more pessimistic, the release of a very sexy new site rendering notwithstanding.
The new picture is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the Freedom Tower pictured is almost exactly the same, as far as I can tell, as the one which was unveiled nine months ago. That Freedom Tower was a last-minute thrown-together compromise, and since then the foundation stone has been laid, and some kind of construction has begun.
There are two possibilities here. The first is that over the course of the past nine months, zero progress has been made on what the tower is going to look like, especially its upper half. The second is that David Childs and Larry Silverstein do have a good idea of what they're building, but they're keeping it secret – maybe because they fear what the public and/or Daniel Libeskind might think of the changes. Neither of these two possibilities makes me particularly hopeful about the future of construction on the WTC site.
That said, there is one obvious difference between this rendering and the one which was released in July. Look at the trelliswork at the top: the old rendering is on the left, the new one is on the right.
Doesn't it look to you that the top of the Freedom Tower has been glazed? If you magnify the image even further, it's clear that the buildings viewed through the top of the tower are much less clear than the ones viewed to the side – DBox, the renderers, clearly want it to look as though we're looking through glass. What's more, the windmills, which were never much in evidence to start with, seem to have disappeared altogether. Is the top of the Freedom Tower going to become a useless glass box? I do hope not.
My guess is that neither rendering looks much like what we're eventually going to get. I stand by what I said in February: the spire will look very different from what it's being rendered as right now, the sloping roof is likely to go, and there'll be some kind of observation deck at the very top.
And the really big picture, of course, is that the Freedom Tower is a camel. As Paul Goldberger explains in his new book, it's essentially the product of wishful thinking by George Pataki, who somehow managed to convince himself that David Childs and Daniel Libeskind – both big-time architects with a strong impression of what the new tower should look like, and an even stronger conviction that the other guy was wrong – could somehow be forced to fruitfully collaborate on the skyscraper. It was never going to happen, and the final building is quite probably worse than either man would have come up with on his own – although I daresay it's better than Childs' Bear Stearns building in midtown.
Other
bits of the new rendering are also interesting. Look at the detail on the left:
not only has Dey Street
been restored, but Cortlandt Street is just visible as a vehicular street as
well. That's good news: it shows that in at least one design shop New York City
has won out over the floor plate Nazis, although of course none of this is final.
The one thing I can't work out is the jagged reflection in the office tower behind Santiago Calatrava's PATH terminal. It seems to be the reflection of some kind of building, but which building is not at all clear. This is actually the most annoying part of the rendering: I would much have preferred an idea of what we're going to see in four or five years, rather than a wishful-thinking plan including four large office towers which probably won't be built for decades and in any case won't look anything like this if and when they are built. Hidden behind the middle two, for instance, is most of the Wedge of Light and all of the Millenium Hilton: I still don't really have any idea of how the PATH station and the Wedge of Light are meant to interact and point pedestrian traffic coming from the Brooklyn Bridge, say, down towards the memorial.
What we do see quite clearly in this rendering is the memorial, and the way in which it's almost entirely at grade. Libeskind's pit of memory is long gone, and what remains of the slurry wall will be as nothing compared to the edifice which so impressed Libeskind and the people who chose his design from the shortlist. More generally, when I reread what I wrote back in 2002, I feel a sense of opportunity squandered:
It all starts down in the dirt, by the huge slurry walls which stop the Hudson River from rushing in to the site. These were and are true engineering marvels: as Liebeskind says, they "withstood the unimaginable trauma of the destuction and stand eloquent". He keeps them exposed, 70 feet below ground, and then spirals up and out, into the rest of the site and beyond.
At the bottom is the museum and the memorial; at the top is a vertical "gardens of the world", rising in a glorious spike well above the rest of the skyline. The buildings in the rest of the site are extremely strong as well, especially the ones which border on what Liebeskind rather unfortunately calls the "wedge of light". This is a triangular plaza which will have no shadows each year on September 11 between the hours of 8:46am and 10:28am. It's mirrored by the Heroes Park, one of three or four green spaces in the plan.
What's left of this vision? The slurry walls are gone, the spiral walkway is gone, the gardens of the world are gone, the spike is rapidly going, the wedge of light won't have no shadows at the crucial time, thanks to the Millenium Hilton, the Heroes Park has all but disappeared... as Goldberger says, Libeskind's plan has been "ground down" to the point at which we can reasonably ask ourselves why we needed a major architectural name to design the WTC site at all. With all the compromises which have been made, it's looking increasingly as though the high-profile competition was little more than a shiny toy which took the eyes of the public off the places where the real decisions were being made – mainly the offices of George Pataki and Larry Silverstein.
As Goldberger says, what was needed here was someone with a strong vision and the ability to make it happen – someone like Francois Mitterand, who did something similar in Paris. Pataki was not that man; I have a feeling that New York's deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, with the wholehearted backing of Michael Bloomberg, might have been.
New York City, which has had very, very little say in the development of the WTC site, had a wonderful plan for Lower Manhattan as a whole, much of which – especially housing – has been jettisoned by the Port Authority and the LMDC. The cooks in charge of this particular broth were the wrong ones, I fear: some deal surely could have been done whereby New York City received the land under the World Trade Center from the Port Authority, in return for the land under JFK and LaGuardia airports. Doctoroff would then have had much more power, Pataki would have had much less, and there might well have been many fewer compromises along the way.
Just look at the results of the competition for the cultural buildings: the Joyce Theater and the Drawing Center are going to be the anchor tenants at the new site, because their competition, mainly the New York City Opera, was considered to be too big to fit into the small gaps remaining between office buildings. I'm all for facing up to realities, but there comes a point where you simply can't give office buildings which might never be built priority over an institution like the New York City Opera, which isn't all that big to start with. If Ground Zero is too small to accommodate one medium-to-large cultural institution, then there has to be a strong case for revisiting the whole question of why so much space has to be set aside for offices.
I might look as though I'm contradicting myself here: Last September, I wrote that
In theory, Silverstein could be bought off with a cash settlement rather than office space. But he doesn't seem to understand the cashflow situation here: far from the taxpayer giving money to Silverstein to go away, Silverstein is actually the central, necessary source of funds for rebuilding the WTC site in the first place. It is Silverstein who held the insurance contracts on the World Trade Center, you see, and without those insurance proceeds, nothing is going to get built on the site at all.
But the situation has changed. Silverstein's insurance payout is barely going to be able to cover the cost of the Freedom Tower, after his legal expenses and his rent to the Port Authority have been paid. Yes, Silverstein does have a contractual right to rebuild 10 million square feet of office space – but surely there's a case to be made for crossing that bridge when we come to it. No one expects Silverstein to exercise that clause in his contract any time soon, and in the meantime there's a whole new neighborhood to be built.
I went to a press conference with Daniel Libeskind this week, and if I've learned anything from being a journalist for the past ten years, it's that the fewer questions someone answers, the more worried they are. Libeskind, on Wednesday, answered very few questions, and fell back time and time again on the stock answers that he's been wheeling out for the past two years. The only news we got was regarding new projects of his, nothing pertaining to Ground Zero, where I get the feeling he's been doing very little work this year.
I would like to think that Libeskind will get the commission to design at least one of the new cultural buildings, and that being able to get involved with the minutiae of a real building on the site will bring his enthusiasm and involvement levels back up. But the bigger battle has been lost, I think: at every turn since the initial choice of Libeskind as master planner, political realities have trumped the larger vision. While I'm still optimistic for the neighborhood in the long run, I don't think it's going to be the greatest piece of urban planning that the world has ever seen. And it should have been.
Posted by Felix at 16:23 EST | Comments (5)
Waiting for fabulous things
Today is the first day of New York Fashion Week, when the world's fashion industry descends on Bryant Park for a sleepless round of shows, parties and gossip. The magazine industry loves it, of course, with the September issue of Vogue setting a record for the largest monthly consumer magazine ever. (It has 648 ad pages, and 832 pages altogether.)
This week, however, the New Yorker has decided not to do a fashion issue – maybe ad buyers have worked out that fashionistas don't read. But two years ago it did, with a 8,900-word profile of Puff Daddy by Michael Specter. Hard-hitting journalism this was not:
Sean John, the clothing company he started three years ago, has emerged as one of the best-selling--and most highly regarded--men's lines in America. Combs's runway show in New York last fall met with praise from even the most skeptical fashion professionals. "It was better than anything in Europe," Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper, the downtown fashion magazine, told me. "It was perfectly presented, perfectly original American fashion."
One day while I was in Paris, I ran into Richard Buckley, who is the editor of Vogue Hommes International. "I just got an e-mail from this writer who asked me who I thought mattered in men's clothes these days," Buckley told me. "I said the only man who is doing anything important is Puff Daddy. Right now, he is all we got."
The idea behind Sean John was great. As any visitor to the USA knows, men here are not well dressed. Most of the time they're in jeans and t-shirts, or maybe short-sleeved polo shirts; menswear is chosen for comfort and value, and is often bought at Wal-Mart. When men do dress up, in a suit and shirt and tie, the suit is likely to be a nasty $199 thing, and the tie polyester. With Sean John, the idea, as his designer said in the Specter article, was to target "a man who aspires to wear Gucci one day and Prada one day and to be able to afford the custom Zegna suits" – and give him quality clothes at a price within the bounds of possibility.
The entire fashion industry seemed to be on board: Sean John suits, when they got sent down the catwalk, had a kind of Dolce & Gabbana edge to them, a stylishness which has long been absent from US menswear. Frankly, I wanted one. But the two New York Sean John shops which were meant to materialise in 2003 never happened, and, as far as I could work out, there wasn't a single retail outlet on planet earth where these things were actually available for sale. (Trust me: I looked quite hard.)
Finally, this week, a Sean John store finally opened in New York – right on Bryant Park, actually – just in time for Fashion Week. I popped in there yesterday, and, surprise surprise – no suits. "They're coming in October," a salesman told me. But I'm not holding my breath. A similar state of affairs obtains with the long-rumoured Ozwald Boateng store in New York: we've been hearing about it for years, but we still don't seem to be any closer to actually seeing it.
We don't, despite appearances, actually live in a world of instant gratification. In fact, we live in a world of advance hype, where movies are advertised more before they come out than afterwards, where magazines are more interested in the future than in the present, where many items, especially in the world of technology, have an aura of obsolescence even on the day they're released.
Techology-related products and services are often, in fact, the worst offenders: whether it be wireless number portability or G5 Xserves, we're often waiting forever for things to come along.
It's now been well over two years, for instance, since Samsung announced its SGH-i500, a GSM flip-phone running the Palm operating system. This was something I was immediately attracted to – I'd love to be able to combine my phone and Palm Pilot in one device, and be able to run my favourite Palm application, Vindigo, on it. But no dice: it's since transmogrified into the i505, the i530 and the i550, but not one of them has yet actually come to market. I'm probably going to just give in and get a Treo 650 instead, even though I really don't want all the email functionality, full qwerty keyboard, and the rest. Although I do have to note that the Treo 600, too, took forever to come out in a GSM version: for some reason, GSM Palm phones always seem to be horribly delayed.
It's reached the point, now, where companies are actually telling people not to get excited about forthcoming innovations. After Newsweek reported that Tivo was going to team up with Netflix to offer, essentially, movies on demand, both companies went into rapid-rebuttal mode:
Netflix spokeswoman Lynn Brinton said there was no formal relationship between her company and TiVo, nor was there a timeline to form one. TiVo spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly told Bloomberg News that the company would not offer a movie download service for at least a year.
Broadband is one of the areas where people get very excited about what might happen in the future. Om Malik greatly understates the reality when he says that "venture capitalists have put a value of $867 per customer" on Vonage – he gets that figure by dividing Vonage's $208 million in total VC funding by its 240,000 customers. In fact, although we have no idea what kind of valuation the VCs bought in at with their latest $105 million investment, I can guarantee you that it's a lot more than $208 million.
On the broader question, however, Om is right: Vonage is overpriced – and so are Netflix and Tivo, if investors are buying them on the basis of movie delivery over broadband pipes. Vonage and Netflix and Tivo are all small startups with bright ideas who do what they do better than anybody else. But put them up against AT&T, Wal-Mart and Time Warner, respectively, and they look like complete underdogs, their first-mover advantage notwithstanding. The barriers to entry in all of their businesses are far too low to justify high valuations on these companies – the best they can hope for is that they get bought out as a strategic investment by a giant like Microsoft.
Broadband has enabled lots of great technologies, of which VoIP is only one. I'm far from convinced, however, that anybody's going to make any money off it. The bandwidth itself has already been commoditised, as have wireless router technology and digital video recorders. Once the movie industry comes up with some kind of DRM system for downloadable films, multiple sources will offer that, too, and Apple won't be out in front like it is with music. (How long Apple will keep its pole position is also unknown, now that Microsoft has entered the fray.) While I love my broadband technologies, and wouldn't dream of giving up my Vonage phone (a recent 113-minute phone call to Argentina cost me just $5.65), I equally wouldn't dream of investing in any of these companies. The time between now and profitability is likely to make the wait for a nice affordable suit seem positively Lilliputian.
Posted by Felix at 15:24 EST | Comments (3)
Waking Up
It has felt like waking up out of a dream, that slightly hazy feeling after a crazy night out, a little disorienting, stretching, opening eyes, rolling over again and returning to the comfort of covers. Dizzy and perplexed, happy memories, smiles creeping in upon recollection. And then looking around to see a familiar landscape, a much loved desert, a place that was once filled with busyness and now is so empty, so solitary, totally isolated – but not threatening or scary. I have been in this half dreamworld for most of the week. I feel as though I'm waking up after a long and restful sleep. Realities of the otherworld coming back to me like lost memories. They have meant nothing lately, have had no role in my life.
We had a storm, a big storm. Fast and furious winds, white-out conditions, snow everywhere. Then we had snow, lots of white fluffy christmassy snow. No, hang on, the snow came first, then the storm. And all that freshly fallen white powder swirled around our heads. Stomping through it you could step knee deep. Normally, it's like walking on hard ice here. See, even my analogies are referenced only to themselves. It's normally like styrofoam, crunchy and squeaky to walk on. This fluffy stuff was like blancmange, like the soggy snow we get at home but dry. Just powder snow and air. You couldn't tell how far your foot would sink at any placement.
And then the storm. And then the lull. That was an eerie day. In the morning, 40 knot winds, Vanessa and I clinging to a handline. By lunchtime the flags were drooping and it was flat calm. We even saw stripes of blue sky to the west. For an amazing half hour we saw the antarctic plateau to the south. I thought about turning the telescope on again to measure molecules to the east but by the time we did, clouds had rolled in again. Craig flew a kite and nearly lost his arm when it took off. The boys moved skidoos and shifted wood from the dump line. Everyone was out and about. Steph and I hadn't been able to get to the lab for three days and we ran out there hoping nothing had been too neglected. Vanessa came out to check the met equipment, Simon appeared to back-up computers. It was a mysterious day outside. You could feel the storm systems near-by over-head.
What was coming next? Were we in the eye of the storm, or had it passed. Look at the satellite photos. We were between two swirling systems, swirling madly above our heads. By 6pm, the winds were increasing again and the following day we were back at 30 knot winds. I kept blinking. It was so bright outside, so white. It's time for squinting and shades. Really bright and no contrast. Nothing but white in every direction. Where are we?! If you look carefully you can see the shape of the peninsula curving down the left hand side, the Weddel Sea in the middle and then the Brunt Ice Shelf (where I live) going off to the right.
I think the next day was a Friday and winds dropped gradually throughout the day. In the evening I stayed in the caboose again. It seems so close to base now that you can see it from the window. I understand why some people, most people here, don't see the point in going there. All the flags and drums seem like overkill. Was there really a time when we couldn't find it for what felt like hours?! And the caboose was so warm! How odd in the morning to not have to reach for the matches and tilly lamp before doing anything else, to be woken by daylight. How much simpler that makes everything!
Saturday was calm and clear. Huge mirages of icebergs dominated the view to the north-east, the plateau rising to the south incredibly clear. Is that really land, so high? Are we really living on a moving ice shelf?! Ludicrous existence! Sastrugi still cast long shadows, patches in the snow. At first the memorial looked like a pyramid tent, so did a tarped-up skidoo and a red flag in the distance. There is no sense of perspective. I kept looking around – what's this? What's that?! The refuelling depot looks strangely like the Shackleton returning to pick us up. You can see all around, a perfect flat circle, restricted only by the curvature of the earth. There is so much to see, my eyes aren't used to this much information. Ironic: when I first came here the same landscape struck me as incredibly empty. I remarked on how little there was to focus on.
Saturday night there was a themed party, come as your favourite star. I guess I should have come as Sirius but Tank Girl was much more fun. Lots of costumes, special food, the last big party before post-winter trips begin. At the end of the night we watched Human Traffic and I was pulled back into the world of nightclubs heaving with bodies, Saturday nights in Britain.
Felix has been writing about Critical Mass, about protests on the streets of New York. Thousands of people in one small space? What was once my reality is now almost incomprehensible to me. I share a huge section of ice shelf with 17 other humans and a couple of penguin colonies. We don't come into contact with political strife on a global level. The news-sheet this morning talked about people being massacred in a school in Russia. How have I missed this story completely? I hurriedly looked through the last week of papers printed off and there were a few lines each day, a couple of paragraphs in the last couple of days, but still less coverage than the Royals or Beckham ever get. I would have missed it completely a couple of months ago. I am waking up, see.
Sunday, another glorious calm day and we played golf in the afternoon. My first time ever holding a golf club! I can't very well shout hatred at the principle here for its not as though woods are being clear-cut for the sport! It was fun, great to get out and about for a change. I stepped through a motion of Tai Chi and started growing sprouts again. In the evening we had a small fire. It's a beautiful place to wake up, Antarctica, and I've had a lovely dream.
Posted by Rhian at 19:19 EST | Comments (2)
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