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Saturday @ Phillips

In an attempt to stay young 'n' trendy, Phillips de Pury has launched a new auction series called Saturday @ Phillips. The idea is that it's an entry-level auction, for people who don't have hundreds or even tens of thousands of dollars to spend on high-end art and design. Instead, the work is generally in the $1,000 to $5,000 range, and the target audience definitely includes people who have never bought work at auction before.

The next Saturday @ Phillips auction is on September 16, and it includes a couple of gorgeous Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs (a movie theatre and a seascape) estimated at $700–$900 and $1,000–$2,000 respectively. I've long been a fan of Sugimoto, so of course when I saw those I briefly pondered whether I should even perhaps bid on them myself.

Certainly someone who knows what they're doing might be able to pick up something of a bargain at the auction. My favourite jeweler, Jill Platner, has four pieces in the auction (1,2,3,4), and it's pretty easy to phone up or visit her store and find out what they retail for. If you buy a $5,600 necklace for the mid-estimate price of $4,000, for instance, you know you've got a pretty good deal.

The Sugimotos, on the other hand, are a little trickier. For one thing, there's clearly a big difference in value between the photolithograph of the movie theatre and the silver-gelatin print of the seascape: the movie theatre is from a smaller edition than the seascape, and it's a much larger print, but is still the cheaper of the two. Most people who buy at auction are educated sophisticates, who know what they're buying, know what they think it's worth, and bid accordingly. But the new crowd at Phillips might well not really fit into that category: how many of them even know what a photolithograph really is? (I certainly don't.) What's more, Phillips is presumably trying to attract the kind of people who are scared off by the opacity and malpractice endemic in the art world, which means that they are much less likely to be able to work out what the "going rate" is for such Sugimotos, or which other, similar, Sugimotos might be on the market at the moment.

In any auction, the size of the winner's curse is highly correlated with the degree to which the bidders have incomplete information about the value of the item they're bidding on. In other words, the more bidders there are, and the less they know, the more that the winning bidder is likely to overpay. Saturday @ Phillips is an auction series which seems designed to maximise the number of bidders and at the same time attract bidders who know relatively little about what they're bidding on, compared to most of Phillips's clients. A recipe for crazy bidding.

If you are confident in your own valuations, then, Saturday @ Phillips might be a good opportunity to pick up the kind of art and design which is often overlooked by the auction houses. But you have to be prepared to drop out of the bidding with no regrets, since there's a very good chance that a lot of the work for sale will go for overinflated sums.

Posted by Felix at 12:11 EST | Comments (3)

Straight outta Charlie Kaufmann

Not only does New York have a Puppet Lending Library, but it's in the Grand Arch at Prospect Park! Yes, as in inside the arch. It's open Saturdays from noon to 4pm, and occasionally there are even performances in the crossover at the top! (Via the Coolest New York Blogger By Far)

Posted by Felix at 16:59 EST | Comments (0)

The Apple recall

So there's tons of news about Apple's battery recall, which involves Apple replacing either 1.1 million or 1.8 million Sony batteries. Obviously the source for all this news is Apple itself. But there's nothing on the apple homepage, nothing on the news page, nothing on the press release page – nothing at all anywhere, as far as I can see, explaining exactly which batteries are affected or what owners of Apple laptops should do. One would think that Apple could coordinate things so that the details of the recall would be up on the website as soon as the press release went out – or, at the very least, would be able to put the press release up on the website.

In fact, how did all the news organisations get this information? Was it by email?

UPDATE: It seems the news came from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. There also may or may not be a recall page at http://support.apple.com/batteryprogram, but I just get an error message when I try to go there.

UPDATE 2: Guess what? My PowerBook battery has been recalled! I get a brand-new battery (value: $130)!

UPDATE 3: I found the link on apple.com! You click on the "support" page, and it's buried in the right-hand column. Thing is, if you try to click on it, it doesn't work... that page is down. So I phoned the number on the CPSC page, and the friendly Apple person told me that:

• No, he couldn't organise a new battery for me, since that's done through the webpage, and the webpage is down.
• No, I can't just take my battery in to the Apple Store and get a new one there: it has to be done through the mail.
• I should just try that webpage again "in a couple of hours" and hope it's up at that time.

In other words, chaos. Not the kind of user experience one expects from Apple. In any case, after the jump, a screenshot of where that link is buried.

UPDATE 4: The webpage is up! But when I input my battery's serial number, I'm told that this "serial number didn't validate". Back to the phone... at which point, after almost an hour on hold, I'm told that this is a known issue and that they (on the phone) can get around it. My new battery is on its way! But the whole process was much, much harder than it should have been.

Continue reading "The Apple recall"

Posted by Felix at 14:29 EST | Comments (4)

Earthlink alternatives

Just as my cable-modem bill increased to $42 per month, my cable-modem service started getting horrible. Connection is very spotty: internet access seems to come and go on a minute-by-minute basis, and is sometimes very fast and sometimes incredibly slow. I've now started getting weird error pages from Earthlink, too, like this one when I try to reach an Amazon page.

So, is there an alternative? Earthlink is nothing more than a rebranded Time Warner Cable, so there's no point in switching to Roadrunner. And I don't have a landline (I use Vonage), so DSL doesn't really seem to be an option. Or, is there a known issue with cable-modem access in NYC which is likely to be resolved at some point?

Posted by Felix at 10:50 EST | Comments (6)

Ushuaia here I come

So after having to cancel my trip at the last minute in March, I've now rebooked, and am all set for a trip all the way down to the Antarctic Peninsula in November. Can't wait! I'm looking to spending some time with my sister on a slightly smaller boat afterwards, too.

I can go now because I have all the necessary papers – along with a wonderful work authorization card. So, if anybody has any work for me between now and mid-November, let me know: it doesn't even need to be journalistic!

Posted by Felix at 15:06 EST | Comments (0)

Gentle reminder

Jenufa tickets are on sale now. Buy them. (I'm going Wednesday February 14 if you'd care to join: tickets are cheaper Mon-Thu.)

Posted by Felix at 11:02 EST | Comments (0)

Rothschilds in the NYT

One of the more minor differences between English English and American English is the way that investment banks are referred to. The English have a weird habit of pluralising everything: Goldman Sachs becomes Goldmans, Lehman Brothers is Lehmans, NM Rothschild & Sons is Rothschilds. The habit is so ingrained that the investment bank named after England's Schroder family was actually called Schroders before it was sold to Citigroup.

In any case, the pluralisation is something that all English financial journalists eventually learn to lose when they move to New York, because "Goldmans" just sounds weird to American ears. Which is why it's weird to find this in the New York Times today, from an American no less:

Rohatyn Associates, which had been loosely affiliated with Rothchilds, the British investment bank, worked on several prominent mergers like SBC’s acquisition of Cingular and later AT&T.

Or is Andrew Ross Sorkin, now an A-list blogger, simply bringing a little bit of bloggish informality into the Grey Lady?

Posted by Felix at 10:58 EST | Comments (5)

Diane Shamash, 1955-2006

Two art-world doyennes, Diane Shamash and Annely Juda, died last Sunday. I don't want to read too much into the coincidence, especially considering that although they died on the same day, they were born 41 years apart from each other. Diane died at 51: when Annely was that age, her best years were very much ahead of her and Annely Juda Fine Art wasn't even founded. It's a sobering reminder of how much Diane could have accomplished given more time.

Still, there are definite similarities between the two: both were physically small and temperamentally uncompromising, with a tendency towards perfectionism. Both, too, were intensely loyal to their artists: the art, always, came first, for both of them, and they had a rare ability to bend the art world to their will when they wanted something.

I never met Annely, although I spent many wonderful hours in her pristine Dering Street gallery, lost in her beautifully-curated shows of usually underrated abstract masters. I remember one constructivism show particularly well – there was a Malevich I returned to Saturday after Saturday on my weekly trips into town from Dulwich.

Diane I knew better, often meeting her in some kind of food-related context: she loved food almost as much as she loved art. Diane saw great chefs as artists in their own right, and was particularly interesting when she explored the intersection between fine art and food, as in the work of Christian Philipp Müller.

The biggest difference between Annely and Diane might be in the fate of their legacies. Annely Juda Fine Art is in the excellent hands of David Juda; Minetta Brook, on the other hand, has lost not only its founder but its very soul, and although I dearly hope that it will be able to continue, I fear that might not be possible.

Minetta Brook was a serious-minded public art organisation which refused ever to condescend to the public it served. Diane would find artists as serious-minded as she was, and would help them realise their vision with unquestioning faith that there would always be an audience for good art, no matter how superficially inaccessible it might be.

As part of a project called Watershed, Minetta Brook once rented out a storefront in Beacon, NY, where it exhibited a long silent black-and-white film of the Hudson River by Matthew Buckingham called Muhheakantuck. Christian Philipp Müller's piece in the same project consisted of a long steel trough in Annandale-on-Hudson planted with Hudson River flora. Neither was easily accessible in any sense of the word.

The audience for these pieces came largely from the art world: Minetta Brook was never scared to create "public art" which in practice was seen and appreciated by a very small audience. For Diane, public art was not a popularity contest. She always served her artists first, even when their projects might not receive much in the way of public acclaim.

If she refused to submit to the tyrannny of the popular, Diane also refused to be told what was art and what was not. Food could be art, as could be barbecue grills (designed by Pae White and installed in Bear Mountain State Park) or park benches (by Constance De Jong and installed at Hessian Lake). The most ambitious of all the Watershed projects was George Trakas's Beacon Landing: something that many art-world types would automatically consider architecture, or design, or in any case Not Art.

Diane, however, had the utmost faith in and respect for her artists and their art, and treated all of these projects with the same white-gloved respect that she would give to the films of Dan Graham or the sculptures of Lothar Baumgarten.

New York without Diane Shamash is certainly a poorer place, but it will be poorer still if it loses Minetta Brook as well. Public art is often thought of in terms of hits: big projects in Rockefeller Center or along Park Avenue or installed in subway stations. Diane had her own hits, too, foremost among them the realization of Robert Smithson's Floating Island from little more than a single sketched drawing. Predictably, that project takes up a large part of the NYT obituary.

But it's the smaller, quieter pieces which for me are her true legacy. If you went down to Pier 26 on the West Side Highway at any time before last November you might have seen an upside-down canoe-like structure on a couple of stilts. In fact the whole pier was an artwork by George Trakas called Curach and Bollard, one which wasn't often admired as art, but one which very many people enjoyed very much all the same. That was part of its beauty, and part of what made it such a classic Minetta Brook piece. Every so often someone would stop, and consider, and move on, and the world would be just a little bit better.

Posted by Felix at 9:43 EST | Comments (1)

You've gotta feel a bit sorry for Alice Coote

I just got the Met Opera's 2006-7 season guide. Excerpted without further comment:

the marvelous tenor Macello Giordani
exceptional baritone Dwayne Croft
the greatest Rossini tenor of our time, Juan Diego Flores
the great Strauss interpreter Deborah Voigt
the celebrated lyric soprano Lisa Milne
legendary tenor Ben Heppner
the commanding Violeta Urmana
tenor sensations Rolando Villazón and Marcello Giordani
the majestically-voiced Maria Guleghina and Dolora Zajick
the dynamic Salvatore Licitra
the sensational Renée Fleming
charismatic Dmitri Hvorostovsky
the dynamic Ramón Vargas
the young Russian star Ildar Abdrazakov
popular countertenor David Daniels
English mezzo-soprano Alice Coote
the radiant Dorothea Röschmann
the glorious Karita Mattila
the remarkable Anja Silja
the great tenor Johan Botha
international sensation Anna Netrebko
baritone greats Carlos Alvarez and Juan Pons
young tenor stars Piotr Beczala and Joseph Calleja
acclaimed baritone Thomas Hampson
the magnificent Angela Gheorghiu
the great Italian bass Ferrucio Furlanetto

Posted by Felix at 14:26 EST | Comments (2)

Luxury amenities

I wouldn't live in the Sculpture for Living if you paid me. (Well, of course I would if you paid me, but I doubt that's likely to happen any time soon.) I rarely agree with Michael Blowhard on matters architectural, but he's absolutely right when he criticises "the way it detaches itself so completely from its surroundings".

But boy do a couple of the features of the $12 million penthouse sound cool. First, there's a "mini 'morning kitchen' just outside the master bedroom" for an espresso machine – I don't know why, but the idea of not even having to go into the kitchen to get one's morning jolt really tickles me. And then there's "the windowed walk-in closets (the better to choose your wardrobe while you're looking at the weather)". Dude. A windowed walk-in closet – and, given the design of the building, a floor-to-ceiling window at that. That's pretty cool, even by New York standards.

Posted by Felix at 11:35 EST | Comments (3)

Irony in Gawker Stalker

"I was being ironic" really is the last refuge of the scoundrel. If you do a stupid or offensive thing, you can almost always claim that you were being ironic. Once in a while, you might even be right, in that you might have had ironic intent. But that doesn't stop what you did being stupid or offensive. And, of course, anybody can claim after the fact that they were being ironic (or, better, "subtly ironic", whatever that means) even if they had no ironic intent whatsoever.

Gawker knows all this better than anyone. Indeed its weekly "Blue States Lose" feature is little more than an extended excoriation of hipsters who think they're being ironic but are really just being tragic.

I'm like most people, I think, in that I have different uses for irony at different times. When I say I love Thomas Kinkade, the appreciation there is definitely in the realm of the ironic; when I say I love Britney Spears, I actually mean it. (Hit Me Baby One More Time and Toxic are two of the greatest pop songs of all time.) For me, however, irony really comes into its own when it's a bit more sophisticated and a bit less clear-cut. For instance, I have a neon sign on my wall at home: there it is, at right. I was the person who came up with the idea for it, and even I (perhaps especially I) am far from clear on how ironic it is. In fact, that uncertainty is a large part of the reason why I like the sign so much. (If you don't "get" the sign, don't worry, nobody gets it. Try asking Choire.)

But back to Gawker, and its various alumni. Former Gawker editor Jesse Oxfeld is quoted in New York magazine as saying that the skeevy Gawker Stalker feature belies Gawker's "Ur-New Yorkerness". In response, former Gawker editor Choire Sicha quotes former Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers responding with this:

The point of Gawker stalker *was* not being impressed by the celebrities. The irony was subtle, but I'm fairly certain it was obvious. (That Jesse interpreted it that way may be indicative of why he wasn't a good fit for Gawker.)

Oh, and in response to Spiers's response to Oxfeld (are you tired of this yet?) former Gawker "mascot" Andrew Krucoff says that Spiers is talking bullshit.

I'm with Oxfeld and Krucoff on this one, even after a very interesting and wide-ranging IM conversation with Spiers, who bases her analysis of Gawker Stalker much more on the history of its inception than on how it is actually perceived.

The main reason that I'm with Krucoff against Spiers is that I hate the irony defense. (Spiers does too, sometimes: she was quite famous, for a while, for hating on "ironic" trucker caps at every available opportunity.) And in any case, insofar as "subtle irony" means anything it means non-obvious irony, and therefore obvious subtle irony is something of a contradiction in terms.

That said, however, the New York article does actually say what I think Spiers was trying to say, or at least what I think Spiers was driving at with her "subtle irony" quote:

Even Gawker Stalker is presented partly tongue-in-cheek, a guilty pleasure that’s heavy on the guilt, its meticulous missives a halfhearted joke about how silly it is to obsess over the whereabouts of Ryan Adams.

The problem is how halfhearted the joke is, and how old the joke is. When Gawker Stalker was launched, says Spiers (and she takes full credit for the idea, saying that Nick Denton was on holiday at the time, and refuting any assumption that it was a feature forced on her by a gossip-hungry overlord), "the celebrity mags weren't nearly as nasty as they are now. Gawker Stalker was exactly the opposite of standard celeb coverage at the time, which was fawning and worshipful."

Of course, that no longer applies, since features along the lines of "stars: they're just like us" appear in every tabloid in the supermarket. Gawker Stalker is no longer the opposite of standard celeb coverage; it's merely an extension of it. Which means that whatever irony or separation from the celebuverse was there originally has long since disappeared.

Spiers concedes that Star magazine and its ilk are now doing something very similar to Gawker Stalker, but says that what they're doing is "coming from a different place" than Gawker Stalker. That, it seems, makes all the difference: "we're talking about intent, not effect," she says. Oxfeld should know that the intent behind Gawker Stalker was in some way ironic, and therefore he shouldn't have been offended by it.

This is not particularly convincing, especially when Spiers also concedes that Eurotrash, when she was working at celebrity tabloids, "invented several features that were at least according to her, ironic". She also concedes that most Star readers, at least on the coasts, are reading the magazine ironically – or at least kid themselves that they are. In other words, there might be a little bit of ironic intent behind Gawker Stalker, but there might be a little bit of ironic intent behind Star, as well. And there might be a little bit of ironic intent in Gawker Stalker's readership, but there's a lot of ironic intent in Star's readership, certainly in New York. And Spiers certainly stops short of defending Star on the grounds of irony.

It's worth noting that Gawker no longer feels the need to resort to the irony defense: their note today says in as many words that they're practicing gutter journalism.

You can either hunt with the pack or sympathize with the prey, but you can't do both. Once that dick comes out of your mouth and you're handed the money, you're a whore; it doesn't matter how many pages you spend contemplating the symbolism of sucking cock for cash. We, at least, know who we are - and we welcome Adam Moss and Co. down here to the gutter.

Spiers might not like the fact that her invention, Gawker Stalker, has now become Gawker's proud flag of whoredom. But Gawker is right and Spiers is wrong: there's nothing noble or justifiable about Gawker Stalker, certainly not in its present incarnation. Gawker's not trying to justify it; she shouldn't, either.

Posted by Felix at 19:40 EST | Comments (6)

The WSJ is getting desperate

I got an "exclusive limited time offer for Preferred Professionals" in the mail yesterday: a 1-year subscription to the Wall Street Journal, including online access, for just $99. Seemed like a pretty good deal, so I compared it to the standard subscription rate, which is, um, exactly the same. Indeed, if you don't want online access, you can get the Journal for a year (call it 313 issues) for just $79. Or roughly 25 cents per issue, including the delivery fee. Which is what the New York Post charges at the height of its circulation war with the New York Daily News.

Posted by Felix at 15:55 EST | Comments (0)

Afflicting the afflicted

Claire Hoffman's LA Times article on Joe Francis reveals the Girls Gone Wild entrepeneur to be a raging id. This is unlikely to come as a great surprise to anybody who knows much about who he is and what it is that he sells. It also, however, reveals a lot about the morals of US journalists.

The article is certainly less than flattering to Francis, who could certainly be arrested for the things he did to the LA Times reporter alone. (Indeed, one police officer advises her in the article to press charges against him.) At the same time, however, Hoffman herself is more than a little bit exploitative – of exactly the same girls who have already been exploited by Francis.

In the article, Hoffman talks both to Francis and to the girls who get naked for his videos in return for little more than a free t-shirt. Why do they do it? 21-year-old Jillian Vangeertry talks about her "15 minutes of fame". Kaitlyn Bultema is more explicit about her motives:

"Most guys want to have sex with me and maybe I could meet one new guy, but if I get filmed everyone could see me," Bultema says. "If you do this, you might get noticed by somebody—to be an actress or a model."
I ask her why she wants to get noticed. "You want people to say, 'Hey, I saw you.' Everybody wants to be famous in some way. Getting famous will get me anything I want. If I walk into somebody's house and said, 'Give me this,' I could have it."

We read this, and we are saddened by the delusions and naïveté of these girls. No one is likely to become an actress or a model through appearing on a Girls Gone Wild video. If people do see you in the video, they're likely to label you as a slut long before they will give you "anything you want". Later on in life, when you're working at your job, your subordinates or your superiors might find video footage of you and a couple of other girls having sex on camera. This will not be good for your career. And yet given the enormous potential downside and the nonexistent potential upside, girls still flock in their thousands to be feature in GGW videos.

Hoffman then tells the harrowing story of Jannel Szyszka, described as "a petite 18-year-old". Acccording to her acccount, she was plied with alcohol before she got naked for the GGW video cameras, masturbated with a dildo, and told the cameraman that she was a virgin. Then Francis himself takes over.

Afterward, she says, Francis cleaned them both off with a paper towel and told her to get dressed. Then, she says, he opened the door and told the cameraman to come back, saying, "She's not a virgin anymore."

At the end of the night, Szyszka has three pairs of underwear, and at best unpleasant memories of something which might well have been rape. Six weeks later, however, things go from bad to worse: she agrees to talk, on the record, to Claire Hoffman. Until that point, her downside to appearing in a GGW video was confined to what might happen if someone she knew saw the video – something which might well never occur.

Now, from here on in, anybody googling her (she has a pretty unique name) will see first and foremost that she was the girl seduced / taken advantage of / raped by Joe Francis. It's something which will follow her for the rest of her life, long after her episode of Girls Gone Wild has stopped being watched by anyone.

Hoffman didn't need to use Szyszka's real name, and certainly didn't need to use her surname, but doing so gives her (Hoffman) added brownie points at the LA Times. After all, getting people on the record is always preferable to granting them anonymity.

We don't know how Hoffman ended up talking to Szyszka. We know that Szyszka first "came out" about her experience to her family a month after the events took place, and that she seems to have first spoken to Hoffman between that point and the point a couple of weeks later when Hoffman confronted Francis about what happened. Who approached whom is unknown. But even if Szyszka approached Hoffman, I think that a responsible journalist would have taken it upon herself to shield this vulnerable young woman from this kind of posterity.

As it is, Szyszka ends up as not only a notch on Francis's belt, but a notch on Hoffman's as well. Yet Hoffman comes out with nothing but accolades for her story. She exposed Joe Francis as an exploiter of young and innocent girls; has it occurred to her that she could be described the same way?

Posted by Felix at 23:25 EST | Comments (6)

RIP, Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

It was hilarious, while it lasted, but now, for unknown reasons, it's gone. In memoriam, a post from July 30 which I happen to have cached, after the jump.

Continue reading "RIP, Secret Diary of Steve Jobs"

Posted by Felix at 18:05 EST | Comments (3)

Offsetting emissions

I'm flying quite a lot this year, so I used the (not particularly user-friendly) CarbonNetural flight calculator to give me some idea of my total emissions. Most people fly less than this in a year, I'm sure, but then again I can think of very many people who fly a lot more. In any case, here are my flights for the year, which collectively account for more carbon emissions than the rest of my life combined:

These numbers are inprecise, of course: there's no generally-accepted way for calculating the carbon emissions one is responsible for when taking an airplane. What kind of airplane do you base the model on? What percentage occupancy do you assume? How much cargo do you model? What do you use for the CO2 equivalent of other greenhouse gases emitted? And, most crucially, what multiplier do you use for the extra harm caused by emissions at 35,000 feet?

In any case, the cost to offset 9.7 tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to the Climate Care calculator, is £72.75, which is $137.75 at today's exchange rate. A significant sum, but certainly an affordable one, so I'm happy to offset my flight-related emissions for the year with one donation.

But the weird thing, to me, is that all of the websites I can find about carbon offsets seem to be based in the UK or Canada. People there – at least the environmentally-responsible ones – are very likely to know about offsetting their emissions. In the US, however, when I bring up the subject, I'm generally greeted with blank stares. Some high-profile Americans offset, of course: this article cites Al Gore and Dave Matthews. But the concept is still not generally known about in this country.

What I would love to see would be the ability for flyers to offset their carbon emissions when they buy their plane tickets, rather than having to proactively go to some other website entirely. It shouldn't be too hard for a progressive airline like Virgin or JetBlue to add a little button on their ticket-sales page, saying "offset your carbon emissions from this flight for an extra $22" or whatever – many more people would do that, I'm sure, than currently go to places like Climage Care. Of course, all donations would be tax-deductible.

At the very least, if the airlines won't do it, might not one of the big travel booking sites give it a go? I'd probably switch from Orbitz to Travelocity, say, if it had those kind of environmental credentials.

Posted by Felix at 10:45 EST | Comments (13)

Ayamye

Coming soon to a film festival near you (we hope): Ayamye, a wonderful, heart-warming documentary by my friends Tricia Todd and Eric Matthies, about the Village Bicycle Project. If you want to watch it, let me know, and I'll see if I can't get a DVD to you somehow.

There's nothing particularly complicated about the film: Todd and Matthies follow a shipment of bicycles from Boston to Ghana, where they change peoples' lives. The Village Bicycle Project is clearly run by dedicated professionals who know what they're doing and do it very well, and if you're in a charitable state of mind there are many worse places to send your money. Check out the website for more details, or, of course, the film.

The film is structured well. It starts with the bicycles being sent over to Accra; then we learn the stories of four individuals who will shortly be getting bikes. They get their bikes, the filmmakers leave, and then they return a year later to see how the lives of the individuals, and the other people in their villages, have changed. The difference a bike can make in rural Ghana is amazing, and you finish the film desperately wanting to send thousands more bikes to the country.

I was mildly annoyed by some slightly irrelevant IMF bashing at the beginning from some of the Westerners involved in the project: I suspect that they haven't actually met the IMF and World Bank officials who work very hard on poverty reduction in the country and whom they criticise in a superficial and knee-jerk manner. But their anti-globalization rhetoric thankfully doesn't correspond to wide-eyed idealism in the field. They've made a conscious decision, for instance, to sell all their bikes, rather than giving them away. This means that Ghana's poorest don't have access to the bikes, but it's also a very smart decision.

If the bikes were given away, they'd probably end up with the relatively rich and powerful anyway, either because those people could maneuver themselves to the front of the queue, or because they would simply buy the bikes from whomever they were given to. Selling the bikes means that the recipients, many of whom take out loans to buy them, put their bikes to the best possible use. After all, all of us have a tendency to value things we've paid a lot for over things we've received for free.

And because the Village Bicycle Project doesn't give bikes away, it can do something more important – give bike tools away. It's educating bike mechanics in every village it's giving bikes away, extending the lifespan of the machines and giving villagers an important and valuable skill.

I have two questions about Ayamye which I hope the filmmakers will answer in the comments. The first is substantive: how many villagers did you follow for this film? Was it just the four you ended up using in the film, or were there more who ended up on the editing room floor? And are the experiences of those four Ghanaians really representative of the experiences of most of the VBP bicycle recipients? We all know that aid and charity projects in Africa are horribly frustrating and demoralizing at times: it hardly seems feasible that this one has so much visible success and so little visible failure.

Secondly, a tiny quibble: is there any way you can change "formally" in the subtitles to "formerly"? I fear your transcriber wasn't perfect...

Posted by Felix at 22:05 EST | Comments (5)

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