Eyes Wide Shut

Dancer in the Dark

Umbrellas

Air travel

The Radically Contingent Destination

Patria

Who is Felix Salmon?

The Corrections

I can get my life back now: I finally finished The Corrections last night. It’s a great book, it has some amazing virtuoso writing in it, and it certainly kept me up until 5 in the morning more than once. The first, and best, chapter is a masterpiece of satiricial prose: I haven’t read anything remotely as funny since Infinite Jest, and this book is much, much easier to read, although no less ambitious.

Actually, the chapter I’m talking about is the second: the first chapter is a very short “modernist hump” which the reader has to get past before being allowed into the action. Since Franzen himself in his novel admits on page 106 that it shouldn’t be there, I don’t know why he kept it in. Maybe to dissuade Oprah from adopting the book?

As I’m sure you all know by now, the book follows a nuclear family with three kids. Each chapter concentrates on one of the five principals, and it’s interesting to see how reviewers have reacted to them. I loved Chip, the younger son, who meets his parents at the aiport at the beginning of the first (second) chapter only to suddenly disappear off to Lithuania by its end. Chip gives Franzen the opportunity to pull out all the stops: the scene where he shoplifts a $78.40 filet of line-caught Norweigan salmon at a gourmet food market on Grand Street called the Nightmare of Consumption is the funniest satire of yuppie New York since the call-waiting scene in American Psycho.

The following chapter, however, is not nearly as good. Its subject is Gary, the eldest, who for my money is just a completely unhappy, unlikeable and unimaginative capitalist. He’s depressed, of course, so we can’t blame him for being unhappy, but it doesn’t make the reading experience any better.

Then, after Gary, it all gets better, even if it never quite rises to the heights of the first Chip chapter. Denise, the youngest, is attractive enough to make female reviewers quite jealous, and it’s always fun to read about her. (We could do less with reading about those around her, though: her boss’s wife’s brother’s life story really isn’t all that necessary, especially when we have to get his father, uncle and grandfather too.)

But the real soul of the book lies in the portraits of the parents, Alfred and Enid, and it’s there that the superlatives have really been flying off the book-review pages. Alfred, the reserved patriarch, is certainly the most lovingly-portrayed character in the book; Enid, with her satirically exaggerated midwestern squareness, too often comes off as a foil for her husband (and for the more refined sensibilities of we, the readers).

But if the soul of the book is with Alfred and Enid, its driving force is elsewhere, in the descriptions, the perfectly-formed paragraphs, the beautifully set-up jokes. What Franzen has done – and I can’t think of anybody with the possible exception of Updike who’s also done it – is bring high-art writing into a page-turner of a novel. I love Rushdie and Nabokov as much as anybody, but they’re difficult; Franzen is just as beautifully written, but also easy to read.

It’s just a pity that the person finally managed to demolish the crumbling barrier between highbrow and middlebrow happens to be the same person who is now chiefly famous for sneering at Oprah’s book club. Still, at least he’s managed to single-handedly relegate Tom Wolfe into the has-been bin, and for that we should be grateful.

 

How to win the War on Drugs

One of the side-effects of the all-out war on terrorism has been a complete absence of any mention of the war on drugs. The two are linked, however: Afghanistan is one of the largest opium exporters in the world, and the Taliban, for all that they have eradicated much poppy production, still have large stockpiles of heroin should they need some extra cash.

As we all know, efforts to stamp out the supply of drugs are doomed to fail, whether they occur in Afghanistan or Colombia: the best that can be hoped for is that the supply moves to some other country. What is needed is a clampdown on demand.

One would like to think that we have moved on from the days of Nancy Reagan and “Just Say No,” but so far the US government seems to have been singularly unsuccessful in persuading its population to stop doing drugs. Now, they have a golden opportunity.

America is in the throes of anthrax paranoia. Everybody now knows that anthrax is generally curable if it only gets into contact with skin: the really lethal form of the disease occurs when the spores are inhaled. So any terrorist organisation wishing to infect as many people as possible with anthrax will attempt to ensure that it is inhaled, rather than simply handled.

So: Start a rumour that terrorists have been adding anthrax spores to cocaine supplies! With America’s present heightened state of alert, cocaine consumption would plummet overnight. The United States has an opportunity to strike a decisive blow in the war on drugs, and where it counts the most: on the demand side, rather than on the supply side.

Keep an ear out for the word on the street…

After

“There are no words.”

It was only happening a couple of dozen blocks away, but I’d come down from the roof, and was watching the World Trade Center attacks on the television, just like the rest of the planet. The second tower had just imploded, and the anchor on CNN said pretty much the only thing to stay with me all day. There are no words: it’s impossible to think, let alone write, the emotions and implications of something like this.

I saw a lot of it from my roof, a lot from television, a lot just riding around downtown Manhattan on my bicycle. The initial rush of adrenalin when we heard that a plane had flown into the first tower became unspeakable horror when we saw a second one do exactly the same thing: at a stroke, we knew this was the most horrific terrorist attack of all time. And then when things got worse by orders of magnitude when the towers collapsed… there are no words.

Yes, New Yorkers will now live in the knowledge that they are vulnerable, just like Londoners have done for years. But whatever has happened in London just doesn’t compare to this. I worked no more than three minutes’ walk from the World Trade Center for nearly all my time in New York, and I know every street corner on the television intimately. The Millenium Hilton (sic), Liberty Square Park, Vesey Street, West Street – they look a bit like they do after a big ticker-tape parade, only instead of being covered in celebratory paper, they’re covered in the aftermath of tragedy and death. I spoke to one friend today who told of a New York Post photographer who had body parts flying past her on the West Side Highway; the guy next door to me in my apartment building was on the 30th floor and, although he got out fine, saw dozens of people either jump or fall out of the 80th story.

Rudy Giuliani has really come through today; when he gave a press conference and announced that the fire chief and his deputy – both good friends of his – had died, but at the same time kept his eye very much on the bigger picture, he seemed a thousand times the man that George Pataki, to his right, or George W. Bush, earlier on the television, had. Far too many politicians, reporters, and pundits have spewed far too many platitudes about evil and the loss of life; most of us in New York aren’t going to be able to come to terms with the magnitude of what has happened for a long time yet. I still can’t believe that the World Trade Center isn’t there any more, and it’s been a good 15 hours now since it’s been gone. It’s not just a part of the skyline: it’s a part of every New Yorker’s life. When you’re disoriented coming out of the subway, you just look for the World Trade Center, and you know that’s south.

Personally, I can’t think of any single deliberate event since Nagasaki in which so many people died. I don’t know whether today is going to change the course of history, but it certainly puts a final full stop to the glorious decade of peace dividends and bull markets that we had from 1990-2000. If this is the 21st century, I’m not sure I want to sign on.

What today has done, though, is remind me of the value of my friendships, and how good our life really is. To everyone I ought to have been in touch with more recently, to everyone whose phone call I never got around to returning, to everyone I should have spent more time with (which is everyone I know, really): I love you all. Maybe we need something unutterably bad to remind us of what is really important and good.

 

Magazine notes

New Yorker fact-checkers, where are you? In the big lead story in this week's issue, Jon Lee Anderson's profile of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, we find this:

I really don't have the inclination right now to go into the multitude of ways in which this is incorrect. But anybody with any knowledge of the subject would have told any fact-checker that there's no way that sentence should ever appear in a news magazine.

Vanity Fair runs its annual boring listing of the "50 leaders of the information age" (in fact, there are 64). The list includes five women (Meg Whitman, Marjorie Scardino, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and Paramount's Sherry Lansing) and three non-whites (Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Yang, and Sony's Nobuyuki Idei). Everyone else is a middle-aged white guy. At least we don't need to see another of Annie Liebowitz's equally boring photos of them all lined up at Sun Valley.

 

Clarification

The posting below is a bit confusing, so let me clarify it a bit. Here's a story from inside.com, with the headline "All Michael's Is Wondering: What Does Tina Mean by 'Masturbatory Glare'?" The story doesn't bother to explain what Michael's is, or even who Tina is: it's understood that we know these things, and we get to smile inwardly at the fact that we don't need to skim those boring sentences, because they're not there. Feelings of superiority, and all that. Now, could that ever happen on MSNBC? Of course not. So why is MSNBC running Inside stories?

 

News on the internet

You want branding? I'll give you branding. Have a look at this story, and tell me where it comes from. Even before clicking on the link, you can see the URL: it's at http://www.msnbc.com/news, which means that it's news from msnbc. We're not much the wiser, because we're not entirely sure what msnbc is, but we reckon that it's probably news from NBC, a reasonably well-respected network. (It could be news from Microsoft, of course, but that would probably be on msn.com, not msnbc.com. And Microsoft isn't really in the news business, Slate being more of an opinion site.)

Once we click on the link, of course, we get even more confused. Ignoring the banner ads at the top of the page, we see, from left to right: the msnbc logo; "CNBC and the Wall Street Journal"; and "[INSIDE]".

So now we're really confused.CNBC means that it's not NBC, the network, who's providing this content; it's CNBC, the business-news cable channel owned by NBC. Wall Street Journal is, well, the Wall Street Journal, another content provider altogether. And [INSIDE] -- well, if you don't know what that is, I'm not going to be the one to tell you.

The byline helps a bit: "by Simon Dumenco, inside.com". The copyright line at the bottom helps a bit too: Copyright © 2001 Powerful Media Inc.Well, it helps if you know that Powerful Media is the entity which owns inside.com.

So why is this being branded with the Wall Street Journal name?

At this point, the conflicts of interest are getting ridiculous. NBC is owned by the biggest old-economy company in the world, General Electric; in turn, msnbc is part-owned by the biggest new-economy company in the world, Microsoft. The Wall Street Journal is owned by Dow Jones, while Powerful Media is owned by Brill Media Holdings (I think; I get a bit confused at this point) which also owns the sprawling content-distribution site contentville.com, and which has licensing and revenue-sharing agreements with just about anybody you care to mention. Oh, and did I mention that this is a media column?

The internet has certainly changed the way we get our news. My daily round-up every morning involves looking at the Americas headlines on ft.com, the diary column in the Guardian, the front page of the New York Times (it used to be the "quick news" page, but they discontinued that), and all manner of juicy links at MediaNews. No longer do I need to choose between this paper or that one: I can just take the bits I like from all of them. At some point in the day I'll also check out Slate; the Guardian's UK headlines; the top stories from the Evening Standard, and whatever's been posted recently on Plastic.

The key to all these sites is branding. I click on those buttons every day because I have loyalty to those brands. But what's happening with this msnbc story is that the branding is falling apart. It cheapens the Wall Street Jounal brand, becuase the Journal would never publish something like this. It makes NBC look incredibly inside-baseball, and it dilutes the power of the inside brand by throwing that name in there with half a dozen others: it's entirely possible that someone reading this story would just consider it to be a CNBC story, rather than an inside.com one.

This is the problem with the winner-takes-all nature of the internet. The World Wide Web was meant to be a network of informative pages which linked to each other. But now its commercialisation has meant that sites hate to link to places outside their own domain, preferring to bring outside content onto their own servers under their own brand name. That might increase advertising revenue and "stickiness," but it's no way to build a brand: any site seeking to be all things to all people will necessarily lose the individuality, the editorial vision, which breeds loyalty.

It will be a great shame if this is the future of the internet: if quirky, intelligent sites fall by the wayside and leave the Web to the faceless corporate behemoths.

 

Harper's Bazaar: The September Issue

Anyone interested in what Glenda Bailey has done to Harper’s Bazaar is advised not to bother picking up the latest issue, hitting newsstands now. The September issue of any women’s magazine is something of a flagship, but the powers that be at Hearst are going to want to forget this 400-page monster ever happened.

The heft is pretty much the only impressive thing about it. The rest of it looks like it was put together by a headless chicken – a bit like the masthead on page 60, which amazingly doesn’t have an editor or editor-in-chief at all. Top of the list is the creative director, Michel Botbol, who probably won’t last much longer.

The front cover is OK at best, featuring a Patrick Demarchelier portrait of a heavily-made-up Nicole Kidman (kinda ironic, then, that the top strapline is “BEAUTY: How to Get the New Natural Look”). It’s ironic, too, that the first thing that falls out of the magazine when you open it is a blowout card touting subscriptions to Talk magazine – featuring Nicole Kidman on the cover. Also worth noting for a magazine which is meant to be at the top end of the market: an annual subscription runs to $10, which can’t even cover the cost of postage, and, at least on my copy, Nicole has nasty white spots under her left nostril and on her top lip, which look as though someone’s been cutting corners either at the printer’s or at the repro house.

Inside, it’s lowbrow fluff for at least 250 pages: the combination of front-loaded ads and front-of-the-book bite-sized-chunks seems to drag on indefinitely. It’s not done well, and it certainly doesn’t give the impression that the magazine is a window onto a rarefied, more glamorous world.

As we approach the feature well, we have to tiptoe our way around a “special advertising section” (that’s advertorial to you and me) which begins on page 207, takes a break on page 224, restarts on page 257, and continues until page 282.

Finally, on page 315, the fashion begins. This is the point of a fashion magazine, right? I mean, this is where Bazaar gets to show us what it’s all about. The first spread is by Patrick Demarchelier, of nothing in particular photographed against a plain background. Some of the photos are better than others, of course (the best, harking back to the Irving Penn glory days, is on page 330, if you’re reading along with mother), but the first one is dreadful, and none is excellent.

The second story, by Carter Smith, is the best thing in the book. It’s a fashion spread which ought to be the sort of thing Bazaar does in its sleep, but it turns out that the magazine is finding it harder than ever to get really high-quality fashion photography.

Because from then on in, it’s just depressing. Craig McDean, like Patrick Demarchelier, is obviously just snapping away in his sleep here: 12 pages of white girls in black frocks on white backgrounds. Then there’s Patrick Demarchelier’s Nicole Kidman story: it’s dreadful, once again against a plain background, with nothing approaching the quality of the cover photo. Sølve Sundsbø has a seen-it-all-before I’ve-been-looking-at-too-many-Nick-Knight-photos studio session, and then we’re back once again to Patrick Demarchelier portraits on plain backgrounds, first for a beauty story, then for a Marc Jacobs story, and then for a profile of an actor. That’s it.

Of 69 fashion pages, Patrick Demarchelier has shot 35, and might as well have shot Craig McDean’s 12 for all the respite they gave us. I’m sure he’s on some sort of long-term contract with Hearst which more or less forces them to give him lots of work, but this is ridiculous. He’s past it: while he can generally be relied on not to totally fuck up, filling your pages with Paddy D is not going to give you the kind of respect in the fashion world which Harper’s Bazaar desperately needs to regain.

The next issue should start to show Glenda’s hand: we’ll begin to see how she copes with a fashion title. The worry is that she’s going to bring the book downmarket, and less fashiony: I have a feeling that if she’s bright, she’ll go the other way, and try to drag it back upmarket from the middlebrow ditch into which it currently seems to have fallen. Kate Betts got fired for putting Britney Spears (shot, surprise surprise, by P.D.) on the cover of the August issue; I have a feeling Glenda Bailey’s not going to make the same mistake.

 

The World's Greatest Atlas

More traveller’s thoughts: this time one of those ideas you have when you wake up in a strange hotel room at some time of day when you’re really meant to be going to sleep, not waking up, and you’ve just had the weirdest dream about old Ordnance Survey maps, not of the UK but of the world, and they fit together onto a big table, six of them, side by side, and they’re relief, with the Amazon rainforests burning real flames and the Gulf Stream shown in the Atlantic in real blue water, and it’s all dated circa 1955 or thereabouts, and you’re trying to get people, including your ex-boss, to see this amazing old thing which you’ve discovered on the shelves of a second-hand bookshop which is packing up to move elsewhere, but it’s down the end of a dark alleyway, and it’s really hard to make them interested – you don’t know what I’m talking about? Never mind, this is great idea anyway. It’s not original, I’m sure, but I’m loving thinking about it, and because this is my website, I can put up on it whatever I want.

So… The World’s Greatest Atlas. As we all know, maps are all computerised now: it was a lot of work to take all of the information which had painstakingly been immortalised in print and transfer it into a huge relational database, but now it’s been done, and both Bertelsmann and the OUP now have incredibly detailed information about pretty much all of the surface of the earth, which they can print out in various different forms for different atlases aimed at different markets all over the world.

So: put it all on a DVD-ROM, or something like that: I have no idea what the ratio is of the sort of information I’m talking about here to the storage capacity of a multimedia disk, but if it can’t be done, then just put it all on a big fast web server (actually, come to think, that’s even better, because then all the information is kept up-to-date in real time) and sell the software which is required to read it over the high-bandwidth pipes we’ll all have in next to no time. I’m not joking here: this could be the high-bandwidth killer app which finally gets people to upgrade from dialup en masse, and which also manages to be the first website outside the business information and pornography industries which millions of people are actually prepared to spend money for. (The economics are great: you can have annual subscriptions, or just pay on a per-visit basis; the kind of things you can find on the internet anyway can be free, but higher levels of granularity can cost more, that sort of thing. Hell, if it gets big and fabulous enough, you might even need some sort of CIA clearance to get to the really detailed stuff!)

Now the software’s the real beaut. Pick up any world atlas in your local bookshop, and you’ll see that the maps in most of them are hideously garish. Maps used to be things of real beauty, but now most publishers don’t have the resources to make beautiful maps any more. They just hit a button on their relational database, pick a few colours, and let it fly; some peon in the graphic design department then spends maybe a couple of hours on each one making sure that the place names don’t overlap too badly, and it’s off to the printers. The problem is, the maps have to show far too much information in far too little space: they have to be all things to everybody. Someone looking up a small town in south-western Germany has to use a map showing the topography of north-eastern France. With a computer generating maps on demand, however, all of that is a thing of the past. If all you want is the cities of south-western Germany, that’s all you’ll get. If you want a general topography of western Europe without bothering with lots of useless place names, you’ll get that as well. Everything can be done to the scale you want, with only the information you want. The mapmaker’s art is that of fitting lots of information into an enclosed space: this software will do away with the mapmaker’s art (to be honest, it’s pretty much dead already anyway) by having much less information in an essentially unlimited space.

The latest edition of the Times Atlas of the World did away with the city maps. On the one hand, you can see why: they’re certainly of no use compared to the sort of city maps you can find for free on the internet. But at the same time, it’s a real loss to the atlas. Our new software can drill down from the world to the Americas to North America to the United States to New York State to New York City to Manhattan to – and this is where New York City’s own map gets integrated into the atlas – the very block you live on, with its water supplies, its buildings, street numbers and everything. You can even see it in photographic form if you want.

This atlas will do things no one has ever been able to do before: pull up a topographic map of the world, say, and then at the touch of a button evaporate all the water: see the surface of the earth without the arbitrary cut-off at sea level which most maps make. With the three-dimensional data available, you won’t even need to confine yourself to the standard bird’s-eye view: you can move around the canyons of the earth and sea just like you can move around an unbuilt house using a CAD program.

Political boundaries will be constantly updated, of course, but the old ones won’t be erased: type in a year, and the political map of the world for that year will immediately appear. Press a button, and you can fast-forward through wars and treaties and see Europe’s states alter over time, watch the African independence movements slowly appear.

You want a road atlas to get you from Peoria, Illinois to Nashville, Tennessee? You’ve got it. You want to see where the world’s known oil reserves are? Here you are. You want a map of caribou breeding grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve? Pronto. Add in data from space satellites, and you can see a pictorial representation of just about anywhere on the earth’s surface, as it looks right now.

We’re not there quite yet, of course, although we’re not that far away. The great thing about this atlas is that it doesn’t need to be up to full strength immediately: just the ability to manipulate the information available right now would be something incredible. There’s nothing the software needs to do which hasn’t already been written in some form. Getting the information together in one place and in one format is the tough bit, sorting out copyright issues, that sort of thing. But this isn’t just a cartographic version of the Humane Genome Project I’m talking about here: its usefulness far outstrips the relatively small world of maps and mapmakers. There’s something in it, literally, for everyone. Please let me live to see it!

 

Airplane notes

It’s 11:55pm, New York time, and I’m on Continental Airlines flight 31 from Newark to Sao Paulo. They’ve served the meal already – I accepted the mini-bottle of Cotes du Rhône – and I’ve also popped a couple of the Calmosedans I picked up in Santiago. They’re perfect for plane travel, especially red-eyes: they’re a combinatino of valium and sleeping pill. All the same, I’ve whipped out my laptop, and am writing this.

I was inspired by a sentence in the novel I picked up at the airport bookshop, Up in the Air by Walter Kirn. (It was the last copy in the shop, buried away in the K section of the fiction shelves, despite Christopher Buckley's rave New York Times review and the obvious affinity for airport passengers. I noticed as I was flicking through the opening pages that I’d wound up buying a First Edition. I haven’t got that far into it, but I’ve already decided that it’s an excellent book, and I highly recommend it: it’s kind of Brett Easton Ellis for the mild-mannered air traveller.) The narrator, who spends most of his life on airplanes, is sitting next to a woman. “I’d guess her age as twenty-eight or so, the point when working women first taste success and realize they’ve been conned.”

Well, that got me thinking. I was 28 when I left Bridge News (or BridgeNews, as it later rebranded itself), the company where I could finally call myself a journalist without thinking I was being economical with the truth, a company which paid me $5000 a month for my expertise in capital markets: a key number for me, the point at which I always thought that a person could be very comfortable, and beyond which money became a little bit pointless, meaningless, silly. And yet, notwithstanding the fact that I’m male and not female, I did indeed realise that I’d been conned. I knew it at the time, although I didn’t really know that I knew it: it was only after I qui^H^H^Hwas fired that the truth sank in.

I was miserable at Bridge; I knew that; and the freedom which came with not having to go into an office every morning; with not having to answer to a boss wanting to know what I was up to all the time; with being able to spend any day I liked in bed doing nothing (most importantly, being able to sleep in in the morning, rather than getting rudely awoken at 6:30 by my alarm clock); with being able to take weeks or even months off on holiday; with being able to surf porn sites on the internet without any fear of repercussion (not that I would ever actually do such a thing, of course); with interviewing bigwigs while sitting in my underpants in my living room; with walking the streets of Manhattan in the middle of the day, enjoying the sound of schoolkids playing in the yard across the street; with being able to go into shops during the day and not having to suffer the weekend crowds; with going into a Citibank ATM lobby without having to get my card out and swipe it to gain entrance: this was something I’d never really known before, and which I will be extremely loath ever to give up.

There’s an astonishing work culture where I live: even I fall into it, and feel weirdly uncomfortable when I’ve been with someone for any length of time and still don’t know what they do for a living. I don’t want people to judge me by my job, yet I judge them by theirs the whole time: I honestly don’t think I could ever be really good friends with anyone in sales.

But I think for Americans, a lot of the time, it’s worse. Without exception, the Americans I meet and who find out that I’m freelance assume that the minute I’m offered a “real” job, I’ll take it. I won’t, of course, and I think that the headhunters who were chasing me in the immediate aftermath of my departure from Bridge realised that. I haven’t heard from them in months, and I’d like to think that’s because they know that now I’m a tougher sell. (Of course, I don’t really think that’s true. They just happened to find out I’d left, and so did their job on me; now the job market’s even tighter than it was then, and they probably just have very little to offer me. Besides which, come mid-September, hundreds of ex-Bridge reporters will be hitting the streets in need of gainful employ.)

Is it true that the entire 28-year-old workforce is being conned? No, it’s not. There are a lot of 28-year-olds out there who either have a burning desire to make loads of money, or who need the security of a job. I don’t fall into either camp: I’ve been very lucky in that I grew up in a family which placed no kudos whatsoever on the size of your paycheck, and I also managed to get myself a fabulous I-1 journalist’s visa which allows me to stay in the United States more or less indefinitely.

But anyway, I think now I’m going to go back to the book for 10 minutes, and then try and get some sleep. Night night.

 

Tuesday, July 3, 2001

A.I.

So, the film we had all been waiting for has finally been released. I saw it in Toronto: lucky me. The screen there was enormous, Ziegfeld-size, and the experience was amazing. (It makes up for Canadian passive-aggression: cafés which wouldn't sell me a bacon sandwich, or Air Canada putting me in a middle seat on a virtually empty flight, twice.)

You know my attitude towards Stanley Kubrick; my attitude to Steven Spielberg is not far off. So, predictably enough, I loved the film. I loved the classic Spielberg moments, of which there are many (David, left alone in the woods, receding in his mother's oval rear-view mirror) and also the Kubrickian production design. Quotes from both Kubrick's and Spielberg's oeuvres came so thick and fast I couldn't keep up; I'm not sure quite so many were strictly necessary. But Spielberg gave himself completely free reign here by writing the screenplay, the first time he's done so for one of his own films since Close Encounters.

A.I. really does come across as a cross between the two masters. The opening weekend's box office was bigger than anything Kubrick ever saw, but hardly compares to great Spielberg blockbusters. Part of the problem seems to be that the Kubrick touches have put off the family audience: A.I. doesn't have the simplicity of E.T., and 80% of the opening weekend's audience was over 25. I can see why: having recently taken a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old to see Shrek, I know I wouldn't have wanted to take them to see this. It's too long, too dark, and too subtle; it also requires prior knowledge of Pinocchio.

But at the same time, Spielberg has surely kiddified Kubrick's vision: the film comes with a PG-13 rating, and you just know what Kubrick would have done with Rouge City.

A lot of people seem to be surprised or disappointed at the final third of the film, and, knowing that, I was expecting something akin to the ending of 2001. But although there are similarities, A.I. has been made in a much less credulous era, something of which Spielberg is fully aware. I think the ending is beautiful and not at all difficult to sign up for, while 2001's ending was a bit hard to swallow even when it was made. Do I have a minor problem with David suddenly growing tear ducts for the final reel? Well, yes, but that's about the extent of it.

One thing I particularly love about this film is the way in which it tells a story from the point of view of robots who don't really have a point of view themselves. It certainly does no favours to the "orgas," but I'm not at all sure that I accept the criticism that the film places the viewer on the side of the robots against the humans without really exploring the full implications. Yes, David is a sympathetic character, although Haley Joel Osment does a stunning job of always remaining a little bit less than human. In one of the best scenes in the film (and one for which I think the credit must go to Spielberg much more than to Kubrick), David's auto-defence mechanism results in him almost drowning his brother. It's a chilling reminder of the limitations of machines, and of the price we might have to pay when we try to make them part of the family.

When the action moved on to the flesh fair, I, for one, felt little sympathy for the destroyed robots who feel no pain. I did, on the other hand, sympathise with the stone-throwing demotic, who were seeing their world being both destroyed by their environmental negligence and taken over by their technological hubris.

Jude Law, in his excellent performance as the mecha Gigolo Joe, has a monologue towards the end of the second third of the film where he complains of the "suffering" (his word) that the mechas are going through. That rang a little false: the robots have been imprinted with basic survival mechanisms, but it seems to me that the whole premise of the film is that, at least until David comes along, they can't feel emotions. And if you can't feel emotions, you can't suffer.

Really, however, all this discussion misses the point: A.I. is a fairy tale, and an excellent one. I defy anybody to easily forget the image of the lions crying at the flooded base of Rockefeller Center: this is the sort of thing which only cinema can do, and which Steven Spielberg does better than anybody else.What he has done in this film is make a much more grown-up fairy tale than he has in the past, one in which a search for love turns out to be a search for death. If Spielberg's Jewishness was responsible for his initial move from mass entertainment into something more cerebral, then Stanley Kubrick has taken him back, as a mature filmmaker, to the cinematic playing-fields of his earlier career. For that we should all be thankful.

PS. It's interesting, after seeing the movie, to read the original short story on which the film is based. Written by Brian Aldiss at the end of the 1960s, it has none of the intelligence and subtlety of the film; it also suffers from the worst sort of leaden sci-fi prose. In a word, it's dreadful.

Hope Springs Eternal department

A classified ad in the last issue of the New York Review of Books:

Wow. I mean, that's more than $1,500 a month for the precise time of the week when you don't want to be in the city! So while the person with the West Village studio suns it in the Hamptons or Spring Lake, some chump is going to cough up $375 to live in an empty city? Still, the ad only cost $175 or so; maybe it was worth a try...

Hitchens

Memory can play nasty tricks on one. I "discovered" Anthony Lane long before Tina Brown, for instance: he was the film reviewer for the Independent on Sunday before he moved to the New Yorker, and I always loved his reviews there. I especially remember his review of London Kills Me, Hanif Kureishi's regrettable move from writing into direction. A masterpiece of comedic criticism, it left both subject and reader helpless on the floor, although, of course, for different reasons. It ranks up there with Clive James's review of Princess Daisy, by Judith Krantz, where at least he has the good manners to pause at one point and say that attacking such a book is a bit like kicking a powder-puff. (Sidenote: while going to Amazon to provide you, gentle reader, with a URL for the bonkbuster, Seattle's most famous bookstore tells me that "Felix, you'll love this!" with a predicted rating of 4.5 stars out of a maximum five.When I ask Amazon why, it tells me that it's because I bought Paris to the Moon, by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. Huh?)

But London Kills Me came out a long time ago, and I've long since lost the review (actually, I lent it to Purni Mukherjee, and she never gave it back). And when I finally asked a friend with Lexis-Nexis access to email me a copy of the review, it turned out to be much shorter, and much less funny, than I had remembered.

So it was with trepidation that I opened my brand-new copy of Unacknowledged Legislation, the new book from Christopher Hitchens. I ordered it from the library, and was particularly looking forward to rereading Hitchens' article on Oscar Wilde, which had first appeared in Vanity Fair and which I had loved. As luck would have it, the article was the first thing in the book. And was I disappointed? Not a bit. It's all of five pages in the book, but I daresay it's the best single thing that has ever been written about Wilde. I urge you all to go out to your nearest bookstore and read it: it doesn't take long to read five pages.

Of course, a lot of the piece is given over to Wilde himself, who naturally shines in his own words much more brightly than he ever does in the words of others. But quoting a genius to good effect is harder than it looks. And some of the quotations are not nearly as familiar as you might think. I'll leave you with this one, if only because the subject of the death penalty in the United States is getting a lot of coverage at the moment:

Carphone Warehouse

They're the biggest cellphone retailer in the UK, and I've had quite a lot of trouble with them.

Gays in The Wall Street Journal

It's Pride Week this week, that time of year when opinion-formers' minds turn to the status of gays in society. And helpfully, the Wall Street Journal editorial page is here to give them a little pastoral guidance.

Well, the gay-lesbian lobby can't be that powerful if it lost the vote. But what I'm interested here is the way that the Journal's editorial page has moved from a kind of beefed-up Economist-style libertarianism to supporting anti-gay Jesse Helms amendments. How many people on Wall Street (the Journal's self-declared constituency), or indeed in America, would find it shocking, surprising, or even noteworthy that gays and lesbians in America might have as much power as the Boy Scouts?

In fact, the more one reads that paragraph's last sentence, the less it makes sense. Is there some a priori lemma that anybody with nearly as much clout as the Boy Scouts cannot be besieged in American life? Wonder what the African-American community would make of that. And what's the other side of the implied distinction? If Boy Scouts turn unruly boys into responsible men, what does the gay-lesbian lobby do? Surely the Journal can't be implying that it takes responsible men from the heartland of America and turns them into unruly boys displaying their pierced nipples during the Gay Pride Parade?

Sexy Beast

Sexy Beast is the latest British import to get rave reviews among the art-house crowd, and it's obvious why: it features first-rate performances from two of England's best film actors (Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley). Kingsley is astonishing as an East End gangster sent over to Winstone's villa on the Costa del Sol to persuade him to come back to England for one last job. The novice director, Jonathan Glazer, allows Kingsley and Winstone the time and space to show just what they're capable of. (Glazer came from directing television commercials, but there's very little jump-cut freneticism here.)

But partly because of the relatively sedate camerawork, and partly because of the script (by Loius Mellis), the good bit of the film -- the war of wills between the two leads -- feels like an adapted stage play. And when the action moves to England and the pace picks up, Glazer turns out not to have any ability to build suspense. I think Winstone narrowly avoids death at one point (just as he does right at the beginning of the film, for no obvious reason), but it wasn't very clear.

A lot of the film simply fails. Glazer insists on throwing in various dream sequences and magical realism which don't work at all, and the exposition of the reasons for the heist seems utterly pointless. (There's also a shot of Ian McShane dripping water, which needed a lot more explanation. Ambiguity is not always a good thing.) On the other hand, Kingsley's last lines will stay with all who see this movie for a very long time, and not only because Kingsley is such a good actor: Glazer shoots them magnificently.

So it's a curate's egg of a movie. If you go to the movies in order to see great acting performances, then go see this one. If you want to see a perfectly-formed film, however, don't bother. Go rent Dog Day Afternoon or something instead.

Probabilities

Reading the media diary column at mediaguardian.co.uk, I found this:

So I decided to do a bit of number crunching. It involved trying to remember A-level probability, but eventually I found a lovely little combination calculator on the internet, and it all became much easier. Anyway, the results, maestro, please:

Chances of:
No one having a birthday: 1 in 6.69
1 person having a birthday: 1 in 3.20
2 people having a birthday: 1 in 3.39
3 people having a birthday: 1 in 6.08
4 people having a birthday: 1 in 16.60
5 people having a birthday: 1 in 66.08
6 people having a birthday: 1 in 378.87
7 people having a birthday: 1 in 3,167.74
8 people having a birthday: 1 in 40,359.33
9 people having a birthday: 1 in 867,725.57
10 people having a birthday: 1 in 41,457,999.50

 

Friendly neighborhood shops

A few weeks ago, I rented a medium format camera and went out shooting bridges at the weekend. I was using slide film, and got the film developed that same weekend; a lot of the shots came out great. So obviously the next step was to get some prints made.

I could have gone back to the shop which developed the film; after all, they did a very good job. But they were expensive for R prints and even more expensive for digital prints, so I thought I'd give my friendly neighborhood photo shop a go. I went into this place on Grand Street, in between Doughnut Plant and Kossar's Bialys, and asked if they could make R prints from my slides. I didn't think that they would be able to do it in-house, but if they could that would have been great, and if they couldn't then they would certainly go to a reasonably reputable lab.

The shop is run by a father-and-son team. They're Jewish, but I'm not sure where they're from, probably Russia. The son, I was told by one of the regulars who happened to be in the shop when I went in, is a professional photographer, which put my mind at rest somewhat. The father's English is not very good, and he certainly had no idea what an R print was, but the son seemed on the case, and said that he'd probably wind up doing digital prints, which is fine by me. He quoted a very reasonable sum.

I didn't hear from them for a few weeks, so eventually I remembered to go in. The son wasn't there, but the father was, and eventually we found the prints. Immediately, my heart sank. My favourite photo, of the central span of the Brooklyn Bridge suspended over the East River with the Statue of Liberty in the background, was a greeny-grey mush, far from the electric blue in the transparency. The bridge itself was both blurry and out of focus, which surprised me as the slide seemed very sharp, and I took the shot in bright sunlight and focused on infinity.

We'd found the prints, but so far not the slides. I went looking for the slides, to compare them to the prints, and eventually found them; they were just as colourful and sharp as I'd remembered. But then the father pulled out a few 35mm negatives, and said that he'd found them. No, I said, it was medium-format slide film, I've got it right here, look. And then the father acted out what he'd done: he'd taken his little 35mm camera, pointed it at the slides, taken colour negatives of the slides, and then blown up the negatives into prints!

I think I must have looked at him like he was mad. I mean, this was a man who was praising my photography to the sky when i'd brought the slides in originally, and now he was trying to fob me off with enlargements from bad 35mm copies? I said no, that's most definitely not what I'd asked for, and said I'd just take my positives and leave. But the father persuaded me to leave them one more day, so he could take them back to the lab and see what they could do.

So I went back today to see what the situation was. The son was there this time, and basically said that the lab was not equipped to do either scans or R prints. At least I think that's what he said: he wasn't exactly crystal, but that was the message.Of course, I left with my positives, but not before the father laid a guilt trip on me by saying that he'd paid over $100 for the prints.

Then I got to thinking. When the father first told me what he'd done, I was furious. I mean, what could he have been thinking? Why on earth would I go to the trouble of taking 6x4.5 professional-quality transparencies if I'd be happy with a washed-out enlargement of a bad photo of a slide?

But then I thought that maybe he was just trying to help me out; he knew I wanted prints from these slides, and so he tried to provide me with prints the only way he knew how. Still, surely his son should have stopped him.

And then I thought I was being the worst type of yuppie invader, feeling angry at local businesses because they can't cater to my yuppie needs. A bit like that constant problem I had with the deli over the street which never, ever had tonic water. They would get, like, two bottles in, which would be snapped up in a matter of minutes by the yuppies in 203 Rivington, and then there would be nothing for weeks. Didn't they see? There was a demand for this! Just like whenever they got the New York Times in, it would sell out hours before El Diario. But they never did order more tonic water, or more of the New York Times, and eventually they went out of business.

I don't know what the moral of this story is, so please let me know if you do. But I do know that friendly neighborhood shops are often much better in theory than they are in practice.

 

The New York Times emails

I'll post here some of the observations I've made to friends about the New York Times in recent days.

June 12: From pages A14 to A21 of the New York Times, there are 7 2/3 pages of consecutive ads with no editorial content at all.
June 7 headline: In Town Scared by Meningitis, Relief Now Begins Setting In
June 6 headline: Homosexuals Now Get Their Own Prom
June 5 headline: Control of Senate by G.O.P. Now Passes to the Democrats
June 6 headline: Now, High Schools' Sex Gossip Is Scrawled on Web Site Walls
June 3 headline: Once Republicans, Guyanese Immigrants Are Now Turning to the Rival Party
June 5: The Times publishes an editorial on Alejandro Toledo, the volatile new president of Peru. Here's how it starts:

"Alejandro Toledo, one of 16 children of an Andean sheepherder, who went from shining shoes on the street to teaching at Harvard, was elected president of Peru on Sunday. In a country not noted for social mobility, Mr. Toledo's rise indicates unusual perseverance, talent and luck... Mr. Toledo, who holds a doctorate from Stanford and has had years of experience at the World Bank, is likely to work toward these goals with sound economic practices that will encourage foreign investment, a necessity for Peru to grow."

I defy anybody to find a single foreign investor who likes Toledo; he's almost universally considered a very scary and unpredictable guy, with no statemanlike qualities at all, who ran a very ugly mud-slinging campaign, and who is only barely better than the man he beat, Alan Garcia.
But of course what the Times didn't tell us is that his finance minister, Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, is the father of Alex of that ilk, the Times' own feared media reporter. Might this connection have swayed the Grey Lady's fearsomely independent editorial board? Surely not!

Notes on London

1. The wastebins are back! The wastebins are back! Finally, that empty bottle of Oasis Classic Lemon which you drank while walking down the street has somewhere to go! I can’t remember exactly when it was that they went – certainly the IRA was bombing for quite a while before the drastic decision was taken – but boy, am I happy for their return. It’s made central London cleaner, too, not that it was filthy before.

2. London vs New York: New Yorkers are better looking. Londoners aren’t exactly ugly, but they tend to be a bit quirkier: bigger noses, odd features, that sort of thing. In New York everybody looks like a model (and most of them are, it turns out); London is more individualistic. Corollary: Londoners are more stylish. They’re not competing on legginess and perfection, but they are competing on coolness, stylishness, funkiness. They get away with a lot more in terms of what they wear and how they look, and in general the (younger) population is refreshingly diverse to look at. London hasn’t been Gap-ified yet, thankfully.

3a. Old London/Old England: It still exists. I went over for the opera; specifically, I went over for Glyndebourne. And while certain parts of London, like New York or Paris or Helsinki or Singapore, have been taken over by the Internationally Wealthy, the sort of people who jet from this hotel to that island with their Louis Vuitton bags and their Gucci loafers, Glyndebourne is still a bastion of the old upper classes, English gents and ladies with plummy accents and precious little dress sense who have seen their effortless superiority turn into effortless irrelevance, yet who still seem completely unruffled by the transformation.

3b. Encounter With The Abovementioned OL/OE: My mother took me aside while we were at Glyndebourne, and told me that my shirt was lovely, but really she didn’t think that she’d be able to continue ironing it for much longer. My dress shirts were inherited from my grandfather, who’d had them made at Sulka on Bond Street. They are thirty years old now, and the collars are a bit wrinkled and difficult to iron. I had a brainstorm: I’d take them into Sulka, if it was still there, and ask them to replace the collar. My father reckoned that they’d do that, and said that Sulka was still on Old Bond Street. Surely it would be cheaper than buying new dress shirts of similar quality, and it would help preserve some sort of connection with OL/OE.
Turns out my father was wrong: Sulka no longer exists, on Bond Street or anywhere else. The venerable marque was taken over by the House of Dunhill at some point in the relatively recent past; I’m not sure if Dunhill itself isn’t part of LVMH or somesuch conglomerate. But all was not lost. I walked into what used to be the Sulka shop (it’s now a Dunhill shop) on Old Bond Street, and asked if they still had Sulka shirts. It was a lazy Tuesday morning, and I think I was the only customer. A man directed me to a woman, who told me that no, Sulka has been done away with entirely. But, she said, they did still have a Master Shirt Maker, whom they’d inherited from Sulka… if I would just step this way and take a seat, she’d bring him up and he’d see what he could do.
Eventually, a sixtyish guy in a sleeveless t-shirt and drawstring trousers came up and introduced himself; I’ve forgotten his name, although I think it was David something. He explained all manner of interesting things about shirts and collars, tutted at the collar on the Hilditch & Key shirt I was wearing – completely wrong for my head shape, or something – and agreed to do the work; he’d replace the cuffs as well. He also told me that they do still make shirts like that, which start at about £220. So £25 for a collar and £25 for a pair of cuffs doesn’t seem half bad, really.

Who are your 12?

My friend Mimi told me today that each person has the emotional capacity to really care for about 12 people: that on average, at any given time there are only 12 people we would be genuinely upset about if they died. I'm not sure I understand what this means, but a corrollary just occurred to me: that if you were to die tomorrow, on average there would be 12 people who would really be upset. Doesn't seem very much, does it, really.
Thought experiment: who appears in one column but not in the other?

 

Personals redux: The boys are back in town

Addendum to item below: this week's personals section has four columns of "Women seeking men" and almost five (albeit a bit smaller) of "Men seeking women." Maybe the women were just that bit more organised when it came to placing personals once the Times started offering them.

 

Notes on reading the New York Times personals section

1. There are ten columns, and five categories. "Women seeking men" takes up 8.5 columns; "Men seeking women" takes up slightly less than one; "Men seeking men" is about half a column. "Women seeking women" and "Recreation and hobbies partner" are both so far blank. "You can find the type of person and relationship you are looking for by placing your ad in this category today," they say, hopefully.

2. None of the personals include email addresses: the only way to respond is by phoning 1-900-370-9656 at $5.98 for the first minute and $2.99 for each additional minute. Or you can phone a toll-free number and pay $3.49 per minute on your credit card. Just for the sake of comparison, AT&T's basic international rates range up to $1.97 a minute for Burundi, $2.42 for Cambodia, and $2.57 for Chad. You can phone North Korea for less than it costs to call the New York Times personals. The highest rate I could find was $3.72 a minute to Mayotte Island. (Apparently it's part of the Comoro Islands, northwest of Madagascar at the north end of the Mozambique Channel.)

3. Before we even start reading the ads we have to read the "legend", which, along with the standard abbreviations (J-Jewish, F-Female) includes "A-African American". Quite a few of the ads include "P-Professional," which seems pretty redundant in this context.

4. If the New York Times deliberately set out to confirm all of the stereotypes held against it by Texas Republicans and others, it could hardly have done a better job. We start out with a Jewish teacher, 52, and carry on in that vein for most of the rest of the page. "CULTURE VULTURE Loves classical music, opera, film, theater, some art. Seeks male, 55 to 65, with mutual interests." "STUNNING BLONDE Vivacious, accomplished, statuesque, multilingual, author, lecturer. Desires extremely cultured and deeply intelligent equal (except for the "statuesque" part!) male over 50 of any race for intellectual companionship." "LOVELY MANHATTANITE 5'7", fit, green-eyed, spirited, warm, Jewish, enjoys the arts, dining out, travel. Seeks tall, professional, non-smoking, good looking, energetic, 53 to 63, giving man, similar interests." "IVY LEAGUE GRADUATE SWJF, 61, loves opera, art, concerts, theatre, dining, outdoors, family. Good-natured. Seeks refined, thoughtful gentleman. Non-smoker."

5. The general age seems to be in the 50s, although it does range down to "30s". The only younger advertisers are two incredibly obnoxious men, "ELITIST Socially liberal, elitist, atheist, decaffeinated, non-smoking, rugby playing, swimming, PHD, 28, seeks equal or superior," and "ENGLISH ARTIST 25-year-old WM seeks whatever. I'm financially secure, gorgeous, live in Manhattan and ready for a surprise."

6. Most of these seem to have cost around $100, plus the $20 which everybody seems to have paid for inclusion on the website.

 

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Three words: read this book. I got it out the library, but you can order it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble for $19.96. If you're in the UK, Amazon.co.uk has the hardback for £15.69, or paperback for £5.59. Or just nick a copy from your local bookshop. Whatever, just read it.

 

Sleaze in the UK and USA

The USA is the world's greatest democracy, right? It has a written constitution incorporating all manner of checks and balances which largely preclude the sort of sleaze allegations which have plagued Cabinets both Tory and Labour in recent years. As if.

The New York Times runs today with an astonishing investigative piece about New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli which would automatically result in his resignation were he a UK MP. The interesting thing about it is that it's really not that investigative: it's obviously based on the findings of a federal investigation into the senator which began more than three years ago and which only recently has looked into the obviously sleazy relationship between Torricelli and David Chang, one of his largest campaign contributors.

The evidence in the Times piece is damning: Torricelli wrote effusive letters on Chang's behalf to senior members of the South Korean government, including the prime minister, in an attempt to help him buy an insurance company he was ill-prepared to run; he even brought Chang along to a meeting with the finance minister which was meant to be about foreign relations with North Korea, something which forced a formal apology from the US Ambassador.

But Torricelli is still blithely continuing as a senator. Has he no shame? Well, he is an American. But compared to the sort of activity which forced the resignation of Peter Mandelson, he ought to be long gone.

I have a feeling that in the final analysis, the degree of political sleaze, and the degree of acceptable political sleaze, is directly proportional to the amount of money floating around parties and politicians. America has more money than anywhere else, so it's got more sleaze as well.

 

Lulu at the Met

I've just come back from a performance of Berg's Lulu, at the Metropolitan Opera. It's a great piece, of course, although weirdly much of the audience didn't seem to think so: it was noticeably thinner by the end than it was at the beginning. I don't really understand this: it's not like people buy tickets to Lulu thinking they're getting Puccini. And the crowd was definitely younger than normal at the Met, something else I found surprising: I don't see why Lulu should attract a particularly younger audience than, say, Moses und Aron or the newly-commissioned version of The Great Gatsby I went to see there.

I also had a piece of luck; whether it was good or bad I wasn't sure to begin with. The eponymous role was meant to have been sung by Christine Schäfer, who got rave reviews. But she was ill, and instead her golden stilettos were filled by Cyndia Sieden, someone I shouldn't imagine one audience member in a hundred had heard of. I did a little web search on her when I got back home, and as far as I can make out she's a coloratura Mozart specialist who has never done anything like this at all.

And this wasn't just outside her natural Mozart turf, it was also her Metropolitan Opera debut: imagine walking out onto the stage of the Met, a nerve-racking experience in the smallest of rôles, and then having to sing Lulu! Understandably, she was a bit shaky to begin with, and even towards the end she found it quite hard to project in the spoken parts. Also, while Lulu is certainly romantic, it's not mushy, and she did have a tendency to heap on the syrup a little bit when it came to the high bits.

That said, however, Sieden grew enormously in confidence over the course of the evening, and by the harrowing end she was Lulu.The cast, the audience and James Levine all gave her an enormous round of applause, which was very well deserved.

It's at times like these that you remember that opera is a theatrical art, and that the audience and the performers really do connect. Especially in this production, which had a fair few Brechtian touches such as the singers referring directly to the Concertmeister Levine, by the end the successful staging of this performance, with this lead soprano, was an individual triumph.Sieden might not be one of the world's great Lulus, but she touched us, here, tonight.

 

How the mighty are fallen

What do Goldman Sachs, CSFB, and Salomon Smith Barney all have in common? They all came in somewhere below Rothschild's in the European M&A advisory league tables for the first quarter of 2001. The Guardian knows where the story is: the really quite satisfying schadenfreude of Goldie's falling from first to eleventh place. (You've gotta love the ordinal, don't you: it's the league-table equivalent of the Vauxhall Conference.) Reuters leads with Morgan Stanley taking the number one spot, but still gets Goldman in its headline.

But for me (and this may only be because my Dad used to work for them) the Rothschild's story is in a way even more interesting. (Caveat: This league table is based on one quarter's figures, and a quarter which was exceptionally weird in the M&A world at that.It's certain that Goldman will go up and Rothschild's will go down the league table over the next few quarters. Even so, it's worth examining.)

Thompson Financial, who generate the league tables, and who I'm not going to link to 'cos their site makes my browser crash, have simply put Rothschild, not ABN Amro Rothschild, in the Number 6 position. Seeing as how they carefully credit the bizarre entitiy known as Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, I think we can chalk this one up to the Last Remaining UK Investment Bank, without even giving the Dutch so much as a look-in. (Besides, ABN Amro is hardly a major player in European M&A advisory.)

Now the received wisdom in recent years has been that you're either big or you're nothing; that balance sheets are everything. There's always been room for "boutiques," but room only in the sense of making lots of money for their founders, not room in the sense of overtaking SSB and Goldman Sachs in league tables. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (or should it be Allianz Dresdner Kleinwort... oh, never mind) might have made number four, but Wasserstein Perella certainly never did.

And hell, Rothschild's is English! Everybody knows that English banks are little more than takeover fodder. All the important investment banks these days are American, Swiss, or German. There are big and important Dutch, Swiss and Japanese banks, but they're all basically lenders at heart.There are important Italian boutiques, but you know, that's Italy for you. The English banks all got bought (Morgan Grenfell, Kleinwort Benson, Flemings) or died horrible deaths (BZW, NatWest Markets). And don't even think about mentioning HSBC.

So what on earth is Rothschild's doing on this league table? Total volumes might be pretty low so far this year, but $38.5 billion is nothing to be sneezed at in anybody's book. Could it be that large corporations are finally getting sick of arrogant, overpaid American whizzkids and are finally seeking a bit more maturity and a bit less smoke-and-mirrors? Could it be that without the implied promise of lots of positive research reports from the bank's analysts, the American M&A teams seem rather diminished? Could it be that corporations are now deciding to pay for the best advice, rather than the biggest name? Could it be among the cacophony of bursting bubbles in recent months, few people have been alert to the collapse of the myth of the bulge-bracket M&A titan?

Probably not. But it's good to hope.

 

Ya gotta be fast in this town

Most weeks my precious copy of the New Yorker arrives in my mailbox on a Tuesday afternoon, but this week, maybe because the mail woman arrived so late, I got it on Monday. I did what I always do: start reading it slowly, from front to back. Slower than usual, actually, because I was also engrossed in this book I'm reading, Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. (It's excellent; I highly recommend it.)

Anyway, it took me until late on Tuesday night to get to the middle of the magazine, where the New Yorker Festival insert can be found. Now I remember last year, and the way the tickets sold out weeks in advance, so I decided to book some tickets then and there. And already all the tickets to see Steve Martin interviewed by Adam Gopnik have sold out! (As have all the tickets to the Kitchen Confidential Brunch at Les Halles, and I don't know what else. I did manage to get a couple of tickets to see Martin Amis and Norman Mailer, though.) These things have been on sale for two days! This is like when I tried to get tickets to Coldplay at Irving Plaza, and the box office never had them, because they went on sale through Ticketmaster a day previously and sold out.

Oh, yes, and all those $15 tickets were, of course, actually $20 tickets, because you have to pay a $5 service charge, or handling facility, or whatever it's called. Seeing as how there's no box office, I couldn't avoid it. But that's an old complaint.

Twisted ankles and jerking knees

Not exactly known for sensationalism, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has just published what sounds like a very interesting study showing that among amateur basketball players, those who wore shoes with air cells in the heel (that'll be Nikes, then) were four times more susceptible to ankle injuries. This was reported by ABC News, which immediately called up a number of doctors who hadn't read the report to rubbish it.

There was a Dr Jon Shriner of the Michigan Center for Athletic Medicine in Flint, Michigan, for instance, who said that "the air-soled shoes, like those in the Nike basketball line, do not contribute to ankle injuries," without giving any reasons for his beliefs. Of course, the fact that Centers for Athletic Medicine probably get a lot of money from Nike, or at the very least from athletes sponsored by Nike, would never influence Dr Shriner's opinion -- or get reported by ABC News.

The article continues: "A major way recreational players can protect themselves from ankle injuries is to tape their ankles for more support and to replace their shoes after a month or two of constant wear. The shoes wear out and so do their support systems." Ah, yes, of course. A couple of months after buying my new $150 Air Shoks, I'm going to go out and replace them. I don't think.

Oh, and I was going to link to the Nike Air Shok page, but the site is so horrible, with Flash 4 and pop-up windows and no URLs, that I can't. Sorry.

 

Sourcing

Noticed two extremes in anonymous sourcing in daily newspapers today, both annoying. The first comes from the Guardian:

That was by Fiachra Gibbons, the Grauniad's Arts Correpsondent. She makes no attempt at all to conceal who her "source" is, to the point where inistence on anonymity becomes a joke.

At the other extreme of the spectrum, take a look at Keith Kelly in the New York Post:

This is New York, ferchrissakes! Everyone is a "media observer". This is editorialising, plain and simple, in the guise of reporting. If we knew anything at all about this source, it would be interesting. But the "media observer" is so vague that the whole thing becomes meaningless.

Profiled writers hit back on the web

In the past week or so, we've seen David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times profile Dave Eggers, and Michael Wolff of New York magazine profile Andrew Sullivan. Both pieces were, rightly or wrongly, perceived as hatchet-jobs by their subjects, who both hit back by airing their grievances on their websites.

The Eggers/Kirkpatrick spat not only ran to more than 10,000 words on Eggers's site alone, but also prompted weighings-in from the likes of Slate, the New York Post, and, of course, the collected readership of Plastic. Naturally, the main clearing house for links such as these (as well as letters from Kirkpatrick, his friends and his enemies) is Jim Romenesko's Media News, which has a permanent link to andrewsullivan.com on its home page.

The knee-jerk reaction to all this is to say that it's a good thing, that the internet has democratised the media to the point where it's become much easier to find rebuttals and alternative views.

Yet virtually everybody involved has emerged from these skirmishes dimished. David Kirkpatrick comes across as a toadying hack who is more or less willing to email his entire article to its subject in advance; Dave Eggers shows himself to be a solipsistic thin-skinned whiner; Michael Wolff turns out to be the sort of person who would rather be tendentious than accurate; and Andrew Sullivan only confirms Wolff's thesis about his self-obsession. The New York Times, of course, is revealed once again to be staffed by human beings, rather than the empyrean creatures of its own lore.

Of course, we can't turn the clock back, and there is something incredibly compelling, in a car-crash sort of way, about watching Eggers air his own and David Kirkpatrick's dirty laundry in public. But once again the internet has proved itself best at the cheaply sensationalist, rather than the genuinely useful or informative. I'm sure that Dave Eggers would hate to be called the Matt Drudge of the New York Meejah Community, but in a way that's what he turned his website into: the place to go for off-the-record email exchanges and other such jetsam of the journalistic craft.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to point out that Dave Eggers has done a lot more damage to his own reputation with his petualant posting than David Kirkpatrick may or may not have inflicted with his piece on the paperback publication of Eggers' book. Certainly Eggers' complaints hugely increased the number of people who read the original piece. But Eggers isn't stupid. Could that have been his plan all along? Is this whole thing just a stunt to keep his name in the headlines? Sounds unlikely, but stranger things have happened over lunch at Michael's.

Traffic

Steven Soderbergh's Traffic is a great film, there's no doubt, especially when compared to most of the rest of the dross which came out in the year 2000. I would be very happy if it won the best picture Oscar it deserves, although I have a hunch it'll have to make do with Best Director. But for all its excellence as a piece of cinema, I'm upset at how it treats the world of drugs.

Traffic was adapted from Traffik, a 1989 Channel 4 miniseries. By necessity, a lot has been lost in the transition from six hours to 147 minutes: never, for instance, do we see the cultivation of drug crops or the effect of drugs on the local economies of poor drug-producing nations. And because there isn't time to draw out the individual strands of plot, the interstices between them are reduced to grating shots where the hand-held camera will pan away from one character and join another who is moving in the same place but a different direction.

My main problem, however, is not with Soderbergh's direction, which is generally first-rate. The overprivileged teenagers' drug-fuelled party, for instance, is perfect. (There are gauche missteps, however, such as the cop realising, too late, that his partner is about to walk into a booby trap.) What I object to is the way in which a film which is generally regarded as providing a pinkish "enlightened" attitude to drugs in fact adheres much more closely to cinematic conventions than it does to reality.

The prime example of this is the fact that none of the characters is a street-level drug dealer. We see a few, in the LA ghetto, passing crack through letterboxes in exchange for crumpled bills, but there's no indication that these are real people, with thoughts and feelings and motives just like the other characters in the film. The Catherine Zeta-Jones character, for instance, remains sympathetic even as she takes over her husband's drug-running operation, personally transports cocaine across international borders, and even murders people. Yet the dealers on the street are basically your stereotypical ghetto blacks, sans even names.

Or look at the drug czar's daughter, the addict who is responsible for him breaking off a White House press conference mid-speech and flying off instead to be with his family. (Er, right. But hey, this guy I guess is prone to improbable behaviour: the conservative jurist decides to turn all vigilante on us halfway through, kicking down doors and looking very mean in stubble and shades.)

Caroline Wakefield is a rich kid who falls so quickly into the quicksand of drug addiction that within weeks she's turned to prostitution. Now this just doesn't happen. Sure, the character Jennifer Connelley played in Requiem for a Dream ended up in more or less the same place, but only at the end of a very long road, and from much less auspicious beginnings.

What does a rich drug addict do when she needs money? Sell to her friends, of course. But that would turn Caroline Wakefield from victim into Evil Scourge of Society. Selling her body harms only her; selling cocaine is truly unforgivable.

And of course Caroline's rehabilitation is something out of a twelve-stepper's PR dream. There's no horrible withdrawal (remember Trainspotting?), no indication that recovering from heroin addiction is significantly more traumatic than getting over a drinking problem. Why is this? Maybe because the film wants to push its trite observation that the War on Drugs is hypocritical because it would treat addicts like Caroline much more harshly than drinkers like her father.

I don't want to overstate my case here. Better that Hollywood produce films saying that the war on drugs is unwinnable than it inflict upon us more screeds saying that AIDS sufferers are human (Philadelphia) or that racism is bad (Dances with Wolves). The Academy, for some reason, loves these films which make viewers feel saintly in their preconceived opinions.

And that's really the saddest thing about Traffic: that it won't change a single person's mind on the contentious issue of drug policy. I don't know how many latter-day Nelson Rockefellers there still are out there; whoever they are, they probably won't watch the film, and if they do they'll consider it bleeding-heart claptrap. Most other people will probably consider the film pretty realistic, more or less.

The way I see it, films about contentious issues should be contentious. They should attack received opinion, in Middle America certainly but in liberal Hollywood as well. They should make people stop and think, and maybe get angry. You want examples? Well, Warren Beatty's Bulworth is the better film, but the movie I really have in mind here is James Toback's Black and White. Now there's a film that would never win an Oscar.

The urge to complain about Some Complaining About Complaining

The king of the post-ironicists, Dave Eggers, has been holding an email conversation on his website this week all about how we really should stop criticising people and start encouraging artists. It's called Some Complaining About Complaining, and so far there are 1, 2, 3 sections; I think more are forthcoming.

It's a very long conversation, which I would recommend you read, and a short quote can't really do justice to its breadth or its general flavour. All the same, here's one entry from Eggers:

I've been in LA this week, and as horrible as it was staying on Sunset, I do really like the city's enthusiasm for just about everything, every stupid ugly cheap thing. I like that they get excited about making TV shows. That they want to make things, and make them quickly, and then make more things, and reach people, and make them laugh or cry or whatever. It's nice ¤ it's jumpy and desperate in a healthy and wide-eyed sort of way. They obviously fear death, and this is good.

Critics in general (and, it must be said, the interlocutors do not exempt themselves) are, well, criticised for being mean about artists, be they pop stars or writers or whatever. It's silly dismissing large chunks of Bob Dylan's oeuvre, we're told; Norman Mailer embarrasses himself when he pans Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full; liberals should stop carping on about where Michael Moore (Roger and Me) sends his kids to school.

My friend Matthew Rose attuned me to this sort of thinking back in December, when he made some very unflattering noises about the New York Press critic Godfrey Cheshire, who had just devoted a column to criticising the New Yorker's Anthony Lane. Whether Cheshire was right or wrong was beside the point, Matthew said: film critics have much more important things to do than indulge in public infighting between each other.

Now, I'm sure I'm nowhere near being on the McSweeney's radar screen, but I felt as though the dialogue on the website was aimed straight at me.

Twice in the past few days I've penned long screeds tearing apart the design of certain websites; follow the link to "Dancer in the Dark" on this page and you can see me in the same polemical voice taking apart Jonathan Foreman's review of Lars von Trier's latest.

Furthermore, I'm generally a big fan of negative criticism. Anthony Lane, for instance, is never better than when he's panning a film: his Independent on Sunday review of Sammy And Rosie Get Laid remains, in my mind, the best and funniest film review I've ever read. Or consider Clive James's review of Judith Krantz's Princess Daisy.

So my initial reaction was to try to pick holes in the arguments. One thing missing from the McSweeney's debate so far, for instance, is to be any consideration of criticism as an artform in itself, something in which quality and artistry can inhere every bit as much as it can in a novel or a film. I subscribe to the New York Review of Books not because I want to know which books are good and which bad, but because the quality of the writing in the Review is so high in itself. And if criticism itself is raised to the level of an artform, any imperative not to criticise art would apply equally to negative criticism.

There's also a certain element of hypocrisy in what Eggers writes. He's just as guilty of putting people down as any of us: consider this from his website.

Speaking of messes, we would like to invite readers to visit Slate.com, because your McSweeney's Representative last week did a Diary on that site, and the reaction to it -- see "The Fray" -- provides for much fun. Why? Well, see, in a sort of running theme of the diary, the diarist muses aloud about why there has not, to date, been someone courageous enough to produce an all-black remake of The Wizard of Oz.
Yes. Well.
It seems there are a number of people out there, reading Slate, who are aware that there already is an all-black Wizard of Oz. And some of them -- including one frequent (though, thus far unsuccessful) submittor to McSweeney's -- were not happy that the diarist was seemingly unaware of this. Go see and have yourself some fun. You deserve some fun, with how hard you work and all.

Eggers admits he's failed to live up to his new high standards in the past, of course, although this is the relatively recent past. But what he did in this instance was more than just laugh at people: it was he who incited those people to do the laughable thing in the first place. It's tantamount to asking an entire room to sing, and then having fun at the expense of those who are tone deaf.

But what's really important here is not whether Dave Eggers is a perfect human being or not; it's whether we (and, more immediately, I) have been corrupted to the point where there's more fun to be had in negative criticism than there is in positive appreciation.

For all my sarcastic tendencies, people often make fun of my positive hyperbole, telling me that not everybody in my orbit can be the most fabulous person I know, that not every movie I've seen can be the best film ever made. Presumably, the New Eggers Philosophy wouldn't mind that tendency at all: better to wax lyrical about how Breaking the Waves reignited my faith in cinema than to snipe about the shortcomngs of Three Kings.

But I have a feeling that no one holds only positive strongly-held opinions. If we're to have a healthy intellectual life, it's better that artists grow thick skins than that critics self-censor. I'm not saying that good criticism is a necessary condition for good art, although I'm partial to that argument. What I am saying is that good criticism is worthy in and of itself, and shouldn't be circumscribed by exhortations to civility.

If, Mr Eggers, that is, you don't mind me saying so.

BridgeNews shuts down Latin bureaus

BridgeNews, the wire service owned by beleaguered Bridge Information Systems, closed its bureaus in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Panama Monday. The sackings came on the same day as the organization fired all of its municipal bond reporters in New York and across the United States.

Bridge (for which, in the interests of full disclosure, I used to work) has had well-publicised difficulties meeting the covenants on its bonds and staying current on its debts. Sources at BridgeNews say the downsizing is an attempt to jettison any parts of the business which aren't making money.

The U-turn on the municipal bond coverage is possibly the larger surprise: only a few months ago, Bridge was hiring aggressively to build up the group.

But the move in Latin America is the bigger decision. It comes just two months before crucial presidential elections in Peru, and involves the permanent closure of three fully-operational bureaus in the region. (Bolivia never had anything more than a stringer, albeit a very good one.)

Perhaps the writing was on the wall. The Latin America desk in the New York bureau is down to just two staffers now, from five a couple of years ago, and has been merged into something called the "US Policy Group."

The decision has repercussions outside Bridge. Reliable information from the Andean countries is hard to come by at the best of times, and Bridge had a very good reputation in the region. Its departure will mean even less interest in a part of the world which is already suffering greatly from an international perception that it isn't important.

Clinton to move into Tina's old digs

The New York Times reports today that President Clinton will move to an office on the 56th floor of Carnegie Hall Tower, at 152 West 57th Street. What it doesn't report is that those offices are precisely the ones vacated by Tina Brown's Talk magazine when the Miramax/Hearst joint venture moved down to Chelsea late last year.

The negotiations for the office space, which is reported to be worth about $90 to $95 a square foot, have been between the landlord and the federal government; there's no indication that Clinton supporters Harvey Weinstein and Tina Brown are involved at all. But even if it's only coincidence, there's still a sense that Clinton is buying not only a fabulous Central Park view, but is also cementing his credentials as undisputed leader of the New York Liberal Elite.

Bill's only competition for the position, of course, comes from his wife, the junior senator for New York. Tina has published fawning articles about both of them in her time. But Bill is the more clubbable of the two, and being based on 57th Street will give him the edge.

It's an interesting choice of location. The Times says Clinton's broker also looked at space in the Seagram Building “ the Mies/Johnson tower the newspaper of record dubbed "building of the millennium."

The Seagram Building would seem like the obvious choice: not only would Clinton not even need to go outside to get to his regular table at the Four Seasons, but he would also avoid the permanent throng of tourists headed for Planet Hollywood on 57th Street.

But maybe the lingering aura of Tina was just too hard to resist.

Alex Ross on John Adams

In the latest issue of the New Yorker, the magazine's music critic Alex Ross has a profile of John Adams. That, in itself, is no great surprise, and in fact the profile tells us little new about the composer. The quality of the writing, though, is very high indeed, much higher than most of Ross's work for the magazine.

So in the fashion, perhaps, of Victorian commonplace books, I'm going to copy out a couple of my favourite passages here.

It is a strange business, composing music in twenty-first-century America. The job is difficult in itself: it is slow, solitary, and intensely cerebral. You have to believe deeply in yourself to get through the process. You have to be possibly a little mad. When you are done, you have in your hands not a finished object¤a painting that can be put up on a wall or a novel that can be read at one sitting¤but a set of abstract notations that other musicians must learn and perform. Then you step back into the culture at large, where few people embrace, or even notice, what you do. In this country, classical music is widely regarded as a dead or alien form¤so much so that jazz aficionados routinely say, "Jazz is America's classical music." To make the counterargument that America's classical music is America's classical music is somehow to admit that the battle is lost.

There's some great stuff here. "Cerebral"¤love that word. "You have to be possibly a little mad." And that lovely final sentence, which isn't actually the final sentence of the paragraph. Ross ends it with the assertion that "In such a climate, composers easily become embittered." A little bit weird, that, considering that he goes on to detail how minimalism "reversed the trend toward the marginalization of the American composer," how "America's classical music, then, is alive and well," with "a huge new audience for contemporary music," and how "Adams is one of the very few American composers who receive a comfortable income from commissions and royalties." (Well, Mr Ross, you're the reporter, why don't you tell us what a "comfortable income" is? Presumably this has been fact-checked; I don't like the way that there seems to be a conspiracy between Ross and Adams to prevent us from gauging for ourselves just how under- or over-valued the composer is, financially.)

But never mind the bricks and mortar, check out the colour:

Adams was something of a child prodigy. He wrote music, played the clarinet, and, on accasion, conducted the local orchestra, which was sponsored by the New Hampshire State Mental Hospital. He had to cope with the fact that the hospital patients who played in the group sometimes improvised freely during the performance. When he was thirteen, the orchestra presented his Suite for String Orchestra, and he became the talk of the village. At this time, he was listening to little twentieth-century music, although he did fall under the spell of Sibelius. "I was used to seeing snow and pine trees in New Hampshire," he explained. "When I went into the record store, I bought albums with snow and pine trees on them. They were all Sibelius." Adams has takn on many other influences with the passing years, but he remains loyal to this early one; echoes of Sibelius's slowly evolving musical landscapes can be heard in all his major orchestral works.

It's a very ambitious paragraph, moving as it does from the child prodigy to the precocious young composer, back to the almost unbelievably naive child, and closing with a general musical observation. My favourite bit is the way he jumps from Sibelius to a completely unrelated quote about New Hampshire's winter flora, and then manages to tie it up very elegantly. A bit like John Adams's own music, in a way. Again, though, I could probably have done without the final sentence.

Still, there's one more great paragraph yet to come, which has great colour (John Adams as forklift operator!), fantastic locations ("the Arboretum in Golden Gate Park"), and a lovely ending:

By 1972, Adams had had enough of East Coast musical politics, and he drove to San Francisco in a Volkswagen Beetle. After working for a year as a forklift operator on the Oakland waterfront, he took a low-paying job at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, as a jack-of-all-trades instructor. He had been studying the writings of John Cage and began organizing elaborately anarchic Cagean happenings. For one piece, "lo-fi," he and his students assumed various positions around the Arboretum in Golden Gate Park and played 78-r.p.m. records that had turned up in Goodwill stores. This activity proved no more satisfying than the highbrow work that he had done at Harvard. In an autobiographical essay, he wrote that "the social aspect of these events was piquant, and the post-concert parties were always memorable, but the musical payoff always seemed Ślite.' I began to notice that often after an avant-garde event I would drive home alone to my cottage on the beach, lock the door, and, like a closet tippler, end the evening deep in a Beethoven quartet."

Mucko's wish list

The internet is exciting and new, we all know that. And we also know that it can be used for nefarious purposes. But today I came across something I never really thought I'd see, although in retrospect it was obvious it would happen. Michael McDermott, the man who shot seven people dead in Boston, had a Wish List on Amazon.com, which anyone can look at.

Amazon's wish lists are a weird mixture of the public and the private: they're not the sort of thing you expect complete strangers to parse, as surely people across the country are doing now (and as I'm doing here), yet at the same time they are public documents, reflecting both your desires and how you might wish to be seen by your acquintances.

McDermott, known as Mucko (he even registered the domain name mucko.com) describes himself on his Amazon page as "Uncle Mucko, a big, fat, hairy guy with glasses." The last bit we already knew about, but the Uncle bit is disconcerting: there's nothing avuncular about storming into your office with a shotgun and blowing away half a dozen of your co-workers. All the same, the nickname was given to him by his nephews and nieces, so there's probably nothing creepy about it.

It seems unlikely that McDermott thought of himself as a person likely to go postal, and there's really no evidence from his wish list that he had any kind of psychopathic tendencies.

McDermott started his wishlist on March 14, with a request for a VHS tape of Wizards, a very poorly-received animated feature by cult cartoonist Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat). With its fantasy-world setting of post-apocalyptic wizards and elves, it fits right in to the stereotype of what a lonely nerd like McDermott would like, but in fact it's atypical of the other films on his list.

For one thing, it's the only VHS film on the list: all the others are DVDs. And for another, it's obscure. Nearly every other film on McDermott's extensive list is a famous movie most cinema-literate people will know.

The Wish List started getting much more mainstream with McDermott's next two additions, on March 20 and 22: The Shawshank Redemption and There's Something About Mary “ which still hasn't been released on DVD. Both films seem typical McDermott fare: the former a well-received example of what Hollywood is capable of at its best, the latter an equally well-received example of Hollywood pitching itself squarely at the lowest common denominator.

After adding Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on July 3, McDermott then went on something of a spree July 14, adding 17 new DVDs to his list. Maybe he expected some friendly person would buy him the lot, maybe he wanted to give people a large array of films they could choose from, maybe he just wanted to keep a list of his favourite films. Maybe he decided to upgrade his collection from VHS to DVD. We're unlikely to know for a long time, if ever.

The real heart of the Wish List, however, was added on September 18, when McDermott added 43 new DVDs. There are no books on the list, no CDs, and certainly no electronic gadgets or garden furniture. It's just films.

It turns out that McDermott didn't have bad taste, really. He was something of a completist: if he wanted Lethal Weapon or The Naked Gun, he had to have all of the sequels as well. (Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls was added on September 18.) But the themes running through his choices are all perfectly respectable.

There are five Bill Murray films, three each with Kenneth Branagh and Jack Nicholson, and no fewer than seven Mel Gibson flicks, thanks to all the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon sequels.

McDermott liked classic comedy, with choices ranging from The Jerk and A Fish Called Wanda to classics from Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. Most of all, however, he liked science fiction: nothing particularly out of the ordinary there.

Of course, there's no reason why any of this should come as a surprise. That Michael McDermott had decent taste in film is no less likely, on the face of it, than if he'd turned out to have good taste in wine, or in art. But the difference is that had McDermott's Wish List turned out to be full of bloody slasher flicks, all manner of cultural conservatives would be running out of the woodwork to denounce the way in which Hollywood corrupts Americans.

But it'll be hard for anybody to start pointing to films like Total Recall and Conan the Barbarian as morally dangerous, especially when they share billing with The Princess Bride and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Rather, what we have learned from Michael McDermott is that mass murderers aren't always hormone-addled teenagers, or illiterate gun freaks; that they can be funny guys who quote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on their answering machines and who get into trouble with the tax man. In other words, they can be a lot like the rest of us. Thank god for the big beard, eh: otherwise, McDermott might seem just a little bit too normal for comfort.

The art of gift giving

I have an old LP at home, I can't play it, because I don't have a record player. But it's sitting there all the same, a 12-inch plastic pill which never fails to make me happy when I'm feeling blue. It's a recording of Shostakovich's 10th symphony, the final movement of which is one of the most uplifting pieces of music ever written.

The funny thing is, you can't short-cut it. If you try to just play the final movement, it doesn't have anywhere near the same effect. It's like going to see a Lars von Trier film: the ending is only devastating because you've been through the beginning with him.

It's the same with presents, at least a certain type of present, given to a certain type of person in New York or London. I'm thinking of glamorous twentysomethings here, the sort of people who are often seen sporting a Gucci lariat chain or a Tiffany dog-tag bracelet.

Wearing the jewelry, or the Prada sunglasses, or the Burberry bikini, is just the final movement in the symphony. Beforehand must come the giving itself, which has to be imbued with the perfect combination of occasion and diffidence. The giver has to make the givee feel important and special, but also has to be careful not to build the whole thing up so much that the gift itself becomes anticlimactic.

Then there's the really crucial part, the presentation of the gift. There are more glamorous places to find jewelry than Tiffany, there are higher-quality sunglasses than those found at Prada. But nowhere else has the branding that these places do.

The branding is a multi-layered thing, which includes everything from name-dropping in Brett Easton Ellis novels to glossy advertisements in Vanity Fair. But a crucial part of it is the gift-wrapping, the perfect presentation of every present in beautiful branded boxes.

There's something very un-English about all this, it must be said. I grew up feeling that even if a gift was simply bought at a shop, there was always a personal touch in the wrapping. Getting the store to wrap your present for you would be like typing a birthday card.

I suppose it's the genius of Tiffany and Gucci that they have managed to transcend the bathos of in-store wrapping and turn it into what is probably the most important part of the gift. The eggshell-blue box, the silver embossed logo, the layers of tissue paper: all these serve to bring the recipient into a state of perfect heightened sensitivity to whatever lies inside. Done properly (and it's always done properly), this kind of presentational foreplay to a large degree makes the actual present inside irrelevant. Whatever it is, it will be the climax to the act of unwrapping, emotionally spotlit, the center of attention.

We're all familiar with the idea that it's the thought that counts. As consumerists, however, we also understand that actually, the gift itself is pretty important too.

But the true genius of the way in which certain luxury brands refract our postmodern society is only fully revealed when we finally realise that it's not the thought, and it's not the gift: it's the wrapping that really matters.