Felix Salmon

Publishing on the internet has never been as easy as the technoütopians would have it. (This week, I’ve decided to maximise my use of the diaeresis: see this MemeFirst entry if you want to know why.) And after fiddling around with felixsalmon.com for a few hours yesterday, I’m more pessimistic than ever about the prospects for the web becoming the great democratic leveller which it looked set to become when I first got online.

The problem is that every time a difficulty is solved and the road onto the web becomes easier, a new development takes place somewhere else which only serves to make life more complicated than it was before. What used to be an easy publishing system with high barriers to entry is now a much more complex publishing system with lower barriers to entry. As a result, web publishing remains largely confined to the overeducated urban elite – precisely the population which had the greatest access to more old-fashioned media.

While I was tweaking this site (more on that later), Oliver Willis was at BloggerCon in Boston, and had this to say:

During one of the Saturday sessions a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as “utopia”. Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don’t want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities. I’m not whining about that, but simply stating the fact that a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males does diddly to change the real world.

I don’t think Oliver is right: there are many technologies which are mainly the pursuit of upper middle class white males and which have undoubtedly changed the world. Space travel is one obvious example. But he does make the excellent point that blogging is essentially giving a voice to the kind of people who were not exactly muzzled in the past.

The depressing thing is that the barriers to web publishing at this point are not cultural so much as they are technical. Most people are capable of sending an email or posting on some kind of web-based bulletin board. Most people are not capable of setting up a halfways-decent weblog. I’m hoping TypePad (which officially launched today) will help change this, but the fact remains that if you want to do any real messing about with how your website is put together, you need to essentially become a coder.

When I first started browsing the web, on a Sun workstation running Mosaic, it was really incredibly easy to understand. You would write text, basically, and then put <h> tags around headlines, <strong> or <em> tags around things you wanted to emphasise, and so on. Images were a little bit harder, but not much. You basically just marked up your text to show whch elements were which, and let the browser do the rest.

But it wasn’t long before the designers got in on the act. They didn’t care about making sure that text was correctly marked up – they cared about what it looked like when it was rendered in a browser. From demand came supply, and it wasn’t long before rogue tags like <b>, <i> and, of course, the dreaded <flash> started turning up in HTML. These things said nothing about the text itself, and attempted instead to dictate how it was seen by the reader.

Now while all these developments were OK in and of themselves, the problem was that most websites wanted to be one step ahead of everybody else. The browser makers, led by Netscape and Microsoft, rushed to support all manner of increasingly recondite code, and web pages became more and more complex, to the point where the vast majority of commercial websites are completely incomprehensible when viewed as source code. A lot of the markup was automatically generated by software like FrontPage which generally erred on the side of specificity rather than simplicity, with the inevitable bloatful consequences. And we’ve long since passed the point where the markup actually takes up more bandwidth than the content, which I’m sure was something that Tim Berners-Lee never envisaged.

By this point, your own personalised website was a pretty easy thing to get: rather than having to provide name servers yourself, you could pay a for-profit company to do all that kind of thing for you. But once people started having to pay for domain names, the internet, fueled by the dot-com bubble, became a corporate playground, further and further removed from its original inception as a democratic network. The vast majority of us were lurking viewers, and the vast majority of web traffic went to a handful of sites with enormous market capitalisations.

The advent of blogging, which coincided with the bursting of the stock-market bubble, was meant to change all that. Easy web publishing tools put everybody on an equal footing, and we could all have our own place where we could print whatever we liked.

The problem was that web publishing technology had moved on, and a plain-bones HTML site simply wouldn’t hack it any more. I can think of one reasonably-trafficked site which is bog-standard hand-codeable HTML, but if anybody less famous were to go down that route I can’t imagine that anybody beyond their friends would come back very often. Besides, the presence of things like “&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;” in the source code betrays the fact that even this ultra-basic blog was actually generated not by hand but by computer.

If you want something a bit sexier, then you start running into an alphabet soup of what are, essentially, programming languages you need to learn. XHTML, PHP, RSS, CSS – all of these things are very, very user-unfriendly. On top of that, if you use a blogging tool like MoveableType, you need to deal with all of their idiosyncratic coding as well.

What I’m talking here is infinitely more complex and counterintuitive than old-fashioned markup. It does wonderful things, of course – I can change the whole look and feel of this site without having to reënter any of the content, for instance – but it also comes at great cost. There’s been a kind of arms race when it comes to web-based tools, and anyone using only HTML is essentially using a penknife to compete with a laser-guided cruise missile.

The thing is, penknives are easy to understand and control, while cruise missiles aren’t.

Take felixsalmon.com as an example. It’s powered by Moveable Type, which had to be installed on my server. Even MT themselves admit that’s non-trivial: I got my techy friend Stefan in Sweden to do it. Then you have page templates, which the brave toss out and rebuild anew, but which I just tweak to try to get things vaguely as I’d like them. That involves looking at code like this, and working out what it does and how I might want to change it.

<div id=”banner”>

<h1><a href=”<$MTBlogURL$>” accesskey=”1″><$MTBlogName$></a></h1><p></p>

<span class=”description”><$MTBlogDescription$></span>

</div>

That’s real code from the template for this homepage, by the way. See those <div> tags? I half-understand what they do; I have no idea what the <span> tag does.

But that’s not the half of it: in order to really change the look and feel of the site, you need to mess about in something called the Stylesheet. That’s written in something called CSS, and looks a bit like this:

.blogbody a,

.blogbody a:link,

.blogbody a:visited,

.blogbody a:active,

.blogbody a:hover {

font-weight: normal;

text-decoration: underline;

}

Of course, all those curly brackets and full stops and spaces and colons are absolutely vital, and it takes quite a bit of chutzpah to go in and try to change stuff, especially when you don’t really have a clue what you’re doing.

Yesterday I decided that since I’d already changed my blog to php from html (don’t ask: I don’t really understand myself), I might as well make use of it and include links to recent stories I’d posted on MemeFirst. The results are up in the top left hand corner of the page. This took about three hours, altogether, first of all googling around the web trying to find the right tool to do what I wanted, then trying to install it, and then getting it to look like what I wanted it to look like. If you’re interested, I used a set of PHP functions written by Jason of the Trommeter Times, and the instructions for installation, in full, are “it’s really pretty simple and should be self-explanatory.”

Without Stefan, I could never have done it; with him, it was still very difficult. Here’s some of my PHP code, to give you an idea of what I was dealing with:

if ($tagName == “ITEM”) {

printf(“<li><a target=’_blank’ href=’%s’>%s</a><br

/></li>\n”,

trim($link),htmlspecialchars(trim($title)));

if (strlen ($description) > 0) {

printf(“%s<br />”,htmlspecialchars(trim($description)));

}

Trust me, it’s just as forbidding as it looks. And yes, the type of people who come up with this stuff really do think that it’s self-explanatory. (I might add that they’re also the type of people who think it’s really funny that PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Yes, it kind of recurses infinitely back into itself.)

We’re living in a world, as Virginia Postrel likes to point out, where cleaning ladies advertising their services compete largely on the strength of the graphic design on their flyers. Anybody with a PC can come up with something pretty beautiful pretty easily, and many do.

But when it comes to web design, there’s nothing easy about it. If you want complete control over your flyer for janitorial services, you’ve got it. If you want complete control over the look and feel of your website, you have to either jump straight into the deep end of geekdom, or get a geek to do it for you. Of course, geeks often like to throw all manner of horrible bells and whistles into websites just because they can and because it means they can charge more, so most people like to do the web-designing themselves if they possibly can.

Given all that, it’s hardly surprising that bloggers tend to be overeducated urban graduates, who are less likely to be intimidated by all those $‘s and ==‘s, and who in any case have relatively easy access to web designers and the ready cash with which to pay them. But it doesn’t bode well for the future growth of blogging.

I am convinced that just as the web-publishing revolution is supposedly going full speed ahead, it has ironically never been harder to publish your own stuff on the web. Blogging is not going to include very many genuinely marginalised voices unless and until someone writes some powerful and yet easy-to-use software which makes things like setting up templates as easy as formatting a document in Word.

To be honest, I don’t think that’s possible: there are so many variables now in the code for web pages that you really can’t just keep things simple any more.

For that reason, then, I think that bloggers are going to remain an elite subset of the already-elite group of web users for the foreseeable future. It’s just too bloody difficult to ever become really popular.

DVD is a great medium: there’s a virtually limitless list of films available,

they look much better than they do on VHS, and you can do things like freeze-frame

much more effectively. But until now, the market has been dominated by the major

theatrical distributors. If you want to rent a movie which came out in theaters

for a couple of weeks and then bombed, that’s easy. Everything else, on the

other hand, is almost impossible to find.

There are three types of DVD I’ve long wished to be able to find, with very

little luck. The first is art films, ranging from short pieces by Bill Viola

or Bruce Nauman to feature-length films by Andy

Warhol or Rebecca Horn.

It’s understandable why these films would be difficult to find, however:

they’re sold at extremely high prices in very small editions through art galleries,

and a generally available perfect copy would severely dilute the edition.

The second is made-for-TV material, especially documentaries. There are amazing

documentaries out there, but most of them appeared once or twice on television

and have since become all but impossible to see. Much more effort goes into

making a good feature-length documentary than goes into writing a magazine article,

but future researchers on any subject are generally confined to the latter,

because the television material is stuck, inaccessible and unindexed, in a basement

somewhere.

The third is music videos. On a dollars-per-minute basis, these are probably

the most expensive films regularly made, and enormous amounts of effort and

creativity are put into them. Yet very few make it onto television, and even

fewer are available once the single in question is no longer in the shops. Real

classics, like Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer

(now there’s a song no one would remember if it wasn’t for the video)

exist largely in our memories these days: we can’t rummage around among old

DVDs for them in the same way that we can with our music collection.

(I could add a fourth category here, of television commercials, but while they

can be very clever and funny, I personally have no particular desire to watch

a whole DVD’s worth of them.)

I have friends in Los Angeles who are very plugged in to the music-video production

scene, and who collect pirate copies of such things in much the same way as

people in the art scene have illicit collections of art videos. But these copies

are invariably on VHS. It’s also possible to get DVDs featuring collections

of an individual recording artist’s work. The problem with going down that route,

of course, is that it’s the music which drives the video selection, and not

the other way around, meaning that a lot of the videos are very average in quality.

(One exception can be found here,

and another here).

But now, thanks to Spike Jonze, there’s a whole new company, The Director’s

Label, devoted to releasing the best work of the best music-video directors.

Better yet, the first three releases, coming out at the end of October, also

happen to be the best three music-video directors working today. The press release,

complete with trailers for each of the DVDs, can be found here.

The

subject of the first DVD, of course, is Jonze

himself. Jonze first appeared on the scene making skateboard videos, but

his unique visual imagination soon made him one of the most celebrated and accomplished

music-video directors ever. The Beastie Boys started hiring him on a regular

basis: they’re the kind of artists who really care about making their music

videos into self-standing artworks in their own right.

This DVD features all the Jonze classics. The Beastie Boys’ Sabotage

is a hilarious send-up of 70s cop shows, while Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice

is probably the best place in cinematic history to see just how good a dancer

Christopher Walken really is. The cover features a still from Wax’s California,

a slow-motion sequence of a man on fire, running, which once seen is impossible

to forget.

Jonze stands apart from the other directors in the series in that he isn’t

really known for his cutting-edge use of technology. That said, he spent a lot

of effort inserting Weezer into the Happy Days TV show for Buddy Holly,

and did their Undone video entirely in one take.

The

second DVD is Michel

Gondry. Gondry has come to fame more recently, largely thanks to Björk,

who has used him in half a dozen videos. Their first collaboration was on Human

Behaviour, a video which singlehandedly made Gondry’s name with a wonderfully

skewed fairy tale featuring Björk as a hunter who eventually winds up inside

a bear’s stomach.

Gondry also directed the wonderful Kylie Minogue video of Come Into My

World. Shot in a Parisian suburb, it shows Kylie dancing and skipping around

a crossroads again and again – and each time she circles, another Kylie

joins her, until there are four Kylies in all. And it’s not only Kylie who replicates,

it’s also the townsfolk, each of whom is a small little story unto themselves.

It’s the kind of video which can happily be watched over and over again for

the dozens of small things you miss the first few times.

But Gondry is more than just a high-tech wizard: consider probably his most

celebrated video, for the White Stripes’ aggressively low-tech Fell in Love

With a Girl. Done entirely in old-fashioned Lego, the very rawness of the

animation pefectly echoes the stripped-down nature of the song, and deservedly

makes it to the cover of the DVD.

Finally,

there’s Chris

Cunningham. The fact that he’s part of this series at all is particularly

impressive, because he’s considered an artist in his own right, and sells his

work through art galleries. His longest and most expensive piece of video art,

Flex, is actually featured on this DVD, which bodes well for the wider

availability of other artists’ work.

If the American Jonze is associated with the Beastie Boys and the Frenchman

Gondry is associated with Björk, then the Englishman Cunningham is very

much linked with Aphex Twin. There’s a problem here, in that Aphex Twin is not

particularly commercially successful, which means that Cunningham’s videos have

even less chance than most of being seen. What’s more, Cunningham’s vision in

his Aphex Twin videos is genuinely shocking, disconcerting, and scary: these

aren’t simply clever and imaginative works, they’re also the kind of thing which

can give you nightmares.

So it’s Björk who makes it onto the cover of this DVD, since Cunningham’s

video for her All is Full of Love is probably the most-watched thing

he’s ever made. It’s technically flawless, especially considering the technology

which went into it way back in 1999. It’s also stunningly beautiful, with a

white porcelain Björk robot building another one and falling in love with

her.

I can’t wait for these DVDs to be released, and I’m very much looking forward

to seeing who Jonze will choose to be the next director tapped for a retrospective.

Still, between the three DVDs, there’s 20 hours of material here, so that should

be enough to keep me occupied for the time being.

Who will stick up for PowerPoint? It’s always been the subject of low-level

grumblings, and Lance Knobel points

out that the World Economic Forum, in Davos (usually), has long had a "deep-rooted

aversion" to allowing it into presentations. But ever since Edward Tufte

came out with his 24-page

jeremiad on the subject of slideware generally and PowerPoint specifically,

it’s got even worse press than usual.

The New York Times chimes

in today, with an article centered on Tufte’s criticism of the use of PowerPoint

within NASA. Tufte points to a PowerPoint presentation which was given to senior

managers while the Columbia was still orbiting, on the subject of whether or

not the famous piece of foam had caused serious damage.

Among other problems, Mr. Tufte said, a crucial piece of information —

that the chunk of foam was hundreds of times larger than anything that had

ever been tested — was relegated to the last point on the

slide, squeezed into insignificance on a frame that suggested damage to

the wing was minor.

The independent board that investigated the Columbia disaster devoted an entire

page of its final report last month to Mr. Tufte’s analysis. The board wrote

that "it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint

slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation."

In fact, the board said: "During its investigation, the board was surprised

to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical

reports. The board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead

of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical

communication at NASA."

In a recent issue of Wired Magazine, Tufte recapitulated his message in a short

article, but the editors had a harder time finding anybody who would stand

up for the accursed software. They ended up alighting on David Byrne, who’s

been playing around with PowerPoint for a while now, and who has just released

a book and DVD called Envisioning

Emotional Epistemological Information. The title, of course, is direct nod

of the head to Tufte, whose second book is entitled simply Envisioning

Information. Byrne’s

Wired article is whimsical, showing a few slides from PowerPoint presentations

he’s put together, with sardonic commentary on each:

I began this project making fun of the iconography of PowerPoint, which wasn’t

hard to do, but soon realized that the pieces were taking on lives of their

own. This whirlwind of arrows, pointing everywhere and nowhere -each one color-coded

to represent God knows what aspects of growth, market share, or regional trends

-ends up capturing the excitement and pleasant confusion of the marketplace,

the everyday street, personal relationships, and the simultaneity of multitasking.

Does it really do all that? If you imagine you are inside there it does.

Wired magazine, which is now part of the Condé Nast empire, went crazy

over Byrne’s PowerPoint pieces. They put up huge flat-screen multimedia presentations

in the lobby of their magnificent office building in Times Square, and then

sponsored a talk between Byrne and Lawrence Weschler at the 92nd Street Y. (They

also had a dinner at Lever House and a big after-party in Byrne’s honour, but

I wasn’t invited to those.)

The effect of all this attention was to make Byrne’s work seem very important

– a groundbreaking new direction in visual art, perhaps, or maybe even

an effective counterpoint to Tufte’s grumblings. The headline on the article,

after all, is "Learning to Love PowerPoint".

But at the 92nd Street Y, it rapidly became apparent that Byrne basically agrees

wholeheartedly with everything Tufte is saying. He started off with a series

of PowerPoint slides designed expressly to make us laugh at the medium and its

limitations, and then went on to explain how it was those very limitations which

attracted him to PowerPoint as an artform.

At the unveiling of the pieces in the Condé Nast building, he said,

one of the building’s tech-support types went up to him and asked why he hadn’t

created his pieces in Flash rather than PowerPoint, since using Flash would

have been so much easier. The answer, Byrne said, was precisely that using PowerPoint

was hard and that the software was decidedly buggy: when you run a series of

slides together with music in a slideshow, as Byrne does, you can’t be entirely

sure how the slides are going to morph into each other, or exactly at what point

in the show the music is going to kick in. There’s an element of chance there:

the same presentation, run on a slightly different computer, can create a significantly

different result.

I can see the attraction of that kind of thing to an artist, and in fact the

best bits of Byrne’s slide presentations are precisely the bits where PowerPoint

proves buggiest: the jerky dissolves from one frame into another, say, or the

bizarre points at which the presentation freezes for no obvious reason. But

even Byrne admits that the whole thing is a bit of a con, really: the main reason

that some people find the presentations artistically interesting is that moving

images combined with music are nearly always compelling enough to hold attention.

That’s why music videos are so successful. We can’t watch one on mute for very

long, and much of the music might not be to our taste, but put the two together,

and we’ll happily watch.

Byrne once described his music as a way of forcing people to listen to his

lyrics, and in these works he’s doing much the same thing. He uses a Ligeti

piece, say, as a way of keeping attention while putting together an allusive

series of slides on the subject of phrenology.

In the real world, of course, almost no one uses music in their PowerPoint

presentations, and the only sound in the room is usually the presenter droning

on monotonously, laboriously reading out every last word on every last slide.

And as the NASA investigative board – as well as the journalists covering

the story – found out, a lot of the time PowerPoint presentations are

simply printed out or emailed in lieu of distributing a conventionally-written

report.

Every few months I give out various awards in my guise as the Latin America

correspondent for Euromoney, and I get dozens of submissions from banks who

think they deserve a gong or two. If I didn’t put my foot down on a regular

basis, nearly all of these submissions would be in PowerPoint form: 3MB or 4MB

files which, if they don’t crash my computer completely, certainly slow it down

and make reading the submission a painfully laborious process.

Banks like sending PowerPoint submissions because they can insert all manner

of pretty corporate logos and country maps, but a lot of what they’re doing

is simply inertia: "submission" is more or less synonymous with "PowerPoint

presentation" these days.

Of course, there should be a world of difference: PowerPoint was never designed

to convey information on its own. The most interesting part of Byrne’s appearance

at the 92nd Street Y, for instance, was not his PowerPoint pieces, but rather

the presentation which he put together expressly for the talk. He had a series

of slides, some interesting, some funny, but he made sure that they complemented

what he was saying, rather than reflecting it. He understands that PowerPoint

is a tool which can be used as part of a presentation and that it is emphatically

not the same as the presentation itself. In fact, I would go as far as to say

that a good PowerPoint presentation (and such things do exist) should be pretty

much incomprehensible to anybody seeing only the slides and not listening to

what the presenter is saying. (Of course, there are always exceptions.)

The best example of a great PowerPoint presentation that I can find on the

web is this one by Lawrence

Lessig, which can also be reached from this

page if you’re having any difficulties with audio or video. But Lessig is

not the only high-profile master of the medium: Steve Jobs has long been legendary

for his Stevenotes, one of which is online here.

What Lessig and Jobs have in common is that they talk with conviction and enthusiasm

for their subject, and give carefully-written speeches which are more or less

free-standing. Have a look at Lessig’s lectures:

they read like speeches, and are clearly written in a very different manner

to his academic papers.

Those speeches are then enhanced with PowerPoint’s visuals, which can be used

to drive home a message even as Lessig himself is saying something a bit more

subtle.

Unfortunately, the tens of millions of people with PowerPoint generally aren’t

good speechwriters, and invariably don’t have any speechwriters available to

construct their presentations for them. So they resort to PowerPoint’s helpful

content wizard. There’s a whole default presentation called "Communicating

Bad News", for instance, which includes slides like this.

Never mind the fact that the graphics are appalling, this kind of hand-holding

is almost guaranteed to end up producing presentations of astonishing superficiality,

with, as Tufte would put it, "a rate of information transfer asymptotically

approaching zero".

No content wizard is ever going to be able to make people sit down and work

out an interesting and compelling way of communicating information, and no gussied-up

graphics are going to turn a bad presentation into a good one. (That’s why Keynote,

Apple’s competition to PowerPoint, is not going to do much good for anyone.)

And yet PowerPoint can still, very occasionally, be a powerful tool for enhanced

communication. I’d just make a few (bullet) points, with a tip of the hat to

Hasan:

• A series of slides will never turn a bad speech into a good one. So start

  with the speech, and then use the slides to illustrate it, rather than the

  other way around.

• If you’re reading your slides, they have too much information on them.
• Graphs and tables are perfect material for slides. Just remember what you

  learned in The Visual

  Display of Quantitative Information, and avoid Excel or PowerPoint defaults.

• It is not necessary for every slide to be self-explanatory, but, on the

  other hand, you do not need to go out of your way to explain every slide.

  The slides and the speech are parallel and complementary information streams:

  use each to convey the information it’s best suited for.

Finally, and most importantly,

• Write out your speech in advance, and think about how it

  will be received: place yourself in the position of a listener. Jokes are

  always good, and remember that now you have the extra option of throwing in

  visual jokes as well as verbal ones. Enjoy yourself, and the chances are that

  your audience will enjoy themselves too.

I promise – promise – that this will be absolutely, positively,

my last WTC post. This week, anyway. My piece yesterday

was in response to some good questions which were asked back in January and

which I felt I could take a stab at answering. But today there’s a whole new

slew of WTC pieces, which are extremely disparaging and skeptical about the

Libeskind plan, and which deserve a considered response.

Clay

Risen, Greg

Allen, and Megan

McArdle have all written variations on a theme: basically that the WTC site

has been hijacked by the forces of commercialism and is doomed to become a horribly

commerical real-estate development with nary a thought for the greater good.

Much of what they write is sheer rhetoric: it’s hard to argue with a bald assertion

like Risen’s statement that "because of the fast-waning public interest

in the rebuilding, the entire process is at risk of disaster." But there

are a few misconceptions in these pieces which are worth correcting.

Risen, for instance, says that

Last week Westfield, the Australian mall corporation that held the retail

rights to the World Trade Center, took a cash settlement and pulled out, throwing

a screwball at the rebuilding negotiations.

This is completely topsy-turvey: Westfield had been adamant that it wanted

contiguous retail space – it is a mall operator, after all – and

that shops on streets were unacceptable. With Westfield’s departure, the rebuilding

negotiations become a lot easier, not more difficult. It’s hard to see how Risen

can think otherwise, unless he’s so blinded by prior conviction that automatically

all news must be bad news.

Risen also says that the Port Authority, the city, and the federal government

are at fault for refusing to force Larry Silverstein "into a cash settlement

or demanding that he agree to trade for a lease on similar properties elsewhere."

He’s echoed by McArdle:

In the event that more office space is needed in lower Manhattan, there are

other places to put it. There are several underutilized sites in the area,

such as the lot which before 9/11 housed a tiny Orthodox Church and a large

parking lot, both destroyed in the collapse. If the city wanted to, it could

use its power of eminent domain, and an expedited approval process, to give

Mr. Silverstein enough land to replace all the office space he lost.

Is it really possible that McArdle hasn’t even looked at the plans

which she decries as silly and incoherent? The lot she’s talking about is smaller

than one of the footprints of one of the WTC towers. Each

tower had about 4 million square feet of office space, and that was building

much taller than the 70 or so stories which is the practical maximum for a new

office building. Silverstein would find it very difficult to get a building

of much more than 1 million square feet out of that site, and completely impossible

to get anywhere near 2 million square feet. What he’s entitled to, on the other

hand, is 10 million square feet. The kind of land area needed to reach that

total is simply not available in Manhattan’s business districts, eminent domain

or no. The only place it exists is at the WTC site.

Now, Risen’s right that, in theory, Silverstein could be bought off with a

cash settlement rather than office space. But he doesn’t seem to understand

the cashflow situation here: far from the taxpayer giving money to Silverstein

to go away, Silverstein is actually the central, necessary source of funds for

rebuilding the WTC site in the first place. It is Silverstein who held the insurance

contracts on the World Trade Center, you see, and without those insurance proceeds,

nothing is going to get built on the site at all.

McArdle would like that: she just wants the entire site grassed over, with

nothing there at all. It’s one of those proposals, a bit like building the Gaudí

tower or rebuilding the original towers just as they were, which has a certain

amount of conceptual appeal but is completely unrealistic. For one thing, Silverstein

has a contractual right to his office space. For another, the Port Authority

simply can’t operate without the income from the site – and that doesn’t

mean just the PATH trains, it also means JFK and LaGuardia airports, as well

as Brooklyn’s ports. The financial cost to New York City and the states of New

York and New Jersey would be in the high billions – this is not money

which is in any sense available.

McArdle is also unhelpful when it comes to defining exactly what she means

by "the site". From what she writes, it would seem to be the 16 acres

bounded by Vesey, Church, Liberty and West streets. But the very existence of that

site is testament to everything which was bad about 1970s planning: the only

urban site in Manhattan which is nearly as big is Rockefeller Center. Steets

like Greenwich and Fulton were idiotically destroyed when the World Trade Center

was built, and it makes all the sense in the world to bring them back and help

restore street life to lower Manhattan. Leaving the entire 16 acres as empty

space would be a huge "fuck you" to the residents of Battery Park

City and the inhabitants of the World Financial Center, who, trust me, do not

appreciate being stuck on the wrong side of a major highway without any real

interaction with the rest of the city.

It would also be an act of desperation and unbridled pessimism. McArdle declares

that "it seems we can’t" have a great new building, without explaining

why we can’t have a great new building, why Libeskind’s plans preclude one,

or what buildings in the world actually are great and new. Is there something

about Santiago Calatrava she doesn’t like? After all, he’s been commissioned

to design one of the greatest of the new buildings on the site, and certainly

the one which virtually all visitors to the area will enter at some point. But

no, McArdle is so certain that we can’t have something good that she’d rather

have nothing at all. For me, that is not the way that New York City, the capital

of the world, should behave or believe.

It’s also worth pointing out that the area bounded by Greenwich, Fulton, Liberty

and West Streets is enormous in and of itself, and that if a large chunk of

it is going to be green, then it will be much larger than any other park downtown.

A memorial competition is going on right now to design the area in the best

possible way, completely untouched by Silverstein or any commercial considerations.

The only buildings in that quadrant will be cultural, and will be carefully

incorporated into the plan by whomever wins the memorial competition. McArdle

can’t criticise the winner of the memorial competition, of course, because it

hasn’t been announced yet, but why not have a little bit of faith that we’ll

end up with something better than nothing?

Libeskind’s plan does lots of things which will be great for New York. It will

unify neighborhoods which currently have almost no interaction with each other,

from the area south of Liberty Street all the way up, via Battery Park City

and Tribeca, to Chinatown. It will provide a crucial new transportation hub,

and much-needed new cultural facilities – more than 100 cultural organisations

have applied for homes there. It understands that New York City is the ultimate

urban environment, and that skyscrapers belong here – and to

that end, it will restore the skyline and give this town the tallest building

in the world for the ninth or tenth time. It also allows for the construction

of new office buildings – something which you’d think would be unexceptionable

in New York, but which all the critics seem to consider prima facie

deplorable.

Writes Risen:

The rebuilding of the World Trade Center site is of singular importance in

the history of America’s urban environment. It is the moment when the

world of private development, in the form of Larry Silverstein and his dreams

of profit-maximizing skyscrapers, invaded the public realm. It is up to the

city’s political leaders, then, to do something before Silverstein’s

actions set a precedent.

He’s wrong: the whole reason that Silverstein is involved in the World Trade

Center rebuilding to begin with is precisely because it was a commercial development.

New York City has always had an enormous amount of private development, and

it is private development which is responsible for it being one of the greatest

cities in the world. The only reason that the site is in the public realm at

all is because the Port Authority is a state-owned organisation, and that the

destruction of September 11 affected the public as a whole and not just a couple

of tall commercial buildings. But to take a 16-acre site in the middle of the

USA’s third-largest central business district and to use it either for nothing

or for purely public works would be lunacy of the highest order.

Back from a long weekend, there’s lots of fabulous new stuff I want to blog

about, but first I want to get the last of the WTC stuff off my chest. My last

post, on the design revisions, got a lot of inbound links, largely, I think,

because the mainstream media isn’t giving this story the detailed coverage it

deserves. Part of the problem is that the news trickles out slowly, and there’s

no real news hook to hang a big WTC story on.

Anyway, the excellent World New York linked

to me on Thursday, and pointed me back to some questions

he’d asked back in January. They’re good questions, so I’m going to try to answer

them here. He’s particularly keen on what he calls the "six-foot view,"

something he says which seems to have been overlooked in the site plan so far.

Never mind what the buildings are going to look like from the Statue of Liberty,

he says: what are they going to look like from six feet away?

This is a very good question, and one that no one can answer, largely because

none of the buildings have been designed yet. The site plan is basically just

that – a master plan for the site as a whole – and only two of the

buildings even have architects: Santiago Calatrava for the train station and

David Childs for the Freedom Tower. I’m a much bigger fan of Calatrava than

I am of Childs, who’s responsible for the AOL Time Warner monstrosity currently

being constructed at Columbus Circle. But I’m also cautiously optimistic about

the six-foot view in general, and can answer some of the questions posed in

January.

When you stand a body’s length from the skin of the building,

peer in? Are there newsstands? Benches? Bike racks?

At street level, the office towers are going to read largely as retail space.

The idea is to surround the core of the buildings with shops, which enhance

street life. The towers themselves are largely set back from the street, so

they’ll be very hard to see without craning your neck. Obviously, shops nearly

always want as many windows as possible, so yes, there’ll be lots of those.

And as for street furniture like newsstands, benches and bike racks, I’m sure

they’ll be there too. Libeskind is adamant that this become a vibrant new residential

neighborhood and not a soulless central business district. The absence of things

like bike racks is usually a result of no one taking responsibility for such

things. In this case, contrariwise, everybody from the Port Authority and the

LMDC to the city and state of New York is falling over themselves to make sure

that the district works as a pleasant place to live, work, and visit. You’re

much more likely to get bickering over the kind of bike racks to install than

you are to have their necessity overlooked entirely.

Can five tourists walk abreast and still leave room for accelerated

New Yorkers watching their Bostonians?

Insofar as this is possible anywhere in Manhattan, it will be possible here.

The new streets – Greenwich and Fulton – are first and foremost

for pedestrians, with wide sidewalks and lots of trees. There’s a lot of greenery,

too, on the revamped Liberty Street. Even West Street will be great if it gets

buried, although I have to admit I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Are there shops visible from the street—local shops, preferably?

The first part of the question is an easy yes, but the second part is tougher.

The WTC site is not going to grow organically like most of the rest of the city:

it’s going to be built by developers who are going to market it as a hot new

retail destination. Westfield America, the mall operator who ran the shops in

the World Trade Center, is no longer involved, but someone else will surely

take over responsibility for the retail part of the site as a whole. And given

that there’s going to be 600,000 square feet of retail to fill, I have a feeling

that the chain stores we had there before are likely to come back, maybe with

a big department store anchor. The new site won’t feel like a shopping mall

in the way the old one did, but it probably will feel like a shopping mall in

the way the Upper West Side does at the moment. I think that a large number

of national chain stores is an inevitability, if only because – obviously

– there can’t be any small local shops who have been there for generations.

Judging by the World Financial Center, there might be a few independent restaurants,

but the shops are likely to be pretty bland and corporate. Still, Century 21

is still going to be right there on Church Street, and a walk up Fulton Street

to Nassau Street will bring you back to the realm of unique New York retail.

Have piss corners been avoided? Piss corners: you know, those uncomfortable

Have windowless and doorless walls been avoided?

Since virtually all the street frontage is going to be retail, I think you’re

ok on the piss-corners and blank-walls front. While you do occasionally see

rubbish in a storefront’s doorway, the kind of thing you’re talking about usually

happens in business districts without a retail presence.

Have delivery bays and trash areas been made as small as possible,

placed inside the building, in a courtyard or basement?

They’ve been placed underneath the buildings, off a subterranean road

which can only be accessed by trucks which pass a special security area to the

south of Liberty Street. The solution is pretty much ideal from a street-life

perspective: there should be no trucks on Fulton or Greenwich at all.

Have the trees been given room to grow? Or will they forever be saplings,

area for those who have to be there rather than want to be there?

I’m sure the trees have been given room to grow: the LMDC has the best consultants

in the world on such matters. At night, the idea is that the area is going to

be a cultural center, with a performing arts center, restaurants, and all the

other things which will make people want to go there in the evenings, rather

than simply get out of there once the work day is over. The financial district

always has been pretty bleak at nights and weekends, but I’m hoping the new

WTC plan will change all that.

Are the public spaces contiguously external and internal?

Yes: Cortlandt Street, which becomes a pedestrianised internal shopping precinct

when it crosses Church Street, is a good example. There are multiple levels

to the plan, and a lot of what you call contiguousness between external and

internal: for instance, you can walk from the World Financial Center through

to the new train station along wide pedestrian pathways which continue all the

way up to Broadway and beyond. It’s hard to say for sure, because much of the

detailed design work hasn’t been done yet, but the idea is very much to have

a light-filled and pleasant walk around the non-memorial areas of the site which

makes it very easy to get to, say, the World Financial Center or the various

PATH and subway lines. The 600,000 square feet of retail is on many different

levels, from below ground to above it, and no one has any interest in recreating

the fluorescent nightmare that was the original shopping mall. The retail presence,

indeed, is likely to provide another easy way of getting from the below-ground

areas to street level and back, just as you used to be able to walk from the

subway to the street through Borders rather than going up the public staircase.

Are the memorial areas level with the street? Are all the public areas

entered through wide, welcoming gateways?

The memorial competition is ongoing, and no one will know for sure what it’s

going to look like until the results are announced. But at the moment, the memorial

area is sunk about 30 feet below street level, so that it’s separated from the

bustle of the street life. The slurry walls and a new waterfall will give it

auditory isolation, so that you don’t feel like you’re in the middle of a city

while you’re there, and people on the street will probably be able to go about

their business without feeling that they’re intruding on an important spiritual

experience. As for the gateways, again, that’s unclear. They won’t be there

at the beginning, but as the site plan progresses and more of the buildings

get built, they should start appearing.

It’s certainly the case that architects like thinking big, and that if you’re

designing the world’s highest building you might not spend quite the optimum

amount of time thinking about whether people are going to be able to chain their

bikes to lampposts. Some people are mistrustful of all grand plans, and are

much happier if neighborhoods are just left to develop on their own, but that’s

impossible in this situation, and the LMDC is surely the next best thing. For

the time being, I’m confident that these questions are being asked and that

we’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results as they begin to appear. The problem

is one of timing: since everything can’t be constructed at once, what will the

streets be like when they first open? My fear is that they’ll be a little too

pristine, too much like the new piers in the Hudson River Park, without any

New York City grittiness. I don’t want to see the suburbanisation of downtown

New York spread from Battery Park City to the WTC site, but I have to admit

I don’t have any bright ideas about how to prevent that.

It’s been over seven months since Daniel Libeskind was officially

chosen as the architect in charge of the World Trade Center site, and a

lot of us have been wondering what, if anything, has been going on. Well, today

we got our answer: a lot, and it’s pretty much all good. Contra Eward

Wyatt’s alarmist

reporting last week, the changes which have been made since February are

nearly all for the better, and we have now moved, as Kevin Rampe, the CEO of

the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said today, "from a great

vision to a great plan".

The

most important element of the revised

plan –I took a photo of the model, which you can click on for a bigger

version – is the fact that the fate of the Deutsche Bank building (formerly

the Bankers Trust building) is no longer in question. That land is needed and

will be taken – negotiations with Deutsche Bank are ongoing,

but it was made very clear today that the bank will be forced to sell by eminent

domain if necessary. Added to that, a small parcel of land next door, which

used to house St Nicholas’ Church, faces the same fate.

The new land gives Libeskind a lot more breathing room, opening up an L-shaped

parcel which, it turns out, is vital for all manner of reasons. At the moment,

the Deutsche Bank building runs all the way from Albany Street to Liberty Street

(the southern boundary of the World Trade Center site), obliterating Cedar Street

between Greenwich and Washington. In the new plan, the L will be cut the other

way, with Cedar Street restored, creating a large park to the south of the World

Trade Center Site bounded by Cedar, Greenwich, Liberty and West Streets. Washington

Street, which currently runs all the way to Liberty Sreet, will now stop at

Cedar.

The plan at the moment – although this can change – is to build

a new Saint Nicholas’ Church more or less where the old one used to be. Otherwise,

however, the new two-block-long site will be largely empty: called Liberty Street

Park, it will be a place to sit and relax near the new office towers, close

to but not part of the memorial across the street. The really interesting stuff

goes on below the new park – both in terms of up-down and in terms of

north-south.

For the reintroduction of Cedar Street creates a new city block between Cedar,

Greenwich, Washington and Albany, all of which will be taken up with a new tower

(Tower 5) housing some 1.7 million square feet of office space. The 10 million

square feet of office space which now need to be rebuilt in total can be spread

out over much more space, giving the new towers a bit of breathing room, and

allowing small floor plates. What that means in practice is that the towers

are more commercial, since it’s easier to rent out more smaller floors than

it is fewer big ones; it also means that they don’t read quite so much as a

wall of buildings separating the World Trade Center site from the rest of lower

Manhattan.

The initial spiralling design remains; indeed, the addition of a fifth tower

(which was actually in Libeskind’s plans all along, albeit not quite as far

south as it is now) only serves to emphasise the visual path along the towers’

rooftops, from the 57-storey new building slowly up to the 70-storey office

block which makes up the base of the new Freedom Tower. The Freedom Tower (Tower

1) itself remains unchanged in Libeskind’s imagining, although there will surely

be a lot of negotiating between him and the architect, David Childs. Everybody

is adamant, however, that the symbolic 1,776-foot height will remain, as will

the off-center spire designed to echo the torch of the Statue of Liberty.

Now that the two towers on the south-east corner of the site can be made much

smaller, the revised design has much more freedom to play with their placement

on their city blocks. They can now spriral out, away from the recreated Greenwich

Street, with Tower 4 taking up the south-west corner of the block between Greenwich,

Liberty, Church and Cortlandt Streets.Cortlandt Street actually plays an important

role in the new plan: it now extends, as a pedestrian shopping precinct, all

the way to Greenwich Street. The narrowed-down Tower 4 leaves a lot of space

in the rest of the block for a major retail presence – enough for a big

department store, or any other kind of anchor tenant that the new retail developer

might want.

The new plan takes full advantage of the fact that Westfield America, who had

the rights to run the new retail space, has now pulled out entirely, being bought

off, essentially, by the LMDC and the Port Authority. Westfield specialises

in mid-Western shopping malls, and was adamant that it wanted large amounts

of contiguous retail space much like the dingy mall which was destroyed on September

11. That was never going to happen, but Westfield was always a major thorn in

Libeskind’s side, and its departure from the scene is a great relief to everybody

who has high hopes for this project. Now, a lot of the retail space is arranged

vertically rather than horizontally: going down to the concourse level of the

new train station, and going up two or three stories from street level.

To the north of Cortlandt Street, Tower 3 is nestled next door to just that

train station, basically on the corner of Church and Dey. While Tower 4 sits

on Greenwich Street, Tower 3 sits on Church Street, giving a bit more west-east

movement to the spriral. Again, there’s space for large-floor-plan retail between

Greenwich Street and the new tower, which should be easily incorporated into

the station, which is being designed by the great Spanish architect Santiago

Calatrava.

The north edge of the train station is the southern edge of the Wedge of Light,

which is now actually slightly larger than it was in February. On the other

side of this great public plaza, Tower 2 stands right on what should be one

of the greatest crossroads in the world: the corner of Fulton and Greenwich,

September 11 Place. Because Greenwich Street is not north-south so much as northwest-southeast,

Tower 2 is well to the west of Tower 4, and brings the spiral back towards the

great Tower 1 over on West Street.

But back to Liberty Street Park: what’s going on underneath it is actually

more important than what’s going on to its south. Office buildings need truck

access, you see, and there simply wasn’t any way to build secure truck ramps

and parking facilities within the confines of the World Trade Center site –

especially if the wishes of the families of the September 11 victims were to

be upheld, and nothing – not even an underground truck ramp – could

be built on the footprints of the Twin Towers. So now Liberty Street Park is

essentially a pretty, green roof for a massive truck-security operation which

then leads to an underground road which has access to all five towers in a big

loop. It’s crucially important infrastructure, and an elegant solution to a

seemingly intractable problem.

It’s very clear that a lot of very driven people are working extremely hard

to get a visionary plan built – at least in its initial stages –

within a very compressed timeframe of just four years from now. It’s also clear

that the Port Authority is a central player in this process: while in general

increasing the number of cooks tends to spoil the broth, no one’s really talking

any more about removing the Port Authority from the rebuilding by swapping its

World Trade Center land for the land which New York City owns under JFK and

LaGuardia airports. Indeed, New York City and Michael Bloomberg seem quite content,

at the moment, to take a back seat and let the LMDC and Port Authority do most

of the heavy lifting. That’s probably wise: the single most important person

in the whole scheme remains George Pataki, and there’s no point stepping on

his toes and telling him how to do things at this stage.

With the departure of Westfield America and the clear determination to take

control of the Deutsche Bank site, this plan really looks as though it is actually

going to get built. It’s expensive, of course, and the chances are that West

Street will not be buried underground despite desperate attempts by Libeskind

and the LMDC to get the funding to do that. The Freedom Tower will be on West

Street, where it makes architectural sense, and not next to the train station,

where Larry Silverstein wants it; the rest of the towers, so long as they’re

basically the right height, shouldn’t pose much of a problem.

We have yet to see even the most preliminary ideas of what the memorial might

look like, of course, and if that turns out to be a big and ambitious scheme

then chunks of the site plan as it presently stands could well change substantially.

Especially in the area of the footprints, the present scheme is extremely vague,

to give as much freedom as possible to the memorial designers. The exposed slurry

wall will certainly remain; the waterfall on the south-east corner of the site

probably will; and the rest is completely uncertain.

But even ignorant of what’s going to go in the middle, it’s clear that New

York is going to have a vibrant new downtown, complete with a set of new skyscrapers

which actually work – instead of compete – with each other. Anybody

who’s been to the Toronto Dominion Center knows what can happen when office

towers work in unison: it’s pure architectural poetry, and elevates the space

and the spirit. Today, I’m more confident than ever that such a thing can happen

in New York City.

Terry Teachout, arts blogger extraordinaire, reported

Thursday on Zankel Hall, the new 650-seat auditorium at Carnegie Hall. I would

link to its website, but I’m allergic to horrible Flash pages, so I shan’t.

I was fascinated to read Teachout’s piece, which was much more useful than the

coverage by Tommasini

and Muschamp

in the Times. But I was brought up short by one comment:

In the seating setup used at the media preview, the parterre level of the

auditorium had no center aisle and each row was about 20 seats long, meaning

that latecomers will have to stumble over earlycomers, just as they do in

the New York State Theatre. I hope the managers of the hall will try out a

center aisle at some point.

Well, I hope they won’t – or at least, if they do, that they will decide

it was nothing but an unsuccessful experiment. To be sure, bobbing up and down

as an earlycomer is a bit annoying, and it would be wonderful if we could all

be magically teletransported directly into our seats. But no reputable concert

hall will allow latecomers to try to reach their seats once the concert has

started, so it doesn’t affect the experience of listening to the music. On the

other hand, the presence of a center aisle certainly does affect that

experience, and it does so adversely.

The main reason, of course, that concert halls don’t like center aisles is

that they obliterate the best seats in the house as surely as a Robert Moses

expressway: this does huge damage to their revenues. But there are very good

aesthetic reasons to oppose center aisles as well.

For a concert is more than a group of people listening to musicians –

it is equally a group of musicians playing to the public. There’s something

about the presence of an appreciative audience that brings out the best in a

performer, and there’s something rather dispiriting about playing to empty space.

This weekend marked the finale of the greatest music festival in the world:

the BBC Proms. I’ve been to hundreds

of Proms in my time, and there’s no doubt that part of what makes them so great

is the audience. Ask any member of the Berlin Philharmonic: they’ll tell you

that they play better at the Proms because the audience has the perfect combination

of rapt attention and enthusiasm. The Albert Hall probably has the worst acoustics

of any major concert hall in the world, but it doesn’t matter: it’s still the

site of most of the greatest concert performances I’ve ever been privileged

enough to attend.

Now that which makes the Proms great, audience-wise, cannot really be replicated

elsewhere. For one thing, the best seats in the house are also the the cheapest

seats in the house – and they’re not seats at all, since in the arena,

the audience stands. For another, the Albert Hall at full capacity holds some

5,000 people: even the monstrous Carnegie Hall doesn’t break the 3,000 barrier.

Never will someone at Zankel Hall experience the intense, amazing silence of

5,000 people almost holding their breath as Claudio Abbado lets the final notes

of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony echo around the circular auditorium, until you’re

not sure if it’s the Berlin Philharmonic’s music you’re hearing any more or

if it’s just your memory of it. Neither will a New York concertgoer get caught

up in the kind of endless, exilharating applause which follows, the kind of

foot-stamping riotousness that continues even once the orchestra has left the

stage, and which brings Abbado back, alone, for one final bow.

But at the very least, New York audiences can hope that the best seats in the

house exist, and that in a medium-sized venue they will be filled with

music enthusiasts rather than corporate junketeers. A center aisle, while not

as bad in a concert hall as it is in a theatre, is still a void which puts a

damper on any musical performance – not to mention screwing up the acoustics,

which are generally designed on the understanding that any sound reaching ground

level will be absorbed by soft bodies, rather than bounced back by hard flooring.

And Zankel Hall is going to be home to a very eclectic range of music, from

all over the world: we’re not just talking chamber orchestras who mainly stare

either at their sheet music or at the conductor. Just about all the rest of

the music which is going to be performed at Zankel Hall has a much more direct

bond between performer and audience: we’re moving towards theatre here, not

away from it. I’m looking forward to world music gigs at Zankel Hall which follow

the lead of the Proms and take the seating out of the parterre entirely: let

the audience stand, move and dance! Why should it be that when a musician plays

downtown, at Tonic, say, or the Knitting

Factory, the audience stands, but when the same person plays uptown, the

audience is always seated? And of course, the only thing worse than having an

audience sitting down is not having an audience at all – having a whopping

great empty space where people should rightly be.

I have not yet been to Zankel Hall, but I am sure that the idea behind its

design was to have a relatively intimate shoebox: I’m thinking something along

the lines of the original Glyndebourne here. Center aisles destroy intimacy,

especially when the auditorium is deeper than it is wide. They should be avoided

as much as possible.

Most journalists are pretty receptive to arguments about the importance of

intellectual property: after all, we make a living producing just that. But

at the same time, it’s often clear when things go too far. I’ve yet to hear

a cogent defense of the Copyright

Term Extension Act, for instance, which was passed by Congress in 1998 basically

to ensure that Walt Disney retained copyright over Mickey Mouse, who first appeared

in 1928. (Never mind that Walt Disney himself created Mickey from an already-existing

out-of-copyright character.)

As I’ve mentioned

on MemeFirst, the best introduction to IP issues I know is a PowerPoint

presentation by Lawrence Lessig which I can’t recommend highly enough. Listen

to the first part, at the very minimum, before he gets all geeky about the Digital

Millennium Copyright Act.

This isn’t just about what Dan

Gillmor calls our dwindling heritage: old books not being available because

the copyright owners won’t print them and no one else is allowed to. The IP

zealots would have copyright last "forever less a day" (in Jack Valenti’s

formulation) and would certainly not allow Brazil, say, to manufacture AIDS

drugs which neither the sovereign nor its population could conceivably afford

to buy from the large pharmaceutical companies. Millions of lives are potentially

at stake here, and while Saturday’s development

at the WTO is a step in the right direction, it’s still not clear just how

much good it’s going to achieve.

What I find interesting are the cases in the middle. We can all agree that

someone selling pirate copies of the latest Harry Potter book is doing wrong,

whereas posting

a couple of clearly-labelled fake ads is not a criminal offense. Marty Schwimmer,

the lawyer who helped me out in the Puma case, has his own weblog, and he’s

much more of an IP zealot than I am: take a look at this entry

of his from Friday.

Firstly,

Schwimmer praises a Washington Post article

about a Herman Miller marketing

campaign called Get Real. It’s an attempt to get people to buy authentic

Herman Miller furniture rather than cheaper knock-offs, and it centers on two

designs which Herman Miller has managed

to get "trade dress" protection for: the Noguchi coffee table of 1944

and the Eames lounge chair and ottoman of 1956.

"Inferior manufacture means less value to the customer," says Schwimmer,

loyally, but I’m not at all sure. Take the table, for instance, which has already

been Herman Miller’s intellectual property for 59 years. Herman Miller is perfectly

free to continue to manufacture this item for as long as there’s demand for

it, but how much longer should it be able to do so exclusively? After

all, part of the attractiveness of the design is its incredible simplicity:

two identical pieces of wood, held together by nothing but gravity, with a simple

glass top.

The Herman Miller table, according to the Washington Post, has a "signed,

3/4 -inch glass top and ‘flawless’ finish on the wooden base," but those

features are ultimately secondary to the conceptual beauty of the piece’s design.

I’m sure that Herman Miller puts a lot of effort into getting those wooden base

pieces beautifully buffed, but I’m not sure that any number of other companies

and individuals couldn’t do an equally good job. Why not let the people who

want a signed tabletop go to Herman Miller, and allow everybody else to choose

among Noguchi tables made by all manner of artisans and cheap importers?

Herman Miller is at its least convincing when it says in its press release

that imitation "inhibits future investments in innovation" –

while this might conceivably be true in the case of drugs, which can cost billions

of dollars to develop, it’s hardly true in furniture, where thousands of designers

are working every day on new designs. Furniture design is not a capital-intensive

business, and large sums of money flowing to the Noguchi estate aren’t going

to make the design world any more innovative.

Good design should be as accessible as possible, and keeping the Noguchi table

at $1,000-or-you-can’t-have-it doesn’t help that cause in the slightest. Besides,

Herman Miller specialises in "authorized reproductions": most of the

time, the only real difference between a Herman Miller piece and a high-quality

knock-off is that the former is "authorized" and a lot more expensive.

Originals – the battered old pieces you see in museums – are another

thing entirely. Unless Herman Miller can convincingly explain why these designs

should remain its intellectual property forever, I think it’s time for the company

to stop litigating and start releasing some of the older ones into the public

domain.

Schwimmer doesn’t stop with the Get Real campaign, however: he then embarks

on one of his own, to enact some kind of censorship on the Rocky Mountain News.

That newspaper ran a column

on Thursday about fake handbags, explaining that while the Louis Vuitton’s Takashi

Murakami "Alma" style bag goes for $1,030 and has a wait list of 700

people in Denver alone, copies can be found on the internet quite easily.

This will come as no surprise whatsoever to anybody who’s done a web search

for such a thing: it’s very hard to find on louisvuitton.com, impossible to

find on eluxury.com, the lvmh online store, and incredibly easy to find if what

you’re looking for is a copy. But apparently no newspaper should be allowed

to report that: Schwimmer seems to think that knock-offs are so illegal

that even mentioning them, or saying where they can be found, should

be a criminal offense. "I will be surprised if the Rocky Mountain piece

stays online past the weekend," he says: "They are likely to hear

from LVMH, Burberry or Dooney and Bourke by then."

Does the Rocky Mountain News piece constitute irresponsible journalism? Perhaps.

The authors are bringing a great design to a readership that they know could

never afford the real thing: I can guarantee you that no one read the article,

discovered that there were knock-offs avaialble, took her name off the Louis

Vuitton mailing list, and bought a copy on the internet instead. The irony,

of course, is that if you want the real thing, the copies make it more,

not less, attractive: they’re the ultimate arbiter of which designs are the

hottest right now.

Of course, advertisers in the Rocky Mountain News would be well within their

rights to boycott the Lifestyles section if it continues to run articles like

this to which they object. But I see nothing in the article which overrides

the newspaper’s First Amendment rights to publish it in the first place, and

in fact I find it refreshing that something like this can appear in print. There’s

a lot of hypocrisy in journalism: all that’s happening here is that a couple

of women are publishing information which they’ve been telling their friends

for months.

We’ll see how long the story stays up. But in the mean time, as you’ve probably

noticed, I’m experimenting with a new way of generating revenue from my own

intellectual property. This website has been a help to my freelance career:

magazines will sometimes approach me after reading what I’ve written on certain

subjects, and it’s now a lot easier for prospective employers to get an idea

of what my writing is like. But I would like it if the website could actually

make money (just a few dollars would be fine) on a stand-alone basis, so I’ve

started running ads down the right-hand side.

The ads are served by Google, and I have no control over what they are: I do

not endorse the websites they’re advertising, and I do not ask that you visit

them. If and when someone clicks on one of the ads, I’ll receive a few cents:

I’ll need about 400 clickthroughs a month to cover my web hosting fees. I’ll

keep you posted as and when I get any money; I’m sure you’ll let me know in

the comments box if you find the ads too intrusive. My hope is that they simply

make the site look more professional. I don’t suppose there’s any chance that’s the case.

Four years ago, I went to a wonderful wedding on an island in the Thames, between

a hot young MBA and a hotter, younger stand up comic turned newspaper columnist.

The columnist, protocol be damned, decided she was going to give a speech at

her own wedding, and gave a corker. The highlight was when she started to talk

about her new groom’s bathroom cabinet, and whether she’d ever manage to get

any space in there for herself. She recalled a conversation with her father:

"Don’t worry, I said, you’re not losing a daughter. You’re gaining one."

I would like to think that this wedding constituted the impetus for the coinage

of America’s latest buzzword: after all, everybody knows that the US imports

everything cool from the UK. But, alas, although the word did indeed take root

in England before crossing the pond, it had already been around for five years

when the wedding took place.

Still, the meme took off incredibly slowly. Its first significant appearance

in the US came in July 2002, when queer theorist Mark

Simpson, the man who’d first introduced the term in the Independent in 1994,

wrote an

article in Salon called "Meet the metrosexual". One year later,

an article

by Warren St John headlined "Metrosexuals Come Out" appeared in the

New York Times, and the meme metastasized from snowball to avalanche, helped

along by a report from advertising agency Euro RSCG called "Metrosexuals:

The Future of Men".

In the meantime, it’s undergone an interesting emasculation. Simpson says

that when he invented the term he "was being slightly satirical about the

effect of consumerism and media proliferation, particularly glossy men’s

magazines, on traditional masculinity". Now, we get Dan Peres, the editor

of Details, opining

humourlessly on the subject at washingtonpost.com. In the introduction to

the chat session, the editors define a metrosexual as "a new kind of male:

one who takes care of himself — pampers himself — and is not ashamed of getting

facials, buying grooming products and shopping", but by the time the chat

is over, Peres has said that "if you feel comfortable and confident with

your own taste and sense of style, then yes, you may well be a metrosexual",

and that really, what we’re talking about here is nothing more or less than

being a gentleman.

Yet going back to Simpson’s Salon piece, we find this:

Mr. Beckham, candid to the point of blatant exhibitionism as he is, is not

being entirely honest with us about his sexuality. Outing someone is not a

thing to be contemplated lightly, but I feel it is my duty to let the world

know that David Beckham, role model to hundreds of millions of impressionable

boys around the world, heartthrob for equal numbers of young girls, is not

heterosexual after all. No, ladies and gents, the captain of the England football

squad is actually a screaming, shrieking, flaming, freaking metrosexual. (He’ll

thank me for doing this one day, if only because he didn’t have to tell his

mother himself.)

It’s clear what has happened here: as the term has become more mainstream,

it’s, well, become more mainstream. At this point, if you believe Peres, it applies

to anybody who "knows the difference between a daisy and a daffodil";

Simpson himself quotes the marketing report (of course, it’s the marketers who

have really pushed this concept) saying that a metrosexual is "any straight

man who has a salmon pink shirt in his wardrobe".

Maybe something got lost in translation: after all, pretty much every

straight man, in the UK at least, has a salmon pink shirt in his wardrobe. John

Major used to wear them the whole time, and he’s about as far from a metrosexual

as can be imagined. The only men I can think of who only wear white shirts are

bizarre zealots like Ross Perot and John Ashcroft, who aren’t so much anti-colour

as they are opposed to any sign of sexuality whatsoever.

I think what’s going on here is that a debate which has long been going on

in the gay community is being expanded into the straight community. Metrosexuality

is a response to sissyphobia,

which is the idea – common to men both straight and gay – that there’s

something offputting about effeminate men. As Patrick puts it on the Gothamist

comments board, "the guys who get the most shit are not necessarily

those who are gay but rather those who act gay, a high percentage of whom are

straight".

Why did the joke at the wedding get such a big laugh? Because caring about

personal appearance, owning lots of Product in the bathroom, is considered effeminate.

And that’s precisely what keeps a large proportion of straight men from buying

designer clothes or investing in their appearance, even if the basest of men’s

magazines – I pick up the copy of Loaded I have lying around

from my July 19 entry –

have pages and pages full of grooming products along with £280 ($445)

leather Hermes sandals.

So while Peres is keen to place clear blue water between metrosexuality and

the success of Queer

Eye for the Straight Guy, I’m not so sure: both are phenomena which

have caught on across the country and which have served to increase the country’s

general comfort level with effeminate heterosexual men.

On my recent trip to California (yes, that’s why this site hasn’t been updated

in so long), I met extremely straight, suburban, Republican men from towns like

Tustin and San Jose. All had heard of metrosexuals, and none of them seemed

perturbed by the concept, although they might never swing that way themselves.

I doubt they’ll be booking themselves in for manicures or shelling out hundreds

of dollars for designer trousers any time soon, but that’s not the point. The

point is how they will react when they meet men who do fall into that category:

will they respond with fear and aggression, or will they be more likely to embrace

such predilections as just another lifestyle choice, like a preference for ice

hockey over baseball?

As Simon Dumenco writes

in New York magazine, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy "brings

gay style—and wit—to the hinterlands. The show makes homosexuality

and shopping nonthreatening for straight men (the latter may be the bigger achievement)."

He continues:

The real agenda at play these days is, of course, the Buysexual Agenda. As

in: You are what you buy (not who you sleep with). It’s a uniquely American

idea that the nation that shops together stays together. If homos and heteros

like the same moisturizers and the same jeans, why can’t we all get

along?

In short, memes can make a difference: as metrosexuality becomes more widely

understood, it makes the world (or at least America) safer for gay and gay-acting

men. And if it takes increased sales of $1,000

messenger bags in order for that to happen, then surely that’s a small price

to pay.

It’s not been an easy week for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

The people who brought you one of the biggest public consultation exercises

of all time – the one culminating in the decision

to award Daniel Libeskind the mandate to design the new World Trade Center site

– now have $1.2 billion of federal money burning a hole in their corporate

pockets. This is money which is meant to be spent for the benefit of Lower Manhattan,

and so the LMDC has tried to ask the area’s residents what they think the money

should be spent on. The problem is that its Neighborhood Outreach Workshops

– or at least two of them – have been chaotic.

Here’s the relevant

bit from the LMDC website:

Specific LMDC activities and programs are presently funded by a $2.0 billion

Community Development Block Grant administered by the United States Department

of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for the World Trade Center disaster

recovery and rebuilding efforts and an anticipated second grant for $783 million

targeted for damaged properties and businesses, including the restoration

of utility infrastructure, as well as economic revitalization related to the

terrorists attacks, and to assist businesses that suffered disproportionate

loss of life from the September 11 attacks.

The LMDC scheduled six workshops: for the City Hall/Seaport area; for Battery

Park City; for the Financial District; for Soho/Tribeca; for Chinatown; and

for the Lower East Side. Only the Soho/Tribeca workshop has yet to happen, and

no one is foreseeing any problems there. The first three workshops all went

smoothly, too. But Chinatown and the Lower East Side – that’s where the

shouting started.

The workshops were organised by inviting the LMDC’s community and cultural

contacts to nominate people who they thought should be involved. In the case

of the Lower East Side meeting, which took place this evening at the University

Settlement on Eldridge Street, 100 people were eventually invited, 90 RSVPed,

and about 50 actually showed up on a hot and muggy Wednesday evening.

Most of the participants arrived in the expectation of a collegial meeting,

where community representatives could help the LMDC prioritise the kind of projects

it is going to undertake in the neighborhood. What they didn’t expect was what

they found when they reached the venue: a crowd at least as big as the number

of people inside, standing outside with signs and bullhorns, protesting at being

excluded from "this secret closed-door meeting". The protest on the

Lower East Side wasn’t as out of control as the one in Chinatown, where windows

got smashed, but it was certainly loud and disruptive. It was organised by NMASS,

the National Mobilization Against SweatShops; their main complaint

was that "LMDC is not giving out the money they are supposed to give to

poor people, instead they are using these funds to build luxury housing to kick

poor people out of the Lower East Side and Chinatown."

It was actually a fair complaint, and one with which most of the invited community

representatives were sympathetic. In fact, there was a general feeling in the

meeting that at least some of those outside – as many as could be accommodated

– should be allowed in to participate, since they had at least as much

right to take part as any of us inside. But it was not to be, and the LMDC promised

instead to hold another meeting in the next couple of weeks to which anybody

excluded from this one could come.

Even if they had been allowed inside, however, the protestors would not have

been happy. There were many people with identical views in the meeting, and

the general feeling was one of mistrust: that they were being used as a "PR

vehicle" for the LMDC to be able to claim community consultation while

in reality simply ramming through whatever spending decisions its men in suits

had more or less already decided should be made.

The LMDC didn’t help matters by opening the proceedings with a general overview

of the New York City "Vision

for Lower Manhattan", which is in reality only peripherally related

to the disbursement of the HUD grants. The assembled neighborhood activists

were presented with a glossy PowerPoint presentation all about a grand new transit

hub, the importance of new communications corridors between the Financial District

and New York’s airports, and in general the outlines of the plan (which, I have

to say, is an excellent one) for integrating the World Trade Center site into

Lower Manhattan, and for integrating Lower Manhattan much more effectively into

New York City and its environs.

Since the plan has been around for the best part of two years now, the general

impression given was one of a process where the big decisions have already been

made. While the LMDC thought it was generating genuine bottom-up grassroots

ideas for how it should spend its HUD money, the grassroots activists thought

they were basically being used to provide a veneer of democratic accountability

for a top-down decision-making process which is sorely lacking in transparency

and which they had very little trust in, much of the money already having gone

to subsidising luxury accommodation in the Financial District.

The LMDC’s next big mistake was to ask for ideas under certain headings, one

of which was transportation. With the plans for transit hubs and air trains

fresh in our minds, it certainly seemed as though the LMDC was pretty determined

to go ahead with its large-scale projects, to the detriment of the things which

really mattered to the community: things like low-income housing, job retention

and creation, and the strengthening of existing neighborhood institutions, from

small businesses to arts and community centers.

In fact, while I’m sure the LMDC would love HUD’s money to help realise its

broader vision, there’s no conflict between transit hubs and community outreach.

The money for each comes from different places, and money spent on the World

Trade Center site is not money which could or would otherwise be spent on the

Lower East Side.

The suspicions of the attendees notwithstanding, then, I think the exercise

was useful. It’s clear, for instance, that there’s precious little interest

in, say, traffic-control measures, but that many people are very interested

in a genuinely community-focused redevelopment of Seward Park. If there

was unanimity on one thing, it was this: that the Lower East Side does not stop

at Houston Street, and that the LMDC should concentrate its attention all the

way up to 14th Street rather than drawing lines in the sand which bisect longstanding

communities.

In reality, however, the whole exercise felt a little bit fraudulent, and smelled

of political pandering. Look at this

map: it’s the boundaries of the assembly district of New York State Assemblyman

Sheldon Silver, one of the three most important politicians in the state, and

a key mover behind this community outreach program. It should help explain why

the Lower East Side and Chinatown – the "problem" meetings in

the outreach program – are included in it at all.

Do we Lower East Siders really need HUD help more than any number of neighborhoods

in Harlem, or Brooklyn, or the Bronx? Were we more severely affected by the

events of September 11 than commuter towns in Jersey or Long Island? Not really.

The Lower East Side is not Lower Manhattan, and what people were asking for

this evening is exactly what they would be asking for had September 11 never

happened. This federal money was meant to go to help repair the gash which appeared

at the bottom of this island that day; it was not meant to subsidise the Lower

East Side Boys’ Club, no matter how worthy a cause that might be.

If I were the HUD, I would consider the shouting and the demonstrations in

the Lower East Side and Chinatown to be evidence – if any were needed

– that the impact of September 11 is a bit like gravity, decreasing with

the square of the distance from the center point. There’s little controversy

over what needs to be done for the neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of

the World Trade Center, because they were genuinely devastated by the events

that day and because their needs are being intelligently (if not adequately)

addressed by both the LMDC and the mayor’s office. Get much beyond the Brooklyn

Bridge, however, and quotidian neighborhood concerns – the kind of things

which can be found in any community in any city in the world – rapidly

outweigh anything directly or even indirectly related to the events of September

11.

But try telling that to NMASS.

I went up to Dia:Beacon last month,

without easy access to a Miami newsstand, however, here’s the article: enjoy!

Since long before the Guggenheim Museum single-handedly revitalised the entire

Basque economy with its Gehry-designed, titanium-clad outpost in Bilbao, it

has been an article of faith among museum directors that new art galleries have

to make a splash. Whether it was Renzo Piano and Norman Foster in Paris or James

Stirling in Stuttgart, architecture has long trumped art: the thing you most

remember after visiting these places is the building, not its contents. Eventually

the process reached its logical conclusion when crowds lined up around the block

to view Daniel Libeskind’s new – and empty – Jewish Museum

in Berlin.

But that is all in the past. To see the future, you need to travel 80 minutes

up the Hudson River from New York City, to the characterful if crumbling town

of Beacon. Built on light-industrial manufacturing and long in decline, Beacon

has suddenly become revitalized by the construction and opening of the world’s

biggest museum of contemporary art.

Dia:Beacon breaks all the rules. For one thing, no big-name architect is claiming

credit for it; for another, it’s all but invisible from any direction

until you’re more or less on top of it. The views you remember after a

visit there are not from the outside looking in, but rather from the inside

looking out: standing in a gallery full of John Chamberlain sculptures, with

the verdant riverside forest visible through the characterful old windows which

let in more light than you’ve ever experienced in an art museum before.

Direct sunlight has historically been the enemy of fine art, which can be damaged

by unfiltered ultraviolet radiation. But Dia has an art collection full of pieces

made of steel, glass or string, and these – impervious to light damage

– have never looked better than they do here.

The centerpiece of the collection is a series of monumental sculptures by Richard

Serra, installed where the rail sidings used to be – Dia:Beacon is housed

in a converted Nabisco packaging factory. Serra has bent and torqued enormous

slabs of Cor-Ten steel into previously unimagined forms, and the unidirectional

light coming from the high windows causes them to cast dramatic shadows on themselves

which change in subtle and unexpected ways over the course of the hours and

months. Serra’s most recent sculpture, 2000, takes the visitor on a spiral

journey into a light-and-dark-filled inner sanctum with walls the color and

texture of ancient sandstone. A sign at the entrance to the gallery admonishes

visitors to “please do not touch the artworks,”but everybody does:

they have no choice, in fact, given the narrowness of some of the steel corridors

into which they are forced.

Dia is full of such pieces: works which engage the body of the viewer, rather

than just his eye or brain. Fred Sandback, for instance, uses the simplest possible

means – lengths of acrylic yarn -– to literally carve out spaces

in the gallery. You walk up to them and then you walk through them: almost as

if you’ve become a ghost who can walk through walls. The feeling is one

of heightened sensitivity: suddenly cracks in the poured-concrete floor take

on a sculptural significance.

The idea of art residing not in a single object but rather in the way that a

viewer experiences a space is common to many of the artworks at Dia. Robert

Ryman, for instance, has taken his paintings – which started off as more-or-less

conventional oil on canvas – and both pared them down and expanded them,

so that distinctions between the painting, the wall on which it is mounted,

and the gallery space in which the wall is contained all start to blur in to

each other. And Robert Irwin, who was one of the first artists to explore such

boundaries of what could and couldn’t be considered art, has worked entirely

outside the formal gallery space altogether, landscaping Dia’s gardens

and car park.

Meanwhile, Walter De Maria has a series of highly poliched stainless steel squares

and circles running in parallel down the length of two long, long galleries.

Most visitors don’t spend much time with them, but in a sense that doesn’t

matter: even if they don’t consciously realise that the forms get slightly

bigger or smaller, nearly all the people who visit Dia will on some kind of

level get a frisson of distorted perspective.

Such works change the whole experience of museum-going: rather than simply walking

around looking at paintings on walls, Dia’s patrons become that much more

highly attuned to everything around them, even when they leave the gallery entirely.

This is what happens when artists, rather than architects, take control of a

building.

Dia spent a lot of time and money making sure that the necessary infrastructure

of a modern art museum was invisible to the visitor. “A lot of expense

went into making it look like the building was a raw, mechanical structure,”

says Michael Govan, Dia’s director. Govan likens the roof of the gallery

to a computer chip: in order to maintain the cleanliness of the gallery spaces,

all the pipes, wires and whatnot got bumped up top. “The idea was that

it would have that simplicity and calm and light and space,” he says –

and it does. Such simplicity doesn’t come cheap: Dia:Beacon cost more

than $57 million to construct and renovate, even after having been given the

building for free by International Paper, its most recent owner. The amount

is pretty reasonable on a per-square-foot basis (there are 240,000 square feet

of exhibition galleries alone), but Govan would still take it as a compliment

to be told that it doesn’t feel like $57 million has been spent here.

You’re not meant to admire the architecture: you’re meant to admire

the art.

And there’s a lot of art to admire, arranged in rooms which were designed,

mostly, with the active cooperation and involvement of the artists concerned.

Every artist gets his or her own space or spaces, which means that there’s

almost nothing in the way of curatorial mischief. (The closest Dia comes is

probably placing an early Richard Serra scatter piece right next to Joseph Beuys,

emphasizing how similar these titans of European and American contemporary art

really were.)

So Richard Serra divides up the gallery into narrow, claustrophobic spaces filled

with massive works; Gerhard Richter installs a series of gray mirrors underneath

a clerestory of skylights; and Louise Bourgeois retreats, insect-like, to the

attic, where she installs one of her trademark spiders, as well as a haunting,

darkened shrine full of sexual menace.

But interestingly, often it’s the dead artists who come off the best.

Dan Flavin’s huge series of fluorescent-light “monuments”

are stunning in the daylight next to a window-filled wall, while painting cycles

from both Blinky Palermo and Andy Warhol sit simply and beautifully under the

natural light of Dia’s north-facing sawtooth skylights.

Living artists like Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin, on the other hand, seem to

have done their best work in the early 60s, near the beginning of their careers,

and have indulged their freedom to exhibit what they want by showing too much

of their weaker, later pieces.

But that’s the way that Dia works, and is meant to work. Dia was founded

to be, and remains, a place which supports a few artists in an extremely generous

manner – hence the fact that this enormous museum houses the work of just

24 artists. The vast majority are going to be here permanently: if you come

back in 20 years’ time, this place will look much the same as it does

now. It’s the kind of legacy most artists can only dream of, especially

when they themselves are involved in every aspect of the installation of their

own work.

For Dia takes the historical perspective: Govan points out that Walter De Maria’s

Lightning Field – another Dia project – has been seen by some 15,000

people since its installation near Quemado, New Mexico, in 1977, despite only

a handful ever experiencing it at any one time. He’s therefore comfortable

not spending any money on advertising, since over a period of decades it’s

inevitable that a huge number of people are going to pass through his doors.

Here’s one man refreshingly free of the feed-the-masses culture seen at

places like the Guggenheim or the Tate – a museum director who seems genuinely

not to care how many people visit his flagship venue. “Whether it’s

50,000 or 200,000 people a year,” he says, “is not really a huge

concern.”