Felix Salmon

Back in my protoblogging days, in March 2000, I posted an item

on the old, low-tech felixsalmon.com disagreeing with a certain piece

of advice given by Slate’s agony aunt, Dear Prudence. I don’t know what

it is about Prudence which makes me want to respond to her columns, but she’s

gone and done it again today, with an answer to a question about a couple who

are starting up a B&B. They want their friends and family to come and stay

– and pay; Prudie responds

by saying that

As for what Prudie would do, she would try to arrive at an honest answer

to the question of whether or not she wanted to help her friends, financially,

without any ambivalent feelings. And if the answer turns out to be "no,"

they might catch on that the invitation didn’t seem very friendly.

I’m not entirely sure I understand this, but the gist is clear: friends don’t

ask friends to pay for lodging. I disagree.

If you’re going to spend money, say I, better you spend it on your friends.

Let’s say you need to buy a wedding present. You can bring up the wedding list

online and order a china plate from a department store, or you can commission

a painting from your talented artist friend Joanna Fox. No competition. One’s

personal, and the money stays within your circle of friends; the other is antiseptic

and a little too close to simply writing out a cheque. (The dirty secret of

wedding lists, of course, is that much of the time the gifts can be returned,

unopened, for store credit or even cash.) To try to get out of paying for the

painting would be cheap and nasty behaviour.

Similarly, if you’re going to stay in a B&B, surely it’s better to stay

in your friends’ new house than to give your money to someone you don’t know

and will never see again. Refurbishing old houses and operating them as B&Bs

is an expensive and risky business, and it’s good to support your friends when

they embark upon such a venture.

People like getting things for free. If their friend writes a book, they expect

a free copy; if they open a bar, they expect free drinks. It’s as though they

value the things their friend sells less than they value similar items from

complete strangers. Why is that? People should actively seek out opportunities

to spend money on their friends’ products and services, not feel aggrieved at

having to do so.

Moreover, in the case of a B&B, there’s a real opportunity cost to putting

your friends up for the night: if you’re not charging them for their room, then

you might be foregoing income from a paying guest. If your friends ask to stay

over a certain weekend and they offer to pay the going rate, then you can accept

them with open arms and have a great time together. But if they expect you to

comp their visit, and then someone else asks to book the room for those dates,

you’re out some very useful cash.

In general, if someone makes money from a certain activity, it’s verging on

the rude to expect them to give it to you for free just because you’re a friend.

Some people get this more than others, of course: lawyers and computer technicians

are always being asked for free advice, while court stenographers are very rarely

asked if they’ll do their friends a favour and sit down and take some dictation.

At least in these cases, however, the person concerned isn’t giving up income

to help out a friend.

The fact is that when you turn your house into a B&B, the old rules of

having people over to stay no longer apply. If a friend stays with me in New

York, the cost to me is marginal; if a friend stays in my B&B, they’re availing

themselves of a valuable service for which I normally charge money.

But maybe some people feel uncomfortable paying their friends money: they think

it might cheapen or commercialise the friendship. In that case, I would advise

Mary, the person who asked the question, to see if the owners of the B&B

have a favourite charity to which she could donate the cost of the room. That

way, there’s no implication that the hosts are being paid to simply do what

friends normally do, but there’s also an acknowledgement that a valuable service

is being provided, and that the guest is supportive of the way in which her

friends have chosen to try to make ends meet.

In any case, I think it’s definitely stretching to accuse these B&B owners

of not being good friends, just because they want to run their new business

as a business. Especially considering that at the beginning, at least, most

of their visitors will be friends and friends-of-friends, it could be financial

lunacy to start giving away rooms which they need to pay the mortgage.

That said, there’s a limit to spending money on friends. If the room rates at the B&B are exorbitant, and Mary would never normally spend that much on such a service, then she shouldn’t do so just because it’s her friends offering it. And if Joanna Fox started selling her paintings at prices I could no longer reasonably afford, then it would be perfectly reasonable of me to stop buying her paintings. But I don’t get the impression that there’s such a disconnect here: what we’re talking about is the principle at stake, not the cash.

Many months ago, my grandmother told me that I should read a short book she’d

just finished. We were on the telephone at the time, and it took a while for

me to get the title straight: Pretty

girl in crimson rose (8) is pretty unique as the name of a book. The

book itself is pretty unique, too.

I can tell you this now, because I’ve finally finished reading it. It’s taken

a long time, but not because the book is a hard slog. Quite the opposite, in

fact: I brought it home from the library less than 24 hours ago. The problem

was that so many other people wanted to read this book that I had to wait a

long time to get to the top of the New York Public Library’s waiting list.

I have a feeling that Pretty girl in crimson rose (8) is one of those

books which is much more popular among the library-going population than it

is among the general public. It’s a memoir built around a theme of cryptic crosswords,

and without that theme it would be thin and meaningless to the point of evanescence.

The author, Sandy Balfour, has certainly had an interesting life: after fleeing

South Africa at the age of 21 in 1983 in order to avoid military service, he

hitchhiked with his girlfriend to London, where he settled down, started a family,

and became a successful producer of television news. He’s travelled all over

the world, to some of the most gruesome and interesting places imaginable, and

has interviewed everybody from Congolese warlords to Tory cabinet ministers.

It takes some skill to turn such a life into little more than filler between

meditations on the art of setting and solving cryptic crosswords, but Balfour

manages it. Worse, he’s constantly trying to draw parallels between crosswords

and life, both in general and his own in particular. Occasionally, when he’s

not talking about crosswords, he can get things just right, as when he talks

about "the number of times I have sat, half asleep, on the Tube from Heathrow

airport, feeling the rhythms of the train, watching the ebb and flow of passengers

climbing on and off, and taking a gentle pleasure from the familiarity of the

way the people look." Much of the rest of the time, however, he will take

advantage of a river trip in the Congo with a satellite phone to learn that

"crossword puzzles hold us together just as surely as telephone conversations,"

or that

Although it is possible to move both ways within the river, the river itself

flows only to the sea. I see now that this is how crosswords work. We worry

back and forth amidst the clues, but in the end there is only one answer.

There is only one way to go, only one place to be.

In the end you are who you are.

Maybe Balfour should give up the TV day job and become a guru on Oprah: he

seems surpassingly fond of such vapid and meaningless psuedo-profundities.

That said, inside this television producer’s personal memoir lurks a great

little book on crosswords. Balfour has spent a lot of time talking to crossword

editors, compilers and solvers, and obviously loves the subject. Clues are scattered

through the text, from the easy to the wonderfully hard. You start off by scoffing

at the old women who can’t solve "Country with its capital in Czechoslovakia

(6)", but end up astonished that so many people can easily solve such wonderful

clues as "Poetical scene has surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating

(3,3,8,12)".

The answer to the former is Norway, since "Oslo" is buried within

"Czechoslovakia"; the answer to the latter is "The Old Vicarage,

Grantchester" – an anagram of "chaste Lord Archer vegetating",

and the title of a famous poem by Rupert Brooke.

As Balfour says, everybody has their own favourite clues. His, it would seem,

is "Amundsen’s forwarding address (4)"; his girlfriend’s is "Bust

Down Reason? (9)". Mine, I think, at least among those that Balfour quotes,

is "Die of cold? (3,4)".

There’s really nothing to compare to the feeling of realising you’ve got the

answer to one of these clues: you want to kill the setter and garland him with

laurels at the same time. The first, a masterpiece of misdirection, is Mush

(clever, eh?), the second is Brainwash (which can be read two ways: to brainwash

someone is to, well, bust down their reason, but also a reason for having a

down bust could be "bra in wash"). The third is simply Ice Cube.

Of course, cluing "Ice Cube" in a cryptic crossword means something

which people put in their G&Ts: it could never reference an American rapper

and actor. That kind of knowledge is too specialised for crossword solvers,

who are tweedy pipe-and-slippers types living in places not unlike The Old Vicarage

in Grantchester. Yet Balfour finishes his book with a reasonably typical Guardian

prize crossword, one which was published for him on his 40th birthday. It requires

pretty extensive knowledge of Robert Louis Stevenson: not only his Samoan nickname,

the answer to 21dn – "Bird on the wing captivating American storyteller

(8)" – but also his fictional heroes: "…Breck, concluding

21’s name (4)" and "21’s David’s a degree over 54 (7)". The answers,

by the way, are Tusitala, Alan and Balfour, respectively.

Balfour (the author, not the fictional character) takes no small degree of

pleasure in the arcane and specialised knowledge required of crossword-solvers:

that, thanks to cricket, "leg" is "on" and "maiden"

is "over"; that "Seaman" is AB or Tar; that "ay"

means "ever". The English cryptic crossword, with the possible exception

of Cyclops in Private Eye, is the last bastion of the Old England which John

Major so hilariously thought immortal when he said that "Fifty years on

from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket]

grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and old maids bicycling

to Holy Communion through the morning mist".

In other words, crosswords have always been provincial, in the sense that they’re

targeted squarely at a generation of people who might not have gone to university,

but who certainly know their Dickens, Shakespeare, Bible and military rankings.

Not to mention Robert Louis Stevenson and Rupert Brooke. Even Balfour was a

little taken aback by one clue which assumed knowledge of the fact that King

William II’s nickname was Rufus.

For me, however, crosswords are – or should be – more cerebral

than that, and when they range out of genuinely general knowledge and into Anglocentric

trivia, they lose a lot of their attraction. Balfour, an ex-pat South African

who uses crosswords to limn his attachment to his adoptive country, rather likes

their Englishness. I find it stifling, off-putting: cricket, parliamentary democracy

and even the Spice Girls are easier to export than cryptic crosswords.

Tina Brown tried them, towards the end of her time at the New Yorker;

the cryptic crossword at the back was one of the first things to go once David

Remnick took over. The Atlantic has been publishing cryptic crosswords

since 1977. And clearly, among the patrons of the New York Public Library at

least, there is quite a lot of demand for this book. So maybe there is some

hope yet for the successful export of the cryptic crossword across the pond.

But one thing makes me think that it probably won’t ever happen. Notes Balfour,

upon observing some genteel women of a certain age failing to complete a crossword

in early-80s Nairobi:

It is easy to make fun of the little old ladies in the twilight of their

colonial experience. But I realize that it is not necessary for them to be

good at crosswords for them to enjoy them. Being good is not the point. The

point is the ritual.

The English are very good at rituals; the Americans much less so. Americans,

I think, will only take to crosswords insofar as they can complete them. (Anybody

who lives in New York will know what I’m talking about when I say "the

only thing I enjoy more than doing the crossword puzzle is actually finishing

it".) Cryptic crosswords have a steep learning curve, and Balfour, for

one, had years of happy crosswording before he actually finished one on his

own. That’s not the type of thing which is likely to take off in an American

culture of instant gratification.

I live with one of those arty-filmy types, who idolises Ingmar Bergman, and

who forced me to get tickets to Ghosts

when we were filling out our BAM subscription last year. Ghosts is

a relatively minor Ibsen play which has been loosely translated by Bergman into

Swedish (from Norwegian) and directed by him in a production for the Royal Dramatic

Theatre of Sweden, who John Lahr of the New Yorker calls "probably

the best repertory theater in the world".

The five performances of Ghosts here in New York have been long-anticipated,

and sold out for months. This is despite the fact that they’re in Swedish. There

were certainly a lot of Swedes in the audience, but most people were following

the translation. Bergman obviously has a broad and deep following.

I’m no stranger to theater in a foreign language, even if you exclude opera.

I once went to an all-day-long Russian-language performance of War and Peace

at Tramway in Glasgow,

and although it was incredibly boring at points (the political discussions did

tend to drag a little) I managed to cope with the supertitles much as I would

with the same thing at the opera, or with subtitles on a film.

So I was looking forward to this play. I’m a big Ibsen fan, and I’m always

interested in seeing theatrical productions which are acknowledged to be among

the best in the world.

I didn’t make it past the interval.

The reason had nothing to do with the acting, the direction, the stage design,

or the play itself. All, I’m sure, were first-rate. Even the costumes were great.

But the whole theatre-going experience was destroyed by BAM’s mind-blowingly

idiotic decision not to use surtitles, like any other theatre would, but to

use simultaneous translation instead.

It was just like when you go to an international conference: you walk up to

the little man with the headsets, and give him a credit card, driver’s license

or the like in surety for your little piece of high-tech gadgetry. The headset

itself was a bit like this

one, but not quite as nice: the earpieces didn’t have foam covers, which

meant that – because the weight of the whole device was borne by the inside

of your ears – you were definitely feeling it after more than an hour

of usage.

Four translators worked on the piece, which had many more than four characters,

meaning that sometimes you had the same person speaking two different parts

in very close proximity to each other: weird, and disconcerting. What’s more,

because (I suppose) that it’s much easier to find English-speaking Swedes than

Swedish-speaking Americans, the translators sometimes got pronunciations wrong,

or tripped over their lines. (The translation from Swedish to English, by the

way, was beyond dreadful: cliché-filled hackwork at its very worst.)

The translators made what was probably a smart decision not to attempt to act

their parts: the acting was on stage, and the translation was merely to keep

us up to speed with who was saying what to whom. But when the characters are

shouting and crying at each other, there’s definitely a disconnect when what

you’re hearing is delivered in such a deadpan that often it was hard to work

out whether a certain line was meant sarcastically or not.

What’s more, Ghosts is a dialogue-heavy play, which means that a lot

of the time the characters simply stand or sit on stage and have long discussions.

Everything, here, is in the delivery – but we who were listening on headphones

got none of that, since the translation effectively drowned out all of the audible

information from the stage.

For me, choosing between simultaneous translation and surtitles in a theatrical

context is a no-brainer. If the art resides largely in the text and the delivery,

then we should be able to hear it; if you’re listening to a bad translation,

badly delivered, you’re never going to appreciate the play. Surtitles do detract

attention from what’s going on on-stage, but most of the time, in this play,

that was very little. And one of the great complaints about surtitles in the

operatic world – that they steal attention from the music, which is what

really matters – simply isn’t relevant in the case of theatre.

What’s more, surtitles are much more forgiving of bad translation than simultaneous

translation is. With a surtitle, you’re always aware that what you’re listening

to is a very loose translation of the original, there to provide an idea of

what’s going on. In films, most of the script is jettisoned by the time it reaches

subtitles, without too much in the way of ill effects. You glance at the surtitle

to keep abreast of the plot, and then refocus your attention on the action.

Simultaneous translation, on the other hand, offers no opportunity to concentrate

purely on what’s going on in front of you: it’s impossible even to hear the

actors. The whole theatrical experience is mediated through an uncomfortable

headset housing uninspiring voices. (And which, incidentally, delivers hissing

white noise when no one is speaking, especially if you turn your head away from

the stage at all.)

I really can’t imagine why BAM didn’t go the surtitle route, and chose to use

translation and headsets instead. Maybe some kind company donated the headset

technology, and BAM felt that it had to use them. Maybe Bergman got full of

himself, and decided that he didn’t want surtitles bespoiling his perfect production.

Maybe the cost of making slides for surtitles was a lot greater than the cost

of hiring translators for the week. None of them strike me as particularly good

reasons: if you know what the real reason was, do leave a comment below.

But at least there was a silver lining: leaving BAM early meant that we were

finally able to try out Thomas

Beisl, the hot new Austrian restaurant in Fort Greene. Great food, wonderful

beer, very reasonable prices: all in all, one of the best places to eat out

in New York, I’d say. If you have tickets to future performances of Ghosts,

I’d recommend you sell them to the line of desperates wanting to get in, and

go treat yourself to a delicious Viennese meal with the proceeds. You’ll have

a much more enjoyable evening.

Kasimir Malevich has long been one of my favourite artists, ever since I saw

one of his great white-on-white paintings at Annely

Juda as a teenager. There’s a handful of paintings which seared themselves

into my consciousness the minute I saw them: this was one, along with a Van

Gogh in what was then Leningrad, and a Paul Klee in London.

If it was Annely Juda who first introduced me to Malevich, though, it was the

Guggenheim who really helped me to understand his importance: one of the first

big art books I ever bought was the exhibition

catalogue for the enormous show which the museum put on to mark its new

ambition after its grand bigger-and-better reopening in 1992. I loved reading

about Malevich, and got very much into the photography of Alexander Rodchenko

at the same time.

So I was very excited when I saw that the Guggenheim was putting on a whole

show dedicated to Malevich. The Guggenheim knows how to mount well put-together

exhibitions, and, considering its excellent

connections in Russia, there’s probably no institution in the world which

could mount a better exhibition dedicated to Malevich’s most important art.

I got to the Guggenheim, and it was still covered in blue astroturf. The Matthew

Barney show, which I blogged

back at the beginning of April, is staying up until June 11. And no matter how

much you like Barney, you could never accuse him of being quiet and meditative.

Malevich is relegated to a couple of rooms in the fourth floor of the annex,

which are reached directly from the Barneyfied rotunda. No standard gallery

hush here: blaring Barney video installations are never out of earshot. And

I can’t think of an artist who demands silence more than Malevich does.

For Malevich is not like the minimalists at Dia:Beacon, creating human-scale

works which work on a purely physical level: for all his revolutionary avant-garde

fervor, Malevich always remained something of an old-fashioned painter and artisan.

His paintings repay studious attention, rather than hooking you with a conceptualist

gimmick or bowling you over through their sheer scale.

What’s

more, many of the paintings are now historical artifacts more than they are

the artworks Malevich intended to create. The single most important piece here

– the Black Square of 1915, never before seen outside Russia

– is cracked and damaged like a dried-out desert floor, with all manner

of constituent colours visible amidst the decay. Malevich would be shocked at

its present condition, and would probably have to be forcibly prevented from

attacking it with a paint brush. So looking at this painting perforce involves

a re-imagining of what it originally looked like, something made much easier

by the presence nearby of the sibling Black Circle, which is in much

better shape. So I would definitely recommend you go see this show; just wait

until after the Barney has come down, so that it’s easier to keep your concentration.

What you’ll see when you get there is concentrated essence of Malevich: the

show begins in 1915, with the quartet of abstract black shapes on white backgrounds,

and ends in 1932, with the death of Suprematism. The four black and white paintings

at the beginning (Black Square, Black Cross, Black Circle,

and Elongated Plane) have not been seen together since 1920, which

means there’s probably no one alive who can remember seeing them all in the

same place. It’s a pity they’re not shown together, then: the square comes first,

with the other three arranged next to each other on a wall on the other side

of the narrow gallery.

They’re stunning, gorgeous paintings, well worth going to see, which lose a

huge amount in reproduction. The brush strokes are thick and impassioned, much

more like Jasper Johns’s encaustic than the affectless monochromes of someone

like Ad Reinhardt. This isn’t the less-is-more philosophy of the late 20th Century;

this is an attempt at a universal visual language, full of emotion and without

representation. It’s hard to see these paintings through pre-war eyes, but Malevich

was not trying to emphasise the picture plane, or achieve some kind of ideal

of "flatness". The geometric shapes were pure, for him, to be sure,

but not in a cold, mathematical way: his squares weren’t like Carl Andre’s floor

panels. Rather, the very universality of the forms was meant to allow the art

to speak to all viewers equally: think Rothko, not Ruscha.

Most of the rest of the exhibition fails to live up to the four early paintings:

as Malevich’s canvases became more cluttered and colourful, they also lost a

lot of their directness and power. There is one gorgeous red square, beautifully

framed in heavy black wood, but after that one has to wait until the white-on-white

paintings to really see what Malevich was capable of. In the meantime, there

are not only dozens of paintings which are almost Kandinsky-like in their complexity,

but also architectural models and even designs for tea sets (which, amazingly,

are not available at the Guggenheim Shop).

Overall, it would seem that Malevich is one of those artists who is not particularly

well served by a major exhibition. I’m very glad this show is on, and I’m sure

it serves all manner of crucial art-historical purposes. But really I think

a small, well-chosen exhibit at Annely Juda (especially in the beautiful, light-filled

surroundings of her top-floor space on Dering Street) would have packed a greater

punch than the Guggenheim’s attempt at comprehensiveness. Everything you need

to see here could really be encapsulated in a dozen small paintings: the rest

is really just distracting noise, if not as unsettling as the Matthew Barney

films banging away in the background.

All the same, I’ll be going back. I think all art shows should be seen twice:

the first time you walk around them dutifully, trying to see everything; the

second time you can pick and choose and concentrate on the stuff you love. I’ll

be heading straight for the black circle, the red square, and the white cross.

And in the background, Frank Lloyd Wright’s pristine white spiral will add to,

rather than detract from, the experience.

I

saw my first ever Cirque du Soleil show last night. Imagine that – 31

years old, and somehow I’d managed to avoid it until now. Snob that I am, I

expected mass-market middlebrow entertainment, and went as much out of curiosity

as out of any particular desire to see what all the fuss was about. But I wasn’t

about to pay $95 for a ticket. Fortunately, a Large European Bank provided me

with an invitation, as well as the all-important transportation to and from

Randall’s Island.

Cirque du Soleil is even better than Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh

when it comes to persuading vast swathes of the population to pay eye-popping

prices to go see a show. Every day in Las Vegas, hundreds of people line up

at the Bellagio hotel in an unsuccessful attempt to buy $110 tickets to that

day’s performance of O: it’s been going for five years now, and still

sells out 2,000 seats at each and every performance.

This is not a run-away-and-join-the-circus sort of show: it’s very slick, very

professional, and very focused on the most important thing, which is making

money. The shops sell everything from $12 "souvenir programmes" (which

take about a minute to read) to discarded items of clothing from previous productions

on sale for thousands of dollars each. The circus’s founder, already one of

the richest men in Canada, says he expects to be a $1 billion-a-year business

by 2007. And yet there’s no mistaking the goodwill of the audience: people are

really excited to see this show, and if anything the high prices only serve

to heighten their expectations.

The sold-out crowd for Varekai, Cirque du Soleil’s latest production,

started arriving well over an hour before the performance began. I know this

because I did, too, but at least I had the VIP tent to check out, complete with

free-flowing Champagne and delicious canapés. Cirque du Soleil lays on

a great VIP experience, with its own mini-performances, fabulous costumes, along

with fully-decked-out circus objects like crazy mechanised heads and fluffy

bugs crawling around on aerial wires. I have no idea what the non-VIPs did:

queue up to buy popcorn, I suppose. Randall’s Island is an unpreposessing place,

a lump of nothing much stuck in the northern reaches of the East River, between

Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens. But the circus itself is colourful enough,

with a brightly-swirling yellow-and-blue big top, if no sideshows.

When everybody was seated, the show began, very, very, slowly. One costumed

person came out and crawled around the stage in a vaguely bug-like manner, followed

by a few more. This went on for a long while until an incomprehensible clown

act marked segued, finally, into a beautiful aerial act by an Icarus figure,

sans wings, rolling around in mid-air in a big net. After that, things speeded

up a bit, and we had a series of impressive circus acts, including three amazing

Chinese kids who did incredible things with lengths of rope.

Ultimately, however, a circus act is a circus act. Girls hanging off a trapeze,

guys jumping over each other, people balancing in difficult positions: these

are the bread-and-butter of any circus, and although Cirque du Soleil does them

well, it doesn’t shatter any boundaries. The only thing it’s missing is a high-wire

act, and apparently there’s no shortage of those in other Cirque du Soleil productions.

This is not Archaos, with its motorcycles

and chainsaws; rather, it’s an expensive and slightly new-agey show which gussies

up an old-fashioned circus so much that it becomes entertainment for grown-ups

rather than for children. (Soon, there’ll be a genuinely adult show, Zumanity,

although judging by its FAQ,

Cirque du Soleil has gone overboard on both portentiousness and pretentiousness.

Why not just do something sexy, seeing as how it’s going to be permanently based

in Las Vegas?)

The conversation during the intermission rarely got beyond the "which

act was your favourite" phase: Varekai certainly isn’t thought-provoking,

or even something it’s remotely easy to talk about in any way at all. Thankfully,

Julia Roberts was seated a couple of rows in front of us, so the bond investors

and bankers had a ready-made topic to gossip about. The show is all about present-time

experience: schlubby Americans marvelling at the athleticism and stamina of

some phenomenally talented performers. (To make things even more impressive,

this show is put on ten times a week.) Once it’s over, it’s over.

This is something I’ve never been very good at: admiring art of any form just

because it’s physically difficult. That’s one of the reasons I’m no great fan

of dance, either classical or modern, and why virtuoso musical performances

often leave me cold as well. Ultimately, that’s what a circus is all about:

seeing people and animals do things you never thought that a member of that

species would be capable of doing. Cirque du Soleil, quite rightly, has never

used animals, but the principle remains.

So should you splash out on tickets for Cirque du Soleil? Michelle says

it’s "a pretty good experience" and that you should go if you can

make it and the tickets are free; I’m basically of the same view. If you love

the circus, then rush to Randall’s Island: this will be paradise for you. If

you’re generally indifferent to circuses, however, then it’s unlikely Cirque

du Soleil is going to change your mind.

Woody Allen has directed his first play, and it’s currently in previews at

the Atlantic Theater Company in Chelsea. Actually, Writer’s Block is

two plays: the first an absurdist take on marital infidelity set on the Upper

West Side of Manhattan, and the second an absurdist take on marital infidelity

set in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

Riverside Drive is the kind of play which lends itself naturally to

student-theatre productions at small liberal-arts colleges: it can be put on

with pretty much no scenery or props at all, and is essentially a two-person

acting vehicle with some fantastic one-liners. Skipp Sudduth gets the best of

them; he plays Fred Savage (imagine the polar opposite of that

Fred Savage), a homicidal paranoid schizophrenic vagrant ex-copywriter. He’s

been stalking newly-successful screenwriter Jim (Paul Reiser) for weeks, convinced

that Jim stole his idea – nay, his life – as the basis

for his movie treatment.

Sudduth is an anti-Woody Allen: large, gruff, with a salt-and-pepper beard

and nary a hint of nebbishness. He’s the consummate scene-stealer, overpowering

Reiser in size, volume, charisma, creativity and funniness. He shuffles around

the stage like a demented bulldozer, emanating non sequiturs in much the same

way as the Empire State Building emanates the messages (Burn down your advertising

agency!) which only he can hear transmitted over his red vintage radio.

Reiser, playing a conventionally-successful writer who’s having an affair with

a much younger blonde, is powerlessly drawn into this crazy man’s orbit, and

eventually ends up confessing his infidelities shortly before the arrival of

his illicit lover.

Watching these two first-rate actors playing off each other is a true joy,

and the jokes – Allen at his funniest – come thick and fast. This

is not the Woody of films: rather, it is the Woody of short stories or stand-up

comedy. The action is very far from realistic, and the improbabilities and absurdities

are simply played, for exaggerated comic effect. The weirdest thing is listening

to Woody Allen’s inimitable monologues coming out of the mouth of someone like

Sudduth: it’s a bit like watching a familiar movie dubbed into a foreign language.

Once the girlfriend arrives (unlike Godot, she does actually appear), the sparks

do stop flying a little. Kate Blumberg does very well with her small role, but

she’s not on stage long enough for any kind of individuality to emerge. Her

arrival marks the end of the conversation and the beginning of the plot; she

then departs, prompting another funny conversation, reappears, and departs once

again. The plot is thin, and I shan’t summarise it here, and ends with a brave

and unsuccessful attempt at injecting some meaning and/or emotion into the material.

When the house lights go up, we’re a little confused: after all of the laughs,

are we meant to be feeling something now? Is there a moral

to this comic tale?

The audience ponders such questions for 15 minutes, ten of which are taken

up by some horrendous banging and crashing on the other side of the curtain.

The sets for the two plays are both very elaborate, and they’re both completely

different, to the point of Bebe Neuwirth and Jay Thomas having to stay very

still doing nothing when the curtain rises on Old Saybrook, to allow

the audience some applause at the transformation. And none of the cast from

the first play reappears in the second: there’s been no cost-cutting here.

The titles of the two plays, incidentally, are projected white-on-black onto

the curtain, in Woody Allen’s trademark style, just as if they were film titles.

It’s been a year, now, since Hollywood Ending was released, and Anything

Else isn’t going to come out until September, so it’s good to see those

projected on something, at least.

It’s also great seeing Bebe Neuwirth on stage, looking radiant under lots of makeup,

if that’s possible. Probably the single best moment of the whole evening is

when she’s sitting on a sofa admiring a birdhouse on the other side of the fourth

wall, which, she’s just been told, was "modelled on the Guggenheim".

Her face runs through a series of emotions from puzzlement to surprise, sending

the audience into hysterics.

Neuwirth plays the wife of an orthodontist, who is hosting her sister and golf-mad

plastic surgeon brother-in-law at her grand suburban house in Connecticut. The

arrival of a couple who once owned the building marks the beginning of an old-fashioned

English sex farce, written with verve and cunning. The cast is excellent, from

the obnoxious intruder (Christopher Evan Welch) to the sex-kitten sister (Heather

Burns), but the humour becomes increasingly strained as the writerly conceits

start piling atop each other. It’s all very well Woody Allen going all Pirandello

on us three-quarters of the way through, but even that doesn’t excuse an ending

– complete with violins – in which Allen either tips his hat to

Adaptation

or else simply throws in the towel. (There’s not a lot of difference between

the two: if you don’t know where to take a film/play, simply announcing very

loudly that you don’t know how to end it does not an ending make.)

Despite their endings, however, both plays in Writer’s Block are very

funny, and you’ll not regret going to see them. Don’t go expecting masterpieces

of the comic form: instead, just go to enjoy yourself and get your jollies as

they arrive. Think of this as an extended version of the Shouts & Murmurs

columns which Allen now writes for the New Yorker: great in parts,

even if you feel he could do better. After all, Woody Allen’s second best is

still better than most comedy on Broadway these days.

A couple of weeks ago, I was quite

rude about those who take their literature extremely seriously. Today, in

order to redress the balance a little, I’d like to respond to the opposite tendency:

the idea, as Michael Blowhard puts

it, that literary writing is "no longer something special and above,

but a niche market instead."

Well, in terms of numbers of books sold, one could probably say that ’twas

ever thus. Genre fiction, be it sci-fi, horror, romance or mystery, has always

sold more in aggregate than difficult, literary works. But Michael wasn’t talking

about sales figures, he was saying "that, in the larger scheme of things,

lit just doesn’t matter that much, that it’s just a specialist taste and activity."

Michael is particularly

rude about his two bêtes noir, Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison. He

doesn’t like them one bit, and, what’s more, he claims that his friends in the

publishing industry don’t like them either. It’s all some kind of conspiracy,

it would seem: the powerful few, lunching at the restaurant whose name Michael

borrowed for his nom de web, constituting a cabal who pump up the likes

of Rushdie and Morrison in order to perpetuate a literary heritage of their

very own. Or something.

It’s pointless trying to get into an argument about quality here: I could shout

very loudly about how wonderful Rushdie is, and Michael would shout back "oh

no he isn’t," and no one would get anywhere. De gustibus non est disputandum,

and all that. But then I had an idea: I could show, quantitatively,

that literary fiction is not just another genre, and is, in fact, separate and

different from the rest of contemporary fiction.

The idea came from reading a column

in Slate which reminded us that classic novels are big money makers. It’s

hard to track their sales, since they come in so many different editions, but

when you do, they outsell many bestsellers from only a few years ago.

Well, I don’t have access to Nielsen BookScan, but I do have access to Amazon.com,

which helpfully provides a sales rank for every book it offers. I had an idea:

that Rushdie and Morrison could be distinguished from their non-literary contemporaries

by their staying power. I would compare their books to those written at the

same time, and see where the numbers fell. If the literary types were selling

much more than the genre writers, then it would be clear what the difference

is between literary and other fiction: literary fiction aspires to longevity,

to being read many years in the future, whereas most other contemporary fiction

is written basically only for immediate consumption.

What follows is not tweaked at all for rhetorical purposes. I have included

every book I looked up: I haven’t excluded genre fiction which sold better than

I thought it would, or literary fiction which was languishing in the 200,000s

on Amazon’s sales rank. I didn’t need to: every literary book I looked up was

in Amazon’s top 10,000, while every non-literary book was lower, sometimes much

lower. What’s more, literary books were generally available in hardcover or

library bindings, whereas non-literary books generally weren’t: it’s clear which

ones are aimed at posterity.

The results, then: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is ranked

4,475 in

paperback and 23,337 in

hardback. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is 4,002 in

paperback, 6,788 in a

different edition, and 84,203 in hardback.

Other relatively recent literary books might include One Hundred Years

of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, which is 2,394 in

paperback, and 9,469 for the Everyman’s

hardback.

By contrast, the number one bestseller in 1988, The Cardinal of the Kremlin,

by Tom Clancy, is now 11,396 in

paperback and 28,473 in

hardback. Clancy’s royalties from this book are lower than those received

by Thomas Pynchon for the famously-unreadable Gravity’s Rainbow, which

is ranked

at 7,050.

The number one bestseller in 1991, selling an unprecedented 2 million copies

in hardback, was Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the

Wind, by Alexandra Ripley. Where is it now? At 17,776 in

paperback; the hardcover is long out of print. Even the paperback is outsold

by Infinite Jest, ferchrissakes.

The following year, the biggest-selling book was Dolores Claiborne,

by Stephen King. It’s now 85,325 in

paperback, and good luck finding the hardback (there is a library

binding, ranked at 500,670).

Meanwhile, let’s go back to literature, and Don DeLillo, whose White Noise

is ranked

at 3,461. The Viking Critical Library also has its own

edition, ranked at 26,378, which includes "an extensive critical apparatus,

including a critical introduction, selected essays on the author, the work and

its themes, reviews, a chronology of DeLillo’s life and work, a list of discussion

topics, and a selected bibliography."

DeLillo has another claim to literary merit: a scathing

review of his latest novel in the New York Times’ Sunday books section.

It is impossible to imagine a review such as this being written of any book

without literary aspirations: if Walter Kirn had written anything half as cutting

about Clancy, Ripley or King, the Times would never have published it. If such

a piece ever did appear, thousands of letters would come in, complaining that

Kirn doesn’t get it, or shouldn’t be reviewing such books in the first

place if he hates them so much.

Literary fiction is different, is more important, and not

only is taken more seriously than other types of fiction, but – rightly

– will continue to be taken more seriously for the foreseeable future.

Rushdie was universally panned for his latest

novel: he’s not some kind of sacred, untouchable icon of the publishing

world. Rather, he’s written some books – Shame, Midnight’s

Children, The Satanic Verses – which are magical, wonderful

works, the kind of writing that will be read with great pleasure long after

anybody reading this article is dead. In a word, literature.

If New York didn’t know about Dia:Beacon

before, surely it does now. A massive Richard Serra piece dwarfs a black-clad

gallery-goer on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, which inside runs

a 6,500-word

opus by Michael Kimmelman all about the Dia Foundation and the new home

for its permanent collection.

The piece is nothing if not gushing: at parts it reads more like a press release

than a critically-reported magazine feature. "The Greatest Generation,"

it’s called on the cover:

The most influential American artists weren’t Pollock or De Kooning. They

were the ones who came next – Minimalists, Conceptualists, Earth artists

– who redefined what art was and who are now, finally, celebrated in

a spectacular new museum.

Granted, probably Kimmelman didn’t write the cover blurb. But he does contrive

to put Dia (and Barnes & Noble) chairman Leonard Riggio in a very favourable

light, despite being confronted with a man whose quotes would be considered

self-parody if he weren’t so serious:

"When Jay Chiat asked me to join the board, I asked the question everybody

asks: ‘What is Dia?’ He told me it had great parties. My epiphany came when

I saw Serra’s ‘Torqued Ellipses.’ I immediately got the idea of the single

artist space, seeing art in its own environment. I just got the concept of

Judd, Flavin and all the others without even seeing their work yet."

One fears to think what Donald Judd would have said about a man who "just

got" his work before seeing any of it, but Kimmelman doesn’t even pause

to catch his breath before Riggio continues, po-facedly glossing some of the

most élitist artists in the history of the world as champions of the

people.

"I went to Marfa and Roden Crater and visited Heizer in Nevada, and

I thought these artists recognized the genius of the average American. Judd

built his museum in a little Texas town. Turrell was hiring Native Americans

from the area. Heizer was working with local people."

Sure, Leonard. Ask the "local people" of Marfa what they think of

Donald Judd. (Be prepared for invective of a vehemence you probably never normally

encounter.) Ask yourself, for one minute, who else Turrell and Heizer

could have been working with, given where they were constructing their projects.

These are great artists, but recognising the genius of the average American

was never what they were about.

Similarly, Kimmelman seems to have written his article not for the general

public, but for a very small number of art-world grandees. The piece concludes

with our intrepid reporter standing in the middle of the new museum, its walls

still bare, the museum director by his side. Here’s what we learn:

To get acclimated to Beacon is to become attuned to an aesthetic of plainspoken

industrial spaces, simple forms and a kind of meditative silence.

Sure, Michael. "Meditative silence" – that’s bound to be what

most of us find when we squeeze through the "tight vestibule like a small

compression chamber" which Robert Irwin has designed as the entrance to

the museum.It’s "akin to the entrance at the Guggenheim in Manhattan,"

we’re told, an entrance which is usually so bottlenecked that a line ends up

running down Fifth Avenue, often stretching around the corner onto

88th Street.

I saw such a line myself on Saturday: I went up to the Guggenheim to check

out the Matthew Barney

show which they have on there at the moment. It opened back in February,

and it’s on until June, but even so, the crowds were huge and the lines for

people to pay their $15 entrance charge long and chaotic. If this is the kind

of response that Matthew Barney gets, imagine what Serra, Judd, Warhol, Heizer

et al will elicit up in Beacon. "Meditative silence"? I think

not.

I saw the Barney show just after finishing A

Box of Matches, the new book by Nicholson Baker, and it’s interesting

to see how one can consider both Barney and Baker to be direct descendants of

the Dia’s artists.

Few, if any, artists were ever self-declared minimalists: no one liked the

term much, and it only really caught on by default because the alternatives

(like "literalism") were even worse. One of the biggest problems with

the name is that it conceals what Kimmelman refers to as the work’s "crazy

scale and wild ambition". These are artists who blast tons of rock, who

change the shape of ancient volcanic craters, who drill holes a kilometer deep

into the Kassel earth, who buy up entire Texan towns: both ego and hubris are

outsized in most of them, from Judd all the way to Serra. Michael Heizer’s 20-foot-deep

holes, lined in Cor-Ten steel, stand in relation to your average Pollock much

as the Pollock would to a Van Gogh. And those holes are as nothing compared

to Heizer’s City.

Matthew Barney is one of the few artists of the next generation to make work

of similar ambition and magnitude. The Cremaster cycle, a series of five films

and associated artworks which rival Wagner’s Ring cycle in length and complexity,

fills essentially all of the Guggenheim. The show isn’t a retrospective, it’s

one work. Ain’t many other artists, of any generation, who need an

entire museum just to show one piece.

Whatever you think of the Cremaster cycle, there’s no denying the way in which

the sheer scale of the work awes the spectator. The production values, as they

say in Hollywood, are about as high as these things get: no starving-artist

cost-cutting here. Walk in to the Guggenheim, and it’s almost as though the

long circular drain running down the museum’s famous spiral was built to collect

not liquid vaseline, but rather the money which is pouring off every surface

in the exhibition.

Meanwhile, Nicholson Baker has taken the simplicity of minimalism, its focus

on the kind of things we normally don’t even bother to see, and transferred

it into print. This is minimalist minimalism, in all senses: the book is very

short, is broken up into tiny little parts, only a few pages each, and is concerned

with the minutiae of life, the kind of things we never stop to think about in

any detail: how we take our pajama bottoms off, or the sequence of actions we

go through when we take a used coffee filter out of the machine in the morning.

Baker also has a nice line in wry punchlines: at the end of one of his finely-observed

and meandering paragraphs, he’ll suddenly come out with a phrase like "no

animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck". Here’s an example:

Once I told a doctor from France that I was able to wake myself up at a preset

time with the help of nightmares, and he said that his father had been a soldier

who had taught him that if you want to wake up at, say, five in the morning,

you simply bang your head five times on the pillow before you close your eyes,

and you will wake up at five. "But how do you manage five-thirty?"

I asked the doctor with a crafty look. He said that in order to wake at five-thirty

you just had to do something else with your head, like jut your chin a little,

to signify the added fraction, and your sleeping self would do the math for

you. I’ve tried it and it works except that it’s much harder to go to sleep

because your head has just been hit repeatedly against the pillow.

Most of the time, however, Baker is doing much the same thing that people like

Robert Irwin and John Cage did in the 70s. Irwin would try to focus attention

on elements of a space which are normally ignored; Cage brought to notice the

kind of sounds which were never previously considered eligible to be classed

as music. More generally, all three are concerned with the processes of perception,

and with foregrounding the normally overlooked.

At Dia, Irwin has designed the car park: a characteristically oblique act in

that most people will rush through it on their way to the Serras, barely giving

it a moment’s thought. But it’s good to see that the legacy of minimalism continues

to run both ways, or even more. You could set up a kind of matrix, with a simple/complex

distinction on one axis ranged against an effacement/hubris distinction on the

other. Irwin would be simple effacement; Serra would be simple hubris; Baker

would be complex effacement; and Barney would be complex hubris. At Dia, they

like to keep things simple. Looking at contemporary work, however, it looks

like complexity is more the order of the day.

It’s been a while (over six years, to be precise), but I think I’ve been living

in New York for long enough now that I can finally weigh in on the subject of

Britain in general, and London in particular, with the objectivity and omniscience

that only an occasional visitor to the country can ever have. Live somewhere,

and the particular will always overwhelm the general: I can parse the difference

between the Lower East Side and Nolita till the cows come home, but don’t bother

asking me what New York is like in general. A bit like my

sister, really, who is far too polite to people whose first question, upon

learning that she’s just returned from Antarctica, is "what’s it like?".

Anyway, Britain. First things first, the national airline. After my

experience with American Airlines a few weeks ago, British Airways was a

joy to fly. It’s not that things don’t go wrong; it’s that there are human beings

working for the company who care when they do.

My flight to London, for instance, took off more or less on time, but was held

up dreadfully upon arrival at Heathrow. First of all we were forced to be towed

to the gate (don’t ask me why); then the little "finger" thing which

connects the gate to the plane wasn’t working; and to make matters worse, some

useless chap in New York had put me in the very last row of seats, telling me

I’d have more legroom there. (Nope.) Off the plane, there were huge queues of

people waiting to get in to Terminal 1 – just when you thought you’d finally

made it, you turned a corner and another queue revealed itself. And all the

way through, the Heathrow staff displayed an Olympian detachment with regard

to anybody with a connection to make. Upshot: I completely missed my flight

to Milan.

Now this is where things start getting interesting. Just as with my flight

to Buenos Aires, this trip, to Italy, suffered from problems both within and

– as the Scots would say – outwith the airline’s control. (BA could

have realised I had a tight connection and given me a seat nearer the front;

they also could have hastened my transfer from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4. But

there’s still a good chance I would have missed my flight anyway, due to BAA

– the operator of Heathrow – and their faulty finger.) The huge

difference between BA and AA became apparent not in terms of their ability to

make mistakes, but rather in their desire to make amends.

AA is ever and always loathe to admit that anything is ever their fault, and

is very quick to say that if something isn’t their fault, then there’s nothing

they can do about it. Even when something is clearly their fault, AA

will generally be as cheap and unhelpful as possible: they make mistakes, and

the travelling public suffers.

BA, on the other hand, seems to (imagine this!) feel some responsibility for

the travelling experience of its passengers, and tries to make things up to

them if (as will inevitably happen, on occasion) their journey goes awry. The

friendly woman at the connections desk was faced with something of a perfect

storm when I arrived: they’d just installed a new computer system she hadn’t

come close to mastering; the next flight to Milan was not only on a different

airline but also went to a different airport; I was on an e-ticket which needed

to be converted to paper before anything else could be done, in a highly laborious

process which no one really understood; and the flight she was trying to get

me onto was, officially, full, despite the protestations of the Al Italia girl

on the other side of the hall, who was adamant that there were 19 free seats

and that I was more than welcome to any one of them.

An AA employee wouldn’t even have found the Al Italia flight in the first place

(since it was going to a different airport). If they had, they would have seen

that it was full and left it at that: they wouldn’t have walked over to the

Al Italia desk to double-check. And then, when things started going rather pear-shaped

with the computer system, they would simply have told me that there wasn’t enough

time to get me onto the earlier flight, and that I was going to have to wait

another six hours for the next one.

None of that happened with BA. I wouldn’t say that the connections staff were

highly expert and competent, but they had something more important than technical

expertise: they had friendliness and a desire and willingness to help. It wasn’t

their fault I’d missed my flight, but they were going to try their hardest to

get me to Milan as expeditiously as they could anyhow.

I made that Al Italia flight, in the end (although my luggage didn’t). But

that wasn’t the end of the story. A week or so later, I was flying back to New

York, and checked in at Paddington. (That’s one significant advantage that BA

has over Virgin. It’s not just that the queues at Paddington are nonexistent,

especially compared to the endless lines at Heathrow. It’s also the simple convenience

of not having to schlep your luggage all the way out to the airport, and thence

to the check-in lines. Why can’t Virgin get a slot at Paddington?) The woman

at check-in was very friendly, and gave me the perfect seat: at the front of

the plane, in an exit aisle, loads of leg room, no one sitting next to me –

and an upgrade to World Traveller Plus, BA’s answer to Premium Economy.

Now, I still like Virgin. Their entertainment system is better: when my iPod

ran out of juice, none of BA’s radio stations were bearable; BA’s choice of

movies is not nearly as imaginative is Virgin’s, the screens on BA are worse,

and the few systems which do offer games don’t offer games: they’re always "currently

unavailable". Virgin’s general attitude is Soho to BA’s Upper East Side,

and I can’t imagine keeping a BA souvenir in the same way that I keep Virgin’s

air socks with eyes sewn on or their incredibly useful drawstring plastic bags,

which I use to keep my laptop in when I’m travelling.

But if Virgin beats out BA by a nose, BA beats out American by much more. American

has the legroom, of course, which is wonderful, but they niggle all that goodwill

out of you and more: whoever heard of charging for wine with the meal on an

11-hour flight to South America? On AA, the passenger’s relationship with the

airline is largely antagonistic, whereas with the British airlines you’re much

more in it together.

One could say the same thing about the two countries’ attitude to soldiering,

judging by the progress of the war thus far. The Americans seem to be good at

blowing things up, but very bad at getting any kind of dialogue going with the

Iraqis, let alone any goodwill. The Brits, on the other hand, seem to understand

that Iraqis aren’t simply going to welcome them with flowers and open arms:

that they have to do something to earn the locals’ trust, and that hiding behind

a tank turret is a bad way of going about that. The Brits are just as good at

killing the enemy as the Americans are, but they’re much better at relating

with the vast majority of the population that isn’t the enemy.

On the other hand, Britain is becoming increasingly like America, and I have

a feeling that distinctions between the two countries are going to become nicer

and nicer over the coming years. I picked up the latest issue of The Face to

read on the plane (the one with Justin Timberlake on the cover) and it was not

only bland enough to be an American magazine, it even hyped gawker.com,

finding a throwaway line about "Condé Nastiness" particularly

amusing.

Even on the little things, London and New York are following each others’ leads:

after London switched from seven-digit dialling to eight-digit dialling, New

York had to go and do it one better by switching from seven-digit to eleven-digit

dialling.

Much more depressing, I discovered that Milk & Honey, the cooler-than-thou

appointment-only cocktail bar on New York’s Lower East Side which was well past

its sell-by date two years ago, has opened up a London branch. London’s Milk

& Honey, of course, is a private member’s club: it costs £300 just

to get in the front door, before you’ve bought a single mojito. London’s full

of these places, largely because if you’re not a member of one it’s an absolute

nightmare trying to find somewhere to have a drink after midnight. But Soho

House, one of the most successful, is now moving

to the meatpacking district of New York, giving out free memberships to the

likes of Graydon Carter in an attempt to attract the wealthy and beautiful.

Graydon Carter?!?! He’d be eligible for a bus pass in London.

Here’s a quiz for you. It’s 2:30am on a Wednesday night, and you’re in a high-design

bar somewhere south of 23rd Street. You look to your left and you realise that

the expensively-coiffed gentleman holding court at the table next to you is

Graydon Carter. Do you (a) think to yourself "I’ve made it!" while

ordering an expensive cigar in self-congratulation; or do you (b) realise that

you’re not half as cool as you thought you were, and resolve forthwith never

to return? Answers on the back of a cheque marking the amortization payment

on $40 million of meatpacking-district construction activity, please.

Fact is, members’ clubs won’t work in New York because there’s a free alternative.

People might fight to get in to a swanky club, but they know they’ll be fighting

to get into somewhere else

next week: if you join a member’s club, you end up having to go there a great

deal just to make your membership fee worthwhile. And I don’t think that people

will dress down in New York the way they do in London: part of the attraction

of London clubs, I think, is that you can get in, if you’re a member, no matter

what you’re wearing. New Yorkers don’t think like that: if they’re going somewhere

fabulous, they’ll dress up for it, whether they have to or not.

But London and New York are not (or not only) moving together by adopting each

other’s worst and snobbiest characteristics. There are brighter spots too. My

friend Christabel, for instance, has opened up a truly fabulous art space in

London’s East End, called Hotel. Its inaugural exhibition shows a beautiful

neon piece by Peter Saville, and the whole project is very New

New York indeed: effortlessly superior to much more high-profile

exhibitions, at a fraction of the expense.

And if Mayor Bloomberg carries through on his proposal to slap tolls on all

bridges into Manhattan, maybe New York might become a bit more like London in

the wake of the introduction of the congestion charge. I couldn’t believe it

when I was there this time: traffic is flowing smoothly, and central London

is much, much more pleasant. What’s more, the tube and the buses didn’t seem

to be noticeably more crowded, despite the fact that the Central Line was closed.

Cars take up a huge amount of space for a very small amount of people: if those

passengers transfer to public transportation, it would seem, the effect is a

large improvement for all concerned.

Once Bloomberg has sorted congestion in Manhattan, all that remains will be

JFK. Seated right at the front of the plane, I was sure that, for once, I would

get through immigration before my luggage arrived. No chance: the INS computers

went down just as two jumbos were arriving, one from Hong Kong and the other

from London. Eight hundred people went nowhere for the best part of an hour.

Now that’s something you really can’t blame the airlines for.

MemeFirst has responded to Puma’s

cease and desist letter. Trademark lawyer Martin Schwimmer was kind enough

to draft a response both for us and for AdRants, and you can download

a PDF file of it here.

If you don’t want to plough through three dense pages of legalese, however,

here’s the basic gist of our response.

1. We didn’t create those

   images. (To be fair, Puma never accused us of creating the images, but

   it’s worth getting the ground rules straight.)

2. The images, whether real or fake, constitute an item of public interest.

   As such, we have a First Amendment right to comment and report on them.

3. We are not a commercial website, and we do not accept advertising. This

   means that (a) we didn’t profit from the use of the images; and that (b) no

   one could have considered the images as being genuine Puma advertising.

4. Far from generating the impression that the images were genuine, we actually

   sought out Puma, got a statement from them saying the images were fake, printed

   that statement, and generally were prime source of the information that this

   was a hoax. In fact, to this day, Puma has nowhere on its website disavowed

   the ads.

This whole episode with Puma has been fun. I’ve enjoyed getting unprecedented

numbers of visitors both to this website and to MemeFirst, and I’ve never received

a cease-and-desist letter before. But this, I think, is an obvious point at

which to bring the matter to a close. We’re about to go to war, there are much

more important things on everybody’s mind, and we have an absolutely watertight

legal case.

Peter Mastrostefano, Puma’s lawyer, never returned the phone message I left

for him the day I received his c&d, so I really have no idea what his take

is. But I’ll be very surprised if he chooses to pursue this any further.

Memefirst received an official (and officious) letter from Puma today, telling

us to "IMMEDIATELY cease and desist

from all further display, use and publication of the

offensive PUMA image". Why are they shouting? Why is "immediately"

in all caps? No one knows.

The letter helpfully came in the form of a PDF file, which you can download

here, if you like. Otherwise,

it’s very similar to the letter which Gawker posted

earlier today. Gawker’s also written an open

letter to Puma, wondering why they’re getting so upset about something which

is probably very good for them in their target market.

I asked Puma’s Peter Kim a similar question when I spoke

to him a couple of days ago, and he told me that Puma had received "dozens

of emails" from people upset about the ad. Personally, I’m not particularly

interested in taking a position on whether these images are good or bad for

Puma. But this is obviously something which tens of thousands of people are

interested in, and I feel that I have every right to discuss it on felixsalmon.com,

memefirst.com, or anywhere else.

The web page which Puma is asking me to take down states very clearly that

the ads are fake. It is part of a website devoted to the discussion of precisely

this sort of internet meme. Martin Schwimmer, over at trademarkblog, who is

a trademark lawyer and knows his onions, certainly doesn’t

think much of Puma’s tactics:

As to the threats that are being bandied about to those folks reproducing

the ad on their sites, let’s go over some (U.S.) ground rules. If you’re not

using the trademark in commerce, you’re not infringing and you’re not diluting.

If you re-publish a false statement with the indication that it is false (and

in fact publish it because its falsity is news), then you are not commiting

libel or trade disparagement.

Peter Mastrostefano, Puma’s lawyer, says that the memefirst posting "infringes

upon the trademark rights of PUMA"; Schwimmer says it doesn’t. I’m, obviously,

with Schwimmer on this one. What’s more, I don’t like bullies. Of course, Puma

can afford expensive lawyers, and I can’t. But I’m not going to be cowed quite

yet.

Gawker says that "somewhere in the deep recesses of Puma marketing, someone

is snickering into their computer monitor and toasting Photoshop." The

conspiracy theorists, who think this was all the work of Puma to begin with,

are certainly going to think that this whole legal action shenanigans is an

attempt to perpetuate the meme long past the point at which it would naturally

die. But it’s risky, since Puma will now be seen as a big corporate bully rather

than as a cool and streetwise brand.

Peter Kim called me a second time today, to find out who he should send the

cease-and-desist letter to. He was much less friendly this time; in fact, he

was positively curt. I don’t think he minded my previous posting about him;

in fact, he sent me an email saying it was amusing, and thanking me for "the

objective and unbiased reporting". I don’t think he was being sarcastic;

he signed off "best regards". But it’s clear that pretty much everything

is out of his hands at this point.

The pictures aren’t going to go away just by threatening legal action. There

are dozens of sites out there posting them, and if we are eventually forced

to take them down from memefirst, we’ll certainly link to any number of other

places you can view them in their full, unadulterated glory. So I really don’t

understand what Puma thinks it’s going to gain by this.

I’ve got a call in to Mastrostefano; if he gives me an answer, I’ll let you

know.

Oh, yeah, and one other thing. I’m never buying Puma shoes again. It’s adidas all the way for me from now on.

Yes, they’re fake. They have no connection with Puma at all. They’re not real

ads tweaked in Photoshop, they didn’t run in Brazilian Maxim, they’re not viral

marketing by a top-secret Puma subsidiary. They’re fakes, and Puma doesn’t like

them one bit. Here’s the official statement, as emailed to me by Peter Kim,

the man in charge of interactive marketing at Puma in Boston:

It has been brought to our attention that several unauthorized, sexually

suggestive advertisements portraying the PUMA brand have been released over

the Internet. We are appalled that images like these would be created and

distributed under the PUMA name. As a brand, we seek to take a unique perspective

toward our advertising in an effort to challenge the boundaries of our industry;

however we would never consider using these tactics. We are in the process

of researching the circumstances and reserve any legal steps available.

What am I talking about? A pair of ads, purportedly for Puma, which hit the

internet just over a week ago. They hit my radar screen via the incomparable

Gawker, and I posted

them on MemeFirst. I didn’t know whether or not they were genuine, but there

was a lot of interest in them: between Gawker and Salon (in a page no longer

available), the MemeFirst page soon garnered more than 10,000 page views.

What’s more, the site which originally posted the pictures went offline for

some reason, prompting MemeFirst to host them itself (here

and here). If you

don’t want to view them at MemeFirst, however, there’s no shortage of other

sites where they’re available (the original seems to be this

one, in Norway).

At this point, Puma started getting in on the act. Various people at the company

seem to have known about the purported ads for well over a week, but it’s only

been in the past couple of days that they started emailing and phoning people.

Soon one of the first venues for discussion of the ads changed

them to something completely different, and the official statement above

started appearing at sites like ad-rag.com

and blogs.salon.com.

I got interested, and sought out Puma myself. (Evidently MemeFirst.com wasn’t

important enough to hit their radar screen and prompt them to contact me.) I

had a long conversation with Peter Kim, who seems like a very nice chap who’s

well aware of how these kind of viral internet memes spread.

He started out explaining to me that the fake ads constituted trademark infringement,

defamation, and possibly libel, and that "definitely legal action is in

the works". He told me that "it’s a clear-cut case that this is illegal

content," and that if MemeFirst didn’t take the images down, it would face

legal action itself. He even tried to anticipate any argument I might have along

freedom-of-the-press grounds; while saying quite explicitly that he was not

a lawyer, he averred that blogs are "not a media outlet" and that

they are therefore not protected on First Amendment grounds. When I said that

didn’t sound right to me, though, he didn’t belabour the point. "I’m neither

a journalist nor a lawyer," he said. "I’m a web department manager."

Kim seemed pretty straightforward and far from threatening when he told me

that "you can take the stuff down before the machine gets rolling, or you

can choose not to." He was clearly concerned by "dozens of emails"

that he and Puma’s PR people had received from people who thought the ads were

genuine, and who even went as far as threatening lawsuits against Puma on sexual-discrimination

grounds. Certainly, he said, with regard to the person who actually created

these images, "when the truth comes out, it’s not going to be a pretty

picture, because people are pretty miffed about it."

He also seemed to understand that Puma’s PR campaign was something of an uphill

battle. "We are handling it on a case-by-case basis," he said, which

seemed to mean having Peter Kim phone or email any website he came across with

the images. "We’ve decided not to publish a statement on the Puma website."

That decision seemed a bit peculiar to me, and although he was too polite to

say so, I think he thought it a bit odd to. After all, a statement on felixsalmon.com

isn’t quite as authoritative as one on puma.com.

But the fact is, there’s really very little that Puma can do. If it does take

legal action against the likes of MemeFirst, it’s only likely to perpetuate

the meme further. What’s more, the extra publicity would only serve to increase

the number of conspiracy theorists who think that this is all a convoluted scheme

dreamed up by Puma itself. As Kim admits, "there’s almost nothing I can

say" to counter the idea that some bright spark walked in to the office

one day and said "OK, let’s create a blowjob ad and then deny it".

The rival theory, of course, is that the whole thing is a creation of Puma’s

arch-rival, Adidas. Kim’s not convinced, though. "I would not want to give

them that much credit," he says. "My first reaction was that it had

to be a Brit."