Felix Salmon

Music has been becoming increasingly Balkanised for many years now. From the

days of Gregorian chant to the present, there’s been an almost teleological

progression: the number of different types of music has increased, while the

audience for any given piece of music (expressed as a percentage of the music-loving

population) has steadily shrunk. It’s almost reached the point where music can’t

bring different types of people together any more: different people like different

music. None of the chart-topping acts have truly broad appeal: most of them

are, in fact, seriously disliked by most people.

But today I went to a concert with ten-year-old girls, eighty-year-old grannies,

Williamsburg hipsters and cardigan-wearing recluses. It was in Carnegie Hall,

but had probably the youngest audience that venerable venue has had in years;

certainly it was the most diverse. There was no snobbery, no sense that you

were part of some exclusive crowd. The home CDs of the concert-goers ranged

from avant-garde jazz to bubblegum pop to Tony Bennett to Andean nose-flautists. Probably some of us had little in the way of music

at home at all; certainly many of us had nothing by the main composer of the

evening.

It didn’t matter. Everybody in the hall had a whale of a time, and I’m pretty

sure we all left grinning from ear to ear. On the way out, there was a camraderie

amongst us. It was nothing like the grim-faced Music Lovers who loiter outside

the Knitting Factory eyeing each other suspiciously and obsessing over obscure

rarities: rather, we all had experienced a really fun concert, and were simply

in a great mood. As the gym slogan has it, No Judgements.

The concert, of course, or at least its second half, was orchestral arrangements

of pieces by Frank Zappa. Zappa started off as a wacked-out rock star, but didn’t

take long to get himself a certain amount of credibility in the serious (classical)

music world. Even so, his stuff isn’t often performed at Carnegie Hall, or other

venues of that ilk, and today’s performance certainly felt like a special occasion.

More interestingly, it felt like Zappa’s acceptance into the mainstream. That

almost never happens with dead musicians: if they weren’t broadly popular when

alive, the chances are that they’re not going to find new audiences once they’re

dead. But I think that what has happened is that (a) the very fragmentation

of music in recent years has forced people to become at least glancingly familiar

with a Zappaesque range of musical styles and vocabularies; and (b) what once

was daring and transgressive is now harmless and tinged with nostalgia.

That said, Zappa’s music still makes you sit up and take notice: it’s edgy,

exciting, exhilarating. We started off with a short piece called G-Spot

Tornado, a bit like John Adams’ A Short Ride in a Fast Machine

but crazier. Zappa has none of the self-conscious artiness of Adams: while the

latter uses venerable poets to come up with the rhyming couplets in his operas,

Zappa gives us wonderful poetry like this, from the centerpiece of the evening,

The Adventures of Greggery Peccary:

Is this the old loft with the paint peeling off it, by the Chinese police,

where the dogs roll by? Is this where they keep the philostophers now with

the rugs and the dust, where the books go to die? How many yez got? Say yez

got quite a few just sitting around there with nothing to do? Well I just

called yez up cause I wanted to see a philostopher be some assistance to me!

Rhyming couplets, yes, but with a Seussian flavour, as well as an anarchic

iconoclasm. The music is just as wild, if not more so: clashing dischords, wailing

guitars, and even, at one point, a section scored for three electric typewriters.

But somehow, today, such things are appealing, rather than offputting. Zappa

has become a bit like Kurt Weill, whose music obviously was a major influence:

a revolutionary artist whose art will live much longer than his revolutionary

fervour. (The music’s still biting, though. Anyone could love this music, but

no one will emerge from this concert completely unscathed. That’s part of why

it’s so loved.)

The American Composers Orchestra has certainly coped with much weirder things

than typewriters in its time, and in fact breezed through a score which, technically,

didn’t seem particularly demanding by contemporary-music standards. Our narrator,

David Moss, threw himself heart and soul into his role, his voice by far the

most versatile instrument in the orchestra despite the fact that almost never

could you say that what he was doing could really be described as singing. And

the conductor, Steven Sloane, was obviously having a whale of a time, and responded

marvelously to the audience’s very evident enthusiasm.

Elsewhere in the program, before the interval, we had to sit through three

commissions, all of which were pretty benign stuff. Nothing to set the heart

racing, nothing to object to. The harshness of most contemporary music in the

70s and 80s is now being replaced, I fear, with blandness. One of our new composers,

Dan Coleman, is arranging music for Lisa Loeb. Another, Hsueh-Yung Shen, wrote

a piece called Autumn Fall about which he writes that "the work

follows a large unbroken arch". (It’s something of an in-joke among readers

of contemporary-music program notes that at least 50% of all new music is "in

the form of an arch".) Zappa would skewer them all without a second thought.

There was more life and imagination in any 30 seconds of his music than in the

entire first half of the concert. Here’s hoping we get more of him at Carnegie

Hall, and that he continues to mix it up with young and old.

It was a close-run thing, but Studio Daniel Libeskind has won the competition

to design the new World Trade Center site. Today was probably the biggest day

of his career, but he got there not through shameless self-puffery, as some

rival architects have been sniping in the press, but rather through a tireless

commitment to New York and its people. No matter what you think of the plan,

there’s no doubt that Libeskind’s heart is in the right place: everybody from

the family members of the 9/11 victims to New York state governor George Pataki

has been impressed by Libeskind’s dedication to genuine dialogue.

Even if the genuinely revolutionary plan was not, in the end, chosen, the process

by which Libeskind’s victory was achieved was exemplary, and will surely set

the standard for any kind of major urban planning commission, anywhere in the

world, for the foreseeable future. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,

which owns the WTC site and which is notoriously opaque when it comes to development

decisions, ended up being an integral part of the most genuinely consultative

and democratic architectural process any major city has ever seen. Given the

very high standard of many of the shortlisted

plans, I think that the ultimate reason that Libeskind won was that he was

most attuned to the process, and most willing to present his ideas as a work

in progress, something which could and should reflect the views of all the stakeholders

in the site, and not just his own ego.

As Lou Tomson, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation,

said during the announcement ceremony today, the plan was "born out of

tragedy but forged in democracy". The LMDC painstakingly sifted through

tens of thousands of comments from members of the public, not in lip service

to the ideal of public consultation, but as a necessary part of the process

for deciding what would ultimately happen on the WTC site. New Yorkers now have

ownership of the winning plan, which was definitely one of the most popular.

The fact that so many people really like the Daniel Libeskind plan is surprising

to me, an Englishman who well remembers the furor over his proposed addition

to the Victoria & Albert museum in London. But, of course, this is different:

Libeskind is not destroying anything that anybody loves, and bold new buildings

have much more of a place in New York than they do in London. As mayor Michael

Bloomberg noted today, the construction of Libeskind’s spire will mark the tenth

time in history that the tallest building in the world has been built on the

island of Manhattan.

What’s more, the Libeskind plan is one which repays careful attention to detail

– something New Yorkers have been giving all of the proposed designs.

Look at the way, for instance, in which he neither buried West Street nor allowed

it to interfere with the memorial setting on which it borders: by bringing the

memorial down 30 feet below grade, the cars on the highway are both out of sight

and out of earshot to those in the memorial zone.

Libeskind also understood something which was lost on Norman Foster: that this

was a site-use competition more than it was an architecture competition. Lord

Foster spent most of his presentation in December talking about his new skyscraper

– something that would probably never be built. Libeskind, on the other

hand, concentrated on site use, articulating a powerful area for a memorial

(to be designed by others) and placing key buildings along reconstructed Greenwich

and Fulton streets.

The center of his plan – and the new epicenter of Lower Manhattan, once

the plan is realised – is the crossroads of those two streets. It will

be one a great public space, ranking alongside St Mark’s in Venice, rather than

the grey and windswept Austin Toobin Plaza that most of us remember from the

World Trade Center of old. John Whitehead, the LMDC chairman, called it "one

of the world’s most majestic crossroads," and the Wedge of Light, to its

northeast, "a 21st Century piazza for New York City and the world".

Opposite the Wedge of Light, to the southwest, will be the memorial museum and

the Park of Heroes: something Libeskind has glossed in his plan as green space,

but something which the designers of the memorial have a lot of room to play

with. To the northwest will be a gleaming new cultural center, with a 2,200-seat

auditorium, abutting the great 1,776-foot spire. To the northeast will be a

hotel and convention center, while to the southeast will be a grand new transit

hub, which will eventually link lower Manhattan directly to airports to the

east and west.

The transit hub will be a Grand Central Terminal for the 21st Century: filled

with light, even well below ground. The low ground level of the memorial will

help immeasurably here, as will Libeskind’s ingenious idea of building the memorial’s

north wall out of glass. It might be stained, it might be etched, it will certainly

play a central role in the memorial, but it will also act as an illumination

for commuters on the other side. (To the south side of the memorial zone will

be a second wall, this time opaque, which will also be part of the memorial

competition. And the western wall will be the great slurry walls of the original

World Trade Center, which withstood unimaginable trauma and still prevented

the Hudson River from flooding Ground Zero. Part of them will be excavated to

Libeskind’s originally-proposed depth of 70 feet: bedrock.)

The

plan is centered on the memorial square. The photo at left, looking northeast

from more or less the Wall Street Journal offices in the World Financial Center,

is of the new model, and shows the memorial museum cantilevered over the "memory

foundations", as Libeskind calls them. A series of skyscrapers spirals

up from the foundations, up the ramp which descends parallel to West Street

(the big road nearest us) and around the south, east and north edges of the

site to culminate in the large spire holding the "gardens of the world".

On its 110th floor (the height of the original WTC) is a restaurant and observation

deck, but the memorial and the museum are down at ground level, where no one

needs to worry about being high up in the sky. Libeskind said he was aiming

for "places with intimacy and places with grandeur," and that’s what

he’s given us.

Most of the skyscrapers, it’s worth noting, are not going to be designed by

Daniel Libeskind. And since the lower floors of the signature tower are going

to have some tenants, there could be a lot of changes made from how the buildings

are envisaged right now. "It is now our task to make sure that the plan

you see becomes a reality," said New York governor George Pataki today

– but of course this plan is not exactly what will be built.

Libeskind said that within four years we should have the major public components

– the memorial site and museum, the cultural center, the transit hub,

and the restored skyline. Personally, I believe all of it except for the skyline:

I just can’t see this economy being healthy enough to support the construction

of the tallest building in the world.

I don’t see the federal government stepping in to help, either: the representative

of the president today was a minor functionary called Alfonso Jackson, the deputy

secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He gave a horribly

tone-deaf speech, wherein he basically tried to claim credit for everything,

as well as to imply that this plan was somehow integrally connected with both

the war on Iraq and Bush’s proposed tax cut. It’s clear that the White House

doesn’t really care about New York, and that the city and state – both

of whom are horribly in debt right now – are going to have to do most

of the heavy lifting when it comes to reconstructing the public areas of this

site. With the best will in the world, I don’t think they’ll quite manage the

skyscraper within four years, although I hope I’m wrong.

But even without the skyscraper, I’m heartened that New York now has a vision

for rebuilding which is both bold and popular. Not everyone will like it, of

course: there isn’t a major new building in the world that someone doesn’t hate.

But this site is going to be a powerful destination, and I predict that it will,

finally, be responsible for turning lower Manhattan into a vibrant residential

neighborhood. People are really going to want to live here!

Finally, a word about the decision. I have to admit I am a little disappointed:

I wanted the Think plan

to win. Where Libeskind is 1990s avant-garde, Think was genuinely futuristic,

with a vision of a vertical city which had never been attempted anywhere before.

But it was watered down over the past couple of weeks, with fewer buildings

inside the latticework towers, and the memorial museum lowered to the 30th floor

or so rather than being up in the 80s. The latticework was also made lighter

and cheaper, which would have meant it would have been much more difficult to

build new cultural elements as and when the funding for them became available.

In short, it was not entirely clear that the Think plan would really work, and

the rebuilding of a large part of the most important city in the world isn’t

the sort of thing which can be embarked upon with less than 100% certainty.

So I’m happy for Daniel Liebeskind, happy for New York, and happy indeed for

Rafael Vinoly and the other members of the Think team, who have surely got as

much of a profile boost from their unbuilt proposal as they could ever have

got from a finished building anywhere else. I can’t wait to see this plan become

reality.

I haven’t had a lot of luck with air travel of late. My flights always seem

to be delayed – and for some reason, when a flight is delayed more than

half an hour, it always turns out to be six hours at least. You lose a whole

day, your sleep patterns get completly screwed up, and, of course, any vague

hint of a bug you might have had getting on to the plane gets turned into a

full-on raging cold by the time you’ve spent 12 hours in a metal tube breathing

stale, fifth-hand, dry-as-dust air.

I’m in Argentina now, and my trip down here is a case in point. The kind of

people who say "you’re lucky" to someone with a terrible injury would

probably say the same thing about me: I was on the last plane out of JFK as

a major

snowstorm was blowing in to New York, and who knows when I might have been

able to leave had the flight been cancelled.

That said, however, the American Airlines experience left a very great deal

to be desired. On an evening when all flights out of the airport were significantly

delayed due to weather, they insisted on boarding us right on time, only to

sit at the gate… and sit at the gate… and sit at the gate a bit longer.

The announcements from the captain were mumbled, short, and unhelpful: something

about engines, power, de-icing, it was not clear at all.

After about an hour, finally a coherent message from the captain. The good

news: we were finally able to leave the gate. The bad news: a couple of standby

passengers who were meant to be on board turned out not to be, and so their

luggage would have to be removed. Of course, they had all the relevant information

an hour earlier, when we were waiting around twiddling our thumbs, but somehow

failed to act on it until the point when we were hopeful we might finally be

able to take off.

Eventually, the bags were found, the plane left the gate, and – I think,

nothing was made very clear to us – we started the first phase of de-icing.

Apparently there are de-icing "stations" at JFK: this is not a procedure,

like refuelling, that can be done at the gate. So various bits of the plane

got de-iced, and then we headed off to station number two, where the wings and

fuselage would get done. Except we never got there. What with heating and lighting

the cabin, and de-icing whatever they de-iced, they’d somehow managed to run

out of whatever battery power they needed to actually move the aircraft. So

we had to wait for another hour while someone could, in effect, give us a jump-start.

Then, the second phase of de-icing took at least twice as long as it should

have, for similar reasons to do with power. First one side of the plane got

de-iced, then the other, instead of them both being done at the same time.

More profoundly, the way we were running out of power created a big problem:

there now wasn’t enough fuel left to get us all to Buenos Aires. The captain

had three choices: cancel the flight, which no-one wanted; lose 60 passengers

to lighten the load; or refuel in Miami. In the end, the choice was made for

him: the crew had spent so long sitting on the ground that under union rules

they weren’t allowed to work the whole 11 hours to BA. So Miami it was.

It was exactly at this point that things really started to go wrong. Once the

flight had been sitting on the tarmac for a certain amount of time, Miami was

a certainty. In fact, the pilot more or less admitted we would have to refuel

there in one of his earliest announcements, while we were still stuck at the

gate. But let’s be charitable and say it took them a couple of hours to put

two and two together. The plane was meant to leave at 10:20, so by 12:20 American

Airlines should have been getting on the phone to Miami, organising a new crew

to replace the JFK crew, and generally attempting to ensure that we wouldn’t

need to spend any more time in Miami than we needed to refuel.

We finally took off, five hours late, at 3:20. The flight was fast and uneventful,

and we landed by 5:15. The crew, by this point, was very annoyed: rather than

working 22 hours New York – Buenos Aires – New York, they would

get paid for only nine or so, for the time spent idling in New York and the

flight to Miami. Still, they told us, not to worry: the American Airlines agent

would be waiting for us at the gate, along with the replacement crew, and we

should be on our way in no time.

Of course, when we get to the gate, there’s no agent there: no one in Miami

seems to have the foggiest notion what’s going on. Eventually, at 6:00, roughly

when we were expected to be leaving, an agent arrived, and seemed most surprised

to see us at the gate. After a bunch of scrambling around, it’s determined that

our nine-person crew from JFK is going to be replaced by a five-person crew

from Miami – they should be here any time. And, indeed, they all turn

up relatively quickly, except for the one who doesn’t. An extra crew member

must be found, which is likely to take an hour or so, and so at this point it’s

decided that maybe we should be let out of the airplane after all. We’d been

cooped up for eight hours, no one knows how long we’ll be stuck in Miami, and

the flight on to Buenos Aires is another nine: even American realised that it

might not be smart to make a 767 with more than its fair share of small children

stay in its seats for something over 18 hours at a stretch.

So we’re told that we can stretch our legs for half an hour. No longer will

groups of no more than four people at a time be accompanied to the phone booths

and back; rather, we can all enjoy the splendours of the American Airlines departure

lounge in Miami at our pleasure.

The departure lounge is a pretty grim place, outfitted with little more than

a Nathan’s hot-dog stand staffed by the surliest people I’ve ever seen in Miami

(although the fact that they were working at 6:00 on a Monday morning might

explain that bit). All the same, it’s an improvement over the interior of our

airplane’s fuselage.

Actually, scratch that. The surliest people I’ve ever seen in Miami weren’t

the hot-dog vendors, they were the gate Nazis. What no one bothered to tell

us when we were deplaning (yes, they really used that word) was that once we

were off, they wouldn’t let us back on again until they were good and ready.

No, they never said why. For me, it was no great hardship: all it meant was

that I couldn’t read my book, which I’d left safely tucked in the pocket on

the back of the seat in front of me. But for others, especially one woman who

had just got up to make a phone call and who had left two children on board,

including a four-year-old, this petty decision had huge consequences.

Everybody was cranky, remember: it was now 7 in the morning, and no one had

got much in the way of sleep. An 11-hour flight is pretty hard work at the best

of times, but now that another seven or eight hours were being added on to that,

most of them spent on board the airplane, people were getting angry. No one

at Miami knew anything; the only thing they told us was that they’d simply arrived

at the airport at 6:00 and really had no idea what was going on, where the crew

was, how many of them there had to be, when we might be taking off, when we

might be landing, or anything else.

At this point, understandably, various passengers decided that they’d had enough.

They were in Miami, which has many flights down to Buenos Aires each day, and

rather than stick around this accursed airplane, they were going to hang out

in Florida for a day or so and then, somewhat rested, continue on to Argentina.

After all, for the elderly or the very young, an 18-hour plane journey is the

last thing you want, and if you can avoid it, you do.

I don’t know whether anybody actually got off at Miami, whether their bags

had to follow them, or what. No one saw fit to tell us peons what was going

on: all we knew was that the 7:00 deadline for us to get back on to the plane

had come and gone, and there was no sign of anything happening. Communication

was nil. The American staff started playing the sorry-we’re-clueless card a

bit too often: sorry, I don’t know. I don’t know anybody who knows. I can’t

help you.

On the plane, it was the same story: people who’d missed dinner on the grounds

that it had been served at 4 in the morning when no one wants to eat were told

that no, they couldn’t have anything to eat, and that actually, I, your flight

attendant, haven’t had anything to eat since last night either. Oh, and no,

I can’t get you immigration cards for Argentina or anything like that, because

the JFK crew put them somewhere and we have no idea where. And in general, sorry

if you have no service on this flight, but you have to understand: we’re very

understaffed.

On arriving at Buenos Aires, we just got the standard "welcome to Argentina

and thank you for flying American" message: no apology for being eight

hours delayed, and certainly no attempt to make things up to us.

This general unhelpful attitude is something I’ve come across before with American

(and I’ve only flown them on two other occasions). I had an American flight

from Los Angeles to New York once, which involved a change at Dallas-Fort Worth.

All flights in and out of DFW were delayed for some reason, but we were assured

that because everyone was delayed by pretty much the same amount of time, there

shouldn’t be any difficulty making our connections.

Of course the story changed when we got to DFW. Sorry, your flight to LaGuardia

has left already: for noise reasons, planes aren’t allowed to land there after

a certain time, so it got bumped up the list. Again, a failure of communication

from one airport to another: while on the Argentina flight it was New York not

communicating with Miami, on the New York flight it was DFW not communicating

with Los Angeles. Of course, if we’d known in LA that we wouldn’t be getting

to New York that evening, we would never have left at all, and rather spent

one more night in California, catching an early flight back to New York the

following day. But because of information failure, we were stuck in Dallas-Fort

Worth overnight.

It got worse, though: American decided/decreed that the reason we were forced

to stay in Texas overnight was weather, not general incompetence on its own

part, and that therefore they weren’t even going to put us up in a hotel. If

we liked, they could procure some army-style cots and maybe a blanket or two

and we could sleep on the floor of the departure lounge.

Cock-ups, of course, happen on all airlines, through their fault or otherwise.

But where other airlines seem to genuinely want to make things better, American

seems to be as unhelpful as possible. Virgin once gave me a voucher for being

delayed, even though they’d phoned me in advance to tell me that the flight

was late and I could turn up a few hours later. Even the low-cost airlines in

Europe, like Buzz, or in the US, like JetBlue and SouthWest, are known for their

customer service. But American seems to have a completely different mindset.

I think that the problem could well be the aftermath of September 11. American

has been inflicting wave after wave of job cuts, and evidently a lot of the

lost jobs have been the people coordinating its different operations around

the country. I worry, too, that others have been in more vital areas: I don’t

think it’s coincidence that the Rockaway

crash happened so soon after September 11, when morale in the airline industry

was at its lowest and thousands of jobs had just been cut.

People are nervous about flying these days, and maybe they ought to be, although

their reasons for nervousness (war, terrorism) are, I think, misplaced. The

chances of an airline passenger being the victim of a terrorist attack are minimal.

But the chances of the same passenger falling victim to incompetencies which

are a result of downsizing following general nervousness about a terrorist attack

are much greater. It’s almost as though being scared of a flying is a self-fulfilling

prophecy: the more people that are scared of flying, the fewer people flying,

the more layoffs the airlines need to make, the less safe flying becomes, and

the more justified a fear of flying is.

Still, I’m going to continue to fly American, just because of their leg-room.

I’m telling you, once we were airborne, I actually managed to stretch out and

get some sleep – in economy! That doesn’t mean I like them, though.

You probably didn’t notice, but I recently restructured my website. Entries

which used to have unwieldly URLs like https://www.felixsalmon.com/mt-blogfiles/archives/felixsalmon/000067.html

now have nice simple addresses like https://www.felixsalmon.com/000067.php –

a change which has more than simply cosmetic benefits. Now, I can check my referrer

log for who loves me and who doesn’t.

And it turns out that although I do get a few clickthroughs from friendly people

like 2Blowhards and Lockhart

Steele, the majority of referrals come from search engines – often

search engines which seem to have a very weird idea of what’s on my site.

An MSN search

for "flashing co-eds" brings my site up as number 4 on the list, and

a Hungarian Google search

for "grumpy gits" brings felixsalmon.com up in first place, thanks

to my sister’s use of the phrase in her entry

of January 20. (Why Hungarian Google brings me up where US Google doesn’t,

I have no idea.) There’s even a site called mamma.com ("the mother of all

search engines") which considers

my blog the fifth-best result for someone searching on "look for companies

in kuwait and environs".

The problem is, I’m a New York blogger, and I’d much rather have visitors from

New York blogs than from people looking for flashing co-eds or companies in

the Persian Gulf. The New York blogosphere is particularly vibrant at the moment,

especially since the launch of Gawker,

a site I described

on MemeFirst as "an inside-baseball

New York nanopublishing site". (That, in turn, was enough to get MemeFirst

its third listing on Gawker:

the first linked to a

story of mine about Herbert Muschamp, and the second

was about tall buildings. Since I’m one of the three editors of MemeFirst, that

makes me happy: we could use the traffic.)

It’s thanks to Gawker that I rediscovered Supermodels

Are Lonelier Than You Think, a wonderful fashionistablog which is running

a story today about

an "ethical infraction" by W magazine. Now I’ve written

before about the crazy levels to which Americans will go when they get bitten

by the "media ethics" bug, but this is ridiculous. I don’t know how

serious SALTYT is about this, but here’s the relevant bit:

Apparently W got a lot of ads from companies using Gisele because it had

a giant ed with her — or maybe vice-versa. To neophytes in the magazine trade:

asking advertisers to take advantage of their own model’s appearance is sort

of OK; to decide upon a model’s appearance only by the advertisers contributions

is not. It is an ethical infraction.

The whole piece is so crazy on so many levels that one barely knows where to

begin. For one thing, Gisele is the hottest model on the planet: I hardly think

that W needed any prodding from advertisers to put her on the cover of their

bumper March issue. For another thing, part of the reason that Gisele is so

hot is precisely because she’s doing these scorching spreads for Dior

and Dolce & Gabbana. (Although the Dior spread is actually only 6 pages,

not 10 as SALTYT reports.) Advertisers spend insane amounts of money on their

shoots, and it shows: why do you think Gawker illustrated their story with a

picture of the Dior ad, rather than a picture of the W cover? Because the cover,

by Ines van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, is simply not in the same league

as the Dior ad, which I assume is by Nick Knight.

Editorial and Advertising: Which would you buy the magazine for?

The editorial story with Gisele is perfectly good, and has some pretty sexy

shots (as well as some extremely peculiar ones). But flick on for a few more

pages and you get to the 8-page voyeur-porn Dolce & Gabbana sequence, which

includes one shot of Gisele pointing a video camera straight at her spread-open

crotch while her left breast falls out of her top. There used to be a time when

editorial shoots were more daring than advertising: now it’s the other way around,

and real fashionistas buy magazines much more for the ads than for the edit.

Besides, the whole premise of the SALTYT story is ridiculous. "How came

the Vogue issue with Natalia is full of CK ads, while the W issue with Gisele

is full of Dior, D&G, Balenciaga?" we’re asked. Answer: it ain’t. W’s

D&G and Balenciaga ads (8 pages in total) are buried at the back of the

book, while Calvin Klein has 10 pages right at the front, in prime real estate

before the first contents page.

In any case, there are much more interesting things to worry about right here

on the Lower East Side: namely, That Hotel, as helpfully blogged by Gawker here.

For the past year now, a huge 20-story monster has been rising on Rivington

Street between Essex and Ludlow, and finally the Wall Street Journal has revealed

today what it is to be. The original rumour was that it was going to be a W

(hotel, not magazine – really, can’t you tell the difference between a

hotel and a magazine?) but then people started hearing that actually it was

going to be a Standard, or at least owned or operated by Andre Balazs.

The truth? It’s going to be a Surface. As in Surface magazine. (Evidently, no,

we can’t tell the difference between a hotel and a magazine.) Lockhart Steele

had his own take

on the article up in double-quick time, saying that those $250 rooms will probably

be selling for $79 on Orbitz. I doubt it, myself: we’re in something of a hotel

desert down here, and I think it will do pretty well, both as a trendy high-design

destination and as a useful place for the visiting parents of LES yuppies to

stay.

What Lockhart missed was this bit of the WSJ article:

Mr. Stallings wanted to build a hotel with larger rooms and panoramic views.

But late last year, he met Will Candis, a publicist and former manager of

Hotel 17, a one-time welfare hotel in New York that marketed itself as a down-and-out

experience for young artist-types.

In other words, the vision for the hotel has been scaled down significantly.

Those "larger rooms and panoramic views" are gone; in their place

are smallish "studio-style rooms" which are more affordable in the

present economic climate and which will be sold not on the strength of their

luxuriousness but rather as design destinations with possible marketing tie-in

opportunities. Maybe if Hotel (The Mercer)

is the Old New York, then Surface (The Hotel) – as the new place is rather

cheekily naming itself – is the

New New York after all!

The cliché about things designed by committees is going to have to be

rethought. The committee in charge of deciding what’s going to be built on the

World Trade Center site today announced its two

finalists – and they were about as bold and visionary as you could

get. And it wasn’t a committee of avant-garde architects, either: it included

representatives from New York City, New York State and even that epitome of

unimaginative conservatism, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The

decision, it’s worth mentioning, was unanimous.

The committee, in fact, has chastened me into taking one of its finalists seriously.

When I first saw it, I said

that the Think plan for a World Cultural Center was "a crazy idea."

Just for good measure, I added that "This is a flight of fancy, it could

never happen."

Well,

I was wrong. It turns out that the plan, for all that nothing like it has ever

been seen before, is actually eminently practical. The idea behind the World

Cultural Center is to separate culture from commerce: to build around the footprints

of the World Trade Center, but this time filling the space with theatres and

libraries rather than salarymen and offices.

Two latticework towers, the tallest structures in the world, will rise where

the World Trade Center once stood – surrounding, but never touching, the

twin towers’ footprints. At ground level, there may or may not be reflecting

pools, but there will certainly be memorials below grade. High up in the sky,

at the points where the planes hit, there will be another memorial.

The innovative ideas in this project are breathtaking: the fact that wind passes

straight through the latticework, for instance, allows Think to install wind

turbines which will generate enough power to run the whole elevator system.

The engineering is extremely solid, and is designed to stay standing even if

large chunks are vaporised; furthermore, because the latticework is made of

huge steel beams, it’s more likely to break anything crashing into it, rather

than be broken.

These towers are light, in many senses: open to light and the air, they are

tall, but don’t cast oppressive shadows. They also keep the towers of light

which so touched New Yorkers last year: beams can be sent up through the latticework

and up to the heavens, this time exactly where the World Trade Center once stood.

Best of all, this plan, uniquely among the nine shortlisted proposals, would

restore the skyline almost immediately. The latticework towers would start going

up as soon as their foundations were finished, without having to wait for the

New York real estate market to pick up and anchor tenants to be found. The response

I’ve heard most often to the idea of putting towers back on that site is "who

would ever want to work there?" – here, you have the towers, but

precious few workers.

What’s more, even though the concept emphasises the triumph of art over commerce,

there’s still lots of land left over for offices and retail. In fact, the Think

team has kept very much to the spirit of the competition, and simply indicated

where the offices are going to go, without even vaguely trying to show what

they might look like. Larry Silverstein can build what he likes: because the

memorial and the heart of the redesign is concentrated within the area bounded

by Greenwich, Fulton, Liberty and West Streets, everything else in the 16-acre

site can be very close to New York real estate development as usual.

What that does mean is that this plan, almost uniquely among the leading candidates,

has relatively little in the way of parkland or open space. Think has taken

city streets and made them vertical: piling buildings (to be designed by a variety

of architects) on top of each other rather than alongside each other. The space

is up in the sky, not down on the ground. It’s a radically new vision for the

new century, and New York would be the envy of the world were it to play host

to it.

Daniel

Libeskind (I guess I ought to be spelling his name right now he’s a finalist:

I always thought it was Liebeskind), on the other hand, is now in the rather

unusual – for him – situation of being the conservative choice.

I loved his plan when he first announced it, and I still do: it will create

one of the world’s great public spaces, at the center of which will be a very

powerful memorial descending into the ground.

Just how far the memorial will descend is not entirely clear, however. Many

family members appreciated the raw nature of the space, and the fact that the

memorial site would be down in the foundations of the towers, 70 feet below

ground. But that might be impractical, for engineering reasons: the slurry wall,

which is a vital centerpiece of the Libeskind design, was not designed to hold

back the Hudson River without heavy foundations on its eastern side. So the

base of the memorial might have to be moved up a bit, something Libeskind is

fine with.

Either way, the Libeskind design is one of the most coherent and stunning.

The passage out from the bottom of the memorial to the top of the Gardens of

the World, 1776 feet up in the air, will be a magnificent and moving journey.

Moving around the site is intuitive and easy, and the transport hub is extremely

impressive.

Choosing between these two designs will not be easy. I strongly urge you to

check them both out and let me – and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation

– know what you think. Ultimately, however, I think the final choice is

going to be determined by how much ambition the public sector has.

The Think design is far from being a waste of money. West Street remains just

as it is: for the amount of money that other plans spend on either burying or

covering it, Think can build its towers. And in fact, in many respects the two

proposals are the same: the site and size of the memorial, what to do with West

Street, where to put the transit hub, that sort of thing. As far as land use

goes, the decision has pretty much been made. Nevertheless, the Think proposal

is a lot more expensive than that of Libeskind, who calls his proposal "bargain

basement".

While there might be some private-sector sponsorship of cultural institutions

inside the Think latticework towers, they will still have an up-front cost to

the public sector of many hundreds of millions of dollars. And while the Think

towers would go up very quickly, the Libeskind spire wouldn’t rise until Phase

III, which could be a decade hence, if it happens at all.

So while my original reaction to the plans was to prefer Libeskind to Think,

I’ve now changed my mind. Libeskind is architecture we know: modern, avant-garde

architecture, which can be very good but which isn’t going to change the way

that people think about what’s possible and what buildings can be and represent.

The Think plan, on the other hand, turns whole groupings of buildings into a

living memorial, with books and theatre and dance and vibrancy, something visible

from all over New York, and something which, if it’s chosen, will actually get

built.

Be bold, I say. Think Think.

Anybody with an interest in space exploration has known, pretty much ever since

the Columbia first launched in 1981, that the space shuttle was, scientifically

speaking, a white elephant. It was designed as a workhorse capable of taking

large loads into space on a regular basis, but it never came close to fulfilling

that destiny. Desperate to justify the shuttle’s existence, NASA started getting

its astronauts to perform scientific experiments in space. On the Columbia’s

last mission, the experiments included taking photos of dust and watching how

bugs get on in zero gravity. None of this was interesting or important, and

no one even pretended that it was.

So when people say

that the space shuttle ought to be scrapped because unmanned space flight is

cheaper and more scientifically useful, they’re basically doing little more

than repeating what’s been said for decades. They’re also missing the point:

the shuttle was never designed primarily as a scientific research device. Whatever

scientific knowledge that can be gleaned from spaceflight is an ancillary benefit.

I’m reminded of my sister, sunning herself (24 hours a day) in Antarctica right

now, on a hugely expensive scientific project which, while useful, is only

funded because of the UK’s geostrategic claims on the continent. Britain needs

a presence there, and scientists are a great way of establishing that presence

without any kind of belligerence. Remember that just as most astronauts come from the

military, Antarctic bases are usually run by military officers.

The reason why the Columbia disaster was huge news all over the world was not

because seven people died, and it was certainly not because the disaster might

have marked the end of any project of scientific research. Rather, humanity

identifies with the desire to conquer new territories, to explore our world

and its environs to the very limit of our abilities. That a man has walked on

the moon causes wonder even today; that a man hasn’t walked on the moon in decades

is evidence of the fact that doing so is of only the most marginal scientific

interest. When Columbia broke up on re-entry, the dreams of millions of people

around the world crashed back down to earth with it. (Think of when Lady Di

died: people mourned not an individual death, so much as everything she stood

for.)

But just because the space shuttle is a powerful symbol of America’s strength

and humanity’s quest for the heavens is no reason not to scrap it. The best

piece about the shuttle written in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster is

a short

essay in Time magazine by Gregg Easterbrook, titled The Space Shuttle Must

Be Stopped. Easterbrook clearly lays out why the shuttle is a flying anachronism,

worth billions of dollars to what used to be called the "military-industrial

complex" but fundamentally an answer without a question. You want manned

space flight? Fine. Safer, cheaper space vehicles could be built if the space

shuttle programme were scrapped, but it’s got so much political and economic

inertia that its abolition and replacement is almost impossible.

It’s pretty hard to imagine a bigger waste of money than the space shuttle.

Each launch costs half a billion dollars, a hundred times more than the launches

were originally meant to cost once the programme was up and running. Its primary

purpose is to build the International Space Station, whose own primary purpose

is to provide something for the space shuttle to do. The space station has already

cost $35 billion; the cost of its crew’s bottled water alone is almost half

a million dollars a day.

The really annoying thing is that all of this money-burning is actually hindering,

not helping, space exploration. If we’re interested in exploration at all, what

we need is an easy, cheap and safe way of getting into orbit. The shuttle, of

course, is none of the above. If the US government were to put its efforts into

developing such a transportation system, then it’s even possible that the private

sector would step in and help take things to the next level. But the space shuttle

and the space station are like huge vacuums, sucking up all available government

funds, and leaving nothing left over to modernise or rationalise humanity’s

adventures in space.

The US, it seems, learned nothing from the Challenger disaster in 1986. It

kept on running the shuttle programme regardless of its obsolescence, and has

essentially spent the last 17 years marching down a dead end. It’s time to stop

throwing good money after bad, and to start asking why we’re doing this at all.

The half-finished space station can be kept as a memorial to the hubris of the

USA and the avarice of its contractors; the shuttle itself, like the Apollo

programme, can then be remembered as something which sparked the imagination

of billions rather than as a white elephant with a nasty habit of killing astronauts.

The quest to put men into space is noble. The desire to keep the space shuttle

flying is not.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, better known to

New Yorkers as the MTA, is proposing

to abolish subway tokens as part of its drive to help close a budget gap of

$2.8 billion (or $951 million, depending on whom

you believe) for 2003 and 2004. You won’t have seen this, but according

to the dreadful Clyde Haberman in the New York Times today, only 9% of bus and

subway rides are now paid for with tokens, and so it seems a sensible economy

to make.

(The reason that you won’t have seen the statistic is that no one in their

right mind would ever have read past a third paragraph which begins thusly:

"These details — so fascinating that you may already be turning the

page — are mentioned to make a point about nostalgia. It isn’t what it

used to be.")

85% of all rides are now paid for with MetroCards, so it’s obvious how New

Yorkers like to pay for their public transportation. MetroCard is the way of

the future, and, if the MTA gets its way, it’s going to be the only way of the

future. (On the subways, at least, you can’t pay directly in cash, which accounts

for the final 6% in the statistics.)

But MetroCards are not completely understood, even by those who use them on

a regular basis. As a public service, then, I hereby present Felix’s

guide to using MetroCards: eight rules it’s useful always to keep in

mind.

1. Know your balance. There are two ways in which MetroCards

   are inferior to the tokens they replace, and this is one. If you have half

   a dozen tokens in your wallet, you have half a dozen rides. If you have a

   MetroCard in your wallet, you have, um, anywhere from zero to 50 rides. Every

   time you swipe your card, the remaining balance comes up on the little screen.

   Pay attention! If the number is low, remember you need to refill it or buy

   a new card.

2. Discard empty cards. If the remaining balance is zero,

   throw the card away. The one way to know for sure whether you have at least

   one ride remaining is to only hold on to cards with at least one ride left

   on them. This is not environmentally friendly, since one of the good things

   about MetroCards is that they can be refilled. But walking around with a zero-balance

   MetroCard is a very bad idea, since you’ll forget it has nothing on it, and

   end up getting annoyed trying to pass through a turnstile just a train is

   pulling in to the station.

3. Keep a spare. When the balance on your MetroCard gets low,

   don’t refill it, get a new one. Keep the old one as a spare: that way if you

   exhaust the new one before you’ve had a chance to replace it, you’ll know

   you’ve got an emergency ride or two left. If you do replace the new one in

   time, then keep that one as an extra spare. Trust me, you’ll use it.

4. Never spend less than $15. Why lose out on a free bonus?

   Every time you spend $15 or more, you get a 10% bonus automatically added

   on to your card, worth at least one free ride.

5. Be careful with the exact amounts you’re spending. If

   Mr Colman’s profit is in the mustard left on the side of the plate, then a

   good chunk of the MTA’s cashflow comes from 50-cent or $1 fragments of rides

   which sit, unusable, on MetroCards. This is going to become a lot easier to

   work out if the fare increases to $2 from $1.50 – but much harder to

   work out if it rises to $1.75. But in general, make sure that the amount of

   credit on your card is a multiple of the standard fare.

   This is not an easy rule to comply with, especially if you’ve taken rule #4

   to heart. $15 will get you 11 rides, and $30 will get you 22 rides, but there’s

   no amount which will get you any whole number of rides in between. If you

   wanted 15 rides, say, you would have to pay $21, which you get you a card

   with $23.10 of credit on it. After those 15 rides, you’d still have 60 cents

   of useless credit left over. Even if you spent $20.50, there would be an annoying

   5-cent overage at the end.

   I will, however, tell you the solution to the common problem of what to do

   with the change left over on a $10 MetroCard. After six rides, there’s $1

   left on it: how much do you refill it with, if you’re going to comply with

   rule #4? Answer: $25. The 10% bonus makes your $25 worth $27.50 of credit;

   add that $1 and the total on the card is $28.50, or 19 rides. If you think

   of yourself as buying 19 rides for $25, that comes out at just under $1.32

   per ride.

6. Remember the 1-Day Fun Pass. Many New Yorkers who don’t

   buy unlimited-ride MetroCards on a regular basis are losing out by not buying

   the one-day card. Last Thursday, for instance, I took the subway up to 57th

   Street for a panel discussion I wanted to see, took another ride down to 33rd

   Street for a lunch meeting, and then a third one back home again. Already,

   by this point, I would have been better off buying a "fun" pass

   rather than swiping my pay-as-you-go card. By the time I went up to 23rd St

   and back for another meeting in the late afternoon, I’d used up $7.50 of credit

   on my MetroCard (which cost me about $6.80 because I follow rule #4) when

   I could have gotten it all for $4.

   This rule might not be in effect for long, however. Even if the standard fare

   goes up from $1.50 to $2, that 33% increase is dwarfed by the proposed 75%

   increase in the price of the one-day pass, from $4 to $7. And it’s rare indeed,

   outside the realm of tourists, that someone knows before their first ride

   in the morning that they’re going to be making at least half a dozen subway

   or bus journeys that day (not including free transfers).

7. Buy your card when you get to where you’re going. Because

   you’re following rule #1, you’ll know when you get on the subway that it’s

   time to buy a new card. When you get off, you’ll often have a minute to spare

   before you have to be where you’re going. Or maybe you’re going home, and

   you’re not in much of a rush. This is the perfect time to buy your new card,

   since there’s no chance that the time you spend buying it will make you miss

   your train. The only time it’s completely safe to buy a card when you go in

   to the station is when you’re at one of those smaller stations where the train

   tracks are easily visible from the MetroCard machines, and you can see if

   your train has just left. Take your anger at missing your train, and turn

   it into happiness that you now have the opportunity to buy a new card!

8. Beware double-charging. When MetroCards first came out,

   there was a rash of complaints from people saying that they had been charged

   double – $3 – for their rides. If the first avantage of tokens

   is that you always know how many you have left, then the second advantage

   is that they’re completely reliable: you put your token in the turnstile,

   and walk through. With MetroCards, on the other hand, it often takes multiple

   swipes before you get admitted. Many people, when they see the message saying

   "please swipe again", simply try a different turnstile. That’s fine.

   The problem is when the message says "please swipe again at this turnstile".

   For reasons which are rather complicated and hard to understand, the swipe

   system means that your $1.50 gets deducted from your card before the turnstile

   lets you through. If your swipe is too fast, or too short, or something like

   that, then you can end up on the wrong side of the turnstile with $1.50 already

   deducted from your card. If you stay at the same turnstile, it recognises

   the card, and doesn’t deduct another $1.50. But if you move to a different

   turnstile, you get charged twice over.

Learn all these, and you’re pretty much there. You still have to master the

swipe action, of course, but that can only come with practice: I can’t help

you on that. Just remember: your subway ride won’t often be pleasant, but it

can be efficient.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s $1-a-year CEO (not including the 10 million shares and

$90 million corporate jet that the grateful board gave him for turning the company

around) excelled himself in showmanship yesterday. He was giving his annual

keynote address, which everybody expected to be pretty boring, and after an

hour and a half the most exciting announcement was that Apple had developed

a new web browser.

Safari, for that’s what it’s called,

isn’t, it turns out, all that exciting after all: once the übergeeks at

Mac OS Rumors got their hands on it,

they rapidly decided they were going to stick with Chimera.

Personally, I hate the "user-friendly" bookmarks system. And the name’s

silly, too: surely Jaguar should run in Safari, rather than the other way around?

But then, just when everybody thought Jobs was running out of time, he announced

the arrival of his new baby: the 17"

PowerBook. Immediately, every Mac lover in the world wanted one. It’s bigger

and faster and thinner and sexier than anything else in the world, and Jobs

kept on piling on the added extras. FireWire 800, Airport Extreme (with a vastly

improved base station retailing at $100 less than the old cost), Bluetooth,

even a glow-in-the-dark keyboard – the Apple faithful were lapping it

up.

It’s the sort of announcement which makes you immediately forget all the sensible

advice along the lines of "if all you’re going to do is X, then you don’t

need Y, you only really need Z". Just before Christmas, for instance, Walter

Mossberg wrote a column

saying that

While tweaking every last bit of speed out of a PC may matter for techies

and heavy game players and people doing things like professional video or

audio production, it doesn’t make sense for average consumers doing typical

tasks. You won’t be able to type, or print or surf the Web any faster with

a bunch of technically faster components in your PC.

The biggest jargon scam involves the speed of the processor chips that drive

PCs — Intel’s Pentium 4 and its competitors. The most prominent number in

many computer ads is the processor clock speed — 2.0 Gigahertz, or 2.53 or

whatever. But this doesn’t really translate into improved performance for

the user, especially for mainstream users whose typical PC tasks wouldn’t

tax the capabilities of far slower processors. If you’re doing e-mail, Web

surfing, digital-music playback, simple photo work, word processing and other

office-type tasks, a 2.53 GHz processor won’t make those things noticeably

better or faster than, say, a 1.5 GHz processor.

What Mossberg wrote about PCs goes for Apples as well, although Apple’s architecture

means that a 2GHz Intel processor could be slower than a 1Ghz Apple chip.

But Apples have always been luxuries, rather than necessities: it’s always

been possible to get a Wintel machine which basically has the same functionality

(but with less beauty and less user-friendliness) for less money. And given

how much time most of us spend at our computers, these particular luxuries are,

in my opinion, well worth it. It’s a bit like the way in which even relatively

low-paid people will shell out quite a lot for their spectacles: they wear them

every day, they create the face they present to the rest of the world, and so

it’s important to get it right. Similarly, people feel better when

they’re sitting using OS X than they do in front of Windows.

And what the 17" PowerBook offers is something even frugal PC users have

been wanting for a long time now: a huge, flat screen. Even when you look at

desktop computers, consumers in general have been pushing hard for flat screens

in general and large flat screens specifically. While the ratio of laptops to

desktops remains about 1:2, flat-screen systems in general (including laptops)

have already overtaken systems with big and clunky old-fashioned monitors. And

with its 1440×900 screen, the new Apple screen shows almost three times as much

information as an old-fashioned 800×600 screen.

With a nice wide screen like that, you can set up a whole new way of working

in side-by-side windows, rather than having to switch back and forth the whole

time. And there are obvious advantages for anybody who ever does desktop publishing

or any kind of video editing, where you want to be able to see two TV-shaped

screens next to each other, or a whole magazine spread.

So I think that Paul Boutin, in Slate, was being a bit rude when he called

Apple’s new beauty an iSUV, "half computer and half Cadillac Escalade".

He’s right that gigabit data jacks are a little bit on the over-specced side

for the vast majority of users, at least for the time being. But the first rule

of computers is that they always go out of date, and anybody who’s still dealing

with an external USB hard drive knows what it’s like to feel that it just takes

far too long to transfer large amounts of information.

Boutin says that "Among the rows of jaded industry journalists at Jobs’

feet, two things were obvious: Nobody, but nobody, really needs this computer.

And everybody wants one." The second thing is certainly true. But I’m not

sure about the first. This computer could be the first laptop which is good

enough to replace a desktop machine at, say, video or magazine production companies.

It has the new Airport Extreme built in, which means that a single $199 base

station could service a whole office, with people being able to move around

to wherever they’re needed, without being stuck at a desk. And the distinction

between a desktop at work and a laptop for travelling would be lost: you’d just

use the same machine for everything. And any time you needed a truly

ultra-fabulous screen, you’d just plug it in. (With those screens costing

$3500 a pop, going laptop could actually save money: rather than buying a screen

for everyone who ever needs one, you only need as many screens as will be needed

at any given time.)

It’s important to remember that $3300 is not much money in a corporate context,

where the annual cost of supporting computers nearly always exceeds the sticker

price on the machines themselves. You’d need to buy 30 of the new PowerBooks

just to reach the $100,000 that a single tech-support person easily costs.

The computer which genuinely "nobody, but nobody, really needs" is

not the new 17" PowerBook but its little brother, the 12"

PowerBook. This bizarre little computer is basically a slimmed-down 12"

iBook with an imperceptibly faster

chip, a shiny metal casing, and a slightly bigger hard drive. The screen is

exactly the same, 1024×768.

I can see why the PowerBook is better than the iBook, but I can’t see why it’s

80% better: the price of the new, small, PowerBook, is $1800, compared to $1000

for the iBook. (OK, the iBook costs $1300 if you want the same CD-burning drive

that’s in the PowerBook, but that’s still a $500 savings.) The natty gadgets

in the 17" PowerBook are mostly absent: there’s no Airport Extreme card,

no FireWire 800, no backlit keyboard. And in terms of weight, the newer model

saves a whopping 100 grammes: it’s 2.1kg, compared to 2.2kg for the 12"

iBook.

And for the sake of being able to launch this utterly pointless computer, Apple

wasted acres of space on its lovely new 17" PowerBook. Believe it or not,

the keyboard on the two machines is exactly the same size: Apple’s gone and

put huge stereo speakers on the 17" model where it could have had a desktop-style

extended keyboard, complete with number pad, forward-delete key, and all the

other things those of us who used to have desktops miss when we move to a laptop.

But I’m sure that Apple’s not counting on the 12" PowerBook to drive its

sales of notebooks in 2003. It’s the big one which everyone wants, and I have

a feeling that a lot of people will somehow be able to persuade themselves to

buy it. Hell, it’s only 6% of the price of that Cadillac Escalade.