Felix Salmon

The World’s Greatest Atlas

Posted on August 13, 2002 by Felix

More traveller’s thoughts: this time one of those ideas you

have when you wake up in a strange hotel room at some time of day

when you’re really meant to be going to sleep, not waking up,

and you’ve just had the weirdest dream about old Ordnance Survey

maps, not of the UK but of the world, and they fit together onto a

big table, six of them, side by side, and they’re relief, with

the Amazon rainforests burning real flames and the Gulf Stream shown

in the Atlantic in real blue water, and it’s all dated circa

1955 or thereabouts, and you’re trying to get people, including

your ex-boss, to see this amazing old thing which you’ve discovered

on the shelves of a second-hand bookshop which is packing up to move

elsewhere, but it’s down the end of a dark alleyway, and it’s

really hard to make them interested – you don’t know what

I’m talking about? Never mind, this is great idea anyway. It’s

not original, I’m sure, but I’m loving thinking about it,

and because this is my website, I can put up on it whatever I want.

So… The World’s Greatest Atlas. As we all know, maps are

all computerised now: it was a lot of work to take all of the information

which had painstakingly been immortalised in print and transfer it

into a huge relational database, but now it’s been done, and

both Bertelsmann and the OUP now have incredibly detailed information

about pretty much all of the surface of the earth, which they can

print out in various different forms for different atlases aimed at

different markets all over the world.

So: put it all on a DVD-ROM, or something like that: I have no idea

what the ratio is of the sort of information I’m talking about

here to the storage capacity of a multimedia disk, but if it can’t

be done, then just put it all on a big fast web server (actually,

come to think, that’s even better, because then all the information

is kept up-to-date in real time) and sell the software which is required

to read it over the high-bandwidth pipes we’ll all have in next

to no time. I’m not joking here: this could be the high-bandwidth

killer app which finally gets people to upgrade from dialup en

masse, and which also manages to be the first website outside

the business information and pornography industries which millions

of people are actually prepared to spend money for. (The economics

are great: you can have annual subscriptions, or just pay on a per-visit

basis; the kind of things you can find on the internet anyway can

be free, but higher levels of granularity can cost more, that sort

of thing. Hell, if it gets big and fabulous enough, you might even

need some sort of CIA clearance to get to the really detailed stuff!)

Now the software’s the real beaut. Pick up any world atlas

in your local bookshop, and you’ll see that the maps in most

of them are hideously garish. Maps used to be things of real beauty,

but now most publishers don’t have the resources to make beautiful

maps any more. They just hit a button on their relational database,

pick a few colours, and let it fly; some peon in the graphic design

department then spends maybe a couple of hours on each one making

sure that the place names don’t overlap too badly, and it’s

off to the printers. The problem is, the maps have to show far too

much information in far too little space: they have to be all things

to everybody. Someone looking up a small town in south-western Germany

has to use a map showing the topography of north-eastern France. With

a computer generating maps on demand, however, all of that is a thing

of the past. If all you want is the cities of south-western Germany,

that’s all you’ll get. If you want a general topography

of western Europe without bothering with lots of useless place names,

you’ll get that as well. Everything can be done to the scale

you want, with only the information you want. The mapmaker’s

art is that of fitting lots of information into an enclosed space:

this software will do away with the mapmaker’s art (to be honest,

it’s pretty much dead already anyway) by having much less information

in an essentially unlimited space.

The latest edition of the Times Atlas of the World did away with

the city maps. On the one hand, you can see why: they’re certainly

of no use compared to the sort of city maps you can find for free

on the internet. But at the same time, it’s a real loss to the

atlas. Our new software can drill down from the world to the Americas

to North America to the United States to New York State to New York

City to Manhattan to – and this is where New York City’s

own map gets integrated into the atlas – the very block you live

on, with its water supplies, its buildings, street numbers and everything.

You can even see it in photographic form if you want.

This atlas will do things no one has ever been able to do before:

pull up a topographic map of the world, say, and then at the touch

of a button evaporate all the water: see the surface of the earth

without the arbitrary cut-off at sea level which most maps make. With

the three-dimensional data available, you won’t even need to

confine yourself to the standard bird’s-eye view: you can move

around the canyons of the earth and sea just like you can move around

an unbuilt house using a CAD program.

Political boundaries will be constantly updated, of course, but

the old ones won’t be erased: type in a year, and the political

map of the world for that year will immediately appear. Press a button,

and you can fast-forward through wars and treaties and see Europe’s

states alter over time, watch the African independence movements slowly

appear.

You want a road atlas to get you from Peoria, Illinois to Nashville,

Tennessee? You’ve got it. You want to see where the world’s

known oil reserves are? Here you are. You want a map of caribou breeding

grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve? Pronto. Add in data

from space satellites, and you can see a pictorial representation

of just about anywhere on the earth’s surface, as it looks right

now.

We’re not there quite yet, of course, although we’re not

that far away. The great thing about this atlas is that it doesn’t

need to be up to full strength immediately: just the ability to manipulate

the information available right now would be something incredible.

There’s nothing the software needs to do which hasn’t already

been written in some form. Getting the information together in one

place and in one format is the tough bit, sorting out copyright issues,

that sort of thing. But this isn’t just a cartographic version

of the Humane Genome Project I’m talking about here: its usefulness

far outstrips the relatively small world of maps and mapmakers. There’s

something in it, literally, for everyone. Please let me live

to see it!

Posted in Culture | 1 Comment

Number portability: The craven FCC caves in

Posted on July 29, 2002 by Felix

Pop along to the Federal Communication Commission’s website,

and buried in the "Headlines" you’ll find something saying

"Verizon Wireless’ Petition for Partial Forbearance from the Commercial

Mobile Radio Services Number Portability Obligation and Telephone Number

Portability." Click on one of the links (it’s available in text,

pdf

or Word

format, but not in basic HTML) and you’ll find yourself in a 27-page

thicket of legalese. It’s not a petition at all, it’s the FCC’s response

to the petition, and it makes for incredibly depressing reading.

In a nutshell, the FCC has given Verizon (and every other wireless

company) an extra year before they need to introduce number portability

– the ability to change your cellphone provider without changing your

phone number. The decision is in no way atypical. A quick timeline might

be in order here:

July 1996: The FCC tells the operators that they need to have local
number portability (LNP) by June 30, 1999 – three years away.
September 1998: The FCC grants a nine-month extension, to March
31, 2000.
February 1999: The FCC grants another extension, this time all
the way out to November 24, 2002.
July 2002: The FCC grants yet another extension, to November 2003.

So we’re now six years away from the original order, more than three

years past the original deadline for compliance, and we’re still 16

months away from the earliest that this is going to happen, assuming

that the FCC doesn’t come up with reasons to push it back yet further.

It must be really tough, this LNP, eh? Six years of work and the wireless

operators still can’t make it happen! Of course, that’s not the case

at all. The wireless operators could do it in a month or two if they

needed – in fact, they shamelessly admit that they haven’t even started

getting to work on this yet. Basically, all they’ve been doing for the

past six years is paying lobbyists to push the deadlines out, rather

than making the relatively modest technology and staff-training upgrades

needed to implement LNP. (Number portability has existed for wireline

telephony for years now, and Verizon has no problem implementing it

in that context.)

Verizon et al complain that LNP is far too expensive, although

even their own estimates only work out at 20 cents or so a month on

the average cellphone bill. Sprint, for example, estimates that LNP

would cost $26 million, compared to total capital expenditures last

year of $3.327 billion. Coincidentally, my monthly Sprint PCS phone

bill is roughly $33.27, so adding on LNP would bring that up to $33.53,

assuming that Sprint is being completely honest here and not exaggerating

the costs at all. That I can afford.

For LNP doesn’t just bring costs, it brings savings, too. One third

of America’s cellphone customers will "churn" in 2002 – will

switch from one provider to another. When they do so, and change their

phone numbers in the process, they not only need to send out those mass

emails we’re all so used to getting, but also need to get websites edited,

business cards and letterheads reprinted, and inevitably never receive

an unknown number of phone calls from people who didn’t get the message.

The cost of all of that is certainly more than the extra buck or two

that customers may or may not need to pay in annual phone charges.

(Astonishingly enough, the cellphone companies actually use the one-in-three

figure in an attempt to buttress their own argument. The fact that churning

is so common, they say, is proof positive that people don’t mind changing

their phone numbers, so there’s no point in spending money to let them

keep them. What they mean, of course, is that given the choice between

a customer spending $200 on new business cards and themselves spending

$2 on LNP, they’d choose the former any day.)

What the phone companies won’t tell you is that far from increasing

your phone bill, LNP is more than likely to decrease it. The cost of

switching providers at the moment is artificially high, due to the expense

and hassle involved in changing your phone number. If that goes down,

mobile companies will have a huge incentive to start poaching disaffected

cellphone users who can’t stand their present provider but who are presently

daunted by the obstacles to switching. A consulting company called Instat

estimates

that churn would increase by 25% to 50% in the year after LNP was introduced

– more than 20 million people who are presently unhappy but who feel

locked in to a bad relationship.

A good cellphone company would consider those 20 million customers

as an enormous opportunity: now that the wireless market is maturing,

they represent a tsunami of potential new subscribers. But evidently

none of the major national cellphone companies are nearly that confident:

they all feel that they have more to lose from LNP than they have to

gain. They’re probably right: whatever they might gain in new subscribers

they’d probably need to lose in terms of all the discounts and whatnot

needed to attract those new subscribers in the first place. But that

just goes to prove that cellphone bills will go down and not up – quite

the opposite of what the telcos claim in their petition.

A word about regulation, too, for the all-regulation-is-bad types out

there: LNP is almost an axiomatic case of a market inefficiency which

requires regulation. If all providers have LNP, then the market becomes

more liquid, consumers benefit, and the better cellphone companies find

it easier to outperform the less good ones. In other words, you have

something much closer to a classic free market. But left to its own

devices, the market will never get there: if any company institutes

LNP unilaterally, then it can be poached from, while remaining unable

to poach from its rivals. There’s a downside without any upside. In

order for everybody to benefit, a regulator has to mandate that all

companies implement LNP at the same time.

The FCC understands this, but is proving amazingly spineless in making

it happen. LNP might exist in November 2003, or it might not: no one

knows. The commission has managed to justify its latest decision by

saying that the wireless operators are already overtaxed by something

called pooling, and that it’s probably unfair to make them implement

pooling and LNP at the same time. It’s the sort of thing which makes

experts in the field guffaw. The whole point about having LNP and pooling

kick in on the same date was that they’re essentially two sides of the

same coin: they’re based on exactly the same technology. If you’ve got

LNP, you’ve got pooling.

And in fact most of the ruling does read like a brief for the consumer.

The FCC knows what the right thing to do is, and lays out the arguments

for LNP in compelling detail. It then, unfortunately, caves in at the

end. Once again, the lobbyists have won and the general public has lost

out. Some day, perhaps, you’ll be able to switch your land line number

to your new cellphone, and do away with your home phone entirely. (Imagine:

cellphones with 212 area codes!) It was meant to happen this November;

it’s worth hoping that it will now happen at the end of 2003. But I’m

not holding my breath.

Posted in Politics | 4 Comments

Tadpole

Posted on July 28, 2002 by Felix

The first thing we’re told at the beginning of Miramax’s much-hyped

new film, Tadpole, is

that it’s "a film by" Gary Winick. (He also, of course, gives

himself a "directed by" credit a couple of minutes further

on.) Later in the film, our young hero, Oscar Grubman, is feeling upset.

We know this because he’s filmed staring moodily out over the East River,

first in long shot, then in medium shot, then in close-up. We then see

him staring moodily out past the Rose Planetarium, before watching him

walking moodily through an autumnal Central Park. Meanwhile, the soundtrack

is "The Only Living Boy in New York". Oscar Grubman himself

could have done better.

Suffice to say, this film, for all its witty writing, is not a directorial

triumph, and the pretentious opening credit is far from justified. Winick’s

success in selling this film to Miramax and getting nationwide distribution

is largely despite his efforts and not because of them: in that he mirrors

his protagonist, who finds himself in bed with the stunning Bebe Neuwirth

not because of his obnoxious behaviour but rather because Bebe sees

right through it to the eager puppy underneath.

The film is certainly eager to please, and Neuwirth relishes her role

even more than she does her dinner at Cafe Boulud. But other major characters,

including the lead, are less well drawn: why would a boy with a French

mother and American father insist on speaking French the whole time

in New York? And why would his square American father barely react when

he finds out his wife’s best friend has just seduced his 15-year-old

son?

Of course, Tadpole is not a meditation on bohemian Upper East Side

adolescence in the manner of Six

Degrees of Separation or even Everyone

Says I Love You. Rather, it’s a comedy about a kid who, for all

his ability to quote Voltaire at will, knows nothing of love. Tadpole’s

problem is that it’s so lightweight it doesn’t let anything bad happen

to any of the characters: everybody ends the film happier than when

they started. To turn the film’s beloved Voltaire on his head, all really

is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

There are other weaknesses, too. Multiple quotations from Voltaire

in the form of white-on-black intertitles are a grave mistake. And the

film quality is appalling, despite Miramax reportedly spending about

five times the budget of the film in attempting to get a workable print

from the DV original. Films shot on DV never look particularly good

in theatres, but with enough love and a high enough budget, they can

rise to the level of OK. (For example, The

Anniversary Party or Dancer

in the Dark.) Unfortunately, the success of these films seems to

have given aspiring filmmakers license to scrimp much more than is acceptable:

just because it’s possible to shoot DV in low-light conditions doesn’t

mean it’s a good idea.

If you still feel that you really want to see a good comedy with Sigourney

Weaver, my advice is that you get the underrated

Heartbreakers out on video or DVD. The picture quality will be just

as good, and you’ll get a rollicking good story with a great cameo from

Gene Hackman. In the snobbish world of New York media, Tadpole gets

respect just for being a low-budget independent film, while Heartbreakers

is ignored as Hollywood fodder. Don’t make the same mistake: there’s

no doubt as to which is the better movie.

Posted in Film | 9 Comments

Why the Department of Homeland Security is a Really Bad Idea

Posted on July 18, 2002 by Felix

There is no one more boring than the person you get stuck next to at

dinner who expounds at length on the subject of his or her treatment

at the hand of the Department of Motor Vehicles. We know it’s

a nightmare. In fact, we’ve been there ourselves. Tell us something

we don’t know.

Well, how about this. An English journalist who’s lived in New York

for over five years needs to do the following just to get a learner’s

permit:

Go through the same hassle of taking the written test that everybody
else goes through;
Get two original letters (not copies) on official letterhead
from the editor of his publication, addressed to two different people

and saying two different things;
Persuade the British Consulate to write him a letter as well;
and, last but not least
Get a fourth letter, this time from the Foreign Press Center (a
branch of the State Department, for crying out loud – I’m sure

they have better things to do at the moment) which can then be taken

to the Herald Square office of the DMV (not any other branch)

and somehow redeemed for the permit.

All this ridiculousness, needless to say, has only been implemented

since September 11. (And, of course, none of this information is available

on the DMV website; you

have to get shunted around four different desks at the DMV office to

find all this out.) The Foreign Press Center even still has a welcome

note on its website saying that ‘The United States has no central

office responsible for journalists, no "Ministry of Information."

Generally, journalists work without need of official permission.’ Well,

unless they want to drive, of course.

Posted in Culture, Politics | 2 Comments

Rebuilding Lower Manhattan

Posted on July 17, 2002 by Felix

No one seems very impressed by the six

plans which have been put forward for the redevelopment of theWorld

Trade Center site. The pretty much unanimous view seems to be that they’ve

been hamstrung by the requirements to include 11 million square feet

of office space, as well as 600,000 square feet of retail space. Even

the man who unveiled them, John Whitehead, said almost apologetically

when he did so that he would change his plans if none of these ones

worked.

My initial reaction was pretty much along the same lines. All of the

plans of necessity include five or six huge new skyscrapers, which are

represented only in the most schematic way, and read visually as opaque

blocks turning the site into an office park. Certainly, at first glance,

the plans’ similarities far exceed their differences, and none of them

comes close to the bold and imaginative (yet, of course, completely

impractical) plans which we’ve all seen in art galleries or the New

Yorker.

But look more closely, and I think the Memorial

Square plan has a lot to be said for it. Why?

It preserves the "sacred footprints". Personally, I don’t
think this a necessary part of an effective memorial, but a lot of

people, including George Pataki, do. If we can come up with a good

plan which keeps them inviolate, then so much the better.
The area south of Liberty Street is much more successfully integrated
into the rest of the plan than it is in the other proposals. Because

of this, the plan effectively manages to enlarge the 16-acre site

to include Liberty Square Park, which is untouched and unrelated in

the other five plans. In Memorial Square, there’s a green space running

from 1 World Financial Center all the way to Broadway, which opens

up the total perceived area of the memorial plan impressively.
I really like the promenade which enables people to look down on
the memorial space without having to make quite the emotional commitment

involved in actually going into it. A large part of the rebuilding

plan is involved in revitalising Lower Manhattan: this is going to

be an area where hundreds of thousands of people live, work and shop

every day. They’re going to want to be able to go about their daily

lives without feeling the need to stop and reflect every time they

approach the memorial.
It’s the only plan with an opera house: something new for downtown
which will bring high culture to what used to be little more than

a downmarket shopping mall with office blocks on top.
The entrance gates to the memorial, built into the wall which surrounds
the memorial site and which supports the promenade, will be visible

from a lot of places, most importantly from all the way up Greenwich

Street. There’s an approach to the memorial here: you don’t

just stumble across it on your way to the "transit hub".
The plan doesn’t rely on raising lots of office buildings for its
impact. The office towers could come along a lot later; indeed, they

could never come along at all, and the sightlines etc would only be

improved. This is true of most of the plans, of course, but I think

the Memorial Park is the most versatile in that respect.

I certainly hope that something more imaginative than Memorial Square

will eventually be built on the site. We have here an opportunity for

amazing new memorial architecture, and nothing we’ve seen so far really

seems to open up that possibility. But even if all these plans are ultimately

discarded, I think it will still be worth remembering some of the lessons

learned from what the Memorial Square proposal has brought to the table.

Posted in Culture | 3 Comments

Built-in obsolescence

Posted on July 12, 2002 by Felix

Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly developing a theory of what

I call built-in obsolescence in art. It’s still far from fully formed,

but in a nutshell it says that all art becomes obsolete eventually,

and that there’s something to be said for art which not only accepts,

but actually celebrates and depends on the fact that, at some maybe

not-so-distant point in the future, it will have lost its original aesthetic

content.

Of course, art can be repurposed over time. Most African tribal sculpture

in the west is collected and admired for distinctly different reasons

than those for which it was originally made. And probably not one visitor

in a thousand has the ability to read the average cathedral’s stained-glass

windows in the manner in which their designers intended. So art can

still be great, even after it has fallen into obsolescence.

What I’ve always had a soft spot for, however, is art which deliberately

plays off evanescent cultural touchstones. Andy Warhol’s portraits of

B- and C-list celebs already have lost all but their purely formal power:

we no longer know or care who these people are. Warhol, however, was

on more solid ground when he took as subjects people who really changed

the culture: in celebrating Elvis or Marilyn, he also memorialised them

and helped their memory live on, in much the same way as Picasso did

with Guernica.

Brett Easton Ellis’s Glamorama,

however, is a different kettle of fish. It was published in January

1999, and featured lists upon lists of the hottest models of the week,

the coolest bars of the month. It was out of date within six months,

and I remember thinking at the time that it would probably be incomprehensible

within a couple of years. (It’s certainly well past its sell-by date:

the hardcover is 97,136th on the Amazon.com bestseller list, despite

being 72% reduced to just $6.99.) I loved it, though, precisely because

of its very deciduousness: loved it the way we love the cherry-blossom

all the more in the knowledge that it will soon be gone.

Last weekend, however, I read Turn

of the Century, by Kurt Andersen. It came out just four months

after Glamorama, and sought to capture the feverish dot-com millenarianism

of New York City in a future one year away. It, too, is now on the scrap-heap

of literary history: a new hardback can be bought on Amazon for $2.54,

while a used one goes for 84 cents. I bought mine from the New York

Public Library, which had no more use for it, for a buck.

For the first couple of hundred pages of this supposedly out-of-date

book, however, I was laughing out loud most of the time. Even now, long

after we’re all meant to have moved on from such things, it’s an incredibly

funny satire of what New York was like only a couple of years ago. Andersen’s

skewers are just as sharp as always, but now we see them puncture their

targets through a tincture of, if not nostalgia, at least a certain

wry remembrance of how things were.

It’s almost as if a good artist can’t help but make timeless art, even

if he’s trying not to. Scenes from Glamorama still stay with

me, vividly: the book has had an ironically lasting effect for such

a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon.

I’m not saying that Turn of the Century is great art. There’s

a very long middle section with lots of pointless plot, and the satire

of the financial world isn’t half as cutting as that of the meejah lifestyle

in general. But all the same, it’s worth exploring those books you bought

a few years ago and never got around to reading: they’re probably just

as good now as they were then. Maybe even better.

Posted in Culture | 7 Comments

MoMA QNS and Minority Report

Posted on July 1, 2002 by Felix

Yesterday I went to see two much-hyped recent openings, both drawing

capacity audiences. Both, I have to say, were disappointing, although

only by their own very high standards.

Michelle, Stefan and I were not the only ones attracted to a particularly

insalubrious part of Queens by the prospect of free admission to MoMA’s

home for the next three years. The museum

strictly limited the number of people inside, which resulteda round-the-block

queue. I’ve encountered such things at the 53rd St location as well,

but there it’s a lot easier to shrug and decide to come back some other

day: once you’ve made the schlep out to 33rd St and Queens Blvd, you’re

not likely to simply turn around and go back.

The much-vaunted approach on the 7 train, by the way, is very disappointing.

The theory is that painted black-and-white blocks on the roof of the

museurm slowly form the famous MoMA logo as you near the station; the

practice is that you glimpse it for a couple of seconds before it’s

hidden behind the station wall. (And we even made sure to stand right

at the front of the train, looking out through the forward-facing window,

to get the best view.)

Inside, MoMA’s gone for the White Cube approach with abandon. Not only

is every wall in the gallery a bright, flat white, but the lighting

is perfectly even throughout: no spotlighting of masterworks here. The

space used to be a staple factory, but unlike other conversions (the

Saatchi gallery, Tate Modern) very little of its former state remains.

There’s no exposed brick, no poured-concrete floors with markings betraying

the recent removal of old light-industrial machinery. Rather, there’s

a big, versatile space perfect for displaying outsize contemporary art:

Richard Serra, say, or Ilya Kabakov.

The problem, of course, is that MoMA already has a very good space

for displaying contemporary art in Queens: it’s called PS1, and it does

its job extremely well. MoMA QNS is meant to be the home-away-from-home

of the greatest collection of modern art in the world, and indeed the

schedule of exhibitions lined up for next year starts off with Matisse

(b. 1869), Picasso (b.1881), Max Beckmann (b. 1884) and Ansel Adams

(b. 1902). These are not artists who need huge white walls: all of them

benefit from intimate settings.

MoMA QNS is showing "Collection Highlights" at the moment,

which I think is basically all the postcard bestsellers from the 53rd

St shop. The Desmoiselles are here, of course, along with Starry

Night and Cezanne’s Bather, and all of them, even the huge

Picasso, are dwarfed by their surroundings. MoMA should have been more

sensitive: while the contemporary art here was, as a rule, made to be

displayed in such a setting, the 19th Century paintings feel as though

a string quartet was trying to play Wembley Stadium.

The problem is actually worse, interestingly enough, when it comes

to the Abstract Expressionists, and particularly the pair of De Koonings

on show. Abstract Expressionism, of course, was all about bringing painting

up to an unprecedented scale: when these works were painted, they would

completely dominate any room or gallery in which they were shown. Here,

however, they’re stuck in a corner, almost as an afterthought, and have

lost all their ability to dominate through sheer scale.

And while I applaud the death of Alfred Barr’s Reithian Olympianism,

the pendulum seems to have swung far too far in the opposite direction:

the first exhibit you see here is half a dozen dusty cars. It’s Guggenheim

programming, but without Thomas Krens’s magical populist touch.

The magical populist touch of Steven Spielberg, meanwhile, is something

we are increasingly having to take on faith. It’s been nine long years

since the last time he

directed one of the truly

great escapist

films with which he made

his name, and his attempt to get back on form with Minority Report

is only a partial success.

Spielberg is too self-conscious now. That was excusable in A.I.,

because he was chanelling the great Stanley Kubrick, one of the most

self-conscious directors ever. But if I’m watching a sci-fi Spielberg

actioner starring Tom Cruise, I don’t want to sit back and admire the

cinematography or the artful use of classical music: I want to be on

the edge of my seat, enjoying the thrill ride. In short, I want Spielberg

to rise to the challenge set by John Woo in M:I-2. But he doesn’t,

and I suspect he can’t.

There are a couple of exciting sequences near the beginning, although

the first relies far too heavily on the old man-against-the-clock trope,

and the second is often visually incoherent. But then we leave the action

behind and far too quickly get bogged down in plot and exegesis which

fails even to explain what’s going on. (Stefan’s

right: although we learn that Cruise has been set up, we never learn

how. And the whole film seems to be predicated on the assumption that

if you live in DC and want to murder someone, you will go to astonishing

lengths to murder them in DC, where murder has ostensibly been eliminated,

rather than simply getting away with it elsewhere in the country, where

it hasn’t. And there are half a dozen other huge plot holes I could

enumerate if I cared.)

"Everybody runs," says the film’s tag line, and Cruise helpfully

repeats it here. But it doesn’t mean very much, and in fact he doesn’t

do a lot of running. (One of the great Spielberg touches, and there

are a few in the film, is the point at which Cruise evades detection

from dozens of police officers looking for him in a shopping center

by standing still right in the mall’s single most visible point.) What

Cruise does do is switch dizzyingly backwards and forwards from being

Tom Cruise Supercop to being Troubled Druggie Dad. The whole subplot

about how he has never recovered from the loss of his son adds nothing

to the film except an excuse for Spielberg to get all schmaltzy on us

and show off some clever special effects when Cruise starts doing drugs

and cueing up 3D recordings of his beloved Sean.

I didn’t buy Tom Cruise as Tormented Soul in Eyes Wide Shut,

and I don’t buy it here, either. More to the point, there’s no need

for tormented souls in this kind of film in the first place. What I

want is suspense, and there’s precious little of that: after all, we

know what’s going to happen. The only time the precogs are wrong happens

right at the end of the film, and it’s jarring: the wrong person dies,

and we segue straight into an almost comically happy ending. Spielberg

has been given props for making a sci-fi dystopia which doesn’t look

like Blade Runner, but that’s no reason for an ending of quite such

nauseating schmaltziness.

Posted in Culture, Film | Comments Off

Globalization and its Discontents

Posted on June 27, 2002 by Felix

It’s that time of year again: the G8 is meeting, this time in

Kananaskis, Canada, and the protestors are out. “Their one overriding

message:” as Jon Stewart said on the Daily Show last night, “we

don’t have an overriding message”.

The protestors say that the mainstream news media doesn’t take

them seriously, and saddles them with labels like “anarchists”

which only serve to marginalise them further. This is probably true,

but the fact is that it’s hard to sum up any given protestor’s

opinion in a simple-to-understand slogan, and there are in any case

nearly as many opinions as there are protestors. That’s why CNN,

say, will bring on a right-wing isolationist like Pat Buchanan to represent

opposition to the G8/WTO/whatever: he’s not representative, but

at least he’s engaged in conventional political debate.

What this means in practice is that the educated public remains decidedly

unclear as to exactly who the goodies and the baddies are. They might

not trust the politicians, but they certainly don’t like Pat Buchanan,

and a lot of the protestors seem a lot like the hippies of the 60s and

70s: haven’t we outgrown that?

After all, while the crusties and the trade unionists make lots of

noise outside, the educated men in suits seem to be trying to come up

with the best way to avert and/or resolve financial crises. They speak

the language of the middle classes: fiscal prudence, financial market

liberalisation, wanting to ensure that their money is well spent.

And every so often the WTO or IMF will seem to make some kind of concession

to the protestors: more transparency here, an official mandate to bring

down poverty there. So they’re listening, right?

Wrong. For the first time, we’ve been given a book

which lays out in the clearest and most authoritative of terms just

how misguided and destructive these multilateral institutions can be.

Globalization and its Discontents is the biggest challenge to

date of the IMF’s hegemony, and is required reading for anybody interested

in international development, emerging markets or free trade. The author,

Joe Stiglitz, needs no introduction from me: one of the world’s greatest

living economists (he won the Nobel Prize for his work on information

asymmetries; he also wrote the standard economics undergraduate textbook),

Stiglitz also had the perfect vantage point from which to observe the

IMF’s response to the Asian and Russian crises of 1997-8: he was chief

economist of the World Bank.

Stiglitz grew increasingly frustrated at the Fund’s arrogant and willful

refusal to listen to basic economic common sense, and eventually, rather

than shut up, resigned from the Bank. He penned an explosive article

for The New Republic, which formed the basis of the new book; the difference

is that the book has a lot more weight behind it, and is if anything

even more powerful now for refusing to pull any of the earlier punches

despite the passage of a couple of years.

I think the title of the book is a mistake: Stiglitz himself makes

it very clear that he’s not against globalization per se, just the selfish

version of it propagated by G7 trade and finance ministers. He is an

economist, after all, so he’s perfectly happy extolling the virtues

of free trade or privatisation, so long as they happen in the right

place in the economic development of a country. But he makes a very

strong case that in an imperfect world, acts like tariff reduction and

market liberalisation have to be considered means to an end, and that

often they’re more destructive than constructive.

Yet still we get the likes of Stiglitz’s Columbia University colleague,

Jagdish Bhagwati, writing

in the accursed Economist that it’s a "misconception"

to say that the rich countries have wickedly held on to their trade

barriers against poor countries, while using the Bretton Woods institutions

to force down the poor countries’ own trade barriers. Here he is defending

his case:

In fact, asymmetry of trade barriers goes the other

way. Take industrial tariffs. As of today, rich-country tariffs average

3%; poor countries’ tariffs average 13%. Nor do peaks in tariffs—concentrated

in textiles and clothing, fisheries and footwear, and clearly directed

at the poor countries—change the picture much: the United Nations

Council for Trade, Aid and Development (UNCTAD) has estimated that they

apply to only a third of poor-country exports.

The great thing about the Stiglitz book is that it immediately reveals

this for the sophistry that it is. Bhagwati, in concentrating only on

industrial tariffs, conveniently forgets both quotas and subsidies,

which rich countries use to devastating effect against poor countries.

(And does he exclude non-industrial tariffs as well? It’s not clear.)

As for the "only a third" statistic, isn’t a third quite a

lot? And don’t you think that the reason those exports are so low is

precisely because of the tariffs aimed at them?

Bhagwati even, later on in his article, manages to condemn countries

for raising tariffs when they enter an economic crisis and desperately

need any funds they can get to balance their budgets andmeet the IMF’s

fiscal targets. What Bhagwati doesn’t mention is the fact that tariffs

represent a vital revenue stream for smaller countries, whereas their

purpose in the richer nations is much more protectionist. If you force

a poor country to give up its tariffs, you have to give it some hope

of making up that revenue elsewhere.

For me, however, the real strength of Stiglitz’s book lies not in its

responses to the likes of Bhagwati, but rather in the way it lays bare

why we hear so little on a day-to-day basis about the IMF’s shortcomings.

The reason is that the media loves news, and usually reports on a country’s

economy only when something happens there. At that point, what they

need is a friendly economist they can phone up and ask whether what’s

going on is good or bad. And the economists who get paid to follow news

on a minute-to-minute basis and form immediate opinions are not the

likes of Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs or Paul Krugman: they’re the

analysts at Wall Street investment banks.

And as Stiglitz points out, the main reason that the IMF behaves so

appallingly towards its member countries is that it is beholden to Wall

Street. (That might be changing a little now that the IMF’s biggest

shareholder – the US Treasury – is no longer run by a Wall Street guy,

but if it’s changing it’s doing so very slowly.) If the IMF forces a

country to open up its financial markets before being allowed multilateral

funding, that doesn’t benefit the country nearly so much as it does

JP Morgan.

So next time you hear a pundit praising the IMF, ask yourself who they

work for. If it’s a bank, take everything they say with a pinch of salt.

Posted in Finance, Politics | 1 Comment

Maxim

Posted on June 5, 2002 by Felix

David Brock, meet Dave Itzkoff. Dave is a bit like you: he used to

be blind, but now he sees! Except he hasn’t changed his political

allegiance, he’s just quit his job at Maxim. And written a piece

for the New York Press excoriating his former employer.

I didn’t quite understand Itzkoff’s article, so I went out

and bought a copy of the magazine, to see if I could work out what he

was talking about. I hadn’t read it since its launch, when it was

basically recycled material from the UK version which didn’t really

work over here. Now, the US version is an excellent magazine in its

own right.

So, am I saying that Itzkoff, who ought to know what he’s talking

about, is wrong? Yes and no. I certainly hate the faux-naïveté

with which he writes that “I would also like to believe that someday,

someone is going to publish an intelligent men’s magazine that

speaks to today’s generation of twenty- and thirtysomethings without

pandering to them or making excessive use of the word "dude."”

Dave Itzkoff, meet Details.

The problem is that Maxim is a much better magazine than Details,

and for many of the reasons that Itzkoff glosses. His main complaint

is that Maxim is “one of the most slickly cynical products you’ll

find on a newsstand, a continued testament to the fact that good window-dressing

is all that’s needed to bring a customer into the shop, even if

there’s no merchandise to be found inside.”

He then develops this observation in excruciating detail, explaining

that Maxim doesn’t go in for standard magazine fare like long puffy

profiles, and rather sticks with a tried-and-tested formula which is

heavily reliant on spending a lot of effort on cover lines.

But actually he undersells his former self. The cover lines aren’t

all that: the top one on the June issue is “SEX at first sight!

Doltproof pickup tips women wish you knew” – which is a bit

of a syntactic mess, really, requiring a couple of readings to understand,

and in any case not likely to prompt mass buying of the magazine. Given

that the word “sex” has to appear on the cover somewhere,

that’s probably one of the less intelligent uses of the word: a

bit like using up your S in scrabble on an 18-pointer.

Meanwhile, the content of the magazine is actually excellent. The

front of the book rips along nicely, with fun, nugget-sized articles

and pictures which are enjoyable to read yet at the same time light

and fluffy enough that you’re happy reading on. (Advertisers in

the middle of the magazine don’t want you giving up at the beginning,

daunted by something large and worthy.)

There’s a lot of gratuitous babeage, of course: photos of underdressed

girls which barely even pretend to illustrate the articles. But I’m

not complaining, and neither are the 12 million other readers of the

magazine. Loaded, which started the lad mag industry, has as

its slogan “for men who should know better”, which nicely

encapsulates the combination of lewdness and irony which makes these

magazines work. The fact is that guys like being guys, and no one’s

ever been in any doubt as to what it is that guys want.

The thing is that Itzkoff isn’t even complaining about the objectification

of women. Hear him cry:

Time was when one of Maxim’s numerous detractors

would cut us down in the press, and my first instinct (after having

a good cry and contemplating graduate school) was always to dismiss

it as sour grapes–these people were just jealous that the magazine

had achieved so much so quickly. But now, belatedly, I understand the

dilemma its success has raised, one that cuts right to the heart of

this industry: Is a magazine supposed to engage, enlighten and edify

its readers, or is it only intended to distract them as they flip from

one advertisement to the next?

Dave Itzkoff, meet Planet Earth. You want Maxim – Maxim

– to “engage, enlighten and edify”? Those million people

who bought Maxim at the newsstand this month because of the cover lines

or perhaps the picture of that girl off the telly – you think they

want edification and enlightenment? Who do you think you are, Lord Reith?

Who do you think Felix Dennis is, a public servant dedicated to the

education of the American male? He’s a businessman, out to make

money, and he makes money by selling ads.

I was reading two magazines yesterday – Maxim and the New Yorker.

I was entertained by the former, and edified by the latter. But the

last thing I want is for Maxim to run 22,000-word articles on newspaper

editors, or, on the other hand, for the New Yorker to run cover stories

filled with juvenile double-entendres of the lowest order, such as “SAT

scores aren’t the only thing on the rise at fictitious Winslow

High”. Oh, wait, that cover story was by one Dave Itzkoff.

The point is that the magazine market is about filling niches. Maxim,

it turns out, fills a very big niche indeed (oo-er), and I’m completely

at a loss as to why Itzkoff considers this such a dreadful state of

affairs.

What he wants, he says, is “a publication with content that’s

challenging, that people might want to read, and if it connects with

your audience, they’ll buy the magazine of their own volition,

without having to be tricked into it.” (His emphasis.) What he

doesn’t seem to realise is that Maxim fulfills two of his three

criteria: people want to read it, and they buy it of their own volition.

You can’t trick a million people into buying a magazine, and if

you do, and if they’re disappointed, then they’re not going

to buy it again. Maxim’s newsstand sales, however, continue to

rise.

Itzkoff seems to think that Maxim’s readers are looking for “issue-oriented

news features or authoritative first-person narratives,” and must

therefore be disappointed every time they buy the magazine: the fact

that such things aren’t found in Maxim is proof enough for him

that they were tricked into buying it. After all, who would knowingly

buy a magazine without an authoritative first-person narrative?

Well, I would, Mr Itzkoff, and I’ll do it again. I like a mixture

of high and low in my life: I’m happy putting down a heavy political

biography in order to watch Britney Spears Live from Las Vegas. What

I don’t want is Britney suddenly putting on a sober suit and lecturing

me on international geopolitics.

What would be the purpose of running longer features in Maxim? Could

Maxim do them better than anybody else? Maxim is, at the moment, the

best magazine at what it does in America. If you don’t like doing

that thing, then, fine, quit to join Spin instead. But don’t try

to spin your own preference in magazines as an industry-threatening

dilemma.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments

Wired

Posted on May 28, 2002 by Felix

It’s hard to find halfways-decent magazines these days, and when,

like me, you’ve gone on one airline journey already this month,

the range of reading materials at Orange County airport can start to

look rather thin. Which is how I ended up picking up a copy of Wired

for the first time in years, paying $4.95 for the privilege – a

full dollar more than the much glossier and more enjoyable copy of W

I read on my flight the following day.

Wired, you probably won’t be interested to learn, has

had a full-scale redesign this month, and there’s even an editor’s

letter talking about how “the changes are both editorial and visual,

reflecting my own vision for the magazine”. The vision, in case

you were confused, is that of the Editor in Chief. He’s not alone

on the masthead, however: others glory in the titles of Executive Editor,

Managing Editor, Deputy Editor, Articles Editor, Senior Editor (nine

of these), Assistant Managing Editor, Senior Associate Editor, Assistant

Editor, Copy Editor (two, who look as though they work for the Copy

Chief), Research Editor, Assistant Resesarch Editor (three), Editor

at Large, Contributing Editor (sixteen of these), Contributing Copy

Editor (another two), Photo Editor, Deputy Photo Editor, and finally

the Founding Editor and the Editorial Director. Add in the 32 Contributing

Writers, 21 Contributing Artists, 29 Contributing Photographers, two

Contributing Photo Researchers, as well as the Creative Director, Design

Director, Assistant Design Directors (two), Senior Designers (two),

Designer, Design Department Assistant, Photo Editor, Deputy Photo Editor,

Photo Assistant, Production Director, Associate Production Director,

Associate Production Manager, Senior Production Artist, Production Artist,

Prepress Specialist, Editorial Business Coordinator, Assistant to the

Editor in Chief, Director of Photography and – of course –

the Special Correspondent, and it’s lucky someone has a

vision to keep all this together.

When you stop to consider that the three main features, including

the cover story, are all by people who don’t appear anywhere on

the masthead, you do pause, briefly, to wonder what all these people

actually do. I’d love to bump into Jennifer Hillner at a

party, just to find out whether “Senior Associate Editor”

means anything at all, and if so, what.

The job titles also seem to bear no relation to the structure of the

magazine. Our friendly Editor in Chief guides us through the signposts:

first there’s the Start section, then Play, then View, then Found.

Features get a subordinate clause somewhere in the middle there.

The sections all look and read exactly the same way, however, rather

defeating their purpose, at least as far as the long-suffering reader

is concerned. Magazine sections only become memorable when they stand

out from the rest of the book, but no-one at Wired seems to have

realised this.

The new design is even more depressing. After all, Wired was

always, at least before it was bought by Condé Nast, the most

visually innovative magazine on newsstands. (Raygun competed

for that distinction, but got marked down for being so innovative as

to be unreadable most of the time.)

What we have now, in any case, is lots of white space and a general

design which looks like it was lifted wholesale from The Face

circa 1989.

What we also have is a credulousness of will-sapping proportions.

The cover story, on Steven Spielberg, is as fluffy as any Vanity

Fair cover story, only without any actual writing: it’s

in Q&A format. It’s followed by a six-page blowjob for a Star

Wars spin-off video game, and later on by a similarly uncritical piece

on the new Stephen Wolfram book (“even if he is wrong, A New

Kind of Science is an incredible achievement, one that will richly

reward adventuresome readers”). Maybe Stefan

can tell me what that rich reward is – bigger biceps from lifting

the thing, perhaps?

There are two pieces worth reading in the magazine: one on computer-animated

faces by New Yorker writer Lawrence Wechsler, and one on rusting

supertankers by Richard Martin. Niether seems particularly suited to

Wired, as opposed to, say, GQ or Gear or the New

York Times Magazine. In other words, insofar as the new Wired

is good, it doesn’t have an identity; insofar as it has an identity,

it isn’t any good.

Meanwhile, judging at least from the size of the masthead, Condé

Nast is losing a fortune on this franchise. I was one of Wired‘s

most avid readers ten or 12 years ago, so it pains me to say this, but

it’s time to put the thing out of its misery. Let it be a fond memory,

rather than an embarrassing rebuke to its former self.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment

Journalistic innumeracy, cont.

Posted on May 22, 2002 by Felix

I’ve written before about journalists and

statistics, but a couple of recent articles

in America’s paper of record, the New York Times, make it worth banging

this particular drum a little bit more.

First of all, Rick Lyman, the Hollywood reporter, weighed

in on Monday with an article about the relative box-office successes

of Spider-Man and the new Star Wars film. Here’s the relevant bits:

"Star Wars: Episode 2 — Attack of the Clones"

sold an estimated $116.3 million worth of tickets in its first four

days in theaters, an impressive opening for any film, but one, it must

be said, that did not quite match the $115 million that "Spider-Man"

made in just three days two weeks ago… Fox had tried to inoculate

itself from comparisons to "Spider-Man" with a news release

on Thursday pointing out that "Clones" would be on only 6,000

North American screens, far fewer than the 7,500 showing "Spider-Man."

But even taking that into consideration, the $31,769-a-screen average

of "Spider-Man" was far higher than the $27,254 for "Attack

of the Clones."

It starts off with the genuine studio estimates: although the Star

Wars numbers were subsequently revised downwards by a substantial $6

million, the blame for that must lie with Fox and not with Lyman.

But then comes this sentence saying that Star Wars made $27,254 a screen

over 6,000 screens. If that was true, it would have grossed an astonishing

– I daresay impossible – $163,524,000 in its opening weekend.

They just gave us the actual gross, which was $116.3 million: can’t

they see that their numbers don’t add up?

And the "per-screen" numbers are obviously meant to give

us an opportunity to compare like with like, so they wouldn’t give us

a comparison between the three-day gross for Spider-Man, on the one

hand, and the four-day gross for Star Wars, on the other. In fact, the

average for Star Wars was based on its Friday-Sunday gross. But that’s

automatically going to put it at a disadvantage: since the real fanatics

will have all seen the film on Thursday, the averages exclude the first

(and, presumably, the most important) day of release.

But Lyman made a much more important mistake than that: he confused

the per-theatre average with the per-screen average. Any Hollywood reporter

– hell, any moviegoer – knows that blockbuster films are opened

on many different screens in any given theatre. In fact, the per-screen

average for Spider-Man, based on the initial studio estimates, was $15,312

– $5,104 per day – while the per-screen average for Star Wars,

excluding the initial Thursday, was $14,358 – $4,786 per day. Including

the initial Thursday it was $19,383 – $4,846 per day, a difference

from Spider-Man of only 5%. When you take into account the fact that

Thursday was a school day when people are less free to go to the cinema,

the averages become essentially indistinguishable.

There are other factors one could take into account as well, such as

the fact that the producers of Star Wars were pickier than most about

where their film could be shown, which presumably meant that Star Wars

was shown, on average, on screens with more seating than Spider-Man

was. Those sorts of numbers are unavailable. But even so, to say that

Spider-Man’s averages were "far higher" than those for Star

Wars is definitely off the mark.

Then, today, the New York Times publishes an

article with the headline "Perelman Sells Stake in Bank to

Citigroup for $5.8 Billion". The first sentence reads: "The

financier Ronald O. Perelman is selling his largest and his most profitable

holding, a stake in Golden State Bancorp, as part of a $5.8 billion

acquisition of Golden State by Citigroup, the companies announced yesterday."

The sentence is right; the headline is wrong. Citigroup is paying $5.8

billion for all of Golden State, not just for Ron Perelman’s 30-ish

per cent stake. If the headline had said "Perelman Sells Stake

in Bank to Citigroup in $5.8 billion Deal", it would have been

ambiguous but arguably correct. As it stands, however, it’s indisputably

wrong. The headline says that Perelman is trousering $5.8 billion, when

in fact he’s getting maybe $1.75 billion. It’s a big difference: more

than $4 billion.

I’ve dealt, once, with the New York Times editing process, and from

my experience and that of friends of mine, I can tell you that it’s

very rigorous. Rigorous with grammar, that is. When it comes to numbers,

New York Times editors are obviously asleep at the wheel. After all,

both of these articles were internally inconsistent, and in neither

of them was the mistake picked up.

Posted in Culture, Media | Comments Off

Literary financial journalism

Posted on May 19, 2002 by Felix

Chalk this one up for the annals of self-defeat: it won’t take

long before the tireless spiders of Google chance upon this posting

and thereby rid my favourite

web page of its punch. ‘Your search – “literary financial

journalism” – did not match any documents’ it says, or said:

I love the idea of the most comprehensive search engine in the world,

an index of Borgesian proportions, trawling through its billions of

documents in vain, seeking but never finding the object of our present

discourse.

On the other hand, there’s an upside: for a while at least, anybody

searching for “literary financial journalism” on Google will

find but one result. For the purposes of Google, Felix Salmon (or felixsalmon.com)

will be the first and last word on the subject.

That shouldn’t be the case, I think. After all, literary journalism

is nothing new: most of us, off the top of our heads, can rattle off

a list from George Orwell and John Hersey through Truman Capote to Tom

Wolfe and PJ O’Rourke. Magazines from GQ to Rolling Stone pride

themselves on their literary heritages; the Atlantic and Harper’s

go further and define themselves by theirs. Then, of course, there’s

the New Yorker, the grandaddy of them all.

But financial magazines don’t think that way, and, with the possible

exception of Michael Lewis at the New York Times Magazine, the financial

journalism which appears in the generalist press (John Cassidy in the

New Yorker; Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Review of Books) aspires

more to authoritativeness than it does to any kind of lasting style.

Part of the reason, I think, is that journalism is always written

with a certain readership in mind, and financial professionals generally

mistrust ornament and beauty: such things tend not to outperform the

market. They’re perfectly happy amassing important collections

of contemporary art, of course, but that’s different: that’s

a hobby, a sideline, not work.

There’s an interesting contrast with lawyers here: while much

legal prose is impenetrably dry, there is a long and glowing tradition

of carefully and beautifully written juridical opinions, many of which

are admired as much for their prose as they are for their clarity and

insight.

The best that financial editors ever hope for, by contrast, is a coherent

and compelling narrative structure: a story well told, with a beginning,

middle and end. And even that’s rare enough, vanishingly so outside

the world of M&A.

It’s also worth noting why most major mergers are quickly followed

by detailed back-stories in the press: the companies need to file various

legal documents to the SEC, and the lawyers who draft those papers generally

put in quite a lot of colour. In other words, those narrative pieces

aren’t reported, most of the time, they’re more copied out.

For the time being, rhetorical flourishes in the world of financial

journalism never seem to rise above the level of description –

what the protagonists are wearing, how their offices are decorated,

which Bordeaux they ordered at the celebratory dinner. Metaphor tends

to appear only in the guise of cliché.

So, Felix, I hear you ask, are you going to stake your claim to this

relatively virgin territory? I dunno, I think I ought to talk to my

editors first. Besides, I’m not even sure I’m capable of it:

I’ve never written anything literary in my life. But someone ought

to go there, and I’ll be cheering them on.

Posted in Culture | 2 Comments

Spider-Man and Hollywood Ending

Posted on May 7, 2002 by Felix

They’re both franchises. Spider-Man, in his various incarnations, and

Woody Allen, in his, have been around seemingly forever; both, too,

are identified with New York City. Both released films on May 3, and

both films are pretty much as you would expect them to be: the former

a big-budget action spectacular, the latter a low-budget comedy.

I was more disappointed in Spider-Man, if only because it’s been so

successful that I thought that maybe there might be something to it

beyond the standard action-hero caper.

Why, then, the success? Well, Spider-Man is a much-loved cartoon character,

both in comic-book and cartoon form. A lot has been made of the way

in which he’s one of us: an adolescent boy, rather than a reclusive

multi-millionaire (Batman) or an extraterrestrial refugee (Superman).

I think the reason is more basic still: the idea of swinging on spider-ropes

from building to building, once implanted in the brain, is impossible

to remove. I should imagine that pretty much every kid who’s ever been

exposed to the Spider-Man concept has looked up at his or her city at

many points in his or her childhood and fantasised about what it would

be like to be up there, among the skyscrapers, freed from terrestrial

limitations.

Both theories of Spider-Man’s success correspond to weaknesses in Sam

Raimi’s movie.There’s a cute bit where Spidey is learning the ropes,

as it were, and crashes into a wall, and there’s even a great half-second

or so when we realise along with him that the way to do it is to fire

off a second rope in the opposite direction and let go of the first.

But after that, it’s all jumps and blurs: no Spider-cams, or feelings

of what it’s like to swing around the rooftops.

More problematic for the movie is the very fact that it’s grounded

in some kind of recognisable reality, where Peter Parker is bullied

at a New York City school, lives in a loft on Broadway and Bond, and

bumps into his love interest at the corner of Houston and Sixth Avenue.

That’s all well and good, but it makes our suspension of disbelief a

lot more difficult: it serves to make the slavishly-followed comic-book

conventions look as ridiculous as they are when you stop to think about

them. The cigar-chomping newspaper editor; the girl who somehow never

cottons on to Spider-Man’s identity; the villain who, even after he’s

decided to kill his nemesis, decides to construct a dastardly plan involving

torn loyalties despite the fact that it serves no purpose whatsoever:

switching back and forth between reality and ultrafantasy can be a bit

tiring after a while.

The biggest switch of all happens halfway through the film. It’s fun

to watch Peter Parker coming to grips with his spider-powers; it’s boring

to see him use them. The minute he appears in his full-blown spider

costume, ready to save the world from evildoers, is the minute that

you can safely walk out of the cinema. After all, you know the ending

already: Spider-Man vanquishes the Green Goblin, while leaving lots

of room for a sequel.

Also confusing is the fact that the movie doesn’t seem entirely sure

where it’s set: it’s New York, to be sure, but when? The street

criminals are straight out of Taxi Driver, but the Macy Gray

appearance in Times Square is post-Disneyfication. I last got this feeling

in Eyes Wide Shut, weirdly enough, in the scene where Tom Cruise

is jeered at by Greenwich Village hoodlums accusing him of being gay.

But if Eyes Wide Shut is hurt by the disconnect between the real

and the portrayed New York, Spider-Man suffers more, because

the portrayed New York is so central to the film. Maybe this is a criticism

only a New Yorker could make, but what’s the point of setting your movie

here, of having Spider-Man introspect from the vantage point of a Chrysler

Building gargoyle, if you’re just going to turn NYC into Batman‘s

Gotham? In Batman, Tim Burton got to spend a fortune on a slick

dystopian production design which looked gorgeous; in Spider-Man,

Sam Raimi’s constrained by the fact that New York City is a real place,

and then denies himself any of the upside.

Woody Allen, of course, is virtually New York incarnate, and any time

he makes a film without some kind of heartfelt expression of love to

our city we feel that something’s missing. His latest effort, Hollywood

Ending, comes sans any kind of New York flavour, and one gets the

impression that Woody didn’t really invest any emotional equity in it.

It’s a throwaway Allen film: very funny, yet even more lightweight than

Small Time Crooks. Good comedy is hard work, and although there

are some great lines and fabulously inventive writing in this film,

most of it seems rushed, as though Allen couldn’t be bothered to put

in the extra effort.

Take just about any scene between two characters: you’ll see one of

them say a line, then there’ll be a slightly-too-long pause, and then

you’ll cut to a shot of the second responding, back and forth any number

of times. No fluid cameras, no flavour; it’s as though he’s decided

that the writing is funny enough that he doesn’t need to bother directing

or editing.

There’s also really only one joke in the film: the film director who

can’t see. Woody Allen makes sure it’s a funny one, but I’m not sure

it’s really capable of sustaining a full-length feature. Bring back

the inventiveness of Deconstructing Harry, please!

Posted in Film | 6 Comments

Herbie Hancock

Posted on March 28, 2002 by Felix

It’s probably fair to say that there’s been virtually nothing really

new and different in popular music over the past few years. It’s been

nearly ten years since a band has come along which has changed the world’s

musical vocabulary in the way that Kraftwerk, the Sex Pistols, Public

Enemy, Nirvana or Massive Attack did. That’s fine: we don’t need endless

innovation all the time, and there’s been no end of excellent artists

putting a new spin on old styles: Oasis, Moby, Macy Gray.

Last night, however, I heard something genuinely new. It wasn’t a musical

revolution: Bill Laswell, Herbie Hancock’s producer, has been making

similar recordings for many years. Rather, what has happened, quietly,

while no-one was really watching, is that performance technology has

finally caught up with where studio technology was a few years ago.

I’ve never heard anything like it, and that’s true on many different

levels: I’ve never seen a grand piano on stage at Irving Plaza before,

I’ve never been blown away by an Irving Plaza sound system before, and,

most importantly, I’ve never before felt that performers have been able

to combine the precision and technological sophistication of a studio

recording with the elements of a live gig which can never be captured

on DAT.

About five years ago, I went to see Spiritualized at the same venue,

after becoming rather addicted to their masterful CD Ladies and Gentlemen

we are Floating in Space. But the gig was dreadful, little more

than a self-indulgent cacophonous two-hour feedback loop.

Fast forward to last night, and Herbie Hancock has two huge advantages

over Spritualized: vastly superior technology, including surround sound

in a live context for what he said was the first time ever, and a mind-blowingly

good band. If Herbie Hancock got his big jazz break from Miles Davis,

then he’s doing the same favour to his own trumpeter, Wallace Roney,

who provided the soulful heart of the evening.

Hancock himself, looking 20 years younger than his 62 years, proved

himself to be just as adept on the piano as we all know he can be when

he wants, and showed as well that there’s still a huge gap between what

can be done on an electronic keyboard and what can be done on a concert

grand, even when the latter is amplified and distorted.

Elsewhere in the band, a pretty standard jazz line-up (keyboards, bass,

drums, trumpet, all outstanding) was augmented with Laswell’s favourite

turntablist, DJ Disk, and Hancock himself on Korg, piano and a little

twiddly instrument he kept in his shirt pocket.

They could certainly jam with the best, as they proved in the encore,

when Hancock brought on Me’Shell Ndegocello on bass guitar. More importantly,

though, they followed very complex Bill Laswell/Herbie Hancock lines

for more than two hours without ever lapsing into the kind of now-it’s-your-turn-now-it’s-mine

which you normally get with jazz ensembles. Even when legendary jazz

drummer Jack DeJohnette took over the percussion for one tune, he melded

seamlessly into the rest of the ensemble and didn’t show off at all.

But beyond the sheer excellence of Herbie Hancock and his band, what

really excites me is the prospect that, finally, live gigs are going

to be able to include the best aspects of studio recordings. For far

too long, concerts have often proved disappointing, with the artists

bereft in the absence of their producer’s sheen. What I learned last

night was that if the artist is good enough, a live performance, no

matter how electronic, can far surpass the best recording.

Posted in Culture | Comments Off

Felix at the Oscars

Posted on March 25, 2002 by Felix

I called ’em. Unlike certain Belgians who never

really outgrew their D&D phase, I knew that even the Academy at

its worst wouldn’t give the Best Picture award to a piece of dreck like

Lord of the Rings. I got all four of the big awards, and five of the

top six: I missed only Jim Broadbent for Iris, reckoning that Ian McKellen

would win that one. So LOTR did even worse than I thought it

would!

What I didn’t expect was the angry reaction to the African-American

sweep among certain of my fellow Oscar-watchers. The debate was so heated

that it wasn’t entirely clear what position people were taking, but

there did seem to be a feeling that the Sidney/Halle/Denzel gongs smelled

of political correctness if not tokenism.

Not true. The Academy was, of course, painfully aware of the dearth

of black actors with leading-role statuettes, but it’s been painfully

aware of that for a long time. When Denzel was nominated for Malcom

X in 1993, it had already been 29 years since Sidney Poitier’s award

for Lilies of the Field. This year, he was the beneficiary of the same

forces that saw him lose out to an execrable performance by Al Pacino

back then: the Acadmey’s desire to reward one of its favourite actors,

almost regardless of the nominated performance.

The difference this year is that Washington actually did just as well

in Training Day as any of the other nominees did in their films. (Pacino

beat out superior performances not only from Washington, but also from

Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven and Robert Downey Jr in Chaplin.) In truth,

Washington was unbeatable this year: the Academy loves to award the

actors it loves, and it had a great performance to hang its award on.

Russell Crowe lost for the flip reason: the Academy will never give

an actor the top award two years in a row unless he’s loved as much

as Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks.

As for Halle Berry, she and Lions Gate worked the Oscar campaign masterfully,

and her competition was two Grand Old Dames who already have Oscars,

and two performances in what the Golden Globes calls a "comedy

or musical". Given the choice between that and a serious, meaty,

dramatic role, the Academy will always choose the drama.

Berry was by no means the highlight of the show, though: that was undoubtedly

Woody Allen, appearing at his first awards ever (he didn’t even show

up the year he won for Annie Hall), and showing the likes of Billy Crystal

and Whoopi Goldberg how a comic monologue is really done. Woody,

you done all us New Yorkers proud.

Posted in Film | Comments Off

Journalists and statistics

Posted on March 2, 2002 by Felix

In recent days there has been much play

over the fact that CNN, the Associated Press, NBC and other news organisations

swallowed a statistically worthless report which said that underage

drinkers drank 25% of all the alcohol consumed in the US. It turns out

that the true figure is closer to 11%, and that the 25% figure, distributed

by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia

University, was the result of not adjusting for an oversampling of teenagers

in the National Household Drug Survey. (The Center’s retraction

of its original report makes it seem just like a surly teenager being

forced to apologise for something he doesn’t think he ought to apologise

for: "In its report CASA estimates that underage drinkers consume

25 percent of the alcohol sold in the United States… If the over sample

is adjusted to reflect the population, the percentage is 11.4 percent…

Nevertheless, CASA’s estimate is that underage drinkers consume 25 percent

of the alcohol consumed in the U.S.")

I don’t blame the news outlets for buying the 25% figure. It came from

a highly reputable university, and it’s within the bounds of possibility:

teenagers account for 20% of the population, and there’s no doubt that

18-20 year-olds do a lot of drinking. If the story is well sourced,

busy journalists can’t be blamed for not checking the statistical basis

for every finding. Michael Kinsley says

that the whole story demonstrates America’s "national innumeracy";

I think it doesn’t, but that other stories do.

The real problem is not the innumeracy of the nation in general, but

rather of journalists specifically. Journalists are generally the sort

of people who never really liked mathematics, stopped studying it as

soon as their schools allowed them to, and like to rely on experts whenever

numbers find their way into their stories. It’s the old division between

the arts and the sciences: journalists are writers, they shouldn’t be

expected to understand numbers.

Fact is, the experts upon whom journalists typically rely often don’t

have a strong grasp on their own numbers. I used to write up the weekly

league tables for Bridge News: the obsessed-over rankings of which banks

had underwritten the most bond deals. Pretty much every week, after

receiving the fax from the people who drew up the numbers, I would find

some problem with them, phone them up, and eventually get a corrected

version a couple of hours later. No one else, as far as I knew, approached

the league tables with any sort of critical eye: they just ran whatever

numbers they were given.

But never mind statistical snafus: some stories in highly-respected

publications quite happily print numbers which can’t possibly be true.

Reporting that 25% of alcohol is consumed by teenagers is a mistake;

reporting that 98% of alcohol is consumed by teenagers would be an obvious

sign of complete innumeracy.

Let’s look at David Broder, dean of the Washington press corps, writing

last week:

Between 1980 and 2000, an analysis by the nonpartisan

Alliance for Better Campaigns showed, the amount spent on political

ads in major market TV outlets more than quadrupled, from less than

$200 billion to almost $800 billion, even after adjusting for inflation.

This factoid was picked up by The Week, where I read it as part of

its round-up of the best columns in the US. The news summary magazine

did appreciate how startling the figure was: "In 2000," it

says, "political candidates paid TV stations an astonishing $800

billion to reach voters."

Astonishing? Unbelievable, more like. $800 billion works out at $3,200

per US citizen, or getting on for $10,000 per voter. It’s roughly 16

times the market capitalisation of the Walt Disney Company, and is certainly

a large multiple of the value of all the TV networks in America combined.

Going back to the

source, you won’t be surprised to hear, we find that the real number

is not "almost $800 billion" but rather $771 million. The

Washington Post was out by more than three orders of magnitude.

Two mistakes were made here. Someone, somewhere, misread a "million"

as a "billion": this is understandable. But then no one stopped

to think about whether the new number made sense: not David Broder,

not the Washington Post copy editors, not the editors at The Week. These

are people who are incredibly anal when it comes to errors of language,

but they all seem to have a huge blind spot whenever a number enters

a paragraph.

I think this is one of the reasons behind the press’s failure to pull

back the curtain on Enron. Journalists don’t like numbers: they’re nearly

always happy to repeat whatever they’re told, no matter how implausible

it is. And as Broder shows us, they haven’t learned their lesson.

Posted in Culture, Media | 4 Comments

Gerhard Richter

Posted on February 28, 2002 by Felix

There is very little in the way of curatorial interjection in MoMA’s

Gerhard Richter retrospective. There are only two wall texts: one

at the beginning, saying, essentially, that writing about Richter

is futile; and one half-way through, giving the necessary background

to the great October 18, 1977 suite of paintings. The labels

are discretely far from the works: this retrospective is all about

letting the paintings speak for themselves.

While it is possible to applaud MoMA’s curatorial minimalism, it’s

also important to realise that in this case necessity was probably

the mother of virtue. Any attempt to pigeonhole Richter, to place

him in a context, is bound to fail. It’s not hard to see the

influences here, from Vermeer all the way through Clyfford Still to

Andy Warhol. But it’s also impossible to see Richter as a follower

of any movement. Similarly, although Richter’s paintings could only

have been painted by a German, this is not German Art in the sense

that Norman Rosenthal might understand it.

What Robert Storr, the curator, has done is to make a strong case

that Gerhard Richter is one of the great painters of the 20th Century.

This will come as no surprise to most art-savvy Europeans, but by

all accounts Richter has never been given his due over here, somehow

being overshadowed by the likes of Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz.

This exhibition should change all that.

The title of the exhibition, Forty Years of Painting, makes

a very clear statement that this is not going to be a comprehensive

retrospective: it intends to deal only with Richter’s paintings. That’s

great: they’re more than strong enough on their own. The show then

does exactly what it says it will do: presents us with forty years

of painting, in chronological order, some 188 paintings in all.

This simple device shows Richter to be almost unique among painters.

Some artists do essentially the same thing for all their career; others,

like Picasso, change their styles frequently. With Richter we see

great breadth, to be sure, but rather than moving from one painterly

idiom to the next, he is quite happy juggling three or four simultaneously.

To take just one example, his Onkel Rudi – a black-and-white

photograph of his late uncle grinning in his Nazi uniform not long

before he was killed, painstakingly transferred to canvas and then

blurred with a squeegee – is more or less contemporaneous with

his colour paintings, where he simply applied a series of different

colours, in rectangles, onto a gridded canvas. Both have been hugely

influential: the first broke new ground in making highly-charged political

statements out of highly-charged personal history, while the second,

even if it hadn’t been copied by Damien Hirst, was always a very important

piece of early Conceptualism.

Richter’s multiplicity of styles does make it hard to see the connections

between his works. They are few, it must be said: Richter has an urge

to paint, but he also has an urge to dismantle metanarratives, to

discredit political or painterly ideals. And before I go on, I must

make it clear that Richter can by no means be reduced to any simple

technique: there’s a lot more to his paintings than anybody can put

down in writing. Yet from the beginning of this show to the end, we

see one thing in every room: a highly adept facility with the squeegee,

Richter’s tool of choice for unpainting his works, for smearing the

surface of the canvas.

Sometimes, Richter will use this technique on his photorealist canvases,

with the ostensible effect of blurring the subject matter. In some

paintings, the squeegee has been so heavily applied that the original

photograph can be hard to discern. But after seeing this show, it

starts to dawn on the viewer that the wielding of the squeegee is

an act of creation as much as it is one of destruction. This is most

obvious in Richter’s abstract canvases: by far the most beautiful

paintings in the retrospective, they’re the result of an almost obsessive

sequence of adding, blurring and removing hundreds of layers of paint.

But it is the same mechanism which gives the abstract paintings their

beauty that gives the photographic paintings their soul. In blurring

the sharp edges of contemporary images, Richter creates something

very personal, and very new. You could say he’s done for the family

snapshot or newspaper image what Jasper Johns did for the American

flag: he celebrates it, elevates it to art, and yet changes it profoundly

in the process, creating something unique and beautiful.

Don’t just go see this exhibition; go see it twice. These paintings

grow on you, even when you’re not there: while you’re asleep in the

week after you see the show the first time, they’ll become part of

your visual vocabulary. This is not the sort of art we’re used to

these days, the kind of thing where you look at it, get it, and then

decide that it’s either great or crap. Richter’s work is much more

subtle: his paintings want to be looked at like Titians, not like

Warhols. While it’s relatively easy to immerse oneself in the painterly

surface of the abstract works, much of the rest of the show has that

Modern Art intellectual edge to it: there’s a temptation to say "I

don’t get it" and move on. Either resist that temptation, or,

better, simply return a week later. There’ll be a whole new show waiting.

Posted in Culture | Comments Off

Michael Finkel and the New York Times Magazine

Posted on February 27, 2002 by Felix

As any regular Romenesko

reader knows, the New York Times Magazine has fired a contributing

editor, Michael Finkel, for using "improper

narrative techniques" in his profile

of a Malian teenager who worked on a cocoa plantation. The basic facts

of the case are simple: Finkel conflated the stories of many different

boys to tell a story which wasn’t true. Furthermore, parts of his

story weren’t even true of any boy at all, let alone the subject of

the piece. That’s the sort of thing which you might get away with

at Seventeen,

but it’s just not done at the New York Times.

Finkel understands that, and doesn’t

blame the Times for firing him. Neither do I. But after reading

an old profile

of Finkel, and a new story

in the New York Observer today about the whole affair, a slightly

more well-rounded picture emerges.

Finkel’s prose is spare and clean, and a huge amount of work goes

into it: "the dirty dark secret is that it takes me forever to

make it sound like I just wrote it in a minute," he says. Since

the New York Times gig was by far his most high-profile job, it stands

to reason that Finkel would have put even more effort than usual into

the story he submitted to them after travelling to Mali. The problem

was that he hadn’t found what he was looking for: he’d pitched a child-slavery

story, and found only boys working for very low pay and in great hardship.

If anything, the story was that aid agencies were playing rather fast

and loose with the slavery label, because it suited their own ends.

The Observer talked to the photographer who travelled with Finkel

to Mali, Chris Anderson.

After a couple of weeks of reporting in June and

July of last year, Mr. Anderson said, Mr. Finkel had a lot of trouble

writing. Mr. Anderson said Mr. Finkel went through a lot of drafts.

To compensate for the lack of a hard child-slavery angle, Mr. Anderson

said, The Times editors wanted Mr. Finkel to "try to make it

more personal, more human, so Mike tried to do that and wrote a couple

more drafts, and they were all rejected for one reason or another."

These drafts, it would seem, involved much more than tweaks: they

were full-scale rewritings and restructurings. A huge amount of time,

work and frustrated effort was going into this story, and Finkel was

very keen to get it out of the way so that he could move on to other

projects: specifically, a mountain-climbing expedition in Nepal.

Only the New York Times editors ever saw the original drafts, so

only they know for sure, but I would be very surprised if the first

couple of drafts had anything ethically wrong with them. The problem

was that Finkel had travelled to Mali to report one story, and was

now being pressured to write another: one which his reporting really

couldn’t sustain. According to Adam Moss, the editor of the New York

Times magazine, Finkel wrote the story which ended up being published

"as an exercise, to put down on paper what he wanted to write,"

although that hardly explains how it got into the hands of the magazine

without any indication that it wasn’t true.

Freelance journalism is a risky gig, for reporters and editors both.

Stories get pitched and commissioned before they’re fully reported,

and most of the time the story which emerges at the end is different

from that envisaged at the beginning. Problems arise when, after the

reporting has been done, the resulting story turns out to be very

different indeed from the one which was commissioned.Reporters are

generally happy to go back to a magazine with a tale along the lines

of "as I was reporting on X, I stumbled across a much bigger

story: Y". What they’re less keen on doing is saying "the

more I looked into X, the more I realised there really wasn’t a story

there at all."

It’s the job of editors to help journalists find the angle and write

a good story, even when the reporting doesn’t necessarily back up

the original commission. A lot of the time, the editor will propose

that the reporter phone a few more people and get the extra material

needed for the new story, as it’s now envisaged. The problem in this

case was that no one was proposing that Finkel return to Mali, and

there was no way that the extra material could be obtained over the

phone.

Eventually, Finkel gave the New York Times what it wanted: a compelling

third-person account of a typical "child slave". I’ve written

a similar kind of account myself,

although in a very different context. My story was written directly

from my notes, a couple of hours after I talked to the subject of

the piece. Even though the conversation was still fresh in my mind,

I relied heavily on what I wrote down as he was talking.

Finkel, by contrast, doesn’t take any notes at all when he’s talking

to his subjects, only writing down his "impressions" later

in the day. Furthermore, he wrote the whole New York Times story without

referring to his notes once. With all the good will in the world,

I have great difficulty imagining how such a story could ever be wholly

accurate. To that we must add the facts that the story was being written

in order to pacify an editor who had already rejected several drafts.

In such a context, it becomes clearer how the noteless writer ended

up producing something better than the story which he was actually

able to write, given the reporting.

While Michael Finkel is certainly to blame for this affair, I think

there is a lesson here for all features editors: Beware stories which

change significantly after the reporting has been finished. All editors

should go back to their writers and ask for more material when more

material is needed. But if what they got originally was short on crucial

elements, then they should bear in mind the fact that there’s a good

chance the journalist hasn’t had any access to those elements. If

you’re an editor and you get back a revised draft which adds in stuff

which wasn’t in the original and which couldn’t have been obtained

in the mean time, proceed only with extreme caution.

Posted in Media | 3 Comments

Kinsley on mammograms

Posted on February 21, 2002 by Felix

Michael Kinsley is no longer editor of Slate. He gave up that post

amidst rather a lot of publicity last week, saying that he would continue

at the online magazine as a columnist. That was good news: Kinsley,

when he’s on form, which is most of the time, is one of the most perspicacious

columnists in America. He’s particularly good at using subtle but

decisive logical arguments to cut through standard political rhetoric.

Kinsley’s first column

as full-time writer, however, makes one wonder whether his talent

as a columnist was in some way reliant upon his day job. It’s about

the Great Mammography Debate, and it’s terrible.

In a nutshell: The medical industry in the US is very keen on regular

mammograms for women over 50, and possibly even for women over 40.

But recent research out of Denmark reviewed the available data and

concluded that the benefits of regular mammograms were statistically

zero: women who got tested had the same chance of dying of breast

cancer as women who didn’t.

Since then, a National Cancer Institute advisory panel has concluded

there is insufficient evidence to prove that mammography reduces breast

cancer deaths, although the controversy still rages.

Kinsley’s contribution to the debate is worthless. He starts off

with four paragraphs of sheer irrelevance, about official NIH advice,

dating back to 1997, about when and how often women should have mammograms.

Kinsley then moves on to pretty much his only argument in the whole

piece: one he repeats, but never bothers to argue.

Every day, thousands of American women have mammograms

and some of them discover tumors that would have killed them if the

tumors hadn’t been discovered and removed. Almost everyone knows women

who have survived breast cancer thanks to a mammogram.

Kinsley, of all people, knows that correlation is not causation.

It may be true that almost everyone knows women who have survived

breast cancer; it may even be true that most of those women’s cancers

were discovered by means of a mammogram. It is certainly true that

if a malignant tumor is not discovered and removed, then it is very

likely to kill. But from none of this can we conclude that mammograms

save lives. If the breast cancer would have been discovered in time

by other means, then the mammogram has done no good.

The problem is that advances in treatment have not kept pace with

advances in mammography. A mammogram will show growths maybe 20mm

in diameter – growths easily confused with many other markings

on the film. The problem is that medicine really doesn’t know what

to do when it encounters a growth that small: quite often the best

thing to do is nothing, and see if it grows.

Continues Kinsley:

No one tries to deny that some tumors are caught

and removed that would have been fatal and that some women are alive

as a result. So there’s no serious case that mammograms have no benefit.

The fancy explanations point to alleged disadvantages of mammograms

that might possibly outweigh the benefits.

This is incredibly disingenuous. For one thing, it completely ignores

all of Kinsley’s own throat-clearing at the beginning of the article:

his whole argument from here on in applies as much to 16-year-olds

as it does to 40-year-olds. There is a serious case that mammograms

have no benefit: it has been made, in excruciating statistical detail,

by a pair of Danish scientists. To say that there is none, and to

base that assertion on a statement that has nothing to do with mammography,

is to commit a logical solecism quite atypical for Kinsley.

Kinsley’s column becomes even more unhinged towards the end, however,

after he’s done some really rather bizarre and off-topic chin-scratching

about how much anxiety a woman feels when she’s been diagnosed with

a certain probability of having breast cancer. Are you ready?

Why blame the mammogram for someone’s conscious decision

to have a biopsy or surgery? Why "blame" anyone for deciding

sensibly that a large chance of saving your life is worth a small

chance that it will turn out to have been unnecessary?

It’s obvious that if someone decides to have a biopsy or surgery

on the basis of a mammogram’s results, then the mammogram has caused

the biopsy or surgery. What’s not at all obvious is that said biopsy

or surgery has a "large chance" of being life-saving, and

a "small chance" of being unnecessary. Kinsley simply asserts

here, without citing any evidence at all.

The whole argument in this piece, insofar as there is one, seems

to rest on the idea that the Danish research thinks that the downside

to having a mammogram in some way balances out the upside. But that’s

not what the research says at all: the research says that even if

there were no downside at all to the cost and inconvenience of the

mammogram, not to mention the pain and anxiety of the biopsies and

surgeries which would otherwise not happen, there still wouldn’t

be any upside to having mammograms: people live just as long without

them.

Now, it’s possible that the Danes are wrong about this, although

most of the arguments against them seem to be far too reliant on breast-cancer

deaths falling since mammography was introduced, which is something

that can be explained by advances in treatment as opposed to diagnosis.

But to miss the point entirely, and to start tilting at straw men:

that’s most unlike Mr Kinsley. I think he should go back to editing.

Posted in Media | 7 Comments

Lord of the Rings

Posted on February 18, 2002 by Felix

I guess it’s partly my fault: I made a bet

with Stefan just after Lord of the Rings came out, and as part

of that bet I promised him that if the film got nominated for either

Best Director or Best Picture at the Oscars, then I would go see it.

So it got nominated, so I went to see it. I mean, how bad can it be?

It’s now at #2 on the IMDB top

250, in some extremely exalted company.

How bad can it be? It was dreadful. If we’re talking IMDB top 250

here, you need to go down to #65 and Braveheart before you

even start getting close to a movie as bad as this one. Actually,

it was a lot worse than Braveheart. It felt like the bastard

offspring of Phantom Menace and Conan the Barbarian,

only stretched out to 178 of the longest minutes I’ve ever had the

misfortune to spend in a cinema. If I wasn’t with two friends, and

if I hadn’t been in the middle of a row, I’d’ve got up and walked

out less than halfway through. I would happily give up my bottle of

1990 Pol Roger never to have seen the thing.

The film opens with an epic battle scene (natch), but rather than

start us off with a bang likeGladiator did, Peter Jackson decides

to treat us to the sort of dreadful computer-generated animation which

we’ve all grown to hate through seeing the likes of The Mummy Returns

or the Phantom Menace. Immediately, we’re in the mindset of

watching a video game, rather than an Oscar-worthy film. Not coincidentally,

the only other film of 2001 which I can think of which is as bad as

this one was Tomb Raider.

The weird thing is that the nauseating overreliance on CGI continues

well past the tens-of-thousands-of-orcs scene and well into the innocent-hobbits-frolicking-in-bucolic-bliss

act which takes up most of the next half hour. The Shire looks like

nothing so much as the set of Teletubbies, with acid-green

rolling hills and cute wide-eyed little people.

Into the Shire rides Dumbledore, I mean Obi-wan Kenobi, I mean Gandalf,

a wizard (you can tell by the pointy hat) played by some Grand Old

British Actor or other. And Ian McKellen (for it is he) turns out

to be the best thing in the film: quite up to Alec Guinness’s hammy-but-not-too-hammy

standards. The way in which Peter Jackson sends him on his way after

a fight to the death with the incarnation of the Forces of Darkness,

faced off against him on a slender bridge over a bottomless pit, is

a little bit much, however. And Darth Vader is an infinitely more

convincing baddy than the Balrog. (In fact, rather than try and come

up with something original, Jackson simply nicks the Balrog straight

from the Night on Bare Mountain part of Fantasia.)

Come to think of it, was there any scene in the whole film which

didn’t feel as though we’ve seen it a hundred times before? The dark

riders galloping out of the fortress gate, the collpasing staircase,

the swordfights in the woods, the helicopter shot of our plucky heroes

dwarfed by nature as they paddle down the river… it was cliché

after cliché after cliché. The genius of a film like

Raiders of the Lost Ark is that it takes a tired genre and

revitalises it; this film looks as though it was cobbled together

out of offcuts from Hollywood’s recycling bin.

The rest of the cast generally looks like it’s been chosen solely

on the basis of how blue their eyes are, although Jackson makes sure

that Frodo, the purest of them all, also has the bluest eyes. The

Fellowship, note, is 100% white, while most of their opponents are

shades of brown. It’s frankly racist, the way in which the Aryan Fellowship

happily hacks its way through hordes of sub-humans at every available

opportunity, and completely defeats the whole purpose of comprising

the Fellowship of various different races. That dwarf is tokenism,

although he does get the only (deliberate) laugh line in the whole

film.

It reached the point where I could feel the whole audience sighing

in exasperation every time we had to endure another close-up of Frodo’s

large blue eyes. It’s a bit like Zoolander: he has the same

expression throughout the film, whether he’s impaled by a monster’s

weapon or whether he’s just seen Queen Galadriel Nerwendë Artanis

Alatáriel of the Galadhrim for the first time. And when we’re

not subjected to Elijah Wood’s face, we’re subjected to his hand,

outstretched, with the ring sitting in the palm, over and over again.

I could moan about the plot, too, I suppose, but there’s little point:

this type of film never has any plot to speak of. But I think it is

reasonable to point out that there’s no structure to the film either:

it’s plucky Frodo and his gang versus yet another threat and… repeat,

with no indication that they’re actually getting anywhere, or that

this latest obstacle is particularly dangerous compared to all the

others. I mean, thousands of orcs in the caves scarper when they see

the Balrog, and we managed to cope with the Balrog alright, but then

a couple of hundred orcs later on in the film manage to capture a

pair of hobbits and kill one of our blue-eyed heroes.

A lot of the weakness of the film can certainly be laid squarely

at the door of JRR Tolkien and his ridiculously over-written epic.

Jackson wanted to be reasonably faithful to the book, so that explains

the hilariously archaic dialogue and the directionless episodic nature

of the screenplay. All the same, it makes for very bad cinema. And

the dreadful mattes, especially elf-land, which looks like it was

nicked straight from Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, are unforgivable.

Is there really appetite for another six hours of this? Why is it

that it seems to have any chance at all of winning multiple Oscars?

Although I hated Braveheart or Forrest Gump or Titanic

with a passion, at least I could see where the Academy was coming

from. But if they give this thing multiple gongs after having ignored

all the great films in its genre for the past 20 years, I will be

mute with incomprehension. Is Peter Jackson really a better director

here than Steven Spielberg was in any of the Indiana Jones films?

Is Lord of the Rings better than Crouching Tiger, Hidden

Dragon? This film has achieved the impossible: it’s made me actually

want a Ron Howard film to clean up at the Oscars. That takes some

doing.

Posted in Film | 25 Comments

Books and Chomsky

Posted on February 15, 2002 by Felix

Cast your mind back, if you will, one month. The bestseller lists

at the time were dominated by right-wing screeds; Michael Kinsley

even wrote a column

about it, which is helpful, because we can use it to remember where

those books once stood.

The most successful, then as now, was Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes

How the Media Distort the News, Bernard Goldberg’s screed against

the liberal tilt of America’s TV networks. It was Top Book, back then;

now, it stands at #7 on Amazon’s bestseller list.

One month ago, Kinsley found five right-wing books in the Amazon top

15; now, Bias stands alone in that group. Its former position at #1

is now held by The Wisdom of Menopause: Creating Physical and Emotional

Health and Healing During the Change, by Christiane Northrup,

M.D.

Goldberg’s fellow-travellers, it turns out, have done pretty poorly.

Pat Buchanan, bless his cotton socks, is still up there: his charmingly-titled

The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions

Imperil Our Country and Civilization has slipped merely to #25

from #11. Meanwhile, Barbara Olson’s The Final Days: The Last,

Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House has dropped

down to #154 from #7, Peggy Noonan’s When Character was King: A

Story of Ronald Reagan has fallen to #263 from #10, and Bill O’Reilly’s

The No-Spin Zone: Confrontations with the Powerful and Famous in

America now languishes at #3,046, down from #8 a month ago.

Meanwhile, who do we find at #8 on the list but Michael Moore, of

all people. His Stupid White Men …and Other Sorry Excuses for

the State of the Nation! has got the one of the main criteria

of success (a really long title) down pat, but nobody seems to have

told him that you need to be a right-winger to write a bestseller.

The ellipsis and exclamation mark, however, are obviously there to

make up for the lack of a colon: Moore’s book is one of only three

in the top 15 without one. But the point is that Moore is well up

there already, and his book hasn’t even been published yet. Could

it be that the right-wing books on the bestseller lists were only

a temporary blip?

After all, the next political book after Buchanan’s on the list is

9-11, the admirably short-titled pamphlet by, of all people,

Noam Chomsky. Could it be that the nation’s flag-waving fervor in

the wake of the terrorist attacks has been replaced by second thoughts?

Have Americans suddenly developed an interest in how the world sees

them and what their nation has been up to overseas in the past few

decades?

The weird thing is that Chomsky is definitely losing the intra-Left

war against the likes of Christopher Hitchens over whether or not

America was to blame for the events of September 11. Conventional

wisdom on the Upper West Side these days has it that Chomsky might

be a great linguistic theorist, but that he’s a little bit over the

edge when it comes to politics.

Which is why it’s unfortunate for Chomsky that the latest issue of

the New York Review of Books carries a fabulous article – the

first of two, no less – about Chomsky by his old sparring partner

John Searle. Searle purports to be reviewing Chomsky’s latest philosophical

book, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, but in

fact he aims squarely at the whole history of Chomsky’s theories,

past and present. He spends a good amount of time gloating, in the

politest possible fashion, over the failure of Chomsky’s early linguistic

project, and then jauntily skewers the bizarre animal into which it

has now morphed.

The whole thing makes me very happy. I never got very much into Chomsky

during my undergraduate days, but what little I understood of him

seemed ridiculous on its face. I was always given to feel rather sheepish

about my opinions, however: many much more learned and intelligent

philosophers than I seemed to take Chomsky’s theories about language

being hard-wired into the brain perfectly seriously. The fact that

Chomsky himself now seems to have abandoned them makes me very thankful

I didn’t waste many hours trying to understand them further.

My only regret is that Chomsky seems to be far too busy bashing his

political drums to spend much time rebutting Searle: we probably won’t

see his response in the pages of the New York Review. Indeed, although

Searle is too polite to say so, even the book under review is not

a genuine scholarly work so much as it is a collection of relatively

short essays and papers which repeat themselves as much as they gloss

over any really knotty problems. Chomsky’s obsession with conspiracy

theories centering on Henry Kissinger has distracted him from his

linguistics: maybe deep down, he always knew the latter was going

nowhere.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment

Air travel redux

Posted on February 13, 2002 by Felix

Last Monday, I flew to New York from Toronto, where I’d gone

to watch my sister become a Ph.D. I was booked onto a 9am flight,

but I got there early enough that I had time to make it onto the 8am

flight.

Just after I asked the person at the gate whether I could change my

flight, I heard a message over their walkie-talkie saying “we

can’t land at La Guardia”. This concerned me, I’ll

admit, but they changed my ticket all the same, and I went off to

read my book. A couple of minutes later we were told the flight was

delayed, and I wondered whether I shouldn’t have stayed on the

9am flight.

But all was well: the plane was cleared for takeoff relatively quickly,

and we all filed on and left without too much of a delay. The journey

was bumpy: I found out later it was due to high winds, but I wasn’t

sure that we didn’t just have a bad pilot. Coming in to land,

we were being shaken around all over the place.

And then it really got scary.

We’d reached the point where landing was maybe 10 or 15 seconds

away: we were very close to the ground indeed. Suddenly, the jets

came on full thrust, and we soared back up into the air. Everybody

looked at each other and wondered what was going on: there were some

nervous jokes about going down and up again.

A stewardess came on, obviously knowing no more than we did, and said

that the landing had been rejected and that the captain would let

us know what the situation was. He did, eventually, after a fashion:

babbling something about ATC and vectors, he said that we were going

to have to go around and try again.

About a minute later, we realised just what “go around”

meant: it comprised flying incredibly low directly over the site of

what used to be the World Trade Center. I used to go up to the bar

on the 107th floor after work relatively frequently, and I can easily

remember the size of the buildings when you looked out the window

there. When I saw the building where I used to work – the Equitable

Building, at 120 Broadway – I realised it was bigger than when

I used to look at it out of the World Trade Center. In other words,

we were flying right over Wall Street, maybe a few hundred feet from

the Chase Manhattan tower, at an altitude lower than the top of the

World Trade Center.

Six months ago, this would have been an amazing sight: it was a clear

and sunny day, the wind notwithstanding, and we could clearly make

out the workers and tourists on the street below us. But I don’t

think anybody in that aircraft was admiring the view: we were all

thinking the same thing, that we were in an airplane flying through

some of the most high-profile skyscrapers in the world, just five

months after September 11.

Of course, we landed safely – eventually. But even for blasé

people like me, the flight was more than a little disconcerting. As

New York gets back into Fashion Week, and new bars and restaurants

open up, it’s easy to think that things are getting "back to

normal". In a way, they are, and that’s a good thing. But on

a very profound level, things really have changed for ever. Every

New Yorker before September 11 would have been amazed at their good

luck were they to have been on a flight such as mine. And every New

Yorker nowadays would be shaken, not stirred.

Posted in Culture | Comments Off

Mail.com redux

Posted on February 5, 2002 by Felix

So I got something approaching a proper reply from mail.com. (If

you don’t know what I’m talking about, I wrote about it in January,

but suffice to say that they promised me a free-for-life email forwarding

service, and then told me they were charging for it.) Here it is in

full, with annotations:

Dear Felix,

This is already a huge improvement on anything I’ve received from

them in the past: my very first email from mail.com personally addressed

to me!

Thank you for contacting Mail.com regarding our email forwarding

feature.

Recently, Mail.com initiated a new policy which reclassified

the

forwarding service as a premium feature. Therefore, effective the

date

referenced in our original notice to users, all currently existing

users

of the free email service must now subscribe to this premium forwarding

feature if they would like to continue to have their email forwarded

to

an email account outside the Mail.com network.

Well, they certainly understand the problem.

In accordance with the User

Agreement(http://mymail.mail.com/templates/common/us/agreement.htm),

it

is our position that this change in service terms does not have any

impact whatsoever on the original promise of a free, permanent email

address made by Mail.com, Inc., and that any and all claims that attempt

to extend the notion of a free email account to a free forwarding

service are misguided.

My, what a long sentence! Smells like it was drafted by a lawyer

to me.

What they don’t mention is that I never consented to the User Agreement.

I signed up with iname before it merged with mail.com, and as far

as I know I never had to click through any legalese at all. (The internet

was far more innocent then.)

The idea that "any and all claims that attempt to extend the

notion of a free email account to a free forwarding service are misguided"

is hilarious; even the idea that I’m attempting to extend anything

is pretty laughable. When I signed up for the iname service, a free

email account and a free forwarding service were coterminous. There

WAS nothing else: web-based email systems had not yet arrived on the

scene. The irony here is that it’s mail.com doing the extending: it’s

their attempt to extend the notion of a free email account to a free

way of accessing one’s email over the web which is misguided. I know

that internet newbies these days tend not to understand that there’s

a lot more to the internet than the web, but mail.com is surely no

internet newbie. What use, for instance, would mail.com’s service

be to my sister when she moves to Antarctica later this year? She

will have email access, but no web access. And what about blind people

who find it a lot easier to read emails than web pages?

Rest assured, your email account in and of itself

remains a free, permanent account. As you know, Mail.com’s business

is

based on an advertising network; that is, the more users we have that

regularly login to their accounts from the home page, the more valuable

advertising space on our site becomes. We therefore value all of our

users, whether they are free account holders or premium users. Given

current market conditions, we have determined that making the forwarding

service a pay service is essential to the continued existence of the

Mail.com service. We believe this change will help ensure that we

can

continue to bring you the benefits of a free basic email account now

and

in the foreseeable future.

Sincerely,

Mike Anderson

Mail.com

Wow, breaking their promise to their clients is essential to their

continued existence? I’d better change my email address anyway: I

don’t hold out much hope for their continued existence in that case.

Given the challenge of increasing the number of people using their

email service, they chose to do so not by making it better but by

making it worse.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo have wildly popular free web-based email

systems. Mail.com had two edges over them: it had a large range of

domain names to choose from, and it offered free email forwarding.

Now it only has one edge. They’ve given up a huge advantage: a lot

of people, like me, hate web-based email. We consider it slow and

clunky with insufficient functionality; you can’t even store all your

old emails. There are lots of very good email clients out there, and

a lot of them are free. Why give all that up and migrate to a web-based

email system? Someone isn’t thinking straight here, and I’m pretty

sure it’s mail.com.

Posted in Announcements | 1 Comment

Self-esteem

Posted on February 4, 2002 by Felix

The New York Times Magazine this weekend has an interesting, if slightly

confused, article

about how self-esteem is overrated. It’s based on research by, among

others, Nicholas Emler of the LSE and Roy Baumeister of Case Western

Reserve University. Here are the nut grafs:

”There is absolutely no evidence that low self-esteem is particularly

harmful,” Emler says. ”It’s not at all a cause of poor academic

performance; people with low self-esteem seem to do just as well

in life as people with high self-esteem. In fact, they may do better,

because they often try harder.” Baumeister takes Emler’s findings

a bit further, claiming not only that low self-esteem is in most

cases a socially benign if not beneficent condition but also that

its opposite, high self-regard, can maim and even kill.

”The fact is,” Emler says, ”we’ve put antisocial men through

every self-esteem test we have, and there’s no evidence for the

old psychodynamic concept that they secretly feel bad about themselves.

These men are racist or violent because they don’t feel bad enough

about themselves.”

This rings true, as far as it goes. The Enron debacle, for instance,

was probably caused by the high self-esteem of the company’s top brass:

their feeling that they were so amazing that they could do anything.

On the other end of the spectrum, it takes an incredible amount of

arrogance (which is what we term an excess of self-esteem) to send

thousands of innocents to their deaths, as Osama bin Laden did in

September.

I can also easily believe that statistically, people with high self-esteem

are no more successful – financially, academically, whatever

– than those with low self-esteem.

However, the author of the article, Lauren Slater, misses two crucial

points. The first is that people want to have high self-esteem because

they want to be happy. It almost seems to obvious to mention,

but Slater doesn’t mention it, so I will: if you feel good about yourself,

you’re probably more likely to feel good in general.

The second point is that there is such a market for self-help self-esteem

books and the like because people are aspirational. The American

Dream is that anybody can become President, or a multimillionaire.

Statistically speaking, virtually nobody will, of course. Class mobility,

I believe, is not much greater in the US than it is anywhere else.

But the country is built on aspirationalism, which is why poor southerners

vote Republican and why welfare mothers in the inner cities, when

asked, favour the abolition of welfare.

When you’re aspirational, you look to the very top, and what you

see is, overwhelmingly, men with very high self-esteem. Take Bill

Clinton: the sheer chutzpah he showed when he denied having

sexual relations with "that woman" is exactly the sort of

thing that the average Oprah watcher would love to have.

For while high self-esteem might be an extremely bad indicator of

success, I would hazard that extreme success – rising to the

very top of a corporate or political greasy pole – is probably

a very good predictor of high self-esteem. It’s the desire to Be Like

Them

which drives people into the arms of groups like the Landmark Forum,

a rather scary organisation which seems to break people psychologically

in order to persuade them to spend more money on its courses.

People join the Forum because they think – probably correctly

– that it will give them a certain extra drive, will boost their

self-confidence. Looking at the Forum members I know in New York,

that will mean that they will take on scary amounts of debt, safe

in the knowledge of their future success. That can have one of three

effects: it can cause a horrible spiral of indebtedness; it can cause

a bubble of prosperity which lasts for a while and then bursts; or

it can succeed, creating a lot of genuine wealth. Since it’s very

hard to differentiate the third from the second (see Enron), and since

the Forum is a very large organisation, it’s easy to see it they can

find a lot of success stories with which to wow prospective members.

And so the search for self-esteem continues, for good reasons and

for bad. As Slater points out in her article, the main beneficiaries

of this societal obsession, apart from the motivational speakers,

are the psychoanalysts. But you can hardly blame the likes of the

Landmark Forum for getting in on the act as well.

Posted in Culture | Comments Off

Smith

Posted on February 4, 2002 by Felix

Brian McNally is a smart guy. He’s got a new restaurant open in the

East Village, and he’s working the media as masterfully as ever. This

time, post-9/11, the spin is that it’s low-key, it’s not about the

glitz and the glamour, it’s just another neighborhood restaurant.

Yeah, right, Mr McNally: you’ve been open less than a week,

and already the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times is gushing

over sightings of "Julianne Moore, Ellen Barkin, Sophie Dahl

and Mr. McNally’s onetime roommate, Anna Wintour of Vogue."

So of course I had to pop over there and check it out.

It’s called Smith, although you have to read the media coverage to

know that: the name appears nowhere on the awning, the door, or the

menu. It’s chaos inside, as you might expect from a brand-new joint.

The woman who takes my name at the door promptly disappears and isn’t

seen again for the rest of the evening; the barmen seem to spend half

their time apologising for the lack of various spirits and the other

half trying to work the cash register; the dishes are curiously unaccompanied

by cutlery; the bread arrives in the middle of the first course; the

waitress knows nothing about the food. All these things will be ironed

out, I would guess, sooner rather than later.

What needs no ironing out is the food, which is fantastic. Remember

that this is Brian, not Keith: a man who aspires to something slightly

greater than the souped-up French bistro food of Balthazar and Pastis.

I don’t know how he’s done it, but within days of opening up, I have

to say he’s got the best kitchen in the East Village. It’s certainly

not pretentious: their sardines are served in the can (and they’re

delicious, when accompanied by Smith’s flavourings). But it is ambitious:

I ordered sweetbreads followed by rabbit ravioli, both of which were

mouth-wateringly delicious, bringing out the earthier flavours while

remaining sweet and succulent.

And the bread – oh! the bread. When it arrived, it was

quite simply the best rye bread I think I’ve ever had in my life.

I have no idea where it came from, but this stuff can give Bouley

a run for his money.

The one real disappointment is the decor: this is visually a very

bland restaurant indeed, both in the rear dining room and in the front

bar area. Apparently there are murals coming, but there is no feel

of fabulousness, of being a destination at all. It’s not even cosy

or comfortable.

Still, I can highly recommend a trip to the restaurant: after all,

located as it is on the same block as Chez Es Saada, Prune and the

Tasting Room, there’s no shortage of alternatives to go to if you

fail to get a table. Just hope they haven’t changed the bread.

Posted in Restaurants | Comments Off

The World’s Greatest Atlas

Number portability: The craven FCC caves in

Tadpole

Why the Department of Homeland Security is a Really Bad Idea

Rebuilding Lower Manhattan

Built-in obsolescence

MoMA QNS and Minority Report

Globalization and its Discontents

Maxim

Wired

Journalistic innumeracy, cont.

Literary financial journalism

Spider-Man and Hollywood Ending

Herbie Hancock

Felix at the Oscars

Journalists and statistics

Gerhard Richter

Michael Finkel and the New York Times Magazine

Kinsley on mammograms

Lord of the Rings

Books and Chomsky

Air travel redux

Mail.com redux

Self-esteem

Smith

Meta

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