Back in 1998, I was the head of a group of people trying to put an English-language magazine together in the wake of Zitty having killed the one I'd been editing, Metropolis. At one point, we decided to dummy up a cover, and our genius art-director, Tanja, whipped out a nice image, a nice logo, and...all we needed was some headlines. So, looking at the current events around town, I came up with the one above. Unlike some of the other headlines on that cover dummy, there was no article to go with it.
Life imitates imagination, or something: a couple of people have e-mailed me a Guardian article on the latest crisis in the life of this unhappy space, and, after reading it, my response was familiar: who cares?
A little history: Tacheles was an idea ahead of its time, a shopping mall. Europeans were familar with market halls, in which food-vendors gathered in a covered space to protect themselves and their wares from inclement weather, and arcades, covered single-story collections of merchants, were also not unknown: see Leipzig, for instance. But a multi-story collection of varied businesses, including fashion merchants, was a new idea, and it didn't work. Before the bombs damaged the building, it was already derelict, since its promoters had gone bankrupt. And, like most of Oranienburger Str., it stood empty during the post-war DDR era. The communists didn't quite know what to do with Oranienburger Str., due to its Jewish history, other than to use the Neue Synagogue for peace-oriented rhetorical statements.
They also didn't know what to do about various derelict buildings all around East Berlin in the days when it was becoming evident that the government was about to fall. Communists are great when it comes to drawing up plans, less so about executing them. A list of old buildings scheduled for demolition was prepared, but there was a serious shortage of workers to actually perform the demolition. Immediately after the Wall opened, a photocopy of the list was circulated among people looking to squat East Berlin, and a number of prominent squats -- Eimer on Rosenthaler Str., the Italian art-junkies on Auguststr., the complex on Castanienallee -- were the result. But Tacheles was the first, inhabited by people who styled themselves artists. Who knows, they may actually have been artists at first. But by the time I caught up with Tacheles, it was just another squat, albeit one which loudly proclaimed itself for artists.
The thing is, I actually knew a lot of artists, and they didn't take Tacheles seriously -- not past its bar, anyway. The people who lived there seemed more provocateurs with dimly-defined politics than creators of anything serious. At one point, the city tried to normalize its status, offering, according to a long Berlin tradition of dealing with squatters which went back to the Charlottenburg squatters in 1968, for a token rent in exchange for the squatters bringing it up to fire and sanitation code. A split developed in the Tacheles crowd, with some wanting to take the city's offer, and others screaming "Art should be free! Down with the pig capitalists!" Word on the street was that the latter group involved a heroin-dealing ring tied to a larger organized-crime operation, and there were, in fact, several overdoses on the premises during this time.
The provocateurs wound up in Poland, I heard, trying to build a spaceship on a beach somewhere in the north. I also heard that those who stayed had reached an accommodation with a Swedish investment group which had bought the larger parcel of land, and were paying a token rent and improving the place. But, as the Guardian article points out, that deal is due to expire.
A little perspective here: an art-historian friend in Philadelphia e-mailed me some years ago that an artist from that city, armed with some grant money, was coming to Berlin to make some art, and game me his e-mail address so he'd know someone when he got here. He was looking for studio space at the same time some businessmen I knew were looking for office space. When the artist, who'd read so much about Tacheles, insisted on going there to inquire about a studio, he reported that they were incredibly hostile to him because he was American and because he had a grant. They also quoted him a price per square meter that was just under half what the businessmen had been quoted for space in one of the less expensive skyscrapers in Potsdamer Platz. Given that the Tacheles crew was paying a euro a year to Berlin for the property, someone was doing very well.
Thus, I had to laugh at the so-called artist who told the Guardian "This is the last place where you are free to be an artist." Puh-leeze. It might be the last place in Mitte -- except it isn't. When I first came to Mitte twelve years ago, it was heaving with alternative art spaces: Die Aktionsgalerie, Berlin-Tokyo, Haus Schwarzenberg, Eimer, and others which never had a name. Of these, only Haus Schwarzenberg remains, and in very different form due to the real-estate war which they won by going legal and buying their property with funds from an angel. But, much as I hate to break the news to the guy at Tacheles, behind the locked metal gate in Haus Schwarzenberg are a couple of wings in which actual real artists who have a place in the local and international art worlds work on art. No, there's no gift-shop there. They have galleries. And much as one hates to agree with the Berlin city cultural bureaucrat who said "Tacheles used to be a very exciting place with major cultural importance, but it isn't any more," he's telling the truth. About the only real cultural value the decaying hulk has any more is that occasionally Cafe Zapata will book a good band, but, as the article points out, Cafe Zapata and Tacheles only share space; they don't talk.
One other salient detail. The Guardian's headline calls Tacheles the "last stand of Berlin's bohemians," which is not only hyperbolic, but inadvertantly points out Tacheles' failure. Not to be too pedantic about it, but bohemianism is not a permanent state. It's a stage of development some people go through which may lead to a way of life, usually in the arts. But there's usually a point when each bohemian realizes that it's time to either get serious about their life-project or put on a suit and start looking for work. Tacheles' residents are bohemians, nothing more. They're not artists, no matter how many "galleries" of welded distorted shapes and weird photographs the place has. Bohemians, as residents of Montmartre and Greenwich Village know, are easy to sell to tourists. That keeps the tourists from disturbing the artists.
So Tacheles is soon to close. Who cares? I don't. Well, I do, but only in that what will replace it will be another episode in Berlin's vain chase for the upscale tourist dollar, which is almost certainly bound to fail. Oranienburger Str. has long since lost its hip! edgy! cachet to the pub crawling EasyJetters and mass-market clothing stores. And I care because I have memories of when the area was actually culturally vital, before real-estate speculators moved in and turned Berlin-Tokyo into the Beverly-Hills-on-bad-acid of the Rosenhof. But I've packed away those memories, just like I've packed away the memories of the magazine which was going to bear that headline. As long as Berlin stays poor and cheap, there will be bohemians and artists taking advantage of that fact. And once they've made a neighborhood interesting, the real-estate sharks will move in and the artists will move on and the bohemians will have their tough choices to make again.
Showing posts with label idiocy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label idiocy. Show all posts
Monday, September 15, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
Great Timing
If you've been around Berlin, you know what Bionade is: a soft-drink made with natural fruit flavors in ingenious combinations.
And if you know Germany, you've been anticipating the onslaught of attempts to copy that success. Well, one of them rolled out today in my local supermarket. Nice-looking bottles, odd flavor combinations (the one I noticed was green mango-kiwi, which made me wonder if it was made with amchur powder), and a big old free-standing display everyone had to maneuver their gigantic baby limos around.
Shame about the name: Spirit of Georgia.
And if you know Germany, you've been anticipating the onslaught of attempts to copy that success. Well, one of them rolled out today in my local supermarket. Nice-looking bottles, odd flavor combinations (the one I noticed was green mango-kiwi, which made me wonder if it was made with amchur powder), and a big old free-standing display everyone had to maneuver their gigantic baby limos around.
Shame about the name: Spirit of Georgia.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Way Ta Go, Weltstadt!
Over the weekend, I ran into a couple of old friends, and among the info I picked up was a rumor that the plug was about to be pulled on Radio Multikulti, Berlin's absolutely unique radio station. Further research turned up an article confirming this.
Now, I'm in a bad position to defend Radio Multikulti for a number of reasons. First, I never listen to it. I never listen to any radio unless I'm driving. I've got too many CDs, and too little time. But that's neither here nor there.
Another factor is that I'm always uncomfortable with German multiculturalism as it's officially expressed. I've touched on this before some years back. And, for all the good work it does giving foreign residents of Berlin a touchstone, Radio Multikulti also fuels that syndrome.
A third, personal, factor is that when I moved here, one of my employers was a Big Honcho in the local world music scene who went on to become even bigger when he joined the staff of the brand-new Radio Multikulti. This guy was a piece of work: he was the first West German I'd ever met who hated Americans. There were three of us on the job, and he stiffed us -- and just us -- our last month's salary. Just because. I asked him one day where this bizarre animus came from, and he told me "It's because you destroyed a civilization. You did absolutely nothing to stop the Vietnam War, and this meant the destruction of Vietnamese culture, a very old culture." In this particular year, when the media is making so much noise about the events of 1968, the idea that Americans, especially young Americans, one of whom I was at the time, did "absolutely nothing" about the war in Vietnam, may seem a bit odd. But he believed it, he really believed it.
So I can't say I'm the biggest booster of Radio Multikulti, but I can say that this turn of events is both sad and unsurprising. Sad because this station, in both its avowed mission and its execution, is unique in the world, as far as I know. A radio station that both attempts to help immigrants integrate into an alien society (well, exotic immigrants, anyway; we Euro/American types are on our own), while seducing the locals into acceptance by playing them "world music," pop music from foreign climes (except, again, Euro/American styles, but I don't have any complaint against that: there's enough of most of that around), is, at least on paper, a good idea. And, since it's run by human beings, and, thus, imperfect, what actually comes out of the speakers has been pretty good every time I've heard it.
More to the point, pulling the plug on yet another unique, interesting, popular cultural manifestation in Berlin not only deprives Berliners of yet another of the things which ameliorate life here, it also proves that the people who make cultural policy here are totally unconcerned with Berlin's hip! edgy! image -- which is attracting who knows how much money to this city -- and only interested in supporting the most mainstream, culturally conservative institutions. Since another villain here seems to be ARD, the central public radio-television network of Germany, I'd say this de-funding also brings up questions of just how welcome immigrants -- particularly ones outside the Euro/American ambit -- actually are, not just in Berlin, but in Germany generally. Funny how that question keeps popping up.
Anyway, I'm glad to be leaving. At the rate this city is self-destructing, I can see myself coming back to visit friends in a couple of years and realizing there's nothing to see or do here while those friends are at work and I have free time. Berlin will have committed cultural suicide and become as fascinating as Bochum. Well, almost as fascinating.
Now, I'm in a bad position to defend Radio Multikulti for a number of reasons. First, I never listen to it. I never listen to any radio unless I'm driving. I've got too many CDs, and too little time. But that's neither here nor there.
Another factor is that I'm always uncomfortable with German multiculturalism as it's officially expressed. I've touched on this before some years back. And, for all the good work it does giving foreign residents of Berlin a touchstone, Radio Multikulti also fuels that syndrome.
A third, personal, factor is that when I moved here, one of my employers was a Big Honcho in the local world music scene who went on to become even bigger when he joined the staff of the brand-new Radio Multikulti. This guy was a piece of work: he was the first West German I'd ever met who hated Americans. There were three of us on the job, and he stiffed us -- and just us -- our last month's salary. Just because. I asked him one day where this bizarre animus came from, and he told me "It's because you destroyed a civilization. You did absolutely nothing to stop the Vietnam War, and this meant the destruction of Vietnamese culture, a very old culture." In this particular year, when the media is making so much noise about the events of 1968, the idea that Americans, especially young Americans, one of whom I was at the time, did "absolutely nothing" about the war in Vietnam, may seem a bit odd. But he believed it, he really believed it.
So I can't say I'm the biggest booster of Radio Multikulti, but I can say that this turn of events is both sad and unsurprising. Sad because this station, in both its avowed mission and its execution, is unique in the world, as far as I know. A radio station that both attempts to help immigrants integrate into an alien society (well, exotic immigrants, anyway; we Euro/American types are on our own), while seducing the locals into acceptance by playing them "world music," pop music from foreign climes (except, again, Euro/American styles, but I don't have any complaint against that: there's enough of most of that around), is, at least on paper, a good idea. And, since it's run by human beings, and, thus, imperfect, what actually comes out of the speakers has been pretty good every time I've heard it.
More to the point, pulling the plug on yet another unique, interesting, popular cultural manifestation in Berlin not only deprives Berliners of yet another of the things which ameliorate life here, it also proves that the people who make cultural policy here are totally unconcerned with Berlin's hip! edgy! image -- which is attracting who knows how much money to this city -- and only interested in supporting the most mainstream, culturally conservative institutions. Since another villain here seems to be ARD, the central public radio-television network of Germany, I'd say this de-funding also brings up questions of just how welcome immigrants -- particularly ones outside the Euro/American ambit -- actually are, not just in Berlin, but in Germany generally. Funny how that question keeps popping up.
Anyway, I'm glad to be leaving. At the rate this city is self-destructing, I can see myself coming back to visit friends in a couple of years and realizing there's nothing to see or do here while those friends are at work and I have free time. Berlin will have committed cultural suicide and become as fascinating as Bochum. Well, almost as fascinating.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Treehugging And Its Discontents
There is a tiresome meme, particularly in America, that goes "scratch a German and you'll find a nazi." Get one of these people worked up enough, the thought seems to be, and the inner authoritarian antisemite with delusions of world conquest comes out. Nobody who's lived here for more than ten minutes, let alone anyone who's ever actually met a real live German believes this, of course, but it persists.
No, the real meme is "scratch a German and you'll find an animistic pagan."
The early Christian missionaries must have really had a hard job in these lands, because they never really succeeded, in my opinion. Could the ancient Germanic nature-religion really have been wiped out when 2008 years after the birth of Christ nobody thinks twice about naming a child "wolf-path?" (Well, what did you think Wolfgang means?)
This is why, when German cinema first started making Westerns, it went straight to Karl May, the German writer who never left Europe and ground out pulp novels about the Old West which centered on the Indians. German Westerns weren't ahistorical: the Indians always lost, but they were also clearly the tragic heroes. They lived in close harmony with nature, and revered it. Why, they were almost Germans!
It's why Germans have those little settlements of garden houses everywhere there's enough space to wedge them in, and it's why they go mushroom hunting at the crack of dawn on weekends in the fall. It's why, when they go to America, they head to the National Parks, drive down Route 66, or groove on the Arizona desert. It's why they number the trees in their parks and forests (and really, if you don't believe me, go look: there'll be a little tag there somewhere, placed in the name of Ordnung).
And it's why my street is about to erupt into a seething cauldron of civil disobedience. Or not.
Early last week, some official-looking papers were taped to the doors of our buildings informing us that tomorrow, Monday April 21, city workers would fell most of the trees on our street and some adjoining ones. The trees in question were black cherry trees, and had, according to a Herr Doktor at the Berlin Environment Office, developed a root syndrome which might result in their falling over and hurting cars parked beneath them. The reaction was swift: more signs appeared, taped to the trees in question. One of them had word from yet another Herr Doktor questioning the accuracy of the first Herr Doktor's report. All of them noted one truly unfortunate detail: the city didn't have funds to replace the trees being felled.
In a repeat of something I've seen a lot before, signs resembling funeral notices appeared on the condemned trees, with a big black cross. "CONDEMNED TO DEATH" read a huge headline. A more reasonable sign in green then went up, calling for a mass demonstration. "The report of the root damage to the black cherry trees is doubtful," it says. "Not all the marked trees must be taken down. There is no money to replace them."
Then some red and white striped tape was stretched between the trees to be felled, along with no-parking signs effective at 7am on Monday. Sometime last night it vanished.
Today at 2pm, a demonstration was scheduled. About 30 minutes into it, I went to check it out. A merry old chap with a beard was pounding black wooden crosses into the patches of ground where the condemned trees were standing, as a television crew documented it. A pair of grim young men unfurled a huge sign that said "FIRST THE TREES...THEN THE PEOPLE!!" and just as quickly unfurled it after they'd gotten some attention. There was a table set up, at which signatures were being collected, and some guy walked down the street sticking copies of the mock-obit flyers under people's windshield wipers. The center of attention seemed to be another old guy with one of those contraptions of stick and string which make gigantic soap bubbles, and clusters of young parents stood around with their kids and chatted. A couple of bored cops checked every car coming into the street and otherwise stood around.
Will any of this cause the city to reconsider or put off the date of the trees' doom? Can demonstrating on a Sunday, when you'd better believe any relevant office is closed, do any good? Will this end up like every other instance like it I've ever seen in Berlin, with officials nodding their heads in sympathy and going ahead and doing what they'd intended to do anyway? And...are these trees really such a menace to automobiles and real estate? I don't know.
One thing I do know: it's not smart to mess with trees in Germany. It really does seem to call forth an atavistic response from people, as if the tree spirits had spoken to them and reminded them of the symbiosis that binds the Volk to the Bäume.
Another thing I know is that I've never yet seen the city of Berlin dissuaded from doing anything, no matter how stupid, once it had made up its mind to do it.
My heart's with the trees, but my money's with the chainsaws.
(The doomed eight, above, in green).
UPDATE: Went out at 1pm on Monday, all trees gone. A new, badly-painted sign declated it a SAW-MASSACRE!!
No, the real meme is "scratch a German and you'll find an animistic pagan."
The early Christian missionaries must have really had a hard job in these lands, because they never really succeeded, in my opinion. Could the ancient Germanic nature-religion really have been wiped out when 2008 years after the birth of Christ nobody thinks twice about naming a child "wolf-path?" (Well, what did you think Wolfgang means?)
This is why, when German cinema first started making Westerns, it went straight to Karl May, the German writer who never left Europe and ground out pulp novels about the Old West which centered on the Indians. German Westerns weren't ahistorical: the Indians always lost, but they were also clearly the tragic heroes. They lived in close harmony with nature, and revered it. Why, they were almost Germans!
It's why Germans have those little settlements of garden houses everywhere there's enough space to wedge them in, and it's why they go mushroom hunting at the crack of dawn on weekends in the fall. It's why, when they go to America, they head to the National Parks, drive down Route 66, or groove on the Arizona desert. It's why they number the trees in their parks and forests (and really, if you don't believe me, go look: there'll be a little tag there somewhere, placed in the name of Ordnung).
And it's why my street is about to erupt into a seething cauldron of civil disobedience. Or not.
Early last week, some official-looking papers were taped to the doors of our buildings informing us that tomorrow, Monday April 21, city workers would fell most of the trees on our street and some adjoining ones. The trees in question were black cherry trees, and had, according to a Herr Doktor at the Berlin Environment Office, developed a root syndrome which might result in their falling over and hurting cars parked beneath them. The reaction was swift: more signs appeared, taped to the trees in question. One of them had word from yet another Herr Doktor questioning the accuracy of the first Herr Doktor's report. All of them noted one truly unfortunate detail: the city didn't have funds to replace the trees being felled.
In a repeat of something I've seen a lot before, signs resembling funeral notices appeared on the condemned trees, with a big black cross. "CONDEMNED TO DEATH" read a huge headline. A more reasonable sign in green then went up, calling for a mass demonstration. "The report of the root damage to the black cherry trees is doubtful," it says. "Not all the marked trees must be taken down. There is no money to replace them."
Then some red and white striped tape was stretched between the trees to be felled, along with no-parking signs effective at 7am on Monday. Sometime last night it vanished.
Today at 2pm, a demonstration was scheduled. About 30 minutes into it, I went to check it out. A merry old chap with a beard was pounding black wooden crosses into the patches of ground where the condemned trees were standing, as a television crew documented it. A pair of grim young men unfurled a huge sign that said "FIRST THE TREES...THEN THE PEOPLE!!" and just as quickly unfurled it after they'd gotten some attention. There was a table set up, at which signatures were being collected, and some guy walked down the street sticking copies of the mock-obit flyers under people's windshield wipers. The center of attention seemed to be another old guy with one of those contraptions of stick and string which make gigantic soap bubbles, and clusters of young parents stood around with their kids and chatted. A couple of bored cops checked every car coming into the street and otherwise stood around.
Will any of this cause the city to reconsider or put off the date of the trees' doom? Can demonstrating on a Sunday, when you'd better believe any relevant office is closed, do any good? Will this end up like every other instance like it I've ever seen in Berlin, with officials nodding their heads in sympathy and going ahead and doing what they'd intended to do anyway? And...are these trees really such a menace to automobiles and real estate? I don't know.
One thing I do know: it's not smart to mess with trees in Germany. It really does seem to call forth an atavistic response from people, as if the tree spirits had spoken to them and reminded them of the symbiosis that binds the Volk to the Bäume.
Another thing I know is that I've never yet seen the city of Berlin dissuaded from doing anything, no matter how stupid, once it had made up its mind to do it.
My heart's with the trees, but my money's with the chainsaws.
(The doomed eight, above, in green).
UPDATE: Went out at 1pm on Monday, all trees gone. A new, badly-painted sign declated it a SAW-MASSACRE!!
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Techno-Mandarin Blind Spot
Not all the magazine news at SXSW was bad. Besides the idiotic travel magazine I commented on earlier, another magazine fell out of my goodie bags (twice). It was an old favorite, Wired, which I've usually enjoyed engaging with, which is not to say I've always enjoyed reading it. But its goofy utopianism (I've still got their December, 1999 issue around here somewhere, with its truly over-the-top predictions for the next few years of the coming millenium, and I really should dig it out for a giggle sometime) combined with hard science and information has almost always made it worth looking at. My last copy was a couple of years ago, and I found it utterly changed and virtually impossible to read; I abandoned it on the plane on the way back here, unable to get through a single article.
But this one was different. Not only had there been another design change, always a challenge to the eyeballs (and, I have to admit, the eyeballs won this round for reasons I wasn't able to analyze: just imagine, glitz and readability), but this issue also managed to shore up my belief in paper being the best medium for long-form pieces. I read everything in the issue.
Including the cover story, natch. It was by the editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, who had impressed me years back with his "long tail" article, derided by many, but nonetheless filled with truth for those of us who create stuff, be it music or writing, which is treated as inutterably ephemeral by the mainstream culture. And, as it happened, time began to prove that this whole concept he'd articulated was, for the most part, solid. Which was good.
This time the article is called "Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business", so I had a feeling this would be utopianism with more than its fair share of goofiness and wide-eyed neophilia.
As it turned out, there were some great facts in there, as well as some questionable statements, but overall (and I'm not an economist, so I can't poke holes in it from that vantage-point) I felt like it was a worthy intellectual exercise, definitely worth the investment of my time.
Or I did until I came to this paragraph in the section outlining some of the key concepts (which no doubt Anderson will expand on when this article comes out in full book-length next year):
· Zero marginal cost
What's free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.
This describes nothing so well as online music. Between digital reproduction and peer-to-peer distribution, the real cost of distributing music has truly hit bottom. This is a case where the product has become free because of sheer economic gravity, with or without a business model. That force is so powerful that laws, guilt trips, DRM, and every other barrier to piracy the labels can think of have failed. Some artists give away their music online as a way of marketing concerts, merchandise, licensing, and other paid fare. But others have simply accepted that, for them, music is not a moneymaking business. It's something they do for other reasons, from fun to creative expression. Which, of course, has always been true for most musicians anyway.
Ahem.
Especially in the wake of SXSW, this hurt. Let's look at these sentences again: "But others have simply accepted that, for them, music is not a moneymaking business. It's something they do for other reasons, from fun to creative expression. Which, of course, has always been true for most musicians anyway."
It has? A musician goes to all that trouble, training to be able to play his or her instrument as well as possible, practicing endlessly to maintain the level he or she's already attained and, possibly, to get better, just for the joy of it? What are you supposed to live on while doing this? How do you pay your rent? What kind of self-expression do you get when you're living under a bridge? What percentage of, let's say, the New York Philharmonic is doing its job only for "fun" or "creative expression"? Which is not to say that those elements don't come into it.
Musicians now give their stuff away because there's very little alternative, because there's a huge bloc of consumers which feels entitled to the products of someone's hard work without in any way helping to support the person who made it. Fortunately, there are those who are working to change this, to find a way that mediates between the indentured servitude of an old-school major record deal and flat-out piracy.
Perhaps in Chris Anderson's world, artists live on nectar distilled from the dew and clothe their children in raiment spun from sunlight. Perhaps Chris Anderson himself lives this way.
But I doubt it.
But this one was different. Not only had there been another design change, always a challenge to the eyeballs (and, I have to admit, the eyeballs won this round for reasons I wasn't able to analyze: just imagine, glitz and readability), but this issue also managed to shore up my belief in paper being the best medium for long-form pieces. I read everything in the issue.
Including the cover story, natch. It was by the editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, who had impressed me years back with his "long tail" article, derided by many, but nonetheless filled with truth for those of us who create stuff, be it music or writing, which is treated as inutterably ephemeral by the mainstream culture. And, as it happened, time began to prove that this whole concept he'd articulated was, for the most part, solid. Which was good.
This time the article is called "Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business", so I had a feeling this would be utopianism with more than its fair share of goofiness and wide-eyed neophilia.
As it turned out, there were some great facts in there, as well as some questionable statements, but overall (and I'm not an economist, so I can't poke holes in it from that vantage-point) I felt like it was a worthy intellectual exercise, definitely worth the investment of my time.
Or I did until I came to this paragraph in the section outlining some of the key concepts (which no doubt Anderson will expand on when this article comes out in full book-length next year):
· Zero marginal cost
What's free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.
This describes nothing so well as online music. Between digital reproduction and peer-to-peer distribution, the real cost of distributing music has truly hit bottom. This is a case where the product has become free because of sheer economic gravity, with or without a business model. That force is so powerful that laws, guilt trips, DRM, and every other barrier to piracy the labels can think of have failed. Some artists give away their music online as a way of marketing concerts, merchandise, licensing, and other paid fare. But others have simply accepted that, for them, music is not a moneymaking business. It's something they do for other reasons, from fun to creative expression. Which, of course, has always been true for most musicians anyway.
Ahem.
Especially in the wake of SXSW, this hurt. Let's look at these sentences again: "But others have simply accepted that, for them, music is not a moneymaking business. It's something they do for other reasons, from fun to creative expression. Which, of course, has always been true for most musicians anyway."
It has? A musician goes to all that trouble, training to be able to play his or her instrument as well as possible, practicing endlessly to maintain the level he or she's already attained and, possibly, to get better, just for the joy of it? What are you supposed to live on while doing this? How do you pay your rent? What kind of self-expression do you get when you're living under a bridge? What percentage of, let's say, the New York Philharmonic is doing its job only for "fun" or "creative expression"? Which is not to say that those elements don't come into it.
Musicians now give their stuff away because there's very little alternative, because there's a huge bloc of consumers which feels entitled to the products of someone's hard work without in any way helping to support the person who made it. Fortunately, there are those who are working to change this, to find a way that mediates between the indentured servitude of an old-school major record deal and flat-out piracy.
Perhaps in Chris Anderson's world, artists live on nectar distilled from the dew and clothe their children in raiment spun from sunlight. Perhaps Chris Anderson himself lives this way.
But I doubt it.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The Magazine Of The Future?
I dumped out the contents of my goody bag from SXSW Interactive, and Hell fell out. I don't mean the deluge of swag -- one expects that -- but a large, glossy magazine. A travel magazine. A vision of Hell.
Everywhere, it's called. "The New Travel Magazine Made by You." I knew it was trouble the minute I saw that cover line.
Inside, my worst nightmares were fulfilled in spades. Oh, it's pretty. It's glossy. It even has a few ads. But my heart sank, and it's remained sunk. This thing is evil. The explanation is right there only page 8. Read along with me and see if you don't get creeped out, too:
How Everywhere works.
1) See the world
Visit wonderful places, have fun, take lots of pictures.
2) Document your trip
Select your best photos and tell us about where you went.
3) Upload
Contribute your travel tales and photos to Everywheremag.com.
4) Peer review
The community votes on travel stories, photos, and favorite places.
5) Final selection
Our editors curate each issue from the best of the best.
6) Publication
Published contributors get $100 and a free subscription.
In other words, it's a blog. On paper. A very pretty blog on paper. And if it catches on, someone's going to be making crazy money.
Now, let me take a minute to explain why this is a very bad idea. This strikes to the heart of the whole neophilia thing I've been raving about, and I can just imagine Grant Alden's reaction when he reads this. I already know the reaction I got from a professional travel writer who's doing work she hates because she can't make a living being a travel writer. She's ready to pass out torches and meet me in the streets of San Francisco while we storm the Everywhere headquarters.
She and I, it turns out, had an identical vision at about the same time, before we were in e-contact: a travel magazine aimed at how the people we know travel. Not the "Paris on $5000 a Day" crowd that Conde Nast Traveler seems to target, but real people going to interesting places who want to learn about other interesting places to go. Superficially, Everywhere would seem to be that magazine, but it's not.
As I learned a long time ago, pure democracy is a very bad thing in the magazine business. There not only has to be a hierarchy, but there also has to be something of a dictatorship if the thing is going to work. This seems evil, but really it's not: nobody is an expert on everything. If you need your house rewired, you could, theoretically, do it yourself, but if you're not an electrician, my guess is you'll defer to an electrician's expertise and pay for it. And if you're an accountant, you might do your electrician's taxes. There's nothing wrong with this, is there?
There's something about writing, though, that makes anyone capable of creating a sentence think they can do it. They can't, any more than anyone can take a picture by pushing a button. You can write a sentence and snap a picture, but is either any good? So accountants account, electricians electrish, writers write, and photographers photograph. The writers and photographers put out a magazine, the electrician and the accountant buy it, and they rewire our houses and do our taxes.
Putting together an article is a very complex thing. While turning the pages of Everywhere, I came up with an example of how this works so I can show you what I perceive as the biggest problem with the admittedly seductive idea it puts forth, that a magazine "created by the world's smartest experts -- our readers" is doomed to mediocrity.
A few years ago, I did a story on Cracow. Let us say that a magazine or newspaper wanted me to go back there and do another one. Okay, first we have to come to an agreement: I'll lay out the dough for the travel, the hotel, the meals, and get receipts and send them to the magazine, who'll pay me back. In return, I'll give them a travel story about Cracow based on what I already know and what I'm going to learn about how it's changed since I've been there. Now, it's not ethical to take freebies from folks you're writing about, but the first thing I'd do would be to contact the Cracow Tourist Office and tell them what I was planning to do and when I was planning to do it. This opens some doors: I might be able to get a room -- which I'd pay for -- in a hotel I might ordinarily not have been able to get into. Cracow is dominated by a huge castle. Only a small number of tickets to it are available every day. I wouldn't hesitate to use my article to push my way to the top of the line on the day I needed to visit it if the travel folks could help, because it's the main tourist attraction and I'd have to report it. I'd want to see the brochures they put out, so I could see how they perceived the city, which would give me a foil for how I would see it. I wouldn't hesitate to ask them to make something available to me, to set up an interview (and provide a translator) for various important people, to give me an unfair advantage over the ordinary tourist -- that guy over there, sort of wandering around, who's going to upload his trip to Everywhere, for instance.
If you go to Cracow, you're going to see some unpleasant stuff. For one thing, right nearby -- your hotel can arrange a bus-tour -- is Auschwitz. There's no way I'd write a comprehensive travel story for an American travel magazine about Cracow without mentioning Auschwitz -- if only because for a lot of Americans who lost family there, it's a place of remembrance and prayer. I wonder if Everywhere would do a spread on Auschwitz. Or the controversy (now, I believe, settled) with the religious people adjoining it, hyper-conservative Catholics who were trying to hijack the site for their own purposes a few years ago. I couldn't not mention that, myself, because it has a larger resonance in contemporary Poland, which remains a place of pretty upfront anti-Semitism. On a somewhat lesser note, there are poor peasant women who come in from the countryside and sell cheeses out of baskets. They're everywhere, and you can tell at a glance that they're impoverished. I didn't even know what they were selling until I asked a Cracow resident, and he was embarrassed I'd seen them. But I'd want to report that, too.
Writing the article, I'd want to get in history, the major sites, places to eat, practical information, things to do and things to avoid, and then season this with some attitude. When I was there a few years ago, there were loads of tourist stalls in the Cloth Hall in the central square selling wooden statues of sad-eyed Jews, which appalled me because at that time there were only 300 real Jews living in the whole city. There were more wooden Jews than that in two stalls in the Cloth Hall! With Auschwitz nearby, a Jewish section of Cracow that was enthusiastically emptied under the Nazis, and the residual anti-Semitism, there's a rather sharp edge that any observant person's going to see, and needs to understand. It's part of the experience.
It's also nuanced. Everywhere's articles are tiny bites. The "big" ones take up maybe a page of type spread out over two pages, with pix. You don't get the impression that anyone who wrote them did a lot of research, because most people don't research their vacations, even when they do want to know a little more about what they're seeing. That's what I'd want this article to do, and you just can't do it in that amount of room.
The whole Facebookian "community" thing, too, is scary. Wooden Jews, Auschwitz, threadbare grandmothers selling cheese in the park...a bummer! So what you'd get from these folks would be a smiley-face story about the castle, the churches, and the pretty square. Maybe the good restaurants in the reconstructed Jewish quarter. The pictures would definitely pass: Cracow is stunningly beautiful. But the content would be, um, very superficial.
And so it turns out to be: without professionals -- except for a few who put together the section on Stuff and the Gridskipper ripoff section, and they work in the home office -- you get what you pay for. And you pay $100 and get a story that's worth just that. Not, likely enough, to pay for even a night at the hotel the writer stayed at, let alone the cost of getting where they were going. But who needs professionals? We're all professionals now! We have blogs instead of magazines, You Tube instead of television. The diminution of quality isn't even commented on.
So my travel-writing friend and I are out of jobs. As far as I can tell, my career is essentially over, by some sort of mandate I wasn't allowed to vote in. This (and its sister publication, a photo magazine called JPG) is the wave of the future: poorly informed people talking to each other. Ignorance will snowball, and nobody will care.
No, it's not going to happen that way. I'm going to resist, and I hope others do, too. The travel magazine I want to do may not happen (or maybe it will: I'll happily correspond with any professional interested in developing it, since I've sure thought about it enough), but I think the coming economic collapse in the United States may wake some people -- the right people -- up to the fact that you can't have amateurs in charge of things, whether they're foreign policy or magazines, and that the only way to turn things around is to let experts do what they do, even if it's only entertain and inform you. That's all I want to do, and I think I've proven over the years that I can do it. It's worth paying for (my Cracow story made me $1000 plus expenses, and it wasn't even as long as this post; someone like Conde Nast Traveller would pay substantially more), just as any expert's expertise is worth paying for.
A word to the wise, Everywhere: doing something doesn't make you an expert. And a hundred bucks is chump change.
Everywhere, it's called. "The New Travel Magazine Made by You." I knew it was trouble the minute I saw that cover line.
Inside, my worst nightmares were fulfilled in spades. Oh, it's pretty. It's glossy. It even has a few ads. But my heart sank, and it's remained sunk. This thing is evil. The explanation is right there only page 8. Read along with me and see if you don't get creeped out, too:
How Everywhere works.
1) See the world
Visit wonderful places, have fun, take lots of pictures.
2) Document your trip
Select your best photos and tell us about where you went.
3) Upload
Contribute your travel tales and photos to Everywheremag.com.
4) Peer review
The community votes on travel stories, photos, and favorite places.
5) Final selection
Our editors curate each issue from the best of the best.
6) Publication
Published contributors get $100 and a free subscription.
In other words, it's a blog. On paper. A very pretty blog on paper. And if it catches on, someone's going to be making crazy money.
Now, let me take a minute to explain why this is a very bad idea. This strikes to the heart of the whole neophilia thing I've been raving about, and I can just imagine Grant Alden's reaction when he reads this. I already know the reaction I got from a professional travel writer who's doing work she hates because she can't make a living being a travel writer. She's ready to pass out torches and meet me in the streets of San Francisco while we storm the Everywhere headquarters.
She and I, it turns out, had an identical vision at about the same time, before we were in e-contact: a travel magazine aimed at how the people we know travel. Not the "Paris on $5000 a Day" crowd that Conde Nast Traveler seems to target, but real people going to interesting places who want to learn about other interesting places to go. Superficially, Everywhere would seem to be that magazine, but it's not.
As I learned a long time ago, pure democracy is a very bad thing in the magazine business. There not only has to be a hierarchy, but there also has to be something of a dictatorship if the thing is going to work. This seems evil, but really it's not: nobody is an expert on everything. If you need your house rewired, you could, theoretically, do it yourself, but if you're not an electrician, my guess is you'll defer to an electrician's expertise and pay for it. And if you're an accountant, you might do your electrician's taxes. There's nothing wrong with this, is there?
There's something about writing, though, that makes anyone capable of creating a sentence think they can do it. They can't, any more than anyone can take a picture by pushing a button. You can write a sentence and snap a picture, but is either any good? So accountants account, electricians electrish, writers write, and photographers photograph. The writers and photographers put out a magazine, the electrician and the accountant buy it, and they rewire our houses and do our taxes.
Putting together an article is a very complex thing. While turning the pages of Everywhere, I came up with an example of how this works so I can show you what I perceive as the biggest problem with the admittedly seductive idea it puts forth, that a magazine "created by the world's smartest experts -- our readers" is doomed to mediocrity.
A few years ago, I did a story on Cracow. Let us say that a magazine or newspaper wanted me to go back there and do another one. Okay, first we have to come to an agreement: I'll lay out the dough for the travel, the hotel, the meals, and get receipts and send them to the magazine, who'll pay me back. In return, I'll give them a travel story about Cracow based on what I already know and what I'm going to learn about how it's changed since I've been there. Now, it's not ethical to take freebies from folks you're writing about, but the first thing I'd do would be to contact the Cracow Tourist Office and tell them what I was planning to do and when I was planning to do it. This opens some doors: I might be able to get a room -- which I'd pay for -- in a hotel I might ordinarily not have been able to get into. Cracow is dominated by a huge castle. Only a small number of tickets to it are available every day. I wouldn't hesitate to use my article to push my way to the top of the line on the day I needed to visit it if the travel folks could help, because it's the main tourist attraction and I'd have to report it. I'd want to see the brochures they put out, so I could see how they perceived the city, which would give me a foil for how I would see it. I wouldn't hesitate to ask them to make something available to me, to set up an interview (and provide a translator) for various important people, to give me an unfair advantage over the ordinary tourist -- that guy over there, sort of wandering around, who's going to upload his trip to Everywhere, for instance.
If you go to Cracow, you're going to see some unpleasant stuff. For one thing, right nearby -- your hotel can arrange a bus-tour -- is Auschwitz. There's no way I'd write a comprehensive travel story for an American travel magazine about Cracow without mentioning Auschwitz -- if only because for a lot of Americans who lost family there, it's a place of remembrance and prayer. I wonder if Everywhere would do a spread on Auschwitz. Or the controversy (now, I believe, settled) with the religious people adjoining it, hyper-conservative Catholics who were trying to hijack the site for their own purposes a few years ago. I couldn't not mention that, myself, because it has a larger resonance in contemporary Poland, which remains a place of pretty upfront anti-Semitism. On a somewhat lesser note, there are poor peasant women who come in from the countryside and sell cheeses out of baskets. They're everywhere, and you can tell at a glance that they're impoverished. I didn't even know what they were selling until I asked a Cracow resident, and he was embarrassed I'd seen them. But I'd want to report that, too.
Writing the article, I'd want to get in history, the major sites, places to eat, practical information, things to do and things to avoid, and then season this with some attitude. When I was there a few years ago, there were loads of tourist stalls in the Cloth Hall in the central square selling wooden statues of sad-eyed Jews, which appalled me because at that time there were only 300 real Jews living in the whole city. There were more wooden Jews than that in two stalls in the Cloth Hall! With Auschwitz nearby, a Jewish section of Cracow that was enthusiastically emptied under the Nazis, and the residual anti-Semitism, there's a rather sharp edge that any observant person's going to see, and needs to understand. It's part of the experience.
It's also nuanced. Everywhere's articles are tiny bites. The "big" ones take up maybe a page of type spread out over two pages, with pix. You don't get the impression that anyone who wrote them did a lot of research, because most people don't research their vacations, even when they do want to know a little more about what they're seeing. That's what I'd want this article to do, and you just can't do it in that amount of room.
The whole Facebookian "community" thing, too, is scary. Wooden Jews, Auschwitz, threadbare grandmothers selling cheese in the park...a bummer! So what you'd get from these folks would be a smiley-face story about the castle, the churches, and the pretty square. Maybe the good restaurants in the reconstructed Jewish quarter. The pictures would definitely pass: Cracow is stunningly beautiful. But the content would be, um, very superficial.
And so it turns out to be: without professionals -- except for a few who put together the section on Stuff and the Gridskipper ripoff section, and they work in the home office -- you get what you pay for. And you pay $100 and get a story that's worth just that. Not, likely enough, to pay for even a night at the hotel the writer stayed at, let alone the cost of getting where they were going. But who needs professionals? We're all professionals now! We have blogs instead of magazines, You Tube instead of television. The diminution of quality isn't even commented on.
So my travel-writing friend and I are out of jobs. As far as I can tell, my career is essentially over, by some sort of mandate I wasn't allowed to vote in. This (and its sister publication, a photo magazine called JPG) is the wave of the future: poorly informed people talking to each other. Ignorance will snowball, and nobody will care.
No, it's not going to happen that way. I'm going to resist, and I hope others do, too. The travel magazine I want to do may not happen (or maybe it will: I'll happily correspond with any professional interested in developing it, since I've sure thought about it enough), but I think the coming economic collapse in the United States may wake some people -- the right people -- up to the fact that you can't have amateurs in charge of things, whether they're foreign policy or magazines, and that the only way to turn things around is to let experts do what they do, even if it's only entertain and inform you. That's all I want to do, and I think I've proven over the years that I can do it. It's worth paying for (my Cracow story made me $1000 plus expenses, and it wasn't even as long as this post; someone like Conde Nast Traveller would pay substantially more), just as any expert's expertise is worth paying for.
A word to the wise, Everywhere: doing something doesn't make you an expert. And a hundred bucks is chump change.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Neophilia And Its Discontents
The end of No Depression is one thing, but this is getting ridiculous. Grant over there sent me an article yesterday about the Atlantic's new "web brand," The Current, which will crunch articles into 250-to-300-word little thingies.
If you have ADD, be warned: this post will be longer than that.
Now the Atlantic is one of America's leading magazines. According to the Wikipedia article, it was founded in 1858 by a bunch of famous writers and intellectuals and has been publishing ever since. Just what they expect to accomplish with this new venture I can't say, although they think they'll be able to attract more eyeballs and, presumably, sell more advertising. What they won't be able to do, needless to say, is explore anything they write about in any depth. And exploring things in depth has always been what they've been about.
This rush to the Web, and the parallel abandoning of print by both publishers and advertisers is a prime example of something I've chosen to call neophilia. Neophilia is probably defined as "love of the new," but I, well, I want to explore it in more depth.
Okay, look, I'm a guy, and, like a lot of guys, I like gadgets. I like new gadgets, too: I was grumpy about computers until I moved to Europe, when someone pointed me to Compuserve, whereby I could send e-mail. This meant I could also send articles to magazines and get them there in the time it took to send them, which, on dial-up with a 256k modem, was about two minutes. This revolutionized my life: I got an Apple Powerbook, and boy, was it cool. Not only did it do e-mail and word-processing, but it did a whole lot of other things, too. If Compuserve had let its customers do it back then, I could have accessed this newfangled Internet thing, and I burned to do so, but unfortunately it would be a couple of years until I could. I was, however, able to access bulletin boards, and almost found an apartment in Berlin using one. I actually did find one during that search because of the computer, though: my brother-in-law sent me an e-mail saying a guy he knew was moving out of one here, and I called the number he sent me and got the place. Just like that.
Once I finally could access the Internet, life got really interesting. There was all kinds of stuff out there, and I zipped around (as fast as one could zip with a 256k modem with Deutsche Telekom's heinous tariffs breathing down my neck the whole time) and found a lot of it. I joined the Well, and "met" a lot of interesting folks. In fact, I also met them in person (excuse me: IRL), and that was fun.
I got more gadgets, too: I fell in love with Palm Pilots, and am on my third one now. It's a great machine that has applications that allow you to figure out public transport (a great app called MetrO, which has the routes of hundreds of cities' bus, tram, and light rail lines), keep various kinds of lists, and store all your phone numbers -- and coordinate it with your computer.
There were gadgets I wanted to like, but didn't. Cell phones: I never saw the point. I now own one, and it's great for travelling, or when you're trying to coordinate things on the fly, but I keep leaving the house without it. Then there was the iPod. I'm a confirmed Apple-head, but I really don't need to convert all my records to MP3 files and carry them with me everywhere all the time. I just don't. Although now it appears that the iPod Touch may be encroaching on Palm territory (and Palm's done a terrible job of maintaining their OS), so maybe I'll use one when they figure that out -- just not for music.
Okay, so: I like gadgets. That's been established.
But, as the cases of the cell phone and iPod prove, not unless they improve some area of my life. Because it's new doesn't mean it's better. Or even that it's important. But there are those who figure that any new gadget has to be better because it's new.
Case in point: some months ago, Amazon introduced a gadget on which you could read books you'd downloaded from them. I'm not sure how it works because I took one look at it and recoiled in horror, but over on the Well, there are sufficient neophiliacs that a big fuss ensued. One guy actually said "I'm never buying a physical book again. This is it," or some such balderdash. Finally, someone who spoke neophiliac pointed out that the platform hadn't been established, and that just maybe this guy would download a bunch of books he couldn't read in ten years. Or maybe five years. Or maybe by the end of 2008. One wise old sage noted that he had to keep old computers around just to read documents he'd created in now-vanished software programs or now-vanished platforms. No means of converting them had ever appeared. (And I know what he means: all my e-mail correspondence prior to a given date is stored in Compuserve's proprietary format on a Mac OS which is no longer supported, and I have it all stored on...a ZIP disc!)
Someone who would seriously consider abandoning books for this new gadget of Amazon's -- or similar ones Sony and others are pushing -- is a neophiliac in need of intervention.
So, in my opinion, is someone who'd abandon nearly a century's worth of work on figuring out how to mechanically reproduce music so it sounded as close as humanly possible to live performance for MP3s, portablility or not. (I mean, do you really need to be entertained every moment of your waking life? Apparently some people are so shallow that they do.) Yet the neophilic rush to this new format is such that it has practically ruined the market for physical product, allowed free exchange of music files to the point where musicians are no longer able to make a living off of recordings (and don't say "make your money on the road" until you've clocked the prices at the gas station this morning), and sent the music business into a tail-spin. I'd be the last to argue that the record biz didn't deserve a shake-up, but when the little guys are falling as fast as the big guys, then something's clearly wrong.
And so is someone who'd abandon print for the Web. Sorry, but this makes absolutely no sense to me. First there are the issues of readability. I have to walk away from the computer a lot or risk my eyeballs feeling like they've been sandpapered. Some web design is absolutely awful: one of the web's best music magazines is a design horror, so bad that I rarely read it, which I feel bad about, because the guy who puts it together is really smart and has impeccable taste. I wish...well, I wish he'd edit a magazine instead. Or, better, in addition. There's the portability and durability: you can read a paper or a magazine or a book in places where you can't read the Web. On trains, for instance. We ride a lot of trains here in Europe. Or on planes. You simply don't have to worry about battery life with print. And the platform: I can, given other variables like the language it's printed in, read books printed hundreds of years ago, and so will people hundreds of years from now. Moreover, I can be sure no one's hacked the content -- at least once the thing's been published.
Then, as I mentioned last time, there's the issue of length. Some things are so complex they take a lot of time to explain, explore, or expose. You want to be able to check back, whether to verify who a given character is, go back to the beginning of an argument, check a fact or date, or whatever. That's just harder with a virtual document. And these complex arguments or expositions just don't crunch down into 250-to-300-word bites. Moreover, they're often very important, vital to understanding our world, our society, and the ideas that drive them.
This, I think, is something that's in danger of becoming, if not lost, at least far more scarce. And that's bad.
The paranoiac in me is forced to ask a question: who benefits from neophilia? And the answer comes ringing back: the gadget-mongers. And then I have to ask, why do they get to tell us what to do? Because they've made huge fortunes selling these gadgets? Does the future of music have to be dependent on iTunes? Does the future of our political discourse have to be dependent on the Web? Does the future of literature have to be dependent on what you can read on a screen? Do Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon get to set the boundaries of our intellectual life?
Does everything have to be simplified into a compressed MP3 file, a sound-bite, a 250-to-300-word idea-bite?
Because if it does, we're in a heap of trouble.
I think there will be what the economists call a "correction," but I don't see it because the horizon is obscured by neophilia. I have to rely on gut feeling, and that's always scary when so many other guts are busy digesting what's new. I worry that it won't come quickly enough to save what I do for a living, what I've done for a living for over 40 years. Is my whole career, my whole body of expertise and skill, going to be sacrificed so that someone can sell silicon? We've already seen the damage lying memes can do: John Kerry's a traitor; Barack Obama is a Muslim (and, hence, a terrorist, as everyone "knows" all Muslims are). Without rational explanation, this sort of thing can run amok, and I believe that print plays a vital role in keeping rationality alive in a way that no other medium can.
Maybe I'm a grumpy old man, resentful at the coming new age, but somehow, I don't think it's that simple. There are those who benefit from keeping people stupid, just like there are those who benefit from compressing music into MP3 files. Both are dangerous, in wildly different ways, of course.
Naturally, I have a large stake in keeping print media alive. But I'd like to gently suggest that you do, too.
* * *
It's that time of year again, and I'm off to Texas Friday morning for SXSW. I'll try to blog some of that, just as I did last year, and I'll also certainly be blogging about the food. After SXSW, I'll fly to Paris and take the train to Montpellier. If all goes as I hope, I'll be looking for apartments that graduating students will be moving out of this summer, with an eye towards moving into one of them when they leave. With luck, I'll find one, and I'll also find enough new work to pay for it. Wish me luck. I'm more in need of it now than ever.
If you have ADD, be warned: this post will be longer than that.
Now the Atlantic is one of America's leading magazines. According to the Wikipedia article, it was founded in 1858 by a bunch of famous writers and intellectuals and has been publishing ever since. Just what they expect to accomplish with this new venture I can't say, although they think they'll be able to attract more eyeballs and, presumably, sell more advertising. What they won't be able to do, needless to say, is explore anything they write about in any depth. And exploring things in depth has always been what they've been about.
This rush to the Web, and the parallel abandoning of print by both publishers and advertisers is a prime example of something I've chosen to call neophilia. Neophilia is probably defined as "love of the new," but I, well, I want to explore it in more depth.
Okay, look, I'm a guy, and, like a lot of guys, I like gadgets. I like new gadgets, too: I was grumpy about computers until I moved to Europe, when someone pointed me to Compuserve, whereby I could send e-mail. This meant I could also send articles to magazines and get them there in the time it took to send them, which, on dial-up with a 256k modem, was about two minutes. This revolutionized my life: I got an Apple Powerbook, and boy, was it cool. Not only did it do e-mail and word-processing, but it did a whole lot of other things, too. If Compuserve had let its customers do it back then, I could have accessed this newfangled Internet thing, and I burned to do so, but unfortunately it would be a couple of years until I could. I was, however, able to access bulletin boards, and almost found an apartment in Berlin using one. I actually did find one during that search because of the computer, though: my brother-in-law sent me an e-mail saying a guy he knew was moving out of one here, and I called the number he sent me and got the place. Just like that.
Once I finally could access the Internet, life got really interesting. There was all kinds of stuff out there, and I zipped around (as fast as one could zip with a 256k modem with Deutsche Telekom's heinous tariffs breathing down my neck the whole time) and found a lot of it. I joined the Well, and "met" a lot of interesting folks. In fact, I also met them in person (excuse me: IRL), and that was fun.
I got more gadgets, too: I fell in love with Palm Pilots, and am on my third one now. It's a great machine that has applications that allow you to figure out public transport (a great app called MetrO, which has the routes of hundreds of cities' bus, tram, and light rail lines), keep various kinds of lists, and store all your phone numbers -- and coordinate it with your computer.
There were gadgets I wanted to like, but didn't. Cell phones: I never saw the point. I now own one, and it's great for travelling, or when you're trying to coordinate things on the fly, but I keep leaving the house without it. Then there was the iPod. I'm a confirmed Apple-head, but I really don't need to convert all my records to MP3 files and carry them with me everywhere all the time. I just don't. Although now it appears that the iPod Touch may be encroaching on Palm territory (and Palm's done a terrible job of maintaining their OS), so maybe I'll use one when they figure that out -- just not for music.
Okay, so: I like gadgets. That's been established.
But, as the cases of the cell phone and iPod prove, not unless they improve some area of my life. Because it's new doesn't mean it's better. Or even that it's important. But there are those who figure that any new gadget has to be better because it's new.
Case in point: some months ago, Amazon introduced a gadget on which you could read books you'd downloaded from them. I'm not sure how it works because I took one look at it and recoiled in horror, but over on the Well, there are sufficient neophiliacs that a big fuss ensued. One guy actually said "I'm never buying a physical book again. This is it," or some such balderdash. Finally, someone who spoke neophiliac pointed out that the platform hadn't been established, and that just maybe this guy would download a bunch of books he couldn't read in ten years. Or maybe five years. Or maybe by the end of 2008. One wise old sage noted that he had to keep old computers around just to read documents he'd created in now-vanished software programs or now-vanished platforms. No means of converting them had ever appeared. (And I know what he means: all my e-mail correspondence prior to a given date is stored in Compuserve's proprietary format on a Mac OS which is no longer supported, and I have it all stored on...a ZIP disc!)
Someone who would seriously consider abandoning books for this new gadget of Amazon's -- or similar ones Sony and others are pushing -- is a neophiliac in need of intervention.
So, in my opinion, is someone who'd abandon nearly a century's worth of work on figuring out how to mechanically reproduce music so it sounded as close as humanly possible to live performance for MP3s, portablility or not. (I mean, do you really need to be entertained every moment of your waking life? Apparently some people are so shallow that they do.) Yet the neophilic rush to this new format is such that it has practically ruined the market for physical product, allowed free exchange of music files to the point where musicians are no longer able to make a living off of recordings (and don't say "make your money on the road" until you've clocked the prices at the gas station this morning), and sent the music business into a tail-spin. I'd be the last to argue that the record biz didn't deserve a shake-up, but when the little guys are falling as fast as the big guys, then something's clearly wrong.
And so is someone who'd abandon print for the Web. Sorry, but this makes absolutely no sense to me. First there are the issues of readability. I have to walk away from the computer a lot or risk my eyeballs feeling like they've been sandpapered. Some web design is absolutely awful: one of the web's best music magazines is a design horror, so bad that I rarely read it, which I feel bad about, because the guy who puts it together is really smart and has impeccable taste. I wish...well, I wish he'd edit a magazine instead. Or, better, in addition. There's the portability and durability: you can read a paper or a magazine or a book in places where you can't read the Web. On trains, for instance. We ride a lot of trains here in Europe. Or on planes. You simply don't have to worry about battery life with print. And the platform: I can, given other variables like the language it's printed in, read books printed hundreds of years ago, and so will people hundreds of years from now. Moreover, I can be sure no one's hacked the content -- at least once the thing's been published.
Then, as I mentioned last time, there's the issue of length. Some things are so complex they take a lot of time to explain, explore, or expose. You want to be able to check back, whether to verify who a given character is, go back to the beginning of an argument, check a fact or date, or whatever. That's just harder with a virtual document. And these complex arguments or expositions just don't crunch down into 250-to-300-word bites. Moreover, they're often very important, vital to understanding our world, our society, and the ideas that drive them.
This, I think, is something that's in danger of becoming, if not lost, at least far more scarce. And that's bad.
The paranoiac in me is forced to ask a question: who benefits from neophilia? And the answer comes ringing back: the gadget-mongers. And then I have to ask, why do they get to tell us what to do? Because they've made huge fortunes selling these gadgets? Does the future of music have to be dependent on iTunes? Does the future of our political discourse have to be dependent on the Web? Does the future of literature have to be dependent on what you can read on a screen? Do Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon get to set the boundaries of our intellectual life?
Does everything have to be simplified into a compressed MP3 file, a sound-bite, a 250-to-300-word idea-bite?
Because if it does, we're in a heap of trouble.
I think there will be what the economists call a "correction," but I don't see it because the horizon is obscured by neophilia. I have to rely on gut feeling, and that's always scary when so many other guts are busy digesting what's new. I worry that it won't come quickly enough to save what I do for a living, what I've done for a living for over 40 years. Is my whole career, my whole body of expertise and skill, going to be sacrificed so that someone can sell silicon? We've already seen the damage lying memes can do: John Kerry's a traitor; Barack Obama is a Muslim (and, hence, a terrorist, as everyone "knows" all Muslims are). Without rational explanation, this sort of thing can run amok, and I believe that print plays a vital role in keeping rationality alive in a way that no other medium can.
Maybe I'm a grumpy old man, resentful at the coming new age, but somehow, I don't think it's that simple. There are those who benefit from keeping people stupid, just like there are those who benefit from compressing music into MP3 files. Both are dangerous, in wildly different ways, of course.
Naturally, I have a large stake in keeping print media alive. But I'd like to gently suggest that you do, too.
* * *
It's that time of year again, and I'm off to Texas Friday morning for SXSW. I'll try to blog some of that, just as I did last year, and I'll also certainly be blogging about the food. After SXSW, I'll fly to Paris and take the train to Montpellier. If all goes as I hope, I'll be looking for apartments that graduating students will be moving out of this summer, with an eye towards moving into one of them when they leave. With luck, I'll find one, and I'll also find enough new work to pay for it. Wish me luck. I'm more in need of it now than ever.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Ginglish On Musemsinsel
So while I'm looking for a new place, life, and work, goes on. In recent days, I've picked up a guidebook gig, and one of the chapters I have to do is museums. Which is great: I love museums, and if I had it to do all over again, I might well give in to the impulse I had in my teens to go to musem school and wind up making some dough. I've always loved the way a museum, properly done, is an alternative way of arranging knowledge. I'm used to doing it with words, but museums have to do it with objects. Just as there is with a book or essay, there's an implicit agenda in a musem's ordering of objects: a curator is arguing a position, and the viewer is obliged to sort out the information and react.
I started on Tuesday with a visit to the Deutsches Historisches Museum because although I've been to a bunch of shows in its I. M. Pei annex, I had yet to see the new permanent collection in the main building itself. Plus, I woke up that day feeling depressed and decided, on the principle of the blues, that immersing oneself in another's misery might make me feel better.
Dunno if it worked, actually; I left the place feeling like my head was going to explode. But that's getting ahead of myself. The permanent collection is divided in two: Roman times to World War I upstairs, and postwar through reunification downstairs. Right off the bat, there's something odd, in that prehistory isn't even touched on, and, thanks to the Neander river valley, if nothing else, Germany has a starring role in that. And anyway, those Germanic tribes must've come from somewhere. But you're only a few meters inside by the time the Christians come on the scene, and the long road to the Holy Roman Empire isn't far away. And so you stroll, as Teutonic knights head off to the Holy Land, Martin Luther nails his theses to the church door (an event the captions claim almost certainly didn't happen), the French fight the Germans, the Germans fight the French, the Austrians fight the Turks, the Swedes fight the Poles, the Germans fight the French, the French fight the Germans, the Germans fight with themselves, and here comes the Congress of Vienna! Pretty soon it's time for the Industrial Revolution, paintings give way to photographs, there's a nice little pair of rooms up a flight of stairs with Jugendstil stuff in them, with a film of German soldiers jamming into trains on their way to the front playing on the downstairs wall just inches away. Next thing you know, you're back on the landing and it's time to go downstairs.
I went through the downstairs rather quicker than I would have liked to; closing time was looming in an hour or so, and I also knew this part of the story better than I did the other half (not that I knew the first half much better after a couple of hours with it, for which I blame my education as much as anything). I also had more tools with which to assess the artifacts, and I have to say, the collection is amazing. Also, the way they partition the post-war stuff the way the country was partitioned is done extremely well; you can see the stuff on the other side, but getting there is another matter, although it's easily enough achieved, of course. (I should mention, though, that the struggle to end the DDR is infinitely better-presented at the almost-unpronounceable-by-non-Germans Zeitgeschichtlisches Forum Leipzig, which is almost reason enough to visit Leipzig all by itself).
But as I walked out into the dark of Unter den Linden, I was experiencing a sensation not unlike vertigo because of all of the captions I'd read. Now, there was a time when all of Berlin's museums' captions were in German only, and there was no way to know what was going on unless you could read German. (Lest this seem a bit of xenophobia, I invite you to go into your nearest American museum and see how much information there is in any other language but English). Now, however, as Berlin's museums are slowly integrating collections divided by the Wall, bilingual German and English captions are showing up. The weirdest of all, though, are in the DHM, which erupt into inexplicable italics every now and again. And it's not because the words are untranslatable German ones like Heimat or Lebensraum, because they're not. They're just random words italicized (a practice I've now demonstrated enough and will cease; you're welcome), in both the German and the English texts. I don't get it, but it sure does slow you down.
The next day I went to the Bode-Museum, which is practically my next-door neighbor. I had no idea what was in it, because back before it got dome-to-dungeon redone, the best anyone could tell me was "coins and stuff." Well, the coins are still there, but so is a load of Byzantine and medieval and early renaissance sculpture, painting, and bits of architecture. I made the acquaintance of the amazing woodcarver Erasmus Grasser, who flourished in Munich between 1474 and 1518, and was boggled by an entire room of stuff by Tilman Riemenschneider, whose ability to represent facial expressions and even emotions is unparallelled in his time. The Bode is all about space, which is why it's particularly good for sculpture; there are two domes letting daylight in, and a gigantic "basilica" with "chapels" on the sides which allow for the display of groupings of renaissance and baroque religious statuary, paintings, and altars.
Here, the captions weren't annoyingly italicized, and for the most part the English was pretty good. Well, until the one where it really wasn't. My eyes were glazing over on the second floor, what with an oversupply of baroque bronze sculpture, but I did stop to read about how they were mass-produced, and I came upon this: "The bronze-smith then prepares the metal to be porn into the mould at this time." The "then...at this time" is bad enough, but...ummm... The piece used to demonstrate this is a naked statue of Mars, anatomically correct, and the first thing that came to my mind was that it isn't porn til it's poured.
This leads me to give voice to what I'll call Augustine's Complaint, because it's been voiced over and over by reader and commenter here Steven Augustine. There are tons of underemployed writers and editors, native English-speakers, here in Berlin. Pay us to proofread this stuff, and we'll turn it into idiomatic English that won't embarrass you. Really. We may not have doctorates in English, but we do read and write it quite fluently, idiomatically, and we offer really, really affordable rates. However, time and again, it's the "qualified" Germans who render this English text, and it shows. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who wrote for a (now defunct, I hope) terrible magazine published by Berliner Tourismus und Marketing for distribution in hotels which were BTM members, called Berlin|Berlin. It was German and English...sorta. My friend, a journalism school graduate, raised bilingually in America, and veteran of some of America's top magazines, wrote an article for them and was told by the editor that her English was terrible. The "corrected" article, of course, was a total howler.
At any rate, I ended this week's museum-going at the Pergamon, whose holdings aren't of as much interest to me, although it's swallowed the Museum of Islamic Art from West Berlin, and you can't help but be awed by a museum that contains not just artifacts, but whole complexes of ancient buildings and a huge hunk of the city wall of Babylon itself. There, the English captioning is often inscrutable and nearly always polished for maximum dullness. They're going to do renovations there in the not-too-distant future, and I wonder if this will mean dealing with this problem. Probably not; they have a reputation to uphold, after all.
I started on Tuesday with a visit to the Deutsches Historisches Museum because although I've been to a bunch of shows in its I. M. Pei annex, I had yet to see the new permanent collection in the main building itself. Plus, I woke up that day feeling depressed and decided, on the principle of the blues, that immersing oneself in another's misery might make me feel better.
Dunno if it worked, actually; I left the place feeling like my head was going to explode. But that's getting ahead of myself. The permanent collection is divided in two: Roman times to World War I upstairs, and postwar through reunification downstairs. Right off the bat, there's something odd, in that prehistory isn't even touched on, and, thanks to the Neander river valley, if nothing else, Germany has a starring role in that. And anyway, those Germanic tribes must've come from somewhere. But you're only a few meters inside by the time the Christians come on the scene, and the long road to the Holy Roman Empire isn't far away. And so you stroll, as Teutonic knights head off to the Holy Land, Martin Luther nails his theses to the church door (an event the captions claim almost certainly didn't happen), the French fight the Germans, the Germans fight the French, the Austrians fight the Turks, the Swedes fight the Poles, the Germans fight the French, the French fight the Germans, the Germans fight with themselves, and here comes the Congress of Vienna! Pretty soon it's time for the Industrial Revolution, paintings give way to photographs, there's a nice little pair of rooms up a flight of stairs with Jugendstil stuff in them, with a film of German soldiers jamming into trains on their way to the front playing on the downstairs wall just inches away. Next thing you know, you're back on the landing and it's time to go downstairs.
I went through the downstairs rather quicker than I would have liked to; closing time was looming in an hour or so, and I also knew this part of the story better than I did the other half (not that I knew the first half much better after a couple of hours with it, for which I blame my education as much as anything). I also had more tools with which to assess the artifacts, and I have to say, the collection is amazing. Also, the way they partition the post-war stuff the way the country was partitioned is done extremely well; you can see the stuff on the other side, but getting there is another matter, although it's easily enough achieved, of course. (I should mention, though, that the struggle to end the DDR is infinitely better-presented at the almost-unpronounceable-by-non-Germans Zeitgeschichtlisches Forum Leipzig, which is almost reason enough to visit Leipzig all by itself).
But as I walked out into the dark of Unter den Linden, I was experiencing a sensation not unlike vertigo because of all of the captions I'd read. Now, there was a time when all of Berlin's museums' captions were in German only, and there was no way to know what was going on unless you could read German. (Lest this seem a bit of xenophobia, I invite you to go into your nearest American museum and see how much information there is in any other language but English). Now, however, as Berlin's museums are slowly integrating collections divided by the Wall, bilingual German and English captions are showing up. The weirdest of all, though, are in the DHM, which erupt into inexplicable italics every now and again. And it's not because the words are untranslatable German ones like Heimat or Lebensraum, because they're not. They're just random words italicized (a practice I've now demonstrated enough and will cease; you're welcome), in both the German and the English texts. I don't get it, but it sure does slow you down.
The next day I went to the Bode-Museum, which is practically my next-door neighbor. I had no idea what was in it, because back before it got dome-to-dungeon redone, the best anyone could tell me was "coins and stuff." Well, the coins are still there, but so is a load of Byzantine and medieval and early renaissance sculpture, painting, and bits of architecture. I made the acquaintance of the amazing woodcarver Erasmus Grasser, who flourished in Munich between 1474 and 1518, and was boggled by an entire room of stuff by Tilman Riemenschneider, whose ability to represent facial expressions and even emotions is unparallelled in his time. The Bode is all about space, which is why it's particularly good for sculpture; there are two domes letting daylight in, and a gigantic "basilica" with "chapels" on the sides which allow for the display of groupings of renaissance and baroque religious statuary, paintings, and altars.
Here, the captions weren't annoyingly italicized, and for the most part the English was pretty good. Well, until the one where it really wasn't. My eyes were glazing over on the second floor, what with an oversupply of baroque bronze sculpture, but I did stop to read about how they were mass-produced, and I came upon this: "The bronze-smith then prepares the metal to be porn into the mould at this time." The "then...at this time" is bad enough, but...ummm... The piece used to demonstrate this is a naked statue of Mars, anatomically correct, and the first thing that came to my mind was that it isn't porn til it's poured.
This leads me to give voice to what I'll call Augustine's Complaint, because it's been voiced over and over by reader and commenter here Steven Augustine. There are tons of underemployed writers and editors, native English-speakers, here in Berlin. Pay us to proofread this stuff, and we'll turn it into idiomatic English that won't embarrass you. Really. We may not have doctorates in English, but we do read and write it quite fluently, idiomatically, and we offer really, really affordable rates. However, time and again, it's the "qualified" Germans who render this English text, and it shows. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who wrote for a (now defunct, I hope) terrible magazine published by Berliner Tourismus und Marketing for distribution in hotels which were BTM members, called Berlin|Berlin. It was German and English...sorta. My friend, a journalism school graduate, raised bilingually in America, and veteran of some of America's top magazines, wrote an article for them and was told by the editor that her English was terrible. The "corrected" article, of course, was a total howler.
At any rate, I ended this week's museum-going at the Pergamon, whose holdings aren't of as much interest to me, although it's swallowed the Museum of Islamic Art from West Berlin, and you can't help but be awed by a museum that contains not just artifacts, but whole complexes of ancient buildings and a huge hunk of the city wall of Babylon itself. There, the English captioning is often inscrutable and nearly always polished for maximum dullness. They're going to do renovations there in the not-too-distant future, and I wonder if this will mean dealing with this problem. Probably not; they have a reputation to uphold, after all.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Short Technical Notice
I seem to have abgeficked my e-mail. If you write me on an address not the one posted here and not my Well address (if you do, you know what I mean), please have patience. The best minds in Australia and India are working on moving my e-mail from the evil GoDaddy folks, who've been losing my e-mails, to a decent e-mail provider that's not trying to sell you stuff all the time and, as far as I know, does not run a NASCAR car. However, this apparently takes time, especially when the client (me) is a total idiot when it comes to things like virtual domains and aliases and stuff, so please be patient.
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