Felix Salmon - Not Econoblog

727-727 vs 727

2008-04-17T15:10:51-05:00

A curious postscript to the post below: both the NYT and Slate have slide shows about the Murakami show. Both of them talk about 727-727, and attempt to illustrate it, on slide 10 of the NYT slideshow, and slide 8 of the Slate sideshow. And both of them use an illustration of a different painting, 727, rather than 727-727. Both paintings are on show in Brooklyn right now, but they are definitely distinct: 727-727 is more expressive and painterly. It's not that hard to tell them apart, you'd think that a professional art critic could manage it. (See here, or below, for what 727-727 really looks like.)

Incidentally, I emailed the NYT on April 6 to inform them of their mistake, on their inform-us-of-errors email address of nytnews@nytimes.com. I got a form reply saying "your e-mail will reach the appropriate editor promptly," but so far there's been no correction. I'm trying the same thing with corrections@slate.com, we'll see if the response is different. Who knows, maybe this blog entry will prompt a correction. Probably not.

A Masterpiece from Murakami

2008-04-06T13:32:26-05:00

I went to the Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum last night, it's well worth seeing. For me, the highlight is the painting above, 727-727, which unfortunately just doesn't work very well in reproduction. In real life, it's enormous – each of the three panels is 3 meters high (that's 9'10", for Americans).

Now Murakami has been painting (or getting his assistants to paint) very large paintings for a very long time, and many of his installations are significantly bigger than this: the scale of this piece is nothing new. But often the size of Murakami's pieces works only to overwhelm, to bludgeon the viewer with sensory overload. In this case, Murakami creates a complex and stunningly beautiful ground of worked and reworked paint: he mounts his canvas on board, puts on a layer of acrylic paint, sands it down until there's almost nothing left, puts on another layer, sands that down, and so on and so forth until the end result ends up looking like a cross between a Gerhard Richter squeegee work and an Andy Warhol oxidation painting.

The result isn't incoherent from afar, as some Murakami paintings can be; instead, it's one of those paintings which works perfectly at any distance from far across the room all the way up to right against the astonishing surface of the canvas.

The content of the painting could easily fill a very large catalogue essay, from the DOB mascot to the flattened and stylized wave forms and the carefully-applied drips at the right-hand edge: intellectually, this is a very complex work. But it also marks the point at which Murakami starts becoming a bit less conceptualist and more of a pure painter: the colors are gorgeous, the formal structure is extremely strong, and there's a pitch-perfect interplay between the flattened areas of abstract color and the more representational elements. In short, I feel comfortable calling this a 21st Century masterpiece, maybe the first I've seen. And frankly I'm a little annoyed it's wound up in the collection of Stevie Cohen; I hope and trust he'll be lending it out a lot, since it really deserves to be on more or less permanent public view.

West Texas

2008-04-02T16:49:36-05:00

On one's first trip to Marfa, the tour of Chinati is revelatory enough that you don't get too annoyed by the restrictions. On one's second trip to Marfa, the fact that you're shepherded out of Judd's masterpiece so that you can spend 15 minutes bored by Ilya Kabakov borders on the criminal.

Also, the steaks at the Gage Hotel are very good – but they're corn-fed beef from Wisconsin or thereabouts. What happens to the West Texas cattle? Where can I get me some of those steaks?

Transplant surgery

2008-02-28T19:35:56-05:00

Liesl Gibson: Best doctor ever!

John Adams: Encore!

2008-02-17T12:49:18-05:00

Last year, I extolled the virtues of listening to new-music pieces more than once. Yesterday, I went to Carnegie Hall to hear the new Doctor Atomic Symphony by John Adams, and it was wonderful; but it was also very dense and complex, and I'd love to be able to listen to listen to it again. The problem is that it's unlikely to be either performed in NYC or recorded any time soon. Which is why I think that last night's concert constituted a large missed opportunity on the part of David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Am I saying that he should have performed the entire symphony twice? Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. The symphony, you see, was "put on liposuction" (John Adams's words) since it was first performed at the Proms in August. Back then it was over 40 minutes; now it's less than 25 minutes. And as a result, David Robertson had to "scramble" (his words) to rejigger the program, which originally had the symphony taking up the entire second half. Since 24 minutes is a very short second half by anyone's standards, he inserted an 18-minute Sibelius piece after the interval and before the symphony.

Now I've got nothing against Sibelius, but the audience certainly wasn't coming to listen to Sibelius (they bought their tickets before the Finn was added to the menu), and most of them were very much coming to listen to Adams.

Given that the Adams symphony is now so trim, why not play it twice? Here's what I wrote last year, after listening to Michael Gordon's Decasia three times in a row:

Let me recommend repeat visits to any great musical experience, whether it be a contemporary symphony or a magnificently-performed opera. Too often, I think, people have the opportunity to go back and relive a wonderful performance, and don't. Many symphonies and pretty much all operas are performed more than once: take advantage of that, if you can! I remember once going to a London Symphony Orchestra concert at the Barbican in London, where Kent Nagano started off the program with a short piece by, as I recall, Olivier Messiaen. After playing it, he announced to the audience that new and unfamiliar music really needed to be heard more than once – so he played the whole thing a second time. I wonder if that kind of thing ever happens in New York.

Robertson himself talked admiringly of the way in which composers like Sibelius and Adams do radically new things when composing their music – even as he himself originally stuck to the standard appetizer-concerto-symphony structure which concertgoers are getting increasingly bored by. Given the necessity of shaking that up a little, he chose the safest route possible, rather than doing something much more interesting and imaginative.

Indeed, during the pre-concert talk, Robertson said that his choice was between scheduling a new piece and "playing a really long encore". He speaks fluent French, he knows exactly what "encore" means. So maybe that's what he should have done: played the Adams symphony, taken his bow, and then asked the audience if they wanted to hear it again. The ones who didn't could just have left; the vast majority would have very, very happily stayed for the repeat.

The Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio

2008-02-10T11:11:23-05:00

After flicking through the wine list at Cafe Gray on Friday night, I've come up with what I'm calling the Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio, or RPR. The formula is simple:

RPR=W/E

W is what you might call the quarter-median wine price: take the red wines only (to make things a bit more manageable) and find the price of the wine such that 25% of the wines on the list are cheaper, and 75% of the wines on the list are more expensive.

E is simply the average price of a main course.

At the Mermaid Inn, in the East Village, the average entree is $21; its red wines range from $28 to $74, with the quarter-median wine costing $34. (Three wines are cheaper; nine wines are more expensive.) So the RPR is 1.6.

At Cafe Gray, the average entree is $37. The wine list on the website doesn't have prices, but I can tell you that the red wines range from $60 to $5,100, and my gut feeling is that the quarter-median price is somewhere around $175. In which case the RPR would be 4.7.

If you point me to restaurant wine lists online,. It should be interesting to see where the typical restaurant lies.

Update: Thanks, Eater! Here's some more datapoints:

Landmarc: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $42/ Average Entree Price $25 = 1.68 ratio
Balthazar: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $55/ Average Entree Price: $24 = 2.29 ratio
Frankies Spuntino: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $30/ Average Entree Price: $15 = 2.0 ratio
Fiamma: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $110/ Average Entree Price: $35 (estimate) = 3.14 ratio
Le Cirque: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $204 / Average Entree Price $49 = 4.16 ratio

Gawker's resurgence

2008-01-21T04:37:57-05:00

I am so losing my bet. Thanks to Tom Cruise, Gawker is going to easily set a new record for pageviews this month. Remember that the old record was 11.5 million pageviews in the month of October; Gawker got 5.3 million pageviews in 4 days between January 15 and January 18.

The page with the Tom Cruise video has received over 1.8 million pageviews so far, and there's another 400,000 or so over at Defamer, too. Nick knew that he had something unique and special on his hands, and he's been taking full advantage of it, buying ads on other websites and driving a huge amount of traffic to the generic Tom Cruise page on Gawker. That's smart: Nick wants readers of Gawker much more than he wants people who come for one video and then leave, never to return. And he seems to be getting those readers, judging by the ratio of total pageviews to video views over the past week.

Does this have anything to do with "Manhattan media news and gossip", as the title of Gawker's home page would have it? Well, no. But than again, as Nick will readily admit, Gawker's pageviews have always been goosed by Hollywood celebrity gossip, even all the way back in the Age of Spiers. He's not fussy: he'll take those pageviews where he can get them. There's nothing new or underhanded about this method of getting traffic, and Nick has won the bet (which he never actually took) fair and square.

Indeed, Nick, in hosting this video and keeping it up in the face of nastygrams from the Scientologists, has shown himself to have bigger cojones than his former employers at the FT.

I'm also glad that Gakwer Media has scaled enough, over the years, that Nick is capable of pulling this off. Back in the day, this quantity of traffic – especially video traffic – would have brought Gawker's servers crashing down. And Nick and I actually received the same C&D back in March 2003, from Puma – back then, he didn't have an in-house lawyer to reply to such things, and the great Khoi Vinh even offered money to help defend the lawsuit – which, of course, never materialized.

Today, Nick is a fully-fledged new-media mogul, and he has a monopoly on this video, since YouTube won't host it, and Nick won't allow it to be embedded on other websites. He's managed to alight on one of the very, very few instances of internet content which can't easily be copied and posted elsewhere, and he's taken full advantage of that. I also give him full credit for obtaining the video and working out how to post it on his own web page: this is not elementary stuff.

We'll see in February how much of this Tom Cruise spike translates into lasting traffic for Gawker; I suspect it might actually be quite high. Certainly there's some real buzz surrounding the brand now, and it's not of the pornographically scatological variety, either. If Jezebel is the new Gawker, appealing to the creative underclass, then maybe Gawker is the new Defamer, appealing to a slightly more sophisticated breed of celebrity-gossip consumer.

Back in December 2002, Nick wrote this:

Gawker is an online magazine for Manhattan launching in January 2003. It's target audience is the city's media and financial elite. Think of it as the New York Observer, crossed with Jim Romenesko's MediaNews. The publication will be supported by advertising, primarily from real estate brokers and luxury goods retailers. It adopts the weblog format, and relies on links to external content.

Of course, it didn't quite work out that way. But one of the reasons that Nick has become so successful is that he isn't wedded to ideas which don't work out. There are those of us who would very much like to be able to read a Gawker as it was originally envisaged. But one can hardly blame Nick for following the money.

Email down

2008-01-18T09:46:05-05:00

I'm not receiving any email at my felixsalmon.com address, for some reason. If you need to reach me, my temporary email address is felix.salmon at gmail. Email back up. Crisis over.

Nick Denton's task at Gawker

2008-01-12T09:12:45-05:00

I'm quoted* in Allen Salkin's NYT article on Gawker tomorrow. I thought that he'd place more emphasis on the importance of Gawker's commenters for generating pageviews, since we talked quite a lot about that, but I guess Sunday Styles doesn't like getting into numbers.

So here's the big idea which didn't make it into the article. Gawker's unique visitors have been stagnant for two years: they essentially reached their present level at the end of 2005. Gawker's pageviews continued to grow through 2006, as (a) Nick Denton increased the number of blog entries with a "jump" which required navigating away from the home page; and (b) the comments system became very sophisticated and capable of drawing people back to the same post dozens of times in succession.

But then, at the end of 2006, Denton found himself unable to grow the pageviews-to-unique-visitors ratio any further, and both pageviews and uniques were basically unchanged through 2007.

At the moment, Gawker is going through the biggest change in its history, and no one knows how it's going to turn out. But I'm quite sure that Denton, having maximized the pageviews-to-uniques ratio, has realized that the only way of increasing pageviews at this point is to increase the number of unique visitors that the site receives.

But here's the problem: the very posts which will help bring in new unique visitors (Denton wants Gawker to be "a national media gossip and pop culture site, which is based in new york, but can attract a national audience") also risk being the posts which alienate Gawker's core commenter audience.

In other words, Denton might succeed in goosing Gawker's uniques – but only at the cost of a declining pageviews-to-uniques ratio. Which is why I think it's going to be hard for him to boost pageviews.

Meanwhile, the "creative underclass" which used to owned by Gawker has increasingly migrated to Jezebel – after all, there's no doubt that the creative underclass skews very female. In November and December, Jezebel got more pageviews than Gawker – which is really impressive for a site which only launched in May.

So Nick Denton, qua Gawker Media overlord, is sitting pretty: he's getting more pageviews and creative-class attention than ever, thanks to Jezebel. But as Gawker editor, Denton has a tougher job.

*For the record: I did use the word "skeevy" in my conversation with Salkin; I was not misquoted. But I used it in the context of the title of a blog entry I wrote in 2006 – which is something no NYT reader is going to understand. But hey, insofar as Salkin's Sunday Styles piece is saying that Gawker's getting skeevy, it's only two years behind the felixsalmon.com curve!

Gawker's decline

2008-01-07T00:02:39-05:00

Nick Denton has for some time been goosing Gawker's pageviews by encouraging long comments threads on Gawker posts. There's nothing wrong with that, and Gawker's comments system is excellent. But it turns out that even Gawker's loyal commenters will exit if pushed hard enough.

When Nick Douglas posted a truly execrable blog entry on Friday afternoon – a time when just about any blog entry is likely to get a longer-than-usual comments thread, since the site updates much less often on weekends – the commenters finally revolted. They knew that every time they reloaded that page in order to continue their conversation, Nick Douglas's pageviews would go up. And so they moved their conversation over, to the blog entry which precipitated the pay-for-traffic model. Since that blog entry was authored by Alex Balk, Nick Douglas won't get any bonus from their back-and-forth.

But it's still Gawker, which means that Nick Denton gets advertising revenue from all those comments even if Nick Douglas doesn't get a bonus. And so one of the more frequent Gawker commenters simply decreed that the comment thread should move over to his blogspot blog – which, impressively, it did, with 782 comments so far this weekend.

Let's recap. First, substantially all of Gawker's editors deserted it: Alex Balk led the exodus, followed quickly (and simultaneously) by Choire Sicha, Emily Gould, and Josh Stein. (Update: It was actually Doree Shafrir who led the exodus: she left two weeks before Balk gave notice.) And that wasn't the last of the departures, either. In their wake, Gawker's most loyal readers are now leaving the site as well.

Nick Denton has personally taken over running Gawker, which means he has no one but himself to blame if the site's numbers start continue heading south. It's not really fair to judge him on his first week on the job, but then again, this is Teh Blogs, where fairness has never been a strong suit.

In any case, I feel another wager coming on. Gawker's traffic has been declining for the past couple of months: it got 11.5 million pageviews in October, 9 million in November, and 8 million in December. I'll bet Nick a lunch at Lever House that he's not going to beat Gawker's October pageview figure at any time in the next three months.

Are we on?

Update: I haven't heard from Nick Denton, but I have heard from Lockhart Steele. He reckons that Gawker's going exactly as he anticipated: a total shitshow in January, followed by a serious uptick in quality in February, and then "every traffic trick in the book" leading to an all-time Gawker record in March. So the bet is on, albeit with Lock rather than Nick.

Update 2: Denton speaks! "You'll ask when we'll match October's peak. Answer: I don't know. But I would certainly like to get there in the first half of this year."

O-ba-ma!

2008-01-06T16:43:26-05:00

I watched the New Hampshire debates last night, the first debates I've watched this election season. (I would have watched more, I'm sure, but for the fact that I don't have a television.) And after watching first the Republicans and then the Democrats, I'm increasingly convinced that Barack Obama not only should be the next president of the United States, but that he will be.

For me, the low point of the evening came when Hillary Clinton, asked to compare herself with Obama, instead desperately compared Obama to George W Bush:

In 2000, we unfortunately ended up with a president who people said they wanted to have a beer with, who said he wanted to be a uniter not a divider — who said that he had his intuition and, you know, really come into the White House and transform the country. And you know, at least I think there are the majority of Americans who think that was not the right choice.

Ugh. And that wasn't her first attack on Obama, either; Obama, by contrast, while defending himself, managed to stop short of attacking Clinton, leaving that to John Edwards.

Clinton did well in the first part of the debate, on foreign policy: she was lucid and forceful and presidential. But she lost all of the goodwill she earned early on by becoming shrill and needlessly oppositional in the middle of the debate. While Barack Obama is going out of his way to appeal to independents and Republicans, I still see Clinton having very little appeal to non-Democrats.

And it's not ridiculous to think that many Republicans would indeed vote for Obama. Ron Paul's supporters, for one, are going to find it very difficult indeed to vote for a pro-war candidate. And Mike Huckabee really is the Republican Obama, in many ways: a nice, approachable guy with an anti-establishment message. I can definitely see his supporters voting for Obama over the likes of Romney and Giuliani.

If Obama gets the Democratic nomination, then, I think he has much broader appeal than the polarizing Hillary Clinton: I just can't see many if any Republicans voting for her. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side of things, the likes of Larry Lessig are really excited about Obama, and very unexcited at the prospect of Another Clinton Presdiency.

Obama also has the ability to get a lot more votes than Clinton, just because he energizes people and makes them want to go out and vote for him. Democrats will, if given the choice in the presidential election, vote for Clinton over any Republican. But I'm not at all convinced that they'll do so in the numbers that would vote for Obama: Obama is a man who can reach hearts as well as minds, and that's very, very important.

Will Obama be a better president than Clinton would have been? That, no one can know. But Job Number One right now is to get a Democrat in the White House. And the best way to do that is to give the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama.

Merry Christmas Bleg

2007-12-25T14:01:04-05:00

Merry Christmas to you. As for me, all I want for Christmas is...

...a very simple WYSIWYG HTML editor. Why can't I find one?

I spend most of my days writing blog entries. Mostly it's just text inside tags, although I also use a lot of <blockquote>, plus of course , , and the occasional <strike> or <ul>. A few blog entries will incorporate images. And then every couple of weeks I want to put together a table.

If I really wanted to, I could hand-code all this stuff in a text editor – well, all of it except the tables, anyway, where a WYSIWYG editor is invaluable. But I'm not the kind of geek who loves to look at code: I'm much happier looking at something which more or less resembles what it is I'm trying to write. Plus hand-coding hyperlinks is always a bore, and I'm perfectly happy to leave it to my HTML editor to remember what all my special characters are in HTML.

Then, once it's written, I want to be able to copy and paste the raw HTML into a web interface in order to publish it. How hard can that be?

I have tried out a few HTML editors. Some, like MarsEdit, are ridiculously bare-bones: they're basically text editors with blog-publishing features. Others are designed for people putting together complicated websites, and are great at creating stylesheets and beautiful pages and whatnot, but are really bad at generating ultrasimple HTML. Others, like KompoZer and GoodPage, also fall short of what I want.

SeaMonkey is not even close: for one thing, it seems impossible to use it to generate simple or <blockquote> tags. Any HTML editor which automatically gives instead of nice ... should be shot, IMHO, and anything which gives instead of <blockquote> is simply perverse.

I use ecto quite a lot, and I like it, especially its way of auto-populating the hyperlink field if you have a URL in your clipboard. But it suffers from a couple of problems: you can't create a table in it, and it has an incredibly annoying habit of slapping an http:// onto the beginning of anything you put in a hyperlink, even if you don't want one there.

Now there is a program which does everything I want: it's called Dreamweaver, it costs $400, and it also does a gazillion things I don't want. But is there some other app I can use without going down the ridiculously-overspecced Dreamweaver road?

Update: Many thanks to my commenters, and to Brad DeLong for bringing my bleg to a wider audience. Brad recommends Markdown, which isn't really wysiwyg and which doesn't do tables. David and gek both recommend Windows applications, but I don't have Windows. And Ivan points me to Contribute, which I didn't know about, and which would probably be perfect if it wasn't for the fact that it steadfastly refuses to let you see your own HTML – in order to do that, you have to open your page in another application entirely, like KompoZer. So maybe the Contribute-KompoZer combo is what I need, but it's a bit unwieldy, and I'm not sure that the Contribute bit of it is really worth $149.

Pinot Contest

2007-11-18T18:30:22-05:00

Last night, a dozen or so friends and I discovered one of the best-value wines in America.

I'll tell you what it is in a minute. But first, it's worth explaining how we came to that conclusion: Michelle and I held a Pinot Contest at our apartment. The structure was pretty much the same as the wine contest we held last year: each contestant brought two identical bottles of wine. One was tasted blind, while the other was kept for the prize pool. This year, every bottle had to be either a Pinot Noir or a Burgundy.

Everybody scored every wine out of 20, and we added up the results, which you can download as an Excel spreadsheet with a wealth of information in it.

With 14 people tasting 12 wines, the maximum score was 280. In the end, the scores ranged from 115 to 212. And it's worth emphasizing that the overall quality was extremely high: much higher, actually, than it was last year, when people could bring any red wine they liked. If you make a bit of an effort with a Pinot, it seems, you're likely to be well rewarded.

But the other thing which really sprang out from the tasting was that there was absolutely no correlation whatsoever between price and quality. Here's the chart:

If you plug these numbers into a correlation calculator, you actually get a negative correlation of -0.2: the higher the price, the worse the wine, on average.

As you can see from the chart, the real standout wine was Wine F, which got the best score of the evening (212 points) while costing just $13 per bottle. It's not a typical Pinot: it was full-bodied, and fruity, and utterly delicious. "A Burgundy probably," wrote Jay on his scoring/tasting sheet, adding "expensive" and scoring the wine 20/20. "Simon?" wrote Seth, knowing that Simon had brought a very expensive Burgundy, and also giving the wine the full 20 points. "Yummy," wrote Gaby, giving it her top score of 17. When she poured too much of the wine into her glass by mistake, she asked for a second glass: it was simply too good to pour away, but she did need to carry on tasting.

Wine F turned out, to everybody's surprise, to be the 2005 Heron Pinot Noir, made in California from French grapes by Laely Heron. It cost just $13 a bottle, or $11 if you buy by the case – which I assure you I am going to do. Meanwhile, Simon's expensive Burgundy (Wine D) managed to get a total score of just 146: only three wines scored lower.

This contest was emphatically not a triumph of cheap New World wine over expensive Burgundies. In the bang-for-the-buck ratings, the top wine in terms of points per dollar was mine (Wine I), a 2004 Burgundy which got 180 points and cost just $9.99 at Warehouse Wines on Broadway. Simon gave it 20/20, while giving his own $52 Burgundy just 12/20. The Heron was in second place in the bang-for-the-buck ranking (it was made with French grapes, of course), while in third place was Seth's 2005 Burgundy (Wine K) which also cost $13, and which received a score of 154 points.

At the other end of the scale, Wine J was a $50 El Molino Pinot from Napa, which scored a fair-to-middling 167 points, making it the second-worst value after Simon's Burgundy. As you might expect, in general the cheaper wines did better in the bang-for-the-buck stakes, but it's worth noting that Michelle's Pinot (Wine G) – which came from Germany, of all places, scored 193 points and cost $26 – ranked higher than Gaby's $18 Pinot Nero from Italy (Wine A), which garnered a mere 115 points despite the fact that I, personally, loved it.

In general, the Burgundies were clustered right in there with the non-French Pinots. While Burgundy has a reputation for being very expensive and rather unreliable, in fact its wines seem to be consistent with Pinots globally. And the second-place wine was a Burgundy: Wine B was a 2006 Alain & Julien Guillot Clos des Vignes du Maynes, brought by Rory but chosen by Jay. Since the winning wine was brought by Savannah, Jay's wife, that meant that Jay and his party ended going home with all the bounty – although they were generous enough to let me keep the two winning bottles.

Thanks to everybody for coming and making the contest so fun and successful. And remember: sometimes the cheapest wines are also among the best.

Update: Josh Reich does some seriously high-end statistical analysis on the scores, and concludes that "price is not a significant predictor of wine score".

Zipcar Insurance: Solved!

2007-10-31T20:46:40-05:00

Details here. In a nutshell, Zipcar bought Flexcar, and adopted Flexcar's insurance policies. Hooray!

iPhone question

2007-10-29T16:05:06-05:00

Sometimes I need to restart my iPhone. No big deal, it's a computer, computers need to be restarted once in a while. But for some reason, when that happens, all my photos get wiped. Not the songs on the iPod, mind, just the photos in my photo library. Why on earth should this happen?