Articles by nick

Sigh. May Samantha be waiting to give you the horn.

Normally, when someone is obviously, painfully wrong on a topic, it offers a warning to take that person’s other opinions with a bucketful of salt. But, occasionally, it can serve as a bullshit offset, a sink into which you can pitch all your wrongness to keep it from contaminating the rest of your thinking.

Thanks, John Gruber, for showing us how it’s done.

As a kind of prelude to what I’m going to discuss in terms of identity and the stuff of identity, I’ll point to this fine New York Times Magazine piece by Gershom Gorenberg on proving one’s Jewishness in order to marry in Israel. The pivoting grafs:

Trust — or lack of it — is the crux. Zvi Zohar of Bar-Ilan University explained to me that historically, if someone said he was a Jew, “if he lived among us, was a partner in our society and said he was one of us, we assumed he was right.” Trust was the default position. One reason was that Jews were a persecuted people; no one would claim to belong unless she really did. The leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Israel in the years before and after the state was established, Avraham Yeshayahu Karlitz (known as the Hazon Ish, the name of his magnum opus on religious law), held the classical position. If someone arrived from another country claiming to be Jewish, he should be allowed to marry another Jew, “even if nothing is known of his family,” Karlitz wrote.

Several trends have combined to change that. In an era of intermarriage, denominational disputes and secularization, Jews have ceased agreeing on who belongs to the family, or on what the word “Jew” means.

Among close communities, and especially among those with long histories of discrimination and persecution, trust is the engine of belonging. Trust is bestowed first by the say-so of trusted others, and when that’s unavailable, the fall-back is to documentation of heritage, lineage, an extrinsic point of connection. To marry in Israel, it’s not enough to be a Jew: someone with authority has to declare you Jewish.

That be itself seems problematic: being oscillates, depending upon the point from which identity is constituted. It works the other way, too, with those who apply for a visa to the land of their ancestors to be told by the consulate that they have always been citizens. (At college, I had a friend who was born and raised in Britain, but held an American passport through a parent: when visiting the US, it amused him that regardless of his accent and birthplace, the border agents would always say ‘welcome home’.)

On one level, it’s situational, a matter of utility. Not being able to prove one’s Jewishness to the satisfaction of Israel’s rabbinical judges is only an impediment to those who wish to marry or take advantage of the Law of Return; it won’t prevent you from holding a Passover seder. (Though having your identity questioned in such circumstances might have its own consequences.) Similarly, that grandfathered claim to a passport or to sporting eligibility only becomes part of who you are should the need or opportunity arise.

For the most part, we still function on trust and tokens, but the changing character of our interactions outpaces both the formal and informal structures in which they are used.

Long (and long-delayed) discussion on ‘the stuff of identity’ coming.

But to get back in the mood for writing, it’s a happy coincidence that the latest spat over Nick Denton’s editorial methods appears at the same time as another brief profile of Felix Dennis, something the media desks seem to write up on a semi-regular basis.

Dennis changed American magazine publishing in the late 90s. It was obvious from Maxim’s first few British issues that it was doomed to fourth place in a market saturated by lad mags; it was also clear that Americans were buying import copies of Loaded with nothing of their own to compare. Conventional wisdom was that the format wouldn’t work: you had your serious gentlemen’s monthlies, the sporty-outdoors mags, the aging hipster mags, the pinkish Details in post-Truman decline. All neatly stratified and commodified. Instead, Maxim’s US launch in 1997, driven by Dennis and a no-bullshit British staff, immediately made GQ and Esquire look fusty, and put Details out of its misery.

Of all the lad mags, Maxim was the one you’d least have expected to succeed in the US, based upon content and market positioning. But that misses one key element: Felix Dennis. Ten years on, it outsells all its US competitors combined, most of which now imitate some or all of its house style. (Details is back on the shelves, though in name only.) As for Dennis himself, he’s no longer at the helm, predicting the slow decline of print mags; that didn’t stop him from getting around $250m for offloading his American titles last year. (Translation: even more time to spend writing doggerel in Mustique. As a poet, he’s a great magazine publisher.)

That’s your model for understanding Nick Denton and his American blog menagerie, his treatment of writers, his PPV earnings model, his zest for publicity. (The comparison is inexact: if Denton writes poetry, he keeps it to himself; his prose sings like a goose.)

All done with complete unnerving honesty. Which you have to admire — from a safe distance.

Update: Denton’s made the comparison himself. (Note to self: 2003 and Kinja seems like a long time ago.) But the report presents it simply in terms of Maxim’s content, not the wider aspects of how both Dennis and Denton seem to view publishing.

I’m informed that the MacBook Air’s solid-state drive option fits the SAUK model precisely, with no rounding: 110% of (117.5% of (US$3098 in UKP ~= £1569)) = £2028. And Apple doesn’t always round upwards, it seems: the US$99 external SuperDrive comes out at £65.33 before adjustment, and is apparently being sold at £65 rather than £69. What charity.

Reaching back to my mostly forgotten maths classes, you can simplify the calculation to a standard Apple British Coefficient of 1.2925, for those who don’t get to buy ex-VAT (or, more likely these days, on a weekend in NYC).

The Apple Store numbers are somewhat deceiving, because US prices exclude state sales tax, which is paid by most buyers, while UK prices include VAT. But the standard rule of thumb for working out how much extra Apple screws out of British customers is as follows:

Convert the US price, add VAT, stick 10% on top for shits and giggles, then round up to the nearest £49 or £99.*

The MacBook Air fits this, as did the iPhone (figures rounded to nearest UKP):

Rounded up to nearest £99, you get £1199. Voilà.

* Unless it’s under £100, where you round to the nearest £5 or £9. Leopard’s $129 became (£65 + VAT) + 10% = £84, rounded up to £85.

Etsy dataset. (two more: via kottke.)

The curious case of the canoeist from (Seaton) Carew reminded me of the stern notice that greeted me [mumble] years ago: ‘This passport remains the property of Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom and may be withdrawn at any time’. My passport is still a fascination: the complexity of its printing, the attempts to divine national characteristics from the stamps and visas they leave in its pages, the multilingual rubric that embraces ever more of Europe, and ever more pages, renewal upon renewal; but most of all, the way in which it pivots identity between self and state.

It’s not just the passport that’s government property, but the particular form of identity it instantiates. John Darwin isn’t charged with faking his death, but with making a false statement to obtain a passport. Put another way, he tried to give up something that wasn’t his, and that something was himself.

To those exposed to complicated books written by French sorts, the idea that identity is imposed in facets from without is hardly novel. But in this context, ‘identity theft’ seems a strange term. The elements that make it possible, tangible or intangible, may be in your possession, but they’re rarely your property in the Lockean sense, to be used and disposed of at will. Instead, they carry all the anxieties of items on extended loan: which is, in essence, what they are.

And as Ben Goldacre notes, the creep of biometrics subjects bits of your own body to this transformation. It’s a different kind of identity theft: one that takes your property and returns it on loan, reconstituted as identity data.

Here lies the paradox: the repeated instructions (and helpfully-offered subscription services) to protect your identity carry the implication that it’s yours to protect. Except that it isn’t. It might be argued that you have a duty of care, the same that would stop you from leaving your mate’s car unlocked with the keys in the ignition when you borrow it for a late-night beer run. Except that it’s not. Instead, we’re asked to protect something that’s not our own, warned not to give away something that has already been taken.

Standing on a remote hilltop some months ago, attentive to the sounds we too often dismiss as background noise — the enveloping wind brushing leaves, the rumble of a distant car — made me think about just how the world sounded before recorded music permeated, then saturated the air. The privilege of birdsong; the preciousness (and impermanence) of human performance.

Which is one reason why I’m observing No Music Day.

Returning to the topic of careers (the length of, and when to stop) inspired by a recent Saturday morning drive with the CBC as aural accompaniment (praise Sirius), it occurred to me that there are potentially two stages to the career of the typical quirky, niche-audience indie-type performer.

The ‘make records that get decent ratings, sell a few copies, and tour 500-capacity venues while sleeping in a van’ stage is one that can continue until you decide it’s too much bloody hassle.

But at some point, a fan who got into your music at student age may well end up in the advertising business, with the power to say, ‘hey, this track fits perfectly with…’ and you can insert the product here, but if you’re in the indiepop business, you’re going to be hoping beyond hope that it’s something with at least marginal credibility, and not tampons or fibre supplements. Dear gods, let it be Apple.

Consider it the musical equivalent of a mercy shag, albeit one that has the potential to get you on Saturday Night Live.

Thing is, you can’t predict when the commercial interest is going to kick in, and if you try too hard to court it, you become Moby — or worse, Liz Phair. But you don’t want to act too coy, because the last thing you want is the loyal fanboi who’s a junior producer at Creative Cokesnorters, Inc. thinking that your niche appeal is too precious to be exposed to the masses as part of a thirty-second sales pitch.

It raises a quandary: given that it generally takes a handful of years for your college-student fans to graduate and climb the ad-industry career ladder, is it worth flogging out another tour in a van before calling it a day? After all, there’s basically a point (again, hard to measure) where your commercial revival won’t happen till you’re dead.

Thus, the LFFI (not to be confused with this slightly more established financial venue) to quantify the likelihood of your favourite niche popster getting a career-enhancing, ad-fuelled moment in the limelight, and not alienating the fanbase as a result.

(By which I mean those figures who inevitably get passed over in the sweep of history classes because they punctuate two much more interesting periods. AKA the John Major Cup.)

My long-time favourites: the Directors of France. No, not Godard, Truffaut et al. Think guillotine. Think Terror. Think Robespierre dragged off to be the climactic blood sacrifice to the cause. What comes next? ‘Um’, then ‘er’, then ‘uh’, then ‘oh, Napoleon?’ That was them in charge. So, let’s hear it for the people who ruled France for the four years that everyone skips between the blood & barricades and the short bloke.

Sometimes I think of these one-graf periods as pockets of the landscape kept deliberately uncultivated to encourage natural habitats, the fauna in this case being graduate students, who are naturally drawn to such obscure fields because the richest ones are long taken.

The Nobel for literature rewards a ‘body of work’, which oftentimes comes across as a well-meaning back-pat to an author who has plugged on for fifty years, all the while knowing with ever-greater assuredness that the prodigious early novel, the poem from the year that memory expunged, or the play written in a mist of sweet smoke and alcohol will be the thing that’s remembered, taught in schools, perhaps make the grandchildren spoilt with royalties.

But this is more a continuation of the ‘post-fame’ musings. There are a few standard narratives of the literary career: the one-hit wonder; the prodigious beginning, slump and re-emergence, sometimes repeated in cycles; the late flowering; and of course, the ‘early, middle, late’, in which an writer’s final works, often tendentious and exasperating, are given particular attention (I blame you, Beethoven).

Those narratives are usually established well after the fact, though not always, and the search to impose a career path on living authors makes me glad that my studies are largely confined to those long gone, spared the indignity of the Sunday-sheet backscratchers trying to pad their reviews with a couple of grafs on ‘development’.

I suppose the question in all literary careers, for writers as well as for those who read and study them (often two separate disciplines, alas) is ‘how much is enough?’ It was the late Tony Nuttall — damn, how out of it was I to miss his obituaries? — who first drew my attention to a now-favourite passage from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, in which the young George III contrived an encounter with the great man in the Queen’s library:

His Majesty enquired if he was then writing any thing. He answered, he was not, for he had pretty well told the world what he knew, and must now read to acquire more knowledge. The King, as it should seem with a view to urge him to rely on his own stores as an original writer, and to continue his labours, then said ‘I do not think you borrow much from any body.’ Johnson said, he thought he had already done his part as a writer. ‘I should have thought so too, (said the King,) if you had not written so well.’—Johnson observed to me, upon this, that ‘No man could have paid a handsomer compliment; and it was fit for a King to pay. It was decisive.’

Knowing the tensions inherent in Johnson’s attitude towards writing (here, and see what the refresh button brings) drives home the poignancy of this exchange. Necessity unlocked capability: the jobbing early works to survive, the subscription works to justify the monies paid, and Rasselas, most famously, to pay for his mother’s funeral and settle her debts. It casts a sober eye at his contemporaries’ talk of original genius; his work, like so many great writers, is spring-wound-tightly stuff.

Sometimes it’s easy enough to know, as writer and reader, when all has been said. (I do wonder, though, how many great extended careers have been forestalled by an over-generous early advance. Note to publishers: multi-book deals, and deliver the big money late.) Not always, though: and great writing summons an appropriate appetite for more, even if the writer may not always be capable, or know his true capabilities. Then comes the dance of expectations, as we prepare for a career to take a certain next step only for it to throw us off balance, rendering our mental narratives fiction.

Like I said, it’s easier to wait until they’re dead.

Picking up on what Danny said[1], some thoughts on fame. Stewart Lee’s answer gets it right, I think: fame enough to be financially comfortable and comfortable with one’s audience. The further question is whether that’s only achievable — or only recognisible in a way that brings the associated comfort — on the downslope, after you’ve tasted celebrity — and celebrity, in turn, has spit you out.

Fame has frontiers, and some you only notice when you return. There’s only a step between a comfortable, loyal fanbase and, well, this.

But I mostly wonder what happens ‘after’ fame. Not many of the bands and artists whose careers I followed (and, I suppose, helped sustain) in those formative college years are still around. The first thought is of a quiet retirement living off the royalties, perhaps a production job or similar to keep busy. But then you realise: that only happens to a few former popstrels after they put away the bleach and bad outfits. For those earnest indie types I came to love, if there was any money left at the end, it was barely enough to pay the rent, let alone relax by the pool. And that’s okay, in its own way, as long as you park the tour bus and pack away your gear knowing that the rest of your life is waiting.

Stephen Fry (now, more or less, the best blogger ever) talks expansively about what fame is. What fame was, though, is another thing entirely.

1. Ten years ago? I remember that night, not least for Charlie Brooker’s interlude. Who knows where the time goes? Anyway, keep writing, you bastard.

On my first weekend in the US, I took a town car from Manhattan to Newark airport. As we hit the Turnpike’s miles of steel and brick and smoke, (think: opening minute of The Sopranos) I joked to the driver, a middle-aged Russian man, that it felt like home. It took me the rest of the drive to explain.

The look and feel and talk of hard industrial graft is deeper in my system than anything the chimneys spewed out. The bridges and old works may be steampunk, but take the trunk road to the coast at night, and the lights lay bare something that forces itself beyond modernity. And, dear god, did we have sunsets.

Which is just to point to this interview with Ridley Scott, in the knowledge that, like him, I’ve seen the first light from the flaring.

What’s so delicious about Stephen Fry’s survey of smartphones, as deep as it is wide, isn’t the unabashed geekery, though that has generated an antiphonal ’squee!’ from all corners of my digital neignbourhood. No, it’s the unconscious connoisseurship of the thing: the sense that you (well, that he) can write about geek toys in a mode that’s neither Mossberg nor Gizmodo nor anything in-between is as exhilarating as the breeze that waves farewell to a stultifying summer.

Speaking of imaginary worlds created by cliques…

Close one eye, and you lose your depth perception, the ability to see behind things. So it is with Monocle, the Tyler Brulé pseudo-vanity project that I continue to buy in spite of itself and myself. Take the carefully arranged global pantry in ‘Shelf Life’:

While we spend a great deal of time sniffing and squeezing the fresh produce at Portobello Road market, we also spend a great deal of money on pantry staples at Globus in Zurich.

Do you bollocks.

Perhaps Tyler Brulé really does nip to Zurich for a half-kilo of coffee beans; if so, it says far more about his airmiles account than his nose for coffee. No matter what, it sums up the particular strain of globollocks in Monocle that both entices and infuriates, like a coke-fiend friend.

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There’s a point in certain forms of appreciation where value detaches from the object under scrutiny and attaches to the surrounding milieu, the ability to imbibe augmented by the means to own, the opportunity to acquire, the capacity to describe. In the world of fine wine, I’d suggest that point starts at around fifty quid a bottle; any more is essentially a exponentially-graduated entry fee into an ever more rarefied social circle.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker piece on wine counterfeiting is a case in point, a deliciously understated narrative with hints of Nabakov and Borges. It sketches out the aspirations of one millionaire collector, the intoxicating mixture of glamour and mystery concocted by Hardy Rodenstock, and the collaborative wish-fulfillment of wine masters and Merlot-tinged prose artists for whom the world of untainted vines and Jeffersonian vintages is so enticingly close that one might already have dreamed its taste. Is it surprising that such a milieu would be so ripe for deluding?

Sidling uneasily into the space reserved for unfortunate exemplars, we have the ‘Compare People’ Facebook app, as noted by Sugarrae and reported on by The Reg:

Maksimovic says he has suspended new sign ups of the premium service until he figures out a way to clarify exactly what information is given out.

He’ll have a job on, since Facebook’s third-party apps are seemingly built with components that can’t help but obfuscate. On top of that, he may well be forced to refund the $9.49 coughed up by people who hoped his ‘premium’ service was the equivalent of those old back-of-the-paper X-Ray Specs.

That a naive and clumsy solo developer exposed the opacity of Facebook’s privacy framework doubtless chafes the marketroids working on more insidious ways to procure personal data that can be converted, if you know the right people, to cash money. They’re a new kind of pickpocket, ignoring your wallet to go straight for the loose change, in the knowledge that nabbing pennies from thousands adds up to the same thing as lifting tenners from individuals, but with much less risk of being found out.

I know how much my organs might fetch on the black market. I even have a vague sense of what turning my forehead into a casino billboard would earn me. I have no idea how much my intangibles are worth, and it’s time to start asking.

Two kinds of knowledge are needed to unlock fragment B3 of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. One comes from learning Smart’s life and career, the sad circumstances of the poem’s composition, its implied antiphonal structure and a scintillating range of biblical, classical and contemporary allusions.

The other? From time spent in the company of a cat.

I understand the reasoning behind MSNBC’s rebroadcasting the live NBC coverage of six years ago. The crass rationale is that CNN did it (albeit via streaming) last year, and they had to wait until this year to copycat. Less crass is that after an orgy of replays, the footage was locked away for years, and the chaotic and war-fogged reporting was superseded by a more coherent narrative to suit what followed. Enough time has passed, perhaps, to recall the confusion.

That they repeated that repeat after dark makes less sense. The broken verisimilitude, for some odd reason, makes it feel crass. Or perhaps it exposes the innate crassness of the re-enactment.

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In this RadioLab segment, artist David McDermott talks about his attempt to live an Edwardian existence in 21st-century Dublin. His decision when young to step back, soak up the memories of much older people — ‘I felt like they knew something I didn’t know’ — and let the bleeding edge vanish over the horizon is likely to prick the curiosity of anyone neck-deep in technological gore:

In terms of time, I do believe that we can travel in time. I’m not talking to you about actual time-travel. I’m trying to talk in practical terms that anyone can participate in, I call it, ‘time experimentation’.

All moments in time are ever-present and coexisting, he asserts: all that’s needed is a conscious choice to step into one. Escapist and contrived it may be, but in some respects our choice of place and space and engagements (and even dress) is a temporal choice, albeit one in finer gradations, like the adjustments of a clock before the railways.

All of which is backstory to this AskMefi question.

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A more scatterdash followup to the previous, based on a few related discussions and responses.
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It feels almost arrogant to start a blog by essentially saying everything you know is wrong. Oh well. The long-form title ought to be:

‘Seek permission, not forgiveness: why the web’s fundamental axioms break down when data gets personal’

but that’s a title built for an academic paper, not a blog post.

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I think this thing is on. Expect me to change theme and fiddle with the styles and add some sidebar content and blah etc blah, but given my usual capacity to do such things, not necessarily in the next 24 hours.