All posts by Kevin

Culture

What goes around, comes around

When I was studying Psychology at university 20 years ago, one of my professors told me that after much consideration he had concluded that most natural phenomena and all human behaviours are cyclical. “Everything”, he said, “waxes and wanes.”

He cited the example of a driver given a ticket for speeding. Having been penalised, the driver reduces his speed in order not to get punished again. After a while, however, the driver forgets about his previous violation, and the effect of the punishment wears off. Consequently his speed begins to creep up to its previous, normal level, and before long he gets caught speeding once again. The second penalty produces the same response as the original punishment - the driver once again reduces his speed, but again only temporarily. In this way the cycle repeats itself continuously.

Map of England showing Alnwick, Northumberland.An article in the most recent weekend edition of the Financial Times made me wonder if this pattern is applicable to property. In What your money can buy in Britain’s best place to live journalist Christian Dymond “finds out what is selling - and who is buying - in the Northumberland market town of Alnwick”.

The article caught my eye because last November I celebrated Thanksgiving with friends who currently live in the village of Longhoughton, Northumberland, which is less than four miles from Alnwick. At the time I was surprised to learn that Alnwick had recently been chosen as the best place to live in Britain, but the FT article confirms the story and attributes it to a recent survey in Country Life magazine (let’s simply ignore the implicit assumption that the best place to live has to be in the “country”).

History, relatively low house prices, location, local identity, a low crime rate, schooling, health care and the local farmers market all contributed to Alnwick’s pole position. Alnwick Castle, used as a location for the two Harry Potter films, has been the seat of the Dukes of Northumberland since 1309, while its £7m garden project has brought major benefits to the town.

A final, clinching attribute, said Country Life, was that Northumberland is projected to have a smaller increase in new households over the next 20 years than any other county. Until 2006, at least, the figure given by Northumberland County Council is about 700 a year. And that is in a county of 2,000 square miles, with a population of just over 300,000, the majority of whom live in the south-east corner.

So, Alnwick has been chosen as the best place to live in Britain because few people are going to live there. Alnwick is popular because it will remain unpopular - or at least relatively unpopulated, for whatever reason - in the future.

I like that circular irony very much, and if it’s true, we can predict with some confidence that Alnwick will cease being the best place to live once it has become sufficiently popular to attract lots of people. What goes around, comes around. Everything waxes and wanes.

Media

Peep into Pepys

Just yesterday I read the sentence “Who remembers Samuel Pepys anymore?” in The New York Times (see ‘Samuel Pepys’: The Man Behind the Diaries
; thanks to ::: wood s lot :::).

Now all of a sudden Samuel Pepys is everywhere!

You’ve got to admire Phil Gyford. How many people make New Year resolutions to last a decade?

Culture

Baz’s Boheme

La Bohème On Broadway
Recently while in New York, my wife and I saw the production of La Bohème directed by Baz Luhrmann and currently playing on Broadway. This production has attracted a lot of media attention, not only because it’s directed by Luhrmann, currently one of Hollywood’s favourite directors, but also because it’s sung in the original Italian, features young, classically trained singers, and is playing on Broadway, an unusual location for “traditional” opera in New York.

My wife and I both enjoyed the performance, which was clearly the source for much of the style and content of Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge (this production of La Bohème is largely 13 years old having been first produced by Australian Opera in 1989). However, we wondered about the use of microphones during the performance. We couldn’t decide if all the singers’ voices were amplified or not. In the end we concluded they were all wearing microphones, but were perhaps being amplified to different degrees at different times. There was no doubt that the production’s sound quality was given a great deal of care and attention. Amplified voices are normally very easy to detect in traditional theatres, but in this case it really required some careful listening to work out what was going on.

A few days after we attended a matinée performance, Anthony Tommasini, writing in The New York Times, criticised the production’s use of amplification (see Look What They’re Doing to Opera):

…from a musical perspective, many veteran opera buffs will be dismayed, as I was, by the compromises the production has made, most grievously in its use of body microphones to amplify the singers and two digital sampling keyboards to fill in the instrumental textures that the meager (for Puccini) 26-piece orchestra leaves blank. Newcomers to opera who think they are experiencing the real thing are not.

The amplification of “La Bohème” at the Broadway Theater is far more subtle than the blasting sound systems so common at musicals these days. Still, the actual voices are flattened into an amplified wall of sound, and the spatial element of operatic singing, with voices coming from different locations on the stage, is completely undermined. It’s sometimes difficult, especially in the crowd scenes, to tell who is singing without checking to see whose lips are moving. And the voices are thrust at you, even those of the milk maids who, as they pass the city gates in Act III, sing a wistful little tune that is supposed to be subdued and gentle.

I’d agree that amplification certainly does change the sound, but I am not convinced that it is necessarily worse. Some singers struggle to project their voice in large, modern venues, so the “subdued and gentle” sounds can be very difficult to hear. Furthermore, who’s to say what the “real thing” is in opera? Like all art forms, opera has changed over time, and the characteristics and conditions typical of Monteverdi are not the same as those of Bizet or Strauss. How do we know that Mozart wouldn’t have embraced the microphone had he been given the chance? Opera fans should not be distracted by concerns about the illusory “real thing”; instead, they should jump at this chance to see the latest thing. It’s unlikely to be around forever.

Humour

Grilled Simon

Alvin Davis of Bennie's Red BarnDinner on Christmas Eve at Bennie’s Red Barn on St Simons Island in Georgia featured the waiter, Alvin Davis, who among other things has his own parking space right next to the front door.

Alvin is uniquely blessed with a striking physique which this image portrays fairly flatteringly believe it or not. He’s worked at the restaurant for the last 48 years, which basically means since it opened in 1954, and like many people in this part of the world he speaks with a strong Georgian accent. In the course of reciting an extensive menu, long since devoted to memory, Alvin called out each item in a resonant basso profundo that everyone could hear.

Unfortunately his accent can throw tourists off, and tonight I could have sworn he bellowed Grilled Simon rather like a newsboy calls out Read all about it! During the course of our dinner, however, my hosts (who are locals) explained that he was simply announcing the availability of grilled salmon! But for a couple of seconds I was really wondering what could be next? Fried Frederick? Boiled Bob? The mind boggled, and ultimately as you can see, I blogged.

Culture, Humour

American tidings

Some reflections on being in America:

  • At breakfast in the Brooklyn Diner on 57th Street Bing Crosby is singing about "tidings of comfort and joy", while the headline in the New York Times states "Bush has widened authority of C.I.A. to kill terrorists". Some tidings, some joy.
  • The Borders bookstore on Broadway states books are sorted "Alphabetical by Aurthor".
Culture

An American December

December is going to be a busy month. I haven’t posted anything to this weblog as yet, and the rest of the month doesn’t look good, given that my wife and I will soon be in the US for two weeks.

I’m looking forward to our trip, despite the travelling and, what I assume will be, increased scrutiny from US customs and immigration officials. It will be a chance to take stock of the public mood at an unusual time of year in an unique period of US history.

Luckily for me, BBC 4 has just begun the re-broadcast of Alistair Cooke’s 1972 television series on the history of America (see Alistair Cooke: America 30 Years On), so I can brush up on all the US history I never learned. Episode one was televised tonight and the series continues for the next twelve days. Unfortunately we’ll have left before it finishes, so I’ll have to record some of the episodes that we miss.

Media

An incredulous National Post

The headline Couple turn down $2.9M for painting at London auction – ‘It didn’t reach the price … they were prepared to let it go for’ in Canada’s National Post caught my eye this morning. Here’s the lead paragraph:

A Canadian couple yesterday turned down a chance to make $2.9-million at an auction in London, England, after a Victorian masterpiece they acquired by chance with the purchase of a dilapidated farmhouse failed to generate enough interest.

This article betrays a surprising degree of naivety and ignorance on the part of the newspaper, while making the Canadian couple, who acquired the painting "by chance", sound like shrewd market traders. Obviously the owners know that it makes sense to sell as high as possible, no matter what the cost. I wonder if the author and editor would find the owners’ decision so hard to believe if the painting had simply been inherited? It’s a very strange reaction for a publication that comprises Canada’s Financial Post and was formerly owned by Sotheby’s board member, Conrad Black.

Management, Technology

It’s all about the food

On the day when Tesco refuted claims that it was supplying spiders along with its grapes, comes news of a new on-line grocery business serving New York City (well, the Upper East Side at any rate).

According to the BBC (BBC News | UK | Tesco denies using deadly spiders):

Tesco has admitted that a drive to use less pesticides in its food could mean more spiders turning up in bags of fruit. But the supermarket denied that food producers are using black widow spiders, after three customers found them in bags of grapes. In separate incidents, the three women discovered the deadly spider among American-grown grapes bought from Tesco stores. Two of the spiders were alive. The company says producers do use natural predators to protect fruit, as an alternative to chemicals. But it strongly denies that the distinctive spider, whose venom is 15 times more potent than a rattlesnake, is deliberately used on suppliers’ crops in the US.

If that sounds like a scary disincentive, consider FreshDirect, a new on-line grocery delivery business based in Queens and currently serving the East Side of Manhattan.

According to Fortune magazine (The Online Grocer Version 2.0):

Their cargo–meat, fish, cheese, fresh-baked breads, produce, and other foods–sells at prices about 25% below what most New York grocers charge.

FreshDirect does deliver specialty-store-quality fresh food and prepared food at strikingly low prices.

It’s a measure of the times that Fedele and Ackerman [the company’s founders] refuse to call FreshDirect a dot-com. And while they admit that the company could not exist without the web (orders are placed on freshdirect.com for delivery the following day), they insist that efficiency, not technology, is the point. “Our idea was to build the ultimate food company that could scale,” says Ackerman. “The only reason we chose the Internet was that it helped us reach people at a lower transaction cost. It allows us to do for food what Michael Dell did for computers.” One of the great unfulfilled promises of the Internet has been that it would enable manufacturers to sell directly to consumers. But few companies other than Dell have actually done it.

And of course Webvan failed spectacularly. That first great Internet grocery scheme spent more than $1 billion on huge distribution facilities in seven cities before closing shop in July 2001.

Why should these guys do any better? It’s a question they are asked constantly. Fedele and Ackerman insist Webvan was merely a distribution company that missed the point. Says Fedele: “This is a company based on food people, not dot-com people.” FreshDirect’s motto: “It’s all about the food.”

Hmmm…this is interesting. Up to now I had rather assumed that the attraction of on-line home delivery services was the convenience of the service rather than the quality of the food, which I have always assumed would be identical to that purchased in person at any given store. Certainly, here in the UK the food delivered by Tesco, Sainsbury’s, et al., is identical to that found in their stores. In most cases, the food actually comes from your local shop, so it is literally the same food that you would buy if you went shopping in person.

The interesting aspect of FreshDirect’s strategy is that it is offering better food at lower prices, as well as the convenience of on-line ordering and home delivery, which quite frankly sounds too good to be true. I find myself wondering what exactly "specialty-store-quality" really means and how it compares to the quality offered by the average grocery store in the UK. I also wonder if this approach would work outside of Manhattan, or more specifically in places where food is less expensive. Presumably shoppers in Queens already pay less for their food than residents of Manhattan. Will FreshDirect be as appealing to them?

Of course, Ocado (about which I have written previously, and on which the Economist reported just last week, see Off Their Trolleys) claims to be offering similar benefits here by supplying only food from Waitrose, which is generally considered to be the UK’s highest quality grocer; but Ocado is definitely not cheaper than food sold in Waitrose’s stores, in fact the delivery charge makes them more expensive still.

So perhaps FreshDirect’s approach will be limited to places with unusually high food costs. Of course it’s early days, and it remains to be seen if they can even make it work in Manhattan.