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Pride 2008

Nobody rained on his parade.

Good-bye Florent

Dont' forget to head over to Florent to experience the end of the only reason to go the meat packing district.  (Video: Gazelle, TIllly & Olan say Au Revoir)

Cities Respond to Climate Change

At the Cities Respond to Climate Change: The Challenge of Energy Efficiency panel discussion last Thursday evening, the audience responded heartily to comments about energy efficiency and cap and trade programs.  The keynote speaker, John Podesta was in favor of cap and trade (successfully filibustered by the Senate earlier this month) and increased energy efficiency.  But those ideas were countered by one of the panel members, Max Schultz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Energy Policy.  Schultz, a former senior policy advisor for the Department of Energy under the Bush administration, actually agrees with NASA Climate Scientist James Hansen that carbon emissions should be taxed. But he also claimed that energy efficiency does not necessarily translate into reduced energy use, but instead leads to increases in consumption--because lowering the price of driving encourages people to drive more. 

Nearly every other comment during the question and answer period attempted a rebuttal of that statement, the most coherent one stating that it was not efficiency but a growth in productivity that lead to increased use of energy. All the other panel members said efficiency is the cornerstone of their energy policies. 

The event, hosted by ConEdison and The New School, was a look at how state and local governments are trying to combat climate change.   Podesta, CEO of the Center for American Progress, said the federal government has wasted seven and a half years and has even put up roadblocks to domestic and international efforts to take on the challenge.

Podesta said state and local governments can no longer wait for the federal government to take action.  The next two decades will bring severe economic and national security consequences.  He cited the new (and still unclassified) National Intelligence Assessment that examined security risks posed by climate change, including crop losses, wild fires, climate induced human migrations, increased food and water shortages and the spread of disease.   The National Assessment says the gravest risks are for sub-Saharan Africa, but will effect the entire globe.  “It will devastate our economy,” Podesta said.  “Climate change is no longer simply an environmental problem but cuts to the core of our well being.”

Podesta also called for greater efficiency and a thorough upgrade and overhaul to the national grid.  With upgrades, renewable energies like wind and solar can be distributed through the grid system. 

The panel, moderated by The New York Times reporter Andrew C. Revkin, were representatives of some the best and brightest people working in energy conservation and public policy today.  Susan Anderson, director of the Office of Sustainable Development in Portland, Oregon, has instituted sustainable practices in that city for more than a decade. Ashok Gupta is the air and energy program director at the National Resources Defense Council.  Kenny Esser is New Jersey Governor John Corzine’s energy policy director and is revising the state’s Energy Master Plan (which he claimed that no one had looked at since 1995). James T. Gallaher is the chairman of New York City’s Energy Policy Task Force and advises and implements energy recommendation in PlaNYC.  Max Schultz’s work at the Manhattan Institute concerns the practical application of free-market forces in energy matters, particularly in the intersection of energy, the economy and the environment, which as Revkin said, “Boy, that intersection is a very spirited place these days.”

Schultz said energy efficiency was a wonderful thing, but was puzzled by how it could keep consumption down.  “Lowering the price of driving encourages people to drive more.  If you really want to make a dent in oil consumption,” he said, “mandate that cars and trucks get five miles per gallon.  People will drive a whole lot less.” There were a few audible gasps in the audience.  But Revkin said the idea has merit, citing Jevons Paradox, the idea that if resources are more efficient, hence cheaper, people will consume more.  No one else on the panel wanted to agree with Schultz.  While it is tough to argue that increased CAFÉ standards leads to less driving, they maintain that reduced energy consumption in buildings is a net reduction in consumption. But not all policy analysts agree with that statement, their thesis being that money saved in one area leads to consumption in others. Conrad Schmidt of the Canadian Work Less Party, has an excellent film, Workers of the World Relax, that nicely illustrates this point.

Schultz also maintained that nuclear, not renewable, energy was the answer to rising energy costs and consumption and called for new plant construction.  Gupta said that more investors are interested in solar and wind energy because there is much less risk.

Esser said that New Jersey is experiencing growth in peak demand of energy consumption at a rate of 1½ percent a year.  This requires increased infrastructure and power lines.  Yet at the same time, their goal is to reduce energy consumption 20 percent by 2020.  “Our primary goal is energy efficiency.  It’s the most cost effective way to meet the energy challenge.” 

Anderson has been working with Portland’s City Council since 1993 to increase energy efficiency and they have cut greenhouse gas emission by 14 percent, despite a huge population growth.  “We’re back to 1990 levels,” she said.  “But the rest of the U.S. is up by 16 percent.” She attributed this to local government and businesses understanding the connection between transportation and land use and energy efficiency combined with renewable resources like wind and solar.  She also said that five percent of workers in Portland commute by bike, up from two percent four years ago.  “Now it’s cool to come to work with a bike outfit on and have helmet hair,” she said. 

Gallagher, who has worked for the Mayor’s office on PlaNYC (pronounced Plan YC) since December, said that the city has very aggressive goals—a 30 percent reduction in energy consumption by 2017.  The state’s goal is 15 percent by 2015.  This year alone, they have increased efficiency in police stations, firehouses and even installed LED lighting on the Brooklyn Bridge.   

Gupta said the federal government has not been receptive to energy policy development, but state and local governments and business leaders are very active.  “We are at least 10 if not 20 years behind,” he said.  “We really need to scale up because we’ve lot a lot of time.”—Sherry Mazzocchi

The Future of Fine Art

“Today you won’t have a name like Picasso anymore.”  That’s the view of Sundaram Tagore, who was speaking at his gallery in Chelsea last Tuesday evening about The Future of Fine Art.  “The age where a few artists command world wide recognition is over,” he said.  “Each country is developing it own artists, movements and styles.”

The art market is not only taking off in China, India and Dubai, but also Latin America and Russia. Globalization has transformed technology and world economies and now is in the process of creating what Tagore calls a “seismic shift in the art world.” Fifteen years ago, New York’s elite art institutions, critics and curators dictated their terms to the rest of the world.  “Today that authority and centralization no longer exists,” he said.

Now cities like New Delhi, Beijing, Taipei and Seoul have huge art markets.  Tagore cited the new Kolkata Museum of Modern Art (KMoMA) as just one aspect of India’s thriving art market.  Cities all over the world are now creating their own biennales or triennales.  “Look at what Miami Basel has done.  Last year over 300,000 people from around the world and 352 private jets flew in,” he said. “It’s crazy.”  These markets are also a function of booming economies.  While contemporary African artists are producing great work, their market is stalled because the citizens are not able to support it. 

Foreign art markets still have a wild west quality. While artists in New York, London or Berlin are generally represented by only one gallery, that is not always true in other countries.  An artist in China or Russia might be represented by as many as 20 galleries.  “There’s a lot of flipping going on,” Tagore said. 

When one audience member commented that art was just artifice, Tagore reminded us that art has been with us from the very beginning—from 40,000 year old cave paintings, to Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance paintings to the modern art of today.  “Fundamentally, art will exist as long as humanity exists because we need it,” he said.  “We can’t live without it.”—Sherry Mazzocchi

Does the Presence of Starbucks Increase or Decrease Property Values?

Seventh Avenue and 23rd Street is now home to a brand new great big Starbucks, not to be confused with the Starbucks on Eighth and 23rd or the one on Sixth and 23rd or...you get the idea.

Another Heedless Act of Cultural Vandalism

With the Chelsea Hotel in the hands of money-grubbing outsiders, and our favorite restaurant, Florent in the meatpacking district, set to close on Sunday, who could imagine it could get any worse. And yet the developers continue to shock and appall us with their brazen disregard for the cultural heritage of New York City.
     One of the latest cultural icons on the chopping block is 133-139 MacDougal Street, home since 1918 to the famou Provincetown Playhouse, which premiered works by Eugene O'Neill (said by some to have lived at the Chelsea) Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edward Albee, Sam Shepherd (Another Chelsea reisdent), and David Mamet.  The building was also home to the Liberal Club, and the Washington Square Bookshop. (We also recently ran into an acquaintance, Karl White, who we met a couple years before on the Algonquin Hotel walking tour, and he told us about a friend's great aunt, Stella Hanau, who once lived at the Chelsea and was involved in the Playhouse in its earliest years.) (Photo courtesy of the GVSHP. Yellow area is the area NYU proposes to retain.)
     The building is owned by NYU, one of the most rapacious developers in the City.  The latest victim of their wrecking ball lies in the heart of the proposed South Village Historic District -- which is probably why NYU is moving to demolish the building now, despite its obviously cynical support for the proposed designation.  After a huge public outcry at this heedless act of cultural vandalism, NYU added insult to injury by agreeing to preserve the facade and four walls of the theatre, a miniscule part of the entire building.  Do we really need another hidious dorm, or whatever it is they're planning on throwing up, in the heart of the most beautiful and culturally significant neighborhood in NYC?
     Lets hope these Barbarians can still be stopped.  Hey maybe Marlene Krauss can sell them the Chelsea to use as a dorm!
     To learn what you can do to help, contact the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. -- Ed Hamilton

Today There Would be No Bob Marley

At CNN’s Internet Week event on entertainment, Charlie Walk said he would’ve never gone into the music business if he knew what it would be like today, Brett Bouttier said the long tail is crap and Mark Golin said he doesn’t want users to be able to comment on People stories.  But other than that, they were all positive about their “brands” and their ability to monetize them on new and emerging platforms.  The CNN event, moderated by Scott Donaton of Entertainment Weekly last Thursday, was packed, being second only to an event that featured Bono a couple of years back.

The only panelist who was completely positive about her brand was Gillian Sheldon, Supervising Producer of TMZ.  She likes to watch what happens to a story if you edit a headline or change photo and see how many more people will click on it.

Charlie Walk, president of Epic Records, said he was mostly bullish on the future of the music industry, but monetization is their biggest issue.  He said he music industry sat back on their CDs and never saw it coming.  He foresees a time in the near future when the music industry will make money again—everyone will be paying $9.99 a month to access every song on their devices. 

While Walk referred to his Blackberry as his ‘third arm,’ Golin said, “I use my Blackberry to kill a bug.” Editor of People.com, Golin said the new media has ruined everything.  He used to have the luxury of planning content over a long period but now time is condensed.  Editors have to work right through the late life cycle of a story.  They can’t spend time mapping out content, but have to constantly manage it on the site. “I used to have a life,” he said, “but now I don’t.”  He related how users navigate his site, saying, “They read the first paragraph. Then they go to the celebrity database because they want to see the last three stories that they missed before finishing this story.  Then they go off and look at a video.  And then their mind will wander and they will look at all of the dresses she’s worn in the last nine months.  And then they will come back and read the rest of the story.”

Bouttier, senior vice-president of Digital Warner Brothers television, said they were working with the advertisers to try to figure out how to make money off of the different platforms.  “As the new media becomes more pervasive, we can monetize that through advertising. Downloading these $4.99 aps is just a very small way of looking at the business of media.  We need to create critical mass.”

The music business is quickly approaching the critical mass model.  Walk talked about hearing a killer song that he knew would not only be a hit, but also had to “be in the fourth quarter campaign for somebody.  We reached out to ad agencies and went right to Old Navy.  They want to take this artist and—not just for a license--but for a massive multi-million dollar campaign that incorporates the artist in a whole wider scope.”

When an audience member asked him about how gatekeepers field world music, and specifically mentioned Rachid Taha’s spectacular cover, Rock el Casbah, Walk said “Just go on line and get a sense of what the mass audience wants and it’s not that.  But I’m with you.”  Walk said the music industry is about hits, not being hip. He said people still want to be told what is cool.  (For those of you are hip, Taha’s Algerian rai band is performing at SummerStage in Central Park on July 5th at 3pm.)  He talked about Billy Ocean, who’s Caribbean Queen hit of the late ‘80’s was played so much that he became a huge star.  “The real issue is that if it doesn’t sound instantly familiar to someone, you’re fucked.  When you have someone that’s new or a little to the left or a little to the right and doesn’t hit the mainstream per se, that’s the way things get lost.  That’s one of the drawback I see today.”  An audience member commented that today there would be no Bob Marley and that even Bono said there would be no U2 under today’s music industry.

Bouttier maintained that was precisely the strength of mainstream media.  “All of the big films right now are sequels—franchises; Indiana Jones, Iron Man, Batman.  All this stuff are things people know and stories they understand and are getting retold in fascinating ways. I personally think companies that we all represent here are in the business of top-notch programming and the long tail is crap.  It’s for the guy who never got his book on the front table at Barnes & Noble.”

Afterward, audience members I talked to praised the panel’s honesty, but felt that they weren’t even preaching to the choir, but just to themselves.  “It’s not that people don’t spend money on music,” Alejandro Crawford, CEO of Nolej Studios, said.  “People like spending money. They spend it on gadgets like iPods.” He compared the monolithic media companies to the steel industry or to Kodak.  “Why did they lose their market?  They just loved selling film.”—Sherry Mazzocchi

Citizen Journalism

Andrew Rasieg, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, said Barack Obama should limit campaign donations to $250 and challenge John McCain to do the same. Speaking at an Internet Week event on News and Politics at NYU, Rasieg said this would transform the election from one funded by special interests and the federal government to one funded by citizens.   “Ninety percent of his donations are below 90 dollars.  Obama has the potential to raise half a billion dollars on small donations.  It’s just a flip of the switch.  We are reaching a tipping point in politics where this could actually happen.”

Rasieg, along with Baratunde Thurston of Jack and Jill Politics and Jay Rosen of NYU’s Department of Journalism and PressThink.org discussed the evolution of politics and Web 2.0 on panel moderated by author Alison Fine and hosted by OneWebDay.

Thurston said Jack and Jill Politics has been highly productive and visible during the campaign, especially since big media is unable to discuss race in a meaningful or nuanced way.  He characterized the discussion about Reverend Wright as being held by “mostly white millionaires who go to the same schools in the same cities and belong to the same clubs and deciding this is ‘fringe behavior’—that this is un-American and unpatriotic.  They don’t know what they are talking about and they don’t have the life experience and don’t have the incentive to find out so they just go with what they don’t know.”

Social media has an explosion of stories and conversations that are taking the place of the pundits.  Rosen’s project, Off the Bus, hosted on The Huffington Post, is citizen journalism that provides an alternative to top-down media dissemination of news.  OfftheBus made big news earlier in the week when its star reporter, Mayhill Fowler, captured Bill Clinton’s reaction to the unflattering Vanity Fair article.  Clinton spoke to her when she was on the rope line.  “That’s part of our operating style,” said Rosen.  “We are extending the reporting space using different access points.”  While Off the Bus breaks news, Rosen said it is not yet powerful enough to change the fundamental way media covers the election—as a horse race.  “The horse race narrative exists because it solves the problem in mainstream media, not because it produces good journalism.”  The problem is one of objectivity—covering the candidates without having any political identity of your own, he said.  “The horse race angle of politics is the best way that experts have solved the problem.  It goes on not because it produces good coverage, but because it produces press innocence.”

Rasieg said that Obama’s video on race was viewed over seven million times on YouTube alone.  He told the audience, “For a video to be counted as a view you have to watch the whole thing.  The average YouTube video is watched for a minute and a half.  If seven million people are watching a 37 minute video and sending to each other, we are going from the era of the sound bite to the sound blast.”

Everyone agreed that technology enables a more robust democracy.   Video capability and the various platforms of distribution are creating a fundamental challenge to the power structures that control mainstream media and political parties.  In addition, Thurston talked about the Clinton attacks Obama wiki he created. Incidents of racial bias in the campaign were piling up and people were talking about it.  “Big media was saying it’s not going on.  They said: You’re wrong.  You’re not seeing it.  You’re making it up.  It’s black people being super sensitive,” he said.  “As anybody who has been oppressed knows the only thing that is worse than the oppression is being told it doesn’t exist and denying the validity of your experience when you know first hand what is going on and how it makes you feel.”

So Thurston designed a wiki to log the complaints.  He set up ground rules because he didn’t want people to “randomly spew crap.”  He installed a template so users could document all of the instances—the context, the situation, the level of offensiveness.  Also, he wanted to determine, “What was the wackness level?  Because some things are wack, but they aren’t racial.  But they are still wrong.  I wanted it to grab both.” Users could add links to online articles and embed videos.  At last count there were about 50 incidents that users documented.  He found that some users even cleaned up the comments and edited them for the blog and changed the ratings.   Wired blogged about it and others took notice. “It got bigger than I thought it would be,” said.

Rosen said that people who run closed systems don’t know how open systems work and everything they think about them is wrong. “They need people who have grown up on open platforms because people who dominate the closed systems will always fuck it up.”  With citizen journalism and new tools, the internet overcomes the atomization of politics. 

Rasieg said that we are rapidly coming to the point where mashups will give more and more transparency.  “We are approaching the age where you can publish earmarks on Google maps so you can see all of the highways that lead to nowhere,” he said.  Then citizens can take that data and match it to county records to see who owns the property and then others will take that information and match it with personal disclosure documents of who donates funds to Senators and Congressmen. “And we will see that they are actually earmarking money for themselves and their friends,” he said.  These are the kinds of tools, he said, “we will be able to use for a 100 percent engagement of politics instead of an abstraction that has only half of us voting at all.”—Sherry Mazzocchi

Fireside Chats with Obama

Under an Obama administration, there will be fireside chats on YouTube.  That’s what Steve Grove, head of News and Politics for YouTube said the Senator told him when he visited their offices.  Grove, speaking on a panel held at CNN on Wednesday for Internet Week, said one of the main differences between Senators Clinton and Obama is that the voters summoned Clinton to the web and not the other way around. 

Michael Scherer of Time and Nadira Hira from Fortune also spoke at the panel moderated by David Bohrman, the Washington Bureau Chief of CNN.  Bohrman and Grove collaborated on the YouTube presidential candidate debates.  Bohrman said that back in the 1990’s he had a conversation with a high-level executive from Time who said that the internet would be useful only for people putting in change of address forms for subscriptions.  He said, “News executives are not smart about thinking ahead.”

When it comes to the web, neither are most of the candidates.  Scherer laid out the differences between the Clinton and Obama web presence as one of control versus access.  Clinton had a website where you could submit a question and possibly receive a filtered answer.  She would do videos, but everything was presented in a top-down format, with no question about who was in firm control.  Obama has a website where you can build your own web page and it functions as social networking site.  “From the beginning, his message was: This is about you—I need your help,” Scherer said.  By January, the Clinton campaign realized he had an email list of one million people and could raise millions of dollars—all with small donations.  Clinton saw she should have been doing this all along.

According to Scherer, Obama didn’t use the web to pander to established liberal bloggers to raise funds.  Instead, he reached out to voters who rarely use it.  And they signed up on line to do phone trees.  Hira said young voters’ on line relationship with Obama is very real.  He’s their friend on Facebook and people go to the polls for Facebook friends.  Young people don’t listen to pundits on CNN or MSNBC.  They talk to each other, real time, on the web.

When it comes to the differences between Republicans and Democrats, Scherer said it’s like comparing Little League to the New York Yankees.  “Mitt Romney threw a lot of things at the web, but he’s a top-down kind of candidate, too,” he said.  Romney had a big resistance to the YouTube debate because he didn’t want to answer questions from a “snowman.”

Grove said that now there are YouTube debates in Spain and Greece and Japanese parties have their own YouTube channels.  Even Gordon Brown has Ask The PM.  But while candidates are increasingly present on line, Scherer says they will be far less transparent once in the White House.  “Obama is in for a wake-up call,” he said.  “Powerful interests still control Washington.  He’s still dependent on courting those interests.  It’s going to be much harder.”

But how long can transparency, even for candidates, last?  One audience member said advertisers will just learn how to manage the illusion of transparency—and that it will take the form of content that will persuade the user.  Hira said “There is a difference between transparency and authenticity.  Audiences will tolerate a lot of spin—if that’s what they already believe.”—Sherry Mazzocchi

Come Out and Play Festival

Why is play so important? Because, says Catherine Herdlick, play makes hard things fun. Deciphering complicated social issues and nuances is easy when it’s all part of a game. Herdlick is the co-founder of The Come Out and Play Festival taking place this weekend.

The 24 entirely free games in this festival are designed with New York’s public spaces in mind.  Most of the events will be concentrated around Tompkins Square Park and Bluestockings bookstore, the sponsor for the event.  “This is an homage to the city of New York,” Herdlick said.  “It’s a party for the city.”   Since New York is such a stressful and exhausting place to live, she says we are especially good at play.  Most New Yorkers would probably relish playing Pigeon Piñata Pummel, Super Happy Fun City Bingo or Manhattan Megaputt. Herdlick designed Bike Friendly City for the festival.  Played on Sunday at 3 pm, the object of the game is to ‘pimp and build bike lanes for points and cred.’ Herdlick used to ride with Critical Mass, but said it stopped being fun when the events took on a political protest subtext.  This game is designed to recapture the spirit and adventure of biking in the city. 

Herdlick and the other four gamers behind the festival all used to (or still) work at Gamelab.  Before long, they realized each of them independently create and play outdoor games on their own.  Having teamed up, they are now experienced players.  This is their second play festival in New York.  They also held one in Amsterdam and are associated with London’s Hide and Seek Festival. 

Most of the game designers have tech backgrounds but games like Thread, Metrophile or Search Brigade don’t use any devices.  Fort Amsterdam uses GPS and the Comfort of Strangers uses an ipaq PDA and headphones.  Other games use text messaging or Bluetooth. Hendlick says technology like text-messaging is so incorporated into daily life that it doesn’t feel intrusive.  In addition, for certain adults, it can actually serve to lower the barrier to play.  “You can play as a grown-up with a gadget,” she said.

Herdlick, who did her graduate thesis on Play and Public Space at Parsons School of Design, said that generally three different kinds of people are attracted to game design; people with a technology background, performers or philosophers.  “These are the three elements that drive any game,” she said.  Jane McGonigal, designer of The Lost Sport of Olympia, possibly best expresses all three qualities.  McGonigal has a PhD from Berkeley in Performance Studies and MIT Technology Review named her as one of the top 35 innovators changing the world.  Scheduled for play in Central Park on Saturday at 4:30 pm, it is billed as a long lost Olympic game.  Herdlick said it is an “authentic fictional mythology--a new class of folk game.”  Playable by people of all ages, she describes it as “simple and elegant as tag.”—Sherry Mazzocchi

The Come Out and Play Festival starts this Friday and runs through Sunday.