Posts from — February 2011

"There’s so much money invested in hype, it can overwhelm the mundane reality that is often sports," says Blake Rhodes in a Wall Street Journal piece by Jeff Pearlman (2/15/11). Jeff says he came to the same conclusion after watching ESPN anchor Josh Elliott muse over "the Tennessee Titans’ search for a new head coach." Jeff found the speculation about each of the potential candidates "riveting," before remembering that he couldn’t care less about the Titans or their coach.

Blake, a former media-relations guy for the San Francisco Giants, says ESPN knows exactly what it is doing. "The networks have these shows right around trade deadlines, and they make it sound like a presidential election," he says. Or, as Jeff observes: "The truth is, the offseasons are 8,000 times as engrossing as seasons. Transaction listings trump box scores. Status updates kill service points. Ken Griffey Jr.’s return to Seattle? Riveting! Ken Griffey Jr., overweight and 40, regularly popping up to shortstop in his return to Seattle. Not so great."

Jeff says he remembers arguing endlessly about "how Michael Spinks was a far superior heavyweight to Mike Tyson" only to watch "as Mr. Tyson demolished Mr. Spinks in (a shockingly anticlimactic) 91 seconds." He says the MLB’s All Star Game "is so insufferably dull that baseball actually had to make it count for something (the winning league receives home-field advantage for the World Series)." And the NBA Slam Dunk Contest "is boring. Really boring." But not the pre-contest chatter, because, "We crave the next tweet, the next update. We want to know … need to know … have to know. Everything. Anything.

"Though fighting has provoked a lot of great writing, not much of it has actually been about fighting," writes Tim Marchman in the Wall Street Journal (2/19/11). Tim makes the observation in a review of At the Fights, a collection of essays about boxers and boxing, edited by George Kimball and John Schulian. In every case, the stories are more about the fighters — who they are or what they represent, than what they actually did in the ring. This pattern stretches all the way back to the 1910 "Fight of the Century" between heavyweights Jack Johnson and James Jeffries (video).

That fight wasn’t about boxing at all — Jeffries had been retired for six years at the time. It was about Jeffries’s wish to "reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race." That’s how Jack London captured the bout: "His turgid descriptions of what actually happened in the ring bear minimal resemblance to what can be see in footage of the fight; what counted for London was apocalyptic racial passion." Joe Louis’s triumph over Max Schmeling was similarly charged with racial politics, as was Floyd Patterson vs. Sonny Liston, which James Baldwin reduced "to a simple contest between a striving integrationist and a nightmarish thug."

Other stories, such as "W.C. Heinz’s portrait of Bummy Davis, "is much more about who Davis was and where he came from than what he did in the ring." And then there’s Muhammed Ali, whom Mark Kram described as "a splendidly plumed bird who wrote on the wind a singular kind of poetry of the body." Float like a butterfly … sting like a bee. The decline of such prose coincided with the rise of "broadcast technology, which not only made the description of fights redundant but brought viewers into the ring, revealing boxers as less mythic figures than working athletes." It is also "perhaps no coincidence that many of the better writers in this collection ended up, one way or the other, in Hollywood."

The same guy who designed H-43 Huskie helicopters also invented Ovation guitars, reports Stephen Miller in the New York Times (2/2/11). His name was Charlie Kaman, founder of Kaman Corp., who died on January 31st. His company introduced "the twin-rotor concept" and later "went on to become a major supplier of aircraft parts … with total annual sales of more than $1 billion currently." Kaman’s other breakthroughs included building "helicopters with turbines instead of piston engines, an innovation that spread to nearly all other helicopter manufacturers."

The company "introduced remote-controlled helicopters," and the K-Max copter, which could "lift three tons" and was known as the "aerial truck." The company "also produced some of the first helicopter blades made from composite materials." Charlie’s work with composites led to the development of Ovation guitars, which famously feature a rounded, composite back. A guitarist himself, Charlie had "once played with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra," and his guitars became "one of the most popular instruments made in the US."

Apparently, guitars and helicopters were a good combo for Kaman "because musical instruments tended to sell when helicopter sales were weak." Kaman’s "customers included Carly Simon, Jimmy Page (a double-necked model) and Glen Campbell, who played his Ovation guitar on his TV show and lent his name to one model (video)." But Charlie’s greatest dream was to "put a helicopter in every garage." As he told Design News in a 1996 interview: "I believed the skies were going to be black with helicopters." Charlie Kaman was 91.

Navigating the sustainability maze of product packages. By Brad Scott. Acting “sustainably” means maintaining a balance and not depleting your available resources. In business, this often translates into balancing costs against a product’s impact on the community in which you operate. Some companies refer to this as “the triple bottom line,” which takes into account profit, people, and planet.

Another term we often hear is “cradle-to-cradle” or “closed-loop” product management, meaning that products have more than a single life or can be reborn in a new form. Nike Grind is a dazzling illustration of this concept: To date, some 25 million pairs of used athletic shoes have been collected, ground up, and turned into surfaces for playing fields …
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Three gods of guitar — John D’Angelico, Jimmy D’Aquisto and John Monteleone — are the focus of “Guitar Heroes” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reports Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in the Wall Street Journal (2/17/11). The three men, luthiers all, each made his own special contribution to the evolution of the guitar; D’Angelico and D’Aquisto in the 1920s, and Monteleone from the 1970s on. “They were all really innovative in different ways,” says Jayson Kerr Dobney, curator of the exhibit , which runs through July 4th.

“D’Angelico made the guitar jump from mandolin to guitar,” says Jayson. “D’Aquisto had that mind-blowing aesthetic vision. And Monteleone was all about completely reinventing the instrument.” The Italian surnames are no coincidence, as all three are “part of an unbroken line of luthiers that goes back all the way to Stradivari,” that eventually made their way to New York City during the mandolin craze of the 1800s, and then turned to guitars once the mandolin craze subsided.

John Monteleone followed a similar path, even giving his six-stringers “a stylized scroll — quoting that of a mandolin.” (image) He also tinkered with the sound holes, moving them to the side of the guitar so the “sound travels to the player instead of the audience.” His Deco Vox was inspired by the Chrysler Building, and his Four Seasons features “delicate watercolor paintings” inside the guitars, visible only through the side sound holes. John thinks Stradivari would have approved since he sold his guitars “as art, too.”

When Pablo Picasso explored Cubism, his object-of-choice was the guitar, reports Holland Cotter in the New York Times (2/10/11). His focus, along with his friend, Georges Braque, was on still life, and their source material was whatever they found in their word. Their reality was "cheap bars and cafes where artists congregated to get warm while their studios got cold." So, that meant "wine glasses, coffee cups and musical instruments — violins and guitars." For Picasso, it was most notably guitars.

His work during his two-year Cubist period, from 1912-1914, began with an elaborate collage, in oil, called “Bottle, Guitar and Pipe.” But he soon began adding “cut newspaper, sheet music and faux-wood paper,” as he did in “Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass.” By the time he got to “Guitar,” “there’s no paint at all,” just “stuff glued to other funky stuff,” made entirely of paperboard and string. When a Parisian arts journal ran a picture of it, “furious letters came in; subscriptions were cancelled.” It upset people who saw it as “a slap in the face of beauty, idealism and decorum, proof of European culture on the slide.”

But Picasso’s paperboard guitar, "along with a later sheet-metal version of it … Was one of the most influential sculptures of the 20th century." Picasso photographed it, but never agreed to exhibit it during his lifetime. He left it to the Museum of Modern Art, which now has it on display. The work "embodies many of the questions that Cubism raised: What’s real? And why is one version of real better than another? What’s "high," what’s "low"?" (I mean, it must be high or low.) "What makes an object art, and an idea not?" Post-Cubism, Picasso "went back to the figure." The MoMA exhibit runs through June 6, 2011 (link).

Grant Achatz’s next big thing is Next, an eatery that "will morph into an entirely different restaurant" every three months, reports Julia Moskin in the New York Times (2/16/11). Not only that, but each “new” restaurant “will draw from a different place and time. So, rather than the earthbound categories of Japanese, Italian or Peruvian, the food will evoke cloudier concepts: Kyoto in the springtime; Palermo in 1949; Hong Kong in far-off 2037.” The idea is not to reinvent the food so much as to reinvent the dining experience itself.

As new ideas go, this one isn’t, exactly. Park Avenue has been transforming its menu and ambiance quarterly, based on the seasons, for almost four years. Its executive chef, Craig Koketsu, says it’s not so difficult if you’re organized for it. "A really good kitchen is a machine," he says. "If all the parts move smoothly, you can do anything." But Grant, who also runs Alinea — where dinner for two can run $800 — plans some other twists.

These include selling tickets online rather than accepting reservations. Once purchased, the tickets are not refundable, but they can "be sold, scalped or bartered." That idea came from Grant’s business partner, Nick Kokonas. "We are very interested to see what that secondary market might bring," he says. But the main focus is, of course, the restaurant itself, which will initially feature "classical French," or more precisely, Paris 1906, when it opens on April 1st. Next up, in June, "Thai food will be its focus."

"We don’t give you the menu when you walk in because we don’t want you to have any idea of what’s coming," says Nick Curtin in a Wall Street Journal piece by Sumathi Reddy (2/16/11). Nick is chef of a new restaurant called Compose, in TriBeCa, where "menus are printed mid-meal and often distributed at the end of the meal." Says Nick: "We don’t want you to have any preconceived notions … We want everything to be fresh and new as it lands next to you." A few other restaurants are on a similar track.

"I think there’s an overload of information on most menus," says Eduard Frauneder, chef and owner of Edi & The Wolf, in the East Village. He says not having a fixed menu provides greater focus, adding, "I just hate having the same menu all the time. I think compact menus are the future." Ravi DeRossi of Carteles agrees that there’s something to be said for just letting the chef decide what to serve. "There’s too much choice out there, sometimes it’s nice to pay … and not have to really worry about what you’re going to eat."

Meanwhile, Eleven Madison Park offers a menu, but it lists only ingredients. So, your choice of desserts would be something involving lemon, chocolate or coconut, for instance. Nick Curtin says it’s not about dictating what diners eat, but rather to provide diners with greater flexibility. He’s careful to ask guests about any allergies, food restrictions or whether there’s anything they just don’t like. Sunjit Chawla says eating at Compose is "exciting and awesome … It’s like having a baby," he says. "There aren’t too many surprises in the world, so let’s have surprises."

Marketers can — and must — help stores captivate shoppers in new ways. By Nick Jones. The earliest example of the voluntary exchange of goods can be found as far back as 10,000 BC, when, archeological evidence suggests, people traded flint and obsidian.

By 3,000 BC, Ancient Egyptians were trading with their neighbors for, among other goods, precious metals for jewelry. Fast-forward to the third century AD and you’ll find the Persian bazaar, which contained arguably the world’s very first stores.

Regardless of when you choose to date the beginning of “shopping,” people have been at it a very long time. Today, though, the shopping landscape looks at first glance much different than at any point in history. The reason, of course, is the ever-increasing shift of physical store sales moving online … read >>

A new breed of "passive" homes "that are so well insulated they don’t need a furnace or a boiler" are catching on in America, reports Wendy Koch in USA Today (2/18/11). The style is already popular in Europe, especially Germany, where the approach is known as Passivhaus, and the emphasis is on thick walls and roofs, extra insulation, triple-pane windows and well-sealed joints. The technique is especially well suited for Germany’s relatively temperate climate, but is proving attractive in America, despite its more diverse climes.

One drawback is the expense — a passivhaus can "cost 6% to 12% more than other new homes." Architect David Peabody, who built a 4,200 square-foot passivhaus in the Washington, DC area, says construction ran about an extra 8%, but his annual energy costs is less than $750, compared to "an average of $2,639 on energy costs for homes that size." The biggest incremental cost is the triple-pane windows, but architect Corey Saft says he managed to keep his cost per square foot at $110, "which he says is inexpensive for a custom home."

However, John Eckfeldt, who built his passivhaus in Isabella, Minnesota, spent $450 a foot because he went for "huge curved windows and upscale finishes." (image) That’s the thing — the tight design limits nice touches like big windows, curved walls or other elements that require more insulation. The concept is really better suited for "commercial spaces, schools, or — as is commonly the case in Germany — apartment buildings." But John is happy with his passivhaus: "It’s like living in a glass thermos," he says. American passivhauses currently number only in the dozens, but Tom DiGiovanni of the Passive House Alliance says, "It’s growing exponentially."