The world is way too full of post-election pontification as well as pre-election and any other kind of election pontification, I'll add only a few quick thoughts.
The Tea Party: So, yes, the Tea Party did help the Republican wave in the US House and in local legislatures. The Tea Party also kept Harry Reid in his job by putting some "winning" candidates on the ballot for US Senate. Without the Tea Party, odds are very good the Republicans would have had both houses of congress in 2010, and likely still today. The people who think Mitt Romney lost because he wasn't more like all those losing hardcore conservative senate candidates need to think on this.
And just to say, more people voted for Democrats for the House than for Republicans, but I don't think we can make a big deal here. I'm a guy who told people to stop complaining about 2000 because (a) the election was for practical purposes a tie (b) the guy who controlled the tiebreakers won. We let political parties control redistricting. And in the UK, the electoral system is skewed against the Tory party all the time, while here we can switch state-by-state every ten years who gets to make the rules.
Marijuana: Yay!! I have "under-tried" marijuana, which is one of my regrets in life. So I can't comment from personal experience on an OpEd article in the NY Times on Friday that says liberals (me, most of the time) shouldn't be in favor of this. But really. I had an employee who was addicted to cigarettes, who spent his spare cash buying cigs, who lost hours of his life to ciggy breaks puffing away in the cold and the hot and the whatever (this was a good thing for the business because at conventions, it was a networking opportunity with the other addicts), who lost a lot of time from work with various health issues some of which were no doubt exacerbated by the cigarette addiction. And do we want to talk about how helpful alcohol is to everyone ?? I'm sure that people can be addicted to marijuana in bad ways just like alcohol and cigarettes, but on balance you can't come up with a convincing harm analysis to say in more dangerous ways. Or, to put it differently, if marijuana was the legal drug and alcohol the illegal one, in ways where if you switched everything around you couldn't come up with the same arguments to say that alcohol should or shouldn't join marijuana in the legal drug pantheon.
Furthermore, the legalization of marijuana has to be viewed in the context of the overall War on Drugs. Which we've been waging for decades, and which hasn't accomplished anything. The real cost of all the drugs we're waging war on hasn't increased. Some drugs are harder to find, others have become easier to find (once upon a time it was crack, which we don't worry about anymore, yay, we won the war on crack, only when we were waging the war on crack had anyone had crystal meth on their worry radar?), but all in all we're sinking huge societal resources into an unwinnable battle that we are not winning, jailing so many people that we have the highest incarceration rates in the western world with a huge investment in a prison industrial complex. So if the trend toward legalizing marijuana means that some small piece of the war on drug resources will actually be reallocated toward things that are better for society instead of just into other fronts in the war on drugs, it is a good thing.
I'm not the marrying type, but I am happy to see gay marriage making inroads. In the early 1990s I wasn't sure this was the thing to focus on, it seemed to me you could have the civil union thing going and be just fine, but over the past two decades I have become convinced that this is an important battle for basic equality.
Most western civilizations do not have two-year election cycles, they have two months. Can we find some of that for ourselves?
Can we ban polling for even a week before the election? For four days? At all? Please??
The next time you are convinced your guy is going to win against all the polling (which it would be nice not to have so much of, but we do), remember that four or eight years ago it was the other guy who was running around the week before the election looking at the bigger crowds, the greater enthusiasm, the momentum. Because it happens every four years. It's like that line in The Shining, it isn't really Danny. So we can't go looking strange at all the wrong Romney prognostications this year, because it wasn't all that long ago that Kerry was pulling it our, and that Gore was pulling it out.
But that said, if we could ban some of the polling, we could at least more happily sustain ourselves in the belief that behind the black curtain our guy had the Big Mo, and it would force some of the election coverage either to disappear or to refocus on things other than the horse race.
And my final rant: the margin of error doesn't mean that every election is closer than it seems, sometimes it means that the election is looking much closer than it is. Yet we will never read an article that says "the poll has this guy up by five points, which means he's really up by ten points." Nope, it's always, "up by five, within the margin of error" with the implication being that it's really a tie. Yes, sometimes that is what it means. And sometimes, it means it's really just shy of a landslide.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
The After Sandy
So it's been an interesting last ten days or so!
For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does. It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous. But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding. All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise. But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice. And I had power! Many of my Scrabble friends especially live in the part of Manhattan that didn't have power for days.
I am so glad the NYC Marathon was cancelled. Mayor Bloomberg has always had this weak spot for sports, for the football stadium on the west side of Manhattan, or his Olympics bid, now this, he's lost most of those battles. Currently, there are plans to expand the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, which have some community opposition, but which don't look to take too much more parkland, and also plans to build a soccer stadium in the park, which would take up lots of parkland. And would be in the "Fountain of the Planets" area, part of the grand design of the park for the 1964 Worlds Fair. I'd rather the city find the money to restore that area of the park and to restore a little more of the public grandeur. Sometimes people join me for the qualifying at the US Open, if they haven't been to Flushing Meadows before I'll take them around the park, and it's so much "that used to be, this used to be" and not near enough of what actually is. One of the world's richest cities should do better. I don't think it's just that I'm biased in favor of tennis. Having spent a lot of time in the park before the expansion of the tennis center in the 1990s, I didn't perceive that the tennis was taking away a lot of high value area in the park, the soccer stadium would be. When I walk people around the park, I've always pointed to where the soccer stadium would be as "shameful the way the city has let this fall to rot," deciding it can only be saved by covering it with a soccer stadium isn't right.
On tennis, Jerzy Janowicz continued his amazing run at the Paris ATP Masters, winning a semi-final match convincingly against Gilles Simon, currently ranked #20 and as high as #6. Five wins in a week against top 20 players. The run ended in the final against David Ferrer, top 5, who heretofore had the most victories in ATP Masters 1000 events without actually winning one. Ferrer's a short player, it was funny watching the trophy presentation because Janowicz is tall, a foot higher at least, and he's quietly become one of the best players in the game outside the big 4 without getting much attention. Janowicz moved up to #26 in the world, over 40 notches higher, going from nobody to somebody, from qualifying every week to making every tournament by direct draw and guaranteeing himself a seed in the Australian Open.
Comic books. DC is filling "5th Wednesday" months with Annuals and other non New-52 books, it keeps the New 52 on schedule without leaving holes. The last time we had a 5th Monday week the Annuals weren't very good. This week I picked up a Batgirl Annual and a Swamp Thing Annual that were both quite good, and an Action Annual that was solid. Steve Niles has a new horror story Lot 13 with a first issue out from DC that was a little like a Zebra genre horror novel from 25 or 30 years ago but with some nice art and on balance pleasant. First of 5 issues, I look forward to the rest. I didn't like the last in the 8-issue New Deadwardians Vertigo mini-series quite as much as the series as a whole, and I'm not liking the final issues of the current American Vampire arc as much as the first, but still, both were solid enough.
And now I want to get on my soapbox a bit.
I could talk a lot more about my personal experiences during Sandy Week, but I came off a lot better than most, JABberwocky didn't do so badly, for the most part I was just coming away with memories for the memory bank, of walking across the 59th St. Bridge with thousands of people instead of dozens, or watching dozens of cars lined up for gas.
Instead, I'm going to talk about human irrationality as viewed thru the prism of Sandy and 9/11.
The two events can't be directly compared, in part because you can't easily compare thousands of lives lost in 9/11 with the far-flung economic damages from Sandy and other weather events. But we can safely say the events are in their different ways catastrophic.
So why did 9/11 inspire so much action, while a decade of ever-increasing natural threats like Sandy doesn't seem to get much to happen?
If you read my blog regularly, you know I've gone one at some of the things we tolerate in the name of stopping a terrorist event. Enduring patdowns at baseball games, and rules that allow us to bring in factory-sealed water bottles but not an empty water bottle (i.e., a factory-sealed water bottle that we dump out the moment we pass thru the turnstile) to fill at a water fountain. "Heightened security" at office buildings full of people that no terrorist cares about, showing photo IDs or even having drivers licenses scanned to gain admittance (what does building management do with your scanned license?), though happily very few of the buildings have magnetomers, so as long as we have photo ID we can go as postal as we want once inside. All the BS at TSA checkpoints, the layers of reactive-to-the-last-threat security. And the things I rant about are the tip of a vast and mostly hidden security apparatus (link goes to a major Washington Post series) that has huge costs, not just in actual money but in time and in loss of liberty. My point here isn't that all of these things are bad (random bag checks on subways, I think strike a good balance and are worthwhile), but to say that we definitely do a lot, and a lot of that not rationally.
As to extreme climate events?
Well, even if I limit myself only to things that deal solely with the extreme climate events themselves and not with underlying causes, we don't do very much. Forget about if it's rational or irrational, it's not done. It was often very easy for railroads and for highways to follow river valleys, so there are lots of railroad lines like the Metro North Hudson Line commuter rail here in New York, parts of the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City that are very close to water, all over, which are more and more likely to be damaged as sea level rises, which is currently happening. We're not talking about that at all. We've done very little in New York City to add "baby gates" in the subways that might keep the water from coming downstairs. It would make lots of sense to bury power lines in DC which is getting walloped with lots of damaging stores, and fewer than 35% of the electric customers would want to see a dollar a month added to their bill to help pay for it.
What gives?
For one security silliness does gives an immediate sense of benefit, right or wrong but it does, so we don't ask what they actually protecting against, the odds of that bad thing happening, or multiply out the little costs to our time and to our wallet of all of these things. And we rarely pay directly. It's buried in the rent or the price of a baseball ticket or a 9/11 security fee hidden in the fine print of the airline receipt. Small but visible benefit, invisible damage to our wallet, often small time cost that we never think to multiply out. Even small things to deal with climate events will have larger visible costs. We don't actually know every dime our government spends on our homeland security apparatus which is hidden away in black areas of the budget, but if we spend money on sea walls in New York like those in the Thames which protect London or the tidal barriers which were built 50 years ago near Providence RI, those are large public expenses. And after we spend that money, we don't visually see the result, people in Providence don't have a way to visualize the return on investment from spending a lot of money fifty years ago. It's like this with a lot of infrastructure.
Second, we have a political system that reacts to money, and which is designed to protect streams of money more than one-time floods. An example: you give a private company a contract to run a prison, the private company makes a profit, it can use some of that profit to invest back into the political system via campaign contributions and ads in the right places to keep that profit. It's the same with cable companies and health insurance companies and defense contractors and virtually any other business that relies on getting us or the government to give little bits of money on an ongoing basis (and just to mention, there are also people who get government benefits, but food stamps don't supply a lot of profit that you can invest back into the system in order to keep getting food stamps). Some of our money, some of the government's money, goes to guarantee the need for us to keep paying that money. The constructions trades and construction unions also lobby for infrastructure money, but there isn't quite as much spare cash splashing around because a lot of those things are one-time. If you want to leverage the money the construction trades and construction unions have, it usually can't be for infrastructure being built as as long-term public good, but rather needs to be tied to something like the Keystone Pipeline. There, the construction people get business, which leads to a steady flow of oil flowing through the pipeline, so the oil industry is happy to spend money to talk up the (likely inflated) number of construction jobs from the Pipeline, creating a nice resonant echo chamber.
And finally, human beings just aren't very good at evaluating risks.
Which makes it very difficult to do things the way Dr. Spock might logically have us do them. There are way too many areas where we evaluate risk feebly. And since government is us, all joined together...
So what do we have?
The NY Times reports there are many prominent office buildings that are closed for weeks or months in lower Manhattan as a result of flooding. I'm sure over the past ten years that these buildings have, as a rule, spent very generously on lobby security, which has kept all of them safe from terrorist plots. And all that money might better have been spent on something else.
I'm not all that optimistic that Sandy will change very much. The buildings will reopen, and every day the people in them will feel very secure because they have a turnstile in the lobby, and each one of those days Sandy will fall a little further into the past. And we don't have politicians these days of any stripe that want to fiercely advocate for the idea of government as a public good that sometimes needs to step in and do things -- great things, sometimes -- that we can't do ourselves.
For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does. It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous. But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding. All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise. But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice. And I had power! Many of my Scrabble friends especially live in the part of Manhattan that didn't have power for days.
I am so glad the NYC Marathon was cancelled. Mayor Bloomberg has always had this weak spot for sports, for the football stadium on the west side of Manhattan, or his Olympics bid, now this, he's lost most of those battles. Currently, there are plans to expand the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, which have some community opposition, but which don't look to take too much more parkland, and also plans to build a soccer stadium in the park, which would take up lots of parkland. And would be in the "Fountain of the Planets" area, part of the grand design of the park for the 1964 Worlds Fair. I'd rather the city find the money to restore that area of the park and to restore a little more of the public grandeur. Sometimes people join me for the qualifying at the US Open, if they haven't been to Flushing Meadows before I'll take them around the park, and it's so much "that used to be, this used to be" and not near enough of what actually is. One of the world's richest cities should do better. I don't think it's just that I'm biased in favor of tennis. Having spent a lot of time in the park before the expansion of the tennis center in the 1990s, I didn't perceive that the tennis was taking away a lot of high value area in the park, the soccer stadium would be. When I walk people around the park, I've always pointed to where the soccer stadium would be as "shameful the way the city has let this fall to rot," deciding it can only be saved by covering it with a soccer stadium isn't right.
On tennis, Jerzy Janowicz continued his amazing run at the Paris ATP Masters, winning a semi-final match convincingly against Gilles Simon, currently ranked #20 and as high as #6. Five wins in a week against top 20 players. The run ended in the final against David Ferrer, top 5, who heretofore had the most victories in ATP Masters 1000 events without actually winning one. Ferrer's a short player, it was funny watching the trophy presentation because Janowicz is tall, a foot higher at least, and he's quietly become one of the best players in the game outside the big 4 without getting much attention. Janowicz moved up to #26 in the world, over 40 notches higher, going from nobody to somebody, from qualifying every week to making every tournament by direct draw and guaranteeing himself a seed in the Australian Open.
Comic books. DC is filling "5th Wednesday" months with Annuals and other non New-52 books, it keeps the New 52 on schedule without leaving holes. The last time we had a 5th Monday week the Annuals weren't very good. This week I picked up a Batgirl Annual and a Swamp Thing Annual that were both quite good, and an Action Annual that was solid. Steve Niles has a new horror story Lot 13 with a first issue out from DC that was a little like a Zebra genre horror novel from 25 or 30 years ago but with some nice art and on balance pleasant. First of 5 issues, I look forward to the rest. I didn't like the last in the 8-issue New Deadwardians Vertigo mini-series quite as much as the series as a whole, and I'm not liking the final issues of the current American Vampire arc as much as the first, but still, both were solid enough.
And now I want to get on my soapbox a bit.
I could talk a lot more about my personal experiences during Sandy Week, but I came off a lot better than most, JABberwocky didn't do so badly, for the most part I was just coming away with memories for the memory bank, of walking across the 59th St. Bridge with thousands of people instead of dozens, or watching dozens of cars lined up for gas.
Instead, I'm going to talk about human irrationality as viewed thru the prism of Sandy and 9/11.
The two events can't be directly compared, in part because you can't easily compare thousands of lives lost in 9/11 with the far-flung economic damages from Sandy and other weather events. But we can safely say the events are in their different ways catastrophic.
So why did 9/11 inspire so much action, while a decade of ever-increasing natural threats like Sandy doesn't seem to get much to happen?
If you read my blog regularly, you know I've gone one at some of the things we tolerate in the name of stopping a terrorist event. Enduring patdowns at baseball games, and rules that allow us to bring in factory-sealed water bottles but not an empty water bottle (i.e., a factory-sealed water bottle that we dump out the moment we pass thru the turnstile) to fill at a water fountain. "Heightened security" at office buildings full of people that no terrorist cares about, showing photo IDs or even having drivers licenses scanned to gain admittance (what does building management do with your scanned license?), though happily very few of the buildings have magnetomers, so as long as we have photo ID we can go as postal as we want once inside. All the BS at TSA checkpoints, the layers of reactive-to-the-last-threat security. And the things I rant about are the tip of a vast and mostly hidden security apparatus (link goes to a major Washington Post series) that has huge costs, not just in actual money but in time and in loss of liberty. My point here isn't that all of these things are bad (random bag checks on subways, I think strike a good balance and are worthwhile), but to say that we definitely do a lot, and a lot of that not rationally.
As to extreme climate events?
Well, even if I limit myself only to things that deal solely with the extreme climate events themselves and not with underlying causes, we don't do very much. Forget about if it's rational or irrational, it's not done. It was often very easy for railroads and for highways to follow river valleys, so there are lots of railroad lines like the Metro North Hudson Line commuter rail here in New York, parts of the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City that are very close to water, all over, which are more and more likely to be damaged as sea level rises, which is currently happening. We're not talking about that at all. We've done very little in New York City to add "baby gates" in the subways that might keep the water from coming downstairs. It would make lots of sense to bury power lines in DC which is getting walloped with lots of damaging stores, and fewer than 35% of the electric customers would want to see a dollar a month added to their bill to help pay for it.
What gives?
For one security silliness does gives an immediate sense of benefit, right or wrong but it does, so we don't ask what they actually protecting against, the odds of that bad thing happening, or multiply out the little costs to our time and to our wallet of all of these things. And we rarely pay directly. It's buried in the rent or the price of a baseball ticket or a 9/11 security fee hidden in the fine print of the airline receipt. Small but visible benefit, invisible damage to our wallet, often small time cost that we never think to multiply out. Even small things to deal with climate events will have larger visible costs. We don't actually know every dime our government spends on our homeland security apparatus which is hidden away in black areas of the budget, but if we spend money on sea walls in New York like those in the Thames which protect London or the tidal barriers which were built 50 years ago near Providence RI, those are large public expenses. And after we spend that money, we don't visually see the result, people in Providence don't have a way to visualize the return on investment from spending a lot of money fifty years ago. It's like this with a lot of infrastructure.
Second, we have a political system that reacts to money, and which is designed to protect streams of money more than one-time floods. An example: you give a private company a contract to run a prison, the private company makes a profit, it can use some of that profit to invest back into the political system via campaign contributions and ads in the right places to keep that profit. It's the same with cable companies and health insurance companies and defense contractors and virtually any other business that relies on getting us or the government to give little bits of money on an ongoing basis (and just to mention, there are also people who get government benefits, but food stamps don't supply a lot of profit that you can invest back into the system in order to keep getting food stamps). Some of our money, some of the government's money, goes to guarantee the need for us to keep paying that money. The constructions trades and construction unions also lobby for infrastructure money, but there isn't quite as much spare cash splashing around because a lot of those things are one-time. If you want to leverage the money the construction trades and construction unions have, it usually can't be for infrastructure being built as as long-term public good, but rather needs to be tied to something like the Keystone Pipeline. There, the construction people get business, which leads to a steady flow of oil flowing through the pipeline, so the oil industry is happy to spend money to talk up the (likely inflated) number of construction jobs from the Pipeline, creating a nice resonant echo chamber.
And finally, human beings just aren't very good at evaluating risks.
Which makes it very difficult to do things the way Dr. Spock might logically have us do them. There are way too many areas where we evaluate risk feebly. And since government is us, all joined together...
So what do we have?
The NY Times reports there are many prominent office buildings that are closed for weeks or months in lower Manhattan as a result of flooding. I'm sure over the past ten years that these buildings have, as a rule, spent very generously on lobby security, which has kept all of them safe from terrorist plots. And all that money might better have been spent on something else.
I'm not all that optimistic that Sandy will change very much. The buildings will reopen, and every day the people in them will feel very secure because they have a turnstile in the lobby, and each one of those days Sandy will fall a little further into the past. And we don't have politicians these days of any stripe that want to fiercely advocate for the idea of government as a public good that sometimes needs to step in and do things -- great things, sometimes -- that we can't do ourselves.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Grown-Up Movies
There are two really good movies for adults playing right now, Argo and Flight both of which I'd recommend, with perhaps a slight bias toward Argo.
For those of you who don't know, which shouldn't be many, Argo is a new movie directed by starring Ben Affleck about an effort to "exfiltrate" from Iran six workers at the US Embassy who were able to escape and find their way to safety with the Canadian ambassador during the hostage crisis of 1979-1981. It shouldn't work as well as it does, and certainly not from a contemporary standpoint where movies tend to be so loud and action-packed and overwrought. But it wasn't always this way. Before everyone spent so much money on special effects it was common to really cast a movie up and down the line. Which Argo does, with Alan Arkin and John Goodman and Bryan Cranston all having major supporting roles And even smaller roles filled very reliably, as an example the Canadian ambassador being played by Victor Garber (the captain in Titanic) or one of the hostages quietly filled by Tate Donavan. And it's possible to generate a lot of tension very quietly, which this movie does. There's a scene of a van carrying the "film crew" to "scout locations," when this van full of "Canadians" has to make its way through an angry crowd of demonstrating Iranians. No money in the scene. Just a street in Istanbul (doubling for Teheran) and some extras, it could have even been done on a backlot Arab street in Hollywood. But it's so well done, so well edited and the sound mixing so good and the quiet fright on the actor's faces so good that you don't need any much more than that
And because all of these little things are so well done, the film works even though the six hostages aren't well-developed chapters, and the CIA exfiltrator is a cipher with the most basic character traits (child he never sees). That's the main reason why I'm surprised the film works as well as it does, because it doesn't develop the characters very much. And yet the filmmaking so so muscular, so quietly powerful, taks such good advantage of the inherent drama of the situation, that it all works beautifully.
In its opening weekend, the "Cinemascore" service that polls audiences, came up with an A+ for this movie, which hardly ever happens. And it wasn't a figment of something. These days, it is common for a film to drop 40% from its first weekend box office to its second weekend. Some genres like horror films will be happy to drop less than 50%. Argo dropped more like 15%, which just doesn't happen at all any more. It's a lot of good word of mouth and well deserved.
Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future or Forrest Gump in the good old days, more recently motion capture like Polar Express) and starring Denzel Washington, shares one key trait with Argo. It doesn't stint on casting where it needs. John Goodman is in this as well, as a friend and dealer to Denzel Washington's drunkard airline pilot, who knows how to use coke to level Denzel off from his drunken binges. Bruce Greenwood (brilliant in Mao's Last Dancer and good in many other things) is a rep for the pilot's union, Don Cheadle an attorney hired by the union. And while the film centers on a dramatic airline crash sequence that's hardly quiet at all, there've been lots of movies with well-depicted disasters in them. The film works because it backs that up with all sorts of quieter scenes that let the actors shine. There's as much will he - won't he tension to wondering what Denzel Washington's going to do with the connecting room mini bar as there is to that van ride in Argo, and this is even quieter. Just one actor, and the actor not even in camera, just lurking there while we look at a single bottle of booze in a hotel room.
The film doesn't glorify alcoholism. The alcoholic is played by Denzel Washington, so he's charismatic. But he's also a drunk, and often not a very likeable one. This isn't something Hollywood does well, very often. I didn't feel like I was being asked to like the guy, but I wasn't being asked to revel in wallowing with him either.
The one thing that doesn't work for me is the ending. How do you end the movie? You can't send the audience out with Denzel Washington still being a drunk, who would tell their friends to see that movie. You can't end the movie with some kind of miracle cure because it just isn't true to the character in a movie that is trying to be very true. So where do you find the balance? There's a valiant attempt to find the third way, but it didn't work for me. Back in the '60s or '70s I think the movie would have been a little darker and would have worked for back then but recently watching the ending of Marathon Man, which I'd never seen before, you realize that those endings just don't work any more unless you want your $3M film to have a highly regarded run in art houses. Here, it's not $3M film, that won't even cover the star and director.
But these are both really good films, and worth going to a theatre to see.
For those of you who don't know, which shouldn't be many, Argo is a new movie directed by starring Ben Affleck about an effort to "exfiltrate" from Iran six workers at the US Embassy who were able to escape and find their way to safety with the Canadian ambassador during the hostage crisis of 1979-1981. It shouldn't work as well as it does, and certainly not from a contemporary standpoint where movies tend to be so loud and action-packed and overwrought. But it wasn't always this way. Before everyone spent so much money on special effects it was common to really cast a movie up and down the line. Which Argo does, with Alan Arkin and John Goodman and Bryan Cranston all having major supporting roles And even smaller roles filled very reliably, as an example the Canadian ambassador being played by Victor Garber (the captain in Titanic) or one of the hostages quietly filled by Tate Donavan. And it's possible to generate a lot of tension very quietly, which this movie does. There's a scene of a van carrying the "film crew" to "scout locations," when this van full of "Canadians" has to make its way through an angry crowd of demonstrating Iranians. No money in the scene. Just a street in Istanbul (doubling for Teheran) and some extras, it could have even been done on a backlot Arab street in Hollywood. But it's so well done, so well edited and the sound mixing so good and the quiet fright on the actor's faces so good that you don't need any much more than that
And because all of these little things are so well done, the film works even though the six hostages aren't well-developed chapters, and the CIA exfiltrator is a cipher with the most basic character traits (child he never sees). That's the main reason why I'm surprised the film works as well as it does, because it doesn't develop the characters very much. And yet the filmmaking so so muscular, so quietly powerful, taks such good advantage of the inherent drama of the situation, that it all works beautifully.
In its opening weekend, the "Cinemascore" service that polls audiences, came up with an A+ for this movie, which hardly ever happens. And it wasn't a figment of something. These days, it is common for a film to drop 40% from its first weekend box office to its second weekend. Some genres like horror films will be happy to drop less than 50%. Argo dropped more like 15%, which just doesn't happen at all any more. It's a lot of good word of mouth and well deserved.
Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future or Forrest Gump in the good old days, more recently motion capture like Polar Express) and starring Denzel Washington, shares one key trait with Argo. It doesn't stint on casting where it needs. John Goodman is in this as well, as a friend and dealer to Denzel Washington's drunkard airline pilot, who knows how to use coke to level Denzel off from his drunken binges. Bruce Greenwood (brilliant in Mao's Last Dancer and good in many other things) is a rep for the pilot's union, Don Cheadle an attorney hired by the union. And while the film centers on a dramatic airline crash sequence that's hardly quiet at all, there've been lots of movies with well-depicted disasters in them. The film works because it backs that up with all sorts of quieter scenes that let the actors shine. There's as much will he - won't he tension to wondering what Denzel Washington's going to do with the connecting room mini bar as there is to that van ride in Argo, and this is even quieter. Just one actor, and the actor not even in camera, just lurking there while we look at a single bottle of booze in a hotel room.
The film doesn't glorify alcoholism. The alcoholic is played by Denzel Washington, so he's charismatic. But he's also a drunk, and often not a very likeable one. This isn't something Hollywood does well, very often. I didn't feel like I was being asked to like the guy, but I wasn't being asked to revel in wallowing with him either.
The one thing that doesn't work for me is the ending. How do you end the movie? You can't send the audience out with Denzel Washington still being a drunk, who would tell their friends to see that movie. You can't end the movie with some kind of miracle cure because it just isn't true to the character in a movie that is trying to be very true. So where do you find the balance? There's a valiant attempt to find the third way, but it didn't work for me. Back in the '60s or '70s I think the movie would have been a little darker and would have worked for back then but recently watching the ending of Marathon Man, which I'd never seen before, you realize that those endings just don't work any more unless you want your $3M film to have a highly regarded run in art houses. Here, it's not $3M film, that won't even cover the star and director.
But these are both really good films, and worth going to a theatre to see.
Friday, November 2, 2012
The Show Must Go Off
Usually I'm very big on trying to get things back to normal as soon as possible, which may be exactly why I'm totally pissed that the city wants to run a marathon on Sunday.
Because in this case, that's not "back to normal," it's indulging the marathon over the interests of a city that can't get where it wants to go.
Buses and trains from my neighborhood into Queens are totally packed. You've got to wait and watch 'em go buy without stopping or without room to get on. Even Thursday night, when the subway was running somewhat, the 59th St. Bridge was still being used by thousands upon thousands of people as their best route in and out of Manhattan. Because it is. The alternative is waiting for at least two trains or two buses, agonizingly long waits, and you can in fact walk faster. In fact, Brady McReynolds in my office had two "commutes" yesterday that were longer than it might have taken for him to walk 9.5 miles to/from work.
So what is the city going to do on Saturday night? It is going to close the bike/ped lane over the 59th St. Bridge for a full day. And it's also going to disrupt the bus traffic over the 59th St. Bridge for several hours, which is just what we need. And it's not like, as limited as the subway/bus service is, that I'm just going to hop on the couple of limited service subway lines heading into Manhattan. So I sure won't be able to get my life back to normal. I have theatre tickets on Sunday that will be very difficult to use because there won't be a good way to get into Manhattan.
And it's not just me. The marathon will make it difficult for people to get to the Williamsburg Bridge. It will make it difficult for people to get from the East to West sides of Manhattan above 59th St., or for people to get from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to other parts of Manhattan.
Obviously, the Marathon causes disruptions every year, but during a normal year I will smile and make do for a day because I might prefer to walk into Manhattan but I don't have to, I have a choice of fully operational subway lines that I and all the Marathon tourists can join. This year, your Marathon turns Manhattan back into an island.
And if you can't tell, I'm not happy.
Because in this case, that's not "back to normal," it's indulging the marathon over the interests of a city that can't get where it wants to go.
Buses and trains from my neighborhood into Queens are totally packed. You've got to wait and watch 'em go buy without stopping or without room to get on. Even Thursday night, when the subway was running somewhat, the 59th St. Bridge was still being used by thousands upon thousands of people as their best route in and out of Manhattan. Because it is. The alternative is waiting for at least two trains or two buses, agonizingly long waits, and you can in fact walk faster. In fact, Brady McReynolds in my office had two "commutes" yesterday that were longer than it might have taken for him to walk 9.5 miles to/from work.
So what is the city going to do on Saturday night? It is going to close the bike/ped lane over the 59th St. Bridge for a full day. And it's also going to disrupt the bus traffic over the 59th St. Bridge for several hours, which is just what we need. And it's not like, as limited as the subway/bus service is, that I'm just going to hop on the couple of limited service subway lines heading into Manhattan. So I sure won't be able to get my life back to normal. I have theatre tickets on Sunday that will be very difficult to use because there won't be a good way to get into Manhattan.
And it's not just me. The marathon will make it difficult for people to get to the Williamsburg Bridge. It will make it difficult for people to get from the East to West sides of Manhattan above 59th St., or for people to get from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to other parts of Manhattan.
Obviously, the Marathon causes disruptions every year, but during a normal year I will smile and make do for a day because I might prefer to walk into Manhattan but I don't have to, I have a choice of fully operational subway lines that I and all the Marathon tourists can join. This year, your Marathon turns Manhattan back into an island.
And if you can't tell, I'm not happy.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Jerzy Shore
So back in 2010 I spoke quite excitedly about a young Polish tennis player, Jerzy Janowicz, whom I'd watched in the US Open qualifying. "Too good for me" to be able to count on him being in qualifying for very long.
And then in 2011, I was left baffled, as he was again in the qualifying and looked really not that good.
Did he just have an off day in 2011? Or was 2011 the normal, and 2010 the match of his life.
Today we found out the answer. Janowicz was just good enough in 2012 to escape the qualifying at the US Open, and he came into qualifying for this week's ATP Masters 1000 event in Paris, one of the top tier tournies right below the Grand Slams in ranking points, ranked in the high 60s. And he beat Dmitry Tursunov, once ranked in the top 20, and Florent Serra, once ranked in the top 40, to qualify. Then he beat the #19 ranked Philipp Kohlschreiber. Then he beat the #16 ranked (and 13th seed) Marin Cilic. And now he's just finished beating Andy Murray, the guy who won the gold in the Olympics and the US Open and is currently ranked #3 in the world. And he did this after losing a tight first set, then having to prevail in a 2nd set tiebreaker. Well, maybe he's just had the best week of tennis in his life, this could in fact be the best week of tennis in his life beating #19, #16 and #3, and he could still have a nice tennis career for a very long time and wind up in the top 20. And if that's "all" he does, I can look at my blog post from 2010 and say I knew him when...
It also sets him apart from a player like Ryan Harrison, who has suffered from a lot of tough draws where he always seems to have a top-ranked player in the first or second round. But Harrison never seems to beat any of them. He takes a set here or there, he always looks nice, I don't even want to say if it's Janowicz or Harrison who is actually the better player, but right now today you've got to put money on the guy who just beat #19, #16 and #3 in quick succession, over the guy who occasionally takes a set from #3. Harrison is an American, so I hope he can pick up his game that extra little bit, but today, I'm hugely excited by Jerzy Janowicz's run.
And then in 2011, I was left baffled, as he was again in the qualifying and looked really not that good.
Did he just have an off day in 2011? Or was 2011 the normal, and 2010 the match of his life.
Today we found out the answer. Janowicz was just good enough in 2012 to escape the qualifying at the US Open, and he came into qualifying for this week's ATP Masters 1000 event in Paris, one of the top tier tournies right below the Grand Slams in ranking points, ranked in the high 60s. And he beat Dmitry Tursunov, once ranked in the top 20, and Florent Serra, once ranked in the top 40, to qualify. Then he beat the #19 ranked Philipp Kohlschreiber. Then he beat the #16 ranked (and 13th seed) Marin Cilic. And now he's just finished beating Andy Murray, the guy who won the gold in the Olympics and the US Open and is currently ranked #3 in the world. And he did this after losing a tight first set, then having to prevail in a 2nd set tiebreaker. Well, maybe he's just had the best week of tennis in his life, this could in fact be the best week of tennis in his life beating #19, #16 and #3, and he could still have a nice tennis career for a very long time and wind up in the top 20. And if that's "all" he does, I can look at my blog post from 2010 and say I knew him when...
It also sets him apart from a player like Ryan Harrison, who has suffered from a lot of tough draws where he always seems to have a top-ranked player in the first or second round. But Harrison never seems to beat any of them. He takes a set here or there, he always looks nice, I don't even want to say if it's Janowicz or Harrison who is actually the better player, but right now today you've got to put money on the guy who just beat #19, #16 and #3 in quick succession, over the guy who occasionally takes a set from #3. Harrison is an American, so I hope he can pick up his game that extra little bit, but today, I'm hugely excited by Jerzy Janowicz's run.
Monday, October 29, 2012
funny book round-up
So I did some work today, at least one project wring St. Martin's about an author was taken care of, but it's hard to concentrate, especially because I'm getting over a big that's making me a little more tired than usual, which isn't good for doing work reading. So I've read a few weeks of comics. You can find a collection of links to my blog posts on the DC "0" issues in September here:
http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-new-52-weeks-later.html
http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-new-52-weeks-later.html
Disappointments: Issue #1 of Team 7 did not live up to the theoretical promise of the 0 issue, and since the Teen Titans looks to be crossing over with Team 7 and is very of and off, I may stop with Teen Titans. The dark side of crossovers, they are as or more likely to make me stop buying something as to add it.
Crossover Goodness: The Batman books are looking in very good shape going into the Joker's return in a "Death of the Family" crossover. I tried Detective #13 with a new creative team and liked it enough to buy the next issue. This one was a little muddy with the art, but it was interesting art, and an interesting script with Scarecrow, a classic Bat villian. Just in general, the Batman books have done a really good job of using old Batman villains since the New 52 relaunch. Firestorm and others have pretty much ignored earlier villains. Flash has been using the old villains, but not in a way that I like, and I decided not to buy issue #13, if I did it would be a disappointment. Getting back directly to Batman, #13 which starts the crossover was very good. Nightwing #13 was good. Batgirl #13 was good. The Batman books are, to me, in the best place they've been for a long, long, long time.
New and Bereft: A Madame X one-shot, part of this series to introduce non-DCU characters that DC purchased over the years into the DCU, didn't do it for me. Nor did DC Universe #13 Presents Black Lightning and Blue Devil, the first in an arc.
Pleasant Surprise: Fury of Firestorm #13 with new writer Dan Jurgens and artist Ray McCarthy shows signs of being a nice second year re-book for the series, that I may like more than generally I did the past year's worth of books.
Staying Strong: The "2nd" issues i.e., Phantom Stranger #1 and Sword & Sorcery W/Amethyst #1 after last month's 0 issues were both good enough for me to commit to issue #2. Does everyone in Amethyst have to have the same color hair? It's less clear where Phantom Stranger is going than Amethyst, but it's nice to be comparing quality of new issues in a new series. And Talon #1 also has the series on good footing, though I'm not sure there's enough there to make an ongoing series of this. Well, I think we can let 'em show us what they've got.
Steady as She Goes: Superboy and Superman #1 were good enough. The "H'el on Earth" Superman crossover isn't looking to be something so good that it will get me buying Supergirl, but it looks OK that I won't stop buying things I'm buying now. Saucer Country #8 begins to move the series forward after a couple issues of consolidating and reviewing, and continues to be an excellent new Vertigo series for 2012 which I'd recommend to anyone.
Bongo: One Shot Wonder Maggie #1 was about what you'd expect for a Maggie book, no more. Simpsons #195 was a very good issue. Marge exiles Homer to the back yard as a tornado is coming, Homer ends up in a geodesic dome, the dome ends up amidst a LARP/Ren Faire kind of thing, then with Civil War reenactors, then here and there, leading Homer to think he is traveling through time. This is a "don't ask questions" issue, just sit back and enjoy the ride and it's quite delightful. Bart Simpson #76 starts off with a fun high school fundraiser when Bart, has a mediocre Daedalus retelling in the middle, and then an OK haunted house on the highway thing that's nicely illustrated but with no surprises in the script.
Pengdom House
I'm not a big fan of pontificating too much about things with too much uncertainty, and believe it or not there are a lot of uncertainties about Random House's acquisition of Penguin that make it a mistake for people to get too far ahead of themselves.
The first major uncertainty is government regulation. In both the US and UK, the merger will give the combined company large market share in the publishing industry. Will there be any divestitures required? My guess is we're not looking at a lot, because 25% market share with four other decent-sized competitors is hardly a dominant market position. But will the government look more closely at any particular categories? As an example in sf/fantasy, the merged company would control Ace, Roc, Del Rey, and distribute DAW. Which would be quite a dominant market share. Our Bookscan account doesn't offer market share data, but it's out there, if anyone who reads this post has any light to shed on their position in certain genres it would be very interesting.
And the second uncertainty? Well, quite frankly, not even the people at Random House know what they're doing with the new toy. The people at the highest levels of Bertelsmann have crunched numbers and found a price that makes sense, but they haven't formed the committees that actually make everything come together. Obviously the people at Random House like the Random House contract, but that doesn't mean there isn't going to be a committee to decide who actually has the better language on rights reversions, or termination in the event of non-delivery of a manuscript, or a gazillion other things. There hasn't been a committee formed to see who has the better royalty statement format, and how you get the computers to talk to one another to eventually consolidate the systems. I'm told on hearsay that Penguin has a 99-year lease that would go for at least another 80 years on its office space, and Random House has some kind of fancy condominium arrangement I think for its office space, and there hasn't been a committee formed to decide if they want to keep the offices separate or move people here or there or come to an arrangement with a new developer for 99 years of space in some new building.
We do know that Random House gives more editorial autonomy than in other large publishing companies, and I see no reason why they'd change that practice. What this means is that they are happier to let the different editorial divisions compete for books than at other companies, so at least until we get to a situation where Ace and Del Rey both want the same book, or Viking and Crown want the same book, they'll let people go at it. S&S is much pickier about needing to know if/who else in the conglomerate is also looking at something.
We do know that this won't be like when Penguin purchased Berkley 20 years ago, and then let the Berkley people come in and run things because they were very well managed. I can't see Bertelsmann looking at Penguin and thinking "oh, let's buy them for their management expertise!" Bertelsmann has been running book businesses for many many decades.
For JABberwocky, selfishly:
We like our Penguin contract more than our Random House contract, but I don't dislike our Random House contract, and I think over time as Peter Brett becomes a more prominent author for Random House and we're now selling Brandon Sanderson to Random/Delacorte with his Steelheart series, there's a likely move to be able to make our Random House contract better over time. If you told me we had to move all of our Penguin authors to Macmillan boilerplate moving forward, I wouldn't be thrilled. And as I mentioned above, who knows whose contract we'll actually get moving forward.
We do a lot of business with Penguin, too much in some ways, because I hate to have too many eggs in one basket. Having Peter Brett become a breakout author for Random House and Brandon Sanderson the same with Tor has given me a lot more comfort than six or eight years ago, now we're going to have a very big Pengdom House basket and the Tor basket looking that much smaller.
When I started in the business, Penguin was this very strange conglomerate that did all sorts of things that the other big conglomerates were smart enough not to do, examples of this would be that Penguin would do big three-book deals, and dole out half the advance on signing, and all the rest on delivery of the manuscript. Over time, bean-counters started to crack down on some of these things. Penguin payout is more like other payouts. The agita when I tried to suggest a client should get his Penguin delivery advance for a book he hadn't finished revisions on last year, oy! Still, Penguin I would say is a somewhat less corporate place than Random House is.
I do most of my business at Penguin with their Berkley imprint, and Berkley has been an amazingly stable company. I've been doing business with Ginjer Buchanan and Susan Allison for about as long as I've been in the business, and they've been working with the same people atop of them for as long as more. I can tell you exactly when I read that Susan Allison would be taking over Ace, and that was in 1981 when I was still in high school and Jim Baen announced in the final issue of his Destinies "bookazine" that he was going off to get a Jim Baen Presents imprint at Tor and would be turning the reins over to Susan. That's an amazing run. They keep losing excellent junior people because the downside of good stable management is that you eventually run out of promotions and new titles to hand out to ambitious people. I've also got to say, Susan's had a long run because she's razor sharp and deserves it.
Del Rey has been an amazingly unstable company, to be blunt. When I started in the business, and when Random House was still an "independent' publishing company, if you can use that term for an arm of the Newhouse's Advance Communications conglomerate, it was still run by Judy and Lester del Rey. Can we even keep track of how many people have been running Del Rey since it hasn't been the del Reys? For many years, I had this impression that Del Rey was an imprint with a lot of senior people and not a lot of less senior people, "too many chiefs and not enough Indians." I don't think that any more, Scott Shannon seems to have found the right people balance for the Del Rey and Spectra imprints. But it's come with a huge human cost to people working at the companies. The designated heir to the del Reys, Owen Locke, departed. Editors like Jim Minz and Liz Scheier came in and out way too quickly, too quickly for their departures to be based on any profit & loss report card for things they'd purchased. The consolidation of Del Rey and Bantam Spectra led to other departures. This is hardly a full list of people to be in and out of Del Rey and Spectra, my apologies to all the many people I am not specifically naming (yes, Steve, that means you). Elizabeth Moon has had five editors in ten years with Del Rey, it would have been much more difficult to "achieve" that "feat" at the Penguin sf imprints.
If I get a little queasy thinking on some of the less stable aspects of the Random House corporate structure weighing on Berkley, I think I'm excited at seeing Penguin benefit from some of the digitial stuff that Random House is up to. Peter Brett and I had a marketing meeting on plans for The Daylight War in September, my general experience with publisher marketing plans is that they can spend a lot of time coming up with six pages that say "we will send out review copies and galleys" or, today, "review copies, galleys, and we'll do shit on Facebook." The Del Rey plan here looked and felt different, leveraging different things like Suvudu that Random House has invested in over the years, with an awful lot of dedicated digital marketing people, with a lot of coordination and involvement with the editorial and other people at Del Rey. I might be over-stating the import of this, because all the big publishers will do a lot of things for an author like Peter V. Brett that they see heading to bestseller lists that they don't do generally, but I'm not sure I am. I felt like the plan was using more things that are actually embedded in what Random House is doing and has been doing, and that they went beyond what I see from other publishers for other of our bestselling authors.
I hope Random House will switch to Penguin's royalty reporting. Random House has updated their royalty statements the way the TSA updates airport security, grafting layer after layer after layer on to what they were doing when I started in the business, it looks prettier in some ways but you have to keep flipping back and forth between pages to properly read, and they do not routinely provide across-the-board the information on copies shipped and returned the last six months, which is what you actually need, while providing a few lines of information on the total sales of the 1993 edition of your book that hasn't been in print or selling since 1996. Penguin needs to do a little better job of purging sheets of paper on old inactive ISBNs from their reports, but otherwise they provide statements that are a model of clarity. Information on copies shipped and returned is found easily, and there's summary information telling you that information in a big picture way before and during the current period and then in total following.
So this isn't the answer to all of your questions, not even the publisher knows the answer to all of its questions.
Just in a big picture way, what does this mean? Well, I'm never fond of mergers that reduce competition for my authors, reduce the number of markets that I can sell authors to (especially because there are plenty of good books that don't find a market when they should, every time a new publisher starts up they are often buying books other people rejected and finding success with some of them), increase the clout of the people at the other end of the bargaining table. However, the fact that I don't like it when these things happen doesn't keep them from happening, the question is how you deal with what actually comes out the other side, and right now we have no way of knowing anything about that in much detail.
The first major uncertainty is government regulation. In both the US and UK, the merger will give the combined company large market share in the publishing industry. Will there be any divestitures required? My guess is we're not looking at a lot, because 25% market share with four other decent-sized competitors is hardly a dominant market position. But will the government look more closely at any particular categories? As an example in sf/fantasy, the merged company would control Ace, Roc, Del Rey, and distribute DAW. Which would be quite a dominant market share. Our Bookscan account doesn't offer market share data, but it's out there, if anyone who reads this post has any light to shed on their position in certain genres it would be very interesting.
And the second uncertainty? Well, quite frankly, not even the people at Random House know what they're doing with the new toy. The people at the highest levels of Bertelsmann have crunched numbers and found a price that makes sense, but they haven't formed the committees that actually make everything come together. Obviously the people at Random House like the Random House contract, but that doesn't mean there isn't going to be a committee to decide who actually has the better language on rights reversions, or termination in the event of non-delivery of a manuscript, or a gazillion other things. There hasn't been a committee formed to see who has the better royalty statement format, and how you get the computers to talk to one another to eventually consolidate the systems. I'm told on hearsay that Penguin has a 99-year lease that would go for at least another 80 years on its office space, and Random House has some kind of fancy condominium arrangement I think for its office space, and there hasn't been a committee formed to decide if they want to keep the offices separate or move people here or there or come to an arrangement with a new developer for 99 years of space in some new building.
We do know that Random House gives more editorial autonomy than in other large publishing companies, and I see no reason why they'd change that practice. What this means is that they are happier to let the different editorial divisions compete for books than at other companies, so at least until we get to a situation where Ace and Del Rey both want the same book, or Viking and Crown want the same book, they'll let people go at it. S&S is much pickier about needing to know if/who else in the conglomerate is also looking at something.
We do know that this won't be like when Penguin purchased Berkley 20 years ago, and then let the Berkley people come in and run things because they were very well managed. I can't see Bertelsmann looking at Penguin and thinking "oh, let's buy them for their management expertise!" Bertelsmann has been running book businesses for many many decades.
For JABberwocky, selfishly:
We like our Penguin contract more than our Random House contract, but I don't dislike our Random House contract, and I think over time as Peter Brett becomes a more prominent author for Random House and we're now selling Brandon Sanderson to Random/Delacorte with his Steelheart series, there's a likely move to be able to make our Random House contract better over time. If you told me we had to move all of our Penguin authors to Macmillan boilerplate moving forward, I wouldn't be thrilled. And as I mentioned above, who knows whose contract we'll actually get moving forward.
We do a lot of business with Penguin, too much in some ways, because I hate to have too many eggs in one basket. Having Peter Brett become a breakout author for Random House and Brandon Sanderson the same with Tor has given me a lot more comfort than six or eight years ago, now we're going to have a very big Pengdom House basket and the Tor basket looking that much smaller.
When I started in the business, Penguin was this very strange conglomerate that did all sorts of things that the other big conglomerates were smart enough not to do, examples of this would be that Penguin would do big three-book deals, and dole out half the advance on signing, and all the rest on delivery of the manuscript. Over time, bean-counters started to crack down on some of these things. Penguin payout is more like other payouts. The agita when I tried to suggest a client should get his Penguin delivery advance for a book he hadn't finished revisions on last year, oy! Still, Penguin I would say is a somewhat less corporate place than Random House is.
I do most of my business at Penguin with their Berkley imprint, and Berkley has been an amazingly stable company. I've been doing business with Ginjer Buchanan and Susan Allison for about as long as I've been in the business, and they've been working with the same people atop of them for as long as more. I can tell you exactly when I read that Susan Allison would be taking over Ace, and that was in 1981 when I was still in high school and Jim Baen announced in the final issue of his Destinies "bookazine" that he was going off to get a Jim Baen Presents imprint at Tor and would be turning the reins over to Susan. That's an amazing run. They keep losing excellent junior people because the downside of good stable management is that you eventually run out of promotions and new titles to hand out to ambitious people. I've also got to say, Susan's had a long run because she's razor sharp and deserves it.
Del Rey has been an amazingly unstable company, to be blunt. When I started in the business, and when Random House was still an "independent' publishing company, if you can use that term for an arm of the Newhouse's Advance Communications conglomerate, it was still run by Judy and Lester del Rey. Can we even keep track of how many people have been running Del Rey since it hasn't been the del Reys? For many years, I had this impression that Del Rey was an imprint with a lot of senior people and not a lot of less senior people, "too many chiefs and not enough Indians." I don't think that any more, Scott Shannon seems to have found the right people balance for the Del Rey and Spectra imprints. But it's come with a huge human cost to people working at the companies. The designated heir to the del Reys, Owen Locke, departed. Editors like Jim Minz and Liz Scheier came in and out way too quickly, too quickly for their departures to be based on any profit & loss report card for things they'd purchased. The consolidation of Del Rey and Bantam Spectra led to other departures. This is hardly a full list of people to be in and out of Del Rey and Spectra, my apologies to all the many people I am not specifically naming (yes, Steve, that means you). Elizabeth Moon has had five editors in ten years with Del Rey, it would have been much more difficult to "achieve" that "feat" at the Penguin sf imprints.
If I get a little queasy thinking on some of the less stable aspects of the Random House corporate structure weighing on Berkley, I think I'm excited at seeing Penguin benefit from some of the digitial stuff that Random House is up to. Peter Brett and I had a marketing meeting on plans for The Daylight War in September, my general experience with publisher marketing plans is that they can spend a lot of time coming up with six pages that say "we will send out review copies and galleys" or, today, "review copies, galleys, and we'll do shit on Facebook." The Del Rey plan here looked and felt different, leveraging different things like Suvudu that Random House has invested in over the years, with an awful lot of dedicated digital marketing people, with a lot of coordination and involvement with the editorial and other people at Del Rey. I might be over-stating the import of this, because all the big publishers will do a lot of things for an author like Peter V. Brett that they see heading to bestseller lists that they don't do generally, but I'm not sure I am. I felt like the plan was using more things that are actually embedded in what Random House is doing and has been doing, and that they went beyond what I see from other publishers for other of our bestselling authors.
I hope Random House will switch to Penguin's royalty reporting. Random House has updated their royalty statements the way the TSA updates airport security, grafting layer after layer after layer on to what they were doing when I started in the business, it looks prettier in some ways but you have to keep flipping back and forth between pages to properly read, and they do not routinely provide across-the-board the information on copies shipped and returned the last six months, which is what you actually need, while providing a few lines of information on the total sales of the 1993 edition of your book that hasn't been in print or selling since 1996. Penguin needs to do a little better job of purging sheets of paper on old inactive ISBNs from their reports, but otherwise they provide statements that are a model of clarity. Information on copies shipped and returned is found easily, and there's summary information telling you that information in a big picture way before and during the current period and then in total following.
So this isn't the answer to all of your questions, not even the publisher knows the answer to all of its questions.
Just in a big picture way, what does this mean? Well, I'm never fond of mergers that reduce competition for my authors, reduce the number of markets that I can sell authors to (especially because there are plenty of good books that don't find a market when they should, every time a new publisher starts up they are often buying books other people rejected and finding success with some of them), increase the clout of the people at the other end of the bargaining table. However, the fact that I don't like it when these things happen doesn't keep them from happening, the question is how you deal with what actually comes out the other side, and right now we have no way of knowing anything about that in much detail.
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