Month: November 2003

Back from Atlanta, the second city on the IAL tour (third, if you count Nyack, NY on 11.4), the last of my business travel for the year! I took a few too many press junkets this year (and even missed out on one to Puerto Rico in August, due to strep throat). All that remains for 2003 travel is a two-week jaunt to Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud . . .

Given the fact that Tupac still seems to release new albums every few months, we shouldn’t be that surprised that scientists are still finding new Inca cities.

(Trust me: there’s a terrible pun in there, for the wilfully obscure.)

Among other things, there’s the ability to find just about any mangled quote that’s half-stuck in my head. Watching the lunar eclipse tonight, I kept trying to recall that great moment from The Invisible Man, when Claude Rains busts it one night in the countryside. A little Googling got me the exact quotation, which I’ve always liked:

“Even the moon is scared of me! Scared to death!”

Of course, that also gets me thinking about Ed Begley, Jr.’s parody of Rains in Amazon Women on the Moon, which is probably another way the Internet and I seem to parallel each other…

Here’s an article on the profusion of conservative ideas in today’s media. The writer cites a couple of major sources for this trend: Fox News, the Internet (and the Blogosphere or, as I like to call it, the Bloggerdome), and conservative-slanted books.

I’m not going to take an ideological stance on this one, since I’ve spent my last few years unsuccessfully trying to reconcile a lot of my conflicting political viewpoints (and then there’s the attempted reconciliation of my philosophic and mystic bents). However, I will observe that this trend is similar to something that occurred around a decade ago in the music industry and, in both instances, technology was the root.

The author of the article seems to be saying: Conservative America is growing, but the real point is that its very existence and immensity is finally being acknowledged. As new outlets come into play (particularly the collective mental “processing power” of bloggers and other Internet users), we’re finding that a lot of people prefer to get their spin from non-mainstream sources (which, of course, “mainstream-izes” these new sources).

This trend reminds me of what happened when SoundScan was implemented in music retail outlets. See, for the longest time, the “Tops of the Charts” were determined through a pseudo-scientific method that relied heavily on informal polling. So certain musicians were given more heft as chart-toppers than they should have received. With the advent of SoundScan, which compiled sales info through bar-code scanning, a seismic shift occurred: Garth Brooks turned out to be the biggest seller in America.

Until more accurate sales records existed, the country music scene in America was pretty much relegated to underground status, weird as that seems. It was perceived as the province of rednecks and other southerners. With SoundScan, we learned:

a) this genre had broader geographic appeal in America than anyone thought, and

b) there are a lot more rednecks and other southerners buying CDs than anyone thought.

Similarly, SoundScan revealed that hip hop was a much bigger market than previously thought, and that sales were heavier in white suburban areas than in some black urban regions.

My point is, the market (or the population) was always there, but without the technology, its size was criminally underestimated. Of course, this led the major labels to focus almost exclusively on the demographics that were thus revealed, which naturally brought about a stagnation and self-parodization of those music styles, but hey. We’ll see what happens with conservatism in America.

Kudos to Arts & Letters Daily for linking to this City Journal article.

Haven’t gone to see the third Matrix film yet. I enjoyed the first (insofar as it was a live-action version of Grant Morrison’s Invisibles comic), but the second one was terrible, and the third promises more of the same. Nice article by Matt Feeney over on Slate, explaining exactly where the sequels went wrong. Check it out.

Evidently, Duran Duran is kicking off a new tour tonight, their first in 18 years. In honor of that, and for various other reasons (see Remember, Remember below), I’m kicking off a tour of my own tonight:

Inoculated Against Love: The Gil Roth World Tour

It starts tonight at the Hi Life B&G on Amsterdam and 83rd in NYC, before heading down to Atlanta on Sunday, returning to NJ for a while to re-tool (as it were), and then winging it to LA and points beyond.

Here’s a slideshow from my San Diego trip a few weekends ago.

Guy Fawkes Day today. Children throughout the empire burn effigies of the Gunpowder Traitor.

She left me last night. “Sent me away,” to borrow her parlance.

Any of you who know me personally have some idea of how head-over-heels I’ve been for the past two months. At her request, I refrained from writing about her on this blog, which has led to some abortive postings. I couldn’t write about the penultimate show on Springsteen’s tour without discussing the joy I felt at holding her close while the band played New York City Serenade.

My entries from Utah last week are incomplete, nowhere mentioning that the trip was the terminal end of a 16-day period we spent apart. They don’t mention that, the moment I landed, I raced through the airport to my car and drove to the ferry at Weehawken, so that I could see her again.

How did I manage to write that Robert Parish entry (Sept. 6) without adding, “Last night, I met the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with”?

I’m not sure how adequately I can write about her (and myself) right now. I feel like a shadow, which is hardly a descriptor of what’s raging inside me. It doesn’t encompass the fury, the futility, the loneliness of going to bed and knowing that there’s no possibility of holding her close again.

Holding her close: the only moments in my life when I felt I was in the right place. I had no idea a person could feel that way. Which is to say, I never really knew what it meant to be in love. Now I do.

Here’s the editorial for the new issue of the magazine I edit for my day-job. Enjoy:

You, Too?
In the Pharma business, there’s no shame in coming in second. Or third

Hardly seems like four years, but that’s how long it’s been since we launched Contract Pharma. We started with a November/December issue back in 1999, so finishing this issue each year feels something like an anniversary to me (which probably helps explain why I’ve never been married).

It doesn’t feel quite like a year-end edition, because of production lead times, which leave us around seven or eight weeks till 2004. It’s hard to get that impending New Year’s perspective when Thanksgiving is still weeks away. So, no 2004 resolutions this issue; we’ll save that for next time around (the Jan/Feb issue). Instead, I’d like to get into the topic of me-too-ism.

A recent BusinessWeek article (“Is Viagra Vulnerable?” Oct. 27, 2003) goes in-depth with the marketing staff for Lilly, which is responsible for handling the launch of Cialis, a competitor to Viagra and Levitra. Cialis will be backed with a $100 million direct-to-consumer publicity campaign, a first for Lilly (which developed the drug with Icos). The campaign is intended to differentiate the new drug from the others in its class, with the long-term goal, according to Lilly chief executive officer Sidney Taurel, of reaching $2 billion in annual sales for Cialis by 2010.

Reading the piece during the flight to AAPS, the line in the article that caught my attention was from Leonard M. Blum, Icos’ vice president of sales and marketing. Expressing the challenges Cialis faces, he said, “There aren’t many examples in our industry of products launched in second or third position that end up becoming the leader. It’s a tall order.”

Doubtless, this line surprises some of my readers, just as it surprised me; it seemed antithetical to the practices of the Pharma industry as we know it. After all, the recent history of the Pharma business is filled with drugs that were second-in-class and managed to perform just fine in the marketplace. In fact, a recent study by McKinsey, published in a Nature Reviews supplement, indicated that, of the 32 biggest blockbuster drugs of the past decade, the number of “first-in-class” drugs was matched by the number of “me-too” products that were launched more than 15 years after the “first-in-class” drugs. The study also indicated that, of the nearly 200 drugs launched by the top 15 Pharma companies during that period, the highest per-drug sales amounts were among “fast followers,” launched between two and 15 years after the original.

Obviously, Nexium is still rolling along just fine, last I checked (which would have been during our July/August Top Companies report), despite being a late-comer in the proton-pump inhibitor market. Similarly, there’s room for more than one statin out there (and AstraZeneca’s hoping there’s room for one more with Crestor). In fact, over at In the Pipeline, Contract Pharma contributor Derek Lowe discusses the reductio ad absurdum argument that drug companies should only focus on me-too drugs, since they’re the most profitable. Of course, the reality is that, if every company did this, no one would put out any new drugs, and the drug cycle would end in one patent period.

Now, this isn’t to say that Cialis has nothing to worry about, or that its success is assured by its not being the first drug in its class. Nor, however, does it seem as uphill a task as Mr. Blum made it out to be to BusinessWeek. It’ll certainly be an adventure in marketing, as the three companies work to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, while remaining within the boundaries of taste and discretion. But, given the American shift to “lifestyle” drugs, and the graying of the population, being “third-in-class” shouldn’t be too much of a hurdle for Cialis to overcome.

A grad-school buddy of mine, writing pseudonymously, offers this column in the Iranian.