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No horse in this race

Here’s a neat article about how wine overtook beer in America:

Meanwhile, the American middle classes have fast become connoisseurs of everything — coffee, ’80s Japanese garage-rock bands, environmentalist toilet paper. Now, Americans who want the exclusivity that connoisseurship offers but didn’t want to seem like snobs can have it both ways. Beer’s approachability became less of a virtue. Ironically, in the ultimate about-face, craft-brew drinkers lifted the language of wine. (Tasting notes for a pale ale from the Web site BeerAdvocate: “Nose is floral, like orange blossoms, with some citric rind and soft apple.”)

As someone who refers to himself as a “gin snob” (among other examples of my snobbishness), I can see what he means.

So, are you more of a wine drinker or a beer drinker? (excluded from this question: my teetotaling family and my recovering alcoholic exes)

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Publish and perish

Here’s an article about how Perseus Books Group is closing down two of its imprints: Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth Press. The further away I get from my indie-publishing days, the less I can understand how any of them stay afloat. This passage summed up how I tried to see things back then:

“When you see the book world conglomeratizing, it can only mean less diversity of voices,” said Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books, a Brooklyn-based imprint distributed by Perseus. “When I sign up a book, it matters more that I love it than that I’ve identified a good marketing niche for it. That’s the real essence of independent publishing — it’s not a deal, it’s supposed to be a labor of love.”

Then I lost the love.

I hope the founders of those presses got a decent purchase price when they joined up with Avalon Publishing (which was later acquired by Perseus), but I have a feeling that I can see where the “labor of love” part collided with the “good marketing niche” part:

“At Carroll & Graf, we bridged the gap between small, lesser-known presses and the larger houses when it comes to gay literature,” said Don Weise, a senior editor who is losing his job. “In the four years that I’ve been here, I’ve acquired more than 100 books, and no one has ever told me no, I couldn’t do that. In the book world, that’s unheard of.”

I probably would’ve moved his attribution, along with the “senior editor who is losing his job” part to the end of the paragraph, to make my point.

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Regulatory Overkill?

[Excerpted from this month’s From the Editor column at my magazine.]

In last June’s From the Editor page, I wrote about a scandal involving Chinese “innovation,” namely a rip-off that literally involved scraping a western company’s name off of cell-phone chips and painting a Chinese company’s name on them. I received some guff for that editorial, and have been told at numerous conferences in the past year that China will dominate the 21st century, because the world is bowl-shaped or flat or somesuch.

I maintain that the country’s poverty-level population (800 million), out-of-balance birthrates (in the 1990s, some provinces peaked at 32 male births to one female, thanks to advances in portable sonograms), and catastrophic environmental record are going to yield so much unrest as to counter its “economic miracle.” Those of you who’ve had the misfortune of listening to me expound on this subject know that I believe China’s one-party dictatorship makes it impossible for the nation to truly accommodate itself to the western world; instead, it does a passable impression of capitalism. But when it breaks down, it breaks down critically.

Let’s take China’s role in exporting chemicals, a major economic driver. Those exports have made plenty of news lately, after

  1. an ingredient (or two) used by Chinese livestock-food suppliers to falsify protein tests led to the deaths of a number of pets in the U.S., and
  2. a counterfeit ingredient in cough syrup supplied by a Chinese company poisoned at least 100 people n Panama.

These problems don’t only plague China’s exports; the same ingredients have led to deaths within China, too. Perhaps we should envision these as growing pains, a result of China’s crash course in modernizing the SFDA and bringing its drug supply under regulation. If anything, that would mark these events as symptoms of the country’s attempt to join the international community.

That reading might be a valid one, given that the toxic ingredient in the cough syrup happened to be diethylene glycol. After all, the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act was passed in the U.S. in 1938 after the use of diethylene glycol in “Elixir Sulfanilimide” led to the deaths of more than 100 Americans.

Seventy years ago, there was no requirement for tox-tests for drug formulations. The manufacturer’s lab tested for flavor, appearance and smell, but not toxicity. So this elixir shipped, and the death followed. At the time, the agency was simply fortunate that the product was called an “elixir.” According to an FDA article, if it had been called a “solution” instead, “FDA would have had no legal authority to ensure the recovery of the drug and many more people probably would have died.” As it was, agents had to fan out across the country to help in the recall of the elixir. All told, 234 out of 240 gallons of the toxic product were recovered.

Following the diethylene glycol disaster, the FDA was given greater authority to regulate drugs, and evolved into the agency we know today, for better and worse.

Nowadays, we hold congressional hearings about tougher standards for Advisory Committees. Concerned about conflicts of interest, our representatives debate regulations stipulating that no one who is an expert enough about a subject to get paid for it should be responsible for evaluating it. (Hey, it’s my reductio and I’ll ad absurdam if I want to.)

As it turns out, China — and that one-party system of theirs — has also developed new regulations to deter conflicts of interest. In their case, a court recently ordered the execution of the former head of the SFDA.

In May, Zheng Xiaoyu was convicted of taking more than $832,000 in bribes in cash and gifts during his tenure. According to a state newspaper, “Under his watch, six types of medicine approved were fake and pharmaceutical companies got away with using false documents to apply for approvals.” Oh, and an antibiotic produced under not-so-aseptic conditions looks to have killed at least 10 Chinese patients.

The government has already taken the occasion of the sentencing to announce a new food-recall system; we’ll see how it overhauls the drug process. I’m all for creative destruction, but I’m hoping it won’t take too many more of these episodes before we see China adopt some semblance of global standards. I’m not optimistic about this, of course.

Fortunately for Mr. Xiaoyu, if the method of execution is lethal injection, then there’s always a chance he’ll come out of this experience just fine.

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Joims

I watched The Aviator on my train ride up to Boston earlier this month. It never quite bored me enough to make me quit watching it, but I felt that wasn’t a good enough review/blurb to share with you, dear reader.

Fortunately for me, Michael Blowhard just watched and reviewed it, and I’ll second his sentiment: “dull, but watchable.”

The film’s primary drawback is that it has a narrative angle that imposes repetitiveness. The picture — which stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes — confines itself to a relatively brief stretch of Hughes’ life: from his early years in Hollywood making “Hell’s Angels” to his triumph / failure with his giant wooden airplane, the Spruce Goose. (There’s nothing of Hughes’ later years as a legendary recluse surrounded by tissue paper and Mormons.) During the 20ish-year stretch that the film covers, Hughes achieves great things. He’s also first touched by, then eaten-away at by obsessive-compulsive behavior.

The film’s dramatic idea is that, as Hughes’ mental illness grew worse, he channeled more and more of his creativity and his brains into managing an ever-shrinking personal world. As valid or not-valid as this idea is in psychological terms, it means that the film has nowhere to go that you can’t see coming. One after another, gorgeous new planes are wheeled out of hangars; one after another, Hughes’ obsessive-compulsive behavior problems grow more dire. That cycle — a new engineering triumph that’s contrasted with a new pitch of madness — repeats itself over and over until, you know, things finally get really bad.

Or, as my buddy Paul Di Filippo put it, “I’m much more interested in the Howard Hughes who totally lost his mind. This movie quit right before that.”

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Style and not

Over the weekend, I read a neat article about the differences between Apple stores and Sony Style stores. One of the funniest comments came after the writer noticed the huge disparity in foot traffic (a lot more people were in the Apple store) in the two stores in a Palo Alto mall:

Last week, I shared these impressions with Dennis Syracuse, senior vice president for Sony Retail, who assured me that Sony’s stores drew an average of 350,000 visitors annually per store. Mr. Syracuse rejected the idea that his store concept could be compared to Apple’s. His stores were conceived, he said, as a “fashion boutique for women and children” that incidentally happened to carry electronics instead of clothing.

We happen to have both stores (it’s actually a mini Apple store, a narrower version of the full-sized stores) in a nearby megamegamall, so I stopped in on both of them while running an errand after work (I took a half-day today; no need to dive right back into the pool, after a stressful couple of weeks and a nice long weekend). At 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, what did I find?

(Undersized) Apple store: 19 customers, and 7 or 8 floor staff

Sony Style store: 5 customers (3 of whom were under the age of 12), and 5 floor staff

Now, the Sony store is located among high-end stores, while the Apple store is flanked by Banana Republic and a Nine West, but it was difficult to understand Mr. Syracuse’s vision of a “fashion boutique”. This Sony store was just as overloaded with products and “stuff” as the one Mr. Stross describes in his article: laptops, ebooks, Playstation gear, TVs, stereos, home theaters, and more. According to its own site:

The stores feature several hands-on demonstration areas, including HDTV display walls equipped with high-definition TV sets and DVD players, and a digital imaging gallery with a selection of camcorders, photo printers and digital still cameras as well as VAIO PCs to exhibit connectivity.

As product mix goes, it was a mess: a very well-organized mess, but still a mess insofar as there was nothing linking the products but a Sony logo. Or, as Mr. Stross writes:

But Sony’s offerings have not impressed retail consultants with whom I spoke. Willard Ander, a senior partner at McMillan Doolittle in Chicago, was unsparing in his assessment: “Sony doesn’t get retail. The stores are not energized and not shop-able.” Apple stores extend an “emotional connection” to their customers that Sony’s do not, Mr. Ander said. The absence of such a connection, he said, was a common failing of manufacturers who venture into retail on their own.

In addition to this baffling array of electronics, I think another big problem with the Sony Style setup is that, while the Mac store sells hardware (and accessories), the Sony store splits its focus between hardware and software. That is, it featured numerous product displays and posters for Sony’s music and movies. So the Sony store shows off CDs and DVDs of Sony artists, but I don’t believe there’s brand/label/studio awareness when it comes to most music and movies (Pixar notwithstanding).

In contrast, the Apple store treats content (software) as something the user can go pursue: a poster for the iTunes movie store shows many different properties, but doesn’t limit itself to, say, Disney videos. The store is selling its users the opportunity to pick from a universe of movies and music, not those of one label/studio.

On top of that, there’s plenty to be said for the airy brightness of an Apple store. The floor design, even in a mini-version, is open and easy to navigate. It isn’t selling as much as a Sony store, and it doesn’t have to.

This afternoon, I came across another Apple retail article: this one’s about Dell’s attempts at recapturing market share, including a stab at retail, despite its roots in direct sales. Unfortunately, it sounds a lot like Catherine Keener’s character’s store, We Sell Your Stuff On Ebay, in The 40-Year-Old Virgin:

Earlier this year, Dell opened its first retail store in the NorthPark Center in Dallas, right across the mall from an Apple store. Inexplicably, the Dell store carries no inventory. Customers can check out the goods, but can’t actually buy them in the store. This is the main reason cited for the failure of Gateway’s chain of stores, which shuttered in 2004.

The article also explains that, since design is now important in the PC biz, Dell’s gonna get some designin’ on! It felt a lot like a “let’s buy some innovation!” initiative, and that trick (just about) never works. Usually, it involves overpaying for people who had One Good Idea, and telling them to “be creative.” I’ve seen it.

I don’t mean to blow sunshine up Steve Jobs’ ass, but it is pretty amazing that Apple has managed to make retail work in a field where a lot of other companies have tanked.