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Month: June 2012
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Opulent Photographs of Luxurious Subjects
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Whatever Happened to First Class?
Rowan Barnes-Murphy
Multimedia
Champagne, Showers and a Double Bed
February 10, 2012Whatever Happened to First Class?
By JESSE McKINLEY
AS a longtime veteran of the coach cabin and all the horrors therein — the battles for overhead space, the wheelie-bag traffic jams, the knee-numbing legroom — one can only imagine my thrill when I boarded a recent American Airlines flight from San Jose, Calif., to Dallas. There I was, after all, in the first row. My seat was wide, the armrest was enormous, and the guys behind me were talking, businessman-style, about real estate and golf, bankruptcies and bogies. This was the high life, I figured, a conviction that only intensified when the flight attendant approached with a silver tray and addressed me — unprompted — as “Mr. McKinley.” Then he handed me, well, a towel.
Or sort of. Maybe it was more of a wipe? It was basically the size of a cocktail napkin. Or perhaps it was a piece of the pilot’s long-lost security blanket. Whatever it was, it was marginally warm, borderline damp, and had the unmistakable, oft-used texture of a bargain washcloth.
Ah, first class.
Once an enclave of elegance, fabulous fliers and V.I.P.’s with sights to see and places to be, these days, judging from a recent informal survey I undertook of several of the nation’s bigger domestic carriers, the experience is often reminiscent of what one used to find in coach. Same kind of pillows. Same kind of blankets. Same kind of guy in sweats, a fleece and a ball-cap letting his knees expand to the widest possible angle while downing a free drink.
Indeed, what I noticed over the course of several short jaunts, hub-to-hub hauls and cross-country treks was that the airlines’ gutting of almost all niceties from economy class seems to have had a perverse effect on first. Rather than be defined by the benefits it bestows, it is now defined by the deprivations it doesn’t. “You go into first class,” said Joe Brancatelli, the editor of JoeSentMe.com, a Web site for business travelers, “because it’s less horrible than coach.”
Not that there’s always that much difference, mind you. Consider a recent US Airways flight I took from Charlotte, N.C., to Newark — I bought a $75 upgrade — whose amenities were a bigger seat, a tiny pillow, a big bottle of water and a choice of nuts or cheese snacks, delivered in what an airline spokesman later called a “relatively heavy snack basket.” On my American flight from San Jose, there wasn’t even a pillow, though the flight attendant noted I could rest my head against the adjustable (and that’s a generous term) flap in the headrest.
And while there’s ample debate as to when the Golden Age of First Class was — the Stratocruiser ’50s? The Pan Am ’60s? The steak-and-silverware ’70s? — the growing consensus among airline observers is that decades of deregulation, harsh economic swings, increased competition and consolidation, and, most recently, upgrade-hungry frequent fliers, have left the domestic first-class compartment more of a letdown than a luxury.
“The style is gone, the attention to detail is gone, the amenities are gone,” said Henry H. Harteveldt, a founder of the Atmosphere Research Group, a travel industry analysis firm. “The fact is that domestic first class today simply means little more than a wider seat and a better chance of getting your bag in the overhead bin.”
It wasn’t always thus. In the glory days of first-class travel, according to Roland H. Moore, president of the Eastern Airlines Historical Foundation, luxury was the sell. Attendants wore hats, stockings, white gloves and tailor-made suits. Passengers dressed up. Meals were an event, with high-end chefs from restaurants like the “21” Club in New York catering meals that would be served on Rosenthal china with stainless steel silverware, starched white napkins and tablecloths. The pillows were large, the cases starched white, and the candies were hard (to comfort the ears on takeoff, of course).
“Furs would be folded with the lining outside,” said Frank Victor, a board member with the National Airline History Museum, who fondly recalled days of lobster thermidor and chateaubriand carved at your seat. And, he added, “The curtains were closed between first and coach.” (And not those decorative hospital-style curtains you see nowadays.) Most agree that deregulation in the late ’70s was the beginning of major changes for first class — and first-class passengers — as government-decreed fares gave way to competitive pricing. Pre-deregulation fixed fares, you see, meant airlines had to compete in other ways for customers, namely through better service, not better prices.
So while deregulation has “hugely democratized” the skies, said Gary Leff, a founder of milepoint.com, a frequent flier community, it has also meant “that without high fares, the airlines don’t spend on amenities the way that they used to.”
There were also low-cost carriers like Southwest and People Express that didn’t mess with first class at all. Later, 9/11, rising fuel costs and the recession all continued to pummel the airlines, forcing a protracted era of cost-cutting.
Airlines had also developed loyalty programs, allowing frequent fliers to pay for upgrades with miles, and letting regular Joes percolate up into first class. What really opened the flood gates, though — and that first-class curtain — was a more recent decision by some carriers to offer upgrades to their most frequent fliers, gratis, rather than let those seats go empty.
And that, say some, has justified the airlines’ rationale in making the first-class experience less than premium. “Once they are giving it away as a perk,” Mr. Brancatelli said, “why would you go out of your way to make it glamorous?”
And while Mr. Harteveldt — like everyone else — loves his free upgrades, he said that the practice galls him from a business standpoint. “Let’s say you go to Macy’s and buy a generic $49 shirt,” he said. “The clerk doesn’t then take that back and hand you a shirt by a name-brand designer.”
But, to be frank, at these prices, who can afford to pay retail? A recent search of first-class fares on Orbitz.com, from Kennedy Airport to Los Angeles, found nonstop fares as high as $3,116 on United, $3,113 on American. And that was one way. (By comparison, both coach tickets were $149.)
Airlines won’t say how many people are paying the full first-class fare — Mr. Brancatelli estimates it to be 2 percent, while others estimate up to 10. Some first-class cabins, according to the airlines, are more stocked with customers paying full fare than others, but as a passenger it can seem that the front of the plane on many domestic flights is packed with upgraded travelers. On a recent transcontinental flight out of Philadelphia on Delta, for example, exactly 2 of 16 first-class passengers had paid full fare, according to a gate agent there. And one of those big spenders was me.
With tens of millions of upgradable frequent fliers, airlines have taken to adding seats with slightly more legroom and other perks in coach — call it Coach Plus — to accommodate loyal customers shut out of the front of the plane.
American, for one, is making an effort to up their number of “economy class premium,” with more of such seats on its new Boeing 777-300ERs due this year. American has also kept three separate cabins — coach, business and first — while others have gone strictly bicameral (coach and first), and says it’s intensifying its efforts to get Wi-Fi on more planes, said Alice Liu, managing director of onboard products. It is, she said, part of making first class “a seamless transition from everyday life to the airline.”
“It shouldn’t be an interruption,” she said.
Other airlines also strongly contest the assertion that first class isn’t what it used to be, saying that they’ve poured ample resources into maintaining and improving service with everything from new seats — from cloth to leather, for example, on United — to better menus and wines. There are also flashier entertainment devices, power outlets, new online services and, of course, the ever-important issues of more legroom and larger seats.
Airline officials acknowledge that some changes in the front of the plane have occurred over the years, but largely because of the changing expectations and demands of their customers. “I think it used to be that the flight was as much a part of the vacation as the beach in Hawaii or touring the Eiffel Tower,” said Rahsaan Johnson, a spokesman for United. “Now people just want to get on and do what they want to do. And they are far more likely to say, I wish I had a place to plug in my laptop than I wish we had flowers in the lav.”
To be sure, not all first-class experiences are created equal. On some flights, first class doesn’t even mean a meal. US Airways, for example, doesn’t serve prepared food in first class for any flight less than three and a half hours long. When the food comes, it does not always inspire, like an omelet-and-home-fries breakfast I had on American — part of a $986 full-fare one-connection, one-way flight from West Coast to East — where omelet and home fries had appeared to merge like something out of “The Fly.” But the airline did better on a Dallas to Philadelphia afternoon flight: I was given a nice cold salmon salad, a bowl of warm nuts and yes, a hot towel. (By this point in my research, I was politely saying no.)
Airlines tend to load the extras onto their longer, transcontinental flights, which can feature meals designed by celebrity chefs, seats that extend to lie flat and computer tablets loaded with movies and video games. (Details on extras are in the accompanying article.)
First class also has staffing on its side — often two flight attendants for a dozen or so people — and its own commode, of course.
And those are just the perks on the plane. According to Fern Fernandez, managing director for marketing and customer loyalty of US Airways, for some customers they pale in comparison with the biggest prize of all: less time waiting to get on.
“Domestically, it’s that ability to have an expedited experience in the boarding process,” he said. “And having a little extra space.”
But while avoiding the epic security lines — reserved for those suspicious economy-class types — is certainly a perk, the first-class treatment apparently doesn’t always get you past the velvet rope. Holding a first-class ticket does not guarantee access to terminal clubs, something I discovered at Newark Liberty International Airport, where my $759.70 ticket — one way — wasn’t enough to get me into the United lounge, despite the fact that I was wearing my best (and only) suit.
AIRLINES insist that first-class customers have always been — and always will be — special. “First class remained a priority,” said Chris Kelly Singley, a spokeswoman for Delta. “Because the folks who are sitting in those seats are typically paying higher fares.”(If, of course, they are paying.)
Sure enough, on a Delta flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in mid-January, the airline did well. The plane, a Boeing 737-800, came with seatback entertainment systems with free movies and television shows. The meal — grilled chicken, fresh salad, chocolate cake — was yummy, and the drinks were, well, ample. My aisle-mate, separated from me by a wide armrest, drank several glasses of red wine, and only spilled part of the last one on my leg. The Delta flight attendant, like every first-class flight attendant I encountered, handled it with aplomb — and a real cloth napkin.
United Continental also did well on a San Francisco-bound jag, with a menu complete with freshly baked garlic bread, mezzaluna pasta and vanilla ice cream with hot fudge. (You could gain a lot of weight in first class, which might explain the bigger seats.)
Much depends on the type of plane you’re on, with some models allowing for the ultimate in first-class elitism: the ability to turn left when you board the plane. Older planes, however, can struggle to keep up with the times. Consider an American Airlines MD-80 I recently boarded only to discover that the jack below my first-class seat was a round DC outlet like one you might find in your car’s cigarette lighter. Which would have been great had I been driving, but left my PC bereft at 35,000 feet. (The airline promises that it is converting the outlets.)
Still, the view from 35,000 feet is the same no matter where you’re sitting, something I was reminded of on a US Airways flight to Newark: a sunrise over the Atlantic, an eyeliner-thin trace of pink over an unmade bed of clouds. Looking out, I felt that often-forgotten sensation of wonder, of flight, and the excitement of travel to a different place. (Even if that place was inNew Jersey.) My first-class amenities weren’t much: a bag of cranberry nut mix and some organic Cheddar cheese snacks. But the takeoff was flawless and the scenery divine. Settling back into my wide seat, I had a deep thought: I had become spoiled. For even if first class wasn’t as fine as I’d hoped, it still wasn’t coach.
Kenan D. Christiansen and Rachel Lee Harris contributed reporting.
Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved
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On YouTube, Amateur Is the New Pro
How to be a YouTube Celebrity: A mashup of advice from the people who know YouTube best: the amateurs.
Christiaan Felber for The New York Times
YouTubers Maangchi Kim, Jimmy Wong, Meghan Camarena, Richard Ryan, Matt Giudice, Franchesca Ramsey, Meghan Tonjes, Peter Bragiel and Bryan Odell.
June 28, 2012On YouTube, Amateur Is the New Pro
By ROB WALKER
A kid from Nebraska shows up in New York City to make it big. This kid was Bryan Odell, a 21-year-old college dropout who lived with his parents. Gangly, with curly blond hair, he looked and talked as if he arrived straight from central casting. (“I was just a kid from Nebraska,” he says.) But central casting had nothing to do with it. As an aspiring YouTuber, he cast himself.
Odell’s destination was the Manhattan office of Google Inc., YouTube’s corporate parent. He was among the 25 winners of a competition called Next Up, which is aimed at “accelerating the growth of the next big YouTube stars,” as an official YouTube blog explained. The prize included four days of tips and training from “YouTube experts” in New York. It also included a $35,000 check, no strings attached.
Founded in 2005 and owned by Google since 2007, YouTube today contains multitudes: 72 hours of video are uploaded onto the service every minute. For some, it is an infinite museum of moving images: Patti Smith singing “You Light Up My Life” on a 1970s kids’ show; Mike Wallace puffing Luckys through an interview with Salvador Dalí; forgotten teenage dance shows. For others, this is the medium of the one-off “viral” video — the often accidentally funny home movie or blooper that is e-mailed, linked and tweeted into collective consciousness. There is also an endless variety of produced material: “supercut” mash-ups, TED Talks, book trailers, brand campaigns.
Then there are the YouTube stars — people like Ray William Johnson, Mystery Guitar Man, Smosh, Michelle Phan, the ShayTards, Jenna Marbles, Freddie Wong, What the Buck or Philip DeFranco. If these names mean nothing to you, trust me: these are famous, successful YouTubers. Their videos get millions of views, and because they get a share of the resulting ad revenue, they are almost certainly among the “hundreds” that the company says earn six figures or better from their videos.
YouTube executives sometimes refer to such YouTube stars as having been “born on the platform”: they built careers through skillful use of YouTube itself. Given the numbers of viewers involved, it makes sense that YouTube, which places revenue-generating ads on videos, might take an interest in creating more of these stars. This was the goal of Next Up, to which several hundred YouTubers applied. While the final selection process was murky, I was told that the winners were chosen based more on metrics (views per video, subscriber growth rate, uploads per month) and ability to whip up fan support than with some entertainment executive’s opinion about quality.
The winners were a curious mix. Aside from Odell, who interviewed the members of touring metal bands, there was Meghan Camarena, a sweet young woman from Modesto, Calif., who made the grade with her video blogging and lip-synced pop songs. J. Brent Coble created college-humorish skit videos in Denton, Tex. Richard Ryan, originally from small-town Tennessee, destroyed high-tech gadgets with guns and explosives in the Southern California desert. Franchesca Ramsey made comedic videos, and Meghan Tonjes sang earnest songs into her webcam. Others uploaded travelogues, cooking shows, makeup tips, craft tutorials, basketball lessons and stop-motion videos of Lego figurines.
Lately YouTube has received more attention for its focus on a very different approach — household names. Not long after the Next Up winners were named in May 2011, YouTube announced an initiative in which mainstream celebrities like Madonna, Shaquille O’Neal, Ashton Kutcher and Jay Z would curate “channels” of content. A New Yorker article summed up the meaning of this strategy: “YouTube, the home of grainy cellphone videos and skateboarding dogs, is going pro.” YouTube would shell out something like $100 million for these deals, which makes the $875,000 doled out to the Next Up winners look paltry.
But YouTube’s homegrown stars tend to be self-starters. They understand the intimacy of the platform in a way most Hollywood A-listers don’t. YouTube is not just television on a computer, and YouTubers, whether established or aspiring, are their own breed. The Next Up winners are an almost random group of nonfamous people with an idiosyncratic range of talents, striving to succeed and fully conversant in the culture of this relatively young medium. And this medium definitely has its own culture. Any YouTuber could tell you that.
One useful place from which to consider YouTuber culture is the parking lot next to the Granada Theater in Lawrence, Kan. Behind three or four grimy tour vans and a Tioga camper, Bryan Odell and two buddies set up his Canon Vixia HF-10 high-definition camcorder on a tripod. Odell wore a bright blue Aeropostale hoodie that was inadequate for the cold November twilight but indispensable as his on-camera uniform.
We had driven the three and half hours from Lincoln to Lawrence so that Odell could interview four bands that were playing together on a tour organized by the independent hard-rock Fearless Records label. Thanks largely to his Next Up winnings, Odell moved out of his parents’ house and bought a new computer for editing his videos. “BryanStars Interviews” had become more or less his full-time job. When the camera was set, Odell stood between two members of a French group called Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! and began by asking each what his ideal “porn name” would be.
Odell is no Johnny Carson. But he is a heartland showbiz striver, with one notable Web-era difference: He’s not looking to leave Middle America. Though his show, subjects and audience have little to do with where he lives, he prefers staying close to family and friends. Besides, he doesn’t need to move. He told me the number of people who subscribe to his videos has roughly doubled (to about 90,000 when we went to Lawrence). A few months earlier, he started selling BryanStars T-shirts and wristbands. He predicted that he would be recognized in Lawrence, and he was right: a couple of the kids who were already queued up several hours before the show knew him from YouTube. He seemed slightly disappointed that they weren’t more fawning — he had told me several times about fans asking for his autograph — but otherwise he radiated enthusiasm. YouTube, he told me repeatedly, changed his life.
As a senior in high school, Odell won a C-Span contest with a video report about gas prices. While majoring in broadcasting at the University of Nebraska, he interned at an NBC affiliate doing local stories for a segment called “Omaha Buzz.” He found himself reporting from an event called Rib Fest, and he had an epiphany: He did not care about Rib Fest.
Some of his reports, however, involved covering concerts. (“I’d go to a show, and I had a camera with me, so all of a sudden I was V.I.P., you know?”) In November 2009, he uploaded one of his concert-story clips to YouTube, picking the handle “bryanstars” without much thought, and was thrilled to see it rack up 100 views. Then he interviewed the members of Slipknot, the over-the-top metal band, as they were passing through Omaha. The band’s rabid fan base pushed the number of views of that clip past 5,000 in a day. “That’s when I knew that this could be something,” Odell says. “The fact that you could just throw something up from the middle of Nebraska and get thousands of people from all over the country interacting with it was . . . was huge.”
What made BryanStars Interviews go from promising to profitable was YouTube’s Partners Program. Until recently, becoming a partner entailed an application process. Odell and several other Next Up winners told me it took four or five tries before they were accepted. Meanwhile, they uploaded scores or even hundreds of videos and built up views and subscriber momentum, without making a dime. But being chosen meant they got more than half the ad revenue their videos generated. By 2011 there were 20,000 participants in the Partner Program. That same year, YouTube bought Next New Networks, a company that works with entities like the Gregory Brothers (creators of “Auto-Tune the News”) and Barely Political (known for the “Obama Girl” videos). The Next Up program followed soon after, conceived as a way for the company to both help and learn from “people who are looking at YouTube as a platform to build their own career in a way that has never been possible before,” Tom Sly, director of strategic content at the company, told me.
The Partner Program forbids participants to reveal specifics about their ad-share revenue. Rates can vary depending on the size and demographics of the partner’s audience and an array of other metrics. But through conversations with partners and others knowledgeable about the program, it’s possible to come up with ballpark figures. Someone like Odell — who now has around 125,000 subscribers, is averaging about two million views a month and posts a lot of videos, often with 15-second preroll commercials — can make more than $4,000 a month. (Odell and YouTube declined to comment on that estimate.)
It’s not a bad salary for a clean-cut, cornfed, mall-preppy kid interviewing tattooed, pierced, black-clad guys in gothic makeup, using liberal profanity and often-crude questions. If the interviews are not-ready-for-prime-time, the advertising is: spots for the Mini Roadster and Stihl saws pop up on his videos. Besides, Odell is pretty sure his future has nothing to do with prime time, or covering Rib Fests, or moving to New York to scrape for attention from TV bigwigs. “In college, other people decided what would happen to me,” he says. “With YouTube, it’s really not up to anyone but me, and the audience.”
About half of the Next Up winners live in and around Los Angeles, and I assumed they were attracted to the area by the idea of Hollywood, with its showbiz ecosystem. That turned out to be not quite the case. Many had come not for Hollywood but for other YouTubers. A parallel ecosystem has taken root, built by born-on-YouTube creators who “went pro” years ago and are now supported by production companies and agencies with a YouTube-specific focus.
I met Jimmy Wong and Meghan Camarena at Wong’s apartment in downtown L.A. At 24, Camarena has a sweet-little-girl quality about her, with bright eyes, a camera-ready smile and a singsong voice. She talks about how hard it was to move away from her close-knit family in Modesto, about 90 miles inland from San Francisco. As a child, she told me, she watched Nickelodeon and wondered how she could get inside the television set and be on that screen. Later she discovered YouTube, and the skits and home movies and music videos from all kinds of people, delivered to a different screen. “If they’re doing this all on their own, then that means I can probably do it,” she remembers thinking. She got a video camera for Christmas in 2007, and under the handle Strawburry17, she started video-blogging and “lip-dubbing” songs by up-and-coming bands.
Camarena used her Next Up money to move to L.A., where her roommate, Catherine Valdes, is another YouTuber she met online. Camarena’s life is now grounded in the local YouTuber community and the business infrastructure it has spawned. When we met, she was about to travel to India to make a video for the nonprofit Water.org. The job was arranged for her by a year-old firm called Big Frame. (Big Frame describes itself as a “network” representing about 75 YouTubers and brokering moneymaking and audience-growing deals.) She had also just signed a six-month contract to make videos for Teen.com — a property of Alloy Digital, the entertainment and branding firm, which has been signing up its own network of YouTube talents — with Valdes and another cute young YouTuber friend named Joey Graceffa.
She and Graceffa and another YouTuber also formed a band, of sorts, called the Tributes, to record songs and videos inspired by “The Hunger Games.” The movie was coming out in March, and Camarena told me they needed to get out in front of the release with appropriately tagged content, so that they would benefit from the inevitable online search frenzies. “If you’re gonna jump on the bandwagon,” she explained, “you have to do it soon.”
Her fellow Next Up winner Jimmy Wong, an accomplished musician, had a far less systematic approach to YouTube. During his senior year in college, he watched his older brother, Freddie Wong, start building freddiew, a channel for action-comedy shorts that has become one of the most popular channels on YouTube. Jimmy was unsure about devoting himself to YouTube so completely. But then his third video went viral. It was a musical-parody response to a very unfortunate video made by a U.C.L.A. student complaining about Asians in the school library. He ended up discussing “Ching Chong! Asians in the Library Song” on NPR — and that helped him become a Next Up winner.
At first, he couldn’t figure out how to capitalize on that one success. He resisted comedic music for a while, making serious music videos, but they didn’t catch on. By November he was thinking about making more parodies. But in January, he arrived at a completely new idea: A funny cooking show, making fanciful recipes for foodstuffs that exist only in books or movies, called “Feast of Fiction.”
Because there is no such thing as a prime-time debut on YouTube, creators work their way up from small audiences with whom they tend to interact directly on the site’s comments boards and who play a vital role in promotion. While this makes building an audience a challenge, it also means the audience actively and intimately creates its stars. Thus YouTubers constantly exhort viewers to “like,” to forward, to leave a comment.
This bond between YouTube creator and audience is of increasing interest to some advertisers. Some brands will pay stars at Freddie Wong’s level six figures to create an ad and upload it to his or her channel, says Margaret Healy, YouTube’s head of partner engagement. That money is over and above what the YouTubers earn through the ad revenue-sharing Partner Program. For top YouTubers, then, the platform isn’t a farm system for the “real” entertainment industry. It is what they do.
Camarena is far from the Freddie Wong apex. Based on her monthly views, her Partner Program ad-split revenue probably brings no more than $1,000 or $2,000 a month. But having tapped into the YouTube universe, she has found other ways of leveraging what fame she has. She wouldn’t tell me specifics, but she did say that a majority of her income probably comes from side deals like her Teen.com contract and various one-offs for other entities.
Five years ago, “brands would not touch this stuff,” says Barry Blumberg, the former president of Disney television animation who now runs Web sites and YouTube channels for Alloy Digital. Even now, he suspects that many mainstream advertisers don’t quite understand the dynamic between YouTubers and their audiences: “The audience thinks they know them.” And that, he says, can be monetized.
A history of the entertainment business could be framed as a series of experts asking, “Who the hell wants to watch that?” When the answer is “more people than you think,” the definition of profitable entertainment changes. And those people might converge by the hundreds on the Buena Vista resort, outside Orlando, Fla., to meet their YouTube heroes.
Playlist Live is a cross between a fan convention and an entertainment festival. This year, it took place over three days in late March, drawing more than 2,000 attendees who paid between $50 and $80 to get in. On a stage at one end of the hotel’s sprawling ballroom, a rotating series of YouTubers sang, told jokes, showed clips or answered questions; elsewhere fans lined up for autographs, meet-and-greets and cellphone pictures with their favorite stars of the very small screen. A huge kiosk sold T-shirts featuring YouTuber-specific designs and logos.
Surveying the noisy scene, I heard a squeal from the corridor outside the ballroom and turned to see the people I was here to meet: Meghan Tonjes, a singer, and Mike Falzone, a fellow YouTube musician, had just been recognized by a few of their enthusiastic admirers.
Tonjes, 26, is another Next Up winner. In college, she wrote a paper about YouTube when it was a new phenomenon, speculating on “what it says about us as a culture that we put ourselves out there.” Within a year, she was putting herself out there, making videos of herself in her bedroom singing and playing guitar (an instrument she took up at 19 and learned to play largely by watching instructional videos online).
And who the hell wants to watch that? Well, bedroom singers are an established genre on YouTube, and Tonjes was at Playlist to meet fans and perform. Before Next Up, she had one major star turn on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” in January 2011. She built up audience support in other ways, like “Request Tuesdays,” in which her viewers suggest songs she should cover. And she gets personal: in a recent video, “I Am Fat,” she sassily rebukes the “trolls” who leave nasty comments about her weight. When I first spoke to Tonjes last October, she had used a chunk of her Next Up money to pay off student debt and bought a real camera and a better microphone. She had just arrived home from a monthlong tour.
Her video view count is far lower than, say, Bryan Odell’s, but Tonjes didn’t seem that concerned with making it big. She was living near Allentown, Pa., and YouTube just seemed to be one tool — along with selling her music through iTunes and BandCamp and using social media to promote shows — that allowed her to forgo a day job and be an entertainer. She and Falzone, who lives in Connecticut and whom she met via YouTube, had made their way in her car to Playlist, stopping to play in clubs and coffeehouses. This was her goal: Traveling, playing live shows with people she likes and supporting herself through “music and YouTube.”
Playlist Live draws “fan boys and fan girls,” says Kevin Khandjian, the chief information officer of AKT Enterprises, which runs the convention and sold about $2 million of YouTuber merchandise last year. Many are in their teens and accompanied by parents, and many are aspiring creators. The crowd I saw was diverse but mostly young and consistently sporting T-shirts for YouTube stars, or just for YouTube. Many attendees carried video devices, and plenty paced around, recording and narrating. (YouTube itself was represented with only a modest booth.)
Samantha Rider, a young woman from Sanford, Fla., bought her Playlist ticket months in advance. Until a year or so ago, Rider paid little attention to YouTube. “I thought it was people with cats,” she said. But she stumbled on a Tonjes video during a difficult period in her life, and the connection was immediate. Rider sent Tonjes a long letter about what an inspiration she was — her voice, her poise, her frankness about weight, her confidence. “I was incredibly nervous to meet them,” she says of Tonjes and Falzone.
Actually the stars at Playlist are almost aggressively accessible — more likely to give fans a hug than a “don’t bug me” — but even second-tier YouTubers can inspire borderline burst-into-tears-level fandom. This is partly a byproduct of online interactivity and the homemade feeling of many YouTube productions. The way people physically experience these videos must matter, too. On a computer or other device, the image is 18 inches away, not across the room. Frequently a YouTuber addresses the camera directly. More often than not, the YouTube viewer watches alone, not in a group, and studies suggest we engage more deeply in that circumstance. It’s possible to feel as if you’re in on something new and special, no matter how many people may have watched before you.
Rider tells me she has only one friend who really “gets” YouTube. Everyone else she knows looks at the videos that interest her and says, “Why are you watching that?”
A few weeks after Playlist, YouTube gave a party for the advertising industry at the Beacon Theater in New York, featuring a performance by Jay Z. A new era had arrived, the gathering seemed to suggest, in which a slicker and glitzier YouTube, with what it called its “originals” strategy, ought to attract higher ad rates. The message seemed to be: The future of YouTube is mainstream celebrities.
Interestingly, about a third of the new channels that are part of YouTube’s $100 million “originals” strategy were actually created by the production companies formed by born-on-the-platform YouTubers. Philip DeFranco, whose popular YouTube show delivers a witty, high-octane take on current events (punctuated with gratuitous discussion of sexy girls), is producing a show called “SourceFed,” which racked up 100 million views in its first five months. “I think the channels that are going to thrive are the ones backed by YouTubers, or ones that partner with them,” DeFranco told me. Outsiders fail to understand how demanding it is to cultivate an audience and maintain that sense of community. “I think we understand the space,” DeFranco continued. “Being a ’tuber — it’s a grind.”
A few weeks later, DeFranco devoted several minutes on his YouTube channel to discuss the state of YouTube itself. The platform remains a unique vehicle for creative “awesomeness,” he began. But he speculated that “the YouTube community” — the people who make and support born-on-the-platform content — may feel marginalized by YouTube’s mainstream-focused evolution. “Smart YouTubers,” himself included, have been adjusting to make sure they maintain their audiences. “But it hurts me,” he continued, “to see a lot of these smaller YouTubers squirming” because they feel YouTube doesn’t care about them. He wrapped up by addressing YouTubers directly: “There are many people in YouTube that know that you are the heart and soul of this Web site,” he said. “It just seems like there’s less and less of them every day.”
With or without Hollywood, it’s getting tougher to break through to YouTube stardom and become the next Phil DeFranco. The stringent partnership rules of the past have been dropped, and the number of wannabe YouTube stars chasing ad dollars has exploded. Perhaps inevitably, the weird originality gets harder to maintain as new aspirants try to replicate what is already popular. Young as it is, YouTube has already evolved its own genres. This niche-i-fication is reflected in the sequels to the Next Up program, which focus on categories — Next Chef, Next Comic, Next Vlogger. “YouTube is doubling down on content creation as a core feature of its site,” Richard MacManus argued on ReadWriteWeb. “It is doing this across the whole spectrum of content creation: from amateur to professional, with a lot of gray in-between.”
Whether YouTube sees grass-roots creators as “the heart and soul” of the platform, the company seems to recognize them as a secret weapon that no rival currently possesses. Aside from the hope that Next Up creates more bona fide stars, the real goal is to continue advancing the story of YouTube culture in general, says Tim Shey, the director of YouTube’s Next Lab, a division devoted to making the most of what the platform gives birth to. “StrawBurry17’s story, we hope, inspires 100 more people like her to get excited,” he says. “And make videos.”
Strawburry17 — that is, Meghan Camarena — was at Playlist to meet fans and sign autographs. The videos she and her friends were making for Teen.com started to run out; she mentioned plans to make a scripted Web series this summer, and to start a “clothing line,” as well as Strawburry17 perfume and Chapstick. (“My merch sells really well,” she told me.) She and her YouTuber roommate set up at a table, and a line formed. Sam McGillivray, a high-school student from London, Ontario, was there with her mother, Mary. “I like how she’s trying new things,” Sam explained somewhat bashfully of her admiration for Camarena. “And she’s so nice.”
Jimmy Wong had to cancel his Playlist plans because he landed a role in a movie called “Resident Adviser.” Five months after its debut, “Feast of Fiction” had a respectable 50,000 subscribers and about two million total views for its 15 or so episodes. His viral hit “Ching Chong” now seemed less like a launching pad than an interesting one-off. “I almost feel wistful about my first couple of videos,” he told me — the ones he made before he was thinking about audiences and revenue.
Easily the biggest viral-hit video to emerge from the Next Up crew was from Franchesca Ramsey, who had been making comic videos since about 2007 while she pursued acting and stand-up comedy and got a degree in graphic design from the Miami International Institute of Art and Design. She moved to New York, kept making videos and built up some decent numbers. In January, her parody response to another popular YouTube video — hers was titled “Stuff White Girls Say to Black Girls” (of course the real title had another word where I’ve substituted “stuff”) — attracted millions of views and landed her on Anderson Cooper’s afternoon talk show. “For a long time, I worked so hard, and I felt like no one was watching,” she told me in April. “I wasn’t getting the numbers that, you know, cat videos were getting.” When we spoke, she was negotiating to host an online series, as well as pursuing more mainstream options, like a TV writing gig and developing a pitch for a network show.
In the months since I visited Bryan Odell, his audience grew steadily, and he posted a constant stream of new interviews and videos. In one, from January, he spoke directly into his webcam about complaints from some viewers that he’d been rude to a band. He seemed exasperated and exhausted by the ’tuber grind. “What you don’t see,” he said, is the time he spends researching, driving, waiting, editing. “I’m a person; I’m not a corporation. . . . I have feelings.” Then he made an abrupt pivot: “I do this for you guys,” he declared. “This is everything to me.” When I spoke to him in April, he had rebounded. He was looking for ways to push his “formula” further, perhaps interviewing unsigned bands, being a champion to the underdogs. “I want my viewers to relate to me,” he explained, as he rattled off his latest stats. “And to see that I fight my way through it.”
For all these YouTubers — and for YouTube — the future is about the fans. A few days after Playlist, Samantha Rider told me that finally getting to see Meghan Tonjes live was a highly emotional and deeply gratifying experience. Tonjes’s performance made her cry. When it was over, she found Tonjes and gave her a hug. “I’m actually pretty sure I’m going to find a way to start making videos now,” Rider told me. “I really want more of that community in my life.”
Rob Walker is a contributing writer. His last article for the magazine was about Kinect.
Editor: Vera Titunik
Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved -
Celebrating Scuderia Ferrari
Return to Maranello
A journey to discover the origins
Maranello, 29 June 2012 – Maranello has to be the starting point. This is why in the Ferrari Cavalcade’s logbook, after the first stamp at the Museo Enzo Ferrari in Modena, the town in Emilia is the destination of the over 110 participating Ferraris.
It is a return to the roots of the Prancing Horse with an intense programme for the second day, including laps on the Fiorano race track.
A journey through Ferrari’s history
Ferrari Cavalcade delights spectators and participants
Bologna, 28 June 2012 – 110 Ferraris in the streets one uses every day doesn’t happen very often. The exception proved the rule today as long as you were present where the Ferrari Cavalcade passed.
The cars started in Bologna to the event organised by Ferrari with the idea to let the clients of the Prancing Horse feel the magic of the places connected to the history of the manufacturer from Maranello. They went to Imola where they were welcomed by the people who remembered the numerous successes Ferrari had here on this track. And then they arrived in Lugo, home of the Baracca family and of the symbol of the Prancing Horse, where the Ferrari Cavalcade was greeted with enthusiasm.
After the roads of the river Po delta the cars arrived at the Pomposa Abbey, where the people who had a visit planned didn’t know if they should visit the abbey or watch the parked Ferraris from close up. Before the Cavalcade drove back to Bologna they stopped in Ferrara in the shade of the marvelous Castello Estense.
Ferrari Cavalcade is on its way
Discovering the places and roads, which are forever connected to the brand of the Prancing Horse, accompanied by a stunning landscape and behind the wheel your own Ferrari.
Bologna, 28 June 2012 – This is the Ferrari Cavalcade – an initiative especially wanted by Ferrari Chairman Luca di Montezemolo – now at the start of its successful first edition: more then 110 participants, clients from all over the world, who started this morning at 9am in Bologna in their cars from the Prancing Horse.
The Ferrari Cavalcade left in the direction of Imola where the cars will arrive at the “Enzo e Dino Ferrari” circuit. The cavalcade is lead by someone special in the car number 00: Giancarlo Fisichella, winner of the 80th edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the GTE Pro category with the 458 Italia. After the ride on the track in Imola with three ability tests the over 110 cars participating in the Ferrari Cavalcade will drive to the river Po delta with a rich programme accompanying them.
Ferrari Cavalcade 2012
Over 100 clients from the Prancing Horse from all over the world discovering the Emilia region on the roads of the legendary races of the past
Maranello, 26 June 2012 – More than 100 Ferrari clients from all over the world will discover places in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, connected to the birth of the manufacturer from Maranello, with their own cars from the recent production from Thursday, 28 to Saturday, 30 June on the legendary roads of these Italian regions. They will drive on the roads of the Mille Miglia and on the Savio circuit, but also on the tracks where Ferrari has raced and won several times, such as Imola and Mugello as well as Fiorano, where the cars from the Prancing Horse are developed.
The Ferrari Cavalcade will start in Bologna in the direction of Imola and the “Dino e Enzo Ferrari” race track at the Santerno river, where the participants will carry out ability tests for the regularity race. The first day will be dedicated to the roads of the plain in Emilia-Romagna: Lugo, home of the Baracca family, where the Prancing Horse will be celebrated, along the roads of the river Po delta to visit the Pomposa Abbey, coming back via Ferrara degli Estensi on wonderful roads through the so called Pianura Padana. Friday will be dedicated to the area around Modena and the places connected to Ferrari with a visit in Maranello and laps on the Fiorano track. On the conclusive day the cars will drive though the Apennine to arrive at the Mugello circuit and later on at the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. The final stage of the 600 kilometres will lead to Bologna on the roads of the Mille Miglia with the legendary Futa and Raticosa passes.
The list of the participants’ countries underlines the internationality of the Ferrari brand: USA, China, Lebanon, Honk Kong, UAE, Mexico, South Africa and naturally Europe with France Germany, Belgium, the UK and Russia, just to name a few. The Cavalcade event is a way to introduce the clients of the Prancing Horse to the wonderful landscape, the artistic wonders and the exceptional cuisine of Italy. This will also be the philosophy of the upcoming Cavalcade events, which will bring the Ferrari clients to Italy’s most important places to discover hidden gems of this marvellous country.
The final check of the route has been carried out by the official website Ferrari.com with a 458 Spider, the perfect open car for such an exciting tour, with its stunning engine sound of the 570 bhp V8, which won the “Best Performance Engine of the Year” Award.
The updates from the Ferrari Cavalcade stages will be available on Ferrari.com with exclusive photos and videos.
Enrolled in the register of companies of Modena under no. 00159560366 – Copyright 2012 – All rights reserved -
Norta Ephron Dead at 71. Writer with a Genius for Writting.
Jonathan Wenk/Columbia PicturesNora Ephron on the set of her 2009 film, “Julie & Julia,” starring Ms. Streep, seated. More Photos »
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Nora Ephron in 1998 on home turf, the Upper West Side. More Photos »
June 26, 2012Nora Ephron, Dead at 71
By CHARLES McGRATH
Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her era’s most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71.
The cause was pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia, her son Jacob Bernstein said.
In a commencement address she delivered in 1996 at Wellesley College, her alma mater, Ms. Ephron recalled that women of her generation weren’t expected to do much of anything. But she wound up having several careers, all of them successfully and many of them simultaneously.
She was a journalist, a blogger, an essayist, a novelist, a playwright, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and a movie director — a rarity in a film industry whose directorial ranks were and continue to be dominated by men. Her later box-office success included “You’ve Got Mail” and “Julie & Julia.” By the end of her life, though remaining remarkably youthful looking, she had even become something of a philosopher about age and its indignities.
“Why do people write books that say it’s better to be older than to be younger?” she wrote in “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” her 2006 best-selling collection of essays. “It’s not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you’re constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday.”
Nora Ephron was born on May 19, 1941, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the eldest of four sisters, all of whom became writers. That was no surprise; writing was the family business. Her father, Henry, and her mother, the former Phoebe Wolkind, were Hollywood screenwriters who wrote, among other films, “Carousel,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and“Captain Newman, M.D.”
“Everything is copy,” her mother once said, and she and her husband proved it by turning the college-age Nora into a character in a play, later a movie, “Take Her, She’s Mine.” The lesson was not lost on Ms. Ephron, who seldom wrote about her own children but could make sparkling copy out of almost anything else: the wrinkles on her neck, her apartment, cabbage strudel, Teflon pans and the tastelessness of egg-white omelets.
She turned her painful breakup with her second husband, the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, into a best-selling novel, “Heartburn,” which she then recycled into a successful movie starring Jack Nicholson as a philandering husband and Meryl Streep as a quick-witted version of Ms. Ephron herself.
When Ms. Ephron was 4, her parents moved from New York to Beverly Hills, where she grew up, graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1958. At Wellesley, she began writing for the school newspaper, and in the summer of 1961 she was a summer intern in the Kennedy White House. She said later that perhaps her greatest accomplishment there was rescuing the speaker of the house, Sam Rayburn, from a men’s room in which he had inadvertently locked himself. In an essay for The New York Times in 2003, she said she was also probably the only intern that President John F. Kennedy had never hit on.
After graduation from college in 1962, she moved to New York, a city she always adored, intent on becoming a journalist. Her first job was as a mail girl at Newsweek. (There were no mail boys, she later pointed out.) Soon she was contributing to a parody of The New York Post put out during the 1962 newspaper strike. Her piece of it earned her a tryout at The Post, where the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, remarked: “If they can parody The Post, they can write for it. Hire them.”
Ms. Ephron stayed at The Post for five years, covering stories like the Beatles, the Star of India robbery at the American Museum of Natural History, and a pair of hooded seals at the Coney Island aquarium that refused to mate.
“The Post was a terrible newspaper in the era I worked there,” she wrote, but added that the experience taught her to write short and to write around a subject, since the kinds of people she was assigned to cover were never going to give her much interview time.
In the late 1960s Ms. Ephron turned to magazine journalism, at Esquire and New York mostly. She quickly made a name for herself by writing frank, funny personal essays — about the smallness of her breasts, for example — and tart, sharply observed profiles of people like Ayn Rand, Helen Gurley Brown and the composer and best-selling poet Rod McKuen. Some of these articles were controversial. In one, she criticized Betty Friedan for conducting a “thoroughly irrational” feud with Gloria Steinem; in another, she discharged a withering assessment of Women’s Wear Daily.
But all her articles were characterized by humor and honesty, written in a clear, direct, understated style marked by an impeccable sense of when to deploy the punchline. (Many of her articles were assembled in the collections “Wallflower at the Orgy,” “Crazy Salad” and “Scribble Scribble.”)
Ms. Ephron made as much fun of herself as of anyone else. She was labeled a practitioner of the New Journalism, with its embrace of novelistic devices in the name of reaching a deeper truth, but she always denied the connection. “I am not a new journalist, whatever that is,” she once wrote. “I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.”
Ms. Ephron got into the movie business more or less by accident after her marriage to Mr. Bernstein in 1976. He and Bob Woodward, his partner in the Watergate investigation, were unhappy with William Goldman’s script for the movie version of their book “All the President’s Men,” so Mr. Bernstein and Ms. Ephron took a stab at rewriting it. Their version was ultimately not used, but it was a useful learning experience, she later said, and it brought her to the attention of people in Hollywood.
Her first screenplay, written with her friend Alice Arlen, was for “Silkwood,” a 1983 film based on the life of Karen Silkwood, who died under suspicious circumstances while investigating abuses at a plutonium plant where she had worked. Ms. Arlen was in film school then, and Ms. Ephron had scant experience writing for anything other than the page. But Mike Nichols, who directed the movie (which starred Ms. Streep and Kurt Russell), said that the script made an immediate impression on him. He and Ms. Ephron had become friends when she visited him on the set of “Catch-22.”
“I think that was the beginning of her openly falling in love with the movies,” Mr. Nichols said in an interview, “and she and Alice came along with ‘Silkwood’ when I hadn’t made a movie in seven years. I couldn’t find anything that grabbed me.” He added: “Nora was so funny and so interesting that you didn’t notice that she was also necessary. I think a lot of her friends and readers will feel that.”
Ms. Ephron followed “Silkwood” three years later with a screenplay adaptation of her own novel “Heartburn,” which was also directed by Mr. Nichols. But it was her script for “When Harry Met Sally,” which became a hit Rob Reiner movie in 1989 starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, that established Ms. Ephron’s gift for romantic comedy and for delayed but happy endings that reconcile couples who are clearly meant for each other but don’t know it.
“When Harry Met Sally” is probably best remembered for Ms. Ryan’s table-pounding faked-orgasm scene with Mr. Crystal in Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side, prompting a middle-aged woman (played by Mr. Reiner’s mother, Estelle Reiner) sitting nearby to remark to her waiter, indelibly, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
The scene wouldn’t have gotten past the Hollywood censors of the past, but in many other respects Ms. Ephron’s films are old-fashioned movies, only in a brand-new guise. Her 1998 hit, “You’ve Got Mail,” for example, which she both wrote (with her sister Delia) and directed, is partly a remake of the old Ernst Lubitsch film ‘The Shop Around the Corner.”
Ms. Ephron began directing because she knew from her parents’ example how powerless screenwriters are (at the end of their careers both became alcoholics) and because, as she said in her Wellesley address, Hollywood had never been very interested in making movies by or about women. She once wrote, “One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there’s no confusion about who’s to blame: you are.”
Mr. Nichols said he had encouraged her to direct. “I knew she would be able to do it,” he recalled. “Not only did she have a complete comprehension of the process of making a movie — she simply soaked that up — but she had all the ancillary skills, the people skills, all the hundreds of things that are useful when you’re making a movie.”
Her first effort at directing, “This Is My Life” (1992), with a screenplay by Ms. Ephron and her sister Delia, based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer about a single mother trying to become a standup comedian, was a dud. But Ms. Ephron redeemed herself in 1993 with “Sleepless in Seattle” (she shared the screenwriting credits), which brought Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan together so winningly that they were cast again in “You’ve Got Mail.”
Among the other movies Ms. Ephron wrote and directed were “Lucky Numbers” (2000), “Bewitched” (2005) and, her last, “Julie & Julia” (2009), in which Ms. Streep played Julia Child.
She and Ms. Streep had been friends since they worked on “Silkwood” together. “Nora just looked at every situation and cocked her head and thought, ‘Hmmmm, how can I make this more fun?’ ” Ms. Streep wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday.
Ms. Ephron earned three Oscar nominations for best screenplay, for “Silkwood,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally.” But in all her moviemaking years she never gave up writing in other forms. Two essay collections, “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Reflections on Being a Woman” (2006) and “I Remember Nothing” (2010), were both best sellers. With her sister Delia she wrote a play, “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” about women and their wardrobes (once calling it “ ‘The Vagina Monologues’ without the vaginas”) and by herself she wrote “Imaginary Friends,” a play, produced in 2002, about the literary and personal quarrel between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy.
She also became an enthusiastic blogger for The Huffington Post, writing on subjects like the Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn’s accidentally putting a hole in a Picasso he owned and Ryan ONeal’s failing to recognize his own daughter and making a pass at her.
Several years ago, Ms. Ephron learned that she had myelodysplastic syndrome, a pre-leukemic condition, but she kept the illness a secret from all but a few intimates and continued to lead a busy, sociable life.
“She had this thing about not wanting to whine,” the writer Sally Quinn said on Tuesday. “She didn’t like self-pity. It was always, you know, ‘Suck it up.’ ”
Ms. Ephron’s first marriage, to the writer Dan Greenburg, ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Mr. Bernstein. In 1987 she married Nicholas Pileggi, the author of the books “Wiseguy”and “Casino.” (Her contribution to “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure,” edited by Larry Smith, reads: “Secret to life, marry an Italian.”)
In addition to her son Jacob Bernstein, a journalist who writes frequently for the Styles section of The Times, Ms. Ephron is survived by Mr. Pileggi; another son, Max Bernstein, a rock musician; and her sisters Delia Ephron; Amy Ephron, who is also a screenwriter; and Hallie Ephron, a journalist and novelist.
In person Ms. Ephron — small and fine-boned with high cheeks and a toothy smile — had the same understated, though no less witty, style that she brought to the page.
“Sitting at a table with Nora was like being in a Nora Ephron movie,” Ms. Quinn said. “She was brilliant and funny.”
She was also fussy about her hair and made a point of having it professionally blow-dried twice a week. “It’s cheaper by far than psychoanalysis and much more uplifting,” Ms. Ephron said.
Another friend, Robert Gottlieb, who had edited her books since the 1970s, said that her death would be “terrible for her readers and her movie audience and her colleagues.” But “the private Nora was even more remarkable,” he added, saying she was “always there for you with a full heart plus the crucial dose of the reality principle.”
Ms. Streep called her a “stalwart.”
“You could call on her for anything: doctors, restaurants, recipes, speeches, or just a few jokes, and we all did it, constantly,” she wrote in her e-mail. “She was an expert in all the departments of living well.”
The producer Scott Rudin recalled that less than two weeks before her death, he had a long phone session with her from the hospital while she was undergoing treatment, going over notes for a pilot she was writing for a TV series about a bank compliance officer. Afterward she told him, “If I could just get a hairdresser in here, we could have a meeting.”
Ms. Ephron’s collection “I Remember Nothing” concludes with two lists, one of things she says she won’t miss and one of things she will. Among the “won’t miss” items are dry skin, Clarence Thomas, the sound of the vacuum cleaner, and panels on “Women in Film.” The other list, of the things she will miss, begins with “my kids” and “Nick” and ends this way:
“Taking a bath
Coming over the bridge to Manhattan
Paul Vitello contributed reporting.
Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved -
European GP: Fernando Alonso savours emotional victory
European GP: Fernando Alonso savours emotional victory
By Andrew BensonChief F1 writerSpain’s Fernando Alonso said his European Grand Prix win on Sunday was the most emotional of his career.
The Ferrari driver fought from 11th on the grid to win in Valencia on the same weekend the Spanish football team made it to the semi-finals of Euro 2012.
“The emotions are unique because for Spain it is a difficult time with economic problems,” he said.
“People made sacrifices to come here, and yesterday we felt sad because we did not give them what they wanted.”
The win was the 29th of the 30-year-old’s F1 career and it moved him into the championship lead, 20 points ahead of Red Bull’s Mark Webber.
The two drivers Alonso considers his biggest rivals – McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel – both retired from the race.
Vettel had an alternator failure while leading and Hamilton was taken out in a collision with Williams’s Pastor Maldonado.
ANALYSIS
Gary AndersonBBC F1 technical analyst“One of the things that makes Alonso so good is that if he gets an opportunity to win, he will take it. That is exactly what happened in Valencia.”
But Alonso said re-taking the championship lead meant little with more than half the season still to go.
“I’m very happy,” he said. “But it’s the eighth race of 20, (so there is) nothing to be proud or excited about.
“We need to be honest with ourselves and our fans – yesterday we were out of Q3 and there were some people quicker than us but this win will have a big impact on the confidence of the people in Maranello (Ferrari’s base).
“It’s true that we believe and we will never give up, we will have confidence in ourselves and we will arrive with optimism at every grand prix we go to.
“But at the same time, apart from winning today or finishing sixth today, we know that we are not in the position that we want to be and there are a few cars quicker than us and we cannot be blind to that. We need to work.”
Alonso inherited the lead when Vettel retired on lap 34, and had been promoted to third place from fourth behind the safety car following the latest in a series of pit-stop problems for Hamilton this year.
But he won most of the other positions thanks to some audacious overtaking moves, relentlessly quick pace and a typically fast first pit stop from Ferrari.
His final passing move was the one that put him in a position to take the lead when Vettel retired – Alonso passed Lotus’s Romain Grosjean for second place around the outside of the first corner following the resumption of racing after a safety-car period.
“On the emotional side, I think this is the best victory, the emotions I felt on the podium there is nothing to compare,” Alonso said.
“On the driving side maybe we had better wins. We had some good overtaking manoeuvres with some guys but, with some retirements etc, we found the win in an easier way.
“Before the race we were thinking at the best to be fifth or sixth and score as many points as possible and not to lose too many points with the winners.
“I need to watch the race on TV because I don’t know how we were third behind the safety car – how we recovered so many positions – and then I need to look at the moment with Grosjean and then exactly what happened with Sebastian and Hamilton.”
He added: “You need to have the pace to overtake people. There were some overtaking manoeuvres we were lucky (with) because they were quite aggressive and we touched a bit and they can go either way.
“We [took] risks, we were aggressive, we had the pace and we were lucky.
Copyright 2012. BBCSPORT.com. All Rights Reserved
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Schumacher’s Future with Mercedes Formula 1 Team Seemingly Uncertain
Michael Shumacher, Seven time World Formula One Driving Champion.Post categories: Formula 1
Andrew Benson | 20:27 UK time, Monday, 25 June 2012
There was a certain inevitability, given the history of Michael Schumacher’s career, about the fact that his first podium finish since his comeback involved a degree of controversy.
In Valencia, Schumacher drove the latest in a series of strong races to finally deliver on the potential he has shown with Mercedes more or less since the start of the year.
In the end, the controversy was much ado about nothing – the man who is notorious for pushing the boundaries of acceptability did nothing wrong.
Red Bull’s Mark Webber reported to his team that Schumacher had his DRS overtaking aid, which boosts straight-line speed, open as they passed waved yellow caution flags late in the race.
The rules say a driver must slow down significantly for yellow flags; Schumacher did – case closed.
His third in the European Grand Prix has been a long time coming. It was Schumacher’s first podium finish since the 2006 Chinese Grand Prix, when he was driving for Ferrari, but it should arguably have happened already this season, by far his strongest since his comeback at the start of 2010 after three years in retirement.
In 2010 and 2011, Schumacher struggled compared to team-mate Nico Rosberg.
In the first year of his comeback, Schumacher was nowhere near him; by the second half of last year the two were evenly matched in races, but the younger man out-qualified the veteran 15-4 over the whole season.
This season, finally, has been different. On performance, there has been virtually nothing to choose between them in qualifying or races.
Each has scored a pole position - although Schumacher lost his in Monaco to a grid penalty - and only a dreadful reliability record on the seven-time champion’s car has stopped him scoring many more points than he has.
While Rosberg has completed every lap, Schumacher has finished only three races and of his five retirements only one has been his fault.
So where might a podium have come based on his performances prior to this one?
Schumacher was running third in Australia when he retired, but he would probably have finished fifth there. His tyre degradation was too severe to challenge Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren or hold off the Red Bulls of Sebastian Vettel and Webber, who filled the three places behind winner Jenson Button.
Mercedes think Schumacher would have gone on to finish second to a dominant Rosberg in China had he not retired immediately after his pit stop because a front wheel had not been fitted correctly.
But other teams believe the two McLarens would have beaten Schumacher and possibly the Red Bulls, too.
His pole lap in Monaco was particularly impressive and that would almost certainly have been converted into at least a podium finish. But first there was a five-place grid penalty for causing a crash in Spain, and then he retired from the race with a fuel-pressure failure.
When it finally came, the podium finish owed something to the unusual circumstances of the race and a lot to Hamilton being taken out by Williams’s Pastor Maldonado. But it would be hard to argue Schumacher didn’t deserve it on the balance of the year.
When he announced his comeback, he said he wanted to win another world title. But as soon as it became obvious from early in 2010 that he was going to struggle, he has always maintained that getting back on to the pace would be a long-term matter.
No-one expected it to take as long as it has. But perhaps that is to underestimate how much he lost in his three years away, his age – he is now 43 – and the incredible depth of talent in today’s field.
Schumacher is still some way short of the driver he once was, a man who could consistently dance on a limit beyond that of anyone else.
But taking this season on average, there is now virtually nothing to choose on pace between him and Rosberg – the one exception being China, where the younger man had the best part of half a second on his team-mate.
That, though, puts Mercedes in an intensely awkward position and facing a very difficult decision – because Schumacher’s contract runs out at the end of this year.
The problem is, good as Rosberg is, few outside Mercedes believe he is a match for the three towering talents of this generation – Fernando Alonso, Hamilton and Vettel.
Yet this is a team with aspirations to win the world title and some would argue they are putting themselves at an automatic disadvantage with their current driver line-up.
So do they offer Schumacher another contract on the basis of his improved performance, continue to benefit from the undoubted marketing benefits of his presence in the team as a driver and hope they can build a car that is better than a Red Bull, a McLaren and a Ferrari? Or do they go for someone else?
They are known to be interested in Hamilton, the only one of the big three who is potentially available to take his place.
But Hamilton may well not be available – he seems more likely to either stick with McLaren or to try to persuade Red Bull they should take him on given the reasonable possibility they could lose Vettel to Ferrari at the end of next year.
Yet how long can Mercedes expect Schumacher – who will be 44 next January – to be able to continue at this level?
In which case, should they gamble on a younger man who may represent the future, someone like the increasingly impressive Paul di Resta, for example, who just happens to be a Mercedes protege?
What would you do?
Copyright. 2012. BBCSPORT.com All Rights Reserved
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Michael Jackson in His Own Words
Michael Jackson in His Own Words
In the September issue, contributing editor Lisa Robinson revisits her conversations over the years with Michael Jackson, who was just 14 when she met him, in 1972. Here are snippets from her revealing article, illustrated with photographs from the troubled superstar’s career. Related: “The Boy Who Would Be King,” by Lisa Robinson.
Kansas City, Missouri, February 23, 1988: Michael Jackson had just finished the opening night of his Bad tour and his manager, Frank DiLeo, arranged for me to visit the star in his hotel suite.Michael Jackson performs onstage in Kansas City during the Bad tour. By Bettmann/Corbis.
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Copyright. 2012. CondeNast. All Rights Reserved.
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