YES IT’S A CHEAP COINCIDENCE, but Misc. couldn’t help but notice when KING-TV’s Saturday morning “objective” coverage of the Makah whale hunt was peppered with commercials showing a gracefully-swimming whale family to symbolize the feelings of security and strength Pacific Life Insurance promises to provide for your own family.
For over a year now, the Makahs have been using their long-threatened whale-hunt revival to reignite tribal pride and tradition (and to publicize their current-day plight in the media). The anti-whaling protesters, meanwhile, have latched onto the grey whale as, while no longer a threatened species, an icon of anthropomorphic identification, a “virtual pet” as it were, loaded with all sorts of new-agey baggage about the sacred continuum of nature. Both parties are using the creatures to embody their own ideologies. I’m beginning to think the poor whales would be better off if everybody just let them be animals for once. Elsewhere in misplaced-symbolism-land…
MORE POST-LITTLETON MUSINGS: I have to admit, a month or so after the tragedy, that I’ve eagerly lapped up all the print and online gunk by assorted grownups who saw a connection with the shooters–not with the shooters’ neo-Nazi affectations, obviously, but with the other kids’ descriptions of the shooters as the sensitive smart kids who were harassed out of any future adult self-esteem. By the time the monthly print and web magazines came out on the topic, it seemed like everybody who ever grew up to become a writer had been one of the shy, brainy, unpopular kids, a situation I could certainly identify with.
Besides the obvious self-ID part, I wistfully sighed whenever I read remarks that the popular kids, the blondes and the tuff guys, were the ones who’d never amount to anything beyond six kids, three ex-spouses, and a crumbling clapboard rambler in some godforsaken subdivision. Alas, since the mid-’80s it was the jocks and cheerleaders who’ve grown up to be the Limbaugh target audience, the patrons of “hot” nitespots and cigar bars, who drive the bigass SUVs and generally act like they own everybody else. Elsewhere in personal-achievement-land…
BIG BOOK UPDATE: By the time you read this, The Big Book of Misc. will be at the printers for second galley proofs. Design maestro Hank Trotter has come up with a great front cover, reminiscent of Saul Bass’s classic movie posters. It now looks like there will be two release parties. The “pre-release” release party, for loyal Misc. World online readers, will be part of the annual Misc.-O-Rama party held every June–this time on Tuesday, June 8, at the new Ditto Tavern on 5th near Bell. A few weeks later, there’ll be a more widely publicized event once it starts getting into a few stores. You can already pre-order your own copy by check or money order; full instructions are at this link. Online credit-card ordering may be up later this week. Elsewhere in print-land…
FONT OF WISDOM?: The triumphant and unexpected return of Helvetica, formerly the just-about-official Uncoolest Typeface on Earth, is now upon us. It’s the official typeface of ARO.Space and its sister business the Ace Hotel; it’s all over fancy-schmancy mags like Stuff and Surface; and teven he ever trend-following Urban Outfitters chain has adopted it. If it were just the case of a gay dance club, I’d have said it had to be a particularly gay trend–or, at least, that only gay men would see beauty in the typeface straight men have grown up associating with the utter dorkiness of the Penthouse group of magazines (as well as all the tacky little documents that appeared during the early years of desktop publishing, when Helvetica and Times were just about the only font families available on first-generation laser printers).
But the truth of the matter lies beyond such superficial assumptions. Post-rave dance-graphics designers are really using Helvetica because it’s the main onscreen typeface of Kai’s Power Tools, a wildly-popular graphics software program. Power Tools’ chief software architect, the legendary Mr. Kai Krause, built his on-screen menus and instruction screens from Helvetica because (1) it’s a typeface most all computers these days have got; (2) it’s clean and compact; and (3) when used in just the right way, it symbolizes a particularly French-German-Swiss vision of urbane, late-industrial modernism, somewhere between post-Bauhaus architecture and space-age home furnishings. Before Kai’s Power Tools, dance-club flyers, ads, and interiors sported that neo-psychedelic look, all busy and color-saturated and passionate. After Kai’s Power Tools, everything became streamlined and direct and icy-hot.
Some observers might disdain this trend as a regression, away from nostalgia for the celebratory sensuality of 1969 and toward nostalgia for the disciplined, repressive coolness of 1961. I see it as something else, something a little more progressive. To me, the Kai’s Power Tools look is one of invitation and seduction. The old rave look was a very inward iconography, which could only be fully appreciated (or even decoded) if you were already part of the “tribe” (or if you had previously taken the same specific drug-trips the visuals were trying to imitate). The Kai’s incarnation of Helvetica invites newcomers into its deceptively ordered-seeming realm. Instead of an invite-only orgy, it’s a seduction. Elsewhere in early-’60s-relic-land…
WAITING FOR THE END OF THE `WORLD’: We’d previously written that the classic TV soap opera might be a doomed art form in the U.S., because overall network ratings might continue to diminish beyond the point of fiscal viability for these expensive, never-to-be-rerun drama episodes. This is essentially why NBC made the widely-predicted but still shocking decision to cancel the 35-year-old Another World, the network’s second-longest-running entertainment series. It’s been among the lowest-rated soaps for a decade (locally, KING-TV didn’t even run it for two years). But NBC’s dropping AW and keeping the even lower-rated Sunset Beach, because SB has a few more viewers in the prized young-female demographic.
Sure, there are the usual save-our-show fan movements and websites out there, and calls and faxes are descending on other broadcast and cable networks with pleas to keep AW going. But, so far, it’s been to no avail, and the last episode’s still scheduled for the end of June. These other networks probably view AW as unsalvagable. For too many years, too many popular characters have been killed off or otherwise written out, either in budget cuts or in moves to make AW more like NBC’s only successful soap, Days of Our Lives. Instead of stories of equally-sympathetic characters caught up in irreconcilably-conflicting motivations and goals, the producers and writers have gone the DOOL route of building everything around the machinations of one-dimensional supervillains. The largely unwatchable results turned off many longtime AW loyalists while failing to attract many new converts.
AW was originally conceived by soap genius Irna Phillips to be a spinoff of As the World Turns (hence the title). That aspect of the concept was dropped when the show landed on NBC instead of CBS, but it remained a more melodramatic, turmoil-ridden version of a regular extended-family story. (Appropriately enough for the angst-ridden storylines, it’s always been taped at the former Biograph silent-movie studios in Brooklyn, on the same stages where D.W. Griffith filmed Birth of a Nation.) AW found its peak during the ’70s under writer Harding LeMay. In 1974 it became the first soap to expand to an hour, a trend followed by most of the other successful serials and causing the squeezing-out of several long-running half-hour shows.
Now, it’s being squeezed out as a casualty of the new TV economics. A movie runs only a couple of hours but lives forever. A daytime soap is constructed to continue indefinitely, but when it ends it ends for good. When AW goes, an entire fictional universe carefully built up by successive writers, actors, and technicians, and taken to heart by generations of viewers, will disappear into the ether of the airwaves, preserved only on reels of archival videotape.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we start talking about the age-old issue of “what this town really needs,” continue to work for justice-and-or-peace, pray for warmth, and consider this remark by Seattle’s own Gypsy Rose Lee, referring to someone else as being “descended from a long line that her mother listened to.”
