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YESTERDAY, we discussed what’s wrong withPlayboy these days. It’s bland, corporate, materialistic to a festishist extent, and not particularly sexy.
Today, we begin to ponder an alternate vision-in-text of what sex is and can be in this new century.
And I don’t mean that now-passe ’90s vision, expressed in Wired magazine and elsewhere, of advanced masturbation helpers such as holographic pornos and “dildonic” sensor-fitted suits. Even at the time those things were being hyped, I believed sex ought to be about bringing people together, not keeping them apart in their lonely individual fantasy realms.
The world doesn’t need more fake sex. It needs more real (albeit safe) sex. Sex is great. Most people should have more.
This means I think coitus (in whatever gender-combo you prefer) is preferable to solo sex; but, more importantly, that any (respectful) sexual expression is preferable to the squeaky-clean unreality promoted by the religious right and those high-school purity pledges.
Chastity is good, at least for periods of time, for (1) those adults who’ve chosen it as part of a spiritual discipline; (2) those young people who aren’t yet ready for the emotional turmoil of intimate relationships (or for the discipline of contraception); (3) those in monogamous relationships who choose to forego alternatives during periods of separation; (4) those older and/or widowed people who’ve chosen to retire their sex lives; and (5) those in dysfunctional life patterns who need to take time out from intimacy while working to heal themselves.
But for the vast rest of the citizenry, more sex is, generally, mo’ better.
It’s not the answer to everything (and it’s certainly not the only answer to an otherwise failing relationship).
But when it’s done right, it can bring you to a greater awareness of yourself, your partner, and even to the continuum of life.
(It’s also a great way to relieve nervous tension, invigorate your metabolism, and spot potential cancer warning signs.)
And the answer to bad sex, i most cases, isn’t no sex but good sex–a healthy attitude towards one’s body and its cravings, combined with enough guilt-free respect to avoid or resist abusive situations.
You don’t prevent kids from getting exploited by keeping them ignorant and “innocent,” but by teaching them to respect their sexualities and themselves. You don’t prevent the spread of STDs by telling people they have to stay alone in shame and frustration, but by helping them learn to love safely and consciously.
NEXT: Just a little more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
SHOWTIME RAN ONE of those Playboy self-congratulatory videos this month.
The magazine’s video division has put out at least three or four of these tapes in recent years. All of them gush on and on about how the magazine singlehandedly started the Sexual Revolution, conquered the bad ol’ American Puritan double standards, allowed people to feel good about their bodies, and taught folk to view the mating act as fun and even wholesome.
And its founder Hugh M. Hefner is always depicted by his hired video documentarians as the ultimate cool dude, a great party host and a tireless supporter of all righteous causes. By the time one of these videos is over, a viewer might feel a cult-O-personality trip going on, despite the claims to the publisher’s self-effacing humility.
None of these hype jobs or related PR efforts have daunted the magazine’s longtime critics, who’ve leveled the same charges against it all these years–charges that imagine the magazine to be as singularly influential as it claims to be, but in the wrong direction.
Not only is this single monthly rag blamed for the objectivication of women among males and unhealthy body-image obsessions among young females, but some accusers have even blamed it for rape and domestic violence.
In my opinion, that’s a crock. Neither Playboy nor, I presume, anyone working for it wants anybody to get hurt. Nor, at least in their own minds, do they mean to demean womanhood. They think they’re honoring, even celebrating female humanity by offering what they claim to be “The World’s Most Beautiful Women” and asking readers to worship these women as perfect, unattainable fantasy topics.
That’s what I think they think they’re doing. What I think they’re really doing is different, both from that explanation and the critics’ diatribes.
Playboy is really a relic of the grey-flannel-suit era of marketing and advertising it claims to have originally been a rebellious statement against. It’s corporate and bland. It treats sex as just another consumer-leisure activity, no more or less involving than shopping or tourism.
And the girlie pictures are like ads for an unavailable “product,” utilizing every graphic advance in lighting and digital retouching to portray their subjects as “flatteringly” as ad photographers try to “humanize” the newest cars and detergents.
Today’s Playmate characterizations (and, remember, the models themselves might not really be anything like the roles they’re playing) are neither alluring temptresses nor friendly girls-next-door. They’re L.A. starlets, model/actress/whatevers all done up with bleach and silicone. They exist only in a Hollywood make-believe realm (and in the cut-rate versions of that realm that are North America’s lap-dance clubs). Their purpose is to sell–to sell magazines and videos, to sell their own star-images.
And a lot of the time, they’re not even all that sexy.
It’s an aesthetic that has everything to do with turning young men into good consumers and nothing to do with turning them into good lovers.
Its deficiencies wouldn’t seem to matter, since Playboy has had the softcore-hetero market pretty much to itself. Its only non-sleazy rivals are the new Perfect 10 and the newer print version of the website Nerve. All the other girlie magazines have gone to hardcore porn.
But while neither Hefner nor anybody else Stateside was looking, the British “bloke magazines” such as Maxim started U.S. editions with leering-attitude text pieces, non-nude pictures of supermodels (themselves sales professionals in the business of selling women’s clothes), and advice (albeit often wrong advice) on how young men might get beyond just looking at pictures of women and start dating and mating with genuine females.
Maxim and its ilk are simultanously treating sex more like a part of its readers’ lives and making it seem naughty again. They’re rapidly gaining on Playboy in both circulation and in the cultural consciousness; while Hefner continues to schmooze at his palace with his invited Hollywood celebrities, ignoring (or trying to ignore) the social/sexual changes challenging both his and Hollywood’s grip on America’s minds and crotches.
NEXT: Sex magazines may be dumb, but sex is still great!
WHAT WE KNOW about Bush Administration deux after a little over one week:
I predict: He’ll see how much stink these actions raise; then, if they raise sufficient stink, he’ll pretend to be reluctantly disappointed as he backs off from the positions he’s now pretending to uphold.
He’s a dealmaker, the kind of business tycoon who accomplishes power-building transactions, then lets others sort out the resulting operations. (Except he’s generally gotten along in business (and Texas statehouse politics) because of his name, and let other guys do even the dealmaking details.)
He’ll play out his term as an affable head of state, kowtowing to whatever national agenda Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan pushes–just like Clinton eventually did.
NEXT: What’s wrong with Playboy isn’t what feminists think is wrong with it.
IN OTHER NEWS: If you haven’t noticed, I’ve cut out about a third of the clutter around the left and right sides of this page. If anyone still has trouble loading the site properly, please let me know.
AS I’VE PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN, I’m working on a coffee-table picture book about my town (tentatively titled City Light). I hope to get it out in September, coinciding with Seattle’s 150th birthday. I’ll be writing the text (short, pithy odes to my favorite local neighborhoods, places, people, and historical tales). I’m also taking some of the pix, with one of them newfangled digital camera thangs.
But for the book’s big showcase photos, I’m grateful to be working with a great photographer and local native named Lori Lynn Mason. She creates huge 4-by-6-inch color shots, mini-masterpieces of light and color. But even more importantly, she shares my love of Seattle and concern for its accelerating changes.
We’ve been on three or four shooting sessions thus far, assembling a sample chapter on Aurora Avenue (the spine of old Seattle’s heart and soul) to show to prospective publishers or investors. (Color photo books cost a bit more to print than the two monochrome, text-based volumes MISCmedia has published to date.)
As you can tell from these shots (including the above, shot during a 29 Live cablecast at the public access studios), it’s going to be vastly different document from the tourist-oriented Seattle photo books you may know. It’ll be about people of all stripes living, working, playing, and creating around here. It’ll celebrate the ideas, the spirit, and the ambitions of our formerly-fair city.
My only regret is I didn’t start on it sooner.
Not only because we’re on tight deadlines to get this out by September, but because darn near every week a valuable piece of the city’s heritage goes away (such as the Pioneer Square pergola, destroyed inadvertantly by a semi truck earlier this month.)
NEXT: What we know about the new Administration after a week.
JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they’ve quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.
Among them, in no particular order:
Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network’s oldies channel).
NEXT: If you’re really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.
IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): “A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era.”
YOU DON’T NEED those TV Land “Retromercials” to get a remembrance of the ’70s energy crisis nowadays.
But it’d still be fun to exhume some of the old public-service ads from the era. Like the one where Fred Flintstone sings and dances about “Conservation Energy,” or the one with images of a decrepit old ’20s gas station and a solemn announcer proclaiming that “gas for less is gone–less gas is here to stay.”
Between the government-sanctioned extortion games of Calif. electric-generating companies (spun off from electric “retail” providers by a “deregulation” scheme designed to turn the power biz into a high-yield game for stock-market speculators), OPEC oil-supply manipulations, domestic oil-and-gas biz consolidations (such as the Exxon-Mobil merger and BP’s gobbling-up of Amoco and Arco), and climate changes that’ve (perhaps permanently) limited the capacity of Northwest hydro plants, we’re essentially in a mess folks.
And it gets worse when you ponder that this might not be a confluence of bad tidings, but the end of a confluence of good tidings.
That is, the cheap oil and abundant electricity North Americans enjoyed in the ’90s may have been just temporary blessings, not permanent trends of which today’s hassles are momentary interruptions.
In other words: The bad good-old-days of the Energy Crisis are back. And this time, they may stay a while longer.
Get out the CB radios to search for gasoline (OK, you’ll probably use cell phones with wireless e-mail instead, but the idea’s the same). Bring back the toilet bricks, the three extra layers of fiberglass attic insulation, the vanpools, and the notices in the windows of movie theaters and shopping centers apologizing for keeping their electric signs on.
Also, it won’t just be in the back pages of obscure magazines but in junk e-mails that you’ll find solicitations about “miracle” fuel-cell inventions (just needing that little extra bit of capital investment from you to become practical), or conspiracy stories about that secret gasoline pill the oil companies are supposed to have kept off the market.
Hey, maybe we’ll even get a revival of wind and solar power; so something good could come of this yet.
And if we’re really, REALLY lucky, perhaps those monster luxury SUVs will sooner or later become quaintly nostalgic but obsolete relics.
NEXT: Still more wacky new cable channels.
ANOTHER OF MY FAVORITE HAUNTS closed last week.
The Ditto Tavern was one of the tiny joints where, in the mid-to-late ’80s, you could see the likes of Green River, Soundgarden, Andrew Wood, and the other unsung heroes of what was still a very underground local alterna-rock scene. The place was willing to book this stuff because it was a tiny spot, well off of Belltown’s foot-traffic patterns, and hence needed to attract a “destination” clientele.
But as the Seattle scene actually got popular, the little out-of-the-way Ditto could no longer compete for acts with any real following. The place’s old owner seemed unable or unwilling to do anything to improve its situation.
It closed in early ’98 and reopened that fall, under new management and with a very handsome orange-and-black paint scheme. I was in a fairly decent drinking mode that fall, having been hired from a longtime post, and enjoyed having another regular hangout.
It had good pub meals and 21 (count ’em!) micros and imports on tap. It was clean and bright and had good rotating art exhibits. It did a good lunch business and had a modest but loyal regular evening crowd.
But the location problem remained a problem; and without the capital to hire enough relief staff, Lydia the new owner went on a slow-n’-steady road to burnout.
So when the building’s owner announced plans to raze the whole half-block for yet another office-retail midrise, she was, as she told me later, only too happy to get the heck outta Belltown.
Besides, she said, the type of people she wanted as customers seemed to have all moved away from the neighborhood. The affluent new condo dwellers, furthermore, don’t walk around in the neighborhood, preferring to drive to and from their secured garages.
Belltown really lost its “artist neighborhood” status back in ’97 or so; with the demolition of the SCUD studios (a.k.a. “the Jell-O mold building”) as the signature event of this loss. Developers of condo tower in the neighborhood continue to advertise their luxury homes with hype-words about the “lively urban creativity” their projects have already kicked out–or which the new condo dwellers immediately attempt to kick out, via lobbying for enhanced zoning and anti-noise regulations.
(And no, I don’t consider architects’ offices to be “art studios” or $100-a-plate restaurants to be “avant-hip nightspots.”)
Just don’t count on any potential ’01 economic recession to change this trend. All it might mean is a few projects could take a little longer to get off the ground, and the resulting new abodes could be merely ridiculously expensive instead of obscenely expensive.
So with the situation unlikely to change on its own, perhaps an urban-preservation movement is in order. But I don’t mean that old kind of urban preservation, in which ancient meat-packing plants, brothels, and horse stables were “restored to their original elegance.”
I mean a preservation of usages, not just of structures.
Other activists and thinkers have already suggested officially designating certain buildings (or spaces within buildings) for below-market-rent artist use. I’d go further, and designate certain parts of certain “urban village” neighborhoods for affordable housing (artist and otherwise), non-luxury retail, and entertainment (including bars and live-music clubs). Folks who move into a block that a live-music club is on will be told as they move in that they can’t just kick the music people out.
None of this would’ve saved the Ditto, whose problems were endemic from its first opening. But maybe they’ll save what’s left of the ol’ Belltown scene on First through Fourth Avenues.
And, just maybe, if there does turn out to be an oversupply of luxury home units in Belltown this year, the purveyors of those units might be willing to participate in a scheme that would limit or even cut back these units’ inventory, thus keeping the prices of the remaining units from falling too far.
NEXT: The bad old days of energy crises–they’re baaaaaaaack.
I’VE LONG BELIEVED more modern-day American citizens would be fans of jazz music if they weren’t so aggressively ordered, from childhood on, that they MUST love it.
You know, that music-appreciation-class bluster about “American Classical Music” or “This Country’s Only Indigenous Art Form.”
That, alas, is the overriding spirit of Ken Burns’s PBS maxi-documentary Jazz, lumbering to its dubious close next Monday. (The last episode being the only one to cover anything done within many of our readers’ lifetimes.)
The whole 18-hour thing is sluggishly laden with the worst didactic balderdash in the stoic narration and the even stoic-er read quotations from old critics (drowning out every single instrumental band and solo segment and even many vocal clips).
Then there’s the structure, the storyline Burns built the show around. It’s all about Great Men (and a few Great Women), American heroes who overcame (for the black musicians) a racist society or (for the white musicians) conformist notions of social respectability. The swirling stew of influences and trends, of commercial thrusts and avant-garde parries, gets muted and confined by the restrictions of a narrative amenable to suburban middle-class parents (i.e., boring as hell to suburban middle-class kids).
One critic even compared Burns, in his pedestrian approach to the topic and his sports-hero depiction of jazz’s greats, to “Bob Costas with an NEA grant.”
But, this being an age when audiovisual entertainments can be as mutable and expansionist as the best jazz has always been, we don’t necessarily need to be stuck with Burns’s work in its current form. We can write in to PBS and demand a deluxe DVD version of the series.
The new on-camera interviews in Jazz are fun, so they could stay in this proposed special edition–as stand-alone clips accessible from the DVD Extras menu.
Similarly, the narrations and quotations should be shunted off to an optional audio track.
That leaves the heart of jazz, and of Jazz–the music itself.
This proposed special edition would contain all the tuneage of the series, with each song played to its full length. (That would require more of the beautiful old-movie footage and historic still photos (did anyone else notice the three-second shot of a Louis Armstrong marquee sign outside Seattle’s Showbox?), but Burns probably has those piled up to his reed hole.)
This version wouldn’t preach at people, especially kids and teens, about how important jazz is.
It would simply let them hear and see for themselves how great it is.
A Final Thought: Jazz, like all the really great American music and culture, had and has just about nothing to do with that stoic-middlebrow PBS-ian (or Ken Burns-ian) voice of mellow authority. Real jazz (like ragtime, western swing, swamp blues, Gospel, rockabilly, R&B, bluegrass, disco, Ramones-era punk, Melle Mel-era hiphop, etc. etc. etc.) is music of cultural mongrelization and cross-pollenization; of life and lust and passion; of pain and loss and joy and the will to go on.
That’s why the music will survive long after dumb TV shows about it have been deservedly forgotten.
NEXT: Should we pity poor Belltown yet?
EVERYBODY WANTS ‘IT.’
Everybody seems to think IT will change the world.
Nobody who knows what IT is is apparently willing to talk.
For those who tuned in late, IT (all capital letters), also code-named “Ginger,” is a mysterious invention being cleverly hyped by its creator, one Dean Kamen.
The Harvard Business School Press is said to have paid $250,000 for a book about IT, to be issued at the same time the invention itself is revealed, sometime next year. The press’s press release about the book deal claims Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and some venture capital tycoons have seen the thing but are sworn to non-disclosure agreements not to discuss it.
The release also offers some hypeworthy clues: that the invention isn’t a computer or a medical device, that the model shown to Jobs and Bezos (which may or may not be full size) can be assembled quickly from pieces carried in a large gym bag, and that it would be so revolutionary that, quoting Jobs, people will “architect cities around it.”
This clever tease campaign has led to some serious speculation and rumor-mongering.
While some mighty wacky theories have popped up, ranging from an antigravity device to a Star Trek-like teleportation machine. Some amateur sleuths have discovered patent applications in Kamen’s name for a sort of Razor scooter on steroids (one of Kamen’s past inventions was an all-terrain wheelchair); but that thing could very well be an abandoned Kamen project, or one unrelated to the “Ginger” code name.
I, however, will be your IT boy today, for I have it on very good authority indeed just exactly what IT is.
And just because you’ve been extra-nice, I’ll share it.
The definitive and accurate description comes from Kieren McCarthy at the UK tech-news site The Register:
“What can it be? What can it be? Is it a hoax?, cry the cynics. Will it stop my hair falling out? Will it make my sad, pathetic existence better for a few minutes? Well, folks, we can tell you what Ginger is. It’s a manifestation of the sick modern world where style is more important that substance, where perception is king, where people screw their neighbour to buy an overpriced bit of clothing with a particular name on and where the press report a story because other parts of the press have reported it and so it must be a story. It could also, possibly, be an interesting bit of technology. But we’re not holding our breath and we don’t care until we see it. And you shouldn’t either. Call up your wife and tell her you love her. That’s real.”
“What can it be? What can it be? Is it a hoax?, cry the cynics. Will it stop my hair falling out? Will it make my sad, pathetic existence better for a few minutes?
Well, folks, we can tell you what Ginger is.
It’s a manifestation of the sick modern world where style is more important that substance, where perception is king, where people screw their neighbour to buy an overpriced bit of clothing with a particular name on and where the press report a story because other parts of the press have reported it and so it must be a story.
It could also, possibly, be an interesting bit of technology. But we’re not holding our breath and we don’t care until we see it. And you shouldn’t either.
Call up your wife and tell her you love her. That’s real.”
MONDAY: I love jazz. I hate Jazz.
SEVEN DISGRUNTLED MICROSOFT EMPLOYEES (current and former) have filed this here $5 billion race-discrimination lawsuit. They claim there’s a “plantation mentality” at the software giant, in which black employees were routinely denied promotions and raises and were subject to retaliation if they complained.
In its statements of denial, MS officials essentially said such a thing could never, ever have occurred at a company so forthright, so diversity-conscious. The routine tech-media gang of MS defenders has gone on to share this line.
Why are some people so shocked to hear about the Microsoft discrimination suit? You all oughta know by now how the software giant’s got this corporate culture in which only a certain type of person (the Gates clone wannabe) gets ahead.
The MS corporate culture was, at least indirectly, inspired by that of Nordstrom (which, you may recall, faced its own discrimination suit a few years back).
In both companies, and in whitebread Seattle society in general, the real goal of preaching “diversity” isn’t to bring more minorities into the corridors of power but to allow the white folks already there to feel better about themselves. If corporate Seattle could figure out a way to support minority rights without having to actually deal with real black (or hispanic or American Indian) folks in their own offices, they would.
One quintessential example of this hypocrisy is the awful movie version of that breast-beating, locally-written novel Snow Falling On Cedars.
It’s ostensibly about the WWII relocation camps and other racist acts against Japanese Americans in our state not too long ago. But the movie (in which no Asian-American actor is billed higher than eighth!), and the novel, are really all about raising audience sympathy for the nice white-boy hero, a noble hack journalist (and the author’s presumed alter ego).
This past week’s local Martin Luther King Day public-service ads further exemplify this faux-diversity mindset.
The ads all venerate King as a visionary, a leader, a forward-thinker (i.e., a representative of the values CEOs often imagine themselves to have). The ads then close with pats-on-the-ol’-back to the forward-thinking corporations who pitched in to pay for the ad space or time. Little or no mention is made of the real social issues King confronted, many of which still need confronting today.
So it stands to reason that a theoretical company that participated in these and other “diversity” themed self-celebrations (which theoretically might also include donations to inner-city schools, representatives at minority recruiting fairs, and internal sensitivity-training classes for white employees) might theoretically, and informally, decide it’s been doing enough to feel good about itself diversity-wise, and that it doesn’t have to go that extra, often-unpublicized step and actually demand fair treatment for actual minority persons within its own employment ranks.
If that’s what really went on, I (though perhaps not top company management) wouldn’t be the least surprised.
TOMORROW: I know what IT is. Will I tell you? Find out.
FOR NEARLY A CENTURY NOW (actually longer if you consider the touring vaudeville circuits), the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of the drive to turn this mongrel assortment of conquered natives, ex-slaves, and immigrants from all over into One America.
A people of one language (American English), one cuisine (bland), one apparel style (the toned-down Sears knockoffs of the previous year’s couture), one politick (the narrow oscillation between “liberal” big-money stooges and “conservative” big-money stooges), and most especially one culture.
A culture defined by Top 40 music, Top 10 radio (and later television) shows, Republican newspapers, best-seller books, marketable celebrities, and especially by the movies.
As the other major media began to splinter into niches and sub-niches (secondary and tertiary cable channels, hate-talk and shock-talk radio, alterna-weeklies and local business papers, and this whole Web thang), the movie industry has held steadfast in its drive to mold and hold a single unified audience.
Every woman’s supposed to weep for Julia Roberts’s love life. Every man’s supposed to cheer at Schwarzenegger’s gunslining. Every child’s supposed to gaze in wonder at the Lion King’s antics. Not just across this continent but globally.
(The few established niche genres within the movie world (“indie” hip-violence fests, foreign “art” films, direct-to-video horror and porn) are exceptions that prove the rule.)
So it’s a small surprise to read from a card-carrying Hollywood-insider hype artist, longtime Variety editor Peter Bart, acknowledge recently that there’s no single American mass populace anymore.
The cause of Bart’s revelation? Not the changes within the non-movie entertainment milieu, but the Presidential election fiasco. The two big parties had so effectively thrusted and parried their target-marketing efforts that, by the time the statistical-dead-heat results came in, they’d forged equally-sized constituencies, each with strengths in different demographic sectors.
Bart fails to realize these political coalitions are at least partly group marriages of convenience. Many Bush voters aren’t really censor-loving, art-hating hix from the stix; just as many Gore voters aren’t really free-trade-loving, hiphop-hating corporate mandarins.
A better explanation of the U.S. political divide comes from the British Prospect magazine, by a writer who asserts that, even after all these years, the socio-cultural-political divide in America remains north-vs.-south. In his view the Democrats, once the party of Southern racists and Northern Irish Catholics, are now the party of “good government” New Englanders and sanctimonious whitebread Northwesterners. The Republicans, once the party of Wall Street princes and Illinois farmers, are now the party of good-old-boy Texas oil hustlers and sex-loathing South Carolina reactionaries.
(The essay’s writer says he doesn’t know how to classify the West, but I do: Us Nor’westers are Northerners first and Westerners second; while Calif. is run by a Southern doublefaced aesthetic of public moralism and private crony-corruption.)
But even these classifications are overly broad. They always have been, but are even more oversimplistic nowadays.
The American scene isn’t breaking down into two cultures, but dozens, even hundreds. The politicians know this, and are scrambling to keep their coalitions together. The movie business, apparently, doesn’t know this. Yet.
TOMORROW: Micosoft? Discriminatory? How can one think such a thing?
IN THAT NEWSWEEK COVER PIECE a few years back about “Seattle Chic” (the one with Slate swami Michael Kinsley on the front), my ol’ UW Daily colleague Lynda Barry contributed a comic strip about how she’d never really fit in in this town. She was a giddy, borderline-superficial funtime gal in a place more welcoming to somber reflection.
But from the looks of her latest illustrated novel Cruddy, Barry’s quite adept indeed at the somber-reflection bit, even to the point of abject grimness and a teenage nihlism that’s not at all affected.
The basic plot: In 1971, 17-year-old Roberta Rohbeson has been grounded to her horrible family (bratty sis, hysterical mom) in a decaying rental house, after getting busted for dropping acid. She uses the time of confinement to write about her sordid past, which is even more nihilistic than her present.
Seems that six years before, Roberta had disappeared with her maniacal, violent (and possibly incestuous) father. She was found weeks later in a Nevada foster home, with no apparent memory of what had happened to her or where her father had disappeared to. But in the diary that becomes the flashback story of Cruddy, Roberta tells all about the road trip through various hells of the American west, complete with arson, smuggling, triple-crossings, many brutal murders by the father, and two equally gruesome slayings by Roberta herself (including patricide).
Two of the towns of her hellish odyssey are Seattle-inspired.
“Cruddy City,” where the 17-year-old Roberta’s “present day” (1971) story takes place, is an almost geographically exact rendition of the Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill.
More specifically, the dreary blocks around Roberta’s dreary home are modeled on the still-rundown area just west of the Rainier Avenue-Martin Luther King Way intersection; a land of sidewalk-less streets, weed-strewn yards, the Copeland Lumber yard with its spooky black-cat logo, garbage-strewn winding roads up Beacon Hill (one of which, clasic-TV fans, is named Della Street), and taunting hillside views down onto the affluent blocks closer to Lake Washington.
I became very familiar with the neighborhood in the ’80s, when I had a miserable job in typesetting and layout for the South District Journal/Capitol Hill Times chain of neighborhood weeklies. I worked on ancient Compugraphic phototypesetting machines, in a wooden shed that had weeds growing inside from cracks in the concrete floor. Barry perfectly captures the little-corner-of-despair sense of the place.
(Remember, 1971 was the depth of the Boeing recession, the economically bleakest period in Seattle since the Depression.)
In contrast to the nothingness of Cruddy City, lots of stuff’s happening in Dentsville, one of the stops on Roberta and her dad’s road trip of terror.
The geography of Dentsville is based on downtown Seattle; specifically the waterfront (including Ye Olde Curiosity Shop), the pre-Convention Center Pike Street corridor (including the recently demolished Gay Nineties restaurant-lounge), and the pre-Interstate 5 west Capitol Hill (where, in the 1965 flashback story, the no-good dad confronts a no-good relative who’s squatting in a freeway-condemned house).
Of course, realistic geography isn’t what makes a novel really work. That requires great writing, compelling characters, and an intriguing story. Cruddy has all those aspects in vast supply; plus some of Barry’s best-ever visual works (in the form of maps and sullen character portraits).
In its vision of completely justified youthful despair, Cruddy is the Great Grunge Novel (even if the flashback story takes place before most ’90s rock musicians were born).
Just, please, don’t let anybody make it into a movie. They’d never get it right. They’d undoubtedly use the horror and violence in the story to depict exciting action, not Barry’s world of desperate rootlessness.
TOMORROW: Even Hollywood insiders are foreseeing the death of mass culture.
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LAST THURSDAY, we talked a bit about the end of the Seattle Union Record, the little paper formed by then-striking Seattle Times and P-I workers.
I said then that the Union Record was about two-thirds of the way toward becoming the real opposition daily this town (heck, any town) needs. There oughta be a way to make something like it that can survive as an ongoing venture. (The UR relied on volunteer help and “sympathy ads” bought by other unions, tactics which obviously wouldn’t work on a permanent for-profit paper.)
So here’s my not-at-all-modest proposal for a new local daily, based on the UR format:
A (non-strike) daily paper isn’t a zine. Even a tight-and-taut li’l free daily like the one I’m outlining here would require a full-time staff of at least several dozen, and enough operating capital to keep it going until it proves itself as an ad vehicle. (USA Today took three or four years to become consistently profitable; some bigtime magazines can take up to five years.)
But I’m convinced the potential is there. The UR proved there’s reader interest in such a paper. By reaching readers who’ve become turned off from the standard cookie-cutter U.S. newspaper, it would provide an alternative for advertisers who like the dynamic and semipermanence of print but don’t generate enough business from placing ads mainstream dailies.
Given the right people and enough time and money, such a paper could become successful enough that the Newsaper Guild would be able to demand (and get) its rightful share of that success.
So who wants to help me get this started? Lemme know.
TOMORROW: Lynda Barry’s Cruddy is anything but.
A LITTLE OVER A MONTH AGO, this virtual space contained a listing of certain groups of people who might consider themselves to be intrinsically superior to you, but who are not. (Go ahead and read it now if you haven’t; we’ll wait for you.)
This, in contrast, is a listing of groups of people you might consider yourself to be intrinsically superior to, but which you are not.
Here, therefore and with no further ado, are People You’re Not Better Than:
MONDAY: Imagining, in a little more detail, a successor paper to the Seattle Union Record.
YESTERDAY AND TODAY, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #5: Our Love and War Man already misses Mike Mailway (real name Larry M. Boyd), whose locally-based syndie trivia column ended a week and a half ago. Always wished I could write like him. That staccato, crime-movie-soundtrack rhythm. The eternally provocative mix of historic, scientific, and just odd facts gathered from all times and places. Had the privilege of meeting him a few times; always the perfect gent. I wish him well.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #1: What with all the sanctimonious gnashing-O-teeth that’s gone on over the threatening might of big-box chain bookstores, you might not expect any tears for the demise of such an outlet. But loyal customers are indeed huing and ado-ing over the impending loss of Tower Books on lower Queen Anne. Cause of death: The usual (mercenary rent hike).
The store’s annual 30-percent-off pre-inventory sale is being extended until closing day, Feb. 4. It’ll be missed, partly because Tower’s one chain that acted sorta like an indie in its niche-marketing prowess. Because most of its other outlets were attached to Tower Records stores, it was big on the sorts of books CD buyers like. Glossy pop-star tomes, yes; but also coffee-table art and photography, sci-fi, erotica, student reference, self-help, astrology, comix, lefty-politics, Beat-generation nostalgia, and literary-hipster fiction. (Although the approach had its drawbacks, such as when they had to put the Bukowski novels behind the counter to prevent theft by suburban down-and-outer wannabes.)
Tower says it wants to eventually build a book annex on the site of its current record store six blocks away, but has given no timetable for the project.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #2: Puget Consumers Co-op is closing its oldest alterna-food and vitamin store, in Ravenna. Way back in the early ’80s, when PCC really was a cooperatively-run small merchant, Ravenna was its only space (it had previously been an even smaller food-buying club). It was a subculture, a ‘tribe’ if you wish.
As you may know, I’m something of a skeptic about many of today’s neo-Puritanical food religions (macrobiotic, organic, vegan, ‘live,’ etc.). But I had, and have, every respect for the healthful values of community, of being part of a circle of humans who care about one another. That’s something PCC gradually lost as it became a professionally-managed chain store.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #3: The Seattle Times Co., citing a need to cut costs due to recent circumstances (see below), is shutting Mirror, its eight-year-old monthly tabloid for teenagers.
I was a part-time assistant on Mirror’s first five issues. The yup-ladies who ran it had believed those mainstream-media scare stories that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of illiterate louts; so the yup-ladies thought they’d need an adult to write the paper. But the editors soon realized that many public high school students really can read and write (they just choose not to read the Seattle Times); so my services proved unneeded.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #4: With the end of the Seattle newspaper strike comes the end of the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.
As I’ve said previously, it was about two-thirds of the way toward becoming the real opposition daily this town needs. While the Newspaper Guild won’t be publishing the Union Record anymore (or drumming up other unions for sympathy ads), many of the Seattle Times strikers won’t be returning to their old jobs, and hence might be available to continue their Record work under new management. I’d love to be a part of making such a paper happen.
Let’s all talk about this again real soon.
TOMORROW: People you’re not better than.
