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TODAY AND TOMORROW, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #1: The 211 Club pool hall abandoned its increasingly costly Belltown space after 16 years (following more than 40 years at its previous site where Benaroya Hall is now). It was something Belltown, and Seattle in general, is rapidly losing–a classy and unpretentious gathering place, a timeless and fadless site for serious playing without noise or capital-A Attitude.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #2: Montgomery Ward is closing its last 299 stores after 106 or so years in business. Most news articles about the closure claimed Wards had lost its market niche to newer chains like Wal-Mart and Target. But the roots of Wards’ decline go back many decades earlier, to its rule by a bullhorn company president named Sewell Avery.
In his prime, Avery brought color photography and modern graphic design to the Wards catalogs; and spearheaded the company’s expansion into retail stores.
But he became both dictatorial and senile. There’s a famous photo of him being forcibly carried out of his office in 1944 by Federal agents, because he’d refused to obey War Production Board quotas regarding the use of scarce materials for consumer goods.
In the postwar years Avery got even odder–he kept the retail stores at a uniform size and building style (two stories plus a basement and half-story mezzanine), small and unresponsive to local market conditions. Then he decided the catalog was too risque, and ordered that all women’s fashions except coats were to be photographed on dress forms, not live models or even mannequins.
By the time Wards’ board of directors finally had enough votes to oust Avery, the chain had become a distant competitor to Sears and Penney’s, and never caught up. It junked its “big book” catalog a decade before Sears did, and retreated from a national retail presence to a few select regions where it could afford to compete.
Even in some of those, such as Portland, it found itself shut out of major mall projects and had to build freestanding stores far from the peak car-traffic zones. Such companies as Mobil Oil and GE invested millions to keep Wards alive, but to no ultimate avail.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #3: Oldsmobile was America’s oldest car brand, but the General Motors top brass, in their infinite ignorance, didn’t know what to do with it. It had long ago become the odd leftover in GM’s grand market-segmentation strategies; it offered few models that weren’t renamed versions of other GM products.
Olds’s final end wasn’t a casualty of imports or SUVs, but an admission that GM couldn’t think of anything to do with it anymore.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #4: When KOMO-TV put up its grandiose new building, I was unaware the station was going to promptly demolish its old building. It was a beautiful work of postwar, post-Deco architecture.
At a garage sale once, I managed to obtain the big color brochure commemorating the building’s opening in ’46. That was still in the so-called Golden Age of Radio; but KOMO was already planning to expand into TV, and built its new broadcasting palace with that in mind. But the Truman Administration froze new TV licenses soon after KING-TV got on the air.
KOMO-TV had to wait until ’54 to start up. It got the local NBC affiliation, and within two years had the region’s first color cameras (one of which is now on display in the Lincoln-Mercury showroom up on Aurora). But then KING snatched the NBC franchise in ’59, leaving KOMO with ABC (whose market position then was comparable to UPN’s today).
All that history, and four decades’ worth more, were in the old building at Fourth and Denny. Boomerang, the local kiddie show hosted by former Hollywood voice-over singer Marni Nixon. Assorted Town Meetings and AM NWs and Northwest Afternoons. Keith Jackson’s first sportscasts. That still-harrowing film footage from a news photographer who got caught in the Mt. St. Helens ash storm.
All that’s left of the building are the memories, whatever tapes the station’s kept, and a small pile of rubble (which, admittedly, gave folks standing on Denny a better view of the Space Needle fireworks on 1/1).
TOMORROW: A few more sad tales of this type.
ELSEWHERE:
LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.
Then we went off on a tangent, and started instead to discuss the centuries-old dichotomy between established Christendom and the pleasures of the flesh, a topic some folk have written whole books about.
Religion needs more sex; it needs to acknowledge human passions and the joys of earthly existence. And it always has needed this. Back in the early Christian days, when the study of Jesus was was essentially an ethnicity-free Judaism for Romans (and Roman-conquered peoples), women from prominent families were among its leading converts. These women appreciated a religion that treated women as something more than just sex-and-baby machines.
(Then, of course, Constantine made it Rome’s new official religion, and a hierarchy formed that kept women out of power within the church, etc. etc.).
Anyway, Christianity developed as an antithesis to the decadence and excess of Rome’s bread-and-circuses culture, its orgies and slavery and human lion-feedings and corruption and cruelty. It developed into a religion that, in various degrees and with various exceptions over the years, renounced sex and the whole physical aspect of human existence.
But porn (or erotica, or whatever PC term you prefer to use) also needs more religion, or at least more spirituality.
Whether you’re talking hardcore videos and magazines, hard-sell web sites, softcore cable shows and magazines, strip clubs, “women’s erotica” books, or the get-a-guy articles and see-thru supermodel pictures in women’s magazines, you get almost nothing to do with two human souls using their bodies to come closer together.
You just get stimulus-response mechanisms. Sex is defined as a shallow physical pleasure to be obtained by spending lots of money and suppressing anything cool or individualistic about yourself.
It’s a ruthlessly materialistic vision. In a nation where prostitution is outlawed (except in rural Nevada), commercial sex-culture defines both female and male genitalia as nothing more than capitalist tools, products to be sold and/or target markets to be sold to.
All this means the “Christian porn” I thought up last Friday half jokingly could actually be a useful thing, an aspect of reintegrating bodies to souls, females to males, and humans to one another and their universe.
We finish this topic, at least for now, with a very brief example of what written Christian porn might be like.
(Be warned: This particular fiction piece is not only sexual, but also involves an attempt to write characters of an ethnicity other than my own, in a nondemeaning yet candid manner.)
Dozens of African-American adults (and a few interracial-couple spouses) arrive at a series of revival tents constructed at a private campground. They remove their well-ironed, handsome garments to enjoy a nude BBQ feast. This is followed inside the tents by a boistrously inspiring service of chorus music; a nude and exhortative preacher who gets everybody into the right state of emotional ecstasy while he encourages everybody to love everybody in the room; and then the sex itself. All the attendees gleefully join in: Thin to obese, young-adult to elderly, breasts heaving, erections proudly flailing, couplings (and triplings and more) of every pleasurable sort, a few woman-woman and even man-man encounters somewhere in the tent, orgasm moans in “tongues,” many “Praise Be”s and “Hallelujahs.” Outside, there are a few church buses among the parked cars, a gorgeous sunset between the trees, and a couple of strewn flyers marking this as an event that would only be promoted within churches–“No TV or Radio Advertising; No Outsiders Will Be Invited.”
Dozens of African-American adults (and a few interracial-couple spouses) arrive at a series of revival tents constructed at a private campground. They remove their well-ironed, handsome garments to enjoy a nude BBQ feast. This is followed inside the tents by a boistrously inspiring service of chorus music; a nude and exhortative preacher who gets everybody into the right state of emotional ecstasy while he encourages everybody to love everybody in the room; and then the sex itself.
All the attendees gleefully join in: Thin to obese, young-adult to elderly, breasts heaving, erections proudly flailing, couplings (and triplings and more) of every pleasurable sort, a few woman-woman and even man-man encounters somewhere in the tent, orgasm moans in “tongues,” many “Praise Be”s and “Hallelujahs.”
Outside, there are a few church buses among the parked cars, a gorgeous sunset between the trees, and a couple of strewn flyers marking this as an event that would only be promoted within churches–“No TV or Radio Advertising; No Outsiders Will Be Invited.”
TOMORROW: Remembering some things that went away at the end of Y2K.
LAST FRIDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.
That simple gimmick led me to pondering a whole bigger question–how to bring sex, and a healthy respect for it, back to Christendom.
This might seem either double-icky or sacreligious to some of you. I assure you I don’t intend to be either.
After all, many of the world’s great religions and cultures have embraced strongly sexualized images and messages–including the Euro-pagan cultures Christianity borrowed so much else from.
What I imagine, in 3 parts:
Examples and precedents from over the centuries:
TOMORROW: The last of this for now, I promise.
ANY POP-CULTURE GENRE that’s washed up, or at least on the decline, can be given a new life, or at least an afterlife.
All you have to do is revamp it for a born-again Christian audience.
It’s been done with hippie folk music, soft rock, and even hardcore punk rock. It’s been done with thriller and romance novels. It’s been done with form-follows-function modern architecture. It’s been done with superhero comics and action video games.
How you do it: Take a genre (such as those above) with by-now cliched rules and formulae. Slap on a devotional, evangelistic, or crusading-for-the-faith message (doesn’t matter how trite). Make sure the protagonists are (or claim to be) morally forthright. Wrap it up in sanctimony and sell it thru Christian niche-market outlets (specialty bookstores, websites, catalogs, magazine ads, etc.)
There’s one genre out there that hasn’t yet been Christianized, at least on any visible scale; yet is clearly ripe for it. It’s got an established schtick and an established audience, but has gotten completely ritualized, commercialized, artless, non-entertaining, and otherwise meaningless.
I speak, of course, of pornography.
But the ol’ American puritan hypocrisy thang’s prevented much experimentation with Christianizing porn; at least as far as I’ve been able to find.
A simple web search of the word “Christian” with “porn,” “erotica,” or “sex” will get you a lot of angry anti-porn preachers, many prayer-based programs for overcoming “sex addiction,” and a few over-the-top parody pages (some apparently created by disgruntled ex-Christians).
But no actual Christian porn, verbal or visual.
The closest you get are a few pages that provide potential ideological justifications for Christian porn. Some of these are by members of the Christian-swingers and liberated-Christians sub-subcultures, such as Rebecca Brook’s recent essay “Body and Soul: Confessions of a Kinky Churchgoer.” “God is a caring top,” Brook writes, “not a rapist.” Brook, like other members of these subgroups, believes there should be no contradiction between exploring one’s spiritual potential and exploring one’s sensual potential.
Similar thoughts are promoted on the “Christian Sex” pages of Poppy Dixon’s Adult Christianity site. That’s the same semisatirical site that’s got The XXX-Rated Bible, the “good parts” chapter-and-verse listing that could indeed be the original Christian porn.
So what might real, commercial, non-parody, Christian porn be like?
It could build on the sensual traditions of medieval mystery plays, the ecstatic traditions of holy-roller evangelists and speaking in tongues, sensual Catholic imagery, pro-sex interpretations of Scripture, the works of pro-sex artists and writers with spiritual inclinations, and Christianity’s historic ability to absorb pieces of other spiritual traditions (including, and why not, Tantra and sacred prostitution and “pagan” mating rituals).
This genre would not be “anti-family,” or contradict Jesus’s real teachings, by any means. There’s much that the preadolescent can learn about body self-esteem and living a life of connection with one’s surrounding world; and there’s plenty the adolescent needs to learn about dealing with raging hormones in the context of respecting oneself and others.
MONDAY: Some more thought on what what this new sub-sub-genre might be like.
MANY ARTS AND THEATER PUBLICATIONS have come and gone, nationally and locally, over the years.
The local attempts have mostly foundered or struggled on a lack of cash flow. Artists and artsy-type folk are often considered insufficiently upscale for advertisers to bother with. Already-strapped funding organizations have had other priorities than merely documenting whatever visual or performing projects are already out there. That’s left these would-be documentors to work on an all-volunteer basis, with the personal-burnout rates and marketing weaknesses built into that concept.
One local outfit thinks it has the answer. Their magazine’s aimed not at artists, nor even at the bulk of their audiences.
Instead, Arts Patron (whose third issue should be out this month) is aimed squarely at upper-crust good-life-livers who (as a common stereotype goes) “Support the Arts” partly out of a good-works motivation, partly for the tax breaks, and partly for social status.
It’s mailed free to addresses on the fundraising mailing lists of ten participating theaters, museums, and hibrow-music ensembles. The rest of us have to read it online. (Thus keeping those downscale painters and actors and other assorted boho types from lowering the print edition’s advertiser value).
Seattle didn’t used to have very many of these patrons. Certainly not enough for a slick nine-times-a-year magazine to be aimed just at them. But post-Bill Seattle apparently has enough for publisher Jonathan Nichols to give it a shot. (If the concept works, Nichols may try to expand it to other towns.)
Should us non-gazillionaires care about the whole endeavor? From the looks of the first two issues, yes. Editor Douglas McLellan (who briefly was the best thing that had ever happened to the P-I arts section) has gone beyond mere PR hypeage for the mag’s participating institutions. Sure there are big pieces about the new Bellevue Arts Museum and the John Singer Sargent show at the Seattle Art Museum. But there are also big pieces about the Total Experience Gospel Choir, filmmaker Sandy Cioffi, the alterna-art space Howard House, and local mural-preservation advocate Roger van Oosten. McLellan himself contributes an important item about a UW study showing ballet dancers can have careers as short and injury-prone as pro football players (at far lower salaries).
So go to the site. Let its makers know you like it, and that you deserve the chance to see it in print even if you’re not a gazillionaire.
IN OTHER NEWS: Loyal reader Danny Goodisman writes, “Rumor has it, Paul Schell may run for re-election. To help him along, here are proposed slogans for Paul Schell’s re-election:
10. Still not a wimp.
9. Support international child labor.
8. Affordable housing for the rich.
7. Once a developer, always a developer.
6. Give corporate welfare a chance.
5. Blacks and Hispanics ‘raus.
4. Known round the world.
3. More ugly architecture for the Center.
2. King County multi-billionaires agree: Paul Schell for mayor.
1. Leadership which can bring tears to your eyes.”
TOMORROW: How to revive any waning popcult genre–make it Christian.
A MERE SIX MONTHS after the WTO riots, I predicted there’d be folks who’d spend the rest of their lives in the shadow of that singular protestorial moment, or (worse) using their participation in it (no matter how peripheral) as a badge of radical sanctimony, a way of defining their personal specialness. (I’d seen too much of that in ’60s fogeys.)
So it should come as no surprise that documents of this type are beginning to appear.
Case in point: The recent book Five Days That Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond. It lists three “authors” on the front cover. One is really a photographer, Allen Sekula, whose color close-ups emphasize the more photogenic (or most visibly wounded) protestors, obscuring both the scope of the marches and the diversity of the marchers.
The text is by longtime lefter-than-thou essayist and syndicated columnist Alexander Cockburn and his colleague Jeffrey St. Clair. The main piece of text, the “Seattle Diary” chapter, is credited solely to St. Clair, and is our topic here.
And it disappoints greatly. And I’m not just talking about the many many typos.
St. Clair seems less interested in getting to the grit of global trade and its discontents, of the miraculous breadth of the anti-WTO coalition, than in (1) name-dropping all the radical personal friends he runs into at the marches (all of whom seem to be from San Francisco), and in (2) berating everyone he sees at the marches or accompanying events whom he considers insufficiently radical.
These not-good-enough types include the respected populist-progressive commentators Michael Moore, Jim Hightower, and Molly Ivins; folks who’ve made plenty of unkind words about the rule of Global Business and its political lackeys, but whom St. Clair, for reasons apparently perceptible only by the sort of people who read The Nation, considers to be less than ideologically pure.
In short: Where the WTO protests were a grand coming-together of all sorts of people who had all sorts of agendas and priorities, and who wanted to persue these agendas and priorities without a global-corporate monoculture’s repressions, St. Clair saw the protests as a big party to which only persons meeting his doctrinal standards should have been allowed.
St. Clair, I’m afraid, is a ’60s-style radical who Doesn’t Get It about the way-new left. It’s not about bringing back the allegedly-good-old-days of self-aggrandizing counterculture hustlers and sectarian schisms. It’s about working together with people who don’t necessarily belong to the same subcultural “tribe,” but who share a dream for a more just, more democratic, and more healthy world.
For a more thoroughly researched, more serious account of the events on and surrounding Nov. 30, 1999 in Seattle, pick up Janet Thomas’s The Battle in Seattle. Thomas (who’s actually lived in the Seattle area) takes the issues behind global trade and corporate power seriously and soberly. Instead of St. Clair’s oversimplified us-vs.-them dichotomies, Thomas finds patterns of power and influence, and people from all continents and walks-O-life who’ve been finding ways to work together to change those patterns even after the last tear-gas canisters were discharged on Capitol Hill.
She even includes dozens of addresses and websites in the back for those of you who’d like to get in on the hard work of building a better society, not just protesting against the one we’ve got.
TOMORROW: How to publish an arts magazine in the Post-Funding Era.
BARRING ANY UNFORESEEN year-2001 computer bugs, this will be the first MISCmedia entry for the year of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
So what might you, my loyal (in your own fashion) readers, expect here over the coming months?
Many folk these days are claiming pure “content” websites, as business propositions, are molding corpses from 1998. I believe, now that the stupid money has largely abandoned the field, we can all get back to the work of figuring out just what might work in this crazy, still-new medium. Remember that broadcast radio was around almost a decade before the first national commercial networks started; and TV’s developers spent the whole of the 1940s working out the medium’s operational shticks.
To make it more than a “personal zine,” albeit a professionally written and designed one, will require a move up to a thicker, slicker, and possibly more infrequent format. Perhaps something along the lines of the great old humor magazines (Punch, the original New Yorker); though for that I’d need some outside investment and a lot more content contributors.
TOMORROW: Two books, two different “radical” interpretations of the WTO protests.
