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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!
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.
Better Listening Through Research
by guest columnist Ilse Thompson
RAYMOND SCOTT–recognized these days for compositions adapted for Bugs Bunny cartoons–spent the first half of his musical career as a pop figure.
He was an acclaimed and formidable band leader, composer and pianist through the ’30s and ’40s. In the ’50s, he led the house band on the TV show Your Hit Parade, all while writing bouncy ad jingles for everything from Sprite to IBM–allowing him to fund his secret, and very private, life as an avatar of electronic music.
This is the Raymond Scott–inventor, pioneer, visionary–Basta Records pays homage to with Manhattan Research Inc.
Left to its own devices, this two-CD set of Raymond Scott’s previously unreleased electronic compositions evokes a transcendental catatonia. Played on instruments of his own invention (the Clavivox, Circle Machine, Bass Line Generator, Rhythm Modulator, Karloff, Bandito the Bongo Artist, and his baby, the Electronium) these pieces will shift your foothold.
So… enough about the music, already.
Scott’s recordings are hardbound to accommodate a lavish 144-page set of “liner notes,” edited by Irwin Chusid–WFMU radio mainstay, director of the Raymond Scott Archives, and author of the recently released book, Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music.
In his introduction, Chusid says that “throughout Scott’s career in the public spotlight, there were occasional reports of an alter ego–the inventor, the engineer, the professor in the lab coat, the electronic music pioneer. But little of this work received public exposure.”
In order to remedy that, Chusid has compiled a collection of interviews with Scott’s contemporaries, including Robert Moog; historical essays, including one on Scott’s trippy collaborations with Jim Henson; articles written about Scott from back in the day; photographs of Scott and his musical equipment; patent designs; private musings and correspondence; promotional material; advertisements; detailed descriptions of each piece included on the CDs; and a wealth of fascinating ephemera.
As Chusid says, MRI is “a chapter of electronic music history you won’t find in most existing books on the subject.”
“In the music of the future,” Scott writes in 1949, “the composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely THINK his idealized conception of his music. His brain waves will be picked up by mechanical equipment and channeled directly into the minds of his hearers, thus allowing no room for distortion of the original idea.” These glimpses into Scott’s mind make the listening experience deliciously disorienting.
If Chusid’s compilation were simply an academic thesis on the subject of electronic music or a plain old biographical essay, I could take it or leave it.
It is essential as an accompaniment to the CD set, however, because it reveals Scott as a downright visionary–a man who collaborated with his machines and was driven by more than a simple desire to make wicked new sounds.
He was trying to ignite an evolutionary leap in music, technology and even consciousness.
TOMORROW: The ol’ WTO-riot-anniversary thang.
AFTER EVERYTHING, after all the hue and cry about the Supreme Court and “spoilers” and Social Security and foreign-policy competence, the Presidential election may have turned out to be what I thought it was back in the summer–a matter of branding, of the demographic target marketing of similar products.
As Republican analyst Laura Ingraham has pointed out, Gore was marketed to the “hip” areas, the big-money urban centers. Bush was marketed to the “square” areas, the rural midsection and Sunbelt areas. The “swing states” tended to be the ones where these two market niches had near-equal constituencies.
Chief among these “battlegrounds” was Florida, where, as of the time I’m writing this (11:18 p.m. PST), two TV networks have just proclaimed George Bush fils the winner of the state’s electoral votes, and hence of the whole national shebang.
Bush was able to do this by simultaneously running against the Clinton legacy and with Clintonesque tactics. He packaged himself, like the 1992 Clinton, as the confident, smiling, hand-shaking, baby-kissing Good Ole Boy (who only incidentally had the backing of real-power-and-money institutions).
Bush also won back enough of the territories that Bush pere had won in ’88 but lost in ’92, by distancing himself, on a superficial marketing level, from the rhetorical excesses of recent-past Repo men. No Contracts With (or on) America, no impeachment-era moralizing. The serious anti-abortion and pro-handgun arguments were saved for local ads in those states where such statements were likely to play. In the rest of the country, Bush ran away from the worst of Gingrich and Limbaugh and DeLay (and even, by implication, Reagan), at least as much as Gore had run away from Clinton and Clinton had previously run away from the Democrats’ FDR-liberal heritage.
What corporate-Democrat media people labeled “the Nader spoiler factor” might indeed have been a factor there, and also in Oregon and Wisconsin. But the Nader challenge may also have reinvigorated the Gore campaign, almost enough to have won.
For the longest time this summer and even into early fall, Gore was offering nothing to ordinary voters but a stay-the-course economic plan and a vague promise to keep the Supreme Court out of the hands of Roe-v.-Wade haters. Thanks to Nader, Gore had to rediscover the leftish-leaning voters he and Clinton had written off as irrelevant since circa 1993. But the too-little-too-late part of this was that Gore’s campaigners and media flunkies never did come up with a solid argument why Naderites should vote for Gore rather than merely against Bush.
In the end, you had a Democrat (once, supposedly, the party of populist crusading) who’d let himself be branded as the scared-stiff status-quo defender, and a Republican (once, supposedly, the party of boardrooms and golf courses) who’d worked hard to get himself branded as the affable dumb-cluck whose heart was in the right place.
One complication: Bush fils, like Bush pere, will be taking office just as those pesky economic indicators are starting to turn south. It’ll be fun to see Bush blaming Clinton for any ’01 recession, and to see the Demos blame Bush for it as part of a drive to win back Congress in ’02.
The Naderites insisted all along that these images were just images, that there was no significant difference between the two big candidates or between the two big parties. Well, there’s also no significant difference between Glenfiddich and plastic-bottled rotgut–if you happen to be a Prohibitionist. To someone who only thinks in absolutes, the Big 2 can indeed seem like interchangeable parts. But in the subtleties, in the details, there’s still enough variation between the party of Rupert Murdoch and the party of Time Warner to be worth a vote.
(Disclaimer: That pesky Fla. vote’s so close, it might just swing back by the time you read this.)
In local stuff, meanwhile, the Demos and progressives won pretty much everything they’d reasonably hoped to. John Carlson and (apparently) Sen. Fishstick were defeated, as was the worst of Tim Eyman’s two initiatives. The save-the-Monorail initiative seems to have passed. Now if we can only get decent challengers for mayor and city attorney next year….
MIDMORNING UPDATE: Yep, Fla.’s too close to call again. Recounts are underway (with brother Jeb Bush, the governor there, promising to “take charge”). Best coverage of the impasse: The Onion. And Sen. Fishstick isn’t conceding yet.
TOMORROW: The ‘war on drugs’ as a drug.
TWO OR THREE SHORT THINGS TODAY, starting with a defense of a perennial, and perennially maligned, American institution.
YES, I LIKE NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN ADS. The rest of the time, TV and radio commercials are all bright ‘n’ bouncy, overstuffed with that incessant mandatory happiness that’s pervaded American life from employee-motivation courses to theme-park architecture and even many evangelical churches. But during election season, suddenly the tenor of spots changes.
We get Our Man depicted in bright, cheery color, hugging the wife and kids. The Other Guy, meanwhile, gets portrayed in stern black-and-white still mug shots that get shrunk and darted across the screen; while buzzwords get electronically stamped on his face like canceled postage.
And judging from this year’s slander spots, the received ideas behind the buzzwords are ossifying into a formulaic ritual, of little relation to either the candidates or the voters. Republican consultants still expect the populace to get scared out of our wits by the mere mention of “bureaucrats,” “big government,” and especially “liberal,” as if the Reaganisms of 20 years ago were still a novelty instead of a bore. And the corporate Democrats can’t seem to think of anything to smear Republicans with besides the spectre of an anti-choice Supreme Court.
(There’s plenty of other legit complaints to be made against the Repo Men, of course; but the corporate Demos don’t want to bring up issues on which they could themselves be called to account.)
So if smear ads have become a rite engaged in strictly for its own sake, why haven’t other advertisers hopped on the trend? I’m still hoping to hear something like: “Pepsi says they’ve got the most refreshing soft drink. But take a look at the facts….”
‘SWING’ KIDS: Here’s a recommendation for a book you can’t get, at least not very easily.
Canadian author Billie Livingston was in town a month or two back, accompanying a friend of hers who’d gone to participate in a joint reading at the Elliott Bay Book Co. While here, Livingston consigned a few copies of her new novel Going Down Swinging, thus far published only in Canada.
It’s a gorgeous, poignant little tale about a severely alcoholic mom whose second husband and teenage daughter have both abandoned her. Her only solace, besides bottles and pills and lines, is the seven-year-old second daughter she struggles to keep custody of and who loves her dearly, despite mom’s frequent blackouts and occasional hooking. It’s a tale of real family values and survival, mainly set in Vancouver’s threatened-with-gentrification east end.
You should try to get it, at Elliott Bay or thru a Canadian online bookseller such as Chapters.
UPDATE: Thanks for your emailed comments about our forthcoming experiment with fictional alter-ego characters in the online column. The first episode to include some of them will appear in the next week or two, and will be duly identified as fictional, maybe.
UN-SPOOKED: Halloween 2000 turned out about as expected, at least at the events attended by myself and our intrepid team.
There were the usual assortments of robots, furry critters (rabbits, cats, dogs, et al.), politicians, celebrities (Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, Elvis), lumberjacks, devils, ’70s disco dudes, loinclothed adventure heroes, bare-butted samba belles, firefighters, detectives, politicians, superheroes, and at least one woman dressed as a kitschy lamp (gold body paint, gold grass skirt and bra, a shade on her head).
Not seen, at least by our team were any of the characters that would’ve been really scary here and now:
A WTO riot cop.
OTHER WORDS (from Aldous Huxley): “I can sympathize with people’s pains but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.”
TOMORROW: The Clash, Motown, and three generations’ notions of musical empowerment.
LAST FRIDAY, I began a recollection of what Seattle was like in the fall of 1975, when I first came to the allegedly Big City after a childhood in much smaller burgs.
I’d already mentioned the only “alternative” paper at the time, The Seattle Sun; and its target audience niche, a Capitol Hill-centered clique of 25-to-35-ers who just wanted to settle down after doing whatever they’d done in The Sixties.
The mainstream media in town were also fairly tame at the time.
The Seattle Times, still an afternoon paper, was still as wide as the Wall Street Journal and as plain-looking as a cheap suburban tract house. It always ran a half-page photo on Page 3, which was almost always of a dog or Mount Rainier. Its features section, then called “View,” had many cute stories about somebody doing something important who was–gasp–a woman!
The P-I, meanwhile, was a feisty archrival to the Times in those pre-Joint-Operating-Agreement days (well, except for the editorials, which usually touted the same Chamber of Commerce party line). It still had some of that old Hearstian spunk in it; at least in the sports pages, which were then mostly about the Sonics, college sports, and out-of-town stuff. There were no Mariners or Seahawks yet; though the P-I’s lovable geezer Royal Brougham (who’d been at the paper since WWI) was already drumming up oldtime rah-rah support for our soon-to-be local heroes.
Local TV was a far different animal then than now. Newscasts were heavy on in-studio commentators and grainy 16mm film. Portable video cameras were just being introduced, and were largely used as gimmicks (as they mostly still are). That meant a lot of interviews, press conferences, and staged media events (held before 1 p.m. so the film could be edited by 5); interspersed with a few of the fires and police chases that now dominate local newscasts across the country.
And there was still a good deal of non-news local TV. J.P. Patches and Gertrude still ran a bizarre, funky kiddie show on KIRO, whose influence on the local theatrical and performance scenes lasted for decades. KING had morning and evening talk shows, providing endless interview slots to all the itinerant book-pluggers crisscrossing the nation. KOMO had a “religious program” called Strength for These Days, which ran at 5:45 a.m. weekdays and consisted entirely of the same film footage of ocean waves and windblown trees every day, accompanied by choir music.
Seattle radio was an even odder beast. For one thing, AM stations still dominated.
For the grownups, KVI’s dynamic eccentrics Bob Hardwick and Jack Morton engaged a spirited ratings battle against KOMO’s personable square Larry Nelson and KIRO’s fledgling news-talk format.
For the kids, KVI and KING-AM played an odd top-40 melange of anything that happened to be popular (Dolly Parton, Lynard Skynard, Helen Reddy, Barry White, Edgar Winter, Tony Orlando, Donny Osmond).
For the older kids, the FM band found KISW and KZOK blasting Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and their metal brethern out to Camaro-drivin’ teens from Spanaway to Stanwood.
The UW, meanwhile, had a little FM operation, KUOW, which played blocks of classical music (competing with the then-commercial KING-FM) and that newfangled network newscast with those really soft-talking announcers. (The U also ran a smaller operation, KCMU, as a laboratory for broadcast-communications students to play Grateful Dead songs and mumble their way through the weather report.)
And there was an honest-to-goodness radical community station, KRAB-FM. Its announcers often hemmed and hawed their way through a set list, but they played everything from Thai pop to big-band to political folk. It had talk blocks, too: Vietnamese children’s fables, classical lit, rambling speeches by already-aging hippie celebrities about why Those Kids Today had become too apathetic. KRAB stumbled through internal politics and mismanagement until 1984. Its frequency is now occupied by KNDD.)
TOMORROW: The Seattle arts scene at the time.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a fun rumor for all you conspiracy theorists (which I’m not): Could OPEC countries be scheming to raise oil prices and engender U.S. voter restlessness against Gore/Lieberman? (found by Progressive Review)
FOR THE FIRST TIME ALL SUMMER, we resume our occasional habit of looking for meaning in real estate.
A Bell System ad from the late ’40s claimed, “It takes 500 tons of equipment for just one telephone exchange” (that is, for the central-office connections among the 10,000 phone numbers sharing one prefix). As you may have noticed, electronics are a lot smaller these days. So, even with the explosion of phone numbers due to modems, cell phones, and fax machines, US West didn’t need all the downtown buildings it had inherited when Ma Bell was broken up. One of these buildings was extensively reworked (with exterior windows and other amenities) to become the Hotel Monaco.
The view of downtown Seattle from the Camlin Hotel’s top-floor Cloud Room was forever ruined in the early ’70s by Pacific Northwest Bell’s new headquarters tower. Originally, it was officially billed as being at the made-up address of “1600 Bell Plaza,” confusing out-of-town phone company officials and everyone else who didn’t know it was really on 7th Avenue. With the Baby Bell spinoffs in 1984, the building went from PNB’s head office to a mere divisional outpost of the Colorado-based US West–which, in turn, was just acquired by the long-distance provider Qwest (no relation to the Quincy Jones-owned record label of the same name and spelling.)
The Bauhaus Cafe complements its retro-modern appearance by posting its phone number with a lettered prefix. These were remnants from the early days of telephony, when local service was hard-wired into named “exchanges” of no more than 1,000 lines. Before the rotary dial was invented, callers were initially put through to an operator, who manually patched a switchboard to connect the caller to the number he or she verbally asked for. As phone use grew, exchanges grew and numbers got longer. The Seattle Times, for instance, had the successive numbers over the years of “Main 300,” “MAin 0300,” “MAin 2-0300,” and “622-0300,” before the paper installed a new office phone system that required a block of separate numbers.
The El Gaucho steakhouse and cigar bar’s in a building that used to service a different end of the management-labor equation, as the meeting hall of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific. Its downstairs (now the Pampas Room and the Big Picture) was the Trade Winds, an irony-free tiki lounge whose back bar was decorated with exotic coins from around the world, collected from sailor patrons. A small sculpture in front of the building, in the form of a beret adorned with union badges (including that of the radical Industrial Workers of the World) remembers the site’s heritage.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, black empowerment became a rallying cry in the suites as well as on the streets. African-American-owned banks started popping up in cities across the U.S., including Liberty Bank in Seattle’s Central District. It sold home loans to people and neighborhoods underserved by the big banks; it provided business-banking services to the black-owned construction companies that had emerged to do affirmative-action subcontract work on government building projects. But the big banks soon went after the more profitable segments of Liberty’s business. A reorganization under the name Emerald City Bank didn’t last; it was sold to Key Bank in the late ’80s.
TOMORROW: Real Seattle fiction.
NAOMI KLEIN’S BOOK NO LOGO claims greedy corporations are brainwashing kids into letting themselves (the kids) become walking billboards.
Up to this point, I agree with her. Branded clothing has become just so damned ubiquitous. Grade-schoolers crave anything with the Nike “swoosh;” skate teens sport FuBu; collegian preppies plug Abercrombie & Fitch; white gangsta-wannabes ride their baggy pants low to expose their Tommy Hilfiger boxer waistbands.
But then Klein goes further than (or perhaps not as far as) I would.
She wants all good strict parents to keep their children’s apparel iconography-free.
That’s acceptable if you’re into spiritual asceticism; even then, the deliberate plain-ness of your attire is, itself, an icon.
For those who consciously choose to make this sort of “anti-statement” statement, more power to you.
For the rest of us, I say go for it. Wear your heart (and your mind) on your sleeve. Be a walking icon.
Don’t like the bigtime marketers? Choose other word/picture combos to identify with. Your favorite town or nation or planet (whether you’ve ever been there or not). Your favorite heroine or hero (real, mythical, or somewhere between the two). A guiding principle of your life, in slogans and/or imagery.
And if the particular vision that defines you doesn’t seem to exist in the stores, make up your own.
Become a bosom-based sloganeer for Heidegger’s Uncertainty Principle, or for the joys of bicycle commuting, or for the joys of eating mashed potatoes with peanut butter, or that perfect movie you’re going to get around to making one of these decades, or that invisible childhood friend who used to save your sanity.
It’s easy. It’s fun.
Just, well, you know….
TOMORROW: Do kids these days know how to really live?
Confessions of a Boss Chick
by guest columnist Debra Bouchegnies
ALL THROUGH JUNIOR HIGH, Kathy liked to get drunk and fuck.
She was, as you can imagine, pretty popular with the guys. Especially Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.
As unlikely as one would expect, Kathy and I found a common bond and became inseperable in the summer of ’76.
Understandably, Kathy didn’t have alot of girlfriends. She lived around the corner from me but went to Catholic school; so the only time I ever really saw her was on summer nights after dinner when I would be out walking my sister’s ugly dog Fluffy so I could sneak a smoke.
One night, early into the summer, while I was out with Fluffy, I discovered the pack of Marlboros I had stashed in my sock was empty. I figured I’d bum a smoke from the first one in the neighborhood I saw.
And there was Kathy, sitting on her steps, smoking a Salem 100 and drinking an iced tea. She was so girly—red, white and blue pinstriped polyester hot pants and a pale yellow halter top. Painted toes. A charm bracelet and an ankle bracelet and a cross around her neck.
Somehow, through some mysterious unspoken connection, we knew we needed each other. Somehow, Kathy knew I had entered the summer friendless.
She didn’t know the details; that I had been cruelly ostracized during spring break from my group of do-gooder straight-A students who fell in love with a water bong in Ocean Shores, NJ. Having been a stoner at 11, by now I was cleaned up and getting serious about school and my future.
So, having refused to get high, I found myself a lonely 16-year-old girl with dreams and braces and a long hot bicen-fucking-tennial east coast summer ahead of me.
And, somehow, I knew Kathy had been through some adolescent trauma; though I didn’t know her mother’s boyfriend was fucking her.
By the end of that ciggarette she was offering me a friendship ring, which was this gaudy cluster of rhinestones that obscured half her finger. And from that day on you couldn’t pull us apart.
Well, at least not until the “Boss Chick” incident.
I had decided to try to get a summer job at a local radio station, WFIL. 540 on the dial. The number one Top 40 bubblegum radio station in Philly. Their catch phrase was “Boss Radio.”
When I told Kathy my plans, of course she begged to tag along. I knew it was going to be hard enough to get my foot in the door; now I was having to get in two.
The receptionist was kind enough to get some guy to come out and speak to us. Between Kathy’s looks and my determination, a half hour later we found ourselves sitting in a room filled with boxes of promotional LPs around us. Our job: To cut one corner from the jacket of each record, turning them into official “giveaways.”
Kathy was starstruck. She was thrilled to rub elbows with Captain Noah (the star of WFIL-TV’s local children’s program) or the weatherman or news anchors in the hallway. None of this impressed me, as I somehow placed myself in the same league. By mid-day, Kathy was spending more time “star-searching” than in with me and our scissors and pile of vinyl.
They asked us to come back the next day. After about an hour, the guy who’d hired us came into the room and asked Kathy to come with him. He said he’d be back for me later.
I got home that night and called Kathy. “Debra! You won’t believe it! They made me a Boss Chick!”
“Boss Chicks,” for those of you who don’t know, were the gals they’d send out to promotional events. They wore hot pants and white knee-high crushed leather boots and Boss Chick T-shirts.
And they got a really cool WFIL handbag–the only part of Boss-Chickdom that interested me.
The next day I was back at WFIL. They were finding all kinds of work around the office for me. I learned how to use the Addressograph, and helped compile survey information brought in from the local record stores.
I didn’t see much of Kathy. She worked at night mostly now. A lot of Phillies games and WFIL nights at local clubs.
I ran into her one afternoon. “Debra! Oh my God! This is the best job I ever had! And I’m making twice what they were paying us when we started!”
Of course, my salary hadn’t budged.
Needless to say, I didn’t see much of Kathy the rest of the summer.
MONDAY: More of this, as our guest columnist goes from being the pal of a Boss Chick to becoming one herself.
YESTERDAY, we began a look at Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project.
Today, a few more thoughts on the building and what it might mean.
7. The commodification of “rebel” images as corporate and safe has reached an apex with architect Frank Gehry’s gargantuan shrine. No longer can rockers, especially Seattle rockers, romantically imagine their milieu as a stronghold of anti-Establishment defiance. (Unless EMP becomes a symbol of everything to be rebelled against (see item 5).)
8. It’s a hallmark of “smooth” industrial design, the same aesthetic principle seen in the New Beetle, the Chrysler PT Cruiser, the iMac, Nike shoes, etc. etc.
Two essays in the July Harper’s (not posted online) discuss this aesthetic as a symbol of global-corporate power and the ascendancy of soft-edgedness in all social endeavors: Mark Kingwell’s “Against Smoothness” and Thomas de Zengotita’s “World World–How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blob.”
9. The opening was almost exactly three months after another Paul Allen-instigated event, the Kingdome implosion.
The latter event took place on the Spring Equinox weekend, that traditional time of new beginnings. The EMP celebration, featuring a Seattle Center-wide weekend of free-to-$140 concerts (several of them quite good, especially Patti Smith’s), took place on the Summer Solstice weekend, that traditional time of celebrating the bounty, the harvest; the time when all is, to quote a title of a certain Seattle songwriter, “in bloom.”
10. The opening ceremony itself, in which Allen smashed a custom glass guitar made by Dale Chihuly, was one of those singular moments encompassing so many references. In this case, it encompassed many aspects of the Seattle baby-boomer fetish culture–Allen’s Microsoft bucks; Chihuly’s eternal cloyingness; and the Seattle white guys’ cult of Hendrix.
11. People still don’t know what to think of the building. One woman told me she thought it was supposed to “represent a heart.” I replied that that couldn’t possibly be so; it would have required Mr. Allen to have been aware, at the project’s outset, of musicians who’d actually lived in Seattle as adults.
But my personal conundrum of what the design’s supposed to represent was finally satisfied by this image of the Monorail tracks entering a strategic opening through the building. (Amazing, the raunchy content that can get into a so-called family newspaper these days.)
12. It’s bound to be a classic tourist trap. See the fish-throwers, Ride the Ducks, eat at the Space Needle, take a ferry boat, do the EMP.
One of these months, I might even go inside the thing myself.
(I did go into the merchandise shop, which you can enter without paying admission to the rest of the place. So far, they’re not selling a certain book that no Seattle music museum merchandise shop should be about. If you go there, you might ask them for it.)
TOMORROW: Reality, what a concept!
“DOT COMS MUST DIE!”
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard that phrase, or phrases like it, over the past month or so.
It seems more and more Seattleites, in and out of the computer and Internet industries, have become ever-sicker of these companies–and not just of Microsoft either.
These various observers are offended, in differing amounts, by the real-estate hyperinflation, the SUVs, the traffic jams, the condos, the “market price” fancy-pants restaurants, the new chain stores full of useless luxury tchochkes, the cell phones a-bleating in theaters and parks, the rude and humorless public behavior, the slavedriving conditions and disposable-commodity treatment placed upon employees, the destruction of so many funky little places, and all the other civic ills that are popularly blamed, justly or unjustly, on the 300 or more “new economy” companies in King County.
Dot-coms might not be dying. But they’re not as robust as they were six months ago either.
And their decline and/or fall won’t be pretty. (Layoffs, closures, paranoid management behaviors, stock roller-coasters, cash-flow hiccups, pension-fund bankruptcies, avalanches of neo-modern furniture flodding Goodwill stores, you know the drill.)
But it could be entertaining to watch.
Besides, what else did you expect? Most new retail and other business ventures fail in their first five years–even when they’re backed by big stable corporations. Why did so many day traders and CNBC viewers mistakenly assume this law would be wiped away just by putting a “.” into a company’s name?
But they did. So did venture capital outfits, ploughing billions into business plans that would look dubious to any sane observer.
The result: A national economy, particularly the urban economies of a dozen specific metro areas including ours, increasingly organized around a “new prosperity” where many of the most acclaimed corporate “success stories” have lost millions and expect to lose millions more for the indefinite future–if they have one.
MONDAY: Imagining a post-Net-stock-crash world.
IN OTHER NEWS: The guy who’s spent the past half-decade or more defining himself as the anti-BS, anti-hype crusader joins Monday Night Football. Huh?
A REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
AS LONG AS the Feds have Microsoft square in their judicial gunsights, ready to cleave the software monopoly in two (pending the results of a few years in appellate courts), let’s add our own recommendations for the “remedy phase” of the case.
After all, we in the Seattle metro area have been affected by the machinations of our own native son Bill Gates, for good and/or for ill, just as the global business and computing scenes have been.
So herewith, a few modest proposals for how Gates and company (or companies) can partly atone for what they’ve done to our formerly quiet little region:
“Money. It’s not everything.”
“Support the arts. Buy some local art today.”
“Other people. Talk to one or more of them today.”
“There’s not enough ‘country’ for everybody who wants to be the only person in it.”
“Tech stocks: Tempting but dangerous.”
“Is that fourth car really necessary?”
“Get off the computer and talk to your wife. At least once a week.”
“Sex is like tennis. It’s a lot more fun when you’re not playing alone.”
“You’re not the center of the universe. Live with it.”
(Okay, this last demand is the one MS will never, ever agree to. But one can dream, can’t one?)
IN RELATED NEWS: The Canadians have already taken away Wash. state’s film industry. Now they want to take Microsoft. I’d say “Let ’em have it,” but that’d be cruel to our beloved neighbors-2-the-north.
TOMORROW: Did I really think white people wouldn’t take over hiphop?
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
THE FIRST TIME Life magazine died, it was mourned far and wide on TV newscasts and in other publications’ commentary pages as symbolizing the end of an era.
This time, its second demise is hardly noticed outside the mag industry.
The old Life was a huge glossy that came out every week for a paltry price. (The original 1936 cover price was 10 cents; subscription rates at its 1972 end were little higher.) It was supported by ads–big, slick, colorful ads for brand-name consumer products ranging from cars to Campbell’s soup; ads aimed at mass-market middle-class households with little regard for the details of demographic market segmentation.
Five years after the weekly’s end, Time Inc. bosses figured the Life name still held a cachet among readers. So they relaunched it as a monthly. They charged more for it the second time around, but it basically kept to the same format–photo-heavy stories and features about assorted general-interest topics (movie stars, animals, science, history, uplifting-human-interest stuff, etc.).
Time Inc. killed the old Life because TV had taken mass-marketing ad dollars away from magazines. AOL-Time Warner is killing the current Life, effective with the current issue, because the entirety of the advertising business (even broadcast) has gone to niche marketing as its gospel.
Life still had a steady circulation around 1.7 million. It was still turning a small profit. But AOL-TW’s ad sales team was finding the mag an increasingly difficult sell to ad agencies.
The company could promote Money as reaching an audience of middle-managers, Fortune as reaching top executives, Sports Illustrated as reaching young-adult males, and In Style as reaching young-adult females.
But who reads Life? A little bit of everybody? Companies don’t want to sell to a little bit of everybody. They want to sell condensed soup to grandmas, dry soup to college kids, ready-to-heat soup to upper-middle-class moms, microwaveable soup to busy singles, vegan soups to vegans, and boxes of soup ingredients to weekend chefs.
So Life will again become a heritage of photojournalism and a word in the names of AOL-TW’s Time-Life Books and Time-Life Music.
It didn’t have to be this way, and it still doesn’t.
AOL-TW could always reinvent the title again, in this or some future year. The next time, they could downplay the feature-y material and emphasize a harder, more immediate brand of photojournalism, telling compelling stories to a readership that could cut across the demographic boundaries, allowing marketers to reach beyond their increasingly boxed-in little niches.
Could it happen? As they say in the photojournalism trade, let’s see what develops.
TOMORROW: A few things you think you know, but which are wrong.
SOME SHORT STUFF this Memorial day, starting with two words you should start remembering:
“Fette Mittlelschrift.”
You’ve probably never heard its name before, but you’ve seen it.
It’s the typeface that’s taking over the world.
(Some type suppliers call it “Meta,” but we’ll choose to call it by the more-fun name.)
Last year, it seemed every wannabe-hip graphic designer and design client (from rave flyers to MTV to Urban Outfitters) was agog over plain old Helvetica, the typeface they all saw as representing the sleek modernism people in the ’60s thought people in the ’00s would all be living in. (I, as a former late-’70s-early-’80s young adult, still identify Helvetica with bad early desktop publishing and Penthouse magazine.)
But now that nostalgia for formerly-predicted 21st centuries is a fairly done deal, this newer sleek-modern sans serif face is spreading everywhere.
Readers around here probably know Fette Mittelschrift as the typeface in The Bon Marche’s current ads. It’s immediately identifiable by its narrow letter shapes, its large “x” sizes, and the peculiar lower-right curve in its lower-case “L”s.
Once you recognize it, you’ll start spotting it everywhere–Harper’s Bazaar cover blurbs, assorted smaller lifestyle and fashion rags, on-screen graphics on The NBA On TNT and the Independent Film Channel, and ads and in-store signs for Bank of America, Canon, Merrill Lynch, Payless ShoeSource, Kmart, Oldsmobile, Subaru, American Express, HBO, Philip Morris (those pathetic “Working to Make A Difference” spots), and many, many others.
(Similar, but not precisely identical, typefaces are used by the new P-I TV listings and those annoying ABC “We Love TV” ads.)
But be careful–once you start realizing just how widespread Fette Mittelschrift is, you could end up seeing it everywhere; or even obsessively-compulsively repeating the name, a la Zippy the Pinhead. “Fette Mittelschrift, Fette Mittelschrift, Fette Mittelschrift.”
PHILM PHUN: Let’s attempt, for future readers, to explain some prospective future confusion.
The 2000 release American Psycho was, on at least one level, about beauty–a cold, antihuman, perfectionistic ideal of beauty.
The 1999 release American Beauty was about psychos–four adults and three teenagers, each a case study in a different type of psychological dysfunction (neurosis, paranoia, catatonia, voyeurism, transferred incest-compulsion, etc.).
Critics who called AB just another anti-suburban slam were wrong. It’s really a taut character study that could be set in any affluent North American setting. It’s just that the “wide open spaces” setting clashes perfectly with the characters’ internal confinement.
TOMORROW: The city Paul Allen’s building, in spite of us.
