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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.
YESTERDAY, we talked a little about the irony some clueless big-media outlets continue to find in the fact that symbols of Bohemian hipness have become the driving forces of so many marketing campaigns.
Today, a little more about why hip (or rather, a highly specific image of hip) fits so well with corporate agendas.
What marketers like to show off as hip is an updated version of the old Rugged Individualist archtype from an earlier age of corporate largess. The corporate hipster is faster, spryer, sexier, more fashionable, more energetic, and more athletic than ordinary people. He or she (and, yes, it’s often a she, at least in ads) has no use for limits, boundaries, rules, or regulations. He or she either sneers or patronizes with kitsch anything old-fashioned, such as thrift, moderation, caution, humility, or cooperation.
He or she is unjustly scorned by all those pathetic squares–not because he or she’s a weirdo but because he or she’s just so darned superior.
It’s exactly the image admired by certain Wall St. corporate raiders and tech-biz bullies and sweatshop moguls.
Our Oregon neighbors at Nike are continuing to lose invaluable PR goodwill by their insistence on doing as little as absolutely possible for the workers at overseas subcontractors they get their merchandise from. It’s gotten, or will eventually get, to the point that the company will lose more money from its intransigent stance than it will save by treating its manufacturing as something to be done as cheaply as possible, so as to put more money into advertising.
Justice for subcontract workers is antithetical to the whole Nike corporate culture. It brings to mind square ’50s-esque mental images like security, stability, teamwork, providing for family, and industry. It sees itself as a hyper-aggressive design and marketing company for the globalized, post-industrial era. It doesn’t actually make anything and doesn’t want to. Making things, having visible factories or directly employing manufacturing workers in North America, is too Organization-Man ’50s.
By contrast, everything Nike’s associated its name and logo with involves images of individual hustlers, strivers, and go-getters. Even Nike endorsers who play team sports are always depicted individually, as lone-wolf superheroes, forever young, never shown with spouses or other adult encumbrances.
Many in the Way-New Left get this.
As described in a recent Nation cover story, politically-minded students across many U.S. campuses are moving beyond the smug self-aggrandizement of “identity politics” and are actively embracing such old-Left ideals as social justice and working-class solidarity.
They’re pushing for their colleges to enact fair-employment policies for their own workers and for the workers of the colleges’ suppliers, including the suppliers of athletic equipment.
Nike, natch, has been decidedly less than cooperative.
But then, being known for cooperation is like getting the “Plays Well With Others” line check-marked on your report card.
It’s just so square.
TOMORROW: The coolest product fad of the year, those hi-tech scooters.
ELSEWHERE:
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
YOU DON’T HAVE to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
But apparently you have to be a Republican to be willing to publicly express such weariness.
Today’s case in point: Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a new book by card-carrying Weekly Standard essayist David Brooks.
Brooks’s official point is to skewer the ever-pandered-to upscale ex-radicals and their younger brethern, whom Brooks collectively brands as “bobos” or “bourgeois bohemians,” engaged in a united lifelong cult of self-congratulation.
His real point, natch, is to himself pander to his own audience. Brooks depicts Those Nasty Liberals as today’s version of Spiro Agnew’s “effette snobs,” so as to let his conservative readers smugly imagine themselves as at least relatively populistic and unpretentious in comparison.
Nevertheless, Brooks does have a few points left-of-center folk should ponder.
Like Tom Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, Brooks chronicles how marketers and the media took ’60s-generation “identity politics” and successfully took all the politics out, leaving pure demographic target marketing. Advertisers re-defined political activism as something the special people of the special generation used to do, something that helped make them so gosh-darned special and hence deserving of some really special consumer products.
But the ads and the TV human-interest pieces and the newspaper columns lavishing praise beyond praise upon the Generation That Thinks It’s God always depict activism as an activity of a past, never-to-be-repeated Golden Age. Speaking out today, on behalf of anything more threatening than the right to the very freshest produce, is considered so beyond-the-pale as to be unmentionable.
“But,” you say, “activism’s come back, perhaps stronger than ever, thanks to the Way-New Left, as shown at the WTO and IMF protests.”
(Well, maybe you’d say it a little more conversationally than that, but you catch my drift.)
Yeah, but the Way-New Left’s threatening already to get trapped in many of the same mistakes that doomed the old New Left to effective irrelevance.
Some of the noisier, more easily caricaturable elements of the new protest movement are too easily tempted by oversimplistic us-vs.-them platitudes (vegan vs. carnivore, hip vs. square, raver vs. jock, neopagan vs. Christian, etc.). The very sort of see-how-special-we-are identity ploys that so easily devolve into mere ad slogans. (“Some people want to change the world. We just want to change your oil.”)
So, for this and all future generations, a few words of reminder:
Politics isn’t about being, it’s about doing.
Politics isn’t always fun or thrilling or even sexy. If hedonistic thrills are what you’re after, consumer-materialism will always provide those more consistently.
Politics isn’t always hip. A lot of it has to do with improving the lives of whole classes of people who’ve never lived in college towns or been to a single punk concert.
TOMORROW: Mount St. Helens, still a boomin’ favorite after twenty years.
THE COMMIES USED to deride Western modern art as decadent and elitist, a tool of imperial idologists.
Turns out they were right, at least partly, about the latter accusation.
Frances Stonor Saunders’s new book The Cultural Cold War relates the now-it-can-be-revealed tale of how the Central Intelligence Agency organized and funded a series of foundations that funnelled cash into museums, galleries, publications, and arts promoters.
The CIA’s purpose: to promote a vision of American arts and letters as a font of modern progressiveness, boldly looking forward into a future of vigor and abstract sophistication.
The intended audience: Not really Americans, but ’50s-early ’60s European intellectuals tempted by the egalitarian promises of Soviet Communism (and by the more practicable, less cruelty-laden realities of the milder Euro-socialism).
If Saunders is to be believed, not just the success of certain artistic styles but the careers of specific individuals, most notably Jackson Pollack, could be credited to the spy agency’s indirect and uncredited support.
It wanted to brand America as a land of free thinkers and big ideas, of clean lines and industrious energy–as contrasted to those clumsily censorous Soviets with their oh-so-passe heroic realism and their brutalist architecture.
Other U.S. agencies were doing similar jobs at the time, more overtly. The U.S. Information Agency, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe regularly promoted the U.S. in western and eastern Europe in just these ways. The aspects that made the CIA program different were its scope, its covertness, and its role as an cultural patron (not just as a publicist).
From the present-day viewpoint, it’s ironic-‘N’-odd to imagine the federal government (particularly one of its most reactionary, militaristic segments) as a friend and proponent of rebellious creative folk. Thirty-two years or so of anti-government and anti-authority attitudes in much of the arts world, plus twenty or so years of anti-modernist and kill-the-NEA attitudes among prominent politicians (some of whom seem to prefer a Soviet-realist style aesthetic!), have put many in the boho-world onto a permanent distrust of federal largesse.
Besides, the real money these days, for any and every nonmilitary endeavor, really comes from big business.
Warhol, you may remember, was a mostly un-ironic champion of logos, brand names, and guys with money. More recently, that oh-so-controversial shock-art show in Brooklyn, N.Y. may have been housed at a partly government-supported space, but it was organized and funded by a British ad agency.
While much has been made lately of the problems some arts funders are having in raising money from the dot-com nouveau riche, overall it’s still business that’s increasingly the main patron of bigtime contemporary arts iin the U.S.
Why’s business doing this? The same reason the CIA used to: Branding.
Global marketers have long relied on images of America as the land of the open road, rock ‘n’ roll, blue jeans, and self-styled “rebels.”
By funding and promoting brash, loud art, corporations are further promoting this image of America–or at least of the America corporations would currently like to help create.
Again, artists are being utilized as part of an ideological crusade.
But these days, the mythical warrior figure is the bureaucracy-bashing, ego-loving, rule-breaking Cultural Rebel–first cousin to the bureaucracy-bashing, ego-loving, rule-breaking Corporate Rebel.
MONDAY: American Psycho as anticapitalist tool.
Dream of Fields
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
NOWHERE DO I FIND the notion of utopia more tantalizing than in sports.
Stadiums get demolished and built, in defiance of the voters they are supposed to benefit and with subsidies for rich team owners who actually benefit from these glorified playpens.
The teams that play in the stadiums may enjoy a storybook history of heroes as well as a corporate history of business leaders who pull together when the going gets tough in order to provide a venue for an All-American pastime; but these enterprises are also masters of illusion, promising only a vicarious thrill of victory for fans who would be identified with winners.
Then there’s the side show of teams selling stadium naming rights to sponsors (who pay a fraction of the cost the public pays for the building and maintenance of the stadium)–sponsors whose dot-comic monikers often defy recognition, but whose cheap advertising is nevertheless slavishly echoed by sportscasters and even by people who don’t get paid to lie.
This is a national trend, but Seattle is leader in the clubhouse, thanks to record construction costs, public payments, and game attendance costs of the Mariner stadium.
Except in San Francisco, where a string of defeats on election day effectively called the bluff of the Giants and forced them to find their own investors for the new park, public will seems powerless to resist the way to build a public facility for private industry. Even cities in small markets with deteriorating attendance figures (Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Detroit) legislators finagle deals to please team owners, lending hope to truly hopeless markets (Montreal) that they, too, can win simply by building.
The pathetic examples in Tampa, Miami, and Chicago miss the cut when promoters talk stadium, as they sensibly focus on Baltimore and Cleveland. And we may pretend to separate Church and State in our one nation under God, but woe to anyone who might suggest that football and baseball be forced to share the same facility.
Pantywaist Park: While it remains to be seen how the Mariners will sell tickets with Griffey gone and Rodriguez on the threshold, consider the utopia of a retractable dome stadium. Supposedly the solution of all possible weather problems, the retractable dome has become a dome with a vengeance, closing whenever there’s the slightest fear of rain.
Then there’s the utopian meteorological phenomenon that occurs only in Seattle: Closing the roof of the unheated stadium makes the field 10-15 degrees warmer (according to the sensitive ballplayers).
Weather or not, another aspect of the new Mariner stadium defies expectation: The best seats in the house are the worst.
The luxury boxes offer a season in hell, from their inner living room with all the comforts of a Holiday Inn to their outer seating area with a dome-like overhang that aggressively funnels every last in-house TV commercial to the people with the money.
The cheap seats, in terrific (and dystopic) contrast, are great–but only if you don’t sit down. Buy a $5 ticket and roam around the upper regions of the center field bleachers, pity the rich, and finally get something for your tax dollars.
TOMORROW: This continues with stadium blackmail, Tacoma style.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT TEASED HERE YESTERDAY: I didn’t get the final random phone call from that TV quiz show on Tuesday, after having made it thru the prior qualifying rounds. Therefore, I won’t be out of town any week soon, and will be right by the ol’ computer dutifully uploading your daily doses of popcult ennui.
YESTERDAY, we started to talk about how so many of the folks moving into gentrified artist spaces are info-biz professionals who want to live amid an “artistic” community without the insecurities of personally trying to depend upon an artistic career.
There are some things these movers-in could do to help the painters, performers, writers, et al. they’re displacing.
The first thing they could do to help save the local arts community: Buy some art.
Specifically, buy some works by local street-level artists, not just from out-of-town big-name gallery stars.
The superficial response to this superficial suggestion is that too many alternative-contemporary artist types don’t want to make the kinds of slick, pleasant room decor rich folks like to have in their homes.
But that response neglects that a lot of the ladies ‘n’ gents moving into former artist spaces aren’t the bankers and lawyers who used to have all the money in this town, and who never cared much for non-glass Seattle artists.
A lot of the loft and condo folks are info-biz and software-biz studs. Folk with the inclination, or at least the potential inclination, to see themselves as outre “rebels” and connisseurs of the odd and wonderful.
To a large extent, the Seattle galleries aren’t tapping into this. They probably have wanted to, but haven’t yet figured out how.
Seattle’s Old Money never cared all that much for the contemporary arts. Seattle’s New Money could probably be trained to care; but a lot of it’s in the hands of former middle-class kids who didn’t grow up learning about the wonderful world of patronage.
I recently talked about this with my ol’ pal Matt Richter, who now co-runs the Consolidated Works performance/exhibition space, for a piece I wrote in Washington Law and Politics.
Richter said arts administrators he knew had been having some success getting new-money folks to chip in for one-shot or emergency donations; but that the nouveaus don’t yet “understand the meaning of an annual gift. They’ll be the hero once; but people in the arts have to train these people in the basics of giving. I don’t think that’s as big a problem as some make it out to be.”
I’m thinking an education campaign (what the heck, let’s go ahead and call it advertising) is in order.
Instead of nice, safe ads cajoling nice, safe people to “Support the Arts,” this campaign would run loud, brash ads inviting loud, brash people to, say, “Join the Party.”
The ads would emphasize the beauty, the vicarious emotions, the stories, the alternate lives, the points-O-view, and the experiences you can get from the visual, aural, literary, and performance milieus. The ads would beckon and/or seduce New Money folks into first becoming arts consumers, then into getting more deeply immersed and involved.
You may have already guessed the potential slogan for these ads:
“Art. The Original Virtual Reality.”
TOMORROW: A drink to free trade.
TO OUR READERS: There may or may not be an announcement in Wednesday’s online edition, which may or may not affect how the site’s updated later this month.
THANKS TO A KIND READER, I’ve finally obtained a few copies of Philadelphia’s Metro, the only new big-city daily newspaper in the U.S. these days.
Can the city where the U.S. was born now facilitate the rebirth of a sleepy, slowly-but-inexorably declining print-news industry?
From the looks of things, maybe. Just maybe.
Metro is the first North American unit of a chain of identically titled and formatted tabloids. The chain started in Sweden and now has clones in a half-dozen European cities plus Santiago, Chile.
The concept is so utterly simple, it’s a wonder nobody did it before. Metro is a free tabloid, put out five mornings a week. Most of its editions are entirely ad-supported. The Philly version also gets a partial subsidy from the regional transit authority, which had commissioned the chain to set up there and has made it the only paper available inside its bus and train stations.
The content: A controversy-reduced package of short items. Think of a USA Today, cut down to fit 24 tabloid pages (including seven pages of ads). There’s color on every page, and a couple of staples in the spine for extra convenience.
What Metro doesn’t have (besides a real website): No stock listings, no unsigned editorials, no want ads, no mealy-mouthed “analysis” pieces. Also no subscriptions, no home delivery, and no in-house printing plant (it’s printed by a subcontractor out in the Jersey suburbs).
What Metro has: Over 100 short and short-short news items (world, national, local, business, sports, entertainment), a weather map, one two-page feature story, a page of TV listings, a few arts-and-events listings, a half-page of sports statistics, one local-commentary column (by a different writer each day of the week), a letters page, an easy syndicated crossword, and only two comic strips.
Because it’s a freebie, Metro can be a small enterprise witha startup-size staff, without having to match the volume-for-your-quarters content value of the city’s established two-paper monopoly, the Inquirer and Daily News. Because it’s made from an established formula, it doesn’t have to employ a lot of seasoned news hacks. Because it’s short and convenient, it may attract readers who’ve not bothered with daily papers.
Could the formula work here? Most likely; especially once the Sound Transit commuter-rail system gets underway later this year.
But it wouldn’t necessarily have to be a paper on the strict, bright-yet-bland Metro formula. It could be a paper with a little more personality, a little more local flavor to it.
Any cyber-zillionaires out there want to help start up such a paper? Let’s talk.
TOMORROW: Real estate hyperinflation: Is the war already lost?
IN OTHER NEWS: Disneyland employees are finally being allowed to grow moustaches. This means if ol’ Walt really was frozen (he’s not), he could thaw out and legally work for his own theme park.
A KIND READER, noting my recent obsessions with the changing, increasingly hype-ridden language of business journalism and P.R., advised me to check out Cluetrain, a site which talks about just that–among many other “revolution in business” topics.
The site includes the full text of something called “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” a Martin Luther-esque set of “95 Theses.” It also offers samples from a book the manifesto’s four co-authors are selling.
The book adds details to the manifesto’s arguments that the Net is bringing about “The End of Business As Usual”–not just because of online retail but also because “people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”
On the surface, the manifesto writers are proclaiming the imminent decline and fall of corporate gobbledygook and meaningless bureaucratic procedure, in favor of human-scale conversation and systems that make sense.
Dig one level down from that, though, and the “Theses” read like the worst Wired-style bombast. Meet the new hype, same as the old hype.
Like Wired, the manifesto-ists claim their “revolution” is an inevitable, linear, historic course; and that when they call for corporations to change their ways, they’re just helpfully advising these corporations to accept the inevitable or fade into the dustbin-O-history.
(Typical excerpt: “There’s a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”)
But dig one level beneath that, and you could ascertain at least the faint beginnings of a post-hype order.
Not an inevitable post-hype order, but at least a possible one.
Certainly, a hype-reduced business universe would be welcomed by most people, with the possible exception of those who work at generating the hype (capitalism’s equivalent of the USSR’s old “ministers of ideology”).
Instead of buzzwords like “business-to-business solution paradigms” and “the dynamic realignment of restructured global opportunities,” the folks who sell and buy stuff would have to, or even want to, explain exactly what they’re really doing. If they know.
But, as can be seen in Chechnya and the Balkans, a brutal regime that drops its old ideological excuses doesn’t necessarily become less brutal.
And the regime of Global Business, shorn of Dilbert-esque B.S., would still be the regime of Global Business.
It would still seek profit and/or organizational growth to the neglect of other goals or values. It would stil, to a large extent, view the environment as raw materials, employees as machine tools, and human beings as target markets. It would still do everything it could to merge, consolidate, downsize costs, move industrial work to low-wage countries, and remove any governmental or other impediments to its ambitions.
It would simply do these things honestly and directly.
At least with the old buzzwords, companies admitted they had to disguise some of their ambitions and behaviors under convoluted excuses.
TOMORROW: Even in L.A., they complain about losing their civic identity.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Kingdome implosion, held the week after the spring equinox (the old pagan new year) was everything Carl Smool’s Fire Ceremony, a sort of neo-pagan new year’s ritual (rescheduled to the previous Sunday), had been created for.
It was a huge, populist moment–a dramatic goodbye to the past, a shared big spectacle in the present, and a greeting and/or dreading to the future.
(Indeed, several TV and radio commentators made comments to the effect that this was the millennium celebration Seattle didn’t get in January.)
I was at the Dome’s opening party in ’76. The show wasn’t much, but the feeling was warm and electric. Amid the marching bands and ethnic dance troupes and politicians’ speeches was the sense of civic triumph, of having become a gosh-darn Big League city in our own modest, thrifty way, via a big building best appreciated by structural engineers.
But now, the Brave New Seattle has no room for a homely yet functional multi-purpose room. So, a millennial Destruct-O-Rama brought one more community gathering experience.
And it was damned cool. That dome blowed up real good!
(Dome-TV marathon moment (KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison): “Look; there’s an armored personnel carrier. I feel like we’re back at WTO.”)
I’VE TALKED HERE BEFORE of the uncomfortable similarities between what left-wing academic types call “Identity Politics” and what the media business calls target marketing.
The evidence is everywhere you look.
Earlier this week, we wrote about punk rock getting turned into soundtrack music for skateboarding exhibitions designed to sell athletic shoes and soda pop.
Then there was that bizarre Super Bowl commercial with a hospital nursery full of newborn girls throwing off their little pink caps.
It was for Oxygen, a commercial website and cable TV channel billed as being “For Women, By Women.” It’s really owned by some big media-conglomerate backing; but it’s run by Geraldine Layborne, the former Nickelodeon executive who infamously fired creator John Kricfakusi from The Ren and Stimpy Show.
The TV component of Oxygen is not yet available locally. But a Salon review of its initial offerings (mostly talk shows) claims it’s about as bad as one can imagine.
Essentially, according to the review and similar slams by other critics, the channel’s message is “Don’t obey those old corporate images telling you how every female everywhere should think, behave, and consume. Obey our new corporate images telling you how every female everywhere should think, behave, and consume. And now that we’ve established your material and psychological desires for you, buy these products.”
Marketers, of course, have exploited feminist identity politics at least as far back as the launch of Virginia Slims cigarettes in 1968. (When the cigarette’s makers bought the controlling sponsorship of pro women’s tennis in the ’70s, critics used lines like “I am woman, hear me cough.”)
Even before that, appliance makers used to tout such newfnagled contraptions as home freezers and electric clothes dryers as tools to help housewives cut down on household drudgery–not, like later ads for such items did, to make women feel such duties comprised the central definition of their lives.
Any “political” or “radical” ideology based not on action but on mere identity just plays into the norms and priorities of the Regime of Marketing.
Some “identity” subcultures will be more ripe for advertiser exploitation (say, college-educated white women) than others (say, homeless people).
But the principle’s still the same.
As long as you define yourself by marketer-exploitable definitions (age group, income level, gender, race, or “psychographics”), you identify yourself as a market, not as a soul.
And as long as you identify yourself by your perceived differences from (or your perceived moral superiority to) other market segments (subcultures), you’re doing nothing to build the human-to-human coalitions any real change will need.
MONDAY: One group’s attempt at defining a way out of the tyranny of marketing.
IT’S SPRING EQUINOX TIME at long last.
And around these parts, that’s come to mean one primary thing–the imminent end of snowboarding season and the associated “X-treme” marketing loudness.
But each year, that relief seems to come later and later. I won’t be surprised if it eventually goes year-round, with fake-snow machines spewing forth human-made slipping and sliding stuff for the soft-talking, hard-playing dudes ‘n’ dudettes.
Of course, X-treme hype goes on all year round anyway.
It’s come to cover not only those athletic activities invented during the years the name’s been in use, but also older activities such as surfing and skateboarding. Anything involving individual athletes (preferably male; preferably just barely old enough to sign their own contracts) proving themselves in grandstanding, gravity-and-common-sense-defying stunts.
Activities that can be turned into context-free images of near-superhuman achievement, for the selling of soda pop, cereal, cars, energy bars, Ore-Ida Bagel Bites, etc. etc.
This ultimately corporate marketing iconography devolved from what had once been celebrations of individuality, of rebellion against the squaresville realm of organized sports (particularly team sports).
But that’s something you all should’ve expected from the start. (Precedent: The original re-imaging of surfing from something vaguely rebellious into the milieu of Frankie and Annette.)
Slightly more improbable is the role “X-treme” marketing played in the mainstreaming of punk rock during the middle of the previous decade. The music that, for nearly two decades, symbolized the near-ultimate in uncommerciality suddenly became soundtrack music in sneaker commercials.
Whole books, or at least whole masters’ theses, could be written about this transition. How high-school punk rockers used to be the scrawny ones, the unathletic ones; but then their freaky-geeky little subculture got taken over by jocks and ex-mullet-heads.
Other full-length works could be written about how the sports themselves, once tightly-knit subcultures of relative egalitarianism (or at least meritocracy) became, under the corrupting influence of sponsor bucks, into annexes of the mainstream sports universe complete with celebrities, endorsement deals, and star/spectator dichotomies.
Snowboarding participants of my acquaintance insist to me they don’t bother with all that advertising-related image crap. While some of these folks enjoy the equipment shows, videos, and promotional events corporatization has brought to the sport, they insist it’s still fundamentally a DIY, make-your-own-fun scene if you want it to be.
I have a hard time explaining to these folks another, more insiduous aspect of the corporatization–how it’s redefined these sports, even on the individual-participant level, in corporate-friendly ways.
It’s a whole X-treme world these days. The corporatized image of X-treme sports meshes perfectly with the X-treme-ized image of business. Today’s CNBC and Fast Company heroes are self-styled “rebels” who (at least in the business-media fantasies) “break all the rules,” take “big risks,” and turn into IPO gazillionaires while they’re still young enough to snowboard.
There’s nothing really all that extreme about X-treme anymore. It’s not rebellious, and it offends nobody (except maybe some old downhill skiers).
Maybe the way beyond the X-treme hype is to acknowledge it’s all square and mainstream now, but that you like to participate in it anyway.
To refuse to either blindly follow or blindly reject the sports’ fashionability.
Besides, the marketers have already started planning for any X-treme backlash; as evinced by Nabisco Sportz crackers–which let armchair athletes get fat whilst ingesting images of old-style team sports gear.
TOMORROW: Bye bye Muzak.
IN OTHER NEWS: Artist Carl Smool’s quasi-apocalyptic “Fire Ceremony” performance, postponed from New Year’s, was finally held on a perfect mid-March Sunday night. The reschedule date was picked because it was the closest weekend date to the spring equinox. It turned out to be even more appropriate–the pagan New Year, for a vaguely neopagan rite. Giant effigies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were lit by fireworks and slowly burned away, followed by the centerpiece figure of a giant egg (with a figure of the mythical roc bird revealed inside). Thousands gathered for the under-publicized makeup date, and stood in shared solemn awe at the spectacle. It was the biggest gathering I’d seen at the Seattle Center fountain area for one shared experience since the Cobain memorial. Next Sunday, at sunrise instead of sunset, comes another rite of destruction which will signify a change of eras and which will be watched by thousands–the Kingdome implosion.
BACK IN THE ’80s, it seemed like a franchised Benetton clothing store was opening up every day, in every possible North American shopping district. In downtown Seattle, I could swear there were four or five of the boutiques at once. (This memory could be slightly exaggerated.)
Supporting this vast-growing empire were the ads in every magazine and on every billboard and bus exterior, with the slogan “United Colors of Benetton” accompanying pictures of scrubbed-faced young models sporting wild and wacky earrings, necklaces, badges, and rings atop drab-looking sweaters.
Once shoppers figured out that the Benetton stores were really selling just the sweaters, not the accessories, the number of Benetton outlets markedly decreased.
The Italian-owned company never went away (it still has one local outlet, in the same building as F.A.O. Schwarz). But as its physical presence (what the dot-com guys call “brick and mortar stores”) has lessened, and as a supposedly more cynical young-adult generation has succeeded the supposed Reagan-era innocents, the company’s adopted ever-“edgier” marketing angles.
One part of that push has been the “controversial” print ads, in which fashion-model imagery was replaced by increasingly in-your-face material–AIDS victims, wartime destruction, and most recently death-row inmates–keeping the company and the brand
The less mainstream-media-publicized part of Benetton’s branding push has been Colors magazine, “A Magazine for the Rest of the World.”
It’s published in five bilingual editions (the U.S. gets English and Italian). Its New York-based editors claim, “the magazine is based on a simple idea: Diversity is good.”
Yet it exists to sell a single global brand name to some 80 countries, to get everybody wearing the same sweaters and jeans from Rio to Osaka.
The editors finally got around to exploring this contradiction in the current issue, themed “Monoculture.”
Behind the cover image of Mickey Mouse’s head as a Photoshopped goop of neon-glo goo, the issue has picture after slick color picture of Coca-Cola in Egypt, Shell in Malaysia, Madonna CDs in Tokyo, etc. etc. The WTO protestors would interpret these images as the 666-marks of a corporate beast intent on devouring us all. A reader trained by the protests to see the images that way could easily see them that way.
But the editors insist they’re “celebrating” the rise of a single commercial lingua franca uniting all nations, all faiths, and, yes, all colors under a shared experience of Big Macs (even if the ones served up in India are all either chicken or veggie), Frosted Flakes, Toyota Corrollas, Tom Hanks movies, Barbie dolls, Hershey bars, and at least one certain clothing brand.
The images and the accompanying texts show, even inadvertantly, that we’re losing a lot in terms of real cultural diversity. As Jim Hightower once wrote, “There really is a new world order, but it’s not black helicopters. It’s global corporations.”)
But they also show the world as still having quite a bit still there, diversity-wise. Despite all attempts at imposing a Monoculture, most of these marketers still have to localize their products or at least their brand-images everywhere they go. (MTV, as I wrote here last week, has had to increase its regional versions around the world from 5 to 22, in order to compete with local channels in all those countries that play fewer US/UK corporate superstars and more indigenous pop.)
Before the violent Yugoslavian breakup, advocates of Global Business liked to note that no two countries that both had McDonald’s outlets had ever gone to war against one another. That doesn’t mean globalization has been all peaceful, or all progressive. As some of the WTO protestors noted, corporate imperialism has brought sweatshop labor conditions, environmental compromise, and the end of countless local business ventures across the globe.
Some lefty historians like to recite long histories of cruelties done to folks whose economies were colonized. (What were the tea and opium wars in old Asia, f’rinstance, but the result of intercontinental commerce?)
The marketing Monoculture is different from past colonizations in several ways. Perhaps most important: In older forms of colonialism, the people of the colonized societies made stuff for Global Business to sell. Nowadays, the same folks are also expected to buy the stuff of their lives from these same trading groups. You’re not just picking coffee beans for Procter & Gamble, you’re buying P&G toothpaste. You’re not just mining iron ore to become Fords, you’re supposed to dream of one day driving your own Ford.
Whether that’s really any more “empowering” is a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: The singular joys of single-artist Net radio.
LAST MONTH, I found myself reading a short stack of those newfangled rah-rah business magazines.
One of the things that struck me was all the weird, weird names companies are giving themselves (or hiring image-consultants to give them).
I mean, it’s one thing to take an ordinary English-language word or phrase, stick an “E-” at the front and/or a “.com” at the end, and boast about how innovative and outside-the-proverbial-box you are. It’s something else again to come up with a grouping of vowels and consonants that means absolutely nothing except what your ad budget can make it mean.
Such made-up corporate monikers have come a long way since George Eastman thought up “Kodak” simply because he thought the “k” or hard “c” consonant was snappy, or since Standard Oil of New Jersey picked “Exxon” from a list of random letter-collections spun out of a mainframe computer. Now we’ve got whole companies that do nothing but find names for other companies.
Herewith, some of the goofiest and/or cleverest nonsense names seen in hi-tech magazine ads this past month:
Now: Write a sentence using all of these.
TOMORROW: Putting gentrified uses into old buildings–slightly better than just razing ’em.
FIRST OF ALL, a huge thanks to all who attended the group lit-fest I participated in last Sunday at Titlewave Books.
Whenever I do something like that, I pass out little questionnaires to the audience. Here are some of the responses to this most recent survey:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite historical era:
Favorite website:
Favorite Pokemon character:
Favorite word:
What this decade should be called:
My biggest (non-money) wish for the year:
I think the Experience Music Project building looks like:
Favorite local band/musician:
The Seattle music scene’s biggest legacy/lesson?:
How I’d preserve artist and low-income housing:
What This Town Needs (other than construction projects):
MULTIPLE CHOICE PORTION
What should be done with Schell:
What should be done with Microsoft:
What should be done with Ken Griffey Jr.:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
I’d pay for MISCmedia magazine:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
TOMORROW: Confessions of a Microsoft refugee.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea (see below).
TIRED OF WTO-PROTEST MEMOIRS? Tough. ‘Cause here’s some more.
But these aren’t just police-brutality horror stories or look-at-me boasts.
The Tentacle, Seattle’s own invaluable periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music, has published a group of personal essay on the protests by its co-editors Henry Hughes, Christopher DeLaurenti, and Dennis Rea.
The three pieces, especially Hughes’s, offer up an intriguing premise: that protesting global corporations isn’t enough. The likes of Microsoft and ExxonMobil, according to these guys, are merely the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations” and “centralized… top-heavy organizations.”
Hughes also seems not to mind if the grand anti-WTO coalition of leftists, environmentalists, unions, et al. splits apart, because his own “politics are an order of magnitude more radical than that of organized labor.” He’s also less-than-enthusiastic about any organized, permanent activist group that becomes “an organization with the agenda of self-perpetuation, rather than a loose tool for fomenting revolution.”
According to Hughes, the problem isn’t just business empires but the whole 20th-century structure of organized human relations in which such empires (or even more centralized empires such as the Stalin or Hitler types) take root.
This is similar to the philosophy of the late Marxist/Freudian thinker Wilhelm Reich, who believed the western world needed massive political and economic changes, but those changes were impossible unless individuals learned to change the way they thought and behaved in their personal lives.
So–how do you accomplish that?
Hughes and Rea believe the kind of music they’ve been championing in The Tentacle for over a year now offers a sonic and social glimpse of their preferred alternative society.
Rea believes “experimental music is much closer in its aims and methods to the radical spirit of the demonstrations than any other form of music you can name.
“Like many of the WTO demonstrators,” Rea continues, some “improvising and experimental musicians advocate the abolition of outmoded and restrictive structures of organization, in this case musical structures that have long since outlived their usefulness. As one musician friend put it, improvised music at its best is a demonstration of anarchy in action–self-governance and collective action manifested in musical terms.”
Much as certain advocates of obscurantist political writing believe modern notions of “clarity” depend too much on linear or dumbed-down thought processes, Rea and Hughes believe the very forms and structures of standard western music (not just the major-label system that disseminates it) keep human minds and souls locked into standardized, authoritarian modes.
But much obscurantist writing (such as the writing styles used in certain religious cults) is used to actually encourage authoritarian obedience. Free-improv and experimental musics, on the other hand, stress ingenuity and creativity and personal craft and cooperation and equal collaboration–skills necessary for any real revolution that doesn’t just lead to another power elite running everything.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
FROM TIME TO TIME, we like to look at the search-engine keywords that bring users here. So many of them are so darned off from anything actually found at this site, I have no idea how those keywords got folks here:
Now, of course, I’ve just gotten all these words on the site, so even more people looking for links in all the wrong places will end up here.
TOMORROW: Avant-improv music as a sociopolitical statement.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea.
SOME EVEN MISC.-ER ITEMS to peruse on your real-Washington’s-birthday non-holiday:
THE SECOND ISSUE of MISCmedia, the Magazine should be at subscribers’ mailboxes any day now. Thinking of subscribing? Here are some reasons why you should.
Reason one: If more once-a-month distro-pals don’t start helping out, we’re gonna have to cut back on the delivery of free copies around town.
Reason two: Subscribe during the March issue’s delivery cycle (approximately the next four weeks) and you’ll receive a cute little toy or trinket from our grab bag o’ goodies; including several giveaway doodads from the last High Tech Career Expo.
AD VERBS: The nationwide Azteca mexican-restaurant chain has discovered a shtick for associating its TV commercials with “authentic” Mexican culture of the pop variety. The spots closely resemble those telenovelas soap operas on Univision!
The stoic line readings, the over-drenched color schemes, the tearjerker situations–they’re all there.
The only differences are that the actors are speaking slightly-accented English and the ads are intentionally funny.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Redeye is a thick photocopy zine full of neo hiphop-graffiti style art and lettering, and articles about such popular national young-lefty topics as Mumia Abu-Jamal, “materialism and the lack of consciousness in hiphop,” coming of age in L.A., and Allen Ginsberg.
It’s also got a one-page essay repeating the fun but totally false rumor that the KFC restaurant chain changed its name from “Kentucky Fried Chicken” because the critters it serves up have been so genetically modified as to no longer legally qualify as chickens.
The tale’s gotten so widespread, the company has felt it necessary to put up a page debunking the hoax. The University of New Hampshire, referenced in some of the e-mail versions of the story, also has its own debunking page. Another telling of the story behind the story comes from About.com.
So you can be assured: KFC’s serving real chicken. Real often-greasy chicken, in often-small portions, served up by a global giant currently using a (re-)animated icon of its dead founder talking like a dorky white mall-rapper.
(Another untrue rumor Redeye didn’t know about: the one that claimed KFC’s profits went to the Ku Klux Klan.)
TOMORROW: Search engine fun.
