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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.
YESTERDAY, we started discussing the fantasy universe promoted in those new rah-rah, way-new business magazines, Fast Company and Business 2.0.
But business writing and advice seems to be everywhere.
CNBC runs 15 hours a day of financial coverage. CNN and Fox News Channel have been adding additional hours of money talk to their daytime lineups. Satellite dishes offer the all-day, all-nite stock-talkin’ and number-flashin’ of CNNfn and Bloomberg TV.
There’s a site called GreenMagazine.com that claims to be “about attaining the freedom to do what you want to do,” with investment tips and celebrity financial-advice interviews with the likes of Emo Phillips.
Even Jesse Jackson has a money guidebook called It’s About the Money. In it, Jackson and his Congressmember son talk about financial planning as “The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony” for minority and working-class Americans.
While the Jacksons’ main lessons are pretty basic stuff (get out of debt, avoid those hi-interest credit cards, start saving, build home equity), it’s still more than a bit disconcertin’ to see the onetime Great Lefty Hope now traveling the talk-show circuit with the same subject matter as the Motley Fools.
Perhaps it’s time this website and print magazine got with the program. I can see it now:
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours. “Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime. Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill. “Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime. “You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121. “Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours.
“Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime.
Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill.
“Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime.
“You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121.
“Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
MONDAY: An involuntary single’s thoughts on Valentine’s Day.
IN OTHER NEWS: Hey Vern, Ernest’s dead. Future film historians will look at Jim Varney’s nine-film series as the late-century period’s last true heirs to the old lowbrow B-movie series comedies like The Bowery Boys and even the Three Stooges (also critically unappreciated at their times).
ELSEWHERE:
THE WIRED WEBSITE DIDN’T INVENT the banner ad, despite its official claims to have done so (Prodigy did). And Wired didn’t invent rah-rah way-new business writing.
Elbert Hubbard, Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill, and Steve Forbes’s late dad Malcolm all used to love pontificatin’ and philosophisin’ about industry as the driving force of the human race, commerce as the world’s noblest calling, and the businessman as rightful leader of all things.
All Wired did, and it’s an important little thing, was to marry this motivational pep-talk lingo to the hyperaggressive hipness of techno music and corporate-PoMo design, and to apply it not toward such old-economy trades as shoe selling but toward the Now-Now-Now realm of tech-mania.
But for all its self-promotin’ bluster, Wired never got the mythical sack of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow, and had to be sold to the Conde Nast oldline mag empire.
It’s taken a couple of other ventures to morph the concept into something more reader- and advertiser-friendly.
Wired treated the Way New Economy, ultimately, as just the replacement of an old elite by a new elite. Its fantasy-universe was a rarified hip-hierarchy centered in San Francisco and ruled by a clique of aging Deadheads working as strategic consultants to telecom and oil companies.
In contrast, both Fast Company and Business 2.0 depict the “revolution in business” as something anybody can, at least in theory, get in (and cash in) on. Both mags are thick with second-person features on how you and your firm can get connected, shake off those old tired procedures, and rev up for today’s supercharged Net-economy.
Fast Company (circulation 325,000) has become the cash cow of Mortimer Zuckerman’s publishing mini-empire, which has also included U.S. News & World Report, the N.Y. Daily News, and (until he recently sold it) the Atlantic Monthly.
Business 2.0 (circulation 240,000) has quickly become the American flagship of the British-owned Imagine Media, whose other “Media With Passion” titles include Mac Addict and the computer-game mag Next Generation.
Each of the two has its individual quirks, but they essentially play in the same league by the same rules.
And rules constitute the main theme of both magazines–breaking all the old rules, mastering all the new rules, and, with the right pluck and luck, getting to make some rules of your own.
One of the new rules, all but unspoken, is that everything in the reader’s life is apparently supposed to revolve around the ever-more-aggressive worship of Sacred Business. In the shared universe of Fast Company and Business 2.0, nothing exists that doesn’t relate to (1) amassing wealth and/or fame, (2) having adrenaline-rush fun while doing so, and (3) achieving the ideal life (or at least the ideal lifestyle) via the purchase of advertisers’ products.
Wired, for all its elitism and silliness, did and does acknowledge a larger universe out there. It always has at least a few items about how digitization is affecting art, music, politics, sex, food, architecture, charity, and/or religion.
In the world according to the way-new business magazines, however, none of those other human activities is considered worth mentioning even in passing. It’s as if all other realms of human endeavor are merely unwelcome distractions to the magazines’ fantasy reader, a hard-drivin’ entrepreneurial go-getter with no time for anything that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.
Fast Company (which is slightly less totally business-focused than Business 2.0) did run a cover-story package last November about businesspeople (especially female ones) who find trouble balancing their careers with their other life-interests and duties.
But even then, second-person narcissism ruled the day. It was all about how You (by identifying with the articles’ case studies) could preserve your personal sanity, and hence become an even better cyber-warrior.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: Last November, I wrote about the hit UK soap Coronation Street, which can be seen on the CBC in Canada (and on some Seattle-area cable systems) but not in the U.S. Since then, the Street has finally made its U.S. debut, on the CBC-co-owned cable channel Trio. The channel’s not on many cable systems yet, but you can get it on the DirecTV satellite-dish service.
BEFORE WE BEGIN, A QUICK ANNOUNCEMENT: My once-canceled talk radio appearance has been rescheduled on short notice. It’ll be at noon this Sunday on “The Buzz,” 100.7 FM.
WHILE RESEARCHING a future piece for this space about those screeching new business magazines, one phrase kept recurring in their headlines. It was a phrase I’d remembered from dreadful Reagan-era articles in the likes of Vanity Fair and Esquire about seemingly unstoppable tycoons and financiers.
Such profiles would almost inevitably carry the title “The Rise and Rise Of….”
The oft-unspoken assumption behind the phrase is that there were certain ultra-Alpha-Male money-gods for whom the rise-and-fall, birth-and-death rules of normal human existence do not apply.
You want to know the roots of today’s supposed decline in “civil society?” The I-got-mine-screw-you zeitgeist exploited by conquest-of-nature SUV ads and ultraviolent video games? The who-needs-you “Attitude” of wrestlers, sexist/racist comedians, “aggro” rock bands, and Microsoft attorneys? It’s all in those five short words, expressing the manufacture of a particularly annoying social archetype–the quasi-neo-Nietzschean ubermensch who believes himself to be above the petty rules of puny humans.
With this premise in mind, I did a quick Net-search for the phrase. Following are some of the hundreds of results of the search; people, places, and things that, according to various print and Net-only journalists, are or were on “The Rise and Rise”:
And, of course:
There are also films entitled The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer and The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket, and an earlier stage play called The Rise and Rise of Arturo Ui.
Mind you, I happen to like some of the stuff on this list (particularly Bowie, bagels, miniskirts, and the Net). It’s just that nothing keeps rising forever and ever, except in theoretical algebra.
MONDAY: More media merger madness.
IT’S SUPER BOWL WEEK, and any day now we’re supposed to find out when the Kingdome’s going to finally get it.
That big concrete multi-purpose room, with a face only a structural engineer could love, built in a town ruled at the time by structural engineers, has been deemed obsolete. It will be imploded, probably just before baseball season begins at the new Safeco Field two blocks away.
The 24-year-old Dome’s not just an anachronism in today’s sports industry (with its quest for luxury boxes and costly amenities). It’s an anachronism in today’s Seattle.
The Dome, as I wrote in this online space last year, is as quintessential an icon of old Seattle as the more beloved Space Needle and its adjacent Seattle Center (built a mere 14 years before). Like the reused armory building, ice arena, Shrine temple, and other gathering spaces incorporated into the Center, the Dome was made to do many things cheaply, none of them extremely well.
It was an attempt by a town torn between ambition and repression to become “world class” without breaking the budget or going too outlandish about it.
Seattle’s always been a city in search of a new identity. Indeed, this civic dissatisfaction with its identity is a key component of its identity.
The first permanent white settlement at present-day West Seattle (which we’ll discuss more fully next week) was called “New York-Alki” (“New York By and By” in Chinook jargon).
The city’s early leaders pushd and pushed for Seattle to become the regional railroad hub, despite the old Northern Pacific’s plan to promote its own company town of Tacoma.
In 1897, Seattle firmly became the region’s commercial capital (outpacing the older Portland) when it was successfully promoted as the place for Yukon gold-rushers to get bilked on pans and provisions.
Seven decades later, the ex-frontier shipping post had become Jet City, home of Boeing and the ’62 World’s Fair, a leader in public arts funding and medical research. But to our civic establishment, it still wasn’t enough. Seattle was told it had to become a Big League City; which meant a full complement of pro sports teams and a dome to put them into.
But even that still wasn’t enough. Now, Seattle’s told it has to be “world class.” To really become New York by-and-by (with atttitudes and housing prices to match).
So the relentless destruction of every structure or institution of the ’60s-’80s Seattle is perfectly in keeping with the town’s overall heritage of constant re-creation. So is the ’00s Seattle’s obsession with building architectural monuments to its own “Emerald City” self-image; including the two new gorgeous, luxury-box-festooned stadia replacing the Dome.
I hated a lot about the old Seattle. I used to call it “City Light;” comparing the name of the municipally-owned power company to an official aesthetic of mandatory mellowness, in which laid-back, comfortably affluent baby boomers were considered the only people who mattered.
But the new urban zeitgeist, in which relentless dot-com tycoons are the new more-equal-than-others, disturbs me in other, more serious, ways.
The Seattle I’d called “City Light” at least had some interstitial spaces–low-rent districts, cheapo apartments, punk houses, art studios, fringe theaters, dive bars, no-nonsense retail strips–in which other sociocultural constructs could be imagined. But all those are now either gone or threatened.
It’s not City Light anymore. It’s something harsher, faster, more abrasive.
It’s City Extra Light.
TOMORROW: Some more of this, in the form of oversimplified comparisons.
YESTERDAY, we discussed something I’ve long hoped for and others now fear and wish to prevent: The decline of the New York/California duopoly on pop culture in America (and, hence, the world).
Meanwhile, in the sociopolitical realm, some misguided guides still insist that we all will become just like California. As Newsweek claims, “California, as always, shows us our future.”
The magazine’s specifically claiming that all of the several states are going to repeat what that state’s gone through; as an emerging “majority of minorities” racial makeup realigns old political coalitions and fuels an Anglo reactionary retreat from multicultural ideals.
But not all of America has the major corporate-agribusiness lobby that helped give California the political careers of Nixon, Reagan, et al. Northwest “progressive” politics had some of its roots in family farmers fighting the big banks and railroads. California Republicanism was hugely influenced by factory-farm interests who’d been in cahoots with the banks and the railroads.
This, along with the Hollywood-bred schtick of hyped-up and dumbed-down “populist” campaigns on behalf of those already in power, led to the peculiarly divisive, reactionary breed of politics that have bogged down the most populous state lo these past three decades or more; and which have been exported to the nation via Nixon, Reagan, Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet” advisors, et al.
(It also might explain a political left-of-center up here that, during of the first half of the last century, tried to build organizations and institutions; and a political left-of-center down there that, by the end of the last century, seemed to define protesting as the limit of what it would or could do.)
We must also go beyond simplified notions of “whiteness” for a closer look at our ethnic past. European immigrants may have come in vast numbers through NYC, but they didn’t all move on to other places in the same mixes. German and Irish Catholics helped settle the Great Lakes; Nordics came to Minnesota (and eventually from there to Washington); Hispanics are still more numerous along the southern-tier states than elsewhere, except for the Puerto Rican component in NYC. California’s blessed with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants; Washington’s proportionately more blessed with assorted Asian newcomers.
The U.S. is definitely going to become a nation of “a majority of minorities.” But which minorities are more influential in which parts is going to help keep things lively.
Even the Newsweek article acknowledges that these emerging ethnic voting blocs don’t vote alike. It doesn’t, but could’ve, noted the big wedges between blacks and Cubans in Florida as well as the rift it did note between Latinos and Asians in California.
If we’re lucky, Washington (the first mainland state to elect an Asian-American governor) and the other states will learn to avoid some of the divisive rancor California politics has gone through.
The nation, as a whole, is becoming less uniform. But it won’t become less uniform in one uniform way.
(An aside: In the ’60s, legendary ad designer George Lois made a campaign with the faces of New Yorkers of every possible ethnicity, each clutching a slice of bread in his or her own portrait above the slogan “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy’s Jewish Rye.” The campaign was dropped after market research showed everybody loved the ads featuring their own ethnic groups, but hated the ads with everybody else.)
TOMORROW: Is incomprehensible “political” writing really necessary?
FROM MY FREELANCE work for Everything Holidays, here are some last-minute Xmas gift ideas. MISCmedia takes no responsibility if anything breaks the first time it’s used, or if your beloved takes one look at the gift and decides you’re getting nothing next year.
TOMORROW: Is indie film on a comeback?
LISTEN UP: Your fave online columnist might be appearing on a local talk-radio outlet soon. Maybe even this Friday. Further details forthcoming.
ONCE AGAIN, something I originally did for Everything Holidays. This time, the topic’s infamous Xmas gifts.
It’s said, “It’s not the gift but the thought that counts.” If so, some of these gifts represent less than the highest thoughts.
Moving from the merely ill-advised to the totally dorky, American Express last year asked people to send in real, really dumb, presents. Some of the “Most Outrageous Gift Contest” entrants included:
Some folks try to make up for less-than-stellar gifts by including a less-than-stellar card. Like so much of North American culture, modern Christmas cards let you buy a mass-produced item to express your individuality.
Some of the basic types:
TOMORROW: Why digital cable TV ought to have more than just movies.
IN OTHER NEWS: 60 Minutes II last night juxtaposed the Eugene anarchists with the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia–who could be interpreted as having also dreamed of destroying industrial society and imposing a neo-agrarian regime upon a less-than-willing populace. If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d imagine an “objective” attempt to discredit the WTO window-breakers’ cause.
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: It’s a sad day for Great Pumpkin worshippers everywhere.
ANOTHER HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON begins tomorrow.
And in Webland, that means one (1) thing: Pundit pieces pondering how much biz the leading e-commerce shopping sites will generate, and what, if anything, the old tangible-location retailers might do in response.
The retail giants might very well be scrambling to confront the online threat in the future. But for now, their attitude seems to be business as usual, or even business more than usual.
Frequent readers to this site know how I’ve been tracking the rise of ever-bigger, ever-more-consolidated chain-store outposts. The accumulated result hit me a couple nights ago when I went on a pre-holiday-rush walking tour of my local brave-new downtown.
Aside from the Bon Marche, the Pike Place Market complex, the Ben Bridge jewelry store, and the Rite Aid (ex-Pay Less, ex-Pay n’ Save) drug store, every major space in Seattle’s retail core had either changed hands, been completely rebuilt, or both in the past 13 or so years. And only a handful of smaller businesses were still where they used to be (among them: M Coy Books, the Mario’s and Butch Blum fashion boutiques, a Sam Goody (nee Musicland) record store, and a Radio Shack).
All else was change. Chains going under (Woolworth, Kress, Klopfenstein’s, J.K. Gill) or pulling out of the region (Loehmann’s) or retreating to the malls (J.C. Penney, Weisfield’s Jewelers, Dania Furniture). Other chains pushing their way in (Borders, Barnes & Noble, Tiffany, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Men’s Wearhouse, Sharper Image, Ross Dress for Less, Shoe Pavilion, Warner Bros. Studio Store, Old Navy, FAO Schwarz, etc. etc.). Local mainstays dying off (Frederick & Nelson, the Squire Shops, and now Jay Jacobs); others expanding (Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, REI, Seattle’s Best Coffee) or at least moving about (Roger’s Clothing for Men).
Now, the ex-Nordstrom building (actually three buildings straddling the same half-block) is reopening, one carved-out individual chain storefront at a time.
(When the building was first being reconfigured, I actually had a dream about the building being turned into artists’ studios; something that now is unlikely to ever happen–unless e-commerce really does bite into old-style retail during the next decade, and these fancy-schmancy chains all pull out at once).
First to open in the ex-Nordstrom was an all-Adidas store that actually looks homey compared to the Niketown a half-block away. Other shops, apparently all chain-owned (including Urban Outfitters) will move into the divvied-up spaces during and after the holiday shop-O-rama time.
But the project’s biggest and most elaborate storefront thus far belongs to Coldwater Creek, selling pseudo-outdoorsy clothes and home furnishings for rich software studs with $2 million “cabins” in the woods or on the water.
It’s a catalog operation based in Sandpoint, ID; a town known in the news for the various far-right nasties (Klansmen, militias, Y2K-survival compounds) who’ve moved to the surrounding countryside. But a more relevant-to-today’s-discussion aspect is Sandpoint’s recent status as one of the “Little Aspens” dotting the inland West, once-rustic little hamlets colonized by Hollywood types (including, in Sandpoint’s case, Nixon lawyer turned game-show host Ben Stein).
Ever since the first department stores first offered the allure of couture-style fashions without custom-made prices, upscale retailers have been in the biz of selling fantasies. The fantasy sold by Coldwater Creek is the one sold in SUV ads. The fantasy of living “on the land” without having to work on it, without being dependent upon a rural economy.
It’s the fantasy depicted in magazine puff pieces about folks like Ted Turner in Montana and Harrison Ford in Wyoming–the sort of folks I described a couple weeks back as pretending to “get away from it all” while really bringing “it all” with them. Folks who commute from their work in other states by private plane, then preach to the locals (or to those locals who haven’t been priced out of the place) about eco-consciousness and living lightly.
TOMORROW: Continuing this topic, a hypermarket chain takes over a steel-mill site and builds a store that looks like a steel mill.
IN OTHER NEWS: The outfit known for syrupy background music, AND which employed innumerable loud-guitar musicians in day jobs, is moving away.
TODAY, A BREAK from the heavier topics we’ve covered of late, for some slightly-odd short stuff.
FASHION-VICTIM ASSAULT WEAPON OF THE WEEK: Rolling Stone magazine now has its own brand of sunglasses. Presumably just the thing if you want to look like a washed-up, clueless, verbose rock critic (you know, the oldest and squarest guy at the concert).
WHICH PAPER D’YA READ?: Times headline, 11/12: “University District: Rail’s last stop.” P-I headline, following day: “Support for Northgate link gains momentum.”
ART UPDATE: Several weeks ago, I wrote about a poster advertising a “Butch Erotica” cabaret, which looked from afar like it was instead advertising “Butoh Erotica.” At the most recent First Thursday art openings, I finally saw some Butoh erotica.
It took place at the Jem Studios (currently doomed-for-gentrification), in a room filled with video monitors showing footage of one nude model moving about extremely slowly. In the middle of the room, the artist/model herself appeared, “dressed” only and entirely in white body paint (applied by a male assistant with a house-paint roller). She then slowly walked about the room, slowly climbed a step ladder, slowly smoked a cigarette (handed to her by another male assistant), and slowly gazed at the art-viewers.
She became the voyeur; we became the spectacle. Nothing had turned me on as much in months.
WORST JUNK EMAIL OF THE WEEK: (needless to say, from a “friend” I’ve never heard of, at an apparently nonexistant email address)
Subject: hey wassup CLArK 😉 From: asynergy@quixnet.net To: clark@speakeasy.org Hey yaw, you not gonna beleive this yo. I found this place that gives ya access to like soooooo many hacked membership based sex/xxx sites for free man, no shit!! It’s like, no banners, no popups even, no credit card, no membership and no bullshit yaw~~~~!!!! f*ck me dead dude ;). Anyway, the secret address is [name deleted] ok? You jsut go there, click on any site you want and you get secret membership access, for free, too about (i think) 350 different sites. when i see ya at school tomorrow, make sure you bring the damn bio sheets ok? btw, wtf r u doing using speakeasy.org anyway?? wtf is up with that yaw, waj ya chage your addy? newayz, later… im off to that [name deleted] site again ;), catcha in class tommorow.
Subject: hey wassup CLArK 😉
From: asynergy@quixnet.net
To: clark@speakeasy.org
Hey yaw, you not gonna beleive this yo. I found this place that gives ya access to like soooooo many hacked membership based sex/xxx sites for free man, no shit!! It’s like, no banners, no popups even, no credit card, no membership and no bullshit yaw~~~~!!!! f*ck me dead dude ;).
Anyway, the secret address is [name deleted] ok? You jsut go there, click on any site you want and you get secret membership access, for free, too about (i think) 350 different sites.
when i see ya at school tomorrow, make sure you bring the damn bio sheets ok? btw, wtf r u doing using speakeasy.org anyway?? wtf is up with that yaw, waj ya chage your addy? newayz, later… im off to that [name deleted] site again ;), catcha in class tommorow.
BEST EMAIL OF THE WEEK: (from a David Foster Wallace mailing list)
Subject: wallace-l: Advertising overkill From: Hamilton, Cathy, [address deleted] To: ‘wallace-l@waste.org’, wallace-l@waste.org Wanna hear something frightening? I just got a joke forwarded to my Inbox that was sponsored by – I kid you not! – Polo ™ Sport Condoms! Talk about being a slave to fashion – this must mean that the Tommy Hilfiger (incidentally the most overrated designer in the world!!) flag pattern condoms can’t be far behind. It’s so important to be properly accessorized! I wonder if in the near future, that “space” will be rented out by condom companies for advertising, you know like: “Dominoes we get it to you in 30 minutes or your pizza is free!” or “Call Roto Rooter toll free for your really bad clogs.” And how exactly will they be able to estimate the space for billing beforehand…?
Subject: wallace-l: Advertising overkill
From: Hamilton, Cathy, [address deleted]
To: ‘wallace-l@waste.org’, wallace-l@waste.org
Wanna hear something frightening? I just got a joke forwarded to my Inbox that was sponsored by – I kid you not! – Polo ™ Sport Condoms! Talk about being a slave to fashion – this must mean that the Tommy Hilfiger (incidentally the most overrated designer in the world!!) flag pattern condoms can’t be far behind. It’s so important to be properly accessorized!
I wonder if in the near future, that “space” will be rented out by condom companies for advertising, you know like: “Dominoes we get it to you in 30 minutes or your pizza is free!” or “Call Roto Rooter toll free for your really bad clogs.” And how exactly will they be able to estimate the space for billing beforehand…?
I can see it now. Probably colors, patterns, and logo “wallpaper.” I think we can all imagine some of the advertisers more likely to use this medium:
TOMORROW: I’ve complained about rude, pretentious San Franciscans. But are Seattleites these days any better?
THERE’S A MAGAZINE you probably haven’t seen called Speak.
It’s from Frisco, and bears all the traits of all those other Frisco “alternative” magazines that have come (and mostly gone) over the past decade and a half.
Specifically: It’s ruthlessly hipper-than-thou, parading a succession of counterculture celebrity profiles and essays on why these celebs and their worshippers are supposedly some intellectually/aesthetically/morally superior species to all us non-Californian redneck hicks.
Like many of those prior magazines (The Nose, Might, Mondo 2000) already have, Speak is running out of money and may have to fold. But publisher Dan Rolleri isn’t going down without a fight.
Rolleri’s tried to sell ads to big youth-appeal advertisers like Nike and Calvin Klein and the major record labels. So far, he’s had few major takers, except from two Seattle outfits (Fantagraphics and the Alibi Room) and from the Philly-based “hip ad agency” representing Goldschlager liquors and Red Kamel cigarettes.
Speak doesn’t really look like a forum for slick consumer ads; it’s all black-and-white inside, it uses hard-to-read headline type effects, and it only comes out every two or three months.
But that hasn’t stopped Rolleri from complaining.
In two consecutive editorials, he’s ranted on about how the would-be big advertisers wanted him to make his mag more sponsor-friendly. Consumer-product manufacturers wanted colorful features about the buying and using of consumer products (PCs, sports gear, fashions, etc.). Record and movie companies wanted long, glowing stories (preferably cover stories) about celebrities the media companies were currently hyping.
In short, nothing like Rolleri’s idea of a true “alternative” publication.
To paraphrase that immortal cartoon character Super Chicken, Rolleri knew the job was dangerous when he took it.
From the grisly fates met by those prior Frisco mags, he should’ve realized that if he was going to insist on a format different from (or in opposition to) those of today’s big corporate media, he’d have to have a business plan that didn’t depend on big corporate sponsors.
After all, even big ad-friendly mags often don’t turn a profit for as long as five years.
Speak’s website contains precious little content. The best online source for Rolleri’s anti-advertiser rants is an anti-Rolleri rant in Salon (which is also Frisco-based and money-losing, but which, as a dot-com company, is able to attract venture-capital support). The Salon piece claimed Rolleri was wrong to claim ad-friendly magazines are “dumbed down” only to appease advertisers, but rather that magazines are trashy and stupid because readers like ’em that way.
That’s a load of Libertarian bull.
Ad-supported media live and die, not on the whims of audiences, but on the whims of advertisers. CBS has more total viewers than the other broadcast networks this season, but The WB has more of the particular viewers sponsors give a damn about. The NY Daily News has more New York-area readers than the NY Times, but far fewer ad pages.
The task of Speak or anything like it is to build and service a community of readers without the likes of Nike.
IN OTHER NEWS: Judy Nicastro and incumbent Peter Steinbrueck were the only self-styled “progressive bloc” candidates to win Seattle City Council seats, thus ensuring two more years of the rancor and bitterness we’ve grown to love. Meanwhile, the state Initiative 695, which gave tiny tax breaks to ordinary car-owners and humongous breaks to luxury-SUV owners, passed handsomely. My theory why: The proponents used every trick of talk-radio demagoguery to proclaim themselves the “rebels” against authority figures, while the opponents used big bucks and barrages in all the other local media to basically tell voters that all the authority figures wanted them to vote no. Next step: Lawsuits.
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: The shock of the biggest intentional walk in regional sports history was only partly allieved by the Sonics’ opening win against the still-lowly LA Clippers, who, now that they’re sharing a space with the media-adored Lakers, seem even more the deliberately underemphasized #2 brand–sorta like the afternoon halves of jointly-owned newspaper monopolies (the late Spokane Chronicle, the late Minneapolis Star, etc.)
TOMORROW: Ben Is Dead is dead. Does that mean zines are dead too?
CORPORATE-MEDIA REACTIONS TO THE INTERNET have come in waves. The “Threat To Our Children” wave. The “Threat To Common Discourse” wave. The “E-Commerce” wave.
(Funny, I always thought “E-Commerce” was what happened in the parking lots outside rave dances.)
Now, there’s another wave, and it’s something corporate media absolutely luuvvv, at least in principle.
The Net, according to the newest Received Idea, is indeed good for one thing.
Selling movie tickets.
By now, even people who haven’t seen The Blair Witch Project are totally familiar with the film, its plot, its premise, and, most prominently of all, the hype. The simultaneous Time and Newsweek cover stories. The cast’s appearance on the MTV Video Music Awards. The endless repetition, from Entertainment Weekly to the New York Observer, of the filmmakers’ success-story legend–how a next-to-no-budget indie horror film became a huge hit thanks to “word of mouth” publicity on the Net.
A more careful look at the story, though, reveals something much less “spontaneous” yet simultaneously more interesting to corporate-media types.
Blair Witch turns out to have been a marriage made in marketing heaven, a three-way match between the economics/aesthetics of ’90s Fringe-Indie filmmaking, the Net’s genre-film fan base, and good old-fashioned B-movie hucksterism.
From the indie-film craze, the Blair Witch filmmakers got a whole language of “looks” and shticks: College-age, unknown actors; wobbly camera work (some shot on video); the gimmicks of fake-documentary shooting and characters talking into the camera; and other assorted means of turning a lack of production resources into a feeling of immediacy and a sort of realism.
From the scifi/horror fan community online, distributors Artisan Entertainment found a ready-made audience, with highly articulated opinions on what it liked and disliked in genre movies (a marketer’s wet dream!). Artisan could fashion a campaign promising everything real fans wanted, while making the film’s cheapness into an asset.
From the exploitation tradition, Artisan learned the importance of spending more money selling the movie than the filmmakers had spent making it. The studio put up a big website (that never mentioned the story’s fictional), slipped preview tapes and screening passes to influential online reviewers, planted preview stories in “alternative” papers, and generally sucked up to a fan community used to being treated as an afterthought by the big studios.
The result: A return-on-investment Roger Corman probably never even dreamed of.
But what happens when a movie gets the fan-site treatment, the newsgroup recommendations, and the chat room praise, but without the distributor’s puppet-strings directly or indirectly manipulating it all?
You get The Iron Giant.
A movie described by gushing fans as representing everything from the first successful U.S.-made adaptation of Japanese adventure-anime conventions to the potential harbinger of a new era in animated features. A movie praised and re-praised on darn near every weblog site and online filmzine as a refreshingly serious, grownup animated film.
But after the box-office nonsuccess of Space Jam, Quest for Camelot, and The King and I, Warner Bros. seems to have little remaining faith in its feature-animation unit.
The Iron Giant was released in the dog days of August, with nominal TV advertising (chiefly on the Kids WB cartoon shows), almost no merchandising tie-ins (even at the Warner Studio Store), and a nice-looking yet perfunctory website.
What’s probably singlehandedly kept the film in the theatres for seven weeks (at least in some parts of the country) has been the Net word-O-mouth. Real word-O-mouth, with little or no studio push or even studio attention.
The Iron Giant cost a lot more to make than The Blair Witch Project, so it won’t be easy to compare the effectiveness of each film’s free online fan publicity.
But it’s clear which one’s the real netfan-championed underdog, for whatever that’s worth.
TOMORROW: A new book treats strange-phenomena with Brit-reserve skepticism.
YESTERDAY, we discussed how Y2K survivalists are becoming less communitarian and more capitalistic.
In a way, it’s a hopeful sign that more folks are seeing the supposed global computer crash (which I don’t think will happen on the scale the scaremonges hope for) not as the end of the world but as just another opportunity to sell stuff.
But I’m still longing for an older, more optimistic future.
The future we were promised at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition.
I’m far from the only one with such retro-futuristic longings. Manray, a new predominantly-gay “video nightclub” on Seattle’s Capitol Hill (one of several clubs started this year to siphon audiences from ARO.Space), takes its logo from a slightly-altered version of the Fair’s logo, an oval with an “arrow of progress” pointing up. (Local label Up Records also uses a version of the fair’s symbol.)
Alas, the Manray folks tell me most customers think the logo’s just a “male” symbol. But the thought’s still there, and that’s what counts.
The rest of the bar’s equally Jetsonian, by the way, with recessed white lighting, Eames-esque furnishings, and curves instead of corners just about everywhere.
IN OTHER SPACE-Y NEWS, I recently attended what might be the last “Gothic Surf Shop” art party, at a group of four houses in Lower Queen Anne all occupied by visual artists (painters, photographers, installation-builders, and at least one car customizer) and sharing a common back yard.
You can guess the story here: At least one of the houses is being threatened with condo-replacement. The Gothic Surf artists are hoping to pitch in and buy the place, but nothing’s certain yet.
Anyhoo, the Gothic Surf complex is a simply gorgeous hidden treasure in the heart of the city. Between the different plywood-based installation pieces, the gardens, the “art cars” parked in front, the separate bar building (reused from an old COCA installation), the woodshop/studio in an old carriage house, and the many art collections inside the houses (including both the residents’ own works and collections of such artifacts as bakelite radios and Asian masks), it’s a site that should be saved.
It’s also a potential harbinger of the future. As the yupscale “urban revival” continues apace, here and in select other urbs across North America, less-than-wealthy creative types may end up living in the older suburbs, the already-decaying beige-rambler subdivisions surrounding airports and ex-industrial sites. It’s easy to imagine artsy folk combining their resources to buy up several adjoining cul-de-sac properties and spending the rest of their lives transforming them into neo-art-colony spaces, with folk or “naive” art decorations and self-built alterations all over.
(You can see some other examples of the endangered species that is local, affordable artist’s space during next weekend’s “Art Detour,” a program of self-guided studio tours around town.)
TOMORROW: Some more of this, plus the lost art of seductive architecture.
PITCH IN: This time, I’m looking for cultural artifacts today’s young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
IN OTHER NEWS: Buried in a Macworld story is the factoid that commercial printers these days are making fewer huge press runs, instead churning out “a greater number of small- and medium-volume projects than ever before.” Cultural decentralization continues…. Buy a magazine, help a struggling neighborhood institution….
ELSEWHERE: The Virtual Talking Mom (found by Bifurcated Rivets) is ready to give you a virtual scolding any time of the day or night…. The last days of the original Prodigy, inventor of the Banner Ad and the censored chatroom…. Musings on the real nature of creativity….
AMERICANS LOVE stuff, particularly if it’s new and/or wacky and/or ingeniously-thought-up stuff.
Here’s some of the funnest stuff I’ve found lately.
IF YOU MISSED last week’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. this Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.
IN OTHER NEWS: After 17 years as the virtual living room of the Belltown arts community, the beloved Two Bells Tavern, where some of our live Misc.-O-Rama events have been held, is in the process of being sold to ex-NYU prof Tina Morelli-Lee and hubby Jeffrey Lee. So far, the new mgmt. promises to keep everything the same (i.e., no hard alcohol and no Bud Light; and it’ll still serve some of the city’s best burgers but won’t serve French fries).
TOMORROW: The return of bad-white-boy rock; just as stoopid as ever.
ELSEWHERE: Zero Population Growth claims Seattle’s America’s most kid-friendly city. (As long as you’re not a kid who wants to see live music or put up street posters)… Surreal, haunting, quasi-Goth–who doesn’t love dream stories?…
ANOTHER BREAK from the full-length webcol, for the old-time Misc. schtick of little stuff from all over.
AD VERBS: Remember when we all used to scoff at ’60s pop hits being turned into dumb commercials? Now there’s ’80s pop hits given the same treatment.
Johnson & Johnson, f’rinstance, is selling contact lenses with a recent dance remix of the Dream Academy’s “Life In a Northern Town,” a Britpop tune originally about survival amid the economic doldrums in a forlorn industrial corner of Thatcher’s England. Not necessarily the most appropriate tuneage for aggressive brand-name marketing or for a product that promises ease and security. Speaking of relief…
TAKING THE CURE: In 1976, Canadian raconteur Don Herron (best known stateside as Hee Haw radio announcer Charlie Fahrquarson) called Gerald Ford’s swine-flu vaccine crusade “the cure for which there is no known disease.” In 1989, I heard a doctor on TV predict the 21st century would be all about hooking everybody on genetically-engineered prescriptions to treat conditions not yet known to exist.
Now, Michelle Cottle in the New Republic reoprts on the newest psychological/medical fad, “social phobia” (what used to be called chronic shyness, before drug companies said they had a treatment for it):
“…One wonders how much of the nation’s social phobia epidemic stems from our growing sense that everyone should be aggressive, be assertive, and strive for the limelight. Forget the life of quiet contemplation. We are a society that glorifies celebrities and celebrates in-your-face personalities such as Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura…. “Increasingly, we have little admiration–or patience–for those who don’t reach out and grab life by the throat. And if we have to put one-eighth of the population on expensive medication to bring them into line, then so be it.”
“…One wonders how much of the nation’s social phobia epidemic stems from our growing sense that everyone should be aggressive, be assertive, and strive for the limelight. Forget the life of quiet contemplation. We are a society that glorifies celebrities and celebrates in-your-face personalities such as Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura….
“Increasingly, we have little admiration–or patience–for those who don’t reach out and grab life by the throat. And if we have to put one-eighth of the population on expensive medication to bring them into line, then so be it.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE DAY: Ready for yet another upscale “urban lifestyle” journal? The publishers of Metropolitan Living sure hope so. It’s slick, it’s colorful, it’s bright and breezy. And, of course, it has acres of restaurant reviews (though, unlike certain no-longer-published mags of its ilk, it doesn’t charge restaurants money to get reviewed.) And, like slick monthlies in some other towns, it’s got articles about topics other than the proper spending of consumer wealth–what a concept! (Free from plastic boxes all over town, or from 400 Mercer St., #408,Seattle 98109.) Elsewhere in magland…
THE SO-CALLED ‘REAL AMERICA’ has finally gotten to see the endlessly hyped Talk magazine, and it’s not half as stupid as its own publicity makes it out to be. There’s long articles, many of which are about big real-life concerns rather than just about The Least Interesting People In The World (a.k.a. “celebrities”). And it was an encouraging surprise to see, in a mag so full of fashion ads, a long expose of misery and survival in a Mexican sweatshop town (though none of the lo-wage factories in it were identified as garment plants). Just one major beef: It was released to stores in NY/LA/DC on Aug. 3, but not to anyplace else until Aug. 10. Hey, editrix Tina Brown: That old capital/provinces cultural-dichotomy concept is SO passe. And a minor beef: It’s co-owned by Disney thru its Miramax Films subsidiary. When Miramax was independent, it claimed to be about film-as-art, not Hollywood hype. While Talk’s content isn’t as hype-centric as initially feared, its promotional campaign certainly is.
PASSAGE OF THE DAY (from the film version of The Road to Wellville: “If I hear one more word of German, I’m going to take this stick and shove it up your alimentary canal!”
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. If you can’t make it then or want a double dose, there’s another one the following Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be a parallellogram.
TOMORROW: How prejudiced are you? No, not “those people” in bad-old Mainstream America, YOU!
ELSEWHERE: A slew of books tells Brits how Americans manage, more or less, to mix the “pluribus” with the “unum”…
>PORTLAND HAS HAD its own “hip” interior design look for some time now.
You can see it down there at nearly every Pearl District record store, book store, bar, clothing boutique, and coffeehouse. You can see it up here at Hamburger Mary’s and the McMenamin’s brewpubs. It’s a look that even makes efficient new buildings look quaint and lived-in, at least on the inside. It involves “weatherbeaten” paint hues, retro wallpaper, “antiqued” wood paneling, and reproduction posters and metal signs. It doesn’t really look old; it looks like a stage set for some nice little play about how sociable life used to be, back before the sterility of modern design and the hectic pace of advanced-industrial society.
Seattle now has its own “hip” interior design look, and it celebrates everything the Portland look implicitly renounces.
We’ve previously mentioned it in regards to the ARO.Space dance club and its associated venture, the Ace Hotel. Now, the look’s spreading further.
Example #1: The Lux coffeehouse on 1st used to be a homey, comfy little joint, intimate and coccoon-ish. Now it’s been redone in “clean” off-whites. The overstuffed chairs and heavy tables have been replaced by lightweight, curvy, Scandinavian Modern-inspired furnishings.
The old Lux was a womblike shelter, a respite from the day’s stresses. The new Lux is a more engaging environment, a place to recharge one’s batteries.
Example #2: Pages is the new independent, capitalistic bookstore in the Capitol Hill space formerly occupied by the leftist Red and Black Books Collective. Red and Black was tastefully crammed with products of feminist, gay/lesbian, ethnic-minority, labor, Beat, and other un-corporate thought systems. Pages is much cleaner-looking and much, much airier; almost a boutique. It carries far fewer titles than Red and Black did, and it displays them far more “elegantly.”
Red and Black was like a reassuringly-cluttered general store for vital information. Pages is more of a boutique.
(Being on Capitol Hill, Pages still carries gay books, but they tend to be celebrations of out-ness rather than struggle-for-respect broadsides.)
Out-of-towners can see the principles behind this look in the UK-based magazine Wallpaper*. It’s like a Charles and Ray Eames revival blended with a Herman Miller fetish, stirred through with less-cheap versions of Ikea designs, and strained through a seive of World’s Fair-style futurism.
And it is not, despite everything Wallpaper* and others claim, foreign to Seattle. As I wrote in Seattle magazine, the ARO.Space name implies a reference to our leading pre-Gates industry. We make planes here. We know a thing or four about sleek lines, functional streamlining, and making small interiors look roomier than they are.
And, 37 years ago, we built the Space Needle and the arches of the Pacific Science Center as parts of the Century 21 Exposition.
As the real 21st century approaches, the homey-clutter look is getting turned into upscale preciousness by the likes of Restoration Hardware and The Pottery Barn; while the new hipsters, inspired by Euro-chic and Tomorrowland nostalgia, are heading back to the futurism.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.
TOMORROW: The potential next great civic task, humanizing the suburbs.
ELSEWHERE: Speaking of Oregon-based trends, the L.A. Times has discovered Eugene’s punk anarchists, about 20 years after their first appearance–and starts out the article with yet another dumb ’60s nostalgia lead.
