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AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS, by and large, have been a slowly dying institution for the past quarter-century or so. Most U.S. cities have only one daily these days, and a lot of these dailies have experienced stagnant circulations and revenues.
Instead of revitalizing their operations, many publishers have expended a lot of energy cutting costs, dumbing-down their products, and tailoring their coverage to ever-more-precise demographic targets.
Go to any out-of-town-newspaper store or big public library, and you’ll see the same set of vapid formulae practiced from approximately coast to coast. Big color pictures of dumb “human interest” topics. Polls, surveys and “front porch forums” designed to find out just what the affluent suburban 25-49 female market feels about the issues of the day. Editorials that courageously challenge citizens to muster up the ol’ civic oomph by supporting everything the local Chamber of Commerce wants this year.
And, every now and then, Op-Ed whine-pieces about the sorry fact that Americans just aren’t reading newspapers like they used to (total circulation hasn’t kept up with population growth for many years now)–and how it just goes to show you how stupid Americans are getting, especially Those Kids Today.
In a classic example of institutional self-misdiagnosis, publishers apparently continue to believe they can stem the tide if they only do exactly what they’re doing now, only more extremely. Even shorter, more meaningless articles! Even fewer original voices! Even blander layouts!
Britain’s The Economist magazine has a long, thorough look at the press’s sorry state, here and across the pond; paying particular attention to the latest threat to newsprint. You guessed right, it’s that bad ol’ Internet; which is starting to muscle in on newspapers’ most precious ad markets (classifieds) and editorial attractions (sports and stock stats, entertainment listings, movie-star gossip).
The Economist piece was published before Microsoft announced it’s going to sell off its Sidewalk local-entertainment-listings sites, which cost a lot to keep updated and which no longer fit MS’s online-business model.
But the magazine did make one on-target point in its description of newspapers’ essential nature:
“A newspaper is a bundle of goods and revenue streams brought together to amortise the cost of a printing press, and to pay for newsprint and a distribution network. The goods are the different editorial sections, stock prices, the weather forecast; the revenue streams are classified advertising, display advertising, promotions and the cover price. “…Get rid of the need for physical inputs, however, and the economics of the business changes completely… niche publishers can pick off speciality areas of content–the weather, say, or the stock market–and build a business around them. Classified advertisers can set up their own sites where prices to advertisers are likely to be lower because they do not have to pay for the physical inputs or subsidise the content. “The newspaper, it turns out, was a hundred different businesses rolled into one; and, now that the economic glue that held them together has dissolved, they could fall apart.”
“A newspaper is a bundle of goods and revenue streams brought together to amortise the cost of a printing press, and to pay for newsprint and a distribution network. The goods are the different editorial sections, stock prices, the weather forecast; the revenue streams are classified advertising, display advertising, promotions and the cover price.
“…Get rid of the need for physical inputs, however, and the economics of the business changes completely… niche publishers can pick off speciality areas of content–the weather, say, or the stock market–and build a business around them. Classified advertisers can set up their own sites where prices to advertisers are likely to be lower because they do not have to pay for the physical inputs or subsidise the content.
“The newspaper, it turns out, was a hundred different businesses rolled into one; and, now that the economic glue that held them together has dissolved, they could fall apart.”
Defenders of newsprint will argue that having a little something for everyone, without meeting any particular reader’s full needs, is a local paper’s strength; that it focuses the attention of a whole community (or at least the advertiser-desired slices of a community) around a single set of topics and concerns. We (or at least the demographically advantagous of us) all laugh at Dilbert, cry at JFK Jr.’s tragic demise, get angry about Serbian atrocities, root for our local sports teams, and wisely compare the growth trends of different mutual funds.
But that’s just another of the obsolete things about the corporate news media (conservatives like to call it “the liberal news media,” but those of us who really are liberals know better).
America’s not a one-size-fits-all society anymore, and one-size-fits-all newspapers just won’t work in it anymore. (At least European countries have national papers targeted to appeal to all sorts of different audiences.)
So there will be Websites and specialty print media for readers who really care about all the side stuff newspapers skim over (business, sports, lifestyle guides, and so on).
But what of local papers’ supposed central reason for existence–those two to five pages’ worth of local “general news,” letters, and opinions?
Those could easily be covered in a much smaller (and less wasteful) package. Say, something the size of the Christian Science Monitor, or the “alternative daily” tabloids popping up in such scattered spots as Aspen. Because these papers would be small, they wouldn’t need to own their own printing and distribution infrastructures. Because they’d need readers who really wanted to read them, and because they’d need less operating capital, they could take stands their local business leaders might not always approve of.
Instead of killing daily print media, the Net and the Net-influenced decentralized culture could help bring it back to life.
TOMORROW: I mistake a poster advertising “Butch Erotica” for one advertising “Butoh Erotica.”
ELSEWHERE: Frat boys report receiving unwanted sexual advances almost as often as initiating them…. The ultimate crusade against all things “leftist”…. The end of the Woodstock mystique? One can only hope; considering the conventional media wisdom on the original festival reduces a decade of necessary social turmoil to a single image of affluent college kids sowing their wild oats….
TO BEGIN TODAY’S TOPIC, please note the various big billboards in Safeco Field for Bank of America.
Then, notice how Seafirst branches have started getting new ATMs installed with painted-canvas marquees on top, apparently covering the real nameplates beneath–a sure signal of an impending name or logo change, to which anyone who’s lived through all the bank and gas-station name changes in recent years can attest.
For over a decade, the Frisco banking behemoth has promised it would keep the Seafirst Bank name on its acquired Washington operations, even as it’s stuck the B of A brand onto all the banks it’s since bought in some 16 other states beyond its Calif. stronghold.
Is this promise about to finally be broken?
Seafirst officials aren’t saying, yet.
But the writing’s on the wall–or, rather, on the temporarily-covered ATM nameplates.
Soon, Seattleites will be able to go to a Frisco-owned Chevron station’s convenience store, use a Frisco-owned B of A ATM card to buy a Frisco-owned Hearst newspaper, and read all about the hipper-than-thou elitists down in Frisco complaining about Seattle-owned coffee shops befouling their oh-so-precious town.
Frisco-elitists, even the “alternative”-minded ones, might not be personal fans of B of A, Chevron, or Hearst, but might not see anything out-of-place about Frisco-based corporate empires controlling big swatches of the Northwest economy. After all, that’s what empire cities are supposed to do. But when Redhook or Nordstrom or especially MS dares to invade the City That Thinks It’s God, then golly you’re in for some serious turf-defendin’ talk as those peasants from the outlands attempt to storm the castle.
Sooner or later, the Friscoids are gonna have to face one of the more unsettling revelations of the multi-way economy their own Global Business Network loves to preach about–there’s no more center, no more periphery, or at least there eventually won’t be.
And what goes for goods-and-money trading goes for ideas-and-dreams trading too. SF (and NY and LA) are gonna have to learn to live with being just another region, not Center of the World.
TOMORROW: As the new edition of my book Loser goes into production, I get interviewed by another Euro music magazine; while another apparently-tacky Cobain exploitation movie comes to town.
ELSEWHERE: Speaking of people who mistakenly think they’re hotter-than-thou, Richard Meltzer used to be one of the more imaginative rock-writers before he started trying too hard to make himself into a brand name, essentially writing about nothing but how cool he wanted you to know he was. He makes something of a return to his older, more creative form in a long Chicago Reader memoir about about the good-old-days of vinyl records.
YES IT’S A CHEAP COINCIDENCE, but Misc. couldn’t help but notice when KING-TV’s Saturday morning “objective” coverage of the Makah whale hunt was peppered with commercials showing a gracefully-swimming whale family to symbolize the feelings of security and strength Pacific Life Insurance promises to provide for your own family.
For over a year now, the Makahs have been using their long-threatened whale-hunt revival to reignite tribal pride and tradition (and to publicize their current-day plight in the media). The anti-whaling protesters, meanwhile, have latched onto the grey whale as, while no longer a threatened species, an icon of anthropomorphic identification, a “virtual pet” as it were, loaded with all sorts of new-agey baggage about the sacred continuum of nature. Both parties are using the creatures to embody their own ideologies. I’m beginning to think the poor whales would be better off if everybody just let them be animals for once. Elsewhere in misplaced-symbolism-land…
MORE POST-LITTLETON MUSINGS: I have to admit, a month or so after the tragedy, that I’ve eagerly lapped up all the print and online gunk by assorted grownups who saw a connection with the shooters–not with the shooters’ neo-Nazi affectations, obviously, but with the other kids’ descriptions of the shooters as the sensitive smart kids who were harassed out of any future adult self-esteem. By the time the monthly print and web magazines came out on the topic, it seemed like everybody who ever grew up to become a writer had been one of the shy, brainy, unpopular kids, a situation I could certainly identify with.
Besides the obvious self-ID part, I wistfully sighed whenever I read remarks that the popular kids, the blondes and the tuff guys, were the ones who’d never amount to anything beyond six kids, three ex-spouses, and a crumbling clapboard rambler in some godforsaken subdivision. Alas, since the mid-’80s it was the jocks and cheerleaders who’ve grown up to be the Limbaugh target audience, the patrons of “hot” nitespots and cigar bars, who drive the bigass SUVs and generally act like they own everybody else. Elsewhere in personal-achievement-land…
BIG BOOK UPDATE: By the time you read this, The Big Book of Misc. will be at the printers for second galley proofs. Design maestro Hank Trotter has come up with a great front cover, reminiscent of Saul Bass’s classic movie posters. It now looks like there will be two release parties. The “pre-release” release party, for loyal Misc. World online readers, will be part of the annual Misc.-O-Rama party held every June–this time on Tuesday, June 8, at the new Ditto Tavern on 5th near Bell. A few weeks later, there’ll be a more widely publicized event once it starts getting into a few stores. You can already pre-order your own copy by check or money order; full instructions are at this link. Online credit-card ordering may be up later this week. Elsewhere in print-land…
FONT OF WISDOM?: The triumphant and unexpected return of Helvetica, formerly the just-about-official Uncoolest Typeface on Earth, is now upon us. It’s the official typeface of ARO.Space and its sister business the Ace Hotel; it’s all over fancy-schmancy mags like Stuff and Surface; and teven he ever trend-following Urban Outfitters chain has adopted it. If it were just the case of a gay dance club, I’d have said it had to be a particularly gay trend–or, at least, that only gay men would see beauty in the typeface straight men have grown up associating with the utter dorkiness of the Penthouse group of magazines (as well as all the tacky little documents that appeared during the early years of desktop publishing, when Helvetica and Times were just about the only font families available on first-generation laser printers).
But the truth of the matter lies beyond such superficial assumptions. Post-rave dance-graphics designers are really using Helvetica because it’s the main onscreen typeface of Kai’s Power Tools, a wildly-popular graphics software program. Power Tools’ chief software architect, the legendary Mr. Kai Krause, built his on-screen menus and instruction screens from Helvetica because (1) it’s a typeface most all computers these days have got; (2) it’s clean and compact; and (3) when used in just the right way, it symbolizes a particularly French-German-Swiss vision of urbane, late-industrial modernism, somewhere between post-Bauhaus architecture and space-age home furnishings. Before Kai’s Power Tools, dance-club flyers, ads, and interiors sported that neo-psychedelic look, all busy and color-saturated and passionate. After Kai’s Power Tools, everything became streamlined and direct and icy-hot.
Some observers might disdain this trend as a regression, away from nostalgia for the celebratory sensuality of 1969 and toward nostalgia for the disciplined, repressive coolness of 1961. I see it as something else, something a little more progressive. To me, the Kai’s Power Tools look is one of invitation and seduction. The old rave look was a very inward iconography, which could only be fully appreciated (or even decoded) if you were already part of the “tribe” (or if you had previously taken the same specific drug-trips the visuals were trying to imitate). The Kai’s incarnation of Helvetica invites newcomers into its deceptively ordered-seeming realm. Instead of an invite-only orgy, it’s a seduction. Elsewhere in early-’60s-relic-land…
WAITING FOR THE END OF THE `WORLD’: We’d previously written that the classic TV soap opera might be a doomed art form in the U.S., because overall network ratings might continue to diminish beyond the point of fiscal viability for these expensive, never-to-be-rerun drama episodes. This is essentially why NBC made the widely-predicted but still shocking decision to cancel the 35-year-old Another World, the network’s second-longest-running entertainment series. It’s been among the lowest-rated soaps for a decade (locally, KING-TV didn’t even run it for two years). But NBC’s dropping AW and keeping the even lower-rated Sunset Beach, because SB has a few more viewers in the prized young-female demographic.
Sure, there are the usual save-our-show fan movements and websites out there, and calls and faxes are descending on other broadcast and cable networks with pleas to keep AW going. But, so far, it’s been to no avail, and the last episode’s still scheduled for the end of June. These other networks probably view AW as unsalvagable. For too many years, too many popular characters have been killed off or otherwise written out, either in budget cuts or in moves to make AW more like NBC’s only successful soap, Days of Our Lives. Instead of stories of equally-sympathetic characters caught up in irreconcilably-conflicting motivations and goals, the producers and writers have gone the DOOL route of building everything around the machinations of one-dimensional supervillains. The largely unwatchable results turned off many longtime AW loyalists while failing to attract many new converts.
AW was originally conceived by soap genius Irna Phillips to be a spinoff of As the World Turns (hence the title). That aspect of the concept was dropped when the show landed on NBC instead of CBS, but it remained a more melodramatic, turmoil-ridden version of a regular extended-family story. (Appropriately enough for the angst-ridden storylines, it’s always been taped at the former Biograph silent-movie studios in Brooklyn, on the same stages where D.W. Griffith filmed Birth of a Nation.) AW found its peak during the ’70s under writer Harding LeMay. In 1974 it became the first soap to expand to an hour, a trend followed by most of the other successful serials and causing the squeezing-out of several long-running half-hour shows.
Now, it’s being squeezed out as a casualty of the new TV economics. A movie runs only a couple of hours but lives forever. A daytime soap is constructed to continue indefinitely, but when it ends it ends for good. When AW goes, an entire fictional universe carefully built up by successive writers, actors, and technicians, and taken to heart by generations of viewers, will disappear into the ether of the airwaves, preserved only on reels of archival videotape.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we start talking about the age-old issue of “what this town really needs,” continue to work for justice-and-or-peace, pray for warmth, and consider this remark by Seattle’s own Gypsy Rose Lee, referring to someone else as being “descended from a long line that her mother listened to.”
MISC., the column that likes to think it knew better than to plant delicate little outdoor plants just before last Saturday’s overnight near-freeze, is proud as heck that ex-Steelhead zine editor Alex Steffen has not only taken the helm of the once-moribund local advocacy group Allied Arts, but has, along with his colleagues in the agency’s new leadership, issued a strong call for Seattle to become a city that actually supports the arts and artists, instead of merely coasting on its decaying “liberal” reputation as an excuse to subsidize construction projects and rich people’s formula entertainments. Speaking of which…
BOARD GAMES: A few nay-sayers in the performance-art community have privately suggested that the board members of On the Boards fired artistic director Mark Murphy, who led the production and theater-management outfit to national prominence, because those board members supposedly wanted to turn OTB away from art-for-art’s-sake presentations and closer toward yupscale commercial crowd pleasers, whatever those might be in the realms of modern dance and post-jazz music. (Mellow acoustic folkies? Lord of the Dance clone acts?) Anyhoo, I don’t quite believe the story. I have no proof either way, but I can imagine the board firing Murphy out of little more than personal spite. It’s still a shameful situation that shouldn’t have happened. Murphy’s possibly the best arts promoter this town’s seen (outside of the rock and DJ-music realms) since COCA’s heyday. Part-time board members can come and go, but an artistic director like Murphy’s someone you oughta try to keep under most any circumstances.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. goes to press this week! Everything’s on schedule for the Tues., 6/8 release party, now tentatively scheduled for the new Ditto Tavern at 5th & Bell. Mail orders are now being accepted; online ordering’s still in the process of being set up. The updated version of my older book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, also continues apace, with that publication date still more-or-less set for late Sept. or early Oct. I still wanna know which 1995-99 local acts ought to be mentioned in it; make your nominations at our splendido Misc. Talk discussion boards.
UPDATE #2: Summit Cable has resumed transmitting the public access channel 29 after one week in which it claimed TCI had ceased feeding the channel to it and TCI claimed Summit was simply not receiving the feed properly due to an engineering glitch of some sort.
UPDATE #3: The Speakeasy Cafe will remain open! And, as I’d recommended (not that they deliberately followed my advice or anything), its post-June 1 format will reiterate its core identity as an Internet cafe and low-key Belltown neighborhood hangout joint. The money-losing food-service side of the operation (soups, salads, sandwiches, hummus) has already been cut back. Within three weeks, there’ll be no more cover-charge music shows in the front room (which, besides drawing negative attention from the Liquor Board and the pool hall upstairs, detracted from the drop-in atmosphere an Internet cafe needs). While some music events may continue in the Speakeasy’s back room, the end of front-room shows means the loss of what had become a premier venue for Seattle’s vibrant avant-improv scene. Elsewhere in clubland…
DANCING TO THE TUNE OF $$: 700 Club/Last Supper Club entrepreneur Bill Wheeler says he loves being the target of that hate poster some anonymous Judas has pasted all over Pioneer Square, headlined “The Last Supper Club: All Hype” and berating it as a cash-grubbing nouveau riche hangout, a traitor to the supposed “tribal” spirit of the dance-music community. Wheeler says he couldn’t have generated better publicity had he made the poster himself (which he insists he didn’t).
Wheeler’s also quite proud of the expensive, elitist reputation his new club has so far succeeded in creating, and which the poster-creator loathed: “Can you believe it? People are paying $50 to get into the place! This is what Seattle’s needed.” Well, loyal Misc. readers already know what I think about headstrong San Franciscans (which Wheeler would freely admit to being) unilaterally proclaiming what Seattle needs, so I won’t persue that remark any further. As for paying that kind of money as a cover charge for entree to DJ music and a no-host bar (and suffering, on heavy nights, from a disco-era “selective door” policy), I’m fairly confident true Seattle hipsters can discern whether it’s worthy of their bother and their $$ or not. If not, I’m sure the savvy Wheeler can keep the business going by remarketing it to certain cyber-wealthy squares who think they can buy their way into hipness. Speaking of dance-club goers and notions of what’s hip…
HET-SETTERS: Entrepreneurs in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla. area (you know, home of the nation’s raunchiest strip-club scene and the region that tried to take away our baseball team) have launched a line of T-shirts and other logo apparel called “Str8 Wear,” purporting to announce heterosexual pride. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that stands to easily get misconstrued as gay-hatred. The designers insist in interviews and on their website that “We’re not anti-gay, we’re pro-heterosexual,” and merely want to offer “your chance to let everyone know you are proud of your sexuality,” via “an emblem that will identify you as a person who is available to the opposite sex.” It’s especially intended, the designers claim, for patrons of certain dance-music clubs and other urban-nightlife scenes where anyone who’s not gay might feel themselves branded as total out-of-it squares.
There are other problems with the Str8 Wear concept. It invites its wearers to see themselves as a tight li’l subculture via a term that merely indicates belonging to a vast, undifferentiated majority (except when referring to that punk-rock subsector, “str8 edge”). (But then again, merchandisers have long tried to persuade customers they’re expressing their invididuality by being just like most everybody else.)
A more positive, even more provocative, alternative might be the models at that T-shirt store on University Way, “I (heart) Men,” “I (heart) Women,” “I (heart) Cock,” and “I (heart) Pussy.” These come closer to provoking some of the anti-hetero biases that still exist in an urban-hipster culture where, too often, “sex positive attitudes” are permitted only to gay men, lesbians, and female-dominant fetishists.
In the square/conservative realm, sexually active straight men are often denounced as selfish rogues (or, more clinically, as “sex addicts”); and sexually active straight women are still often disdained as sluts (or, more clinically, as suffering from “self esteem issues”).
In the so-called “alternative” realm, straight men are often viciously stereotyped as misogynistic rapist-wannabes; and straight women are often condescendingly treated as either the passive victims of Evil Manhood or as really lesbians who just don’t know it yet.
As I’ve said from time to time, we need to rediscover a positive vision of heterosexuality, one that goes beyond the whitebread notion of “straight” and toward a more enthusiastic affirmation of one’s craving to connect with other-gendered bodies and souls. Hets don’t need to differentiate themselves from gays as much as they need to learn from them. To learn to take pride in one’s body and one’s desires, no matter what the pesky stereotypers say about you. Elsewhere in gender-identity-land…
BEATING AROUND THE BUSCH: The big beer companies, seeing the money to be made in gay bars, have for some time now tried to position themselves as at least tacit supporters of the gay-rights cause. Miller (owned by Jesse Helms’s pals at Phillip Morris) has cosponsored the Gay Pride Parade in Seattle for several years. Coors (owned by Orrin Hatch’s pal Pete Coors) has run ads in gay magazines claiming the company’s a lot queer-friendlier than popular rumor has sometimes alleged. And Anheuser-Busch has placed huge ad banners inside gay bars reviving (and repurposing) the Bud Light ad-tagline from a few years ago, “Yes, I Am.” Now, the company’s devised an ad for mainstream magazines depicting two men holding hands; quite possibly the first time this has been shown in any big company’s product ad (even the Chivas Regal ad from a few years ago had its gay couple maintaining proper distance while they jogged along a beach). The slogan: “Be yourself, and make it a Bud Light.” Apparently, the company’s got hundreds of homophobic phone callers denouncing the ad. If you want to show your support, you can dial the same number (1-800-DIAL-BUD). Remember, you can approve of this modest symbol of inclusiveness even if you never drink the beer.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK AT THIS SAME TIME (or whatever time you choose to read the column), pray for warmth, root for the Seattle-owned TrailBlazers in the basketball playoffs, and ponder these still-ahead-of-their-time words attributed to JFK: “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.”
MISC. really tries to point the way toward a post-irony age, but can’t hemp noticing when the downtown-Seattle Borders Books outlet holds a promo event this Saturday for the video release of You’ve Got Mail, that romantic-comedy movie predicated on the presumed evil of huge chain bookstores like Borders.
YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the new URLs on this page and throughout the rest of the venerable Misc. World site. We’re now at Miscmedia.com, so adjust your bookmarks accordingly and tell all your friends. It’s all part of a big scheme tied into our new print venture; speaking of which…
UPDATE #1: The ultra-limited first edition of The Big Book of Misc. is a mere five weeks away. You can now pre-order your copy by following the instructions on this link. Act now to get your own signed and numbered copy of the 240-page, illustrated collection of the best items from 13 years’ worth of reportage about the wacky-wacky world that is American culture. The release party’s tentatively set for Tues., June 8 at the new Ditto, 5th & Bell.
UPDATE #2: When we last reported on the Sugar’s strip joint in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, it smanagement was trying to fend off municipal regulations by launching an initiative to change the suburb’s governmental setup toward one less likely to restrict the club’s ability to earn a buck. That drive made it to the ballot but lost.
Now, the club’s trying another tactic. It’s declared itself a non-profit “private club,” and hence not subject to any Shoreline regulations i/r/t commercial adult-entertainment businesses. To go there now, you’ve got to fill out a very short membership application, then return a week later to find out if you’ve been accepted, then pay $50 a year (installments accepted), all for the privilege of spending more money on table dances.
An explanatory flyer offered at the door claims all the membership fees get donated to assorted kids’ charities, and that the whole setup’s a small but necessary step to keep America from succumbing to “a Brave New World in the form of a Christian conservative state.” Actually, the flyer’s author (club attorney Gilbert Levy) got it wrong. The dystopian future in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World had plenty of commercial porn and sexual “freedom” (all the better to prevent the formation of intimate or family bondings that would threaten individual subjugation to the mass society). It’s George Orwell’s 1984 that had the Anti-Sex Leagues running about to forcibly stamp out all human passion other than hate and blind obedience. Speaking of which…
FOLLOWING THE WAKE OF THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: You’ve read the media analysis of the Littleton, Colo. teen tragedy, and by now you’ve even read the analysis of the analysis. A few things to remember, some of which didn’t make it into some of the analyses:
Certainly in my own teenhood, and later in two day jobs dealing with teens, I’ve found little support or recognition within the system for any kid who wasn’t a potential star on the playing field or the sidelines. The media largely follow the inequity: One local TV newscast used to have a “Prep Athlete of the Month” segment, another used to have a “Student Athlete of the Week,” but nobody in local news (until this year’s revival of the Washington Spelling Bee) paid any notice to non-athletic young scholars. A truly progressive school system wouldn’t just be where it was OK for a girl to be good at sports; it would be where it was OK for a boy to be bad at sports.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, call TCI to demand it resume feeding the public access channel to Summit Cable customers, and take to heart these words by E.B. White: “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom–he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”
MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.
UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.
AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)
ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.
If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)
GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).
Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)
The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!
CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.
Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.
Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).
Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.
While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)
It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”
MISC., the column that wants to be more than your warm-weather friend, is proud to announce several non-weather-related pieces of good news:
Good News Item #1: Our efforts to get the column, or something like it, back in print have succeeded. Sometime late this spring, look for full-length essays based on some of your favorite Misc. topics in the soon-to-be-very-different-than-it-used-to-be Seattle magazine.
Good News Item #2: The ultra-limited first edition of the absolutely bee-you-tee-ful Big Book of Misc. is still set for release on Tuesday, June 8. The site of the big whoo-tee-do release party is still to be announced. You’ll be able to get your own copy days or perhaps even weeks before that, however. (You’ll even be able to pre-order the new edition of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story at the same time, or shortly thereafter.) Details, as they say, shall be forthcoming.
Good News Item #3: When the new book comes out, your ever-faithful Misc. World site will probably go through another redesign. Maybe even a new name. Look for it. In other futurism news…
GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: It’s not just the Y2K survivalist-exploitation promoters and the militia cults who’ve said this would be the last model year for Civilization As We Know It. To find out how one such scenario turns out, set your calendars for Aug. 19. That’s the birthday of the late TV prognosticator and Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Jeron Criswell, and the date he predicted for the end of the world. In his 1968 book Criswell Predicts: Your Future From Now Until the Year 2000, he wrote, “The world as we know it will cease to exist, as I have stated previously in this volume, on August 18, 1999. A study of all the prophets–Nostradamus, St. Odile, Mother Shipton, the Bible–indicates that we will cease to exist before the year 2000! Not one of these prophets even took the trouble to predict beyond the year 2000! And if you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 19, 1999 [he actually left our realm in 1980], and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak and no words will come out, for we have no future… you and I will suddenly run out of time!”
How will time run out? Criswell envisioned a “black rainbow” which “will encircle the planet Earth and it will be seen from every vantage point on the face of the earth for at night it will glow with an irridescent light and at night it will be a black streak across our sky.” He defines this entity as “a magnetic disturbance in our atmosphere, set about by change in gravitational pulls throughout the universe.” He claims it “will draw the oxygen from our atmosphere, as a huge snake encircling the world and feeding upon the oxygen which we need to exist. Hour after hour it will grow worse. And we will grow weaker. It is through this that we will be so weakened that when the final end arrives, we will go silently, we will go gasping for breath, and then there will be only silence on the earth.” At least we’ll all get to die, he writes, before “the sudden shift in gravitational forces will cause our earth to jump out of orbit and start flying through space, closer and closer to the sun.” In other time-marching-on news…
TWO MORE DOWN: The ranks of the G-Word-era Seattle clubs still around diminished again this month. The Off Ramp, glorious rundown mecca for loud-music fans and Monarch Vodka drinkers, closed again for the third and possibly final time. And the Vogue,which as WREX hosted some of Seattle’s first punk/new wave bands, and then under its latter name was the site of Nirvana’s first Seattle gig and Seattle’s first regular fetish-dance night, moved out of its nearly 20-year digs on First Avenue and reopened in part of the former Encore/Safari gay bar site on Capitol Hill. What’s still left, you ask? The Crocodile, of course; plus the OK Hotel, the Ditto Tavern (reopened but with only occasional band nights), the Colourbox, and RKCNDY. (The latter two are rumored to be eventually doomed for redevelopment.) In other ebbing and flowing popcult trends…
GUY-ED WIRES: Almost Live! sketch comic Pat Cashman got his entree into Seattle morning radio when his first station put him on in place of Bob Hardwick. Now, Cashman has also been dismissed (by KIRO-FM) for being too unhip, and also for being too popular with women. (Say what?) So he was canned, in favor of an L.A.-based pair of toilet-talking wild-and-crazy doods. The Weekly described the current fad in faux-Howard Stern shock jocks (Stern himself is still not carried here) as “sex in the morning.” I hear it as something else: A calculated demographic attempt to ensure you’re selling advertisers a nearly all-male audience, by putting out personas of arrested-pre-adolescent “guy” humor almost guaranteed to drive the ladies away.
History will show that corporatized “guy” culture, in its current U.S. incarnation, had two antecedents. One was the aging-frat-jock milieu of “blooze” bars, cigar bars, muscle cars, Hooters restaurants, cable wrestling shows, dumb “action” movies, and the abstract rituals of hardcore porn. The other forebearer was Britain’s venerable tradition of boorish behavior: The realm of soccer hooligans, pub crawlers, Andy Capp, Punch and Judy puppet shows, boarding-school cruelties, flogging, Jack the Ripper, the comic magazine Viz, and those ol’ armies that thuggishly enforced colonial rule across the globe.
In the early ’90s, some British magazine publishers evolved a formula to mesh this latter aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) with articles and ads promoting upscale consumer goods. The result was magazines like Maxim, Loaded, and FHM (which are or will soon have U.S. editions). They found a way to reach male young adults without that one editorial element (generous nudity) some still-prudish advertisers fear. The mags have only as much female flesh as advertisers will bear (a few shots in the U.K. editions, almost none in the U.S. editions), and instead rely on supermodel faces and smutty sex-talk articles, punctuated by accolades to the glory of whatever “stuff” Real Men are supposed to want to buy this year (gold cufflinks, Harley Davidson-logo knick-knacks, ultraviolent video games). TV got into the game with the short-lived sitcoms Pigsty and Men Behaving Badly (a remake of a U.K. series), and continued with cable’s Movies For Guys Who Like Movies (and, later this year, something on Comedy Central called The Man Show); all these offerings wallow in stereotyping the male of the species as stupid, hygiene-challenged, and obsessed with violence and crudity.
Print and broadcast Guyville, like most corporate culture, is a place of mediocrity, extremely standardized mediocrity. The novelty is that this particular commercial mediocrity claims to be an outlandish voice of bad-boy rebellion against previous, squarer, commercial mediocrities. But, like those various other mediocrities, it really promotes acquiescence to the endless drive to make and spend money, and to let dumb magazines tell folks exactly how to live and how to think.
There’s also something insinuous about Guyville. Yes, it could harmfully influence young males, but not in the ways some sexist female commentators and right-wing prudes claim. It won’t turn boys and young men into misogynistic rapists or family-abandoning rogues. It just might, though, turn some of them into lonesome bachelors-for-life. By deliberately promoting a vision of manhood devised to turn off women, Guy Culture just might leave a few young men bereft of the real-life social skills needed for attracting and maintaining a romantic relationship. And if you can’t get a date, it doesn’t matter how many salacious magazine articles you’ve read about proper cunnilingus technique.
Still, there are things I sort of like about the trend. It’s good that the relentless hatemongering of right-wing talk is fading in radio popularity, in favor of shticks that (however crudely) celebrate sexuality, mating, and enthusiasm for life. And it’s perfectly understandable that, after the early-’90s propriety in which only women and gay men were permitted to have “sex positive” attitudes, the inevitable pro-straight-male reaction would adopt such immature swagger. But I’d still rather have our male population try to be “gentlemen” than “guys.” Stupidity and boorishness are not positive traits (except in big business and advertising, which is of course the real point of the whole Guyville industry.)
Your high-test online Misc. welcomes the imminant arrival of Tesoro gasoline to Washington. Yeah, the name sounds a lot like “testosterone” (the name’s actually Spanish for “treasure”), but it’s a growing indie refiner that’s become very big in Alaska and Hawaii, cementing Washington’s “Pacific Rim” consciousness. It’s bought the ex-Shell refinery in Anacortes and is snapping up gas stations whose franchise agreements with other companies are lapsing. This arrival comes as we might start saying goodbye to the Arco brand (formerly Atlantic Richfield, formerly Richfield). The L.A.-based company, which rose to dominance in the western states when it dumped credit cards and service bays and installed all those AM/PM convenience stores, is in talks to sell everything to BP (which itself has just absorbed Amoco).
AMONG THE PIONEER SQUARES: This month’s gallery choices are Wes Wehr’s exquisitely detailed tiny line drawings of adorable fantasy critters (at the Collusion Gallery), and Malcolm Edwards’s narrative photo-essay of Rosalinda, a golden-years woman recalling her life’s journey from a convent to careers in stripping and belly-dancing, and who’s still sexy and radiantly beautiful today (at Benham).
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Sunrise Organic cereal is General Mills’ attempt to muscle in on the organic-cereal trade now the province of the major indie makers servicing the separate health-food-store circuit (but who’ve recently gotten an in into big regular supermarkets, as those chains try to muscle in on the “natural” stores’ business). It’s sticky-sweet and hard-crunchy, thanks to all the honey slobbered over the Crispix-like hexagons. Like an increasing number of “healthy choices” type food products, it boasts modern-day health-food buzzwords such as “organic” and “natural,” without making any claims to be better for you than any other foodstuffs. It lets you have your sweet-tooth fix while pretending you’re doing your body good.
AD CLICHE OF THE WEEK: Both Columbia Crest wines and Eddie Bauer have billboards these days showing their products as the end of a rebus-like visual arithmetic equation. Example: (Thread) + (mountain) + (sunshine) = (Eddie Bauer outdoor shirt). Here’s one I’d like to see instead: (Clip-art catalog) + (addle-brained ad manager) + (arterial street) = (dumb billboard).
SOMETHING FISHY: Recently seen downtown, a “Darwin Fish” car plaque only with “QUEER” in the middle instead of “DARWIN.” It’s one thing to boast of scientific evolution as the heart of a worldview more rational and even human-centric than religious mysticism. But to boast of gays (who typically spend a lifetime of childlessness) as comprising an advanced stage of evolution isn’t quite in keeping with Darwin’s theories, which stated that the the main lines of any species’ evolution involved those who bred the most survivable offspring. But a case might be made that our own species reaches a more advanced stage of social evolution when it becomes more accepting of non-reproducers and other cultural mutations. Speaking of which…
SPREADING OUT: A 3/29 NY Times op-ed piece (reprinted in the 4/1 P-I) claimed the outmigration of Californians across the rest of the west (writer Dale Maharidge specifically mentioned the mountain states, but Washington also qualifies) is an even more inisdious matter than some commentators (including myself) have pictured it. (You know, the old “Californication” imagery of rural hamlets transformed into Little Malibus, where cell-phone-hogging movie stars, agents, and dealmakers have their enclaves of expensive homes and fancy restaurants with made-up “regional cuisines,” driving the locals to the fringes of their own former communities.)
But Stanford prof Maharidge (author of the book The Coming White Minority) describes it as a matter of white flight. Instead of running away from neighborhoods and cities and school districts when too many minorities and immigrants start showing up, these fleers are abandoning a whole state. This would help solidify the national partisan alignment of the Clinton era, by helping Democratic presidential candidates in electoral-vote-rich Calif. while ensuring GOP control over the U.S. Senate (where those sparse mountain states already have power far beyond their population). It’s also potential bad news for those of us who’ve hoped the rest-of-the-west would grow more diverse, less monocultural; who’ve wanted to trash the illusion of comfort associated with the image of the rural or exurban west as a white-mellow paradise where everybody’s in harmony because everybody’s alike. Speaking of the new western monoculture…
BOOMTOWN RATTING: It hasn’t just been the winter of my own discontent. Just about everywhere I go, I run into another artist, writer, musician, graphic designer, tattooist, etc. who can’t stop repeating how they absolutely hate Seattle these days. But when I ask them to elaborate, usually they just shrug an “Isn’t it obvious?”
Occasionally I can get a few details. Some of these details involve the old saw that nobody here supports anybody from here; that you can’t make it as a DJ or a fashion designer here unless you have the proper pedigree from the big media cities. More often I hear the boomtown economy’s just made them too pessimistic. When the Seattle alterna-arts metascene was still struggling, many artists of various genres dreamed of a time when there would be money and patronage and outlets for work; then their struggles would be recognized. Well, there are such outlets now, but to a large extent what they want to buy is work that’s as un-reminiscent as possible of the old, pre-Gates Seattle. Nothing nice and funky and small and personal, nothing that hints of negativity in any way. Just big art, glass art, expensive art that looks expensive, third world crafts which affirm an ecotourist image of third worlders as happy little semihumans. And everywhere, architecture and cars and clothes and gourmet foods that remind the new elite of just how precious and special they believe themselves to be.
Last week, I wrote how the local entrepreneurs behind the ARO.Space dance club had successfully tapped into two of the key aspects of the New Seattle mindset–smug, self-congratulatory “good taste,” and the unquestioned belief that Real Culture still has to come from someplace else. It’s more than an appropriate theme for a dance club. It’s a double-whammy for anyone already making art here of any type other than that which tells smug rich people how utterly wonderful they are. Of course, the “fine” arts have always depended upon patrons who’ve exerted various degrees of creative/curatorial control, and commercial arts have always depended on what the traffic would bear. “Alternative” arts were supposed to be about finding interstices and open spaces between the commercial demands, so one could create according to one’s own muse. So why are modern local alternative artists complaining so much about their lack of commercial success? Maybe because the stuff that’s been successful in ’90s American commercial culture so often involves a veneer of “alternative” street cred, without actually being too outre or questioning the socioeconomic premises of its world. Real rappers/rockers/graphic designers/painters etc. can see ever-so-slightly more marketable versions of their own work selling, and feel they’ve lost their own shot at the brass ring.
Also, financial survival for the non-wealthy has turned out to be just as tough in boom years as in bust years. What with stagnant incomes and exploding rents, not to mention the fact that no non-millionaire who didn’t buy a house in Seattle three years ago will ever get to buy one.
So, upon the fifth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, we’re left with a town that’s just as dysfunctional as the town he died in, but in different ways. Instead of there being no career opportunities for artistic people in this town, there are plenty of career opportunities here for people other than the people who struggled through the down years here. And instead of the brief “slacker city” period in which it seemed one could make art or music with only the least demanding of day jobs, daily survival has again become an issue for anyone not at the economic top (while many of those near the economic top are stressing themselves toward an early grave just to stay at or near the top). To paraphrase that famous Seattle-abandoner Lynda Barry, the good times just might be killing us.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, enjoy the last weeks of Kingdome baseball, and consider these words from the restless Carl Jung: “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
MISC. HAS FAIRLY GOOD local news and confusing/depressing international news to comment upon this week, but first your update about the best-of-Misc. book (titled, for the time being, The Misc. Book). Layout and proofreading are proceeding apace; a couple different potential cover designs are being worked on; distribution arrangements are being negotiated. Right now, we’re aiming for a June release. As for the reissue of the old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, that might come a month or two later. More details forthcoming. (In the meantime, please suggest which local musical acts of the past four years should be in the new edition; via email or at our plangent Misc. Talk discussion boards.
ON THE STREET: Misc. was momentarily confused by the proliferation of street posters up on E. Pike Street (pasted onto plywood construction scaffolds, not light poles) for TheStreet.com. When I showed this to someone who’d just moved here last year, she said “only in Seattle,” with its now-mythical corps of under-30 techno-rich, would bohos perusing this form of sidewalk commercial-graffiti be considered potential clients of an online stock brokerage and investment-advice site. I’m not so sure about the “only” part. If anything, Seattle has (or used to have) fewer trust-fund hipsters than the larger media towns. Now, though, with the cost of living around Capitol Hill creeping toward NYC levels, it might be getting to the point where you have to have money in order to live the antimaterialist ideology. Either that, or the posters were aimed at the upscale gay-dance-club clientele also swarming the Pike-Pine corridor these days. Speaking of which…
NOSTALGIA FOR THINGS NOT ALL THAT WORTHY OF REMEMBERING: The ARO.Space club recently promoted an ’80s-nostalgia dance night under the moniker “Star 80.” As if anybody who remembers the era would find exciting, joyous connotations from that sleazy movie (which starred Mariel Hemingway as a real-life Vancouver model-actress stalked and slain by the sicko hubby she’d left behind).
SUCH OCCASIONAL LAPSES OF TASTE ASIDE, though, the one-year anniversary of ARO.Space (in a club climate, particularly a dance-club climate, where high-budgeted spaces sometimes go under interior construction for eight months only to close after three) means something. Last week I ran into the Dutch journalist who interviewed me about the post-“grunge” aftermath last year; among other recent insights, she said she was surprised ARO.Space had apparently succeeded despite being so unlike anything in “The Seattle Scene.” I begged to differ. First of all, there’s always been an audience of inferiority-complexed hipster wannabes here who’ll rush to anything billed as an authentic copy of whatever’s hot in NY/SF. Of course, to get them to keep coming back means you have to have something they’ll actually like on a non-imitative level.
That’s the place’s genius: It seems alien, not at all like “The Seattle Scene,” yet it fits right in. The Nordic-cool furnishings, the MS “new money” feel, the sleek blandness, the polite aloofness of the place, all complement the current and the classic Seattle-bourgeois zeitgeist. They complement different aspects of that zeitgeist than the grungers did, but then again the grungers were, at least on one level, rebelling against the affluent, self-satisfied mindset ARO.Space gloriously celebrates. I wrote when the place opened that, on one level, it looked like the product of gay men trying to assimillate into regular upper-middle-class society. I’ve since realized it’s more like the product of gay men taking their rightful place among the taste-definers of regular upper-middle-class society.
It’s taken time, a long time, for me to accept this, but modern-day affluent Seattle really is a lot more like the fictional universe of TV’s Frasier than I’ve ever wanted to admit. Its cold aloofness can seem to outsiders as arrogance, though it’s really due more to emotional repression. It wallows in superficial benchmarks of “good taste,” often involving gourmet dining and starchy social propriety. It believes in stark, spare design, complete with pastel shades not found in nature. It defines itself by its consumer choices (even the “anti-consumerists” and the “downshifters”). And while it’s proud as heck of its town, it’s afraid to try to do its own thing. So a place that promises the hottest, beat-iest imported dance-music fads, in seemingly bold yet ultimately retro-modern surroundings, is more comfortably, reassuringly “Seattle style” than it might seem.
(Its owners should’ve been expected from the start to know this. ARO.Space’s owners are part of the informal clique of local hip-capitalists whose various members, in various combinations and partnerships, have various stakes in Tasty Shows, Sweet Mother Records, Linda’s, the Capitol Club, the Baltic Room, Bimbo’s Bitchen Burrito Kitchen and Cha Cha Lounge, Rudy’s Barber Shops, and the soon-to-open Ace Hotel.)
This also means (not as ironically as it might seem) that the dance-music scene isn’t as un-Seattle as its biggest local fans might wish it to be. Passive-aggressive consumption of imported sounds, looks, and attitudes is as endemic to Seattle as it is to any city in the “other 48” states. In an age of corporate-media consolidation, nothing’s more timely (or less “alternative”) than “live” entertainment that’s all “in the can” (or on CDs and 12-inch vinyl records), whose only human components (the DJ/curators) are themselves often NY/Calif. fly-ins. What would be out of place in this particular aspect of Seattle would be to develop dance musicians, DJs, and audiences who were less afraid of trying to create their own sounds.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER WAR: That’s how it seemed this week. The town was collectively bored by the Sonics’ irregular performance during the NBA’s irregular regular season, and indeed generally blase; as the long dreary winter refused to completely go away. The Fringe Festival had come and gone, leaving the small-time theatrical promoters exhausted and burned-out. Downtown, more excitement came from a high speed chase on Friday (cop cars had followed a carful of bank robbers all the way from Shoreline to the GameWorks block) than from the now-familiar ritual of antiwar protests. It just might be that Clinton’s lite-right Pentagon-coddling has finally succeeded in silencing the pacifist left and the isolationist right (or, rather, cowering them into a stance of hopelessness to change the situation).
This means this president (and probably the next one) will get to use the last-remaining-superpower-blah-blah-blah not to “fight two major wars simultaneously” (the Pentagon planners’ latest excuse for ever-escalating weapons budgets) but to push around any little regime anywhere, within carnage-levels the domestic opinion polls say the U.S. voting public will tacitly accept, and when and where it’s deemed strategically valuable to do so. It’s true the Serb regime’s despotic and genocidal.
It’s also true the Kosovo war is essentially a war of secession, like the U.S. Revolutionary and Civil wars (and Chechnya, Bangladesh, Tibet, East Timor, Eritrea, and other wars in which the White House either stayed out or supported the existing regimes). So, after a decade of Serbs and their vassals and ex-vassals fighting and killing and retaliating with too-little-too-late U.S./UN/NATO involvement, why bomb Belgrade now? Maybe becuase it’s politically feasible now. Maybe because the realpolitik gamers decided to take down one of Europe’s last vestiges of Soviet-style rule. Maybe because the realpolitik guys felt they needed to support a Muslim-dominated self-rule movement for a change, after verbally or physically bashing Islamic fundamentalists in so many other lands. And maybe because our leaders could somehow identify with the Kosovars’ plight to an extent they couldn’t with the Timorese or the Eritreans.
But now that the bombs have fallen, the situation can’t help but keep getting stickier and bloodier and more intractable. The bombing strafes might be promoted as clean, modern warfare minimizing potential U.S. casualties, but war’s never as clean in real life as it seems on paper (or in role-playing games).
UNTIL NEXT TIME, when we hope there’ll be happier news to report, ponder these thoughts from Aldous Huxley: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards..”
On Your Marx
Original online film essay, 3/10/99
I just saw East Side Story last week on Cinemax. Yes, the popular documentary from last year’s Seattle International Film Festival, which contrasts the untenable fantasy of filmed musical comedy vs. the equally untenable fantasy of the promised socialist future utopia, was shown on a channel dedicated 24/7 to the dissemination of Hollywood’s state-propaganda messages (without those pesky interruptions for Madison Avenue’s rival propaganda).
Despite the proven worldwide popularity of Hollywood musicals (and the examples from France and India of how the musical format could be adapted for Eastern Hemisphere cultures), financial, bureaucratic, and production problems conspired against the form in the USSR (and, after 1945, in its satellites).
According to the documentary, only 40 such films were made in the Soviet bloc from 1933 to 1973; a time period roughly corresponding to about three or four years behind the start and end of Hollywood’s musical era. (This figure doesn’t count period-piece operettas, which were supplied much more plentifully, especially in Hungary.)
Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, many of the musicals that did get made are, from the documentary’s excerpts, infected with an incessantly “happy” mood. Everybody’s smiling, everybody’s moving and dancing as all-get-out. Everything’s saturated in light. The color films (in the prints shown in East Side Story) have the muted-gaudy tones of old rotogravure fashion advertising.
The overall effect bears little resemblance to Hollywood’s endless rehashes of the song-and-story technique pioneered on Broadway by Rodgers & Hammerstein (whose own works, you might recall, included such less-than-whistle-happy topics as wife abuse, the rise of Naziism in Austria, and the mainstreaming of Asian American culture).
But it does look a lot like the insistently-perky dream world of “industrials,” the musical shows and films commissioned by corporations. Some of the best examples of these are the films made by the old Jam Handy Studio on behalf of General Motors, of which some of the best can be found in the compilation video seriesEphemeral Films, which unfortunately appears to now be out of print except on CD-ROM.
The closing credits of East Side Story contain the dedication, “To Karl Marx, without whom none of this would have been necessary.” The Marxist utopia, or rather the Leninist utopia, imagined a society built around Workers, i.e. around people whose sole purpose in life was to work, to work hard, to work happily, and to work for work’s sake. So it’s not surprising that the Leninist world’s “light entertainment” films portrayed play as intense, ardorous work–when they weren’t portraying work as something more exhilarating than play. (Yes, there is a singing-tractor-driver scene, as well as a singing-wheat-harvesters scene and a singing-coal-press-operators scene.)
The Jam Handy films for GM, shown at auto shows and sales meetings, depict a slightly different utopia: They imagine a society built around Sellers and Buyers. In this scheme, the salesperson is the foot soldier of the entire western economy. All other professions exist to provide salespeople with something to sell, or to support the sales process. (Handy’s sales-training slide films were tributed in Diane Keaton’s appropriately-titled picture book Mr. Salesman.)
And the process of buying, in the Handy universe, is shown as the key to just about every non-economic human need. Any problem that can’t be solved by the acquisition of products is a problem that doesn’t exist. (And Marx dared to call his philosophy “materialist”!)
In the latter-day interview portions of East Side Story, surviving members of the eastern-bloc film industries recall how communist-party censors were always berating entertainment movies for supposedly celebrating western-style decadence, as opposed to the unceasing dedication-to-work expected from all good citizens of the Workers’ States. The closing narration wonders if everything would’ve been different had the Communist bosses only learned to have a sense of fun like that seen in a few of the musicals. I think it wouldn’t have changed much. Just instead of states built around an unending quest to increase production, these countries would’ve become states built around an unending quest to increase consumption.
Better Than A Pokemon With A Sharp Stick
TV essay, 3/3/99
I like Pokemon, despite (or perhaps partly because of) the awkward way the animated series’ episodes seem to have been re-edited from the original anime.
I’m intrigued by what the series might or might not be saying about human/animal relations, within its alternate-universe world where most nonhuman animal species belong to this whole other life form with odd superpowers (varying from species to species) but which can be tamed by being weakened in a fight and then forcibly teleported into an egglike “Pokeball.”
Each episode introduces viewers to at least one previously-unseen species of Pokemon, ranging from superpowered equivalents of everyday Earth animals (birds, bugs, cats, moles) to total bug-eyed monsters and abstract shapes with faces and legs tacked on. (Like I said, it’s an incredibly complicated plot, one which grownups are far less likely to comprehend than kids.)
It’s also a show and a marketing phenomenon with two local connections. The Pokemon name, and the 150 or so different critters in the Pokemon universe, are owned by Nintendo, the Japanese gaming empire whose U.S. division’s in Darkest Redmond; while Renton’s Wizards of the Coast puts out a role-playing card game based on the show’s elaborate fantasy lore.
The first Americans heard of Pokemon was when hundreds of Japanese children got epileptic seizures after viewing strobe-like patterns flashed during an episode. (The real irony’s that fewer than half the victims watched the episode’s original telecast; most were exposed when Japanese evening newscasts excerpted the scene in question.) That scene was cut when the series was redubbed for U.S. consumption. Other changes also seem to have been made; episodes are chopped up, cut to as little as 18 minutes of airtime, and then padded with low-budget extraneous material (such as the daily “Pokerap” song).
Or perhaps they’re not as heavily altered as they seem. Fans I’ve corresponded with in the process of writing this piece insist they’ve seen “Pokerap”-type segments in the original Japanese episodes. They also claim the stories were written presupposing viewer familiarity with the characters and concepts from the original games; and that that’s why the plots sometimes seem choppy by the standards of dumbed-down American kidvid.
The Pokemon universe began in 1995, when Nintendo released the original “Pocket Monsters” video game in Japan, in three versions. The independent designers who created the game on Nintendo’s behalf tried to place cute kid-appeal characters within a long, engaging adventure-game format that would encourage lingering exploration of the game, its fictional world, and its puzzles and secrets. It also encouraged fan dialogue (to successfully complete the game, by capturing and taming all 150 critters, required learning clues scttered across the game’s three slightly-different versions). The smashing success of the original game spawned sequel games, Game Boy condensed games, the card game, an animated feature film (not yet here), comics, dolls,and assorted other merchandise; much of which is now showing up Stateside. The expansive, open-ended concept (sequel games now in preparation supposedly will introduce 250 newly “discovered” Pokemon species) means the phenomenon could keep going for years to come, or at least until the next batch of young gamers decides it’s dumb and wants something else (a cycle which apparently turns over in Japan even faster than over here).
At its best, the kiddie side of Japanese anime (Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z) is an entertainment genre in which soon-all-too-familiar plot and design formulas can collide with moments of utterly-baffling weirdness. Pokemon is kiddie-anime at, or nearly at, its best.
MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #1: An outfit in northern California’s selling officially-licensed Space Needle brand bottled water.
MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #2: Banners have been mounted all along the streets of the Darkest Eastside, calling on one and all to “Celebrate Redmond.”
WORKIN’ IT: A week or two back, we recounted alarming statistics in Variety claiming kids’ TV viewership was significantly down in each of the past three years. Now, other articles offer up a reason why. Not too long
ago, Those Kids Today were constantly berated as illiterate videots and Nintendo-junkies whose slacker study habits were going to be America’s downfall as a productive player on the global economic stage. Now, Time, the NY Times, and other media outlets are crying in alarm that kids as young as the first grade are being inundated beneath piles of homework so daunting nobody has time to be a kid. The NY Times account, citing a U. of Michigan study, claims in the last 17 years “homework for first- to third-graders had nearly tripled, to 123 minutes a week.”
The first caveat, naturally, is the mass-media biz might be worrying that young eyeballs are getting too captivated by mandatory attention, therefore limiting the young’uns’ ability to be marketed to.
Beyond that, another question arises–at a time when the effective application of knowledge is more nonlinear (or, rather, multilinear) than ever, when Net-based reference tools may make data acquisition as simple as using a calculator, why should we be dooming our children by force-feeding them a rigorous, narrow discipline of left-brain rote memorization? The most likely answer’s that in the ’80s, everybody was so darned worried we weren’t keeping up with those other industrialized nations in producing quantifiable test-score results. Test-score results, of course, don’t really equal knowledge; and knowledge certainly doesn’t equal wisdom–let alone economic “success.” As far as I’ve been able to figure, Japan’s schools are just as tough and soul-sapping as ever, while the nation’s economy’s gone to the dogs for reasons totally unrelated to study habits.
POT-CALLING-THE-KETTLE-BLACK DEPT.: In a recent PBS hour called We the (Rude) People, Morton Kondracke joined the chorus of those who bemoan the death of “civil society” and who blame America’s subcultural fragmentation and in-group politics and just about everything else wrong (or perceived to be wrong) with America on those darned ’60s antiwar protesters. Really, for a veteran panelist on The McLaughlin Group to claim the liberals are causing all the hatemongering is beyond ludicrousness!
THE FINE PRINT (In the closing credits of Artisan Entertainment’s video trailer to Jerry Springer: Ringmaster): “All characters and events in the preceding motion picture were entirely fictional, and nothing is intended to depict any actual participant in, or aspect of, ‘The Jerry Springer Show,’ which is broadcast on television. This motion picture is not connected to ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ and is not licensed from its producers.”
THE OTHER FINE PRINT (from a brochure soliciting public-art proposals for the UW Medical Center’s new Maternity and Infant Care wing): “Since not every MIC patient outcome results in a live or healthy birth, the successful artwork will respect this fact with appropriate imagery. For example, the artist may decide to omit direct references to children, babies, or reproduction.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: I seem to always be praising the NW punk bible 10 Things (Jesus Wants You to Know). Its latest issue (#20) is its best yet. Besides the usual acreage of interviews and reviews, it’s got editor Dan Halligan’s tale of his Vegas wedding, a woman named Mels disappointedly relating how punks turn out to have most of the same sex hangups as other Americans, interviews with two DIY Netporn entrepreneurs, lotsa talk about the Teen Dance Ordinance repeal advocates, an art-photo by Wendy Wishbone of three goth models representing “the Three Fates of Punk: Death, Hypocrisy, Capitalism,” and Ben Weasel’s cogent analysis of how a vital, energetic subculture’s degenerated and ossified into a conformist, formulaic, commercialized “New Punk Order.” (Mightily timely reading during last week’s ESPN “Winter X Games” with all the post-Green Day noisemakers used for snowboarding sountrack tuneage.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $3 from 8315 Lake City Way NE, #192, Seattle 98115.
LOSS OF DOWN: Another Super Bowl Sunday’s on the way, and with it the usual pseudo-intellectual garbage about pro football as an institution of violence and stupidity and that perennial fall guy testosterone–even though football puts more kid through college than any other sport, even though it’s really a game of coaching and choreography as much as one of hitting and tackling, and even though it’s got enough female fans for QVC to offer NFL-logo costume jewelry trinkets. Time staff essayist Lance Morrow recently claimed, “Football, still in bad odor among thinkers, needs a fancier mystique;” then proceeded to offer up a “deconstructionist theory” of the sport–which, natch, turned out to be less a defense of the gridiron game than a spoof of PoMo egghead jargon. (“Football enacts the Foucaultian paradigm wherein all actions, even involuntary motions or ‘fakes’ or failures (quarterback sacked), coalesce in meaning, and everytyhing that the game organizes in the way of objects, rites, customs (the superstitious butt slapping, the narcissistically erotic Bob Fosse touchdown dances) constitutes a coherent whole — the game lui-meme.”)
I, however, am not afraid to stake whatever remaining highbrow street-cred I might have on the line by actually and sincerely stating my praise for the game. I’ve (largely) grown out of my sensitive-post-adolescent jock-hating phase (my above remarks about snowboarding hype notwithstanding), and have come to an honest appreciation of the Big Game played by Big Dudes, their bodies (and usually their faces) hidden beneath the group-identity of the uniform, their individual heroics interdependent upon the coordinated effort of the entire team. A game with separate offensive and defensive players, in which fully half the participants can usually do nothing but “loss prevention.” (Hmm–maybe Safeco should’ve bought the naming rights to the new football stadium instead of the new baseball stadium.)
Here, then, is my partial list of what makes the perfect Super Bowl experience (please feel free to print this out and keep score at home):
NEXT WEEK: The long-delayed final results of our quest for appropriate honorees on a mythical Seattle women’s walk of fame. ‘Til then, here’s your next topic to mull over via email and our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards: What’s the most beautiful “ugly” building in town (i.e., a beautiful structure the official tastemakers would despise)?
WELCOME BELIEVERS AND HESITATORS alike to MISC., the pop-culture column that can’t help but see Xmas as a Season of Wonders….
WONDER #1: Watched HBO’s Walter Winchell biopic last week, which naturally got me into pondering about the fate of a columnist in career decline without the backing of his ex-paper. As you might know, Winchell’s one of my all-time idols (despite the rightward tilt of his later writings and his prediliction for dumb personal feuds). For over 40 years he put fun, passion, and zest into prose. His Broadway gossip columns weren’t merely about entertainment; they were entertainments. But by working exclusively in the perishable commodities of newspapers and radio, Winchell was on what his contemporary, radio comedy legend Fred Allen, called a “Treadmill to Oblivion.” When that golden age of NYC-based entertainment faded, Winchell was left without a milieu to cover or a paper for which to cover it. Makes a scribe think seriously about trying to get more books out (which I pledge to do in ’99 somehow or another).
WONDER #2: It’s sure peculiar how Geore Carlin’s making commercials for a long-distance service. Wasn’t it just a year or two ago Carlin made an HBO special in which the venerable standup comic (who’s reinvented himself more times than Madonna, and at the time was in an angry-old-geezer mode) devoted the first 10 minutes of his monologue to brutally chastizing commercials–not any specific ones, but the whole damn advertising industry–for supposedly dictating consumer tastes and ruining public discourse?
WONDER #3: The Pike Place Market’s embattled management inserted an upscale-as-all-damnation Xmas flyer inside its December Market News tabloid. It’s got purple prose about snob-appeal products (just how many times can one repeat the word “unique” on the same page?), recipes for eggplant cavier and panzanella con calamari, and images of exotic birds, fancy cocktail glasses, and those quintessential icons of today’s Hustler Caste, cigars. and pictures of It makes one wonder whether any further proof’s needed that Market management’s gone totally 100 percent of-the-upscale, by-the-upscale, and for-the-upscale, to the exclusion of the more diverse communities the Market’s supposed to serve according to city mandate.
WONDER #4: After years of generally ignoring non-crime stories in south Seattle, local mainstream media now highly publicize opposition efforts to RDA surface light-rail in the Rainier Valley. Are the papers and TV stations really listening to the neighborhood advocates who’d rather have a subway tunnel in the south end (and under Roosevelt Way in the north end)? If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d consider whether emphasizing public opposition to surface-level transit tracks was part of a larger strategy to re-discredit Monorail Initiative supporters.
WONDER #5: Why the huge 3-day blitz of “personality profile” publicity for Kalakala Foundation bossguy Peter Bevis in the Times, P-I, and the Times-owned Downtown Voice? If I were a conspiracy theorist (and I’m still not), I’d say the Communtiy Development Round Table elitists might have decided (after ignoring Bevis’s ambitions for a decade) that the ’30s-vintage streamline ferry, once restored, would be a great fulcrum for re-development plans at the Pier 48 dock off Pioneer Square (where the Northwest Bookfest has been held, in a building now scheduled for tourist-oriented replacement). Of course, whether Bevis (who’s spent a ton of cash and two tons of debt on the Kalakala effort) will get his due, or whether the powers-that-be will simply wait for his group to fail and then buy the boat from it at a distress-sale price, remains to be seen.
THEATRICAL UPDATE: Years of uncertainty might finally be over for Seattle’s Seven Gables movie chain. 7G’s parent circuit, Landmark Theaters, was quietly bought up recently by the Dallas-based Silver Cinemas outfit; thus freeing 7G from the clutches of mercurial financier John Kluge.
LOCAL PUBLICATION UPDATES: Some months ago, I complained about the dance-music mag Resonance as the Seattle music publication that never covered any Seattle music. Now, I’m happy to report, that’s no longer true. Issue #18 has local DJs Eva Johnson and Donald Glaude on its cover, a local fashion spread in the middle, and articles about Critters Buggin, film promoter Joel Bachar, and the expanding empire of local entrepreneur Wade Weigel and Alex Calderwood (owners or co-owners of Rudy’s Barber Shops, the Ace Hotel, ARO.Space, and Tasty Shows). Not only that, but the whole mag’s now on slick paper with colors you can eat with a spoon. (Free in local clubs or $15/year from P.O. Box 95628, Seattle 98145.)….
Mansplat, Jeff Gilbert’s occasional tabloid tribute to beer, B-movies, and low living, is out with a fresh issue #14 full of snide buffonery about “the worst cartoon characters of all time” (Scrappy-Doo only made #10), made-up superheroes and wrestlers, a “history of swear words,” silly rock-star stage names, and real and fake ads (one of the fake one’s for “Marty’s Discount Gynecology”). But the strangest parts are the letters and notices referring to issue #13, which is officially “completely out of stock” and which I, for one, never found to have ever been available, but is purported to have featured “the Mansplat staff–naked!.) (Free at select dropoff spots or from 2318 2nd Ave. #591, Seattle 98121; home.earthlink.net/~mansplat/.)
SIGN OF THE WEEK (On a Gourmet Sausage Co. van parked in Pioneer Square): “Enjoy, Just Enjoy.” Runner-up (ad poster at Kinko’s promoting color laser copies of family photos): “There’s only one you. Make copies.”
THAT NEVER STOPPED THE EAST GERMAN OLYMPIC TEAM (P-I correction, 12/12/98): “O’Dea should not have been listed in the Metro League high school girls’ basketball preseason rankings that appeared on Page E4 of Wednesday’s Sports section. O’Dea is an all-boys school.”
HANGING IT UP: The Meyerson & Nowinski Gallery’s closing after three years: The two owners, who currently each live in separate states (neither of which is Washington), got distracted by their primary careers and couldn’t take the time to make a go of what, at its opening three years ago, was to have been Seattle’s premier, world-class commercial modern-art emporium. Instead, the Foster/White gallery’s moving its (be brave, Clark, say the phrase) glass art (see, you could do it!) into the M&N space. With M&N, Donald Young, and Richard Hines all gone, who will attempt another would-be premier viz-art showcase around here and when?
NOT-SO-SOLID GOAD: Life continues to be crazy in the universe of Jim Goad, the Portland writer behind the book The Redneck Manifesto and the almost-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me! His wife and Answer-Me! co-publisher Debbie Goad left him shortly after the Redneck book came out in ’97, then publicly accused him of physical abuse. He denied the allegations. But on May 29, according to Portland prosecutors, Jim “kidnapped” his more recent ex-girlfriend–even though he’d applied for a restraining order against her.
As Goad’s fellow underground-zinester Jim Hogshire claims in a recent mass e-mailing supporting Jim’s side of the dispute:
“It seems the two ex-lovebirds were fighting in Jim’s car as Jim drove for about 20 minutes through populated areas of town, obeying all the traffic rules, stopping at red lights and not doing anything reckless. Goad did not have or use any weapon, use any force, or even make threats to keep his spurned, but very angry ex-girlfriend in the car with him. The car doors were not locked — a fact made clear when the alleged “kidnap” victim, Sky Ryan, tired of her harrowing “kidnap” experience and effected a daring escape by the simple tactic of opening the car door and getting out.”
A version of the case more sympathetic to Goad’s accusers appeared in the Portland paper Willamette Week:
“According to Ryan, she and Goad got into an argument while driving to her apartment around 5:30 that Friday morning. The verbal battle soon got physical, Ryan says. ‘He locked me inside the car and skidded out,’ Ryan told WW. ‘He was laughing, saying he’d kill me. I was pleading for my life. He’s pounding me.’ On Skyline Boulevard, Ryan, ‘screaming and bloody,’ finally convinced Goad to let her out of the car. “When police interviewed Ryan at St. Vincent’s [hospital], her left eye was swollen shut, she had bite marks on her hand and she was bleeding in several places, according to an affidavit filed by District Attorney Rod Underhill in Multnomah County Circuit Court. “In June 1997 Debbie Goad learned that she had ovarian cancer. After that, her husband of 10 years began beating her almost daily until October, according to a restraining order filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Debbie Goad accused Jim Goad of kicking her, spitting on her, hitting her and threatening to kill her, among other things.”
“According to Ryan, she and Goad got into an argument while driving to her apartment around 5:30 that Friday morning. The verbal battle soon got physical, Ryan says. ‘He locked me inside the car and skidded out,’ Ryan told WW. ‘He was laughing, saying he’d kill me. I was pleading for my life. He’s pounding me.’ On Skyline Boulevard, Ryan, ‘screaming and bloody,’ finally convinced Goad to let her out of the car.
“When police interviewed Ryan at St. Vincent’s [hospital], her left eye was swollen shut, she had bite marks on her hand and she was bleeding in several places, according to an affidavit filed by District Attorney Rod Underhill in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
“In June 1997 Debbie Goad learned that she had ovarian cancer. After that, her husband of 10 years began beating her almost daily until October, according to a restraining order filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Debbie Goad accused Jim Goad of kicking her, spitting on her, hitting her and threatening to kill her, among other things.”
Goad’s remained in jail (bail’s now up to $760,000) and is set to go on trial on Jan. 18. Hogshire insists it’s all a trumped-up case, pursued by publicity-minded authorities eager to use Goad’s writings as character-assassination ammo. I hope the prosecutors aren’t really planning such tactics. Censorship and free-speech issues needn’t belong in what, to the best I can figure, appears to be a situation involving two self-admittedly excitable people and the murky issues of which one did what to whom.
I don’t personally know the parties in this case, but I have known people living on certain emotional wavelengths, who attract friends who are on corresponding wavelengths. People who can get all too easily caught up in the excitement of vicious relationships, and not know (or not immediately care) when those relationships degrade into a realm (physical violence) where one partner has a decided disadvantage. This isn’t a gender-specific thang: I’ve seen it among gay and les partners, and among non-romantically-involved members of the same rock band. Censors should not get away with using ‘protecting women’ as their excuse; abusers should not get away with crying ‘censorship.’
YOU’VE ANOTHER WEEK OR SO to nominate people, places, and things on the shine or the decline for our annual MISC. World In/Out List, either by email or in our fresh new MISC. Talk discussion boards. ‘Til then, pray for snow, and ponder these words from Denis Dutton, webmaster of Arts and Letters Daily: “At this stage in its evolution the Web resembles a typical Australian goldfield, with vast mountains of low-grade ore.”
Words Against Words
Original book feature, 12/7/98
THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS:
The Conflict Between Word and Image
by Leonard Shlain
(Viking) $24.95
THE RISE OF THE IMAGE, THE FALL OF THE WORD
by Mitchell Stevens
(Oxford) $27.50
Between these two tomes, you get two men taking 728 pages to denounce left-brain linear thought and its chief manifestation, the written word.
Surgeon-physicist-author Leonard Shlain, in particular, has few nice things to say (except as afterthoughts) about either his own medium or his own gender. One of those men who loves to claim everything associated with his own kind is intrinsically evil, it takes him until a brief afterword to acknowledge that a few males have done a few good things during this planet’s history. Most of his long, long account involves reiteration after reiteration of one greatly oversimplified premise; an expansion on the new age/radical feminist belief that the whole world was into goddesses and matriarchy but it ended just before recorded history started.
His notion: It was the ability to record history itself that put goddess worship out of business; that as soon as any particular tribe or nation of humans started (or, in the case of the Renaissance, restarted) the widespread use of written language, everything promptly went straight to H-E-double-hockey sticks, particularly regarding women’s civil rights. Shlain sees militaristic Sparta as having been far more gender-equal than literary Athens. Egypt: A supposedly great place for the ladies during the hieroglyphic days, much less so once they got ahold of the Coptic alphabet. China: Despite its whole different writing system it’s still a writing system, blamable for everything from foot-binding to the Cultural Revolution. Wherever writing goes, Shlain posits, narrow-mindedness, drab official clothes, grim military discipline, sexual repression, and male domination, and denunciations of visual art all follow.
In real life (that universe far more complex than even the best-thought-out book), left-brain, literal thinking isn’t just for men; and visual-spatial enjoyment isn’t just for women. Women can certainly create and consume words. Indeed, women buy most of the novels in this country; men buy most of the comic books (and porn videos). Women can be literal-minded too, and self-righteous, and grim and drab. Women can also be very interested in the maintenance of strict social rules and castes (particularly those women who are on the winning side of those rules).
Still, Shlain’s initial premise could, with tweaking and better arguments and more acknowledgement of the diversity and complexity of social existence, turned into a notion with a few intriguing possibilities. I’d suggest a slightly different premise, no more or less supported by Shlain’s package of historical “evidence.” I’d say wherever militaristic nationalism takes hold, with its need to mold humans of all genders into impersonally-assigned roles, that all those glum suppressions follow. Shlain would likely counter-argue that you couldn’t have big, far-flung, Roman-style armies without written commands, so it’s still writing’s fault.
NYU prof Mitchell Stevens can write about the limitations of writing much more effectively than Shlain can. Mitchell’s clearly a professional wordsmith who struggles daily with his art form’s strengths and weaknesses. But his choice of hopeful talismans for a new, neo-iconic age are a bit odd: those ’60s “collage films” that always seemed to stick a mushroom-cloud image into everything; hyperactively edited MTV specials; the image-layered intro to an ABC documentary on religion in America. The use of these particular examples, out of the hundreds of thousands of filmed, videotaped, televised, and/or animated works generated this past century or so, basically reveals Stevens’ own wishes for what he calls “the New Video.” He wants a medium that can do what he feels can’t be done in boring ol’ text narratives. He wants quick juxtapositions of images that can stir viewers’ minds as well as their emotions. He wants works that can combine and compare scenes from different places and times. These tasks have been accomplished in verbal form (from the interludes in John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy to any newspaper front page).
While both Stephens and Shlain see hope for a post-linear mindset from computers and the Net, they forget programming is intensely literal and abstract. Indeed, any post-Word age is going to be at least as word-filled as this one. Movies and videos have scripts and editing lists. Websites have text surrounded by HTML scripts, which are intrepreted by more abstract program code. The daily stuff of commerce and governance will still involve forms, documentation, instructions, memos, etc.
Mind you, I’ve got my own problems with The Word and those who purport to be its champions. If any medium, even my own, has stuffy pendants like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and George Will as its bigtime defenders, there’s got to be something wrong with it. Besides, words can be so darn clumsy at trying to express what Bette Davis or Salvador Dali or animator Tex Avery could get off in a single, well-planned instant. But words can do many things images can’t do well (witness any number of good novels made into bad movies). Instead of seeing words and pictures as rivals, as Stephens and especially Shlain do, it’d be better to see them as complementary ways of seeing our world and of imagining other ones.
IT’S A COOL, DAMP, MISTY PRE-WINTERTIME MISC., the pop-culture report that always knows the launch of arrival of high shopping season when the regular downtown freaks are pushed aside by the seasonal-specific freaks. (For our own special gift to you, read on.)
HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN OUR TIME: Despite what it seems, not every old, lo-rise building in greater downtown Seattle’s being razed for cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. At least a dozen have been meticulously saved from the wrecking ball, so they can house the offices of the architects designing the cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. I’m reminded of a slide lecture I once saw by Form Follows Fiasco author Peter Blake. Among his examples of bad modern architecture was a mid-size city in central Europe with narrow, winding streets faced by quaint, homey, romantically worn-down buildings. When the socialists came into power, they hated the place. They had a new city built across the river, designed on all the efficient, rational, no-frills principles of Soviet-inspired central planning. The only government workers permitted to still live and work in the old city? You guessed it–the architects who designed the new city.
SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION IN OUR TIME: Ever notice how the 1-800-CALL-ATT long-distance logo, with a light-blue circular shape gently rising from within a dark-blue square, looks, at first glance, a heck of a lot like a condom wrapper?
AD OF THE WEEK: Future Shop, which publicly stopped selling Macintosh computers back during Apple’s pre-iMac sales doldrums two years ago, now prominently uses the Mac screen-window design in its current CD sale flyer.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Times, 11/29): “Drunk Driving Made Easier.” The story was really about a new state law that’ll make drunk driving arrests and prosecutions easier.
MEN AT WORK: The old truism that men will pay for sex but women will pay only to “look sexy” may be changing, at least among certain affluent women in remote locations. A loyal reader recently told of her recent trip to Jamaica, where she and her adult daughter were regularly propositioned by male locals on the streets and public beaches. But she says the solicitations weren’t expressions of harassment but of commerce. Hetero-male hooking’s apparently become such a big tourist draw on the island in recent years, the Jamaica Rough Guide travel book even lists the best spots for European and American women to rent what the book gingerly calls “Jamaican steel.” Some of the gated seaside resorts are discreetly offering bus tours for the ladies to go partake of a tall, dark toy-boy, then return to the hotel in time for scuba lessons.
This is a different phenomenon from the also-booming business of “swingers’ resorts” across the Caribbean and Mexico, where the sex is just as casual but is restricted to one’s fellow paying tourists. It’s also a phenomenon of potential interest to North America’s own remote, economically depressed regions, regions which tend to have ample supplies of rugged if less-than-gentlemanly men. You’d have to get some anything-for-a-buck politicians to change a few laws, then put the recruited men through some Full Monty-esque makeovers and charm lessons; but from there, the only limit would be one’s ambition and one’s marketing budget. I can easily imagine big layouts in the continental fashion mags, inviting the pampered ladies of Italy and France to really experience the rugged, robust America they’ve only known through movies and ads, by enjoying a real Akron factory worker or a real Detroit homeboy or even a real Aberdeen lumberjack!
SLICKSVILLE: Earlier this year, business analysts were talking about the mergers of the seven Baby Bells into four as presaging a potential reassembly of the Bell System. Now, with Exxon and Mobil combining and BP taking over Amoco, we might be seeing the reassembly of the old Standard Oil! (Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and BP’s current U.S. division are all descended from pieces of John D. Rockefeller’s old monopoly.) The headline in last Friday’s Times claims the merger would “benefit consumers” somehow–even though it would result in further station closures across the country (neither company has much of a presence left around here) and mass layoffs, and even though today’s low oil prices are the result of the collapse in OPEC’s ability to set prices for its member oil-exporting nations.
The first hints of a possible merger made the news the same day as the fatal explosion at the Anacortes refinery built in the ’50s by Texaco, but now operated by Texaco and Shell under the joint-venture pseudonym “Equilon.” All these spinoffs, mergers, joint ventures, and consolidations in the business have scrambled what had been clear vertically-integrated brand identities. (Could the Anacortes plant’s management change have influenced conditions that led to the freak accident? In all probability, no. The coking tower that blew up was designed and built when Texaco still fully owned the installation.)
Still, doesn’t anyone remember back in the ’70s when TV oilman J.R. Ewing became the world’s image of a slimy businessmen? When oil companies were popularly thought to be the bad guys, and the bigger they got the badder they were presumed to be? The oil giants turned out to have profited then from circumstances beyond their control; they’re now struggling from circumstances equally beyond their control. But these are still global collossi whose only true loyalties are still to (1) the stock price, (2) executive salaries and perks, (3) promoting government policies favorable to the first two priorities, and (4) their public images. Everything else (environmental protection, resource conservation, fair labor practices, preserving neighborhood service stations) the companies either pays attention to when doing so fits priorities 1-4 or when they’re forced to. And as we’ve seen in places like Kuwait (where women still have virtually no civil rights) and Nigeria (where opponents to the Shell-supported dictator are harrassed and shot), these companies are still perfectly willing to associate with less-than-admirable elements as long as it’s lucrative.
SCARY COINCIDENCE #1: In this space last week, I promised this week I’d list things I was thankful for. Little did I know I’d be grateful to the fates for some relatively lucky timing. I was on the southbound Metro #359 bus at 3:15 p.m. Thursday, heading back from the ol’ family dinner–exactly 24 hours prior to the incident in which a presumably deranged passenger shot the driver on a southbound #359 on the northern reaches of the Aurora Bridge, just above the Fremont Troll. (The bus crashed through the guard rail and plunged to the ground below. The driver fell out and died.)
Scary coincidence #2: A KIRO-TV reporter, mentioning cops scouring the wreckage site for evidence, noted how investigators spent months combing the seas off Long Island, NY after the TWA Flight 800 crash several years ago. A friend of mine had been on that plane from Paris to NYC that day; the fatal flight was to have been the plane’s return trip.
Scary coincidence #3: As part of the part-time duties I’m still handling for The Stranger, I’d scheduled to turn in a website review this week about www.busplunge.org, a site collecting every English-language news story containing the words “bus plunge.”
Scary coincidence #4: The driver, Mark McLaughlin, was shot in the arm. Mudhoney singer Mark Arm’s real surname: McLaughlin.
Back in the late ’80s, Metro Transit’s ads tried to discourage citizens from thinking of bus riders as underclass losers and winos, with images of well-scrubbed, pale-skinned models and the slogan, “Metro. Who rides it? People just like you.” Then in the ’90s, as headlines blared of “road rage” and roads became clogged with “out-of-my-way-asshole” SUVs, bus riders got plastered with the PR image of “civil society” do-gooders who did their part to reduce traffic congestion and encourage social mingling, people whose efforts deserved to be furthered by the regional light-rail referendum. Will this tragedy re-ignite the old stereotype of bus people, or be perceived as the wheeled equivalent of a drive-by?
NOW FOR YOUR GIFT: I also promised last week I’d start adding exciting new features to your beloved Misc. World site. With the assistance of the speakeasy.org programming staff, I’m proud to pre-announce the forthcoming, one-‘n’-only Misc.Talk discussion board. In a sense it’s a return to my roots, having first discovered online communication via bulletin board systems back in 1983. Your first question: What’s the ickiest, most inappropriate, or most embarrassing Xmas gift you ever got (or gave)? Have fun, and talk nice.
