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I’M BACK at the computer room of the Stamford Marriott, a midrise tower hotel in a midrise tower district just off I-95. Stamford, or what little I’ve seen of it on the Metro-North commuter train and in the hotel’s vicinity, appears to have formerly been a real community with a real downtown, which was almost completely razed (except for a few too-ornately “restored” blocks) and replaced with the ugliest of late-modern buildings. Office parks and towers, condos and “townhome” developments, hirise apartments and a Bellevue Square-like mall (multilevel parking garages instead of an outdoor parking moat). Somewhere out among those hideous office buildings are the headquarters of General Electric, Samsung USA, the World Wrestling Federation, and other famous outfits.
Got here after an 11-hour odeal that included two flights on the airline soon to be formerly known as TWA (what Howard Hughes hath joined together, Carl Ichan tore asunder), which is still in the process of being integrated into American Airlines’ systems. At the St. Louis layover, I saw the big hangars of what had been McDonnell-Douglas, now sporting the Boeing logo. The common adage these days is that Boeing thought it was taking over McDonnell-Douglas, but was infiltrated by it instead. Certainly the move of Boeing’s HQ to Chicago clearly bears the scent of Midwesterners’ plottings. From there, ground transportation took me through rustic-earthy Queens, still-striving-against-all-odds Harlem, and the progressively tonier suburbs going further away from the city.
The Crossword Puzzle Tournament itself has eight rounds. Six were completed today. I knocked off all six puzzles with time to spare, but was nowhere near the fastest at any of them. Confabbing with fellow entrants later, I’ve learned I’ve made at least two mistakes today. On Saturday, puzzle 7 will be issued, followed by the championship round 8 for the finalists in five skill levels. (As a first-timer, I’m in category C.)
Everyone sits at tables in the big hotel meeting room. Volunteers pass out photocopies of each puzzle, one puzzle at a time. Everyone works on each puzzle at the same time. Each has a predetermined time limit, from 15 to 40 minutes. Solvers’ filled-in grids are scored on accuracy and speed. I think I’ve done fairly well, but won’t know until tomorrow just how well comparitively.
There are about 400 entrants, almost all Caucasian. Eighty percent are from the Northeast corridor, with most from the NYC metro area. I’m one of only two Washingtonians here.
Will offer up more details later.
…or what would at least make for interesting new stories:
…and, as the commentators have commentated, it’s a challenge to find things to be thankful for (other than the ol’ “at least things aren’t worse” standby).
On top of the mass murder, war, riots, earthquake, dead dot-coms, runaway Boeing execs, general economic malaise, and other calamities affecting this world, nation, and region this year, government analysts just announced Washington state’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation. And that’s before the 32,000-ish Boeing layoffs kick in.
And now comes something bound to dishearten the most hardy U.S. proponents of the war in Afghanistan–its stunning, nearly-complete success.
This was supposed to go on smoldering for months and years of stalemate. Now, the Taliban are only holding on to four provinces and a couple of surrounded townships; and that principally due to foreign mercenary soldiers. By year’s end, the Taliban could be crushed. Their house guest and patron Osama bin Laden could be captured any month now, or maybe he’ll just disappear as just another powerless refugee, or maybe he’ll be found dead of natural causes sometime next Autumn.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Pentagon/GOP strategists almost admittedly wanted the start of Cold War II, the resumption of what some Vietnam-era activists called “the permanent war economy.”
This was supposed to be so pervasive, so intense, and so drawn-out that three decades’ worth of domestic anti-military sentiment would permanently disappear. The public would unanimously support the re-direction of the federal money spigot back toward weapons contractors.
Citizens daring to speak non-Limbaughesque points of view were to be silenced, either by the shouts of mass disapproval or the heavier hand of new anti-dissent regulations. We were expected to rabidly cheer the piece-by-piece dismantling of due process under the law. Even the mildly authority-questioning satires of Saturday Night Live and e-mail joke lists, the mid-October conventional wisdom went, would have to fall in line with a new and permanent spirit of disciplinary obedience, or face publc obsolescence.
Instead, we’ve got a war that debuted in the fall and just might leave the airwaves in midseason. (Unless, of course, the Bushies try to get it renewed by adding the plot-twist of invading another country or two.)
Maybe, instead, some of us could start scripting our own midseason replacement. One with the far more difficult (hence more intriguing) storyline of trying to build a lasting peace and a more equitable lot for the folk (including the female folk) of that once-obscure land.
Call your cable or satellite provider (or, more directly, your Congressional representatives). Tell them you want to see The Peace Show.
(This article’s permanent link.)
YR. HUMBLE EDITOR was recently awarded the honor of being one of the 18 jurors who selected the “MetropoList 150,” the Museum of History and Industry/Seattle Times list of the 150 most influential people in the 150-year history of Seattle and King County.
I’m quite satisfied with the final list, available at this link. There’s almost nobody on it I wouldn’t have wanted on it.
Nevertheless, there are several names I wrote in which didn’t make the final selection. In alphabetical order, they include:
IN ADDITION, here are some names nominated by other people (with the descriptions these anonymous nominators wrote) for whom I voted, but who also failed to make the final cut:
HUGE BOEING LAYOFFS: Why so soon and so massive? For the same reason the company’s top execs split town for Chicago—the Almighty Stock Price. (It’s the same reason the airlines moved so swiftly for their own massive layoffs.)
Boeing boss Phil Condit has now made his statement to the investment community that Boeing is no longer a “Seattle company” or even a manufacturing company, but an investment portfolio that moves swiftly to cut potential losses.
At one time, even during the previous massive layoffs of the early ’70s, Boeing was a company that Made Stuff. In bad times, it made sure to hold on to at least its key personnel and its design-engineering infrastructure. Now, who knows?
THE RADIO MEGA-CHAIN that’s rapidly becoming the Microsoft of music (that’s not a compliment) wants its umpteen-hundred stations to ban over 150 individual songs, plus anything by Rage Against the Machine.
NOT ONLY HAVE news websites struggled to stay online with the heavy demand, but the founder of one of the leading bandwidth-supply and server companies was one of the slain.
Also confirmed dead: Frasier co-creator David Angell, who as much as anybody invented the modern image of Seattle as a smugly sophisticated, or sophisticatedly smug, place.
And, of course, the image of Boeing jets might forever be changed in the subconscious minds of millions.
YESTERDAY, we started to talk about the Boeing Co.’s stunning news that it would set up a new, slimmed-down head office–which would be located away from the offices of any of its main operating groups (i.e., not in Seattle).
And yes, the media were right to give the story the big play they did (including NY Times and USA Today front page stories as well as wall-to-wall local coverage).
Only 500 or so of Boeing’s 78,000 Washington state staffers will go away or be laid off (local dot-coms alone have collectively topped that in some weeks this year). And Boeing’s vast Commercial Airplane Group (with all its own execs, engineers, salespeople, and assemblers) is staying put.
But a corporate HQ, even a rump holding-company HQ, still means something. It symbolizes an organization’s commitment to an on-the-ground community. Its removal to some neutral site, as we’ve already mentioned, is Boeing brass’s (expensive) statement that it’s turning its back on that “old economy” heritage, that it’s just another player on the global-corporate stage, untied to anyplace, anything, or anyone other than the transnational elite of financiers and dealmakers.
Of course, the idea that Boeing doesn’t want to be associated anymore with any one specific place doesn’t make things any nicer for the civic-leader types at this specific place.
Seattle, as you may know, has cared a lot more about Boeing than Boeing has about Seattle. True, the company continued to build planes here when it might’ve constructed plants in the home states of important defense-appropriation Senators.
But in return for that, the company sought, and almost always got, total subservience from local politicians, media people, and ordinary citizens. (The cover of the late Bill Speidel’s book The Wet Side of the Mountains: Exploring Western Washington included a cartoon image of hard-hatted workers kneeling and praying at the gates of a Boeing hangar.)
Seattle’s civic-development establishment has spent the past half-century or so trying to make sure this town became, and remained, the kind of town Boeing would want to keep calling home.
A place where top executives could retreat to their waterfront dachas, unbothered by the outside world.
A place where level-headed engineers could enjoy sane, tasteful leisure opportunities in sane, tasteful surroundings (with the hardhat workers and their rough-hewn ways exiled to the outskirts, a la Soweto).
A place of quiet intelligence and modest personal ambition, but also a place that would do anything within (or slightly beyond) reason to become “World Class.” We’ll build World Class stadia and convention facilities. We’ll host World Class trade confabs. But we’ll pretend we’re still an overgrown small town, where everybody’s laid-back and mellow and ultra-bland and ultra-white. This schizophrenic drive to be simultaneously big and small, aware and innocent, world-wise but not worldly (similar to the New Testament ideal to be “in the world but not of the world”) served Seattle, and Boeing, relatively well for many years, until its contradictions started becoming too apparent in recent years.
Now, Boeing–the company that made the International Jet Set possible, thus spawning today’s rootless global financial elite–is redefining itself as neither in nor of the world, but as belonging to the Everywhere/Nowhere of that aforementioned elite.
The New Boeing will supply aircraft and satellite-communications equipment to keep the elite’s members in actual or virtual contact with one another and their assorted fiscal empires, while treating the rest of Planet Earth as one big “flyover zone.”
NEXT: A special offer.
ELSEWHERE:
THIS EDITION OF MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of William Hanna, whose TV cartoons entranced millions of kids (and whose early, low-budget shows helped demystify the animation and filmmaking processes for thousands of those kids).
AS YOU MAY HAVE HEARD BY NOW, the Boeing Co. announced one of its periodic reorganizations the other day.
It’s gonna group its own heritage assets, and the assets it’s bought from Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and General Motors into three main groups, each of which would act more like a stand-alone company with its own management and offices (and, potentially, its own “tracking stock” IPO). At the top would be a slimmed-down corporate headquarters–which won’t be in Seattle (or St. Louis or Long Beach, where two of the three operating groups will be based).
So Boeing’s gonna become just another rootless global corporation, and have a head office not where any of its main plants are but whereever it can wring “job blackmail” deals from the local authorities and/or wherever the top execs would prefer to live.
The official reason given, that the company needs to be based someplace with “cultural diversity” and “a pro-business climate,” is, as everyone here knows, B.S. Our local and state politicians have spent their collective professional lifetimes doing whatever the Lazy B wanted. And as for the diversity part, there’s a whole world out in Seattle’s neighborhoods and suburbs that the Coldwater Creek store and the other promoters of Demographic Correctness couldn’t even imagine.
So let’s imagine the potential real reasons:
By having a head office physically removed from all manufacturing operations, Boeing’s proclaiming itself to the stock markets and the corporate community that it’s gonna be a company run by salespeople and financiers for salespeople and financiers, not an “old economy” company making specific products for specific customers. It’ll be a company whose real “bottom line” isn’t its operating profit but its stock price. A company that’ll do anything for the sake of short-term upturns–even take moves that could sacrifice its long-term position (such as giving away wing-design technology to the Japanese).
And if the top execs move to Texas, they’ll have more potential clout when pushing new military contracts from a Texan-run White House.
One potentially ironic note was that the top brass had apparently been bitching among themselves about all the flying around they had to do to go from Seattle to other Boeing sites and to Washington, DC lobbying sessions. (If you don’t like airline travel, guys, get into some other line of work than trying to promote more airline travel.)
NEXT: Some more of this.
SINCE LAST FRIDAY, I’ve been remembering the far different Seattle of the fall of 1975.
It was a time of gas lines, of stagflation, of post-Watergate cynicism, of post-Vietnam shellshock, of continuing doldrums in the Boeing-centric Seattle economy.
In short, a perfect time for an up-‘n’-coming hardbitten-journalist wannabe such as myself.
Seattle was still a “company town,” and that company was Boeing. (Microsoft was just getting underway, selling software to hobbyist programmers out of New Mexico.) Boeing had just begun to recover from its massive 1970-71 slump when the U.S. pullout from Vietnam brought drastic military plane-buying cuts, thusly plopping the region right back into recession mode.
(At least Boeing, thanks to its head start in the passenger-jet biz, was less dependent on Pentagon contracts than other planemakers were. That’s why it was able in the ’90s to take over McDonnell Douglas and outlast Lockheed.)
A then-united OPEC (a few years before the Iran revolution set off squabbles and wars between Mideast oil nations) was in one of its price-hiking, supply-restricting movements. Radio Shack sold CB radios with ads claiming they’d help you “Find Gas Fast.” Companies like Gulf, Amoco, and Phillips 66, which had boldly moved in on the Northwest gasoline trade just a few years before, either sold or abandoned their area stations. The great muscle cars and land yachts faded from popularity and rusted on used-car lots (many of which were set up at abandoned gas stations).
Politicians tried to allay citizens’ fears by adopting bland feel-good personas. Gerald Ford was marketed as the emotionally stable, ambitions-in-check anti-Nixon. Jimmy Carter, already running to displace Ford in the White House, billed himself as half good-old-boy, half engineering nerd.
Seattle politics was run, then as now, by a downtown Democratic machine that pretended to be a neighborhood progressive movement. (It did a little more pretending of that sort then than now.)
The machine’s figurehead at the time was Wes Uhlmann, a glib, silver-haired gladhander. Uhlmann’s mayoral regime had survived a police-payoffs scandal and took (perhaps too much) credit for starting Metro Transit and saving the Pike Place Market from high-rise development. He’d retire in 1977, leaving a mayoral race between machine functionary Paul Schell and TV-news pretty boy Charles Royer. Royer would win handily, leaving future generations to deal with Schell.
TOMORROW: The sleaze district, and other places that are gone.
YESTERDAY, we mentioned in passing the Seattle Mariners’ new “classic” baseball stadium.
The movie-theater biz is also trying to get neoclassical.
OK, they’re not going back to single-screen palaces of architectural wonder. (And they’re sure not going back to old-fashioned ticket or concession prices.)
But the big chains are trying to make moviegoing an entertaining experience again.
After decades of building big, bland, boxy multiplexes, they’re now putting up much fancier joints. The new multiplexes still have umpteen screens serviced by a central projection room; they still play the same dorky big-studio formula movies.
But they’ve got plushier seats, fancier carpets and lighting, and prettier lobbies and signage. They’ve got hi-tech projection and sound systems. They’ve got doublewall construction between auditoria, so you’re less likely to hear the movie next door.
Some of them even have curtains concealing the screen between shows (amazing what they’ll think up!).
But the new movie boxes are costly things to build and run, especially with the high rents in some of the “restored” big-city downtowns where many of the biggest and fanciest megaplexes are going up. And the chains aren’t closing their older multiboxes at the same rate they’re opening new ones. (For one thing, chains are building these partly to encroach on other chains’ established territories. For another, they’re often stuck in long-term leases, especially at malls.)
So even with movie attendance holding steady, and even with the high ticket prices and the high concession prices and the on-screen ads and the hawking of CDs and posters in the lobbies, the big cinemonster chains are in trouble. Three have already filed for bankruptcy protection; two others may do so this week. The biggest current circuit, Loews Cineplex (formed by the merger of several already-big chains), is being propped up by steadily cash infusions from Sony (which hasn’t been making big profits in its movie-production arm either). But even that isn’t keeping the chain afloat.
As one to always see an opportunity where others only see trouble (and vice versa), I can foresee many uses for the movie boxes that might become immediately abandoned if these bankruptcy moves go through. When Cineplex Odeon (now merged into Loews Cineplex) shut down its Newmark fiveplex, a local nonprofit theater briefly used one of its rooms before the whole space was redone for offices. We can do that again, all over North America.
Let’s turn some of these umpteenplexes into multidisciplinary fringe-arts centers. I can see it now:
Not only would such a scheme provide valuable, centrally-located space for these sometimes neglected resources in the heart of their respective cities and/or suburbs, they’d provide a modicum of historic preservation to these buildings.
This way, kids in the 2030s will be able to see the places in which films like Rambo III were meant to be seen. It may help them understand why such films got made.
MONDAY: Both major Presidential candidates (heart) censorship.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
AFTER AN HOUR of watching architect Rem Koolhaas’s slide presentation at Benaroya Hall on 5/3, I finally figured out the dual schemes behind Koolhaas’s design for the new Seattle library:
(1) It’s a giant, 15-story, uneven, vertical pile of books. (Imagine the stack of law books in the Perry Mason closing credits)
(2) It’s also the linear, angular, rational counterpart to the Experience Music Project’s touchy-feely curves and textures.
Seattle’s a town where yang-oriented geeks and eggheads have long been prized (Boeing engineers, software coders, biotech researchers). But it’s also a town where more yin-ish salespeople and dealmakers have brought the real money in.
The new library and EMP, while situated some two miles apart from one another, will provide a balanced tribute to both sides of the city’s character.
I could bore you with rundowns of how Koolhaas (yes, it’s pronounced “cool-house”) discussed the building’s schemes for foot-traffic flow, seizmic safety, natural-light bringing-in, computer access, balance between public-gathering and info-storage functions, and ability to handle expanded multimedia collections. But if you’re anything like most of the packed Benaroya audience, you want to know about two particular aspects of the design:
(1) The translucent floors on certain levels won’t be so see-thru that enterprising Net-entrepreneurs could use them in making “upskirt” image sites.
(2) And the spiraling central corridor of book stacks (officially devised not as a tribute to the labyrintian monastic library in The Name of the Rose but to allow “the uninterrupted flow” of the Dewey Decimal system) won’t be too steep for either wheelchairs or employees’ carts, Koolhaas insists. It’ll just be a gentle four-percent grade, much easier to handle than the steep 20-percent-grade Benaroya Hall aisles (or the spiraling galleries at NYC’s Guggenheim Muesum).
Koolhaas tried to prove his point with still photos of a full-size mockup of the sloping stacks, built on short notice by the Seattle Opera scene shop. The photos showed humans and wheeled devices ascending and descending and stopping on the ramped floor with ease.
You might be able to make your own test; the mockup might be installed for a couple days or so at the current downtown library later this month. If that happens, you might even be able to give it the real test–how well it allows for the descent of marbles, Hot Wheels cars, and Slinkys.
CORRECTION OF THE WEEK (Tom Heald at TV Barn: “A few weeks ago this column may have implied that pop stars Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears may not be ‘naturally curvy.’ What I meant to say is that they are untalented. I regret possibly offending their fans.”
TOMORROW: You don’t have to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
ON WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.
Along with the rest of the high-tech and e-commerce industries, MS has brought this once-forgotten corner of America into full boomtown mode.
And, along with the rest of the software and Internet businesses that have grown here, it’s led to a building boom.
Many American cities have gone through boomtown eras this century. Seattle itself had one starting with the 1897 Yukon gold rush and continuing (in greater or lesser spurts) until the 1929 stock crash.
Recent decades have seen booms overtake Denver, Houston, Miami, and (in several waves) Las Vegas.
In each of these, big new buildings have arisen. In most of these, the character of the new buildings has expressed a more extreme, more intense version of the cities’ former character. Houston’s glass towers could be seen as reflecting the same bluster as an old Texas ranch mansion. Miami became even more shallow and glittery. Vegas became even brighter and louder.
Seattle’s current boomtown phase is significantly different from those other booms–precisely because it marks such a break from the city’s heritage. And I don’t just mean behaviorally.
It’s changing the face of the city. But it’s not just replacing old buildings with newer, bigger buildings of the same basic aesthetic.
Boomtown Seattle’s new buildings replace an old local architectural shtick of a quiet engineers’ and lawyers’ town trying desperately to become “world class” and failing spectacularly) with real world-class-osity, expressed in big, costly, and monumental public and semi-public structures.
The Kingdome’s final scheduled event, a Seahawks football game, takes place in 16 days. Sometime between then and the start of baseball season, the Dome will be imploded. In its place will eventually rise a luxury-box-heavy new football stadium, the last of the three structures replacing the Dome’s different functions. Already up: Safeco Field and a new exhibition hall (where Chris Isaak and Squirrel Nut-Zippers will ring in the millennium).
While all three post-Kingdome building projects have substantial public subsidies, all were instigated by software fortunes–Nintendo’s Hiroshi Yamauchi for Safeco Field; Paul Allen for the football stadium and the exhibition hall.
Steps away from the soon-to-be ex-Dome, Allen’s refitting the old Union Station as a posh gathering place, and building a fancy new office building next to it.
Allen’s also been involved in the newly rebuilt UW Henry Art Gallery (subtitled “The Faye G. Allen Center for the Arts”), the restored Cinerama Theater, and the sculpture park to be built at the old Union 76 waterfront terminal site; and is the sole sponsor (to date) of the Experience Music Project, the huge blob-shaped pop-music museum rising in the Space Needle’s shadow.
Allen’s erstwhile partner Bill Gates fils has taken smaller, but still significant, roles in putting up the new Seattle Art Museum (essentially the first of Seattle’s current generation of culture palaces) and the big new wing of the UW’s main library, and is contributing to rebuilding neighborhood libraries (just like that prior monopolist, Andrew Carnegie).
And Bill Gates pere, the corporate lawyer, has used his networking skills to help assemble local “old money” (i.e., non-computer-related wealth, from the likes of real estate and broadcasting) to join with the new cyber-rich in backing, and pressuring governments to further back, still other temples: A new symphony hall, a new basketball arena, the Pacific Place shopping temple, a new domed IMAX cinema, new or heavily-remodeled homes for four big theater companies, three old movie palaces reworked for Broadway touring shows, and (announced last month) a rebuilt opera house.
Still to come, with various funding sources: A new central library, a new city hall complex, a rebuilt UW basketball arena, and a light rail network.
On smaller scales, the new Seattle architectural aesthetic has influenced everything from condos to discos to Catholic churches. The new St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle U. is asymmetrical, sparse, and airy–values you’d ordinarily not expect from Jesuits, but would expect from a high-tech town awash in new money.
The Seattle Boeing built was a place that attempted brilliance-on-a-budget. A town that tried to avoid wasteful extravegance even as it wanted the world to notice it.
The Seattle Allen & Gates are building is a place that settles for nothing less than the most spectacular, the most “tastefully” outlandish.
UPDATE: Coronation Street, the long-running U.K. working-class soap opera, is now on the Net. A startup company called iCraveTV is streaming all of Toronto’s over-the-air TV stations to any Net user who can type in a Canadian telephone area code (such as 604, 250, or 416). The stations are taking legal action, to try to stop this unauthorized re-use of their signals. But for now, you can see the Street on the web at 12-12:30 p.m. PT Mon.-Thurs. and 6-8 a.m. PT Sundays. (Click on “CBC” from iCraveTV’s site).
MONDAY: Bad beers I have known.
LAST FRIDAY, I related some of the things I told the Italian mag Jam about the Seattle music scene since the U.S. corporate media stopped caring about it.
Here’s some more of what I told that publication’s writer:
A: Nirvana tried to find its own way within the music-industry machinery and failed. Pearl Jam, which in its first year was more aggressively promoted than Nirvana, tried to find its own way within the music-industry machinery and succeeded on its own terms. PJ became a major-label act with the fan devotion of an “indie” act. By under-using the industry’s mass-marketing tools, it maintained its status as a “people’s” band.
A: Let me clarify: A few people here are now tremendously wealthy, but those of us who aren’t on the upper rings of the high-tech and software industries are still struggling as much as ever. With the price of housing here having skyrocketed, some of us have struggled even more.
A: Perhaps even more so. Besides local outposts of whatever national trends come and go (alternative-country, lounge, techno, etc.), there’s a vital and growing avant-improv and postmodern-jazz scene. But, yes, the national magazines like Wallpaper still look at anything in Seattle that contradicts the “all-grunge” stereotypes and act all weird: “This is in Seattle but it’s Not Grunge–how strange!”
A: Don’t worry. That will all come by the end of next year, when the Experience Music Project museum opens, including a big permanent exhibit all about the G-word era.
But for now, yes. The ‘underground attitude’ was officially opposed to tourist attractions, theme parks, or the like. And the powers-that-be in local business and political circles have continued to eagerly play the role of intolerant authority figures (what all would-be “rebels” need in order to have something to rebel against), so there was never any threat of any city-supported Grunge Festival or anything like that.
A: Perhaps further away than before. Of the bands I wrote about in ‘Loser,’ the only ones still on the major labels are Pearl Jam, Built to Spill, Candlebox, Alice In Chains (who haven’t put out a lot of new stuff lately), and Chris Cornell’s new solo act. There are still bigtime producers and managers and promoters around here, but they work as much with out-of-town acts as with local ones.
A: Nirvana meant a lot to a lot of people. More than the studio-manufactured pop combos before or since, and more than certain California bands that sound sort of grungy but have much more industry-friendly business plans (appearing at snowboarding festivals, selling songs for movie soundtracks, etc.).
The Industry did regain control of pop music from the upstarts. But it might just turn out to be a temporary victory. One of the six major-label groups has merged itself out of existence. The remaining five groups are cutting divisions, firing staff members, dropping bands left and right, and publicly whining about Internet-based “threats” to its well-being. While the techno-dance genre is still almost all indie-label-based; and cheap digital recording, Net-based promotion, and a club circuit invigorated by the early-’90s indie-rock mania make it easier than ever to get an act established (if not wealthy) without the majors’ waste or overhead.
A: It certainly made everything seem a lot less fun for a good long while.
It also convinced some people of the wrongness of the music-industry system. Cobain had clearly been burnt out by the stress, not of being “the voice of a generation” but of being the locus of a multimillion-dollar business that used to be a little punk band. Geffen demanded videos, interviews, and long, overseas arena tours, and Cobain apparently felt unable to say no to these demands. (Of course, he was also sufferring under the drug-addict’s paradox of needing more money while becoming less capable of working for it.)
A: None of them moved to L.A. (except Courtney Love and a couple of former Seven Year Bitch members).
But it was traditional, in the pre-Microsoft years, for rich people in Seattle to withdraw from public life, to move out to gated suburbs or country homes and to stick to themselves. Some of the financially-successful music-scene people have done that, retreating to Idaho or Montana or the islands of Puget Sound.
But others are still quite involved. Prime example: Krist Novoselic, who these days appears in public more often than he did during Nirvana’s heyday, and who’s been involved in anti-censorship drives and other political actions.
A: Anything running two hours or less, covering a topic so complex, will by necessity be a condensation.
Home Alive, the women’s self-defense coalition formed after Zapata’s death, has had some attrition of volunteers and funding but is still active after six years. Zapata’s death, still unsolved, left a lot of people with a sense that they were in a seriously threatening environment; that death and violence weren’t just the stuff of goth or cartoon-heavy-metal fantasies.
A: You bet. It taps into one eternal Seattle schtick–the mistaken belief by would-be hipsters that everything in Seattle sucks, that the only really hip thing is to copy whatever San Francisco or New York says is hip. But it also taps into a certain spirit you can find in the Microsoft coprorate culture, where everybody’s young, ruthlessly “positive,” aggressively modernistic, and into hot-hot-hot hype.
A: Boeing’s corporate culture used to set the rules for mainstream society in Seattle–businesslike, rational, respectable, unassuming, consensus-oriented, square, and obsessed with quiet good taste.
Today, Microsoft sets the tone–loud, fast, brash, aggressive, ambitious, arrogant, power- and success-oriented, and obsessed with ostentatious displays of wealth.
TOMORROW: Is irony dead, or just playing possum?
THE VOICE OF DESCENT: On this Pearl Harbor Day, let us remember not too many years ago, when “the Japanese threat” meant their high-flying companies were going to take over our economy. Now, there’s a new Japanese threat–that their troubled companies, and those of other structurally-shaky Asian economies, might stop buying America’s soybeans, wheat, and jet aircraft.
Once again, as it has several times over the past 30-odd years, Boeing’s given a lump of coal to the Puget Sound region’s collective Xmas stockings. After all the manic growth, all the stupid growth, all the countryside-clearing growth and all the urban-life-draining growth, part of me actually looks forward to the more sluggish economy 48,000 layoffs and unfilled job vacancies might bring. Yet another part of me still feels sorry for the young adults and newcomers who’ve known nothing here but constant economic expansion, and who might find it more difficult to land decent jobs or backing for their dream restaurants.
ALREADY WE’VE ONE major business closure due to changing economic conditions. As you might expect, the last week of KSTW’s local news (mandated by the station’s current owner, Viacom) played out as both personal desparation (clips of old cute-dog stories strung together by a staff obviously intent on assembling demo reels for its resumes) and light pathos (co-anchorman Don Porter holding up a “Will Anchor For Food” sign). The headline graphic for the top story on the final newscast (a story about a newly-found cache of dynamite in Puyallup): “TNT Destroyed.” KSTW’s former call letters, several owners ago, were KTNT (from its original owner, the Tacoma News Tribune). Also throughout the final broadcast, the station ran the logo from its old ownership by Gaylord Broadcasting–not the ugly “UPN 11” symbol Viacom management had imposed. The cancellation means 62 newsroom and studio layoffs, and turns what had been one of the strongest non-big-three-network stations in the country into just another mere outlet for reruns and forgettable semi-network shows (can you even name any UPN original production other than Star Trek Voyager?).
PULP FRICTION: A couple weeks back, I mildly dissed a Stranger article dissing the retro-swing revival. Now I’ve something I never expected I’d say: Seattle Weekly, once one of the few “alternative” weeklies to be more conservative than its town’s daily papers, has lately become darn near pinko with Geov Parrish publicly questioning the canonization of the late Seattle School District PR machine John Stanford and Mark Worth listing Seattle’s equivalent of the “50 families” that run everything in certain Latin American countries. This is one case of a publication becoming more progressive under chain ownership. When it was locally owned, the Weekly was tied heavily into this town’s business and political elites, far more so than many urban weeklies in other towns. Founder David Brewster was a defender (to this day) of ’70s-style notions of leadership by an enlightened intelligentsia; as applied in his pages, it meant individual politicians and political decisions could be criticized but not the larger priorities of our Pro-Business Democrat machine. But after Brewster retired and sold out to the Hartz Mountain chain of papers, the paper’s rather suddenly started growing something resembling a spine. (And I’m not just saying these things ‘cuz I’m trying to get a job with them. Honest.)
CATHODE CORNER: Finally saw digital cable over the holidays, and was immediately taken by the way each channel first appears on screen as a collage of small screen areas, taking as long as a second before all the rectangles fill in. How long do you think it’ll take before the effect appears as a deliberately-planned schtick in music videos? (It’s already been used in series, if you count the “puzzle piece” effects that used to lead into and out of commercials on Get Smart! and The Streets of San Francisco.)
SCREEN DEFENSE: The same week the mighty Scarecrow Video store celebrated 10 years of rough-and-tumble survival, Capitol Hill’s smaller but equally feisty Video Vertigo posted photocopied trade-magazine articles on its wall, claiming 400 indie video-rental shops are going out of business each week in the US due to predatory pricing by, and sweetheart deals offered by studios to, Blockbuster. While some of these individual stores and small chains probably won’t be missed (I’m thinking of those stores offering only the same creaky action-hits and moldy ’80s sitcom movies as the big chains), there are also plenty which deserve to stick around (with more, or different or better, selections than the corporate stores, and/or better rates or looser return policies). Wanna see a flick at home tonite? Go to one of those joints first.
THIS MONTH’S FIRST-THURSDAY HIGHLIGHTS:
1. Gloria DiArcangelis’s stunning neo-realist paintings at Myerson & Nowinski. Nobody else (on this continent anyway) can make contemporary faces and figures look so much like they belong in the Renaissance.
2. Meghan Trainor’s tiny wall shrines (made from “authentic Boeing aluminum” and what look like labels from ancient brands of produce) at the relocated Roq La Rue.
3. Parris Broderick’s “Sitting Duck” series at Zeitgeist Espresso. You’ve seen his murals, sandwich signs, etc. all over town; now see his loving post-expressionist touch applied to images of ducks (or are they decoys?).
4. The abstract-installation piece at Oculus, a study in geometric form and color created by gluing hundreds of Starburst Fruit Chews to the wall.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Emerald City Connections (“Seattle’s #1 Meeting Place”) purports to be a slick singles’ resource with personal ads, relationship advice, and related articles. But six of the first issue’s 24 pages comprise ads for escorts, phone-sex lines, and other “adult services”–as if the publishers were admitting the personal ads might not work. (Free at vending boxes around town, or from 1767 15th Ave. S., Seattle 98144.)
TWO FOR THE SHOW: At least one secret to understanding the eternal conflict of American culture can be found in the decades-old conflict of burlesque vs. vaudeville. Burlesque wasn’t just raw as in naked (or rather as naked as the law allowed or could be bribed into allowing). It was raucous; its dancers and skits and comic monologues celebrated the boistrous passions of turn-of-the-century urban immigrants. It also regularly barbed politicians, judges, bosses, and other authority figures. Vaudeville (as shown in a KCTS documentary late last year which still haunts my memory) was squeaky clean, celebrated “wholesome family entertainment,” and promoted a monocultural America of thorough white-middlebrow dominance (with just a few ethnic touches inserted for the mildest of spiciness).
Vaudeville led to the everywhere/nowhere America of Hollywood movies (several of the big studios trace their corporate history from vaudeville-theater chains), Lawrence Welk, Mickey Mouse, Reader’s Digest, Miss America, soft rock, light beer, weak coffee, and eventually to what The Nation and The Baffler call today’s global “culture trust.”
Burlesque, conversely, led to Milton Berle, Betty Boop, the prewar version of Esquire, drag-queen shows, the comedy-relief segments in early porn films, and (eventually and indirectly) to punk rock, S/M showmanship, and zine culture.
Despite its handful of often fondly-remembered burlesque “box house” theaters in and near today’s Pioneer Square, and our status as home to burlesque’s greatest star Gypsy Rose Lee (born into a vaudeville family), Seattle was a vaudeville town through and through. Seattle’s first corporate inroad on the national entertainment biz was the locally-founded Pantages vaudeville circuit.
The battle continues. Across the country, city governments are trying to banish strip clubs and adult video shops (slicker yet raunchier descendents of burlesque), sanitizing downtowns for the sake of Planet Hollywood and The Disney Store (dining and shopping as toned-down descendents of vaudeville).
At its best, the spirit of vaudeville represents precision, energy, showmanship, and a pleasant good time. And all those things are good. But at its worst, it represents cloying paternalism and sentimental “family entertainment” that bores kids and insults grownups’ intelligence. Burlesque’s descendents have their own downsides; particularly the recursive traps of parody and ironic detachment seen in so much pseudo-hip art, music, and advertising.
But we need more of burlesque’s assertive populism, its healthy skepticism about authority and its healthy affirmation of the life force. Somewhere between post-vaudeville’s mandatory naiveté and post-burlesque’s relentless cynicism lies the truth.
(Good, close re-creations of classic vaudeville can be found year-round at Hokum Hall in West Seattle. The best evocation of burlesque in town’s the “Fallen Women Follies,” held two or three times a year at Re-bar. You can also see the old days of burley-Q at the Exotic World museum out in the southwest.)
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, pray for snow, and be sure to enter your nominations for this year’s Misc. World In/Out List (the only worthwhile and accurate list of its type in the known world), either by email or in our lovely new >Misc. Talk discussion boards.
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Aporia”
YOUR EVER-HOPEFUL MISC. would really, really like to believe Newt is really gone for good, even though it knows he’s probably just repositioning himself for the 2000 presidential run. (More material tangentally related to this toward the column’s end.)
THE MAILBAG: Thanks to all who responded to our request for new pro-sex public-service slogans, designed to encourage teens and young adults to get off the streets and on each other. While no snappy slogans were suggested, one reader did propose a TV commercial with two gal-pals chatting at the water cooler: “How do you manage to feel so fresh and positive in the morning?” “Simple: I don’t leave the house without some sex.” Or, alternately, a print ad could feature the big face of a sensitive-looking young man staring out from the magazine page to say at one time, a man was expected to take care of a woman, to provide for her material needs. Nowadays, such traditional roles are increasingly passé. But still one important way you can help a woman achieve her goals in life. Share some sex with her, today. Not only will she feel better–but so will you.” At the bottom of the page would go a common-sense disclaimer, similar to that used by liquor advertisers, to the effect that those who enjoy sex best enjoy it responsibly.
PHILM PHUN: The Big Chill is actually going to be re-released in theaters, giving late-’90s audiences a chance to relive the alleged good old days of early-’80s nostalgia for the late ’60s. I say, forget the original movie (even though it was, and is, a depressingly-accurate depiction of the original Seattle Weekly target audience). Instead, why not remake it? The new Big Chill-Out could depict a circle of aging late-’80s punks who whiningly long for the good old days of simplistic heroes and villains, bond in the tribal solidarity of smug self-righteousness, and enjoy the timeless tuneage of Killing Joke (while sneering at those Hanson-listening kids these days).
GOIN’ SOUTH?: The Portland tabloid Willamette Week ran an essay package two or three weeks back, on the topic “Seattle Envy.” For those whose only notion about either Portland or Seattle is they’re not New York, the essays provide a valuable intro to the real differences between the two towns, only 185 miles away and nearly identical in size (though Seattle’s greater metro area has almost a million more folks than Portland’s). All six writers (four current Seattleites, two Portlanders) agree Portland’s older, smugger, and more civic-minded, while Seattle’s brasher, louder, and more globally aware. That leaves them to disagree on which they prefer….
Now if you ask me, the differences are at the same time more blatant and more subtle than Willamette Week’s crew suggests. The subtle ones come from Portland’s stronger sense of “society,” the kind of community-spirit that means both public-transit systems and beauty pageants get taken a lot more seriously there than here, where traditionally more folks headed to out-of-town recreations on the weekends. The blatant ones come from one prime source, Boeing. Without Boeing, Portland was free to build its economic base on timber, shipping, and insurance. With Boeing, Seattle came to see itself as a player on the world stage. Also with Boeing, Seattle gained a civic hierarchy built around the dual elites of gladhanding deal-makers and obsessive-compulsive engineers, hierarchies which would eventually find their ultimate meeting point at Microsoft. (Though Nike proves Portlanders can easily match Seattleites in the ruthless pursuit of profits and market share at any cost.)
A LOVELY MAT FINISH: The Monday after Newt resigned and Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota, I tried to watch the competing pro wrestling shows on cable. No longer the pseudo-sport for dummies, wrestling’s now a pair of complex soap-opera plot threads that no first-time viewer can even hope to sort out. These threads play out all year long on the basic-cable shows (one of which, WWF Monday Night Raw Is War, will hold a cablecast from the Tacoma Dome on Dec. 14); leading to climaxes not during Neilsen ratings sweeps weeks but on separate pay-per-view events. On some shows (the World Wrestling Federation has four hours a week on USA; the Time Warner-owned World Championship Wrestling has seven weekly hours split between Time Warner’s TNT and TBS channels), the shouting and the theatrics drag on far longer than the action.
The theatrics, the action, and the characterizations are all far more “X-treme” than during rasslin’s last heyday when Ventura pretended to hate Hulk Hogan. The matches themselves now bear only a miniscule resemblance to real (high school, college, and Olympic) wrestling, and have more in common with that banned-in-every-state gorefest known as “ultimate fighting” (tactics include kickboxing, bare-knuckles boxing, and explicit crotch-grabbing).
The combatants’ grandiose personas and rhetorical bombast certainly have a lot in common with Newt’s now-disgraced system of governance by blowhardedness–except wrestlers, unlike Republicans (and particularly Republican talk-radio hosts) are always ready to directly confront their foes, instead of staying safely within one-sided environments. In this regard, Ventura (as the first candidate from Ross Perot’s Reform Party to make it to a high office) may actually prove more effective than Perot himself would have.
And then there’s the strange case of WWF proprietor Vincent McMahon Jr. A few years ago he presented himself to the world as the underdog of faux-sports titans, a third-generation family businessman (with a son he was grooming to eventually take over from him) struggling to compete against the conglomerate-backed WCW. These days, he’s taken on the TV persona of a corrupt corporate overlord, taking personal sides in the matches he telecasts to favor the baddest of the bad guys. (He even designates his favorites as “corporate champions”!) At one time, rasslin’ villains bore the colors of Russians and Iranians. Now, they’ve captured changes in the popular imagination and re-emerged as the toadies of Big Business. McMahon, who’s perfectly willing to be hated by his audiences as long as they keep watching, has caught onto a shift in the public zeitgeist, before WCW’s sister company Time magazine discovered corporate welfare. He could’ve taught ol’ Newt about this, if either had cared. (Does Ventura know about this shift? Most likely.)
TO CLOSE, take the Kalakala tour, and enjoy the next 10 weeks’ worth of long nights and short days (like you’ve got an alternative).
(Still seeking your pro-sex ad slogans (not one-to-one pickup lines). Send your suggestions to clark@speakeasy.org.)
