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UPDATE #1: The two-week-delayed spring print MISC will be out this week. We’re only waiting confirmation of one ad.
UPDATE #2: Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men indeed showed up at a local Borders Books–and on the bestseller shelf. Still no Barnes & Noble sightings.
…new conservative-bashing book Stupid White Men at a big chain bookstore? If you have, let me know. As previously mentioned in this space, HarperCollins (Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house) tried to pull out of its contract to publish the book unless Moore toned down his barbs against George W. After Moore publicized the fracas, HarperCollins backed down and issued the book as scheduled. But you can’t find it (at least in my town) in the chains that heavily depend on promo bucks from the likes of HarperCollins. I’ve heard of record labels burying releases by bands they no longer care to promote; could this be a book-biz equivalent?
The biggest Seattle print-media news this month is the debut of Matte, an ambitious square-bound quarterly arts review started by sometime Comics Journal employees Anne Elizabeth Moore and Carrie Whitney. It essentially covers “alternative”/”indie” music, film, comics, and visual art in the Comics Journal writing style–long and leisurely, full of verbatim interviews and philosophical reviews.
The editors and writers spend a lot of space promising what they’ll get around to in future issues and explaining their sociocultural stances. These statements frequently invoke the familiar premise that all of American culture can be nearly divided into The Mainstream and The Alternative, or The Corporate and The Independent. (Music reviewer Tizzy Asher repeatedly invokes “white,” “male,” and “heterosexual” to decry America’s ruling elite, as if everyone who fit one or more of those adjectives was rich and powerful).
Please note: By critiquing the Matte writers, I am not trying to shut them up. I’m asking them to be more challenging; to question their own preconceptions instead of just complaining about those held by others; to explore the more complex realities of how influence and pressure really work in this society. (Remember: Most rich people are white, but most white people aren’t rich.)
Anyhoo, on to the parts of Matte I enjoyed. Robin Laananen contributes a haunting photo essay about people wasting away their evening hours. Greg Lundgren, of Minus 5 Gallery and Artists for a Work-Free America, waxes elequantly on the contradictions of working oneself to death in a culture that idolizes “leisure.” Beautiful, well-told one-page comix stories are supplied by Jesse Reklaw, Laurenn McCubbin, Tatiana Gill, and several others. Jennifer Daydreamer and Phil Yeh debate whether the recession can lead to a DIY renaissance. And, scattered among the back acreage of record and book reviews, are quotations from various “radical” (left and right) manifestos over the years, showing how too often dreams for a “perfect” world would involve the suppression (or worse) of persons significantly different from the particular dreamer.
WHY, AND HOW, a major publisher would try to keep its own book off the bestseller lists.
FOLLOWING UP on a prior reference, a kindly reader submitted this link to (wondrous) images of Chris Ware’s 3-D paper toys!
A FRENCH CONSPIRACY THEORIST offers up some (dubious, in my opinion) theories about what really happened at the Pentagon on Sept. 11 in the form of a photo-seek type game, “Hunt the Boeing!”
ANNOY YOUR CO-WORKERS with an array of buzzer, horn, bell, and siren noises, all downloadable and ready to be turned into your computer’s standard alert sound.
IT’S BEEN A BANNER YEAR for business blunders; one magazine has found and ranked 101 of them! (Only 15 of which directly involve Enron.)
AN ENVIRONMENTAL WEBSITE gives some needed skeptical glances at The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book making summarizing the conservative boasts about how we supposedly don’t have any environmental problems and should just let big business do whatever it wants.
THANX TO THE NEARLY 100 souls who braved the blustery Feb. night to attend our suave Signifying Nothing exhibition opening last night. The rest of you can see it seven days a week until March 6 at the 2nd & S. Jackson.
BACK ON THE POP-CULT FRONT, that PBS workhorse Sesame Street got a major format overhaul this week. The kiddie-ed show now features far fewer one-minute-or-less blackout skits and films, instead favoring longer segments (up to 10 minutes) with narratives and familiar characters. Producers say this restructuring is the result of intense audience research into what Those Kids Today prefer to see.
This, of course, begs the question: What will come in future years, as this long-attention-span generation enters adolescence? I’m no corporate futurologist a la Faith Popcorn, but there are certainly intriguing possibilities to imagine emergine sometime in the mid-2010s:
RUPERT MURDOCH’S PUBLISHING HOUSE tried to get Michael Moore not to say bad things about George W. Bush in his new book. The question is therefore begged: What was Michael Moore doing at Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house in the first place?
OUR OL’ PAL Kathleen Wilson has written the greatest single piece of writing the Stranger’s ever published.
…our little Son of MISCsalon kaffeeklatsch on Sunday. Many items were discussed, many of which may make it into the print MISC or onto this site.
Later that same day, many of us were also at Titlewave Books on Lower Queen Anne for the store’s monthly reading series. Above, print MISC contributor Doug Nufer warms up the crowd with a short story written in the jargon of circus workers. Below, fellow print MISC contributor Matt Briggs offers highlights from his forthcoming short-story collection.
COMING SOON to this site: You’ll get to buy lovely, durable prints of some of the great photos which have appeared on this site and/or which will appear in forthcoming MISCmedia-published books.
RICHARD TODD WRITES on the future of America’s diffuse culture: “Already in the post-Sept. 11 society we have seen a marked shrinkage in socially acceptable political discourse.”
The Northwest Bookfest was held again this year in the Stadium Exhibition Center, and again failed to fill even the front room of that vast space. (Curtaining off sections of the room is apparently not practicable or feasible, because the center’s restrooms and concessions are situated along the side walls.)
The result: While attendance was apparently comparable to last year’s event (which had more touring big-name authors), the room energy (and, perhaps, consequently the booth sales) just wasn’t what it had been back when Bookfest took place in the cozy confines of Pier 48 (where, as I’ve oft mentioned, Alice Wheeler shot the cover of Loser at one of Nirvana’s last shows). The pier, alas, is no longer available for public rental. The State Convention Center, whose more flexible floors hosted the 1999 Bookfest, is apparently not available at the right time of year to land a lot of big-time touring authors.
Last year, I proposed revamping Bookfest to fit the space. Since it’s a space built for auto show-type events, I said Bookfest should become more like one of those–a World Of Words Literama, full of pomp and circumstance and balloons and gold lame jumpsuits.
The promoters did successfully attract a few new types of vendors (paper-ephemera dealers, f’rinstance), but still more could be sought out–home office supply stores, computer dealers, college writing programs, grey-sweater and tweed-jacket merchants, magazine publishers (Ed McMahon could even show up to give away some bucks!).
Other possibilities to fill more of the vast room, or otherwise make the thing more exciting: More word-game and puzzle competitions; after-hours no-kiddies-allowed readings from the “good parts” of highbrow novels; Appalachian-style storytelling fests; banks of computers where visitors could add-a-line to ongoing stories; bulletin boards (real, not computerized) where visitors could post index-card-borne answers to pollster-type questions (favorite literary character, first book ever read, etc.); classic poems displayed on big LED-readout walls; maybe even a literary-character costume contest.
Yes, these suggestions go beyond Bookfest’s laid-back-and-mellow dictum of good taste, and that’s part of the point. Reading and (especially) writing are largely solitary pleasures. It’s good to get readers and writers in one big place to share their joys and receive one another’s support. And as a mid-October event, Bookfest marks the beginning of stay-inside season; thus it should be more festive and celebratory, the better to help its attendees stave off Seasonal Affective Disorder and remain cozy and happy thru the dreary months to come.
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:
(This article’s permanent link.)
AT BAILEY-COY BOOKS last night, local author Rebecca Brown carried on with her previously-scheduled reading promoting Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary (Grey Spider Press), a short nonfiction narrative about taking care of her dying mother. Brown opened the event by telling why she declined to cancel it–because her book is largely about the grieving process, something we all must go through now.
Brown added that the nature of the N.Y. and D.C. attacks, with so many deaths, occuring so suddenly, and with so many bodies that might never be recovered, makes the grieving process even more difficult. Brown and her mother had both known the mother’s end was coming, and were able to psychologically and emotionally prepare themselves; then afterwards, the family was able to gather and celebrate the mother’s life.
Excerpts, by the way, is highly recommended. It’s currently available only in a 500-copy limited edition, made on an old fashioned letterpress and hand-bound, in keeping with Brown’s emphasis on the personal touch and intimate care.
CHRIS ESTEY WRITES:
“Nice Michael Moore quotes, but to add to your ‘videos of movies that won’t be revived any time soon’ list:
Hardcore band that won’t see reissue for awhile: Fearless Iranians from Hell.”
UPDATES: Except for some college football games, major sports won’t resume until Monday. All canceled Major League Baseball games will be rescheduled for the week after the previously-set end of the regular season, which means the Mariners will still be able to attempt an all-time win record… One by one, the non-news cable channels that had switched to disaster coverage or signed off altogether are returning to regular fare today.
MORBID ASIDE #6: The Letterman show will have to create a new opening segment, sans the main NYC skyline shot. What’s more, the show’s whole flippant-ironic attitude may have to be altered, along with its ‘Fun City’ portrayal of life on the streets of Manhattan.
The best “new” TV series of 2001 (thus far) is a leftover from 1999 that just happens to completely outdo that overblown A.I. movie in regards to questioning the nature of humanity-vs.-machines.
It’s a cartoon on the Fox Kids schedule, The Big Guy and Rusty.
The show’s origin lies with a graphic novel made in the mid-’90s for Portland comics giant Dark Horse, by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. Miller (who’s often credited with the “darker” characterization of Batman that inspired that figure’s movies) and Darrow had collaborated since the late ’80s on sullen, violent, and stunningly-drawn titles such as Hard Boiled.
The Big Guy was a slight departure from the established Miller-Darrow formula. It was set in a bright, futuristic urban environment modeled on latter-day Japanese anime films. Its heroes (inspired by those of the early Japanese cartoons Gigantor and Astroboy) were real heroes, not gruff antiheroes (albeit more heavily armed, and more prone to retaliatory vengeance, than their wholesome precursors).
The Sony-owned Columbia Tristar Television bought the animation rights in 1995. During its four-year development period, executive producer Richard Raynis kept Darrow’s character and background designs but tossed most of Miller’s plot. Raynis and his team concocted a new premise for the characters, one that could support a strong central cast while allowing subplots and conflicts to unfold among multiple episodes.
So as the TV version starts, the Big Guy has already been defending Earth from alien invaders for 10 years. He’s an imposingly huge grey robot with an immobile “face,” a booming voice (spouting patriotic cliches), and giant arms filled with, well, giant arms (missiles, bombs, guns). He’s the oldline military-industrial America strutting its might and heft.
But only the Big Guy’s support team knows he’s not a “real” robot but just a big metallic suit, piloted by one Lt. Dwayne Hunter. Dwayne’s a soft-spoken, unassuming pilot who, when he’s out of the suit and walking on his own legs, shares none of his alter ego’s bombast.
Rusty, the show’s real protagonist, is a real robot, something the Big Guy’s original designers (a defense-contractor conglomerate whose tower is the tallest building in New Tronic City) have only now been able to accomplish. Rusty has the personality of an enthusiastic boy adventurer, avid to clobber the bad guys but lacking in experience or wisdom. Rusty represents the “new economy” and the high-tech future that seemed so promising in 1999, when the show was produced–high-flying, free-wheeling, but sometimes almost fatally immature.
Rusty adores the Big Guy as a substitute dad, but only knows Lt. Dwayne as the Big Guy’s “chief mechanic.” Lt. Dwayne initially dismisses Rusty as an unfinished technology, but grows to trust and feel for the “Boy Robot,” both when inside and outside the Big Guy suit.
This central relationship, along with those of a strong human supporting cast, carry the series through 26 installments that unfold as chapters in a novel (like the best anime shows). But Fox, desperate for a quick ratings fix in the Pokemon-dominated 1999 cartoon season, dropped TBG&R after only six installments had aired. The network’s been “burning off” the entire series in a spring-and-summer run this year. Its ratings this time have apparently been OK, but the show’s creative staff has dispersed to other projects and a second season is apparently unlikely.
But the shows that were made work well as a complete “work,” with a beginning and end. In between are some episodes that work as stand-alone adventures with foes (and friends) of assorted alien origin, some episodes that explore the relationship between the real robot and the fake one, and some episodes involving a set of recurring villains, the Legion Ex Machina (evil, real robots out to eradicate the human race).
In the last episode, the Big Guy’s original chief designer is seen for the first time. He claims the Big Guy had been “a failure” because it depended on a human pilot; even though the man-in-a-suit had successfully fought off countless bug-eyed alien monsters and destroyed the Legion.
Similarly, Fox treated TBG&R as a failed show. But it’s really a success. At a time when primetime “reality” shows are pulling the lowest common denominator ever lower (even lower than is possible with scripted fiction shows, which must maintain a minimal story credibility to work on a weekly basis), TBG&R is a highest-common-denominator show.
Its premise is full of holes (if the Big Guy is so important to Earth’s survival, why was only one ever built and why does it have only one trained pilot?).
But the characters (even the bad guys) are fully developed, the storylines fully explore the complexities of these characters, the scripts are smart without succumbing to overt “hip” attitude nonsense, and the artwork (all done in traditional cel animation) is often spectacular.
See it while you still can.
For 31 of Seattle Center’s 39 years of existence, Bumbershoot: The Seattle Arts Festival has been its biggest annual event.
Devised from the start to encompass the entire former World’s Fair grounds (except the now separately-run Space Needle and Pacific Science Center), it’s also the last of Seattle’s annual lineup of big populist summer gatherings (starting in May with Opening Day of Boating Season and the Film Festival, then continuing with Folklife, the Bite of Seattle, and Seafair).
Bumbershoot’s premise: An all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet of culture. A book fair in one corner, short plays in another, contemporary art installations in another. At the big stages, bigname music celebs. At smaller stages scattered about, secondary performers of all types.
And between everything, the familiar sideshow attractions of Thai-food booths, street jugglers, balloon sellers, and fenced-off beer gardens.
In its early years, Bumbershoot was strictly aimed at a specific socioethnic caste then taking control of the city’s cultural identity–aging, increasingly square baby-boomers. Nonwhite performers were largely limited to boomer-friendly blues bands; mainstage shows were heavy on the likes of Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor.
In the late ’80s, that started to change slightly. Younger, hipper, and more diverse acts have steadily gained their way into the mix.
A bizarre P-I preview story called this year’s lineup “Bumberpalooza,” comparing it to the ’90s Lollapalooza rock package tours. I initially thought the article’s writer used the analogy to claim the festival was becoming more corporate-mainstream.
But the writer, still believing Lollapalooza’s original “alternative” hype, really wanted to say B’shoot had become edgier and more experimental. Fortunately, she was right.
With more hip-hop acts, a whole electronica stage, and a mainstage lineup ranging from Loretta Lynn to G. Love and Special Sauce, Bumbershoot 2001’s fulfilling its name’s promise of an all-covering umbrella of expression.
In these images: Happy crowds; the Book Fair (including, this year, only one small press with the word “heron” in its name!); local collectors’ caches of electric mixers and Harlequin Romance cover paintings; an information booth at the start of the slinking line into KeyArena; Posies legend Ken Stringfellow; a hula-hoop demonstration on the main lawn; and, below, our ex-Stranger colleague Inga Muscio.
Muscio, scheduled to perform on the Starbucks-sponsored literary stage, peppered her half-hour slot with plugs for smaller coffee brands. She ended it with a story about dreaming Starbucks boss Howard Schultz was her S&M slave.
In keeping with a more-or-less annual tradition around these cyber-parts, here comes another fantabulous MISC Late-Summer Reading List. Its purpose: To let you know what you should’ve been investing your time with this warm-weather season, instead of frittering it away on needless time-wasters such as jobs and sex.
High Drama in Fabulous Toledo by Lily James: A raucous, giddy little novel that lives up to its title with nary a tinge of irony. Our heroine is the bored, easily distracted fiancee of a borderline-suicidal bar owner. She gets kidnapped from a 7-Eleven parking lot one night, and turned over to become the captive bride of a rich computer genius completely lacking in social skills.
After the initial shock she comes to like the adventure of her predicament; but soon becomes bored again as she realizes her captor’s domestic-suburban plans for her life. Meanwhile, her distraught boyfriend is consoled by a mysterious policewoman with, shall we say, personal issues of her own. To tell any more would spoil the ride.
High Drama is a great light-comic caper story that also happens to be classifiable as “post-feminist” or “genre-deconstucting” (the genre here being romance-novel ravishment). It’s also a highly accessible, engaging read that, in a better world, would bring wealth and renown to James and to the literary-press publisher FC2, which put it out.
The Knife Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser: One of the dozen or more tomes I’d left stacked at home from the Tower Books closing sale back in February. Shouldn’t have waited this long to read it.
This guy’s one helluva prose stylist, and he spins great yarns too. His sentences and paragraphs, lovely as they are, are always held subordinate to his fantastical plots–which, clever as they are, are always held subordinate to the heart and dignity with which he endows his characters.
Many of these tales have to do with the dark side of small-town existence, and the light hidden behind such shadows. The finest example of this is “The Sisterhood of Night,” in which a gentleman relates his town’s newest teenage fad: Girls who sneak out of their homes in the middle of the night to gather in the woods and, apparently, do nothing. No drugs, no sex, no Satanic rites; but also no peer pressure, no parental shrieks, no requirements to do or say anything. The narrator ends by wondering whether this could be more potentially subversive than any cult or gang; Millhauser leaves you feeling like it just might.
The Bellero Shie by Jay Davis: A gem of a tiny paperback. When the author was here on a reading tour in June, he left some promo copies at Confounded Books (now at 2nd & Bell in Belltown). Behind the circa-1961 corporate-manual cover are eight stories which amaze and confound in their finely-tuned haunting alienation.
In “Family Food and Drug,” an unwitting supermarket customer is put through militaristic interrogation, for the “crime” of refusing to provide personal demographic-marketing information. In “Sparky,” a man retreats from his wife and family to his only consolation, the family dog, which happens to be dead and stuffed. Yeah, it’s PoMo, but it’s PoMo with a soul–and a quietly aching one at that.
(The apparently closest thing the publisher has to an online presence is this review, which lists a California address for the outfit even though the inside cover says it’s from Illinois.)
Erogenous Zones: An Anthology of Sex Abroad, edited by Lucretia Stewart: Great premise: Literary nonfiction passages from many times and places, all about having sex far from one’s home, with someone the author didn’t set out from home with. But the adventures become repetitious after a while; particularly the ones involving hookers with the invariable hearts-O-gold and the ones involving anonymous gay-pickup sex. But it is a very handsomely-manufactured volume; and it’s fun to read some of the troubadoric descriptions from male diarists, languishing wistfully over the bodily and other charms of their long-separated meaningless-encounter partners.
Yr. ob’d’t c’r’s’p’n’d’t recently saw the classic 1960 film Elmer Gantry, based on the even-more-classic 1927 Sinclair Lewis novel of corruption and hypocrisy in the heartland.
I was struck by the film’s remarkable willingness, for a Hollywood product of its time, to maturely handle its topic (though it was still considerably toned down from the novel’s even harsher anti-hypocrisy message.) And, yes, I was pleasantly shocked to see Shirley Jones, Mom Partridge herself, as a hooker w/a heart-O-gold.
But I was even more astounded at the story’s lessons for today’s Netculture.
In the film, Jean Simmons’s revival-preacher character is wowed by Burt Lancaster’s smooth-salesman title character into turning her ministry into a cash-generating circus, only to lose everything as his snake-oil ways catch up with him and destroy her life’s work.
So must the online community (those of us, that is, who’ve worked to make a real community out of online communication) must now work to rebuild our battered tents and broken pews after the invasion by, and subsequent comeuppance of, the IPO gang.
In the movie, Simmons’s character is destroyed in a church fire (caused indirectly by Elmer’s having convinced town leaders to let him ignore building codes), while Elmer soldiers on to new scams. Can the human-scale Internet avoid such a metaphorical fate?
Commentator Dave Winer, whom we’ve mentioned here previously, likes to use the acronym “FUD” (for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”) to describe the rhetorical hype mechanisms by which certain big companies try to control the medium’s future.
Companies accomplish FUD by convincing other companies and end users that, for instance, the Microsoft agenda will inevitably prevail, and hence that any technology or business model contadicting the MS agenda (Java, Linux, Macintosh, Netscape, RealAudio, open-source software, or cross-platform Net-based applications), and anyone attempting to use it, is doomed to the eternal damnation of techno-obscelescence.
But FUD doesn’t have to be deliberately spread by someone with an unterior motive. It can thrive on its own power. Folks in the tech-biz can get caught up into it on their own.
Companies can be be-FUD-dled into believing they’ll never make it unless they Get Big Fast, or that they’ll lose the “mindshare” wars unless they spend megabucks on hi-profile brand advertising, or that they won’t get or keep an A-list staff unless they pour more megabucks into perks for executives and other “key” personnel.
Hundreds of companies were so be-FUD-dled in these ways that they put everything they had and more into business practices any sane person could see were faulty. Many of these companies are no longer with us, burned up in fiscal disasters of their own making.
Those of us who have, thus far, survived the tech-biz equivalent of a trial by fire should consider ourselves duly chastized and inspired to follow the true faith of changing the world.
