It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
Mike Daisey, the comic actor and monologuist who became the conscience of Seattle E-business with his show 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com, has signed a (reputed six-figure) deal to turn it into a book.
The bad news: Daisey’s taking the money to finance a move to NYC. Don’t leave us, Mike! We need you!
ELSEWHERE:
Odd recipes including “Tofu Sex Aids” and “Liquid Meat” (found by Robot Wisdom).
IT’S CRUTCH WEEK IN SEATTLE! The downtown streets are filled with normally self-ambulant d00dz & d00dettez (you can tell from their inept, inexperienced limps) hobbling along with leg casts, canes, etc. One can only presume something in the early-summer air got ’em all to try risky, untrained-for athletic maneuvers.
ONE MORE PROBLEM WITH BELLTOWN THESE DAYS: The once-hip neighborhood has all these $100-a-plate foodie restaurants, but no decent bar at which to watch TV sports in the company of one’s fellow sedentary sports fans. Mr. McAlpern, please do something about this.
HAD A LONG TALK the other morning with someone from a prominent local commercial publishing co. about my aforementioned book project. The talks were productive, but I’ve still some persuading to do.
ON OTHER SITES:
Corporate charity-giving as a brand-building strategy.
Not only does eBay have an eternally entertaining “Weird Stuff” section, but it’s now subdivided into “General,” “Slightly Unusual,” “Really Weird,” and (if you dare!) “Totally Bizarre….”
WHAT I THOUGHT I’D NEVER DO, I just did.
Yes, I returned to a certain sleazy tabloid after about 32 months away.
Even after all that blather just weeks ago in this virtual space about giving up on the pathetic word biz in order to concentrate on the more tangible realm of photographic imagery.
The first batch of pieces, in the issue coming out tomorrow night, will be little regular features: The X-Word puzzle, and a new obituaries piece.
I’ll also be contributing larger feature pieces on a less-regular basis. The first will be a nostalgic look back at the last time I was one of the paper’s key contributors, the dot-com-crazed autumn of 1998.
For this, I seek your help.
Tell me your stories of those giddy (for the financially ambitious) yet scary (for many of the rest of us) times, via email or via our MISCtalk discussion boards.
(Ahh, the Late Nineties. They were such simpler times…)
NEXT: Another of my former homes depicted.
TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have, as local readers might guess, been postponed.
When last I wrote about Emmett Watson, the dean of Seattle newspapermen, I described him as “possibly the greatest self-proclaimed hack writer in Northwest history.”
He was a helluva lot more than that.
He was a city’s chronicler, in a three-dot item column and occasional longer essays, then in three volumes of memoirs (all, alas, out of print).
He was also a city’s conscience, though he’d never admit to such a potentially pretentious appellation.
He would, however, freely admit to being a throwback to both the old days of newspapering and the old days of Seattle.
The former meant he was a master of the now largely-forgotten Art of the Column and the heritage of the classic newspaperman character type, the ink-stained wretch who drank with two fists and typed with two fingers. Watson wasn’t really like that, but he endearingly pretended to be such for droll-comic effect.
The latter meant he gave a damn about this once-forgotten corner of America and the humans of all social strata who inhabited it. He hobnobbed with the powerful, and dropped many a local-celeb name in his columns, but felt at home with the working stiffs, the unsung men and women who actually did things. (It’s sad but appropriate that his final published column appeared in last fall’s strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.)
Even his “Lesser Seattle” schtick, a running semi-gag about trying to “Keep the Bastards Out” and put the brakes on regional development, was really a not-so-disguised paean to the Seattle and the Northwest that he knew, the gruff but lovable place of honest curmuddgeons and simple dreamers–a culture he saw being steadily eroded, not just by loud-talkin’ Calif. immigrants but by local boosters who seemed to hate everything that was great about this place and desperately wanted to turn it into something “World Class” at any cost.
Watson tweaked and stretched the format of the three-dot column so it could say just about anything he wanted it to. He was outspoken (and on what I consider the right side of) just about every big political and social issue of the past half-century.
And it’s not an exaggeration to note that all I’ve done in this online (and sometimes print) column was an attempt, however misdirected and feeble, to try to write like he did.
NEXT: My print future.
TODAY, I’M PLUGGING a book you can’t buy yet.
But I want you to remember it; it’s just that great.
The Golem’s Mighty Swing, by original Stranger art director James Sturm, is the first comic I know about (and one of the best narratives of any sort) about that relatively obscure but avidly-followed-by-some corner of sports history,
Jews in baseball.
It’s also an astounding feat of storytelling, finding the Universal in the Particular by creating specific characters and situations that show off these characters’ personalities.
And it’s an amazing piece of art.
Remember a while back when I raved about Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, that brilliantly written and drawn “educational comic” about the medium’s aesthetic principles? The Golem’s Mighty Swing could be a textbook case for many of these principles. Every frame is exquisitely composed. Every figure, every face, is a mini-masterpiece of action and characterization in deceptively simple ink lines. The baseball-playing scenes by themselves are frozen-action renderings that outpunch almost all superhero comics ever drawn.
The plot, you ask? The Stars of David are a barnstorming baseball team, traveling across 1920s middle America in a broken-down bus, playing local minor-league teams in exhibitions. They play up their ethnicity as an exotic selling point to the small-town audiences. But a fly-by-night promoter convinces them to take the act further, dressing their physically biggest player (who’s really black) as a golem, the man-made monster of Hebrew legend (and of a popular silent film of the era).
What neither the team nor the promoter realize, until it’s too late, is that the golem character’s visage on publicity posters helps inflame the anti-Semitic sentiments of the town where the team’s next game is scheduled, leading to vicious attacks and a dramatic climax you’ll never get in any yuppified baseball-as-Americana tale.
The book’ll be out in a couple of months from Drawn & Quarterly Publications. I’ll let you know when it appears. When it does, get it.
IN OTHER NEWS: Last week’s piece about the new book Fast Food Nation drew a quick email response from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous. He wrote that I shouldn’t have been so hard on the book’s author Eric Schlosser, who, despite the book’s rants about big restaurant chains and their corporate-agribusiness supply system, claims to still be a meat-and-dairy consumer and a loyal patron of his hometown indie pizza joint.
NEXT: The original Seattle Weekly crew was never as “alternative” as it apparently thinks it used to be.
I LIKE FAST FOOD. Wanna make something of it?
Many do. (Want to make something of it, that is.)
Eric Schlosser’s new book Fast Food Nation is only the most recent example.
Schlosser’s tirade states, essentially, that all of America except for the Enlightened Few such as himself (and presumably his readers) are mindless sheep, being led to a metaphorica slaughter of obesity and cholesterol by greedy mega-corporations, callously out to rake in billions off of lethal meals at home and then to export this monolithic Americulture to the world.
At best, these arguments are misguided. At worst, they display a classist basis.
I like fast food (although I know it’s a pleasure best enjoyed, like so many other pleasures, in moderation). It’s cheap, tasty, unpretentious, and gets you back to your busy day. Feeding doesn’t have to be sit-down and from-scratch, any more than sex has to always involve a whole weekend at one of those dungeon B&Bs.
And fast food doesn’t necessarily have to be huge and corporate. Look at those tasty burger and gyros booths at street fairs, or at the feisty local drive-ins and hot-dog stands in most cities and towns.
And it sure doesn’t have to be a symbol of American cultural imperialism. Look at the feisty taco wagons of White Center and South Park, or the teriyaki and bento stands that are a modern fixture of most Northwest urban neighborhoods.
Fast food, or something like it, exists in nearly every society big enough to have urban dwellers on the go. (Although many of U.S. ethnic-restaurant favorites were actually invented here, by clever immigrant chefs.)
So get off your exclusionary-tribalist purity trip and have a fry. Or a spicy chicken bowl. Or a falafel-on-a-stick. Or some flying morning glory on fire.
IN OTHER NEWS: Had the privilege of meeting Floyd Schmoe, patriarch of the Seattle Quaker church and longtime peace activist, in 1991, around the time he started the Seattle Peace Park across from the Quaker center in the U District. He was in his mid-90s then, still alert and still a devout activist for pacifism. If I live as long as he (passing this week at age 105), I can only hope to have achieved half the good works he did.
NEXT: Images full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
EVEN THOUGH I’M NOT, and am not even related to, the guy who still writes “I Love Television,” I still defend the medium from its more strident and less thoughtful bashers.
Among those are the promoters of something called “Turn Off TV Week,” going on now.
I am just so darned tired of these decades-old (and oversimplified even then) arguments that Reading Is Always Good and Viewing Is Always Bad.
There’s nothing intrinsically empowering or progressive or even truthful about The Book. Mein Kampf was a book. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a book. The Memoirs of Richard Nixon was a book. Heck, even some of the most horrid movies ever made (Donovan’s Brain, Forrest Gump) were originally books.
And in the supposed Golden Age Before Television, what were some of America’s favorite mass entertainments? Adventure pulp magazines (lurid covers, bland formulaic insides). Sensationalistic Hearst newspapers. Underground “Tijuana bible” mini-comics. I happen to adore all of these ephemera, despite (or at least partly because of) their classic-showbiz energy and their lack of intellectual pretension.
Meanwhile, the audiovisual medium all conformist hippies and rote radicals obediently hate has recently given us endless numbing hours of impeachment, Elian, and celeb divorces (not to mention the Fox News Channel’s nattering ninnies); but also such quite smarty fare as Malcolm in the Middle, The Big Guy and Rusty, (the original) Law and Order, The Awful Truth, The Drew Carey Show, BBC America’s world news, BET On Jazz’s Live from the Knitting Factory, etc. etc. etc.
Heck, even PBS has something smart on every once in a while.
Smartness and/or dumbness can be found most anywhere, in most any medium. (Though the smartness half of the equation is increasingly hard to find at chain-owned radio stations, but that’s a rant for another time.)
NEXT: On a similar note, a eulogy for a Net radio favorite.
IN OTHER NEWS: I’ve continued to delay the transformation of this site’s main page to the increasingly popular “welbog” format. Still haven’t figured out how to replicate all the page’s features in one of those scripted weblog programs.
AS LONGTIME READERS KNOW, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the behind-the-scenes leveraging of power and influence.
I just believe it doesn’t work the way the conspiracy people claim. Power in modern-day America doesn’t flow through the Knights Templar or the Bildebungen. It flows through golf-course gladhanding, alumni dinners, and especially the flow of political campaign money. You don’t need to romanticize about the Illuminati–the ugly truth about the power elite is mostly out in the harsh bright open.
This has never been as true as it is with the current Presidential administration.
George W. Bush, appointed by appointed Supreme Court justices, has no electoral mandate and knows it. His First Hundred Days (aside from an overhyped diplomatic rift with China) was entirely devoted to proposing measures to help the only three groups of people he cares about:
Well, actually, that’s not exactly the case. Bush fils doesn’t even care about all the rich. He doesn’t care about manufacturing or shipping or agriculture or media or those troubled tech companies.
He only cares about the specific interest groups that funded his campaign–specifically, the oil, mining, and other extraction-based industries.
Which brings us to Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel
Underworld.
The book’s sprawling narrative encompasses many themes, but chief among them is a highly linear sense of American history. DeLillo’s trajectory follows the center of U.S. influence and money away from the Northeast (as symbolized by New York’s onetime domination of baseball) toward the inland west (as symbolized by giant chain-owned landfills).
At the time it first came out, I thought it was a kind of reverse nostalgia piece, a complaint about a trend that had already ended. The Yankees were back in dynasty mode, and finance was considered far more important than industry–especially those boring old resource industries, industries that deal in heavy-dirty things and don’t have hip urban offices with Foosball tables.
Oil was cheap, the metals markets were glutted with third-world imports, and in any event the future was going to be all about “pushing bits, not atoms,” as somebody at Wired once wrote.
I should have remembered something I always said in scoffing at linear-future sci-fi novels: Trends don’t keep going in the same direction forever. There are backlashes, and backlashes to the backlashes.
The Age of W. is such a backlash. Call it the Revenge of the Oilmen. Bush’s sponsors/beneficiaries are the executives who were left behind by yesterday’s allegedly New Economy.
He’s doing his darnedest to put his friends back on top of the power-and-money heap, even if he has to put the whole rest of the country into a recession in the process.
If he has his way, he could try to turn all of America into an economy like that of certain rural Texas counties where a few oil and ranching families own everything and everyone else struggles.
NEXT: The real reason why delivery e-tailers are failing.
YOU SIMPLY MUST GET Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry.
This handsome full-color volume, curated and narrated by Julie Lasky, gathers the best posters, album covers, ads, logos, magazine covers, and other assorted graphic creations produced from 1978 to 2000 by Chantry, the king of Seattle designers (until he followed a girlfriend’s career move to St. Louis).
Lasky thoroughly chronicles Chantry’s various “periods” or subgenres of retro design–Sub Pop, Estrus, the Rocket, theatrical work, slick posters, cheap posters, copies of sleazy-mag back-cover ads, copies of tool catalogs, copies of circus posters, copies of retro-smut, and, oh yeah, the four or five books he designed, including mine. No amount of thanks I can ever give will be enough for the work he did on Loser (which gets its due as a piece of Chantry’s oevure in Lasky’s book).
When Chantry held his leaving-town bash at the new Cyclops back in March 2000, he gave me the usual rant people were giving in those pre-NASDAQ-crash weeks about the dot-com invasion having finally sealed the ultimate triumph of the gentrifiers over the humble, funky li’l Seattle we’d known and loved (even though he’d complained as much as anybody about the town’s supposed lack of opportunities and urban sophistication back in the old days).
But it wasn’t just the destruction of artist housing and funky spaces, or the increase in arrogant cell-phone yappers, that he hated about the alleged Internet Revolution.
He was a lo-tech guy, in both his aesthetic styles and his working techniques. The text of Loser was desktop-published, but the 1,000-or-so images and the chapter headings were all pasted-up by hand, and all the photos were screened on a real stat camera. He despised the soulless perfection and numbing slickness he saw in digital graphics.
Nowadays, with KCMU in Paul Allen’s clutches and The Rocket and Moe and the OK Hotel gone, but also with clubs slowly getting back to booking more live bands instead of soundalike techno nights, and with retro-industrialism so beloved in PoMo architecture (plate glass, thin wires, exposed duct work), I have one thing to say to Art:
It’s OK now. Really. Things are getting better; that is to say, Seattle’s feeling comfortably depressed again. The dot-comers are on the run. Everybody’s sick of virtual reality. Real objects, real passions, and real life are back in vogue.
You can come back now.
NEXT: George W. Bush and Don De Lillo.
THE DEMISE OF PUNK PIONEER JOEY RAMONE, of lymphoma at age 49, struck me more than that of Elvis Presley (at an even younger age).
Not just because, unlike Presley, I’d actually seen the Ramones live several times, but because of their respective places in the advancement of rock as an art form.
Presley hadn’t been the first white white singer to copy a hard R&B style. But he was the first to make a huge business from it. The process of his schtick was to bleach the blackness out of black music, to make it just acceptable enough for white consumption while still being “wicked” enough to draw prudes’ ire.
When that territory got too crowded, he turned on himself in a series of self-deconstruction movies. This inward obsession finally manifested itself in drug-influenced lethargy and obesity.
Joey and his fellow faux-bros. emerged on the scene as Presley had disappeared into the recursive trap of self-parody. The Ramones took self-parody as one of the four corners of their group persona (along with ’60s garage-rock, Phil Spector-Brill Building pop, and biker leather wear).
But instead of retreating further into self-referentiality, they started by jokingly depicting themselves as cretins and pinheads, then expanded outward with a hard, fast recapturing of the vital energy that had been sucked out of rock by the post-1960 Presley (and by flower power, Sgt. Pepper, prog rock, soft rock, mullet-head metal, etc.). As Joey allegedly once said, “We wanted to play rock n’ roll, not drum solos.”
Along the way, they reinvigorated rock, launched (not singlehandedly but almost) the punk revolution, directly and/or indirectly inspired thousands of bands (yes, including many here), and churned out dozens of mini-masterpieces of two-minute, three-chord perfection.
While Presley turned ever-inward until he died alone, Ramone kept spinning out toward the allegedly-real world. Joey eventually (at least indirectly) renounced the just-kidding aspect of his original schtick with the anti-Reagan song “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.” In it, the singer who used to sport swastikas on his leather jacket as a cheap anti-PC gag got serious to denounce a president who’d become too forgiving about the real Nazis.
Also, nowhere in Ramone’s originals or his carefully-chosen cover recordings did he ever pretend to be black. (Ex-bandmate Dee Dee Ramone did, on a misguided rap CD, but that’s another tale.) A strange ’90s book called Hole In Our Soul saw this lack of minstrelism as a renunciation of the whole R&B tradition and, hence, of everything wonderful and heartfelt about America’s cultural heritage. I think that’s bunk. What Joey and his punk pals and proteges did was find themselves enough heart and, yes, soul in the garage-rock heritage, and could express themselves while respecting black music enough to not try to take it over.
P.S.: The afternoon Ramone died, I happened to be at the Museum of Flight and happened to see U2’s elaborately painted private jet taking off from Boeing Field following their Tacoma Dome gig. U2 would never have had that jet, let alone a career, if it hadn’t been for Ramone–one who, at least publicly, decried the whole material-excess lifestyle and rock-star aesthetic U2 now relishes.
NEXT: A chant, re: The art of Art Chantry.
WITH THE STEADY RISE of DIY culture, and the increased hype over electronic books, printing-on-demand, and other newfangled verbal-delivery systems, has come a mild (so far) outcry from defenders of publishing’s old guard.
This is somewhat different from the Napster uproar and related rants against the music industry. In regard to music, there’a a general consensus among the ranters that the big corporations running the show are slick, corrupt money-grubbers and always have been.
But book publishing, the conventional wisdom goes, is, or was, or is supposed to be, a fraternity of tweed-clad, nice old men who live for the passion of nuturing capital-L Literature. Instead of rebelling against the book biz’s middlemen, these critics claim we should defend their importance.
Publishing’s current obsession with hype and market-share, under the control of some of the same media conglomerates that run the music business, is seen by these critics as a mere unfortunate anomaly, a digression from some Platonic ideal of the book trade.
That, as you might expect me to say by now, is a crock of bull.
Publishing’s always been about profit. it’s just that the tweed-suited guys worked for little companies before they got big, before they were fully integrated into media-conglomerate “synergies.”
As noted in a recent Times essay by my ol’ pal Fred Moody, who’s put out two books thru major NY publishers and seen scant return for the trouble, “authors have stored up so much enraged aggrievance that that alone could propel electronic publishing and distribution into being, with enough energy left over to fill California’s electricity needs forever.”
And a small-press or even self-published book doesn’t have to be an unreadable mess. It can be, of course, but so are many (if not most) corporately-published works.
There are thousands of self-released CDs out there, and I’d say they aren’t, on the average, as bad as some self-published books. My idea why: Most musical performers still have to learn their trade in front of live audiences. A band-made CD might not have slick 24-track production (although with digital recording, it often does), but it does carry, if it’s any good, a sense of the performer’s live act.
Too many self-published books contain material nobody’s read, heard, or critiqued before. Some author with a credit card just puts it out, hopes it’ll be loved, and gets disappointed when it isn’t.
There are ways to avoid that dreary fate, and they’re well-known ways. Authors should do what they can to make their works known and their schticks honed. Conferences, workshops, zines, live readings, broadsides, etc. etc.
And concerning the argument that some authors still need good editors to shape their work into readable form, an author who does need that help (like most of ’em) shouldn’t be ashamed of asking for it. If a writer’s gonna spend money to get a book or e-book out, s/he oughta spend just a little more on a good editor, designer, and/or packager.
Such as my humble self.
NEXT: Remember rain?
OUR PROBLEM COULD BE YOUR OPPORTUNITY.
We’ve got about three dozen copies of Loser that got hurt in, or on their way to, bookstores. They don’t have any faults that would make them any less enjoyable, only less saleable (little bends on the cover, scratches on the spine, etc.) (I know, I know, people have been calling me slightly bent for years, but that’s not the issue here.)
These books have gotta go, and we’re willing to let ’em go cheap. If you already have the 1995 edition, this is your chance to get the new material in the update chapters. If you haven’t yet obtained your own copy of the most complete history ever written about the Seattle rock-music scene, here’s your best chance.
Deal #1: Start or renew a subscription to MISCmedia the print magazine, at $15 a year, and get a slightly-hurt but still ultimately readable Loser for just $10 more (yep, that’s a grand total of $25 US, postpaid.)
Deal #2: Not quite as great a deal as Deal #1, but still worth your trouble. Get an almost-imperceptibly blemished Loser on its own for $14 US postpaid, a whole third off the normal price for a perfect copy.
NEXT: Are self-published books any worse, on the average, than self-released CDs?
IN OTHER NEWS: The wrestling biz plays Monopoly, with WWF taking over onetime arch-rival WCW. Several readers tell me I should care about this.
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.
IN THAT NEWSWEEK COVER PIECE a few years back about “Seattle Chic” (the one with Slate swami Michael Kinsley on the front), my ol’ UW Daily colleague Lynda Barry contributed a comic strip about how she’d never really fit in in this town. She was a giddy, borderline-superficial funtime gal in a place more welcoming to somber reflection.
But from the looks of her latest illustrated novel Cruddy, Barry’s quite adept indeed at the somber-reflection bit, even to the point of abject grimness and a teenage nihlism that’s not at all affected.
The basic plot: In 1971, 17-year-old Roberta Rohbeson has been grounded to her horrible family (bratty sis, hysterical mom) in a decaying rental house, after getting busted for dropping acid. She uses the time of confinement to write about her sordid past, which is even more nihilistic than her present.
Seems that six years before, Roberta had disappeared with her maniacal, violent (and possibly incestuous) father. She was found weeks later in a Nevada foster home, with no apparent memory of what had happened to her or where her father had disappeared to. But in the diary that becomes the flashback story of Cruddy, Roberta tells all about the road trip through various hells of the American west, complete with arson, smuggling, triple-crossings, many brutal murders by the father, and two equally gruesome slayings by Roberta herself (including patricide).
Two of the towns of her hellish odyssey are Seattle-inspired.
“Cruddy City,” where the 17-year-old Roberta’s “present day” (1971) story takes place, is an almost geographically exact rendition of the Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill.
More specifically, the dreary blocks around Roberta’s dreary home are modeled on the still-rundown area just west of the Rainier Avenue-Martin Luther King Way intersection; a land of sidewalk-less streets, weed-strewn yards, the Copeland Lumber yard with its spooky black-cat logo, garbage-strewn winding roads up Beacon Hill (one of which, clasic-TV fans, is named Della Street), and taunting hillside views down onto the affluent blocks closer to Lake Washington.
I became very familiar with the neighborhood in the ’80s, when I had a miserable job in typesetting and layout for the South District Journal/Capitol Hill Times chain of neighborhood weeklies. I worked on ancient Compugraphic phototypesetting machines, in a wooden shed that had weeds growing inside from cracks in the concrete floor. Barry perfectly captures the little-corner-of-despair sense of the place.
(Remember, 1971 was the depth of the Boeing recession, the economically bleakest period in Seattle since the Depression.)
In contrast to the nothingness of Cruddy City, lots of stuff’s happening in Dentsville, one of the stops on Roberta and her dad’s road trip of terror.
The geography of Dentsville is based on downtown Seattle; specifically the waterfront (including Ye Olde Curiosity Shop), the pre-Convention Center Pike Street corridor (including the recently demolished Gay Nineties restaurant-lounge), and the pre-Interstate 5 west Capitol Hill (where, in the 1965 flashback story, the no-good dad confronts a no-good relative who’s squatting in a freeway-condemned house).
Of course, realistic geography isn’t what makes a novel really work. That requires great writing, compelling characters, and an intriguing story. Cruddy has all those aspects in vast supply; plus some of Barry’s best-ever visual works (in the form of maps and sullen character portraits).
In its vision of completely justified youthful despair, Cruddy is the Great Grunge Novel (even if the flashback story takes place before most ’90s rock musicians were born).
Just, please, don’t let anybody make it into a movie. They’d never get it right. They’d undoubtedly use the horror and violence in the story to depict exciting action, not Barry’s world of desperate rootlessness.
TOMORROW: Even Hollywood insiders are foreseeing the death of mass culture.
<
YESTERDAY AND TODAY, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #5: Our Love and War Man already misses Mike Mailway (real name Larry M. Boyd), whose locally-based syndie trivia column ended a week and a half ago. Always wished I could write like him. That staccato, crime-movie-soundtrack rhythm. The eternally provocative mix of historic, scientific, and just odd facts gathered from all times and places. Had the privilege of meeting him a few times; always the perfect gent. I wish him well.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #1: What with all the sanctimonious gnashing-O-teeth that’s gone on over the threatening might of big-box chain bookstores, you might not expect any tears for the demise of such an outlet. But loyal customers are indeed huing and ado-ing over the impending loss of Tower Books on lower Queen Anne. Cause of death: The usual (mercenary rent hike).
The store’s annual 30-percent-off pre-inventory sale is being extended until closing day, Feb. 4. It’ll be missed, partly because Tower’s one chain that acted sorta like an indie in its niche-marketing prowess. Because most of its other outlets were attached to Tower Records stores, it was big on the sorts of books CD buyers like. Glossy pop-star tomes, yes; but also coffee-table art and photography, sci-fi, erotica, student reference, self-help, astrology, comix, lefty-politics, Beat-generation nostalgia, and literary-hipster fiction. (Although the approach had its drawbacks, such as when they had to put the Bukowski novels behind the counter to prevent theft by suburban down-and-outer wannabes.)
Tower says it wants to eventually build a book annex on the site of its current record store six blocks away, but has given no timetable for the project.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #2: Puget Consumers Co-op is closing its oldest alterna-food and vitamin store, in Ravenna. Way back in the early ’80s, when PCC really was a cooperatively-run small merchant, Ravenna was its only space (it had previously been an even smaller food-buying club). It was a subculture, a ‘tribe’ if you wish.
As you may know, I’m something of a skeptic about many of today’s neo-Puritanical food religions (macrobiotic, organic, vegan, ‘live,’ etc.). But I had, and have, every respect for the healthful values of community, of being part of a circle of humans who care about one another. That’s something PCC gradually lost as it became a professionally-managed chain store.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #3: The Seattle Times Co., citing a need to cut costs due to recent circumstances (see below), is shutting Mirror, its eight-year-old monthly tabloid for teenagers.
I was a part-time assistant on Mirror’s first five issues. The yup-ladies who ran it had believed those mainstream-media scare stories that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of illiterate louts; so the yup-ladies thought they’d need an adult to write the paper. But the editors soon realized that many public high school students really can read and write (they just choose not to read the Seattle Times); so my services proved unneeded.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #4: With the end of the Seattle newspaper strike comes the end of the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.
As I’ve said previously, it was about two-thirds of the way toward becoming the real opposition daily this town needs. While the Newspaper Guild won’t be publishing the Union Record anymore (or drumming up other unions for sympathy ads), many of the Seattle Times strikers won’t be returning to their old jobs, and hence might be available to continue their Record work under new management. I’d love to be a part of making such a paper happen.
Let’s all talk about this again real soon.
TOMORROW: People you’re not better than.
