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…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.
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.
