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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.
ELSEWHERE:
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.
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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.
LAST FRIDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.
That simple gimmick led me to pondering a whole bigger question–how to bring sex, and a healthy respect for it, back to Christendom.
This might seem either double-icky or sacreligious to some of you. I assure you I don’t intend to be either.
After all, many of the world’s great religions and cultures have embraced strongly sexualized images and messages–including the Euro-pagan cultures Christianity borrowed so much else from.
What I imagine, in 3 parts:
Examples and precedents from over the centuries:
TOMORROW: The last of this for now, I promise.
ANY POP-CULTURE GENRE that’s washed up, or at least on the decline, can be given a new life, or at least an afterlife.
All you have to do is revamp it for a born-again Christian audience.
It’s been done with hippie folk music, soft rock, and even hardcore punk rock. It’s been done with thriller and romance novels. It’s been done with form-follows-function modern architecture. It’s been done with superhero comics and action video games.
How you do it: Take a genre (such as those above) with by-now cliched rules and formulae. Slap on a devotional, evangelistic, or crusading-for-the-faith message (doesn’t matter how trite). Make sure the protagonists are (or claim to be) morally forthright. Wrap it up in sanctimony and sell it thru Christian niche-market outlets (specialty bookstores, websites, catalogs, magazine ads, etc.)
There’s one genre out there that hasn’t yet been Christianized, at least on any visible scale; yet is clearly ripe for it. It’s got an established schtick and an established audience, but has gotten completely ritualized, commercialized, artless, non-entertaining, and otherwise meaningless.
I speak, of course, of pornography.
But the ol’ American puritan hypocrisy thang’s prevented much experimentation with Christianizing porn; at least as far as I’ve been able to find.
A simple web search of the word “Christian” with “porn,” “erotica,” or “sex” will get you a lot of angry anti-porn preachers, many prayer-based programs for overcoming “sex addiction,” and a few over-the-top parody pages (some apparently created by disgruntled ex-Christians).
But no actual Christian porn, verbal or visual.
The closest you get are a few pages that provide potential ideological justifications for Christian porn. Some of these are by members of the Christian-swingers and liberated-Christians sub-subcultures, such as Rebecca Brook’s recent essay “Body and Soul: Confessions of a Kinky Churchgoer.” “God is a caring top,” Brook writes, “not a rapist.” Brook, like other members of these subgroups, believes there should be no contradiction between exploring one’s spiritual potential and exploring one’s sensual potential.
Similar thoughts are promoted on the “Christian Sex” pages of Poppy Dixon’s Adult Christianity site. That’s the same semisatirical site that’s got The XXX-Rated Bible, the “good parts” chapter-and-verse listing that could indeed be the original Christian porn.
So what might real, commercial, non-parody, Christian porn be like?
It could build on the sensual traditions of medieval mystery plays, the ecstatic traditions of holy-roller evangelists and speaking in tongues, sensual Catholic imagery, pro-sex interpretations of Scripture, the works of pro-sex artists and writers with spiritual inclinations, and Christianity’s historic ability to absorb pieces of other spiritual traditions (including, and why not, Tantra and sacred prostitution and “pagan” mating rituals).
This genre would not be “anti-family,” or contradict Jesus’s real teachings, by any means. There’s much that the preadolescent can learn about body self-esteem and living a life of connection with one’s surrounding world; and there’s plenty the adolescent needs to learn about dealing with raging hormones in the context of respecting oneself and others.
MONDAY: Some more thought on what what this new sub-sub-genre might be like.
A MERE SIX MONTHS after the WTO riots, I predicted there’d be folks who’d spend the rest of their lives in the shadow of that singular protestorial moment, or (worse) using their participation in it (no matter how peripheral) as a badge of radical sanctimony, a way of defining their personal specialness. (I’d seen too much of that in ’60s fogeys.)
So it should come as no surprise that documents of this type are beginning to appear.
Case in point: The recent book Five Days That Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond. It lists three “authors” on the front cover. One is really a photographer, Allen Sekula, whose color close-ups emphasize the more photogenic (or most visibly wounded) protestors, obscuring both the scope of the marches and the diversity of the marchers.
The text is by longtime lefter-than-thou essayist and syndicated columnist Alexander Cockburn and his colleague Jeffrey St. Clair. The main piece of text, the “Seattle Diary” chapter, is credited solely to St. Clair, and is our topic here.
And it disappoints greatly. And I’m not just talking about the many many typos.
St. Clair seems less interested in getting to the grit of global trade and its discontents, of the miraculous breadth of the anti-WTO coalition, than in (1) name-dropping all the radical personal friends he runs into at the marches (all of whom seem to be from San Francisco), and in (2) berating everyone he sees at the marches or accompanying events whom he considers insufficiently radical.
These not-good-enough types include the respected populist-progressive commentators Michael Moore, Jim Hightower, and Molly Ivins; folks who’ve made plenty of unkind words about the rule of Global Business and its political lackeys, but whom St. Clair, for reasons apparently perceptible only by the sort of people who read The Nation, considers to be less than ideologically pure.
In short: Where the WTO protests were a grand coming-together of all sorts of people who had all sorts of agendas and priorities, and who wanted to persue these agendas and priorities without a global-corporate monoculture’s repressions, St. Clair saw the protests as a big party to which only persons meeting his doctrinal standards should have been allowed.
St. Clair, I’m afraid, is a ’60s-style radical who Doesn’t Get It about the way-new left. It’s not about bringing back the allegedly-good-old-days of self-aggrandizing counterculture hustlers and sectarian schisms. It’s about working together with people who don’t necessarily belong to the same subcultural “tribe,” but who share a dream for a more just, more democratic, and more healthy world.
For a more thoroughly researched, more serious account of the events on and surrounding Nov. 30, 1999 in Seattle, pick up Janet Thomas’s The Battle in Seattle. Thomas (who’s actually lived in the Seattle area) takes the issues behind global trade and corporate power seriously and soberly. Instead of St. Clair’s oversimplified us-vs.-them dichotomies, Thomas finds patterns of power and influence, and people from all continents and walks-O-life who’ve been finding ways to work together to change those patterns even after the last tear-gas canisters were discharged on Capitol Hill.
She even includes dozens of addresses and websites in the back for those of you who’d like to get in on the hard work of building a better society, not just protesting against the one we’ve got.
TOMORROW: How to publish an arts magazine in the Post-Funding Era.
Better Listening Through Research
by guest columnist Ilse Thompson
RAYMOND SCOTT–recognized these days for compositions adapted for Bugs Bunny cartoons–spent the first half of his musical career as a pop figure.
He was an acclaimed and formidable band leader, composer and pianist through the ’30s and ’40s. In the ’50s, he led the house band on the TV show Your Hit Parade, all while writing bouncy ad jingles for everything from Sprite to IBM–allowing him to fund his secret, and very private, life as an avatar of electronic music.
This is the Raymond Scott–inventor, pioneer, visionary–Basta Records pays homage to with Manhattan Research Inc.
Left to its own devices, this two-CD set of Raymond Scott’s previously unreleased electronic compositions evokes a transcendental catatonia. Played on instruments of his own invention (the Clavivox, Circle Machine, Bass Line Generator, Rhythm Modulator, Karloff, Bandito the Bongo Artist, and his baby, the Electronium) these pieces will shift your foothold.
So… enough about the music, already.
Scott’s recordings are hardbound to accommodate a lavish 144-page set of “liner notes,” edited by Irwin Chusid–WFMU radio mainstay, director of the Raymond Scott Archives, and author of the recently released book, Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music.
In his introduction, Chusid says that “throughout Scott’s career in the public spotlight, there were occasional reports of an alter ego–the inventor, the engineer, the professor in the lab coat, the electronic music pioneer. But little of this work received public exposure.”
In order to remedy that, Chusid has compiled a collection of interviews with Scott’s contemporaries, including Robert Moog; historical essays, including one on Scott’s trippy collaborations with Jim Henson; articles written about Scott from back in the day; photographs of Scott and his musical equipment; patent designs; private musings and correspondence; promotional material; advertisements; detailed descriptions of each piece included on the CDs; and a wealth of fascinating ephemera.
As Chusid says, MRI is “a chapter of electronic music history you won’t find in most existing books on the subject.”
“In the music of the future,” Scott writes in 1949, “the composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely THINK his idealized conception of his music. His brain waves will be picked up by mechanical equipment and channeled directly into the minds of his hearers, thus allowing no room for distortion of the original idea.” These glimpses into Scott’s mind make the listening experience deliciously disorienting.
If Chusid’s compilation were simply an academic thesis on the subject of electronic music or a plain old biographical essay, I could take it or leave it.
It is essential as an accompaniment to the CD set, however, because it reveals Scott as a downright visionary–a man who collaborated with his machines and was driven by more than a simple desire to make wicked new sounds.
He was trying to ignite an evolutionary leap in music, technology and even consciousness.
TOMORROW: The ol’ WTO-riot-anniversary thang.
SCOTT MCCLOUD first emerged on the independent-comics scene in the ’80s with Zot!, one of the most intelligent and character-driven (and, for the time, least violent) superhero series around.
But he found his real calling in discussing comics, and making comics that discussed comics.
He’s now followed his ’93 bestseller Understanding Comics with a bigger, even more ambitious work, Reinventing Comics.
McCloud’s first volume was an introductory explanation of the art form, and an argument about why it should be considered an art form instead of the kiddie pap many Americans have treated it as.
His new one also has two tasks, divided into two sections.
In the first half, he bemoans the sorry state of the comics scene in North America as both an art form and a business. Daily strips are following the newspapers they appear in on a slow road toward oblivion or at least irrelevance in many people’s lives. Comic book stores, and the publishers and creators supplying them, took a financial shellacking in the mid-’90s when the speculator market collapsed. The so-called “mainstream” comic book publishers still concentrate too tightly on selling one genre (superheroes) to one niche audience of white male fanboys, neglecting the diversity of subjects, styles, and creators that could attract a wider clientele.
(Although, he acknowledges, some strides have been made in creator’s rights; and indie publishing has slightly increased the breadth of both content and diversity of contributors.)
In the second half, McCloud looks to possible solutions to comics’ artistic and business dilemmas. Guess what? They all have to do with the medium on which you’re reading this.
NASDAQ speculators and venture-capital funds may have written off the Net as a content medium, but McCloud insists its only problems are simply bugs to be worked out; mainly involving most users’ slow modem speeds and still-developing display technologies.
McCloud remains a mostly-unwavering advocate of the Internet (or what it can evolve into) as a force for decentralization, disintermediation, and creative breakthroughs.
The thing is: If and when all these revolutions come into being, will the result be anything approaching comics (or “sequential art”) as we know it?
If you define “comics” as printed documents comprising hand-drawn still images in linear sequence (sometimes with written narration and/or dialogue), maybe not.
If you define comics according to McCloud’s definition, maybe.
By the time Web comics really take off, they could become something closer to today’s Flash animations or the narrative elements of CD-ROM games than to silent still images in frames.
A new art form, perhaps; or at least a new blend of existing forms (comics, animation, film/video).
But it still wouldn’t mean the preservation of the existing comics form; many of the strengths of which lie in the disciplines of its limitations (no motion, no sound).
TOMORROW: A guest columnist remembers the worst job he ever had.
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
NEWSPAPER STRIKE UPDATE: Just as the excitement of a Presidential non-election finally wound down, the Seattle scab newspapers returned to their previous levels of bulk and dullness. Indeed, with their no-name staffs they’re even duller than before. Meanwhile, the Seattle Union Record has quickly blossomed into quite the spunky li’l alterna-rag. I still want it to go permanent and daily.
Generation S&M, Part 1
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
THE OTHER DAY I was surprised to see a preview to the new movie Quills, a tale loosely based on facts about the Marquis de Sade.
Surprised because I thought that S&M was out. The movie is complete with a star-studded Hollywood cast and lots of flogging.
Some fads go out slowly, occasionally bobbing their heads aggressively before drowning completely. You can’t really write a fair essay about a fad until it’s over. You have to give it time to die, and God knows you don’t know a fad is happening while you’re in it. No one knew the roaring ’20s were roaring until at least the ’50s.
So it’s stupid for me to reminisce about S&M and the glorious late ’90s yet, but I’m doing it anyway.
S&M made a comeback in the early ’90s. I heard someone once say that Seattle was some sort of Centre de Sadism renowned throughout the world. I don’t really think so.
I mean, of course there was the Vogue, which started having Sunday fetish nights in the nineties. Then the Catwalk, where you could playfully whip boys in leather, a few underground S&M raves that were hard to avoid if you ever danced.
There was even a more serious bordello/dungeon of sorts in Magnolia. The torturous Jim Rose Circus Side Show and The Pleasure Elite originated here. Still, I never thought of Seattle as an epicenter for S&M.
I did notice that suddenly S&M was cool. People were wearing corsets and spiked heels and dog collars again and suddenly black rubber was everywhere. People were “coming out” about their sexual strangeness. The personals started being really entertaining with all the weird fetishes. Post-grunge fashion picked up on the trend.
The S&M love story by Anne Rice, Exit to Eden, was made into a (crappy) Hollywood movie. Xena: Warrior Princess started kicking the shit out of men; as did Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Catwoman, and Lara Croft the cyberbabe.
Obvious dominitrixes like Miss Parker of The Profiler came back to TV. The Gimp appeared in Pulp Fiction; vampires made a comeback; Clinton was elected (and everyone knows he’s a bottom).
When you write an essay about a fad, like for example the slew of Vietnam movies made in the late ’80s or the preppy movement of the early ’80s, or even anorexia nervosa, you have to say what were the factors that allowed the fad to be.
Like for example, a lot of preppy kids had these cool ex-hippie, pro-pot, pro-everything parents, and the only way suitable for them to rebel was to change their name to Buffy and buy stocks and iron their clothes. Works for me.
Much the same thing happened with S&M.
Everyone knows that our parents raised us in the ’70s and they were into the most hideous, revolting, normal sex.
Encounter groups, est, Unitarian Church Singles Groups (called USAG). I’m OK, You’re OK. The Show Me! book, the anatomically correct dolls. The ’70s, when people sang “I’m Easy” and “Sometimes When We Touch” with a straight face.
Yeeech. Blek.
Our parents’ sex, although “open” and “free”, bored us all to tears. I mean, Alan Alda and Woody Allen as sex symbols?
While their twenties were spent rebelling against the sexual repression of their ’50s-era parents, our twenties were spent trying to re-achieve the coolness of repression.
And I think I personally found it in Catwoman.
TOMORROW: A possible source of S&M fascination–’60s sitcoms.
Book Review Confidential
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
WHY DO PEOPLE WRITE BOOK REVIEWS?
I used to think the whole point of this racket was to force publishers to pay attention to my own books. Editorial screeners, however, have little clout or they simply resent query letters that lead with a whiff of a tit-for-tat proposal for them to accept me as a potential supplier of literary merchandise in exchange for my support of their products.
The reviewer gig does offer some perks, like free samples; and it’s usually more lucrative to write about books than to write the damn things, even when you factor in all of the time it takes to read them.
Apart from industrial considerations such as personal career advancement, there’s an altruistic side to book reviewing. This ranges from the fairly innocent (I love books, therefore I write about them to spread my enthusiasm to others) to the reasonably corrupt (I love books that really matter–not the crap the NY Times thinks is important–so I aim to reward fiction that advances the art of fiction). And then, some people just like to criticize things (I love to write about what I hate).
Although most book reviews are written by freelancers for little or no money, newspapers and magazines often have staffers whose job is to review books. Beyond that, there are plenty of commercial opportunities for freelancers, even if you don’t specialize in quickies of under 200 pages for cash cows who pay more than $200 for a short review. By indulging in some tricks of the trade (reading a few pages and then cobbling together your review from quotes in the press pack), anyone can turn a buck on the book beat.
After all, the stylebook standards of reviews are child’s play. Basically, you dress up a plot summary with some toney opinionating (just go easy on the poststructuralist lingo), dangle a reservation or two, and close with a pick or a pan.
While some dream of being critics, nobody sets out to become a book reviewer. Primarily, reviewers are writers, editors, or professors who have or have had other lit projects more ambitious than review work.
Not that this means the reviews are slipshod knock-offs. The pros I know consider (reread, if necessary) an author’s previous books as well as similar books by others, seldom review books by friends or enemies, and skip rather than slam books by unknown writers.
Editors have some influence over quality, but nothing drives reviewers as effectively as the fear of hanging their asses out in public. You can toil in painstaking obscurity, cranking out reliable and incisive reviews, but if you compare Frankenstein to Gertrude Stein, you’re bound to be immortalized in a blurb.
Although experienced reviewers are better at covering their asses than beginners are, even the best ones can unwittingly look like fools. Some play the reference game. To put something in critical context, they nick so many literary luminaries that reading their reviews is like watching an arcade superstar play pinball. Others succumb to the towline effect (or its inverse, the backlash effect), where the value of the book is directly (or, inversely) proportional to the effort it took them to read and review it. Often the towline effect has a cart-pulling-the-horse dynamic (see the NY Review of Books): If the review is five times longer than it needs to be, the book must be important.
Reviewers new to the game may threaten to get personal, as they star-fuck their favorites and lay waste to their foes. This gets old fast, but generally, I think it’s good for a reviewer to have a personal stake in the book under review. Who better than an entomologist to review a book about entomology, even if she just wrote a book on the same topic?
Book review assignments may deserve another article or none at all: The topic is either too mysterious or too obvious. Everybody knows that a tiny percentage of published books get reviewed, that big names and bestsellers and commercial houses hog the ink, that tons of worthy books go undiscovered. Many suspect that reviewers despise the proliferation of books, even while the reviewers themselves feed the literary lottery pot with their own hopes to overcome the astronomical odds and win fame.
Few realize, however, that nobody determines what books get reviewed as much as the reviewers do (more through whim and inertia than through any flex of power), and that the most formidable obstacle an author wanting to be reviewed can face is the neglect or incompetence of his own publisher.
And why do people read book reviews?
So they don’t have to read books.
(Doug Nufer is an editor of and contributor to American Book Review. His book reviews have appeared in the Nation, the Seattle Times, the Oregonian, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and currently appear in the Stranger and Rain Taxi. He hated to write book reports in school.)
TOMORROW: What might really be behind the recent frey over movie content.
