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LAST FRIDAY, we looked at Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, one of those bestseller-wannabe business books with a really simple idea.
In this case, the idea (as explained on Godin’s website) is that simple ideas, themselves, are the key to making it in today’s marketing-centric world–as long as the ideas are snappy, catchy, and capable of spreading contagiously.
Over the years, I’ve seen principles similar to Godin’s at work in that other “market,” the so-called Marketplace of Ideas:
But “Free Mumia” has an articulate mascot/spokesman, a focused agenda, and, at least as portrayed by his supporters, clear heroes and villains. (Never mind that the circumstances and events surrounding his case are way more complex.)
Yet far too many of us bounce along from one religiously-embraced faddish regimen to another (the Atkins Diet, The Zone, veganism, Ultra Slim-Fast, et al.).
But it’s too tempting to seek a singular cause for any misguided youth behavior; preferably a cause originating from outside the home. (Video games made him violent! Fashion magazines made her anorexic! Commercials are turning them into soulless materialists! The liberal media’s turning them into valueless hedonists!)
Tim Eyman’s Initiative 745, which would force 90 percent of all transportation funds in Washington to go to road construction, will only make all that worse. But it sounds good on talk radio.
(Indeed, most talk-show-led crusades (killing affirmative action, flattening tax rates, lengthening jail sentences, censoring the Internet) involve really easy-to-grasp solutions that either do nothing to solve the underlying “problems” or actually complicate them.)
But these elaboratenesses seldom matter to the followers of John Gray, Laura Schlessinger, Tom Leykis, Andrea Dworkin, and the many other allegedly “nonfiction” writers who’ve created mythical characters called “All Women” and “All Men,” and then proceed to endow these stick-figure creations with behavior and thought patterns so rigidly defined, perhaps no actual woman or man has ever completely fit them.
The too-simple response to this addiction to too-simple ideas is to dismiss it as something only “Those People” embrace. You know, those dolts, hicks, rednecks, and television viewers out in Square America. Us smarty-pants urbanites are far too enlightened to fall for such nonsense.
That is, to put it simply, a crock of shit.
Still, it’s the propagators of simple and too-simple ideas who get the NPR interview slots, the Newsweek and Salon profiles, the “New and Recommended” blurbs at Barnes & Noble.
Should I “reinvent myself” into a marketable “brand” built around a simple and catchy idea? And if so, what should it be?
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
YESTERDAY, I discussed my ongoing ponderings about my career future. I closed with a brief remark about the burgeoining mini-industry in guidebooks, lectures and courses aimed at people with this same obsession to worry about their own career futures.
One of these books is Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, excerpted in a recent Fast Company cover story.
Godin, who’s posted his book’s full text online, is one of those many commentators who treat, as an unspoken “given,” the idea that business is, and ought to be, the single driving force and operating metaphor for human life.
He’s also one of those who proclaims that business, in this supposedly post-industrial age of global trade and info hi-ways, is entirely about marketing.
And the key to marketing, according to Godin, is The Idea.
But not every idea makes it in this ruthless, hectic world. The ideas that succeed are the ones with the capacity to spread among people like a contagion; hence the “Ideavirus” rubric.
Godin is also one of those business writers who treats the hipster-vilified Nike as an ultimate success story. He sees the Nike concept as a quintessential Ideavirus. The idea was turning athletic shoes from a commodity into a high-profit-margin fashion statement, by spending lavishly on advertising and outsourcing the manufacturing to those cheap overseas subcontractors. The flashiness of the shoes and their ever-prominent logos comprised the “virus” that helped spread that idea.
Another of Godin’s great Ideaviruses is the now Microsoft-owned Hotmail. It was not only a simple idea with a powerful promise (free e-mail forever), but it advertised itself within its own product (every free e-mail message ended with a blurb for the service).
Indeed, looking at other hot or recently-hot local companies through Godin’s prism can be quite instructive.
Of course, this is a gross oversimplification. Many enterprises start out with potentially lucrative concepts, but fail to profitably execute them. Or, the concepts are imitated by bigger outfits. Or, the concepts are successfully quashed or discredited by bigger outfits with their own agendas to push (remember solar energy?).
But simplification is what Ideaviruses appear to be all about.
It’s certainly what best-seller business books appear to be all about.
MONDAY: Should I reinvent myself according to the Ideavirus concept?
BACK IN THE ’80S, I used to complain about what passed for “regional” literature here in the PacNW, as officially defined by a certain clique. Quaint little nature poems depicting still-life scenes devoid of human presence; humorless prose about rugged living-off-the-land types.
Back in the ’90s, I noted the apparent passing of nature-lit, and also recounted some of the diverse writings that have come from here that weren’t like that.
Now, a few of these other strains have finally gotten their recognition as a “genre” of sorts, thanks to the new trade-paperback anthology Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions, edited by Lidia Yuknavitch and L. N. Pearson and published under their Portland-based Two Girls imprint.
It’s a fast-paced, well-rounded revue of stories and experimental prose-works, with a few photo-narrative pieces (mostly by Richard Kract and L.N. Pearson) mixed in for relief.
Among the highlights:
Virtually none of the pieces revel in the old nature-poet Northwest of herons and seals and sunsets on the beach. And some of them simply reflect a global bohemian zeitgeist.
But the best of them depict a Northwest state of mind. It’s a hard thing to encapsulate, but it comprises hefty doses of droll skepticism, dry humor, and a BS detector set to eleven.
MONDAY: Political conventions–I say let’s keep ’em.
NAOMI KLEIN’S BOOK NO LOGO claims greedy corporations are brainwashing kids into letting themselves (the kids) become walking billboards.
Up to this point, I agree with her. Branded clothing has become just so damned ubiquitous. Grade-schoolers crave anything with the Nike “swoosh;” skate teens sport FuBu; collegian preppies plug Abercrombie & Fitch; white gangsta-wannabes ride their baggy pants low to expose their Tommy Hilfiger boxer waistbands.
But then Klein goes further than (or perhaps not as far as) I would.
She wants all good strict parents to keep their children’s apparel iconography-free.
That’s acceptable if you’re into spiritual asceticism; even then, the deliberate plain-ness of your attire is, itself, an icon.
For those who consciously choose to make this sort of “anti-statement” statement, more power to you.
For the rest of us, I say go for it. Wear your heart (and your mind) on your sleeve. Be a walking icon.
Don’t like the bigtime marketers? Choose other word/picture combos to identify with. Your favorite town or nation or planet (whether you’ve ever been there or not). Your favorite heroine or hero (real, mythical, or somewhere between the two). A guiding principle of your life, in slogans and/or imagery.
And if the particular vision that defines you doesn’t seem to exist in the stores, make up your own.
Become a bosom-based sloganeer for Heidegger’s Uncertainty Principle, or for the joys of bicycle commuting, or for the joys of eating mashed potatoes with peanut butter, or that perfect movie you’re going to get around to making one of these decades, or that invisible childhood friend who used to save your sanity.
It’s easy. It’s fun.
Just, well, you know….
TOMORROW: Do kids these days know how to really live?
THE 2000 NORTHWEST BOOKFEST is still more than two months away. But I can already predict two of its most overhyped topics of discussion will be:
1. Falling stock prices for online booksellers, whether this portends doom for these dot-coms, how any such doom would affect small publishers’ inventory and debt situations, and whether any such doom would provide an opportunity and/or a threat to independent “brick and mortar” bookstores.
2. The much-hyped “eBook” craze, whether the electronic distribution of consumer literature is finally taking off, whether any such takeoff would threaten the power base of big publishing companies, and whether any such takeoff would provide an opportunity and/or a threat to independent “brick and mortar” bookstores.
I can safely state that at this point, the eBook and its various rival portable reading-pad electronic devices are novelties. The technology doesn’t appear to have seriously improved since the models I saw at last year’s Bookfest. The screens are still too hard to read in less-than-optimum light; there are still software incompatibilities among the various devices (and between them and regular computers); and they still cost too much.
Last month’s publicity stunt by the ever-hype-savvy Stephen King, in which he put pieces of a serialized horror novel (based on a leftover manuscript from 1982) online and invited those who downloaded it to pay shareware-esque fees, provided what mainstream media always seem to need in order to proclaim a new medium as “arrived”–a celebrity.
The story itself, thus far, isn’t much. But King and his associates have solved a lot of the distribution and formatting issues quite elegantly.
The story’s available in several formats, compatible with most computers, eBook-type devices, and Palm-type hand-held machines; but King’s site recommends Adobe’s Acrobat Reader format, which offers real page layout features for PCs and Macs (even though many potential “early adopters” of e-publishing are Macintosh true-believers, most eBook-esque software is not Mac-compatible); in a relatively quick-downloading form, and which lets you, the reader, increase the type size up to half an inch high without losing detail.
Of course, what you’re reading now is on-screen, Net-delivered “literary” content of a sort. Like many hundreds of other such efforts out there, this one has tried to pay the bills via advertising and “affiliate” programs with online merchants. So far, these have paid the bills, but just that.
If King can figure out how to make this pay, I’m certainly willing to listen. (More about this a little later.)
Meanwhile, digital and online text is indeed making inroads in areas outside “trade” bookselling. Computer manuals, technical-training documents, legal databases, professional reference works–lotsa stuff people have to read at work rather than for pleasure. Online posting of this data provides immediacy; CD-ROM publishing of it provides compact permanence.
I can easily see more home-market books of a factual-matter basis move toward digital formats (how-tos, learning guides, diet and investment manuals, and many of the other workhorse categories that make a major part of many bookstores’ balance sheets).
Even if reading-for-pleasure categories (fiction, art books, celebrity memoirs, etc.) principally remain the domain of physical printed documents (which they very well may), it will still behoove independent bookstores to figure out how to grab their piece of the e-lit action.
(Other views on today’s topic: Author Mark Mathabane believes electronic distribution “lets authors control their literary fate;” John Kelsey and Bruce Scheiner propose a “Street Performer Protocol” to fund Net-distributed works by audience donations; Random House gets into the e-act; so does Barnes & Noble.)
TOMORROW: Beyond the “No Logo” movement.
THE RISE OF “BLOKE” MAGAZINES, and of TV shows and commercials based on the same worldview, has, as I’ve previously written here, has propagated a new male archetype.
Call it the Proud Creep.
This character type is just as stupid, boorish, and woman-hating as the villain stereotypes in ’70s-’80s feminist tracts, but proclaims these to be somehow positive qualities.
In many ways, it reminds me of the “He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club” schtick in the old Our Gang movie shorts. It’s certainly just as juvenile.
I hereby propose a different archetype of hetero masculinity. One that is neither the Creep of certain sexist-female stereotypes, the Proud Creep of the bloke magazines, or the self-punishing Guilt Tripper of “sensitive new age guy” images.
It’s a man who doesn’t have to be sexist in either direction. A man who knows yang’s just as valuable as yin.
Herewith, some tenets of our proposed He-Man Woman-Lover’s Club:
As hetero men, we fully admit we need women in our lives. We need women’s beauty, touch, wisdom, style, zeal, perserverence, leadership, and, yes, the occasional constructive nag.
(In a more ideal world, some of the socially-prominent present and former customers of the sex industry would out themselves and publicly proclaim support for sex-workers’ rights. More on that later, maybe.)
I do not personally claim to have fully become this kind of man. But it is an ideal to which I, and I hope many others, will strive.
It’s hard to find contemporary role models for this type of man in the modern pop-culture universe, aside from certain soap-opera hunks or the heroes of the “urban love story” novels written by black men for black women. If you can think of any, please submit them to our luscious MISCtalk discussion boards.
MONDAY: My sordid past with John Carlson.
FOR EVERYBODY who’s gotten more than a bit annoyed at all the assorted excesses attributable, rightly or wrongly, to Global Business’s machinations (you know, the layoffs, downsizings, job exports, slave-labor and near-slave-labor imports, consolidations, deregulations, price gougings, political corruption, pollution, global warming, species depletions, suburban sprawl, SUVs, stock-market roller coasters, anti-democratic “free trade” agreements, national economies ruined by IMF/World Bank austerity demands, awful Hollywood movies, dot-com boors gobbling up all the best places to live, dumb fashion magazines, brand logos in classrooms, etc. etc. etc.)–take heart.
Local author David C. Korten has a message for you: It doesn’t have to be this way.
Korten, who wrote When Corporations Rule the World back in ’96, returned last year with a follow-up, The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism.
He and his wife are among the leaders of the Positive Futures Network, which does various new-agey think-tanky kinds of stuff and publishes a journal, Yes!, which once infamously put ex-Seattle Mayor Norm Rice (that corporate-Democrat, developer-suckup) on the cover of an issue about making urban areas more “sustainable.”
Anyhoo, Korten has a few ideas about how to stem corporate power. Like many of his generation used to propose in the ’70s, a lot of his prescriptions involve proposed governmental fiats (end corporate tax breaks, increase capital-gains taxes, kill WTO, retract corporations’ extra-personal legal rights, etc. etc.
These applications of sticks and/or deprivals of carrots, Korten thinks, could sufficiently weaken the big-money stranglehold on the political and economic lives of the world just enough to allow his kind of good guys to come in–environmentalists, neo-community activists, transit planners, small and employee-owned enterprises, grassroots organizers.
The result, if all goes the way he hopes, would be something very close to the ’70s novel Ecotopia or the early-’90s TV show Northern Exposure–the kind of utopian world where the values of 50-ish baby boomers would rule.
A world of villages, of arts and crafts, of sufficiency, of collective yet oh-so-rational decision-making, where everything and everyone would be laid back and mellow.
A world where there would be two and only two ways of doing everything–Korten’s way and the bad way. (As he puts it, the “path of life” vs. the “siren song of greed.”)
A world filled with such buzzwords as “voluntary simplicity,” “holistic health,” “biocommunities,” “living consciously,” “latent human potential,” and “inner awakenings.”
In short, the kind of world I’d be bored to tears in. The kind of insular, pastoral, prosaic world Emma Bovary and the son in Playboy of the Western World tried like hell to escape from.
What’s more, Korten (and the social researchers he chooses to quote from) has this annoying habit of
Despite those caveats, and Korten’s propensities toward reducing social and historic complexities to oversimplified binary choices (principally a choice between a life-affirming world and a money-grubbing one), he has some good points.
Some of these good points involve the championing of certain local activist operations, including Sustainable Seattle and the Monorail Initiative.
And he’s at least subtle enough to note a distinction between “capitalism” (as currently practiced by the globalists) and “markets” (small business, human-scale exchanges, family farms, etc.).
And as for his monocultural post-corporate future, it doesn’t have to be that way.
For one thing, a great deal about DIY cultural production, community organizing, and anti-conglomerate thinking has been developed over the past quarter-century by the punk, hiphop, and dance-music subcultures, and also by gays and lesbians, fetishists, Linux programmers, sci-fi fans, immigrants and their not-totally-assimilated descendents, religious subsects, and many, many others of the assorted cliques and sub-nations that have emerged and/or flourished (abetted by new corporate priorities away from forging one mass audience and toward identifying (or creating) ever-more-specific demographic marketing targets.
Corporate power, here or in the world as a whole, could very well collapse from its own imbalance. (And I hope it doesn’t take a massive stock crash to do so.)
When it does (quite possibly in our quasi-immediate futures), we won’t need one universal socioeconomic premise of a neo-village monoculture, to replace today’s universal premise of everything revolving around big money. I predict we’ll be able to muddle through just fine with different groupings of folks all pursuing their own different priorities in life.
The trick will be reaching out across these cultures to solve common needs.
There’ll be something about that, sort of, tomorrow in this space.
TOMORROW: We finally watch Survivor.
I’VE BEEN THINKING OF MOVING to another building.
In the great tradition of “We’d Rather Sell It Than Move It” sales promotions, I’ve been auctioning pieces of my book collection on eBay. (Please go ahead and click here to look at what I’ve got up there today; I promise I’ll still be here when you get back.)
I’ve been augmenting the sale items I’ve already got wtith a few titles I’ve picked up at second-hand outlets, for whch I can find avid collector-buyers.
One of these was The Girls from Esquire.
That was a 1952 hardcover collection (which I’ve already sold; sorry) of stories, essays, and cartoons about and/or by women, originally published in “The Magazine For Men” during its 1933-52 original heyday.
(For the uninitiated, the first version of Esquire, created by legendary editor Arnold Gingrich (no relation to Newt), was far different from the sad little mag it is today. It was a lush, oversize compendium of top-drawer fiction, quasi-naughty humor, “good girl art” cartoons, pinup paintings, fashion, and other material for the sophisticated Urbane Gentleman, or rather for the man who fantasized about being an Urbane Gentleman.)
The main attractions of The Girls from Esquire for modern-day collectors are (1) the cartoons and (2) the big-name authors. The authors include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Benchley, Ilka Chase, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Brendan Gill, Langston Hughes, Budd Schulberg, and James Jones. The cartoons, by such unjustly-forgotten greats as Abner Dean and Gardner Rea, mostly depict gorgeous, splendidly-dressed fantasy women who are totally adorable even when doing less-than-proper things (kept mistresses, husband-killers, etc.)
The fiction pieces are great. So are the profiles of four of the period’s great women (Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, and Ingrid Bergman).
But what makes this book truly a relic of an earlier age are the seven essays (four by female writers) complaining about those uppity U.S. females who insist upon careers in the work-world and upon dominating marriages and families at home.
Piece after piece rants on and on about how American had lost their femininity, their sense of purpose, their joy, their fashion sense, their homemaking skills, and their “knowledge of woman’s rightul place”–especially as compared to the WWII war brides from Britain and the European continent, who (the various authors claim) were more attractive to men and more satisfied with their own lives because they still knew how to be soft, beautiful, quiet, modest, and deferential to men.
A half-century (and umpteen new paradigms for American womanhood) later, similar arguments are still being made by hate-radio hosts and by mail-order-bride websites. Books like The Rules and A Return to Modesty and What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us propose to bring back “old fashioned” feminine values and principles.
And Esquire is in a circultion and ad-sales rut; threatened by the British-led spate of “bloke” magazines celebrating the end of the Urbane Gentleman and the rise of the Guy. Freed from the sole-family-provider role and from the associated need to appear mature and stable, the new Guy (at least in these magazines’ fantasies) can remain an overgrown boy, possibly for life. He can drink and cavort and drive fast and sleep around and perform any other number of less-than-responsible behaviors, leaving the women to run more and more of the household and the world.
Any return to old-fashioned womanhood would require a return to old-fashioned manhood. By that I don’t mean the drunken rapist boor of radical-feminist villain imagery, but the suited-and-tied, emotionally repressed breadwinner who used to read Esquire in order to fantasize about being an Urbane Gentleman, going to Broadway shows with the wife and to hotel afternoons with the mistress.
Despite the recent cocktail and swing revivals, I don’t think many men really want that era back.
TOMORROW: Memories of the Bicentennial summer in Philadelphia.
AFTER THE LAST ISSUE of our MISCmedia print magazine discussed various variations on the theme of “Utopias,” it seemed only proper to follow with a “Dystopias” theme.
Only thing is, I couldn’t find folks who wanted to write about nightmare worlds–other than ones they’d personally lived through.
Perhaps I just didn’t ask the right people.
Perhaps all the dystopia fans were heartbroken when Y2K failed to instantly end Civilization As We Know It.
Perhaps economic times really are good enough (or enough people believe they’re good enough) that they couldn’t imagine things ever getting really scary.
Perhaps everybody’s just so taken in by the talk about global corporate power representing the “End of History” (i.e., the world’s final and permanent socioeconomic configuration) that even those who protest against it can’t imagine any other system (let alone any other dysfunctional system).
Indeed, the cheap and easy way to construct a fictional nightmare future has been to predict the future will be exactly like the present, only more so.
In the past three or four decades, there have been fictional evil futures constructed wholly around single dominant trends of all types: air pollution, oil shortages, overpopulation, fundamentalist religion, nuclear war, the dehumanizing effects associated with big old mainframe computers, radical feminists, radical anti-feminists, humorless liberals, repressive conservatives, Communists, Fascists, Thatcherists, and (just about every dystopian writer’s all-purpose bad guy, in either a lead or supporting role) television.
Just maybe, all these authors’ different wrongnesses add up to one big accuracy–that any future elaborated from a single aspect of the present would be a dystopia.
History seldom flows in a single, linear progression or regression. There are multiple, competing influences in the course of events everywhere. There are trends, backlashes, and backlashes to the backlashes. There are intercene fights, palace struggles, wars, and rumors of wars. There are serendipities, happy accidents, and unplanned disasters.
Life is oscillation and vibration. Death is stasis. A static culture, no matter what it was, would be a living death.
MONDAY: Would “open media” do for (or to) journalists what Napster might do for (or to) musicians?
IN OTHER NEWS: Shopping malls are losing sales fast. Some analysts say half the nation’s current suburban shopping centers may be gone within 10 years. How does a crafty mall operator survive? Make the place look more like a ‘real’ downtown!…
YESTERDAY, we began a praiseful discussion of of The Best of Myles, a collection of 1940s newspaper “humor” columns written by the sadly neglected Irish writer Flann O’Brien (1911-66) under his alternate pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (“Miles of the Little Horses”).
Today, some examples of just why O’Brien/Copaleen is so damn great.
Was only five or six %.
The rest was only words and sound–
My reference is to Ezra £.”
“Chapman, looking in for an after-supper pipe, was astonished at the poet’s composure, and did not hesitate to say so. Keats smiled (in a way that was rather lovely).
“‘And why should I not fiddle,’ he asked, ‘while Byrne roams?'”
“But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable.
“Furthermore, poetry has the effect on the negligible handful who read it of stimulating them to write poetry themselves. One poem, if widely disseminated, will breed perhaps a thousand inferior copies. The same objection cannot be made in the case of painting and sculpture, because these occupations afford employment for artisans who produce the materials.
“Moreover, poets are usually unpleasant people who are poor and who insist forever on discussing that incredibly boring subject, ‘books.'”
“‘Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m.–act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the rows of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff-faces, the stench of congealing badger’s suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron’s boil, a leprechaun’s denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake’s clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman’s dumpling, a beetle’s faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man’s curse, a blasket, a ‘kur,’ a fiddler’s act of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottle’s ‘farm,’ a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat’s stomach-pump, a broken–‘
“But what is the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular.”
The Copaleen columns also might not reach anywhere in particular. But they provide quite the entertaining and scenic ride.
TOMORROW: The dot-com bubble deflates.
REGULAR READERS of this feature might recall my ongoing devotion to the Irish writer Flann O’Brien (1911-66; legal name: Brian O’Nolan; birth name: Brian O Nuallain), whose 1939 first novel At Swim-Two Birds first turned me on to the possibilities of Great Kickass Writing.
Today I want to talk about O’Brien’s other career, that of self-styled “newspaper funny man.”
A few months after the publication of At Swim, the conservative daily The Irish Times hired him to write a daily essay-and-humor column, “Cruiskeen Lawn.” For this work he took on another pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen (“Miles of the Little Horses”).
The alternate name was more than just an affectation; it was a character.
The “Myles” persona was that of a distinguished older gentleman (O’Brien was only 29 when the column began), comfortable enough in his nobility to mix drawing-room anecdotes with bilingual or trilingual puns, yet enough of a man-of-the-people to gently bash both elitist modern artists and elitist modern-art denouncers.
Two collections of Myles columns have finally been issued in the U.S., by the Dalkey Archive Press (named after O’Brien’s fifth and final novel). The Best of Myles covers his 1940s work. The just-domestically-issued Further Cuttings follows the column into the ’50s.
I’ve just finished reading the first volume. On one level, it’s a remarkable account of normal daily life in one of the few European countries that had anything approaching “normal daily life” at the time. (Ireland, which had only become an independent country in 1920, stayed out of WWII, partly as an act of defiance against Britain.)
O’Brien writes nostalgically about old steam locomotives; relates fictional yet believable tales about his father, brother, and “married sister;” and makes droll comments upon such issues of the day as preserving the Irish language and coping with wartime shortages of consumer goods.
But O’Brien/Copaleen’s writing works on dozens of other levels.
Almost-too-clever-for-its-own-good wordplay meets up with de- and re-constructions of traditional columnist and “humorist” formats (fake inventions, wise bartenders, social-improvement campaigns, good-old-days reminiscences, etc. etc.), and gets cooked up within O’Brien’s astoundingly beautiful prose.
It’s enough to make any would-be modern funny writer, such as myself, give in and surrender all hope of ever becoming good enough.
But I won’t. At least not just yet.
TOMORROW: A few examples of O’Brien/Copaleen’s genius.
OF THE LAST 100 Amazon.com purchases from people who linked from the search box on my site, only 16 were items specifically mentioned anywhere on the site.
This means:
(1) many of you are choosing to help support MISCmedia by making your Amazon buys thru this site’s link, and
(2) I might not have the influence on your reading/viewing/listening habits I’ve liked to imagine having.
Nevertheless, few of these items were at all sucky, proving at least that many MISCmedia readers have quite good taste indeed.
Herewith, a few of the things you’re using this site to attain, in no particular order:
TOMORROW: What you’re writing.
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
IT FINALLY HAPPENED: Yr. ob’t corresp’nd’nt was name-dropped in a name-dropping novel.
You’ll find a passing reference to “Clark Humphrey’s Loser” at the bottom of page 97 of Mark Lindquist’s new novel Never Mind Nirvana. Right in a list of a sweet young thing’s bookshelf contents, alongside the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (who also supplies a back-cover blurb).
I wish I could tell you all to go out and share in this grand dubious achievement. But as a supporter of good writing, I can’t.
I could also say I could’ve written this book. But I wouldn’t have.
On one level, Never Mind Nirvana’s a Seattle translation of Ellis’s NYC-beautiful-people novels. Its 237 pages include references to several hundred Seattle-scene people, places, and institutions. The references are pretty much all accurate (some were fairly obviously taken from Loser). But they often feel wrong. In some passages, it feels as if the author had worked from reference material without going to the place he was writing about (a la Kafka’s Amerika).
(Yet I know Lindquist has been here; he hung out at the bars and clubs he refers to, and has pesonally known a few of the real-life music-scene people to whom he gives cameo appearances.)
Lindquist’s protagonist Pete, like Lindquist himself, has a day job as an assistant prosecuting attorney. Pete’s also a former “grunge” musician (yes, he dreaded G-word appears regularly) whose private life involves trawling the bars for pickups (he boinks three women within the first 100 pages, not counting a flashback scene involving his favorite groupie from his rocker days).
He’s also suffering from the creeping-middle-age angst that, in novels, apparently turns the most outgoing and smooth-talking people into compulsive introspective worriers.
Then there’s the main plot of the novel, the aspect that’s attracted the main part of the bad-vibes reputation it’s got among the local rock-music clique.
Lindquist has taken a real-life date rape allegation against a prominent local musician and turned it into fodder for a quasi-exploitive courtroom-procedural plot. (Could be worse; he could’ve made it a “courtroom thriller.”) Since the case is seen strictly from the prosecution’s point of view, the musician’s guilt is presumed at the start and is never seriously questioned.
The many Clinton/Lewinsky jokes peppered throughout the text might be the author’s attempt at an “understated” comparison between the talk-radio depiction of Clinton (as a selfish heel who thinks he’s got the right to do anything to anybody) and the musician-defendent.
At least Lindquist appropriates enough of the less-than-clear aspects of the original case, a complicated situation in which both parties were drunk and/or stoned and in which even the accuser’s testimony could easily leave doubts whether the encounter was sufficiently forceful or involuntary to be legally definable as rape.
(In the real case, all charges were dropped. In the novel’s version, the narrative ends at a mistrial, with the prosecutor expecting to win a conviction at the re-trial.)
A novel that was really about the Seattle music scene in the post-hype era could still be written, and it would have plenty of potential plot elements that Lindquist either ignores or breezes through.
It could be about trying to establish a rock band at a time when the business largely considers rock passe; in a town where a young middle-class adult’s increasingly expected to forgo such “slacker” pursuits in favor of 80-hour-a-week careerism.
It would be about people still deeply involved (trapped?) in their artistic milieu, not about a pushing-40 lawyer.
Perhaps a just-past-40 online columnist? Naaah, that’d never work either.
TOMORROW: Some other things we could demand as part of the big Microsoft verdict.
HIPNESS, REBELLION, the counterculture–whatever you call it, it’s been so thoroughly colonized by advertisers for so long, even the normally out-of-it LA Times has caught onto it.
But not everybody’s caught on.
Just last night, I was talking to a couple of longtime skateboard doodz. One of them was discussing his attempt to start his own brand of T-shirts and backpacks. He was hoping to attract skaters to his logo, away from some other brand that’s apparently gone too far beyond the boarders’ in-crowd toward amainstream markets.
(These aren’t the exact words he used. I won’t embarrass myself by trying and failing to replicate his jargon; which, like that of many hip white kids, is that of white kids trying to talk like black hip-hop kids, gettng it subtly wrong, and inventing something new as a result.)
Anyhoo, I could have gone on my usual rant about that being the way marketing works these days–to start out gaining hip street-cred, then using it to sell mass quantities in the malls. But it was getting late at night and would have been futile anyway.
Guys like him have grown up immersed in brands, and naturally seek self-identification via new brands, brands they can call their very own.
Even the anti-branding movement expresed in publications like Adbusters and No Logo just takes branding-as-identity to its mirror image. Instead of identifying yourself by what you buy, you’re identifying yourself by what you don’t buy, or by the corporate logos you sneer at on your own anti-corporate jacket patches.
Is this inevitable? After all, iconography has long been part of human social existence, from ancient Egypt to the totem poles. And turning oneself into a walking icon is as old as body modification (something skaters and other hipsters love these days, except for those modifications judged by present-day westerners to be misogynistic.)
Perhaps a new tactic’s needed. Perhaps, instead of promoting logos intended ultimately to advertise their own ventures, the entrepreneurs of street-level, small-scale hipster fashion could instead start coming up with words, phrases, designs, colors, patterns, fabrics, and styles intended to subvert the notion of corporate demographic marketing.
I don’t know what that would be–maybe something so utterly square, so non-class-specific, so anti-exclusionary, it couldn’t possibly be turned into something Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger could take over.
Oops–sorry. That was already tried.
Some people called it “grunge.”
TOMORROW: Making it truly hip to be square.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
YOU DON’T HAVE to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
But apparently you have to be a Republican to be willing to publicly express such weariness.
Today’s case in point: Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a new book by card-carrying Weekly Standard essayist David Brooks.
Brooks’s official point is to skewer the ever-pandered-to upscale ex-radicals and their younger brethern, whom Brooks collectively brands as “bobos” or “bourgeois bohemians,” engaged in a united lifelong cult of self-congratulation.
His real point, natch, is to himself pander to his own audience. Brooks depicts Those Nasty Liberals as today’s version of Spiro Agnew’s “effette snobs,” so as to let his conservative readers smugly imagine themselves as at least relatively populistic and unpretentious in comparison.
Nevertheless, Brooks does have a few points left-of-center folk should ponder.
Like Tom Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, Brooks chronicles how marketers and the media took ’60s-generation “identity politics” and successfully took all the politics out, leaving pure demographic target marketing. Advertisers re-defined political activism as something the special people of the special generation used to do, something that helped make them so gosh-darned special and hence deserving of some really special consumer products.
But the ads and the TV human-interest pieces and the newspaper columns lavishing praise beyond praise upon the Generation That Thinks It’s God always depict activism as an activity of a past, never-to-be-repeated Golden Age. Speaking out today, on behalf of anything more threatening than the right to the very freshest produce, is considered so beyond-the-pale as to be unmentionable.
“But,” you say, “activism’s come back, perhaps stronger than ever, thanks to the Way-New Left, as shown at the WTO and IMF protests.”
(Well, maybe you’d say it a little more conversationally than that, but you catch my drift.)
Yeah, but the Way-New Left’s threatening already to get trapped in many of the same mistakes that doomed the old New Left to effective irrelevance.
Some of the noisier, more easily caricaturable elements of the new protest movement are too easily tempted by oversimplistic us-vs.-them platitudes (vegan vs. carnivore, hip vs. square, raver vs. jock, neopagan vs. Christian, etc.). The very sort of see-how-special-we-are identity ploys that so easily devolve into mere ad slogans. (“Some people want to change the world. We just want to change your oil.”)
So, for this and all future generations, a few words of reminder:
Politics isn’t about being, it’s about doing.
Politics isn’t always fun or thrilling or even sexy. If hedonistic thrills are what you’re after, consumer-materialism will always provide those more consistently.
Politics isn’t always hip. A lot of it has to do with improving the lives of whole classes of people who’ve never lived in college towns or been to a single punk concert.
TOMORROW: Mount St. Helens, still a boomin’ favorite after twenty years.
