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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.
AFTER AN HOUR of watching architect Rem Koolhaas’s slide presentation at Benaroya Hall on 5/3, I finally figured out the dual schemes behind Koolhaas’s design for the new Seattle library:
(1) It’s a giant, 15-story, uneven, vertical pile of books. (Imagine the stack of law books in the Perry Mason closing credits)
(2) It’s also the linear, angular, rational counterpart to the Experience Music Project’s touchy-feely curves and textures.
Seattle’s a town where yang-oriented geeks and eggheads have long been prized (Boeing engineers, software coders, biotech researchers). But it’s also a town where more yin-ish salespeople and dealmakers have brought the real money in.
The new library and EMP, while situated some two miles apart from one another, will provide a balanced tribute to both sides of the city’s character.
I could bore you with rundowns of how Koolhaas (yes, it’s pronounced “cool-house”) discussed the building’s schemes for foot-traffic flow, seizmic safety, natural-light bringing-in, computer access, balance between public-gathering and info-storage functions, and ability to handle expanded multimedia collections. But if you’re anything like most of the packed Benaroya audience, you want to know about two particular aspects of the design:
(1) The translucent floors on certain levels won’t be so see-thru that enterprising Net-entrepreneurs could use them in making “upskirt” image sites.
(2) And the spiraling central corridor of book stacks (officially devised not as a tribute to the labyrintian monastic library in The Name of the Rose but to allow “the uninterrupted flow” of the Dewey Decimal system) won’t be too steep for either wheelchairs or employees’ carts, Koolhaas insists. It’ll just be a gentle four-percent grade, much easier to handle than the steep 20-percent-grade Benaroya Hall aisles (or the spiraling galleries at NYC’s Guggenheim Muesum).
Koolhaas tried to prove his point with still photos of a full-size mockup of the sloping stacks, built on short notice by the Seattle Opera scene shop. The photos showed humans and wheeled devices ascending and descending and stopping on the ramped floor with ease.
You might be able to make your own test; the mockup might be installed for a couple days or so at the current downtown library later this month. If that happens, you might even be able to give it the real test–how well it allows for the descent of marbles, Hot Wheels cars, and Slinkys.
CORRECTION OF THE WEEK (Tom Heald at TV Barn: “A few weeks ago this column may have implied that pop stars Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears may not be ‘naturally curvy.’ What I meant to say is that they are untalented. I regret possibly offending their fans.”
TOMORROW: You don’t have to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
ELSEWHERE:
PLENTY OF BAD MOVIES have come from good books.
And, occasionally, a good movie has come from a bad book.
Today’s case study: American Psycho.
Folks who’ve seen the movie but haven’t read the book have had a hard time believing the book was so dumb when the movie was so smart.
Where the movie was witty, bitingly satirical, and equipped with a standard story arc, the book was dull and repetitive, and didn’t end; it just stopped.
Where the movie depicted title character Patrick Bateman’s crimes obliquely, as possibly just his own fantasies, the book made them all too real and depicted them all too explicitly.
And where the movie has Bateman killing (or fantasizing about killing) anyone who even moderately annoys him, the book’s psycho principally kills beautiful women, principally as a power-fetish obsession.
Before the book came out, as some of you may remember, it was the topic of a boycott campaign by certain radical feminists who’d apparently neither (1) read it nor (2) heard that a novel’s chief character isn’t always a “hero.” The boycotters wanted folks to not only not buy Psycho but any other book from any publisher that dared put it out (except for books written by radical feminists).
When the book came out, the boycott campaign quietly faded. It was instantly clear to any reader that author Bret Easton Ellis (Glamorama, Less Than Zero) wanted to update the Jack the Ripper legend to 1980s Wall Street. He wanted to depict his modern-day setting as a parallel to pre-Victorian London, another place where decadent rich kids thought they had the unquestionable right to do anything they wanted, to anyone they wanted to do it to.
But Ellis’s thematic ambitions greatly dwarfed his literary abilities. The result was a borderline-unreadable mishmosh of heavy-handed moralizing, repeating the same plot sequence several times:
1. Bateman works at his bank job, making merger deals that make him rich while sending workers at the merged companies to unknown, and uncared-about, fates. 2. Bateman hangs out with his “friends;” chats about some of the fine brand-name consumer products he has or will soon get. 3. He meets someone, usually female, often someone he’s previously known (an ex or a recent date). 4. He gets her alone and emotionlessly, methodically butchers her. Repeat step 1.
1. Bateman works at his bank job, making merger deals that make him rich while sending workers at the merged companies to unknown, and uncared-about, fates.
2. Bateman hangs out with his “friends;” chats about some of the fine brand-name consumer products he has or will soon get.
3. He meets someone, usually female, often someone he’s previously known (an ex or a recent date).
4. He gets her alone and emotionlessly, methodically butchers her.
Repeat step 1.
The movie’s director and co-screenwriter Mary Harron was told by her backers to cut way down on the book’s explicit violence, both to ensure an “R” rating and to make it more acceptable to female moviegoers. When she did that, she also restructured the story. She emphasized the dark humor and social commentary Ellis had tried and failed to achieve.
She’s made a movie nice upscale audiences can go see, then chat about later, comfortably imagining themselves to not be anything like the psycho Bateman and his shallow drinking buddies.
Meanwhile, the real-life Batemans on Wall Street and elsewhere continue to pull the strings of a consolidating economy, destroying thousands of livelihoods (though not directly destroying lives) and seldom giving it a second thought.
TOMORROW: Could Microsoft become a greater threat apart than together?
(NOTE: YESTERDAY AND TODAY, we’re running excerpts from “Tropisms,” a slide lecture given in March at Richard Hugo House by Matthew Stadler, author of the novels Allan Stein and The Sex Offender.)
BY THE 1960s, one highway was insufficient and a ring-road was proposed to save downtown.
The Monson Plan, 1963. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s ideal of a Radiant City, Seattle planned a ring-road and high rises to clear out open space in the downtown.
Four parking reservoirs, one at each corner of the ring (capacity, 13,000). Entire reconstruction of the waterfront, including the elimination of the Pike Place Market. A new government center. Leveling of Pioneer Square with slab towers to be built in the cleared open space. And more!
The battle of competing visions was carried out not only through bureaucracies and debate, but also through drawings. Most of the plans we’ve been looking at are just powerful drawings–political tools.
A professor of architecture at the UW, Victor Steinbrueck, published his own vision of Seattle, Seattle Cityscape (1961), just before Monson became a public plan. These competing visions could not have been more starkly realized:
SLIDE: MONSON PLAN SMITH TOWER BIRD’S-EYE VIEW
The Monson Plan.
SLIDE: STEINBRUECK SMITH TOWER STREET SCENE
Steinbrueck has taken us down to ground level–now we’re pedestrians, not planners; we live here, not lord over here.
Steinbrueck asserts so much with these drawings–with his style of densely overlapping lines he asserts that the urban fabric is so tightly, intricately woven that no one part of it can be removed without damaging the whole; he asserts this is a place of hidden, obscured lives, into which we may project/find our own fantasies and meanings.
Steinbrueck’s drawings were as powerful, even successful, a projection of the private imagination into civic realities as were the Monson drawings, or any of R.H. Thomson’s less delicate or graceful projections.
SLIDE: MONSON PLAN, OVERVIEW
The Monson plan was funded by the city in collaboration with the downtown business group, the Seattle Central Association. It was received enthusiastically by the Times, which helped argue for the $225 million in public money that was being asked to fill out the $575 million budget.
Within a few months, opposition news began appearing in the Times’s back pages.
Finally, the news (in Seattle, the equivalent of an obituary) of the decision to defer and “make a study.” (Headline: “Central Plan Foes Win Partial Victory”).
This process helped catalyze the ideology and infrastructure of preservation in Seattle: Allied Arts. Save the Market.
Also, drawing styles changed; so even the pro-Monson reports of the Urban Design Commission in the mid-’70s feature Steinbrueck-style populist street scenes.
By the late ’60s and early ’70s, both consciousness and practice in the city were well prepared to resist proposals such as John Graham’s 1966 proposed renovation of Pioneer Square.
The meaningful give-and-take that determined the place and impact of these projects–themselves the product of many private visions colliding–was as much effected by forms such as drawing, public speaking, even party-going, as they were by government and city planners.
There are no clean dividing lines between “real” projects and the fantasies from which action springs. Victor Steinbrueck’s drawings are merely different in scale or degree from R.H. Thomson’s regrades–they are not different in kind.
Built projects can also be graceful, leaving a delicate trace, nimble, and mutable in the hands or minds of the present:
SLIDE: A.Y.P. AT NIGHT
Buildings from the Alaska-Yukon Exposition stayed with us (the architecture building on UW campus is the only structure still remaining, other than the Drumheller Fountain); the images have also persisted.
Even real buildings can function the way I think fictions and drawings do–flexible, intimate yet autonomous, available to each of us to be made or remade into meaning.
SLIDE: SEATTLE TOWER BUILDING IN FOG, WITH MT. RAINIER IN BACKGROUND
Notice how this most-beautiful, most flexible and graceful of the city’s buildings pays its respects to the humbling forms around it, the enormous ones on the horizon.
And, most astonishing of all, this vision is real, material, built here in this city, yet as it stands is as unreal and available as a novel or a dream of the city.
All our projections of the private imagination into the civic space should be so graceful.
TOMORROW: Yet another doomed cool place.
JAMES TWITCHELL, a U. of Florida English prof, has written three books discussing, and generally praising, late-modern pop culture: Adcult (which I haven’t read), Carnival Culture (which I generally liked), and his newest, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (which I’ve mixed feelings about).
I had a chat the other night with one of Twitchell’s former students. This ex-student claims Twitchell loves to parade himself about as a Lone Wolf Conservative among all those pesky Marxist deconstructionists running amok within academe.
God, there are so many of these guys, and they all claim they’re the only one out there. Such double-faced smugness–to suck up to the real centers of power and money in this country, yet to still proclaim yourself a daring rebel of the “look at how un-PC I am” variety.
Twitchell at least acknowledges that he’s worked hard over many years to hone just such a self-image, and has used the acquisition and display of consumer goods for this purpose. In the last chapter of Temptation, he describes having bought a Mazda Miata (that favorite vehicle of 50-year-old boys) precisely to distinguish himself from all those other cult-studies profs with their identical ugly Volvos.
As for the book itself, it’s a mostly-defensive essay of praise, not necessarily for consumerism but for the impulses and desires upon which it feeds.
Twitchell’s main statement, which he keeps repeating throughout the volume: “Once adults are clothed, fed, and sexually functioning, their needs are cultural, not natural.”
So far, I’d agree. Give us bread but give us roses, as the old suffragette anthem said. Man does not live by bread alone, someone else said long before that. Various attempts at stern, utilitarian, no-fun cultural constructs (from the Puritans to Pol Pot to the utopian schemes of modern-day vegan prudes) have been short-lived precisely because (among other factors) they failed to address people’s needs for self-expression.
Twitchell’s right when he says advertisers don’t “manufacture needs” so much as they exploit (or at least try very hard to exploit) any and every impulse and urge; the more basic and visceral the better. Sexual attractiveness? There’s a product for that. Excitement? Relaxation? There’s stuff that’ll give it to ya. Want to speed up or slow down, to simplify or complicate your life? You can buy something to help. Want to rebel, to fit in, or (more likely) fit in with other rebels? Just wear the right look, eat the right food, listen to the right music, and (yes) read the right websites.
Twitchell’s also right when he notes that anti-materialism, as commonly practiced among North American “alternative” types, is really just another flavor of materialism. If you define youself with organic foods and grey sweaters and acoustic guitars and non-animal-tested soap, you’re still defining yourself by what you buy.
Where I essentially disagree with Twitchell is where he says it’s basically good that our urges and impulses have so largely become corporate assets. Just as there’s more behind the Quest for Stuff than just the satisfaction of primitive needs, so should there be more to human life than simply servitude to Sacred Business.
TOMORROW: The continuing story of CNBC.
YOU KNOW I LOVE JIM HIGHTOWER, that Texas tornado of progressive commentatin’.
So you can expect I’d recommend his latest book-length screed, If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They’d Have Given Us Candidates.
Alternately angry, cynical, skeptical, alarmist, and hopeful, Hightower wittily offers detail after sordid detail on just how politics in the U.S. of A. has gotten so pathetic.
The short version of his argument is just as you might expect: All the past primary season’s main presidential candidates and both major parties are wholly-owned subsidiaries of corporate money, managed by slick consultants, and completely out of touch with the non-wealthy.
The nation’s fastest-rising political bloc, Hightower continues, is that of disgruntled non-voters. But the parties don’t mind this; because, like so many other corporate enterprises, they no longer care about “the masses” and only wish to persue niche markets (i.e., identifiable “likely voters” who can be easily manipulated by target marketing, attack ads, and loud speeches on non-issues such as flag burning).
So far, so good (or rather, so bad).
But then Hightower introduces one of his frequent radio topics: Two-Party-System Nostalgia.
He repeatedly insists that there was once a time when the Democrats stood for something more than just winning elections and building party bureaucracy at any cost.
As a Texan, living all his life on the edge of what used to be the territory of segregationist Dixiecrats, he oughta know better.
Through most of the past century, the Republican party has had three traditional constituencies, which sometimes have had contradictory goals but which have more or less stuck together in the party fold: Big business, rural churchgoers, and the Rabid Right.
The Democrats’ history is a lot more complicated.
It’s been the party of FDR and JFK, of George Wallace and the senior Richard Daley, of the AFL-CIO and AOL-Time Warner, of Tammany Hall grafters in New York and pious reformers in Minnesota.
Its chief organizational imperitave, through all these factions and eras, has been to amass whatever combinations of voting blocs, no matter how transient or fluid, could be cobbled together to win elections.
Many individual Democrats and groups within the party over the years have, of course, sincerely sought to improve the environment, help the poor and the working class, end bigotry, and/or promote world peace.
But the party’s also had plenty of cold-war hawks, Chamber of Commerce toadies, corrupt ward-heelers, Military-Industrial Complex lackeys, panderers to racism, and funnelers of public subsidies into private retail projects.
Currently, the party’s national bureaucracy’s thoroughly run by corporate butt-kissers. If you ask any of them why they’re such money-stooges (and I have), they’ll tell you the only way to hope to beat the Republicans is to play by the Republicans’ rules–to raise big money, spend it on ads and consultants, and upon election to do whatever the big money wants.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to stay this way.
And it might not stay this way anyway.
Ultra-big-money campaigning games, as currently constructed, are predicated on Reagan-era presumptions about the social and media landscapes.
In particular, they’re built on the dichotomy of the corporate Mainstream Media (three TV networks, monopoly daily newspapers) and the parallel Conservative Media (talk radio, televangelists, “action alert” newsletters), with no true liberal-advocacy counterpart.
In the Cyber-Age, this doesn’t have to last. Over the next few years, no matter who’s President, we’ll see a flowering of thousands of local and national niche-movements. Many of them will be progressive. Many others will comprise ideological conservatives who don’t want to feed money and votes to corporate Republicans anymore. The WTO protests included a loose coalition of dozens of niche movements and sub-movements, which may or may not agree on any other issue besides the power of global companies.
Hightower, I’m glad to say, does recognize at least some of this stirring-O-discontent, and sees how it might be put to effective use in organizing for a post-corporate politics.
His book’s last line insists it’s a great time to be an American. I couldn’t agree more.
MONDAY: Remembering when downtown retail wasn’t just for the gold-carders.
THERE’S AN AUTHOR named Dave Eggers. He just put out a slightly-fictionalized memoir, immodestly titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
It’s gotten a lot of press attention.
Some reviewers criticize Eggers’s audacity for daring to publish his life story at age 29; and then for writing it in a modified PoMo, self-reflexive, hip-ironic manner.
Other reviewers praise all that.
For the most part, neither group of reviewers seems to know what Eggers’s book is really about.
It’s not about Eggers being a smarty-pants hipster.
It’s about his journey through that stance and finding a way beyond it.
The plot in brief: Eggers is a 21-year-old college grad who returns to his home in a patrician Chicago suburb to tend to his cancer-striken mom. Only his dad turns out to also have the Big C, and both parents die within weeks of one another.
Dave, his big sister Beth, and his orphaned seven-year-old brother “Toph” (short for Christopher) then head out for hyper-hyper San Francisco. There, Dave takes a day job in P.R. while spending much of his inheritance starting Might, a magazine that’s first going to have been The Voice of A New Generation but which quickly turns into typical S.F. fare: Attitude-overdosed hipsters proclaiming how with-it they are and how out-of-it the Rest of America is.
The Might years are rightly disclaimed in Eggers’s long intro as the dullest section of the book. He says they “concern the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time.”
Indeed, the book ends with Dave realizing the meaningless treadmill his life and work had become, as he returns to Illinois for a friend’s wedding and reconnects with the world of his past. The book’s story, Eggers’s personal journey from extended post-adolescence to budding adulthood, ends there.
This personal journey corresponds with Eggers’s professional journey–from merely sneering at mainstream media to exploring a pro-active alternative, and finding it in Lawrence Sterne-esque serious whimsey.
After folding Might and moving to N.Y.C., he took a day job at Esquire. Then, after signing his book deal, he quit that job and started Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, a beautifully-made occasional paperback journal of gentle (but never wimpy) humor and pro-social texts of many types.
In a cultural milieu that values bad-boy hipster Attitude ahead of all other possible values, A Heartbreaking Work and McSweeney’s are attempts to reconnect with what’s great and eternal about human communication and community.
The Eggers of Might was a writer-editor of his period; the Might book collection already seems quite dated indeed.
The Eggers of McSweeney’s is a writer-editor of the timeless.
Perhaps he’s not really a “staggering genius.” But that’s not really what we need right now.
MONDAY: Literary lessons from the business papers.
A KIND READER, noting my recent obsessions with the changing, increasingly hype-ridden language of business journalism and P.R., advised me to check out Cluetrain, a site which talks about just that–among many other “revolution in business” topics.
The site includes the full text of something called “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” a Martin Luther-esque set of “95 Theses.” It also offers samples from a book the manifesto’s four co-authors are selling.
The book adds details to the manifesto’s arguments that the Net is bringing about “The End of Business As Usual”–not just because of online retail but also because “people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”
On the surface, the manifesto writers are proclaiming the imminent decline and fall of corporate gobbledygook and meaningless bureaucratic procedure, in favor of human-scale conversation and systems that make sense.
Dig one level down from that, though, and the “Theses” read like the worst Wired-style bombast. Meet the new hype, same as the old hype.
Like Wired, the manifesto-ists claim their “revolution” is an inevitable, linear, historic course; and that when they call for corporations to change their ways, they’re just helpfully advising these corporations to accept the inevitable or fade into the dustbin-O-history.
(Typical excerpt: “There’s a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”)
But dig one level beneath that, and you could ascertain at least the faint beginnings of a post-hype order.
Not an inevitable post-hype order, but at least a possible one.
Certainly, a hype-reduced business universe would be welcomed by most people, with the possible exception of those who work at generating the hype (capitalism’s equivalent of the USSR’s old “ministers of ideology”).
Instead of buzzwords like “business-to-business solution paradigms” and “the dynamic realignment of restructured global opportunities,” the folks who sell and buy stuff would have to, or even want to, explain exactly what they’re really doing. If they know.
But, as can be seen in Chechnya and the Balkans, a brutal regime that drops its old ideological excuses doesn’t necessarily become less brutal.
And the regime of Global Business, shorn of Dilbert-esque B.S., would still be the regime of Global Business.
It would still seek profit and/or organizational growth to the neglect of other goals or values. It would stil, to a large extent, view the environment as raw materials, employees as machine tools, and human beings as target markets. It would still do everything it could to merge, consolidate, downsize costs, move industrial work to low-wage countries, and remove any governmental or other impediments to its ambitions.
It would simply do these things honestly and directly.
At least with the old buzzwords, companies admitted they had to disguise some of their ambitions and behaviors under convoluted excuses.
TOMORROW: Even in L.A., they complain about losing their civic identity.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Kingdome implosion, held the week after the spring equinox (the old pagan new year) was everything Carl Smool’s Fire Ceremony, a sort of neo-pagan new year’s ritual (rescheduled to the previous Sunday), had been created for.
It was a huge, populist moment–a dramatic goodbye to the past, a shared big spectacle in the present, and a greeting and/or dreading to the future.
(Indeed, several TV and radio commentators made comments to the effect that this was the millennium celebration Seattle didn’t get in January.)
I was at the Dome’s opening party in ’76. The show wasn’t much, but the feeling was warm and electric. Amid the marching bands and ethnic dance troupes and politicians’ speeches was the sense of civic triumph, of having become a gosh-darn Big League city in our own modest, thrifty way, via a big building best appreciated by structural engineers.
But now, the Brave New Seattle has no room for a homely yet functional multi-purpose room. So, a millennial Destruct-O-Rama brought one more community gathering experience.
And it was damned cool. That dome blowed up real good!
(Dome-TV marathon moment (KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison): “Look; there’s an armored personnel carrier. I feel like we’re back at WTO.”)
ANOTHER SOOPER TOOSDAY has come and gone, the party nominations are decided, and damned if I don’t remember a single one of the major Presidential candidates talk about anything like that onetime pie-in-the-sky official goal of Presidential candidates–progress.
These days, the politicians seem to propose nothing more ambitious than cleaning up various perceived governmental messes (soft-money campaign financing, gun-show regulatory loopholes) or restoring a supposed past golden age of integrity and authority in high places.
All our other problems are apparently supposed to be taken care of by that boomin’ private-sector wealth.
It’s a pleasant thought that ignores the extent to which that same boomin’ private-sector wealth is causing or at least exacerbating many of our problems (the money-corruption of elective politics, the rich/poor divide, the affordable-housing crisis, the affordable-health-care crisis, the stagnation in real wages for the non-rich, wrenching consolidations in industry after industry, etc.).
A few folks unconnected with any Presidnetial campaign are thinking about some of these things. Two of them are Harvard profs and prolific essayists Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West. They recently issued a little manifesto-book, The Future of American Progressivism.
The term “Progressive” sometimes denotes a pretty specific strain of the American political tradition. It was strongest in the upper Midwest and here in the Northwest, from the turn of the century until the rise of “pro-business Democrats.”
It emphasized not just a governmental but a social, even an aesthetic, ideal of clean, rational leadership by a well-educated, well-groomed caste of dedicated public servants. Its various “reform” mechanisms (such as at-large city council races), however, often served to consolidate power among WASP farmers and homeowners at the expense of German or Irish Catholic urban-factory workers.
But Unger and West have a different idea of “Progressive” in mind. Theirs is essentially any and all political factions to the left of the corporate Democrats, but more practical than the separatist or ideologically-obsessed far-left cliques.
What’s more, their inclusive attitude extends to their agenda. They don’t have a single “magic bullet” economic or social scheme. Instead, they’re willing to try a lot of different programs in order to advance their general goals–social justice, economic opportunity, minority rights, environmental stewardship, etc.
America’s overriding current problem, as Unger and West (and many other left-O-center observers) see it, is that the old New Deal coalition devolved long ago. Big business rules the whole political agenda, across the board; all liberals seem willing to do these days is propose slightly more humane variations on corporate rule (a tax credit here, a land-use regulation there).
Unger and West want to re-popularize the notion that pro-active work for social progress is both good and possible. Within that framework, they offer up a lot of policy ideas (a value-added tax, job-retraining programs, venture-capital funds for small businesses, mandatory voting, labor-law reforms).
But they’re not firmly committed to any one of those. It’s the results they want, not necessarily any of these specific mechanisms. If one program doesn’t work, try another. They’d put up different pilot programs in different jurisdictions to speed up the process of finding which ones work best.
And that, in itself, might be their most radical idea.
U.S. society has become awfully project-oriented during this Age of Global Business. That Internet “stock bubble” is pouring investment into companies not on the basis of how much money they’re making but on the size of the organizations they’re building. Governmental programs often become entrenched entities most concerned with their own self-preservation, in spite of “sunset laws” devised to stem this.
A neo-prog movement organized around goals, not around organizations or specific projects, could provide just the worldview-shiftin’ kick this world really needs if it’s gonna make any real progress.
MONDAY: It’s an X-treme world.
“I USED TO LAUGH at people stuck in the ’60s,” I wrote in this forum a few years back, “until I met people stuck in the ’80s.”
By that, I meant how bored to laughter I’d always been by aging hippie memoirists and raconteurs who’d incessantly insisted that their endlessly-repeated tales of their own former wild-oat sowing:
The fact that folks my age and even younger are now telling all-too-similar personal histories of their own past “rebellions” only proves:
Which brings us to ex-Rocket writer Ann Powers and her new autobiographical history, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America.
A research- or interview-based book about “bohemian America,” particularly one that got out of the NY/LA/SF media capitals and into the DIY-arts scenes around the 50 states, could be interesting. This book isn’t it.
Instead, Powers discusses little other than her own story, and the story of her wild-‘n’-crazy “rebel” pals in San Francisco and New York. She and/or her close friends form punk bands, take drugs, have gay and/or fetishistic sex, go to all-night parties and raves, and collectively imagine that all this makes them superior to Those People out here in Squaresville America, those people who are all too obsessed with superficial lifestyle crap.
The whole thing ends with an essay on “Selling Out,” in which she attempts to reconcile her adult lifetime of “anti-establishment” stances with her decision to leave the alternative-newspaper biz and take a job at the NY Times.
This part also contains brief references to Sub Pop Records and Kurt Cobain–the book’s only specific references to anything outside N.Y. and Calif., or to anything beyond Powers’s or her pals’ own lives.
Until this last chapter, Powers seems to imply that all us hicks out here in The Provinces are deathlessly awaiting the latest transgressive style trends from the media capitals, so we can stop mindlessly obeying the dictates of midtown Manhattan and southern California and instead start mindlessly obeying the dictates of downtown Manhattan and northern California.
Melanie Phillips, an editorialist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers, recently wrote an essay complaining that her readers have mistakenly thought her to be a right-wing reactionary. She’s really a progressive, Phillips insists–she just believes real progress doesn’t come by encouraging decadent lifestyles. But then Phillips goes on to detail some of what she believes constitutes decadent lifestyles: gays, single moms, the divorced and remarried, etc. etc. So it’s easy to imagine how Phillips’s readers could mistake her for a flaming Thatcherite. Heck, I could.
But still, there’s at least a tiny core of truth within Phillips’s posturing.
It’s proper and necessary to promote gay-les-bi-etc. civil rights, to advocate freedom of (or from) religion, to make difficult-listening music and not-necessarily-pleasant art. But none of those things are really “transgressive” anymore.
In today’s Age of Demographic Tribes, neopagans and BDSM fetishists and Phish-heads are just more lifestyle-based consumer subcultures, all too easily identifiable for purposes of target marketing.
In this regard, both Phillips (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who dislikes that) and Powers (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who likes that) are mistaken.
Yes, America (and Britain and the world) needs folks who boldly assert their rights to engage in specialty-taste ways of life and forms of fun. But bohemian hedonism of the classic post-’60s formula, especially as practiced by unholier-than-thou alternative elitists (in cities big and less-big), strengthens, not subverts, the power of the corporate-consumer culture.
As long as you define yourself by what you consume, you’re still primarily identifying yourself as a consumer.
And as long as you define yourself by your supposed different-ness from (or superiority to) everyone whose lifestyle’s different from yours, then you’re playing into the hands of a culture that keeps people trapped in their separate demographic tribes, preventing the cross-cultural community real progress needs.
Everybody’s really “weird like us” in their own special way. We need to find a way to reach out to all the other weirdos in this great big world, including those weirdos who seem square at first glance.
Something else I wrote here a few years back: “We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We need to figure out how to put it back together.”
TOMORROW: The Internet needs fewer tall guys and more fat guys.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattleites finally got an honest-to-Bacchus Mardi Gras rowdy-fest for the first time in two decades. The Seattle Times would have undoubtedly covered it in Wednesday’s edition, but it’s a morning paper now and the drunken troublemakers were arrested after the paper’s new deadlines. What Wednesday Times readers got instead: A front-page-blurbed feature, “Your Complete Guide to Flossing.”
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea (see below).
TIRED OF WTO-PROTEST MEMOIRS? Tough. ‘Cause here’s some more.
But these aren’t just police-brutality horror stories or look-at-me boasts.
The Tentacle, Seattle’s own invaluable periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music, has published a group of personal essay on the protests by its co-editors Henry Hughes, Christopher DeLaurenti, and Dennis Rea.
The three pieces, especially Hughes’s, offer up an intriguing premise: that protesting global corporations isn’t enough. The likes of Microsoft and ExxonMobil, according to these guys, are merely the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations” and “centralized… top-heavy organizations.”
Hughes also seems not to mind if the grand anti-WTO coalition of leftists, environmentalists, unions, et al. splits apart, because his own “politics are an order of magnitude more radical than that of organized labor.” He’s also less-than-enthusiastic about any organized, permanent activist group that becomes “an organization with the agenda of self-perpetuation, rather than a loose tool for fomenting revolution.”
According to Hughes, the problem isn’t just business empires but the whole 20th-century structure of organized human relations in which such empires (or even more centralized empires such as the Stalin or Hitler types) take root.
This is similar to the philosophy of the late Marxist/Freudian thinker Wilhelm Reich, who believed the western world needed massive political and economic changes, but those changes were impossible unless individuals learned to change the way they thought and behaved in their personal lives.
So–how do you accomplish that?
Hughes and Rea believe the kind of music they’ve been championing in The Tentacle for over a year now offers a sonic and social glimpse of their preferred alternative society.
Rea believes “experimental music is much closer in its aims and methods to the radical spirit of the demonstrations than any other form of music you can name.
“Like many of the WTO demonstrators,” Rea continues, some “improvising and experimental musicians advocate the abolition of outmoded and restrictive structures of organization, in this case musical structures that have long since outlived their usefulness. As one musician friend put it, improvised music at its best is a demonstration of anarchy in action–self-governance and collective action manifested in musical terms.”
Much as certain advocates of obscurantist political writing believe modern notions of “clarity” depend too much on linear or dumbed-down thought processes, Rea and Hughes believe the very forms and structures of standard western music (not just the major-label system that disseminates it) keep human minds and souls locked into standardized, authoritarian modes.
But much obscurantist writing (such as the writing styles used in certain religious cults) is used to actually encourage authoritarian obedience. Free-improv and experimental musics, on the other hand, stress ingenuity and creativity and personal craft and cooperation and equal collaboration–skills necessary for any real revolution that doesn’t just lead to another power elite running everything.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
YESTERDAY, we started discussing the fantasy universe promoted in those new rah-rah, way-new business magazines, Fast Company and Business 2.0.
But business writing and advice seems to be everywhere.
CNBC runs 15 hours a day of financial coverage. CNN and Fox News Channel have been adding additional hours of money talk to their daytime lineups. Satellite dishes offer the all-day, all-nite stock-talkin’ and number-flashin’ of CNNfn and Bloomberg TV.
There’s a site called GreenMagazine.com that claims to be “about attaining the freedom to do what you want to do,” with investment tips and celebrity financial-advice interviews with the likes of Emo Phillips.
Even Jesse Jackson has a money guidebook called It’s About the Money. In it, Jackson and his Congressmember son talk about financial planning as “The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony” for minority and working-class Americans.
While the Jacksons’ main lessons are pretty basic stuff (get out of debt, avoid those hi-interest credit cards, start saving, build home equity), it’s still more than a bit disconcertin’ to see the onetime Great Lefty Hope now traveling the talk-show circuit with the same subject matter as the Motley Fools.
Perhaps it’s time this website and print magazine got with the program. I can see it now:
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours. “Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime. Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill. “Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime. “You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121. “Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours.
“Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime.
Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill.
“Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime.
“You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121.
“Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
MONDAY: An involuntary single’s thoughts on Valentine’s Day.
IN OTHER NEWS: Hey Vern, Ernest’s dead. Future film historians will look at Jim Varney’s nine-film series as the late-century period’s last true heirs to the old lowbrow B-movie series comedies like The Bowery Boys and even the Three Stooges (also critically unappreciated at their times).
YESTERDAY, we discussed some of the problems that can arise when folks try too hard to make the real world more like their Utopian dreams of a more perfect world–dreams that are almost always too rational, simplistic, and/or monocultural for the chaos that is real-life humanity.
Proclaiming a real-life place to already be a Utopia on earth can be even more problematic.
In the late ’70s, I was assigned a college sociology textbook that had a different indigenous tribe in New Guinea to represent each aspect of the authors’ dream society–matrilinear inheritance, collective decision-making, etc. The teacher didn’t like it when I questioned in class why the textbook’s authors had to find a different tribe for each social trait they wanted to promote, implying there was no one group that had it all.
Idealized societies seldom live up to their idealizers’ fantasies. Cuba’s egalitarianism and Singapore’s orderliness both turn out to be propped up by harsh authoritarian practices. “Unspoiled” rural places are often that way because everybody there is too impoverished to spoil them.
One of the most famous cases of Utopianization was Margaret Mead’s landmark book Coming of Age in Samoa. By now, almost everybody knows Mead’s book, a supposedly rigorous sociological study of “free love” and premarital guiltlessness among Pacific Island teens, wasn’t completely factual. Rather, it represented two urges at least as universal as teen sex-confusion:
Real-life Samoans had, and have, social structures and strictures just like organized societies anywhere on the planet. They might not, on the whole, have had the same specific types of sex-fear and sex-guilt as Westerners (at least before the missionaries did their work); but they had arranged marriages and adultery taboos and all the emotional awkwardness of growing up that you’ll find wherever there are conflicting hormones.
Still, the “Exotic Other” and “Sex-Positive Other” stereotypes remain. And after the Mary Kay LeTourneau TV movie of a few weeks ago, I got to wondering: Would this teacher and her prematurely-mature student have gotten into parental mode if she hadn’t seen those received ideas of innocent licentiousness in his Samoan heritage?
We’re not all one tribe, but we are one species. If we dream of a better way to do things, we shouldn’t force others to express them for us, any more than we should force our current social ways upon them.
(Though the anti-female-genital-mutilation advocates would surely disagree with the latter assertion.)
TOMORROW: Those rah-rah, way-new business magazines.
IN OTHER NEWS: Yep, the Web really is growing like weeds.
WITH Y2KOOKINESS long past by now, we might be able to resume talking about “The Future” without sounding too much like hype-followers.
We might even get to resume talking about ideal futures, a.k.a. Utopias.
Utopias may never exist here in the realm of the real (indeed, the name literally means “Nowhere”). But they express the kind of society certain people want to create. Thus, they can hold bold and sometimes dangerous dreams–especially if those dreams involve the destruction or subjugation of everyone outside the dreamer’s own group.
Last month’s Atlantic Monthly carried a roundup of “five and a half” currently popular Utopian dreams:
One could go on and on into ever more bifurcated Utopian fantasies; many of which would be someone else’s Reign of Terror.
There’s the one where all males would be held in bondage (if allowed to live at all). There’s the one where all meat eating would be unlawful. There’s the one where the total ideological rule of midtown Manhattan and southern California would be replaced by the total ideological rule of downtown Manhattan and northern California. There’s the one where the poor would be sent off to boot camps, to learn to become good submissive house boys. There’s the one where all drinkers would get stoned and all stoners would get shot.
What all these have in common is the dream of engendering a simpler, more predictable world by developing (by force if need be) a simpler, more predictable human race. None of these dream futures seems to have a place for anybody like me who believes society’s too simple and predictable already.
Corporate-libertarian writer Virginia Postrel sees a common flaw in both Utopian and anti-Utopian future-fantasies: “A uniform society, a flattened, unnuanced world designed by a few smart men.” She seems to find that a heresy against her own belief in capitalist hero figures continually emerging to seize the day.
I’d go even further, diversity-wise, than Postrel. My kind of Utopia’s one where entreprenurial crusaders wouldn’t get to run everything, because commerce wouldn’t be considered the totality or even the centrality of all human endeavor.
More about that some other time.
TOMORROW: The problems with proclaiming real-life Utopias.
BAD WRITING has seemingly always been with us.
So has bad writing by academics, self-styled “communications” experts, and others who presumably ought to know better.
I’ve certainly attempted to read a lot of it as part of my cultural-critiquing career. And some of the worst comes from self-styled political leftists–guys ‘n’ gals who supposedly want to overthrow existing elitist institutions in favor of a sociopolitical regime more responsive to The People.
The teaching-biz trade mag Lingua Franca came out last month with a whole article on the topic of whether bad writing was necessary. It’s apparently a big issue in certain ivory-tower circles, according to writer James Miller: “Must one write clearly, as [George] Orwell argued, or are thinkers who are truly radical and subversive compelled to write radically and subversively–or even opaquely, as if through a glass darkly?”
Some campus-leftist obscurantists, of course, aren’t really dreaming for a Dictatorship of the Prolateriat but rather, whether they admit it or not, for a Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia–a society in which learned theoriticians will rationally decide what’s best for everyone (a sort of cross between Sweden and Singapore). Such ideologues will naturally go for ideological discourse that doesn’t make a whiff of sense to outsiders.
Others, according to Miller, actually defend their writing style with anti-authoritarian arguments.
Miller quotes ’50s German philosopher Theodor Adorno as proclaiming that “lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision” are merely “ideologies” that have been “invented” by “editors and then writers” for “their own accommodation….” “Concrete and positive suggestions for change merely strengthen [the power of the status quo], either as ways of administering the unadministratable, or by calling down repression from the monstrous totality itself.”
In short (just the way Adorno wouldn’t want it): Readable writing can’t help but reflect standardized, conformist ways of thinking. To imagine a truly radical alternative to the way things are, you’ve gotta use different thought processes, and use written forms that reflect these processes.
I don’t buy it.
You see, there’s this little discipline called “technical writing.” Maybe you’ve heard of it. A lot of ladies and gents in this hi-tech age are studying it.
One of the tenets of good tech writing is that some topics are naturally complex–such as PC hardware and software design, operation, and maintenance. But they still can and should be explained as clearly as reasonably possible, without losing necessary detail or treating the reader as an idiot. Certain works of tech writing necessarily require that the reader have a basic familiarity with the topic at hand, and will use certain nouns and verbs not used in everyday discourse, but should still strive to communicate what they’re trying to communicate effectively and efficiently.
Political and social theories can be as complex as circuit-board schematics and C++ programming code, if not more. But, as shown in the products of Common Courage Press and Seven Stories Press, among others, these ideas can still be expressed in readable, persuasive ways.
TOMORROW: The one sexual behavior women never do–or do they?
NEW-MILLENNIUM HYPE’S DIED DOWN ENOUGH by now, I trust (this is being written a couple days in advance), that you won’t mind if I start in again bashing those futurists who can’t imagine a future without their own sort running things.
Just as Xerox staff futurists imagined future offices all centered around copiers, the NY and Calif. cultural trend-diviners keep presuming all pop-cult product in years to come will be funnelled thru the likes of Viacom, Time Warner, Hearst, Fox, and Silicon Valley’s most prominent dot-coms.
DIgital video? To the likes of Newsweek, it’s just a new toy for Hollywood.
MP3s? The NY Times has officially dismissed its utility as anything but a promo mechanism for established major-label acts.
At some press junket three or four years ago, a PR agent from LA confided in me what she believed to be the eternal procedure of pop-cult trends (whether they be in the fields of music, fashion, food, games, or graphics):
1. Something catches on somewhere. It could be anything, it could be from anywhere. But it will die unless–
2. The NY/LA/SF nexus takes it over and turns it into something mass-marketable; then–
3. The masses everywhere eat it up, get tired of it, and patiently await the next trend foisted upon them.
I told her that was going to cease to be the inevitable course of everything one of these years. She refused to believe me.
Even today, with the Net and DIY-culture spreading visions and ideas from every-which-place to every-which-place (including many visions and ideas I heartily oppose) without the Northeast/Southwest gatekeepers, I still read from folks who cling to the belief that America inevitably follows wherever Calif. and/or NY lead.
It’s never been true that everything from underwear to ethnic-group proportions follows slavishly from the NE/SW axis. Country music, while eventually taken over by the media giants (even the Nashville Network’s now owned by CBS), developed far from the nation’s top-right and lower-left corners. So did R&B, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime, jazz, etc. etc.
American literature has its occasional Updike or Fitzgerald, but also plenty of Weltys, Faulkners, Cathers, Poes, Hemingways, and others from all over.
What could these creators, and others in the performing and design and visual arts, have done without centralized publishers, galleries, agents, and other middlemen controlling (or preventing) audience access? Quite a bit more than they did, I reckon.
And as online distribution and publicity, DIY publishing and filmmaking, specialty film-festival circuits, and other ascendent means of cultural production mature, the artistically-minded of the 21st Century won’t have to even bother dumbing down their work to what some guy in Hollywood thinks Americans will get.
I’ve talked about this a lot, I know; but I’ve failed to give one particularly clear example: The live theater.
New Yorkers still like to imagine “the national theater” as consisting only of those stages situated on a certain 12-mile-long island off the Atlantic coast, and inferior “regional theater” as anything staged on the North American mainland.
T’aint the case no more.
These days, the real drama action takes place in the likes of Minneapolis, Louisville, and Ashland (and, yes, Seattle). What Broadway’s stuck with these days is touristy musical product, often conceived in London (or, for a few years this past decade, in Toronto) to play long enough to spawn touring versions in all the “restored” downtown ex-movie palaces of the U.S. and Canada. Off-Broadway these days gets its material from the other regions at least as often as it feeds material to them.
Another example: I’m writing this while listening to a giveaway CD from Riffage.com, one of the many commercial websites now putting up music by indie and unsigned bands from all over, in vast quantities. (Others include EMusic, Giant Radio, and MP3.com.)
This particular CD uses MP3 compression to cram in 150 tracks, all by bands I’ve never heard of and may never hear of again. And that’s OK. I’m perfectly happy with a future where more musicians might be able to practice their art their own way and make a half-decent material living at it; as opposed to a recent past where thousands gave up in frustration as all the money and attention went to a few promoted superstars (whose lives often wound up in VH1 Behind the Music-style tragedies).
Sure, there’s mucho mediocrity on the Riffage CD. But that’s OK too.
I’d rather have a wide regional and stylistic range of mediocrity than some LA promoter’s homogenized, narrow selection of mediocrity.
TOMORROW: This same geographic-centricism as applied to topics of race and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some of you might have seen a parody Nike ad disseminated by countless e-mail attachments during the WTO fiasco. It depicted a nonviolent protester attempting to flee from Darth Vader-esque riot cops. The tag line: “Just Do It. Run Like Hell.” Well, during the college football bowl games (ending tonight), there’s a real Nike commercial depicting an everyday jogger dutifully executing his morning run in spite of numerous Y2K-fantasy disasters and destructions all around–including street riots.
