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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.
ELSEWHERE:
“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.
I’M PRETTY SURE you’re all damn sick-N-tired of the millennial hype by now.
So we’ll take a few days off from the whole new-era talk, and instead talk about an era that’s ending today.
When other boys in the mid-’60s were into the likes of Spider-Man, I was collecting Peanuts books.
The Fawcett Crest volumes, to be precise–mass-market paperbacks that arranged four-panel daily strips into full-page layouts, often with additional, anonymous artwork that usually ruined the deceptive simplicity of Charles Schulz’s designs. (Yes, I could realize that as a kid.)
My family didn’t subscribe to a paper that carried the daily strip; so the books, which showed up in supermarket newsracks a year or two after the strips’ original newspaper publication, provided my only access to them.
Eventually, I tracked down the better Peanuts books–the Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston trade paperbacks that stacked two strips per page in proper sequence.
When the papers announced “the first in a series of animated adaptations” of the strip, I was elated. You can imagine my disappointment when I found out the “series” wasn’t going to be a weekly visit with the gang but just occasional specials. The week after A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired in all its depressing glory, I glommed up to the black-and-white Magnavox only to find a regular episode of that mediocre sitcom The Munsters.
A very Charlie Brown-y moment.
Like a lot of smart, unathletic, unpopular boys throughout North America, I identified a lot with Charlie Brown.
He was no dumbed down kid-lit tyke like the Family Circus brood, nor an artificially cheery “lovable loser” like Ziggy or The Born Loser. He was a realistic kid with realistic kid frustrations. He lived in a cookie-cutter suburb like the one growing around our house.
He was lousy at sports, at making friends, at one-upsmanship games–at everything except verbally articulating his troubles; a skill that often just led him into deeper troubles, thanks to “friend” Lucy’s “Psychiatric Help” booth.
His only true friend was a dog whose hyperactive playfulness settled into an elaborate fantasy existence, part of which Charlie Brown was once invited into (the sequence in which Snoopy’s tiny dog house was revealed (verbally but not visually) to be a Doctor Who-like dimensional portal into a vast, art-filled mansion).
Such occasional flights of fancy (a boy known only as “5;” Pig-Pen’s magical ability to become instantly unclean) somehow only enhanced the “realism” of the Peanuts universe.
The strips were often funny and more often poignant, and always maintained sympathy with the characters. They taught an infinite number of lessons in comic pacing, dialogue, and the construction of complex narratives within the discipline of daily four-panel installments.
Bill Melendez’s TV specials and movies (all scripted by Schulz) expanded the visual scope of the strip’s universe without breaking its fundamental laws (except for a few of the later shows, which showed adult human characters on-screen). Vince Gauraldi’s jazz-piano music was gorgeously understated. The casting of real child actors to voice the characters’ elaborate dialogue further cemented Schulz’s central tenet that children really do think and talk this intelligently.
But the tight perfection of Schulz’s draftsmanship (at its peak from about 1965 to 1985) was one aspect of the strip that Melendez’s animators never quite mastered. This was a clue that the strip, unlike most strips from before the days of Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County, would not continue without Schulz.
In 1987, Schulz suddenly abandoned the format of four identically-sized panels per strip. Peanuts went to three taller panels most days; except on days when Schulz chose to divide his space differently. At the time, I wrote that, while it brought a new energy to the strip, it ruined one of its main unspoken themes. The rigid repetition of the same number of frames, all the same size, perfectly matched the ultimately hellish concept of these characters forced to repeat the same life mistakes, to remain the same presexual age for eternity.
Now, they finally get to leave their newsprint prison. Not to enter adult freedoms, but merely to disappear.
AARRGH!
IN OTHER NEWS: Thousands took my heed (or, more likely, got the idea on their own) and gathered all around the closed-off Seattle Center to enjoy a healthy, terrorist-free New Year’s despite mayor Paul Schell’s best efforts to ban them. Schell himself showed up to be interviewed on KOMO, and was very properly met outside the TV station by safe-and-sane jeers and catcalls. Good job, citizens. Next step: A recall election that would be a referendum on the city’s now more official than ever damn-the-non-upscale attitude.
IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: The one company you’d expect to have changed its name by this week still hasn’t, at least as of Sunday night.
TOMORROW: A portent of the digi-future most culture mavens don’t want to talk about–the potential obsolescence of culture mavens.
ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.
In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.
But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.
It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.
We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.
We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.
As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)
In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.
The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.
We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.
TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.
AS WE LEFT OFF YESTERDAY, I’d finally gotten around to reading Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s (1850-96) 1888 utopian tract.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every male and childless female citizen from the age of 21 until mandatory retirement at 45, and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Some other aspects of Bellamy’s ideal state:
One person’s utopia, someone I can’t remember once wrote, is another person’s reign of terror. You don’t have to be a Red-baiter to see elements of other folks’ dystopian nightmares within Bellamy’s utopian dreams.
Soviet-style communism used some of the same ideals spouted by Bellamy to justify its police-state brutalities. But the “human face” experiment of post-WWII Euro-socialism had its own problems–uncompetitive enterprises, bureaucratic sloth & corruption, massive worker dissatisfaction.
Of course, neither of those systems went as far as Bellamy would’ve liked. They still had rich-poor gaps and ruling classes. But that’s reality for you.
TOMORROW: Back to the (more likely) future.
SINCE IT’S THE LAST ‘TRIPLE-DOUBLE’ DAY of the century (11/22/99–get it?), I’ve got just as good an excuse as any of the current barrage of century-in-review pundits to go off and pontificate.
But instead of reviewing all the supposedly most important movies, CDs, public speeches, world leaders, or stadium-organ songs of the past 100 years, let’s skip the present century altogether and instead look at the 21st century as somebody imagined it in the 19th.
Edward Bellamy (1850-96) wrote Looking Backward in 1888. Many critics consider it the first major utopian novel written in the U.S.
Like most of the perfect-future tales that have followed, Bellamy’s is less of a story than a tract. The plot, such as it is, is pretty much over by page 50–a wealthy, “refined” young man of 1887 Boston, who’s come to loathe most of railroad-age industrial society, awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000.
From then on, just about all that happens is that our 19th-century sleepyhead looks around the future Beantown, while the kindly doctor who’d awakened him (and the doc’s smashingly-beautiful daughter) simply tell him everything about how wonderful everything has become. (The doctor has a wife, but we see or hear almost nothing of her.)
There are no conflict points in the story, but that’s part of the point.
Bellamy’s ideal future is one of those in which most anything that could result in trauma, let alone drama, has been systematically removed from the social condition.
Indeed, in one chapter the awakened narrator reads from a late-20th-century novel (you millennium-sticklers out there will be relieved to hear Bellamy refers to 2000 as part of the 20th century). Without detailing this other story’s plot or characters, the narrator tells us how weird it was for him to read…
“…a romance from which shall be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer… a romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love unfettered by artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart.”
As you might’ve guessed, Bellamy’s is one of those utopias where nobody goes hungry but nobody’s obscenely wealthy. That’s ’cause everybody works for one employer (a strict-yet-benevolent government “Industrial Army”) for the same wage. (Physical labor and other unpopular jobs are made to be as attractive as cushy office posts, by offering shorter hours or unspecified prestige perks)
It was a popular fantasy at the time it was written. Many of Bellamy’s readers had become baffled by the rapidly-changing industrial scene and its massive social consequences–which by 1888 had already included urbanization, telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, monopolies and cartels running key industries, the mass immigration of low-paid laborers from such places as Germany and China, the lonely-guy culture of single-male immigrant workers (hookers, saloons, gambling), tenement housing, coal-smoke pollution, nationally advertised brand-name products, and the first large-scale labor strikes.
To those dismayed by the 1880s present, an end-O-history future, a stable and prosaic future with no conflicts or worries, would seem mighty desirable.
TOMORROW: More on why Bellamy’s scheme wouldn’t work, why he and his readers thought it might, and lessons for muddling through the real century-switch.
ONE OF MY FAVORITE Net-centric literary forms is the funny list. Not necessarily the faux-Letterman type, but the more informal, longer, add-on-your-own type.
Among my favorites: The “Ways to Annoy Your Roommate” list.
A few days ago, I suddenly had an idea for a perfect annoy-your-roommate concept that I hadn’t seen on any such lists: Rent porn videos, and fast-forward past everything EXCEPT the dialogue scenes.
That simple idea led to a more elaborate one: Rent porn videos, and then use a second VCR to copy only the dialogue scenes.
Then I got to thinking: These throwaway plot parts constitute one of today’s most ephemeral commercial-art genres. A genre that should be studied and preserved.
That one notion, natch, led to more.
There are plenty of such genres and forms, still underdocumented by a popcult-scholar racket still obsessed with Madonna deconstructions. Here are some:
Somebody already put out a picture book showing old Apple Computer employee T-shirts. Somebody else could create a similar, but fictional, book using logos and slogans to depict the rise and fall of an Internet startup from its first big idea, to its venture-capital phase, to its unsuccessful IPO attempt, to its “restructuring for the future” downsizing phase, to its Chapter 11 reorganization, to its last appearance on a shirt “celebrating” another company’s acquisition of its remaining assets.
TOMORROW: A newspaper for the digital age.
AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED, my cable company finally restored the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to my local cable lineup recently.
CBC’s got a lot of great Canadian-made programming (though its audiences and budgets have fallen during the Cable Age, as have those of the old-line U.S. networks).
But my favorite CBC attraction is a British import, the prime-time soap Coronation Street.
“The Street,” as it’s called in the UK tabloid press, will begin its 40th year this December. Most of those years it’s been the country’s most popular show, and the backbone of the commercial ITV network.
But you’ve probably never seen it. Apart from northern U.S. regions that get CBC, the show’s only Stateside exposure came when the USA Network ran it for a few months in the early ’80s, as part of a package deal to get reruns of the miniseries Brideshead Revisited (both shows are from the Granada production company). But American audiences apparently couldn’t decipher some of the characters’ heavy Yorkshire accents; USA dropped the show as soon as it contractually could.
So in 1985, when the BBC devised its own Street knockoff show, EastEnders, they made sure the characters would all be comprehensible when the show was shipped Stateside. Thus, EastEnders plays to loyal audiences on scattered PBS afiliates and the BBC America cable channel.
But there’s nothing like the original.
The Street has a feel all its own. It comes from the “music” of the accents and the dialogue (like EastEnders, Coronation Street uses no background music), the rhythm and pacing of the scenes (few lasting longer than a minute), the lovable non-“beauty” of the cast (even the teenage characters are as awkward-looking as real-life teens often believe themselves to be), the character-driven storylines, and the respect the show gives both to its audience and to its working-class characters.
The Street was launched when “kitchen sink” realism was all the rage in British literary and film drama. The show reflects that era in its tightly-sewn format, chronicling some two dozen people who live and/or work on a single block in a fictional industrial town outside Manchester.
There’s no glamour (the show’s wealthiest character merely owns a small garment factory), and no overwrought melodrama beyond the limited scope and ambitions of the characters.
What there is, is a community–an extended, close-knit, multi-generational family of people who may argue and fight and cheat but who ultimately love one another. Just the sort of community that late-modern suburban North America sorely lacks, and which those “New Urbanist” advocates always talk about trying to bring back.
A couple years back, CBC began its own Street imitation, Riverdale (no relation to the town in Archie Comics). While Riverdale’s creators seem to have made every effort to replicate every possible element of the Street formula, it doesn’t quite translate. Riverdale’s relatively emotionally-repressed Ontarians, living in relatively large, set-back private homes rather than the Street’s row houses, have far less of the interaction and adhesion seen on the Street.
USA’s said to be developing its own working-class evening soap along the Coronation Street/EastEnders/Riverdale style. It’ll be interesting to see if the formula can even work in the setting of today’s disconnected American cityscape.
IN OTHER NEWS: Another Northwest Bookfest came and went. This year, it was moved from the funky ol’ rotting Pier 63 to the clean, spacious (and about to be made even more spacious) Washington State Convention Center. While the move was made for practical, logistical reasons, it could also be interpreted as signifying a move “up” from the homey, rustic realm of the Northwest-writing stereotype (beach poetry, low-key “quirky” mysteries, and snow falling on you-know-what). Even litter-a-chur, the festival’s new setting implies, has gotta get with the program and become just as aggressively upscale and as fashionably commercial as everything else in Seatown’s becoming.
TOMORROW: Strange junk e-mails and other fun stuff.
LET’S TRY TO GET THIS STRAIGHT. A couple weeks ago, a teenage boy from the Seattle suburbs was hospitalized for severe injuries, following a backyard boxing match that got a little out of hand. News media immediately branded the incident as an obvious copycat of the movie Fight Club.
Then, a few days later, the mom of the injured boy revealed that he and most of the other kids involved in the bout hadn’t seen Fight Club, but had simply been attempting to emulate their real-life boxing heroes.
On the immediate level, it doesn’t matter whether the kid wanted to be Brad Pitt or Ali. It still got him a night in intensive care. On another level, it shows how today’s ever-more-tabloidy media are oh-so willing to exploit personal tragedies, and to believe and spread silly hype angles concerning these incidents.
But the differences go deeper.
Fight Club, based on a novel by Portland writer Chuck Palahniuk (a book described to me by one reader as “a novel clearly written to be made into a movie”), posits a present-day dystopia in which emasculated, office-cubicle-imprisoned, studly white guys have few options to reclaim themselves. Our antihero first sits in on other people’s self-help and 12-step groups, then falls in with a gang of white-collar nihilists who get their kicks in bare-knuckle extreme fighting. Then, the charismatic gang leader reveals himself to have loftier, even more violent ambitions. The “Club” adopts a Manson-esque agenda of generating random violence in order to cause a general state of chaos.
Thankfully, the real world isn’t in such a sorry state.
What the suburban teens were doing was undoubtedly just good old fashioned male bonding via competition. Something young males have done at least since the days of ancient Sparta. One of the boys landed a heavier punch than he’d intended to. But that sort of thing, alas, happens–just as boys can get hurt in more organized sport competitions.
For a good view of the positive values of bloodsport, check out the Canadian movie Les Boys. It’s not on video Stateside (I saw it on Cinemax), but the amiable hockey comedy was one of Canada’s top box-office draws in ’97 and has spawned two sequels.
It stars Marc Messier (no relation to real hockey star Mark Messier) as a middle-aged, small-town Quebec bar owner who leads an amateur hockey team. The minimal plot involves his gambling debt to a small-time hood, which leads to a game between Les Boys and a team of the hood’s hand-picked thugs with ownership of the bar at stake. The real attractions are the characters of Les Boys. They joke and banter, they check and fight, they shoot, they score.
More importantly, they live in a real community. One that recognizes the need for Boys’ Night Out. One that realizes testosteronic rages, when safely expressed in the proper context, might lead to permanent knee damage but also to enduring friendships, stronger families, and a personal pride (even in defeat) that can help one overcome the daily grind.
MONDAY: Can you tell me how to get–how to get to Coronation Street?
A pompous profile of the in-between generation that fails to mention punk rock, hiphop, zines, or any cultural artifacts more “indie” than Indiana Jones….
