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I’VE OFTEN LIKED to define “Northwest environmentalists” as the people who moved here in the ’80s, complaining about all the people who moved here in the ’90s.
Back before Puget Sound became cyber-boomtown, ex-Cali and Eastern rovers with dough would move up here hoping to Get Away From It All. Only they managed to bring “It All” with them, in the form of traffic congestion, inflated housing prices, dumb phony “regional cuisine” restaurants, and particularly increased wear-‘n’-tear on the hiking trails and X-C ski routes which, to them, symbolized temporary escape from the crush of humanity.
(I also like to say I do my part to keep our wilderness areas unspoiled by not going there.)
Anyhoo, all this is nothing new. Humans have always struggled to create what they hope will be ideal living environments, only to then dream of another realm where everything would be different somehow–more “natural,” more mystical, more magical, more heroic, less stressful, less humdrum.
Which brings me to today’s book–Escapism, by Univ. of Wisconsin geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.
In this slim but intellectually-rigorous volume, Tuan proclaims that “a human being is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is.”
Therefore, to ridicule somebody’s ideas or visions as “fantasy,” “myth,” or “escapist” is more than insulting. It’s a denial of basic human nature, the nature that enabled our species to spend these past millennia steadily constructing more permanent and effective escapes from nature and its cruelties.
For one example, he offers the genre of landscape painting. Tuan asserts it only developed as European and Chinese civilizations got “advanced” enough that The Land was no longer seen as the all-powerful, dangerous, fickle element upon which humans totally depended; but instead as the relatively tamed, pastoral setting of a relatively stable existence.
For another example, here’s his quite rational argument against the E-droppers’ hyperbole about druggies somehow being the Next Stage of Human Evolution:
“Drugs that produce sensations of orgasmic power and visions of mystical intensity do not turn their consumers into better, more enlightened people. One reason why they do not–apart from the chemical damage they inflict on the human system–is [a] fixation on unique particulars at the expense of their weave and patter. From this we understand why artworks are superior to drugs in cleansing perception. Though they cannot produce amphetamine’s euphoria, they make up for it at an intellectual level by putting objects and events in context. They hint at, if not explicitly state, the relatedness–the larger pattern….”
As you might surmise, Tuan’s a generalist whose essaying goes pretty far afield, taking vague definitions of “escape” and “escapism” as a springboard for broad discussions of human nature. Such as this passage, with which many of the harassed-as-kids computer-nerd types out there might identify:
“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored…. “Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”
“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored….
“Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”
Thankfully, history’s had its share of ladies ‘n’ gents who’ve dared to break this taboo. Including Yi-Fu Tuan.
TOMORROW: Remember kids, Fight Club’s only a movie.
ELSEWHERE:
YESTERDAY, I looked at a book collecting “Postmodern American Fiction” and wondered when Western society was ever going to get over postmodernism and start being and/or doing something new.
If you think of “the modern era” as everything since the Renaissance and Francis Bacon, as many PoMo theorists do, then you might be a little less impatient than me.
The modern era, by this definition, has gone on so long that its failings and fissures are all-too-evident to the PoMo skeptic–but has also become so entrenched that the good postmodernist can’t think of a thing to do except ironically kvetch about it.
But if you think of “the modern era” as essentially the 20th century, as I do (maybe we could appease all factions by calling the electricity-and-motorized-transport age “late modern”), then there might be a little hope.
As seen in the handy comparison charts on some college-course websites, the mostly-reactive tenets of the various substrains of PoMo thought do contain, here and there, a few hints of prescriptions for a more positive-minded future. Not many, but at least a few.
And it’s fairly clear to most anyone that, due to several interrelated factors (computers and other advanced communications electronics, Global Business, ever-bifurcating subcultures, socialism’s crash-‘n’-burn, enviro-awareness, feminism, religious revivalism, STDs, indie-pop, etc. etc.), that the late-late-modern dream of a post-WWII utopia where everybody would rationally coexist in one homogenous society, under the benevolent guidance of the Best ‘n’ the Brightest, is pretty much shot.
So, the big End-O-Millennium question is, What Next?
In occasional pieces over the next few weeks, I’ll try to forge a guess.
To start, it’s fairly clear the old late-modernism, in both aesthetics and philosophy, was predicated upon early-to-mid-century advances in metallurgy, streamlining, communications technology, etc. Advances that led to air travel (and the bombing of Hiroshima), broadcasting (and the media monopoly), small-press publishing (and Holocaust-revisionist tracts), personal transportation (and gridlock), declining death rates (and soaring populations), etc.
Postmodernism, I’ve posited above, was and is a state of mind predicated upon people having gotten tired of those onetime “advances” and their eventually-evident limitations.
But can there be an era after the postmodern or late-modern? I say yes, and it’s already showing up.
Some gals ‘n’ guys are being paid small fortunes to tell people with money what they want to hear–that the new era will be especially beneficial to persons such as these pundits’ audiences. It’s a revolution, but merely a “revolution in business,” that has no chance to ever become a revolution against business.
As I’ll explain in tomorrow’s installment, I’m less sure about that.
TOMORROW: Why George Gilder’s future won’t quite happen, if we’re lucky.
I recently spent a few days pretty much shut-in by the painful recovery from extreme oral surgery.
The extended couch-time gave me a chance to finally finish Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.
It’s 632 pages of tiny type. Except for the theoretical-essay collection at the end, none of it’s horrible. Many of the pieces are, indeed, good. A few would even qualify for my own highest honorific, Great Kickass Writing.
(Among them: The piece of Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, Sherman Alexie’s Captivity, Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story, and pieces of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.)
But, of course, the whole project of a postmodern anthology brings one to ask what the hell “postmodern” is anymore (besides an already-obsolete term MTV once used to use to announce videos by The The or New Order).
Some of the pieces do seem to take a more-or-less literal interpretation of the adjective–i.e., they express a culture in which “modernity” has grown old and stale but in which nothing’s come up to replace it.
That’s the world of endless air-quotes, where everything’s an ironic insincerity. The world of Douglas Coupland, for instance. A literary world very similar to the nihilism of the Sex Pistols (who, in turn, were heavily influenced by group svengali Malcolm McLaren’s time with the PoMo ideologues of the French Situationist movement).
A second category of stories in the collection attempt to imagine a world beyond the world beyond the modern. Where modernism sought a bright, clean, shiny future (as seen in a mid-century literature of clean writing about rational decision-makers) and postmodernism saw the limitations of that future, some of these folks (such as William Gibson) try to celebrate the coming of a decentered, decentralized, chaos-theory society. (Something similar to the society I’ve been celebrating on this site.)
But in a chaos culture, there will always be those who would simply exchange the old hierarchical order for a new one. That’s what you get with the likes of local writer Joanna Russ, who (in an excerpt from her novel The Female Man) imagines a sci-fi alternate dimension in which everything’s darned-near perfect because the whole population is not only composed exclusively of women, but of women who share a certain sensibility.
Like most utopians, Russ’s ideal society consists pretty much solely of people exactly like herself. In this regard, she’s quite modern, or at least pre-postmodern. Her fantasy is of little use toward helping real-world folk figure out how to live among hundreds of ethnicities, dozens of gender-role variants, and thousands of conflicting worldviews.
As the book’s website notes, this collection was at least partly meant as a college reader. Certainly some of the closing essays belong strictly within campus grounds–they’ve got that peculiar combination of borderline-incomprehensible communications-theory lingo and academic-left sanctimony that implies another dreamed utopian future, the very old-modern wish for a dictatorship of the academics.
But then again, the name “Postmodern” implies that we have only yesterday’s modernism (with its utopian dreams of well-ordered civility and certainty under one centralized authority system or another) to either long for or to scoff at, without any new worldview to replace it.
I like to think we can learn to become “post-” that by now.
TOMORROW: After PoMo, then what?
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s been a fast news week in my town, climaxing with the potential beginning-O-the-end of the century’s last major empire….
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: …But it’s a great week for us adopted fans of college football’s formerly most luckless team; now eligible for its first bowl game since ’65 (before college teams started using separate offensive and defensive squads). Remember: Once a Beaver, Always a Beaver!
TODAY’S AN “OFF-OFF-YEAR” ELECTION, the kind where neither Presidents, Congresspeople, nor state legislators stand up for the picking.
My town holds its big municipal elections during odd-numbered years, so as to give its own politicians the spotlight.
And, as it happens, the Talk-Radio Right has one of its “across-the-board tax cut” schemes on the ballot, in the form of a state initiative.
And, as it also happens, the state initiative and the Seattle City Council elections both turn out to involve appeals to “We The People” against the common enemy of both rightish “populists” and leftish “progressives”–the corporate middle-of-the-road.
The eternally-lovable Jim Hightower likes to say there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But so far, the center has managed to hold, at least in segments of the American system–albeit as a center that’s drifted steadily rightward.
The Religious Right has had fewer successes in its attempts at “morals” legislation in recent years; the prog-left has been equally unsuccessful at reforming health care or getting working folks a fairer share of the economic boom.
Instead, big business and its wholly-owned politicians have pretty much had a free run in the U.S. Executive Branch, in the Federal Reserve System, and in many state and local jurisdictions. All the talk in the post-Reagan era about new paradigms or the end-of-politics-as-we-know it has, thus far, still found the entrenched old-line powers-that-be still being.
That doesn’t mean they’re not running scared, at least around these parts.
Seattle news media are chock full of heavy-handed wrangling over the potential devastating effects of Initiative 695, which would replace graduated-rate motor vehicle taxes with a flat $30 fee–and would impose tuff referenda requirements any time the Washington legislature wanted to add any new revenue source.
As phony-populist “across the board” tax cuts go, this is a particularly clever fraud. It cuts just enough from average folks’ car taxes to seem like a sensible bargain to average voters. But it cuts hundreds or even thousands from what the big boys pay for their Lamborghini SUVs.
And the funds it cuts from include funds targeted for transportation (including the new regional light-rail scheme as well as road-fixing) and those used by the state to prop up county governments.
I-695’s so extreme, the business lobby loathes it. It would potentially cripple some of the basic infrastructure business needs to get its goods trucked around, and the referendum part would make it damn difficult for the state to create new business-subsidy plans, like those used for the new baseball and football stadia.
But the Washington State Republican leadership felt it needed the talk-radio gang’s rabblerousing capabilities more than business’s patronage, and endorsed 695. No matter what happens in today’s vote, a possibly permanent rift has been created between the Rabid Right and the corporate powers who used to be its chief beneficiaries.
Meanwhile, five of the nine Seattle City Council seats are for grabs (all are citywide races).
In four of these contests, self-styled “progressive” candidates (Curt Firestone, Judy Nicastro, Charlie Chong, and incumbent Peter Steinbrueck) not only won their primaries but won by big enough margins that they’re threatening, with fellow prog-candidate Dawn Mason and incumbent prog Nick Licata (whose re-election bid comes in the next half-cycle), to form a majority coalition that could push for renters’ rights, slow the pace of gentrification, and block new subsidies for corporate-backed development plans.
And oh yeah–they also just might, if given half the chance, officially call BS on city attorney Mark Sidran’s “civility” laws, a systematic war on poor people, black people, young people, and anybody else who doesn’t fit the downtown business establishment’s upscale-boomer target market.
So some members of Sidran’s upscale fan base, led by a Microsoft executive (as if those guys knew a damn thing about “civility”), are spending “soft money” on behalf of the progs’ opponents.
In a municipal system traditionally run by corporate-Democrat machine politics, we’ve got a real, essentially partisan, race here. Should be fun.
TOMORROW: A self-styled “alternative” magazine whines about not getting the opportunity to sell out to big advertisers.
JUST OVER A WEEK AGO, I attended a reception for a specially-commissioned set of works by ten top contemporary artists.
All the artists had to start with the same object and paint or otherwise decorate it to their tastes.
The objects of beauty: Five-foot-tall fiberglass coffee mugs.
It was a promo piece for Millstone Coffee, the Everett, WA-founded, value-priced, supermarket gourmet-coffee operation that was bought a couple years back by none other than Procter & Gamble, the conglomerate ruthlessly fictionalized in Richard Powers’s novel Gain.
P&G’s been running national TV spots touting Millstone as the real coffee lover’s alternative to “that leading specialty-coffee chain,” alleging that other company’s more interested in selling T-shirts (i.e., promoting its brand name) than in serving up the finest quality java.
That’s a mighty allegation to be made by P&G, which practically invented brand-name marketing early in this century.
But anyhoo, they’re trying to emphasize that real-coffee-lovers image by test marketing a line of even gourmet-er beans, “Millstone Exotics.” That’s where the artists came in.
They include several whose work I’ve followed for some time–Parris Broderick, Meghan Trainor, and Shawn Wolfe.
Their colorfully-decorated big mugs, to be trucked around to public outdoor viewing spaces in the cities where Millstone Exotics will initially be marketed (Seattle, Portland, and Spokane), were meant by the company to convey a new image for the new higher-end product line; as something even fancy-schmancier than the stuff found in the coffee-store chains.
(Even though Millstone is now made at P&G’s existing coffee plants as well as its original Everett facility, and is shipped to supermarkets by the same distribution infrastructure that brings you Tide, Tampax, Iams pet foods, and diet snacks made with Olestra.)
Anyhoo (again), the artists at the reception expressed no public qualms about the project (many have done commercially-commissioned work before); not even for a company traditionally known for less than avant-garde cultural visions. And, goodness knows, in today’s art climate they could certainly use the income.
I have just one beef about the project. Because the giant cups were devised for outdoor display during the winter, they were molded with sealed tops. They can’t be reused (without a lot of hacksawing) as something an exotic dancer could jump out from.
Not even for the old “Won’t you join me in a cup of coffee?” gag.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some background reading about the fashion industry’s “friends” in Saipan.
TOMORROW: Another possible way to restore contemporary art’s place in urban society.
A NUMBER OF recent books and essays are questioning one of the central “received ideas” of the Lifestyle Left–the notion that males, particularly heterosexual males, constitute some sort of inborn and irretrievably evil subspecies.
You’d think the notion that 40 percent of the human race shouldn’t be stereotyped or collectively dehumanized, particularly by folks who claim to be all about “celebrating diversity,” should be a well-duh.
But nope, it’s taken a while for the idea to catch on.
Some well-meaning psychology-types put out a few books such as Real Boys, whose basic premises include: Girls aren’t the only kids with problems. We shouldn’t treat adolescent identity crises and emotional traumas as if only girls got them. Stop scoffing at the very idea of males having souls or needing help. So what does at least one reviewer do? Scoff at the very idea.
Then comes Susan Faludi, whose ’91 book Backlash was widely misinterpreted (even by readers who liked it) as portraying an organized, deliberately anti-woman conspiracy of All (or Most) Men against All Women. It actually detailed a bunch of generally-reactionary government and corporate trends during the Reagan-Bush era, as they specifically affected feminist issues.
(Before that, Faludi worked at the Wall St. Journal, where she wrote a highly influential expose of Nordstrom’s labor practices.)
Faludi’s now come out with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man– not a repudiation of Backlash but an expansion of its real premises. (Here’s an excerpt.)
Faludi’s point here: It’s not Men Against Women and it never was. What we’ve really got isn’t a “Patriarchy” but a profit-and-power society that treats most anybody as an expendable, replacable part. Feminism isn’t to blame for men who’ve lost their sense of place in the world, it’s the forces that really run things (like globalized business and the non-community of suburban angst) you should look at.
Indeed, she continues, to blame some collectivized entity called “Women” or “Men” for one another’s problems only prevents you from more clearly seeing a social structure that keeps us down and out and blaming each other.
So far, Faludi hasn’t gotten the kind of sneers the “boy books” have gotten. (Though she has gotten milder scorn such as this.) Maybe because of her feminist-insider credentials, or because certain neo-sexist critics might accept a female author speaking in sympathy for men but might trash a male author who tried to say the same things.
Or, I hope, because Faludi’s argument provides an escape route beyond the ideological recursive trap that is the Lifestyle Left.
Faludi’s saying the purpose of a real progressive movement is to seek progress, not merely to let its own members boast of their personal moral superiority. Man-bashing’s as dumb as woman-bashing, and just as futile. It’s not Us vs. Them, Good People vs. Bad People. It’s much more impersonal than that. And the impersonality of the system is one of its problems.
Faludi’s leading toward something I’ve dreamed of for years, an American Left that worked (both “work” as in achievement and as in at least getting up to actually do something).
MONDAY: We’ll talk about an actual man who dares to speak out for men (not against women but with them).
MY FIRST BEEF about James Gleick’s new book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything has to do with a passage near the end, about the mind’s ability to discern patterns in strings of numbers (part of a discussion on short-term memory and people’s ability to receive information at accelerated rates).
Gleick mentiones several such sequences of numerals (prime numbers, numbers divisible by seven, etc.), then gets to a sequence “any New Yorker, for instance, will recognize.”
He never bothers to tell non-New Yorkers what “14, 18, 23, 28, 34, 42, 50, 59, 66, 72” is supposed to represent. He just assumes everybody in North America’s so into NYC local lore that they’ll recognize these as the street numbers of Manhattan subway stations.
Of course, the fact that I (as one who’s only been to NYC twice) was able to guess this answer (which Gleick confirmed to me in an email exchange) may be part of Gleick’s intended lesson–that human minds can figure out puzzles like this with only minimal clues.
The rest of Gleik’s story is pretty much what you (if you’ve got the nimble mind he thinks you’ve got) could predict it to be. For those of you whose lives are too hectic to even read the book (a briskly-paced tome, with short paragraphs and lotsa chapter breaks), a summary:
But there are exceptions and caveats in Gleick’s oh-so-linear timeline.
Movies and novels these days can be frighteningly long. The new Star Wars runs a whole half-hour longer than the original. Passions, that new “youth oriented” soap opera, is decidedly leisurely-paced (one day in the story can take up to two weeks of episodes). Net-browsing and video-gaming might seem exciting, but can be among the greatest time killers ever invented. Rush-hour freeway speeds in many metro areas are slowing down to bicycle rates. Today’s most heavily-hyped fantasy vehicle isn’t the sports car (promising mastery of the clock) but the SUV (promising a make-believe world outside the clock’s reach).
Gleick might say these are fantasy-realm counterparts to an ever-faster reality. I’d say they’re parts of a more complex set of figures than Gleick’s ready to deal with.
Stuff involving (directly or indirectly) electronics and computers is indeed always getting faster, smaller, cheaper, etc. Everything else in life still runs by basic scientific laws. Faster-than-sound flight is possible, but usually impracticable. Puberty, gestation, digestion, alcohol absorption, clinical drug trials, falling in and out of love, pretty much take as long as they always have.
As that favorite old computer-geek bumper sticker used to say, “186,000 Miles Per Second. It’s Not Just A Good Idea, It’s the Law.”
TOMORROW: Susan Faludi and other writers dare to insist that men are people too–why’s this treated as something shocking?
MOST EVERYBODY LOVES ODD STUFF. Strange events. The unknown. The wacky, the wild, the bizarre.
Even stiff-upper-lip Brits.
Especially those Brits who read and write for the quarter-century-old journal The Fortean Times (named for pioneer odd-stuff researcher Charles Fort, and now published by the same folks behind the bad-bloke magazine Bizarre and the bad-boy satirical comic Viz).
One of the mag’s chief researchers,Mike Dash, has now come out with Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Surrounding Unknown. It’s been out in the U.K. for a few months now; the U.S. edition might be available this week or within a few weeks.
The book’s a long, leisurely intro to all sorts of odd and quasi-supernatural stuff around the world, past and present. Think of it as a quaint stroll through just about everything that seems to happen or to have happened, and which can’t be firmly, rationally explained.
What you get: UFO sightings and alien abductions. The Loch Ness Monster. Yetis. Ghosts and poltergeists. Crop circles. Miraculous relics, stigmata, and Mary sightings. Stonehenge and mystery spots. Ley lines and energy centers. Dear-death and out-of-body experiences. Seances and spirit guides. Mediums and ESP. The face of Jesus in tacos and Arabic script in vegetables. Fairies, gnomes, goblins, and wildmen. British authors who claimed to really be Tibetan wise men. Carlos Castaneda and Uri Geller. Time travelers and clairvoyants.
And of particular interest to our local readers: Bigfoot! The famous 1947 “Flying Saucer” sighting near Mt. Rainier! The Olympia “Satanic cult” scare, eventually blamed on false-memory syndrome. Ogopogo, British Columbia’s own mythical lake monster. Reports of a similar beast in our own Lake Washington in 1987, found to really be an 11-foot sturgeon. The mirage-like “Silent City” visions in Alaska.
But plenty of books, movies (documentary, fictional, and in between), zines, comix, and TV specials and series have explored some or all of these topics. What sets Borderlands apart is Dash’s personable-yet-levelheaded tone (he’s a Cambridge Ph.D.) and his attitude of informed, open-minded skepticism. He’s ready to call a fraud a fraud (Castaneda). He’s all for scientific and material evidence behind strange occurrances, when and where such evidence might be found. And he’s open to both rational and supernatural explanations for this stuff.
But, ultimately, the phenomena he chooses to include in this book are phenomena which remain unsolved, unproven, unconfirmed. Something that has become known and proven, such as hypnosis, is something that’s now within the rational realm. The “borders” of knowledge referred to in the title keep moving back, but the borders’ length, and the size of the area beyond them, may remain as large as ever.
TOMORROW: Celebrating one year exclusively online.
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s second annual list of pop-cult references incoming college students know about that their profs might not, and vice versa.
Never one to let a good shtick go uncopied, I asked for your recommendations in this regard.
While the ever-voracious nostalgia industry keeps bringing back old songs, fashions, movies, cars, and foods, many important aspects of bygone life remain bygone.
Thus, based partly on some of your suggestions, this list of cultural reference points distinguishing today’s fake-ID bearers from pathetic fogeys such as myself:
As late as the early ’70s, college English profs could assign their students as many as 100 books for one semester; thanks to cheap paperback editions, the kids could afford to buy ’em all.
Now, only fogeys remember that comic books had ever been for kids.
Newspapers were also a lot more popular back when they were more populist, something the entire industry’s forgotten.
IN OTHER NEWS: Who needs freakin’ ideological “battles of the sexes”? Let’s get on with the real thing!
TOMORROW: Concluding this series, some things young adults know that fogeys probably don’t.
YOU KNOW THE SOUTH PARK EPISODE in which a “prehistoric ice man” goes bonkers trying to readjust to how massively his world has changed since he was frozen–in 1997?
Books about the high-tech culture can seem like that. They can seem outdated by the time they come out, and positively nostalgic if they resurface later as paperbacks.
Case in point #1: The previously-mentionedJoystick Nation by J.C. Hertz; a history of video games up to 1997 that failed to predict Nintendo’s comeback just as certain computer-biz analysts had failed to predict Apple’s comeback.
Case in point #2: Douglas Rushkoff’s Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids.
Hertz’s book tried to depict video-gaming as a prosocial, synapse-building, mind-stimulating thing, something good for your children (even with all the fantasy violence, often in that “first-person shooter” mode that invites the user to get off on the fun of slaughtering).
Rushkoff’s book (written in ’95 and now in a slightly-revised paperback) takes a more generalized, and more hyper, POV. He rapidly jaunts around from video and role-playing gaming to snowboarding to raving to neopaganism to tattoos to chat-rooming (the World Wide Web’s only briefly mentioned) to “mature readers” comic books to MTV to Goths to Burning Man. His purpose–to state and re-state how today’s “screenagers” are increasingly equipped to lead society beyond its flaccid, industrial-age ideologies and into a millennial, tribal utopia.
Lord, Rushkoff tries all he can to assure us that Those Kids Today aren’t brain-dead slackers but instead the harbingers of a grand new future (he even uses rave-dance promoters’ self-congratulatory cliches about hedonistic E-addicts somehow being “the next stage of human evolution”).
But it all comes out like last year’s drum-and-bass; or, worse, like something out of the long-dormant mag Mondo 2000.
Chapters have titles like “The Fall of Linear Thinking and the Rise of Chaos.” Every other page or so introduces another kid-culture or young-adult-culture phenomenon depicted to illustrate how us fogeys are just too darned stuck in passe pre-Aquarian mindsets about money, politics, religion, sports, dancing, music, etc. etc.; compared to the Wired Generation’s effortless surfing thru the waves of chaos theory and multiculturalism.
Some random examples of the book’s numbing hyperbole:
“Most screenage political activism is geared at penetrating the awkward innefectuality of existing social contracts…. The old policies attempt to eradicate injustices by institutionalizing them and to encourage independence by infantilizing the oppressed. This is because the old policies conform to a nonorganic view of social structure.” “We are afraid of the universal wash of our media ocean because, unlike our children, we can’t recognize the bigger patterns in its overall structure.” “Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the many uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids are younger and less experienced than us, but they are also less in danger of becoming obsolete.”
“Most screenage political activism is geared at penetrating the awkward innefectuality of existing social contracts…. The old policies attempt to eradicate injustices by institutionalizing them and to encourage independence by infantilizing the oppressed. This is because the old policies conform to a nonorganic view of social structure.”
“We are afraid of the universal wash of our media ocean because, unlike our children, we can’t recognize the bigger patterns in its overall structure.”
“Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the many uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids are younger and less experienced than us, but they are also less in danger of becoming obsolete.”
Besides the unnerving tone, inaccuracies abound.
Rushkoff repeatedly refers to Marvel Comics’ multilinear storylines (which he sees as one of the kids’ influences in growing up to appreciate a complex, complicated world) as the creative invention of Jack Kirby. (While Kirby established Marvel’s look, designed most of its early star characters, and played an underappreciated role in the plotting of individual issues, it was editor/head writer Stan Lee who devised the “Marvel Universe” concept of heroes and villains and plotlines endlessly crossing over from title to title.)
Rushkoff also uses “the long-running TV talk show The Other Side” as evidence for the popularity of New Age and supernatural topics (the show only lasted one year).
But still, at least Rushkoff, in his annoyingly hyperbolic way, at least has unapologetically nice things to say about a younger generation forever damned by aging hippie-elitists, patronized by cynical advertisers, and stereotyped by clueless mainstream media.
One of Rushkoff’s positive points is that those Gen-Y gals n’ guys seem increasingly unpersuaded by the manipulative language of ads and marketing.
If true, this would mean they’d also be skeptical of Rushkoff’s own marketing blather on their supposed behalf.
IN OTHER NEWS: If America’s power grids and financial systems could survive Hurricane Floyd with disruptions like this, the whole Y2K scare won’t be all that scary.
TOMORROW: Home satellite dishes–still worth it?
PITCH IN: This time, I’m looking for cultural artifacts today’s young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
YESTERDAY, I discussed the potential partial demise of the Gothic Surf Shop, a group of four adjacent Lower Queen Anne houses where several artists and photographers live and work.
(You can see some other examples of the endangered species that is local, affordable artist’s space during next weekend’s “Art Detour,” a program of self-guided studio tours around town.)
I’d been there at a party which was centered in the houses’ joint back yard and trailed off into the various live-work spaces. I found myself repeatedly wandering back to one particular room, where a prominent photographer showed off some of her exquisite hand-tinted, neoclassical portraits and nudes.
This lusciously sensual exhibition, and the path leading toward it, reminded me a lot reminded me, in a low-budget DIY way, of a book I’d read that week–The Little House: An Architectural Seduction, an odd 18-century short story by Jean-Francoise De Bastide.
In the story, a wealthy French libertine nobleman has commissioned a country estate for the specific purpose of seduction. Every inch of the place, from the entrance-court to the gardens to the individual rooms, is meant to stir a woman’s senses (except her sense of resistance).
It’s published in an elegant, tiny paperback by none other than the Princeton Architectural Press, in an edition loaded with introductory remarks about the use of storytelling to explain principles of architecture and decoration.
You don’t have to approve of the story’s antihero and his predatory motives to admire his devotion to the home arts and his obsession with detail (as illustrated in the Princeton edition with period line drawings of real chateaus similar to the story’s fictional one.)
And you don’t have to be a nostalgist for pre-revolutionary France’s ornate architectural excesses to long for a sense of design that cared this much about the human spirit, about nurturing the senses, instead of just about mounting the most square footage for the least amount of money (or, in the case of most rich-people’s residential construction, intimidating people with out-of-scale behemothness).
TOMORROW: The Amtrak Cascades train and the America that once was.
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, thanx and a hat tip to all who attended my second live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. last night at Elliott Bay Book Co. Further events TBA.
(ADVISORY: The rest of today’s edition contains tasteful language about topics some of you might find borderline-icky. But that’s America for you.)
In his new book For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, the author-cellist Wayne C. Booth quotes Walt Whitman liking Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing for the “amount of passion–the blood and muscle–with which it was invested, which lay concealed and active in it.”
That’s as close to a workable definition of “amateur” as I can find these days. The previously-dominant definition, of working without financial renumeration, was pretty much buried a few Olympic Games ago.
The “passion” definition’s also better than the “unpaid” definition to describe the thousands of “amateur adult” Websites out there these days.
Yes, a good proportion of those sites are trying to earn money. Many of them charge for access, to everything or to extra-hot “members’ areas.” Many of them sell videos, CD-ROMS, photos, autographed mementos, and/or undergarments.
But these sites (or at least the better ones) offer something you can’t get from the formulaic rites of corporate porn.
Call it a spirit, a joie de vivre, a feeling (even if in some cases it’s just an affectation of a feeling) that these women really like to do their varying degrees of wicked things (from nude posing on some sites all the way to, well, all the way on other sites) and to let you see them doing them.
Three of these webmistresses recently made a pair of joint public appearances in Seattle and suburban Des Moines, WA. One of them, Oasis, was having a west-coast tour of these “bar meets” with fans; two others, the local Gina and the Portland-based J, accompanied her on this stop.
All three have husbands (Gina for 20 years) who attended the bar meet; all have “open” relationships, at least for the purpose of gathering photo and video material for their sites. Oasis even invited some of her bar-meet guests to an “after-party” safe-sex photo shoot back in her hotel room. (I didn’t attend or ask to.)
All three women were extremely nice and personable. Even while legally dressed in the bars, they exuded an open sensuality and an enthusiasm for life. They were perfect hostesses, graciously leading the shier computer-nerd fans into the bar-table conversation. The women talked a lot about how they love bodies (their own and other people’s), they love sex, and they want to use their sites to help people overcome their own inhibitions and lingering prudish repressions.
But, just like “indie” rock, “amateur” webmistressing is still show business, which means it’s business. Oasis conducts her bar-meet tours so she can personally bring in new fans, so she can turn current occasional viewers into paid members, and so she can make cross-promotional photo ops with other webmistresses across North America. She and her hubby have also worked as consultants and server-providers to other amateurs. Their site claims,
“If you can be a consistant model, have the desire to attend functions, meet new people and promote a website then you could be an internet star! We won’t shit you, the pay-off is much faster being a model, but the long term investment is greater to have your own site. Don’t believe any of the ‘get rich quick’ crap you read on other sites… It takes a while to establish a website and turn a good profit. But if you have the drive, patience and charisma you can earn big bucks with your own website.”
MONDAY: A little more of this.
ELSEWHERE: Some ex-Yugoslavs dream of Cyber Utopias; while others retreat to the paranormal… Probably not the ultimate ad-placement abomination, but the lowest for now…
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, here’s one last reminder to get thyself and thy loved-ones out to our live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. tonight, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. ‘Til then, please enjoy the following…
IMP-ERATIVES: Let us now praise two not-very-famous men, both of Chicago: Cartoonist-illustrator-calligrapher Chris Ware and his recent biographer-explainer, Daniel Raeburn.
Raeburn is the publisher of The Imp, an occasional one-man zine devoted to a single, full-length profile of a different comics creator each issue. The first Imp was an authorized career-study of Eightball creator Daniel Clowes; the second, a highly unauthorized (yet not-completely-condemnatory) look at Fundamentalist tract king Jack T. Chick. These were published in the respective formats of a comic-sized pamphlet and an oversized Chick tract.
For his Ware tribute, Raeburn has pulled out all the stops. He’s issued his work in the form of a fake turn-of-the-century tabloid magazine; apparently drawing particular layout inspiration from The Youth’s Companion, a boys’ adventure-fiction mag published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Perry Mason Company of Boston. (Yes, Erle Stanley Gardner named his whodunit hero after the publisher who first turned him onto formula fiction as a kid.)
This small-type layout means Raeburn can cram his full 40,000-word bio, with dozens of pix and fake ads (more about them later) into 20 tabloid pages (plus a two-page center section containing four other cartoonists’ full-color tributes to Ware). It’s also a perfect match to Raeburn’s subject.
Ware, as any reader of his Acme Novelty Library comix (or their current syndicated source, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth) knows, is a devout lover of pre-modern American ephemera, design, architecture, and music (particularly ragtime). Loss in general, and in particular the loss of so much of what was great and beautiful about North America, plays a huge role in the Corrigan saga.
The Ware issue of The Imp covers most every facet of the young cartoonist’s productive career, and many (though not nearly all) of the issues and themes leading into and out from Ware’s elegant, sad works. Of particular interest to the pop-culture student such as myself are the sections on Chicago architecture (particularly that of the 1893 Columbia Exposition), the old Sears catalog (possibly Chicago’s most important print product), and the Sears book’s “evil twin,” the still-published-today Johnson Smith catalog of novelty toys and practical jokes.
That latter essay forms a center and counterpoint to the fake ads along the sides and bottoms of most of the zine’s pages, in the tiny-print style of old newspapers and magazine back-pages (a design look familiar to many people today from Wendy’s tabletops). These ads (some of which previously appeared in the endpages of Ware’s comics) are dense with copy that melt away the bombastic promises of advertising better than the entire run of Adbusters Quarterly:
Appropriately enough, on the night I finished reading The Imp, the Disney Channel ran an awkwardly computer-colored version of Galloping Gaucho, the second-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon (1928). It had been produced as a silent, but had music and sound effects tacked on just before its release. Ub Iwerks’ original Mickey character design bears a slight resemblance to Ware’s early character Quimby the Mouse.
But more importantly, the early Mickey films represent a transition from the imagination-crazy days of silent animation toward the hyperrealistic, desexualized, formulaic slickness Disney would soon turn into. Seeing this with bad latter-day color schemes added only made it even more of a Chris Ware moment.
(The Imp has no known website; copies of it, and of Ware’s comics, can be ordered via Quimby’s (a Chicago store named after Ware’s mouse character and utilizing Ware-designed graphics), Last Gasp, and Atomic Books. Ware’s works are also available direct from Fantagraphics.)
TOMORROW: If an adult website charges money, how can it be “amateur”?
ELSEWHERE: Seattle’s mayor sez he wants to launch a new crusade for “the arts.” Considering the extent to which past “arts” crusades have generated more and more cash for big institutions and construction projects, and less and less cash for artists, excuse us if we’re a bit skeptical until we see the details… Creative uses for AOL CD-ROMs and diskettes… The search continues to find anybody who likes Microsoft who isn’t being paid to like it; while MS is quoted as calling itself nothing less than “The Most Important Company in the History of the World”…
SOMETIME LATE LAST YEAR, erstwhile Stranger music writer Everett True called for a “Campaign for Real Rock” (inspired by the British beer-lovers’ lobby, the Campaign for Real Ale).
True’s premise: Just as the great British brewing traditions were being threatened by callous cost-cutting measures at big corporate breweries, so was classic American hard rock n’ roll threatened by the commercial-pop acts manufactured by the major record labels.
True’s gone back to the U.K.; but without him, real rock (or, as Backfire zine editor Dawn Anderson calls it, “Rawk”) is back. Alas.
Lost in most mainstream-media coverage of rape and pillaging at Woodstock 99 was the fact that the festival bore only a trademark connection with the ’69 original. This festival was not a corporate exploitation of “Peace and Music” but a showcase for harder, louder, more aggressive acts, especially on its last night.
Now there’s a radio station devoted entirely to the likes of Limp Bizkit, KORN (the group which relegated BR-549 to being only the second most popular band with a Hee Haw-derived name), Eminem, Kid Rock, etc. etc.
It’s called “The Funky Monkey,” though its official call letters are KKBY. It had been a fairly progressive, Tacoma-based R&B station, but hadn’t turned a profit with that format; so it’s now going straight for the white-gangsta-wannabe market.
The contrast between the station’s new and old formats couldn’t be much more stark.
The old KKBY had played music by and for African-Americans who’d long ago gotten weary of gangsta rap, that “authentic ghetto voice” concocted or at least pushed by Hollywood promoters eager to nakedly exploit white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men as sexy savages.
The new KKBY plays mostly white artists who’ve taken the gangsta acts’ “Xtreme” hiphop (via such crossover pioneers as the Beastie Boys and Jane’s Addiction) and removed all blackness except for a thin veneer of supposed street-credibility. White artists “admiring” their black gangsta forebearers for fostering an image of doped-up, violent, woman-hating jerks with a finely-tuned fashion sense.
In other words, “Angry White Rappers.”
A mostly-white continuation of former black-music trends many black listeners had rejected. (Which is nothing new. Black audiences have long rushed to the Star-Off Machine after a black-music subgenre had been infiltrated, then taken over, by white acts, from big-band to doo-wop.)
This new white-rock-rap genre (KKBY calls it “the new heavies”) is at least as stoopid as most other Rawk waves over the past three decades. What’s different is the level of personal aggression–a rage often not against the machine but against one’s peers and the opp. sex. Rock n’ roll used to be about trying to seduce, to woo, to attract sex. The “new heavies” are often boasting to other males about their sexual prowess, while snarling at females to shut up and take it.
I’m really trying not to sound here like an old fogey–or worse, an old rock critic. There are too many parallels in what I’ve written above to the ’50s critics who loved authentic black R&B but loathed that commercialized white teenybopper corruption of it known as rock n’ roll.
And, there are some signs of non-idiocy within the genre. Eminem, at times, approaches the electro-laconic wit of, say, MC 900 Ft. Jesus. And those old-school new-heavies, the Beastie Boys, know the ultimate idiocy of the “Wigger” stance (and also shouldn’t be blamed too much for having some of the same retro-fetishes as Quentin Tarantino).
But compare these SK8-rappers to the best real hiphop and a wide creative chasm remains. Even the most corporate of fin-de-siecle R&B product-suppliers, such as Missy Elliott or Sean Combs, has a sense of the complex potentials of their music you can’t find in Insane Clown Posse, and certainly not in white doodz who wish they were Insane Clown Posse.
TOMORROW (in person):Get everyone you know, plus any strangers you might run into, to get to the big promo event and reading for The Big Book of MISC. tomorrow night, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.
TOMORROW (on the site): The beauty that is The Imp.
IN OTHER NEWS: The good news is Seattle’s public-access cable channel’s getting a massive infusion of new studio equipment. The bad news is the whole studio will be out of commission for at least two months during the renovation, so everything on Channel 29 (probably starting in October) will be pre-taped on location, or a rerun of an older studio show.
ELSEWHERE: This new learning-tools site for schoolkids features some of the dumbest adult-writers-trying-to-sound-young slang ever attempted–even in the plot summaries of major books!… Speaking of learning tools, will Microsoft’s new print dictionary include nonstandard definitions for “monopoly,” “coercion,” or “protection racket”?… Now, for a limited time only, you can make up your own Netcolumn. The professionally-constructed ones you find here at Misc. World, of course, will still be better….
AMERICANS LOVE stuff, particularly if it’s new and/or wacky and/or ingeniously-thought-up stuff.
Here’s some of the funnest stuff I’ve found lately.
IF YOU MISSED last week’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. this Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.
IN OTHER NEWS: After 17 years as the virtual living room of the Belltown arts community, the beloved Two Bells Tavern, where some of our live Misc.-O-Rama events have been held, is in the process of being sold to ex-NYU prof Tina Morelli-Lee and hubby Jeffrey Lee. So far, the new mgmt. promises to keep everything the same (i.e., no hard alcohol and no Bud Light; and it’ll still serve some of the city’s best burgers but won’t serve French fries).
TOMORROW: The return of bad-white-boy rock; just as stoopid as ever.
ELSEWHERE: Zero Population Growth claims Seattle’s America’s most kid-friendly city. (As long as you’re not a kid who wants to see live music or put up street posters)… Surreal, haunting, quasi-Goth–who doesn’t love dream stories?…
