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What’s At Stake
Book feature, 6/2/99
THE STAKEHOLDER SOCIETY
by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott
Yale University Press
Now here’s one Big Idea To Save America that’ll likely get lotsa attention from certain media outlets dependent on the consumer buying power of young adults:
Give every young, non-criminally-convicted U.S. citizen $80,000 to spend as they damn well please, with no pesky bureaucrats telling them how.
If they wanted to spend it for college, they could get the dough right away at age 18. Otherwise, they’d get it in four annual installments starting at age 22.
Sure, it would vastly multiply the market for all the goods and services sold in “alternative” weeklies. But, asYale law profs Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott claim, it would also put America back on the road toward equality of opportunity, multicultural harmony, and even participatory democracy.
They admit some young “stakeholders” would undoubtedly foolishly fritter away their dough on cars, gambling, booze, pot, lap dances, designer clothes, genital piercings, killer stereos, and the other fine material temptations aimed at young adults. But they insist most would wisely use their “stakes” to start careers, go learn about the world, buy homes, have kids, help retire family debts, invest in no-load mutual funds, or otherwise make better lives for themselves while helping drive the engines of the producer/consumer society.
OK OK, so it’ll cost some bucks. About a quarter-trillion, they authors estimate. But we can always impose Swedish-level taxes on the really rich. Then, once stakes have been given out, we can hike inheritance taxes so past recipients will have to pay their 80 grand back upon death.
And besides, more young adults with money oughta eventually mean fewer young adults robbing gas stations or dealing dope to get money, so we’ll get to cut back on currently rapidly-escalating costs of cops, courts, and prisons.
The genius of the Stakeholder Society concept is it has something to offer radical leftists, pro-business Democrats, welfare defenders, affirmative-action defenders, and entrepreneurial Republicans (though not sanctity-of-property Republicans or government-as-root-of-all-evil Libertarians).
The way the co-authors plug their scheme, everybody would come out a winner except the really rich and certain low-wage employers who rely on a steady supply of desperate kids. (That rank of employers now includes the U.S. military, so any pay raises needed to keep attracting recruits would add to the stakeholder scheme’s final cost.)
As summarized on the cover blurb, the authors think it’s a great idea because it’d help lead to “a society that is more democratic, productive, and free,” and would “enhance each young adult’s real ability to shape his or her own future.”
It would jumpstart opportunity for the urban and rural poor, eliminate the burden of college loans, feed more technically-trained kids into a hi-tech 21st-century economy that’ll desperately need ’em, shove more dough through those stock-market “investment products” so many non-22-year-olds are depending on for their retirements, and let young women have babies without worrying about how they’ll support ’em.
And, Ackerman and Alstott include in an aside, it’d do wonders for “the arts.” Millions more would get to buy digital-video cameras and DAT recorders, paint pictures, stage performance-art pieces, publish zines, and/or hang out in Prague with other idea-laden folk.
Ackerman and Alstott include tons of details, crunched numbers, supplementary arguments, counter-counter-arguments, and endnotes to back up their proposal. But I have my skepticisms, natch.
Besides the difficulties in getting it underway (they’d basically have to turn a total about-face from 20-year national trends toward enriching the already-rich and disenfranchising the poor), would it work the way they imagine? It’s not hard to imagine the rich and their wholly-owned-subsidiary politicians demanding to burden the program with more restrictions and eligibility requirements year after year, to the point where it becomes an excuse to force all young adults (not just poor ones) to live under the thumb of bureaucrats telling ’em precisely how to live their lives.
Still, it’s good to at least have these two speaking out for the non-upscale, which darned near nobody else does these days (even on what used to be called the left).
It might be an idea that’s doomed to be little more than a fantasy in the current political climate. But you gotta credit Ackerman and Alstott for daring to propose it, and daring their readers to come up with something better.
A Triumph of Underachievement
Book feature for The Stranger, 5/26/99
AN UNDERACHIEVER’S DIARY
by Benjamin Anastas
Spike/Avon, $10 (paperback)
Success, success, success. Sometimes all the damned ostentatious displays of wealth, power, and smugness out there just make one want to throw up, or at least momentarily escape from it all with this beautiful, spare novella. The book’s a success itself, but that’s forgivable because it successfully celebrates failure.
One of its many triumphant aspects is its (relatively) unapologetic defense of that venerable American personality type, the scion of affluence who rejects striving in favor of what pessimists call “slacking” and what optimists call “voluntary simplicity.”
As the back-cover blurb explains, “In the mid-1960s, William was the firstborn of identical twins. It is the last time in his life he will ever be first in anything.”
What gets in the way is a series of debilitating childhood illnesses, which keep him out of school for the better part of two years and permanently affect his self-image. Narrating from adulthood, he insists he wasn’t and isn’t looking for anybody’s pity. He claims his underachieving was a deliberate life choice, a path of bitter struggle to contrast with his twin’s charmed life of effortless grace.
“Please, do not confuse this diary with a memoir written for a therapeutic purpose, designed to exorcise my demons and provide a thrill for everyone who cares to watch them all take flight….”
You don’t have to be familiar with the literary “theory of the unreliable narrator” to detect a taste of self-serving defensiveness.
But no matter what the motivation, William’s early life certainly is one defined by its missed marks.
Almost fatally introverted, he cuts down on his opportunities to strike out with girls by asking his parents to send him to a boarding school he calls “The Boys’ Prison.”
From there it’s five years in a hilariously undistinguished little college, where he adopts “a steady diet of beer and chicken wings” while his classmates wander “through the dirt and rubble smiling like idiots, name tags affixed to their ‘Coed Naked Frisbee’ T-shirts” (and while his brother wows ’em all at Harvard).
From there it’s a series of go-nowhere jobs, ending as William hooks up with a small-time religious cult, not out of any worshipful fever but for the convenience of letting someone else make all the decisions for him.
Of course, it’s no real autobiography. Benjiman Anastas comes from out of that ever-acclaimed Iowa Writer’s Workshop gang, and his elegant prose ripples with the mark of patient polishing with which any real William wouldn’t bother, even when defending the nobility of the underachiever:
“The underachiever’s life is a lonely one, devoid of sustaining warmth, and fundamental intimacy; this statelessness, if you will, can be the source of boundless happiness, a kind of transcendental bliss known only to the deepest American thinkers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Tony Robbins)…”
Tomorrow’s Not What It Used to Be
TV essay, 5/12/99
The Simpsons, as all good fans know, began as a series of comic-strip-like shorts on the original Tracey Ullman Show, one of the nascent Fox network’s first prime-time offerings. Life In Hell panel-cartoonist Matt Groening, who had grown up in Portland and gone to Evergreen State, was one of two “alternative” cartoonists hired in the show’s first season to come up with 20-second, character-based animated gags to run in between Ullman’s skits.This meant Groening, his voice cast, and his original animation partners got to spend two and a half years discovering the intricacies of Bart, Lisa, Homer, Grandpa, and Marge (originally named simply “Mrs. Simpson”) before they got a whole show to themselves.
The resulting series, TV’s longest-running current prime-time comedy, found a way to expand out from the shorts’ narrow focus without slowing down its gag and dialogue pacing, by placing the family in a vast, carefully-constructed cartoon universe, designed less for narrative consistency (exactly how do all those celebrities keep passing through what Lisa once called “a small town with a centralized population”?) than for comic and story potential.
As the series has ploughed on (the 250th episode is now in the early stages of production), successive incoming writers have moved its emphasis even further from the Simpson family (except to find ever-more excrutiating ways to humiliate poor Homer), toward the now-nearly-100 other semiregular characters and their ever-morphing town of Springfield.
When Fox finally let Groening start an all-new series, he didn’t start over at The Simpsons’ character-comedy roots. Instead, he went further into the expansiveness.
The result is Futurama, a show whose leading “character” is its achingly-detailed comic vision of 30th-century New York City.
The show’s six or seven assorted human, robot, and alien protagonists are, so far, little more than deliberately underplayed explorers and explainers of this setting. In the show’s mix of cel and computer animation, the characters are, literally, two-dimensional figures in three-dimensional surroundings.
Of course, a lot of science fiction stories, novels, comic books, movies, and shows have been like that. Nobody really studies Buck Rogers or Lara Croft as characters with personal histories motivations (other than the motivation to kick bad-guy butt).
It’s the “conceptual” parts of these creatures’ worlds that turns on the hardcore sci-fi fans–the architecture, the costumes, the gadgetry, the gimmicks, the spectacle.
The spectacle is also what makes sci-fi so amenable to being played for humor. That, as well as the hammy heroics of older sci-fi concepts (or, more recently, the unrelieved grimness of so many ’70s-’80s sci-fi concepts).
I’m not sure who first used the phrase “May the Farce Be With You” (I think it was Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck, itself later made into a pathetic movie). But it fits a whole subgenre of works ranging from the sublime (Dark Star, Red Dwarf) to the ridiculous (Flesh Gordon) to the horrific (the “filk” parody songs performed at sci-fi fan conventions).
Futurama’s particular spectacle-farce is, like its NYC (explained as having twice been completely destroyed and rebuilt), constructed on top of past notions of futurism.
Its spaceships and doohickeys and skylines are funnied-up versions of the ones in old Flash Gordon serials andWorld’s Fair exhibits, full of modernist hope rather than the dystopian decay of Blade Runner or Escape From New York.
Its robots and aliens are burlesques of the bug-eyed creatures in old monster movies, not the bureaucratically-slick Data from Star Trek or the hyperrealistic critters in Alien or Jurassic Park.
This is partly due, certainly, to Groening being an over-40Â Blank Generation kid whose childhood fantasy entertainment involved pre-Star Wars fare. But it’s also an admission on the part of Groening and his writers that the futurisms of the past were just plain more exciting, more involving, more adventuresome, and above all more fun. All you have to do to turn those futures into a sincere comedy (the kind that will stay fresh after a few hundred episodes) is to play up their fun parts while gently assaulting their utopian assumptions, instead reasserting the eternality of human nature with all its flaws.
To play the worlds of Blade Runner or even Star Wars for laffs, you’d have to settle for either shallow parody (which wouldn’t last long as a series) or play it for dark, antiheroic irony (which, as Max Headroom proved, also plays itself out too quickly for an ongoing series).
Most science fiction has, on the surface, been about where society’s going. Futurama is, in its subtext, more about where we’ve been, what we’ve lost, and, by using itself as an example of a neo-adventure aesthetic, how we might bring at least pieces of it back.
MISC., the column that likes to think it knew better than to plant delicate little outdoor plants just before last Saturday’s overnight near-freeze, is proud as heck that ex-Steelhead zine editor Alex Steffen has not only taken the helm of the once-moribund local advocacy group Allied Arts, but has, along with his colleagues in the agency’s new leadership, issued a strong call for Seattle to become a city that actually supports the arts and artists, instead of merely coasting on its decaying “liberal” reputation as an excuse to subsidize construction projects and rich people’s formula entertainments. Speaking of which…
BOARD GAMES: A few nay-sayers in the performance-art community have privately suggested that the board members of On the Boards fired artistic director Mark Murphy, who led the production and theater-management outfit to national prominence, because those board members supposedly wanted to turn OTB away from art-for-art’s-sake presentations and closer toward yupscale commercial crowd pleasers, whatever those might be in the realms of modern dance and post-jazz music. (Mellow acoustic folkies? Lord of the Dance clone acts?) Anyhoo, I don’t quite believe the story. I have no proof either way, but I can imagine the board firing Murphy out of little more than personal spite. It’s still a shameful situation that shouldn’t have happened. Murphy’s possibly the best arts promoter this town’s seen (outside of the rock and DJ-music realms) since COCA’s heyday. Part-time board members can come and go, but an artistic director like Murphy’s someone you oughta try to keep under most any circumstances.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. goes to press this week! Everything’s on schedule for the Tues., 6/8 release party, now tentatively scheduled for the new Ditto Tavern at 5th & Bell. Mail orders are now being accepted; online ordering’s still in the process of being set up. The updated version of my older book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, also continues apace, with that publication date still more-or-less set for late Sept. or early Oct. I still wanna know which 1995-99 local acts ought to be mentioned in it; make your nominations at our splendido Misc. Talk discussion boards.
UPDATE #2: Summit Cable has resumed transmitting the public access channel 29 after one week in which it claimed TCI had ceased feeding the channel to it and TCI claimed Summit was simply not receiving the feed properly due to an engineering glitch of some sort.
UPDATE #3: The Speakeasy Cafe will remain open! And, as I’d recommended (not that they deliberately followed my advice or anything), its post-June 1 format will reiterate its core identity as an Internet cafe and low-key Belltown neighborhood hangout joint. The money-losing food-service side of the operation (soups, salads, sandwiches, hummus) has already been cut back. Within three weeks, there’ll be no more cover-charge music shows in the front room (which, besides drawing negative attention from the Liquor Board and the pool hall upstairs, detracted from the drop-in atmosphere an Internet cafe needs). While some music events may continue in the Speakeasy’s back room, the end of front-room shows means the loss of what had become a premier venue for Seattle’s vibrant avant-improv scene. Elsewhere in clubland…
DANCING TO THE TUNE OF $$: 700 Club/Last Supper Club entrepreneur Bill Wheeler says he loves being the target of that hate poster some anonymous Judas has pasted all over Pioneer Square, headlined “The Last Supper Club: All Hype” and berating it as a cash-grubbing nouveau riche hangout, a traitor to the supposed “tribal” spirit of the dance-music community. Wheeler says he couldn’t have generated better publicity had he made the poster himself (which he insists he didn’t).
Wheeler’s also quite proud of the expensive, elitist reputation his new club has so far succeeded in creating, and which the poster-creator loathed: “Can you believe it? People are paying $50 to get into the place! This is what Seattle’s needed.” Well, loyal Misc. readers already know what I think about headstrong San Franciscans (which Wheeler would freely admit to being) unilaterally proclaiming what Seattle needs, so I won’t persue that remark any further. As for paying that kind of money as a cover charge for entree to DJ music and a no-host bar (and suffering, on heavy nights, from a disco-era “selective door” policy), I’m fairly confident true Seattle hipsters can discern whether it’s worthy of their bother and their $$ or not. If not, I’m sure the savvy Wheeler can keep the business going by remarketing it to certain cyber-wealthy squares who think they can buy their way into hipness. Speaking of dance-club goers and notions of what’s hip…
HET-SETTERS: Entrepreneurs in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla. area (you know, home of the nation’s raunchiest strip-club scene and the region that tried to take away our baseball team) have launched a line of T-shirts and other logo apparel called “Str8 Wear,” purporting to announce heterosexual pride. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that stands to easily get misconstrued as gay-hatred. The designers insist in interviews and on their website that “We’re not anti-gay, we’re pro-heterosexual,” and merely want to offer “your chance to let everyone know you are proud of your sexuality,” via “an emblem that will identify you as a person who is available to the opposite sex.” It’s especially intended, the designers claim, for patrons of certain dance-music clubs and other urban-nightlife scenes where anyone who’s not gay might feel themselves branded as total out-of-it squares.
There are other problems with the Str8 Wear concept. It invites its wearers to see themselves as a tight li’l subculture via a term that merely indicates belonging to a vast, undifferentiated majority (except when referring to that punk-rock subsector, “str8 edge”). (But then again, merchandisers have long tried to persuade customers they’re expressing their invididuality by being just like most everybody else.)
A more positive, even more provocative, alternative might be the models at that T-shirt store on University Way, “I (heart) Men,” “I (heart) Women,” “I (heart) Cock,” and “I (heart) Pussy.” These come closer to provoking some of the anti-hetero biases that still exist in an urban-hipster culture where, too often, “sex positive attitudes” are permitted only to gay men, lesbians, and female-dominant fetishists.
In the square/conservative realm, sexually active straight men are often denounced as selfish rogues (or, more clinically, as “sex addicts”); and sexually active straight women are still often disdained as sluts (or, more clinically, as suffering from “self esteem issues”).
In the so-called “alternative” realm, straight men are often viciously stereotyped as misogynistic rapist-wannabes; and straight women are often condescendingly treated as either the passive victims of Evil Manhood or as really lesbians who just don’t know it yet.
As I’ve said from time to time, we need to rediscover a positive vision of heterosexuality, one that goes beyond the whitebread notion of “straight” and toward a more enthusiastic affirmation of one’s craving to connect with other-gendered bodies and souls. Hets don’t need to differentiate themselves from gays as much as they need to learn from them. To learn to take pride in one’s body and one’s desires, no matter what the pesky stereotypers say about you. Elsewhere in gender-identity-land…
BEATING AROUND THE BUSCH: The big beer companies, seeing the money to be made in gay bars, have for some time now tried to position themselves as at least tacit supporters of the gay-rights cause. Miller (owned by Jesse Helms’s pals at Phillip Morris) has cosponsored the Gay Pride Parade in Seattle for several years. Coors (owned by Orrin Hatch’s pal Pete Coors) has run ads in gay magazines claiming the company’s a lot queer-friendlier than popular rumor has sometimes alleged. And Anheuser-Busch has placed huge ad banners inside gay bars reviving (and repurposing) the Bud Light ad-tagline from a few years ago, “Yes, I Am.” Now, the company’s devised an ad for mainstream magazines depicting two men holding hands; quite possibly the first time this has been shown in any big company’s product ad (even the Chivas Regal ad from a few years ago had its gay couple maintaining proper distance while they jogged along a beach). The slogan: “Be yourself, and make it a Bud Light.” Apparently, the company’s got hundreds of homophobic phone callers denouncing the ad. If you want to show your support, you can dial the same number (1-800-DIAL-BUD). Remember, you can approve of this modest symbol of inclusiveness even if you never drink the beer.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK AT THIS SAME TIME (or whatever time you choose to read the column), pray for warmth, root for the Seattle-owned TrailBlazers in the basketball playoffs, and ponder these still-ahead-of-their-time words attributed to JFK: “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.”
MISC. really tries to point the way toward a post-irony age, but can’t hemp noticing when the downtown-Seattle Borders Books outlet holds a promo event this Saturday for the video release of You’ve Got Mail, that romantic-comedy movie predicated on the presumed evil of huge chain bookstores like Borders.
YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the new URLs on this page and throughout the rest of the venerable Misc. World site. We’re now at Miscmedia.com, so adjust your bookmarks accordingly and tell all your friends. It’s all part of a big scheme tied into our new print venture; speaking of which…
UPDATE #1: The ultra-limited first edition of The Big Book of Misc. is a mere five weeks away. You can now pre-order your copy by following the instructions on this link. Act now to get your own signed and numbered copy of the 240-page, illustrated collection of the best items from 13 years’ worth of reportage about the wacky-wacky world that is American culture. The release party’s tentatively set for Tues., June 8 at the new Ditto, 5th & Bell.
UPDATE #2: When we last reported on the Sugar’s strip joint in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, it smanagement was trying to fend off municipal regulations by launching an initiative to change the suburb’s governmental setup toward one less likely to restrict the club’s ability to earn a buck. That drive made it to the ballot but lost.
Now, the club’s trying another tactic. It’s declared itself a non-profit “private club,” and hence not subject to any Shoreline regulations i/r/t commercial adult-entertainment businesses. To go there now, you’ve got to fill out a very short membership application, then return a week later to find out if you’ve been accepted, then pay $50 a year (installments accepted), all for the privilege of spending more money on table dances.
An explanatory flyer offered at the door claims all the membership fees get donated to assorted kids’ charities, and that the whole setup’s a small but necessary step to keep America from succumbing to “a Brave New World in the form of a Christian conservative state.” Actually, the flyer’s author (club attorney Gilbert Levy) got it wrong. The dystopian future in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World had plenty of commercial porn and sexual “freedom” (all the better to prevent the formation of intimate or family bondings that would threaten individual subjugation to the mass society). It’s George Orwell’s 1984 that had the Anti-Sex Leagues running about to forcibly stamp out all human passion other than hate and blind obedience. Speaking of which…
FOLLOWING THE WAKE OF THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: You’ve read the media analysis of the Littleton, Colo. teen tragedy, and by now you’ve even read the analysis of the analysis. A few things to remember, some of which didn’t make it into some of the analyses:
Certainly in my own teenhood, and later in two day jobs dealing with teens, I’ve found little support or recognition within the system for any kid who wasn’t a potential star on the playing field or the sidelines. The media largely follow the inequity: One local TV newscast used to have a “Prep Athlete of the Month” segment, another used to have a “Student Athlete of the Week,” but nobody in local news (until this year’s revival of the Washington Spelling Bee) paid any notice to non-athletic young scholars. A truly progressive school system wouldn’t just be where it was OK for a girl to be good at sports; it would be where it was OK for a boy to be bad at sports.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, call TCI to demand it resume feeding the public access channel to Summit Cable customers, and take to heart these words by E.B. White: “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom–he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”
Journeys of the Mind:
Yourgrau, Mygrau, Ourgrau
Book feature, 4/28/99
HAUNTED TRAVELLER:
An Imaginary Memoir
by Barry Yourgrau
Arcade Publishing, $23.95
Barry Yourgrau, as he insists on telling us (in the least interesting segment of his latest collection of “sudden fiction” sketches), is, in real life, yet another middle-aged, N.Y.C.-based author whose existence is centered around the old home office and whose “adventures” tend to involve sitting at the keyboard, trying to think stuff up.
Actually, his life’s been a little more exciting than that. He’s had side careers in acting and performance art (the latter basically involving telling his stories to live audiences). The bulk of the press packet for his new book,Haunted Traveller, consists of article clippings regarding the ill-fated film version of his last collection, The Sadness of Sex. (The movie, which alternated between readings and re-enactments of Yourgrau’s surrealistic mini-tales of obsession and low-key angst, remains unreleased after only a few producer-paid screenings in L.A.)
The Sex book, however, was and is a triumph. It can essentially be described as a sequence of brief, finely-described dream/nightmare imageries, mostly built not on erotic excitement but on sexuality’s other easy-to-push buttons–despair, loneliness, frustration, fear, embarassment, farce, compulsion, emotional turmoil, and the particularly hetero-male metaphor of finding oneself lost within an alien (and potentially unfriendly) environment, apprehensive yet compelled to continue surveying.
It’s no big stretch, then, for Yourgrau to switch to deconstructing travel-memoir cliches in his newest themed collection of fiction-oids.
I feel I’d spoil it if I mentioned too many of Yourgrau’s ingenious story premises here, because their downbeat, Kafkaesque revelation forms the whole point of many of his pieces. Like that mythical Japanese tour group that spends days on a bus to the Grand Canyon and then turns back after taking a few snapshots, Yourgrau never spends more time in any one fictive place than he deems necessary.
I am comfortable saying all the stories are based on the same premise: A first-person narrator travels, usually by foot, across strange and distant lands where he happens to speak the local language well enough to get involved (usually against his better judgement) with assorted citizenry and strange phenomena. It’s a classic storytelling setup (used everywhere from The Odyssey and Gulliver’s Travels to TV’s Route 66 and even Pokemon). But in Yourgrau’s deft hands, it serves less to introduce colorful short-term characters than to illuminate glimpses of his unnamed protagonist’s own persona. Through the 40 or so vignettes, we end up learning a lot less about the assorted places and people the Haunted Traveller meets than we do about the Traveller’s own rootlessness, his restlessness, his need to keep seeing more and more places and to never see too deeply into any one of them.
I will also reveal that the last piece, “Music,” finds the Traveller’s soul finally at rest, only after he’s no longer capable of continuing his lifelong escape from his own mortality.
In The Sadness of Sex, Yourgrau deconstructed lust. In Haunted Traveller, he deconstructs wanderlust. In both collections (and in two earlier books Arcade’s reissuing), he uses the precision techniques of the short-short story to provide a well-balanced exhibition of tiny glimpses into the human condition. Think of it as literary pointillism, or as the use of breadth to tell what depth cannot.
MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.
UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.
AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)
ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.
If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)
GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).
Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)
The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!
CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.
Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.
Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).
Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.
While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)
It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”
MISC., the column that wants to be more than your warm-weather friend, is proud to announce several non-weather-related pieces of good news:
Good News Item #1: Our efforts to get the column, or something like it, back in print have succeeded. Sometime late this spring, look for full-length essays based on some of your favorite Misc. topics in the soon-to-be-very-different-than-it-used-to-be Seattle magazine.
Good News Item #2: The ultra-limited first edition of the absolutely bee-you-tee-ful Big Book of Misc. is still set for release on Tuesday, June 8. The site of the big whoo-tee-do release party is still to be announced. You’ll be able to get your own copy days or perhaps even weeks before that, however. (You’ll even be able to pre-order the new edition of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story at the same time, or shortly thereafter.) Details, as they say, shall be forthcoming.
Good News Item #3: When the new book comes out, your ever-faithful Misc. World site will probably go through another redesign. Maybe even a new name. Look for it. In other futurism news…
GOD HELP US IN THE FUTURE: It’s not just the Y2K survivalist-exploitation promoters and the militia cults who’ve said this would be the last model year for Civilization As We Know It. To find out how one such scenario turns out, set your calendars for Aug. 19. That’s the birthday of the late TV prognosticator and Plan 9 From Outer Space narrator Jeron Criswell, and the date he predicted for the end of the world. In his 1968 book Criswell Predicts: Your Future From Now Until the Year 2000, he wrote, “The world as we know it will cease to exist, as I have stated previously in this volume, on August 18, 1999. A study of all the prophets–Nostradamus, St. Odile, Mother Shipton, the Bible–indicates that we will cease to exist before the year 2000! Not one of these prophets even took the trouble to predict beyond the year 2000! And if you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 19, 1999 [he actually left our realm in 1980], and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak and no words will come out, for we have no future… you and I will suddenly run out of time!”
How will time run out? Criswell envisioned a “black rainbow” which “will encircle the planet Earth and it will be seen from every vantage point on the face of the earth for at night it will glow with an irridescent light and at night it will be a black streak across our sky.” He defines this entity as “a magnetic disturbance in our atmosphere, set about by change in gravitational pulls throughout the universe.” He claims it “will draw the oxygen from our atmosphere, as a huge snake encircling the world and feeding upon the oxygen which we need to exist. Hour after hour it will grow worse. And we will grow weaker. It is through this that we will be so weakened that when the final end arrives, we will go silently, we will go gasping for breath, and then there will be only silence on the earth.” At least we’ll all get to die, he writes, before “the sudden shift in gravitational forces will cause our earth to jump out of orbit and start flying through space, closer and closer to the sun.” In other time-marching-on news…
TWO MORE DOWN: The ranks of the G-Word-era Seattle clubs still around diminished again this month. The Off Ramp, glorious rundown mecca for loud-music fans and Monarch Vodka drinkers, closed again for the third and possibly final time. And the Vogue,which as WREX hosted some of Seattle’s first punk/new wave bands, and then under its latter name was the site of Nirvana’s first Seattle gig and Seattle’s first regular fetish-dance night, moved out of its nearly 20-year digs on First Avenue and reopened in part of the former Encore/Safari gay bar site on Capitol Hill. What’s still left, you ask? The Crocodile, of course; plus the OK Hotel, the Ditto Tavern (reopened but with only occasional band nights), the Colourbox, and RKCNDY. (The latter two are rumored to be eventually doomed for redevelopment.) In other ebbing and flowing popcult trends…
GUY-ED WIRES: Almost Live! sketch comic Pat Cashman got his entree into Seattle morning radio when his first station put him on in place of Bob Hardwick. Now, Cashman has also been dismissed (by KIRO-FM) for being too unhip, and also for being too popular with women. (Say what?) So he was canned, in favor of an L.A.-based pair of toilet-talking wild-and-crazy doods. The Weekly described the current fad in faux-Howard Stern shock jocks (Stern himself is still not carried here) as “sex in the morning.” I hear it as something else: A calculated demographic attempt to ensure you’re selling advertisers a nearly all-male audience, by putting out personas of arrested-pre-adolescent “guy” humor almost guaranteed to drive the ladies away.
History will show that corporatized “guy” culture, in its current U.S. incarnation, had two antecedents. One was the aging-frat-jock milieu of “blooze” bars, cigar bars, muscle cars, Hooters restaurants, cable wrestling shows, dumb “action” movies, and the abstract rituals of hardcore porn. The other forebearer was Britain’s venerable tradition of boorish behavior: The realm of soccer hooligans, pub crawlers, Andy Capp, Punch and Judy puppet shows, boarding-school cruelties, flogging, Jack the Ripper, the comic magazine Viz, and those ol’ armies that thuggishly enforced colonial rule across the globe.
In the early ’90s, some British magazine publishers evolved a formula to mesh this latter aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) with articles and ads promoting upscale consumer goods. The result was magazines like Maxim, Loaded, and FHM (which are or will soon have U.S. editions). They found a way to reach male young adults without that one editorial element (generous nudity) some still-prudish advertisers fear. The mags have only as much female flesh as advertisers will bear (a few shots in the U.K. editions, almost none in the U.S. editions), and instead rely on supermodel faces and smutty sex-talk articles, punctuated by accolades to the glory of whatever “stuff” Real Men are supposed to want to buy this year (gold cufflinks, Harley Davidson-logo knick-knacks, ultraviolent video games). TV got into the game with the short-lived sitcoms Pigsty and Men Behaving Badly (a remake of a U.K. series), and continued with cable’s Movies For Guys Who Like Movies (and, later this year, something on Comedy Central called The Man Show); all these offerings wallow in stereotyping the male of the species as stupid, hygiene-challenged, and obsessed with violence and crudity.
Print and broadcast Guyville, like most corporate culture, is a place of mediocrity, extremely standardized mediocrity. The novelty is that this particular commercial mediocrity claims to be an outlandish voice of bad-boy rebellion against previous, squarer, commercial mediocrities. But, like those various other mediocrities, it really promotes acquiescence to the endless drive to make and spend money, and to let dumb magazines tell folks exactly how to live and how to think.
There’s also something insinuous about Guyville. Yes, it could harmfully influence young males, but not in the ways some sexist female commentators and right-wing prudes claim. It won’t turn boys and young men into misogynistic rapists or family-abandoning rogues. It just might, though, turn some of them into lonesome bachelors-for-life. By deliberately promoting a vision of manhood devised to turn off women, Guy Culture just might leave a few young men bereft of the real-life social skills needed for attracting and maintaining a romantic relationship. And if you can’t get a date, it doesn’t matter how many salacious magazine articles you’ve read about proper cunnilingus technique.
Still, there are things I sort of like about the trend. It’s good that the relentless hatemongering of right-wing talk is fading in radio popularity, in favor of shticks that (however crudely) celebrate sexuality, mating, and enthusiasm for life. And it’s perfectly understandable that, after the early-’90s propriety in which only women and gay men were permitted to have “sex positive” attitudes, the inevitable pro-straight-male reaction would adopt such immature swagger. But I’d still rather have our male population try to be “gentlemen” than “guys.” Stupidity and boorishness are not positive traits (except in big business and advertising, which is of course the real point of the whole Guyville industry.)
YOUR IDES-OF-APRIL MISC. wonders whether we can gloat yet about all those 4×4 gas-guzzler owners who mistakenly thought gas prices were going to stay low forever.
MISC. BOOK UPDATE: The long-awaited (by a few of you, anyway) Big Book of Misc. (the third or fourth, and probably the last, tentative title) has a publication date! The ultra-limited first edition will be brought out at a special release party on Tuesday, June 8, at a site to be announced later. The text and the layout are just about ready. The cover design’s coming along (we’ve got one pretty good concept, involving the Space Needle surrounded by construction of the new KOMO-TV building, but might chuck it for something bolder). By next week, we should be set up to accept pre-orders for signed and numbered copies from you, the loyal Misc. World online community.
CASTING CALL: The planned sculpture park out on the three-block former Union 76 oil terminal site, on Broad Street east of Pier 70, has caused the entire city to rise up as one and cry in exhaltation: “Eek! Not tons more huge, awful public art!” In more creative public-art news…
COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The convicted street “tag” graffiti artist mentioned in the 4/6 P-I goes by the street name Flaire, but his reported real name is Max Ernst Dornfeld. The original Max Ernst, of course, was also an artist known for challenging the staid mores of his own society.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK (sort of): Seattle Pride is a slim, free, glossy monthly, a clone of a similar-named mag in Chicago devoted to the concept Dan Savage derided (previously, about other publishing efforts) as attempting to reach a homosexual audience without any references to sex. Instead, this one gives you lots and lots of interior decorating tips, plus a canned feature about a Bill Blass fashion show and an L.A. travel article advising readers to “pack the sunblock today, get your travel agent on the phone and as the ancient wisdom of disco says–go west.” (In case you haven’t noticed, Los Angeles is actually south-southeast of Seattle.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $40/year from 3023 N. Clark, #910, Chicago IL 60657. Speaking of gay interior-deco gods…
THE ACE FACE: Continuing our recent discussion on the Brave New Seattle, the new Ace Hotel at 1st and Wall is either A Clockwork Orange nightmare, hospital fetishism, or something contrived for touring musicians to remind them of the comforts of the rehab center. (I know, a sick joke.) It’s also ARO.Space as a hotel, conceived and designed by many of the same partners as that gay dance club, which means just what I said two weeks ago–upscale “hip” Seattle encapsulated and concentrated.
On the second hand, it’s also the white space that can mean anything to anyone, so perchance I’m over-interpreting.
On the third hand, it does remind me of one of the late Jim Henson’s early, experimental, live-action productions, The Cube, which starred Richard Schaal (later a stock-company supporting player on the MTM sitcoms) as a man inexplicably trapped inside a bright, white, plastic room, where assorted off-Broadway-esque characters briefly appear to taunt him, but from which he cannot escape.
Now, compare the Ace to the new Cyclops restaurant, on the ground floor of the same building, which opened in its resurrected form on Easter night. It’s just as all slick and fancy-schmancy as the Ace, but with color and texture and style and charm, not just sterility marketed as taste.
(Cyclops and the Ace opened the weekend before Newsweek came out with a piece citing the Denny Regrade as an example of a national trend in downtown housing booms. The old Cyclops had had bedrooms above it too, but those were the bedrooms of affordable artist-housing apartments; something almost nobody in modern boomtown Seattle’s even talking about anymore.)
In any event, the two businesses’ joint opening weekend proved “alternative” is deader than it was when I first wrote that it was dead a couple or so years ago. At one time, not so very long ago, there was a loose-knit community of artists, musicians, zine publishers, graphic designers, performance artists, writers, dramatists, and film/video makers who considered themselves to be a subculture set apart from the anything-for-a-buck affluent-whitebread society many of them had grown up among.
But nowadays, that notion seems to be withering away, at least among many of its ’80s-and-early-’90s adherents. The operative notion these days appears to be not “alternative” but “cool,” as in proclaiming oneself to be on the artsy leading edge of new-money Seattle rather than apart from (or in opposition to) the realm of the cell-phonin’, stock-optionin’ hyper capitalists. If you consider the really early punk rock to have been an extension of ’70s glam rock, then you might consider this a full-circle tour, back to the Studio 54-era NYC concept of hipsters as the beautiful people, urban society’s brightest and worthiest.
Bourgeois culture in Seattle once meant enthusiastically provincial attempts at aping the “world class” high arts. More recently, it meant an indigenous but ultra-bland aesthetic of comfort and reassurance, typified by Kenny G and glass art. That was the official Seattle I used to wallow in mocking, using the name of the city-owned power company in vain to call it City Lite. But now it’s something else. Not City Lite anymore, but something one might call City Extra Lite. No longer the supposed refuge of smug, staid, aging Big Chillers who couldn’t tolerate anything too fast or too bright or too exciting or too fun; but rather the supposed stomping ground of brash young turks and still-with-it aging New Wavers.
Seattle in the Age of Gates is a place with “Attitude” up the ass, a place where everybody (so long as they’ve got dough and aren’t excessively non-white) can party on down to nonstop generic techno music before scarfing down a $20 plate of penne pollo in an Italian/Chinese fusion sauce (or, for the more prudish partiers, a Crocodile Cafe vegan soyburger with extra cheese and bacon). A place where hipsters aren’t rebels against the monied caste but the entertainers and servants to the movers ‘n’ shakers (many of whom consider themselves to be “rebels” against the Old Routine and old ways of doing business). In the Newspeak of the Gates Era, “punk rock” is ESPN2 soundtrack music and “radical” is an adjective for a snowboarding stunt.
But then again, the arts have historically served their patrons. Perhaps it was foolish to dream for a city where artists could churn out reasonably self-sufficient careers without expressing the utter wonderfulness of people with ample discretionary income. Perhaps the century-or-so-old notion of bohemianism (what conservative commentator Charles P. Fruend called “the image of the artist as a visionary who lives outside time”) has become an outmoded fantasy. (As that famous Seattle abandoner Courtney Love sez, “Selling out’s great. It means all the tickets are gone.”)
Or, just maybe, there’s a need for a new notion of rebellion. More about that at a later date. Next week, though, another supposedly-hip, supposedly-rebellious subculture–the realm of toilet-talk radio and magazines.
Precious Is As Precious Does:
Tell It To McSweeney
Alterna-journal feature, 3/31/99
Hard not to like a magazine whose almost all-text cover starts out, “People, People—Stop blaming yourselves! Have you forgotten: Timothy McSweeney’s Blues/Jazz Odyssey? (For short, say ‘McSweeney’s’) Also known as: ‘Pollyanna’s Bootless Errand.'” This sort of quaint, literate entertainment doesn’t stop for the next 192 pages and back cover.
For decades now (even before TV’s ascendancy), left- and right-wing Puritans alike have bemoaned Americans’ supposed disinterest in The Word; when actually it’s been dull word-packages that’ve drawn all the yawns. If literary journals, political position papers, and highbrow essays could be presented with this sense of smart whimsey, the verbal marketplace could be a quite different landscape indeed.
The origins of McSweeney’s are somewhat remarkable. David Eggers used to edit Might, one of those San Francisco magazines that claim to be “regional” or even “national” in scope but which end up almost never writing about anything outside San Francisco. Might’s post-Spy brand of smug satire wasn’t all that hot in this reviewer’s opinion, but it generated enough impressive portfolio clippings that, upon its demise, Eggers shipped off to NYC to make his way in the “real” magazine racket. There, he plies his way through what he describes as mind-numbing day-job employment at dumb, audience-despising corporate publishing; while by night, from his Brooklyn home office, he puts out McSweeney’s and its associated web site, both as an outlet for his and other writers’ “real” work and as a low-budget example of how word-wrangling ought to be done.
The second McSweeney’s finally arrived in local stores, a little over four months after the first issue of the “Quarterly Concern” appeared. Worth the wait? Yeah.
Within the densely-typeset covers are slightly less densely-typeset interior pages, comprising a variety of pleasant and often insightful prose, fiction, and humor. Of particular note is “Hooper’s Bathhouse” by co-editor Todd Pruzan. It’s a neat, tidy, precise send-up of children’s adventure fiction (one of those genres frequently touted by self-proclaimed defenders of The Word as something we must force-feed our kiddies whether they like it or not), in particular the 1980s “choose your own adventure” subset of that genre. Some of the paths in the story (spread out throughout the magazine) lead to nothing but afternoon boredom. Some lead to afternoon boredom amplified by underage pot smoking. And one path leads to the child heroes discovering some real old-time sea pirates—who promptly slay the kids.
With such a perfect example of exposing the predictability of formula fiction, it’s almost silly to refer to the magazine’s factual stories as “stranger than fiction.” Yet that tired phrase well applies to Sean Wilsey’s “The Republic of Marfa,” a long, leisurely account of an extremely remote west Texas hamlet that got turned into one of those southwest art-colony towns more commonly found in New Mexico and Arizona, and which hosted an international conference on modern architecture whose visiting egos barely fit in the region’s wide open spaces.
Many other delights await within the second McSweeney’s. I’ll leave it for you to find them, in the magazine and on the website. Just remember two of the slogans on issue #2’s cover, “Have Pity,” and “Precious Is As Precious Does.”
Perhaps if it came out more often, I could get tired of the preciousness. But 4x/year, plus weekly-or-so online doses, works out just fine. Beyond the preciousness, though, could McSweeney’s help spur a revival of fine copywriting and editing, of reading for pleasure? Couldn’t hurt trying. Or, as the motto on the bottom of issue #1’s cover states, “We Mean No Harm.”
Going to ‘The Dogs’
Original book essay, 3/24/99
The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary
by Rebecca Brown
City Lights Books, $10.95 (paperback)
First, the behind-the-scenes stuff you might remember from a few months back: Seattle author Rebecca Brown made the highly acclaimed The Gifts of the Body, a slightly fictionalized memoir about her days as a volunteer caregiver to AIDS patients. Then, she got a healthy deal with HarperCollins for her next novel. Then, HarperCollins proprietor Rupert Murdoch ordered management to cut expenses, after the company vastly overspent on celebrity books (including one by Murdoch’s pal Newt Gingrich). Brown’s The Dogs was one of the titles dropped, after it had already been announced in company publicity documents. It finally came out months later from a smaller press, for a smaller advance.
But enough of that. Now let’s talk about the book itself, for it’s truly a fine little piece of work which ought to stand on its own rather than as a survival story of the publishing-consolidation wars. To understand the premise, you have to start with the back cover text, which defines a “bestiary” as a “medieval book combining descriptions of real or mythical animals with fables designed to teach a lesson.” The lesson taught in this tale isn’t as clear as something the Brothers Grimm or Aesop might have told (especially in the original, violent versions), but it still haunts.
Our nameless heroine/narrator, an introverted young adult living on Seattle’s Capitol Hill with little need or desire for companionship, meets, or runs into, or is run into by, a doberman pinscher. The narrator takes the dog into her tiny studio apartment, names her Miss Dog, and establishes an emotional bond with the creature beyond any she’d known with her fellow humans.
Then, somewhere around page 32, things get spooky. Miss Dog has a litter of puppies. Then the narrator also gives birth to a litter of puppies. Then more dogs of various ages and demeanors start appearing, as if from nowhere, in the apartment. They follow the narrator wherever she goes, seen by nobody else yet all too physically real to her. Then Miss Dog surgically removes the narrator’s heart, then feeds it back to her chopped up into hors d’ouvres. Then she’s ritually deflated, as a balloon, so there’s more room in the apartment for the ever-increasing numbers of dogs.
As strange as this reads in this summary form, it all makes perfect dream-logic as Brown tells it. She gradually increases the surrealism quotient, patiently (well, as patiently as can be done in a 166-page tale) luring her readers into the heroine’s otherworldly plight.
Brown also never gives an “it was just a dream” cop out. Instead, she ends the heroine’s tale of woe and harrassment on a thickly-disguised therapeutic note, as the heroine finally learns what the dogs had come to her for, to show her what had been missing from her own soul (or something like that). I also cannot do justice here to Brown’s elegant, exquisite prose. Mere excerpts wouldn’t show you the tone, the delicate pacing, of her work. You’ve really got to pick this up for yourself.
MISC., the column that knew how to pronounce “Gonzaga” years before SportsCenter, has noticed a disturbing subtext in those Bud Light commercials. You’ve surely seen some of these spots, in which desperate guys will go through assorted humiliating, life-threatening, illegal, or icky experiences just to get a beer (or to prevent one’s roommate from having any of his own stash). Are these really intended as beer promotions or as AA recruitments?
THANX TO ALL who attended my reading last Sunday in the packed little space that is Pistil Books and News. Further previews of the new best-of-Misc. book will follow. Still no publication date yet; but faithful Misc. World readers will have the first opportunity to get a copy. As for the next edition of my old book, I’m waiting on getting back the original offset-printing film (it’d cost a lot to have to re-halftone those 800 or so pictures). More at the end of this report, and when info becomes available.
UPDATES: Looks like the Speakeasy Cafe will remain open for the time being, but without the live music shows that had provided the space’s chief source of income (while diminishing its utility as an Internet cafe and casual hangout spot, and getting it in hot water with the upstairs tenants and with the Liquor Board)… As if the loss of the Speakeasy to music promoters weren’t bad enough, the folks behind the Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge are (according to The Tentacle, that vital local creative-music newsletter) rumored to be near burnout point and ready to close. For the past two or three years, the VE’s most of the all-ages music events that mattered (along with RKCNDY, already slated for demolition sometime this year). Dunno yet why VE might be packing it in or what might happen to its space; ‘tho I suspect they might have become too dependent upon one show, the over-a-year-old production of the one-man musical Kerouac. Of course, the space’s previous tenant, the Pioneer Square Theater, also went kablooey in ’89 after it became too dependent upon one production (Angry Housewives). Anyhow, The Tentacle‘s asking its readers for input on helping resolve this sudden dearth of experimental-music-friendly venues. In similar subcultural news…
BOUND FOR GLORY?: The Beyond the Edge Cafe on E. Pike, where members of the Seattle fetish community used to hang out, quietly closed up a couple months back. But the fetish community’s not taking things lying down, as it were. Kink-niks are now looking to open their own “sex positive community center” somewhere in the greater downtown/Capitol Hill zone. Info’s at the “Seattle Fetish Gazette” site. It just goes to show what you can do when you base your entire emotional center around discipline. Speaking of discipline…
FORCING THE ISSUE: The Star Wars Episode One trailer is a bigger hit than just about any full-length movies this season. Maybe they should dump the film itself and just release more previews. For that matter, why not just make original short films in trailer form, without releasing a subsequent long-form version? We’ve all seen parody trailers for otherwise nonexistent films (Hardware Wars, et al.), but those were essentially spoofs of feature-film genres, done in short form to avoid stretching their gags too far. I’m talking about self-contained shorts made with the conventions of previews: Narration, chopped-up scenes and dialogue, intimations of a larger narrative arc without fully explaining the storyline, a buildup of excitement based on increasingly intense lines or visuals (rather than linear plot progression), and an ending that climaxes the visual/verbal spectacle without providing a plot resolution. This is close to shticks some experimental/independent filmmakers over the years have toyed with. But those films often lack (or deliberately reject) the oldtime showmanship-energy trailers have always employed in their selling function. It’s something all filmmakers should learn (and then choose whether or not to employ).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Special Rider Alert looks, on the cover, like a real Metro Transit pamphlet (except that it’s a b/w photocopy job). Inside, though, you won’t find route-change announcements but rather a short essay by one “Will N. Dowd” about the difficulties of existence as a bar-hopping bus rider who tries to drink in the far south end while living in the far north end or vice versa, or something like that; while observing “Shoreline High gangsters say `beyatch’ and `Mudda Fugga’ just like their MTV ghetto heroes.” Free with SASE from 9594 1st Ave. NE, #256, Seattle 98125.
OUR LAST SURVEY asked you to nominate your favorite building that you find beautiful but squaresville critics might find “ugly.” Some of your responses follow:
Actually, I’ve been in the “Live Ladybugs” shack on several occasions; the most recent just a couple of weeks ago. It’s the home-studio-office-warehouse of Buddy Foley, an unreconstructed hippie who’s been self-employed in umpteen simultaneous endeavors over the years. Besides selling math textbooks and ladybugs, he’s been a musician, recording engineer, illustrator, buyer-seller of musical instruments, and videomaker (most recently assembling footage of naked young neohippies at Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival).
As for some of the other buildings mentioned above, the nonprofit operators of the Grand Illusion have already done their remodeling of that space, but wisely emphasized better projection equipment rather than changing the look of the mini-auditorium. Preservationists are working to save the Hat n’ Boots. And the Hostess factory’s still churnin’ out its Sno-Balls, even though Interstate Brands is halving employment at its Wonder Bread plant on Yesler.
And as for some of my own favorite beautiful “ugly” buildings (at least those which haven’t been destroyed in Seattle’s rebuilding craze), I’ve a few nominations to give:
(I could also talk about the Experience Music Project, but that’s a tale for another time.)
OUR NEXT SURVEY has an ulterior motive. I want your suggestions on which recent (1986-99) Seattle musicians and bands should be mentioned in the forthcoming revised edition of my old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Start naming names today, via email or at our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. As always, organized letter-writing campaigns on behalf of yourself won’t get you any more attention.
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to enjoy the upcoming last half-season of Kingdome baseball games, but please don’t wallow in any of that George Will crap about the return of baseball symbolizing the sense of renewal in the American spirit.
THIS IDES-O-MARCH MISC. starts out with a second announcement for my fantabulous live reading event this Sunday (March 21), 7 pm, at the splendiforous Pistil Books, 1015 E. Pike St. I’ll be reading from the soon-to-be-reissued old book (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and from my new book (the yet-untitled Misc. collection). (And, if the audience is really nice, I might even sing the national anthem to the tune of the theme from Valley of the Dolls.)
SPEAKING OF SEATTLE MUSIC, I want your recommendations: Which recent (1996-99) Seattle-area bands and solo musicials should be mentioned in the updated edition of Loser? Make your recommendations via email or at the ever-scintillating Misc. Talk discussion boards. Bonus points if you recommend someone other than yourself.
SPEAKING OF MUSIC: Kool and the Gang recently placed a large display ad in the Village Voice, seeking a new lead singer-dancer for an upcoming nostalgia tour. In his 1990 graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn, the once-promising alterna-cartoonist Kyle Baker had his antiheroine claim that playing “Louie Louie” at a party or a bar was like ordering people to Have Fun, or embodied a too-determined effort to Have Fun. I’d say the current incarnation of that would be playing “Jungle Boogie.” (Or the Commodores’ “Brick House,” or those three James Brown songs white people have heard of.)
AFTER THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: Even during the Lewinsky-as-celebrity hype week the question remains: If Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats turn out to have succeeded to any permanent extent in tearing the Right’s money-and-religion marriage of convenience asunder, why? Is it merely to preserve the Democratic Party as an organization, or does the Clinton camp have any larger ideological or social agenda of any sort? That’s what the 2000 Presidential-election cycle ought to be about, but probably won’t.
BITING IT?: As you know, I love one junk food more than almost any othe, the mighty Clark Bar. So it’s sad to hear its Pittsburgh-based makers have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to hold off creditors while they attempt to reorganize the business. It’s another setback for the once-mighty D.L. Clark Co., which was merged into that onetime epitome of food conglomerates Beatrice; then, after Beatrice’s disillusion and asset sell-off, was barely saved a few years ago from the clutches of Leaf (a company that bought smaller candy companies, closed their plants, and kept the brand names (sort of like Stroh Brewing has done with the likes of Rainier beer) before it sold out its remaining assets to Hershey’s). But the Clark factory’s new owners (and the newer owners who took over from them) never got proper national distribution after that. Locally, the chocolatey peanut butter crunch of the original Clark Bar (the first U.S. candy bar to be individually wrapped, as a shipping convenience for WWI soldiers) is available only at a few Bartell Drug stores and at scattered indie candy outlets (like the downtown post-office newsstand). Recent variants, such as Clark Dark and Winter Clark, are even harder to track down. But please do so. (For e-commerce lovers, the local food-delivery service HomeGrocer.com doesn’t supply Clark Bars, but Hometown Favorites and The Candy Castle do.)
THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer flashed during a Chevrolet Malibu commercial): “Made in the U.S.A. of domestic and globally-sourced parts.”
SPROCKETS: It’s Oscar time again, and some print-media observers are calling this the “year of the foreign film” at the Awards, what with the Italian Life Is Beautiful and the British Elizabeth and Shakespeare In Love vying for the Best Picture statuette. But, as with the Oscars’ supposed “Year of the Woman” and “Year of the Indie,” the reality’s something less than the hype. The German-based, English-language webzine Rewired recently ran an essay noting the long-term decline in film production on the European continent (parallelling similar declines in Japan and Hong Kong), and begged the question of whether American “indie” films (increasingly distributed and even financed by the “specialty” divisions of the big Hollywood studios) were really just foot soldiers in the global media trust’s ongoing push to trample all the other film industries in the world, to subsume all regional cultures under a true “Planet Hollywood.” I wouldn’t go that far, even though the glut of (often incompetent and inane) “indie” films has almost copletely driven foreign-language films out of the “art house” screens of North America.
For one thing, beneath the hordes of cookie-cutter Sundance/Miramax formula productions there’s a whole ‘nother scene of indie-r filmmakers. Seemingly everybody I know’s getting into hi-8 or digital-video moviemaking. Occasionally, one of these people tries to recruit me into his or her would-be megaproduction (on an all-volunteer basis, natch). But I have standards. I won’t work for free for just anybody (and won’t work for free for anybody who’s gonna be making money from my work).
Herewith, a few things I don’t want in any movie I may be involved with:
You think these strictures leave one nothing with which to work? Au contraire, mon frere. There’s a whole universe of topics and themes left to discover once you decide to eschew the easy ideas everybody else is using. One example, seen last week on the FX cable channel: No Retreat, No Surrender, a 1986 teen B-movie made Stateside by Hong Kong director Corey Yuen. Set in Seattle and Reno, but largely filmed in L.A., it involves a teenage martial-arts aspirer (Kurt McKinney) who gets lessons from the ghost of Bruce Lee, just in time to battle Jean-Claude Van Damme (in one of that refugee from a dying Euro film industry’s early roles, as an evil Russian kickboxer). It’s also got some classic lines: “Beat it Brucy! Why don’t you go home and play with your wooden dolly?!” Or: “I’ll tell my dad not to worry.” Plus: “Karate is NOT to be used AGGRESSIVELY!” It might’ve been a classic if only it hadn’t exhibited a “Seattle” setting that had plenty of palm trees in the backgrounds and plenty of Spanish-stucco houses along the streets, with only a few establishing shots of real local scenery (Pacific Science Center, the old Dog House restaurant; all shot without live sound). If it were made today, of course, it’d undoubtedly show a “Seattle” setting with the B.C. Place stadium and Vancouver SkyTrain in the background. But at least the regional vegetation would be right.
‘TIL NEXT TIME (when we bring you the final results of our search for beautiful buildings other people might deem “ugly”), join us in remembering Stanley Kubrick, Garson Kanin, Dusty Springfield, Peggy Cass, and Mr. Coffee, and ponder these words from John Kenneth Galbraith: “People like the exposure of wickedness in high places. It gives them a sense of ultimate righteousness of the world… The squirming of those who are caught allows people to indulge in a certain legitimate sadism which, otherwise, they would feel obliged to suppress.”
On Your Marx
Original online film essay, 3/10/99
I just saw East Side Story last week on Cinemax. Yes, the popular documentary from last year’s Seattle International Film Festival, which contrasts the untenable fantasy of filmed musical comedy vs. the equally untenable fantasy of the promised socialist future utopia, was shown on a channel dedicated 24/7 to the dissemination of Hollywood’s state-propaganda messages (without those pesky interruptions for Madison Avenue’s rival propaganda).
Despite the proven worldwide popularity of Hollywood musicals (and the examples from France and India of how the musical format could be adapted for Eastern Hemisphere cultures), financial, bureaucratic, and production problems conspired against the form in the USSR (and, after 1945, in its satellites).
According to the documentary, only 40 such films were made in the Soviet bloc from 1933 to 1973; a time period roughly corresponding to about three or four years behind the start and end of Hollywood’s musical era. (This figure doesn’t count period-piece operettas, which were supplied much more plentifully, especially in Hungary.)
Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, many of the musicals that did get made are, from the documentary’s excerpts, infected with an incessantly “happy” mood. Everybody’s smiling, everybody’s moving and dancing as all-get-out. Everything’s saturated in light. The color films (in the prints shown in East Side Story) have the muted-gaudy tones of old rotogravure fashion advertising.
The overall effect bears little resemblance to Hollywood’s endless rehashes of the song-and-story technique pioneered on Broadway by Rodgers & Hammerstein (whose own works, you might recall, included such less-than-whistle-happy topics as wife abuse, the rise of Naziism in Austria, and the mainstreaming of Asian American culture).
But it does look a lot like the insistently-perky dream world of “industrials,” the musical shows and films commissioned by corporations. Some of the best examples of these are the films made by the old Jam Handy Studio on behalf of General Motors, of which some of the best can be found in the compilation video seriesEphemeral Films, which unfortunately appears to now be out of print except on CD-ROM.
The closing credits of East Side Story contain the dedication, “To Karl Marx, without whom none of this would have been necessary.” The Marxist utopia, or rather the Leninist utopia, imagined a society built around Workers, i.e. around people whose sole purpose in life was to work, to work hard, to work happily, and to work for work’s sake. So it’s not surprising that the Leninist world’s “light entertainment” films portrayed play as intense, ardorous work–when they weren’t portraying work as something more exhilarating than play. (Yes, there is a singing-tractor-driver scene, as well as a singing-wheat-harvesters scene and a singing-coal-press-operators scene.)
The Jam Handy films for GM, shown at auto shows and sales meetings, depict a slightly different utopia: They imagine a society built around Sellers and Buyers. In this scheme, the salesperson is the foot soldier of the entire western economy. All other professions exist to provide salespeople with something to sell, or to support the sales process. (Handy’s sales-training slide films were tributed in Diane Keaton’s appropriately-titled picture book Mr. Salesman.)
And the process of buying, in the Handy universe, is shown as the key to just about every non-economic human need. Any problem that can’t be solved by the acquisition of products is a problem that doesn’t exist. (And Marx dared to call his philosophy “materialist”!)
In the latter-day interview portions of East Side Story, surviving members of the eastern-bloc film industries recall how communist-party censors were always berating entertainment movies for supposedly celebrating western-style decadence, as opposed to the unceasing dedication-to-work expected from all good citizens of the Workers’ States. The closing narration wonders if everything would’ve been different had the Communist bosses only learned to have a sense of fun like that seen in a few of the musicals. I think it wouldn’t have changed much. Just instead of states built around an unending quest to increase production, these countries would’ve become states built around an unending quest to increase consumption.
SPRING MAY OR MAY NOT be just around the corner, but Misc.’s here with a container-ship hold chock full o’ good news:
THE GOOD NEWS #1: I’ll be reading from my books old (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) and new (the still untitled best-of-Misc. book) on Sunday, March 21, 7 pm, at Pistil Books, 1013 E. Pike. Be there. Aloha.
THE GOOD NEWS #2: Progress on getting the new book out, and on getting the old book back out, continues apace. I don’t have release dates yet, but both will be offered to Misc. World online readers first. Stay tuned.
THE GOOD NEWS #3: Beyond these two projects, I’m looking into ways to get the ongoing column back into print. Again, stay tuned.
THE WRIGHT OF SPRING: There was a little confusion surrounding the recent press coverage of Bagley and Virginia Wright, the longtime local art collectors whose holdings form the bulk of the Seattle Art Museum’s current modern-art exhibit. Actually, it was the unrelated Howard S. Wright who built the Space Needle (and took a great deal of credit, perhaps more credit than was due him, for designing it).
Virginia Wright inherited some timber money (she’s a Bloedel, as in MacMillan-Bloedel, the logging company B.C. environmentalists most dearly love to hate). She came back here from an Ivy League college with hubby Bagley, who invested her dough in real estate and assorted business ventures, including the Space Needle partnership (originally called the Pentagram Corp.) and Seattle Weekly.
In a region of industrialists and builders, Bagley Wright was almost purely a financier–an anomaly around here in his heyday, an anomaly that may partly explain why he and his Mrs. bought so much art. In a local business community centered around the making and owning of tangible, physical things, Bagley and Virginia Wright may have felt they had to show off their status by having some notable tangible, physical things of their own.
One of the things at the SAM show is a wall installation by one Jack Pierson entitled, and simply comprising the words, “Kurt Cobain,” made from worn-out outdoor sign lettering and hung directly above a Jeff Koons molded-plastic desecration of Catholic religious art. Cobain would’ve liked the molded-plastic desectration of Catholic religious art, but (and this is half-informed conjecture on my part) might not have cared for an artist such as Koons, obsessed with perpetuating his own celebrity image.
Also, for the duration of the SAM show the general public gets to look at (most of) the Wrights’ new private gallery, at 407 Dexter Avenue North (or, as I call it, “Dextrose Avenue North,” because it’s right next door to the Hostess bakery). As befits Seattle’s usually reclusive old-money crowd, the private gallery offers a blank wall to the sidewalk with its entrance in the alley. Hours are 11 am-2 pm Tue-Fri, thru May 7. It’s more than an annex to the SAM show; it’s got huge paintings and installations, by such mod-art biggies as DeKooning and Warhol and Rauschenberg, most of which get showcased individually on their own skylighted walls.
And it has the feeling of a “site-specific installation,” even though none of the works were expressly created to be displayed there. When you go to the Wrights’ private gallery, you’re not going into a space created to cater to people like you. You’re invading a private turf (which after May 7 will be by-appointment-only; probably mostly for private tours by art-world bigwigs, students, and money people), catching a glimpse-on-the-sly of how Seattle’s seldom-showy, usually-secretive elites live.
THE DENIM AIN’T ALL THAT’S BLUE: Levi Strauss is shrinking and fading. The company announced a week or two back that it’s laying off a third of its staff and closing half its plants, ending its status as the one big U.S. clothing maker that still made most of its clothing in the U.S. The reason, claim stock-market analysts: Levi’s reputation among the kids has suffered over the past decade or more. As brands like Joop and Diesel (and, to a lesser extent, our own Seattle-based Unionbay and Reactor) plastered loud ads all over loud hip-fashion magazines, Levi’s came to be perceived as the old-hat brand, the brand of aging baby-boomers who Just Don’t Get It, who try furtively to stay young-looking in their Levi’s For Men (with “a sconch more room in the seat and thigh”), who think anybody would actually go swing-dancing in khakis.
THE TRUTH IS WAY, WAY OUT THERE: In its March issue, Harper’s Magazine has discovered Loompanics Unlimited, the beloved Pt. Townsend purveyor of outre how-to paperbacks. Yet the hibrow magazine (via writer Albert Mobilio) can’t quite manage to believe people really take the shit seriously (besides the occasional arrested killer or charlatan found with a stray copy of one of its books in his or her home). The reasons why non-criminals buy books (all published officially “for informational purposes only”) on how to supposedly commit criminal or antisocial acts and get away with them are more complicated than Mobilio’s premise that they’re just bought for a cheap laff.
A few Loompanics readers really are interested, or half-interested or quarter-interested, in getting a fake ID or establishing a whole new identity or using “gaslighting” tricks to get back at ex-bosses or growing their own opium or collecting a private guerrila arsenal or establishing an alternative to the western monetary system or outsmarting the IRS or opening handcuffs without keys or partaking of international sex-tourism (no longer for men only, as we’ve previously mentioned). And a few punks and boomers indeed just buy the books to snicker at the wacky religious cults and pseudo-science advocates and conspiracy theorists.
But I suspect the plurality of Loompanics readers are in it for the fantasy and the zeitgeist. They know by instinct and by direct observation that the world is not, and probably has never been, as neatly ordered as middle-of-the-road politicians claim it is; and it’s certainly not as neatly ordered as far-left or far-right philosophers wish it were. In physics, chaos might be a theory. In society, especially American society, chaos is reality. The Loompanics collection doesn’t merely include tracts by anarchists; it portrays a society where anarchy already largely rules.
And (here’s the fantasy part) it lets readers imagine, within the confines of their own homes, how they might, one day or one way, take personal action to get more of whatever they want (money, security, personal power, orgasms) within the anarchy.
Mobilio’s essay, “The Criminal Within,” is right to set the roots of Loompanics (and Paladin Press, which publishes even ickier books like Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors) within the Anarchist Cookbook dark side of ’60s “empowerment” how-to literature. He could’ve, but didn’t, add a comparison to that signature document of hippie-how-to’s sunnier side, the Whole Earth Catalog (whose original 1969 edition has just been reprinted). Whole Earth instructed its readers in nice arts like tent-building, nice work like running a communal farm, and nice philosophers like Buckminster Fuller. It preached not anarchy but “whole systems,” the supposedly reassuring idea that everything was interconnected and everybody had their proper place in the great order of things.
Loompanics, in the books it’s published and/or distributed through its mail-order catalog, has instructed its readers in nasty arts like Better Sex Through Chemistry, nasty work like How to Steal Food from the Supermarket, and nasty philosophies like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or the Church of Satan. Whole Earth’s founders and several of its early contributors wound up as operatives in the Global Business Network, the Frisco think tank and schmoozing society that believes big corporations don’t have enough power. Whole Earth continues as a non-profit quarterly journal, which despite its big-money connections perennially begs readers for donations to continue publishing. Loompanics, the little outfit out in the alleged sticks whose products often denounce the anti-democratic repressions commited by corporate America, has survived and, on its scale, prospered as a pure for-profit business operation within a book industry that hasn’t been all that nice to independent suppliers in recent years.
Whole Earth represents the world as Global Business wishes we’d think of it as being–a neat, complex-but-understandable place governed by knowable procedures and universal, unquestionable rules. Loompanics presents the world as Global Business has made it–complicated, contradictory, chaotic, violent, and unknowable, but with interstices where one can achieve, or at least dream of achieving, something vaguely resembling freedom.
TO CLOSE, ponder these somewhat Loompanicky words from John Fowles in The Magus (1965): “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.”
