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THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT: I’m making a rare exception to my normal self-imposed ban on weather comments. I loathe the cutesy rain jokes someone like Jean Godden might spread, and believe most Seattle winters are, like southern-English winters, spectacular only in the degree of their unspectacularness. But things have been a little different this time.
As early as mid-January (around the time Canadians hold “Winter Carnivals” to force themelves out of S.A.D.-ness), I found myself counting the weeks and days until the halfway point toward the vernal equinox; once that point was reached, I started checking the weather pages for the daily sunset time, as it ticked a minute or two closer each day toward the magic 6 p.m. mark. I’ve been going to some restaurants and bars, and avoiding others, on the basis of how brightly lit they were inside. I’ve been cranking my 3-way bulbs in the apartment up to the 150-watt level, even at noon. I’ve been playing the loudest, poppiest, least-depressing music I’ve got (Pizzicato Five si, Built to Spill no).
Granted, there are reasons for me to be a bit less than perky these past few months, what with this column suddenly going to online-only status and all. But I’ve been unemployed or underemployed in previous winters and didn’t noticeably feel like this. Let’s just say that since this dimmer-than-normal, way-damper than normal winter, I now understand why the new Nordstrom store’s got such garish lighting, why I keep meeting people who talk about canceling their cable TV so they can save up to visit Mexico, why those “herbal energy” capsules are so darn popular, and why heavy, spicy drinks taste so darn good these days.
NOW, TO THE GOOD NEWS: The Best-Of-Misc. book’s plowing steadily ahead. I’m currently working on proofreading, cover design, interior art, and–oh, yeah–raising the capital to get it printed and distributed. As yet there’s not a final title or release date; but it will be made available to Misc. World readers first. (It will likely come out simultaneously with the long-awaited reissue of my old book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, of which I still can’t legally say any more.)
During the book’s production, there might be a slight slowdown in the production of Misc. World material. A few of you might have already noticed the Cyber Stuff section’s short website reviews haven’t been updated lately. At a few points over the next few months, you might not see a new Clark’s Culture Corral essay each and every week. But rest assured, the Misc. column and the X-Word puzzle will continue to shine forth from your monitors in all their hi-res, eminently print-out-able glory.
SUDSING OFF?: Us magazine recently claimed TV’s eleven current daytime soap operas just might constitute a doomed art form, destined to go the way of the radio soaps that preceded them. The magazine makes the very rational point that with dozens of cable and satellite channels competing for viewers’ attention, network ratings will continue to slip, past the point where it’ll no longer be feasible to spend $200,000 or more per hour on daytime-drama episodes that’ll only be shown once.
Any eventual decline or ending to classic 260-episodes-a-year soap production wouldn’t have to mean the end of televised, serialized drama. There are many other possible serial formats, used here and abroad. There’s the famous Mexican telenovela concept, a maxi-series that runs for up to a year toward a predetermined ending, as opposed to the open-ended American soap model. Or, like prime time’s Homicide or Wiseguy, daytime stories could be arranged in self-contained “arcs” that would allow for hiatuses or repeats. Of course, that would likely mean the end to the annual summer ritual of explaining away actors’ vacations by having characters talk about absent actors’ characters being off to visit their relatives in Seattle. Speaking of industries in decline…
BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, TAKE 2: Visited the probably-doomed Rainier Brewery last Friday. The last time I’d been there was when I took the factory tour during the year I turned 21. The ol’ place hadn’t hardly changed. Even the trophy cases in the front office, with souveniers of high points in the company’s history, hadn’t been substantially added to in 20 years. What had changed in those years were my preferences in malt-and-hop matter. The seven beers on tap at the Mountain Room were, to my current microbrew-hooked palate, either beer-flavored water (classic Rainier, Schmidt) or alcohol-enhanced, beer-flavored water (Mickey’s, Rainier Ice). Rainier, once one of the most innovative marketers in the industry, is now on a death watch, as everyone awaits the finalilzation of current owner Stroh’s tentative plans to sell the brand names to Pabst, while keeping the plant site (which, except during Prohibition, has been making suds for 121 years) for separate real-estate speculation. It may have been inevitable. You could blame Bud and Miller’s big ad budgets for the decline of smaller mass-market beers, but really it’s an industrywide death-spiral situation. Total alcoholic-beverage consumption hasn’t kept up with population growth for over a decade; and tastes among many drinkers have permanently switched away from old-style 3.2 American beer toward microbrews, wines, and (as will be mentioned in our next item) mixed drinks.
Still, it would sure be a shame to see this beautiful structure go away, and only slightly less sad to see it converted into condos (E-Z freeway access, solid old-time construction). Speaking of business sites going away…
WATCH THIS SPACE: The Vogue’s probably moving to Capitol Hill, specifically to the former Encore/Safari disco site across from Value Village; thus ending the tradition at the venerable dance club’s current First Avenue location begun with WREX in 1980, which will close just before people conceived in its bathrooms in the early years could legally start to go there. It’s fared better than some other beer-wine clubs in recent years, partly because it had the town’s premier fetish night for several years and partly because it owned its own building. But the big thing these days in Seattle clubs is to serve hard booze, which requires at least a semblance of food service, which the current Vogue’s narrow space couldn’t really accommodate. And besides, the dance-club scene in Belltown’s become so squaresville in the years since the Weathered Wall’s closing that the scruffy-yet-chic Vogue increasingly looked like an outsider in its own neighborhood. Speaking of the sense of place…
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Vashon-Maury Ticket is a semi-monthly Vashon Island community tabloid from sometime poetry-slam promoter Hamish Todd. As one might expect from such a literarily-minded publisher, it’s not your typical throwaway neighborhood paper. Recent issues have featured a profile of the 70-year-old Vashon Hardware store, a “Remembering Vietnam” verse by “author and retired veteran” Rick Skillman, a Valentine’s-week guide to herbal aphrodisiacs, and a call-to-action to save the island’s only movie theater. I’m a bit disappointed, though, at the paper’s “Y2K” issue, in which contributing author Robert Gluckson seems to believe the survivalists’ predicted Collapse of Urban Civilization next 1/1 is not only inevitable but is to be hoped for. (It should be noted that certain hippie poets, like certain right-wing militia cults, can have wet dreams about big cities burning up while the Righteous People out in the countryside survive to forge a purified society under their control.) (Free at about 20 dropoff spots on the island; at the Crocodile, Shorty’s, the Elysian, and the Globe Cafe in Seattle; or by subscription from P.O. Box 1911, Vashon WA 98070.) Speaking of local scenes…
WALKING THE WALK: Nicole Brodeur, the new Seattle Times columnist freshly shipped in from out-of-state, recently wrote she couldn’t understand why Seattleites she meets are so dismayed and disapproving that she set up her new household in Bellevue. Among her points in defending her domicile on the Darkest Eastside was the old untruth that, unlike Seattle, “you’re not afraid to walk anywhere” in Bellevue.
This begs the eternal question: Who the hell ever actually walks in Bellevue? (Building-to-parked-car strolls don’t count; neither do exercise jogs in driven-to park areas.)
Misc. hereby challenges Brodeur to produce tangible, unstaged, photographic or videographic evidence of any adult other than herself found walking out-of-doors, under his or her own unassisted foot power, between any two different places (i.e., not within a single strip-mall or office-plaza setting), neither of which can be a motor vehicle, anywhere within the “city” limits of Bellevue. I double-dare you.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, spend plenty of time in brightly-lit places, uphold your right to live in town, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our Misc. Talk discussion boards, and consider these words from the highly maneuver-able Dr. Henry Heimlich: “If all of your peers understand what you’ve done, you haven’t been creative.”
IT’S THE FEBRUARY SWEEPS WEEKS, which means the TV newscasts and the “newsmagazine” shows are even fuller of alarm and scare tactics than usual. So, as a public service, this week’s online Misc. column will mix at least two pieces of good news for every piece of scary news.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #1: The new best-of-Misc. book will be out this summer, somehow or another. It’ll be available online via Misc. World, via mail-order, and in at least a few local stores. (A more comprehensive bookstore-distribution contract’s still pending.)
GOOD NEWS ITEM #2: My old book,Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, will probably get back in print sometime this summer as well. There’s still a lot to be worked out about that, though; I’ll keep y’all in touch.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #3: I’ll appear in April at a public reading series, dishing up segments from one or both books. Stay tuned to this site for further details.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #4: I finally got a replacement modem, so I’m back doing full Web research. With any luck, my 2400-baud backup modem (which sent some of you the same Misc. World email alert five or six times) won’t see any further use.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #1: Martha Stewart may be moving to (or at least setting up a second home in) the greater Seattle area. Actually, this was first rumored about a year ago. When Seattle magazine held a silly reader survey to find “the Martha Stewart of Seattle,’ it reported the real Stewart had been seen around town, holding the well-manicured hand of some Microsoft exec.
Why should this information fill me with such fear and dread? I happen to know several acquaintances who sorta like Little Miss Perfect’s handy cooking and decorating hints, but aren’t quite yet completely seduced into the total worldview of Marthaism. If the Anti-Goddess of perkiness were to set up a household somewhere in western Washington, or even move a piece of her Time Warner-backed book-magazine-TV empire here, I fear these good people, and perhaps many others, might fully succumb.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #5: A P-I story claims bulimia just might be related to a brain-chemical imbalance. The article says a study at Oxford linked the binge-and-purge disorder to screwed-up amounts of tryptophan, the chemical that regulates appetite. Like depressives who found a simple prescription could offer the basic capability years of therapy couldn’t, maybe now we’ll stop psychiatrically picking on girls and young women who can’t keep their food down. Their torture just might not be due to body-image paranoia and the negative influence of fashion advertising after all, but to a simple, potentially fixable, misdose of the brain’s natural pharmaceuticals. The phrase “it’s all in your head” is becoming a statement of hope!
GOOD NEWS ITEM #6: Both Scarecrow Video and the Elliott Bay Book
Company are being sold to new owners with deep pockets and the determination to keep these local institutions alive and kickin’. Scarecrow, home of the astounding 40,000-title selection of cinematic faves and obscurities, will now be under the care of owners with MS money and the determination to maintain it as a film-lover’s paradise. Elliott Bay’s coming under the stewardship of the guy who runs the Honey Bear Bakery (the beloved north-Seattle loitering spot for underemployed computer “consultants”) and Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (just about the only reason to ever go to that particular stretch of sprawl). He plans to add used books to Elliott Bay’s shelving, which should double the selection at that large but more-spacious-than-it-has-to-be literary palace.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #2: After months of hostile citizen input, Sound Transit’s still going ahead with plans to run its light-rail tracks at surface level down Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. At hearing after hearing, south-Seattle residents said they’d rather have a subway tunnel, which would (1) let the trains go faster, (2) let car traffic down and crossing MLK go faster, (3) require the demolition of fewer existing buildings, and (4) provide more of that good urban atmosphere; but would also (5) cost a lot, lot more than surface light rail. Neither Sound Transit nor its critics even mentioned the everybody-wins solution to this problem–sticking the tracks above the street, instead of on or beneath it. But that, of course, would require bureaucrats to stop pooh-poohing the sensible claims of the Friends of the Monorail, something these stubborn we-know-better-than-you officials appear loath to ever do.
GOOD NEWS ITEM #7: Low-power radio might become legal. The Federal Communications Commission’s rumored to be drafting new rules to let educational and other nonprofit entities operate FM stations of one watt (creating a signal reaching a one-mile diameter) to 1,000 watts (about 18 miles). That’d be great for ethnic minorities and subcultures not currently served by ever more-consolidating commercial broadcasters or by upscale “public” broadcasting. The big broadcasters don’t like this, natch, and may sue to stop it. And even if that challenge fails, I doubt if any licenses will be granted to the parties now running unlicensed pirate stations (of which one’s now running evenings in Seattle at 87.9 FM, and another’s supposed to be starting any week now). But maybe, just maybe, this’ll mean we can get a real, above-ground, community station in this town for the first time in over a decade.
SCARY NEWS ITEM #3 and GOOD NEWS ITEM #8: Researchers at the University of Amsterdam are embarking on a study to see whether virtual-reality
technology can treat people’s phobias. Their idea is to immerse patients in 3-D video-game-like scenarios to help people confront, and ultimately overcome, their deepest fears, all within the safe real-world confines of a clinic.
It’s good news because, if it works, it could help a lot of people. It’s scary news because, if it works, I might one day feel the urge to use it myself. Here, for examples, are some of the situations I might ask to be programmed into a VR headset for me to face:
ON THAT PLEASANT NOTE, let’s again remind you to nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our splendid Misc. Talk discussion boards, and to read these words from Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
McLuhan Made Simple(r)
Book feature, 2/10/99
McLuhan for Beginners
by W. Terrence Gordon; illustrated by Susan Willmarth
Writers and Readers Publishing
The Mechanical Bride:
Folflore of Industrial Man
by Marshall McLuhan
Beacon Press
The Medium Is the Massage:
An Inventory of Effects
by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore
HardWired
War and Peace in the Global Village
In the late ’70s, the U.K.-based Writers and Readers organization helped revitalize the sub-genre of educational comics with its series of cleanly-drawn, rigorously-edited trade paperbacks, many on leftist political topics that had become the domain of ponderous academic verbiage. After a falling-out around 1990 with Random House, which had issued the U.S. editions of its early books, Writers and Readers set up its own Stateside distribution arm for what it calls its “documentary comic books” (which are really more like heavily-illustrated texts). The “For Beginners” line’s topics have broadened from Marx and anti-nuclear-power activism to include opera, architecture, pan-Africanism, and the history of clowns.
But what happens when you try to use the illustrated-text format to simplify an author/philosopher/sociologist who already tried during his lifetime to issue illustrated and simplified expressions of his ideas?
Not the total redundancy one might expect.
Marshall McLuhan’s own illo-books (the early The Mechanical Bride and the later The Medium Is the Massageand War and Peace in the Global Village) still hold up today as prime examples in the marriage of word and picture to express a sequence of ideas and critical arguments. Bride, the Toronto media analyst’s first, now damn-hard-to-find book (1950), used the word-picture interplay not only as its technique but as one of its topics. At the time TV was just starting up, McLuhan (1911-80) found most of the things later curmuddeonny media-analysts would blame on TV in the existing realms of radio, movies, newspaper front pages, comic books, and especially magazine ads. While his fellow academics were coccooned away in their ivory towers (perhaps in hiding from the hordes of GI Bill kids then invading campuses south of the Canadian border), McLuhan saw the forces of corporate culture using every persuasive trick, not to inform the populace but rather to keep it in a passive, sleepwalking state of production and consumption.
After his long, detailed, and pictureless Understanding Media (1965) brought him fame and a modicum of critical respect, McLuhan returned to the illustrated format with Massage in ’67, followed-up the next year by Global Village. The two mass-market-paperback sized books, co-written by Quentin Fiore and designed by Jerome Agel, can be seen as one two-volume work. McLuhan called them “mosaics,” possibly referring to the old adage that America was a melting pot but Canada was a mosaic of still-differentiated identities. The McLuhan-Fiore-Agel team mixed New Yorker cartoons, ads, found images, and news and documentary photos to accompany short, pithy, universal pronouncements (“Art is what you can get away with,” “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins”).
By chopping up his remarks into micro-essays (more about that literary form in a future week) on nothing less important than the essence of modern social interactions, with lots of sharp black and white pictures, it’s easy to see he was trying to use the techniques he’d observed in commercial media to new, more enlightening ends. Unfortunately, readers and critics sometimes didn’t understand the difference between McLuhan’s and advertisers’ use of such visual-verbal techniques, and incorrectly presumed McLuhan was celebrating or approving of the social changes he was actually trying to warn us against.
McLuhan for Beginners author Terrence Gordon (whose work here was admired enough by McLuhan’s family for him to bag the assignment to write his estate-authorized biography) makes clear, to the point of redundancy, that the old Torontoan was trying to keep up with the ’60s, not to wallow in the go-go-go zeitgeist but to warn us about it, as a reserved yet kindly Canuck gentleman dismayed by the U.S.A.’s culture of excess. An excess which not only sent Americans into space but into the horrors of the Vietnam war, into cloverleaf freeways and decayed ghettos, into ever faster, busier, and more manic existences.
Massage and Global Village were intended to only explore pieces of McLuhan’s worldview. Gordon’s book, written nearly two decades after his subject’s death and a decade since his last posthumously-published work, gets to summarize the man’s whole life, career, and teachings. That he does an admirable, cohesive job of it is due partly to his skill, partly to the finely honed instincts of the Writers and Readers editors, and in no small part to the head start given him by his subject.
At a time when so many self-proclaimed “communication” experts can’t write a simple declarative sentence (to the point where you need a “documentary comic book” re-interpretation just to get what they’re trying to say), McLuhan’s knack for breaking down a complex argument into solid bite-sized points, learned largely from the mass media he studied and often opposed, still points the way toward not just understanding media, but making yourself understood in the process.
‘Life, The Movie’:
All the World’s a Multiplex
Book feature, 2/3/99
Life, The Movie:
How Entertainment Conquered Reality
by Neal Gabler
Knopf, $25
Seems most everybody these days hates the mass-media industry, including a lot of the folks who work in it.
Now, in Life, the Movie, we’ve got Hollywood biographer Neal Gabler complaining semi-coherently about Hollywood’s power to shape the popular zeitgeist. I’ve complained about that myself over the years. But my beef’s different from his.
I believe the six big studios (and the five big record labels, the three or four big networks, the 12 big cable-channel owners, and the similarly concentrated magazine and newspaper operators; most of which are cross-owned by a dozen or so media Goliaths) concentrate too much sway over the world’s visions, dreams, and consciousnesses.
Gabler, though, apparently has no problem with a nation (and, by extension, a world) beholden to a single set of ideas dictated by a small cultural elite. He just wants a different elite to be in charge. If anything, he thinks a society organized around mass media (and various interest groups’ need to attain publicity via mass media) istoo populist. From politics and warfare to religion and academia, from fashion and architecture to journalism and bestseller literature, any venture or idea Gabler surveys is one that has to become popular to succeed, and to become popular it has to put on the old razzle-dazzle, to gussy itself up in a narrative arc and a star system and a carefully-staged spectacle and a happy ending.
Gabler’s take will likely appeal to both liberal and conservative elitists. I suspect he’s personally on the left wing of what the webzine Salon calls “the literate overclass,” for the simple reason that Gabler, like a lot of left-elitists, is far more articulate about what he’s against than about what he’s for. He admires that sourpuss left-elitist prude Neil Postman, and he expresses wistful nostalgia for dour Puritanism with its repression of individual personality in favor of “character” (yet he disapproves of cynical politicians who preach about “character” while practicing stage-managed campaigns and market-researched platforms).
While not explicitly calling for it, Gabler seems to want a society run, well, by people like him. A more ordered, rational society, such as that fantasized by the “civil society” movement. A society where a few urban-Northeast big thinkers ponder what’s best for everybody, then face few obstacles of authority in putting their decisions into action. A society where all of us residing outside the corridors of power work hard, save our money, and solemnly tend to our own affairs. Something like what those Seattle City Council members admired so much about Singapore on their junket there a year or two back, before today’s Asian recession discredited a lot of that paternalistic-central-planning ideal.
Besides, America isn’t and never was what Gabler seems to wish it was. Hell, the human race isn’t. We’re a sensual, sensuous species. From the Noh theater of Japan to the Greek tragedies to African tribal dances to Shakespeare to carny shows to museum mega-exhibitions to porn to the Indy 500 to the fashion runways to heavy metal to Japanese magazine ads showing fantasies of American cowboys, we want and love to have our passions stirred, and marketers and publishers and preachers and politicians would be fools to not know it. And, on at least one level, Gabler seems to know it too. In his long, tedious invective over the failings of all humans less brain-centric than himself, Gabler reveals himself to be what the gays call a “drama queen.”
Precision Ennui in the Funny Pages:
Too Clowes for Comfort
Book feature, 1/13/99
Caricature
by Daniel Clowes
Fantagraphics, $29.95 (hardcover)
Let us now praise Daniel Clowes, one of the reigning American masters of visual perfection and human imperfection in the graphic-novel field.
Clowes emerged from Chicago in the ’80s with Lloyd Llewellyn, a private-eye spoof series full of fab ’50s architecture, pre-cocktail-revival hip men’s clothes, and gag stories built around a combination of early MAD Magazine subtle outrageousness and postpunk hip irony.
For many an aspiring alterna-cartoonist back then, a modest success like Lloyd would’ve been the cornerstone of a career. But for Clowes it was just a start.
Encouraged by Fantagraphics Books to phase out the limited Lloyd format in favor of a broader pallate, Clowes launched the anthology comics series Eightball in 1990. The first few issues contrasted Lloyd-style gag humor with darker, scarier drama pieces (such as the story Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, serialized for over two years) and first-person illustrated rants and fantasies (“On a Desert Island With the People on the Subway”). By the time Velvet Glove finally ended, Clowes had constructed a recipe for low-key, high-anxiety tales that married precise, tight drawings with all-too-flawed characters moving through an urban landscape of loneliness and forever-dashed expectations.
Over the past six years, Clowes has continued to perfect this style; with more than a little influence from another Chicago-based Fantagraphics cartoonist, Acme Novelty Library creator Chris Ware. Eightball continued to combine the outrageous with the comitragic, particularly in the series’ five-year serial Ghost World.
Which brings us to Clowes’s newest Eightball collection, Caricature. It collects eight one-shot stories from pastEightball issues, plus one similar piece (“Green Eyeliner”) commissioned for last year’s Esquire summer-fiction issue.
The title of Caricature fits both the topic of the lead story (a once-promising commercial artist now reduced to drawing faces for hire at crafts fairs) and the book’s overall tone. In front of all of Clowes’s exquisitely-composed frames of strip-mall landscapes, motels, and “restored” blocks of former urban decay, the faces of his characters hauntingly stare straight out at you, as if pleading for your understanding. In most cases, they’re the jaded, tired faces of men and women who’ve been either burned by life, frozen out of life, or both.
These characterizations go far beyond the one-dimensonal square-bashing Clowes once practiced with gag characters such as Young Dan Pussey (the ultimate alternative-comix-world putdown of geeky superhero-comics fans). The characters in Caricature, no matter how pathetic, antisocial, or cruel, are all given a degree of human dignity by Clowes that they lack in their own lives.
Many of these going-nowhere people go through quite a bit of plot twists in their brief tales, mostly minor tragedies that leave them even more jaded and confused than before. In the collection’s longest work, the 22-page “Gynecology,” Clowes employs flashbacks, flash-forwards, asides, asides within asides, and suplots often lasting a single ninth-of-a-page drawing frame to relate the complicated, yet ultimately futile, lives of a lonely doctor’s wife, the cynical gallery painter with whom she’s cheating, and their assorted friends, spouses, lovers, rivals, and enemies. This story, like all the stories here, is a masterwork of the comix-narrative form, bouncing images and words off of one another and using sequential drawings to juxtapose subplots and ideas, only to neatly bring it all back together in the last two pages.
It’s also a bookend to the title story, in a way. The title of “Caricature” implies a seemingly shallow impression of a public face which can actually reveal much (maybe too much) about the person’s soul. In “Gynecology,” the doctor’s wife’s lover complains that her husband can coldly stare at other women’s private parts with no emotional response, that there’s something wrong about “a man who can turn off natural human impulses like a light switch whenever he feels like it.”
While Clowes never gives his characters an alternative to their Hobson’s choice between snide sarcasm and jaded reserve, his drawing and his writing offer such an alternative to us. It’s the opportunity to see the world directly around us with a little more compassion, a little less self-centeredness.
Her Throbbing Volvo:
My Troubles With Upscale Erotica
Book review feature, 1/6/99
SEDUCTIONS: Tales of Erotic Persuasion
Edited by Lonnie Barbach, Ph.D.
Dutton, $23.95
HIGH INFIDELITY: Twenty-Four Great Short Stories About Adultery by Some of Our Best Contemporary Authors
Edited by John McNally
Quill/William Morrow, $13 (paperback)
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF INFIDELITIES
Edited by Stephen Brook
Penguin, $12.95 (paperback)
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF NEW EROTICA
Edited by Maxim Jakubowski
Carroll & Graf, $10.95 (paperback)
Every year, a group of British book critics gives out an award-O-shame for the most ridiculously-written sex scenes in contemporary mainstream novels. Sure they’re fun, but bad writing, when it’s done right (no, that’s not a contradiction), can make a sex scene sexier. After all, sex at its best is a release from the rigors of the intellect and the propriety of good taste.
Would that any of that contest’s winning examples of purple prose appeared in the ’80s-’90s specialty genre of upscale “literary erotica.” You know: those hardcover and trade-paperback collections sold in the back of Tower Books or the front of Toys In Babeland, promising ever-so-tasteful excursions into the lower passions, many of which proudly claim all-female and/or all-gay mastheads.
Instead, what you usually get are bland, mannered accounts of bland, mannered people, almost always upper-middle-class and ultra-caucasian (except in anthologies specifically ethnic-branded), for whom orgasms are merely another upscale leisure activity, and for whom discovering a new lover is no more or less exciting than discovering a new store.
Lonnie Barbach’s collections appear to be aimed at those readers who can only indulge in visceral-fantasy reading if it’s got a justifying patina of “education.” Her introductions in Seductions denote specifically what pleasures and psychological lessons the reader is expected to attain from each of the collection’s 20 stories. Only five of Seductions’ stories are written from a male point of view–in three, the men serve as helpless targets of women’s schemes; in one, a nice gay man pondes another man’s cute dimpled face (but never gets into discussing gay-male sex as explicitly as other stories in the book discuss lesbian sex); and in the other, a Renaissance-era rogue (i.e., a safe fantasy figure from a time and place far removed from ours) gives a lovemaking lesson to another man’s fiancee.
The book’s other stories are all about heroines, nice complacent heroines who have nice complacent fun with nice complacent men and/or women. Even when cheating on husbands or screwing compliant department-store workers in the fitting room, none of these women (except the ones who get converted to lesbianism) learn major life-changing things about themselves, and none of them does anything really mind-altering like falling in love.
(At least, however, the stories in Barbach’s collection present non-monogamous and recreational sex as something potentially beneficial and even wholesome. After 15 years of stupid “erotic thriller” movies and novels in which intercourse (even hetero intercourse among HIV-sparse population segments) was treated as a crime punishable by death, it’s welcome that fictional heroines can again enjoy their and others’ bodies this nonchalantly.)
In contrast to Seductions’ unbearable lightness of licking, the High Infidelity collection occasionally acknowledges the limitations of a lifestyle-centered sexuality. Indeed, its focus is not The Affair (let alone The Act) but about how affairs are great angst generators for self-centered, all-too-literate white people who seem to get off less on sex (or on the excitement of illicitness) than on the opportunity to wallow in their own guilt, confusion, and/or vengeance. This is a theme implicit in most of the book’s segments and is made explicit in one story (Robert Boswell’s “Flipflops”), wherein a philandrous couple vacationing at a Mexican seaside resort are only briefly, temporarily, disrupted from their vapid relationship-talking by the sight of a local man drowning just beyond their beach.
The Penguin Book of Infidelities tells more, and far better-written, tales of illicit couplings and the wide variety in cultural attitudes toward them in different places and times. While John McNally’s introduction to High Infidelitytreats extramarital play as an eternal problem, the Penguin collection notes it’s been considered more or less of a problem depending on where and when it happened. From Tunisian wives who found public veil-wearing advantageous while persuing local stable boys without being seen, to old French lords and ladies who sat for banquets as foursomes with their respective current lovers seated to each side, there’ve been plenty of social solutions to the stability/monotony dilemma, few of which (besides secrecy and guilt trips) find their way into the modern-day tales in High Infidelity.
If you want to find out about this genre without investing a whole lot of money, Carroll and Graf’s huge paperback collections give you a lot of different stories for not much money. Few are outstanding, but they do represent almost as much variety as you can expect in the scene. The best of them try to combine the visceral manipulation of the reader with a solid plot; such as The Mammoth Book of New Erotica’s centerpiece novella, Michael Hemmingson’s “The Dress.” A proper upper-middle-class British couple realize (unlike any of the protagonists in Seductions) the limitations of their mannered upscale life. The husband’s solution: Go out in public with the wife in highly revealing dresses. It revitalizes their sex life, but then leads them to further self-realizations that change their lives forever, as the wife goes from play-acting the “lead” role in the couple’s sex life (at her husband’s prodding) to taking charge for real. But still, all works out for the best; as both partners decide they’d rather enjoy their passions than sit around and brood about them. Perhaps a lesson to be learned by the characters in some of the other books discussed here.
‘I Was A Teenage Hacker’
Book review roundup, 12/23/98
EXTRA LIFE:
Coming of Age in Cyberspace
by David S. Bennahum
Basic Books ($23)
Bennahum’s is merely one of many stories that could be told about the teen and young-adult males who played a huge, under-documented role in the 1974-84 dawn of personal computers and online communication, back when the word “hacker” still meant a guy who got kicks from high-intensity programming, not from crime.
Bennahum (a Manhattan rich kid who got to learn programming in a prestigious private high school with its own DEC PDP mini-mainframe computer) isn’t the most typical early-’80s compu-teen. But his story’s close enough to the subculture’s norm for his memoir to reveal its era. As he sees it, it was an era marked by specific phases in technology, after the very first personal computers but before the Mac and Windows stuck the guts of computing behind user-friendly (but programmer-hostile) interfaces.
True hackers (of the old definition), like true auto mechanics, didn’t just want to make their machines go–they wanted to know every aspect of how they ran, from the hexadecimal codes to the 8-bit processor chips. Popular sentiment derides guys of such obsessions as geeks. But, as Bennahum’s tale shows, it’s just this kind of obsession that can change the world (or at least one’s own life).
REDHOOK, BEER PIONEER
by Peter J. Krebs
Four Walls Eight Windows ($22)
What’s a nice ultra-highbrow house like Four Walls Eight Windows doing with a lightweight business “success” story like this? (The Redhook book’s existence isn’t mentioned at its publisher’s website; often an omen.)
Not that the book’s a total puff piece. You will learn a lot about the ’80s-’90s microbrew phenomenon if you can get past the fawning portrayals of Redhook founders Gordon Bowker and Paul Shipman. Peter Krebs (author of Microsoft Press’s Building Microsoft Exchange Applications; not to be confused with the beloved singer-songwriter Pete Krebs) pours out every cliché from hokey business-magazine profile articles (the kind usually titled “The Rise and Rise Of…”).
Read how Shipman (previously an up-n’-coming exec at Chateau Ste. Michelle) and Bowker (also involved in the launches of Starbucks and Seattle Weekly), armed with the dream to do for American beer what Starbucks had done with American coffee, hit up all the available moneybags in town, barely collecting enough loot to install some used brewing equipment in a former Ballard transmission shop.
Share the pain as the original Redhook Ale’s released in 1982, to near-unanimous cries of “This tastes funny.”
Feel the struggle as the founders, abetted by original brewmaster Charles McElevey, kept fiddling with the original Redhook, only to abandon it as better-selling flavors (Blackhook, Ballard Bitter, Redhood ESB, Winterhook, Blonde Ale) come along.
Sense the pride as the Little Brewery That Could starts getting its wares out to such exotic outposts as Denver and Spokane; then shudder the dreaded word “Sellout” as Shipman abandons the “craft brewing” mystique in favor of state-of-the-art plants (one later chapter’s entitled “You Can’t Taste the Automation”) and distribution deals with Anheuser-Busch.
Cringe as the great microbeer glut of 1996-97 leaves Redhook badly overextended, causing the closing of the brew part of its Fremont brewpub.
If, after all this, you still think of Redhook as the quaint little upstart, just read Shipman’s closing words of encouragement, insisting his outfit will survive because of its “combination of distribution, quality control, brewery efficiency, and resources deep enough to survive the current shakeout.”
(For a different, slightly more craft-devoted, take on the dawn of microbeer, Redhook’s Yakima archrival Bert Grant’s got his own memoir just out, The Ale Master (Sasquatch, $19.95). Of course, Grant’s own company’s now owned by the snuff-tobacco people who also own Ste. Michelle.)
CIRCUS OF THE SCARS
by Jan T. Gregor with Tim Cridland;
illustrated and designed by Ashleigh Talbot
Brennan Dalsgard Publishers ($26)
First thing anyone will notice is what a beautiful, elegant tome this is; easily the best-looking thing to come from a Northwest indie publisher this year. It’s not just a document about high-profile show people, it is a work of showmanship.
Second thing you’ll find is how utterly long it is. It takes over 500 pages to tell about a little over two years in the lives of the first Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. At the risk of boring the supposed short-attention-span audience the sideshow lived for, ex-Rose roadie Gregor has tried to recreate the pace of life on the road, hour after hypnotic hour of driving somewhere punctuated by moments of onstage thrills and the occasional round of groupie sex and/or tourism. So far, it might seem like a rock band’s tale; appropriately, since the sideshow essentially toured as a rock n’ roll attraction that performed stunts instead of songs.
But venues notwithstanding, these particular freaks were and are very serious about seeing themselves as a revival of the old-time carny tradition. Long interludes compare the Rose troupe’s travels to the apparently fictional (but thoroughly research-based) life story of a turn-of-the-century carny performer.
Rose himself is depicted not so much as the bad-boy persona he offered in his own book Freak Like Me (cowritten by Melissa “Babs Babylon” Rossi) and more like a clever, energetic entrepreneur who put the show on the map, staged near-perfect publicity coups, then let go of performers like Tim Cridland (“Zamora the Torture King”) and Matt Crowley (“The Tube”) when he chose to move the act into a more mainstream direction.
Whatever lingering personal rancor Rose and his ex-troupers might have, they did and do follow in an honorable tradition of showmanship. They may see themselves as rebels, but they’ve eschewed the now-30-year-old “generation gap” schtick. We’ve always had freaks, geeks, and outrageous stage people. If the current and former Rose troupers have their way, we always will.
MISC., the pre-Xmas relief-from-shopping column of choice, has been trying all weekend to come up with something to say about the topic you’re probably expecting something about today. There will surely be more to say about it in the weeks and months to come, but for now let’s just say it’s no exaggeration to call it a coup attempt, a kill-or-be-killed attempt by the Rabid Right to destroy the two-party system in favor of a quasi-Iranian theocracy. It’s because the GOP Sleaze Machine’s seen what Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats have been up to (and largely succeeding at)–turning the Demos into the Lite Right party, the new “party of business,” thereby marginalizing the Republicans into the party of demagogues and hatemongers. It’s worked so well, all the Republicans can do anymore is to become even more extreme demagogues and hatemongers. I don’t believe Clinton will be forced out of office, but it’ll be interesting (as in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times”) to see just how much damage to the national discourse is made, and how many careers on both sides are destroyed, along the way.
AS FOR THAT OTHER TOPIC you might expect a comment on: No, I don’t believe Clinton bombed Iraq as a desperate impeachment-prevention tactic. Clinton can be dumb as doodoo about his private lusts, but he’s way too smart about his professional image to think a too-obvious mini-war at a too-obvious time would help it. No, I sincerely believe he sincerely believed the air strikes would serve a tactical purpose, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were killed or hurt by ’em, and no matter how little they’d do to topple the dictator we helped install over there.
JUST ONE, SLIGHTLY-TOO-LATE, XMAS GIFT SUGGESTION: My very first Misc. column, published in 1986 in the old monthly tabloid ArtsFocus, included a “Junk Food of the Month.” That title was never trademarked, so there was nothing stopping some clever entrepreneurs in NYC from starting their own International Junk Food of the Month Club. Its brochure boasts, “Each month you’ll receive a box stuffed with a new assortment of the best candy, cake, cookies, and chips the planet has to offer.” The first month’s package promises “raisins covered in strawberry chocolate, crunchy pancake-and-maple-syrup flavored snack puffs, chocolate-covered banana creams, toffee-and-crisped-rice chocolate bar, raspberry malt balls, chocolate-covered fruit gummies, plus a whole lot more!” Memberships are available in three levels, ranging from one to four pounds of goodies per shipment. Further info and signups are available by calling 1-888-SNACK-U4EA.
YOU GOTTA LOVE ‘EM, OR IT, OR… The Seattle Reign‘s a great b-ball squad, but that darned name just doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. These awkward singular-named sports teams just could be the one and only lasting legacy of the 1974-75 World Football League (whose teams included the Chicago Fire, Southern California Sun, and Portland Storm). What, exactly, do you call one member of the Reign (or the Miami Heat or Orlando Magic or Utah Jazz, for that matter)?
SEAGRAM’S ABSORBS POLYGRAM: Probably some of the 3,000 record-label employees to be sacked after the merger will be absorbing a lot of Seagram’s in the weeks to come…. Not mentioned in most accounts of the acquisition: The Decca trademark will finally be globally reunited. Decca was originally a British record company, which established a formidable U.S. subsidiary during the Big Band era but then sold it off in the ’50s. American Decca became one of the cornerstones of the MCA media empire, acquired by Seagram’s a few years back. British Decca (which used the London name on its U.S. releases) eventually became one of the three main components of PolyGram. The merger also means a company based in lowly Canada, one of those countries with cultural-protection laws to keep some semblance of indigenous entertainment production, now controls the biggest recorded-music conglomerate on the planet (or at least it’s the biggest now; management’s already promising massive roster cuts as well as the aforementioned staff layoffs).
WIRED: Free Seattle Radio, the third attempt in recent years at a freeform pirate station, is now on the air at 87.9 FM. The anonymous collective currently broadcasts evenings only, on a low-power transmitter whose signal mainly reaches Capitol Hill and slightly beyond. I haven’t been able to tune in, but readers who have tell me it’s got freeform DJ music and lotsa talk supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal and denouncing the Iraq bombings.
UNWIRED: Guess what, guys & gals? TCI won’t meet its Jan. 20 cable-upgrade promise to the city after all! You might not get to see South Park at home until maybe next October. By that time, of course, the show will have become soooo ten-minutes-ago.
UNPLUGGED: The end is finally near for RKCNDY, that cavernously run-down garage space that was one of Seattle’s leading rock clubs during those times a few years back when the “Seattle Scene” was in all the media. For the past year or more, it’s been an all-ages showcase while the property’s owners tried to figure out what to do with the building. They’ve decided–to demolish it, for yet another upscale hotel-retail complex. RKCNDY won’t close right away, but will within months eventually. The irony here: Even if activists manage to finally amend or repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance (whose heavy regulations make all-ages rock shows in Seattle even more financially risky than they would otherwise be) in ’99, the staggering pace of real-estate activity (barring any Boeing-influenced slowdown) might effectively eliminate any potential sites for such shows.
SEATTLE OLYMPICS BID (APPARENTLY) FINALLY DIES: Could there possibly be a limit to Seattle’s “world class” ambitions? Could the wishes of the city elite old-boy network (great-grandsons of the pioneers) to build, grow, build more and grow more finally have reached a point-O-no-return conflict with the somewhat more modest dreams of those upper-middle-class swing voters (see below) who want the nice, quiet, city-that’s-more-like-a-small-town they thought they’d moved to?
WELL-HEELED?: The Stranger’s 12/10/98 “TTS” column remarked on a relative lack of female shoe prints along the Walk of Fame outside the new downtown Nordstrom store. There are many regional women of achievement who could’ve made the sidewalk shrine, besides the six who made it (Bill Gates’s late UW Regent mom Mary, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her two daughters, and Heart sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson) alongside some 20 notable male Seattleites.
Of course, many of those other historic local women are political activists, socialists, madams, burlesque queens, Prohibitionists, psychiatrically-committed actresses, punk rockers, sometimes-nude modern dancers, and other types the Nordstroms might not consider community role models. (At least one reader’s already noted to me the oft-rumored role, documented in the late Bill Speidel’s Seattle-history books, of Pioneer Square prostitutes in funding the rebuilding of the city after 1889’s Great Seattle Fire and in supporting our first public-school system.) Suggest other enshrinable Seattle female individuals by email or at our new Misc. Talk discussion boards; results will be listed here in two or three weeks.
SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND… WELL, YOU’LL FIND SOMETHING: According to my new hit-tracker service, these are some of the phrases users are entering into search engines that end up sending them to this site:
(All this is in addition to the search words that actually relate to topics I’ve written about here (however briefly).)
(The worse gag is that now that I’ve put all these phrases into this column, they’ll all be here waiting for some search engine to find them and mislead still more users here.)
BE BACK HERE NEXT WEEK for the always-splendiforous Misc. In/Out List (always the most entertaining and accurate list of its type done up anywhere). Your suggestions are still being accepted at our lovely Misc. Talk discussion boards, and by email. ‘Til then, enjoy the snow, have a happy Boxing Day, and consider these words from one Dr. John Roget: “Insanity is merely creativity with no outlet.”
Words Against Words
Original book feature, 12/7/98
THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS:
The Conflict Between Word and Image
by Leonard Shlain
(Viking) $24.95
THE RISE OF THE IMAGE, THE FALL OF THE WORD
by Mitchell Stevens
(Oxford) $27.50
Between these two tomes, you get two men taking 728 pages to denounce left-brain linear thought and its chief manifestation, the written word.
Surgeon-physicist-author Leonard Shlain, in particular, has few nice things to say (except as afterthoughts) about either his own medium or his own gender. One of those men who loves to claim everything associated with his own kind is intrinsically evil, it takes him until a brief afterword to acknowledge that a few males have done a few good things during this planet’s history. Most of his long, long account involves reiteration after reiteration of one greatly oversimplified premise; an expansion on the new age/radical feminist belief that the whole world was into goddesses and matriarchy but it ended just before recorded history started.
His notion: It was the ability to record history itself that put goddess worship out of business; that as soon as any particular tribe or nation of humans started (or, in the case of the Renaissance, restarted) the widespread use of written language, everything promptly went straight to H-E-double-hockey sticks, particularly regarding women’s civil rights. Shlain sees militaristic Sparta as having been far more gender-equal than literary Athens. Egypt: A supposedly great place for the ladies during the hieroglyphic days, much less so once they got ahold of the Coptic alphabet. China: Despite its whole different writing system it’s still a writing system, blamable for everything from foot-binding to the Cultural Revolution. Wherever writing goes, Shlain posits, narrow-mindedness, drab official clothes, grim military discipline, sexual repression, and male domination, and denunciations of visual art all follow.
In real life (that universe far more complex than even the best-thought-out book), left-brain, literal thinking isn’t just for men; and visual-spatial enjoyment isn’t just for women. Women can certainly create and consume words. Indeed, women buy most of the novels in this country; men buy most of the comic books (and porn videos). Women can be literal-minded too, and self-righteous, and grim and drab. Women can also be very interested in the maintenance of strict social rules and castes (particularly those women who are on the winning side of those rules).
Still, Shlain’s initial premise could, with tweaking and better arguments and more acknowledgement of the diversity and complexity of social existence, turned into a notion with a few intriguing possibilities. I’d suggest a slightly different premise, no more or less supported by Shlain’s package of historical “evidence.” I’d say wherever militaristic nationalism takes hold, with its need to mold humans of all genders into impersonally-assigned roles, that all those glum suppressions follow. Shlain would likely counter-argue that you couldn’t have big, far-flung, Roman-style armies without written commands, so it’s still writing’s fault.
NYU prof Mitchell Stevens can write about the limitations of writing much more effectively than Shlain can. Mitchell’s clearly a professional wordsmith who struggles daily with his art form’s strengths and weaknesses. But his choice of hopeful talismans for a new, neo-iconic age are a bit odd: those ’60s “collage films” that always seemed to stick a mushroom-cloud image into everything; hyperactively edited MTV specials; the image-layered intro to an ABC documentary on religion in America. The use of these particular examples, out of the hundreds of thousands of filmed, videotaped, televised, and/or animated works generated this past century or so, basically reveals Stevens’ own wishes for what he calls “the New Video.” He wants a medium that can do what he feels can’t be done in boring ol’ text narratives. He wants quick juxtapositions of images that can stir viewers’ minds as well as their emotions. He wants works that can combine and compare scenes from different places and times. These tasks have been accomplished in verbal form (from the interludes in John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy to any newspaper front page).
While both Stephens and Shlain see hope for a post-linear mindset from computers and the Net, they forget programming is intensely literal and abstract. Indeed, any post-Word age is going to be at least as word-filled as this one. Movies and videos have scripts and editing lists. Websites have text surrounded by HTML scripts, which are intrepreted by more abstract program code. The daily stuff of commerce and governance will still involve forms, documentation, instructions, memos, etc.
Mind you, I’ve got my own problems with The Word and those who purport to be its champions. If any medium, even my own, has stuffy pendants like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and George Will as its bigtime defenders, there’s got to be something wrong with it. Besides, words can be so darn clumsy at trying to express what Bette Davis or Salvador Dali or animator Tex Avery could get off in a single, well-planned instant. But words can do many things images can’t do well (witness any number of good novels made into bad movies). Instead of seeing words and pictures as rivals, as Stephens and especially Shlain do, it’d be better to see them as complementary ways of seeing our world and of imagining other ones.
IT’S A COOL, DAMP, MISTY PRE-WINTERTIME MISC., the pop-culture report that always knows the launch of arrival of high shopping season when the regular downtown freaks are pushed aside by the seasonal-specific freaks. (For our own special gift to you, read on.)
HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN OUR TIME: Despite what it seems, not every old, lo-rise building in greater downtown Seattle’s being razed for cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. At least a dozen have been meticulously saved from the wrecking ball, so they can house the offices of the architects designing the cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. I’m reminded of a slide lecture I once saw by Form Follows Fiasco author Peter Blake. Among his examples of bad modern architecture was a mid-size city in central Europe with narrow, winding streets faced by quaint, homey, romantically worn-down buildings. When the socialists came into power, they hated the place. They had a new city built across the river, designed on all the efficient, rational, no-frills principles of Soviet-inspired central planning. The only government workers permitted to still live and work in the old city? You guessed it–the architects who designed the new city.
SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION IN OUR TIME: Ever notice how the 1-800-CALL-ATT long-distance logo, with a light-blue circular shape gently rising from within a dark-blue square, looks, at first glance, a heck of a lot like a condom wrapper?
AD OF THE WEEK: Future Shop, which publicly stopped selling Macintosh computers back during Apple’s pre-iMac sales doldrums two years ago, now prominently uses the Mac screen-window design in its current CD sale flyer.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Times, 11/29): “Drunk Driving Made Easier.” The story was really about a new state law that’ll make drunk driving arrests and prosecutions easier.
MEN AT WORK: The old truism that men will pay for sex but women will pay only to “look sexy” may be changing, at least among certain affluent women in remote locations. A loyal reader recently told of her recent trip to Jamaica, where she and her adult daughter were regularly propositioned by male locals on the streets and public beaches. But she says the solicitations weren’t expressions of harassment but of commerce. Hetero-male hooking’s apparently become such a big tourist draw on the island in recent years, the Jamaica Rough Guide travel book even lists the best spots for European and American women to rent what the book gingerly calls “Jamaican steel.” Some of the gated seaside resorts are discreetly offering bus tours for the ladies to go partake of a tall, dark toy-boy, then return to the hotel in time for scuba lessons.
This is a different phenomenon from the also-booming business of “swingers’ resorts” across the Caribbean and Mexico, where the sex is just as casual but is restricted to one’s fellow paying tourists. It’s also a phenomenon of potential interest to North America’s own remote, economically depressed regions, regions which tend to have ample supplies of rugged if less-than-gentlemanly men. You’d have to get some anything-for-a-buck politicians to change a few laws, then put the recruited men through some Full Monty-esque makeovers and charm lessons; but from there, the only limit would be one’s ambition and one’s marketing budget. I can easily imagine big layouts in the continental fashion mags, inviting the pampered ladies of Italy and France to really experience the rugged, robust America they’ve only known through movies and ads, by enjoying a real Akron factory worker or a real Detroit homeboy or even a real Aberdeen lumberjack!
SLICKSVILLE: Earlier this year, business analysts were talking about the mergers of the seven Baby Bells into four as presaging a potential reassembly of the Bell System. Now, with Exxon and Mobil combining and BP taking over Amoco, we might be seeing the reassembly of the old Standard Oil! (Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and BP’s current U.S. division are all descended from pieces of John D. Rockefeller’s old monopoly.) The headline in last Friday’s Times claims the merger would “benefit consumers” somehow–even though it would result in further station closures across the country (neither company has much of a presence left around here) and mass layoffs, and even though today’s low oil prices are the result of the collapse in OPEC’s ability to set prices for its member oil-exporting nations.
The first hints of a possible merger made the news the same day as the fatal explosion at the Anacortes refinery built in the ’50s by Texaco, but now operated by Texaco and Shell under the joint-venture pseudonym “Equilon.” All these spinoffs, mergers, joint ventures, and consolidations in the business have scrambled what had been clear vertically-integrated brand identities. (Could the Anacortes plant’s management change have influenced conditions that led to the freak accident? In all probability, no. The coking tower that blew up was designed and built when Texaco still fully owned the installation.)
Still, doesn’t anyone remember back in the ’70s when TV oilman J.R. Ewing became the world’s image of a slimy businessmen? When oil companies were popularly thought to be the bad guys, and the bigger they got the badder they were presumed to be? The oil giants turned out to have profited then from circumstances beyond their control; they’re now struggling from circumstances equally beyond their control. But these are still global collossi whose only true loyalties are still to (1) the stock price, (2) executive salaries and perks, (3) promoting government policies favorable to the first two priorities, and (4) their public images. Everything else (environmental protection, resource conservation, fair labor practices, preserving neighborhood service stations) the companies either pays attention to when doing so fits priorities 1-4 or when they’re forced to. And as we’ve seen in places like Kuwait (where women still have virtually no civil rights) and Nigeria (where opponents to the Shell-supported dictator are harrassed and shot), these companies are still perfectly willing to associate with less-than-admirable elements as long as it’s lucrative.
SCARY COINCIDENCE #1: In this space last week, I promised this week I’d list things I was thankful for. Little did I know I’d be grateful to the fates for some relatively lucky timing. I was on the southbound Metro #359 bus at 3:15 p.m. Thursday, heading back from the ol’ family dinner–exactly 24 hours prior to the incident in which a presumably deranged passenger shot the driver on a southbound #359 on the northern reaches of the Aurora Bridge, just above the Fremont Troll. (The bus crashed through the guard rail and plunged to the ground below. The driver fell out and died.)
Scary coincidence #2: A KIRO-TV reporter, mentioning cops scouring the wreckage site for evidence, noted how investigators spent months combing the seas off Long Island, NY after the TWA Flight 800 crash several years ago. A friend of mine had been on that plane from Paris to NYC that day; the fatal flight was to have been the plane’s return trip.
Scary coincidence #3: As part of the part-time duties I’m still handling for The Stranger, I’d scheduled to turn in a website review this week about www.busplunge.org, a site collecting every English-language news story containing the words “bus plunge.”
Scary coincidence #4: The driver, Mark McLaughlin, was shot in the arm. Mudhoney singer Mark Arm’s real surname: McLaughlin.
Back in the late ’80s, Metro Transit’s ads tried to discourage citizens from thinking of bus riders as underclass losers and winos, with images of well-scrubbed, pale-skinned models and the slogan, “Metro. Who rides it? People just like you.” Then in the ’90s, as headlines blared of “road rage” and roads became clogged with “out-of-my-way-asshole” SUVs, bus riders got plastered with the PR image of “civil society” do-gooders who did their part to reduce traffic congestion and encourage social mingling, people whose efforts deserved to be furthered by the regional light-rail referendum. Will this tragedy re-ignite the old stereotype of bus people, or be perceived as the wheeled equivalent of a drive-by?
NOW FOR YOUR GIFT: I also promised last week I’d start adding exciting new features to your beloved Misc. World site. With the assistance of the speakeasy.org programming staff, I’m proud to pre-announce the forthcoming, one-‘n’-only Misc.Talk discussion board. In a sense it’s a return to my roots, having first discovered online communication via bulletin board systems back in 1983. Your first question: What’s the ickiest, most inappropriate, or most embarrassing Xmas gift you ever got (or gave)? Have fun, and talk nice.
SCARY POST-ELECTION, post-Halloween greetings from MISC., the popcult report that, on the night MTV aired the last episode of The Real World: Seattle, was at Pier 70, in an ex-retail space right next to the ex-Real World studio, where two campaigns (No on 200 and Yes on Libraries) held election-night parties. You’ve seen enough TV coverage of such parties to know how they went down. The KCPQ news crew there even had a script prepared for both contingencies: “The crowd here cheered/groaned when the first returns were announced.”
As it turned out, just about every progressive stance won, with one extreme exception. The anti-affirmative-action Initiative 200 won big. Why? At the bash, the main explanation handed about was the initiative’s clever ballot wording, which, by purporting to oppose racial/gender discrimination in public hiring or education, may have confused anti-racist voters. My old personal nemesis John Carlson, I-200’s official leader, is politically sleazy enough to have promoted such confusion, but not clever enough to have thought it up. For that the credit/blame has to go to the Californians who actually drafted the measure. Hard to believe, but some well-meaning friends still ask why I’ve never moved to the fool’s-golden state. After Nixon, Reagan, Pete Wilson, the “English Only” initiative, the anti-bilingual-education initiative, and the original anti-affirmative-action initiatives now being cloned in assorted states, it’s way past time we all stopped believing the hype about Calif. as some sort of borderline-pinko progressive paradise.
Adding to the confusion, anti-200 campaign leaders apparently feared racial divisions in Wash. state had gotten so bad, white voters wouldn’t vote to keep affirmative action unless it was marketed as helping white women. So all you saw in anti-200 ads were white-female potential victims of the measure. The pro-200 forces (who wanted to restore old white socioeconomic privileges) flew in out-of-state black conservatives to speak for the measure (and even flew in paid out-of-state black signature gatherers), while the anti-200 forces (who wanted to preserve the legal remedies that had jump-started workplace diversity) presented a public face of soccer moms and blonde kindergarten girls.
HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Only one Monica Lewinsky in sight, at least among the parties seen by me or reported on by readers.
Misc.’s crack team did report sighting a few South Park costumes, several Spice Girls quartets and quintets, a couple adult Teletubbies, a lot of devils and vampires and waitresses and scullery maids, several construction workers and Catholic schoolgirls, two male Hooters Gals, and one Linda Smith.
My second favorite sight was at Champion’s a couple days before, where a real policewoman stood doing crowd-control duty right next to the life-size cardboard cutout of Xena.
My first favorite sight was outside Sit & Spin, when a guy in an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask started to converse with his pal dressed like Steve Urkel–in sign language. A deaf “Scream”! More perfect than perfection!
NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE DEPT.: Why haven’t any reviews of that awful new movie Pleasantville mentioned the title’s connection to Reader’s Digest? For decades, the now fiscally-embatteled RD has trucked its mail from the post office in Pleasantville, NY to the town 10 or so miles away where its offices really are. It’s quite possible Pleasantville writer-director Gary Ross created his fantasy of a fetishized ’50s sitcom town less from the sitcoms of the period (none of which resemble it) than from a non-RD reader’s received ideas about the hyper-bland, ultra-WASP, problem- and temptation-free Real America RD is supposed to have championed, particularly as the ’60s came along and conservatives’ rant targets moved from Commies and labor unions to the sort of unwashed bohemian types who’d grow up to make dumb fantasy movies.
In reality, of course, RD‘s editorial stance was more complex than its rigorously-enforced simple writing style. It was running improve-your-sex-life articles years before GQ, and has run more anti-smoking articles than most other big magazines (it’s never accepted cigarette ads). For that matter, as film reviewers have pointed out, those TV sitcoms weren’t really as “postively” life-denying as Ross suggests. Anything that has to explore the same characters week after week, in formats light on action and heavy on dialogue and close-ups, will by necessity come to explore the characters’ inner and outer conflicts, torments, and sexual personalities–even if the shows scrupulously avoided what used to be called “blue” material.
So Ross’s fantasy world is really about today’s nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’50s, not directly about those original fictions. Already, we’re seeing nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’80s, via nostalgia picture-books that claim Ronald Reagan really was universally loved and brought America together again. There are now plenty of movies exposing the dark side of the ’50s (from Parents to Hairspray and even JFK), but will future fetish-nostalgia filmmakers depict the ’80s as exclusively a time of Rambo and Risky Business? Speaking of filmic fantasy worlds…
PLACE OR SHOW: The PP General Cinema elevenplex means, even with the permanent closure of the UA 70/150 (the “200 penny opera house”) and the temporary closure of the Cinerama, there are now a whopping 39 commercial movie screens in greater downtown Seattle (including Cap. Hill and lower Queen Anne), plus the Omnidome, IMAX, and 911 Media Arts. No more the days when high-profile new films would premiere no closer to town than the Lake City, Ridgemont, or Northgate (still open!) theaters…. Lessee, what would have been the movie for me to see in this giant multiplex, on the top two floors of a massive, climate-controlled environment totally dedicated to commercialism and with no visible exits? Hmm, maybe–The Truman Show? (To update one item on last week’s list of things Seattle needs,” the elevenplex will indeed have a cocktail lounge in its upper lobby level once the permits come through. No booze will likely be allowed in the theater auditoria themselves, tho…)
As for the mall itself, a tourist overheard on opening day of Pacific Place said, “It reminded me of Dallas.” I can imagine the likes of J.R. Ewing and Cliff Barnes hanging amid the huge, costly, gaudy, yet still unsophisticated shrine to smugness. This penultimate major addition to downtown retail (the last phase of downtown’s makeover will occur when the old Nordstrom gets permanent new occupants) constitutes one more shovelful of virtual dirt on the old, modest, tasteful Seattle. The PP management even kicked out a branch of the Kay-Bee Toys chain the day before it was to open, solely because Kay-Bee’s Barbies and Hot Wheels weren’t upscale enough for the tony atmosphere the mall wants everything in it to have!
At least one good thing you can say about PP is it makes the 10-year-old Westlake Center (also built with partial public subsidy) look comparably far more egalitarian, with its cafeteria-style food court and its Beanie Baby stand and its “As Seen on TV” cart selling your favorite infomercial goodies: Ginsu knives! A “Rap Dancer” duck doll! Railroad clocks that whistle on the hour! Magna Duster! Citrus Express! EuroSealer! Gyro Kite! Bacon Wave! EpilStop Ultra! And Maxize, $39.95 Chinese-made foam falsies (“Avoid risky, expensive, ineffective surgery”)!
STACKED ODDS: Pacific Place’s Barnes & Noble, more than any other book superstore I’ve seen, clearly displays the book-superstore concept’s tiers of priorities–literally. On its small main-floor storefront level, B&N displays a few tables and shelves of highly advertised new releases, plus audio books, coffee-table picture tomes, and magazines. For everything else (including the everything-for-everybody, indie-bookstore-killing miles of midlist titles), you’ve gotta take an escalator to the basement. Of course, most big bookstores have a special display area front-and-center for a few dozen highly advertised or “recommended” titles. Big publishers will routinely cut deals with superstore chains for these prominent spots. Powell’s City of Books in Portland makes it more explicit than most, with a separate room for the up-front goodies. The University Book Store makes it less explicit than most, almost hiding its prime-display tables in the store’s geographic center, past the remainder tables.
(Also in the B&N basement: A small but selective CD department, including preprinted divider rack-cards for “Tributes” and “Benefits.” And the ground-floor magazine rack’s the first place downtown to sell British Cosmopolitan, still the raunchiest mainstream women’s magazine in the English language.)
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, presuming no heretofore-charted comets hurl toward Earth, welcome the early sunsets, and watch the Seattle Reign instead of complaining about any lousy NBA lockout.
The Microsoft File
Book reviews for The Stranger, 9/15/98
The Microsoft File:
The Secret Case Against Bill Gates
by Wendy Goldman Rohm
(Times Books/Random House) $25
Bill Gates’ Personal Super Secret Private Laptop
by Henry Beard, John Boswell, and Ron Barrett
(Simon & Schuster) $13.95
If you don’t know much about the federal, state, and competitors’ accusations against the Redmond Software Behemoth, this might be a relatively painless place to start.
Over the course of some 300 pages spanning some 10 years, Rohm slowly conveys the various, wide-ranging complaints made against MS (that it’s hustled and bullied people around in order to maintain its lock on PC operating systems and to leverage that monopoly into full market control of applications software, Internet browsers, and electronic commerce).
But if you’re already familiar with the basics of the story, Rohm’s slow-yet-hurried pace and her convoluted attempts to stick it all into a “human interest” linear narrative may leave you almost as frustrated as, say, trying to remove the Internet Explorer icons from a Win98 desktop. She seems less interested in the case of U.S. v. Microsoft than in her soap-opera sagas of its players.
That’s the only obvious reason for her frequent side allegations concerning the premarital Gates’ sex life (concerning one alleged tryst: “She was beautiful. It didn’t matter that she was paid”).
Like Ken Starr, Rohm apparently believes an unrepressed libido’s a telltale sign of an unworthy character. Also like Starr, she apparently wants to sway public opinion against her target more than to gather and disseminate factual matter. Despite Rohm’s obsessions, Gates’ character isn’t the real issue; it’s his company’s actions and their legality.
Besides, much of the world already sees Gates as a near-mythical figure of limitless ambition and limited conscience. It’s enough of a premise for National Lampoon vet Henry Beard and his partners to create a whole picture book purportedly consisting of screen shots from Gates’ own PC.
Some typical gags involve a proposed Star Trek script with himself as the hero, a hype-generation program that “changes comparative adjectives to superlatives,” a Perrier-filled wading pool for baby daughter Jennifer, proposed “on-screen error messages so users will blame themselves for foul-ups and glitches,” and in-house acronyms such as “OGITWEP (Our goal is the whole enchilada, period).”
Nothing in it’s actually funny, but it’s a telling document about exploitable public sentiments toward the fifth-richest American in history.
IN STORE: Borders Books held an Ally McBeal fan party and trivia competition on 8/20. Seeing this tribute to gushily pathetic “vulnerability” next to the diet and fashion books brought me a revelation: Ally isn’t a sex-object fantasy, it’s a target-marketing fantasy. An attempt at female-oriented counterprogramming opposite the male-targeted Monday Night Football and cable pro-wrestling shows, built around the most exploitive stereotypes from modern women’s-magazine articles. Of course, that’s just as antithetical to feminist precepts as any sex-object fantasy would be.
(The same store is now selling official “Windows 98 Roast” brand coffee. Sometimes it’s hard to keep my vow to never write a coffee joke in the column.)
LOOSENING UP: The week of the Clinton quasi-confession (an attempt to defuse the “family-values” demagogues’ attacks) was the same week Rupert Murdoch took over Pat Robertson’s Family Channel, turning it into Fox Family (a repository for former Fox Kids Network cartoons, plus such non-700 Club material as Pee-wee’s Playhouse reruns and a Spice Girls special). The ol’ squeaky-cleanness just didn’t produce Murdoch’s desired profit rate. A potential omen to PaxNet, the UHF broadcast network to launch this week with a format even squeakier than Family used to have.
THE VIEW FROM THE ROAD: The Oldsmobile Sihlouette Premiere, a forthcoming minivan, will offer a built-in VCR and an LED video screen (out of the driver’s view). Besides wondering if the GM-installed machine will try to scramble any attempted viewing of Roger and Me, imagine the possibilities:
Some Amtrak trains, and some European intercity bus lines, already have ground-level “in-flight movies;” no reason Greyhound couldn’t do the same (or for that matter, the Green Tortoise would be the perfect venue for watching Half Baked!).
FILLING THE BILL: I’d fantasized about doing it for years, but now it’s been done: A Vancouver band has taken my all-time wannabe band name, the Special Guests. They never headline a gig, but they’ve opened for everybody! (Until this happened, I appeared to be the only person whose favorite wannabe band name wasn’t “Free Beer.”)
TAKING UP THE SLACK: I don’t read the Wall St. Journal every day, so it took an attentive reader to let me know I’d missed its 8/6/98 front-page story on the last of the slackers congregating in Seattle, where supposedly “Good Times Are Bad” for goateed Caucasians wishing to identify themselves as victims of a no-future society.
Writer Christina Duff took a rather snide attitude toward young-adult males who dared refuse to join in the WSJ-proclaimed great boom economy: “Their ranks thinning everywhere, many aging slackers are congregating in Seattle, as if circling the grunge wagons…. The slackers’ last refuge here is the Capitol Hill area, where tattooed 20-somethings walk the streets giving hugs and high-fives…. Faced with the depressing news that things aren’t as depressing anymore, some are shamed into shedding their angst.”
Of particular scorn was one D.J. Thompson, belittled for choosing to only work part-time pouring coffee while his girlfriend pursued a Real Career.
Duff’s kinder to “ex-slacker Joanne Hernon,” now “a computer consultant for law firms” with unkind words for her former fellow Linda’s barflies: “They feel they need to be on the outskirts. Keep themselves in a poor position. Blame everyone but themselves. It’s easy to make money these days.”
Duff and Hernon don’t say how it’s easier for some (such as, admittedly, pale-skinned young-adult college grads) to make money than others; or how relative prosperity can more folks the option to choose not to devote their whole lives to material pursuits or the kissing of boss-butt. (Besides, Seattle’s currently up-‘n’-coming Boho-hood isn’t the maturing Capitol Hill but Georgetown.)
MISC. CAN’T BELIEVE nobody else (to our knowledge) has noted how the new logo for Safeco Insurance (and, hence, for Safeco Field) looks a lot like a rightward-slanting dollar sign…. Speaking of stadia, turns out the Kingdome can’t be imploded on New Year’s 2000 without canceling a Christian convention tentatively scheduled for that night. Darn.
(SUB)URBAN RENEWAL: With the opening of the 3rd Ave. Deli in the ex-Bon Tire Center on 3rd, downtown has its own mobile, curb-based readerboard sign with arrow-pattern chase lights. Strip-mall flavor in the heart of the city!
AFTERWORD: Crown Books is closing all its Washington stores, as part of a nationwide retrenchment. The book superstore chains’ chief victims aren’t the specialty independents, but the smaller general bookstores of both indie and chain ownership.The stores that discounted the bestsellers, prominently displayed the most heavily advertised books, and offered very little else.
BUT DO THEY COME IN LONG-SLEEVES?: Viagra that male-potency pill endorsed by everybody from Bob Dole to Hugh Hefner, isn’t available yet in some countries, including India. That hasn’t stopped a Bangalore, India company from marketing Viagra-logo T-shirts with the slogan “What the World Wants Today.” A co-owner explained to Reuters, “Today, Viagra is not just a pill… it is a positive attitude bringing hope to people.”
JUST IN TIME FOR XMAS: Mattel’s debuting a Barbie-sized Erica Kane doll. Imagine all the wedding gowns you could get for it! Or maybe you could play where she grittingly grins while your Marlena Evans and Vicky Lord dolls show off their tiny Emmys.
REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: A couple months back Misc. wrote about the possibilities (for good or ill) of a new American revolution. Seems the topic’s becoming popular; at least as a selling tool. Both Taco Bell and Dos Equis invoke bizarre takes on Poncho Villa to sell consumer consumables. A golf ball called the Maxfli Revolution advertises it’ll help you “Seize Power and Take Control.” Closer to home, the highly institutional-looking ARO.Space sez its initials stand for “Art and Revolution Organization” (its ads even say “Viva le Revolution!”). If this keeps up, Baffler editor Tom Frank will have enough “advertisers co-opting the language of dissent” rant topics to keep going for years.
PASSING THE TORCH: British Petroleum (which bought Standard Oil of Ohio in the ’80s) will buy Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana); so the former Mobil (nee Standard of New York), Exxon (nee Standard of New Jersey), and assorted other gas stations in Washington now bearing the BP brand will eventually change. (Alas, no more “Petrol for the lorry” lines, and no more jokes about where bees go to the bathroom.) But it’s not known yet whether they’ll assume Amoco’s torch logo or whether Tosco the Connecticut-based company that bought BP’s Northwest operations in the mid-’90s and kept regional rights to the BP name, will instead change them to the 76 brand, which Tosco now owns outright. (After the print edition of this column went to press, Tosco announced it would keep the BP brand on its stations for the time being.) In other energy-related matters…
A BURNING ISSUE: It’s hard right now to think about heating equipment, unless it’s everybody’s favorite gas-powered industrial space heater. I speak, of course, of the mighty Reznor. When a rock singer using that surname showed up, some fans wondered whether he was related to the brand name bearing down from near the ceilings of stores, warehouses, artists’ studios, garages, nightclubs, etc. Turns out ol’ Trent is indeed a descendent of the company’s founder George Reznor (who entered the furnace trade in 1888, in the same central Penna. town where Trent grew up).
But the Reznor family’s had little to do in decades with the company, which has changed owners several times. Current owners gave 120 or so employees an “offer” last year: Take pay cuts of up to 28 percent, or else. The workers stood their ground. The owners shipped the jobs off to Mexico. Northeast politicians are now invoking the ex-Reznor workers as poster children for the injustices of NAFTA and the Global Economy.
So next time you hear Trent’s moans about frustration and helplessness amid a decaying industrial landscape, look up. If you see a Reznor heater above you, it’s a reminder that, for some, such feelings aren’t just an act.
AS PROMISED three weeks ago, here’s the official Misc. list of the 64 arts and sciences a modern person should learn; as inspired by one of the nonsexual parts of the Kama Sutra. (Here’s the original passage; here’s how to get the whole book.)
I’m not claiming to be an expert on all of these, or any. They’re just things I, and some of you, feel folks oughta know a little better, in no particular order:
street hockey, et al.).
cinematography, videography, Photoshop).
———————–
Subject: 64 Arts for the Modern Person Sent: 7/27/98 9:20 AM Received: 7/27/98 12:45 PM From: erinn kauer, eakamouse@webtv.net To: clark@speakeasy.org
Interesting topic. All modern persons should bone up (no pun intended) on the various methods of BIRTH CONTROL. To include: proper condom etiquette, taking the pill on time, abstinence, getting off without actually having intercouse, and covering one’s butt by always having a supply of the newly available emergency contraceptive pills (actually just the regular pill, taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, it reduces the chance of actual conception by about 75%… this is not RU486, and does not abort anything, it just does not allow the conception to take place). PLEASE include this particular item in your list, there would be far less unwanted pregnancies occuring, either resulting in having the child because the misguided fool believes so strongly that abortion in wrong (like having a child unprepared and setting them up in this world on a shaky base is right) or in having the costly and scary and stigmatizing abortion and suffering needless guilt because of it. However, abortion is not the end of the world, and should be seriously considered if all other options are not viable at that point. Please call the FDA at 301/827-4260 and ask for Lisa D. Rarick for more info on the 72 hour emergency contraception pill, or 1-800-NOT2LATE, or your local pharmacy. Do not let the pharmacy give you any bullshit about having to get it through your doctor, it is available WITHOUT a prescription and is perfectly legal, etc, etc, etc. I found that my pharmacy balked at the notion, but this has only recently been approved and they are simply not used to it yet. They need to be shaken though, they are needlessly telling people to go through their doctor, but you DO NOT HAVE TO, this should be available OVER THE COUNTER.
Besides contraception, folks of the modern age should study organic gardening, meditation (stress-buster, dream fulfiller, life lengthener), keep an eye on politics and actually know something about the world and the U.S. of A., and how to make a good latte…
I am sure there is much more, and my list is pretty lame, but the CONTRACEPTION/ FAMILY PLANNING is extremely important.
Thanks for hearing me out!
Erinn Kauer / eakamouse
P.S. Concert ettiquette, Gourmet Camping, and the fine art of bodybuilding (look good now AND later!). Whatever. Bye.
