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IN HONOR OF all the kindly PR people who keep sending their bizarre promotional trinkets our way, Misc. hereby informs you that (1) Miller Beer is now printing scenes from its TV ads on the backs of its labels; (2) it’s the 35th anniversary of the Easy-Bake Oven and its makers are sponsoring a recipe contest at www.easybake.com; and (3) GameWorks now has a Jurassic Park walk-through “experience,” whatever that is.
UPDATES: Looks like we’ll get a Ballard Fred Meyer after all. The chain’s reached a compromise with neighborhood activists. As a result, Freddy’s will leave part of the ex-Salmon Bay Steel site near Leary Way for industrial use. The ex-Ernst site up the street, which I’d suggested as an alternate Freddy’s space, will now house the Doc Freeman’s boating-supply emporium…. Not only is the Apple Theater, the region’s last all-film porno house, closing, but so is Seattle’s other remaining XXX auditorium, the video-projection-based Midtown on 1st. Real-estate speculators hope to turn it into more of the yupscale-retail sameoldsameold.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Cindy Simmons’s Wallingford Word (“Cutest newspaper east of Fremont”) is a sprightly eight-page newsletter on north-central issues and events. The first issue highlights Metro Transit’s scary plan to chop service on all-day neighborhood routes in the near north end, in favor of more rush-hour commuter service–a scheme which, if implemented, would devastate the notion of transit as an option for voluntarily car-free urban life. Free in the area, or online at www.seanet.com/~csimmons.
THAT’S SHOE BIZ: The high-priced sneaker biz is collapsing fast, according to a recent USA Today business story. It claims teens and young adults are (wisely, in my opinion) moving toward sensibly-priced footwear and away from $120 high-tops bearing the name of this year’s overhyped slam-dunk egomaniac. What will happen to the NBA without endorsement contracts to make up for salary caps? (Some superstars make twice as much from shoe ads as they do from actually playing basketball.) Maybe something good–maybe the overdue deflation of the league’s overemphasis on individual heroics and the realization that it’s a better game when played the Sonics’ way, as a full-team effort. And maybe the Woolworth Corp. will be proven wrong to have jettisoned its variety stores to put its resources into its struggling Foot Locker subsidiary.
CREAMED: After all these weeks, folks are still talking about the Bill Gates pie-in-the-face incident in Brussels. Maybe it’s ’cause instigator Noel Godin knew the spectacle he wanted to make. Self-proclaimed “entarteur” (applier of, or to, tarts) Godin, 52, is a lifelong provocateur–a vet of the May ’68 rebellion in Paris and of that movement’s ideological forebearers, the Situationists (post-surrealist artists and theorists who explored what Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle”). Besides his paid work as a writer and historian, he and a corps of volunteers have pied famous people in public for almost 30 years. Targets have ranged from writer Margeurite Duras (Godin told Time‘s Netly News website that Duras “represented for us the `empty’ novel”) and bourgeois art-world types to Euro politicians and TV personalities. Godin told Netly News he targeted Gates “because in a way he is the master of the world, and… he’s offering his intelligence, his sharpened imagination, and his power to the governments and to the world as it is today–that is to say gloomy, unjust, and nauseating. He could have been a utopist, but he prefers being the lackey of the establishment. His power is effective and bigger than that of the leaders of the governments, who are only many-colored servants.” Godin’s not merely out to poke fun at the mighty, but to call the structures of power and privilege into question. You can see Godin (as an author during a radio-interview scene) in The Sexual Life of the Belgians, available for rent at Scarecrow Video.
(I still won’t tell latte jokes in the column, but I will be guest barista this Tuesday, 8 p.m.-whenever, at Habitat Espresso, Broadway near John.)
MISC. CONTINUES to be haunted by the Winter Olympics opening-ceremony theme song, “When Children Rule the World.” Sometimes it seems they do now, only in grownup bodies…
SHADES OF PALE: The Times reported this month that Kenny G’s one of the most respected white musicians among black jazz purists. My theory: G represents a stereotype of whiteness corresponding almost perfectly to the stereotypes of blackness profitably portrayed for years by some white people’s favorite black acts.
DELIVERING INFLUENCE: A recent Wall St. Journal told how United Parcel Service tried to pay the Univ. of Wash. to lend its institutional credibility onto pro-corporate research. The formerly locally-owned UPS offered $2.5 million to the UW med school in ’95. But instead of directing its gift toward general areas of study, UPS insisted the money go toward the work of UW orthopedic surgeon Stanley J. Bigos. The WSJ claimed UPS liked Bigos because “his research has suggested that workers’ back-injury claims may relate more to poor attitudes than ergonomic factors on the job.” The company’s fighting proposed tougher worker-safety laws, and wanted to support its claims with “independent” studies from a bigtime university that happenned to need the money. Negotiations with UW brass dragged on for two years, then collapsed. Bigos insists he wouldn’t have let UPS influence his work if he’d gotten its cash. But if companies can pick and choose profs already disposed to tell ’em what they wanna hear, “academic independence” becomes a bigger joke than it already is.
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Steve’s Broiler has lost its lease and closed. The 37-year-old downtown restaurant/ lounge was beloved by seniors, sailors, and punks for dishing out ample portions of good unpretentious grub and drinks, in a classic paneling-and-chrome-railing setting. (It was also the setting for Susan Catherine’s ’80s comic Overheard at America’s Lunch Counters.) The owners might restart if they can find another spot. It was the last tenant in the former Osborn & Ulland building, which will now be refitted for the typical “exciting new retail” blah blah blah…. Remember Jamie Hook’s Stranger piece last year about the Apple Theater, one of America’s last all-film porno houses? If you want to witness this landmark of archaic sleaze, better hurry. The Apple’s being razed soon for an affordable-housing complex incorporating the apartment building next door where the Pike St. Cinema was, and where the rock club Uncle Rocky’s is now. Rocky’s will close when the remodeling starts, and won’t be invited back (the housing people don’t like late-night loudness beneath residences).
MORE, MORE, MORE!: A recent Business Week cover story calls it “The Entertainment Glut.” I call it a desperate attempt by Big Media to keep control of a cultural landscape dividing and blossoming to a greater extent than I’d ever hoped. BW sez the giants (Disney, Murdoch, Time Warner, Viacom, et al.) are trying to maintain market share by invading one another’s genre turfs and cranking out more would-be blockbusters and bestsellers than ever before, to the point that none of them can expect anything like past profit margins. (Indeed, many of these “synergistic” media combos are losing wads of dough, losses even creative accounting can no longer hide.) It gets worse: Instead of adapting to the new realities of a million subcultures, the giants are redoubling their push after an increasingly-elusive mass audience. Murdoch’s HarperCollins book company scrapped over 100 planned “mid-list” titles to make up for losses on costly big-celeb books. BW claims the giants’ movie divisions are similarly “spending lavishly” on intended Next Titanics and trying “to stop producing modestly budgeted fare.” Their record divisions are dropping acts after one album, while ardently pushing the retro rockstar-ism of Britpop. The longer the giants try to keep their untenable business plans going, the better the opportunities for true indies in all formats–if the indies can survive the giants’ ongoing efforts to crowd ’em out of the marketplace.
(If Jean Godden can make personal appearances at coffee shops, so can I. I’ll be “guest barista” the evening of March 10 at Habitat Espresso, on Broadway near John. Mark your calendars.)
HIGH IQ=LOW XXX?: The papers were full of smart-folks-get-less-sex headlines the same week IDG Books brought out Dating for Dummies, the latest extension of a guidebook series initially aimed at people who needed to run computers at work but didn’t like to. Maybe they should’ve put out Dating for Smarties instead. (On the other hand, a programming-manual format’s perhaps an ideal means to show literal-minded people how to survive in such an un-left-brain activity.) (On the third hand, maybe it’s all the wrong way; reinforcing thought patterns completely useless for the realm of hormones and emotions.)
Smart ladies at least have Marilyn Vos Savant and the learned lovelies in Bull Durham and La Lectrice as sexy role models. Who’ve boys got: The antisocial (alleged) Unabomber? The hygiene-challenged Einstein and Edison? OK, there’s the fun-lovin’ late scientist Richard Feynman and certain brooding movie master-criminal types, but they’re the exceptions. But the more common image is the drooling fanboy in a three-sizes-too-small Capt. Kirk shirt, peering through inch-thick spectacles, looking for love in all the wrong places (like AOL chat rooms), fantasizing about Amazonian superwomen but incapable of chatting up a real one, perhaps still traumatized by high-school crushes who slept with jocks and treated him as a brother.
Many hyper-rational people of all genders fear the irrational, and love and sex are about the most irrational behaviors known to humankind. But becoming more desirable isn’t as impossible as it sometimes seems. Practice using a softer, sultrier voice in which to recite post-structuralist literary theory. Memorize love sonnets. Do something to get outside the comfy prison of your own head (yoga, gardening, cycling, pets). Reclaim your place in the physical/ biological/ emotional realm. To quote a love-struck professor in Hal Hartley’s Surviving Desire, “Knowing is not enough.”
`WORLD’ CONQUEST: I’ve heard punk-rock activists might try to disrupt location tapings of MTV’s Real World Seattle with pickets or street-theater type hostilities. I say we can be more creative than that. They think they’re an entertainment network; heck, we’ll show ’em some real entertainment. First, start a phone tree in advance, so you can descend on the place in numbers. Then when the crew and cast are sighted somewhere, arrive en masse in Santa suits, or chanting the Ivar’s Acres of Clams folk jingle, or loading the bar’s juke box to repeatedly play “Convoy.” Let’s show those stuck-up industry people we know how to have an old-school good time in this town. Speaking of entertainments…
WORDS & MUSIC: Fizz: A Blah Blah Blah Blah Magazine has put out its last issue and I’ll miss it. Some of publisher Cathy Rundell’s associates are regrouping to start a successor mag, Plus One. One of the things I loved about Fizz (and its LA-based predecessor Fiz) was its insistance on indie-pop as a force for creativity and empowerment, for doing things where you are with what you’ve got.
Compare this to the attitude in Resonance, the three-year-old local dance and pop mag. Where Fizz got personal with musicians, portraying them as just-plain merrymakers like you or me, Resonance keeps its critical distance. Even its interviews too often practice the same old provincialism, treating musical artists as gods and goddesses descending upon us from the media capitals. The irony, of course, is how dance music depends for its real innovations on stubborn trend-breakers, many from outside the NY/LA/SF/London axis. Another dance-club freezine, the LA-based Sweater, exemplifies this in a recent cover story about Derrick May, the Detroit DJ who pioneered late-’80s house music–and who only found a domestic market for his work after U.K. imitators “popularized” the style.
I’ve been criticized for having a rocker-reactionary “disco sucks” attitude toward the dance revolution. Not true. My beef’s with the self-defeating “real-life-is-elsewhere” attitude among too many dance-scene followers, too content to remain followers. Like an introspective genius afraid to date, the scene needs to shake off its inhibitions, to dare to be foolish, to really get down.
(Share your egghead love tips at clark@speakeasy.org .)
Due to early holiday-season deadlines, this Misc. installment’s the first to get to comment on that very peculiar New Year’s, during which those Seattle residents not blotto-drunk might as well have been, since all attempts to see the Space Needle fireworks resulted only in a fog-blurred haze of colors like something from a Mark Tobey painting.
ERROR MESSAGES: Hardly a day goes by without somebody saying something nasty about Microsoft. The Dept. of Justice disses the way MS tries to strong-arm PC makers. Nader warns about MS trying to monopolize “electronic commerce” tools, wanting a piece of every buck that’ll ever change hands online. Sun and Netscape claim MS wants to quash their “cross-platform” software lines, which threaten the notion of an MS-dictated computer universe. Mother Jones charges an MS-funded antipiracy group promising not to prosecute offices for using unpaid-for software if they promise to not only buy their warez but to buy all-MS software. And MS’s temps and perma-temps complain about their second-class treatment within the firm (including, thanks to new state legislation, no more overtime pay).
In most of these cases, the company claims it’s being unfairly targeted due to its “success” at creating products that just happen to be “popular among consumers.” That’s not quite the way it is, of course. Just about anybody who’s not working for the company (or for one of its media joint-venture partners) will acknowledge MS writes better contracts than code. Instead of innovation and competition, it operates by buying friends and crusing enemies. While its staff ideologues publicly pontificate about a cyber-future of decentralized societies and limitless opportunity, it behaves like an old-fashioned oil or railroad monopoly. In the past, MS’s enemies wanted the feds to split the company in two, spinning the DOS/Windows side into a separate company. That move by itself wouldn’t solve anything now, since the DOJ’s main argument is against MS turning Internet application software into a piece of Windows, making it tough for others to sell separate browser programs. It’s not just using its operating-system dominance to sell application software, but to give away software other companies want to sell. In other industries, it’d be called anti-competive “dumping.”
Our fair region is the born-‘n’-bred home of perhaps the most widely hated American company outside the oil or media businesses. Gates and Allen come from what passes for “old money” in this relatively new corner of western civilization. What does it mean to the longstanding image of this place as, for better or worse, “The City of the Nice” (as proclaimed by Tom Robbins in ’81)?
That, of course, always was an exaggeration. We weren’t “nice” so much as polite and businesslike, eager to please when it’s in our interest. (Author Roger Sale wrote in ’75 that Seattle was “bourgeois from the start.”) Despite the popularity of drunks, scoundrels, labor radicals, and whoremongers as local historical icons, most of the real settlement of the city was led by would-be timber, transportation, and real estate barons. The ones who made it didn’t just have what the new agers call “prosperity consciousness;” they maneuvered themselves into the right places, befriended the right people, made the right deals. Behind today’s Boeing boom lies a heritage of sales execs who forged long-term friendships with airlines, sealing deals Lockheed and Douglas couldn’t match. Rainier and Oly stayed prominent as long as they did because regional Teamster boss Dave Beck used his influence to make sure local beer outlets preferred local beers. The burgeoning Seattle biotech industry’s due to Sen. Warren Magnuson’s pipeline of federal bucks into the UW med school. MS started by signing deals with early hobbyist-computer maker Altair, and became a giant by signing deals with IBM. Much of the Seattle/ Oly “indie rock” philosophy has to do not just with alternative kinds of music but with forging alternatives to the music industry’s contractural practices.
Seattle’s a town of dealmakers as much as it’s a town of engineers. MS took this craft to a hyper-aggressive level. The extent to which this aggression succeeds and/or backfires will affect the company, the region, and the world.
PRE-BOXING DAY GREETINGS to all from Misc., the column that’s lived through at least three ska revivals, four rockabilly revivals, and now a second swing revival. (The last was in the mid-’80s, when Joe Jackson and David Lee Roth recorded Louis Jordan covers, Kid Creole revived the zoot suit, and New York Doll David Johansen turned into Buster Poindexter.) ‘Twas funny, but not unexpected, to see the P-I use the “Swing Revival” hype as the excuse for its fourth annual “End of Grunge” article. Swing never really went away, of course. There’ve been swing dance classes in colleges and high schools lo these many years. The New Orleans Cafe has had a swing night since ’88. The only thing that’s new is that L.A. finally caught onto it, following the success of bands like Squirrel Nut-Zippers, thus making it a “national” trend.
UPDATES: The 66 Bell art studios haven’t been depopulated for redevelopment yet, and now they won’t be until at least July. Some tenants are reportedly trying to negotiate a longer reprieve with the building owner, but nothing’s certain yet…. Just when I wrote about the blossoming of funky retail along the western stretch of E. Pine St., two of the street’s clothing veterans (Reverb and Righteous Rags) announced they’ll soon close. The former will become Penny’s Arcade (old time video and pinball); the latter will become an expansion of Bimbo’s Bitchin Burrito Kitchen.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #2 of Neal Wankoff’s Bang!Bang! is out. It’s a bright-‘n’-breezy 16-page digest-sized popzine packed full with words and pix about Tube Top, Blammo, James Bertram of Red Stars Theory, and much more. Free at the usual dropoff spots or $1 for two issues from 1600 15th Ave., Seattle 98122.
THE FINE PRINT (in an Ericsson TV commercial, set at the Carolina Panthers football stadium the Swedish cell-phone company bought the naming rights to): “Teams depicted do not represent actual football teams.”
TOYLAND GREETINGS: Hasbro reports record sales and profits on its assorted products (GI Joe, Monopoly, Scrabble, Mr. Potato Head, et al.), and a week later sez it will fire 20 percent of its staff, just so it can subcontract more work to Mexican sweatshops. We don’t know how this might affect Hasbro’s Seattle operation, which packages and re-ships products made in the company’s Asian plants. Ordinarily, I’d say there was something strategically amiss about a consumer-products company firing so many people, contributing to reduced middle-class buying power and hence reducing demand for its own products. But Hasbro’s the sponsor of the “Holiday Giving Tree” promotion on the Rosie O’Donnell Show, inviting viewers to buy new toys and send ’em in to be given to less-fortunate kids. Maybe the company’s thinking if there are more layoffs across the economy, there’ll be more less-fortunate kids, and hence a chance for bigger “Giving Tree” programs in future Xmases.
ON THE RACKS #1: Beth Nugent’s novel Live Girls (Vintage Contemporaries trade paperback) has a cover with Kristine Peterson’s photo of the famous sign of the same name outside downtown Seattle’s Champ Arcade, but the story itself takes place in a “decaying Eastern port city.”
ON THE RACKS #2: Nancy Manahan, author of Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence (one of at least three books that year with the same subtitle but different topics) now has a new anthology, On My Honor: Lesbians Reflect on Their Scouting Experience. Mind you, while some lesbians may have fond coming-O-age memories of the Girl Scouts, that doesn’t mean the Girl Scout organization holds many nice thoughts toward lesbians. I’m reminded of the lesbian promoters of the Kit Kat Klub cabaret space in east Fremont (circa 1982), who had to fold their operation after their liquor-license application was challenged by the Girl Scouts’ regional office up the street.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK and the annual Misc. In/Out List, think about the KeyArena crowd who cheered when Perry Farrell shouted, “How many of you here believe God is a woman?” and whether, considering some of the capricious and vengeful behaviors attributed to the Judeo-Christian deity, these cheering boys were really being all that complimentary to the feminine spirit.
Media Bashers:
Rebels Without an Effect
Book review for The Stranger, 12/19/97
We the Media: A Citizens’ Guide to Fighting for Media Democracy, edited by Don Hazen and Julie Winokur (The New Press)
The Conquest of Cool, by Thomas Frank (University of Chicago Press)
Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy, by Robert McChesney (Oxford)
Made Possible By…: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States, by James Ledbetter (Verso)
Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, by Stephen Duncombe (Verso)
While American leftists share few notions on how to improve society, just about all of them love the Media Analysis game. How to play: (1) Read something in the “mainstream media” (anything bigger than Mother Jones or The Nation). (2) Pretend to be shocked that the major news institutions behave, well, like major institutions. (3) Complain long and loud about how Big Media isn’t telling The Real Truth (without you, yourself, saying much about what that Real Truth might be). It’s easy, it’s fun, it doesn’t require changing anything in the real world (the game’s rules presume you can’t change the world, just critique it).
The game’s played to perfection by the creators of We the Media, a brisk anthology of short essays and cartoons covering most of the Media Analysis movement’s topics. Nearly every of its 200 pages express amazement that publishers and broadcasters act like the major corporations they are. We the Media exists only in oppositional stance; it bitches about the media loving big business and business-friendly politicians as if anybody’s still surprised at it. (Most of us grew up with local papers kissing their local business communities’ butts; there’s no reason not to expect “national” journalists to act any different.) Only briefly, mostly toward the end, do the editors get around to stating what they’d like us to be crusading for and what communications tools exist or could be created to aid such crusades.
Baffler co-editor Tom Frank holds few illusions, sincere or feigned, about corporate media ever having had ideals to have fallen from–besides the ideal of self-interest. The Conquest of Cool isn’t the grand unified philosophical statement I’ve hoped from Frank. But it does focus his main sociocultural obsession (“hipness” as a pro-corporate marketing concept) onto one specific point in time–the late ’50s and ’60s, when Madison Avenue discovered newer, flashier, homier, hippier, and sexier ways to push consumer goods. Frank believes advertisers didn’t “co-opt” the era’s “youth movement” but paralleled and even helped inspire it. He “credits” a few “rebel” ad men, who initially wanted to break out of their own industry’s stifling conformity, with instigating the whole notion of a “permanent revolution of style” (what critics called “planned obsolescence”); a notion still seen today in ads showing “rebel” teens gulping Mountain Dew and “rebel” executives running Windows 95. Frank adds a closing section about the simultaneous rise of “hipness” in the men’s fashion biz, the process that led directly into the early-’70s polyester-pimp look now curiously nostalgized.
Robert McChesney helped start The Rocket (local bastion of hip marketing) 18 years ago, then went off to grad studies in Wisconsin. Oxford’s paperback reissue of his 1993 treatise on the early days of radio comes out in time to give background on the first corporate media consolidation movement, just as sweetheart deregulation bills are locking the airwaves into fewer and fewer hands than ever. His book’s heavy reading, full of scholarly detail about forgotten, Depression-era radio reform movements that never stood a chance against the RCA-CBS duopoly that controlled the so-called Golden Age of Radio.
It’s not just that business has always wanted to make big money in media. McChesney believes it’s also always tried to silence any potentially viable alternative. So does fellow scholar James Ledbetter. His Made Possible By… details the ’70s rise of public TV and radio in the U.S. and its quick subjugation, first by right-wing politicians and then by corporate “underwriters,” filling PBS schedules with U.K. drawing-room dramas and Lawrence Welk reruns. But after reading it, I got to thinking about what kind of public broadcasting we might have otherwise had. From the standpoint of getting independent and/or progressive documentaries and public affairs shows on the air, the PBS setup’s about the best one could imagine. A vertically integrated organization like the BBC not only has stricter “neutrality” rules, it’s much less open to outside producers. On the more fiscally unstable, yet more decentralized, PBS setup, anybody can propose a program, seek funding for it from inside or outside the system, and even syndicate it to individual affilliates if the PBS network feed doesn’t carry it. I agree with Ledbetter that today’s noncommercial-TV setup leaves a lot to be improved upon; unlike him, I believe it can be improved upon without the drastic restructuring he advocates.
Meanwhile, Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground tries to imagine the potentials for a different type of media universe, using as his starting point the so-called Zine Revolution with its potentials and contradictions. For Duncombe, the punk-rock, political, and personal zines symbolize the risks and frustrations of an oppositional “alternative” culture–do you stay small and irrelevant, or become part of the corporate media machine? Other books about the Zine Revolution revel in the coolness, weirdness, and wildness of DIY publishing. Duncombe instead solemnly ponders zines as artifacts of safe, middle-class “rebellion,” and wonders whether (and how) they might lead into a more serious movement for social change. It’d be a start if more Media Analysts developed Duncombe’s smarts.
INSTEAD OF SPENDING Election Night at the Muni League’s annual media gathering or one of the big candidate bashes, Misc. watched the returns on a tiny portable TV in Linda’s Tavern with a dozen or so members of the Monorail Initiative campaign. (One campaign leader was named Grant Cogswell–same last name as a Jetsons character!) As the tiny-type updates beneath Mad About You and NYPD Blue kept displaying a solid lead for the measure, the bar’s ambience of conversation and DJ music kept getting punctuated by cheers and loud kisses. The rest of the election went pretty much as polls predicted, with Schell’s slightly-narrower-than-expected victory reassuring a municipal political machine that believes government’s highest and best purpose is construction, what Canadian politicos call “megaprojects.” But this night, at this place, belonged to a civic project the machine hated and the people liked.
Now it’ll be up to the people, and to the new neo-progressive wing on the City Council, to shepherd this unusual city-transit vision into reality without letting the machine and its planning corps literally “derail” it. The Seattle machine’s been rather effective at taking popular concerns and re-interpreting them into problems best solved by more business-as-usual. (Note, for instance, how the “neighborhood empowerment” movement thoroughly got re-interpreted by the politicians (even some of the “empowerment” politicians) into a movement for the upscale homeowners to keep affordable housing out and home-resale values high.) Watch for Schell & co. to try to replace the Monorail mandate (maybe in court) with just more commuter buses and park-‘n’-ride lots.
MEDIA INSIDER-ISM should come as no surprise. Note the reaction to the Monorail Initiative. The papers and the TV stations couldn’t find enough ways to “objectively” dismiss initiative instigator Dick Falkenbury and co. as loonies, threatening to saddle a citizenry with an impracticable transit scheme all the experts pooh-poohed.
Before the election, the papers and stations treated the Monorail plan as a sideshow to the gun-lock initiative and the Seattle mayoral race. The Times’ May 8 story treated the issue as a cute human-interest piece, starting off by describing Falkenbury as “a big, burly guy with a deep, heavy voice.”
The Weekly did run an enthusiastic cover story two weeks before the election (the biggest pre-election coverage the initiative got), but the following week its official endorsements list recommended against the initiative, giving no explanation why. The dailies also endorsed a no vote, also without much elaboration. The Times’ pre-election editorial headline set the tone: “Charming but unsound.”
Once the returns came in, this party-line portrayal came down hard. The Times’ Wednesday and Thursday stories Monorail dissings from the current mayor, the mayor-elect, city attorney Mark Sidran, and downtown-establishment publicist Bob Gogerty. The only pro-Monorail quotations were from Falkenbury himself, who was still described in less-than-flattering terms.
Times editorial columnist Terry McDermott tore into the vote: “It was one of the most charming proposals to get to the ballot in years. And one of the worst.”
Fellow columnist Jean Godden, taking the establishment line that there’s no way this can be paid for, wrote a column of facetious fundraising ideas–tin cups, bake sales, et al. (Never mind that it chiefly relies onmayor-elect Paul Schell’s favorite financing mechanism, the “public-private partnership,” via passenger-station retail (ask a few espresso vendors about the value of high foot-traffic locations). Never mind that much of it could be paid for by reallocating funds already earmarked for RTA light-rail routes that’d duplicate some Monorail mileage. And never mind that the initiative’s text clearly states it’ll use bonds and B&O taxes as a backup scheme.)
The Post-Intelligencer similarly described Falkenbury in every story as “initiative leader and tour-bus driver” or “the 44-year-old cab driver.” Its Friday story emphasized Falkenbury’s “whimsey” and lack of engineering experience, and described the initiative as “a giant transportation project with a seat-of-the-pants blueprint and a wild-guess price tag.” The P-I‘s Thursday story started out with Sidran, Schell, and city councillor Jan Drago; the former saying it “raises a lot of questions without answers.” It also dismissed America’s biggest current monorail, at Disney World, as an “amusement ride” novelty (even though it efficiently carries up to 200,000 people a day throughout that sprawling complex). But at least the P-I bothered to contact some pro-Monorail professionals. On Thursday it quoted two executives with U.S. companies building systems overseas. On Friday it found an ex-UW civil-engineering prof who acknowledged the thing not only could work, it might be more practical than RTA’s light-rail scheme. (Nobody, though, wrote how new urban monorails are currently underway or under consideration in Florida and southern California.)
The TV stations weren’t that much better. Even KOMO, which is planning an office-retail expansion to its building near the existing Monorail line and would hence potentially benefit from an expanded line, treated the vote as a thorn in the side of the new mayor and council. KING made Schell’s pre-election rejection of the Monorail plan the prime focus of his first post-election interview. (He said he’d examine the situation and maybe submit a referendum asking voters to repeal or modify it.) Even Almost Live! host John Keister likened the initiative to “asking people, ‘Do you like monorails?’ The next election they’ll ask what’s our favorite color.”
Compare this to the press’s treatment of the stadium and Commons proposers, who were nearly unanimously lauded as far-thinking visionaries (except in the columns of full-time skeptic McDermott). Papers and radio stations that normally treated sports-team bosses as meddling clueless dorks become sanguine when owners start demanding new playpens. Apparently, the difference between a “visionary” and a “whimsical” crank is whether he’s got cash and connections.
Here’s how I’d analyze the results: The initiative was extremely well conceived despite McDermott’s claims to the contrary. It was a Seattle-only scheme, aimed squarely at urban transit supporters and avoiding suburban conservatives and car-culture addicts. To this core constituency, the Monorail Initiative promised specific benefits at a relatively modest public cost. Nothing “whimsical” about that.
There’s even a legitimate point to the part in the initiative text about withholding city council members’ salaries if they don’t set up Monorail planning promptly. While the clause might not hold up if it’s ever tested in court, it shows Falkenburg suspected from the start that the insiders might try to ground the Monorail Initiative if it passed. So far, he’s being proven right.
YUPPIFICATION MARCHES ON: While the developer-owned politicians were promising to be more responsive if citizens just gave ’em another chance, the developers themselves kept on a-doin’ what they do best. The 66 Bell art studios, where the first Misc. installment was written for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper, were vacated and will become re-divided into smaller spaces at higher prices. The long-abandoned landmark Austin A. Bell bldg. was demolished, except for the front facade (which will become a false-front to the condos being built on the site). And Deja Vu lost its lease on the 1st & Pike strip club where countless businessmen and longshoremen paid out big bucks to momentarily feel slightly less lonely.
The daily papers were aglow about the possibility that entrepreneurs might turn the ex-Deja Vu space into an 1890s-retro “general store.” A general store was a place that sold most of the basic needs of frontier life. Downtown could certainly use a basic-needs retail outlet today. But, of course, this wouldn’t be anything like that. The would-be storekeepers want to sell T-shirts, gourmet jams, lattes, “fine art” (that stuff that’s not as good as just-plain art), and “unique gifts” that’d undoubtedly be just the same as all the other “unique gifts” sold in and around the Pike Place Market. For at least a year, the Samis Foundation landlords had openly expressed their wish to be rid of Deja Vu as a tenant as soon as they could legally kick it out. On my scale, of course, the human physique is wholesome and yupscale trinket stands are a little closer to obscene.
IN MORE POSITIVE RETAIL NEWS: The Pike-Pine Corridor where Linda’s is, an area hyped as the next happenin’ business district for some years now, has stumbled onto a niche. The arrival of several stores full of friendly antique furnishings at Pine and Bellevue has coalesced the area’s status as a bric-a-brac district to rival Portland’s Burnside Street. (The Seattle branch of Hamburger Mary’s, Burnside’s famous bric-a-brac theme restaurant, is now just a few blocks away at Bellevue and Olive.) From the retro ’30s at Fibber McGee’s Closet to the retro ’80s at Penny & Perk, from the vintage skin mags at Starlight Video to the pre-WWI sheet music at Filippi’s Books, the Double-P strip’s got most of the acoutrements for any time-pastiche home look you might imagine. Let’s just hope the big-money boys don’t “discover” the place and ruin it all.
The High-Tech Boys’ Club:
Now For Women Too
Book review by Clark Humphrey, 11/10/97
Release 2.0 by Esther Dyson (Broadway Books)
The Interactive Book by Celia Pearce (Macmillan Technical Publishing trade paperback)
Signal to Noise by Carla Sinclair (HarperCollins)
Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders by Jim Carlton (Times Books)
Interface Culture by Steven Johnson (HarperCollins)
Sometimes it seems a lot of people want to tell us about the future of computer-aided communications. Other times, it seems like it’s just the same few people putting out the same book. That’s because these screeds promising a decentralized, all-empowering cyberfuture are dominated by a small elitist cadre of ideologues who all hang out at the Global Business Network and other right-wing think tanks. These “digerati” all say pretty much the same things; none question their Gates-given right to not only predict but to dictate the direction of computers, the Net, etc. The first three authors in this review are women, but they’re still in the PC-biz “boys’ club.”
Esther Dyson’s a “digerati” insider of the first rank (daughter of celeb scientist Freeman Dyson, publisher of her own industry-insider newsletter). Her book’s essentially a general-audience reiteration of the digerati party line–the computerization of business is subverting all sorts of “paradigms,” you’ve gotta stay on your toes to keep up with market conditions that change overnight, don’t let pesky governments get in the way of all-kind-and-knowing companies, your kids’ll end up homeless tomorrow if their classrooms are computerless today. If you’ve already read Gates or George Gilder or Alvin Toffler or Nicholas Negroponte or any issue of Wired, you really don’t need another volume of the same.
Celia Pearce, who had almost as privileged an upbringing as Dyson (her industrial-designer dad’s worked on everything from Vegas light shows to Biosphere 2), could’ve used an editor. The Interactive Book, Pearce’s 580-page collection of essays, rambles on through her career designing group computer games for shopping malls, her love of the Internet visual-programming language VRML (whose co-designer wrote her introduction), her misadventures with the “new media” divisions of Hollywood movie studios (whom she believes will never “get it” regarding interactive media and its inherent differences from TV and movies), and how the Net and interactive media are supposedly on the verge of exploding all the old hierarchies of media, entertainment, and society in general.
Of course, behind most crusades against an old hierarchy there’s somebody who wants to build a new hierarchy with her/himself at its center. Carla Sinclair’s novel Signal to Noise doesn’t document this trait as much as help propagate it. Sinclair treats her friends and acquaintances in the Digerati as being important enough to have a roman a clef written about them. If you don’t personally knowDouglas Coupland or the Wired editors, there’s really no point in reading this long paean to their alleged hotness.
If the Digerati are the New Rock Stars folks like Sinclair claim them to be, then it’s natural to expect them to be subjected to scurrilous gossip. In Apple, Wall St. Journal writer Jim Carlton does the kind of hatchet job the digerati are always complaining about mainstream-media people for. Carlton blames office politics and executive infighting/ incompetence for Apple Computer’s fall from big profit margins in the late ’80s to multimillion-dollar losses the past year and a half. The eral story’s a lot simpler than Carlton’s account claims: When Microsoft wrested control of the PC platform away from IBM (with help from indie chipmakers who copied the IBM PC’s ROM chips for the first PC clones), MS turned PCs into low-margin commodities (similar to the old Kodak strategy of giving away the camera to sell the film). By then, Apple was already locked into an opposite business model, using the Mac’s superior operating software to sell its costlier hardware. MS’s Windows wasn’t (and still isn’t) as good as the Mac OS, but it got close enough for corporate computer buyers, threatening Apple’s market niches and decimating the high markups it had become dependent upon. None of the boardroom-soap-opera battles Carlton relishes in detailing had much effect on this corporate trajectory, and none probably could have. Apple put out a lot of superior products, but built a big organization that couldn’t change as fast as it needed to. An important story, but not the tabloidy tale Carlton’s trying to sell.
Amid all the hustle-hustle of uniform paradigm-subverting, it’s refreshing to read the occasional voice of common sense. Steven Johnson, who runs the pioneering webzine Feed, is out not to make websites hotter, just better. While Johnson’s Interface Culture isn’t flashily designed itself (not a single illustration), Johnson’s screed about the principles of online design makes compelling reading. He’s out to improve online communication on a structural level, applying oft-forgotten common-sense principles to the creation and organization of text and graphics. While other cyber-pundits blather about their mover-‘n’-shaker pals, Johnson quietly shows the rest of us how to start subverting their paradigms by making our own online statements more effective.
Close to the Machine
Book review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/30/97
Now here’s something you don’t see everyday: A San Francisco essayist who’s not an insuffrable egomaniac. Instead of incessantly promoting herself as a Hipper Than Thou brand name, Ellen Ullman in Close to the Machine (City Lights Books) calmly and personably details some of the routines and subroutines of her daily existence as a freelance “software engineer and consultant.” On one level, this short memoir gives a narrative focus to the process of programming–something I haven’t really seen since a 10-year-old Microsoft Press interview book, Programmers At Work.) On another level, Ullman evokes real sympathy while describing her life as the soul-numbing reality behind the other techno-essayists’ futuristic fantasies. She sits at her keyboard all day and most of the night, except when she’s driving two hours each way on an assignment in some deep-suburban office park. She lives in a cool loft space, but spends most of her time there working alone. Aside from her family back east, her only non-work-related relationship consists of occasional convenience sex with a younger man who dreams of making it big in offshore money laundering and online porn. On the plus side, she does get to drive a fancy car and eat at fancy restaurants and solicit AIDS-benefit money from her wealthy acquaintances. But, as centuries of literature have already shown, upscaleness can’t buy happiness.
AFTER LAST OCTOBER’S COLUMN about a trip to Reno, several readers suggested I go to Las Vegas next time for the real gambling/ tourism/ party spectacle. I did. Some pseudo-random thoughts:
It’s hot. A hundred degrees in the afternoon, eighty at night, seven to nine months a year. No wonder so many tourists are willing to stay indoors, inside their all-under-one-roof hotel-resorts. It’s amazing the Strip has as much foot traffic as it does.
It’s large. Much larger than you think. The bigger of the two main tourist zones, the Strip (a highway built parallel to a railroad from L.A.) is four miles long and a mile wide.
It’s modern-day capitalism laid bare. Incessantly gaudy and hyper, devoted to redistributing wealth from the many to the few. If Seattle’s official mindset is mandatory mellowness, Vegas’s is mandatory excitement, unending “fun.” (Fortunately, I stayed at the Horseshoe, known as the most serious of the downtown hotel-casinos.)
On the plus side, it’s what Republicans and capitalists can accomplish when they don’t have to buy votes from Christians. It’s loud yet clean, gaudy but slick, naughty in a thoroughly businesslike manner.
While the famous Nevada brothels are zoned way outta town, Vegas generally treats sex not as a natural aspect of life: i.e., as something to make cash from. Bigtime skin shows operate in some of the same casino theaters as “family” shows (magicians at 8, breasts at 10). Honeymooning brides from Japan line up to get their photos next to the seven-foot nude male statue in front of Caesar’s Palace.
The #1 category in the Vegas yellow pages is 150 pages of “Entertainers–Adult” (hotel-room strippers). I’m told most don’t fuck for money, though some will let you think they might until after you’ve paid them. I didn’t find out for myself.
I didn’t gamble either. Like veggie burgers or sex with men, it just didn’t personally attract me. Instead, I watched other humans of all adult ages, genders, and nationalities feed coin after coin into hungry slots, hoping the machines would come down with a sudden case of coin diahhrea.
On the strip you can visit ersatz versions of nearly every spot on the world: Latin America (Rio, the small Aztec), Europe (the Riviera, plus Paris and Venice resorts to come), Britain (Excalibur), the Caribbean (Treasure Island), the U.S. East (New York New York), the U.S. South (the Orleans, Texas Station), the U.S. midwest (Countryland, soon to come), north Africa (Luxor, the Sahara). But not Australia, Canada, or the Northwest (except for some totem poles outside a downtown ethnic-art store). But the weirdest work of cultural appropriation is the MGM Grand, “honoring” the movie studio that was dismantled and sold in pieces to finance the casino. But Vegas is always engorging on its former selves; witness the just-demolished Sands and Dunes. Next to go: the Aladdin, this Xmas.
Just beyond the Strip is street-level Vegas: bars and liquor stores, industrial buildings, wedding chapels, one or two real churches, motels, trailer courts, malls, strip malls, strip clubs, cul de sac subdivisions, gas stations, panhandlers, industrial businesses servicing the casino trade. More human-scale than the resorts, but little more heartwarming.
The casinos’ “sports book” areas became my idea of a potential full-time life environment. Imagine a cross between Number Two’s office in The Prisoner and a network TV studio on Election Night. Eighty-seven TV monitors, streaming news tickers, huge odds boards. I fantasized about the life of a casino pro: sleeping any hours I chose, eating at the buffets, gathering all available info about the teams and the horse races, living off the only consistantly winnable games in town (sports bets and poker). Watching the Ms’ first two losses on multiple big-screen TVs was a heartbreak experience, and a sign beckoning me home again. I realized I couldn’t live there, even if I could take the heat. So much of my life here doesn’t exist in the city that supposedly’s got everything (or exists only in scattered locations, far from the tourist areas)–things like bookstores, indie coffeehouses, fringe theater and performance art, anything that’s not part of the unending hustle for money.
Online Extras:
To imagine the size of The Strip, think of the I-5 corridor from the Montlake Cut to Northgate Mall. Or for you out-of-Seattle online readers, imagine one-third the length of Manhattan Island, devoted entirely to tourism and specifically to one mega-resort after another, interrupted only by a (very) few side streets, gas stations, fast-food stands, a handful of strip malls, a few surviving indie casinos, and some huge vacant lots where new mega-resorts are about to be built.
The Horseshoe hotel, where I stayed, is in the downtown area, the second and smaller casino district. (There are also individual resorts along other arterial highways and scattered other spots throughout Clark County.) Downtown Vegas was started as a railroad company town in 1906; above-ground casino gambling began there in 1931 as a Depression-era gimmick. But because the city had slightly more stringent licensing rules in the ’40s and ’50s than the state and county governments, most of the Mob and Teamster money that built the initial core of today’s Vegas went to developments on The Strip, just outside the old city limits. In the early ’90s, the city took the step that’s proven fiscally fatal in other towns, and turned its main street into an outdoor mall. Somehow, it worked. The giant canopy over five blocks of Fremont St. helps block the punishing desert sun, and the nighttime light shows on the canopy unite the 11 casinos on it into one entity of closer-to-human-scale thrills. Particularly cool is the block of the mall devoted to the “Neon Museum,” a half-dozen achingly cool old casino, motel, and milk-plant signs now removed from the buildings they once drew people toward. Walk outside the malled area downtown and you’ll find, well, not much. Just governmental buildings, law offices, a Kinko’s Copies, a couple of squatty six-story bank buildings, some of those famous picturesque wedding chapels, a city transit center, and a freeway separating the district from the residential zones to the north. How complete is the economy’s dependence on entertainment travel and gambling? When the local minor-league baseball team sought relatively modest public subsidies for a new stadium (which would also be offered as a spring-training site for major-league teams), authorities rejected the request on the grounds that it wouldn’t bring in enough out-of-towners.
As noted in Peter Rock’s novel This Is the Place, a large part of the Vegas mentality is based on notions of rebellion against a specific type of conservatism, that of the Mormons who populate much of the lightly-populated inland west (and who briefly had a mission at what later became today’s Las Vegas). The bright lights, the larger-than-life ostentatiousness, the endlessly-flowing booze, the intense freneticism, the strip shows, the uniformly “naughty” vision of sexuality, the insistent “bad taste,” and the total immersion in the idea of pleasure thru spending–all directly relate to universal human temptations the Mormons (and the Mormons’ arch-rivals-in-the-same-league, the Fundamentalists) devote their lives toward repressing.
Vegas, however, could use a little more of one positive Mormon trait, their sense of community. Public spending hasn’t kept up with the area’s massive population growth (now nearing 1 million). Not just the public schools but even the police and fire departments have had to resort to special levy elections, which invariably lose. School buildings either run year-round or on double shifts to pack in all the kids of workers at the casinos (and at the supply and construction companies servicing the casinos, and at the secondary and tertiary employers like car dealers and pawn shops). Meanwhile, the more affluent residents and newcomers (mainly from California) hole themselves up in new gated subdivisions patrolled by private rent-a-cops, steadfastly unwilling to consider themselves part of a larger regional tribe.
And forget about finding any of the lounge music associated with historic Las Vegas by latter-day hipsters. There’s still plenty of lounges, but they’re almost all devoted to “high energy” Earth Wind and Fire cover bands.
A Star and His Bucks
Book reviews for The Stranger by Clark Humphrey
8/21/97
Pour Your Heart Into It
by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang
Hyperion, $24.95
There’s an indie coffeehouse in Belltown with a bumper sticker pasted inside, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Go to Starbucks.” Such folks probably also wouldn’t their friends read Pour Your Heart Into It, the memoir/ success-seminar book by Starbucks chairman/ CEO Howard Schultz. The rest of you, though, might be mildly intrigued by Schultz’s mixture of ’80s-gung-ho hustle with New Age pieties (as polished into shape by Business Week writer Dori Jones Yang). Maybe not intrigued enough to pay $24.95 for the hardcover edition, but enough to leaf through it in the store while waiting for your beverage. You won’t find much nuts-‘n’-bolts stuff about the firm’s operations, but lots of mellow reassurances about life, business, and making it. Like a to-go coffee drink from an office-tower-lobby espresso stand, it’s an unthreatening little pick-me-up that gives you pause to reflect then sends you on your way toward closing that next contract.
Starbucks’ chief asset is its unabashed upper-middle-class image, set by the chain’s original founders in 1971. There had been Euro-style coffee roasters and servers in North America for decades, mainly in college towns and Little Italys. Starbucks founders Gerald Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker (the latter also involved in the launches of Redhook and Seattle Weekly) re-imaged Euro-style coffee as a “gourmet” lifestyle acoutrement for what would soon become corporate Seattle’s favorite consumer and only officially-desired resident, the upscale baby boomer.
A comparison is due at this point:Â Ray Kroc was a milkshake-machine salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from Dick and Maurice McDonald, went to look at their business, and ended up taking it over. Schultz was a drip-coffeemaker salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from a circuit of four coffee-bean stores in Seattle, went to look at its business, and ended up taking it over.
Schultz persuaded the partners to make him Starbucks’ resident marketing whiz in 1982. Schultz quit Starbucks in late 1985 to persue his own concept, a planned national espresso chain (originally to be called Il Giornale). Less than two years later, he added Starbucks’ name, stores, and roasting plant to his empire-in-infancy. His book came out on the 10th anniversary of the acquisition that formed today’s Starbucks.
On nearly every page, Chairman Howard’s hyping his company as something other than your standard mega-retailer (“Starbucks grew to more than 1300 stores and still managed to maintain its small-business sense of values”), and himself as a caring corporate citizen and a careful-yet-bold strategic planner (“If you want to build a great enterprise, you hve to have the courage to dream great dreams”). It’s all to encourage those dream-filled entrepreneur wannabes out there (particularly those who want to raise $37.5 million, what Schultz eventually needed).
Except for Schultz himself (a kid from the Brooklyn housing projects who’d gone to college on a football scholarship), the starting Starbucks core team was all local and mostly well-connected. Only when he outgrew the capacity of Seattle capital did Schultz seek out money and talent from across the country. Besides Bowker, most of Seattle’s small core of retail movers-‘n’-shakers turn up here. Jeff Brotman (Costco founder), Terry Heckler (creator of the old, funny Rainier Beer ads), Herman Sarkowsky (Seahawks co-founder), and Bill Gates pere (Microsoft Bill’s corporate-lawyer dad) are among Schultz’s original circle of investors and advisors. Whatever you think about the company, there’s no denying it’s a thoroughly Northwest-bred institution.
Another of those early investors was the uncle of easy-listening saxophonist Kenny G, who became a goodwill ambassador for the chain. Schultz writes about how G’s music perfectly matches the image of Starbucks’ stores (an image now identified with Seattle as a whole, thanks partly to Starbucks’ PR influence). No other Seattle music personality is mentioned in the book, not even Schultz’s former Viretta Park neighbor Courtney Love. Schultz writes about being “shocked” to learn from market research that Starbucks’ stores were considered squaresville by many “twentysomethings,” even though the stores were planned around the bland pseudo-sophistication most local rockers were rebelling against.
Schultz says he’s more than willing to let smaller outfits take that segment of the business. He acknowledges that as gathering places, Starbucks stands leave a little to be desired. That mom-and-pop cafés provide funkier environments, and in some cases better beverages, only feeds into Schultz’s insistence that underdog entrepreneurs can still make it. Today’s Starbucks makes espresso safe for strip malls and main streets, creating new coffee lovers who often move on to more individualistic beaneries. It’s these chain-eschewers, and the risk-it-all entrepreneurs servicing them, who fulfill Schultz’s admonitions to “Care more than others think wise. Risk more than others think safe. Dream more than others think practical. Expect more than others think possible.”
BRIEFS
Thrift Score
Al Hoff
HarperCollins
Not every big-company book made from a personal zine works. But then again, not every personal zine out there serves as a lifestyle bible, a window onto not just a hobby but a total worldview.
Thrift Score, the zine, is chock full of specific thrift stores and thrift-store finds. Thrift Score, the book, is a more generalized introduction to the topic. Ms. Al Hoff is darn near perfect in both realms. Her book’s a comprehensive lesson in the philosophy, science, and art of “thrifting.” For Hoff, shopping at charity thrift stores isn’t just cheaper and more adventuresome than ordinary retail (or commercial collectible-boutique) shopping, it’s nobler. You’re supporting a good cause while rescuing important artifacts of American life and adopting a way of life that’s simultaneously conservatory and decadent.
Existing thrift-scorers might worry: What if Hoff’s book turns too many people onto the life, increasing the number of people after the same clothes and doodads you’re after? She says not to worry: as long as you share Hoff’s eclectic enthusiasm for Stuff with a capital S, and as long as you’re not some thirift-mercenary after big-E Levi’s, there’s bound to be something way cool waiting for you in any decent thrift store.
Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Pacific Northwest
Lorna Price, ed.
University of Washington Press
The then-“progressive” yet now-unthreatening abstract shapes and colors of ’50s modern art were once new, and once they even shocked. When painter Louis Bunce proposed a big, soothing, yet completely abstract mural for the Portland airport in 1958, protestors called him a pinko and threw garbage into his front yard. Yet, on the other side of the paradox, a lot of 1948-62 arts and crafts (particularly around here) expressed wholesome themes like prosperity, efficiency, gentility, domesticity, and spirituality. They often expressed these themes in a universe of pure visuality, safely removed from the sociopolitical conflicts of everyday reality. And besides, the modernist tradition had been explicitly denounced by Stalin himself–how more cold-war-acceptable could you get?
These are some of the lessons in Jet Dreams, preserving the 1995 Tacoma Art Museum show of the same name with 21 color pix, 112 monochrome pix, and seven long essays about the artists, their works, and their context. It’s got your famous “Northwest School” boys (Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan), their friends and comrades (Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Richard Gilkey), and less-famous but equally-cool folks (architect Pietro Belluschi, sculptor Hilda Morris). Because there were only a few museums and almost no commercial galleries in the region then, a lot of these artists congregated around colleges and worked on government and corporate public-art commissions. This means a lot of their stuff’s still around us every day. From the Science Center arches to the downtown-library fountain to the now-old City Light Building [remodled beyond recognition in 1998], the best ’50s art still offers long-ago visions of what were then thought to be timeless themes. It, and this book, also give a glimpse into the peculiarly conservative “liberalism” now pervasive in the Northwest.
EVEN BRIEFER BRIEFS
Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Vintage) collects 37 of the late Italo Calvino’s odds ‘n’ ends, heretofore not issued in English. While none of its pieces contains the full-borne wonder of his masterworks such as Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities, most are still fine examples of Calvino’s highbrow fantasizing. Written over a 40-year period (some during WWII censorship), they range from modernized fairy tales to a first-person account of Neandrethal life to sad anti-adventure yarns. My favorite: an imagined interview with Henry Ford, in which the man whose company sponsored the Schindler’s List telecast explains away his own anti-Semitic reputation.
The Pin-Up: A Modest History, Mark Gabor’s thorough 1972 survey of cheesecake illustration from the dawn of lithography until just before Penthouse and Hustler drove all the art and beauty out of the genre, is back in a Taschen/Evergreen coffee-table paperback. The technical quality isn’t up to Taschen’s usual art-book standards (many pix look like they were rephotographed from a faded copy of the book’s first edition). But the pix themselves still shine with the loving efforts of the artists and models, providing a century’s worth of elegant, naughty, slick, and less-slick notions of glamour, beauty, allure, and desire. The only really dated part is Gabor’s intro, in which he apologizes on behalf of his entire gender for the images he exhibits. He’s really got nothing to be ashamed of. These umpteen-hundred pix present feminine power as diverse as all get out and universally compelling, nay dominating.
If the GenX-angst stereotype is passe (and it had better be by now), nobody’s told the Farrar, Strauss & Giroux editors who shipped Blue Mondays, Dutch kid Arnon Grunberg’s pseudo-autobiographical novel about wasting time and going broke on Amsterdam’s legal hookers. Grunberg apparently wants us to view his same-named protagonist’s increasing craving for the empty pleasures of rented skin as something akin to drug addiction. Instead (at least in this translation), Arnon (the character) comes off as an attention-starved egocentrist looking for pity and calling it love. Grunberg (the author) fails at the admittedly difficult trick of attracting readers’ sympathy to such an introverted, ungiving, unrevealing central figure. Raymond Carver handled this sort of cold pathos much better.
WATCH THIS SPACE #1: A new independent movie house is tentatively set to open sometime next month, joining the Grand Illusion, the Admiral, and the part-time screening spaces around town. The 108-seat Casbah Cinema‘s downstairs in the Sailors’ Union building at 1st and Wall, next to the former Trade Winds/ My Suzie’s restaurant space. Owners Laura and Anton DeJong are self-described “big film fans” who’ve planned for years to set up their own “grand cinema on a small scale.” They promise “classic and foreign films, but nothing really obscure” on Thurs.-Sun. evenings, with early-week dates open for rental to independent screeners and community groups. The DeJongs are also opening a cafe in part of the space, but aren’t applying for a liquor license at this time–a shame, since some of the McMenamin brewpubs in Oregon have quaint little screening spaces attached to ’em.
WATCH THIS SPACE #2: A Barnes & Noble book superstore (or perhaps a B&N-owned B. Dalton regular-size chain bookstore) is rumored to be taking over the Fantasy Unlimited/ Deja Vu corner at 1st & Pike, previously considered for a new public library. Scouts for the chain are said to have been poring over Left Bank Books across the street in the Market, presumably to make sure the new B&N’s fully competitive in the fields of feminist-film-analysis zines and left-activist memoirs. B&N’s regional management claims no definitive plans to add a location downtown, or anywhere else in town, just yet. While anything’s possible, I’d bet against ’em taking that particular site. For one thing, it’s too small as is, and its adjacent buildings are controlled by too many different interests to make assembling an appropriate parcel easy.
STOPPING THE PRESSES: Aorta, the occasional local art tabloid, has published its fifth and last issue under its current all-visual-arts format. Publisher/editor Jim Demetre’s closing editorial gripes predictably about the vagaries of trying to mount a self-sufficient, unsubsidized journal promoting indie and fringe visual artists. But he also complains that “There are many issues which I am very interested in writng and reading about,” but “the local visual art scene… has rarely provided me, or my writers, with a relevant point of departure for discussing them.”
While thanking Demetre for going this far, and acknowledging he has every right to revamp his publicaiton into something he’s more willing to put time and toil into (he plans to resume later this year with a more generalist culture-crit rag), his statement says something about the state of contemporary-art criticism in America. In Aorta, its precursor Reflex, and some of the slick NYC art mags, critics haven’t seemed to want to write about art or artists as much as about the critics’ own philosophical/ political worldviews. Sometimes, articles and reviews in these would take no more than a sideways glance at the nominal art topic, before wandering around about the writer’s beliefs concernig The Dominant Culture and The Other; or about how prejudice is a major contemporary problem and it’s those people who aren’t like us who’re always committing it. We could still use a regional contemporary-art mag that’s really about contemporary art, but it’d take a whole rethinking of the critic’s role. Any takers?
STARTING THE PRESSES: Two Rocket veterans have pop-cult self-help books just out: Start Your Own Band by Marty Jourard and Start Your Own Zine by Veronika Kalmar. Both are packaged by one Jet Lambert (described on the back cover as “a muse to those bitten by the bug of entrepreneurism in the 1990s”) and distributed by Hyperion (the Disney book division that just paid an upteen-thousand-dollar advance for the yet-unwritten memoir of Seattle Schools boss John Stanford). Besides the juicy irony of learning about DIY culture-making from one of Earth’s hugest media giants, there’s something strange about instruction books for activities you’re not supposed to need instruction books for. Still, ex-Motels member Jourard does get some good basic topics covered (such as what chords are and why good used guitars can be better than bad new ones); while Kalmar’s book lightly touches on a lot of topics experienced zinesters (such as myself) already know plenty about.
YOUR HELP NEEDED: Can you think of any formerly-popular American musical genre which hasn’t been the subject of an attempted “hip” revival in recent years? If you know of one, please let me know at clark@speakeasy.org.
This first Misc. Midsummer Reading List is a totally random collection of titles, recommended for fun value and in some cases for insights into the writerly craft. I started it after two different people asked for recommended reading matter. Within the next few weeks, a regular book-briefs section will appear in The Stranger, featuring various staffers’ recommendations of tomes new and old. But here’s some of mine (and yours). (Book links provided in association with Amazon.com.)
Online Extras
MICOSOFT TO BUY CBS?: That’s what a New York Post story said a couple weeks ago. I didn’t believe it, even before the denials from all sides. For one thing, Gates likes to buy companies on their way up, not underperformers in need of restoration. For another, MS’s current alliance with NBC made for at least a few half-decent jokes around the Internet, contrasting nerd stereotypes with the network’s young, hip image (Gates becoming the seventh Friend, et al.). But there’s nobody on CBS one could even imagine as having ever used a computer–except Dave’s World star Harry Anderson, a card-carrying Macintosh endorser.
AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “At Bally’s health clubs, you can get the body you’ve always wanted to have.” And you thought that sort of offer could only be advertised in the rural counties of Nevada…
WHITE UNLIKE ME: I’m on my third reading of Jim Goad’s book The Redneck Manifesto. Goad (co-creator of the nearly-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me!) has his points, but you have to sift through an awful lot of theasaurus-bending cuss words and almost poetry-slam-style “attitude” to find it. Around all this filler, Goad interweaves his and his family’s story of financial/ social struggle with observations of his current surroundings in industrial north Portland and with what BBC documentary producers might label “a personal history” of the white (rural and urban) working class in Europe and America, from the bad old days of indentured servitude and debtors’ prisons to the bad new days of welfare-mother bashing, wage stagnation, and job exports. In Goad’s worldview, the great mall-hopping middle class either doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter much to his main concept, the eternal war of “white trash vs. white cash.” Among the aspects of his thesis:
* Poor whites and poor blacks have more in common (and socialize together more readily) than poor whites and rich whites.
* Unattractive traits ascribed to rednecks and trailer trash (laziness, savagery, stupidity, promiscuity, poor hygiene) have always been used by the rich everywhere to disparge the poor everywhere.
* America’s “dirty little secret” isn’t race but class.
* Most rich people are white but most white people aren’t rich–and shouldn’t be collectively blamed for slavery, discrimination, and other rich people’s crimes.
* So-called “angry white male” subcults (militias, talk radio listeners, etc.) aren’t necessarily as racist, sexist, homophobic, or paranoid as the upscale media crack ’em up to be. Their real beefs, Goad claims, are against big business and big government, as they should be.
* The media (including most “alternative” weeklies) are tools of the “white cash” class and don’t give a damn about the downscale, except to sneer at ’em.
* The same’s true of white-upscale leftists, whom Goad claims care more about overseas rainforests than about toxic dumps in our own inner cities. Goad says this is an historic trait, citing Brit society ladies who spoke out against slavery in the American south while treating their own servants and employees like dirt.
* The white hipster agenda has always had less to do with assailing bourgeois privileges than with defending these privileges against the downscale squares.
Many of the class-struggle arguments have been made before, by folks like Michael Moore and Baffler editor Tom Frank. Goad’s main addition to the genre, besides his damn-aren’t-I-politically-incorrect sass, is his insistance that there’s no singular white racial caste, united in privilege and oppressiveness. With this, Goad seemingly contradicts the worldview of Race Traitor zine editors Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, who claims there is such a universal Caucasian identity and “progressive” whites should personally renounce it.
But their stances aren’t really that different. Both believe in self-empowerment by dropping out from the mainstream-America assimilation thang. Ignatiev and Garvey (instructors at bigtime East Coast universities) do this by pretending to be black. Goad does it by playing up his links to the white unprivileged. Goad’s is probably the healthier approach. Instead of appropriating the romanticized victimhood of some defined “Other,” Goad argues for the right to be his own Porter Wagoner-listenin’, dead-end-job-workin’, hard-livin’, high-lovin’, prematurely-dyin’ kind. One approach seeks true humanity outside oneself; the other finds it within. (More on this latter sub-topic in two weeks.)
I just spent half a week in Corvallis (Latin for “Heart of the Valley”), the Oregon hamlet where I’d spent some of my post-adolescent years. I was there to revisit childhood memories (unlike Seattle, most of the buildings there in the late ’70s are still there) and to meet my aunt and uncle. Uncle Kurt looks just like the late Days of Our Lives star Macdonald Carey; like Carey’s character, he was (before his retirement) the leading physician in an isolated college town, a pillar of kindly authority in a place that valued such things. Unlike Days’ fictional town of Salem, Corvallis has no known international spy rings or demonic-possession cases (there’s more treachery in Oregon’s real Salem, the state capital).
Corvallis is a place you have to want to go to, deep in the fertile Willamette Valley. It’s 10 miles from the freeway and Amtrak (both at Albany), 50 miles from commuter air service (at Salem or Eugene), 100 miles from Portland. It’s a place of unbeatable scenery, especially with the low cloud ceiling and the summertime field burning. It’s a real town, a feat of collective architecture/ planning/ whatever. Narrow streets are lined with big trees and shrubs. The buildings are human-scale, mostly amiacably rundown. Downtown’s still intact and prosprous, despite the loss of a few big chain stores (the Penney’s storefront now holds a Starbucks and a Noah’s Bagels). The outlying cul-de-sac streets are still part of the town, not elite-retreat suburbs.
It’s a company town, and the company’s Oregon State University (née Oregon Agricultural College), home of the fighting Beavers. It’s a damn handsome college, with low-rise ’20s brick classroom buildings built close together. At the campus’s heart is the Memorial Union (“Vnion” in the exterior stone lettering), an elegant, state-capital-like student union building.
It’s a place where small-town kids arrive, learn a trade in concrete, physical-plane-of-existence stuff (food growing and processing, computers, machines, chemicals, earth sciences), and in the process learn about getting along with people. One of the things they learn how is interracial dating’s no big deal–the college imports out-of-state black athletes (like future Sonic Gary Payton), who invariably end up dating white women (Af-Am females being scarce, even with the rise of the women’s basketball program). (One of the few Af-Ams to grow up in Corvallis was ex-Mariner Harold Reynolds. No, I don’t know anything gossipworthy about either Reynolds or Payton.)
State budget cuts have hit OSU hard. While private funding is helping keep the physical plant up (with several big new buildings going up this summer), enrollment is now less than three-quarters of its 1990 peak of 16,000. Fewer students mean local merchants sell fewer kegs of beer, fewer copies of Penthouse, fewer jogging bras. What’s kept the town going are the office-park businesses that like to put down roots near tech schools, such as the Hewlett-Packard plant and the CH2M-Hill engineering firm.
Also, there’s not much nightlife (though they’re finally getting regular punk shows and have an improving college-radio station). There’s a granolahead scene, but it doesn’t rule the town like in Eugene. There is a “Music of Your Life” radio station (the network KIXI used to belong to). The yellow pages list more multimedia production companies than video-rental stores. There’s a feminist small press (Calyx), and a strong gay-lib movement (surrounded by Lon Mabon’s notorious anti-gay crusaders elsewhere in the valley).
Despite these struggles, Corvallis was recently cited in one of those “top places to live” books as one of America’s most progressive towns. I don’t know if the honor’s deserved, but it is a near-perfect example of the kind of strait-laced yet “mellow” place Utne Reader readers might love. Oregon was always Washington’s older, more patrician sibling; Corvallis is a jewel-box setting for this staid “civil society” attitude. It’s the sort of town where almost nobody’s too rich, too poor, or too dark; where everybody (in certain circles) has some post-high-school education, where everybody wears sensible shoes and drives sensible cars; where even the frat houses separate their bottles for recycling; where Lake Wobegon and Reagan’s “Morning in America” prove to be the same fantasy–soothing for some, scary for others.
