Robert Olen Butler’s ‘Tabloid Dreams’:

Inquiring Minds

Book feature by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/29/96

Robert Olen Butler published six serious literary novels over twelve years, to critical acclaim and meager sales. Then he got a Pulitzer for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a collection of interconnected stories about the struggles of Vietnamese refugees. Fame and fortune (or at least screenwriting contracts) ensued.

Now for something completely different: stories torn from today’s headlines, specifically from supermarket-tabloid headlines.

In the hands of a less expert fantasist, Butler’s new collection, Tabloid Dreams (Holt) might have ended up a glorified writer’s-workshop exercise. God knows, tabloid-spoofing (as practiced by everyone from David Byrne to Jay Leno) might just be the laziest, most sophomoric form of “humor” writing ever invented. But Butler goes the other way, and treats his topics with total sincerity, if not total seriousnes.

Each of Butler’s 12 first-person vignettes takes its title from a tabloid cover story, then goes on to explore how the star-crossed protagonists of the stories might feel about their improbable situations. In every case, Butler depicts his heroes and heroines as fully drawn, fully sympathetic characters caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

Tabloid Dreams is soon to become a big HBO miniseries, with each story adapted by a different big-name director and screenwriter. But this is definitely a situation where you should read the book instead. It’s Butler’s writing that makes these stories work, the way his protagonists matter-of-factly state their peculiar experiences and then plead for the reader’s sympathy, expressing what a publisher’s blurb calls “the enduring issues of cultural, exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for the self.”

“Nine-Year Old Boy Is World’s Youngest Hitman,” the most realistic of Butler’s tales, comes toward the book’s center. It’s not all that far off from being a standard wasted-urban-youth melodrama save for the jaded antihero being six or seven years younger than the typical subjects of such pieces. The kid’s a street-smart sass in a Russian-immigrant part of Brooklyn who respects nobody and nothing but his gun, the only thing left behind by his disappeared dad.

“Woman Struck By Car Turns Into Nymphomaniac” ups the surrealism a notch, yet remains fully plausible as it introduces us to a New York PR agent jarred by the first truly intense physical experience of her life and drawn into seeking further adrenaline rushes via sex.

The book begins and ends with takes on the 1912 Titanic shipwreck, told in ice-water-on-freezing-skin detail. The first, “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed,” introduces us to an English gentleman who remembers patiently waiting for the rising water to reach him, while he smokes one final cigar and bids farewell to an American women’s-suffrage advocate whom he’d persuaded, against her as-tough-as-any-man bravado, onto a lifeboat. He “speaks” to us from a disembodied afterlife, as a spirit fated to flow eternally through the earth’s water cycle. In the last story he’s reunited (as bath water) with the suffragist, who tells her own time-traveling tale in “Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle.” She expresses little surprise about her lifeboat’s emergence in a later decade; but as she waits on her (female-captained) rescue ship to re-enter the world, she imagines the gains she’d fought for having been realized, and that the world of her future will therefore have no need for her: “I am certain in a world like this that women have the right to vote. And I am confident, too, that politicians have become honest and responsive, as a result. And if there is a woman ship captain and if we have been enfranchised, then I can even expect that there have been women presidents of the United States. It is selfish, but this makes me sad. It would have been better to have died in my own time.”

The collection’s other stories play like the better installments of The Twilight Zone, putting ordinary people into extraordinary situations that reveal their strengths and weaknesses. The heroine of “Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband” finds herself caught between the churning hell of her suspicions and the dread of how she’d react if she used the psychic power of her replacement organ to confirm them. The “Jealous Husband” who “Returns in Form of Parrot” is fully cognizant of his surroundings but is unable to speak more than a reflexive “Hello” while his widow fucks other men right outside his cage. The “Boy Born With Tattoo of Elvis” obsesses about his gift the way regular teens obsess about regular physical distinctions, worrying whether potential girlfriends will find it too freakish.

The great stories of any culture tend to involve characters in larger-than-life situations: A prophet swallowed by a big fish, a man who can swallow the sea, a woman made pregnant by a swan. Butler knows this, and so do the tabloid editors he took his themes from. If there’s a disconcerting aspect to Tabloid Dreams, it’s how Butler treats the original tabloid articles (which remain uncited and uncredited) as if they were old public-domain tales, free for him to retell with his own literary and sometimes upscaly spin. Somebody wrote (and probably fabricated) each of these titles. They ought to at least be recognized for it.

(Also by Butler: They Whisper, the erotically-charged tale of a Vietnam vet who dreams of hearing women’s souls speak to him, only to risk losing his own.)

Diane Williams’ Precision Angst:

Small Sacrifices

Book feature for The Stranger, 10/24/96

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf said something to the effect that women’s writing ought to have “incandescence,” a force of light shining outward. The terse, descriptive, often dark short-short stories of Diane Williams don’t beam forth so much as they pull in. Williams says she tries to create “what I’m calling, for lack of a better terminology, stories” that are “powerful, durable, and could conceivably have a scarring effect.”

Such effects can be found usually in the very beginnings and endings of her stories, which in turn are often in the same paragraph. Her story “The Revenge” begins: “She sat in a chair and looked out a window to think sad thoughts and to weep.” It ends, 92 words later: “She arrives at a plausible solution for at least 8 percent of her woes. I know what she is thinking, and I am envious of her. But I am shitting on it.”

In eight years, Williams’ published output has consisted of three slim collections, comprising a total of 163 stories (none longer than 700 words, many as short as 50) and one 7,000-word opus, The Stupefaction (the title story of her newest book), billed by her publishers (Knopf) as a “novella.”

In a recent phone interview, Williams admitted she wrote The Stupefaction to comply with commercial requirements for longer, more traditional narrative structures. Yet even here, Williams eludes the easy summer read. Her long story turns out to be more like 44 of her tiny stories, strung together with the thinnest of narrative strands–one woman’s sequential thoughts and sensations while with a male lover in a country cottage. Yet even this simple premise is broken up and refracted by Williams’ technique. For one thing, it’s narrated by an enigmatic, voyeuristic third party–possibly the woman having an out-of-body experience, though it’s never explicitly stated.

What is explicitly stated is the woman’s sex drive, how her hunger for her man’s flesh leaves her “stupefied”: dazed, dulled, beyond her mind’s control. Unlike today’s “women’s literary erotica,” which usually focuses on women’s bodies and emotions, Williams’ heroine and narrator devote a lot of their (her?) attention to the man, to his “helike face” and his “impressively distinct penis.” Williams is one of the few women writing about men as objects of physical desire instead of moral contempt.

Sex played a principal role in her earlier books, This Is About the Body… and Some Sexual Success Stories, and a major role in this one. One of the short-shorts in The Stupefaction uses a male narrator to remark about how great Diane Williams is as a lover: “How much fun I had with my prick up inside of the great Diane Williams.” She insists there’s more to that piece than mere boasting: “My awareness of my own shortcomings, or my own self-loathing, is also revealed.”

Some of her stories are microscopic observations of personal life: “The stewing chickens–they didn’t lay eggs, and they got their heads copped off. They are tough. The fryer, the Perdue, the capon–they are tender, is her verdict on them.”

Others are like fragments, ending just when another writer’s story would start: “I remember when there was no nostalgia.” And others play with verbiage to pull nuances of feeling into their disciplined length: “Maybe he has not figured out yet how much I wish to stiffly represent myself at coital functions as stiffly as I do here as I speak.”

“It’s the way dreams are,” she explains; “it’s my attempt to have some sort of mastery over what I have no mastery over–to at least in this realm have a measure of control.

“I become very frustrated with my everyday talking in the world of speech. Just retrieving words is getting harder for me. I become more desperate to do the composition work that I do.”

The work she does isn’t as familiar or as popular as longer fiction, but it now has at least a niche in the marketplace, thanks to the short-short boomlet (including the Sudden Fiction and Micro Fiction anthologies). But when she was getting started in the late ’80s, it was a form without a forum, except for tiny-circulation literary magazines.

“There didn’t seem to be too many modern examples of short work. I’ve had to explain what I do in terms of the crucial speeches or declarations of history, which have always been rather short; and in terms of the Psalms, the prayers, the magical incantations, the proclamations, the Old Testament.”

She co-edits the literary mag StoryQuarterly, which despite its title comes out only about once a year. It is, as you might expect, a slender thing, 80 pages of huge type. She joined the journal when she was still living in Illinois; she won’t even go there on book-selling tours now, calling her memories “too painful, still.” Since 1991 she’s lived in New York City (though refraining from the literary-schmooze circuit). She lives with two sons, whom she says are “scared” by some of her writings. It’s easy to imagine, with passages like this from “Rain”: “Found stretched out dead, dead, dead is a speck that used to look like all of the rest. I don’t say they’re all like that, but I might as well say it.”

“If the imagination is not amoral,” Williams insists, “it is not free. I have said things that were disturbing, especially to a small child. Now they’re proud of me, but I don’t know if they want to get too close to it.”

She has another “novel” and batch of “stories” already written, awaiting the vagaries of publishing schedules. But don’t think this stuff comes quickly.

“I collect text in a rather chaotic fashion; and then I manupulate it. Sometimes it’s conscious; some maneuvers are less conscious for [the text] to find its shape. The procedures are slow and tedious and difficult. I am intimidated by what I do. I don’t know many artists who don’t feel that way.

“I would like to feel that what I do isn’t that different from anybody else doing a hard job. I never sit down feeling masterful. I want to keep that in mind.”

Bernstein Book Finally Appears:

Jesse Lives

Book feature for The Stranger, 6/19/96

Almost five years after Jesse Bernstein’s suicide, and two years after Left Bank Books staged an all-star fundraiser to get a selection of his writings into print, the Zero Hour partnership has quietly gotten out a different set of Bernstein works. The still-pending Left Bank book [More Noise Please, published after this review’s original publication] represents one aspect of Bernstein’s star-crossed life–the frustration he faced almost daily to get his art made and appreciated. The Zero Hour book, Secretly I Am An Important Man, represents another aspect–his drive to get the work done, and to get it out by whatever limited means were available to him.

In this age of self-released CDs and credit-card-financed films, it can be hard to remember how tough it was not too long ago to get a piece of real artistic work out on a non-corporate level. Bernstein spent the last 25 of his 41 years in Seattle–doing odd jobs when he could, getting on and off drugs and booze (serving to inflate his already otherworldly demeanor), living sometimes in squalid apartments and residential hotels, befriending strippers, artists and other outsiders, going through three marriages, fathering three kids, taking short stays in the psych ward, and above all else working on his writing and his music; making it right, making it honest, getting it out in whatever tiny zines would have it.

The book also represents the friends who kept Jesse going and supported his work in the face of personal turmoil and an indifferent or misunderstanding public. The Zero Hour partners (Deran Ludd, Alice Wheeler, Jim Jones) knew Bernstein; Ludd had personally published two of Bernstein’s short novels, both now way out of print. They also understood what Bernstein was trying to accomplish with his writing. Many people didn’t understand him, including many who counted themselves among his fan cult.

Audiences at his spoken-word readings sometimes saw him only a “crazy” man, a junkie, a loud ranter with a strange appearance and demeanor, supplying weekend punks with entertaining travelogues about the lowlife underground. While he put a lot of intensity into his performances (his training as a nightclub jazz musician would demand nothing less), audiences’ expectations of him (with which he frequently played and teased) didn’t allow for much depth beyond the loud words about drugs and fucking and bodily functions and despair. Removed from the context of live performance, the stories and poems in Important Man show how much more there was and is to Jesse and his work. He indeed was an important man. A complex man, whose cocktail-curse of physiological, mental, and emotional troubles (many stemming from early-childhood polio) affected and sometimes overshadowed an insightful heart and a brilliant mind.

Despite his reputation, Bernstein seldom indulged in shock-for-its-own-sake on stage and never in his writing. Like the best work of his mentor William Burroughs, Bernstein sought to explore the human condition as he found it, as realistically as possible. Yes, he sometimes wrote about misery and emptiness. But he also wrote about love and hope and sweetness and people’s attempts, no matter how futile, to find a point of commonality. He was not, despite his public image, a nihilist or a cynic. He cared for the world and for people, deeply and sometimes painfully. His pain was deepened by his poignant wishes to be freed from it. As he writes in the story “Out of the Picture,” “I can no longer write about things that contribute to the collective disorder of human thoughts–but I cannot help writing such things either.”

A good starting point for exploring just how serious Bernstein can be is “The Door,” placed near the center of the book. Like many of Burroughs’ stories, it uses a sci-fi premise (here, a man from the present accidentally stepping through a time portal into the Old West) to envelope a tale of extreme behavior (including domestic violence and homicide). Bernstein doesn’t settle for wallowing in the novelty of the premise. Nor does he spew self-indulgently over the sex and violence in his narrative. Instead, he uses the premise to help bring the reader into the same sense of dislocation and helplessness felt by characters trapped in time, in the wilderness, in a hell of unrelenting sameness.

Another example is “Daily Erotica.” Read aloud, one might imagine getting enraptured by all the story’s explicit descriptions of masturbation and gay hooking and not hear much else. But in print, the story reveals itself to be really a chronicle of the narrator’s lifelong loneliness, both when in and out of sexual relationships. A loneliness rooted in a longing for an experience, a state of being, a something perhaps no human love can fulfill:

“Every lover I have had has seemed to be a figure from a mythology I had forgotten and was on this earth to be reminded of, rejoined with–a mythology that has yet to be realized, that must be remembered at the same time as it occurs, in order to be able to become part of the past, to become myth. This vanishes into the dark, scatters among the stars, and shines down on us forever. Influences the shape of things, the pool of dreams, the odd fate of the living, forever.”

He didn’t write to promote himself as some celebrity brand name. A lot of his stories are about himself (and nearly embarassingly revealing). But others have first-person narrators who are clearly not him. The stories in Important Man concern women, men, gays, children, architecture, war, brutality, politicians, nuclear fear, crippling illness, unsatisfying sex, the inevitability of decay, and everyday victories of survival.

Bernstein wrote much about these things, and many others as well. He left hundreds of stories and poems, three short novels, several plays, and several hours of spoken-word material on tape and film. Left Bank’s anthology is still supposed to come out one of these months. With any hope (and Bernstein’s despair was of the kind that always acknowledged the existence of hope), more of his work will become available.

The Info Age, Our Way:

The Road Ahead Less Traveled

Eessay for The Stranger, 5/1/96

You’ve heard lots of hype about the Information Superhighway, the Infobahn, a bright promising tomorrow coming your way out of a little wire running into your home.You may think the hype sucks.

You’re right to be skeptical. The digital utopia promised more or less in unison by the phone companies, the cable TV companies, the online services, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, Wired magazine, and Bill Gates (all of whom get their ideas from the same handful of pro-business think tanks) is a future not appreciably better than our present, and potentially a lot costlier. While claiming to promote “empowerment,” it would merely move us from a society run by a financial elite to one run by a technological elite.

But theirs is not the only possible scenario. The Digital Age can be better, if we can wrest control of it away from the people doing the promising.

THEIR FUTURE

As late as 1994-95, the corporate techno-futurists were boasting of a future in which everyone (or at least everyone who mattered) would live through computer/video screens connected by fiber-optic lines to proprietary online networks. The owners of these online services would become America’s most powerful institutions, controlling everything from entertainment to banking and even politics.

In this future, you could look forward to choosing your morning news packaged in assorted combinations of verbal and visual output, filtered to emphasize your favorite subject areas. You could even choose your news interpreted from a variety of ideological perspectives, all the way from the far right to the near right.

Then, after you’ve downloaded Rush Limbaugh’s or Pat Robertson’s latest commentary, you could instantly contact your elected representatives to demand their support of the Limbaugh/Robertson agenda.

From there, you could log onto a commercial online services to see the latest Treasury Bill yields or a video by your favorite major-label singer. You could enter a virtual-reality chat room, where you’d control a 3-D cartoon character exchanging pleasantries with other characters (all supervised by service employees, ensuring nobody says anything they oughtn’t).

But eventually you’d have to get to work. In this future, all the important work will be done by an upscale Knowledge Class, who will all live in big isolated houses in the country or outer suburbs (since the techno-futurists believe nobody, given the choice, would ever want to live in a city). Most of the Knowledge Class would operate from home workstations, in contact with the boss via video teleconferencing. The other 80 to 90 percent of the population would be freed from the daily grind thanks to corporate downsizing; they’d get to go into business for themselves, selling products or services to the upscale class, at wages competitive with Third World labor.

Come the evening, you wouldn’t need to leave home to be entertained. Just order the latest hit violence movie on Pay Per View, available whenever you are. Hungry? E-mail for grocery delivery from the digital mall; while you’re “there,” get that blouse for tomorrow’s video-conference meeting. The kids, meanwhile, are entertaining themselves with their masturbation robot dolls or vicariously exploding other kids in virtual-reality games.

This nonexistent world already looks incredibly passé. Initial market tests show little interest in high-price, low-selection pay-per-view systems. Meanwhile, the Internet’s near-instant popularity has throttled all but the biggest online services, and those such services that remain are rapidly trying to reposition themselves as Internet gateways.

So instead we’re getting the revised pipe dream of a corporate Internet, in which the wide-open online frontier would be tamed. Data transmission might be based on a decentralized Internet protocol or something like it, but a few dozen companies would still control most of the content and most of the transactions.

ANOTHER FUTURE, AND ITS PAST

But there’s another potential future. It’s a future without major record labels, big Hollywood studios, or broadcast networks; or at least one where they’d have less power. Instead of 50 or even 500 TV channels, Internet server computers would offer tens of thousands of text, video, and audio programs–some free, some pay-per, some by subscription. Virtually anyone with something to say or show could send it to virtually anyone else.

Thousands of subcultures would thrive, none interested in lowest common denominators. Uncensored chat, bulletin boards and e-mail could spark a revolution in active, highly personal, discourse.

This re-personalization of everyday life could lead to a whole re-scaling of American society: co-operatives, barter associations, community schooling, a Babel of new political movements, religious cults, sub-genres of art and literature, cuisines and craft movements, ethnic pride groups (and, yes, a few ethnic hate groups).

These creative, energized people would tire of staying home on the keyboard. They’d find ways and reasons to gather in the flesh: cafés, theaters, musical societies, youth soccer leagues, reading clubs, performance-art troupes, sewing circles. Many would eschew the sterility of the subdivision, the isolation of the exurb, in favor of real communities.

Work and commerce would be increasingly conducted on a person-to-person level, instead of being molded to fit the long-term strategies of giant organizations. Corporations would devolve into small, focused operations doing a few things well, joining forces by short-term contracts to complete individual projects.

The Internet’s most enthusiastic followers are the inspirational descendents of a subculture where “computer hacker” meant a highly individualistic programming ace, not a crook. They’re the people who started using university e-mail in the late ’70s, PC-based bulletin board systems in the early ’80s, the Internet in the late ’80s, and the World Wide Web in the early ’90s. As this group grew, it developed a communications aesthetic now known as “Netiquette,” an aesthetic favoring unfettered, ungated info-culture (expressed in Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand’s 1986 adage that “information wants to be free”).

Corporate futurists patronize these people as “early adopters of technology” whose wishes must now be abandoned so the Net can be “mainstreamed.” But the Internet doesn’t want to be “mainstreamed,” and neither do many of its users. They don’t want to be constrained by top-down ad agency, studio and network thinking–the cornerstone of American mass culture since the 1920s. They also want to talk to one another. Even on the commercial online services, whose only unique selling point is professionally-created “content,” e-mail and discussion-group messages between users account for an estimated two-thirds of time spent online.

MY LIFE AS AN EARLY ADOPTER

I’ve had the privilege to see this culture develop. I was on local bulletin board systems as early as 1983, and was co-sysop of a board from 1984-88. I wrote a hypertext novel in 1988. I watched as university e-mail systems evolved and merged with a military research network to become the Internet. I saw bulletin board systems like Robert Dinse’s Eskimo North develop the threaded message-topic systems later adapted into Internet newsgroups. Eskimo North went on to add Internet e-mail, then add Internet newsgroups with once-a-day feeds of new material, then become a professional Internet service provider with a full-time Net connection. Some BBSs fell by the wayside as their operators moved to other pursuits; others started up to take their place. New companies started up as Internet service providers; it proved not to be a simple “turnkey” moneymaking operation, and many providers died off if they charged too much and/or couldn’t keep up with user demands for faster connections and fewer busy signals.

I’ve seen online services like Prodigy and CompuServe grow from novelties to semi-major powers, then saw them shrink in relative importance as the World Wide Web became the flavor of the year.

MORE BACKTRACKING

The Web is hard to describe tersely, and most mainstream journalists don’t try too hard. Basically, it’s an Internet-based system for transmitting documents of text, graphics, and/or other media formats, with clickable links within and between documents.

It was developed over the winter of 1989-90 at a Swiss particle-physics lab by programmer Tim Berners-Lee. He wanted a simple, unified system for accessing and cross-referencing research data, one that would work on all the lab’s computers. He used the concept of clickable hypertext links (conceived of by computer visionary Ted Nelson and implemented in the mid-’80s in programs like HyperCard and SuperCard) to interconnect texts, graphics, and other document types. Berners-Lee wrote a simple hypertext programming language, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), that allowed some limited text formatting.

Berners-Lee expressly wanted to move the premises of communication from one-to-many to many-to-many. In his initial proposal to CERN management Berners-Lee wrote, “Everything we have seen so far (in the telecommunications field) is information distributed by server managers to clients everywhere. A next step is the move to universal authorship, in which everyone involved in an area can contribute to the electronic representation of the group knowledge.”

The web initially spread to other research institutions, including the UW. In early 1993 Marc Andressen, a $6.75-an-hour student programmer at a U. of Illinois computer center, devised a program called Mosaic as a “graphical front end” to the Web on Unix terminals. That fall, Mosaic came out for Mac and Windows. The following spring, after Wired and others started to hype the web, Andressen got California venture capital to start Netscape Communications, releasing its first Web browsers in October 1994.

Faster than you could download an audio clip, the culture of telecommunications changed. The corporations didn’t notice at first, or didn’t admit it. They continued to talk about the umpteen channels of HBO action hits they’d love to sell us if we’d only give them unregulated-monopoly powers and wait 5-10 years for them to figure out which kind of new wiring systems to install.

The buzzword in places like Wired last year was how the spoils in the New Media race would go to the best-marketed (not necessarily the best) infotainment “brands.” This is the thinking that got us big media mergers and the so-called Telecommunications Reform Act.

But the Web’s astounding growth shows a different paradigm. People are hungry for unfiltered artistic work, for honest discourse and forthright opinions. The web provides a glimpse of such a culture, and it leaves people hungry for more.

THE ROAD TO BANDWIDTH

The content of a post-mass-media culture is here already, or will readily get here. The means to distribute quality audio, video, graphics, and formatted text on the Internet, one- and two-way, exist. But existing modems take forever to receive them. Right now, conventional phone-line modems (which translate data into analog audio signals and back) run no faster than 28.8 kilobits per second. Experts used to claim higher bandwidth would require all-new wiring to every home and business; and that phone and/or cable companies needed an “incentive” to lay this wiring by getting to monopolize the content sent thru it. That was the original justification for the pre-World Wide Web vision of an Information Superhighway of hit movies and home shopping. But the Net community hasn’t been clamoring for a hundred channels of Van Damme movies, but for high-speed transmission from anywhere to anywhere.

The only way now to get anything faster to your home is to plead with US West to sell you an ISDN line. ISDN is technologically and bureaucratically cumbersome, and costly–US West charges $60 a month for a basic package; it’s applied to the state to triple that rate. For that you get up to 128 kilobits per second, a rate barely fast enough to get tiny, lo-res video at Max Headroom frame speeds.

One potential ISDN rival is TCI’s scheme for cable modems. Most neighborhoods are already wired for cable TV, and those cable lines can potentially send digital data much faster than analog phone lines can. TCI said it would start testing its system in California by now, but has pushed that back to later this year. If it works out as currently planned, your cable system would also become your Internet provider (eliminating all the independent phone-based providers) and a subscription-based content provider too.

Meanwhile, Lucent Paradyne (one of the companies being spun off from AT&T) is pushing a scheme called ADSL to fit ultrafast data through regular phone lines refitted with new all-digital modems at each end, as long as you’re within 2-3 miles from your phone exchange office (good news for us in-towners, tuff luck to the exurbanites). It’s potentially cheaper than ISDN and offers far greater speeds (as much as 6,000 kilobits per second). US West and GTE are just starting ADSL test installations, both in other states. US West tentatively plans to eventually offer ADSL as part of its “Interprise” service package, also supplanting the role now provided by indie Internet providers.

There’s another drawback: Like the Hotel California, ADSL and cable modems are programmed to receive. ADSL only lets you transmit at the speed as ISDN; cable modem users might have to use a regular phone modem to send data out. At worst, this will mean a continued role for independent Internet service providers, as operators of high-speed uplink lines connected to hard drives where “publishers” of music, movies and digi-zines would make their works available.

A third scheme for cheap broadband could eliminate even that obstacle. Apple Computer’s asked the FCC to allocate a chunk of the airwaves for two-way wireless data. Potential uses for these frequencies include two-way digital radio units sending and getting data at up to 24,000 kilobits a second.

OTHER OBSTACLES

If bandwidth were the only obstacle toward my ideal networked nation, I’d have little to worry about. But there are other obstacles. One is the corporate-culture status quo. It’s invested a lot toward its vision of a global business cadre dictating the world’s entertainment, cuisine, behavior, politics, and even religion. It’ll maneuver and hustle to preserve the one-to-many communication model into the digital age. (Note TCI’s logo, depicting a satellite beaming its one-way wares to all the Earth.)

Another obstacle is the Net-censorship movement in this and other countries. The futility and unconstitutionality of Net censorship won’t stop politicians from trying to impose it. If we’re lucky, the battle over censorship could lead to a breakdown of relations between the religious right and the political right (the latter opposing it on the principle of unfettered trade). In time, I believe many people who care about religious beliefs will find their causes better served by the Internet’s wide-open exchange of ideas than by cowtowing to politicians who exploit religion to buy votes and promote authority.

CONCLUSIONS AND POTENTIALS

I suspect so many people wanted to own Netscape stock not because of expected profits (they’re not likely to have any for some time) but because they wanted to own a piece of the Web, in a sense of being connected with that amorphous non-thing that’s starting to change the world and could mean the end of media as we know them.

There’ll still be daily papers and broadcast TV, just as there’s still radio. But the change that’s coming will be more profound than the change TV brought to radio. We’re talking information and art, not marketing and entertainment. We’re talking about what the DIY punk rockers were talking about: Cultural expressions people actively relate to, not just time-wasters.

It won’t be a utopia. Some censorship advocates have sincere reasons for fearing a wide-open Net. It now provides voices for unpopular ideas and unpopular sexualities. It’ll eventually provide voices for every conceivable point of view, including perhaps a million Limbaughs and Robertsons as well as a few thousand Jesse Jacksons. Without mass news media to impose a semi-official version of “the truth,” what’s real and what’s important could depend on who you choose to believe.

On a less political level, an open Net will lead to a lot of bad art and media (you think you’re tired of rave graphics and sword-and-sorcery imagery now?). It could collapse the economies of scale that make major motion pictures possible (look what happened to porn movies when shot-on-video took over).

And it could increase the factionalization of America, as the artifice of “mainstream society” withers to leave thousands of warring subcultures. As we’ve seen in Africa and the Balkans, there’s a side to “tribal consciousness” you don’t hear about in New Age fantasies. And what will “alternative” folks do when there’s no more mainstream to rebel against?

Yet it can also become Patti Smith’s “age when everybody creates.” Imagine the potentials. Then go fulfill some of them.

(The Seattle Community Network, a bulletin board and web site operated by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, has started a “Market Place” group to bring independent Internet service providers together and to “protect the grass roots nature of the Internet.” To get involved contact Doug Tooley, P.O. Box 85084 Seattle, WA 98145, or e-mail dltooley@scn.org.)

SIDEBAR: FOR WHOM THE CHIMES TOLL

As I’ve said before, I’m no conspiracy theorist. But if I were, I’d ponder the following:

1) Microsoft enters into “strategic alliances” with NBC (a couple of high-profile Bill Gates-Tom Brokaw interviews, Leno plugging Windows 95, and a planned jointly-owned online news service to be called MSNBC). Brokaw even became the UW’s first out-of-town commencement speaker in years–not because the UW was the alma mater of Brokaw’s late predecessor Chet Huntley but because Gates reportedly asked him to come.

2) The Internet has gotten in the way of both companies’ plans. MS doesn’t own the Net or the software that runs it. Companies like Sun Microsystems claim with the right Net connection, many users could do all their computing on a $500 terminal device instead of a full PC, a setup that could render MS software obsolete.

3) NBC, meanwhile, sees TV viewership on a long-term decline, and (here’s where the theory starts) perceives a threat not just from online usage but from the Internet aesthetic, encouraging many-to-many communication and close community/ subculture ties instead of submission to Big Media.

4) MS first tried to extend its rule of software into the online biz with the Microsoft Network. But paid-access services like MSN are getting swamped as more and more users prefer the Internet, where no head office decides what you’ll get to see. The surviving online services are trying to reposition themselves as Internet access points. But the MSNBC service is planned to reinforce MSN’s position as a provider of exclusive “professional” content.

5) The biggest threat to the Internet as a free, uncentralized medium is the “Communications Decency Act,” championed by retiring Sen. James Exon. Passed as an amendment to a bill to let broadcasters and phone companies consolidate ever-larger empires, the act (if upheld in court) would stick it hard to any Internet server, service provider or content producer who uploads anything a Utah prosecutor might declare “indecent.” It thus threatens everything online except the precensored content of online services. Exon’s original inspiration? An exaggerated, sensationalized “cyberporn” segment on (yep!) Dateline NBC.

The theory breaks down after this point. Gates has issued statements opposing Net censorship; MS and MSN are among the plaintiffs in the court case trying to overturn the Communications Decency Act. And NBC, particularly the Brokaw show, has lately gone out of its way to praise Web-based enterprises including Netscape.

Gossip Galore, But Where’s the Love?:

The Girl With The Most Hype

Book feature for The Stranger, 4/17/96

I don’t really want to blame Melissa “Babs Babylon” Rossi for the disappointing content of her book, Courtney Love: Queen of Noise, A Most Unauthorized Biography (Pocket Books). I’m certain she was just following orders. You don’t have to read between too many lines to realize Pocket wanted this type of book, and dutiful magazine stringer Rossi complied. The type of book I’m talking about was best expressed in an old New York Rocker review of a Keith Moon biography: “All sex and drugs and no rock and roll.”

You get maybe 1,000 words at most about Courtney Love the singer, the musician, the songwriter, the still-aspiring actress. That’s scattered among some 85,000 words about Courtney Love the problem child, the reform school dropout, the stripper, the small-time groupie, the big-time groupie, the wife, the mom, the widow, the riot-grrrl hater, the force of nature, and most of all the Celebrity. Rossi’s book is a chronological compilation of my-god-what’s-she-done-now stories, divided into three sections of roughly equal length (before, during, and since her marriage). The cover photo might show an artfully cropped shot of Love in mid-guitar strum, but the inside teaser brings us not to a concert but to Love’s barging in on Madonna at the MTV Awards preview show. In the priorities of Rossi’s editors, the incident marks Love’s ascendancy to Madonna’s former title of #1 Rock Bad Girl–not because Love, unlike Madonna, writes her own material and plays an instrument onstage, but because Love’s unpredictably wild antics were more outrageous than Madonna’s calculated publicity schemes could ever be. Pocket doesn’t care who’s got the better tuneage, just who’s got the most hype.

(Indeed, at one point Rossi mentions trying to sell publishers on a Love book four years ago; the NY big boys decreed Love, fascinating a character as she might be, was not A Star and hence unworthy of mainstream publishing’s attention.)

On one level, this might be the way Love prefers to be known. More than anyone else in the Northwest “alternative” music universe (at least more than anyone else who succeeded), Love wanted to be a glittering light in the firmament of celebrity and fame. As Rossi thoroughly documents, this lifelong ambition for the spotlight has caused her, and continues to cause her, no end of conflict with music people in Portland, Seattle, and particularly Olympia who believe the punk ethic that music ought to be a creative endeavor and a personal statement, not an industry. Rossi also shows how Love’s ongoing quest to be (in)famous has endeared her to the NY/LA entertainment and gossip businesses. Five years into the “alternative” revolution Love’s late husband helped instigate, Vanity Fairand Entertainment Tonight (and Pocket Books) would still rather talk about Rock Stars than about rock. Love may appear out of control in dozens of the book’s episodes–drinking, drugging, harassing ex-boyfriends, sleeping around, encouraging her husband’s descent into heroin (or so Rossi alleges) then desperately failing to bring him back out. But she also clearly knows how to get and keep her name in the headlines, even when they aren’t always the headlines she wants.

Yet Love is more than just tabloid fodder. She’s succeeded by the pure-art standards she’s sometimes claimed to disdain. The first Hole album, Pretty on the Inside, is an experienced of focused anguish and vengeance, one of the finest American pure-punk records ever. Live Through This is a poppier, more rounded, more “accessible” work effortlessly careening between moments of beauty and ugliness. Love has spoken in recent months of wanting to be known primarily for her work, and also of wanting to be something at least closer to a positive role model (as in her backstage quip to a KOMO reporter about wanting “to prove girls can be the doctors, not just the nurses”).

Ultimately, it’s Love’s work that makes her life worth reading about, not her infamy that makes her records worth listening to. It’s these two contrasting aspects of her story that combine to make her such a fascinating figure.

Thus, by instructing Rossi to write almost exclusively about Love’s life as a succession of notorious (even by punk rock standards) incidents, Pocket loses out on a chance to fully explore Love’s story. Instead, we get a punkified version of The Rose with all the songs cut out.

One place where Rossi’s writing is allowed to shine is in her description of the old Portland music scene. Rossi and Love were both hangers-on in it, though they didn’t know one another. Rossi’s boast that Portland’s early-’80s punk world was livelier and more creative than Seattle’s is certainly a boast I could question; but Rossi makes a stong case for her allegation with Portland’s one great unsung band (the Wipers) and its many darn good bands ( Napalm Beach, Dead Moon, the Dharma Bums, the all-female Neo Boys). That the only mainstream star from that scene is Love, who’d only been a groupie in Portland and started her career in Minnesota and California, is indeed the minor tragedy Rossi makes it out to be. Of course, those other Portland bands didn’t try to be Stars above all other priorities; they tried to make great music, and under the financially-impossible conditions of indie rock at the time they succeeded at their goal.

If I had more space here, I could borrow a few clichés from the middle-aged scholars at our nation’s universities in the field ofAdvanced Madonna Studies, and write interminable ramblings about whether Love’s perceived interest in celebrity above accomplishment, along with her use of fashion-as-uniform and her cosmetic surgeries, somehow represent her identification with a notion of feminine being as contrasted to masculine doing. But I don’t so I won’t.

MISC. DOESN’T BELIEVE everything’s cyclical, but still finds it cute when something that goes around comes around again. F’rinstance, local mainstream retailers seem again interested in exploiting the popularity of the local music scene. Why just last week, the E. Madison Shop-Rite had its neon sign altered, either deliberately or by accident, to read 1ST HILL FOO CENTER.

INDECISION ’96: Drat. Now I won’t get to recycle old druggie jokes about “a really bad Gramm.”

LEGISLATURE WANTS TO BAN STRIP CLUBS: When lap dancing is outlawed, only outlaws will wear buttfloss. But seriously, our elected guardians of hypocrisy are out to kill, via punitive over-regulation, one of the state’s growth industries, employing as many as 500 performing artists in King County alone, many of whom support other artistic endeavors with their earnings. (Old joke once told to me: “What does a stripper do with her asshole before she goes to work? Drops him off at band practice.”)

Yes, these can be sleazy joints, drawing big bucks by preying on human loneliness. Yes, in a more perfect world these clubs’ workforce would have more fulfilling employment and their clientele would have more fulfilling sex lives instead of costly fantasies. Yes, no organized political faction is willing to defend them (‘cept maybe some sanctity-of-the-entrepreneur Liberterians). But if we let the state’s sultans of sanctimony outlaw something just ’cause they think it’s icky, there’s a lot of gay, lesbian, S/M and other stuff they’d love to ban next.

REELING: You’ve heard about the Oscar nominations representing a surprising triumph for “independent” cinema. I’m not so sure. Just as the global entertainment giants have created and/ or bought pseudo-indie record labels, so have they taken charge of “independent” cinema. The Independents magazine given out at 7 Gables theaters lists the following participating sponsor/ distributors: Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight Films, Fine Line Features (owned by Turner Broadcasting, along with New Line and Castle Rock; all soon to be folded into Time Warner), Miramax (Disney), and Gramercy (PolyGram).

Seven Gables’ parent firm, the Samuel Goldwyn Co., just became a sister company to Orion, which at its peak was considered a “mini-major” but is indie enough for my purposes here. And there are a few other real indies still out there, including Jodie Foster’s Egg Films. But between buying up the domestic little guys and crowding out foreign producers, the Hollywood majors (half now non-US owned) are on their way to monopolizing everything on big screens everywhere in the world. Speaking of silenced voices…

THE OTHER SIDE: This paper’s reported how ethnic-rights and environmental activists in Nigeria have faced arrest, torture, and execution. The Nigerian govt. defended itself in a slick eight-page ad supplement running only in African-American papers (includingThe Skanner here). In the same quaintly stilted 3rd World PR prose style seen in the USA Today ad section Our World, the supplement extols the west African nation as a land of “Investment Opportunities” and “Investment Incentives,” whose rulers are “Truly Peace Makers and Peace Keepers.” The center spread insists the country’s military junta’s still on “The Road to Democracy” (“Only those detractors who deliberately persist in a negative view of Nigerians and their efforts fail to take account of all that Nigerians have achieved in a short time”).

The junta’s execution of opposition leader Ken Saro-Wiwa is discussed on the back page, in a “Letter to the Editor” by Af-Am conservative Rev. Maurice Dawkins: “The Nigerians are learning the hard way that the majority media and the international liberal left network is a dangerous foe.” Dawkins denounces Saro-Wiwa as “a terrorist determined to overthrow the government” and his anti-junta movement as “a group of bandits;” justifies the crackdown against his movement under “the right of a soverign nation to conduct business and maintain law and order within its borders,” and accuses the junta’s western critics of holding “a racist double standard, depicted by misinformation and disinformation.” In short, the persecutors are re-imaged as the persecuted–a classic Limbaughan doublespeak technique.

PASSAGE (British-Israeli-American social critic Eli Khamarov in Surviving on Planet Reebok): ” People are inherently good. Bad people are created by other bad people; their survival is guaranteed because of their safety in numbers.”

Food for Thought on Cannibal Movies:

Bite Me

Film essay for The Stranger, 1/31/96

In the horror and horror-farce genres, vampirism is widely considered much cooler than cannibalism. Cannibals are messy and dismember their prey. Vampires simply exchange bodily fluids, in the process converting their prey into new members of the vampire species.

Yet in real life, vampirism is at best a matter of legend and historical conjecture. Cannibalism, on the other limb, is a well-documented practice of historic and indigenous societies around the world. Yes, devouring one’s own species violates the cardinal rule of the food chain; but people have gotten around that through the familiar-to-this-day shtick of declaring enemy tribes to be something less than human. Indeed, in some ancient communities consuming the flesh of a vanquished enemy warrior was/is said to give your warriors the strength or magic the enemy had.

Over the years, many directors have understood the shock potential of cannibalism as one of the cruelest one-on-one crimes imaginable, a crime that robs its perpetrators of their last claim to membership in their own species. In the docudrama Alive (1993) and the PBS documentary The Donner Party (1991), groups of people are trapped in the wilderness and must save their lives by eating their dead comrades, keeping their own bodies alive but destroying their souls. In Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989), the eating of human flesh is the only violent act the Thief can’t bring himself to commit.

Let’s examine some of the film formulae that have incorporated cannibalism. Note that I don’t count films like Little Shop of Horrors,Lair of the White Worm, or the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man;” the victims in those stories are eaten but by non-human creatures.

Sociological drama. The native cannibal-warrior tradition was, of course, exploited and spoofed in countless Hollywood adventure features as recently as Conan the Barbarian (1982). It’s also the theme of what I feel is the best cannibal movie ever made, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971; just now on video). Set in the early years of Brazil’s colonization as seen through Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s modern anti-colonial eyes, it’s the comic tragedy of a French sailor who gets captured by an Amazon tribe. He’s given a wife and lives as one of the villagers until the next ritual feast, when he’s scheduled to be communally devoured. He learns the local language and tries to sell himself as a shaman of European war magic (gunpowder), but all efforts to convince the tribe he’s worth more to them alive than dead prove futile. The “fleshy” aspect of the story is enhanced by the fact that everybody’s nude (including, after the first half hour, the Frenchman).

Thomas Harris’s character Hannibal Lecter is partly a return to the warrior notion of cannibalism. In Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its lesser-known predecessor Manhunter (1986), Hannibal is a rogue warrior without a tribe. He gnaws on his still-living prey (a quite inefficient way to kill) not for sustenance but to uncage the animalistic spirit that makes him capable of his crimes.

In a different modernization of the warrior-cannibal theme, the middle-class revolutionaries of the Seine and Oise Liberation Front in Godard’s satire Weekend (1967) took the then-emerging hippie notion of “going native” to its logical extreme. Proclaiming that “the horror of the state can only be answered by horror,” these terrorist wannabes proclaim their return to a “natural,” anti-industrial way of life by dining on captured bourgeois picnickers.

Big-budget exploitation. Richard Fleischer should’ve been happy to live off the Betty Boop merchandising he inherited from his dad Max. Instead, he became a hack director of grim action films. When Fleischer fils adapted Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! into Soylent Green (1973), he decided the book’s way-overpopulated world wasn’t grim enough. So he added cannibalism. In the novel, “Soylent Green” is a foodstuff made of soybeans and lentils. In the movie, as grim detective Charlton Heston discovers, it’s secretly made from reprocessed humans. Why’s it a secret? Imagine the shock when you tell your vegan friend about the beef gelatin in the Altoid she’s sucking, and multiply it by 40 million irritable 21st Century New Yorkers.

Low-budget exploitation. In a trend starting in 1963 and peaking around 1973-74, cheapo-horror makers found cannibalism a good excuse for gore effects the big studios wouldn’t dare. Herschell Gordon Lewis has said that he turned from directing nudies to gore movies like Blood Feast (1963) and The Undertaker and his Pals (1967) as a marketable genre the big studios wouldn’t muscle in on. After Lewis left films for a more “legitimate” career in direct-mail marketing, his legacy was continued in Deranged, Red Meat, Cannibals in the Streets, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Shriek of the Mutilated, The Folks at Red Wolf Inn (a.k.a. Terror on the Menu), and a score of direct-to-video shockers.

Foreigners got into the game too, like Jess Franco (White Cannibal Queen) and Joe D’Amato (Grim Reaper). Even Peter Cushing, in his pre- Star Wars career lull, chased after a people-eating killer in The Ghoul (1975).

From within this cycle of trashy flesh-feast films came the cannibal zombies of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968; followed by two sequels and one remake). Romero’s filmmaking skills (and sense of dark humor) set his work several notches above most others. He also gave a purpose to his gore. His speechless, pathetic killers are essentially grosser versions of vampires, gnawing on the still-living less to feed than to infect, to convert them to the zombie way. In a twist on the food-chain paradigm, the zombies enlarge their species by dining on ours. Romero’s cannibal lore was parodied in the Return of the Living Dead series, but his own films contain enough sick gags to make any spoofs superfluous.

Comedy and satire. Indeed, people-meat has often been treated for high and low humor. Some films use cannibalism for non-nutritive guffaws and sick sight gags, such as in the Rory Calhoun/ Wolfman Jack vehicle Motel Hell (1980).

But it can also be used for fun with a purpose, to reveal human nature by depicting inhuman acts. In Parents (1989), people-eating is a metaphor for the messy realities hidden behind ’50s suburban “family values.” In Eating Raoul (1982), it’s the logical extreme of an emerging yuppie class proclaiming itself a superior species to (and hence higher in the food chain than) those crude unsophisticate masses.

The Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd (1979) was based on a British legend (filmed as straight horror by UK horror master Tod Slaughter in 1936). Sondheim turned a story of deviance into a celebration of survival, with his downtrodden, disenfranchised London street people learning to literally “eat the rich.”

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s elegant Delicatessen (1993) posits a post-apocalyptic future similar to Sweeney Todd‘s Victorian past, but without the class consciousness. Without class solidarity the survivors have to settle for small-group solidarity, with anyone from outside the delicatessen and its upstairs apartments treated literally as fair “game.” Made during the rise of the global financier-led Right and after the fall of socialism, it posits a future where only love and laughter can free us from the futility of rugged individualism. That’s a warning one can really sink one’s teeth into.

MISC. WAS BAFFLED by a notice on the Internet search site Yahoo! promising a link to a British nudist camp for transvestites. How can you be undressed and cross-dressed at the same time? Did the queens just wear wigs, and high heels? But on reading the “Garden of Eden” site (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/R_Brett3/), the explanation was simple. By summer it’s a normal nonerotic family nudist camp. (As the site says, “Our club is widely recognised as being the in place to go for a fun time holiday.”) But during the miserable Welsh winter, it holds weekends for fully-cross-dressed closeted queens to express their lifestyles away from the general populace. You have three seconds to fantasize about Robert Morley types or the bluebloods from the movie Scandal sharing high tea in frilly lace things.

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of a “No Food/Drink” sign outside a video arcade on University Way): “Thank You For Your Coordination.”

CATHODE CORNER: Wm. Bennett, the Bush Administration drone we’ve previously dissed for his dissing of trash TV, plans to turn his heavy-handed pieties into a cartoon show, Adventures from the World of Virtues. It’ll air on PBS, which Bennett had previously denounced as a waste of tax bucks. If I had kids I’d rather let ’em watch Melrose Place.

BACK INTO THE DRINK: Your fave bar or coffeehouse might soon stock the Canadian-made Jones Soda, the latest attempt at a Gen-X pop sold at microbeer prices (and distributed by microbeer jobbers). It’s got five fruity flavors, each with a different level of carbonation, dressed in as many as 56 different label photos including a pierced navel, a coffee cup, a cigarette lighter, a skateboard, barstools, an OPEN sign, a black fedora, and a Corvette logo. If you ignore the desperate-to-be-hip marketing the pop itself’s not bad, especially the cherry flavor.

DEAD AIR REDUX?: I do have nice things to say about the Weekly sometimes. F’rinstance, their Mike Romano got KUOW/KCMU boss Wayne Roth to quasi-confirm a rumor I’d published a couple months back, that Roth was considering killing KCMU and using the frequency for a classical format aimed at the affluent audiences corporate sponsors (oops, “underwriters”) love. (Roth’s office issued a statement claiming his Weekly statement only expressed speculation, not a firm policy decision.) There’s nothing wrong with KCMU’s programming or finances that can’t be traced to Roth’s mistaken belief that the station is, or should be, his personal bureaucratic turf. Public broadcasting, when it’s really public, isn’t a private business and shouldn’t be run as one. It’s a trust between a dedicated programming team and a closely-involved community of listeners.

CLUB ME: F’r another instance, a Weekly brief last month casually revealed the mysterious “Erik Shirley” lurking behind the scenes at Moe’s was the son of Jon Shirley, prominent ex-Microsoft/ Radio Shack exec, who in turn has a bit of investment in the joint. I can’t imagine a Radio Shack vet caring about music, ‘cept those cool ol’ stereo-separation LPs. Besides, if Moe’s was led by somebody who knew tech, they wouldn’t have entrusted their first live Internet concert (with the Presidents on 12/31) to Spry/CompuServe and Xing StreamWorks, the outfits behind the Paramount’s Cyberian Rhapsody fiasco.

MISC.’S TOP 7: How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, dir. Nelson Periera dos Santos (New Yorker Video), the greatest all-nude Amazon cannibalism comedy ever made… The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, dir. Dave Borthwick (Manga Entertainment Video)… Safeway coupon books… Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal, Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford (Faber & Faber)… The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961, Jeff Kisseloff (Viking)… Blue Raspberry Squeeze Pop, the candy that looks like a tube of Prell… Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (BBC/ Discovery Channel miniseries)…

MISC.’S BOTTOM 6: Watch This! (KING-TV)… AJ’s Time Travelers (KTZZ)… CompuServe’s Usenet censorship (one more reason to switch to an indie Internet provider)… Double-cross-platform software (stuff that’s promoted as running on different operating systems but really only works on Windows)…The NBA’s attempt to shut unofficial fan websites… Betting on the Bud Bowl (it’s pre-scripted! You could be betting with the film editor’s cousin).

THANKS FOR THE GENEROUS WORDS about my book in the past two Weeklys. In the holiday spirit I’ll forgive Fred Moody, who wrote one of the pieces, for misspelling my name.

E-MISSIVES #1: As you’ve seen, the paper’s staked out email addresses under the domain name “thestranger.com”. That’s ’cause “stranger.com” was already taken by a Calif. software firm. Still, it could be worse; the World Wide Web address <<www.therocket.com>> takes you to a porn site in Rhode Island.

E-MISSIVES #2: Kelly Humphries writes, “I work as a messenger in the Sea-Ev-Tac area and see a lot of odd things. Friday I saw Hal’s Meat-Seafood-Cheese on 140th and Lake City Way, the marquee offering `Dry Ice 95.’ Is this supposed to replace the outdated `Dry Ice 3.x’ product? If we wanted to take advantage of all the features found in `Dry Ice 95,’ would we have to upgrade all the frozen foods in our freezer?”

INFOTAINMENT WITHOUT THE TAINMENT: King Broadcasting’s new NW Cable News channel launches this week, tho’ some cable systems won’t see it right away. I got to tour the studio, on the top floor of KING’s building. It’s a set-up a videomaker would die for. It’s all run on Avid video decks for nonlinear digital editing, connected to a Silicon Graphics server computer storing 24 hours of footage online. With robot cameras and preprogrammed graphics, it takes only three people to handle the studio production. The channel will launch with only eight reporting teams; most of its 100 staffers will rewrite reports from KING and its Portland, Spokane and Boise sister stations into Headline News-type newscasts running all day. For big regional stories, it’ll turn into the All-Flood Channel or the All-Packwood Channel. They promise something I’ve longed for: a local (or at least regional) TV newscast where the info’s more important than celebrity fluff, sleazy murder trials, plugs for the station’s prime-time shows, snappy anchor-banter, or Mr. Food. (Next week: We complain about TCI Cable dropping the CBC for NWCN.)

KHOLERIK KORNER: Bruce Chapman, whom I’d always thought to be one of that increasingly-rare breed of respectable, thoughtful conservatives, wrote in a P-I op-ed column a few weeks back, “Is the conservative revolution running out of steam? No–not to hearJohn Carlson tell it on his KVI talk show. Indeed, the jovial Carlson, who infuriates liberals, is even more gleeful than usual these days.”… “I have enjoyed John’s company ever since he was a delightfully irreverent college student at the University of Washington, assaulting the choleric dogmas of the UW Daily.”

(1) As I’ve said before, if KVI said it was raining outside I’d still want it confirmed by a credible source.

(2) Carlson’s not so much “jovial” as snide, his snickers more like the sneers of a comic-book-movie villain or schoolyard bully.

(3) “Infuriating liberals” is a mark of laziness at the art of offense. It’s almost as easy as offending Christians.

(4) Carlson’s really quite reverent toward the three things in which he’s publicly demonstrated sincere beliefs–power, money, and ego.

(5) I was editor of the Daily when Carlson, then a member of the Board of Student Publications, tried to censure me for editing a “humor” piece by a friend of his about Ted Kennedy, similar to modern OJ “jokes.” If Chapman wants to call me “easily angered; bad tempered” (the Am. Heritage Dictionary definition of “choleric”), I can take it. If somebody called Carlson something like that, the rich pretty boy would probably whine about the Big Bad PC Thought Police trying to stifle his daring voice of rebellion. People who can raise out-of-state capital to start newspapers and think tanks are not helpless silenced voices. And people who suck up to the real centers of power in this society are not rebels, no matter how big their Harleys are.

AS WE DO EVERY TIME the sunset creeps up toward 4:15 p.m., we seek your suggestions for the annual Misc. In/Out List (not to be confused with any other listing which may or may not appear in a newspaper such as this). Send hard copy c/o The Stranger, or leave email at the Misc. World HQ website (that URL once again: <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>).

THANKS TO ALL who went to my two most recent reading/ signing gigs. I’m not sure, tho’, what to make of the Elliott Bay Book Co. blurb calling me “an ardent supporter of books and reading.” That sorta language usually describes either terminally mellow NPR-heads or closed-minded videophobes who hate all non-book media formats. Mind you, I love books in general, though there are many, many specific books I’m either nonplussed about or absolutely abhor. And they’re not always the books someone in my position’s expected to hate. F’rinstance, I have nothing against formula romance novels. The early Harlequins, originally imported from Britain, can be read as object lessons in how pre-feminist young women could move ahead in the British class system, by marrying money and calling it love.

KITSCH N’ KABOODDLE: Longtime Misc. readers know we don’t go in for camp-for-camp’s-sake, so we shuddered as fearfully as you may have when we heard about a new TV talk show to start next month, co-starring Tammy Faye Baker and washed-up sitcom actor JM J. Bullock (Ted Knight’s bumbling son-in-law on Too Close for Comfort). No further comment is necessary.

ONLY ANOTHER NORTHERN SONG: The Beatles Anthology has left TV and we’re thankfully in the eye of the associated PR storm, before the hype campaign for longer home-video version of the miniseries starts up next month. During “A-Beatles-C” week, the hype (culminating in the release of two old Lennon demo tapes with schlocky new backing tracks tacked on) got so hot, even Monday Night Football got in by unearthing a 1974 halftime chat between Lennon and Howard Cosell. The corporate media’s completely manufactured re-Beatlemania was a nostalgia for a time when the corporate media’s power was at its height. Despite what the boomer-biased media have proclaimed, there have been many, many joyous, intricate pop, post-pop and power-pop bands since. Bands like the Jam, Pere Ubu, the Posies, and Shonen Knife. It’s just none of those folks had the full-on marketing assault the Beatles enjoyed (or suffered from).

And none of those folks, luckily, found themselves profitable commodities for the truly pathetic hyper-spectacle that is the boomer nostalgia industry. If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not), I’d fantasize about the Powers That Be working to prevent any rebellion among current or future young generations by smothering them with a disinformation campaign “celebrating” The Sixties while mentioning nothing but the wild-oat-sowing of upper-middle-class college kids–leaving out any mention of the environment, the Cold War, or the Black Struggle, and thus turning off any kids who might have silly notions of wanting to change the outside world. Speaking of retooled boomer fads…

THE-GRASS-IS-GREENER DEPT.: After reading last week’s Stranger piece about the bloated save-the-world claims made by the hemp movement, I finally understand the motivations of the wheeler-dealers in the Oakland Hills who thought up the whole hemp-mania in 1990-91. The hemp movement revises the pot aesthetic to seem less pathetically complacent, more in tune with the brash go-for-it dynamism of the ’90s. It does this by deliberately never mentioning pot smoking (except as a potential prescription painkiller), even though pot smoking is what it really wants to legalize. Eschewing the popular association of long-term cannabis use with sleepwalking fogheadedness, it instead markets the drug as an investment commodity, as the best potential friend capitalism didn’t know it had. More sky-high claims are being made for hemp today than were made in the early ’60s for the schmoo (a little bowling-pin-shaped animal that threatened to solve the world’s food problems and thus upset the global economy) in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner.

AD VERBS I (ad headlines in the 12/95 Wired): “At this mall, you can even shop naked” (MarketplaceMCI)… “Shop for CDs without the inconvenience of getting dressed” (MusicNet)… “If you’ve never been shopping while eating Mu Shu pork in your underwear, then you’ve never really been shopping” (éShop Plaza)… “Put our jeans on” (The Gap).

AD VERBS II (electronics-store slogan found in The Irish Times): “Harry Moore–Bringing you the future for more years than we care to remember.”

HERE AT MISC. we adore the new Seattle Center fountain–it squirts higher and more voraciously than the old one, and new recessed nozzles inside a steeper center bulge mean folks are less likely to try climbing it, slip, and get their crotches ripped into (it happenned to someone I knew and it wasn’t fun). We also like (save for the name and sign) the KeyArena, a.k.a. Coliseum II–plenty of comfy seats to watch the T-Birds play the Brandon Wheat Kings. But in other ways, Seattle Center remains a relic of a long-ago futurism, bypassed by brasher monuments like Las Vegas’s fake Space Needle (the Stratosphere Tower, topped off last week). At 1,149 ft., twice the Needle’s height, it’s now the west’s tallest structure (displacing, I believe, a TV tower in the Dakotas).

THE SAME WEEKEND Coliseum II opened, thousands other Seattleites were at the first NW Book Fair. Loved the fair; loved most of the booths; loved the speakers I was able to get to (if Sherman Alexie or his publishers read this, I’d love to hear more sometime about his remarks on shoddy Indian-reservation public housing.) The lack of an empty parking space within five blocks of the event oughta be enough proof that smug elitist rants about a “post-literate society” are at least somewhat exaggerated. Folks are indeed reading these days. It’s what they’re reading that can sometimes be disturbing.

FOR PROOF THAT “The Book” is not the universally progressive-n’-prosocial force the elitists crack it up to be, look no further thanThe Seattle Joke Book III by Elliot Maxx (the comedian formerly known as the other Gary Larson). Not just another round of bland latte gags, it may just be the single worst book ever published here, even worse than those endless whale-poetry chapbooks put out by the Heron Presses (you know: Pink Heron, Chartreuse Heron, Polka Dot Heron). Maxx’s slim volume is crammed with the vilest racist “jokes” disguised as “neighborhood humor;” along with homophobia, sexism, and Keister bald jokes. All it lacks is Wayne Cody fat jokes.

THE NTH POWER: In recent months, even before Annex Theater’s Betty In Bondage, I’ve had trouble with the mainstreaming of S/M culture. Then at the Halloween parties I was at along the downtown/ CapHill arty circuit, seemed like half the attendees wore some variation on fetish garb. There were four hetero couples where one partner dragged the other around on a leash (three of the leashees were guys). I finally figured it out. Today’s S/M isn’t “transgressive.” It’s sure not “rebellious,” save in the minds of those who get off on imagining themselves hated by a stereotyped “Mainstream America.” These days, S/M IS mainstream America, a distillation of the modern American zeitgeist. The newly commodified S/M celebrates power, domination, victimization, ruthlessness–your basic hypercapitalist values. As for politics, I’ve already written comparisons between “pro-business Democrats” and the consensual bottom position.

JUST SAY `NON’?: You realize if Quebec ever does leave Canada, it’d mean no more bilingualism in the rest of Canada? What would we do without bilingual Canadian food packaging, such as Diet Coke with “NutraSuc”? Without CBUF-FM and the great way its announcers pronounce words like Chilliwack and Okanagon? Maybe Vancouver could go bilingual English/ Mandarin, but it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, a Christian Science Monitor commentary by Washington, D.C. corporate lawyer Mark Schwartz called the Parti Quebecois one of the world’s last “hard-line leftist” movements. Schwartz’s piece trembled with fear that an independent Quebec might attempt “a new social order” that’d neglect the proper coddling of foreign investors and instead pursue “full employment, a more equitable society for all citizens, and a lessened role for the marketplace in people’s lives.” He was agog that the separatists’ “64-page vision of an independent Quebec fails to mention a single word about the private sector’s role in creating jobs.” A place where 49.4% of voters declared humanitarian and cultural values more important than business? Alors!

I’m speaking and signing books this Friday at 3 p.m. at the renowned University Book Store. Be there or lose your chance to collect NW music history while earning a Patronage Refund.

I COULD SAY I now know what it was like to be a Cubs fan in ’84 or a Red Sox fan any year, but will instead just say: Damn fine ride. All possible kudos to the players, the coaches, and especially to Dave & Rick.

I’VE GOT IT: Here’s the way to make that maybe-finally-funded but yet-undesigned retractable-roof Son-of-Kingdome thang a better investment, and attract the last major-league sport we haven’t yet got: Make it the world’s first combination baseball-hockey arena! Just make the natural-turf baseball surface in a removable-tile format (that’s how they made instant natural-turf fields in some of the stadia for World Cup soccer last year). Then acquire some of those mobile bleachers like they use for Kingdome basketball. Then bring in whatever they use to make that temporary rink inside the Flag Pavilion at Xmas and stick it on top of the whatever floor’s left when the boxes of turf-tiles are trucked away for the winter. Even if we don’t get an NHL team (what with Seattle money investing in Vancouver’s team and Portland’s franchise try), truck-away turf would let the new ballpark be used as an off-season Kingdome annex for car and boat shows.

THE BROTHER ‘HOOD: Watched parts of the Million Man March on C-SPAN and CNN. The former’s unedited coverage was better, but CNN’s mix of speech segments, commercials and “analysis” brought up some of its own issues. The transitions between the sea of solemn Af-Am faces in the crowd and the pale yup models in the commercials was enough to bring home the message about America’s continuing class struggles.

CATHODE CORNER: You can now see Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the show with a guy and some robot puppets heckling bad sci-fi movies) even if you don’t live in a Viacom Cable neighborhood, thanks to KCPQ. The syndicated rerun version’s only an hour, so the movies are heavily truncated and/or split into two episodes. And so far they’re showing only films from the same repertoire of a couple dozen public domain 50’s badfilms that have circulated the cheapo-video circuit forever (probably due to trouble getting syndication rights to still-copyrighted B flicks). But at least there’s now something for Saturday stay-homes to watch at midnight that’s not the reeking undead corpse of SNL.

CONFIDENTIAL TO RYAN B.: Yes, I know Soma magazine’s a pathetic goop of “cliché generational angst” and “anti-marketing marketing.” But it’s no more so than any of those other 20-odd pretentious Frisco mags that claim to cover “The West Coast” but end up only writing about Frisco. At least the title’s appropriate, taken from a cutesy name for a “restored” ex-industrial district there but reminiscent of the mind-control drug in Brave New World. Speaking of printed effluent-for-the-affluent…

I KNOW I PROMISED to cease Weekly-bashing and stick to going after more worthy targets, but I couldn’t resist its sarcastic, classist ad depicting a glass-eyed, square-jawed, power-suited reactionary yuppie as its mythical average reader under the headline “One of the punk rock weirdos you’ll find in the Seattle Weekly/ EastsideWeek personals.”

MISC.’s TOP 6: I Should Coco, Supergrass (Capitol)… VCRs that mark recording/ playback progress in minutes and seconds, not “counter” numbers… The “Opportunities” ads in USA Today offering prepostrously unlikely franchise or multi-level-marketing schemes… Endust for Electronics (Johnson Wax)… The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meaning of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes, Thomas Hine (Little, Brown & Co.)… The downscale, pulp-paper, ’60s-’70s men’s magazines sold at That’s Atomic on E. Olive (mags that relied less on sex than on faux-Spillane tuff-guy writing and garish graphics)…

MISC.’s BOTTOM 2: Internet service providers that go down for whole weekends, leaving users in acute Web Withdrawal… The slowness of America’s bookstore distribution system…

(Thanks to those who overcame the Sunday-night weather and Mariner Fever to attend my book release party and see four of the rockin’-est sets-O-tunes ever performed. The book itself (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) oughta be in more stores this week. As always, info’s on the Misc. World HQ website.)

Unabombs Away:

F.C.’s Dreams for Agrarian Authoritarianism

Manifesto review for the Stranger, 10/4/95

Industrial Society and its Future (a.k.a. The Unabomber Manifesto) was published as a supplement to the Washington Post and as a “virtual book” at the Time website. Because the daily Post is unavailable outside the Eastern Seaboard, this anti-technology tract is accessible to most readers only via computer. [NOTE: The uncopyrighted work has since been issued in an unauthorized paperback edition, available thru this link.]

Its author is known popularly as “the Unabomber,” but he (the FBI believes it’s a lone male) uses the unexplained pseudonym F.C.

While F.C. doesn’t cite ideological inspirations, he stands in a long line of anti-tech thinkers from William Blake to Gerry Mander. Many of these authors are slicker and more coherent than F.C., but that’s part of F.C.’s point. Early reviewers described F.C.’s writing as stilted and dry, detracting from his persuasiveness. I disagree. Any work of criticism carries the aesthetic of its ideal alternative. F.C.’s stodgy, authoritarian pronouncements express his wish for a stodgy, authoritarian future. His rambling arguments visualize his dream for a slower-paced world. His overgeneralizations about human nature reveal a utopia where most people would be treated as “masses,” placed in socially-useful labor.

F.C. believes “the industrial-technological system” is a social, psychological and environmental “disaster for the human race.” He believes people have become slaves to a system working for its own growth, not for human betterment; a system too complex and powerful to ever be “reformed;” a system which, unless overthrown, will eventually destroy the planet. Plenty of non-murderers have said things like that. In his way F.C. essentially says he’s tired of talk and wants action. He’s tired of college leftists because they just talk, and also because Marxist ideals of collective “progress” and planned economies would require the industrial state he wants to smash.

Most dystopians are utopians at heart, and most utopians seek a society in which people like themselves would rule or at least fit in better. While his prescriptions for the world are far more vague than his condemnations, F.C. clearly pines for a society guided not by the “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith’s marketplace, nor by the impersonal demands of production and consumption, but by the force of muscle and will — presumably other people’s muscle and his will.

He doesn’t mention that modern experiment in a planned neo-agrarian society, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. Here was a philosopher-activist who, like F.C., was willing to sacrifice other people’s lives to bring about a more “natural” state; except his system couldn’t feed an industrial-age population base, and the industrialist Communists of Vietnam had a stronger army. In F.C.’s utopia, there wouldn’t be heavy machinery or internal-combustion engines (he fantasizes about “burning all technical books” so these things can’t be brought back), hence no armies capable of reversing his revolution. Cold Warriors used to rant about the Reds’ ability to “bomb us into the stone age.” F.C. would settle for bombing us into the Bronze Age.

SPACES IN THE HEART: While watching this year’s fifth annual Belltown Inside Out, a “community” festival originally sponsored by condo developers and now increasingly run by local Scientologists, an acquaintance told me the newly-widened 2nd Ave. sidewalks were an omen that the whole neighborhood was doomed to become “another Rodeo Drive.” Dunno ’bout that; the Nordstroms, who have de facto control of retail zoning in Seattle, are getting all the new costly stores situated next to them. Indeed, the movie megaplexes planned for the Pike/ Pine corridor (30 total screens) are helping end Belltown’s mini movie row. The King has closed for probably the last time. And now it’s been announced the ugly-outside-gorgeous-inside Cinerama will close when or before the mega-cinemas open. The Cinerama was the first Seattle movie house I went to (for the minor musical Song of Norway). Only the UA’s two screens remain, as discount houses… Similarly, a belated goodbye goes to Village Lanes, closed for redevelopment into an Office Depot just as bowling becomes the hip sport of the ’90s (many of your fave Seattle musical performers are also keglers). Speaking of things hip-n’-now…

BUZZ BIN TO BARGAIN BIN?: We’ve written recently about the continued flow of big money into the book biz, disproving the common notion that nobody reads anymore. Now there’s MTV Books, out to disprove the notion that no young’ns read anymore. It’s an imprint of MTV’s fellow Viacom unit Simon & Schuster, launching with such tie-in titles as The Real Real World and Aeon Flux: The Dossier.

Underlying all this is Viacom’s mistaken notion that there’s a generation out there that loves its MTV and will eat up anything bearing its name (in the trade mag Advertising Age, MTV claims to be sponsors’ gateway to “32.1 million impressionable young minds”). What there really is, as known to everyone except Viacom, is a generation that reluctantly turns to MTV for a few specialty shows and the flips to it when there’s nothing else on, but doesn’t think of it as anything more than a corporate-media compromise.

You could really see it if you were on America Online during the recent MTV Online promotion. The channel solicited comments from AOL users, some of which were retransmitted on a censor-delayed basis across the bottom of the MTV screen during select video segments. There was quite a bit of MTV bashing, in various degrees of maturity and intelligibility, in the messages posted on AOL that didn’t make the censor’s cut. What made the MTV cablewaves was generally limited to the likes of “Eddie Vedder Roolz.” Speaking of online revelations…

THEATRICS: Hope you’re not tired of Courtneymania ‘cuz it’s spreading to the theatrical world. Love in the Void (alt.fan.c-love), a one-woman play by Elyse Singer based on Love’s uncopyrighted Internet newsgroup messages, just ended a three-week run at NYC’s HERE performance space. Carolyn Baeumler gave what by all accounts was a dead-on impersonation of Love, writhing about the stage while reciting online posts about everything from rock-star sexism to life with and after Cobain to a recollection of the first record she ever owned (Marlo Thomas’s ode to non-gender-specific child rearing, Free to Be You and Me). She’s accompanied by a lone guitarist, offstage voices playing her online correspondents, and slides and videos of her career and life trials. A positive review comes in the online zine Addicted to Noise from Carol Mariconda, Love’s personal volunteer liaison with the newsgroupalt.fan.courtney-love. Mariconda writes, “Courtney’s intelligence, biting humor, and weary worldliness, from having experienced more psychic agony than she should ever have had to in her relatively short existence, is captured by Baeumler in a powerful portrayal.”

PLUGS OF THE SHAMELESS VARIETY: My huge book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, is now at the printer and should be in stores by the start of October. A release party’s tentatively set for Sun., Oct. 15; details to follow… Still looking for your favorite local grocery store, in the convenience store, small supermarket, regular supermarket, superstore, and ethnic categories. Details on theMisc. website.

MISC. WANTS TO THANK all the attentive readers who wrote, emailed or faxed in to confirm the flyer I wrote about warning Yellowstone visitors against head-butting buffalo is real. One reader even claimed “I’m still alive today thanks to that advice;” another said park employees maintain a tote board every tourist season saying something like “Buffalo 6, Humans 0.”

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (from the front page of Murdoch’s notorious London tabloid News of the World): “My Sex And Smoked Salmon Romp.” Ahh, the two great tastes that taste great together…

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE AT ITS FINEST: Pee-On-It is a urinal sanitizer-deodorizer by the Ohio-based Anthem Inc., with one of seven pictures on it: A guy holding an umbrella with the caption “And you thought you were having a rough day,” a woman with her mouth open, another woman laughing “What’s That, A Joke?”, a bull’s eye with the caption “If You Don’t Have Length Try For Aim,” a guy getting a “shower,” another guy holding his nose and ranting “You Drank THAT?,” and an opened beer can with the caption “Ecology project: Recycle Your Beer Here.”

META-FICTIONS: Seems that not only is there already a real Gramercy Books, the fictional Gramercy Press of the MCI ads will put out a sort-of real book, Apocalypse of the Heart. Romance queen Barbara Cartland’s allegedly been contracted to pen the tome, to be issued under the pen name of “Marcus Belfry,” a fictional writer in the commercials. Speaking of the word. It’s not the first time a “fictional character” has written a book. Many early Brit novels were written in the first person and presumed by some readers to be true stories. The Ellery Queen mysteries listed the hero as author, tho’ they were written in the third person. Then there’s Venus on the Half Shell, a sci-fi spoof attributed to one Kilgore Trout, a hack-writer character in several Kurt Vonnegut novels. (To this day most folks don’t know Vonnegut didn’t write Venus; real-life sci-fi hack Philip Jose Farmer did.) Speaking of the word…

MANLY READING: It’s common in semiotics texts these days to ascribe homoerotic meanings to the archtypal adult-male heroes of boys’ adventure fiction, from the old Pee-wee’s Playhouse gang to today’s Batman Forever cast. What these texts haven’t mentioned as far as I’ve seen is how all those PR campaigns to sell “Books” to kids as one generic commodity always trot out past generations’ boy-adventure heroes (pirates, knights in armor, your basic Pagemaster cast). I’m sure something could be done with that, maybe something scandalous about how Barbara Bush and the American Library Assn. are propagating homoerotica to children. Speaking of the word…

SEGREGATED SENTENCES: The Times quoted an 1853 Old Farmer’s Almanac homily as warning householders to keep books by male and female authors (unless married to one antoher) stocked on separate shelves. Finally: An explanation for the fiction racks at Left Bank Books. Still speaking of the word…

VOLUME SELLING: The arrival of one of them huge Barnes & Noble book emporia at U-Village points out the perception/reality thang re: the alleged non-popularity of the written word in PoMo America. If nobody were buying these paper artifacts, huge corps. wouldn’t be spending proudly to install great print palaces (and potentially drive the li’l folks outta the biz). Still speaking of the word…

IT’S ONLY WORDS: Thanks to your diligence in reply to our recent solicitations, we have a veritable bevy of non-“surfing” words for Internet use: gigging, looking around, skimming, roamin’, ramblin,’ and my favorite of the week, that ol’ Situationist Internationale term “dérive.” I’ll try using some of these in sentences over the next few weeks, to see how they work.

NOW I HAVE ANOTHER FAVOR to ask of you, to enter your suggestion in our drive to find the best grocery stores in Seattle. Base your nominations on atmosphere, attitude, cool products, and price, and place them under one or more of these categories: convenience store, small supermarket, regular supermarket, superstore, and ethnic. Mail them here to the paper or leave them at the Misc. website.