A COUPLE WEEKS OR SO AGO, we mentioned a Village Voice essay suggesting that not only was “grunge” dead, so was the whole Blank Generation zeitgeist, destined to be remembered only as a brief interregnum of punkesque angst and cynicism prior to the present neo-gilded age of corporate teenybopper pop and happy techno.

I’d already been reading discussions of (for lack of a slicker catch phrase) the “new sincerity” on the Wallace-l email list, devoted ostensibly to discussions of the author David Foster Wallace. He’d written an essay (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calling for young writers to forego what he saw as a recursive trap of self-referential, “hip” irony, and to instead “dare” to be sincere, even at the risk of cloyingness.

In the essay, Wallace asks for a new movement of literary “anti-rebels,” who’d rebel against the perpetual “revolutions” of corporate-media culture. These would be writers “who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”

The recent discussions on Wallace-l have concerned whether the “reverence and conviction” shtick has already taken over in certain areas of the culture with shorter trend-lead-times than literature. One contributor to the list recently claimed irony was still prominently air-quoting its way through the social consciousness, and cited the enduring TV popularity of Seinfeld, Beavis and Butt-head, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Jerry Springer as his support.

This drew a response from list member Marie Mundaca:

“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer).

“I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to.

“Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”

Later on in the cyber-conversation, Mundaca added these additional thoughts:

“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’

“Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill.

“I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently.

“If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong.

“Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”

When I emailed Mundaca for her permission to post these remarks here, I compared her remark about the decline of hip-ironic TV to the Voice piece about the eclipse of youth angst. Her response:

“The real irony, for me, is that when the media picked up on us (i.e., when Nirvana hit), most of my friends were angry that we were being treated like a demographic, insisting that we were all much too complex to be described by numbers and a catchy name. And now they’re all mad that we only had a few years of being pandered and marketed to.”

Our lesson here? Apparently, you’re damned if you do, and touched by an angel if you don’t.

ELSEWHERE: Smug.com has more evidence that the alterna-rock-listenin’ folks (or at least their old-school-punk predecessors) are now on the flip side of a generation gap. In ‘Viva La Drone,’ Joe Procopio writes of young-adult know-it-alls in offices, stuck behind 35-ish know-nothing “arrogant bastards” who will ruin their youngers’ careers and souls until “the revolution” comes. He doesn’t specify what that revolution might be.

TOMORROW: If the Net really does kill newspapers as we know them, it could be the best thing papers have ever had.

A LOT OF ARTY TYPES love to hate Seattle and always have.

Oh, you could live here cheaply enough. And the neighbors were plenty easy to get along with, just so long as you didn’t expect ’em to welcome you with gregariously open arms.

But, the old line went, there was no money here and no decent arts infrastructure–the networks of (depending on your genre) museums, galleries, gallery customers, recording studios, record labels, nightclubs, film producers/distributors, publishers, agents, publicists, etc.

(An exception was the theater community, where patient troupes and producers gradually assembled their needed resources from approximately 1963 through approximately 1978. But to this day, local actors complain, management at the Rep and ACT still cast too many lead roles in New York.)

Today, things are a bit different. The region’s awash in cyber-wealth. Lotsa arts-infrastructure people have moved or at least passed through the place. A lot of culture-management enterprises have indigenously risen here, especially in popular and commercial music.

And with the new communications technology (much of it developed here) and the DIY-culture boom, that oldtime culture bureaucracy’s starting to seem less necessary to a lot of folks.

But all that’s not enough for some boho-folks.

As we noted back in April, the boom’s left a lot of local old-timers behind, some of whom are culture-biz old-timers. The tech biz has produced a lot of low-paying day jobs and perma-temp gigs, but the big-money positions all seem to require either hyper-aggressive sales skills or five years’ experience on software technologies that just came out last year.

As COCA’s current “Land/Use/Action” series of exhibitions and events depicts, real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification mean it’s harder every year to live here–especially if you’re a visual artist who needs adequate studio space, a musician who needs a place to play, or a creator in any discipline who needs to invest time in your work before it’s ready to go out into the world.

(Many of these cyber-employers demand 60 or more hours a week from their staffs, plus a sense of devotion-to-the-empire so fanatical as to pretty much exclude any self-styled free thinkers as potential hires.)

This leaves Seattle as an exciting place to document, with physical and social changes and confrontations to be seen just about everywhere, but still not an optimal live/work site for the would-be documentor.

Contemporary-art galleries still struggle as always. The big-bucks out-of-towners who plopped a couple of fancy gallery spaces down here, hoping to siphon some of that cyber-spending-money, have closed up shop and split.

Literary publishing here still means the gay-and-theory-oriented Bay Press, the feminist-oriented Seal Press, and the tourist-oriented Sasquatch Books.

Bands and musicians can still make stuff here, but managers and promoters find a career ceiling they can’t breach without heading to N.Y./L.A.

Art-film exhibition’s big here, but art-film making is still just getting off the ground (and commercial/industrial filmmaking here has nearly collapsed).

So the new Hobson’s choice, for many, seems to be to either take up a Real Career (if possible) and leave one’s real life’s work to semi-commercial or hobby status; sell out another way and make glass bowls or other stuff the moneyed people here will buy; move to the old-line Big Media cities; or move further out into lo-rent land.

(These topics and others will be discussed in “Where’d the Artists Go?: Art and Development in Belltown,” a COCA-sponsored forum tonight, July 13, at the reopened, remodeled (but looking-exactly-like-it-used-to) Speakeasy Cafe, 2nd and Bell.)

TOMORROW: The new local art neighborhood?

ELSEWHERE: Perservering hippie-musician Jef Jaisun has his own list of reasons to dislike Seattle. Alas, most of them involve weather, and seem intended to discourage inmigration (the old Emmett Watson “Lesser Seattle” schtick). And there’s a whole “Weblog” site to “Why (BLANK) Sucks.”

THE KINGDOME WAS TWO YEARS OLD, and had housed the Mariners for one season, when Esquire contributing editors Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin published a coffee-table picture book, High Tech: The Industrial Design and Source Book for the Home.

Here’s what an out-of-print-books site says about it:

“High-tech is a term being used in architectural circles to describe an increasing number of residences and public buildings with a nuts-and-bolts-exposed-pipes technological look or to describe residences made of prefabricated components more commonly used to build warehouses or factories. The authors have expanded this definition to include a parallel trend in interior design-the use of commonplace commercial and industrial equipment in the home.”

The Kingdome was a high-tech design of the old school (before the trends discussed in the book). That is, it took a purely utilitarian approach to its purpose of housing entertainment.

It was a perfect symbolization of the Seattle civic zeitgeist circa 1976-77. In a town just a few generations removed from the frontier, and just six years removed from the massive Boeing bust, it was a monument to frugality and efficiency. It lacked not only the creature comforts of modern stadia but the basic aesthetic principles of a facility whose tenants had to compete for the public’s discretionary leisure spending.

But it was an engineering marvel, despite having been built to less-than-precision by the low bidder. Boeing, and its engineering mentality, still ruled the Seattle spirit back then.

That spirit adored the miracle of the thin concrete roof, of the whole nine-acre interior room built for only some $50 million. It marveled that our then-fair city could finally become A Big League Town, simply by turning some old railroad yards (on filled-in tide flats) into a just-adequate-enough home for baseball, football, basketball (for a couple years), soccer, evangelists, monster trucks, RV shows, and gift expos.

But, as they say, that was then.

Today, the Seattle civic zeitgeist is much better symbolized in the new Mariner park, Safeco Field.

The old ballpark was done on the cheap. The new ballpark’s the most expensive ever built, at a cool half-billion.

The old ballpark was old high-tech: All business. The new ballpark is the new high-tech, as prophesied in Kron and Slesin’s old book: Industrial luxury.

From the faux-aged brick false front along the 1st Avenue South side to the green steel girders buttressing the mammoth sliding roof, it embodies the same design aesthetic as the Bemis Building a block to its west. That’s one of those old warehouses that’s been gussied up into costly condos, where the cyber-nouveau-riche put up their Chihuly glass bowls among exposed pipework and concrete structural columns and imagine they’re living in “artist housing.”

Safeco Field is a way-cushy entertainment palace that merely looks old-fashioned as a luxury-design choice, intended by the architects to reinforce that George Will baseball-as-Americana feeling while still lushly pampering its patrons and charging them accordingly.

While neither Bill Gates nor Paul Allen is directly involved in the team or its management, the team’s new home clearly reflects the city as the suburban-residing Gates and Allen have helped re-define it.

A city where industry, the making and moving of tangible objects, is treated as a nostalgic memory.

A city where everything and everyone is expected to serve The Upscale, to the point of tax-subsidized luxury suites (still not sold out) within a tax-subsidized luxury stadium.

A city with no more patience for such quaint notions as thrift or mere adequacy; where everything must be World Class (even if it sports a back-to-basics look to it).

ELSEWHERE: The L.A. Times reports a clever Russian company’s found the perfect brand name for its cut-price detergent: “Ordinary Detergent,” copping the name and box design seen in ubiquitous Russian ads for a Procter & Gamble product. I’m still waiting for the chance to start my own band, “Special Guest” (they’d never headline a gig, but would open for everybody).

TOMORROW: Re-examing the age-old question, Does Seattle Suck?

AS WE’VE MENTIONED, there’s a whole counter-revolution in male depictions going on these days. While indirectly due to a post-feminist generation of American college boys taught that their only proper gender-role was to wallow in universal guilt, its direct origin comes from Britain and a slew of “laddie” magazines, many of which have now established successful U.S. editions.

It’s spread to two cable shows, FX’s The X Show (a daily hour of Maxim-like lifestyle features on beer tasting, rowdy football-fan behavior, strip-club etiquette, et al.) and Comedy Central’s The Man Show (a weekly half-hour of Almost Live-like comedy spiels built around the same topics).

These shows and magazines don’t rebut the neo-sexist image of Man As Slime. They revel in it.

More reveling, albeit with more tragic consequences, gets portrayed in current novels (Richard Ford’s Women With Men) and movies (Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men).

When Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace started spewing forth stories into assorted magazines last year under the common title “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” I was prepared for more of the same. More male-as-intrinsically-evil-predator, female-as-innocent-prey-or-righteous-avenger.

Thankfully, Wallace is too smart for such one-dimensionalities.

The men who narrate their life stories to an unheard female interviewer, in segments scattered through Wallace’s new story collection of the same name, are less hideous than merely pathetic. The sins they either boast or whimper about consist of little more than wanting to have sex with women and achieving that goal via somewhat-obvious come-on routines. The men never stop to consider the extent to which their “conquests” might have seen through, and chosen to play along with, these stupid seduction tricks.

If anything, these elequent, rambling narratives show not how bad the men are but how deeply PC-self-consciousness has hurt women and men.

That Wallace’s low-level Lotharios can so readily proclaim and/or bemoan their own self-perceived hideousness, based on nothing more than fulfilling (or wishing to fulfill) their casual-sex desires, shows how ready the characters are to accept the new sexism’s double standard, that a man can only choose to be either male-but-not-human or human-but-not male.

Some of the collection’s other stories don’t quite carry the same emotional heft. “Octet” is little more than a longwinded postmodern writing exercise in the limitations of postmodern writing exercises. He does better with “Adult World” and “The Depressed Person,” in which two young women are psychologically trapped deep within the private hells of their own recursive thought patterns–until sudden, unexpected realizations let than have moments outside their own heads, brief moments that still show them ways out.

These heroines’ obsessive-compulsive thought patters are ideally mated to Wallace’s obsessive-compulsive prose style, which, as always, is the real star of the book. Alternately concise and expansive, it leads you in with acres of rambling asides and aburd levels of detail that appear more like rough-draft notes than exited text–then zings you with a morsel of verbal perfection.

SIDEBAR: One of the collection’s pieces is in the first issue of the new quarterly journal Tin House, which, like Starbucks’ in-store magazine Joe, is a would-be middlebrow litmag with Northwest money behind it (Portland, in this case) but N.Y.C.-based editors.

A dumb hype piece in the Village Voice raved on and on about how Tin House represented something all new and daring and cuttin’-edge. Don’t believe it. Aside from the Wallace piece and Richard McCann’s downbeat liver-transplant memoir, all of it’s competent and none of it’s really good. Would be avant-gardists love to quote something Picasso’s supposed to have said about the chief enemy of creativity being good taste. Tin House has good taste up to its armpits, and that’s about the worst insult I could give it right now.

TOMORROW: The Rainforest Cafe is the world’s easiest satirical target–EVER!

LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Is America Used Up?, a 1973 book about America’s infamous ’70s malaise, a book which recommended somehow finding our way back to the can-do spirit that the author claimed had made this country great.

Twenty-six years after that book came out, we all can think of some things Americans could do if they got back to some of that old industrial-expansionist-era vigor.

Here’s one task: Rebuilding urban, and especially the suburban, landscape. Make the burbs more like real towns, with more informal meeting-places and more strolling around and walking to work; instead of ever-huger houses in ever-sparser subdivisions connected by ever-wider roads for ever-bulkier assault vehicles.

It’s a big task, even bigger than building the suburbs in the first place. But fewer cars is a good first step. And if we can’t have fewer cars right away, let’s at least get smaller ones, like some of the way-cool minicars that sell so well in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

The Mercedes-Swatch Smart Car (discussed on this site last year) is, alas, still not coming to North America anytime soon; and neither is Ford of Europe’s cute little “Ka” (described by one critic as “a concentrated espresso shot of carness”).

But Toyota’s got an electric “concept car” (i.e., just for show) called the ecom that it is trotting around, particularly in Calif. where more severe smog limits are pushing automakers to pursue such desperate measures. Damn, the thing’s cute! It goes 60 mph, with about a 60 mile range between recharges. The company bills it as just the thing for scooting around short-range areas (colleges, small towns, “planned communities,” office-industrial complexes).

I can imagine it as a lot more. I can imagine it as a way to help bring back “community,” by encouraging folks to live, work, shop, learn, and hang out in closer geographic quarters. This would help neighborhood businesses (as opposed to big-box chains), though it would also encourage Net-based home offices and Net shopping and home schooling.

(Other companies are proposing to deal with the pending Calif. smog limits via more conventional-looking vehicles, such as Honda’s Hybrid, which uses batteries to supplement a regular gasoline engine.)

(Speaking of America’s unmet needs, what do you think this country could, or ought to, do? State your case at our ever-belligerent Misc. Talk discussion boards. More on this topic a little later on.)

ELSEWHERE: KOMO claims it’s the first TV station in the world ot air all its daily newscasts in digital, hi-definition TV. But its engineering department confirms only the anchor-studio segments are HD. Those of you well-heeled “early adopters” out there with the way-costly HD-compatible sets can see Connie Thompson’s face exquisitely pixel-rendered, but the field coverage (you know, what you’re really talking about when you talk about “seeing the news”) is still shot on good old, ’80s-vintage, analog-tape Betacams. (KING has some HD field cameras in use, but it also still uses some traditional analog camcorders and then uses digital-processing tricks to enhance their images. NorthWest Cable News shoots and edits its field footage on digital, regular-definition tape.)

TOMORROW: Cool webzines that are not Salon or (thank heavens) Slate.

PRE-FOURTH-O-JULY SPECIAL: Found a used paperback at a sidewalk sale, Is America Used Up? (Judith Mara Gutman, Bantam Books, 1973).

Using the photo-illustrated essay format of Marshall McLuhan’s paperback screeds, Gutman (whose works are all out of print, though she continues to travel and lecture about the history of photography) compared the old spirit of American can-do expansionism (as expressed in old photos of industry, homesteading, and family life) with the national angst she saw in the book’s present-day era of recession, double-digit inflation, oil shortages, Watergate, and the last days of the Vietnam debacle.

“We move more hesitantly,” Gutman wrote, “try to run risk out of our lives, and become more weary about reaching far-off ends. We’ve lost the surety and conviction that we formerly gained from living on an edge that we could never predictably know was going to provide a firm footing. We’ve lost the belief in what we could create, not in what we did create, but the belief in our ability to establish a new order of life should we want to.”

Today, of course, we’re supposed to again be living in boom times. Some commentators have proclaimed end-O-century American corporate capitalism as the final for-all-time social configuration for the whole world. Everybody’s supposed to be hot-for-success, defined in strictly material terms. Few folk, it seems, want to talk about the underclass, about urban ghettos or abandoned factory towns, about victims.

(Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur partly attributed the partly closing of the volunteer agency Seattle Rape Relief to a social zeitgeist that doesn’t want to be bothered with such troublesome facts of human existence as domestic violence and its survivors.)

At least back in the supposed bad-old-days of the ’70s, some folks were a little more willing to consider that all might not be completely hunky-dory in our land.

Gutman saw an America that suffered from nothing less than a lack of spirit.

In our day, America might be suffering from a misdirected spirit.

I’m not the only commentator to question why America’s “reviving” cities can support fancy-ass stadia and convention centers and subsidized luxury-shopping palaces, but not (fill in your favorite cause here).

The simple answer is that business gets most anything it wants from government these days. What doesn’t help business, or the managerial caste, gets ignored. If the NRA and Christian Coalition are losing some of their past political clout, it’s just because business-centric politicians feel they no longer need to suck up to those groups’ voting blocs. If you believe the op-ed pundits, next year’s Presidential race will be a snoozer between two southern scions of boardroom deal-making, Albert Gore fils and George Bush fils.

What we need now is a third or fourth way–something beyond boomer-leftist victimhood, middle-of-the-road corporatism, and religious-right authoritarianism. Something that goes beyond protesting and analyzing, that empowers more folks (including folks outside the professional classes) to take charge of their own destiny. That’s what Gutman believed had once made America great, but which became lost even as “diverse” expressions and art forms emerged:

“Though our dominant culture carries more diverse forms of expression than it ever before managed, we don’t think of it as supporting our desire for expression. It’s as if it can’t. No matter how much we hoped the objects and desires that have widened our cultural patterns would swell our expression, they haven’t.”

MONDAY: The end of Mark Sidran’s reign of terror? One can only hope…

LAST THURSDAY, we briefly discussed whether the “swingers” (organized spouse-swapping) movement was a potential force for social liberation or merely just another middle- to upper-class recreational option.

Last Friday, we briefly discussed the new Austin Powers sequel, whose time-traveling plot’s mainly set in a retro-parody of the “Swinging London” era (albeit in 1969, close to that era’s real-life demise if not just after it), and which depicted the hero’s sexual hijinx as something more than mere casual “shagging” but as a necessary regular recharging of the life-force he needs in order to keep saving the world.

Today, we’ve got a link to a British social critic who claims the casual promiscuity of ’60s-style “swinging” and the organized, invite-only group sex of ’90s-style “swinging” are both less-than-optimal expressions of sexual nature.

Jennie Bristow, writing in the magazine LM (no, I don’t know what the letters stand for), takes a dim view of “playful” sexual expressions of all types, paying particular scorn at “queer culture” and at young heteros who wish to emulate it.

It’s not that Bristow doesn’t want folks to have fun. It’s just that she thinks fun-for-its-own-sake isn’t enough.

Bristow claims consumer culture’s emphasis on the orgasm as a personal experience (little different from a drug high or an athletic feat), combined with radical-feminists’ and corporate-conservatives’ moralistic phobias against coital intimacy, has left a new young generation in the U.K. and the U.S. obsessed with looking and feeling sexy but deathly afraid of anything approaching the deeper, interpersonal aspects of sexual interaction.

The result: College campuses full of sexually-suggestive imagery, attire, walks, and stances. Joy-of-masturbation books and seminars. A booming market in self-pleasuring toys. S/M iconography everywhere, from movies to comic books and video games. Hetero young adults pretending to be bi so they can appropriate the self-righteous hedonism of queer culture.

But also, increasingly draconian sexual-harrassment rules and regulations treating almost everything people do with one another (and especially what males do with females) as (1) really sexual and (2) potentially menacing.

“In public,” Bristow writes, “sex is more than acceptable; in private, between individuals, it is treated as suspect.”

She concludes, “Passion is what sexual codes of condust seek to regulate, and passion is what most of the fashionable forms of sex are safe from. In today’s antiseptic culture, where relationships are conducted at arm’s length and in the public eye, the closer you get to somebody the less you are encouraged to trust them, or commit yourself to them.”

That was certainly the credo of Austin Powers’ spoof source, James Bond, who in Ian Fleming’s original novels was depicted as an aloof aesthete who mated and killed with equal dispassionate skill.

It’s somewhat akin to the credo of the mate-swappers, who enjoy their extracurricular rites but are expected to emotionally bond with no one except the spouse they came in with.

It’s also, as we briefly noted previously, the credo of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which “everyone belongs to everyone else,” where promiscuity and virtual-reality porn are everyday institutions, but where deep one-on-one love is considered a threat to the social order.

I can sort-of partly agree with some of Bristow’s points. I believe public sexual-posturing, erotica, sex toys, and fetishes can be all well and good within their inherent limitations. And I support queer culture more than she does; but I’m more willing than her to know that gays and lesbians are indeed capable of deep relationships with all the associated turmoils and rewards. It’s the rewards part that “sexual liberation” advocates sometimes forget about. There ought to be an approach to sexuality that’s neither the Religious Right’s old-style repression, the Andrea Dworkin crowd’s new-style repression, and the lonely rugged-individualism promoted by the porn and dildo industries.

Sex ought to be about bringing people together, not keeping them apart.

Tomorrow: Some more thoughts on this.

I SAID LAST TIME THERE’D BE a new look for your favorite social-commentary site, and here ’tis. From now on, you’ll get a fresh Misc. World dose every darn weekday.

Usually, these mini-columns will contain only one item apiece, compared to the 13-year tradition (four years online) of a grab-baggy of three-dot juxtapositions. These daily installments will show up right here on the main miscmedia.com page, so you can start ruining your mind right away.

For those of you who can’t log on every day, you’ll still get to read a week’s worth (or more) thanks to the handy links right beneath each day’s installment.

These daily column-ettes will now incorporate the book, movie, and music reviews which for the past seven or eight months have had their separate section of the site, Clark’s Culture Corral. Recent review pieces will continue to be linked from the Culture Corral index page; and you’ll still be able to directly go from the reviews to get the works from Amazon.com.

And, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a slight name change here. The site itself is now known as miscmedia.com; the site’s former name, Misc. World, is now the name of the online column (previously known just as Misc.) that’s the site’s main feature. The short name lives on in The Big Book of Misc.

SPEAKING OF WHICH: The Big Book is out. It’s beautiful, if I may modestly say so myself. Those of you who’ve pre-ordered your copies should have ’em now; if not, please email me.

Thanks to all of you who attended the pre-release party last Tuesday at the Ditto. Highlights from the annual party questionnaire tomorrow.

What’s At Stake

Book feature, 6/2/99

THE STAKEHOLDER SOCIETY

by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott

Yale University Press

Now here’s one Big Idea To Save America that’ll likely get lotsa attention from certain media outlets dependent on the consumer buying power of young adults:

Give every young, non-criminally-convicted U.S. citizen $80,000 to spend as they damn well please, with no pesky bureaucrats telling them how.

If they wanted to spend it for college, they could get the dough right away at age 18. Otherwise, they’d get it in four annual installments starting at age 22.

Sure, it would vastly multiply the market for all the goods and services sold in “alternative” weeklies. But, asYale law profs Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott claim, it would also put America back on the road toward equality of opportunity, multicultural harmony, and even participatory democracy.

They admit some young “stakeholders” would undoubtedly foolishly fritter away their dough on cars, gambling, booze, pot, lap dances, designer clothes, genital piercings, killer stereos, and the other fine material temptations aimed at young adults. But they insist most would wisely use their “stakes” to start careers, go learn about the world, buy homes, have kids, help retire family debts, invest in no-load mutual funds, or otherwise make better lives for themselves while helping drive the engines of the producer/consumer society.

OK OK, so it’ll cost some bucks. About a quarter-trillion, they authors estimate. But we can always impose Swedish-level taxes on the really rich. Then, once stakes have been given out, we can hike inheritance taxes so past recipients will have to pay their 80 grand back upon death.

And besides, more young adults with money oughta eventually mean fewer young adults robbing gas stations or dealing dope to get money, so we’ll get to cut back on currently rapidly-escalating costs of cops, courts, and prisons.

The genius of the Stakeholder Society concept is it has something to offer radical leftists, pro-business Democrats, welfare defenders, affirmative-action defenders, and entrepreneurial Republicans (though not sanctity-of-property Republicans or government-as-root-of-all-evil Libertarians).

The way the co-authors plug their scheme, everybody would come out a winner except the really rich and certain low-wage employers who rely on a steady supply of desperate kids. (That rank of employers now includes the U.S. military, so any pay raises needed to keep attracting recruits would add to the stakeholder scheme’s final cost.)

As summarized on the cover blurb, the authors think it’s a great idea because it’d help lead to “a society that is more democratic, productive, and free,” and would “enhance each young adult’s real ability to shape his or her own future.”

It would jumpstart opportunity for the urban and rural poor, eliminate the burden of college loans, feed more technically-trained kids into a hi-tech 21st-century economy that’ll desperately need ’em, shove more dough through those stock-market “investment products” so many non-22-year-olds are depending on for their retirements, and let young women have babies without worrying about how they’ll support ’em.

And, Ackerman and Alstott include in an aside, it’d do wonders for “the arts.” Millions more would get to buy digital-video cameras and DAT recorders, paint pictures, stage performance-art pieces, publish zines, and/or hang out in Prague with other idea-laden folk.

Ackerman and Alstott include tons of details, crunched numbers, supplementary arguments, counter-counter-arguments, and endnotes to back up their proposal. But I have my skepticisms, natch.

Besides the difficulties in getting it underway (they’d basically have to turn a total about-face from 20-year national trends toward enriching the already-rich and disenfranchising the poor), would it work the way they imagine? It’s not hard to imagine the rich and their wholly-owned-subsidiary politicians demanding to burden the program with more restrictions and eligibility requirements year after year, to the point where it becomes an excuse to force all young adults (not just poor ones) to live under the thumb of bureaucrats telling ’em precisely how to live their lives.

Still, it’s good to at least have these two speaking out for the non-upscale, which darned near nobody else does these days (even on what used to be called the left).

It might be an idea that’s doomed to be little more than a fantasy in the current political climate. But you gotta credit Ackerman and Alstott for daring to propose it, and daring their readers to come up with something better.

A Triumph of Underachievement

Book feature for The Stranger, 5/26/99

AN UNDERACHIEVER’S DIARY

by Benjamin Anastas

Spike/Avon, $10 (paperback)

Success, success, success. Sometimes all the damned ostentatious displays of wealth, power, and smugness out there just make one want to throw up, or at least momentarily escape from it all with this beautiful, spare novella. The book’s a success itself, but that’s forgivable because it successfully celebrates failure.

One of its many triumphant aspects is its (relatively) unapologetic defense of that venerable American personality type, the scion of affluence who rejects striving in favor of what pessimists call “slacking” and what optimists call “voluntary simplicity.”

As the back-cover blurb explains, “In the mid-1960s, William was the firstborn of identical twins. It is the last time in his life he will ever be first in anything.”

What gets in the way is a series of debilitating childhood illnesses, which keep him out of school for the better part of two years and permanently affect his self-image. Narrating from adulthood, he insists he wasn’t and isn’t looking for anybody’s pity. He claims his underachieving was a deliberate life choice, a path of bitter struggle to contrast with his twin’s charmed life of effortless grace.

“Please, do not confuse this diary with a memoir written for a therapeutic purpose, designed to exorcise my demons and provide a thrill for everyone who cares to watch them all take flight….”

You don’t have to be familiar with the literary “theory of the unreliable narrator” to detect a taste of self-serving defensiveness.

But no matter what the motivation, William’s early life certainly is one defined by its missed marks.

Almost fatally introverted, he cuts down on his opportunities to strike out with girls by asking his parents to send him to a boarding school he calls “The Boys’ Prison.”

From there it’s five years in a hilariously undistinguished little college, where he adopts “a steady diet of beer and chicken wings” while his classmates wander “through the dirt and rubble smiling like idiots, name tags affixed to their ‘Coed Naked Frisbee’ T-shirts” (and while his brother wows ’em all at Harvard).

From there it’s a series of go-nowhere jobs, ending as William hooks up with a small-time religious cult, not out of any worshipful fever but for the convenience of letting someone else make all the decisions for him.

Of course, it’s no real autobiography. Benjiman Anastas comes from out of that ever-acclaimed Iowa Writer’s Workshop gang, and his elegant prose ripples with the mark of patient polishing with which any real William wouldn’t bother, even when defending the nobility of the underachiever:

“The underachiever’s life is a lonely one, devoid of sustaining warmth, and fundamental intimacy; this statelessness, if you will, can be the source of boundless happiness, a kind of transcendental bliss known only to the deepest American thinkers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Tony Robbins)…”

Tomorrow’s Not What It Used to Be

TV essay, 5/12/99

The Simpsons, as all good fans know, began as a series of comic-strip-like shorts on the original Tracey Ullman Show, one of the nascent Fox network’s first prime-time offerings. Life In Hell panel-cartoonist Matt Groening, who had grown up in Portland and gone to Evergreen State, was one of two “alternative” cartoonists hired in the show’s first season to come up with 20-second, character-based animated gags to run in between Ullman’s skits.This meant Groening, his voice cast, and his original animation partners got to spend two and a half years discovering the intricacies of Bart, Lisa, Homer, Grandpa, and Marge (originally named simply “Mrs. Simpson”) before they got a whole show to themselves.

The resulting series, TV’s longest-running current prime-time comedy, found a way to expand out from the shorts’ narrow focus without slowing down its gag and dialogue pacing, by placing the family in a vast, carefully-constructed cartoon universe, designed less for narrative consistency (exactly how do all those celebrities keep passing through what Lisa once called “a small town with a centralized population”?) than for comic and story potential.

As the series has ploughed on (the 250th episode is now in the early stages of production), successive incoming writers have moved its emphasis even further from the Simpson family (except to find ever-more excrutiating ways to humiliate poor Homer), toward the now-nearly-100 other semiregular characters and their ever-morphing town of Springfield.

When Fox finally let Groening start an all-new series, he didn’t start over at The Simpsons’ character-comedy roots. Instead, he went further into the expansiveness.

The result is Futurama, a show whose leading “character” is its achingly-detailed comic vision of 30th-century New York City.

The show’s six or seven assorted human, robot, and alien protagonists are, so far, little more than deliberately underplayed explorers and explainers of this setting. In the show’s mix of cel and computer animation, the characters are, literally, two-dimensional figures in three-dimensional surroundings.

Of course, a lot of science fiction stories, novels, comic books, movies, and shows have been like that. Nobody really studies Buck Rogers or Lara Croft as characters with personal histories motivations (other than the motivation to kick bad-guy butt).

It’s the “conceptual” parts of these creatures’ worlds that turns on the hardcore sci-fi fans–the architecture, the costumes, the gadgetry, the gimmicks, the spectacle.

The spectacle is also what makes sci-fi so amenable to being played for humor. That, as well as the hammy heroics of older sci-fi concepts (or, more recently, the unrelieved grimness of so many ’70s-’80s sci-fi concepts).

I’m not sure who first used the phrase “May the Farce Be With You” (I think it was Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck, itself later made into a pathetic movie). But it fits a whole subgenre of works ranging from the sublime (Dark Star, Red Dwarf) to the ridiculous (Flesh Gordon) to the horrific (the “filk” parody songs performed at sci-fi fan conventions).

Futurama’s particular spectacle-farce is, like its NYC (explained as having twice been completely destroyed and rebuilt), constructed on top of past notions of futurism.

Its spaceships and doohickeys and skylines are funnied-up versions of the ones in old Flash Gordon serials andWorld’s Fair exhibits, full of modernist hope rather than the dystopian decay of Blade Runner or Escape From New York.

Its robots and aliens are burlesques of the bug-eyed creatures in old monster movies, not the bureaucratically-slick Data from Star Trek or the hyperrealistic critters in Alien or Jurassic Park.

This is partly due, certainly, to Groening being an over-40 Blank Generation kid whose childhood fantasy entertainment involved pre-Star Wars fare. But it’s also an admission on the part of Groening and his writers that the futurisms of the past were just plain more exciting, more involving, more adventuresome, and above all more fun. All you have to do to turn those futures into a sincere comedy (the kind that will stay fresh after a few hundred episodes) is to play up their fun parts while gently assaulting their utopian assumptions, instead reasserting the eternality of human nature with all its flaws.

To play the worlds of Blade Runner or even Star Wars for laffs, you’d have to settle for either shallow parody (which wouldn’t last long as a series) or play it for dark, antiheroic irony (which, as Max Headroom proved, also plays itself out too quickly for an ongoing series).

Most science fiction has, on the surface, been about where society’s going. Futurama is, in its subtext, more about where we’ve been, what we’ve lost, and, by using itself as an example of a neo-adventure aesthetic, how we might bring at least pieces of it back.

MISC., the column that likes to think it knew better than to plant delicate little outdoor plants just before last Saturday’s overnight near-freeze, is proud as heck that ex-Steelhead zine editor Alex Steffen has not only taken the helm of the once-moribund local advocacy group Allied Arts, but has, along with his colleagues in the agency’s new leadership, issued a strong call for Seattle to become a city that actually supports the arts and artists, instead of merely coasting on its decaying “liberal” reputation as an excuse to subsidize construction projects and rich people’s formula entertainments. Speaking of which…

BOARD GAMES: A few nay-sayers in the performance-art community have privately suggested that the board members of On the Boards fired artistic director Mark Murphy, who led the production and theater-management outfit to national prominence, because those board members supposedly wanted to turn OTB away from art-for-art’s-sake presentations and closer toward yupscale commercial crowd pleasers, whatever those might be in the realms of modern dance and post-jazz music. (Mellow acoustic folkies? Lord of the Dance clone acts?) Anyhoo, I don’t quite believe the story. I have no proof either way, but I can imagine the board firing Murphy out of little more than personal spite. It’s still a shameful situation that shouldn’t have happened. Murphy’s possibly the best arts promoter this town’s seen (outside of the rock and DJ-music realms) since COCA’s heyday. Part-time board members can come and go, but an artistic director like Murphy’s someone you oughta try to keep under most any circumstances.

UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. goes to press this week! Everything’s on schedule for the Tues., 6/8 release party, now tentatively scheduled for the new Ditto Tavern at 5th & Bell. Mail orders are now being accepted; online ordering’s still in the process of being set up. The updated version of my older book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, also continues apace, with that publication date still more-or-less set for late Sept. or early Oct. I still wanna know which 1995-99 local acts ought to be mentioned in it; make your nominations at our splendido Misc. Talk discussion boards.

UPDATE #2: Summit Cable has resumed transmitting the public access channel 29 after one week in which it claimed TCI had ceased feeding the channel to it and TCI claimed Summit was simply not receiving the feed properly due to an engineering glitch of some sort.

UPDATE #3: The Speakeasy Cafe will remain open! And, as I’d recommended (not that they deliberately followed my advice or anything), its post-June 1 format will reiterate its core identity as an Internet cafe and low-key Belltown neighborhood hangout joint. The money-losing food-service side of the operation (soups, salads, sandwiches, hummus) has already been cut back. Within three weeks, there’ll be no more cover-charge music shows in the front room (which, besides drawing negative attention from the Liquor Board and the pool hall upstairs, detracted from the drop-in atmosphere an Internet cafe needs). While some music events may continue in the Speakeasy’s back room, the end of front-room shows means the loss of what had become a premier venue for Seattle’s vibrant avant-improv scene. Elsewhere in clubland…

DANCING TO THE TUNE OF $$: 700 Club/Last Supper Club entrepreneur Bill Wheeler says he loves being the target of that hate poster some anonymous Judas has pasted all over Pioneer Square, headlined “The Last Supper Club: All Hype” and berating it as a cash-grubbing nouveau riche hangout, a traitor to the supposed “tribal” spirit of the dance-music community. Wheeler says he couldn’t have generated better publicity had he made the poster himself (which he insists he didn’t).

Wheeler’s also quite proud of the expensive, elitist reputation his new club has so far succeeded in creating, and which the poster-creator loathed: “Can you believe it? People are paying $50 to get into the place! This is what Seattle’s needed.” Well, loyal Misc. readers already know what I think about headstrong San Franciscans (which Wheeler would freely admit to being) unilaterally proclaiming what Seattle needs, so I won’t persue that remark any further. As for paying that kind of money as a cover charge for entree to DJ music and a no-host bar (and suffering, on heavy nights, from a disco-era “selective door” policy), I’m fairly confident true Seattle hipsters can discern whether it’s worthy of their bother and their $$ or not. If not, I’m sure the savvy Wheeler can keep the business going by remarketing it to certain cyber-wealthy squares who think they can buy their way into hipness. Speaking of dance-club goers and notions of what’s hip…

HET-SETTERS: Entrepreneurs in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla. area (you know, home of the nation’s raunchiest strip-club scene and the region that tried to take away our baseball team) have launched a line of T-shirts and other logo apparel called “Str8 Wear,” purporting to announce heterosexual pride. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that stands to easily get misconstrued as gay-hatred. The designers insist in interviews and on their website that “We’re not anti-gay, we’re pro-heterosexual,” and merely want to offer “your chance to let everyone know you are proud of your sexuality,” via “an emblem that will identify you as a person who is available to the opposite sex.” It’s especially intended, the designers claim, for patrons of certain dance-music clubs and other urban-nightlife scenes where anyone who’s not gay might feel themselves branded as total out-of-it squares.

There are other problems with the Str8 Wear concept. It invites its wearers to see themselves as a tight li’l subculture via a term that merely indicates belonging to a vast, undifferentiated majority (except when referring to that punk-rock subsector, “str8 edge”). (But then again, merchandisers have long tried to persuade customers they’re expressing their invididuality by being just like most everybody else.)

A more positive, even more provocative, alternative might be the models at that T-shirt store on University Way, “I (heart) Men,” “I (heart) Women,” “I (heart) Cock,” and “I (heart) Pussy.” These come closer to provoking some of the anti-hetero biases that still exist in an urban-hipster culture where, too often, “sex positive attitudes” are permitted only to gay men, lesbians, and female-dominant fetishists.

In the square/conservative realm, sexually active straight men are often denounced as selfish rogues (or, more clinically, as “sex addicts”); and sexually active straight women are still often disdained as sluts (or, more clinically, as suffering from “self esteem issues”).

In the so-called “alternative” realm, straight men are often viciously stereotyped as misogynistic rapist-wannabes; and straight women are often condescendingly treated as either the passive victims of Evil Manhood or as really lesbians who just don’t know it yet.

As I’ve said from time to time, we need to rediscover a positive vision of heterosexuality, one that goes beyond the whitebread notion of “straight” and toward a more enthusiastic affirmation of one’s craving to connect with other-gendered bodies and souls. Hets don’t need to differentiate themselves from gays as much as they need to learn from them. To learn to take pride in one’s body and one’s desires, no matter what the pesky stereotypers say about you. Elsewhere in gender-identity-land…

BEATING AROUND THE BUSCH: The big beer companies, seeing the money to be made in gay bars, have for some time now tried to position themselves as at least tacit supporters of the gay-rights cause. Miller (owned by Jesse Helms’s pals at Phillip Morris) has cosponsored the Gay Pride Parade in Seattle for several years. Coors (owned by Orrin Hatch’s pal Pete Coors) has run ads in gay magazines claiming the company’s a lot queer-friendlier than popular rumor has sometimes alleged. And Anheuser-Busch has placed huge ad banners inside gay bars reviving (and repurposing) the Bud Light ad-tagline from a few years ago, “Yes, I Am.” Now, the company’s devised an ad for mainstream magazines depicting two men holding hands; quite possibly the first time this has been shown in any big company’s product ad (even the Chivas Regal ad from a few years ago had its gay couple maintaining proper distance while they jogged along a beach). The slogan: “Be yourself, and make it a Bud Light.” Apparently, the company’s got hundreds of homophobic phone callers denouncing the ad. If you want to show your support, you can dial the same number (1-800-DIAL-BUD). Remember, you can approve of this modest symbol of inclusiveness even if you never drink the beer.

‘TIL NEXT WEEK AT THIS SAME TIME (or whatever time you choose to read the column), pray for warmth, root for the Seattle-owned TrailBlazers in the basketball playoffs, and ponder these still-ahead-of-their-time words attributed to JFK: “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.”

MISC. really tries to point the way toward a post-irony age, but can’t hemp noticing when the downtown-Seattle Borders Books outlet holds a promo event this Saturday for the video release of You’ve Got Mail, that romantic-comedy movie predicated on the presumed evil of huge chain bookstores like Borders.

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the new URLs on this page and throughout the rest of the venerable Misc. World site. We’re now at Miscmedia.com, so adjust your bookmarks accordingly and tell all your friends. It’s all part of a big scheme tied into our new print venture; speaking of which…

UPDATE #1: The ultra-limited first edition of The Big Book of Misc. is a mere five weeks away. You can now pre-order your copy by following the instructions on this link. Act now to get your own signed and numbered copy of the 240-page, illustrated collection of the best items from 13 years’ worth of reportage about the wacky-wacky world that is American culture. The release party’s tentatively set for Tues., June 8 at the new Ditto, 5th & Bell.

UPDATE #2: When we last reported on the Sugar’s strip joint in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, it smanagement was trying to fend off municipal regulations by launching an initiative to change the suburb’s governmental setup toward one less likely to restrict the club’s ability to earn a buck. That drive made it to the ballot but lost.

Now, the club’s trying another tactic. It’s declared itself a non-profit “private club,” and hence not subject to any Shoreline regulations i/r/t commercial adult-entertainment businesses. To go there now, you’ve got to fill out a very short membership application, then return a week later to find out if you’ve been accepted, then pay $50 a year (installments accepted), all for the privilege of spending more money on table dances.

An explanatory flyer offered at the door claims all the membership fees get donated to assorted kids’ charities, and that the whole setup’s a small but necessary step to keep America from succumbing to “a Brave New World in the form of a Christian conservative state.” Actually, the flyer’s author (club attorney Gilbert Levy) got it wrong. The dystopian future in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World had plenty of commercial porn and sexual “freedom” (all the better to prevent the formation of intimate or family bondings that would threaten individual subjugation to the mass society). It’s George Orwell’s 1984 that had the Anti-Sex Leagues running about to forcibly stamp out all human passion other than hate and blind obedience. Speaking of which…

FOLLOWING THE WAKE OF THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: You’ve read the media analysis of the Littleton, Colo. teen tragedy, and by now you’ve even read the analysis of the analysis. A few things to remember, some of which didn’t make it into some of the analyses:

• Real goths don’t collect assault weapons. They might get into fantasies about vampires and post-nuclear zombies, but their real-life personas tend to be far more pacified. (South Park, set in a Littleton-like Colorado town, employed Cure singer Robert Smith for a guest voice as an action hero precisely because the role was so out-of-sync with Smith’s non-action image.)
• As noted in the Weekly, the Euro metal-punk band KMFDM (whose headman Sascha moved to Seattle as the band’s career was winding down) played aggressive music but was always opposed to real-life violence. In its biggest U.S. hit, the band referred to itself as “The Drug Against War.”
• The Trench Coat Mafia boys had their own tribal thang going on. They took bits and pieces from various subcultures and stitched them together to form their own particular monster. Besides industrial and heavy-metal music, they took notions and concepts from neo-Nazis and militia cults. The racist aspect of their ideology is something you just don’t find in more orthodox nerd or goth cliques (which tend to be pasty-face white but to profess solidarity with other outcast groups, including minorities).
• The conservative commentators, as might be expected, went all over themselves to get nearly everything wrong (“Guns don’t kill people, video games and Internet chat rooms and liberal moral relativism and do”).
• The middle-of-the-road commentators (particularly the likes of Dateline NBC) got almost as much wrong. By stereotyping goths, punks, nerds, geeks, smarties, role-playing-game players, video-game players, and just about anyone else who’s not a jock or cheerleader as walking time bombs, the media know-nothings are only encouraging the school officials and the “popular” kids to dehumanize and persecute the unpopular kids even more harshly.
• The liberal and quasi-left commentators liked to compare the Littleton massacre to what they see as America’s “real” culture of violence–the one that presently gives us bombers over Serbia and Iraq. I wouldn’t quite take it that directly. Kids have been cruel to one another in times of relative military peace (like most of the Clinton years), and in times of military conflict (like the Vietnam and Desert Storm eras). Besides, our supposed objective in the Balkans is to stop the kind of ethnic-purity crusade our homegrown neo-Nazis like to dream about.
• Violent media don’t kill people; violent people do. (Note Japan’s relative lack of youth violence and its abundance of youth-oriented-media violence.) Right-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Spawn and Doom. Left-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Schwarzenegger and the World Wrestling Federation. Corporate media defenders might love to blame Littleton on cultural phenomenon outside of corporate control (especially on that bad-ol’ Internet). All these blowhards have done is exploit 15 senseless deaths to promote their own agendas. Some of these agendas are as potentially divisive as that of the Trench Coat Mafia.
• If anything can be learned from the horror, it’s that kids can be, and are, cruel. Especially Caucasian American kids (perhaps a legacy of Britain’s even crueller boarding-school culture). As seen in very mild form in the current crop of teen movies, the typical high school caste system rewards the conceited, the athletic, and the “beautiful,” and disdains anybody with more than half a brain or more than half a conscience.

  Certainly in my own teenhood, and later in two day jobs dealing with teens, I’ve found little support or recognition within the system for any kid who wasn’t a potential star on the playing field or the sidelines. The media largely follow the inequity: One local TV newscast used to have a “Prep Athlete of the Month” segment, another used to have a “Student Athlete of the Week,” but nobody in local news (until this year’s revival of the Washington Spelling Bee) paid any notice to non-athletic young scholars. A truly progressive school system wouldn’t just be where it was OK for a girl to be good at sports; it would be where it was OK for a boy to be bad at sports.

• Perhaps we could use a new kind of PR campaign. One that celebrates the brainy ones, the nonconformists, what that Apple commercial called “the crazy ones.” I wouldn’t go the way of Times columnist Jerry Large, who once called for papers to promote community-volunteer kids as sexy role models. Instead, I’d honor the girls and boys who neither followed role models nor tried to be them. After all, it’s the geeks and the brains these days who (given at least a modicum of adult or peer encouragement) grow up with a chance at creative lives and/or hi-tech careers. It’s the girls who stop worrying about becoming popular who’re more likely to get to 18 childless. It’s the boys who face the taunts and the name-calling who’re more likely to successfully weather the slings and arrows of grownup office politics. It’s the kids who think learning’s too square who end up clerking at Kmart. But it’s the brainy outcasts who are constantly harassed and put down who can end up with the lifelong scars.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, call TCI to demand it resume feeding the public access channel to Summit Cable customers, and take to heart these words by E.B. White: “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom–he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”

Journeys of the Mind:

Yourgrau, Mygrau, Ourgrau

Book feature, 4/28/99

HAUNTED TRAVELLER:

An Imaginary Memoir

by Barry Yourgrau

Arcade Publishing, $23.95

Barry Yourgrau, as he insists on telling us (in the least interesting segment of his latest collection of “sudden fiction” sketches), is, in real life, yet another middle-aged, N.Y.C.-based author whose existence is centered around the old home office and whose “adventures” tend to involve sitting at the keyboard, trying to think stuff up.

Actually, his life’s been a little more exciting than that. He’s had side careers in acting and performance art (the latter basically involving telling his stories to live audiences). The bulk of the press packet for his new book,Haunted Traveller, consists of article clippings regarding the ill-fated film version of his last collection, The Sadness of Sex. (The movie, which alternated between readings and re-enactments of Yourgrau’s surrealistic mini-tales of obsession and low-key angst, remains unreleased after only a few producer-paid screenings in L.A.)

The Sex book, however, was and is a triumph. It can essentially be described as a sequence of brief, finely-described dream/nightmare imageries, mostly built not on erotic excitement but on sexuality’s other easy-to-push buttons–despair, loneliness, frustration, fear, embarassment, farce, compulsion, emotional turmoil, and the particularly hetero-male metaphor of finding oneself lost within an alien (and potentially unfriendly) environment, apprehensive yet compelled to continue surveying.

It’s no big stretch, then, for Yourgrau to switch to deconstructing travel-memoir cliches in his newest themed collection of fiction-oids.

I feel I’d spoil it if I mentioned too many of Yourgrau’s ingenious story premises here, because their downbeat, Kafkaesque revelation forms the whole point of many of his pieces. Like that mythical Japanese tour group that spends days on a bus to the Grand Canyon and then turns back after taking a few snapshots, Yourgrau never spends more time in any one fictive place than he deems necessary.

I am comfortable saying all the stories are based on the same premise: A first-person narrator travels, usually by foot, across strange and distant lands where he happens to speak the local language well enough to get involved (usually against his better judgement) with assorted citizenry and strange phenomena. It’s a classic storytelling setup (used everywhere from The Odyssey and Gulliver’s Travels to TV’s Route 66 and even Pokemon). But in Yourgrau’s deft hands, it serves less to introduce colorful short-term characters than to illuminate glimpses of his unnamed protagonist’s own persona. Through the 40 or so vignettes, we end up learning a lot less about the assorted places and people the Haunted Traveller meets than we do about the Traveller’s own rootlessness, his restlessness, his need to keep seeing more and more places and to never see too deeply into any one of them.

I will also reveal that the last piece, “Music,” finds the Traveller’s soul finally at rest, only after he’s no longer capable of continuing his lifelong escape from his own mortality.

In The Sadness of Sex, Yourgrau deconstructed lust. In Haunted Traveller, he deconstructs wanderlust. In both collections (and in two earlier books Arcade’s reissuing), he uses the precision techniques of the short-short story to provide a well-balanced exhibition of tiny glimpses into the human condition. Think of it as literary pointillism, or as the use of breadth to tell what depth cannot.

MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.

UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.

UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.

AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)

ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.

If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)

GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).

Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)

The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!

CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.

Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.

Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).

Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.

While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)

It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”