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MISC. would rather be most anywhere than San Diego’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon this Sunday, with bands at each mile-mark and a big oldies concert at the finish. An AP story hypes it: “Here’s your new inspiration for running a marathon: Pat Benetar and Huey Lewis are waiting for you at the end.” Now if they were at the start, that’d get me inspired to run as far away as I could.
ON THE RECORD: Some copies of the Airwalk Snowboard Generation CD box set bear a big sticker reading “Made In England.” Can you can think of a worse country to try to go snowboarding in?
INSURANCE RUNS: Those ESPN SportsCenter punsters have lotsa fun with corporate-arena names. Vancouver’s GM Place, they call “The Garage.” Washington, DC’s MCI Arena: “The Phone Booth.” Phoenix’s BankOne Ballpark: “The BOB.” But what could be made from “Safeco Field” (paid-for moniker to the new Mariner stadium)? “The Claims Office” doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. ‘Tho you could call the stadium’s scoreboard “The Actuarial Table.” Two games in a day could be a “Double Indemnity Header.” Home and visitors’ dugouts: “Assets” and “Liabilities.” TicketMaster surcharages: “Co-Payments.” Speaking of corporate largesse…
WINDOW PAINS: We’ll keep coming back to the Microsoft legal flap over the next months. But for now, consider the notion advanced by some MS supporters (including Fortune writer Stewart Alsop) that a software monopoly’s a good thing. The company’s address, “One Microsoft Way,” expresses the dream of Gates and his allies in associated industries to impose a structured, top-down order involving not just a single operating system and Internet browser but a single global culture controlled by a handful of corporations.
They claim it’s for a higher purpose of “standardization,” a unified technology for a unified planet. It’s an old rationalization of monopolists. AT&T used to use the slogan “One Policy, One System.” Rockefeller invoked similar images with the name “Standard Oil.”
Yet at this same time, the Net is abetting advocates of a different set of ideals–decentralized computing, cross-platform and open-architecture software, D.I.Y. entertainment and art. Not to mention thousands of religious sub-sects, sex fetishes, political factions, fan clubs, fashion trends, etc. The MS case won’t alone decide the fate of this diversity-vs.-control clash, but could become a turning point in it. Speaking of unity in cacophany…
SUB GOES THE CULTURE: Something called the Council on Civil Society (named for a phrase that’s served as an excuse for stifling cultural diversity around these parts) put out a treatise claiming “Americans must find a way to agree on public moral philosophy if democracy is going to survive.” Its report (Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths) claims, “If independent moral truth does not exist, all that is left is power.” An AP story about the group cited Madonna choosing single momhood as evidence of such social decay.
At best, it sounds like Dr. Laura’s radio rants demanding a return to impossibly rigid social and sexual conformities. At worst, it’s like the hypocritical pieties of “Family” demagogues who’ve been degenerating moral and religious discussion into a naked power game, selling churchgoers’ votes to politicians who really only care about Sacred Business. Yet any successful demagougery has an appeal to honest desires (for stability, assurance, identity, etc.) at its heart. It’s a complicated, complex populace. Cultures and subcultures will continue to branch off and blossom. Attempts to impose one official religion, diet, dress code, sex-orientation, etc. are dangerous follies at best.
So what would my idea of a standard of conduct be? Maybe something like this: There’s more to life than just “lifestyles.” There’s more to well-being than just money. There’s more to healthy communities than just commerce. There’s more to spirituality than just obedience (whether it’s evangelical obedience or neopagan obedience). We’ve gotta respect our land, ourselves, and one another–even those others who eat different food or wear different clothes than ourselves. Individuals can be good and/or bad, smart and/or dumb, but not whole races (or genders or generations). We’re all the same species, but in ever-bifurcating varieties. Live with it.
Online Extras
This Rage-To-Order thang’s, natch, bigger and, well, less unified than my typical oversimplified approach implies. A lot of different people are wishing for a world reorganized along a unified sociocultural premise; the problem is each of them wants his or her own premise to be the one everybody else has to follow.
Big business, thru its hired thinkers and think tanks (Heritage Foundation, Discovery Institute, Global Business Network, and co.) seek a globe sublimated under a single economic system; with national governments ceding soverignity over trade, labor, and environmental policy to the managements of multinational companies.
The culture component of global business would like nothing better than a whole world watching the same Hollywood movies, listening to the same US/UK corporate-rock bands, and purchasing the same branded consumer goods.
In an opposite corner of the ring (but playing by the same rules), you’ve got your Religious Rightists like Pat Robertson who demand that even if all Americans can’t be persuaded to convert to Christian fundamentalism, they oughta be forced to submit to fundamentalist dictates in re sex, family structures, gender roles, labor-management relations, art, music, etc. etc.
The fundamentalists’ sometime allies, the “canon” obsessives like Wm. Bennett, believe all Americans should be taught to speak the same language (even the same dialect), and all students should all be made to read the same short list of (mostly US/UK) literary classics, instilling a uniform set of “virtues.”
Biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, claims we could arrive at a unified system of knowledge, uniting the sciences and the arts and the humanities, if we only put the principal laws of biology at our philosophical center.
Wilson intends this conception of reassurance as an alternative to “chaos theory” and to the complexities of postmodern critical theory. But it could as easily be made against dictatorial pseudo-unities such as that proposed by the fundamentalists. Indeed, he spends quite a few pages acknowledging how the secular-humanist ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers (his heroes in the quest for unity) helped pave the ideological way for the false new orders of Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, et al. Similarly, biological metaphors were misused in the “social Darwinism” theories propagated by Ford and Rockefeller to justify their mistreatment of workers and crushing of competition.
Then there’s Terence McKenna’s biological excuse for bohemian elitism, proclaiming his followers to represent the next evolutional stage of the human species (as if acid-dropping and square-bashing could bring about beneficial genetic mutations.)
A more promising recipe for unity’s in an obscure book I found at a garage sale, The Next Development in Man by UK physicist L.L. Whyte. Written in England during the WWII air raids, Whyte’s book (out of print and rather difficult to wade through) starts with the assumption, understandable at the time, that the European philosophical tradition had reached its dead end. We’d continue to suffer under dictators and wars and bigotry and inequality so long as people were dissociated–i.e., treated science as separate and apart from art, body from spirit, id from ego, man from woman, people from nature, rulers from workers, hipsters from squares, and so on. (Sounds like something I wrote previously, that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide all the people in the world into two kinds, and those who don’t.) Whyte’s answer to the oppressive aspects of Soviet communism: A re-definition of capitalist economics as not a war of good vs. evil but as a system of privileges, with innocent beneficiaries as well as innocent victims. His idea of unity: We’re all in this life together, and it’s in all of our overall best interests to make it a more just, more peaceful life, one more in tune with the needs of our bodies, minds, and souls. He sees this as an ongoing effort: There’s no past or future Golden Age in his worldview, only a continual “process.” Unity isn’t a static, uniform state of being, but a recognition of interconnectedness of all stuff in all its diverse, changing ways.
Gates of Hell?
Book feature for The Stranger, 6/18/98
Barbarians Led By Bill Gates
by Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller
Henry Holt ($23)
Most reviews of this book talk about how co-author Jennifer Edstrom’s mom is Microsoft’s long-serving PR boss, and how this less-than-flattering portrait of the software giant must be hurting familial relations. A better focus would be on its other co-author, ex-MS programmer Marlin Eller. Barbarians can be seen as the literary equivalent of modern-day Microsoft software. It’s fairly comprehensible, and more or less gets the job done; but it’s clunky in places, with extra features abruptly tacked onto old “legacy code.”
The introduction notes this was originally to have been a straightforward memoir of Eller’s 12 years in the Redmond salt mines. The authors don’t say why the book didn’t end up that way, but the publisher clearly wanted something more applicable to recent news surrounding the company–antitrust suits, allegations of monopolistic and coercive practices. So, Eller and Edstrom re-coded the product (revised the book) to meet the new specs. The shipping version (final draft) emphasizes Eller’s toils on projects directly relevant to current MS controversies, such as early versions of Windows. Chapters about Eller’s years on projects far from MS’s operating-systems heart, like handwriting-recognition software and pay-per-view TV boxes, now emphasize object lessons about MS’s hyper-aggressive culture, its less-than-polite leadership (including Mr. Bill, depicted as an asocial geek on the world’s biggest power trip), and its drive to engulf and devour competitive technologies. Especially technologies which just might maybe nibble a bite or two away at MS’s precious OS monopoly.
MS haters will find their opinions conveniently confirmed. MS loyalists might at least grudgingly appreciate sympathetic portrayals of code warriors striving to finish impossible tasks, within inconceivable deadlines, under unliveable stress, for often-substantial material rewards. In other words, it’s designed to appeal to the largest potential user base.
Other Bill boox:
Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll:
Stories to End the Century
Book review for The Stranger, 5/7/98
The mostly-British anthology Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll: Stories to End the Century (Serpent’s Tail trade paperback; edited by Sarah LeFanu) purports to chronicle the return to the “traditional values” of social repression following the end of the purported ’60s-’70s Bacchinale. Actually, it’s more like a reassertion of one particular traditional value of U.K. fiction: the pre-’60s kitchen sink drama, Angry Young Man version. That was a genre particularly suited for the England of grey skies and grim industrial towns and lingering postwar depression, a place where things new and invigorating just didn’t occur. The protagonists of most of these stories don’t find satori or mind-expansion from their earthy pursuits. At best, they achieve a little solace or escape from their everyday tedium.The sex is mostly of the “alternative” variety, and mostly in conformance with current “alternative” propriety. Professional dominatrixes; gay men searching for mates while on ecstasy; future lesbians engaged in girlhood role-playing; a married woman whose husband supplies her with another man as her birthday present; a honeymooning intellectual couple sitting at cafés while discussing the philosophical implications of fucking.
Similarly, the drugs are mostly used to escape the darkness of one’s life (Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Woman Is Born to Bleed”) or to build an artificial sense of self-confident fuckability (the aforementioned ecstasy users in Philip Hensher’s “The Chartist”). The main exception:Â Laurie Colwin’s “The Achieve, or the Mastery of the Thing,” in which a student bride in the nascent hippie years turns her professor bridegroom onto the then-novel joys of spending one’s entire life too stoned to feel pain.
Not much rock ‘n’ roll is in here, and that’s OK since there’s so little good writing about that world that isn’t really about the sex and drugs. Certainly the main rock story here, Cherry Wilder’s “Friends in Berlin,” has little novel to offer about bandmates getting on one another’s nerves while on tour. Again, nostalgia for the days of potential rebellion provide the highlight–Christopher Hope’s “Gone,” about a ’50s white boy learning to love rock music in apartheid South Africa.
The notion of intense pleasures as dulling narcotics reaches its ultimate point in Michael Carson’s “Postcards of the Hanging,” imagining a near-future in which humans are implanted with 24-hour radio receivers in their bodies, letting the outside world fade away while listening constantly to the top pop hits (with commercials). Like much modern-day sci-fi, it’s based on the schtick of taking a present-day trend (Walkmen and boom boxes) and simply imagining it will become more-O-the-same in the future. In this day of “chaos theory” and “quantum thinking,” many science and pop-science writers no longer believe trends necessarily “progress” in one direction forever. Too bad so many science fiction writers haven’t discovered this notion yet. But then again, maybe chaos-influenced fiction would constitute stories to begin the next century, not stories to end this one.
Writers at Microsoft:
WPA or Pharoah?
Book feature for The Stranger, 5/7/98
Artists, the old saying goes, subsidize art with their lives. Unable to make a living from their life’s passion, they spend their daylight hours pretending to be other, less noble creatures, from strippers to lawyers. These days, untold hundreds of writers, painters, musicians, et al. have infiltrated the 8,000-plus Redmond workforce of Microsoft.
“I had an office mate once,” says painter Pam Mandel. “We joked how Micosoft was like the WPA [Works Progress Administration, FDR’s make-work program for artists during the Depression]. This place has put more artists and writers to work than any place we knew. It’s the biggest employer of creative people I’ve ever seen.”
THE WORK
Two years ago, it seemed half the writers in Seattle were working on proposed “shows” for the Microsoft Network. Now, most of MSN’s entertainment or culture-oriented sites are, or will soon be, gone. (One survivor, the political-analysis netzine Slate, has moved to a paid-access format.) Instead, MS is pushing into websites that can generate direct profits by selling stuff like cars, plane tickets, and financial services.
But that shift still leaves lotsa work for word-wranglers. Besides the remaining MS websites, the company has reference CD-ROMs, software manuals and help files, training guides, Microsoft Press books, PR materials, and in-house documents to be written, edited, and constantly revised. And it has work requiring good communication skills, in such areas as graphics, “interface design,” marketing, and telephone help lines.
Tech writers are part of most MS software-development projects nearly from the start. “The products are so complicated,” poet and essayist Emily Warn says, “they need people who can communicate about them. More and more ,the manuals have gotten simpler and they’ve tried to make the products more intuitive. Yet if you’re only a programmer, you don’t have the ability to think like a user using the product.”
Warn notes the differences between this and traditional literary day jobs on college campuses. “I’ve a lot of writers in academia asking me how they can get jobs at Microsoft. Academia seems so petty and removed for me–all the office politics and ideological sects.”
THE ADVANTAGES
“I know I have a BFA,” says Mandel. “I couldn’t make anywhere near this kind of money teaching or working in a gallery.” Currently working as a technical writer, Mandel previously wrote picture captions for MS’s Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia. “It was the first time I’d ever been paid for my art-history education.”
Warn says she feels “almost apologetic because I like working at Microsoft. There are a lot of creative, smart, chaotic people. It’s a very interesting place to work. In my group alone [maintaining the Internet Explorer website], here are at least five working poets, three working fiction writers, and several highly qualified journalists. My boss is an ex-Maoist fiction writer.”
Eileen Duncan recently wrote in the online literary zine Salmon Bay Review, “I don’t always admit in public that I’m a writer. I’ve had several people ask, `Why would you do anything that doesn’t earn you money when you already have a job?’ At Microsoft, however, people react with kindness and interest to my admission. They even approve of it.”
Second-generation Seattle writer Sean Bentley works in a “user assistance group,” surrounded by “folks who at least read, if not write. This is a happy break from selling wastebaskets to restauranteurs who hadn’t the faintest idea what I was talking about most of the time if it didn’t have to do with Rubbermaid. Bartending was similarly soul-sucking, and I was lucky to escape being knifed, which is something I rarely have to worry about at MS.”
THE DRAWBACKS
Ken Smith co-edits Salmon Bay Review when he’s not at Microsoft. He finds the transition between left- and right-brain work “sometimes tough. When you sit down to write code, it’s absolutely literal. Sometimes the logic doesn’t make sense and it works anyway. Sometimes it’s hard to make the mental shift.
Smith says the sometimes-long hours and the Seattle-Redmond commutes don’t affect him, at least not directly. “I do have the time to do the things I want to, but sometimes my brain is a little more fatigued when I come home than it used to be.”
THE IMPLICATIONS
Microsoft is an aggressive corporate player with an ambitious agenda, to leverage its operating-system dominance into new aspects of the computer business (and many businesses only half-related to computers).
Some writers at Microsoft declined to be quoted about the company’s role in the world, a topic its PR division doesn’t like other employees discussing with the press. Poet and former Microsoft contract employee Arthur Tulee was willing to discuss it in historical-metaphor form:
“I was one of many slave scribes (excuse me, temporary contingent staff) for the Pharoah Bill…. I wrote, drew, and spellchecked on many of the various publications and manuals on how to build the Sphinx, obelisks, Cleopatra’s barge, etc. I studied straw production, quarries, Nile barge traffic, slave lifespans (excuse me, temporary contingent staffing contract periods), and purchasing quality fake beards at less than cost for Pharoah Bill and his thousands of permanent blue-badge lieutenants, some of whom were too young to grow beards.
“All my blue-badge lieutenants were educated, all-wise and compassionate. Some of them started out also as scribes, so no wonder. They worked us beyond human endurance, and promised us one view off the pyramid summit at the end of our project. There is no greater thrill than looking down upon thousands of slaves (excuse me, temporaries) sweating, groaning and straining for one purpose, one cause, one vantage point. We accomplished many stacks of hieroglyphs, some on short schedules, and only a few had slipped on the production calendar. On our backs stand giants.”
THE SHOCK OF THE NUDE: As mentioned previously in The Stranger, Erika Langley’s Lusty Lady coffee-table-book photos won’t have their own Seattle Art Museum show (across from the peep-show emporium where Langley took her pix) after all. She’d been invited by one SAM official, then disinvited by highers-up (who’ve offered her a slot in a group exhibition next year instead). The official line: The show would’ve been in a hallway, where kids on group tours might be exposed to the sight of beautiful women’s physiques. (Langley’d already agreed to leave sexually-suggestive shots out of the show.) Yet Langley and her supporters noted (in this paper and elsewhere) that other nudes (M/F) have been on open display at SAM. I saw plenty of under-agers enjoy the drawn nudes at SAM’s Cone Collection exhibit last year, including several young art students copying the drawings into sketchbooks. But art’s gatekeepers have always preferred their nude images to be safely removed from the here-and-now. I believe as late as Monet’s time, painters were expected to set nekkid people only in historic (ancient Greece), foreign (Mideast harems), or mythical (Biblical sinners) settings. But a modern-day gal willfully showin’ off her bod sans shame? Alors! Speaking of sex-fear…
I WAS READING the 1965 intro to The Olympia Reader, wherein editor-publisher Maurice Girodias complained about French censorship in the de Gaulle era, when the radio told me about a Federal Way city council hearing wherein speakers claimed a planned Castle Superstores sex-toy shop would directly lead to wild-eyed rapists rushing the streets after any woman or child in sight (as if anybody in Federal Way walked anywhere!). As I previously wrote, Castle’s just a big-box consolidation of the indie and small-chain stores where nice straights (and nice closeted gays) buy silk undies, condoms, vibes, videos, and other tools for enabling their decent, wholesome sex lives. A criminal will think like a criminal with or without such stimuli. Indeed, a clean, well-lit, mainstream sex shop might help convince someone with borderline-criminal thoughts that sex isn’t necessarily the stuff of oppressive compulsions but is as natural (and potentially as dull) as any aspect of existence. Speaking of sex-role stigmas…
LESS OF A MAN’S WORLD?: The Seattle Times recently reprinted a Washington Post article (originally one of a five-part Post series on gender relations) claiming increased social stigmas against males, especially boys. It claimed boys were more likely to be ostracized for asocial behavior or “learning disabilities,” and more likely to later become perpetrators (and victims) of violence (to themselves or others). Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld wrote, “Boys are the universal scapegoats, the clumsy clods with smelly feet… feeling the tightening noose of limited expectations, societal scorn and inadequate role models” amid a lack of positive sex-role imagery (girls can now become most anything, but boys are still expected to be dumb jocks). Other reports, meanwhile, talk of lowered sperm counts and fewer boy babies in the major western nations, even of chemical-therapy estrogen finding its way (via sewage-sludge fertilizer) into the food supply. Whatever happened to the ’80s radfem cliché of “testosterone poisoning”? Speaking of a gradually more femdom world…
SPLITTING: Bikini Kill’s members have called it quits their way, after seven years of making music their way–avoiding major labelss, package tours, MTV, even movie soundtracks. It’s not that the band’s career was going nowhere. They achieved just about all they could achieve within their self-prescribed boundaries. And now they’re moving on to new creative endeavors, without major-label debts, contractual-obligation albums, or acrimonious “farewell tours.” While I disagreed with the anti-sexist sexism in some of their words, I always admired the strength of their convictions. When they called for “Revolution Girl-Style Now,” they meant more than simply wishing to stick some female bodies onto the same ol’ seats of power, or some military overthrow with subsequent reign of terror. It was about rethinking the whole premises of social engagement, including the way “rebel” music’s produced and distributed.
Virtual Unrealities:
The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester
Book feature for The Stranger, 4/23/98
I could go on for the length of a trilogy about what’s wrong with most recent science fiction writing. Instead, I’ll recommend Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (Vintage trade paperback) as a near-perfect example of how it should be done. Alfred Bester was a veteran of the ’30s NYC lowbrow-writing circuit, where he ground out tales for pulp magazines, radio, and comic books. Gradually he got opportunities to ply his solid storytelling skills to more ambitious topics. While earning a living writing nonfiction magazine articles in the ’50s, he produced the novels The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, plus occasional short stories, most of them collected here.
Each of these 17 stories has a different fantastical premise, ranging from “hard science” speculation to flights of impossibility and varying degrees in between. But it’s Bester’s writing that makes these premises work.
The book’s centerpiece tale is “Fondly Fahrenheit,” Bester’s futurization of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men premise. In it, a man is doomed to travel the galaxies accompanied only by a psychotic, and possibly homicidal, android. The man and the machine, we slowly learn, have developed a complex mental symbiosis, which Bester subtly reveals by switching his first-person narration between the two, sometimes in mid-sentence.
In that and the other stories, Bester always uses the premise not for its own whaddya-think-of-that? sake but to hook the reader into caring about his (mostly male, mostly melancholy) characters. In “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” a young man learns the secret to time travel and attempts to change history, only to find himself literally disappearing from consensus reality as his own time-track becomes derailed. In “The Pi Man,” a mathematical super-genius rides his mental compulsions into unimaginable wealth, only to live in forced isolation from the imperfect minds of everyone else.
Bester’s stories have a lot teach to today’s would-be fantasists, who’ve been learning too many of the wrong lessons from the golden age of adventure fiction. What was great about the old pulp and early-paperback stories, the comic strips and movie serials, wasn’t the formulaic boy-adventure plots or the one-dimensional characters, but the skill masters like Bester learned from the sheer volume of work they produced, the way they beckoned readers into their worlds, and the vividness with which they used unearthly plot elements to express all-too-universal yearnings and conflicts.
From the periphery of Europe to the heart of America:
The Color Gray
Book feature for The Stranger, 4-16-98
On the surface, The Factory of Facts (Pantheon) is the simple memoir of Luc Sante’s search for his roots, as a child brought to the U.S. northeast in the ’50s by parents emigrating from a depressed small factory town in still-war-scarred Belgium. But Sante wants more than to scratch any mere surface. If you’ve ever lived someplace on the periphery of the bigtime cultural action but not really in the middle of it (hint: you’re in such a place now), Sante’s got some parallels for you to ponder.
Sante (a book reviewer for the New York Review of Books and Microsoft’s Slate) sees himself as an outsider everywhere, neither fully American nor European. What’s more, he sees Belgium as an outsider among nations–something patched together during the breakup and formation of assorted Euro empires over the centuries, situated on an all-too-convenient invasion route to and from France, an amalgam of French and Dutch (and, in his own Wallonia region, German) influences. A place that gave the world (via French publishers and other middlemen) the occasional detective author (Georges Simenon), actor (Jean-Claude Van Damme), or cartoonist (Hergé), but which lives under the largely unbreached notion that the real sociocultural action is elsewhere. A country where Francophone newspapers still encourage readers to erase “colorful native idiomatic expressions”, in favor of pure, Paris-approved French. A country whose “hallmarks are ambivalence, invisibility, secretiveness, self-doubt, passivity, irony, and derision.”
Naturally, this made for little inspiration to an immigrant boy, an arriviesté in the nation that led the world in the export of dreams and ambitions. “Willfully, accidentally, organically, negligently, crudely, systematically, inevitably I got rid of a section of myself, a part that was once majority and shrank to accessory. I went from being the little Belgian boy, polite and diffident and possessed of a charming accent, to a loutish American adolescent. This was nothing special: I drank, I smoke, I stole, I swore, I stopped going to church…. My mother was convinced that Belgian children did not do such things, her view of Belgium becoming more idealized with every year she spent away from it. My view of Belgium became correspondingly more hostile, because it represented authority and also because I was certain its taint was what made me timid and awkward and unpopular and unattractive and solitary. I began a project to reinvent myself, acknowledge no bonds or ties or background, pass myself off as entirely self-made.”
A French culture minister might say the young Luc was buying into American cultural imperialism, abandoning his own heritage for the commercialized temptations learned from James Dean movies. Sante’s explanation is more melancholy: “We lost connection to a thing larger than ourselves, and as a family failed to make any significant new connection in exchange, so that we were left aground on a sandbar barely big enough for our feet. I lost friends and relatives and stories and familiar comforts and a sense of continuity between home and outside and any sense that I was normal…. Continuing to believe that I had just made myself up out of whole cloth was self-flattering but hollow.”
So the grownup Luc returns to Belgium as time and money allow. He seeks to re-connect with the extended family he left behind–not just his blood relatives, but the still-depressed industrial economy of Wallonia, its heritage of radical labor organizing (and authoritarian repression of same), its dying regional language, its once-thriving indiginous music and theater communities, its declining Catholic ideology of personal suppression (what Sante calls “the Sacred Fear”), its remaining un-globalized way of life. “What makes a country, apart from tangled history? Baked goods. Churches. Weather. The habit of discretion. Fried potatoes. Shrubbery. The color gray. The elaborate mandarin ritual that attends commercial transactions, or even just stepping into a shop. Compactness, miniaturization. Cleanliness. The cross of modesty and prudery called pudeur in French. Brickwork. Class consciousness. Women of all ages suffering in skirts and stockings in the dead of winter. Reserve, aloofness, judgment. Varnished wood. Silent children, well-bred dogs, unassertive houseplants. The fear of God, the god of fear. Wallpaper. Comic strips….”
Sante ultimately reconciles himself to his roots by re-defining himself again. He now views himself as a sort of literary industrial worker, toiling in an intangible factory constructing intangible products of value, as his forebearers had built tangible products in tangible factories. He (and we) may now be part of an “information economy,” but he (and we) still exist as the result of all which has come before us, something we forget at our own peril.
Searching for the NW In NW Lit:
We Are Here! (Aren’t We?)
Feature article by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 4/9/98
From a very early age I was instilled with the (probably unintended but unmistakable) message that real art, and by extension real life, were things that only happened in places far away from my rural Washington existence. The stories read to us in class, and later assigned for us to read, all happened in Harlem or Korea or mythical fairylands or mythical Anytowns–until we got to read Beverly Cleary. Her kids had real attitudes. Her grownups had real tics and quirks. And they lived in a real place (Portland) I’d really been to. Ever since, I’ve sought out the stories of my own place, the affirmations that, like Dr. Seuss’s Whos, “We Are Here.”
Eventually, I found some stories that tried to reveal the people and attitudes of the place. And I found other seekers.
Last December, I was involved in an exchange of emails on the topic of Northwest literature. The original question, posed by Raven Chronicles editor Matt Briggs: “Is there any ‘Northwest’ in Northwest Lit’?”
Some of the respondents said there wasn’t any–that Caucasian-dominant society here’s still too new, and too subservient to the national/ global society of airports and strip malls and stadiums. I disagreed. I felt there were indeed distinguishing characteristics in stuff from here, at least the better stuff from here.
Defining the Literary Northwest: Let’s define “here” as Washington, Oregon, Idaho, maybe Alaska, and just maybe Montana; excluding the sociopolitically different worlds of western Canada and northern California.
If that’s the literary Northwest, then Northwest literature could conceivably include anything set in this place, or written by someone who resides or once resided in this place. But that could conceivably include everything from Thomas Pynchon’s V. (partly written while he was a Boeing technical writer) to tales where people leave Seattle early on and never return (certain Jack London stories,Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs).
So for convenience’s sake, let’s classify the four faces, or sub-types, of Northwest lit, and the values and weaknesses of each.
Stuff written here but without “local” content. John Saul’s chillers, Robert Ferrigno’s thrillers, and August Wilson’s African American survival plays bear little or no relationship to their creators’ domiciles. Yet some of these manage to exploit a certain Northwest spirit. Stacey Levine’s Dra- and My Horse occur in surreal fantasy realms (the former in an all-indoor city); but Dra-‘s “drab and dreary world of utter dread” and My Horse‘s “painful psycho-logic” (as described on the cover blurbs) correspond internally to a sense of low-key resignation found in some more “realistic” works from here.
Locally-set genre novels. mysteries and romances with fill-in-the-blanks ‘local color’ (insert name of popular local nightspot here).
I haven’t the space nor the expertise to discuss romances, that last bastion of un-ironic genre fiction (and the only mass-fiction genre predicated on love instead of aggression). But the better whodunit-doers, here and elsewhere, go beyond place names to invoke the spirit of a region in the ways their characters commit and/ or solve crimes. Earl Emerson and K.K. Beck’s crime-solvers have a particularly Seattle kind of world-weariness; the crimes they investigate often invoke particularly local versions of ambition and desperation.
Land Lit. In college I was introduced to a whole “Northwest school” of writers and poets. Only their message, upon initial contact, seemed to be “We Are Not Here.” The poems usually consisted of minutely-detailed nature tableaux, devoid of human life save for the omniscient gaze of their narrators. The fiction viewed this countryside as verbal Cinemascope settings for noble women and stout-hearted men felling trees and fly fishing and behaving not at all like the all-too-human Norwesters I knew. None of those people, of course, lived in any city bigger than Port Townsend.
I now understand a little more about the formula’s pre-Beat-era origins. Concurrent with the Asian-inspired “Northwest School” painters and the spiritual-empowerment aspects of the Mountaineers movement, the first couple generations of nature poets (David Wagoner, Barry Lopez, Lake City kid Gary Snyder) sought a re-connection to the cyclical continuum of life. Even the “urban” writings of Richard Hugo are full of references to birds, streams, and native plants.
But the approach had its limitations, especially in the hands of ’70s-’80s imitators. What began as a quest for Zen tranquility eventually devolved into cloying sanctimony. Its nadir came in the ’80s with the NPR essays of Andrew Ward, who gushed reverently about the plants and birds surrounding his island “cabin” while acting like a landed-gentry snob toward his human neighbors.
Poet-editor Phoebe Bosche notes, “For a lot of folks/writers who have settled here, ‘urban’ (a word that needs to be in quotes) has a nasty connotation, versus the perceived ideal sense of how life should be lived. Urban = technology. These are the writers who don’t like the sound of a crow, many who are of the Poetry Northwest [magazine] school.”
Bosche also disagrees with my disparagement of nature writing: “To just dismiss ‘nature poetry/ writing’ is blind to the overriding presence of our surroundings here. There is the presence of nature in all the urban writing being created here. It is different than the open possibilities that infuse writing from southern California, my home. The cynicism here is also different from east-coast or L.A. cynicism. It is rooted in a denser feeling of our relationship with our surroundings, in the character of this city.”
The real thing. The rarest and dearest, the works that attempt to convey how people here behave, think, and relate. I’m not merely talking about highbrow-appeal, or even what appeals to me. (The annoyingly “lite” Tom Robbins certainly expresses the aesthetic of a certain ‘shroom-munchin’ caste of NW residents.) But I prefer works expressing the moods Robbins’s escapism is escaping from.
Timothy Egan called it “Northwest Noir.” Briggs calls it “the slippery sense of place and identity in the Pacific Northwest… a strange dislocation that sometimes expresses itself in deformed characters, like Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; a reduction of realty into a heavily weighted and controlled narrative, like Raymond Carver’s short stories; or in the complete absence of family history and a sort of constant self-invention as in Denis Johnson’s Already Dead, or stories about isolated and small communities as in Peter Bacho.” To that roster I’d add Gus Van Sant’s philosophical down-and-outers, the Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff’s rambunctious yet worryful teens, Rebecca Brown’s obsessively intricate life scenes, Jesse Bernstein’s defiant celebrations of despair as a life force, Willie Smith’s dark fantasies, and the sublime desolation of Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Point.
“There is a common, nervous energy (like overcompensating for the overcast winter) to a lot of the writing that I think strikes me as particularly PNW,” Briggs adds. “This spirit I’m talking about is like your weird uncle,” Briggs adds. “Your characters are generally losers. They’re not heroic; they’re just odd.”
Even the humor in NW lit, and there’s a lot of it, is off-center (Gary Larson, Ellen Forney, Gregory Hischack’s beautiful zine Farm Pulp), self-deprecating (Spud Goodman’s TV skits, Scott McCaughey’s song lyrics), or concerned with the dichotomy between crudity and beauty (cartoonist Jim Woodring, Oregon historian Stewart Holbrook).
Which brings us to the here and now. At live readings, the nature poets have largely been succeeded by slam poets. The younger would-be literary writers I meet want to be Anais Nin or Charles Bukowski. The economics of publishing virtually dictate that a work with “alternative” appeal reach out to a national or global subculture, while a work with local or regional appeal must hew to a mainstream zeitgeist. And the local mainstream zeitgeist has been thoroughly gentrified beyond David Brewster’s wettest dreams. With all the material riches to be grabbed here now, detective writers can imagine higher-stakes crimes and romance heroines can enjoy more luxurious adventures.
But what place is there for the quirky, the depressive, the unparodic noir, in a social landscape dominated by hypercapitalistic monomania? Marty Kruse, small-press buyer at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, says he’s “really disappointed with the output from the Pacific Northwest (of late)…. There was a great deal more enthusiasm when we all had less to lose.”
But if the best NW lit’s about people who’ve left behind, or been left behind by, family and society, then there’ll be plenty of material to come about people who’ve been left behind by the boom. As Briggs points out, “This has been an industrial town and a seat for the labor movement and there are all of these people who were here before the 1980s (and even those who were there before them, all the way back to the original Salish tribes) milling around, working strange jobs, and who aren’t exactly jumping on the Boeing/ Microsoft bandwagon, largely because they can’t.”
IN HONOR OF all the kindly PR people who keep sending their bizarre promotional trinkets our way, Misc. hereby informs you that (1) Miller Beer is now printing scenes from its TV ads on the backs of its labels; (2) it’s the 35th anniversary of the Easy-Bake Oven and its makers are sponsoring a recipe contest at www.easybake.com; and (3) GameWorks now has a Jurassic Park walk-through “experience,” whatever that is.
UPDATES: Looks like we’ll get a Ballard Fred Meyer after all. The chain’s reached a compromise with neighborhood activists. As a result, Freddy’s will leave part of the ex-Salmon Bay Steel site near Leary Way for industrial use. The ex-Ernst site up the street, which I’d suggested as an alternate Freddy’s space, will now house the Doc Freeman’s boating-supply emporium…. Not only is the Apple Theater, the region’s last all-film porno house, closing, but so is Seattle’s other remaining XXX auditorium, the video-projection-based Midtown on 1st. Real-estate speculators hope to turn it into more of the yupscale-retail sameoldsameold.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Cindy Simmons’s Wallingford Word (“Cutest newspaper east of Fremont”) is a sprightly eight-page newsletter on north-central issues and events. The first issue highlights Metro Transit’s scary plan to chop service on all-day neighborhood routes in the near north end, in favor of more rush-hour commuter service–a scheme which, if implemented, would devastate the notion of transit as an option for voluntarily car-free urban life. Free in the area, or online at www.seanet.com/~csimmons.
THAT’S SHOE BIZ: The high-priced sneaker biz is collapsing fast, according to a recent USA Today business story. It claims teens and young adults are (wisely, in my opinion) moving toward sensibly-priced footwear and away from $120 high-tops bearing the name of this year’s overhyped slam-dunk egomaniac. What will happen to the NBA without endorsement contracts to make up for salary caps? (Some superstars make twice as much from shoe ads as they do from actually playing basketball.) Maybe something good–maybe the overdue deflation of the league’s overemphasis on individual heroics and the realization that it’s a better game when played the Sonics’ way, as a full-team effort. And maybe the Woolworth Corp. will be proven wrong to have jettisoned its variety stores to put its resources into its struggling Foot Locker subsidiary.
CREAMED: After all these weeks, folks are still talking about the Bill Gates pie-in-the-face incident in Brussels. Maybe it’s ’cause instigator Noel Godin knew the spectacle he wanted to make. Self-proclaimed “entarteur” (applier of, or to, tarts) Godin, 52, is a lifelong provocateur–a vet of the May ’68 rebellion in Paris and of that movement’s ideological forebearers, the Situationists (post-surrealist artists and theorists who explored what Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle”). Besides his paid work as a writer and historian, he and a corps of volunteers have pied famous people in public for almost 30 years. Targets have ranged from writer Margeurite Duras (Godin told Time‘s Netly News website that Duras “represented for us the `empty’ novel”) and bourgeois art-world types to Euro politicians and TV personalities. Godin told Netly News he targeted Gates “because in a way he is the master of the world, and… he’s offering his intelligence, his sharpened imagination, and his power to the governments and to the world as it is today–that is to say gloomy, unjust, and nauseating. He could have been a utopist, but he prefers being the lackey of the establishment. His power is effective and bigger than that of the leaders of the governments, who are only many-colored servants.” Godin’s not merely out to poke fun at the mighty, but to call the structures of power and privilege into question. You can see Godin (as an author during a radio-interview scene) in The Sexual Life of the Belgians, available for rent at Scarecrow Video.
(I still won’t tell latte jokes in the column, but I will be guest barista this Tuesday, 8 p.m.-whenever, at Habitat Espresso, Broadway near John.)
MISC. CONTINUES to be haunted by the Winter Olympics opening-ceremony theme song, “When Children Rule the World.” Sometimes it seems they do now, only in grownup bodies…
SHADES OF PALE: The Times reported this month that Kenny G’s one of the most respected white musicians among black jazz purists. My theory: G represents a stereotype of whiteness corresponding almost perfectly to the stereotypes of blackness profitably portrayed for years by some white people’s favorite black acts.
DELIVERING INFLUENCE: A recent Wall St. Journal told how United Parcel Service tried to pay the Univ. of Wash. to lend its institutional credibility onto pro-corporate research. The formerly locally-owned UPS offered $2.5 million to the UW med school in ’95. But instead of directing its gift toward general areas of study, UPS insisted the money go toward the work of UW orthopedic surgeon Stanley J. Bigos. The WSJ claimed UPS liked Bigos because “his research has suggested that workers’ back-injury claims may relate more to poor attitudes than ergonomic factors on the job.” The company’s fighting proposed tougher worker-safety laws, and wanted to support its claims with “independent” studies from a bigtime university that happenned to need the money. Negotiations with UW brass dragged on for two years, then collapsed. Bigos insists he wouldn’t have let UPS influence his work if he’d gotten its cash. But if companies can pick and choose profs already disposed to tell ’em what they wanna hear, “academic independence” becomes a bigger joke than it already is.
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Steve’s Broiler has lost its lease and closed. The 37-year-old downtown restaurant/ lounge was beloved by seniors, sailors, and punks for dishing out ample portions of good unpretentious grub and drinks, in a classic paneling-and-chrome-railing setting. (It was also the setting for Susan Catherine’s ’80s comic Overheard at America’s Lunch Counters.) The owners might restart if they can find another spot. It was the last tenant in the former Osborn & Ulland building, which will now be refitted for the typical “exciting new retail” blah blah blah…. Remember Jamie Hook’s Stranger piece last year about the Apple Theater, one of America’s last all-film porno houses? If you want to witness this landmark of archaic sleaze, better hurry. The Apple’s being razed soon for an affordable-housing complex incorporating the apartment building next door where the Pike St. Cinema was, and where the rock club Uncle Rocky’s is now. Rocky’s will close when the remodeling starts, and won’t be invited back (the housing people don’t like late-night loudness beneath residences).
MORE, MORE, MORE!: A recent Business Week cover story calls it “The Entertainment Glut.” I call it a desperate attempt by Big Media to keep control of a cultural landscape dividing and blossoming to a greater extent than I’d ever hoped. BW sez the giants (Disney, Murdoch, Time Warner, Viacom, et al.) are trying to maintain market share by invading one another’s genre turfs and cranking out more would-be blockbusters and bestsellers than ever before, to the point that none of them can expect anything like past profit margins. (Indeed, many of these “synergistic” media combos are losing wads of dough, losses even creative accounting can no longer hide.) It gets worse: Instead of adapting to the new realities of a million subcultures, the giants are redoubling their push after an increasingly-elusive mass audience. Murdoch’s HarperCollins book company scrapped over 100 planned “mid-list” titles to make up for losses on costly big-celeb books. BW claims the giants’ movie divisions are similarly “spending lavishly” on intended Next Titanics and trying “to stop producing modestly budgeted fare.” Their record divisions are dropping acts after one album, while ardently pushing the retro rockstar-ism of Britpop. The longer the giants try to keep their untenable business plans going, the better the opportunities for true indies in all formats–if the indies can survive the giants’ ongoing efforts to crowd ’em out of the marketplace.
(If Jean Godden can make personal appearances at coffee shops, so can I. I’ll be “guest barista” the evening of March 10 at Habitat Espresso, on Broadway near John. Mark your calendars.)
HIGH IQ=LOW XXX?: The papers were full of smart-folks-get-less-sex headlines the same week IDG Books brought out Dating for Dummies, the latest extension of a guidebook series initially aimed at people who needed to run computers at work but didn’t like to. Maybe they should’ve put out Dating for Smarties instead. (On the other hand, a programming-manual format’s perhaps an ideal means to show literal-minded people how to survive in such an un-left-brain activity.) (On the third hand, maybe it’s all the wrong way; reinforcing thought patterns completely useless for the realm of hormones and emotions.)
Smart ladies at least have Marilyn Vos Savant and the learned lovelies in Bull Durham and La Lectrice as sexy role models. Who’ve boys got: The antisocial (alleged) Unabomber? The hygiene-challenged Einstein and Edison? OK, there’s the fun-lovin’ late scientist Richard Feynman and certain brooding movie master-criminal types, but they’re the exceptions. But the more common image is the drooling fanboy in a three-sizes-too-small Capt. Kirk shirt, peering through inch-thick spectacles, looking for love in all the wrong places (like AOL chat rooms), fantasizing about Amazonian superwomen but incapable of chatting up a real one, perhaps still traumatized by high-school crushes who slept with jocks and treated him as a brother.
Many hyper-rational people of all genders fear the irrational, and love and sex are about the most irrational behaviors known to humankind. But becoming more desirable isn’t as impossible as it sometimes seems. Practice using a softer, sultrier voice in which to recite post-structuralist literary theory. Memorize love sonnets. Do something to get outside the comfy prison of your own head (yoga, gardening, cycling, pets). Reclaim your place in the physical/ biological/ emotional realm. To quote a love-struck professor in Hal Hartley’s Surviving Desire, “Knowing is not enough.”
`WORLD’ CONQUEST: I’ve heard punk-rock activists might try to disrupt location tapings of MTV’s Real World Seattle with pickets or street-theater type hostilities. I say we can be more creative than that. They think they’re an entertainment network; heck, we’ll show ’em some real entertainment. First, start a phone tree in advance, so you can descend on the place in numbers. Then when the crew and cast are sighted somewhere, arrive en masse in Santa suits, or chanting the Ivar’s Acres of Clams folk jingle, or loading the bar’s juke box to repeatedly play “Convoy.” Let’s show those stuck-up industry people we know how to have an old-school good time in this town. Speaking of entertainments…
WORDS & MUSIC: Fizz: A Blah Blah Blah Blah Magazine has put out its last issue and I’ll miss it. Some of publisher Cathy Rundell’s associates are regrouping to start a successor mag, Plus One. One of the things I loved about Fizz (and its LA-based predecessor Fiz) was its insistance on indie-pop as a force for creativity and empowerment, for doing things where you are with what you’ve got.
Compare this to the attitude in Resonance, the three-year-old local dance and pop mag. Where Fizz got personal with musicians, portraying them as just-plain merrymakers like you or me, Resonance keeps its critical distance. Even its interviews too often practice the same old provincialism, treating musical artists as gods and goddesses descending upon us from the media capitals. The irony, of course, is how dance music depends for its real innovations on stubborn trend-breakers, many from outside the NY/LA/SF/London axis. Another dance-club freezine, the LA-based Sweater, exemplifies this in a recent cover story about Derrick May, the Detroit DJ who pioneered late-’80s house music–and who only found a domestic market for his work after U.K. imitators “popularized” the style.
I’ve been criticized for having a rocker-reactionary “disco sucks” attitude toward the dance revolution. Not true. My beef’s with the self-defeating “real-life-is-elsewhere” attitude among too many dance-scene followers, too content to remain followers. Like an introspective genius afraid to date, the scene needs to shake off its inhibitions, to dare to be foolish, to really get down.
(Share your egghead love tips at clark@speakeasy.org .)
Due to early holiday-season deadlines, this Misc. installment’s the first to get to comment on that very peculiar New Year’s, during which those Seattle residents not blotto-drunk might as well have been, since all attempts to see the Space Needle fireworks resulted only in a fog-blurred haze of colors like something from a Mark Tobey painting.
ERROR MESSAGES: Hardly a day goes by without somebody saying something nasty about Microsoft. The Dept. of Justice disses the way MS tries to strong-arm PC makers. Nader warns about MS trying to monopolize “electronic commerce” tools, wanting a piece of every buck that’ll ever change hands online. Sun and Netscape claim MS wants to quash their “cross-platform” software lines, which threaten the notion of an MS-dictated computer universe. Mother Jones charges an MS-funded antipiracy group promising not to prosecute offices for using unpaid-for software if they promise to not only buy their warez but to buy all-MS software. And MS’s temps and perma-temps complain about their second-class treatment within the firm (including, thanks to new state legislation, no more overtime pay).
In most of these cases, the company claims it’s being unfairly targeted due to its “success” at creating products that just happen to be “popular among consumers.” That’s not quite the way it is, of course. Just about anybody who’s not working for the company (or for one of its media joint-venture partners) will acknowledge MS writes better contracts than code. Instead of innovation and competition, it operates by buying friends and crusing enemies. While its staff ideologues publicly pontificate about a cyber-future of decentralized societies and limitless opportunity, it behaves like an old-fashioned oil or railroad monopoly. In the past, MS’s enemies wanted the feds to split the company in two, spinning the DOS/Windows side into a separate company. That move by itself wouldn’t solve anything now, since the DOJ’s main argument is against MS turning Internet application software into a piece of Windows, making it tough for others to sell separate browser programs. It’s not just using its operating-system dominance to sell application software, but to give away software other companies want to sell. In other industries, it’d be called anti-competive “dumping.”
Our fair region is the born-‘n’-bred home of perhaps the most widely hated American company outside the oil or media businesses. Gates and Allen come from what passes for “old money” in this relatively new corner of western civilization. What does it mean to the longstanding image of this place as, for better or worse, “The City of the Nice” (as proclaimed by Tom Robbins in ’81)?
That, of course, always was an exaggeration. We weren’t “nice” so much as polite and businesslike, eager to please when it’s in our interest. (Author Roger Sale wrote in ’75 that Seattle was “bourgeois from the start.”) Despite the popularity of drunks, scoundrels, labor radicals, and whoremongers as local historical icons, most of the real settlement of the city was led by would-be timber, transportation, and real estate barons. The ones who made it didn’t just have what the new agers call “prosperity consciousness;” they maneuvered themselves into the right places, befriended the right people, made the right deals. Behind today’s Boeing boom lies a heritage of sales execs who forged long-term friendships with airlines, sealing deals Lockheed and Douglas couldn’t match. Rainier and Oly stayed prominent as long as they did because regional Teamster boss Dave Beck used his influence to make sure local beer outlets preferred local beers. The burgeoning Seattle biotech industry’s due to Sen. Warren Magnuson’s pipeline of federal bucks into the UW med school. MS started by signing deals with early hobbyist-computer maker Altair, and became a giant by signing deals with IBM. Much of the Seattle/ Oly “indie rock” philosophy has to do not just with alternative kinds of music but with forging alternatives to the music industry’s contractural practices.
Seattle’s a town of dealmakers as much as it’s a town of engineers. MS took this craft to a hyper-aggressive level. The extent to which this aggression succeeds and/or backfires will affect the company, the region, and the world.
PRE-BOXING DAY GREETINGS to all from Misc., the column that’s lived through at least three ska revivals, four rockabilly revivals, and now a second swing revival. (The last was in the mid-’80s, when Joe Jackson and David Lee Roth recorded Louis Jordan covers, Kid Creole revived the zoot suit, and New York Doll David Johansen turned into Buster Poindexter.) ‘Twas funny, but not unexpected, to see the P-I use the “Swing Revival” hype as the excuse for its fourth annual “End of Grunge” article. Swing never really went away, of course. There’ve been swing dance classes in colleges and high schools lo these many years. The New Orleans Cafe has had a swing night since ’88. The only thing that’s new is that L.A. finally caught onto it, following the success of bands like Squirrel Nut-Zippers, thus making it a “national” trend.
UPDATES: The 66 Bell art studios haven’t been depopulated for redevelopment yet, and now they won’t be until at least July. Some tenants are reportedly trying to negotiate a longer reprieve with the building owner, but nothing’s certain yet…. Just when I wrote about the blossoming of funky retail along the western stretch of E. Pine St., two of the street’s clothing veterans (Reverb and Righteous Rags) announced they’ll soon close. The former will become Penny’s Arcade (old time video and pinball); the latter will become an expansion of Bimbo’s Bitchin Burrito Kitchen.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #2 of Neal Wankoff’s Bang!Bang! is out. It’s a bright-‘n’-breezy 16-page digest-sized popzine packed full with words and pix about Tube Top, Blammo, James Bertram of Red Stars Theory, and much more. Free at the usual dropoff spots or $1 for two issues from 1600 15th Ave., Seattle 98122.
THE FINE PRINT (in an Ericsson TV commercial, set at the Carolina Panthers football stadium the Swedish cell-phone company bought the naming rights to): “Teams depicted do not represent actual football teams.”
TOYLAND GREETINGS: Hasbro reports record sales and profits on its assorted products (GI Joe, Monopoly, Scrabble, Mr. Potato Head, et al.), and a week later sez it will fire 20 percent of its staff, just so it can subcontract more work to Mexican sweatshops. We don’t know how this might affect Hasbro’s Seattle operation, which packages and re-ships products made in the company’s Asian plants. Ordinarily, I’d say there was something strategically amiss about a consumer-products company firing so many people, contributing to reduced middle-class buying power and hence reducing demand for its own products. But Hasbro’s the sponsor of the “Holiday Giving Tree” promotion on the Rosie O’Donnell Show, inviting viewers to buy new toys and send ’em in to be given to less-fortunate kids. Maybe the company’s thinking if there are more layoffs across the economy, there’ll be more less-fortunate kids, and hence a chance for bigger “Giving Tree” programs in future Xmases.
ON THE RACKS #1: Beth Nugent’s novel Live Girls (Vintage Contemporaries trade paperback) has a cover with Kristine Peterson’s photo of the famous sign of the same name outside downtown Seattle’s Champ Arcade, but the story itself takes place in a “decaying Eastern port city.”
ON THE RACKS #2: Nancy Manahan, author of Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence (one of at least three books that year with the same subtitle but different topics) now has a new anthology, On My Honor: Lesbians Reflect on Their Scouting Experience. Mind you, while some lesbians may have fond coming-O-age memories of the Girl Scouts, that doesn’t mean the Girl Scout organization holds many nice thoughts toward lesbians. I’m reminded of the lesbian promoters of the Kit Kat Klub cabaret space in east Fremont (circa 1982), who had to fold their operation after their liquor-license application was challenged by the Girl Scouts’ regional office up the street.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK and the annual Misc. In/Out List, think about the KeyArena crowd who cheered when Perry Farrell shouted, “How many of you here believe God is a woman?” and whether, considering some of the capricious and vengeful behaviors attributed to the Judeo-Christian deity, these cheering boys were really being all that complimentary to the feminine spirit.
Media Bashers:
Rebels Without an Effect
Book review for The Stranger, 12/19/97
We the Media: A Citizens’ Guide to Fighting for Media Democracy, edited by Don Hazen and Julie Winokur (The New Press)
The Conquest of Cool, by Thomas Frank (University of Chicago Press)
Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy, by Robert McChesney (Oxford)
Made Possible By…: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States, by James Ledbetter (Verso)
Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, by Stephen Duncombe (Verso)
While American leftists share few notions on how to improve society, just about all of them love the Media Analysis game. How to play: (1) Read something in the “mainstream media” (anything bigger than Mother Jones or The Nation). (2) Pretend to be shocked that the major news institutions behave, well, like major institutions. (3) Complain long and loud about how Big Media isn’t telling The Real Truth (without you, yourself, saying much about what that Real Truth might be). It’s easy, it’s fun, it doesn’t require changing anything in the real world (the game’s rules presume you can’t change the world, just critique it).
The game’s played to perfection by the creators of We the Media, a brisk anthology of short essays and cartoons covering most of the Media Analysis movement’s topics. Nearly every of its 200 pages express amazement that publishers and broadcasters act like the major corporations they are. We the Media exists only in oppositional stance; it bitches about the media loving big business and business-friendly politicians as if anybody’s still surprised at it. (Most of us grew up with local papers kissing their local business communities’ butts; there’s no reason not to expect “national” journalists to act any different.) Only briefly, mostly toward the end, do the editors get around to stating what they’d like us to be crusading for and what communications tools exist or could be created to aid such crusades.
Baffler co-editor Tom Frank holds few illusions, sincere or feigned, about corporate media ever having had ideals to have fallen from–besides the ideal of self-interest. The Conquest of Cool isn’t the grand unified philosophical statement I’ve hoped from Frank. But it does focus his main sociocultural obsession (“hipness” as a pro-corporate marketing concept) onto one specific point in time–the late ’50s and ’60s, when Madison Avenue discovered newer, flashier, homier, hippier, and sexier ways to push consumer goods. Frank believes advertisers didn’t “co-opt” the era’s “youth movement” but paralleled and even helped inspire it. He “credits” a few “rebel” ad men, who initially wanted to break out of their own industry’s stifling conformity, with instigating the whole notion of a “permanent revolution of style” (what critics called “planned obsolescence”); a notion still seen today in ads showing “rebel” teens gulping Mountain Dew and “rebel” executives running Windows 95. Frank adds a closing section about the simultaneous rise of “hipness” in the men’s fashion biz, the process that led directly into the early-’70s polyester-pimp look now curiously nostalgized.
Robert McChesney helped start The Rocket (local bastion of hip marketing) 18 years ago, then went off to grad studies in Wisconsin. Oxford’s paperback reissue of his 1993 treatise on the early days of radio comes out in time to give background on the first corporate media consolidation movement, just as sweetheart deregulation bills are locking the airwaves into fewer and fewer hands than ever. His book’s heavy reading, full of scholarly detail about forgotten, Depression-era radio reform movements that never stood a chance against the RCA-CBS duopoly that controlled the so-called Golden Age of Radio.
It’s not just that business has always wanted to make big money in media. McChesney believes it’s also always tried to silence any potentially viable alternative. So does fellow scholar James Ledbetter. His Made Possible By… details the ’70s rise of public TV and radio in the U.S. and its quick subjugation, first by right-wing politicians and then by corporate “underwriters,” filling PBS schedules with U.K. drawing-room dramas and Lawrence Welk reruns. But after reading it, I got to thinking about what kind of public broadcasting we might have otherwise had. From the standpoint of getting independent and/or progressive documentaries and public affairs shows on the air, the PBS setup’s about the best one could imagine. A vertically integrated organization like the BBC not only has stricter “neutrality” rules, it’s much less open to outside producers. On the more fiscally unstable, yet more decentralized, PBS setup, anybody can propose a program, seek funding for it from inside or outside the system, and even syndicate it to individual affilliates if the PBS network feed doesn’t carry it. I agree with Ledbetter that today’s noncommercial-TV setup leaves a lot to be improved upon; unlike him, I believe it can be improved upon without the drastic restructuring he advocates.
Meanwhile, Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground tries to imagine the potentials for a different type of media universe, using as his starting point the so-called Zine Revolution with its potentials and contradictions. For Duncombe, the punk-rock, political, and personal zines symbolize the risks and frustrations of an oppositional “alternative” culture–do you stay small and irrelevant, or become part of the corporate media machine? Other books about the Zine Revolution revel in the coolness, weirdness, and wildness of DIY publishing. Duncombe instead solemnly ponders zines as artifacts of safe, middle-class “rebellion,” and wonders whether (and how) they might lead into a more serious movement for social change. It’d be a start if more Media Analysts developed Duncombe’s smarts.
INSTEAD OF SPENDING Election Night at the Muni League’s annual media gathering or one of the big candidate bashes, Misc. watched the returns on a tiny portable TV in Linda’s Tavern with a dozen or so members of the Monorail Initiative campaign. (One campaign leader was named Grant Cogswell–same last name as a Jetsons character!) As the tiny-type updates beneath Mad About You and NYPD Blue kept displaying a solid lead for the measure, the bar’s ambience of conversation and DJ music kept getting punctuated by cheers and loud kisses. The rest of the election went pretty much as polls predicted, with Schell’s slightly-narrower-than-expected victory reassuring a municipal political machine that believes government’s highest and best purpose is construction, what Canadian politicos call “megaprojects.” But this night, at this place, belonged to a civic project the machine hated and the people liked.
Now it’ll be up to the people, and to the new neo-progressive wing on the City Council, to shepherd this unusual city-transit vision into reality without letting the machine and its planning corps literally “derail” it. The Seattle machine’s been rather effective at taking popular concerns and re-interpreting them into problems best solved by more business-as-usual. (Note, for instance, how the “neighborhood empowerment” movement thoroughly got re-interpreted by the politicians (even some of the “empowerment” politicians) into a movement for the upscale homeowners to keep affordable housing out and home-resale values high.) Watch for Schell & co. to try to replace the Monorail mandate (maybe in court) with just more commuter buses and park-‘n’-ride lots.
MEDIA INSIDER-ISM should come as no surprise. Note the reaction to the Monorail Initiative. The papers and the TV stations couldn’t find enough ways to “objectively” dismiss initiative instigator Dick Falkenbury and co. as loonies, threatening to saddle a citizenry with an impracticable transit scheme all the experts pooh-poohed.
Before the election, the papers and stations treated the Monorail plan as a sideshow to the gun-lock initiative and the Seattle mayoral race. The Times’ May 8 story treated the issue as a cute human-interest piece, starting off by describing Falkenbury as “a big, burly guy with a deep, heavy voice.”
The Weekly did run an enthusiastic cover story two weeks before the election (the biggest pre-election coverage the initiative got), but the following week its official endorsements list recommended against the initiative, giving no explanation why. The dailies also endorsed a no vote, also without much elaboration. The Times’ pre-election editorial headline set the tone: “Charming but unsound.”
Once the returns came in, this party-line portrayal came down hard. The Times’ Wednesday and Thursday stories Monorail dissings from the current mayor, the mayor-elect, city attorney Mark Sidran, and downtown-establishment publicist Bob Gogerty. The only pro-Monorail quotations were from Falkenbury himself, who was still described in less-than-flattering terms.
Times editorial columnist Terry McDermott tore into the vote: “It was one of the most charming proposals to get to the ballot in years. And one of the worst.”
Fellow columnist Jean Godden, taking the establishment line that there’s no way this can be paid for, wrote a column of facetious fundraising ideas–tin cups, bake sales, et al. (Never mind that it chiefly relies onmayor-elect Paul Schell’s favorite financing mechanism, the “public-private partnership,” via passenger-station retail (ask a few espresso vendors about the value of high foot-traffic locations). Never mind that much of it could be paid for by reallocating funds already earmarked for RTA light-rail routes that’d duplicate some Monorail mileage. And never mind that the initiative’s text clearly states it’ll use bonds and B&O taxes as a backup scheme.)
The Post-Intelligencer similarly described Falkenbury in every story as “initiative leader and tour-bus driver” or “the 44-year-old cab driver.” Its Friday story emphasized Falkenbury’s “whimsey” and lack of engineering experience, and described the initiative as “a giant transportation project with a seat-of-the-pants blueprint and a wild-guess price tag.” The P-I‘s Thursday story started out with Sidran, Schell, and city councillor Jan Drago; the former saying it “raises a lot of questions without answers.” It also dismissed America’s biggest current monorail, at Disney World, as an “amusement ride” novelty (even though it efficiently carries up to 200,000 people a day throughout that sprawling complex). But at least the P-I bothered to contact some pro-Monorail professionals. On Thursday it quoted two executives with U.S. companies building systems overseas. On Friday it found an ex-UW civil-engineering prof who acknowledged the thing not only could work, it might be more practical than RTA’s light-rail scheme. (Nobody, though, wrote how new urban monorails are currently underway or under consideration in Florida and southern California.)
The TV stations weren’t that much better. Even KOMO, which is planning an office-retail expansion to its building near the existing Monorail line and would hence potentially benefit from an expanded line, treated the vote as a thorn in the side of the new mayor and council. KING made Schell’s pre-election rejection of the Monorail plan the prime focus of his first post-election interview. (He said he’d examine the situation and maybe submit a referendum asking voters to repeal or modify it.) Even Almost Live! host John Keister likened the initiative to “asking people, ‘Do you like monorails?’ The next election they’ll ask what’s our favorite color.”
Compare this to the press’s treatment of the stadium and Commons proposers, who were nearly unanimously lauded as far-thinking visionaries (except in the columns of full-time skeptic McDermott). Papers and radio stations that normally treated sports-team bosses as meddling clueless dorks become sanguine when owners start demanding new playpens. Apparently, the difference between a “visionary” and a “whimsical” crank is whether he’s got cash and connections.
Here’s how I’d analyze the results: The initiative was extremely well conceived despite McDermott’s claims to the contrary. It was a Seattle-only scheme, aimed squarely at urban transit supporters and avoiding suburban conservatives and car-culture addicts. To this core constituency, the Monorail Initiative promised specific benefits at a relatively modest public cost. Nothing “whimsical” about that.
There’s even a legitimate point to the part in the initiative text about withholding city council members’ salaries if they don’t set up Monorail planning promptly. While the clause might not hold up if it’s ever tested in court, it shows Falkenburg suspected from the start that the insiders might try to ground the Monorail Initiative if it passed. So far, he’s being proven right.
YUPPIFICATION MARCHES ON: While the developer-owned politicians were promising to be more responsive if citizens just gave ’em another chance, the developers themselves kept on a-doin’ what they do best. The 66 Bell art studios, where the first Misc. installment was written for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper, were vacated and will become re-divided into smaller spaces at higher prices. The long-abandoned landmark Austin A. Bell bldg. was demolished, except for the front facade (which will become a false-front to the condos being built on the site). And Deja Vu lost its lease on the 1st & Pike strip club where countless businessmen and longshoremen paid out big bucks to momentarily feel slightly less lonely.
The daily papers were aglow about the possibility that entrepreneurs might turn the ex-Deja Vu space into an 1890s-retro “general store.” A general store was a place that sold most of the basic needs of frontier life. Downtown could certainly use a basic-needs retail outlet today. But, of course, this wouldn’t be anything like that. The would-be storekeepers want to sell T-shirts, gourmet jams, lattes, “fine art” (that stuff that’s not as good as just-plain art), and “unique gifts” that’d undoubtedly be just the same as all the other “unique gifts” sold in and around the Pike Place Market. For at least a year, the Samis Foundation landlords had openly expressed their wish to be rid of Deja Vu as a tenant as soon as they could legally kick it out. On my scale, of course, the human physique is wholesome and yupscale trinket stands are a little closer to obscene.
IN MORE POSITIVE RETAIL NEWS: The Pike-Pine Corridor where Linda’s is, an area hyped as the next happenin’ business district for some years now, has stumbled onto a niche. The arrival of several stores full of friendly antique furnishings at Pine and Bellevue has coalesced the area’s status as a bric-a-brac district to rival Portland’s Burnside Street. (The Seattle branch of Hamburger Mary’s, Burnside’s famous bric-a-brac theme restaurant, is now just a few blocks away at Bellevue and Olive.) From the retro ’30s at Fibber McGee’s Closet to the retro ’80s at Penny & Perk, from the vintage skin mags at Starlight Video to the pre-WWI sheet music at Filippi’s Books, the Double-P strip’s got most of the acoutrements for any time-pastiche home look you might imagine. Let’s just hope the big-money boys don’t “discover” the place and ruin it all.
