It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
The High-Tech Boys’ Club:
Now For Women Too
Book review by Clark Humphrey, 11/10/97
Release 2.0 by Esther Dyson (Broadway Books)
The Interactive Book by Celia Pearce (Macmillan Technical Publishing trade paperback)
Signal to Noise by Carla Sinclair (HarperCollins)
Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders by Jim Carlton (Times Books)
Interface Culture by Steven Johnson (HarperCollins)
Sometimes it seems a lot of people want to tell us about the future of computer-aided communications. Other times, it seems like it’s just the same few people putting out the same book. That’s because these screeds promising a decentralized, all-empowering cyberfuture are dominated by a small elitist cadre of ideologues who all hang out at the Global Business Network and other right-wing think tanks. These “digerati” all say pretty much the same things; none question their Gates-given right to not only predict but to dictate the direction of computers, the Net, etc. The first three authors in this review are women, but they’re still in the PC-biz “boys’ club.”
Esther Dyson’s a “digerati” insider of the first rank (daughter of celeb scientist Freeman Dyson, publisher of her own industry-insider newsletter). Her book’s essentially a general-audience reiteration of the digerati party line–the computerization of business is subverting all sorts of “paradigms,” you’ve gotta stay on your toes to keep up with market conditions that change overnight, don’t let pesky governments get in the way of all-kind-and-knowing companies, your kids’ll end up homeless tomorrow if their classrooms are computerless today. If you’ve already read Gates or George Gilder or Alvin Toffler or Nicholas Negroponte or any issue of Wired, you really don’t need another volume of the same.
Celia Pearce, who had almost as privileged an upbringing as Dyson (her industrial-designer dad’s worked on everything from Vegas light shows to Biosphere 2), could’ve used an editor. The Interactive Book, Pearce’s 580-page collection of essays, rambles on through her career designing group computer games for shopping malls, her love of the Internet visual-programming language VRML (whose co-designer wrote her introduction), her misadventures with the “new media” divisions of Hollywood movie studios (whom she believes will never “get it” regarding interactive media and its inherent differences from TV and movies), and how the Net and interactive media are supposedly on the verge of exploding all the old hierarchies of media, entertainment, and society in general.
Of course, behind most crusades against an old hierarchy there’s somebody who wants to build a new hierarchy with her/himself at its center. Carla Sinclair’s novel Signal to Noise doesn’t document this trait as much as help propagate it. Sinclair treats her friends and acquaintances in the Digerati as being important enough to have a roman a clef written about them. If you don’t personally knowDouglas Coupland or the Wired editors, there’s really no point in reading this long paean to their alleged hotness.
If the Digerati are the New Rock Stars folks like Sinclair claim them to be, then it’s natural to expect them to be subjected to scurrilous gossip. In Apple, Wall St. Journal writer Jim Carlton does the kind of hatchet job the digerati are always complaining about mainstream-media people for. Carlton blames office politics and executive infighting/ incompetence for Apple Computer’s fall from big profit margins in the late ’80s to multimillion-dollar losses the past year and a half. The eral story’s a lot simpler than Carlton’s account claims: When Microsoft wrested control of the PC platform away from IBM (with help from indie chipmakers who copied the IBM PC’s ROM chips for the first PC clones), MS turned PCs into low-margin commodities (similar to the old Kodak strategy of giving away the camera to sell the film). By then, Apple was already locked into an opposite business model, using the Mac’s superior operating software to sell its costlier hardware. MS’s Windows wasn’t (and still isn’t) as good as the Mac OS, but it got close enough for corporate computer buyers, threatening Apple’s market niches and decimating the high markups it had become dependent upon. None of the boardroom-soap-opera battles Carlton relishes in detailing had much effect on this corporate trajectory, and none probably could have. Apple put out a lot of superior products, but built a big organization that couldn’t change as fast as it needed to. An important story, but not the tabloidy tale Carlton’s trying to sell.
Amid all the hustle-hustle of uniform paradigm-subverting, it’s refreshing to read the occasional voice of common sense. Steven Johnson, who runs the pioneering webzine Feed, is out not to make websites hotter, just better. While Johnson’s Interface Culture isn’t flashily designed itself (not a single illustration), Johnson’s screed about the principles of online design makes compelling reading. He’s out to improve online communication on a structural level, applying oft-forgotten common-sense principles to the creation and organization of text and graphics. While other cyber-pundits blather about their mover-‘n’-shaker pals, Johnson quietly shows the rest of us how to start subverting their paradigms by making our own online statements more effective.
Close to the Machine
Book review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/30/97
Now here’s something you don’t see everyday: A San Francisco essayist who’s not an insuffrable egomaniac. Instead of incessantly promoting herself as a Hipper Than Thou brand name, Ellen Ullman in Close to the Machine (City Lights Books) calmly and personably details some of the routines and subroutines of her daily existence as a freelance “software engineer and consultant.” On one level, this short memoir gives a narrative focus to the process of programming–something I haven’t really seen since a 10-year-old Microsoft Press interview book, Programmers At Work.) On another level, Ullman evokes real sympathy while describing her life as the soul-numbing reality behind the other techno-essayists’ futuristic fantasies. She sits at her keyboard all day and most of the night, except when she’s driving two hours each way on an assignment in some deep-suburban office park. She lives in a cool loft space, but spends most of her time there working alone. Aside from her family back east, her only non-work-related relationship consists of occasional convenience sex with a younger man who dreams of making it big in offshore money laundering and online porn. On the plus side, she does get to drive a fancy car and eat at fancy restaurants and solicit AIDS-benefit money from her wealthy acquaintances. But, as centuries of literature have already shown, upscaleness can’t buy happiness.
AFTER LAST OCTOBER’S COLUMN about a trip to Reno, several readers suggested I go to Las Vegas next time for the real gambling/ tourism/ party spectacle. I did. Some pseudo-random thoughts:
It’s hot. A hundred degrees in the afternoon, eighty at night, seven to nine months a year. No wonder so many tourists are willing to stay indoors, inside their all-under-one-roof hotel-resorts. It’s amazing the Strip has as much foot traffic as it does.
It’s large. Much larger than you think. The bigger of the two main tourist zones, the Strip (a highway built parallel to a railroad from L.A.) is four miles long and a mile wide.
It’s modern-day capitalism laid bare. Incessantly gaudy and hyper, devoted to redistributing wealth from the many to the few. If Seattle’s official mindset is mandatory mellowness, Vegas’s is mandatory excitement, unending “fun.” (Fortunately, I stayed at the Horseshoe, known as the most serious of the downtown hotel-casinos.)
On the plus side, it’s what Republicans and capitalists can accomplish when they don’t have to buy votes from Christians. It’s loud yet clean, gaudy but slick, naughty in a thoroughly businesslike manner.
While the famous Nevada brothels are zoned way outta town, Vegas generally treats sex not as a natural aspect of life: i.e., as something to make cash from. Bigtime skin shows operate in some of the same casino theaters as “family” shows (magicians at 8, breasts at 10). Honeymooning brides from Japan line up to get their photos next to the seven-foot nude male statue in front of Caesar’s Palace.
The #1 category in the Vegas yellow pages is 150 pages of “Entertainers–Adult” (hotel-room strippers). I’m told most don’t fuck for money, though some will let you think they might until after you’ve paid them. I didn’t find out for myself.
I didn’t gamble either. Like veggie burgers or sex with men, it just didn’t personally attract me. Instead, I watched other humans of all adult ages, genders, and nationalities feed coin after coin into hungry slots, hoping the machines would come down with a sudden case of coin diahhrea.
On the strip you can visit ersatz versions of nearly every spot on the world: Latin America (Rio, the small Aztec), Europe (the Riviera, plus Paris and Venice resorts to come), Britain (Excalibur), the Caribbean (Treasure Island), the U.S. East (New York New York), the U.S. South (the Orleans, Texas Station), the U.S. midwest (Countryland, soon to come), north Africa (Luxor, the Sahara). But not Australia, Canada, or the Northwest (except for some totem poles outside a downtown ethnic-art store). But the weirdest work of cultural appropriation is the MGM Grand, “honoring” the movie studio that was dismantled and sold in pieces to finance the casino. But Vegas is always engorging on its former selves; witness the just-demolished Sands and Dunes. Next to go: the Aladdin, this Xmas.
Just beyond the Strip is street-level Vegas: bars and liquor stores, industrial buildings, wedding chapels, one or two real churches, motels, trailer courts, malls, strip malls, strip clubs, cul de sac subdivisions, gas stations, panhandlers, industrial businesses servicing the casino trade. More human-scale than the resorts, but little more heartwarming.
The casinos’ “sports book” areas became my idea of a potential full-time life environment. Imagine a cross between Number Two’s office in The Prisoner and a network TV studio on Election Night. Eighty-seven TV monitors, streaming news tickers, huge odds boards. I fantasized about the life of a casino pro: sleeping any hours I chose, eating at the buffets, gathering all available info about the teams and the horse races, living off the only consistantly winnable games in town (sports bets and poker). Watching the Ms’ first two losses on multiple big-screen TVs was a heartbreak experience, and a sign beckoning me home again. I realized I couldn’t live there, even if I could take the heat. So much of my life here doesn’t exist in the city that supposedly’s got everything (or exists only in scattered locations, far from the tourist areas)–things like bookstores, indie coffeehouses, fringe theater and performance art, anything that’s not part of the unending hustle for money.
Online Extras:
To imagine the size of The Strip, think of the I-5 corridor from the Montlake Cut to Northgate Mall. Or for you out-of-Seattle online readers, imagine one-third the length of Manhattan Island, devoted entirely to tourism and specifically to one mega-resort after another, interrupted only by a (very) few side streets, gas stations, fast-food stands, a handful of strip malls, a few surviving indie casinos, and some huge vacant lots where new mega-resorts are about to be built.
The Horseshoe hotel, where I stayed, is in the downtown area, the second and smaller casino district. (There are also individual resorts along other arterial highways and scattered other spots throughout Clark County.) Downtown Vegas was started as a railroad company town in 1906; above-ground casino gambling began there in 1931 as a Depression-era gimmick. But because the city had slightly more stringent licensing rules in the ’40s and ’50s than the state and county governments, most of the Mob and Teamster money that built the initial core of today’s Vegas went to developments on The Strip, just outside the old city limits. In the early ’90s, the city took the step that’s proven fiscally fatal in other towns, and turned its main street into an outdoor mall. Somehow, it worked. The giant canopy over five blocks of Fremont St. helps block the punishing desert sun, and the nighttime light shows on the canopy unite the 11 casinos on it into one entity of closer-to-human-scale thrills. Particularly cool is the block of the mall devoted to the “Neon Museum,” a half-dozen achingly cool old casino, motel, and milk-plant signs now removed from the buildings they once drew people toward. Walk outside the malled area downtown and you’ll find, well, not much. Just governmental buildings, law offices, a Kinko’s Copies, a couple of squatty six-story bank buildings, some of those famous picturesque wedding chapels, a city transit center, and a freeway separating the district from the residential zones to the north. How complete is the economy’s dependence on entertainment travel and gambling? When the local minor-league baseball team sought relatively modest public subsidies for a new stadium (which would also be offered as a spring-training site for major-league teams), authorities rejected the request on the grounds that it wouldn’t bring in enough out-of-towners.
As noted in Peter Rock’s novel This Is the Place, a large part of the Vegas mentality is based on notions of rebellion against a specific type of conservatism, that of the Mormons who populate much of the lightly-populated inland west (and who briefly had a mission at what later became today’s Las Vegas). The bright lights, the larger-than-life ostentatiousness, the endlessly-flowing booze, the intense freneticism, the strip shows, the uniformly “naughty” vision of sexuality, the insistent “bad taste,” and the total immersion in the idea of pleasure thru spending–all directly relate to universal human temptations the Mormons (and the Mormons’ arch-rivals-in-the-same-league, the Fundamentalists) devote their lives toward repressing.
Vegas, however, could use a little more of one positive Mormon trait, their sense of community. Public spending hasn’t kept up with the area’s massive population growth (now nearing 1 million). Not just the public schools but even the police and fire departments have had to resort to special levy elections, which invariably lose. School buildings either run year-round or on double shifts to pack in all the kids of workers at the casinos (and at the supply and construction companies servicing the casinos, and at the secondary and tertiary employers like car dealers and pawn shops). Meanwhile, the more affluent residents and newcomers (mainly from California) hole themselves up in new gated subdivisions patrolled by private rent-a-cops, steadfastly unwilling to consider themselves part of a larger regional tribe.
And forget about finding any of the lounge music associated with historic Las Vegas by latter-day hipsters. There’s still plenty of lounges, but they’re almost all devoted to “high energy” Earth Wind and Fire cover bands.
A Star and His Bucks
Book reviews for The Stranger by Clark Humphrey
8/21/97
Pour Your Heart Into It
by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang
Hyperion, $24.95
There’s an indie coffeehouse in Belltown with a bumper sticker pasted inside, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Go to Starbucks.” Such folks probably also wouldn’t their friends read Pour Your Heart Into It, the memoir/ success-seminar book by Starbucks chairman/ CEO Howard Schultz. The rest of you, though, might be mildly intrigued by Schultz’s mixture of ’80s-gung-ho hustle with New Age pieties (as polished into shape by Business Week writer Dori Jones Yang). Maybe not intrigued enough to pay $24.95 for the hardcover edition, but enough to leaf through it in the store while waiting for your beverage. You won’t find much nuts-‘n’-bolts stuff about the firm’s operations, but lots of mellow reassurances about life, business, and making it. Like a to-go coffee drink from an office-tower-lobby espresso stand, it’s an unthreatening little pick-me-up that gives you pause to reflect then sends you on your way toward closing that next contract.
Starbucks’ chief asset is its unabashed upper-middle-class image, set by the chain’s original founders in 1971. There had been Euro-style coffee roasters and servers in North America for decades, mainly in college towns and Little Italys. Starbucks founders Gerald Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker (the latter also involved in the launches of Redhook and Seattle Weekly) re-imaged Euro-style coffee as a “gourmet” lifestyle acoutrement for what would soon become corporate Seattle’s favorite consumer and only officially-desired resident, the upscale baby boomer.
A comparison is due at this point:Â Ray Kroc was a milkshake-machine salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from Dick and Maurice McDonald, went to look at their business, and ended up taking it over. Schultz was a drip-coffeemaker salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from a circuit of four coffee-bean stores in Seattle, went to look at its business, and ended up taking it over.
Schultz persuaded the partners to make him Starbucks’ resident marketing whiz in 1982. Schultz quit Starbucks in late 1985 to persue his own concept, a planned national espresso chain (originally to be called Il Giornale). Less than two years later, he added Starbucks’ name, stores, and roasting plant to his empire-in-infancy. His book came out on the 10th anniversary of the acquisition that formed today’s Starbucks.
On nearly every page, Chairman Howard’s hyping his company as something other than your standard mega-retailer (“Starbucks grew to more than 1300 stores and still managed to maintain its small-business sense of values”), and himself as a caring corporate citizen and a careful-yet-bold strategic planner (“If you want to build a great enterprise, you hve to have the courage to dream great dreams”). It’s all to encourage those dream-filled entrepreneur wannabes out there (particularly those who want to raise $37.5 million, what Schultz eventually needed).
Except for Schultz himself (a kid from the Brooklyn housing projects who’d gone to college on a football scholarship), the starting Starbucks core team was all local and mostly well-connected. Only when he outgrew the capacity of Seattle capital did Schultz seek out money and talent from across the country. Besides Bowker, most of Seattle’s small core of retail movers-‘n’-shakers turn up here. Jeff Brotman (Costco founder), Terry Heckler (creator of the old, funny Rainier Beer ads), Herman Sarkowsky (Seahawks co-founder), and Bill Gates pere (Microsoft Bill’s corporate-lawyer dad) are among Schultz’s original circle of investors and advisors. Whatever you think about the company, there’s no denying it’s a thoroughly Northwest-bred institution.
Another of those early investors was the uncle of easy-listening saxophonist Kenny G, who became a goodwill ambassador for the chain. Schultz writes about how G’s music perfectly matches the image of Starbucks’ stores (an image now identified with Seattle as a whole, thanks partly to Starbucks’ PR influence). No other Seattle music personality is mentioned in the book, not even Schultz’s former Viretta Park neighbor Courtney Love. Schultz writes about being “shocked” to learn from market research that Starbucks’ stores were considered squaresville by many “twentysomethings,” even though the stores were planned around the bland pseudo-sophistication most local rockers were rebelling against.
Schultz says he’s more than willing to let smaller outfits take that segment of the business. He acknowledges that as gathering places, Starbucks stands leave a little to be desired. That mom-and-pop cafés provide funkier environments, and in some cases better beverages, only feeds into Schultz’s insistence that underdog entrepreneurs can still make it. Today’s Starbucks makes espresso safe for strip malls and main streets, creating new coffee lovers who often move on to more individualistic beaneries. It’s these chain-eschewers, and the risk-it-all entrepreneurs servicing them, who fulfill Schultz’s admonitions to “Care more than others think wise. Risk more than others think safe. Dream more than others think practical. Expect more than others think possible.”
BRIEFS
Thrift Score
Al Hoff
HarperCollins
Not every big-company book made from a personal zine works. But then again, not every personal zine out there serves as a lifestyle bible, a window onto not just a hobby but a total worldview.
Thrift Score, the zine, is chock full of specific thrift stores and thrift-store finds. Thrift Score, the book, is a more generalized introduction to the topic. Ms. Al Hoff is darn near perfect in both realms. Her book’s a comprehensive lesson in the philosophy, science, and art of “thrifting.” For Hoff, shopping at charity thrift stores isn’t just cheaper and more adventuresome than ordinary retail (or commercial collectible-boutique) shopping, it’s nobler. You’re supporting a good cause while rescuing important artifacts of American life and adopting a way of life that’s simultaneously conservatory and decadent.
Existing thrift-scorers might worry: What if Hoff’s book turns too many people onto the life, increasing the number of people after the same clothes and doodads you’re after? She says not to worry: as long as you share Hoff’s eclectic enthusiasm for Stuff with a capital S, and as long as you’re not some thirift-mercenary after big-E Levi’s, there’s bound to be something way cool waiting for you in any decent thrift store.
Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Pacific Northwest
Lorna Price, ed.
University of Washington Press
The then-“progressive” yet now-unthreatening abstract shapes and colors of ’50s modern art were once new, and once they even shocked. When painter Louis Bunce proposed a big, soothing, yet completely abstract mural for the Portland airport in 1958, protestors called him a pinko and threw garbage into his front yard. Yet, on the other side of the paradox, a lot of 1948-62 arts and crafts (particularly around here) expressed wholesome themes like prosperity, efficiency, gentility, domesticity, and spirituality. They often expressed these themes in a universe of pure visuality, safely removed from the sociopolitical conflicts of everyday reality. And besides, the modernist tradition had been explicitly denounced by Stalin himself–how more cold-war-acceptable could you get?
These are some of the lessons in Jet Dreams, preserving the 1995 Tacoma Art Museum show of the same name with 21 color pix, 112 monochrome pix, and seven long essays about the artists, their works, and their context. It’s got your famous “Northwest School” boys (Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan), their friends and comrades (Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Richard Gilkey), and less-famous but equally-cool folks (architect Pietro Belluschi, sculptor Hilda Morris). Because there were only a few museums and almost no commercial galleries in the region then, a lot of these artists congregated around colleges and worked on government and corporate public-art commissions. This means a lot of their stuff’s still around us every day. From the Science Center arches to the downtown-library fountain to the now-old City Light Building [remodled beyond recognition in 1998], the best ’50s art still offers long-ago visions of what were then thought to be timeless themes. It, and this book, also give a glimpse into the peculiarly conservative “liberalism” now pervasive in the Northwest.
EVEN BRIEFER BRIEFS
Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Vintage) collects 37 of the late Italo Calvino’s odds ‘n’ ends, heretofore not issued in English. While none of its pieces contains the full-borne wonder of his masterworks such as Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities, most are still fine examples of Calvino’s highbrow fantasizing. Written over a 40-year period (some during WWII censorship), they range from modernized fairy tales to a first-person account of Neandrethal life to sad anti-adventure yarns. My favorite: an imagined interview with Henry Ford, in which the man whose company sponsored the Schindler’s List telecast explains away his own anti-Semitic reputation.
The Pin-Up: A Modest History, Mark Gabor’s thorough 1972 survey of cheesecake illustration from the dawn of lithography until just before Penthouse and Hustler drove all the art and beauty out of the genre, is back in a Taschen/Evergreen coffee-table paperback. The technical quality isn’t up to Taschen’s usual art-book standards (many pix look like they were rephotographed from a faded copy of the book’s first edition). But the pix themselves still shine with the loving efforts of the artists and models, providing a century’s worth of elegant, naughty, slick, and less-slick notions of glamour, beauty, allure, and desire. The only really dated part is Gabor’s intro, in which he apologizes on behalf of his entire gender for the images he exhibits. He’s really got nothing to be ashamed of. These umpteen-hundred pix present feminine power as diverse as all get out and universally compelling, nay dominating.
If the GenX-angst stereotype is passe (and it had better be by now), nobody’s told the Farrar, Strauss & Giroux editors who shipped Blue Mondays, Dutch kid Arnon Grunberg’s pseudo-autobiographical novel about wasting time and going broke on Amsterdam’s legal hookers. Grunberg apparently wants us to view his same-named protagonist’s increasing craving for the empty pleasures of rented skin as something akin to drug addiction. Instead (at least in this translation), Arnon (the character) comes off as an attention-starved egocentrist looking for pity and calling it love. Grunberg (the author) fails at the admittedly difficult trick of attracting readers’ sympathy to such an introverted, ungiving, unrevealing central figure. Raymond Carver handled this sort of cold pathos much better.
WATCH THIS SPACE #1: A new independent movie house is tentatively set to open sometime next month, joining the Grand Illusion, the Admiral, and the part-time screening spaces around town. The 108-seat Casbah Cinema‘s downstairs in the Sailors’ Union building at 1st and Wall, next to the former Trade Winds/ My Suzie’s restaurant space. Owners Laura and Anton DeJong are self-described “big film fans” who’ve planned for years to set up their own “grand cinema on a small scale.” They promise “classic and foreign films, but nothing really obscure” on Thurs.-Sun. evenings, with early-week dates open for rental to independent screeners and community groups. The DeJongs are also opening a cafe in part of the space, but aren’t applying for a liquor license at this time–a shame, since some of the McMenamin brewpubs in Oregon have quaint little screening spaces attached to ’em.
WATCH THIS SPACE #2: A Barnes & Noble book superstore (or perhaps a B&N-owned B. Dalton regular-size chain bookstore) is rumored to be taking over the Fantasy Unlimited/ Deja Vu corner at 1st & Pike, previously considered for a new public library. Scouts for the chain are said to have been poring over Left Bank Books across the street in the Market, presumably to make sure the new B&N’s fully competitive in the fields of feminist-film-analysis zines and left-activist memoirs. B&N’s regional management claims no definitive plans to add a location downtown, or anywhere else in town, just yet. While anything’s possible, I’d bet against ’em taking that particular site. For one thing, it’s too small as is, and its adjacent buildings are controlled by too many different interests to make assembling an appropriate parcel easy.
STOPPING THE PRESSES: Aorta, the occasional local art tabloid, has published its fifth and last issue under its current all-visual-arts format. Publisher/editor Jim Demetre’s closing editorial gripes predictably about the vagaries of trying to mount a self-sufficient, unsubsidized journal promoting indie and fringe visual artists. But he also complains that “There are many issues which I am very interested in writng and reading about,” but “the local visual art scene… has rarely provided me, or my writers, with a relevant point of departure for discussing them.”
While thanking Demetre for going this far, and acknowledging he has every right to revamp his publicaiton into something he’s more willing to put time and toil into (he plans to resume later this year with a more generalist culture-crit rag), his statement says something about the state of contemporary-art criticism in America. In Aorta, its precursor Reflex, and some of the slick NYC art mags, critics haven’t seemed to want to write about art or artists as much as about the critics’ own philosophical/ political worldviews. Sometimes, articles and reviews in these would take no more than a sideways glance at the nominal art topic, before wandering around about the writer’s beliefs concernig The Dominant Culture and The Other; or about how prejudice is a major contemporary problem and it’s those people who aren’t like us who’re always committing it. We could still use a regional contemporary-art mag that’s really about contemporary art, but it’d take a whole rethinking of the critic’s role. Any takers?
STARTING THE PRESSES: Two Rocket veterans have pop-cult self-help books just out: Start Your Own Band by Marty Jourard and Start Your Own Zine by Veronika Kalmar. Both are packaged by one Jet Lambert (described on the back cover as “a muse to those bitten by the bug of entrepreneurism in the 1990s”) and distributed by Hyperion (the Disney book division that just paid an upteen-thousand-dollar advance for the yet-unwritten memoir of Seattle Schools boss John Stanford). Besides the juicy irony of learning about DIY culture-making from one of Earth’s hugest media giants, there’s something strange about instruction books for activities you’re not supposed to need instruction books for. Still, ex-Motels member Jourard does get some good basic topics covered (such as what chords are and why good used guitars can be better than bad new ones); while Kalmar’s book lightly touches on a lot of topics experienced zinesters (such as myself) already know plenty about.
YOUR HELP NEEDED: Can you think of any formerly-popular American musical genre which hasn’t been the subject of an attempted “hip” revival in recent years? If you know of one, please let me know at clark@speakeasy.org.
This first Misc. Midsummer Reading List is a totally random collection of titles, recommended for fun value and in some cases for insights into the writerly craft. I started it after two different people asked for recommended reading matter. Within the next few weeks, a regular book-briefs section will appear in The Stranger, featuring various staffers’ recommendations of tomes new and old. But here’s some of mine (and yours). (Book links provided in association with Amazon.com.)
Online Extras
MICOSOFT TO BUY CBS?: That’s what a New York Post story said a couple weeks ago. I didn’t believe it, even before the denials from all sides. For one thing, Gates likes to buy companies on their way up, not underperformers in need of restoration. For another, MS’s current alliance with NBC made for at least a few half-decent jokes around the Internet, contrasting nerd stereotypes with the network’s young, hip image (Gates becoming the seventh Friend, et al.). But there’s nobody on CBS one could even imagine as having ever used a computer–except Dave’s World star Harry Anderson, a card-carrying Macintosh endorser.
AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “At Bally’s health clubs, you can get the body you’ve always wanted to have.” And you thought that sort of offer could only be advertised in the rural counties of Nevada…
WHITE UNLIKE ME: I’m on my third reading of Jim Goad’s book The Redneck Manifesto. Goad (co-creator of the nearly-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me!) has his points, but you have to sift through an awful lot of theasaurus-bending cuss words and almost poetry-slam-style “attitude” to find it. Around all this filler, Goad interweaves his and his family’s story of financial/ social struggle with observations of his current surroundings in industrial north Portland and with what BBC documentary producers might label “a personal history” of the white (rural and urban) working class in Europe and America, from the bad old days of indentured servitude and debtors’ prisons to the bad new days of welfare-mother bashing, wage stagnation, and job exports. In Goad’s worldview, the great mall-hopping middle class either doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter much to his main concept, the eternal war of “white trash vs. white cash.” Among the aspects of his thesis:
* Poor whites and poor blacks have more in common (and socialize together more readily) than poor whites and rich whites.
* Unattractive traits ascribed to rednecks and trailer trash (laziness, savagery, stupidity, promiscuity, poor hygiene) have always been used by the rich everywhere to disparge the poor everywhere.
* America’s “dirty little secret” isn’t race but class.
* Most rich people are white but most white people aren’t rich–and shouldn’t be collectively blamed for slavery, discrimination, and other rich people’s crimes.
* So-called “angry white male” subcults (militias, talk radio listeners, etc.) aren’t necessarily as racist, sexist, homophobic, or paranoid as the upscale media crack ’em up to be. Their real beefs, Goad claims, are against big business and big government, as they should be.
* The media (including most “alternative” weeklies) are tools of the “white cash” class and don’t give a damn about the downscale, except to sneer at ’em.
* The same’s true of white-upscale leftists, whom Goad claims care more about overseas rainforests than about toxic dumps in our own inner cities. Goad says this is an historic trait, citing Brit society ladies who spoke out against slavery in the American south while treating their own servants and employees like dirt.
* The white hipster agenda has always had less to do with assailing bourgeois privileges than with defending these privileges against the downscale squares.
Many of the class-struggle arguments have been made before, by folks like Michael Moore and Baffler editor Tom Frank. Goad’s main addition to the genre, besides his damn-aren’t-I-politically-incorrect sass, is his insistance that there’s no singular white racial caste, united in privilege and oppressiveness. With this, Goad seemingly contradicts the worldview of Race Traitor zine editors Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, who claims there is such a universal Caucasian identity and “progressive” whites should personally renounce it.
But their stances aren’t really that different. Both believe in self-empowerment by dropping out from the mainstream-America assimilation thang. Ignatiev and Garvey (instructors at bigtime East Coast universities) do this by pretending to be black. Goad does it by playing up his links to the white unprivileged. Goad’s is probably the healthier approach. Instead of appropriating the romanticized victimhood of some defined “Other,” Goad argues for the right to be his own Porter Wagoner-listenin’, dead-end-job-workin’, hard-livin’, high-lovin’, prematurely-dyin’ kind. One approach seeks true humanity outside oneself; the other finds it within. (More on this latter sub-topic in two weeks.)
I just spent half a week in Corvallis (Latin for “Heart of the Valley”), the Oregon hamlet where I’d spent some of my post-adolescent years. I was there to revisit childhood memories (unlike Seattle, most of the buildings there in the late ’70s are still there) and to meet my aunt and uncle. Uncle Kurt looks just like the late Days of Our Lives star Macdonald Carey; like Carey’s character, he was (before his retirement) the leading physician in an isolated college town, a pillar of kindly authority in a place that valued such things. Unlike Days’ fictional town of Salem, Corvallis has no known international spy rings or demonic-possession cases (there’s more treachery in Oregon’s real Salem, the state capital).
Corvallis is a place you have to want to go to, deep in the fertile Willamette Valley. It’s 10 miles from the freeway and Amtrak (both at Albany), 50 miles from commuter air service (at Salem or Eugene), 100 miles from Portland. It’s a place of unbeatable scenery, especially with the low cloud ceiling and the summertime field burning. It’s a real town, a feat of collective architecture/ planning/ whatever. Narrow streets are lined with big trees and shrubs. The buildings are human-scale, mostly amiacably rundown. Downtown’s still intact and prosprous, despite the loss of a few big chain stores (the Penney’s storefront now holds a Starbucks and a Noah’s Bagels). The outlying cul-de-sac streets are still part of the town, not elite-retreat suburbs.
It’s a company town, and the company’s Oregon State University (née Oregon Agricultural College), home of the fighting Beavers. It’s a damn handsome college, with low-rise ’20s brick classroom buildings built close together. At the campus’s heart is the Memorial Union (“Vnion” in the exterior stone lettering), an elegant, state-capital-like student union building.
It’s a place where small-town kids arrive, learn a trade in concrete, physical-plane-of-existence stuff (food growing and processing, computers, machines, chemicals, earth sciences), and in the process learn about getting along with people. One of the things they learn how is interracial dating’s no big deal–the college imports out-of-state black athletes (like future Sonic Gary Payton), who invariably end up dating white women (Af-Am females being scarce, even with the rise of the women’s basketball program). (One of the few Af-Ams to grow up in Corvallis was ex-Mariner Harold Reynolds. No, I don’t know anything gossipworthy about either Reynolds or Payton.)
State budget cuts have hit OSU hard. While private funding is helping keep the physical plant up (with several big new buildings going up this summer), enrollment is now less than three-quarters of its 1990 peak of 16,000. Fewer students mean local merchants sell fewer kegs of beer, fewer copies of Penthouse, fewer jogging bras. What’s kept the town going are the office-park businesses that like to put down roots near tech schools, such as the Hewlett-Packard plant and the CH2M-Hill engineering firm.
Also, there’s not much nightlife (though they’re finally getting regular punk shows and have an improving college-radio station). There’s a granolahead scene, but it doesn’t rule the town like in Eugene. There is a “Music of Your Life” radio station (the network KIXI used to belong to). The yellow pages list more multimedia production companies than video-rental stores. There’s a feminist small press (Calyx), and a strong gay-lib movement (surrounded by Lon Mabon’s notorious anti-gay crusaders elsewhere in the valley).
Despite these struggles, Corvallis was recently cited in one of those “top places to live” books as one of America’s most progressive towns. I don’t know if the honor’s deserved, but it is a near-perfect example of the kind of strait-laced yet “mellow” place Utne Reader readers might love. Oregon was always Washington’s older, more patrician sibling; Corvallis is a jewel-box setting for this staid “civil society” attitude. It’s the sort of town where almost nobody’s too rich, too poor, or too dark; where everybody (in certain circles) has some post-high-school education, where everybody wears sensible shoes and drives sensible cars; where even the frat houses separate their bottles for recycling; where Lake Wobegon and Reagan’s “Morning in America” prove to be the same fantasy–soothing for some, scary for others.
HERE AT MISC., we continue to view with bemusement the twists of fate regarding our allegedly post-print-media era. Blockbuster Music on Lower Queen Anne now has huge window posters announcing “We Now Sell Books!” Amazon.Com Books’ stock sale is a big hit, despite the outfit’s lack of profits to date. Book superstore chains haven’t yet led to increased overall book sales (certainly not compared to all the increased retail square footage now devoted to books), but they’ve shaken up a hidebound industry and just might lead to the end of the bestseller mentality (it’s already happening in the record biz, with the same sales dollars now spread among many more releases).
And by the end of this month, local TV newscasts (not counting Northwest Cable News) will drop from a total of 13 hours per weekday (including two hours of 7 Live) down to 8.5, due to the second realignment of station ownership in two years and the return of CBS shows to KIRO. The decimation of the KSTW news operation (and smaller cutbacks at KIRO) leave some 58 station employees on the unemployment rolls. I can see it now: Blow-dried reporters on the sidewalk, in trenchcoats with white spots where station-logo patches used to be, holding up signs (printed on the backs of old cue cards) reading WILL COVER CAR CRASHES FOR FOOD.
UPDATE #1: Virtual i-O, local makers of the Virtual i-Glasses video headsets discussed here a few months back, has gone under. The headsets were cute and offered an intimate viewer-image experience, but (according to a Puget Sound Biz Journal piece) the company couldn’t get the quality and reliability up and the price down before it ran out of funds. TCI, the company’s leading investor/creditor, now owns the rights to the technology.
UPDATE #2: The coffeehouse cereal fad quietly faded like a soggy bowl of Total. The espresso corner in the U District’s Red Light clothing store’s dropped its cereal selections; the downtown Gee Whiz cafe’s cut its own golden-bowl offerings down to a few top-rated brands.
ON THE RACKS #1: We’re still trying to make sense of People magazine’s “Sexy Moms” cover last month. They’re surprised moms can have sex appeal? The mag’s editors, like many Americans, must not realize that most people who have children have had sex first. And many of them even liked it.
ON THE RACKS #2: It’s been a quasi-frustratin’ year for this lover of obscure magazines, with the demise of the YNOT and ALFI stapled-goodie emporia. At least there’s the U-Village Barnes & Noble, where you can still get British Cosmopolitan, perhaps the sluttiest mainstream commercial women’s magazine published in the English language. Sample articles include “Why Bitches Get All the Best Men” and “The Single Woman’s Guide to the Men of Europe” (the latter complete with jokes about Bratwurst and “Nor-Dicks”). But the articles are just warm-ups for the little ads in the back of the book: phone astrology lines, phone sex lines for women, and more before-and-after implant photographs than you’d ever ever expect in the same mag with workplace-equality and anti-harassment essays in the front.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Want more proof computer geeks are the new idols? Just examine the new Think! brand “Proactive Energy” bar, using the old IBM slogan for its name and a Mac screen window on its label. Makers “Ph.D–Personal Health Development,” list a website (www.thinkproducts.com) but give no FDA-required city-state address (the website lists it as in Ventura, CA). It’s your basic exercise/ diet energy-bar thang, a fudgy-mediciny goo with a thin chocolaty coating. Mixed up in there are ginkgo biloba, choline, “complex peanut protein,” vitamins, herbs, and amino acids. It claims to “enhance the performance of your mind by promoting concentration, calmness, and stamina” if you eat one with water “30 minutes before using your brain.” But you ask, does it work? This column was written on one. Can you tell any difference?
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #6 of Organ & Bongos, Russell Scheidelman’s quarterly cocktail-culture guide, includes a truly hilarious satire piece by D. Hume about Vegas casinos we’d like to see (a Vatican-theme casino with religious icons on the slots, a Kremlin-theme casino with mile-long lines for the buffet and hidden microphones in every hotel room). $3 at Fallout or from P.O. Box 20396, Seattle 98102…
THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #1: W.A. Burgess’ new novel Cowards came into the office in an envelope festooned with “LOCAL AUTHOR” stickers. The only author blurb inside said Burgess “lives in Brooklyn, New York.” The dust jacket, a perfect example of NYC designers’ notions of “grunge” (complete with craggly, crooked type), lives up to St. Martin’s Press’s rep for excessively trendy art. The story’s a first-person journal of a heroin-addled Wallingford musician wannabe, with most of the incidents you might expect in a corporate novel of this premise (bands breaking up, couples fucking to avoid talking, a housemate OD’ing). It all comes off as dull and lifeless and meandering as, well, as a hopeless stoner’s monologue can be to a clean-‘n’-sober listener’s ears. Burgess attempts to make compelling reading out of characters who are near-fatally introverted, borderline catatonic, and in some cases barely verbal. He fails at this admittedly difficult task. His bigger failing is his inability to effectively evoke some of the more intense aspects of the punk-housemate life: the manic torment of the music itself, the weird-sick humor, the pseudo-profound beer-fueled philosophizing and political theorizing, the endless de- and re-construction of our pop-culture heritage. “Apathy is our greatest adversary,” sings local band John Q. Fascist on the 10 Things zine’s local-punk compilation CD. Maybe it’s more like dumb corporate books romanticizing apathy.
THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #2: If the NW music scene’s supposed to be passé these days, nobody told L.A.-via-Virginia author Jeff Gomez. His novel Our Noise is one big Northwest-band namedrop, starting with Cub and K Records in the first three pages and going on to mention Some Velvet Sidewalk, the Fastbacks, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Hate comics, Kill Rock Stars, Fizz magazine, Sub Pop, and C/Z Records. None of these people or institutions appear in the plot, which involves some sad excuses for indie rockers in a Wal-Marted near-south town where the biggest remaining downtown retailer is a used-book store. Plot points include a guy trying to print his new zine (called “Godfuck”) via a stolen copier key. Appropriately for these going-nowhere characters, I found the book on the remainder shelves. (Available at Half Price Books while supplies last.)
MIKE ROYKO, 1933-1997: The venerable Chicago columnist was known as cantankerous, yes, and mostly in a good way. But in recent years he’d started to offend some people who weren’t on the high ends of power, where his barbs had usually been aimed. Like many silent-generation liberals who got successful, he spent too much of his later life bitching about gays and immigrants, the latter despite his own Polish heritage (or perhaps because of it; his was often the kind of ethnic pride that sits across a very fine line from me-first-ism). But his was also the kind of fightin’ liberalism that challenged readers to rise up, take charge, and challenge the crooks in high places. He had little sympathy for “progressive” ideologies that treated even whitebread college graduates as victims needing protection by a powerful social system. He’d seen enough of powerful social systems claiming to befriend the helpless, thanks to the machine politics of Chicago’s late mayor Richard Daley.
His basic philosophy of politics was inseparable from his basic philosophy of newspapering. As practiced over a lifetime of daily deadlines, he felt newspapers didn’t have to be complacent, smarmy mouthpieces for their local powers-that-be. They could instead be provocative and hell-raising and lotsa fun to boot. His approach to columning certainly influenced me. It also helped influence some of the upper-Midwest kids who came to Seattle six years ago to start a paper. There might have been no Stranger without Royko’s ink-and-beer-stained hand leading the way.
If you get the chance, get to Uptown Espresso to view John Rozich’s utterly beautiful chalk paintings on the menu boards, commemorating next week’s 35th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair (a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition). Rozich’s exquisite works, modeled after original Space Needle ad art, engender a nostalgia for something once called the future. A mythical state, located in real space and unreal time, where most everything would be better.
I’ve been watching videotapes of KING-TV’s 25th-fair-anniversary telecasts from 1987, based on kinescope films of live fair coverage. The tapes show KING’s first news anchor, Charles Herring, hawking the fair as “A futuristic look into the future… How man will live and work and play in the year 2000.” In other moments, olden-throated announcers present incredible inventions-to-be: Sun power. A 200-mph pneumatic passenger train. An automated highway. Gas-turbine cars. Microwave ovens. Picturephones.
One scene takes viewers to the “World of Century 21” exhibit in the old Coliseum. As the camera closes in on scale models of domed cities connected by monorails, an unseen narrator booms, “We think and plan differently now. Science and technology are the twin architects of tomorrow’s homes… Our energy sources: solar or atomic. Climate control is automatic. Built-in vacuum systems keep our home spotless. The home communication center brings the world’s news, culture and entertainment to our homes in color and perhaps three dimensions… It’s not just any day. It’s tomorrow. The fine day you and millions like you plan and build. And it can be both beautiful and practical. City Century 21. The highest concentration of civilization. The ultimate expression of man’s collective endeavors… Home and work are closer to each other, and near to nature. Our transit-ring monorail provides commuters rapid and enjoyable mass transit. Electronic streets serve as safe, pleasurable secondary highways… Our city is a place men want to live in, not have to.”
But the mood of the Fair was more important than any specific predictions. As John Keister noted on one of KING’s retrospective shows, “It was a time of optimism, knowledge, and beauty. And I loved it.”
Within five years, the fair’s vision became popularly denounced as an empty promise, derived from a pro-industry, anti-environmental agenda. But it really represented something more complex: postwar liberalism, the world of the original Pro-Business Democrats. Our longtime U.S. Senators Magnuson and Jackson, who helped bring the fair here, sincerely felt America could and would be led forward into a Golden Age by Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor working hand-in-hand-in-hand to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.
There have, of course, been several futures since then. Various religious and military cults’ utopias fantasize vicious, vengeful doom for all guilty of not belonging to the right cliques. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia sees Washington and Oregon becoming colonies of a San Francisco city-state, wihch in turn would be run by a plutocracy of the environmentally-enlightened. William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors dream of a dark, violent external world overshadowed by an internal world enhanced by virtual-reality software.
Today’s most intensely promoted future is that of cyber-futurists like George Gilder and Alvin Toffler. But instead of gleaming cities in the sky, these guys look forward to a day when the top-income-bracket folks will never need to leave their gated exurban compounds. Indeed, most currently-promoted futures are anti-city, if not anti-social. White-flighters, black separatists, eco-communalists, Bainbridge nature poets, right-wing mountain men: Most everyone seems to want to be around only their own sort. Perhaps not since the fair did professional visionaries forsee diverse peoples wanting to live among one another. Even the concepts of “urban villages” and “civil society,” at least as intrepreted by Seattle’s top political brass, invoke a definition of “the people” extending no further than Nordstrom’s target demographic.
Still, the Space Needle beckons as its promised century draws closer. Don’t just look on it as a relic of yesterday’s industrial optimism but as a call forward, encouraging us to imagine better, more inclusive tomorrows than the tomorrows we’ve been imagining.
Airframe crashes;Â Flying High cruises:
Of Wings and Tales
Book review for The Stranger, 4/10/97
The jetliner is Seattle’s first big contribution to the world, unless you count Gypsy Rose Lee. Both Michael Crichton’s Airframe (Knopf) and Eugene Rodgers’s Flying High: The Story of Boeing and the Rise of the Jetliner Industry (Atlantic Monthly Press) are massive hardcover tomes (each weighing about a pound and a half) that build their narratives around the public fascination with this big, complicated, beautiful machine (perhaps the most complex machine ordinary folks regularly go inside of). Both also contain enough crash-related material, it’s a safe bet neither will be made into a movie that’ll ever be shown in-flight.
Chricton’s Freefall
In his latest plodding “thriller,” Airframe, Crichton (pronounced “Kryton,” same as the Red Dwarf ninny) pushes all his wearisome big formula-suspense buttons. At least here he has a reason to insert tech talk, unlike the ridiculous way it was tacked on to Disclosure in the form of improbable virtual-reality computing.
And the creator of ER manages to find a way to blast TV and modern journalism (a theme he previously addressed in a Wired essay), here in the form of a villanous taboid-TV producer.
Both the evil producer and our aircraft-company-investigator hero are females, a step probably intended to provide juicy roles for whoever’s the most bankable actresses when the movie version gets made. It also allows the final confrontation between the two to be mercifully free of the gender-war crap Crichton overused to death in Disclosure. (It might also be intended to placate readers who thought Disclosure dissed ambitious career women.)
In keeping with the Hollywood-intended plot devices, Crichton’s heroine is both the aircraft company’s chief crash investigator and its media spokesperson. In real life these jobs would be handled by two people (or two committees), but this trick lets Crichton keep the attention on one character, forever getting into bureaucratic, technical, and physical perils. (The physical threats to her, obviously intended to become movie action scenes, turn out to have little to do with the crash-investigation plot.)
Since I don’t like to spoil a good story, I’ll tell you the jumbo-jet crash our heroine investigates is due to human error, thanks to an underqualified foreign pilot. Among other things, this solution ensures the movie’s producers won’t get immediately turned away when they ask airplane companies for technical advice or factories to film in.
When Airframe becomes a movie, it may be the first such project involving both the main industries of Burbank, CA. While Boeing is now the king of civilian aerospace, much of the rest of the industry’s centered in that valley city where Lockheed and Warner Bros. both found the space for big hanger-like buildings. When Laugh-In and Johnny Carson joked about the nonglamour surrounding NBC’s studios, they referred to a landscape of squatty assembly shops, faceless engineering buildings, and vast employee parking lots–an area whose Pentagon-funded largesse helped enrich many of those anti-big-government California Republicans.
Boeing’s Highs & Lows
Flying High, the first major history of Boeing not funded or controlled by the company’s PR department, notes that California’s powerful politicians helped keep Boeing from a lot of military work after the ’60s. While military work has been a relatively small part of the boeing picture (at least until recent mergers), it’s still been big stuff, with B-52 and AWACS planes and missile components still in use. It wasn’t always this way.
As Rodgers notes, Bill Boeing was a rare breed of aviation pioneer–a businessman first, an air enthusiast only second. A mere decade after the Wrights’ history-making first flight, Boeing started building planes, not out of a fascination with flight itself but as a means to enhance his established timber fortune. Between the world wars, he built a lucrative Post Office air-mail contract into a vertically integrated company, including the future United Airlines. But after FDR’s antitrust guys forced a Boeing/ United divorce, Boeing fell way behind its L.A. rivals in supplying the nascent passenger airlines. When WWII turned planemaking into an all-military industry, Boeing’s company thrived. (Bill Boeing retired in the late ’30s; his descendents weren’t involved in the firm.)
In the early ’50s, the company made a last-ditch effort to get back into the passenger biz with the 707 (whose initial R&D was piggybacked onto work for a military transport).
In the 11 years from the first 707 to the first 747, Boeing (and the airlines it supplied) became a global institution. Then came the 1970-71 bust. Several boom-bust cycles later, the company again booms. For how long? The company, and Rodgers, see no immediate end, at least in manufacturing; on the engineering side, though, there may be enough already-designed airplanes to last the company for a decade or two.
Keeping with the company’s squaresville mindset, Rodgers gets into a little of the initial romance of flying, but not much. There’s almost nothing about passenger aviation in the propeller era, since Boeing was a minor player there. As with Crichton, Rodgers reveals only as much technology as is needed to tell his stories (i.e., why airlines preferred to buy a particular Boeing plane instead of a particular Douglas plane).
Both books almost hypnotically lead the reader into the pressurized, insulated world of their companies’ corporate cultures. Especially in Rodgers’s account, airplane-land is depicted as a near religious order, insulated by both internal politics and obscure knowledge, where outside interests (even airline customers) are treated with hands-off distance or even hostility.
Rodgers devotes one chapter to the sociocultural effects of Boeing’s presence in Seattle. Rodgers points out how Bill Boeing’s cloisered lifestyle in The Highlands, an exclusive compound north of town, influenced the almost antisocial culture of the company’s higher-ups (and of Seattle’s rich in general), forming a perennial obstacle to those who’ve tried to develop high-art and high-society institutions. He also mentions how Boeing’s “Lazy B” work culture and its periodic massive layoffs have affected the region’s economy. He could have gone further, depicting how the firm’s introverted, hyper-rational engineering mindset combined with Scandinavian reserve to form a city where excessively bland “tastefulness” became a fetish.
Boeing turned a timber-and-railroad town, barely beyond the frontier era, into the excessively moderate burg Seattle’s musicians got famous for rebelling against. Its products have helped propel the “globalization” of world culture and trade. As much as we try to ignore Boeing (and as much as it tries to ignore its community in return), it’s helped make us what we are. Eugene Rodgers’s book is a vital first step in understanding this.
CORREC: GameWorks does indeed have a Sonic the Hedgehog video game on the premises. Still no Crazy Climber, though…
THE MAILBAG (via Michael Jacobs): “I realize you’ve just lost all this weight and everything, but here’s the lowdown on a couple new candies. Starburst Fruit Twists: The ad looked good so I grabbed a pack. I was a bit disappointed. It was like flavored licorice, but made (I think) of that fruit-based plastic they use to make Dinosaurs fruit snacks, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fruit snacks etc. Only a little harder. Reese’s Crunchy Cookie Cups: Go find some! They’re like peanut butter cups, but the inner bottom has a chocolate cookie. It’s as if Reese took an Oreo side and built a peanut butter cup around it. Suprisingly, they’re better than you’d expect by far!”
GOING FLAT?: The Northwest microbrew craze may have peaked. A recent Puget Sound Business Journal piece by M. Sharon Baker described how, after growing 20 percent a month earlier this year, state microbrewery output fell 2.5 percent in November, the last month for which the Liquor Board had numbers. The questions: Have the indies taken as much business (now 8-10 percent of local beer sales) from the big boys as they’re gonna? Have bars run out of tap space for all the hefeweizens, porters, and ales? And has that Cocktail Nation fad permanently drawn young ladies & gents away from the foamy stuff? If the latter’s true, when will “microdistilleries” pop up?
BETWEEN THE LINES: Last time, I complained about word worship–the popular-in-highbrow-circles notion that the mere activity of reading, regardless of content, automatically makes you smarter. Now I wanna discuss the similar notion of word nostalgia–the longing for a past Golden Age of U.S. publishing. Mark Crispin Miller’s Nation cover story, “The Crushing Power of Big Publishing,” embraced this nostalgia as a contrast to today’s big-stakes, corporate-dominated bookland. In my recent feature piece about Amazon.com Books, I said early-20th-century publishing only seemed “purer” because it was a more elitist cabal reaching a much smaller audience.
Since then, I’ve found corroboration via The Wonderful World of Books, published in 1952 as part of a Federal program to encourage reading. (Yes! Even back when TV was still an expensive toy found mostly in the urban Northeast, society’s bigwigs worried about folks not reading enough.) Among essays by spirited-minded citizens extolling how books are fun and nonthreatening and good for you and you really should try a few, there were numbers on the narrow scope of books then. There were only 1,500 regular bookstores, plus another 1,000 outlets (department stores, church-supply stores, gift shops) where books were sold along with other stuff. Darn few of those were outside the big cities and college towns. Mass-market paperbacks were more readily available, but they only accounted for 900 titles a year (mostly hardcover reprints) from 21 publishers. The industry as a whole produced 11,000 titles a year back then, of which 8,600 were non-reprints (including 1,200 fiction titles and 900 kids’ selections). Only 125 companies put out five or more “trade” (bookstore-market) books a year. The book also noted, “The output of titles in England often exceeds that in the United States.”
Today, a U.S. population one-and-two-thirds times as big as that in 1952 gets to choose from five times as many new books, from hundreds of small and specialty presses as well as the corporate media Miller vilifies, sold just about everywhere (96 “Books–New” entries in the Seattle Yellow Pages alone). I won’t presume to compare the quality of today’s wordsmiths to Faulkner or Hemingway, but there’s plenty more styles and a helluva lot more races and genders on the stacks now than then. Behind the celebrity bestsellers is a diverse, chaotic, unstable, lively verbiage scene. Not everybody in it’s making money these days, and a lot of good works aren’t getting their deserved recognition. But I’d much rather have the current lit-landscape, with its faults and its opportunities, than the tweed-and-ivy past Miller yearns for, when bookmaking and bookselling was run almost exclusively by and for folks like him.
TURNS OUT IT WAS EASY to lose 41 pounds (one-fifth my old weight) in 21 weeks, after years of vowing to get around to it. I knew enough about myself to know I couldn’t have a prepackaged regimen, lifestyle, or personality foisted upon me. That would have disrupted both my internal chemistry and my ingrained behavior patterns, to the point where I’d get desperate to give up.
As soon as I told some people what I was doing (I admit to having been nearly insuffrably boastful), they’d give me all sorts of detailed advice on complicated schemes and self-help-book tricks I’ve found I didn’t need: The “Chew-Chew” Diet, the Rice Diet, the Popcorn Diet, the Drinking Man’s Diet, the Reversal Diet, the Purification Diet, ab machines, daily eating schedules, Topp Fast, and even spirulina plankton.
Instead, it was just less of the same–my usual food intake, cut to a 1500 calories a day (averaged out by the week), plus a daily half-gallon of water and regular conditioning workouts. No Jenny’s Cuisine, no fat-gram counting, no simple vs. complex carbos, no Enter the Zone, and no macrobiotics.
Because I’m big on prepackaged foods, it was easy to read calories on the “Nutrition Facts” label listings. For dining out, I carried a Brand Name Calorie Counter book. I used Sweet Success diet shakes at first, but realized I could have cereal or soup or toast for the same calories.
Certain aspects of my old intake regime did wither away. Beer and I became more distant friends. I lost contact with Hostess Sno-Balls. Cookies, crackers, and chocolates remained in my life on a limited basis; at the level of maybe one chocolate-covered cherry a day.
Some parts of the regimen were odd. Most diet books are written for women, and don’t mention the masculine predicament of awaking at 4 a.m., needing to expel a lot of that drinking water yet turgidly unable to do so.
On the other hand, those books also neglect the particularly masculine ego trip of discovering one’s thighs are no longer the most forward-reaching aspect of one’s lower anatomy.
I used nonprescription appetite-suppressant pills the first few months. They made me want and not want to eat at the same time. I also found myself losing interest in other favorite stimuli, like movies and concerts. I worried I’d become one of those bland boomers I’ve always ranted against. I pondered why those turn-of-the-century railroad moguls were so fat–maybe they had a hunger to grow, to acquire. I also pondered the words of an ex-anorexic acquaintance; she’d been reared to fear sex, to the point where she literally couldn’t stand to have anything enter her body.
During those initial weeks, I developed a running daily calorie count in the part of my brain where I’m normally obsessing about women or money. I’d weigh myself more than once a day, even more than once an hour. I’d get to worrying about “plateaus” and even about whether exercise was causing me to gain muscle faster than losing fat.
Because I’ve traditionally had the approximate metabolism of a hibernating bear, I started exercising to make sure I lost fat instead of muscle. I took a twice-weekly aerobic conditioning class at Belltown Ballet and Conditioning. Because it’s coed, it doesn’t have the kind of body-image jealousy trips I’ve seen in all-male sessions and I’m told can exist in all-female sessions. Still, the class is definitely tuff stuff, especially for the first eight to ten sessions. There are still stretching positions I simply cannot attain. But I’m getting better at it, slowly. I still can’t accomplish a chin-up, but I can do more crunches than I ever could in high school PE class.
By the end, I’d lost fat faster than my skin shrank, leaving billowy folds of empty flesh containers. I felt like that Dick Tracy villain who smuggled guns in the folds of his multiple chins.
Not that people noticed any change at first. In the difficult first few weeks, a few people volunteered they saw something different about me; but they all concluded I’d just gotten a different haircut. One old acquaintance asked if I’d switched from glasses to contacts (I’ve never worn either). My mom couldn’t even see anything different about me. Only in recent weeks have people been telling me they see any change.
One reason I did this was to look more desirable here in an “alternative” subculture where the single straight male is a decidedly surplus commodity. In his recent book Eat Fat, Richard Klein claims fat feminizes men. He notes how Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra refers to Cleo’s lovers getting fat in her presence as a symbol for ceding their manhood to the Egyptian seductress.
Lesbians have zines like Fat Girl; gay men have the “bears” clique. Men who love fat women, however, are often stereotyped as manipulative “chubby chasers,” out to control low-self-esteem women. And women who love fat men? Unheard of, except in places like the North American Association for Fat Acceptance.
Besides diet advice, dating advice is another of those genres almost never directed toward males. “You Must Not Be Fat,” warns Jim Deane in one of the few such books for men, The Fine Art of Picking Up Girls (1974). Deane claims there’s no such thing as a sexy fat man. I tried to think of some but only got to Brando, the later Elvis, Pavarotti, Babe Ruth, Barry White, and rapper Heavy D. More prevalant were images of near asexuality (Buddah, the later Orson Welles), arrested childhood (Curly Howard, John Belushi, John Candy), or inhumane lords of expanse (Jabba the Hutt, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, those railroad barons).
Klein’s book notes an archaic definition of “corporation” as a bodily protruberance, such as a gut: “…Like their anatomical counterparts, these great abdomens seem to aim only at expanding, greedily incorporating and consolidating in view of increasing their volume.”
Yet Klein also claims fat’s associated today with low-income, low-self-esteem people, while thinness is the visage for the rich and glamorous. The image of financial success these days is not the personal chef but the personal trainer; while today’s companies seem as insistant as Oprah to showcase their “downsizing” into new “lean and mean” forms. Klein quotes essayist Hillel Schwartz as calling yo-yo dieting “the constant frustration of desire,” a necessary mental state for Late Capitalism to function properly in selling unneeded goods (both excess food and diet schemes).
I still support International No-Diet Days and the Fat Pride movement. What I did was for me, and is not intended as a go-thou-and-do-likewise lesson. Different people have different bodies. Others may need or want to do something else, or nothing.
As for me, now comes phase two, best described by a zombie-bite victim’s deathbed promise in Dawn of the Dead: “I’ll try not to come back.”
HERE AT MISC. we’ve always had fun whenever a local media property went up for sale, fantasizing how cool it would be if we could buy KING or KIRO or KTZZ or The End. But the Weekly? Can’t think of a thing we’d wanna do with it. And as for the trade-magazine rumors (republished in the P-I) about Rupert Murdoch wanting to own KIRO, all we can respond with is a deep, cold shudder.
CLARIFICATION: The Samis Foundation, planning to develop the late Sam Israel‘s downtown land holdings, is a nonprofit entity created in Israel’s will to benefit local Jewish organizations. Its leaders and beneficiaries include no Israel relatives, as implied in a Misc. item several weeks back.
UPDATE: The painful revamping of the bookstore biz in the wake of the superstore invasion, mentioned in these pages earlier this month, continues. Pacific Pipeline, the leading wholesale supplier to area indie bookstores the past two decades or so, is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and will probably either fold or get merged into a national distribution firm. With superstores utilizing their own chainwide buying services, Pacific found itself with fewer clients, or rather fewer financially-stable clients. While retail customers never directly dealt with Pacific (except to read its regional-bestsellers list in the Times), its service and its commitment to regional publishers would be sorely missed.
SAY WHAT? (AP dispatch in the KIRO Radio News Fax, on a decline of Canadian shopping trips into Washington): “But another factor is tougher competition from retailers in Canada. Canadian retailers adopted innovations that were losing them customers–more retail space and better use of computers, for example.”
UNTIMELY SABBATICAL: The UW Experimental College will take the entire spring and summer quarters off. The idea is to get a restructured EC organization (including a fancy-schmancy computer registration and accounting system, to replace a notoriously failure-prone current setup) ready and debugged in time for the fall. So far, no word on what the college’s dozens of freelance instructors and thousands of course-takers will do without their weekly fixes of massage workshops, cooking classes, or forums on “New Ways to Meet New People.”
A UW Daily article said the shutdown was needed to keep the college from becoming a drain on the student-body budget, which has sunk $71,000 more into it than it got back out over the past 29 years. That doesn’t sound like much over time, especially when the new computer system’s gonna cost at least $50,000. But later reports give the EC net losses of over $20,000 in each of the last two years. And ya gotta remember how in the personality-driven, sometimes combative world of student-government politics, even small profits and losses can become points of contention–particularly since the EC attracts mostly non-UW students to its courses these days. Ultimately, the EC probably oughta be spun off into a separate nonprofit outfit, responsible for its own budget and operations, with maybe a UW-student presence on the board of directors. Maybe they could get the leaders of one of those courses on “How to Run a Successful Business on a Shoestring” to run the thing.
EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: I used to spend some of the prime days of my childhood with rags, steel wool, formaldahyde, and ugly chemical products, removing grungy old varnish and otherwise “restoring” old furniture and picture frames to be sold in my mom’s antique shop. Little did I know in my grownup world I’d meet people who use “antique” as a verb, to mean the exact opposite of my old work. At three different art gallery openings this month, I overheard viewers talk about a trend toward contemporary artists “antiquing” their works with varnishes, patinas, old junk-store frames, and even cracked stains. I’m not sure what it all means, except maybe the artists are trying for instant posterity, that figurative “veneer” of respectability often ascribed to works that have lasted the ages. Either that or they’re trying to reduce the scariness factor in their work by making it seem more homey, more suitable for a collector with a neo-oldtime living room.
PASSAGE (attributed to the sometimes-interesting Fran Lebowitz): “Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.
