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THE LINE TO GET IN to the new Apple Store in Bellevue Square on its opening day this past Saturday was pleasant and intelligent. Macheads from all over the greater Puget Sound country lingered for as long as two hours to get the chance to buy their hardware and software factory-direct, to temporarily enter the source of theie beloved computing platform.
It was a gathering of the tribe, sharing lively conversation augmented by opened iBooks and PowerBooks. (The store has a free-access WiFi transmitter, also receivable from the nearby Nordstrom espresso stand.)
Inside the brightly lit, cleanly appointed store: Your basic hardware selection of laptops, desktops, monitors, MP3 players, printers, digital still and video cameras, etc.; two big wall displays of software boxes; a customer-service desk pop-pretentiously christened “The Genius Bar;” and big billboards promoting Apple’s new paid music-download service.
The Apple Store doesn’t have anything, with the possible exception of a few third-party software titles, you can’t get for the same price or less at The Computer Store, CompUSA, or other outlets, or online. No, the appeal of the Apple Store is the opportunity to immerse oneself in the brand, to experience Apple Computer as a tangible real-world thang and not just a presence inside the screen.
GOT BACK TO SEATTLE in time to see the last of the Maritime Festival and tugboat races on the waterfront.
JOSEPH P. KAHN TRIES TO EXPLAIN the rash of movie and product names starting with the letter “X.” No, it’s not so they’ll be listed first in reverse alphabetical order.
AS IF YOU HAVEN’T GUESSED IT, there’ve apparently been no big mass-destrux weapons caches in Iraq. Saddam really was only a threat to his own people.
THE MAJOR RECORD LABELS are rumored to be commissioning virus-type software programs that’d be posted within, or under the titles of, online music files, in order to instill fear into the hearts of MP3 traders. I’m old enough to vaguely remember when the record co.’s claimed to be rebels, or at least friendly vendors of rebellious attitudes. Today’s music monoliths might market one-dimensional celeb images of bad boys and naughty girls, but that’s no more “rebellious” than the sight of Republican politicians on Harleys.
TODAY WE BEGIN a new occasional photo series, Space Available, depicting some of the once-productive retail and office real estate currently made redundant by today’s economic collapse.
I’ve freelanced in the past for the Seattle Times, and hope to do so again. But that doesn’t mean I want it to succeed at its current drive to become a true monopoly paper.
I opposed the original joint operating agreement between the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, which took effect 20 years ago this month. Unlike the JOAs in some two-paper towns, which set up a joint-venture agency to handle the papers’ non-news operations (sales, printing, distro, promotion, etc.), the Seattle JOA put both papers’ fates squarely under the Times’ control. The Times was free to undersell the P-I to subscribers and advertisers alike, or to be laggardly about trucking the P-I off to outlying corners of the region. All of which it’s been accused of doing at one time or another.
The 1999 revision to the JOA only increased the Times’ capacity for mischief. When the World Wide Web came along, the Times ruled that a P-I website would fall under the promotional duties ascribed under the original JOA’s terms to the Times. In other words, the Times got to choose what kind of website the P-I could have, and naturally chose a bare-bones PR page without any actual news items. In return for the right to put its full text online (and a slightly higher share of the JOA’s proceeds), the P-I agreed to a revised JOA that would allow the Times to (1) come out in the morning, and (2) invoke an escape clause should it report three consecutive money-losing years.
The latter clause, in retrospect, was a lot like the escape clause former Mariners owner George Argyros demanded from King County in the mid-’80s. Argyros claimed, and the Times and P-I editorially agreed, that the only way to keep the M’s in Seattle was to rewrite the team’s Kingdome lease so Argyros could more easily move the team to Tampa. (Really!) Argyros got his new lease, then promptly attempted to invoke his bug-out option at his first contractual opportunity; the team’s future wasn’t secured until the 1992 sale to the Nintendo-led group that still owns it today.
Similarly, the Times took an agreement that was ostensibly meant to keep both papers in business, and has reconfigured, interpreted, and exploited it in order to try to kill the P-I. The Hearst Corp., which has owned the P-I since 1921 while allowing so many of its other once-mighty dailies to die over the decades, is taking the whole mess to court.
It could end up in any number of ways. Times bossman Frank Blethen says he wants the Times to emerge alone from the fray, and he insists it’ll do so with his family still in charge. But there could conceivably also be a full merger of the papers into one lumbering goliath, or a Hearst buyout of the Times.
What nobody’s openly considering is a return to full competition, with Hearst or some future P-I owner amassing a separate load of presses, trucks, and ad sellers.
But that’s what I’d like to see.
It’d be a perfect opportunity to try and re-invent daily newspapers for the Internet age, when the tiny-print items that have continued to make dailies essential for urban society are more handily available online (movie times, stock prices, sports stats, want ads). In the TV age, dailies survived (albeit in consolidated, monopolized forms in most cities) as the only place you could get such data. With that advantage gone, what would a paper need? Perhaps a strong aesthetic, a sense of the zeitgeist, a coherent package of articles and pictures that at least pretends to try and make sense of a crazy world.
That’s where the P-I, the closest thing the Northwest has to a progressive daily, shines best. Its livelier copywriting and more aggressive feature coverage make it a more intriguing read than the Times has ever been (though both papers were sufficiently compliant suckers for the Bushies’ propaganda massages this past year).
I prefer the P-I as a news product, but I want both papers to live. Any industry that can’t figure out how to make that happen ain’t much of an industry.
…I’ve been reading lately talk a lot about the principle of “OPM,” or “Other People’s Money.” Nobody knows this better than Bill Gates, who’s been steadily rakin’ in the OS/Windows/Office software royalties for years while the PC hardware makers’ fortunes ebb-‘n’-flow. (Anybody remember Acer, Micron, Packard Bell, or Eagle PCs?) Now his MS minions are promoting a new computer hardware format, code-named “Athens.” The Athens machine’s chock full of MS Windows-only technologies, making it either useless or cumbersome as a potential Linux box. If adopted by enough manufacturers (and their end users), Athens will send more factory-installed-software monies Bill’s way, while leaving the manufacturers themselves to compete on razor-thin profit margins to sell boxes with roughly the same features.
…to “Value Added Marketing” and “The Fake Little Laugh That Means ‘Bad Acting,'” Phil Agre’s compiled a long, thoughtful, personal list of “Minor Annoyances and What They Teach Us.”
…in today’s economy. Would you believe… dot-coms?
IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we’re cutting down on the site’s ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).
THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:
THIS SUNDAY, the Seattle Times ran a long and lovely story about the Grand Illusion Theater, where I curated a strange-matinees series in 1987 and where, under the name The Movie House, the Seattle alterna-film exhibition scene began back in 1970. Under various owners over the years (it’s currently part of the nonprofit Northwest Film Forum), the 78-seat GI has epitomized the best of the Seattle filmgoing scene: Friendly curiosity, wild eclecticism, and a healthy indifference to celebrity BS.
The same day the times ran its Grand Illusion piece, Scarecrow Video held a public wake at its Roosevelt Way digs for the store’s founder George Latsois. (He’d died earlier in the month, from the brain cancer that had forced him to sell the store four years ago.)
Latsois essentially took the aforementioned Seattle film-consumption aesthetic and built a video-rental superstore around it. He’d started with a handful of Euro-horror titles he’d consigned to the old Backtrack Records and Video store north of U Village (a sponsor of my matinees at the Grand Illusion). From there he opened his own 500-title store on Latona Ave. NE, which by 1993 had grown to take over a former stereo store on Roosevelt.
He built it from there according to that mid-’90s local business mantra, “Get Big Fast.” It had 18,000 titles when it moved to Roosevelt and over 60,000 now. But like many other local ’90s entrepreneurs, Latsois spent more money on expansion than he was bringing in. He became ill before he could sort it out, but the new ex-Microsoftie owners have honorably continued the store’s operations and its wide-ranging buying policies (want DVDs of Korean films dubbed into Chinese? They got ’em!).
Scarecrow Video, and the Grand Illusion four blocks away on University Way, are hallmarks of the city’s intelligence and unpretentious sophistication. These qualities were quite ludicly expressed in the current Seattle Weekly cover story. In a lengthy essay originally commissioned for The Guardian (that Brit paper that’s become the newspaper of record for un-embedded war coverage), local UK expatriate
Jonathan Raban depicts a city where just about everybody (except the cops and the sleaze-talk radio hosts) is adamantly antiwar, from the coffeehouses to the opera house. Around here we don’t have to escalate Bush-bashing protests into disruptive confrontations, because we’d rather try to send a more positive message out to the world.
Compare Raban’s depiction of the local antiwar movement with that of the current Stranger, which trots out that ages-old self-defeatist whine that Seattle’s (fill-in-the-blank) isn’t an exact copy of a (fill-in-the-blank) in San Francisco and therefore automatically sucks.
I say Seattle people only accomplish anything when they don’t settle for imitating shticks from down south, but instead dare to create their own stuff. We don’t have to break things or shut the city down to get out point across. We can forge our own path toward a less-stupid, less-violent world. We can show, by daily examples large and small, individual and massive, that, as they said in the WTO marches, another world is possible.
WIRED MAGAZINE put out its tenth-anniversary issue last month. Its contents will appear on its website once the issue disappears from the stands.
The issue contains a big section in which the mag, now run by the Conde Nast empire, relived its heritage as the most rah-rah, corporate-hip, cheerleader of the ’90s tech boom in all its manifestations. Particularly noticable are all the excerpts from pieces in which the magazine’s original regime emphatically insisted that “the old rules” of just about everything no longer applied. (With one exception: It once insisted the only way Microsoft could become a company it could approve of was to move to Silicon Valley, because “the Evergreen State is still the sticks.”)
In the world of the old Wired, everything was either Wired (hip) or Tired (square).
What was invariably deemed “Wired:” Giant corporations built up from nothing. Hyper-luxury lifestyles. CEO celebrity cults. Stratospheric stock prices for companies that had never earned a dime. Stock markets that would rise, rise, and keep rising into infinity. Unabashed greed and individual ambition. Power tripping. The relentless thumpa-thumpa of generic techno music. Sex redefined as individual pleasure (hence the “dildonics” fantasies for futuristic elaborate masturbation machines).
What was invariably deemed “Tired:” Thrift. Quiet dignity. Long-term relationships, other than with financial advisors. Labor unions. Health-care reform. Poor people. Caring about poor people. People in rural areas who didn’t move there from a city. Cities in North America that weren’t San Francisco. The “old media.” France. Environmental laws. Minimum-wage laws. Governments in general, except when subsidizing businesses. Literary genres other than science fiction. Movies without special effects.
True to past form, the magazine follows this nudge at its old arrogance with a big bit of new arrogance, in the form of a long cover story extolling hydrogen power, for cars and just about everything else. It’s a nice idea (a clean-burning fuel-O-the-future that emits only water vapor).
But you have to use some other generation system to make hydrogen. Windmills and solar panels could be used for that; but the corporate energy czars would rather promote “more fully developed” technologies—petroleum, coal, and especially nuclear power. The Wired piece goes on to suggest environmentalists should start loving nukes, as long as they’re being used to make hydrogen, and insists there are no safety or waste-disposal problems with today’s nuke-plant designs.
But then an article in the back of the same issue, about the eternally pesky issues regarding permanent radioactive-waste disposal, reminds us we’ve heard those no-problem promises before.
…(Jerry Useem in Fortune):
“Wal-Mart in 2003 is, in short, a lot like America in 2003: a sole superpower with a down-home twang. As with Uncle Sam, everyone’s position in the world will largely be defined in relation to Mr. Sam. Is your company a “strategic competitor” like China or a “partner” like Britain? Is it a client state like Israel or a supplier to the opposition like Yemen? Is it France, benefiting from the superpower’s reach while complaining the whole time? Or is it … well, a Target? You can admire the superpower or resent it or–most likely–both. But you can’t ignore it.”
Wal-Mart began in the suburban and ex-rural South, far from the big population centers. It still has yet to appear inside most cities (though Useem notes it’s just opened a prototype in-town store in LA). Big-city-based media people are still amazed and shocked upon learning how big and influential the chain is. Political people, of course, know. The chain’s late founder Sam Walton was one of Bill Clinton’s first big backers. The whole Republican campaign strategy is wrapped around appealing to Wal-Mart’s target customer base.
You already know about the chain’s notorious censorship policy regarding music CDs and their packaging. As it becomes the nation’s biggest video retailer, it could weild similar power over movie content (even more, and more draconian, than is currently weilded by Blockbuster).
Which means those of us who demand more than a discount-supercenter selection of cultural or other merchandise will need to vigilantly support those who can supply it.
For those of you who love overgeneralized dichotomies, here’s a new one:
America might be polarizing again, this time into Wal-Mart Nation (limited diversity, one big smiley-faced authority system) vs. Internet Nation (everything and everybody you could ever imagine in a big chaotic and contradictory spectacle).
You should know by now I’d rather live in the second world.
The normally at-least-semi-lucid New York magazine media critic Michael Wolff has gone mildly insane in his most recent essay.
He took the firing of an editor at a big NYC book company, something that happens darn near every month at one of those places, and whipped up a big concoction of a piece claiming the whole book biz is an old-media dinosaur stuck in a permanent death spiral.
This is the sort of fluff I’ve been hearing for eight years from the Wired dorks (hey, just ’cause their own book division went sternum-up…) and for over twenty years from the disgruntled-hippie-curmudgeon set. But from where I sit, books (as a fiscal if not a creative endeavor) are about as strong as any media endeavor during our current Great Depression Lite.
When the Kmart Corp. began its current tailspin, what was the first asset it sold, the one most certain to fetch a premium price? The Borders bookstores. That tactic’s what the financially sicker-than-sick AOL Time Warner is doing now. The AOL Internet racket wound’t fetch ’em the price of a measly banner ad; but the conglomerate’s book units (including Little, Brown and Time-Life Books) would, so they’re what AOLTW’s putting up for sale.
The ol’ dead-tree-lit biz has certain advantages in the current marketplace. Unlike websites, it puts out a tangible physical product (that can even be resold on the used market). Unlike periodicals, its products have relatively indefinite shelf lives. Unlike periodicals or broadcasters, books aren’t dependent upon slump-prone ad sales. Books can be “affordable luxuries,” little treats you can give yourself or loved ones.
Wolff claims there’s no need to romanticize The Book anymore, because it’s become just another lowest-common-denominator, dumbed-down product. But then he claims nobody’s buying books (or at least caring about them) except a little Northeastern elite (that happens to coincide with his own readership). There wouldn’t be mass-market books if mass markets weren’t buying them.
There are a few problems besetting the book biz these days, above the general economic malaise. Wolff’s just mistaken about what they are.
First, book publishing can’t be run on a healthy, long-term basis on the kind of profit margins demanded by media conglomerates obsessed with The Almighty Stock Price. Thus, even the making and selling of highly commercial titles is best handled by independent firms. (Thus, the spinoff of AOLTW’s book arm might be better for both the seller and the sold.)
Second, there’s the little matter known as Serious Literature. Like “independent” film and “alternative” music, it’s a niche genre that appeals to customers who think they’re hipper and smarter than any dumb ol’ corporation. (Whether the customers really are all that hip or intelligent doesn’t really matter.) They’re a piece of the business even more apt to be better serviced by the non-conglomerates.
Wolff sneeringly dismisses serious-lit lovers as passé crackpots, out of tune with the 21st century. Actually these are the gals n’ guys who, when they’re doing their jobs right (as writers, editors, sellers, and readers), unearth and reveal the truths about our age.
It’s the media hype speed-freaks like Wolff who, from this corner, seem more like relics of a discredited time.
…ever-so-slightly longer, but it still feels like early winter around here, socio-psychologically. Everywhere you look around these parts, there’s bad news.
Chubby & Tubby finally closes this week.
Fallout Records, the feisty indie music and zine store that supported the print MISC since its relaunch three years ago, is shutting down next month.
The Paradox Theater, which mounted underage rock gigs for the past three and a half years (at the old University Theater, where yr. web editor once promoted some silly little B-movie matinees), is shutting down this weekend; though its operators promise to promote all-ages shows at other sites.
The gorgeous streamlined ferry boat Kalakala is in danger of being sold out-of-state without a quick massive arrival of restoration funds.
Dozens more of Seattle’s most talented creative people are splitting town, including two of the print MISC’s most valued past contributors.
Boeing, now essentially a branch-plant operation of McDonnell-Douglas, continues to churn out massive layoffs while starting up a job-blackmail scheme in which its three or four production cities will surely be asked to pay subsidies for the right to have the company’s next passenger-plane assembly operation.
Even mind-numbing shit jobs are being lost in vast numbers across the local economy. Nearly 2,000 telemarketers have been canned in Washington, as various companies consolidate their “call centers” into low-wage states (or countries). And word has it that computer programming, seen only eight years ago as THE profession of the century, risks becoming a dead-end career, as big corporations ship whole information-tech departments off to India and Singapore.
The politicians around here are playing a game of one-downsmanship, each striving to combine the most brutal cuts against programs to aid the poor with the most pious public apologies for same.
Personally, I’ve gone from underemployed to unemployed. I only get sleep one night out of every three (no I don’t know why). I’ve felt like giving up the daily grind of submitting resumes to everybody in town, for jobs I don’t even want. But I don’t know what to give it up for.
And, of course, the national political/economic situation is as sorry as it’s been since at least the early Watergate era.
Maybe the Erotic Art Festival tomorrow at Town Hall can bring at least a little bit of life/hope back to the memescape.
Bellevue Square is trying to evict FAO Schwarz. But the troubled toyseller isn’t backing down, and is making legal challenges.
It probably won’t end there. Where might it end?
I can see it now. The GI Joes and the Toy Story Bucket O’ Soldiers surround the store, vowing to repel any invasion. Some of the Cabbage Patch Kids start learning triage. Plamobil people start planting small explosives around the 14-foot bear sculpture, ready to turn it into an instant barricade. Some of the Barbies offer themselves as human shields in front of the soldiers. Other Barbies rebel against the whole scene, and go off into a prayer circle somewhere near the educational toys. Bert and Ernie are reprogramming the foot-powered giant keyboard into an early warning alarm. Pokémon villains Team Rocket are attaching incidiary devices to the radio-control model cars, ready to roll right up to the mall manager’s desk upon the receipt of the go-ahead signal (Tickle Me Elmo’s giggle). An expeditionary force of Sailor Moon dolls secretly maps out a counter-attack plan. They will lead a vanguard of Dragon Ball Z and Power Rangers characters in taking more mall territory. They will pelt the mall cops (and any stray shoppers) with Monopoly houses and Jelly Bellys, but only as a diversionary tactic. While mall management is looking the other way, Jay Jay the Jet Plane will fly off toward the Muzak control room, to deploy the toys’ ultimate weapon. The unbearable strains of the “Welcome to Our World of Toys” song will play continuously, at full blast, until an unconditional surrender is attained.
NEWS ITEM #2: Mainstream news media, both national and local, have suddenly discovered young anarchists, some 26 years after the first circle-A teens and three years after WTO. Whether the papers are trying to brand all antiwar protestors as extremists, or whether they really want to shed light on the philosophy of no-government, the issue’s a little more pertinent now than it was pre-George Dubious.
At the time of the WTO protests, many of us perceived a “withering away of the state” underway, giving way to effective rule by a stateless corporate elite. Some WTO opponents vocally wished for a resurgence of governmental paternalism, countering the often inhumane moves of Big Money.
But nowadays, governments and their bosses have reasserted their presence, in unkind ways. The White House occupant has embarked on a macro strategy of sleaze and graft, of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, of imposing or trying to impose a vast spectrum of police-state brutalities. I’m starting to wonder if, should the GOP goon squad win in 2004, whether there will even be a presidential election in 2008.
So: It’s again quite relevant to ask whether the type of megastate that can do this much harm on such a grand scale deserves to exist. The biggest argument in defense of Big Government these days might be that it’s the only thing that could stop terrorism and protect North American residents from hostilities by other governments.
Nine-eleven’s perpetrators were non-governmental but still quite authoritarian. They weren’t after “regime change” here, but did encourage hardline elements within the Muslim world to try and form harsh governments in their own homelands. Our government’s might has so far failed to catch or punish this non-governmental force, and is now instead being massively redeployed against another perceived enemy which had little or nothing to do with the 2001 terror attacks, but which, by being a government with real estate and a real army, is more convenient to deploy forces against.
Back home, the argument against big government could easily be made by invoking Iraq and North Korea as the horrific result of governmental leaders who’ve grasped the kind of extreme strong-arm power our own government now wishes to impose upon us. Even the right wing’s rugged-individualist factions (such as the black-helicopter conspiratists and the “Remember Waco” bunch) are starting to grumble at Bush’s creeping Big Brotherisms. And with most Democrats still shunning their party’s past insistence that governmental power can do good things for people, it’s easier than ever to imagine no (or at least a lot less) government as the only viable alternative to bad government.
But what would replace big government? Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson has fantasied about a future where business takes over everything government used to do, even the police and the roads. Modern anarchists themselves usually invoke collectivist neo-agrarian Utopias where everybody would (supposedly willingly) all be neopagan vegan bicyclists wearing all-hemp wardrobes (a prospect just as monoculturally scary as anything the Evangelicals can propose).
I, as longtime readers can surmise, have other wishes. I happen to like DVD players, rock bands, and cheese-flavored snacks, and want to preserve the technological infrastructure that makes them all possible. But less facetiously, I believe humanity’s too diverse and unpredictable for any preplanned Utopian scheme to ever work. We need a society that’s flexible enough and diffuse enough to allow countless ethnic/religious/gender/subcultural/etc. sub-nations to all pursue their own definitions of happiness. Government can help or hinder this, as can business.
I don’t have the answers, at least not yet. But I’m researching them, for a possible book-length essay/manifesto. Any suggestions on your part would be most welcome.
WIRED PONDERS whether PCs are from Mars and Macs are from Venus.
SURE ENOUGH, as soon as I’m no longer writing Obits a major passing occurs in the Northwest scene. Miller Brewing is closing the 106-year-old former Olympia Brewery, the region’s last mass-market beer factory and Thurston County’s biggest industrial employer.
It comes four years after Seattle’s Rainier Brewery came to a similar end. Both shutdowns (along with those of Blitz-Weinhard in Portland, Carling/Heidelberg in Tacoma, and the Lucky Lager plant in Vancouver WA) were directly caused by the industry’s massive consolidation. Miller’s contract-brewing arrangement with Pabst meant the Oly plant made the brand names formerly produced at all five big Northwest breweries (though Pabst has been phasing out what was left of the Olympia and Rainier brands this past year).
The Oly site was once the west’s second biggest brewery after Coors, but is now the smallest of Miller’s seven facilities. Management apparently decided to surplus it rather than add a recently required wastewater-treatment facility. So, just maybe, It really was The Water.
(The 125-year tradition of sudsy manufacturing in the PacNW, of course, at dozens of microbreweries and brewpubs, whose business plans aren’t as brutally reliant on mass production and mass marketing.)
Like you, we have many dreams and hopes for Ought-Three. We’d like to think no year could be more awful than Ought-Two, but the pro-war politicians keep promising otherwise.
Still, we must hope. Our first hope, natch, is that the purveyors of Armageddon Lite (in this and other countries) be thwarted from their dark dream. We’ve other dreams as well. In our ideal Ought-Three:
