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WHEN LAST WE LOOKED in on the semifictional universe of Fast Company magazine, all was supposedly wonderful in NASDAQ-land.
“New Economy” companies were going strong (at least by the measure of their stock prices and venture-capital accumulations). “Old Economy” companies were being led to believe their very survival depended on copying the “fast” m.o. of the tech firms, and as quickly as possible.
What a difference a year makes.
Recent FC issues betray a much more desperate “positivity.” Their relentless hang-in-there-bud, it’s-gonna-be-OK sermonizing has some of the same quaint crudity once found in Depression-era Hearst editorials.
In the mag’s current issue, there’s a long piece about Seattle’s civic leaders trying to make sure the region’s recent tech-economy boom leaves a permanent legacy. The very premise of the article implies that the tech-economy boom is a limited-life-span event, whose peak may have already come and gone. FC wouldn’t even have let a letter-to-the-editor writer say such a thing 14 months ago.
That alone would be worth the newsstand price of the mag. But even more fascinating is the means by which it claims Seattle will always remember its day in the virtual sun–by erecting culture palaces, designed by “world class” architects, and calling it “arts funding.”
The piece’s writer, Scott Kirsner, starts by noting the usual suspects of the recent Seattle edifice complex: EMP, the Seattle Art Museum, the dual stadia, Benaroya Hall, the Museum of Flight, the in-the-works sculpture garden, the forthcoming Opera House rebuild and city-call complex.
“There’s a seize-the-day spirit at play here,” Kirsner writes. “Seattle wants to put its potent economy to work building museums, civic buildings, and public spaces, so that in the likely event that the good times don’t last forever, the city will be left with more than just empty buildings.”
The problem with that idea, as Kirsner implies toward the end (during an interview with ex-Allied Arts honcho Alex Steffan), is that without a strong local infrastructure of artistic creators and programmers, “empty buildings” could be all we get.
Kirsner gives three big building projects his main attention–the Museum of History and Industry’s plan to move into part of the Convention Center expansion; Rem Koolhaas’s new downtown library; and the just-opened new Bellevue Art Museum. He doesn’t mention that the first two projects are related. While the old library (a rapidly-decaying piece of ’50s jet-age “efficiency”) is destroyed and the new one put up at the same site, a temporary library will operate out of the Convention Center space slotted for MOHAI.
This is actually to MOHAI’s favor, as it gives the organization three years to raise money and community interest in putting together a bigger, more elaborate, and more enticing local-history museum than current, modest li’l artifact display near the Arboretum.
From all accounts, it’s been slow going thus far. The megabucks donors behind the “world class” secular cathedrals have been relatively disinterested in a project so historical and so darned local–especially a project that’ll be just a part of a much larger building complex, and thus provide no employment opportunities for glamorous NYC architects.
NEXT: Don’t let ’em “restore” the Rendezvous too much.
ELSEWHERE:
HERE’S MY TAKE on why Net-based delivery outfits have collapsed (Kozmo.com, Pets.com), merged away (HomeGrocer.com), or are on the verge of demise (Webvan.com).
It’s not just that these enterprises had to Get Big Fast by building real-world inventories, infrastructures, and staffs on what used to be known as “Internet Time.”
They were also based on a faulty premise from the start.
These concepts were devised by tech-biz moguls and wannabe tech-biz moguls who lived in Frisco, Manhattan, and horse country, and who imagined that all of urban America had the lifestyles of tech-biz moguls who lived in Frisco, Manhattan, and horse country.
I.e., they presumed the existence of tens of millions of folk with lotsa disposable income, little or no disposable time, and either no individual vehicle or no major supermarkets or strip malls nearby.
But as it turned out, the suburban lifestyle has yet to take a serious popularity hit. Most middle- and upper-caste Americans have never needed to get their dog food or cat litter delivered UPS Ground, or for their Frosted Flakes to arrive via private courier.
And those who did need or at least enjoy the service didn’t like it enough to pay the extra costs neded to make it all viable. (Part of the genius of/trouble with superstore/strip-mall marketing is the amount of “hidden” distribution costs passed on to consumers by making them drive to ever-larger, ever-further-apart emporia.)
I was an occasional Kozmo.com customer, and still am an Albertsons.com customer. Delivery isn’t just a convenience to me; it’s a vital building block of the New Urbanism. We need to promote more car-free living (not just commuting).
But the way to build such alternatives isn’t with centralized, top-down, venture-capital-funded, high-profile, high-burn-rate Big Ideas. It’s with street-level, little-guy entrepreneurial efforts, rooted in their localities and in touch with customers’ needs.
There’s already a small company in town that handles deliveries for local restaurants. As part of its schtick, it also offers a small selection of convenience-store items. I can’t see why the same can’t be done for video rentals, staple groceries, etc., without the dot-com hype and with old-fashioned service.
NEXT: Turn On TV Week.
IN OTHER NEWS: I’ve continued to delay the transformation of this site’s main page to the increasingly popular “welbog” format. Still haven’t figured out how to replicate all the page’s features in one of those scripted weblog programs.
WITH THE STEADY RISE of DIY culture, and the increased hype over electronic books, printing-on-demand, and other newfangled verbal-delivery systems, has come a mild (so far) outcry from defenders of publishing’s old guard.
This is somewhat different from the Napster uproar and related rants against the music industry. In regard to music, there’a a general consensus among the ranters that the big corporations running the show are slick, corrupt money-grubbers and always have been.
But book publishing, the conventional wisdom goes, is, or was, or is supposed to be, a fraternity of tweed-clad, nice old men who live for the passion of nuturing capital-L Literature. Instead of rebelling against the book biz’s middlemen, these critics claim we should defend their importance.
Publishing’s current obsession with hype and market-share, under the control of some of the same media conglomerates that run the music business, is seen by these critics as a mere unfortunate anomaly, a digression from some Platonic ideal of the book trade.
That, as you might expect me to say by now, is a crock of bull.
Publishing’s always been about profit. it’s just that the tweed-suited guys worked for little companies before they got big, before they were fully integrated into media-conglomerate “synergies.”
As noted in a recent Times essay by my ol’ pal Fred Moody, who’s put out two books thru major NY publishers and seen scant return for the trouble, “authors have stored up so much enraged aggrievance that that alone could propel electronic publishing and distribution into being, with enough energy left over to fill California’s electricity needs forever.”
And a small-press or even self-published book doesn’t have to be an unreadable mess. It can be, of course, but so are many (if not most) corporately-published works.
There are thousands of self-released CDs out there, and I’d say they aren’t, on the average, as bad as some self-published books. My idea why: Most musical performers still have to learn their trade in front of live audiences. A band-made CD might not have slick 24-track production (although with digital recording, it often does), but it does carry, if it’s any good, a sense of the performer’s live act.
Too many self-published books contain material nobody’s read, heard, or critiqued before. Some author with a credit card just puts it out, hopes it’ll be loved, and gets disappointed when it isn’t.
There are ways to avoid that dreary fate, and they’re well-known ways. Authors should do what they can to make their works known and their schticks honed. Conferences, workshops, zines, live readings, broadsides, etc. etc.
And concerning the argument that some authors still need good editors to shape their work into readable form, an author who does need that help (like most of ’em) shouldn’t be ashamed of asking for it. If a writer’s gonna spend money to get a book or e-book out, s/he oughta spend just a little more on a good editor, designer, and/or packager.
Such as my humble self.
NEXT: Remember rain?
YESTERDAY, we started to talk about the Boeing Co.’s stunning news that it would set up a new, slimmed-down head office–which would be located away from the offices of any of its main operating groups (i.e., not in Seattle).
And yes, the media were right to give the story the big play they did (including NY Times and USA Today front page stories as well as wall-to-wall local coverage).
Only 500 or so of Boeing’s 78,000 Washington state staffers will go away or be laid off (local dot-coms alone have collectively topped that in some weeks this year). And Boeing’s vast Commercial Airplane Group (with all its own execs, engineers, salespeople, and assemblers) is staying put.
But a corporate HQ, even a rump holding-company HQ, still means something. It symbolizes an organization’s commitment to an on-the-ground community. Its removal to some neutral site, as we’ve already mentioned, is Boeing brass’s (expensive) statement that it’s turning its back on that “old economy” heritage, that it’s just another player on the global-corporate stage, untied to anyplace, anything, or anyone other than the transnational elite of financiers and dealmakers.
Of course, the idea that Boeing doesn’t want to be associated anymore with any one specific place doesn’t make things any nicer for the civic-leader types at this specific place.
Seattle, as you may know, has cared a lot more about Boeing than Boeing has about Seattle. True, the company continued to build planes here when it might’ve constructed plants in the home states of important defense-appropriation Senators.
But in return for that, the company sought, and almost always got, total subservience from local politicians, media people, and ordinary citizens. (The cover of the late Bill Speidel’s book The Wet Side of the Mountains: Exploring Western Washington included a cartoon image of hard-hatted workers kneeling and praying at the gates of a Boeing hangar.)
Seattle’s civic-development establishment has spent the past half-century or so trying to make sure this town became, and remained, the kind of town Boeing would want to keep calling home.
A place where top executives could retreat to their waterfront dachas, unbothered by the outside world.
A place where level-headed engineers could enjoy sane, tasteful leisure opportunities in sane, tasteful surroundings (with the hardhat workers and their rough-hewn ways exiled to the outskirts, a la Soweto).
A place of quiet intelligence and modest personal ambition, but also a place that would do anything within (or slightly beyond) reason to become “World Class.” We’ll build World Class stadia and convention facilities. We’ll host World Class trade confabs. But we’ll pretend we’re still an overgrown small town, where everybody’s laid-back and mellow and ultra-bland and ultra-white. This schizophrenic drive to be simultaneously big and small, aware and innocent, world-wise but not worldly (similar to the New Testament ideal to be “in the world but not of the world”) served Seattle, and Boeing, relatively well for many years, until its contradictions started becoming too apparent in recent years.
Now, Boeing–the company that made the International Jet Set possible, thus spawning today’s rootless global financial elite–is redefining itself as neither in nor of the world, but as belonging to the Everywhere/Nowhere of that aforementioned elite.
The New Boeing will supply aircraft and satellite-communications equipment to keep the elite’s members in actual or virtual contact with one another and their assorted fiscal empires, while treating the rest of Planet Earth as one big “flyover zone.”
NEXT: A special offer.
THIS EDITION OF MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of William Hanna, whose TV cartoons entranced millions of kids (and whose early, low-budget shows helped demystify the animation and filmmaking processes for thousands of those kids).
AS YOU MAY HAVE HEARD BY NOW, the Boeing Co. announced one of its periodic reorganizations the other day.
It’s gonna group its own heritage assets, and the assets it’s bought from Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and General Motors into three main groups, each of which would act more like a stand-alone company with its own management and offices (and, potentially, its own “tracking stock” IPO). At the top would be a slimmed-down corporate headquarters–which won’t be in Seattle (or St. Louis or Long Beach, where two of the three operating groups will be based).
So Boeing’s gonna become just another rootless global corporation, and have a head office not where any of its main plants are but whereever it can wring “job blackmail” deals from the local authorities and/or wherever the top execs would prefer to live.
The official reason given, that the company needs to be based someplace with “cultural diversity” and “a pro-business climate,” is, as everyone here knows, B.S. Our local and state politicians have spent their collective professional lifetimes doing whatever the Lazy B wanted. And as for the diversity part, there’s a whole world out in Seattle’s neighborhoods and suburbs that the Coldwater Creek store and the other promoters of Demographic Correctness couldn’t even imagine.
So let’s imagine the potential real reasons:
By having a head office physically removed from all manufacturing operations, Boeing’s proclaiming itself to the stock markets and the corporate community that it’s gonna be a company run by salespeople and financiers for salespeople and financiers, not an “old economy” company making specific products for specific customers. It’ll be a company whose real “bottom line” isn’t its operating profit but its stock price. A company that’ll do anything for the sake of short-term upturns–even take moves that could sacrifice its long-term position (such as giving away wing-design technology to the Japanese).
And if the top execs move to Texas, they’ll have more potential clout when pushing new military contracts from a Texan-run White House.
One potentially ironic note was that the top brass had apparently been bitching among themselves about all the flying around they had to do to go from Seattle to other Boeing sites and to Washington, DC lobbying sessions. (If you don’t like airline travel, guys, get into some other line of work than trying to promote more airline travel.)
NEXT: Some more of this.
THEY’RE BACK. Eight years or so ago, I thought we were rid of them for good. But now they’re reasserting themselves, and again threaten to subjugate us all under a numbing regime of enforced mindlessness.
I’m not talking about the Republicans but about the hippies.
Humans of my acquaintance, whom I thought were safe from the infestation, have succumbed one by one. Could you be the next? Take our handy quiz.
Patchouli smells like:
(B) Stale beer.
(C) The breath of the angels.
Television is:
(B) A pleasant-enough diversion.
(C) The root of all evil.
Spectator sports are:
(B) A great way to spend the afternoon with the guys and/or the family.
Lower-income working Americans are:
(B) The key toward establishing a permanent progressive movement in this country.
(C) All redneck fascists.
Tobacco is:
(B) An unfortunate addiction.
(C) Good for you if it’s American Spirits, right?
I buy my groceries:
(B) Where I get the best selection.
(C) Someplace small and dark where I have to bring my own unbleached cash-register paper.
Medical marijuana should be prescribed:
(B) To the extent it can be shown to relieve extreme pain among the seriously ill.
(C) For tummy aches and bad-hair days.
The answer to global warming is:
(B) Concerted efforts to make industry cleaner and reduce automobile use.
(C) Hemp.
The answer to racial inequality is:
(B) Diversity training in schools and workplaces.
The answer to Fermat’s Last Theorem is:
(B) Now believed to be known, but too complex to be quoted here.
The purpose of politics is:
(B) To realign society’s structures of power.
(C) To let me proclaim how perfect I am.
SCORING:
Score one point for every (A) answer.
Score two points for every (B) answer.
Score three points for every (C) answer.
RESULTS:
11-17 Points: You’re safe for now. But creeping hippiedom can occur to anyone, so be careful.
18-25 Points: You’re in serious trouble, dude. You should consider total-immersion therapy: Eighteen hours at the Riverside Inn casino, playing high-stakes poker in between line-dancing lessons.
26-33 Points: If you don’t act now, you might be just days away from tie-dying your bedsheets and taking up the hammer dulcimer. You need professional help; or at least a few days’ worth of sensory realignment at a Tokyo pachinko parlor.
If you didn’t even finish the quiz, you might have lost the ability to concentrate. Get to your nearest aerobics class or sports bar immediately, or as soon as you can gather enough energy to put some shoes on.
NEXT: Boeing becomes just another global corporation.
AS THE ECONOMY CHURNS, influenced partly by wave after wave of dot-comeuppance, more of you are likely to suffer the humiliations and guilt-trips associated with America’s social-services system.
All the hassles, the short office hours, the long lines, the complicated forms, all the miserable eligibility requirements presumably designed to appease politicians who want poor people who feel awful about themselves.
Don’t think for a minute that our appointed President’s idea to turn whole chunks of the system over to churches (oops, “faith-based initiatives”) will make this situation any better. American religion is one whole history of guilt trips.
So, why not privatize welfare, unemployment, et al.?
If local governments can hire companies to handle everything from operating school buses to operating prisons, they could surely contract out the customer-service aspects of benefit disbursement (and their union-contracted staffs) to bidders promising to treat the needy less like suspects and more like valued customers.
Of course, just saying this brings potential problems to mind.
For one thing, what if the politicians and bureaucrats choose contractors to do just what the current civil-service staffs have done–treat the clientele with disdain? And what if the companies are chosen by the lowest bid, encouraging them to slash operating costs by making the application processes even more inconvenient and humiliating?
No, on third or fourth thought, the social-services system is corrupt from the top. Putting a different set of middlemen in charge of day-to-day operations likely won’t change it for the better.
Perhaps the system really needs to be reinvented from the top down. I don’t mean that “ending welfare as we know it” crap that just puts people through more humiliation loops and leaves some of the neediest all washed up.
No, I mean a top-down reinvention of the system of qualifying for and receiving benefits, based on service rather than shame. And to do that properly, we’ll need to keep the whole system, or at least most of it, under fully-accountable public authority.
Some improved customer-service manners, though, could at least be a good start.
NEXT: Could you be turning into a hippie without knowing it?
LAST TIME, we discussed the growing backlash against the major record labels.
This time, a look at how the labels, and other marketers, are trying to get kids to like them in spite of it all.
Last week, PBS’s Frontline documentary series ran a show called The Merchants of Cool. Narrated by anti-major-media activist and author Douglas Rushkoff, it explored how MTV, the labels, soft drink companies, shoe companies, etc. are trying to make huge bucks from the biggest teenage generation in North American history.
The show’s first shock was the very presence of adolescent faces on PBS, which normally ignores the existence of U.S. citizens older than 12 and younger than 50.
The second was the relative even-handedness of Rushkoff’s argument; especially his assertion that real-life teens are, on the whole, probably not really as crude or stupid as the “rebel” stereotypes advertisers sell at them (labeled by Rushkoff as the rude, potty-mouthed “Mook” male and the hypersexual “Midriff” female).
Not surprising at all, for a viewer familiar with Rushkoff’s books, was his conclusion that corporations will do anything to make a buck, even if it involves trampling on any authentic youth culture and treating their own would-be customers as idiots. What’s surprising about this is that he got to say it on PBS–which, like most bigtime American media, seldom has a bad word to say about American business.
In this instance, though, the “public” network might have had a self-interest point to make.
Perhaps it wanted viewers to distrust the media conglomerates, such as those who own most of the commercial broadcast and cable networks, as a way to imply that it, PBS, was the programming choice worried parents could trust (even though it has very little specifically teen-oriented programming)?
But then again, as I’ve often said, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
IN OTHER NEWS: The OK Hotel building won’t be torn down; the quake damage wasn’t even halfway bad enough to revoke its landmark-preservation status. But the music club within has indeed been permanently evicted. Owners Steve and Tia Freeborn say they’ll try to look for a new space somewhere, and might try to promote one-off shows at existing spots in the interim. I was there the night before that last Fat Tuesday night, and was also there yesterday to see the staff start to clean the place out. (Pix forthcoming.)
NEXT: The end of our little fashion-makeover parable.
NINE YEARS OR SO AGO, Courtney Love may have been the personally least popular figure in the then-Red Hot Seattle Music Scene.
In a town that prized politeness and personability above all other traits (even among punk rockers!), Love was defiantly brash, unapologetically careerist, and defiantly self-promoting.
She would’ve been (and was) unpopular among many here and in her former Portland digs, even without the ludicrously false allegations a few guys made against her concerning hubby Kurt Cobain’s drug addiction and suicide. (I believe she’d tried to save him as best she could, but he was too far gone.)
One of her most outspoken schticks was her embracing of Rock Star glamour. While many local musicians (particularly among Cobain’s indie-rock activist pals in Olympia) treated small-scale DIY music as a religion, Love rode in limos, put on (and took off) designer fashions, hobnobbed with celebrities, moved to LA and became a movie star.
So, despite her deliberately generated reputation for hot-headedness, she’s just about the last one I’d have expected to (1) publicly denounce the major record labels, and (2) put her career on the line in order to do so.
She’s suing Vivendi Universal (nee MCA) Records to get out of her recording contract. More importantly, she insists she’s not out to just quietly settle the suit for her own personal gain, but to overturn the major labels’ whole stranglehold on recording artists’ careers and livelihoods.
The corporate record labels’ litany of sins is surely one you’ve heard often, by everyone from Calvin Johnson to Prince.
Artists get signed with big up-front “advances” that actually put them in debt to the labels, and bind them to the labels for as much as seven albums which could encompass their entire careers (while the labels can drop the acts at any time).
The artists are liable against royalty payments for everything the labels spend on their behalf, and are at the mercy of the labels’ marketing effectiveness and all-too-frequent corporate reorganizations and staff turnovers.
If a label opts to give a particular artist low promotion priority, or wastes money charged to an artist on excessive video-production budgets or on drugs-and-hookers bribery to radio stations, an artist can do little or nothing about it.
Even if an artist gets released from a bad major-label deal, s/he has little choice but to accept another bad deal from another major label.
The indie-label resurgence (particularly in the hiphop, alterna-rock, and techno-dance genres) gave some folk a glimmer of hope that this dilemma could be changed, but also a few sobering examples of just how hard it can be to go up against the majors for radio play, record-store shelf space, etc.
Net-based marketing schemes provided additional hopes for musicians to sidestep the majors’ stranglehold (though the first successful online-sold CDs were by already established acts).
Then the Napster craze, and the labels’ litigous response to it, further exposed the majors’ double-faced attitude and money- and power-hogging tactics.
There’s enough popular opinion out there against the entertainment conglomerates that some industry observers say Love’s suit might just succeed at forcing the labels to give up some of their worst contractual practices.
But will it succeed at rehabilitating Love’s reputation among the street-level music community? Only time will tell.
IN OTHER NEWS: Rumors continue to swirl concerning the fate of the OK Hotel, the legendary music club in an historic Pioneer Square building that was hurt in last week’s quake. Unconfirmed tales currently allege the building owner wants to use the quake as an excuse to raze the whole thing for parking. Further details as they become available.
NEXT: PBS discovers marketing to teens.
(NOTE: Today’s installment concerns a topic some readers might find completely icky. Reader discretion is advised.)
THE NATION RECENTLY RAN a fairly long piece by Marc Cromer about the LA corporate-porn video industry and a new set of guidelines issued by some of its biggest producers, discouraging or banning images or situations that could be perceived as violent or excessively kinky.
Cromer’s premise: Nobody knows yet how much more censorous a good-old-boy Republican president will be than a good-old-boy Democratic president. But just in case, the biggest porn makers are reining in their directors, sacrificing freedom of expression on the altar of political expediency.
That’s not quite what’s going on.
The adult entertainment business has always been a business first, tailoring its offerings to what it believes the market, as well as the political climate, will bear.
Certainly, the thousands of lo-budget, lo-creativity XXX videos churned out by the industry’s majors (some 200 different titles every week) don’t attest to sexual or directorial imaginativeness but to assembly-line production, rote formulas, and ever more narrowly-defined market niches.
(Any real couple whose sex life was as unvarying (or as loveless) as the couples in LA porn would be a good candidate for counseling.)
Under corporate porn’s new self-imposed rules, the formula will get (and has already gotten) even duller.
But politics isn’t the chief reason for the new rules.
What happenned was a new set of distribution channels, which have made hardcore product more widely available but, at the same time, have obligated that product’s makers to adjust their content accordingly.
This story begins with the Spice Channel, a cable network owned by some big LA porn-video people. It ran their wares with all phallic and hardcore shots edited out. Then it began Spice Hot, which left in some things but not everything. Playboy bought Spice but not Spice Hot, which became the Hot Network and now appears as a pay-per-view option on assorted cable systems and in thousands of hotel rooms.
It soon became a major new revenue stream for the big LA porn producers. So much so that they started shaping their output to meet the perceived tastes of this more mainstream market.
“Money shot” ejaculation scenes could easily be cut for Hot Network showings but retained for home video. Other types of material, though, had to be rethought from the ground up, lest there be too little Hot Network-appropriate footage in a production to warrant a full pay-per-view retail price.
Hence, the new list of verboten topics Cromer recounts in his story, ranging from wax-dripping and food fetishism to black men with white women.
It doesn’t mean you can’t see these in porn videos anymore. It just means you won’t see them in the videos from the big LA porn factories with contracts to supply shows to the Hot Network. These big companies put out so many darned titles as part of a strategy to crowd smaller producers off the store shelves. The smaller smutmongers, with a whole range of material now theirs alone, might have just been given a new lease on fiscal life.
Unless, of course, there really is a renewed political censorship scare.
IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.
NEXT: Handicapping the Seattle mayoral race at this early date.
AMONG THE MOST ENDURING CLICHES in business guidebooks is “branding.”
No, I don’t mean that kinky fetish from The Story of O. I mean the far kinkier, and more humiliating, ritual of treating a brand name as one’s most important asset, of treating everythiing you’ve got (especially yourself) as a “brand” to be marketed, and of building a line of goods and services around that brand.
You’re not a widget maker using the name Brand X, you’re a marketer of the Brand X name and image, which could start out attached to widgets but then be expanded into doodads, thingamajigs, and whatsits. (After a while you could even consider dropping the original widget business entirely, or at least farming it out to overseas subcontractors.)
With this in mind, let us consider the brand that is MISCmedia. (We’ve done this before about a year ago; but this is one of those exercises the guidebooks say one should regularly reprise.)
Our products, such as they are, are packages of written words, in both online and printed form. But what does the Mm brand really stand for under these guidebooks’ rules? And, based upon that, what other products might it be slapped onto?
Sure, Mm stands for witty oration and smart-alecky pontification. But it also represents a worldview, a zeitgeist of bemused befuddlement. It says to the world, “I want to understand you, world, but it’s just too darned complicated, and I can’t pretend it’s not too darn complicated; all I can do is laugh a quick laugh and get on with it.”
From this brief imaging statement could conceivable arise an entire line of Mm goods. Some of these just might include:
Don’t have time for the full course? Then check out our short-cut guide to utter confusion, Stupidity for Dummies.
One design might depict the (admittedly already stale) image of a former future dot-com millionaire on the streets, shivering in his Casual Friday attire, holding up a perfectly desktop-published sign offering to write CGI-BIN scripts for food.
Another, slightly less didactic, design might display a leggy sueprmodel clad in the latest styles, seated at a downtown library table, pondering a weighty tome by Hegel and pondering (according to the poster caption) whether there really is a perfect antithesis for every thesis, and who or what might be the ideal antithesis to her.
Or, I could just put out some T-shirts and coffee mugs.
NEXT: The most eternal, unsung aspect of the Seattle zeitgeist–whining.
UNIVERSITY WAY, known to all as “The Ave,” is Seattle’s historic “second downtown.” And, even more than the real downtown, it seems to be always lurching from one crisis to another.
In the ’70s, it was the loss of many chain merchants.
In the ’80s, it was the invasion of many new chain merchants, driving out some of the small businesses that had survived (or taken opportunities from) the loss of those previous chains.
Now, The Ave faces a new batch of retail desertions. It’s already seen the disappearance of McDonald’s and The Limited in the past year. Now Jamba Juice, Disc-Go-Round, and Pier 1 Imports are shuttering their doors.
But the biggest surprise was the abrupt end of the Wizards of the Coast Game Center and its adjacent Dalmutti’s restaurant annex.
Wizards began in 1990, and in ’93 released the ever-profitable Magic: The Gathering role-playing card game. It bought up Dungeons and Dragons maker TSR, and then scored a massive coup with the North American rights to the Pokemon cards.
But its HQ in a nondescript Renton office park was ill-suited as the locus of a growing recreation empire. So it launched the U District storefront in May ’97 as part gaming store, part arcade, and part Ground Zero for organized social RPG gaming (particularly its Magic tournaments).
But in late ’99, just before the Poke-craze went bust, Wizards’ owners sold out to Hasbro, the toy giant that’s bought up everything from Scrabble and Monopoly to Playskool and Super Soaker.
Hasbro and Wizards, and the rest of the toy/game biz, had a rough year in ’00. Wizards’ founder Peter Adkison quit. His successors, and Hasbro bigwigs, decided Wizards’ 100-or-so mall-based retail stores fit its new marketing strategy, but a mini-Gameworks with a bunch of card tables in the basement didn’t.
The store’s end means the loss of a clean, high-profile focal point for a hobby traditionally (if unjustly) associated with male social rejects holing up in groups of their own kind, at the back tables of the school library or in a bachelor apartment strewn with beer, Tostitos, and XXL-size T-shirts. The place had also been a real-world symbol of Seattle’s status as a major center of fantasy/sci-fi fandom.
But its loss also deprives The Ave of what, for a few years, had been a third “anchor” retailer (after the University Book Store and Tower Records).
While the loss of some of the district’s chain-run stores and fast-food outlets present more opportunities for small businesses, the availability of the Wizards storefront (fashioned together from former Penney’s and Kress spaces) represents a greater opportunity. It could be divvied up into a marketplace of booths and small shops; perhaps even with an SF/F theme decor. (It could even have stalls specializing in spells and “strength points.”)
NEXT: Makeovers gone wrong, part 2.
AS I KEEP TELLING YOU, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
But if I were, this is how I might consider the current electric-shortage mania:
I. Certain entrepreneurs, hustlers, and speculators successfully muscle their way into the generating side of the power biz; thanks to bought-and-paid-for politicians who push “deregulation” legislation in several big states.
Many of these hustlers just so happen to be among the biggest and earliest contributors to G.W. Bush’s Presidential campaign, which wrapped up the GOP nomination early in 2000 thanks to its having vastly outspent the competition.
2. Once it’s clear that Bush has indeed attained the White House, these suppliers suddenly start exorbitantly hiking the price, and limiting the supply, of power to Calif. (a state which voted for the other guy).
The instant crisis (which oddly didn’t happen last summer, when much of Calif. uses much more power) spreads to those states with contracted supply-swapping arrangements with the Fool’s-Golden State, including Ore. and Wash. (which also voted for the other guy).
3. Bush’s official response, as you might expect, is that the “crisis” can best be “solved” by giving his power-generation hustler pals everything they want, and to just make us ordinary consumers pay through the you-know-what.
4. But unofficial spokespeople (and this is where the real conspiratorial stuff starts) offer another long-term suggestion. They start suggesting that office parks, aluminum plants, etc. get the heck outta the shortage-stricken states and into regions where the juice is still plentiful and comparatively cheap. These just happen to be Texas, Utah, Oklahoma, and other Republican strongholds.
You see, the onward march of U.S. population growth used to flow in an almost-constant direction away from traditionally Demo-controlled areas (northeastern cities) toward traditionally Repo-controlled areas (the ex-rural south and west).
But the Clinton crowd’s pursuit of suburban “soccer mom” votes, the trend toward office-based jobs instead of those in heavy industry and farming, and the comebacks of many once-moribund central cities have changed that pattern. Now, the population growth is concentrating in cities and suburbs that either have been traditionally Demo-voting or have become that way (or at least less solidly Republican).
Many of the strongest regions for Republicans last November either have limited population growth or are actually losing people (such as much of the rural inland west). Bush supporters sometimes like to claim their guy was the clear favorite in a majority of America’s counties, but a lot of those counties are losing people and clout.
So, this particular theory would continue, you could expect more such falderal from Republicans and Republican-leaning business “leaders” in the months to come. Incentive programs to lure developers inland might be combined with traditional Repo indifference toward urban concerns in new and extreme ways.
But since I’m not really a conspiracy theorist, I’ll wait to believe it until I see it.
NEXT: The more-or-less annual “I Love Snow” article.
I HAVEN’T WORKED directly for Amazon.com, but I happened to be at Linda’s Tavern the evening of the big Amazon layoff. Despite personal hoarseness due to a cold and/or flu bug (I’m much better now; thanks for asking), I succeeded at joining in with a rousing call from one of the back tables (obviously occupied by disgruntled laid-off workers) for everyone in the room to yell “Fuck Amazon!”
I could easily commiserate with the Amazon refugees. That very day, you see, I’d received email notice that the dot-com for which I’d been working for the past year would no longer need most of what I’d been doing for them.
Since March 2000, I’d been supplying daily online crossword puzzles to the L.A.-based Iwin.com. (Yes, I, Mr. California-Basher Supreme, willingly took cash from an L.A. media company.) Later in the year, I also started writing questions for Iwin’s trivia pages.
Iwin was bought out late last year by the N.Y.-based Uproar.com, another gaming site (and home to the official Family Feud and To Tell the Truth online games). The usual reorganization-based inconveniences followed (new invoicing procedures; additional delays in getting paid).
Then came word that the crosswords weren’t generating enough website traffic and would be jettisoned once their current backlog was exhausted.
As a freelancer, I didn’t have to work 60 hours a week in some dot-com office, chained to a cubicle save for “motivational” groupthink meetings. (Heck, I never even saw the office.) I was never expected to give my heart and soul to the company, or to have a company-logo tattoo on my ankle. I just did my work the best I could, and was (for once in my life) paid decently for it.
But as a freelancer, I also knew the gig could end at any time. Writers (at least those not employed at unionized newspapers) tend to have only slightly more job security than musicians.
And so, to borrow a motivational-book phrase, my cheese has been moved. I’m out in the maze now, searching for the next gig to keep me going while I keep trying to turn this self-publishing thang into a full-time operation.
Any suggestions?
NEXT: A single mom vs. the welfare bureaucracy.
Dinero Habla, Everybody Rides
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
“THEY DIDN’T EVEN give me five minutes to consummate my marriage!” ejaculates from the video on the Primera Plus autobus en route to Zamora, Mexico.
While the able-bodied seaman on the tube is snatched from his wedding in order to perform some mystery mission against a Nazi U-boat, the Spanish subtitles of the American war movie can hardly explain what the hell is happening.
To the people around us, five minutes is neither a joke nor the measure of a man: It’s simply the length of time you wait for a city bus.
Even in the smallest towns, it takes about five minutes for the coming of the next combi (a 10-20 seat van). Fifty cents and a half hour later, you’re where you wanted to go.
While Sound Transit wastes fortunes to conjure a commuter line for car-dependent suburbanites, monorail supporters jump through hoops to provide a better way for city dwellers to get around, and Tim Eyman files initiatives to destroy what public transportation we do have, Mexicans make good use of a system most Americans should envy.
And, before the World Bank began urging that debt-ridden nation to tighten its belts, the system used to be even better.
Some years ago, in a fit of greedy desperation that only a consortium of international investors could love, the government sold the railroads to private companies, who ended passenger service in favor of freight trains.
This wasn’t a complete disaster. Long distance bus rides down there are a lot easier to endure than they are in the U.S., and service between cities is frequent. But then, as the intercity bus lines made room for more passengers, terminals had to expand and so moved far from the centers of cities and towns, making them almost as hard and/or expensive to reach as airports.
A tourist getting about ten pesos for a dollar doesn’t have the same appreciation for value that a resident making the equivalent of $10 a day would have. Between these extremes lies an enormous middle class of people who migrate north of the border to work for most of the year. They send money home to support families and build houses, fill their driveways with pickup trucks and cars packed with stereo systems that seem custom-built for cruising with the music at top volume.
No matter how many vehicles or how much or little money anyone has, though, it’s usually easier to catch a ride than to drive. Unfortunately, $10 is at the upper end of the pay scale for day labor. Offered $4 a day to work in a shoe store ten miles from home, who wouldn’t turn it down? Would you spend $10 riding Metro to and from a job that paid $40 a day?
Whatever the expense, the value of public transportation in Mexico is above reproach. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in Guadalajara, the streets are full of busses going everywhere. The First World idea of tailoring public transit to commuter schedules (cutting service when people don’t have to go to work) doesn’t seem to have trickled down to this civilization.
“People have places to go on the holidays, maybe more than ever,” says the driver. “Why have fewer busses?”
IN OTHER NEWS: Phillips 66 is taking over Tosco, the parent company of Union 76. Will they call the new company “142?” I sure hope so.
