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LAST TIME, we discussed a few of the possible elements of a future ’90s nostalgia craze.
One such trend, now rapidly becoming part of the past but due to become the topic of hip-ironic remembrance, involves the devil-may-care spending, Nietzchean-superman self-images, and income-be-damned operations of dot-com startup entrepreneurs.
The stock markets have gotten rather sick of such prolifigate money-wasters this past year, and have let Net-related stocks sink faster than John Denver’s airplane.
Therefore, Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos has decided to show those Wall Streeters he means business. He’s going to turn his sprawling, far-flung Net-based retailer from an ever-growing, always-money-losing behemoth into a lean-‘n’-mean profit-making machine. He wants Amazon to no longer be perceived as just a bigger version of your basic dot-com catastrophe but as a solid, respectable firm and a safe investment.
The problem is, he’s going about it all the wrong way.
Instead of shedding questionable product lines (cars, small appliances) and even more questionable investments in other dot-coms (such as its past involvement in the infamous Pets.com), it’s slashing 1,300 workers, two-thirds of them here in Seattle and the rest at a Georgia warehouse.
About half the local layoffs are in the customer-service department, housed in Amazon’s former HQ offices on 2nd Ave. above the Art Bar. It just so happens (coincidence or dot-dot-dot?) that this was where a unionization effort had begun late last year, organized by the
Washington Alliance of Technical Workers. Now, instead of getting their pleas for shorter hours and saner working conditions routinely ignored by management, these folks will get to draw unemployment while their jobs are exported to “right to work” states or even to India.
If I were to ever meet Bezos, I’d set him aside and tell him that kind of screw-the-staff attitude might work in getting him seen as a Real Boss-Type Executive by investors, but it won’t necessarily save the company. A retailer (even, or especially, a Net retailer) is a people business. Getting and keeping good people, treating them right and not like disposable commodities, is key to getting and keeping repeat customers.
To really become a solid, dependable, in-it-for-the-long-term company, Amazon has to start acting neither like a free-spending startup nor like a fire-everybody-but-keep-the-executive-perks “re-engineered” company; but like the great business institutions of old, companies that earned respect because they showed respect. Even if it took union organizing efforts to persuade them to show that respect.
NEXT: Public transit down Mexico way.
ELSEWHERE:
YESTERDAY, we discussed what’s wrong withPlayboy these days. It’s bland, corporate, materialistic to a festishist extent, and not particularly sexy.
Today, we begin to ponder an alternate vision-in-text of what sex is and can be in this new century.
And I don’t mean that now-passe ’90s vision, expressed in Wired magazine and elsewhere, of advanced masturbation helpers such as holographic pornos and “dildonic” sensor-fitted suits. Even at the time those things were being hyped, I believed sex ought to be about bringing people together, not keeping them apart in their lonely individual fantasy realms.
The world doesn’t need more fake sex. It needs more real (albeit safe) sex. Sex is great. Most people should have more.
This means I think coitus (in whatever gender-combo you prefer) is preferable to solo sex; but, more importantly, that any (respectful) sexual expression is preferable to the squeaky-clean unreality promoted by the religious right and those high-school purity pledges.
Chastity is good, at least for periods of time, for (1) those adults who’ve chosen it as part of a spiritual discipline; (2) those young people who aren’t yet ready for the emotional turmoil of intimate relationships (or for the discipline of contraception); (3) those in monogamous relationships who choose to forego alternatives during periods of separation; (4) those older and/or widowed people who’ve chosen to retire their sex lives; and (5) those in dysfunctional life patterns who need to take time out from intimacy while working to heal themselves.
But for the vast rest of the citizenry, more sex is, generally, mo’ better.
It’s not the answer to everything (and it’s certainly not the only answer to an otherwise failing relationship).
But when it’s done right, it can bring you to a greater awareness of yourself, your partner, and even to the continuum of life.
(It’s also a great way to relieve nervous tension, invigorate your metabolism, and spot potential cancer warning signs.)
And the answer to bad sex, i most cases, isn’t no sex but good sex–a healthy attitude towards one’s body and its cravings, combined with enough guilt-free respect to avoid or resist abusive situations.
You don’t prevent kids from getting exploited by keeping them ignorant and “innocent,” but by teaching them to respect their sexualities and themselves. You don’t prevent the spread of STDs by telling people they have to stay alone in shame and frustration, but by helping them learn to love safely and consciously.
NEXT: Just a little more of this.
SHOWTIME RAN ONE of those Playboy self-congratulatory videos this month.
The magazine’s video division has put out at least three or four of these tapes in recent years. All of them gush on and on about how the magazine singlehandedly started the Sexual Revolution, conquered the bad ol’ American Puritan double standards, allowed people to feel good about their bodies, and taught folk to view the mating act as fun and even wholesome.
And its founder Hugh M. Hefner is always depicted by his hired video documentarians as the ultimate cool dude, a great party host and a tireless supporter of all righteous causes. By the time one of these videos is over, a viewer might feel a cult-O-personality trip going on, despite the claims to the publisher’s self-effacing humility.
None of these hype jobs or related PR efforts have daunted the magazine’s longtime critics, who’ve leveled the same charges against it all these years–charges that imagine the magazine to be as singularly influential as it claims to be, but in the wrong direction.
Not only is this single monthly rag blamed for the objectivication of women among males and unhealthy body-image obsessions among young females, but some accusers have even blamed it for rape and domestic violence.
In my opinion, that’s a crock. Neither Playboy nor, I presume, anyone working for it wants anybody to get hurt. Nor, at least in their own minds, do they mean to demean womanhood. They think they’re honoring, even celebrating female humanity by offering what they claim to be “The World’s Most Beautiful Women” and asking readers to worship these women as perfect, unattainable fantasy topics.
That’s what I think they think they’re doing. What I think they’re really doing is different, both from that explanation and the critics’ diatribes.
Playboy is really a relic of the grey-flannel-suit era of marketing and advertising it claims to have originally been a rebellious statement against. It’s corporate and bland. It treats sex as just another consumer-leisure activity, no more or less involving than shopping or tourism.
And the girlie pictures are like ads for an unavailable “product,” utilizing every graphic advance in lighting and digital retouching to portray their subjects as “flatteringly” as ad photographers try to “humanize” the newest cars and detergents.
Today’s Playmate characterizations (and, remember, the models themselves might not really be anything like the roles they’re playing) are neither alluring temptresses nor friendly girls-next-door. They’re L.A. starlets, model/actress/whatevers all done up with bleach and silicone. They exist only in a Hollywood make-believe realm (and in the cut-rate versions of that realm that are North America’s lap-dance clubs). Their purpose is to sell–to sell magazines and videos, to sell their own star-images.
And a lot of the time, they’re not even all that sexy.
It’s an aesthetic that has everything to do with turning young men into good consumers and nothing to do with turning them into good lovers.
Its deficiencies wouldn’t seem to matter, since Playboy has had the softcore-hetero market pretty much to itself. Its only non-sleazy rivals are the new Perfect 10 and the newer print version of the website Nerve. All the other girlie magazines have gone to hardcore porn.
But while neither Hefner nor anybody else Stateside was looking, the British “bloke magazines” such as Maxim started U.S. editions with leering-attitude text pieces, non-nude pictures of supermodels (themselves sales professionals in the business of selling women’s clothes), and advice (albeit often wrong advice) on how young men might get beyond just looking at pictures of women and start dating and mating with genuine females.
Maxim and its ilk are simultanously treating sex more like a part of its readers’ lives and making it seem naughty again. They’re rapidly gaining on Playboy in both circulation and in the cultural consciousness; while Hefner continues to schmooze at his palace with his invited Hollywood celebrities, ignoring (or trying to ignore) the social/sexual changes challenging both his and Hollywood’s grip on America’s minds and crotches.
NEXT: Sex magazines may be dumb, but sex is still great!
SEVEN DISGRUNTLED MICROSOFT EMPLOYEES (current and former) have filed this here $5 billion race-discrimination lawsuit. They claim there’s a “plantation mentality” at the software giant, in which black employees were routinely denied promotions and raises and were subject to retaliation if they complained.
In its statements of denial, MS officials essentially said such a thing could never, ever have occurred at a company so forthright, so diversity-conscious. The routine tech-media gang of MS defenders has gone on to share this line.
Why are some people so shocked to hear about the Microsoft discrimination suit? You all oughta know by now how the software giant’s got this corporate culture in which only a certain type of person (the Gates clone wannabe) gets ahead.
The MS corporate culture was, at least indirectly, inspired by that of Nordstrom (which, you may recall, faced its own discrimination suit a few years back).
In both companies, and in whitebread Seattle society in general, the real goal of preaching “diversity” isn’t to bring more minorities into the corridors of power but to allow the white folks already there to feel better about themselves. If corporate Seattle could figure out a way to support minority rights without having to actually deal with real black (or hispanic or American Indian) folks in their own offices, they would.
One quintessential example of this hypocrisy is the awful movie version of that breast-beating, locally-written novel Snow Falling On Cedars.
It’s ostensibly about the WWII relocation camps and other racist acts against Japanese Americans in our state not too long ago. But the movie (in which no Asian-American actor is billed higher than eighth!), and the novel, are really all about raising audience sympathy for the nice white-boy hero, a noble hack journalist (and the author’s presumed alter ego).
This past week’s local Martin Luther King Day public-service ads further exemplify this faux-diversity mindset.
The ads all venerate King as a visionary, a leader, a forward-thinker (i.e., a representative of the values CEOs often imagine themselves to have). The ads then close with pats-on-the-ol’-back to the forward-thinking corporations who pitched in to pay for the ad space or time. Little or no mention is made of the real social issues King confronted, many of which still need confronting today.
So it stands to reason that a theoretical company that participated in these and other “diversity” themed self-celebrations (which theoretically might also include donations to inner-city schools, representatives at minority recruiting fairs, and internal sensitivity-training classes for white employees) might theoretically, and informally, decide it’s been doing enough to feel good about itself diversity-wise, and that it doesn’t have to go that extra, often-unpublicized step and actually demand fair treatment for actual minority persons within its own employment ranks.
If that’s what really went on, I (though perhaps not top company management) wouldn’t be the least surprised.
TOMORROW: I know what IT is. Will I tell you? Find out.
LAST THURSDAY, we talked a bit about the end of the Seattle Union Record, the little paper formed by then-striking Seattle Times and P-I workers.
I said then that the Union Record was about two-thirds of the way toward becoming the real opposition daily this town (heck, any town) needs. There oughta be a way to make something like it that can survive as an ongoing venture. (The UR relied on volunteer help and “sympathy ads” bought by other unions, tactics which obviously wouldn’t work on a permanent for-profit paper.)
So here’s my not-at-all-modest proposal for a new local daily, based on the UR format:
A (non-strike) daily paper isn’t a zine. Even a tight-and-taut li’l free daily like the one I’m outlining here would require a full-time staff of at least several dozen, and enough operating capital to keep it going until it proves itself as an ad vehicle. (USA Today took three or four years to become consistently profitable; some bigtime magazines can take up to five years.)
But I’m convinced the potential is there. The UR proved there’s reader interest in such a paper. By reaching readers who’ve become turned off from the standard cookie-cutter U.S. newspaper, it would provide an alternative for advertisers who like the dynamic and semipermanence of print but don’t generate enough business from placing ads mainstream dailies.
Given the right people and enough time and money, such a paper could become successful enough that the Newsaper Guild would be able to demand (and get) its rightful share of that success.
So who wants to help me get this started? Lemme know.
TOMORROW: Lynda Barry’s Cruddy is anything but.
YESTERDAY AND TODAY, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #5: Our Love and War Man already misses Mike Mailway (real name Larry M. Boyd), whose locally-based syndie trivia column ended a week and a half ago. Always wished I could write like him. That staccato, crime-movie-soundtrack rhythm. The eternally provocative mix of historic, scientific, and just odd facts gathered from all times and places. Had the privilege of meeting him a few times; always the perfect gent. I wish him well.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #1: What with all the sanctimonious gnashing-O-teeth that’s gone on over the threatening might of big-box chain bookstores, you might not expect any tears for the demise of such an outlet. But loyal customers are indeed huing and ado-ing over the impending loss of Tower Books on lower Queen Anne. Cause of death: The usual (mercenary rent hike).
The store’s annual 30-percent-off pre-inventory sale is being extended until closing day, Feb. 4. It’ll be missed, partly because Tower’s one chain that acted sorta like an indie in its niche-marketing prowess. Because most of its other outlets were attached to Tower Records stores, it was big on the sorts of books CD buyers like. Glossy pop-star tomes, yes; but also coffee-table art and photography, sci-fi, erotica, student reference, self-help, astrology, comix, lefty-politics, Beat-generation nostalgia, and literary-hipster fiction. (Although the approach had its drawbacks, such as when they had to put the Bukowski novels behind the counter to prevent theft by suburban down-and-outer wannabes.)
Tower says it wants to eventually build a book annex on the site of its current record store six blocks away, but has given no timetable for the project.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #2: Puget Consumers Co-op is closing its oldest alterna-food and vitamin store, in Ravenna. Way back in the early ’80s, when PCC really was a cooperatively-run small merchant, Ravenna was its only space (it had previously been an even smaller food-buying club). It was a subculture, a ‘tribe’ if you wish.
As you may know, I’m something of a skeptic about many of today’s neo-Puritanical food religions (macrobiotic, organic, vegan, ‘live,’ etc.). But I had, and have, every respect for the healthful values of community, of being part of a circle of humans who care about one another. That’s something PCC gradually lost as it became a professionally-managed chain store.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #3: The Seattle Times Co., citing a need to cut costs due to recent circumstances (see below), is shutting Mirror, its eight-year-old monthly tabloid for teenagers.
I was a part-time assistant on Mirror’s first five issues. The yup-ladies who ran it had believed those mainstream-media scare stories that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of illiterate louts; so the yup-ladies thought they’d need an adult to write the paper. But the editors soon realized that many public high school students really can read and write (they just choose not to read the Seattle Times); so my services proved unneeded.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #4: With the end of the Seattle newspaper strike comes the end of the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.
As I’ve said previously, it was about two-thirds of the way toward becoming the real opposition daily this town needs. While the Newspaper Guild won’t be publishing the Union Record anymore (or drumming up other unions for sympathy ads), many of the Seattle Times strikers won’t be returning to their old jobs, and hence might be available to continue their Record work under new management. I’d love to be a part of making such a paper happen.
Let’s all talk about this again real soon.
TOMORROW: People you’re not better than.
TODAY AND TOMORROW, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #1: The 211 Club pool hall abandoned its increasingly costly Belltown space after 16 years (following more than 40 years at its previous site where Benaroya Hall is now). It was something Belltown, and Seattle in general, is rapidly losing–a classy and unpretentious gathering place, a timeless and fadless site for serious playing without noise or capital-A Attitude.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #2: Montgomery Ward is closing its last 299 stores after 106 or so years in business. Most news articles about the closure claimed Wards had lost its market niche to newer chains like Wal-Mart and Target. But the roots of Wards’ decline go back many decades earlier, to its rule by a bullhorn company president named Sewell Avery.
In his prime, Avery brought color photography and modern graphic design to the Wards catalogs; and spearheaded the company’s expansion into retail stores.
But he became both dictatorial and senile. There’s a famous photo of him being forcibly carried out of his office in 1944 by Federal agents, because he’d refused to obey War Production Board quotas regarding the use of scarce materials for consumer goods.
In the postwar years Avery got even odder–he kept the retail stores at a uniform size and building style (two stories plus a basement and half-story mezzanine), small and unresponsive to local market conditions. Then he decided the catalog was too risque, and ordered that all women’s fashions except coats were to be photographed on dress forms, not live models or even mannequins.
By the time Wards’ board of directors finally had enough votes to oust Avery, the chain had become a distant competitor to Sears and Penney’s, and never caught up. It junked its “big book” catalog a decade before Sears did, and retreated from a national retail presence to a few select regions where it could afford to compete.
Even in some of those, such as Portland, it found itself shut out of major mall projects and had to build freestanding stores far from the peak car-traffic zones. Such companies as Mobil Oil and GE invested millions to keep Wards alive, but to no ultimate avail.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #3: Oldsmobile was America’s oldest car brand, but the General Motors top brass, in their infinite ignorance, didn’t know what to do with it. It had long ago become the odd leftover in GM’s grand market-segmentation strategies; it offered few models that weren’t renamed versions of other GM products.
Olds’s final end wasn’t a casualty of imports or SUVs, but an admission that GM couldn’t think of anything to do with it anymore.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #4: When KOMO-TV put up its grandiose new building, I was unaware the station was going to promptly demolish its old building. It was a beautiful work of postwar, post-Deco architecture.
At a garage sale once, I managed to obtain the big color brochure commemorating the building’s opening in ’46. That was still in the so-called Golden Age of Radio; but KOMO was already planning to expand into TV, and built its new broadcasting palace with that in mind. But the Truman Administration froze new TV licenses soon after KING-TV got on the air.
KOMO-TV had to wait until ’54 to start up. It got the local NBC affiliation, and within two years had the region’s first color cameras (one of which is now on display in the Lincoln-Mercury showroom up on Aurora). But then KING snatched the NBC franchise in ’59, leaving KOMO with ABC (whose market position then was comparable to UPN’s today).
All that history, and four decades’ worth more, were in the old building at Fourth and Denny. Boomerang, the local kiddie show hosted by former Hollywood voice-over singer Marni Nixon. Assorted Town Meetings and AM NWs and Northwest Afternoons. Keith Jackson’s first sportscasts. That still-harrowing film footage from a news photographer who got caught in the Mt. St. Helens ash storm.
All that’s left of the building are the memories, whatever tapes the station’s kept, and a small pile of rubble (which, admittedly, gave folks standing on Denny a better view of the Space Needle fireworks on 1/1).
TOMORROW: A few more sad tales of this type.
LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.
Then we went off on a tangent, and started instead to discuss the centuries-old dichotomy between established Christendom and the pleasures of the flesh, a topic some folk have written whole books about.
Religion needs more sex; it needs to acknowledge human passions and the joys of earthly existence. And it always has needed this. Back in the early Christian days, when the study of Jesus was was essentially an ethnicity-free Judaism for Romans (and Roman-conquered peoples), women from prominent families were among its leading converts. These women appreciated a religion that treated women as something more than just sex-and-baby machines.
(Then, of course, Constantine made it Rome’s new official religion, and a hierarchy formed that kept women out of power within the church, etc. etc.).
Anyway, Christianity developed as an antithesis to the decadence and excess of Rome’s bread-and-circuses culture, its orgies and slavery and human lion-feedings and corruption and cruelty. It developed into a religion that, in various degrees and with various exceptions over the years, renounced sex and the whole physical aspect of human existence.
But porn (or erotica, or whatever PC term you prefer to use) also needs more religion, or at least more spirituality.
Whether you’re talking hardcore videos and magazines, hard-sell web sites, softcore cable shows and magazines, strip clubs, “women’s erotica” books, or the get-a-guy articles and see-thru supermodel pictures in women’s magazines, you get almost nothing to do with two human souls using their bodies to come closer together.
You just get stimulus-response mechanisms. Sex is defined as a shallow physical pleasure to be obtained by spending lots of money and suppressing anything cool or individualistic about yourself.
It’s a ruthlessly materialistic vision. In a nation where prostitution is outlawed (except in rural Nevada), commercial sex-culture defines both female and male genitalia as nothing more than capitalist tools, products to be sold and/or target markets to be sold to.
All this means the “Christian porn” I thought up last Friday half jokingly could actually be a useful thing, an aspect of reintegrating bodies to souls, females to males, and humans to one another and their universe.
We finish this topic, at least for now, with a very brief example of what written Christian porn might be like.
(Be warned: This particular fiction piece is not only sexual, but also involves an attempt to write characters of an ethnicity other than my own, in a nondemeaning yet candid manner.)
Dozens of African-American adults (and a few interracial-couple spouses) arrive at a series of revival tents constructed at a private campground. They remove their well-ironed, handsome garments to enjoy a nude BBQ feast. This is followed inside the tents by a boistrously inspiring service of chorus music; a nude and exhortative preacher who gets everybody into the right state of emotional ecstasy while he encourages everybody to love everybody in the room; and then the sex itself. All the attendees gleefully join in: Thin to obese, young-adult to elderly, breasts heaving, erections proudly flailing, couplings (and triplings and more) of every pleasurable sort, a few woman-woman and even man-man encounters somewhere in the tent, orgasm moans in “tongues,” many “Praise Be”s and “Hallelujahs.” Outside, there are a few church buses among the parked cars, a gorgeous sunset between the trees, and a couple of strewn flyers marking this as an event that would only be promoted within churches–“No TV or Radio Advertising; No Outsiders Will Be Invited.”
Dozens of African-American adults (and a few interracial-couple spouses) arrive at a series of revival tents constructed at a private campground. They remove their well-ironed, handsome garments to enjoy a nude BBQ feast. This is followed inside the tents by a boistrously inspiring service of chorus music; a nude and exhortative preacher who gets everybody into the right state of emotional ecstasy while he encourages everybody to love everybody in the room; and then the sex itself.
All the attendees gleefully join in: Thin to obese, young-adult to elderly, breasts heaving, erections proudly flailing, couplings (and triplings and more) of every pleasurable sort, a few woman-woman and even man-man encounters somewhere in the tent, orgasm moans in “tongues,” many “Praise Be”s and “Hallelujahs.”
Outside, there are a few church buses among the parked cars, a gorgeous sunset between the trees, and a couple of strewn flyers marking this as an event that would only be promoted within churches–“No TV or Radio Advertising; No Outsiders Will Be Invited.”
TOMORROW: Remembering some things that went away at the end of Y2K.
MANY ARTS AND THEATER PUBLICATIONS have come and gone, nationally and locally, over the years.
The local attempts have mostly foundered or struggled on a lack of cash flow. Artists and artsy-type folk are often considered insufficiently upscale for advertisers to bother with. Already-strapped funding organizations have had other priorities than merely documenting whatever visual or performing projects are already out there. That’s left these would-be documentors to work on an all-volunteer basis, with the personal-burnout rates and marketing weaknesses built into that concept.
One local outfit thinks it has the answer. Their magazine’s aimed not at artists, nor even at the bulk of their audiences.
Instead, Arts Patron (whose third issue should be out this month) is aimed squarely at upper-crust good-life-livers who (as a common stereotype goes) “Support the Arts” partly out of a good-works motivation, partly for the tax breaks, and partly for social status.
It’s mailed free to addresses on the fundraising mailing lists of ten participating theaters, museums, and hibrow-music ensembles. The rest of us have to read it online. (Thus keeping those downscale painters and actors and other assorted boho types from lowering the print edition’s advertiser value).
Seattle didn’t used to have very many of these patrons. Certainly not enough for a slick nine-times-a-year magazine to be aimed just at them. But post-Bill Seattle apparently has enough for publisher Jonathan Nichols to give it a shot. (If the concept works, Nichols may try to expand it to other towns.)
Should us non-gazillionaires care about the whole endeavor? From the looks of the first two issues, yes. Editor Douglas McLellan (who briefly was the best thing that had ever happened to the P-I arts section) has gone beyond mere PR hypeage for the mag’s participating institutions. Sure there are big pieces about the new Bellevue Arts Museum and the John Singer Sargent show at the Seattle Art Museum. But there are also big pieces about the Total Experience Gospel Choir, filmmaker Sandy Cioffi, the alterna-art space Howard House, and local mural-preservation advocate Roger van Oosten. McLellan himself contributes an important item about a UW study showing ballet dancers can have careers as short and injury-prone as pro football players (at far lower salaries).
So go to the site. Let its makers know you like it, and that you deserve the chance to see it in print even if you’re not a gazillionaire.
IN OTHER NEWS: Loyal reader Danny Goodisman writes, “Rumor has it, Paul Schell may run for re-election. To help him along, here are proposed slogans for Paul Schell’s re-election:
10. Still not a wimp.
9. Support international child labor.
8. Affordable housing for the rich.
7. Once a developer, always a developer.
6. Give corporate welfare a chance.
5. Blacks and Hispanics ‘raus.
4. Known round the world.
3. More ugly architecture for the Center.
2. King County multi-billionaires agree: Paul Schell for mayor.
1. Leadership which can bring tears to your eyes.”
TOMORROW: How to revive any waning popcult genre–make it Christian.
IN OUR REGULAR EFFORT to copy whatever every other pundit large and small is doing, we hereby offer our own take on this week’s second most overhyped media topic (after the continuing post-election fun): The WTO Riots One Year Later.
The chief result, to these eyes, is a whole New Positivity among leftoids and progressives who, for as long as a quarter century, to believe everything they really wanted from society was hopeless, that all you could do was protest.
Initially, that was what the anti-WTO affair would be: Just a lot of people protesting really loudly against the biennial convention of the World Trade Organization (which, by striving to make governments do whatever corporations want, had become an all-purpose villain for anyone who had anything bad to say about a social order dictated by markets and profits).
It just happened that a lot more folks than anybody knew had something bad to say about such an order.
The sheer massiveness and breadth of the anti-WTO groups, and the degree of organization and choreography behind them, gave those 50,000 marchers, and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers across North America and Europe, hope that the situation could actually be changed. That People Power really could mass up and stop, or at least call into question, the relentless reorganizing of the whole world around “market forces.”
Subsequent actions haven’t had the immediate impact that the anti-WTO affair did; but that’s only to have been expected. The AFL-CIO brass and some established environmental lobbies, for instance, wanted no part of the outsider protests at the US political conventions or with the Nader for President campaign; they still think they can get at least part of their agenda by continuing to Work Within The System.
And the Way-New Left that coalesced around Nader still has work to do in welcoming more true diversity (i.e., encouraging the participation of farmers, carnivores, and males without ponytails).
This ebb-and-flow, solidaritywise, is all to be expected. One chief aspect of the anti-WTO worldview is the battle between two visions of the future–the WTO’s, in which every activity on Earth would be controlled for the benefit of CEOs and financiers; and the protesters’, in which all manner of individuals, nations, and other groupings would maintain the right to forge their own priorities. Many of these are conflicting, or appear to be (jobs vs. environment, jobs vs. other people’s jobs, free expression vs. cultural tradition, etc.).
But that, as I wrote last year, is part of the whole point.
We, as a nation and a planet, can agree to disagree. We can forge our own paths, our own alliances, our own visions. We don’t have to accept an existence dictated by the single-minded whims of the Dow and NASDAQ. We can, as the X-Files movie said, “fight the future.”
We’re taking back the language of liberation, empowerment, and democracy.
TOMORROW: Amid all this, Tom Frank still finds plenty to bitch about.
LIVING AND WORKING ON ‘INTERNET TIME’ might be all fine and dandy for tech-company execs and senior team members who can expect gorgeous bonuses and stock options (even if the latter may turn to negative values if the NASDAQ takes another dive).
But it’s no road to riches for the average Janes and Joes in the ranks.
Of course, you can’t very well expect the management to realize this.
So, some believe the time has come to rise up, to demand to be treated like real people with real lives, not like pieces of equipment to get used up and thrown away.
Amazon.com officials appear to have a hard time understanding this, or why anyone awarded the privilege of working for them could ever have anything to complain about.
Not only is management publicly pooh-poohing any need for the unionizing drive among its customer-service staff, it’s sent supervisors some (publicly leaked) memos warning to watch out for the danger signs of union troublemaking (such as workers who talk too much to one another).
The AFL-CIO affiliated Washington Alliance of Technology Workers is helping out the Amazon workers, who may very well need the strength of Amazon warriors by the time this is through. The organization drive’s called “Day2@Amazon.com. Washtech’s site quotes organizer Zach Works, “We call our group Day2@Amazon.com because [founder Jeff] Bezos is always telling us, ‘It’s Day One, we can’t stop or rest,’ and we think five years of Day One is generating lots of problems for us.”
In the huge Wired cover story earlier this fall about the Microsoft antitrust case, Bill Gates was repeatedly quoted as saying he didn’t want MS to ever become like today’s IBM–solid and profitable but staid, established, structured, stable.
A lot of dot-com execs feel the same–that their enforced regimens of 60-plus-hour workweeks and cultlike employee-motivation schemes represent a forward advance, not a return to the dark ages of worker exploitation; and that giving in to demands for fair hours, fair conditions, and fair compensation would turn their dynamic “new economy” powerhouses into ordinary, no-fun, old-economy drudgeries.
But the stock markets this month have been favoring the old and the stable over the new and the mercurial.
Maybe there could be some PR advantage for a company with a roller-coaster stock price (such as Amazon) to reorganize, to reinvent itself as an outfit digging in for the long term; partly by treating its own people at least a little less dysfunctionally.
(P.S.: The Washtech organizers have not called for a boycott of Amazon; they insist they want the still-unprofitable company to succeed and for its employees to receive their just share of that success. So the Amazon links on my site are staying up.)
TOMORROW: Some of the top events of 2000, so far.
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
Favorite Videos and Worst Job
by guest columnist Ryan
(ED.’S NOTE: One of the email lists I’m on had a topic thread last month, in which members posted the books they’d least likely let anyone borrow. Thanks to the well-known factor of topic drift, that led to people listing their favorite videos. Ryan [last name redacted at his request] went a step further and added an additional topic-drift step, as printed by permission below.)
Delivered-To: clark@speakeasy.org
Reply-To: [email address redacted]
From: “Ryan” [email address redacted]
To: wallace-l@waste.org
Subject: RE: wallace-l: Top Videos/Degrading Job
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 10:03:11 -0500
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Importance: Normal
Sender: owner-wallace-l@waste.org
TOP VIDEOS:
Apocalypse Now
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Dazed and Confused
The Usual Suspects
Kids
The Harder They Come
…and anything by Stanley Kubrick (esp. 2001)
MOST DEGRADING JOB:
Feel free to disregard this, but I must vent.
I worked for a company called DSMax. They call themselves an advertising and marketing firm. They are lying. I could probably write a book about what was horrible about this job, but here’s a handy list instead.
1. 4:45 a.m. Wake up, shower, put on mandatory shirt and tie.
2. 5:45 a.m.-7 a.m. Commute 1.25 hours to DSMax branch office in Norristown, PA.
3. 7 a.m.-9 a.m. Engage in motivational cheering sessions and spirit-building exercises with fellow “representatives.” (“Where we going?” “To the top!” “WHERE WE GOING?” “TO THE TOP!” “When?” “Now!” “When?” “Now!” “WHEN WHEN WHEN?” “NOW NOW NOW!!!” And other humiliations too numerous and depraved to list. Let me just say there was “hand jive” involved.) Listen in quiet horror as co-workers enthusiastically discuss pro wrestling/soap operas/fanatical, cultish commitment to DSMax/plans for all the money they’ll make once they get promoted to branch manager. Take note of surprising number of co-workers who’ve quit since you started. Envy them.
4. 9 a.m. Commute back to Philadelphia in order to walk door-to-door in the run-down ghetto business districts of West Philly. In December. Peddling long-distance phone service to local small business owners (i.e. hair salons, corner stores, dive bars (people drinking straight vodka at 10 a.m.), garages, endless parade of delis and other shithole restaurants, etc.) Do this until 5 p.m. Return to “office” (really just one large rumpus room) during rush hour.
4a. Locate potential client (e.g., sucker). Check soul at door. “Pitch.” Trudge, defeated, out door OR (rarely) attempt have customer sign multiple contracts and make multiple phone calls to complete sale. Trudge
forlornly out door when customer informs you that he/she “don’t have time for this shit.”
5. 6 p.m. Return to office. Ring small bell, large bell, or gong, according to your sales performance for the day. Calculate commission. Choke back tears at realization that commission will not pay rent and there is NO BASE PAY. Gather round for another session of cheering and practice pitching (just follow your five steps and your eight steps!–DSMax’s keys to success, in addition to trite little coffee mug aphorisms and the sort of pithy acronyms that Judge Judy would find clever: KISS–“Keep It Simple Stupid”). Fend off barrage of entreaties by over-zealous co-workers to attend post-work DSMax get-togethers at nearby Applebee’s.
6. 8 p.m. Return home. Microwave taste-free/nutrition-free food because you are too tired, beaten to cook. Complain to sig. other.
7. 9 p.m. Pass out on couch in front of mindless television.
8. 1 a.m. Wake up on couch. Get up and go to actual bed. Cry self back to sleep.
9. Repeat steps 1-8.
I lasted five weeks. I probably made a total of $1,500.
A part of me died that I will never get back.
TOMORROW: Unionizing a dot-com, an impossible dream?
IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE sometimes that American business interests and their wholly-owned pundits and commentators once feared a go-go Japanese economy, to the point of calling for protection against their imports (especially autos).
Now, the once-feared “Japan Inc.” is reeling. The nation’s government has gone from scandal to scandal.
In “New Economy” tech industries, Japan leads the world only in video monitors and video games.
In autos, Nissan has only now come back from years of fiscal struggle. Mazda got eaten up by Ford. Some speculators think Honda will disappear next, as the industry consolidates to a dozen or fewer worldwide giants.
The Stateside anime fan cult notwithstanding, Japan’s takeover of entertainment went awry. Matsushita/Panasonic gave up on its investment in MCA/Universal. Sony’s purchases of the (previously separately-owned) Columbia Pictures and Columbia Records has proven problematic at best.
The Japanese invasion of some of America’s most prestigious urban real estate, such as NYC’s Rockefeller Center, went away when the country’s domestic corporations and banks started to slide.
Even worse, some of the more annoying “triumph of the inevitable” US corporate advocates crow that Japan can’t ever again become an economic dynamo. Not unless it gives up its entire economic way of life.
You know the drill by now. Dump that central planning. Hack away at “lifetime employment,” health care, and other worker perks. Slash government spending, especially on anything that might help people. Stop protecting domestic producers or farmers. Adhere strictly to the IMF/World Bank party line. Don’t even think about doing anything the NYSE or NASDAQ wouldn’t approve of.
The premise behind all this, as you know, is that not only is capitalism the only possible way to run a society, but that the tyranny of financiers and “The Market” is the only way possible way to run capitalism. I don’t buy it. People (and nations as groups of people) have multiple needs, many of which are neither most effectively nor most efficiently served by a monomaniacal obsession with The Bottom Line or The Stock Price.
Additionally, different economies and economic systems have different cycles of “up” and “down” periods.
Japan had a “down” period a year or two back, due partly to nepotism-related monetary troubles in neighboring Asian countries, and U.S. capital rushed in to exploit it.
If the U.S. system has a “down” period (and some indicators say we might be at the start of one), and there’s no other (more paternalistic or more careful or more long-term-minded) system out there, who’ll bail us out?
TOMORROW: The next MISCmedia book project.
LAST THURSDAY AND FRIDAY, we took the WTO-protest anniversary as an excuse to notice the Way-New Left and its ongoing efforts to bring positivity, vigor, and accomplishment back to the progressive movement; all while cyber-Libertarians and other big-money defenders use the language of “business revolution” to define the moneyed elites as today’s real populists and the critics of corporate rule as meddling reactionaries futilely fighting the inevitable triumph of the market plutocracy.
Meanwhile, a few lefty commentators, including Thomas Frank and Michael Moore, have peppered their critiques of the new corporate order with nostalgic references to the old corporate order, in which big industrial empires forged compromises with strong unions, workers got a predictable living wage with health and retirement benefits, and close-knit communities formed lasting bonds and took care of their members.
That’s a rather rosy depiction of the old America. Too rosy, as even Frank and Moore would admit.
It embodied the seeming end of history after WWII, the arrival of the American Century. Heavy industry was supposedly here to stay, as were the associated principles of permanence (or stuckness).
Industrial unionism rose as a counterforce to heavy industry, demanding that workers and their families get their fair shake from the setup.
The premise of AFL-CIO style unionism, especially in the Red-scare ’50s when the unions purged all lefty radicalism from their ideology, was that (1) big manufacturing companies with big permanent factory installations were the source of all wealth, and (2) the best way for individuals to make it under such a system was to group together to demand strong wages and job security.
It was a reactive ideology, one that acknowledged the centrality of the company.
But now the setup of big business is changing. The tactics for getting workers and their families a fair shake from it have to change too.
One possible, partial answer: Brand pressure.
Most every company (even Microsoft!) depends on good PR, on a healthy public image. Coffeehouse chains are discovering the image value of having organic beans and beans made under “fair trade” working conditions. Automakers, oil companies, and timber companies have long touted “green” business practices (or at least practices that can be passed off as “green” in fancy ads).
Eventually, shoe and garment companies will rediscover that the goodwill factor of making their stuff in North America, under decent wages and conditions, can be worth more than any sweatshop-borne cost savings.
Or, such a goodwill factor could be worth that much, if the anti-sweatshop activists keep working to make it so.
Another possible, partial answer: Re-redefining some of those “New Economy” buzzwords.
So the Wired Libertarians and the post-Gingrich Republicans and the Clinton Democrats and the business-motivation authors say people have to stop relying on big institutions and start fending for themselves?
OK, we will.
We’ll network (organize).
We’ll stop expecting to be taken care of by bureaucracies (corporations).
We’ll become more self-reliant (seize the means of production; albeit nonviolently).
We’ll dare to challenge the authority of old, tired institutions (the Fortune 500 and their media advocates).
TOMORROW: A guest columnist tries to not get arrested in the Son of WTO march.
YESTERDAY, we took the WTO-protest anniversary as an excuse to notice the Way-New Left and its ongoing efforts to bring positivity, vigor, and accomplishment back to a progressive movement that had been stuck in self-defeatism for years and years.
Activists, authors, and even some political candidates are taking back the language of liberation, empowerment, and democracy from those who’d define “revolution” strictly to mean “revolutions in business.”
And it’s about time, as Baffler editor Tom Frank notes in his new book One Market Under God.
Frank details, in 360 brisk pages, a decade or more’s worth of blathering agitprop about the “business revolution,” how it’s supposedly good for everybody. He contrasts this with pithy asides about how the market-as-everything ideology has helped ruin journalism, academia, downtowns, rust-belt communities, third-world conditions, etc.; how it’s brought downsizings and layoffs and sweatshops, all in the name of the inevitable, unerrant tide of globalization and privatization.
If there’s a complaint to be made about Frank’s work, it’s that he spends too much time sneering at his subjects and too little time explaining why we should share his ire. Long passages in One Market Under God read too much like the work of lefty “media analyst” Norman Solomon, who’s notorious for shouting that the news media aren’t telling us what’s really going on, but who seldom gets around to telling us what he thinks the real story is.
I want to hear from Frank what he directly believes democracy and liberation are, instead of keeping this ideas in the shadows, delineated only in the context of his criticisms of corporate culture.
Besides, one of Frank’s central theses-that corporate idealogues are using Orwellesque “newspeak” techniques to redefine the language of liberation so that any real challenge to the plutocracy of Global Business is literally unthinkable-is thankfully yet to be proven successful. If anything, the proponents of real empowerment are getting more vocal in exposing the contradictory bombast of the “New Economy” hypesters.
(Why, the latest Utne Reader even has a piece on “Five Signs of the Coming Revolution.” And the notoriously centrist Utne isn’t talking about a mere reorganization within the corporate ruling class, but an on-all-fronts challenge by those of us who believe business isn’t the end-all and be-all of everything (even if we disagree on almost everything else).
Still, there’s much to admire about Frank’s latest weighty tome.
He’s got a lot to say, and even more to hilariously quote, about the truly dumb ideas and convoluted doublespeak being bandied about by op-ed pundits, techno-Libertarians, and Republican think-tankers to justify the new corporate order.
Just as long as you remember that the old corporate order wasn’t all that hot either.
MEANWHILE: The WTO-protest anniversary began according to script. Hundreds of “get-tough” cops waited impatiently for some anarchist ass to kick. A few thousand old hippies and neo-radicals gathered in four locations to speak out about the usual boho-lefty topics (Mumia, Peltier, pot, veganism, animal rights, and just a little bit about global trade issues).
By midafternoon, they’d gathered in the little Westlake park and the two adjacent blocks of street. They had a great time intimidating the cops, grinning before the TV cameras, dancing and partying. (There was even a return appearance by the duct-tape-pastied women from last year’s protests.)
But by evening, enough of the crowd had withered away for the forces of order to feel assertive. The remaining, outnumbered, bohos were hounded and chased up Fourth Avenue (safely outside the Xmas retail zone). By Fourth and Blanchard, right in front of Sit & Spin, another phalanx of cops gathered on the other end of the block, preventing the remaining protesters from obeying the bullhorned orders to disperse. Paddy-wagon buses were moved in, nonviolent mass arrests were made. It played out like a touring-show version of the original–the same actions played out by a smaller cast on a smaller stage with more practiced choreography and far less spontenaity.
NEWSPAPER STRIKE WATCH: The Seattle Scab Times and Scab P-I have grown in their second strike-bound weeks to 18 pages of non-ad space, up from 15 at the strike’s start. As they gain bulk but not their experienced staffers, they’re becoming even duller than their pre-strike versions.
The Seattle Union Record, however, is getting slicker and livelier. It’s now out three times a week, at regular free-newspaper dropoff sites. (And it was much more sympathetic to WTO and WTO-anniversary protesters than the big papers ever were.)
MONDAY: The possibly-misplaced nostalgia for industrial unionism.
