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TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have been postponed so we can instead discuss the biggest Seattle media story since the Kingdome boom-boom.
It’s the big strike by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. It’s the town’s first newspaper strike since ’53 (and, thanks to the Joint Operating Agreement, the first to hit both the Times and P-I).
Already, the effects have been felt. Monday’s papers included the big ad stuffers normally seen on Thanksgiving; Tuesday’s papers were printed early in the evening to avoid any truckers’ sympathy walkout, and thusly didn’t mention Monday Night’s NBA or NFL results.
The big changes start today, when the papers try to put out at least a semblance of their normal product; to be distributed for free and staffed by management and out-of-state scabs. (I briefly considered applying to be a replacement newshack, but quickly dropped the idea.)
Striking reporters, editors, ad sellers, and deliverers have already started an online strike paper, the Seattle Union Record. A print Union Record is currently scheduled to start next week.
The Union Record name, as editor Chuck Taylor describes it, comes from “a labor-backed paper during the time of the General Strike of 1919, during which 65,000 Seattle workers silenced the city for five days. Before it began, Union Record editor Anna Louise Strong predicted it would lead ‘no one knows where!’ We know how she felt.”
So how might the strike affect the local media landscape?
It will immediately hurt the papers’ finances during the start of the big pre-Xmas ad season.
If it drags on, it will further erode the Times/P-I consortium’s fat and non-sassy hold on regional discourse.
Locally and around the country, newspaper circulation’s failed to keep up with population growth. Local daily-paper readership hasn’t fallen as precipitously as local TV-news viewership, but it’s still flat. (When the Times moved to morning circulation earlier this year, it mostly took readers away from the P-I.)
And while the JOA might have a monopoly on bigtime daily circulation in town, its franchise is beset on all sides by insurgent suburban dailies, weeklies (“alternative” and otherwise), news and want-ad Websites, and the three big national dailies.
For a few years now, I’ve found rarified souls in the Capitol Hill-Belltown-U District belt who, when I tell them about something published that day in “the Times,” automatically assume I mean the New York Times. There were even a couple of early Stranger writers from out of town who took their refusal to read local papers as a matter of pride; even when the resulting ignorance led them to attempting to cross Fourth Avenue on the night of the Seafair parade.)
And if it really drags on, the Times-owning Blethen family just might finally give in and sell their controlling interest in the paper to the Knight-Ridder chain, which owns 49 percent of its stock currently. Knight-Ridder is partnered with Gannett in the JOA-run papers in Detroit, which have been stuck in a protracted strike/lockout mess that’s gone on for year after year, with no end in sight, to the papers’ detriment as well as the workers’.
Perhaps that looming threat will serve as enough incentive for the two sides in Seattle to find a settlement.
TOMORROW: A different way of exposing the news.
ELSEWHERE:
THERE’S FINALLY A TARGET STORE in Seattle. The chain had previously dotted the suburbs, but came no closer to town than Westwood Village, a strip mall on the cusp between West Seattle and White Center.
Now, the “hip” discount department store (which has encouraged its fans to use the faux-French designation “Tar-szhay”) has set up shop in a new development across from Northgate–the historic “Mall That Started It All” where, 50 years ago, the then-parent company of the Bon Marche devised a centralized, all-enveloping shopping experience, separated by a giant moat of parking lots from the outside world.
In contrast, the new Northgate North development, where Target is, was planned in cooperation with city officials who wanted an “urban village” scheme–higher-density development, with leftover space for new residential units.
Therefore, the new Target’s 80,000 square feet (the chain’s standard store size) are cut up into two floors of a building that directly abuts the sidewalk (though you have to enter from the back, next to the five-story parking garage). Target’s on the building’s upper two floors. The ground floor’s devoted to smaller chains with storefront entrances (not open yet). On the lower level: Best Buy, the electronics/appliance/CD chain that once ran a national TV ad promoting itself as the best place to catch up on that then-hot “Seattle Sound,” even though it didn’t have any outlets in the area at the time.
The building itself’s done up in that currently popular retro-“industrial” style. Lotsa exposed framework and corrugated aluminum cladding give off a “busy” and quasi-friendly look, rather than the overpowering nothingness of big blank concrete walls.
The Target store was worth the wait, and suggests the chain should’ve built in-town sooner. While Kmart constructed its merchandising for suburban squares, and Wal-Mart was devised to be Small Town America’s everything-for-everybody store, Target applied niche marketing (also known as “target marketing”) to what had been a mass-marketing genre. Like Ikea, it sought out young-adult singles and new families with more style than cash. From shoes to lingerie, from kids’ coats to tableware, from home-office furniture to home-entertainment centers, what Target’s got is at least a little cooler (and not much costlier) than the stuff at the other big-box chains.
This strategy dates to the chain’s origins. As the chain’s website notes, it’s the only national discount chain to have been started by “department store people, not dime store people.” Specifically, it was started by Dayton Hudson Co., owners of Dayton’s dept. store in Minneapolis (where Mary Tyler Moore flung her hat). Target has now become more important to Dayton Hudson than its collection of regional dept.-store chains; the parent company recently changed its official name to Target Corp. When family scion Mark Dayton won a U.S. Senate election this month, most commentators referred to him as “heir to the Target fortune.”
Indeed, the brand’s become so powerful that the company was able to run commercials earlier this year with rave DJs and hot-panted dancers cavorting around backdrops of the chain’s bull’s-eye logo, with no products being sold and the store’s name not even mentioned.
TOMORROW: Another of our little fiction pieces.
IN OTHER NEWS: There’s a movie out there this week with a supposed anti-materialism message, that has lots of merchandising tie-ins with Nabisco, Hasbro, Visa, the Post Office, and more. Here’s a review, in Seussesque verse.
IT’S BEEN A SHORT WHILE since the announcement that Napster, the profitless dot-com that’s become the symbol of file sharing, DIY music trading, and anti-corporate crusading (and the target of a massive record-industry suit) “sold out,” if you’re to believe the email and chatroom remarks of many disgruntled users.
Since the initial announcement that Napster would accept an investment from the German media conglomerate Bertlesmann (owner of one of the global Big Five record-label groups that’s sued Napster), and would use that money to establish an “enhanced” music-downloading service with yet-unspecified features and a yet-unspecified user fee, the conventional wisdom has been that the party’s over.
Napster’s supposedly caved into industry pressure (and the lousy dot-com investment climate). It’s going to become just another soulless adjunct to the corporate media oiligopoly.
The Napster we’ve come to grow and (except for record-biz sharks) love, in which their computers served as e-matchmakers between users who had song files and users who wanted them, would soon disappear, according to this scenario. It’s sure to be replaced any month now by a pay-to-play setup with all the features corporations like and users dislike (copy-protected files, limited listening periods, limited compatibility across different computer platforms, track and artist selections subject to the priorities of corporate machinations, tons-O-cash going to the companies but not to the artists).
But the Napster folks now insist that ain’t necessarily so.
In an FAQ list about the deal, management claims the current Napster system will remain as long as the courts allow (and they’ll continue to defend the service in those courts). And the current Napster system will continue to be free.
The for-money Napster Plus, or whatever they end up calling it, will provide “an enhanced service that you’ll find even more valuable and that will allow us to generate revenues to be able to make payments to artists and songwriters for music files that our users share with each other.” Details are to be announced later, but might not resolve some of the current Napster setup’s built-in inconveniences (tracks that are sometimes misidentified, improperly converted, or choppily edited; song selection limited by what other users happen to have online at the moment).
In any event, no matter what happens to Napster, free file sharing’s here to stay. Napster happens to have the easiest-to-use file sharing procedure implemented to date. Others, such as Gnutella, do away with Napster’s centralized matchmaking system. The substitute search mechanism, at least as currently implemented, can be slow and inconclusive. But they can, and undoubtedly will, be improved upon. As they get easier to use, the major labels might eventually wish they still had an identifiable and sueable entity like Napster to deal with.
Which may be what’s really behind the Napster/Bertelsmann deal. Napster offers a common user interface and experience, a brandable identity, to song-sharing.
The labels (or at least Bertelsmann) can deal with that, in ways they’ll never be able to deal with the likes of Gnutella and its future incarnations.
MONDAY: The bon Target.
IN OTHER NEWS:The one neighborhood of (or just adjacent to) Seattle that hadn’t been taken over by the gentrifiers has, alas, just been discovered–in an article ostensibly bemoaning its down-and-out status but really inviting real-estate speculators to come-‘n-get-it.
Book Review Confidential
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
WHY DO PEOPLE WRITE BOOK REVIEWS?
I used to think the whole point of this racket was to force publishers to pay attention to my own books. Editorial screeners, however, have little clout or they simply resent query letters that lead with a whiff of a tit-for-tat proposal for them to accept me as a potential supplier of literary merchandise in exchange for my support of their products.
The reviewer gig does offer some perks, like free samples; and it’s usually more lucrative to write about books than to write the damn things, even when you factor in all of the time it takes to read them.
Apart from industrial considerations such as personal career advancement, there’s an altruistic side to book reviewing. This ranges from the fairly innocent (I love books, therefore I write about them to spread my enthusiasm to others) to the reasonably corrupt (I love books that really matter–not the crap the NY Times thinks is important–so I aim to reward fiction that advances the art of fiction). And then, some people just like to criticize things (I love to write about what I hate).
Although most book reviews are written by freelancers for little or no money, newspapers and magazines often have staffers whose job is to review books. Beyond that, there are plenty of commercial opportunities for freelancers, even if you don’t specialize in quickies of under 200 pages for cash cows who pay more than $200 for a short review. By indulging in some tricks of the trade (reading a few pages and then cobbling together your review from quotes in the press pack), anyone can turn a buck on the book beat.
After all, the stylebook standards of reviews are child’s play. Basically, you dress up a plot summary with some toney opinionating (just go easy on the poststructuralist lingo), dangle a reservation or two, and close with a pick or a pan.
While some dream of being critics, nobody sets out to become a book reviewer. Primarily, reviewers are writers, editors, or professors who have or have had other lit projects more ambitious than review work.
Not that this means the reviews are slipshod knock-offs. The pros I know consider (reread, if necessary) an author’s previous books as well as similar books by others, seldom review books by friends or enemies, and skip rather than slam books by unknown writers.
Editors have some influence over quality, but nothing drives reviewers as effectively as the fear of hanging their asses out in public. You can toil in painstaking obscurity, cranking out reliable and incisive reviews, but if you compare Frankenstein to Gertrude Stein, you’re bound to be immortalized in a blurb.
Although experienced reviewers are better at covering their asses than beginners are, even the best ones can unwittingly look like fools. Some play the reference game. To put something in critical context, they nick so many literary luminaries that reading their reviews is like watching an arcade superstar play pinball. Others succumb to the towline effect (or its inverse, the backlash effect), where the value of the book is directly (or, inversely) proportional to the effort it took them to read and review it. Often the towline effect has a cart-pulling-the-horse dynamic (see the NY Review of Books): If the review is five times longer than it needs to be, the book must be important.
Reviewers new to the game may threaten to get personal, as they star-fuck their favorites and lay waste to their foes. This gets old fast, but generally, I think it’s good for a reviewer to have a personal stake in the book under review. Who better than an entomologist to review a book about entomology, even if she just wrote a book on the same topic?
Book review assignments may deserve another article or none at all: The topic is either too mysterious or too obvious. Everybody knows that a tiny percentage of published books get reviewed, that big names and bestsellers and commercial houses hog the ink, that tons of worthy books go undiscovered. Many suspect that reviewers despise the proliferation of books, even while the reviewers themselves feed the literary lottery pot with their own hopes to overcome the astronomical odds and win fame.
Few realize, however, that nobody determines what books get reviewed as much as the reviewers do (more through whim and inertia than through any flex of power), and that the most formidable obstacle an author wanting to be reviewed can face is the neglect or incompetence of his own publisher.
And why do people read book reviews?
So they don’t have to read books.
(Doug Nufer is an editor of and contributor to American Book Review. His book reviews have appeared in the Nation, the Seattle Times, the Oregonian, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and currently appear in the Stranger and Rain Taxi. He hated to write book reports in school.)
TOMORROW: What might really be behind the recent frey over movie content.
HEARD THE CLASH’S “Hitsville UK” on the Linda’s Tavern jukebox (now, alas, CD-based) the other day. The song, from the premier political-punk band’s 1980 Sandinista! magnum opus, was full of contradictions then and bears even more today.
First, it was a tribute to indie labels (and a scathing indictment of major-label marketing practices) that came out on a major. The song’s British 45 release acknowledged this with a sleeve depicting a score of minor-label logos in a “background” color shade; while the CBS Records logo on the record itself was in a brighter shade of the same color.
Second, the song’s title, lyrics, and booming-beat arrangement all invoked the Motown label (originally known as “Hitsville USA”) as an inspiration and a model for artist-centered, commerciality-be-damned music making.
Perhaps to a Brit, a Black-owned company making and selling Black music all on its own from outside the media capitals (albeit within the established music-biz infrastructure; its ’60s classics were distributed in Britain by EMI) could be seen as having blazed a trail leading to the initial punk/indie revolution, and from there perhaps toward the destruction of the major labels and their prepackaged pap. And, as historian Suzanne Smith has shown, many Black Americans saw similar hopes in the label’s original success.
But to some old R&B purists and modern-day indie idealogues, Motown was as ruthless and centralized as the majors. It was an assembly-line operation that produced one product (the “Motown Sound” hit single, an R&B subgenre engineered in every detail for white teenybopper consumption) in assorted models and upholstery schemes. Its stars had to fight for any degree of creative or career control (only Smokey and Stevie really succeeded).
When the Motown Sound had finally played itself out as a top-40 commodity, boss Barry Gordy shut down the factory and split Detroit for L.A., taking all his remaining stars out there with him. (Aretha Franklin, the one Detroit R&B legend who stayed, recorded for Atlantic.)
Still, “Hitsville UK” and its themes of empowerment and innocence regained struck a powerful point in 1980. Its (oversimplified?) depiction of art-loving, street-credible outfits like Factory and Rough Trade reclaiming music from the industry’s “mutants, freaks and musclemen” provided as much hope as a progressively-minded young adult could reasonably expect to have at that time of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s rise to power. Maybe we couldn’t stop the assaults on public education and the environment, the military buildups, or the revival of racism; but at least we could gain control of what was on our own turntables and in our own Walkmen.
Twenty years later, the song’s main message still reverberates. Music-making technology has become so democratized that almost anyone can put out a recording (and, if you look at the post-your-MP3 sites, it seems almost everyone has). Virtually every aspect of music production, performance, and marketing has been, or is being, demystified and popularized. The majors, meanwhile, are consolidating ever further, relying more heavily on rosters of ever blander and/or dumber superstar acts to justify their bloated organizations and their intellectual-property lawsuits.
If these dual trends continue, the whole Napster fracas may prove to have been the least of the majors’ problems.
The song’s proclamations might even come true: No slimy deals with smarmy eels, no consumer trials, no AOR, in the new Hitsville USA.
MONDAY: A pre-election rant of sorts.
MORE LITTLE ANECDOTES inspired by real estate (perhaps the last batch, at least for a while). This time, we ponder why old fake architecture’s more durable than new fake architecture.
Just ’cause Seattle’s only 149 years old and in North America, that doesn’t mean we can’t have Roman ruins (well, sort of). The four, beautifully-decaying columns adorning this lookout point near Pine and Boren came from the original University of Washington building, which had been where the Olympic Hotel is now. These days, neighborhood activists are trying to preserve the lookout’s views, threatened by city plans to permit more high-rise buildings in the Denny Triangle district just beneath it.
Compared to the box-of-leaky-fake-stucco look of many modern “luxury” apartments and condominiums, Frederick Anhalt’s Capitol Hill buildings of the ’20s look more astounding than ever. His Tudor brick and Norman-style bungalow apartments featured individual entrances and felt more like homes than rental units. The Depression wiped out his company; until his death in 1996, he ran a garden-supply store and nursery near University Village. Many of Anhalt’s buildings today command premium rents or condo prices–including this classic on East Roy Street, known to ’80s comic-book readers as the “Sherwood Florist” building in DC’s “Green Arrow.”
The former Capitol Hill Methodist Church was built back in the late 1880s, as the area surrounding 16th and John was first filling with residences. In the 1990s, the dwindling congregation (one of the first in the state to openly welcome gay and lesbian churchgoers) formally dissolved. While the exterior is protected as a city landmark, the interior was redone as an architects’ office. (Former workers there claim the building’s haunted by a former pastor.) Now, One Reel Productions (producers of Bumbershoot, WOMAD USA, and Summer Nights on the Pier) are reportedly interested in the structure as an office for its growing entertainment empire.
The “golden ages” of some entertainment genres are hard to define. But many connisseurs of sex films define that form’s peak as the 1970-87 era of theatrical porno; after “stag films” emerged from the underground into real theaters, but before home video and zoning restrictions across the country put many of the theaters out of business. After ’87, when the last on-film theatrical porno was released, most remaining adult cinemas switched to video-projection systems. The Apple Theater was one of the last film-based porno houses left in the U.S. when it was razed in 1998, as part of an affordable-housing project. The new building’s storefront tenant is in a different “skin trade,” that of tattoos.
TOMORROW: Bremerton, just possibly the most surreal town on the planet.
IN OTHER NEWS: Perhaps never has so much fuss arisen over the firing of a prize-pointer.
Here Today, Gone to Kenmore (Part 2)
by Guest Columnist Sean Hurley
YESTERDAY, our guest columnist started explaining why he’d first considered moving out of central Seattle; first to Rainier Beach and then to Kenmore. Today, more of this.)
AT THIS SAME TIME, rents were on the ascent at an ear-popping rate. Downtown had begun its conversion to the mold-formed Large American City it has since become, sidewalks cleared of humanity’s unsightly flotsom and jetsom by city hall so that the important people–the shoppers–could feel completely comfortable bringing their wads of freshly minted greenbacks down Pine and Pike, hurling their dollars into franchise clothing and home accessory boutiques by the armload, clogging the arteries of their bodies with another overpriced dinner out and the arteries of the city with yet another overpriced rolling status flag.
The heart of a city, its true essence, cannot, I believe, be found in its polarities. When we look at our environment through the skewing lenses of rage or lust, righteousness or nihilism, that environment becomes no more than a reflection of us. This sort of solopsism is both pathetic and dangerous.
And for me, it was easily remedied: We simply moved.
If I could no longer take a measure of my city’s soulfulness because I could no longer see its subtleties, clearly the thing to do was to get another vantage. This we did.
It worked. South Seattle wasn’t even on maps of town. Finding our way to the furthest reaches of upper Rainier Beach for the first time was thoroughly discombobulating; and for a week after the move I felt a sense of displacement that bordered on the existential.
It was much more of an ordeal to, say, walk to the store than I had experienced for perhaps fifteen years. And I became much more reliant on my automobile than I had ever hoped to be, a reliance I still admit to with great shame.
To be unhappy where you are in the world, geographically or otherwise, often results in a gradual abstraction, a reduction of that world to the very polarities by which it can no longer be truly lived in; the unhappy reality is consumed by a fantasy of other, better, more fulfilling, and satisfying worlds. By contrast, to be comfortable and at peace with the area in which you live, physically or otherwise, is to have made some distinction between the real and the illusory.
In a sense, to have moved outside of that dense urban area to the peripheral neighborhoods and eventually to an even more suburban address, I quickly gained a sincere appreciation for the amenities of both. A simple change of environment, and not only did the new place look good, the old place looked pretty good, as well.
I was born in Seattle, and, while I grew up on the Kitsap Peninsula, I have lived in this city since my late adolescence. I’ve always thought that people tended by degrees to live principally in the future or the past, mentally speaking, with a rare few who could be legitimately said to live in the present, in the moment. I myself definitely have my mind on what lies ahead, perhaps sometimes to the point of escapism.
It is perhaps for this reason that I only rarely have any wistfulness for Seattle as I have known it. I find that sort of nostalgia more haunting than comforting. Many of my friends, fellow artists, have left here in the hope that they might find something approaching fame or fortune.
I like to think that what they really got was a bigger world. Although my family and I will not always live in the suburbs, not always live in America even, it seems to me that a suburb can widen the world as well as any other dream.
MONDAY: Why old fake architecture’s better than new fake architecture.
NORTHWEST BOOKFEST isn’t really the Great Affirmation of Seattle As Book-Lovers’ Capital of America that its sponsors like to claim.
It’s merely a stop on a North America-wide circuit of consumer-oriented book confabs (as opposed to industry-oriented book confabs, like the annual trade fairs in Chicago and Frankfurt). Some of these confabs are older, bigger, and/or more prestigious than Seattle’s.
But the Seattle show’s organizers can take credit for having started big six years ago and just gotten bigger since. Originally held in a rustic old pier (where the cover image of Loser had been photographed, at one of Nirvana’s last shows), it’s moved, as of last week’s 2000 edition, to Paul Allen’s Stadium Exhibition Center next to Safeco Field.
There, spread over two of the hall’s three huge rooms, what had previously been a boistrous bazaar of literary hucksterism became little more than another exercise in feelgood moderation.
The front hall was only about two-thirds filled with booths and readings stages. A couple more stages, plus some activity areas and another dozen or so sales booths, were even more thinly spread across the cavernous rear hall. The spaciousness prevented the event from generating the kind of critical mass of people, noise, and energy it needs.
Face it: Reading is (and writing especially is) a lone, quiet entertainment. Even audio books are often listened to while one’s stuck alone in a car. A festival celebrating books and reading needs to be a coming-out event, a joyous gathering where people openly share the experiences, ideas, and fantasies they keep to themselves the rest of the year.
My suggestion: Play up the “fest” part of Bookfest. If it’s going to be held in a space built for auto and boat shows, it should adopt some of the showmanship of those events.
Make it a “World of Words Lit-O-Rama.”
I can see it now:
A Vanna White lookalike letter-turning contest, with separate competitions for women, girls, and cross-dressers.
TOMORROW: Here today, gone to Kenmore.
REGULAR READERS of this page know I’ve been trying to tweak the format of the MISCmedia print magazine, trying to find that elusive formula for success (or at least non-failure).
Today, we’ll discuss a couple of the elements that, according to the experts contribute to success in the field of periodical print.
1. The virtual world created on real paper.
Even publications with few or no fiction texts create a highly selective “reality” based on what pieces of the real world they cover and the viewpoints they take toward those pieces. The result, if it’s executed properly, is an alternate reality readers can only experience through reading the magazine.
(Think of Cosmopolitan’s world of sassy young women enjoying hot careers and multiple orgasms, the pre-Steve Forbes’s world of thoughtful industrialist-philosophers, or Interview’s world of breezy starlets and fabulous fashion designers.
Many magazines also create their own “realities” via staged photo shoots, cartoons, and the like. Examples include fashion spreads, travelogue photos with pro models, and, of course, nudie pix.
Playboy took this a step further with the creation of the Playboy Mansion, in which the magazine’s fantasy world could be staged nightly for its photographers and invited guests.
2. The full-meal deal.
Legendary Saturday Evening Post editor George Lorimer once said something to the effect that a good magazine was like a good dinner. It should have an appetizing opening, a hearty main course, some delectable sides, and a fun dessert.
(I guess, by the same analogy, a good small newsletter-type publication might be like a handy, satisfying deli sandwich with chips and a Jones Soda. And a useful webzine might be like a Snickers.)
3. The clearly identifiable point of view, or “voice.”
The old New Yorker identity, in the Eustace Tilly mascot and in the writings of folk like E.B. White and co., was of a refined Old Money sensibility confronting the sound and fury of the modern urban world with a tasteful, distanced smirk.
A Seattle counterpart might be a funky-chic sensibility (think fringe theater, indie rock, and zines) confronting a sleek, bombastic, postmodern urban world with a worldly, haughty chortle. Maybe.
MONDAY: I finally get around to the Ralph Nader campaign.
OTHER WORDS (from French director Robert Bresson): “Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.”
I ALWAYS GO to the High Tech Career Expo, held every quarter in the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall.
Even though I don’t have three years’ experience in programming technologies that just came out last year (the chief requirement at most of the employers’ booths), I still go through the motions. I pass out resumes. I talk tech jargon with the recruiters (mostly made-up on my part, and for all I know also made-up on their part).
And I collect the free candy, toys, and literature from many of the booths.
Examples of hype-talk and tech-mumblespeak in the companies’ literature:
Examples of the toys:
Get in on the fun yourself. Get to the next High Tech Career Expo, Nov. 7-8 at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue.
Who knows–if dot-com turmoil continues, there might not be as many of these, of this size, by this time next year.
TOMORROW: Memories of punk clubs past.
IN OTHER NEWS: The 2000 Mariners had their streaks and slumps but never gave up. In the end, they came up two Arthur Rhodes-pitched relief innings away from winning their first pennant and bringing joy to Yankee-haters everywhere.
This near-triumph could be intrepreted as a justification for the New Look Ms–a team built on coaching, strategy, and teamwork rather than a couple of superstars.
Or, it could be compared to the “new economy,” including a lot of Washington-based companies, initially riding high but eventually stumbling this year against the real-world domination of the Wall Streeters and their global conglomerates.
Or, it could just be another case of a “small market” team whupped by the big guys with the big regional-TV revenues.
In any event, it was a lot of fun. Let’s do it again soon.
HOLLYWOOD’S WRITERS AND ACTORS might go on strike next summer. The big studios are rushing even more mediocre big-budget movies into production now, in case the strike creates what Entertainment Weekly calls “A Year Without Movies.”
I can hardly wait.
Imagine if the strike drags on, into the summer and fall of the year the cinema once predicted would be a space-age wonderworld.
As the supply of would-be blockbusters dwindles, the multiplexes will try to keep their seats filled by bringing back past favorites. The Pacific Place 11 could turn into an impromptu classic-film festival.
In between the oldies (or at least the more popular films from the mid-to-late ’90s (yes, expect Titanic and The Phantom Menace to be dragged out again and again)), the studios will release everything they’ve got lying around. Time Warner will raid its HBO and TNT subsidiaries, shunting made-for-cable movies into theatrical duty. Direct-to-video horror snores, shoot-’em-ups, and “erotic thrillers” will get an unexpected day or two on big screens.
One screen at a time, indies will infiltrate the (already fiscally beleagured) multiplexes.
Audiences will get the chance to get bored to tears by countless low-budget films made by perky white boys about the struggles faced by perky white boys trying to make low-budget films.
Young couples will make out freely, undisturbed by the laughless genre-film parodies unspooling before them.
And maybe, just maybe, some worthy films will get shown in places besides the U Districts and Capitol Hills of North America. Audiences everywhere could discover movies that really move, with real stories and characters. Maybe even a few films from other countries.
If that happens, watch out. The studios and their media-conglomerate owners will fight back. The studio-controlled TV gossip shows will refuse to cover these pipsqueak upstart films. Instead, they’ll trot out as many “real” movie stars as are willing to appear, pleading for an end to the strike so “real” movies can again be made. As more and more viewers discover they prefer movies with actors instead of stars, more stars will join the public pleading, even breaking ranks with their own union if necessary.
By the time the actors, the writers, and the studios finally get their collective acts together and get back to work, whole swaths of the moviegoing public might have decided they no longer need nor care for the return of Hollywood product.
I know, I know. It’s the kind of happy ending that only happens in the movies.
TOMORROW: Whither CNN?
IN OTHER NEWS: Aside from the fates of the now ex-employees, reading about dead dot-coms is so much fun. Why, I wonder?
IN CASE YOU’VE BEEN STUCK INSIDE all summer and haven’t heard the news, there’s this little software company called Napster.
It’s caused no end of whoop-de-do because its users can exchange recorded-music files online without the express written consent of the gargantuan record labels.
The gargantuan record labels are suing, trying to shut Napster down. They’re asking the judges, and the public at large, to forget all about five decades’ worth of label malfeasance and just plain theft from recording artists, and instead to see the labels as standing up for poor musicians’ right to earn a living from their art.
Support the labels, the labels’ claim goes, and you’re helping bass players stay in guitar picks and tour-van repairs.
Let Napster continue to exist, the labels allege, and no recording artist will ever see a CD royalty again.
Some Internet commentators, including
John Perry Barlow (who doesn’t always take sides against huge corporations, being pals with the Big Oil-funded Global Business Network), have retorted that argument. Instead, these guys claim musicians don’t need no stinkin’ major record labels. Heck, they don’t even need to sell records to earn a living.
For an example of a band that didn’t need to eternally assert its intellectual property rights, Barlow and co. always mention the same band–the Grateful Dead, for whom Barlow was once an associate (as, briefly, was Courtney Love’s dad).
The Dead, Barlow and pals assert, became rock’s number-one touring act partly because they let fans make and exchange their own recordings of their live shows. So, these writers claim, could any other act. Artists not only should let live-show tapes be freely traded, but studio CD tracks as well; it’d all just fan the flames of fandom, which would result in further CD and ticket sales.
Barlow and his cohorts conveniently forget to mention that the Dead released their records through major labels that routinely included the usual threats on the back cover about unauthorized duplication being a violation of applicable laws.
They also don’t mention that the Dead were quite the intellectual-property defenders in regard to the band’s assorted merchandising images and logos. At one point, the band’s attorneys even tried to sue individual Deadheads who sold handmade bear-mascot bongs in the caravan camps outside the band’s shows.
The larger issue in Barlow’s argument, however, lies in what made the Dead different from most rock bands before or since. They were a “jam band,” using long instrumental doodles to make each live show different (thus encouraging hardcore fans to see as many different gigs as possible)
Some current “jam bands” include Phish and Pearl Jam, which just released 25 (count ’em!) live CDs, billed as affordable alternatives to high-priced bootlegs.
Acts that hew closer to tighter performing and songwriting, or acts that have chosen not to tour much, might not get as much out of a freer show-taping and song-trading philosophy. And acts that don’t rely on tours and merchandising sales to pay the rent (many non-jam bands lose money on the road) might not like to hear that they’re now expected to give up record sales and rely on touring income.
Or so one might think.
The Offspring, whose skate-punk sound and terse songwriting are as about far from the Dead as one can get, (heart) Napster. Or, to quote from the band’s official website, “The Offspring view MP3 technology and programs such as Napster as being a vital and necessary means to promote music and foster better relationships with our fans.”
The band’s sold Napster-branded merchandising items at its shows (with proceeds earmarked for charity). And it wanted to put its entire next album online, as downloadable MP3 files, until the gargantuan record label that has the band under contract threatened to sue. The compromise: The band put up a single tune.
Other acts, particularly acts without big-label deals (voluntarily or otherwise), have posted lotsa songs for free download–even entire albums and live shows. Or they’ve let unofficial fan sites post them.
They’re convinced this will get them noticed, draw new fans, and turn those new fans into legit CD buyers.
Fifties rock songwriter Mike Stoller, meanwhile, wrote an NY Times op-ed essay last week. He claimed unfettered Net-downloading of music would put future songwriters out of business. Stoller neglects to mention that full-time songwriters were largely ousted from the rock milieu back in the ’60s. After the Beatles and Stones, most bands started writing their own material.
A big reason: The ASCAP- and BMI-regulated songwriting royalties were a much surer source of income than recording royalties, which were and are subject to all manner of record-label “creative accounting.” Non-performing songwriters either became nostalgia topics or moved into niche markets (country, teen-idol pop).
It’s the major-label business-as-usual that, at least indirectly, helped put the likes of Stoller out of business. It’s that kind of business-as-usual that Napster really threatens.
We close with a line cribbed from the late ’80s and early ’90s, when the gargantuan record labels were similarly up in arms over cassette trading. The labels would stick slogans on back covers, “Home taping is killing music. And it’s illegal.”
Members of the “international cassette underground” preferred to spread a revised slogan–“Home taping is killing the music industry. And it’s easy.”
TOMORROW: Imagining a new fictional persona for the column.
A WHILE BACK, we discussed the idea that the most successful ideas in business were the really simple, direct ones–even the ones that were so simple they were impracticably stupid.
Since then, I’ve found wht might be the simplest, stupidest business motivation book ever made–Who Moved My Cheese?
It was written by Spencer Johnson, who’s made a career out of easy-reading material for self-improvers. His most famous was The One-Minute Manager, which launched a fleet of sequels including The One-Minute Father (don’t way too many guys treat fatherhood as a one-minute experience already, or maybe a five-minute experience with Viagra?).
Anyhoo, Who Moved My Cheese? has an extremely simple lesson–change is inevitable; learn to enjoy the adventure.
It teaches this lesson with a very short, very simply-written parable. It’s a story set in a maze, involving two lab mice and two mouse-sized but human-minded “littlepeople.”
As the story opens, our four maze-runners have found a cache of cheese and decide to stop their daily running. They settle down by the cheese station and feast heartily. But as the days go by, the cheese supply keeps getting staler and smaller. One day, it’s all gone.
After some wailing and gnashing of teeth, the two mice set off in search of “New Cheese.” The Littlepeople sit around moaning and asking the titular question, until one of them (named Haw) finally gets mad enough to act.
As he heads back out into the maze, he realizes he always liked his old life of running around for cheese. He has a sequence of epiphanies about the value of change and adapting to new life conditions, and writes each on the maze walls (in the book, they’re printed as full-page slogans).
Haw finally finds the New Cheese, which the mice already are now at. The story ends with Haw hoping the other Littleperson (named “Hem”) will eventually get off his Littleass and get back into the maze.
Johnson wants us to get our heads in gear to the inevitabily of change. Accept that your job’s going to be downsized; your home’s going to be demolished for luxury condos; your current job skills are going to become worthless in four years or less; your neighborhood store’s going to be clobbered by Wal-Mart; your dot-com’s going to go phhhhft. But it’ll all be to your betterment; just as long as you get with it, give up any futile quest for stability, and become a good little manic-conformist corporate warrior.
In Johnson’s worldview it’s the Littlepeople, the ones with the thinking going on, who have all the troubles coping. It’s the mice who instinctually know what to do and set out to do it without all that time-wastin’ cognition. The mice don’t wonder why they’re stuck in a maze; they just seek out their next given-from-on-high cube of cheddar wherever, within the maze’s confines, it may be.
When Johnson asks if you’re a man or a mouse, he hopes you’ll strive to become the latter.
The book’s implied answer to the titular question is that nobody took away any cheese; the maze-runners merely exhausted their allocated supply.
But that answer begs another question, left unasked in Johnson’s tiny book: Who put the cheese, the mice, and the Littlepeople in the maze in the first place?
TOMORROW: A Pokemon guide to the Presidential candidates.
LAST FRIDAY AND ALL THIS WEEK, I’ve been reminiscing about Seattle during the fall of 1975.
I’d arrived in town in September of that year after a childhood spent in Olympia and Marysville, WA and Corvallis, OR. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, except cease living with my parents and stay the heck out of the military.
Within two days I’d found what would now be called a “mother-in-law” apartment in Wallingford (in a home run by a devout Catholic couple with a Mary shrine in the front yard; within a year, they got a brand-new Betamax VCR equipped with “Swedish Erotica” tapes.) Days later, I got a graveyard-shift job at the U District Herfy’s (a once locally-prominent burger chain; that particular branch is now a Burger King).
I hadn’t many career expectations at the time. Writing was something I seemed to be good at, but I also could see myself in acting, local TV, music, retail, graphic design, even bike-messengering (which I wound up doing for a while).
Some of my initial memories:
Metro Transit. I’d grown up with school buses, but hadn’t lived in a jurisdiction with municipal bus service. How convenient! You just stand in one spot for as long as half an hour and you’ll get anywhere you want to go (except some really obscure places or places out in the ‘burbs).
That fall, a weekly Carson rerun would be replaced by a new show, initially titled NBC’s Saturday Night. The contrast only made Carson’s shtick seem even dumber (but in an endearing sorta way).
(My teenage encounters with the fundamentalist-Christian universe had already taught me to beware those who claimed they were the only ones going to Heaven on the basis of picayune doctrinal trivia.)
All in all, it was a time of diminished expectations, of a big city that still, mistakenly, thought it was a helpless little cowtown.
Despite everything that’s happenned for the better around here since then, and there’s been a lot, I miss something of that funky humility.
MONDAY: Back to the future with the simplest, stupidest business motivation book ever written.
I’ve been reminiscing about Seattle during the fall of 1975.
It was a town with no Kingdome (still under construction), let alone no Safeco Field. Heck, the Space Needle was only 13 years old (and already seemed a relic of a previous era’s optimism).
It did have a lot of old, cool, lo-rise buildings that, in the quarter-century since, have been executed for the crime of standing in the way of alleged progress.
Some of the coolest ones were in the “Sleaze District” of First Avenue, from the still-being-touristified Pike Place Market south to Pioneer Square.
Ahh, I remember it well.
There were the taverns–dark, dusty places with pulltab games and Oly schooners; places where alcoholic consumption was depicted as precisely the shameful activity religious leaders wanted it portrayed as. Some of them had 6-9 a.m. happy hours. None had microbrews (those didn’t start here ’til ’82) and almost none had the few highbrow bottle beers available then (Anchor Steam, Rolling Rock). If you were lucky, they might have had a Michelob at the bottom of the cooler, beneath the Schlitz and the Rainier Ale.
There were the “arcades”–places that had once been penny arcades with pinball and other amusement games, but which had long since turned to pornos. They included Lou’s Arcade, High’s Arcade, the Champ Arcade, and the Amusement Center (precursor to today’s Lusty Lady peep-booth operation).
Lou’s Arcade had a quaint exterior slogan, “Lou Sez: Hey Mate, Why Wait? Our Color Movies Are Super Great!” Another place had a hand-lettered sign on its wall promising “Nude Dancing On Screen.” I was quite disappointed to learn they no longer really had nude dancing on screen, just hardcore pornos. (To this day, my nastier instincts are aroused by beauty more than by hot-hot action.)
There were the little places (in the Sleaze District and beyond) that had seemingly been around forever, but which wouldn’t survive the onward march of upscaling. G.O. Guy Drugs; Shorey’s Antiquarian Books; the Fidelity Lane Ticket Office; the Coffee Corral diners; Steve’s Broiler; the Westlake Bartell Drugs with its oldtime drugstore soda fountain; Woolworth’s; a boutique called Q’raz that sold the kinds of wigs you see today only on drag queens; the murky old 211 pool hall; Abruzzi’s pizza parlor; Cook’s U-Drive truck lot with its beautiful truck-shaped neon sign.
All the little places that make up a town, and which no number of touristy ice-cream parlors and chain-owned cookie stands for dogs can make up for.
TOMORROW: The last of this for now, I promise.
