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SINCE LAST FRIDAY, I’ve been remembering the far different Seattle of the fall of 1975.
It was a time of gas lines, of stagflation, of post-Watergate cynicism, of post-Vietnam shellshock, of continuing doldrums in the Boeing-centric Seattle economy.
In short, a perfect time for an up-‘n’-coming hardbitten-journalist wannabe such as myself.
Seattle was still a “company town,” and that company was Boeing. (Microsoft was just getting underway, selling software to hobbyist programmers out of New Mexico.) Boeing had just begun to recover from its massive 1970-71 slump when the U.S. pullout from Vietnam brought drastic military plane-buying cuts, thusly plopping the region right back into recession mode.
(At least Boeing, thanks to its head start in the passenger-jet biz, was less dependent on Pentagon contracts than other planemakers were. That’s why it was able in the ’90s to take over McDonnell Douglas and outlast Lockheed.)
A then-united OPEC (a few years before the Iran revolution set off squabbles and wars between Mideast oil nations) was in one of its price-hiking, supply-restricting movements. Radio Shack sold CB radios with ads claiming they’d help you “Find Gas Fast.” Companies like Gulf, Amoco, and Phillips 66, which had boldly moved in on the Northwest gasoline trade just a few years before, either sold or abandoned their area stations. The great muscle cars and land yachts faded from popularity and rusted on used-car lots (many of which were set up at abandoned gas stations).
Politicians tried to allay citizens’ fears by adopting bland feel-good personas. Gerald Ford was marketed as the emotionally stable, ambitions-in-check anti-Nixon. Jimmy Carter, already running to displace Ford in the White House, billed himself as half good-old-boy, half engineering nerd.
Seattle politics was run, then as now, by a downtown Democratic machine that pretended to be a neighborhood progressive movement. (It did a little more pretending of that sort then than now.)
The machine’s figurehead at the time was Wes Uhlmann, a glib, silver-haired gladhander. Uhlmann’s mayoral regime had survived a police-payoffs scandal and took (perhaps too much) credit for starting Metro Transit and saving the Pike Place Market from high-rise development. He’d retire in 1977, leaving a mayoral race between machine functionary Paul Schell and TV-news pretty boy Charles Royer. Royer would win handily, leaving future generations to deal with Schell.
TOMORROW: The sleaze district, and other places that are gone.
ELSEWHERE:
‘TWAS A QUARTER-CENTURY AGO THIS MONTH that yr. humble reporter first settled in the Jet City, embarking upon adulthood after a forgettable adolescence in smaller places.
With all the hype these days about ’70s nostalgia (or was that already over by 1998?) and all the talk these days about the monstrously “World Class” burg Seattle’s become, it’s a good time to look back upon the Seattle of 1975.
Even then, the municipal cliches and cliques still plaguing us now were in force. There were the business boosters out to make us a Big League City (the Kingdome was under construction on the site of a disused railroad yard).
There were the grumblers who blamed Californian newcomers for ruining everything, who bitched at the “provincial” ways of the folk already here, or both. There were other grumblers who said Seattle was too much like Los Angeles, not enough like San Francisco, or both.
There were the folks still in their late ’20s who seemed to feel that their real lives had already ended with the end of “The Sixties,” and who saw the verdant Northwest as a place to live out their remaining years in smug contentment. There were young proto-punks who craved passion and excitement, and who naturally loathed their elders who demanded an entire city devoted to peace and quiet.
Downtown Seattle’s transformation had begun seven years before with the Seafirst Tower (now the 1000 4th Avenue Tower), and was well underway by ’75. Freeway Park and the first phase of the Convention Center had been built. But thre were still plenty of blocks of two- to six-story brick and terra-cotta buildings. The most stately of these, the White-Henry-Stuart building, was being demolished for the tapered-bottomed Rainier Bank Tower (now Rainier Squre).
Nordstrom had expanded from a shoe store into a half-block collection of boutiques, and had instituted its infamous sales-force-as-religious-cult motivational system (later imitated at Microsoft and Amazon.com). Frederick & Nelson was still the grand dame of local dept. stores; J.C. Penney still had its biggest-in-the-company store where the Newmark tower is now.
Also still downtown: Florsheim, Woolworth, the old Westlake Bartell Drugs (with a soda fountain), and a host of locally-owned little restaurants, some with dark little cocktail lounges in the back.
The “Foodie” revolution in the restaurant biz had begun, and Seattle was one of its strongest outposts. Because the Washington Liquor Board demanded that all cocktail lounges have a restaurant in front, and that those restaurant-lounges earn at least 40 percent of their revenue from food sales, operators were constantly scrambling for the latest foodie fad–French, fusion, Thai, penne pollo, nouvelle cuisine, pan-Asian, sushi, organic, and that “traditional Northwest cuisine” that was just being invented at the time (mostly by Californian chefs).
And in the U District, a little alleyway-entranced outfit called Cafe Allegro had just begun serving up espresso drinks to all-nighter exam-crammers; while Starbucks’ handful of coffee-bean stores had already been promoting European-style coffee to Caucasian office warriors. One of Starbucks’ founders, Gordon Bowker, would later help start Seattle Weekly and Redhook Ale.
There was no Weekly yet; but there was a small weekly opinion journal for movers-and-shakers called the Argus, which had just been sold by Olympic Stain mogul Philip Bailey to the Queen Anne News chain of neighborhood papers. There was also the Seattle Sun, a struggling little alterna-weekly which ran, between neighborhood-vs.-developer articles and reviews of the latest Bonnie Raitt LP, some of Lynda Barry’s first cartoons.
MONDAY: A little more of this; including the old sleaze district, the daily papers, the TV, the economy, entertainment, the arts, and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some local Green Party candidates don’t get to share the stage at the big Ralph Nader rallies.
OKAY. THIS IS WHAT I’M A GONNA DO.
The online and print versions of this here verbal venture have acted as loss-leaders for each other.
Way-bad business planning, no?
So the print magazine’s going to an all-paid-circulation format either this next issue or the one after. You’ll still be able to get single copies in Seattle, but at fewer spots, and they’ll cost ya.
Ya wanna be a freeloader and read the stuff without payin’? You’ll hafta go online. And even then, you’ll be asked to contribute.
By today, we should have instituted a donations box on this here main page. Look for it. It means you can take a quarter from your credit or debit card and help support this here low-budget but definitely not no-budget textual venture.
You can donate as often as you like; even more than once the same day.
It’s run through a middleman outfit called PayPal. Eventually, I’ll turn the online ordering of the print magazine and our books over to PayPal too. (The outfit doing that part now has done a fine job; but its own screens and help files presume you’re buying “shareware” software, not books or magazines.)
Could the PayPal system be the answer for long-sufferin’ web content creators, or even a path toward such an answer?
It’s not the “micropayments” scheme some have advocated for years, going back to Ted Nelson’s long-proposed Xanadu system. With micropayments, readers would be charged pennies (or even fractions of pennies) for every view of a web page run by a participant in the plan. But it’s as close to it as anyone, to my knowledge, has gotten actually running.
IN OTHER NEWS: There was a gang-related shooting in Pioneer Square last Saturday. Mayor Paul Schell, showing his continuing descent into the influence of reality-challenged City Attorney Mark Sidran, immediately blamed it on hiphop music. The next night, another gang shooting broke out in Chinatown. The mayor declined to blame it on karaoke. Nor has he chosen to blame the Belltown muggings earlier this month on the undue spread of $100-a-plate restaurants.
OTHER WORDS (from page3.com’s “Joke of the Day” page): “Put simply, the core humour preferences of many of the Western world’s men, as we see it, can be roughly summarised thus:
“Brits: sex, booze, the Irish/Scottish/Welsh, English uperiority over everyone else.
“Americans: sex, lawyers, Bill Clinton, death, stupid Southerners.
“Canadians: sex, America, penis size, how great/well-endowed Canada is/Canadians are.
“Australians: sex, beer, masculinity whatever the consequences, sheep, Kiwis.
“Kiwis: sex, beer, masculinity whatever the consequences, sheep, Australians.”
TOMORROW: That ’70s Column.
Shifty Business
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE used to be a joke, a pathetic sort of capitalist propaganda that aimed to make suckers buy new cars with sharp fins or safety razors with finer blades.
Appeals to a consumer’s sense of style seemed as harmless as specious mechanical engineering claims. Even if these companies spent millions of dollars to persuade you to buy their stuff, the choice was yours. The insecure and the gullible were welcome to burn their money in quest of an identity makeover or scientific breakthrough; but thrifty cars and older model razors worked just as well and were just as available as the newer models.
In recent decades, however, there has been a new twist to the old concept of designing things that would have to be replaced while they still worked well.
Thanks to fundamental technological changes, you don’t get to choose anymore.
For many products (cars, computer software, CDs, to name a few), the choices are rigged. Older technologies are scrapped; not because they were less efficient, but because the new, improved systems cost more: i.e., cost a little more to manufacture and a lot more to buy or maintain.
It can be as difficult to buy a decent car that won’t cost a fortune to operate as it is to find an apartment in a city lousy with millionaires.
After hearing horror stories of relatives spending thousands on routine check-ups (the “electronic” tune-up), my partner set out to buy an old car that would be easy to keep and, for the most part, unnecessary to repair. It took weeks of picking through the classifieds and a flash of luck, but she managed to score a 1985 Toyota that looked and drove like it really had gone only 52,000 miles.
Conditioned to years of planned obsolescence on the part of car makers, I perversely admire them for structurally institutionalizing the need to buy newer, expensive-to-operate machines.
Besides, their attempts to provide a cheap model for people who just want a plain set of wheels (Chrysler K cars) have flopped.
What’s strange, though, is how the concept of forcing people to buy only one kind of new “improved” technology has caught on in areas where consumers might be thought to have more functional bullshit detectors, if only because the products are supposed to be the essence of simplicity: bicycles.
Like their four-wheeled nemeses, bicycles have undergone such technological “advances” in recent years, one shop owner told me some of his mechanics would have trouble repairing my old road bike, a 1980s Bianchi.
One problem with old bikes is that parts are getting scarce (unlike cars, bikes don’t have junkyards dedicated to giving Rottweilers something to do), so when things begin to break regularly, it makes sense to buy a new machine.
The problem with the new machines, though, is that designs can be driven by a need to flash something glitzy and needlessly complicated.
Take the shifters. Older models had two levers on the down tube or on the handlebar stem, where it was easy to reach down or up to get to them. Then they migrated to the ends of the handlebars and onto the handles of the handlebars. Although I prefer shifters on the down tube, between the legs, with a short run of cable to the derailleurs, the handlebar placements are elegant and convenient.
What doesn’t make sense to me is the system of shifting that has universally replaced the simpler set-ups. Now there are four levers instead of two. They are mounted on or next to the brake levers. Two levers shift up and two shift down for front and rear sprockets.
Although “index shifting” makes shifting more precise (it’s easier not to get caught between gears), practice makes any rider more precise.
The best arguments for the new shifters may be the demands of the widespread gear choices (as if anyone needs 24 gears, as if anyone HAS 24 speeds).
Some high-performance fans also tout the advantage of never having to take your hands off the brakes. Mostly, though, the new shifters’ function to help make bikes more expensive and harder to repair (unless you take them to the shop).
What’s really strange is the ubiquity of these gizmos. You want to spend $1000 on your main vehicle? The four-lever shifter is the standard.
The older, simpler systems have become quaint, customized options.
TOMORROW: Our recent Vancouver trek.
THE MAJOR-PARTY APOLOGISTS, especially the Democrats, are pleading with voters not to jump on any Nader bandwagon. They’re insisting there really is a difference between Gore and Bush, enough of a difference that you’ve gotta choose only one of those two–lest the nation be stuck with the other of those two.
Yet the Gore supporters’ claims of difference (which seem to involve such secondary issues as how quickly Social Security funds can be fed into the control of Wall Street speculators) continue to be contradicted by the increasingly-apparent similarities.
Both love “free” trade and the rule of global financiers. Both want to turn up the federal $ spigot to big weapons contractors. Both would keep up the dumb ol’ “war on drugs,” and pay as little lip service as possible to campaign-finance reform. Both claim today’s is the best of all possible economic worlds; even though real-world wage and earning-power equations get decreasingly rosy the further you stray from the top-20 income percentile.
And both camps have said, or at least implied, that Something Must Be Done against all the sexy, threatening, violent, or just plain icky material out there in our pop-culture landscape these days.
They’re not saying it loudly or direclty enough to threaten the media conglomerates the candidates depend upon for hype pieces (er, “news coverage”) and, in the case of Gore, for big campaign bucks.
But they are saying it. Particularly Al Gore’s pal, and Tipper Gore’s sometime aide in crusades against musical free speech, Veep candidate Joe Lieberman.
The Lieb’s basic stump speech invokes two main themes:
Lieberman and Gore have avoided, as far as I can tell, bashing NEA-supported art shows or college English classes. The Bush campaign, eager to put the GOP’s legacy of past priggishness behind it, has also been relatively muted in this regard–thus far. But the prigs still have a degree of power in the GOP trenches, and I predict it won’t be long before Bush starts trying to appeal to them.
So should we worry about these comparatively mild, but bipartisan, rants?
Yes.
If these rants become enforced public policy in the next administration, you probably won’t see direct government attempts to fully ban anything (except strip clubs).
You’re more likely to see, both within the next administration and from private groups operating under the next administration’s endorsement, targeted actions against specific “offensive” entertainments:
As usual, you needn’t fret for the big campaign-contributing media giants that have made zillions on raunch in commercial entertainment.
As we’ve seen with the conglomerates’ Napster-bashing, freedom and open expression aren’t among their highest priorities.
And as we’ve seen with the Napster phenom, such attempts to prop up the plutocracy of Big Media these days end up getting ever more desperate and blatant. They might not succeed in the long run, but can do a lot of damage in the attempt.
TOMORROW: Further adventures with the Razor scooter.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some 200 gay activists and supporters massed on Capitol Hill this past Saturday evening and Sunday morning, to counter-demonstrate against a series of antigay “rallies” by seven (count ’em!) supporters of a virulently bigoted Kansas preacher. Except at the end of the Saturday protests (when one counter-protester tried to approach one of the bigots, only to get shoved onto a car hood by the cops who were keeping the two camps apart), I’ve never seen so many loud and colorfully-dressed people get so worked up about a handful of inauspicious whitebreads since the last Presidential nominating conventions.
YESTERDAY, we mentioned in passing the Seattle Mariners’ new “classic” baseball stadium.
The movie-theater biz is also trying to get neoclassical.
OK, they’re not going back to single-screen palaces of architectural wonder. (And they’re sure not going back to old-fashioned ticket or concession prices.)
But the big chains are trying to make moviegoing an entertaining experience again.
After decades of building big, bland, boxy multiplexes, they’re now putting up much fancier joints. The new multiplexes still have umpteen screens serviced by a central projection room; they still play the same dorky big-studio formula movies.
But they’ve got plushier seats, fancier carpets and lighting, and prettier lobbies and signage. They’ve got hi-tech projection and sound systems. They’ve got doublewall construction between auditoria, so you’re less likely to hear the movie next door.
Some of them even have curtains concealing the screen between shows (amazing what they’ll think up!).
But the new movie boxes are costly things to build and run, especially with the high rents in some of the “restored” big-city downtowns where many of the biggest and fanciest megaplexes are going up. And the chains aren’t closing their older multiboxes at the same rate they’re opening new ones. (For one thing, chains are building these partly to encroach on other chains’ established territories. For another, they’re often stuck in long-term leases, especially at malls.)
So even with movie attendance holding steady, and even with the high ticket prices and the high concession prices and the on-screen ads and the hawking of CDs and posters in the lobbies, the big cinemonster chains are in trouble. Three have already filed for bankruptcy protection; two others may do so this week. The biggest current circuit, Loews Cineplex (formed by the merger of several already-big chains), is being propped up by steadily cash infusions from Sony (which hasn’t been making big profits in its movie-production arm either). But even that isn’t keeping the chain afloat.
As one to always see an opportunity where others only see trouble (and vice versa), I can foresee many uses for the movie boxes that might become immediately abandoned if these bankruptcy moves go through. When Cineplex Odeon (now merged into Loews Cineplex) shut down its Newmark fiveplex, a local nonprofit theater briefly used one of its rooms before the whole space was redone for offices. We can do that again, all over North America.
Let’s turn some of these umpteenplexes into multidisciplinary fringe-arts centers. I can see it now:
Not only would such a scheme provide valuable, centrally-located space for these sometimes neglected resources in the heart of their respective cities and/or suburbs, they’d provide a modicum of historic preservation to these buildings.
This way, kids in the 2030s will be able to see the places in which films like Rambo III were meant to be seen. It may help them understand why such films got made.
MONDAY: Both major Presidential candidates (heart) censorship.
FOR THE FIRST TIME ALL SUMMER, we resume our occasional habit of looking for meaning in real estate.
A Bell System ad from the late ’40s claimed, “It takes 500 tons of equipment for just one telephone exchange” (that is, for the central-office connections among the 10,000 phone numbers sharing one prefix). As you may have noticed, electronics are a lot smaller these days. So, even with the explosion of phone numbers due to modems, cell phones, and fax machines, US West didn’t need all the downtown buildings it had inherited when Ma Bell was broken up. One of these buildings was extensively reworked (with exterior windows and other amenities) to become the Hotel Monaco.
The view of downtown Seattle from the Camlin Hotel’s top-floor Cloud Room was forever ruined in the early ’70s by Pacific Northwest Bell’s new headquarters tower. Originally, it was officially billed as being at the made-up address of “1600 Bell Plaza,” confusing out-of-town phone company officials and everyone else who didn’t know it was really on 7th Avenue. With the Baby Bell spinoffs in 1984, the building went from PNB’s head office to a mere divisional outpost of the Colorado-based US West–which, in turn, was just acquired by the long-distance provider Qwest (no relation to the Quincy Jones-owned record label of the same name and spelling.)
The Bauhaus Cafe complements its retro-modern appearance by posting its phone number with a lettered prefix. These were remnants from the early days of telephony, when local service was hard-wired into named “exchanges” of no more than 1,000 lines. Before the rotary dial was invented, callers were initially put through to an operator, who manually patched a switchboard to connect the caller to the number he or she verbally asked for. As phone use grew, exchanges grew and numbers got longer. The Seattle Times, for instance, had the successive numbers over the years of “Main 300,” “MAin 0300,” “MAin 2-0300,” and “622-0300,” before the paper installed a new office phone system that required a block of separate numbers.
The El Gaucho steakhouse and cigar bar’s in a building that used to service a different end of the management-labor equation, as the meeting hall of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific. Its downstairs (now the Pampas Room and the Big Picture) was the Trade Winds, an irony-free tiki lounge whose back bar was decorated with exotic coins from around the world, collected from sailor patrons. A small sculpture in front of the building, in the form of a beret adorned with union badges (including that of the radical Industrial Workers of the World) remembers the site’s heritage.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, black empowerment became a rallying cry in the suites as well as on the streets. African-American-owned banks started popping up in cities across the U.S., including Liberty Bank in Seattle’s Central District. It sold home loans to people and neighborhoods underserved by the big banks; it provided business-banking services to the black-owned construction companies that had emerged to do affirmative-action subcontract work on government building projects. But the big banks soon went after the more profitable segments of Liberty’s business. A reorganization under the name Emerald City Bank didn’t last; it was sold to Key Bank in the late ’80s.
TOMORROW: Real Seattle fiction.
LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, we discussed the growing ’80s nostalgia fetishism.
Today, we continue an itemized explanation of how ’80s nostalgia differs from the real time:
By the latter part of the decade there were the centrally-controlled Prodigy and AOL, with their sloooow graphics and censored chatrooms.
Now, there are at least enough jobs to go around for college graduates (i.e., those who could still get into college after the ’80s decimation of student aid), for nice suburban scions who haven’t gotten stuck into manufacturing or farm labor.
All you had to do to proclaim your radicalness was to distribute posters of U.S. politicians with Hitler moustaches. You didn’t have to organize any coalitions, propose any agendas beyond protesting, or reach out to any constituency beyond your own drinking buddies.
Indeed, you could boast that you were “too political” to get involved in anything as morally impure as politics.
Eighties radicalism wasn’t about getting anything done. It was just about proving your own superiority over all those know-nothing squares out there in the Real America. Today’s way-new left appears to be getting beyond this tired nonsense, thankfully.
It also helped forge a vague unity-of-purpose among a vast assortment of subcultures, from drag queens and performance artists to sex-yoga teachers and health-food elitists. With the years, many of these groups drifted apart from one another, or just plain drifted apart.
In fact, there’s a lot I miss about the ’80s Seattle I hated then. The money-mania was not quite so pronounced; there were more low-rent spaces; there seemed to be more non-life-controlling jobs around; downtown stil had Penney’s and didn’t have penne.
But do I want the ’80s back? Hell no! I’d rather be forced to listen to nonstop Linda Ronstadt ballads for eternity (which, circa 1982, was what I was doing in office-drone jobs).
TOMORROW: Nostalgia for the Bell System.
Cirque du Simoleans
SOMEWHERE AFTER your credit-card account has been nicked to the tune of $35-$70, after a musical of uplifting fusion schmaltz that should have died in the Bloch’s Restaurant men’s room in 1978, the real show begins in the Cirque du Soleil production of Saltimbanco.
A squad of up to 16 acrobats spins up and down four poles arranged in a quadrangle. Inventive, daring, and visually dazzling, this is the kind of act I’ve been led to expect from what has been widely acclaimed as the new greatest show on earth.
While other shows have replaced cage acts, death-defying stunts, and the seedier legal and illegal attractions of the midway with sophisticated presentations of the circus arrts, Cirque du Soleil is the show against which others are measured, while it thrives in a class by itself.
Even champions of the loaded-for-bear traditional shows, as epitomized by Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey, give Cirque du Soleil its due. While there are traditional circus acts some shows do better, nobody tops the Cirque for sheer presentational panache.
The sound and lighting quality (as opposed to the quality of the music) have the production values of a Broadway show.
Rather than rattle off a revue of stunts, the Cirque builds each show around a story or theme. The costumes, at best, reinforce this unity of purpose. Clowns are not only expert mimes and accomplished acrobats, they sing and dance.
But then, it may occur to you that those clowns can’t dance half as well as the dancers in a Broadway show, let alone as well as the dancers in a soda-pop commercial; that the choreography is better when they change sets than when they just dance; that you’ve really had enough clever miming to last a lifetime; and that the production values are nice, but the clock is ticking and, apart from the acrobats on the poles, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Couldn’t they cut corners on the lights and sound and hire a few more acrobats?
There is a terrific juggling act–a woman who does a quick flash of balls after working her way up through a variety of cascades, fountains, and bouncing patterns with three, four, and five balls.
My favorite act was a high-wire routine where a woman does back flips between parallen wires at different heights and finishes off with a “walk of death” slide down a wire at a 45-degree angle to the ground.
An act where acrobats catapult, twisting and flipping, to land on each other’s shoulders was also quite good.
Flamenco-dancer twins in the first half of the show find symmetry in the second half’s twin strong men. A mime dressed as a boy who makes funny noises in the first half also cavorts in the second half, idulging himself and mime lovers (wherever they may be).
There is, however, an interesting twist to his second set, when our hero snatches someone out of the audience and drags him to the ring. The rube played along so well, I thought he was a plant, doing a variation of the old Pete Jenkins act (some hotshot rider masquerades as a drunk in the crowd and then stumbles to the nearest horse and out-rides everyone in the ring); but others who attended different performances saw different folks pulled from the audience (one of whom told Bret Fetzer that he was there with his family).
This breakdown of barriers between performers and audience is noteworthy; particularly in view of the traditional adversarial relationship between circus people and rubes. Rather than knife you with gaffed games of “chance” on the old midway, though, at Cirque du Soleil clowns roam the stands, sitting on laps, stealing a shirt, grabbing a gal and running around with her, throwing popcorn. Whether you find this irritating or funny, it does the essential chore of policing the stands to make sure some rube doesn’t start popping flash bulbs.
Not one to revel in the opportunity to touch clowns, I prefer the old separation of ace and rube, where the aces do stunts that verge on the impossible. Of the newer shows, Circus Chimera is the best I’ve seen for presenting consistently audacious (if inconsistently executed) acts. Rather than cheapen the show, the occasional failures of performers attempting feats of supreme difficulty only enhance the value of their eventual success.
The circus acts of the Saltimbanco show I saw were flawlessly done and, in the case of the stationary trapeze act, mundane. A semi-flying trapeze/bungee jump has more variation, but the spectacle of aerialists bouncing back up to their trapezes is a pale reminder of “The Cranes” of the Russian Circus.
(Not that every new aerial act ought to be compared to perhaps the single greatest flying exhibition ever done, but the problem with shows that rely on wired “mechanics” to tether flyers rather than safety nets to catch them is that these compromised newer acts can seem eternally outdone by even tame versions of the centerpiece aft of the traditional circus.)
Maybe it’s unfair to compare Cirque du Soleil to Ringling or to Cats, unfair to violate the first principle of criticism by failing to prioritize or even consider what the artist framing the show is trying to do.
To me, the story is beside the point of seeing great performers do incredible feats; but what, after all, is the story? For the added cost of the program, this information is available, along with the names of those on the show.
In the Cirque du Simoleans, production values talk.
Notions like giving credit where credit is due walk.
(Saltimbanco is extended thru Sept. 9 at the Renton Boeing plant, southeast corner of Lake Washington. 1-800-678-5440.)
TOMORROW:Figuring out this whole ’80s nostalgia business.
NOW LET US PRAISE the greatest Northwest pop-cult book ever written (other than Loser, of course.)
I speak of Wet and Wired: A Pop Culture Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest, by Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan.
The two Olympians have previously written a history of Seattle-set movies, published a short-lived print and web zine called True Northwest, and produced a comedy radio show. This modestly-produced, large-size trade paperback is their masterwork.
Its 226 pages cover over 500 of the most famous and/or influential people, places, and things in the Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver metro areas (plus a few side trips to Tacoma and Spokane). Mixing and matching the region’s three big cities means even the best expert about any one town won’t already know everything in the book (though I, natch, was familiar with at least most of the topics).
In short, easily digestible tidbits of prose (curiously laid out at odd angles), you get–
…and lots, lots more.
The book’s only sins, aside from a handful of misspelled names, are those of omission:
But these are relatively minor quibbles that can (and, I hope, will) be rectified in a second edition. What Wet and Wired does have is well-written, accurate (as far as I’m able to tell), and a great mosaic of glimpes into our rather peculiar section of the planet.
TOMORROW: Cirque du Soleil pitches its tent in Renton’s Lazy B country.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Tacoma News Tribune, 8/21): “Giant Salmon a Scary Prospect.” I can see the horror movie ad campaigns now….
IN OTHER NEWS: Sometimes justice does occur!
BACK ON FRIDAY AND MONDAY, we discussed whether I should “reinvent” myself and my written/published/posted work, according to the principles of Seth Godin’s business book Unleashing the Ideavirus.
That book claims the key to success in business today is to have a strong, easy-to-understand, and easily-spread idea.
Other business guides, including Tom Peters’s The Brand Called You and Rick Haskins’s “Branding Yourself” courses, insist that individuals have to start thinking about themselves as if they were products, and devise brand images and marketing strategies thusly.
My problem with that is my “product,” comprising the words you read here, is difficult to define in a sound bite or a Hollywood “pitch line.” The points of view expressed within these words are also hard to succinctly summarize.
So: How to accomplish this “self-branding” thang? (And doesn’t that sound too much like a scarification fetish?)
1. I’ve got a slogan already. “Popular Culture in Seattle and Beyond.” But that’s deliberately broad and vague.
2. The Seattle side of the premise is comparatively easy to explain. We’re chronicling the ongoing evolution (and, in some aspects, devolution) of one of North America’s great cities–particularly as these changes affect the arts-‘n’-entertainment scenes and assorted “youth” and “alternative” cultures.
3. The national pop-cult topics discussed here are more nebulous, but potentially could become more popular than the local parts (due to this ‘Net thang being so borderless and all). The MISCmedia title accurately implies a melange of many culture-and-media related topics.
But a little bit of all sorts of things is precisely what these “branding” experts warn their readers against. The well-branded enterprise or individual has to be about one really simple thing.
4. But much of the cultural philosophy expressed in these cyber-pages involves rants against too-simple thinking.
5. This insistence upon the value of complexity might actually be the most apt “simple idea” with which to describe this ongoing work. As the back cover blurb of The Big Book of MISC. says,
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture? Good. Get used to it. Learn to love the chaos.”
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture?
Good.
Get used to it.
Learn to love the chaos.”
Maybe my next book oughta be a manifesto specifically about the transition to a more “Misc.” world, and why that’s nothing to fear. (Unfortunately, the phrase “Chaos Culture” has already been in use, by commentators specifically discussing rave-party culture or trends in conceptual art. But other, equally-appropriate slogans are surely out there.)
TOMORROW: The greatest Northwest reference book ever written.
IN OTHER NEWS: The great Josie and the Pussycats creator’s-rights lawsuit.
LAST FRIDAY, we looked at Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, one of those bestseller-wannabe business books with a really simple idea.
In this case, the idea (as explained on Godin’s website) is that simple ideas, themselves, are the key to making it in today’s marketing-centric world–as long as the ideas are snappy, catchy, and capable of spreading contagiously.
Over the years, I’ve seen principles similar to Godin’s at work in that other “market,” the so-called Marketplace of Ideas:
But “Free Mumia” has an articulate mascot/spokesman, a focused agenda, and, at least as portrayed by his supporters, clear heroes and villains. (Never mind that the circumstances and events surrounding his case are way more complex.)
Yet far too many of us bounce along from one religiously-embraced faddish regimen to another (the Atkins Diet, The Zone, veganism, Ultra Slim-Fast, et al.).
But it’s too tempting to seek a singular cause for any misguided youth behavior; preferably a cause originating from outside the home. (Video games made him violent! Fashion magazines made her anorexic! Commercials are turning them into soulless materialists! The liberal media’s turning them into valueless hedonists!)
Tim Eyman’s Initiative 745, which would force 90 percent of all transportation funds in Washington to go to road construction, will only make all that worse. But it sounds good on talk radio.
(Indeed, most talk-show-led crusades (killing affirmative action, flattening tax rates, lengthening jail sentences, censoring the Internet) involve really easy-to-grasp solutions that either do nothing to solve the underlying “problems” or actually complicate them.)
But these elaboratenesses seldom matter to the followers of John Gray, Laura Schlessinger, Tom Leykis, Andrea Dworkin, and the many other allegedly “nonfiction” writers who’ve created mythical characters called “All Women” and “All Men,” and then proceed to endow these stick-figure creations with behavior and thought patterns so rigidly defined, perhaps no actual woman or man has ever completely fit them.
The too-simple response to this addiction to too-simple ideas is to dismiss it as something only “Those People” embrace. You know, those dolts, hicks, rednecks, and television viewers out in Square America. Us smarty-pants urbanites are far too enlightened to fall for such nonsense.
That is, to put it simply, a crock of shit.
Still, it’s the propagators of simple and too-simple ideas who get the NPR interview slots, the Newsweek and Salon profiles, the “New and Recommended” blurbs at Barnes & Noble.
Should I “reinvent myself” into a marketable “brand” built around a simple and catchy idea? And if so, what should it be?
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
YESTERDAY, I discussed my ongoing ponderings about my career future. I closed with a brief remark about the burgeoining mini-industry in guidebooks, lectures and courses aimed at people with this same obsession to worry about their own career futures.
One of these books is Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, excerpted in a recent Fast Company cover story.
Godin, who’s posted his book’s full text online, is one of those many commentators who treat, as an unspoken “given,” the idea that business is, and ought to be, the single driving force and operating metaphor for human life.
He’s also one of those who proclaims that business, in this supposedly post-industrial age of global trade and info hi-ways, is entirely about marketing.
And the key to marketing, according to Godin, is The Idea.
But not every idea makes it in this ruthless, hectic world. The ideas that succeed are the ones with the capacity to spread among people like a contagion; hence the “Ideavirus” rubric.
Godin is also one of those business writers who treats the hipster-vilified Nike as an ultimate success story. He sees the Nike concept as a quintessential Ideavirus. The idea was turning athletic shoes from a commodity into a high-profit-margin fashion statement, by spending lavishly on advertising and outsourcing the manufacturing to those cheap overseas subcontractors. The flashiness of the shoes and their ever-prominent logos comprised the “virus” that helped spread that idea.
Another of Godin’s great Ideaviruses is the now Microsoft-owned Hotmail. It was not only a simple idea with a powerful promise (free e-mail forever), but it advertised itself within its own product (every free e-mail message ended with a blurb for the service).
Indeed, looking at other hot or recently-hot local companies through Godin’s prism can be quite instructive.
Of course, this is a gross oversimplification. Many enterprises start out with potentially lucrative concepts, but fail to profitably execute them. Or, the concepts are imitated by bigger outfits. Or, the concepts are successfully quashed or discredited by bigger outfits with their own agendas to push (remember solar energy?).
But simplification is what Ideaviruses appear to be all about.
It’s certainly what best-seller business books appear to be all about.
MONDAY: Should I reinvent myself according to the Ideavirus concept?
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with a defense of a long-maligned political institution.
BRING ON THE SOUSA MARCHES: No, I don’t think major-party political conventions are a relic needing abolition. Those who so loudly proclaim the conventions’ obsolescence appear largely to be media people, frustrated that the Presidential nomination process is no longer a dragged-out drama leading to a climactic point of decision in a big arena with live TV cameras.
Yet these same critics use, as their main argument, the claim that the conventions have devolved into “a made-for-TV event.”
There have been many, many conventions, before and during the TV era (and will be in any post-TV era) in which the party’s ticket was known weeks in advance. The conventions all went on anyway. They gave the party faithful a, well, a party to reward their hard work and a big pep rally to inspire further efforts.
Today, conventions serve these purposes and a couple more.
They give the party, and by extension its candidate, an opportunity to prove its organizational skills. (George McGovern once told C-SPAN he knew his candidacy was doomed when he couldn’t get his acceptance speech started before 1 a.m. Eastern.)
And they provide a “long-form” forum for a candidate’s platform.
Yeah, call it an “informercial” if you like. But also call it a tool for unmediated communication with the populace.
The Presidential nomination process is broken, but it’s broken in its foresection–the primaries and the ultra-big-money fundraising. The conventions, largely, aren’t broken (though an equivalent mechanism for independent candidates still needs to be thought up).
GRAFFITO OF THE WEEK (in the Six Arms men’s room): “This town is a youth culture retirement home.”
THROWAWAY GAG OF THE WEEK: Was passing the Paramount Theater when a woman walking toward the theater’s touring production of Fosse told a friend she’d last been to the place “to see Lord of the Rings,–I mean Lord of the Dance.” Of course, I had to barge in; “It’s amazing how high Frodo can kick.”
DROPPING THE POKEBALL: Apparently, the Pokemon phenomenon has passed its peak, at least in North America. Apparently, kids turning 10 are, like kids turning 10 oft do, renouncing the recreational fads associated with those immature 9-year-olds. Merchandising products with the 151 superpowered cute cartoon animals and their human pals are stagnating. The second theatrical movie faced disappointing box-office results. Sales of Pokemon gaming cards have reportedly plummeted. (If the latter’s the case, then Wizards of the Coast, the local outfit that made the U.S. version of the gaming cards, sold out to Hasbro just in time.)
TOMORROW: Monorail madness and its meaning.
NAOMI KLEIN’S BOOK NO LOGO claims greedy corporations are brainwashing kids into letting themselves (the kids) become walking billboards.
Up to this point, I agree with her. Branded clothing has become just so damned ubiquitous. Grade-schoolers crave anything with the Nike “swoosh;” skate teens sport FuBu; collegian preppies plug Abercrombie & Fitch; white gangsta-wannabes ride their baggy pants low to expose their Tommy Hilfiger boxer waistbands.
But then Klein goes further than (or perhaps not as far as) I would.
She wants all good strict parents to keep their children’s apparel iconography-free.
That’s acceptable if you’re into spiritual asceticism; even then, the deliberate plain-ness of your attire is, itself, an icon.
For those who consciously choose to make this sort of “anti-statement” statement, more power to you.
For the rest of us, I say go for it. Wear your heart (and your mind) on your sleeve. Be a walking icon.
Don’t like the bigtime marketers? Choose other word/picture combos to identify with. Your favorite town or nation or planet (whether you’ve ever been there or not). Your favorite heroine or hero (real, mythical, or somewhere between the two). A guiding principle of your life, in slogans and/or imagery.
And if the particular vision that defines you doesn’t seem to exist in the stores, make up your own.
Become a bosom-based sloganeer for Heidegger’s Uncertainty Principle, or for the joys of bicycle commuting, or for the joys of eating mashed potatoes with peanut butter, or that perfect movie you’re going to get around to making one of these decades, or that invisible childhood friend who used to save your sanity.
It’s easy. It’s fun.
Just, well, you know….
TOMORROW: Do kids these days know how to really live?
