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THE 2000 NORTHWEST BOOKFEST is still more than two months away. But I can already predict two of its most overhyped topics of discussion will be:
1. Falling stock prices for online booksellers, whether this portends doom for these dot-coms, how any such doom would affect small publishers’ inventory and debt situations, and whether any such doom would provide an opportunity and/or a threat to independent “brick and mortar” bookstores.
2. The much-hyped “eBook” craze, whether the electronic distribution of consumer literature is finally taking off, whether any such takeoff would threaten the power base of big publishing companies, and whether any such takeoff would provide an opportunity and/or a threat to independent “brick and mortar” bookstores.
I can safely state that at this point, the eBook and its various rival portable reading-pad electronic devices are novelties. The technology doesn’t appear to have seriously improved since the models I saw at last year’s Bookfest. The screens are still too hard to read in less-than-optimum light; there are still software incompatibilities among the various devices (and between them and regular computers); and they still cost too much.
Last month’s publicity stunt by the ever-hype-savvy Stephen King, in which he put pieces of a serialized horror novel (based on a leftover manuscript from 1982) online and invited those who downloaded it to pay shareware-esque fees, provided what mainstream media always seem to need in order to proclaim a new medium as “arrived”–a celebrity.
The story itself, thus far, isn’t much. But King and his associates have solved a lot of the distribution and formatting issues quite elegantly.
The story’s available in several formats, compatible with most computers, eBook-type devices, and Palm-type hand-held machines; but King’s site recommends Adobe’s Acrobat Reader format, which offers real page layout features for PCs and Macs (even though many potential “early adopters” of e-publishing are Macintosh true-believers, most eBook-esque software is not Mac-compatible); in a relatively quick-downloading form, and which lets you, the reader, increase the type size up to half an inch high without losing detail.
Of course, what you’re reading now is on-screen, Net-delivered “literary” content of a sort. Like many hundreds of other such efforts out there, this one has tried to pay the bills via advertising and “affiliate” programs with online merchants. So far, these have paid the bills, but just that.
If King can figure out how to make this pay, I’m certainly willing to listen. (More about this a little later.)
Meanwhile, digital and online text is indeed making inroads in areas outside “trade” bookselling. Computer manuals, technical-training documents, legal databases, professional reference works–lotsa stuff people have to read at work rather than for pleasure. Online posting of this data provides immediacy; CD-ROM publishing of it provides compact permanence.
I can easily see more home-market books of a factual-matter basis move toward digital formats (how-tos, learning guides, diet and investment manuals, and many of the other workhorse categories that make a major part of many bookstores’ balance sheets).
Even if reading-for-pleasure categories (fiction, art books, celebrity memoirs, etc.) principally remain the domain of physical printed documents (which they very well may), it will still behoove independent bookstores to figure out how to grab their piece of the e-lit action.
(Other views on today’s topic: Author Mark Mathabane believes electronic distribution “lets authors control their literary fate;” John Kelsey and Bruce Scheiner propose a “Street Performer Protocol” to fund Net-distributed works by audience donations; Random House gets into the e-act; so does Barnes & Noble.)
TOMORROW: Beyond the “No Logo” movement.
ELSEWHERE:
FOR EVERYBODY who’s gotten more than a bit annoyed at all the assorted excesses attributable, rightly or wrongly, to Global Business’s machinations (you know, the layoffs, downsizings, job exports, slave-labor and near-slave-labor imports, consolidations, deregulations, price gougings, political corruption, pollution, global warming, species depletions, suburban sprawl, SUVs, stock-market roller coasters, anti-democratic “free trade” agreements, national economies ruined by IMF/World Bank austerity demands, awful Hollywood movies, dot-com boors gobbling up all the best places to live, dumb fashion magazines, brand logos in classrooms, etc. etc. etc.)–take heart.
Local author David C. Korten has a message for you: It doesn’t have to be this way.
Korten, who wrote When Corporations Rule the World back in ’96, returned last year with a follow-up, The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism.
He and his wife are among the leaders of the Positive Futures Network, which does various new-agey think-tanky kinds of stuff and publishes a journal, Yes!, which once infamously put ex-Seattle Mayor Norm Rice (that corporate-Democrat, developer-suckup) on the cover of an issue about making urban areas more “sustainable.”
Anyhoo, Korten has a few ideas about how to stem corporate power. Like many of his generation used to propose in the ’70s, a lot of his prescriptions involve proposed governmental fiats (end corporate tax breaks, increase capital-gains taxes, kill WTO, retract corporations’ extra-personal legal rights, etc. etc.
These applications of sticks and/or deprivals of carrots, Korten thinks, could sufficiently weaken the big-money stranglehold on the political and economic lives of the world just enough to allow his kind of good guys to come in–environmentalists, neo-community activists, transit planners, small and employee-owned enterprises, grassroots organizers.
The result, if all goes the way he hopes, would be something very close to the ’70s novel Ecotopia or the early-’90s TV show Northern Exposure–the kind of utopian world where the values of 50-ish baby boomers would rule.
A world of villages, of arts and crafts, of sufficiency, of collective yet oh-so-rational decision-making, where everything and everyone would be laid back and mellow.
A world where there would be two and only two ways of doing everything–Korten’s way and the bad way. (As he puts it, the “path of life” vs. the “siren song of greed.”)
A world filled with such buzzwords as “voluntary simplicity,” “holistic health,” “biocommunities,” “living consciously,” “latent human potential,” and “inner awakenings.”
In short, the kind of world I’d be bored to tears in. The kind of insular, pastoral, prosaic world Emma Bovary and the son in Playboy of the Western World tried like hell to escape from.
What’s more, Korten (and the social researchers he chooses to quote from) has this annoying habit of
Despite those caveats, and Korten’s propensities toward reducing social and historic complexities to oversimplified binary choices (principally a choice between a life-affirming world and a money-grubbing one), he has some good points.
Some of these good points involve the championing of certain local activist operations, including Sustainable Seattle and the Monorail Initiative.
And he’s at least subtle enough to note a distinction between “capitalism” (as currently practiced by the globalists) and “markets” (small business, human-scale exchanges, family farms, etc.).
And as for his monocultural post-corporate future, it doesn’t have to be that way.
For one thing, a great deal about DIY cultural production, community organizing, and anti-conglomerate thinking has been developed over the past quarter-century by the punk, hiphop, and dance-music subcultures, and also by gays and lesbians, fetishists, Linux programmers, sci-fi fans, immigrants and their not-totally-assimilated descendents, religious subsects, and many, many others of the assorted cliques and sub-nations that have emerged and/or flourished (abetted by new corporate priorities away from forging one mass audience and toward identifying (or creating) ever-more-specific demographic marketing targets.
Corporate power, here or in the world as a whole, could very well collapse from its own imbalance. (And I hope it doesn’t take a massive stock crash to do so.)
When it does (quite possibly in our quasi-immediate futures), we won’t need one universal socioeconomic premise of a neo-village monoculture, to replace today’s universal premise of everything revolving around big money. I predict we’ll be able to muddle through just fine with different groupings of folks all pursuing their own different priorities in life.
The trick will be reaching out across these cultures to solve common needs.
There’ll be something about that, sort of, tomorrow in this space.
TOMORROW: We finally watch Survivor.
THOSE OF YOU who’ve already been living in the now two-thirds or so of King County that has AT&T Digital Cable already know about what I’m discussing today.
For most of the ’90s, Summit Cable (the feisty independent serving the few leftover Seattle neighborhoods other cable companies didn’t bother with) had a far better channel lineup than either Viacom or the cable operation successively run by TelePrompTer, Group W, and TCI. When Viacom Cable upgraded its local system (just prior to being bought up by TCI, leaving that company with two different sets of channels in different parts of Seattle), Summit remained either a step ahead of or a step behind in selection.
But TCI got bought out by AT&T, which is aggressively pursuing digital upgrades as a means toward eventually offering all sorts of services (including, down the line, a return of its old “Ma Bell” local phone service).
Summit, meanwhile, was bought out by Millennium Digital Media, a multi-regional independent with seemingly few immediate priorities beyond cash-milking its properties.
Thus, while Millennium’s digital-upgrade package includes only lots of pay-per-view movies, AT&T offers channels with real, short-form TV programming. (What the TV set was built for.)
In all, 35 channels are on the digital service, combined with the 73 channels on the system’s “expanded basic” package.
TCI’s ex-boss John Malone once claimed his company would eventually deliver as many as 500 channels to any home that wanted them. Besides the 108 channels mentioned here already, AT&T Digital has 73 premium and pay-per-view channels, plus 37 music audio channels.
No, that’s still not “enough,” programming-choice-wise.
For one thing, the lineup’s weighted with multiple versions of channels AT&T partly owns (Discovery, TLC, BET, Fox Sports Net, QVC, Encore/Starz), as well as channels AT&T and/or its predecessors at TCI contracted to put on all its cable systems regardless of local interest (Oxygen, Fox News Channel, etc.).
It’s still missing several channels popular among satellite-dish owners and on cable systems in other locales (WGN, the Travel Channel, the Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Playboy TV, the computer-news channel ZDTV, the MTV alternative MuchMusic, the British/Canadian entertainment channel Trio, etc.).
And all those pay-per-view channels essentially show the same few movies, with scattered starting times. The concept of a video store inside your cable box is still too similar to the video racks some 7-Eleven stores used to have–just the same few mainstream Hollywood snoozers “everybody” but you supposedly loved.
And the official “Alternative” channel in the system’s audio section leaves even more to be desired. It plays almost nothing but those annoying “aggro” snothead bands and Pearl Jam impersonators.
On the plus side, there’s tons of fun stuff on AT&T Digital I just couldn’t get on Millennium:
All in all, a big step forward for TV lovers such as myself. But there’s still room for improvement, for even more diversity.
But I’m already in love with the way channels on digital cable appear in small image blocks, taking two seconds or more to fill the screen. Even though, one day soon, music-video and commercials directors are surely going to catch onto the schtick and imitate it to death.
TOMORROW: Is business the root of all evil?
PIONEER SQUARE, most agree, has been lost as an art neighborhood.
The machinations of the Samis Foundation, the old neighborhood’s most influential landlord, have resulted in building after building being transformed from artist housing and little galleries into nouveau-riche condos and dot-com offices. Rock clubs have died off (even some of the Square’s trademark bad baby-boomer-blues venues have disappeared).
The artists, musicians, et al. can scatter (and are scattering) their residences to the new hipster-diaspora neighborhoods in the near suburbs. But they still need a place to gather, to hold the all-important par-tay thang that regularly celebrates folks’ emerging from their studio drudgeries and showing off their wares.
The most recent candidate: Ballard Avenue.
The diagonal, partly-cobblestoned street of paint factories, fishing-industry offices and residential hotels has long been a favorite of hipster types who adored its old-world charm and its reasonable rents. A music scene developed there in the mid-’80s with the club now known as the Tractor (headquarters of the local alt-country community). Other venues with similar musical fare followed. In the early ’90s, Hattie’s Hat (a beautiful old working-class eatery and bar) was rescued and “restored” by new owners associated with the Tractor crowd.
In the years since then, art studios and small galleries have popped up along the street. A tattoo parlor followed. Most recently, the old Sunset Tavern was gussied up into a not-too-slick rock club.
The street had a coming-out party of sorts on July 1. In the galleries, wine and Costco pretzels flowed freely. In the Sunset, a DJ played the Young Canadians’ “(Let’s Go to Fucking) Hawaii” in honor of Canada Day; a neo-burlesque troupe stripped (incompletely but with great skill and spirit); and four bands played. In back of the tattoo parlor, a neo-folk-rock band played tunes reminiscent of the neighborhood’s Nordic heritage. Around the corner at Mr. Spott’s Chai House, an all-female singer-songwriter bill warbled and crooned.
Great times were had by all. There will be further gallery evenings the first Saturday of each month. I can’t promise they’ll be as carefree and wild as this was, but it’s a hopeful start to what might be a renaissance of boho spirits and creative community.
But it’s already changing in the creeping-gentrification manner that often accompanies a neighborhood’s “arrival.” The working-stiff hotels and the industrial storefronts that had coexisted with the hipster joints are being decimated. Already, there’s a trendy day spa and hair salon in the area. And developers have announced plans to demolish the Wilson Ford lot on nearby Leary Way for, you guessed it, luxury condos–complete with a “neo-urban” pedestrian corridor to Ballard Ave.
So enjoy the parties, and the music and art, while you can.
TOMORROW: More de-subbing the suburbs.
YESTERDAY, I began to discuss hassles personally experienced while moving out of Belltown and into a Pike-Pine Corridor condo.
As we finished yesterday’s installment, I’d been left overnight in a situation the opposite of homelessness. I had the keys to both the old space and the new space, but no possessions in either, save for the furniture-to-be-trashed remaining in the old apartment.
I somehow slept on the cruddy old mattress, a motel-surplus job with sharp springs bursting through a couple of holes. I awakened to a bathroom with no soap, no shaving facilities, and no toothpaste (at least there was toilet paper).
Got myself and some of the contents of the old space’s refrigerator over to the new place.
The phone line was already running. (In 1984, I got my first solo phone line as the last customer on the last business day of the Bell System. This year, I managed to be one of the last people to order a new phone line from US West. By the time it was up and running, the company had been absorbed by the minor long-distance provider Qwest–same name as ex-Seattleite Quincy Jones’s record label.)
The assemble-it-yourself loft bed was already waiting. All it needed, supposedly, was “a large Phillips-head screwdriver.”
But before I had time to get such a tool, the DSL guy showed up. He immediately unscrewed my phone-plug cover, saw the dreaded Two Wires Instead Of Four, and declared I was s.o.l. hi-speed-Internet-wise. (A later call to Speakeasy confirmed they could indeed install DSL on a two-wire phone connection nowadays, but I would have to wait for another installation appointment.)
Then promptly at 6:30, my brother the naturopath and his pal showed up with the U-Haul van full of my stuff. Moving in was a lot easier than moving out was (for one thing, there’s an elevator direct from the ground level to my floor; the old place had seven annoying steps down).
I’d religiously labeled each of my nearly 150 moving boxes. Unfortunately, when the brother and the brother’s pal stacked them up in my new space, they paid no heed to which side was facing out. Therefore, several days would elapse before I had access to shoes, silverware, or pants other than the ones I was wearing.
The following morning, after sleeping on a sleeping bag and fold-up foam mattress, I obtained another small cache of groceries and attempted to start assembling all the assemble-it-yourself furniture.
The Cable Guy showed up promptly at 2 p.m., and turned out to be none other than John Rozich, creator of elegant chalk paintings as seen in Uptown Espresso and elsewhere. He efficiently hooked me up to the AT&T Digital Cable package, a full review of which will appear in this space shortly.
After that came the picking-up, in a borrowed station wagon, of a compact retro-modern couch/day-bed unit from Dingo Gallery in Belltown (during which I learned of the impossibility of parking in Belltown on an early Friday evening).
Thence followed five grueling days of unpacking, uncrating, furniture-assembling, thing-finding, and old-stuff-dumping.
I was severely tempted to trash most of my collection of obscure old magazines and newspapers (over 60 filing boxes’ worth), until Nicholson Baker’s piece in the current New Yorker, calling on libraries to stop throwing away old newspapers, convinced me to keep at least the rarest of them. (Where I’ll put them, in this compact space of mine, is another matter.)
On the eighth day, the loft bed was finally fully assembled. (Instead of merely stating one needed a large Phillips-head screwdriver to put it together, the manufacturer should have called for at least two people and a power driver.) My arms aching and my wrists swollen and my fingers sore, I decided the last beautification work (including the attainment of more shelving and storage units) could wait.
This week’s columns are the first written in the new place. I love it. I’ll love it better when the DSL finally comes in, when the extra storage pieces get here, and when all the assorted change-O-address notices get sent out.
But, at least, at the age of 43 I feel I’m no longer living like an ex-college student.
TOMORROW: The new Pioneer Square?
YESTERDAY, I began a series of installments on my private life with a flashback to a lonely childhood in what was, at the time, rural Snohomish County.
That country, in case you haven’t looked out at it from northbound I-5 in recent years, has since become thoroughly suburbanized. Where cows once broke fences and strawberry farms once kept surly teenagers on their knees during picking season, big ugly Aspen-style houses now rule from the Snohomish River delta up into the Cascade foothills.
This sprawl includes the ten acres where my childhood self once spent many an afternoon chopping down weeds.
My parents wisely invested the proceeds from that land sale, and have now donated some of that income to help me put a down payment on a home of my own. This was the only way I could escape Seattle’s insane rent inflation without ending up in the far, far suburbs (such as the formerly-rural parts of Snohomish County.)
Despite this good fortune, the home hunt still proved quite difficult. Especially as a full-time freelancer and publishing-company proprietor (professions not considered the most stable by the lending industry.)
After several months of half-hearted looking around at places I could never afford, I got wise and obtained a real-estate agent. She sent me around to several places, before I decided on an “Old World Charm” (read: pre-prefab) unit in a co-op building.
Co-ops are significantly cheaper than real condominiums, because they’re much harder to buy your way into or sell your way out of. You’re not buying the specific apartment, but a share in the non-profit corporation that owns the whole building. Therefore, only one bank in the whole country (which has only one local mortgage firm representing it) will lend money for them.
After nearly two months spent trying to reshuffle my finances to meet this bank’s stringent requirements, the deal fell through.
Finally, a real condo unit became open in a “Classic Modern” (read: built with real concrete, not that fake-stucco crap that quickly deteriorates) building in the Pike-Pine Corridor. It was smaller than the co-op unit, and even slightly smaller than my current Belltown apartment. But it was a solid unit in a solid building, with a view and a rec room and a “business center.”
After more than a month of signing hundreds of papers, paying various deposits, and wading through the multiple bureaucracies of mortgage lending, credit checks, title, escrow, insurance, etc., etc., it was finally time to move.
I’d been in the ol’ Ellis Court building on Western Avenue for nearly nine years. (In contrast, during my struggling post-collegiate years I’d moved nine times in 34 months.) Boxing and carting the vast collection of cultural ephemera I’d collected during the ’90s was a daunting task indeed.
MONDAY: A little more of this.
GENDER EQUALITY has taken another giant stride as of late.
Men’s designer fashions have become just as silly as women’s designer fashions!
The last time guys were so willing to look like clueless fashion victims in public was in the now fondly-remembered leisure suit days. Back then, flamboyance was the goal and new synthetic fabrics were the tools used to achieve it. “Hip” white guys tried too hard to mimick what they thought black guys looked like (i.e., like pimps and gangsters).
The backlash against Qiana and Fortrel was swift and severe. For almost two decades, men’s fashion headlines almost all contained that soon-overused phrase “A Return to Elegance” or some variant on it. When fashion trade magazines talked about exciting new trends in “menswear,” they almost always referred to the “menswear look” for women, not to clothes for males.
There have been trends and subtrends over the years, of course (logo sweaters, “casual Friday” khakies, Abercrombie & Fitch’s gay-crossover look, the unisex sportswear look, etc.) But the main trend, at least as marketed for adult males by prominent design houses, has been a narrow oscillation between “casual elegance” and “elegant casualness.”
But that’s apparently changing. And, once again, it’s at least partly inspired by white middle-class guys who hold an overgeneralized image of black guys as sexy criminals.
In some prisons, clothes are supplied in few sizes and belts are outlawed. Thus, baggy pants and butt cleavage became icons of gangsta toughness in the ’90s, especially to the suburban middle-class kids who became gangsta rap’s biggest market.
That concept “filtered up” to the department stores. Labels such as Tommy Hilfiger came up with big, low-riding pants and boxer shorts with logo waistbands meant to be seen in public. Rap stars were hired to wear these things in videos.
While that particular look hasn’t “graduated” to the couture-designer level, the general principle of flashy outrageousness has.
Few people directly buy couture fashion, but the industry has come to use it as an early-warning marketing device. Looks that get sufficient media attention at the major runway shows soon get altered into tamer, more easily-manufacturable versions for the department stores.
So we might actually see kilt-like shorts, meant to be worn with formal shoes and a suit jacket, in six to twelve months’ time.
And who knows? They might actually attract the attention of women. A woman might actually see a guy in one of these new getups and think, Now THERE’S a total clueless fashion victim. He obviously doesn’t have a woman in his life to tell him how stupid he looks. He doesn’t know it, but he needs me.
TOMORROW: We are driven.
THE NYC-BASED KOZMO.COM was in the news a couple weeks ago when its Seattle division started firing delivery people and other workers if they refused to submit to background checks. The balking employees called the checks an unfair inveasion of their privacy. Management of Kozmo (which delivers videos, CDs, bestselling books, and fast foods to most of Seattle, and is preparing to branch into costlier goods) says it’s a necessary security measure.
I say the company could have avoided the bad vibes and the bad press. Instead of sicking private eyes on lowly delivery dudes, it could instead have them submit the following Kozmo Quiz:
A. Deliver the ice cream and Three Tenors CD, then continue your route. B. Ask if the person will be free when you get off work. C. Invite yourself in to re-enact scenes from Last Tango In Paris. D. Remember the address for future stalking purposes.
A. Deliver the ice cream and Three Tenors CD, then continue your route.
B. Ask if the person will be free when you get off work.
C. Invite yourself in to re-enact scenes from Last Tango In Paris.
D. Remember the address for future stalking purposes.
A. Ignore the information. B. Snicker about it quietly with trusted friends. C. Report it anonymously to The Stranger’s gossip page. D. Plan your blackmail demands.
A. Ignore the information.
B. Snicker about it quietly with trusted friends.
C. Report it anonymously to The Stranger’s gossip page.
D. Plan your blackmail demands.
A. Hand over the merchandise, no questions asked. B. Hand over the merchandise, but slip in a demo tape by your own (much more progressive) rock band. C. Lecture the mother about the dangers of subjecting an impressionable child to such mindless pap. D. Anonymously report the mother to Child Protective Services.
A. Hand over the merchandise, no questions asked.
B. Hand over the merchandise, but slip in a demo tape by your own (much more progressive) rock band.
C. Lecture the mother about the dangers of subjecting an impressionable child to such mindless pap.
D. Anonymously report the mother to Child Protective Services.
A. Forget about it and hope Ozzy will tour again next summer. B. Arrange to be “stuck in traffic” during the noon hour. C. Arrange for a “sudden family emergency” during the noon hour. D. Bribe the ticket clerk with all the frozen pizzas he can eat.
A. Forget about it and hope Ozzy will tour again next summer.
B. Arrange to be “stuck in traffic” during the noon hour.
C. Arrange for a “sudden family emergency” during the noon hour.
D. Bribe the ticket clerk with all the frozen pizzas he can eat.
A. Scold him about the dangers of drug use. B. Respectfully turn him down. C. Accept the offer. D. Accept the offer, and additionally offer to throw in a customer’s favorite munchies.
A. Scold him about the dangers of drug use.
B. Respectfully turn him down.
C. Accept the offer.
D. Accept the offer, and additionally offer to throw in a customer’s favorite munchies.
A. Report your suspicions to the proper authorities. B. Keep your big trap shut. C. Ask for kickbacks in exchange for your silence. D. Offfer to slip them the new Matchbox 20 disc a week before the official release date.
A. Report your suspicions to the proper authorities.
B. Keep your big trap shut.
C. Ask for kickbacks in exchange for your silence.
D. Offfer to slip them the new Matchbox 20 disc a week before the official release date.
A. Let the anger pass, and continue your deliveries. B. Identify yourself to him and constructively suggest more courteous driving habits. C. Identify yourself to him and give him a piece of your mind. D. “Mistakenly” give him My Little Pony: The Movie instead of the Eyes Wide Shut tape he ordered.
A. Let the anger pass, and continue your deliveries.
B. Identify yourself to him and constructively suggest more courteous driving habits.
C. Identify yourself to him and give him a piece of your mind.
D. “Mistakenly” give him My Little Pony: The Movie instead of the Eyes Wide Shut tape he ordered.
A. Pass their request on to the management. B. Ignore them. C. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors. D. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors, but then instead give them My Little Pony: The Movie.
A. Pass their request on to the management.
B. Ignore them.
C. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors.
D. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors, but then instead give them My Little Pony: The Movie.
A. Respectfully decline to hand over the tape, unless someone with valid ID can sign for it. B. Vocally chew him out over his attempt to put one over on you. C. Slip him the tape, if he promises not to tell. D. Advise him how far he should fast-forward for the really hot scenes.
A. Respectfully decline to hand over the tape, unless someone with valid ID can sign for it.
B. Vocally chew him out over his attempt to put one over on you.
C. Slip him the tape, if he promises not to tell.
D. Advise him how far he should fast-forward for the really hot scenes.
A. Accept the ticket, and duly report the incident to your superiors. B. Accept the ticket, but don’t tell your superiors. C. Accept the ticket, but make up for the loss by reporting a couple of “stolen” videos. D. Tell the cop that the Internet has no use for government interference, just before you speed away.
A. Accept the ticket, and duly report the incident to your superiors.
B. Accept the ticket, but don’t tell your superiors.
C. Accept the ticket, but make up for the loss by reporting a couple of “stolen” videos.
D. Tell the cop that the Internet has no use for government interference, just before you speed away.
Scoring:
Each “A” answer is worth four points.
Each “B” answer is worth three points.
Each “C” answer is worth two points.
Each “D” answer is worth one point.
Totals:
34-40: What are you doing delivering frozen pizzas and rental copies of Next Friday? You’re so honest, you could be in the Secret Service, protecting the next President of the United States.
26-33: You’re honest enough to be trusted with Kozmo merchandise, yet dishonest enough to make good driving time delivering it.
18-25: You possess a valuable combination of superficial trustworthiness and deep-down duplicity. You shouldn’t be delivering goods on behalf of a dot-com. You should be running your own dot-com, collecting dough from day-trading speculators based on dubious business models.
10-17: What are you doing delivering frozen pizzas and rental copies of Next Friday? You’re so dishonest, you could be the next President of the United States.
TOMORROW: An odd night on the town.
I’VE BEEN SPENDING as much time as I can down in Seattle’s great old Duwamish industrial district; partly because it might not last much longer.
Oh, the land (recovered tide flats of the Duwamish River) and the streets will be there for years to come.
But the businesses there now, and the “family wage” jobs they provide, are endangered.
Last month, the Seattle City Council approved a master development plan for the industrial district (called by some real estate developers “SoDo,” as in “South of the Kingdome,” even though there’s no longer a “Do” for anything to be “So” of).
The scheme allows developers, aching to build as many square feet of dot-com office space as they possibly can, to take over the northern part of the area, almost south to the former Sears warehouse now mainly occupied by Starbucks’ HQ offices. A little further south, the Seattle School District is going ahead with plans to turn part of a former Post Office facility into administrative offices.
These encroachments can be interpreted as a Phase One. Once all those blocks have been cleared of warehouses, steel fabricators, garment shops, etc. and planted with office, retail, and restaurant uses, the developers are sure to come back and ask for more; to the eventual gentrification of everything down to Boeing Field (which itself is facing a gentrification issue, as small “general aviation” companies are starting to lose hangar space in favor of hi-tech moguls’ private planes.)
Seattle’s civic establishment hadn’t really cared about the industrial district for years. The last time they tried to master-plan the place was in the early ’90s, when they envisioned a (thankfully scrapped) scheme to evict dozens of smaller businesses, assemble the real estate into larger parcels, and dole out those lots to big corporations.
Even then, the idea wasn’t to save working-class jobs but to make deals with the big boys. The local powers-that-be have long been uncomfortable with Seattle as an industrial city. (They even prefer to think of Boeing as a high-tech engineering firm, not as a manufacturer.)
Their official vision for Seattle has always been that of a financial, administrative, and transportation hub for the region. Seattle would be the island of “progressive” (i.e., WASP and clean-cut, cultured and polite) civilization amid the wilderness. The unsightly business of actually making tangible, physical items (not to mention the Joe Six-Packs employed making them) was to be left to the likes of Renton, Tacoma, and Everett.
So it’s a natural that sweatshop-clothing companies like Generra and Unionbay developed here (and spiritually influenced their Oregon neighbor Nike); and that Bill Gates and co. would have devised a scheme to control the personal-computer industry without making any hardware more elaborate than a replacement PC mouse.
The rest of the country caught onto this anti-industrial aesthetic too; back in the mid-’90s “downsizing” fad and before. (A character in an ’80s Doonesbury cartoon proclaimed, “America doesn’t have to make anything–except SUCCESS!”)
So I encourage all our local-area readers to visit the industrial district while the rust, the rail lines, the diners, and the semi rigs are still there.
Many of the buildings themselves (at least those considered salvageable) will likely stay. Lotsa folks love “industrial design;” even gentrifiers who have no use for industry itself.
After all, there’s nothing that says “hip” to a high-tech office like the post-industrial fantasy, the “art loft look.”
It’s just so nostalgic, so “real.”
TOMORROW: Whatever happened to dystopias?
A FEW DAYS AGO, I briefly mentioned a vision I’d had of what social changes might potentially arise from a tech-company stock crash, should such a rapid downfall occur the way certain anti-dot-com and anti-Microsoft cynics around these parts hope it does.
(If you haven’t read it yet, please go ahead and do so. I’ll still be here when you get back.)
One aspect of this vision was that a general public backlash against “virtual realities” (computer-generated and otherwise) could lead to a craze for any personal or cultural experience that could be proclaimed as “reality.”
Let’s imagine such a possible fad a little further today.
I’m imagining a movement that could expand upon already-existing trends–
It’s easy to see these individual trends coalescing into a macro-trend, coinciding with a quite-probable backlash against the digitally-intermediated culture of video games, porno websites, chat rooms, home offices, cubicle loneliness, et al.
As I wrote on Monday, live, in-person entertainment would, under this scenario, become the upscale class’s preference, instead of distanced, “intermediated” experiences. The self-styled “cultured” folks and intellectuals could come to disdain books, movies, radio, recorded music, and all other prepackaged arts even more than they currently disdain television.
(Not coincidentally, this disdain would emerge just after technology has allowed the masses to fully create and distribute their own books, movies, recorded music, etc.)
Society’s self-appointed tastemakers could come to insist on live theater instead of films, lecturers and storytellers instead of writers, participant sports (including “X-treme” sports) instead of spectator sports, and concerts (or playing one’s own instruments) instead of CDs.
The arts of rhetoric and public speaking could enjoy a revival on the campuses. The slam poetry and political speechifiying beloved by Those Kids of late just might expand into a full-blown revival of Chataqua-style oratory. On the conservative side of politics, Limbaugh wannabes might take their rhetorical acts away from radio and further into staged rallies and intimate breakfast-club meetings.
Jazz, the music that only truly exists when performed live, could also have another comeback.
Even “alternative” minded music types could get into this line of thinking; indeed, there are already burgeoning mini-fads in “house concerts” and neo-folk hootenaneys.
As packaged entertainment becomes more exclusively associated with nerds, squares, and people living outside major urban centers, it might come under new calls for regulation and even censorship; while live performance could become an anything-goes realm.
(If carried to its extreme, this could even lead to the recriminalization of print/video pornography, and/or the decriminalization of prostitution.)
The rich and/or the hip would demand real shopping in real stores (maybe even along the model of the traditional British shopkeepers, in which the wife rang up sales in the front room while the hubby made the merchandise in the back.)
Those without the dough might be expected (or even made) to use online instead of in-person shopping; much as certain banks “encourage” their less-affluent customers to use ATMs instead of live tellers.
In this scenario, what would become of writers–or, for that matter, cartoonists, filmmakers, record-store clerks, etc.?
(One group you won’t have to worry about: The entertainment conglomerates. They’ll simply put less capital into packaged-goods entertainment and more into theme parks (manmade but still “live” entertainment), Vegas-style revues, touring stage shows, music festivals, and the like.)
MONDAY: Another local landmark gets defaced a little more.
IN OTHER NEWS: There’s one fewer employer for washed-up baseball stars.
YESTERDAY, we began a look at Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project.
Today, a few more thoughts on the building and what it might mean.
7. The commodification of “rebel” images as corporate and safe has reached an apex with architect Frank Gehry’s gargantuan shrine. No longer can rockers, especially Seattle rockers, romantically imagine their milieu as a stronghold of anti-Establishment defiance. (Unless EMP becomes a symbol of everything to be rebelled against (see item 5).)
8. It’s a hallmark of “smooth” industrial design, the same aesthetic principle seen in the New Beetle, the Chrysler PT Cruiser, the iMac, Nike shoes, etc. etc.
Two essays in the July Harper’s (not posted online) discuss this aesthetic as a symbol of global-corporate power and the ascendancy of soft-edgedness in all social endeavors: Mark Kingwell’s “Against Smoothness” and Thomas de Zengotita’s “World World–How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blob.”
9. The opening was almost exactly three months after another Paul Allen-instigated event, the Kingdome implosion.
The latter event took place on the Spring Equinox weekend, that traditional time of new beginnings. The EMP celebration, featuring a Seattle Center-wide weekend of free-to-$140 concerts (several of them quite good, especially Patti Smith’s), took place on the Summer Solstice weekend, that traditional time of celebrating the bounty, the harvest; the time when all is, to quote a title of a certain Seattle songwriter, “in bloom.”
10. The opening ceremony itself, in which Allen smashed a custom glass guitar made by Dale Chihuly, was one of those singular moments encompassing so many references. In this case, it encompassed many aspects of the Seattle baby-boomer fetish culture–Allen’s Microsoft bucks; Chihuly’s eternal cloyingness; and the Seattle white guys’ cult of Hendrix.
11. People still don’t know what to think of the building. One woman told me she thought it was supposed to “represent a heart.” I replied that that couldn’t possibly be so; it would have required Mr. Allen to have been aware, at the project’s outset, of musicians who’d actually lived in Seattle as adults.
But my personal conundrum of what the design’s supposed to represent was finally satisfied by this image of the Monorail tracks entering a strategic opening through the building. (Amazing, the raunchy content that can get into a so-called family newspaper these days.)
12. It’s bound to be a classic tourist trap. See the fish-throwers, Ride the Ducks, eat at the Space Needle, take a ferry boat, do the EMP.
One of these months, I might even go inside the thing myself.
(I did go into the merchandise shop, which you can enter without paying admission to the rest of the place. So far, they’re not selling a certain book that no Seattle music museum merchandise shop should be about. If you go there, you might ask them for it.)
TOMORROW: Reality, what a concept!
EVEN IF THE DOT-COM STOCKS all go phhhhht, as some have threatened to do of late, we’ll still be left with an urban landscape shaped by high-tech bucks and high-tech aesthetics.
We’ve already discussed many of Paul Allen’s pet projects (and will do so again tomorrow.) But for today, here’s a glance at a couple of other buildings redone for tech people’s work and/or play, and some other buildings near them.
Pier 70, now reopened for dot-com offices and a swank restaurant, was one of the central waterfront’s first shipping piers, and one of the first to be coverted to non-cargo uses. In the ’70s, the Pier 70 bar and disco (known in its final mid-’90s incarnation as the Iguana Cantina) was the site for leisure-suited guys to attempt the polyester rub-across with lime-green-dressed gals. But the touristy mall lost ground to retail-and-restaurant sites further south on the waterfront. MTV’s ‘The Real World’ got to use a large part of the pier because it would soon be closed for remodeling.
Shakey’s Pizza Parlor and Ye Public House was a circuit of some 300 family pizza restaurants that dotted the west from the early ’60s until 1991. Besides the pies and pitchers of beer, it was known for piped-in “rinky-dink” piano music, pseudo-rustic decor, and supposedly hand-lettered wooden signs inside (“Shakey made a deal with the bank. Shakey doesn’t cash checks, the bank doesn’t make pizza.”) The restaurants’ looks were modernized in the ’80s, but even that couldn’t help the chain survive industry turmoils and shakeouts. Many ex-Shakey’s sites (identifiable by the shield signs) survive as independent restaurants, including RC’s on the Seattle waterfront.
The long waterfront building known today as the Seattle Trade and Technology Center (housing Real Networks, Discover U, and part of the Art Institute of Seattle) was originally an American Can Co. factory. Kids on their way to a birthday meal at the Old Spaghetti Factory up the street would often stop and stare at a skybridge connecting the can plant with a pier across Alaskan Way. You could see unlabeled steel cans on a conveyor belt, traveling single file on their way to being boxed up and shipped to food and beverage processors.
The Edgewater Inn, where you once could “Fish From Your Window,” was built as part of a local hotel-building boom in preparation for the 1962 World’s Fair. The Edgewater first gained a “rocker hotel” reputation when the Beatles stayed there in ’65. This rep was cemented in the early ’70s as the setting of the Zappa song “Mudshark,” relating the raunchy tale of a fish and a Led Zeppelin groupie. Its neon, block-letter “E” was a waterfront landmark for more than three decades, until new owners replaced it with this fancy, “upscale” revision.
The Ace Hotel opened in early 1999 with management vowing to make it THE place for visiting rock musicians to stay. (The hoteliers’ own musical tastes, if its opening-night party was any indication, tend not toward rock but to thumpa-thumpa DJ music.) The building originally housed a soft-drink bottler; that’s why the side has faded dual 7 Up and Pepsi billboards. Later tenants included a costume shop, a home-neon-lights store, and the Seattle Peniel Mission (which helped ex-cons re-enter society and stay out of the slammer). The mission luckily owned an interest in the building; so when the building was upscaled, the mission got some decent relocation money in the deal.
TOMORROW: A review of the Experience Music Project PR hype.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to Murray Morgan, the Sage of Tacoma and perhaps the finest historian and raconteur this region has ever had or will ever have.
LAST FRIDAY, we started fantasizing about what life might be like in a high-tech town such as this one should Internet-company stock prices collapse like some observers predict or even hope they do.
Today, a few more such ponderings.
Thousands of unemployed software developers and business-plan drafters are going to have to find new work at something actually useful, such as designing better bicycles or sewing underwear.
The affordable-housing shortage will be solved by (1) converting office-park buildings into artist live-work spaces (creating the new ‘art-cubicle’ aesthetic), (2) converting monster SUVs into mobile homes, and (3) converting suburban monster houses into apartments and rooming houses.
Thrift stores, once cleaned out by would-be eBay sellers, are again filled, this time with “shabby chic” furniture and now-worthless Beanie Baby collections.
The expensively-sold but cheaply-built condo buildings with those non-watertight fake stucco exteriors will become the new slums; while affluent families in non-Net professions (doctors, shipping brokers, janitors) will have snapped up every urban residential structure built before 1960–or even before 1980.
This means cities and towns with “real” streets, sidewalks, and houses will become more valuable to the affluent than suburbs and exurbs. The old parts of Tacoma and Everett could see higher average house prices than the new parts of Issaquah and Redmond.
Reality, as opposed to “virtual reality,” will be the next age’s entertainment craze. Live, in-person entertainment will be the upscale class’s preference, instead of distanced, “intermediated” experiences–and not just computer-based ones. The “cultured” and the intellectuals will disdain books, movies, radio, recorded music, and all other prepackaged arts even more than they currently disdain television.
One aspect of e-biz that will continue to thrive is that aspect which promises to help companies cut costs and fire workers. This means U.S. corporate annual reports will most proudly emphasize not how much money was made but how many workers were sacked (like the annual reports of British companies in the Thatcher era did).
This also means more just-in-time shipping and fewer goods sitting in warehouses.
Abandoned warehouses, then, will still become available for rave parties (with all-live performers) and art-colonizing. It’s just that they won’t be classic city brick buildings but suburban industrial-park windowless concrete boxes.
Of course, few or even none of these things might happen, or they might not happen quickly. Tech stocks (at least those not principally focused on dot-com business models) could take a gentle summer swoon (as they seem to be doing now), giving investors plenty of time to put their dough into real companies that make real things.
And some other, post-dot-com fad might begin to employ less-than-competent CEOs and an otherwise-surplus white-collar workforce, at least long enough to cushion the transition into whatever next-next-next-big-thing finally shows up.
TOMORROW: Some buildings that have been colonized by the dot-commers.
“DOT COMS MUST DIE!”
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard that phrase, or phrases like it, over the past month or so.
It seems more and more Seattleites, in and out of the computer and Internet industries, have become ever-sicker of these companies–and not just of Microsoft either.
These various observers are offended, in differing amounts, by the real-estate hyperinflation, the SUVs, the traffic jams, the condos, the “market price” fancy-pants restaurants, the new chain stores full of useless luxury tchochkes, the cell phones a-bleating in theaters and parks, the rude and humorless public behavior, the slavedriving conditions and disposable-commodity treatment placed upon employees, the destruction of so many funky little places, and all the other civic ills that are popularly blamed, justly or unjustly, on the 300 or more “new economy” companies in King County.
Dot-coms might not be dying. But they’re not as robust as they were six months ago either.
And their decline and/or fall won’t be pretty. (Layoffs, closures, paranoid management behaviors, stock roller-coasters, cash-flow hiccups, pension-fund bankruptcies, avalanches of neo-modern furniture flodding Goodwill stores, you know the drill.)
But it could be entertaining to watch.
Besides, what else did you expect? Most new retail and other business ventures fail in their first five years–even when they’re backed by big stable corporations. Why did so many day traders and CNBC viewers mistakenly assume this law would be wiped away just by putting a “.” into a company’s name?
But they did. So did venture capital outfits, ploughing billions into business plans that would look dubious to any sane observer.
The result: A national economy, particularly the urban economies of a dozen specific metro areas including ours, increasingly organized around a “new prosperity” where many of the most acclaimed corporate “success stories” have lost millions and expect to lose millions more for the indefinite future–if they have one.
MONDAY: Imagining a post-Net-stock-crash world.
IN OTHER NEWS: The guy who’s spent the past half-decade or more defining himself as the anti-BS, anti-hype crusader joins Monday Night Football. Huh?
THE AMERICAN DISTRIBUTOR of the Danish movie The Idiots demanded its frequent shots of male nudity be (crudely) censored, to insure an ‘R’ rating (and, therefore, the chance at mainstream theatrical bookings and big-newspaper advertising).
My first thought: What’s so horrible about a penis and a couple of testicles anyway? I think my own are just fine. I’ve been in locker rooms and at nude beaches, and my finely-attuned writerly senses were never offended by other men’s dangling participles.
As for female viewers, some sensitive ones might indeed feel confronted by the organs some women associate only with rape and violence, not with lovemaking. But such viewers, I believe, would be helped if they could see more male bodies in the nonthreatening environment of a cinema; they might learn to see them as symbols not of male power but of the ultimate male weakness.
(I’ve seen naked men running, in a nudist camp’s annual Bare Buns Fun Run, and it can be as silly and awkward a sight as one can imagine.)
In certain other jurisdictions of the civilized world (namely Britain and Japan), the formulaic, ritualized entertainment known as hardcore pornography does not legally exist, but less extreme sexual and/or anatomical exhibitions are freely and openly available (nudity in newspapers, cuss words in the comics, simulated film-sex on network TV).
In certain other jurisdictions (such as much of the European continent), this dichotomy is considered superfluous and just about anything goes.
Here, things are a little different.
The Motion Picture Association of America, the media conglomerates who control it, and the other media conglomerates who control major-newspaper advertising have conspired to keep anything more salacious than one Kate Winslet breast from being seen in anything that looks like a real movie theater (where IDs can be checked) and instead relegated to premium cable TV (where anyone living in a subscribing household can conceivably watch) or the adult-video market (where the use of sexuality to reveal characters or tell stories isn’t a high priority).
Anyhoo, I went to the U District and saw the censored version of The Idiots, with the quaint black censor bars around the male parts (and, in only one shot, around female parts).
The movie would’ve been a lot less disturbing if they’d shown the full nude scenes and cut out all the scenes with the cast wearing clothes.
Essentially, this is a story of six men and five women, all young adults of solid bourgeois upbringings, who crash in one of the men’s uncle’s second home and turn their lives into a performance-art project, by acting in a rude and obnoxious manner to anyone they meet. (I can see that sort of thing in the U District any day without spending $7.00 for the privilege, but that’s beside the point.)
Specifically, they do this by pretending to be from a group home for retarded adults. (You might expect me, as one with a retarded older brother, to be offended by this, and I was.)
Back at the house, the film’s characters continue the role-playing as a means of releasing their “inner Idiots.” They justify this with the age-old young-intellectual blather about overcoming everyday consciousness to become one with primal nature; but at least they don’t do this by pretending to be blacks or Indians.
In the last reel, we’re supposed to suddenly poignantly identify with the faux-Idiots, because at least three of them are revealed to have had real emotional problems, and to have been using the Idiot game as therapy. I didn’t buy it.
Nor did I buy the “purity” of the film’s Dogme 95 wobbly-cam technique, which (thanks to too many bad Amerindie fake-documentary films) already seems like just another gimmick.
Director Lars Von Trier has done far better stuff. Any regular filmgoer who tells you otherwise is a, well, you know.
TOMORROW: Flann O’Brien, my current Main Man.
