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WAS IT JUST a little over a year ago that I expressed a longing in these virtual pages for a real Left in America (i.e., a serious political organizing movement, not just an exclusionary subculture of sanctimony)?
Now there is one, or at least enough of one to get syndicated columnists all a-flustered and annoyed.
Whether they’re getting annoyed for the right reasons is still debatable.
You see, the critical depiction of certain Dreaded Eugene Anarchists in a recent Harper’s, as described here last week, is indeed a reasonable enough interpretation of certain elements of today’s Way-New Left. Yes, some young radicals are hedonistic, self-righteous, and more concerned with proclaiming their personal moral superiority than with really changing anything. Many of their third-of-a-century-ago precursors were like that as well; though the boomer-centric U.S. news media will rarely admit it.
But can the Way-New Left learn from the old New Left’s mistakes?
A look at the broader movement (or movements) that converged at WTO last fall and at the IMF convention in Washington, D.C. last month offers a hopeful vision.
Beyond the loud and easy-to-stereotype bandana kids, there’s a whole gaggle of Greens, Net-connected “dot commies,” ideologues of assorted stripes, agitators, disciplined direct-action planners, limo-liberals, Utne Reader yups, bohemians, aestetics, labor advocates, minority advocates, queer advocates, hangers-on, and many, many others.
They’re not in agreement on everything.
That they don’t have to be is part of the whole point.
Part of what they’re arguing for is the right to disagree, to publicly express and sort out the messy cacophanies and contradictions of human social existence–as opposed to letting big business and its wholly-owned politicians decide everything via backroom deals and unelected tribunals.
It’s this diversity-in-practice part that makes the Way-New Left more than just the latest generation of “lifestyle radicals” and square-bashers. Instead of just another “identity politics” (i.e., the continuation of target marketing by other means), it cuts across a lot of the age, race, gender, class, and tribal categories into which the marketers would prefer we remained set apart.
And that’s what might really be causing the corporate conservatives and the corporate liberals to fear it.
The Way-New Left has become influential enough for pro-corporate commentators to try really hard to discredit it. It’ll take a little longer (perhaps longer than the current U.S. election season) to see if it can become influential enough to really change things.
Nothing less than the survival of democracy is at stake.
TOMORROW: Dreaming a city into existence.
ELSEWHERE:
Stadium Blackmail, Tacoma-Style
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist wrote about Safeco Field, that tax-subsidized sports palace where the most expensive seats can be among the worst. Today, he contrasts that with the supposedly more populist ideal of the minor leagues.)
RATHER THAN BROOD like a nowhere man, I try to be a good citizen of the contemporary sports utopia.
But then, I’ve always been a sucker for outdoor baseball.
A cloudy forecast sent me to Tacoma the weekend the Yankees were in Seattle, because I’d rather spend hours in the rain than any time sitting inside a domed stadium because of a mere threat of rain.
Unfortunately, but predictably, Triple-A baseball in Tacoma is threatened by a series of factors, some of which are all wet. The Tacoma Rainiers, owned by chicken mogul George Foster of northern California, demanded $22 million from the city last winter for stadium improvements (i.e., luxury boxes).
Then, as if to facilitate an exit strategy for the 40-year-old franchise, the Pacific Coast League gave them more weekend games in April and May than in August (one weekend series).
Since Foster bought the team from a Tacoma group put together by ex-GM Stan Naccarato, he had taken some drastic and initially effective measures to deal with the utopian math of minor league attendance figures, where giveaways inflate totals but, nonetheless, fill the park with thirsty and hungry fans. He cut back on freebies and created an “on-deck club,” doling out special perks to the country-club set.
But how do you sell luxury boxes in a town that’s 35 miles away from a stadium that, except for the luxury boxes, exudes luxury? Tacoma big shots might rather spend a few thousand bucks on a season ticket plan in Seattle.
And why spend $5 to get into Cheney Stadium when that’ll get you into a Mariner game? Last year the Rainiers appeared to fall back into the Tacoma Tiger policy of having a lot of free ticket promotions. Beer is cheaper in Cheney ($4.75 for a big Grants vs. about that much for a 12-oz. Bud in the bigs), but smuggling food is legal in Seattle’s taxpayer park and allegedly illegal in Tacoma’s.
Other than that, there’s Tightwad Hill, looming over the right field wall, offering the ultimate utopia for the outdoor baseball fan, a place to smoke cigars and drink cheap beer for free.
Ballparks age, die, and get razed or imploded. Somebody has to pay for all of this destruction. Why shouldn’t it be you?
If Paul Allen buys a special election to build one football stadium on the contingency of annihilating of another one, rather than denounce this as a travesty of democracy, maybe we should appreciate the civics lesson.
It doesn’t matter that he spent more money than anyone ever did on an election, or that the people in Seattle voted against his scheme. He won.
And in the utopia of sports, winning is everything.
MONDAY: For May Day, a piece on the Way-New Left.
Dream of Fields
NOWHERE DO I FIND the notion of utopia more tantalizing than in sports.
Stadiums get demolished and built, in defiance of the voters they are supposed to benefit and with subsidies for rich team owners who actually benefit from these glorified playpens.
The teams that play in the stadiums may enjoy a storybook history of heroes as well as a corporate history of business leaders who pull together when the going gets tough in order to provide a venue for an All-American pastime; but these enterprises are also masters of illusion, promising only a vicarious thrill of victory for fans who would be identified with winners.
Then there’s the side show of teams selling stadium naming rights to sponsors (who pay a fraction of the cost the public pays for the building and maintenance of the stadium)–sponsors whose dot-comic monikers often defy recognition, but whose cheap advertising is nevertheless slavishly echoed by sportscasters and even by people who don’t get paid to lie.
This is a national trend, but Seattle is leader in the clubhouse, thanks to record construction costs, public payments, and game attendance costs of the Mariner stadium.
Except in San Francisco, where a string of defeats on election day effectively called the bluff of the Giants and forced them to find their own investors for the new park, public will seems powerless to resist the way to build a public facility for private industry. Even cities in small markets with deteriorating attendance figures (Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Detroit) legislators finagle deals to please team owners, lending hope to truly hopeless markets (Montreal) that they, too, can win simply by building.
The pathetic examples in Tampa, Miami, and Chicago miss the cut when promoters talk stadium, as they sensibly focus on Baltimore and Cleveland. And we may pretend to separate Church and State in our one nation under God, but woe to anyone who might suggest that football and baseball be forced to share the same facility.
Pantywaist Park: While it remains to be seen how the Mariners will sell tickets with Griffey gone and Rodriguez on the threshold, consider the utopia of a retractable dome stadium. Supposedly the solution of all possible weather problems, the retractable dome has become a dome with a vengeance, closing whenever there’s the slightest fear of rain.
Then there’s the utopian meteorological phenomenon that occurs only in Seattle: Closing the roof of the unheated stadium makes the field 10-15 degrees warmer (according to the sensitive ballplayers).
Weather or not, another aspect of the new Mariner stadium defies expectation: The best seats in the house are the worst.
The luxury boxes offer a season in hell, from their inner living room with all the comforts of a Holiday Inn to their outer seating area with a dome-like overhang that aggressively funnels every last in-house TV commercial to the people with the money.
The cheap seats, in terrific (and dystopic) contrast, are great–but only if you don’t sit down. Buy a $5 ticket and roam around the upper regions of the center field bleachers, pity the rich, and finally get something for your tax dollars.
TOMORROW: This continues with stadium blackmail, Tacoma style.
WHILE FEW AROUND HERE WERE LOOKING, Seattle has become the unquestioned world capital of photography–at least from the “intellectual property” angle.
Two local outfits, Getty Images and Bill Gates’s Corbis, have busily bought up lots of the world’s big and medium-sized stock image collections, and have signed exclusive contracts with many of the top agencies that represent individual freelance photographers.
At the present rate of consolidation, it won’t be long before these firms become the places where publishers, ad agencies, news organizations, commercial websites, etc. will have to go to get ready-made and/or historic still images.
The Big Two have become so powerful, they’ve been able to push quite favorable contract terms on the agencies. In turn, the agencies are pushing strict work-for-hire terms on their member photographers, depriving them of any rights to their own work in any form forever.
Some of the awful details are in a recent letter to the MacInTouch site (from the linked page, scroll down to the April 12 archive).
This sort of mercenary behavior represents the more threatening, better-publicized side of the current media-biz churn: ever-fewer big players, force-feeding their “synergies” all the way up and down their respective supply chains to the benefit of only the few at the top.
It’s the exact opposite of the “disintermediation” (elimination of middlemen) the Net’s supposed to be bringing to business and other human endeavors, according to an article in the current Harper’s (more about that tomorrow).
Call it “ultramediation” maybe, control of whole industries by a few middlemen. Major record labels and movie studios are more intermediators than anything else these days–other entities often make the works; but the media giants stay in control by ruling the distribution.
(Gates, of course, is the king of the ultramediators. He took the operating system (a piece of low-level software that originally ran a computer’s most rudimentary functions and translated instructions from application software to the hardware) and made it, and himself, the near-absolute rulers of the cyber-universe.)
But there’s another way the Net could help counter this trend. I’ve written about it often: Using these tools to help get individual photogs, say, together with individual clients via “business to business” (sorry to use such a CNBC-popular buzzword) catalog sites, auction sites, and clearinghouses.
Clients (at least the ones I’ve known) are too deadline-stressed to look carefully at every individual would-be contributor’s portfolio; one reason the stock-photo companies Getty and Corbis are now eating had gotten so popular. But a site where individual photogs and illustrators could pool their offerings in a well-organized display would offer clients most everything the Big Two can offer, while keeping the photogs in control of their own copyrights.
I’m too busy these days to start such a site myself. But if you start one, or know of someone who already has, lemme know.
TOMORROW: Harper’s visits the Dreaded Eugene Anarchists and worries about the cyber-snobs.
A YEAR AGO, I wrote in this space about NBC’s callous treatment and eventual dumping of what had been its longest-running soap opera, Another World.
At the time, I’d neglected to notice the network had, and has, another daytime drama incorporating many of the classic soap elements (heroes, villains, cliffhangers, short- and long-term plotlines, convoluted relationships, petty power battles) in a modern format, highlighting modern-day priorities and personal obsessions.
I speak, of course, of NBC’s business-oriented cable channel, CNBC.
I’ve taken lately to having it on while I’m writing during the mornings.
The past two or three weeks have provided for especially gripping viewing, as you might imagine.
Last Friday, particularly it looked as if the great tech-stock bubble “pop,” which I and many other market observers have impatiently awaited lo these past six months, had finally arrived.
In soap terms, it could be seen as an act of vengeful retribution by the established investors against those upstart bitch-goddess dot-coms and their coming-on-too-strong day-trader speculators. Comeuppance for all the concentration-of-wealth guys, those oh-so-easy-to-stereotype overgrown boys with their big-ass SUVs and their ever-beepin’ cell phones. (Not to mention the billions of on-paper wealth lost by a certain Mr. Gates overnight.)
Of course, in the soaps as well as in real life, the relatively innocent may also suffer when the villains are brought down. A soap baddie might blurt out some devastating family secret in court, or might even commit suicide and set it up so a good guy will be framed with a marder charge.
In the case of the tech stocks, or the stock markets in general, millions of folks who’ve never even bought anything at Restoration Hardware have put their savings and their retirement funds into what market pundits had called the “irrational exuberance” of the dot-com-led bull market. With adjusted-for-inflation wages stagnant over the past decade or two for most non-wealthy folks, mutual funds and other stock-based investments have provided one way for middle-class and some upper-middle-class households to keep up with the rising costs of real estate, college tuition, etc. (My own family is such a beneficiary of such investments.)
And soap villains usually don’t conveniently go away when they’re found out. Not only do many of them avoid long jail terms, they can repeatedly cheat death itself.
And sure enough, the tech stocks you-love-to-hate came roaring back this Monday and Tuesday.
Similarly, we’ll all be living for some time to come with the tech-stock hustlers and the enterprises they’ve built on the shaky foundation of stock speculation. The recent stock drops might have been relative or virtual, but the money these companies are burning through is real enough that a widespread Net-company depression could jeopardize thousands of careers.
(One contributing factor in last week’s slump was an analyst’s report claiming most of those new online retail ventures will fail within the next two years. But most new retail ventures of any type fail in their first five years, as anyone’s who’s been involved in a fledgling restaurant or flower store can tell you.)
One last comparison: On the soaps, storylines drag on more often than they crash and disappear. Same with stock-market storylines. And since the stock markets pay no attention to “sweeps weeks,” anthing could happen on any particular day.
The next few weeks should be gripping viewing indeed.
MONDAY: Some short stuff.
JAMES TWITCHELL, a U. of Florida English prof, has written three books discussing, and generally praising, late-modern pop culture: Adcult (which I haven’t read), Carnival Culture (which I generally liked), and his newest, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (which I’ve mixed feelings about).
I had a chat the other night with one of Twitchell’s former students. This ex-student claims Twitchell loves to parade himself about as a Lone Wolf Conservative among all those pesky Marxist deconstructionists running amok within academe.
God, there are so many of these guys, and they all claim they’re the only one out there. Such double-faced smugness–to suck up to the real centers of power and money in this country, yet to still proclaim yourself a daring rebel of the “look at how un-PC I am” variety.
Twitchell at least acknowledges that he’s worked hard over many years to hone just such a self-image, and has used the acquisition and display of consumer goods for this purpose. In the last chapter of Temptation, he describes having bought a Mazda Miata (that favorite vehicle of 50-year-old boys) precisely to distinguish himself from all those other cult-studies profs with their identical ugly Volvos.
As for the book itself, it’s a mostly-defensive essay of praise, not necessarily for consumerism but for the impulses and desires upon which it feeds.
Twitchell’s main statement, which he keeps repeating throughout the volume: “Once adults are clothed, fed, and sexually functioning, their needs are cultural, not natural.”
So far, I’d agree. Give us bread but give us roses, as the old suffragette anthem said. Man does not live by bread alone, someone else said long before that. Various attempts at stern, utilitarian, no-fun cultural constructs (from the Puritans to Pol Pot to the utopian schemes of modern-day vegan prudes) have been short-lived precisely because (among other factors) they failed to address people’s needs for self-expression.
Twitchell’s right when he says advertisers don’t “manufacture needs” so much as they exploit (or at least try very hard to exploit) any and every impulse and urge; the more basic and visceral the better. Sexual attractiveness? There’s a product for that. Excitement? Relaxation? There’s stuff that’ll give it to ya. Want to speed up or slow down, to simplify or complicate your life? You can buy something to help. Want to rebel, to fit in, or (more likely) fit in with other rebels? Just wear the right look, eat the right food, listen to the right music, and (yes) read the right websites.
Twitchell’s also right when he notes that anti-materialism, as commonly practiced among North American “alternative” types, is really just another flavor of materialism. If you define youself with organic foods and grey sweaters and acoustic guitars and non-animal-tested soap, you’re still defining yourself by what you buy.
Where I essentially disagree with Twitchell is where he says it’s basically good that our urges and impulses have so largely become corporate assets. Just as there’s more behind the Quest for Stuff than just the satisfaction of primitive needs, so should there be more to human life than simply servitude to Sacred Business.
TOMORROW: The continuing story of CNBC.
TODAY’S COLUMN IS DEDICATED to the master of visual macabre humor, Edward Gorey.
LIKE SO MANY 18-YEAR-OLDS, USA Today (founded in the summer of ’82) has suddenly decided it didn’t want to look like a bratty kid anymore.
So it’s thrown out its old typographical wardrobe (backward baseball caps, team-logo shirts and all), got itself a page-size haircut, and is proudly showing off its “mature” look all over town.
The official excuse: Most of the newspaper industry’s moving to a standardized, narrow page size, so national advertisers can place the same ad designs in papers across the country without pesky reformatting.
USA Today, which uses 33 printing plants that belong to local dailies across the country (unlike the Wall St. Journal, which fully controls its own manufacturing network), had to go along with the scheme.
The paper’s original design, built on seven narrow columns, wouldn’t work at the even narrower new width. So the paper had to design a six-column format, and decided to use that as an excuse to modernize the whole look.
The practical result (and, if you’ll forgive me, a metaphor-switch): A paper that had always looked like a mall-store floor display (bright lights; loud, “busy” signage; lots of merchandise departments; small and shallow selections in each such department) now looks like a mall store that’s been “tastefully” redone to look more upscale.
Appropriately enough, the first week of the new look included a long feature about the Adbusters Quarterly folks in Vancouver, who preach that there ought to be more to life than just the selling, buying, and using of consumer goods.
That’s a slightly less hypocritical version of the “voluntary simplicity” movement, which in turn is being thoroughly exploited by some new mall-store outfits as an excuse to sell more consumer goods.
Like a retailer that figures to get higher sales with a clean, uncluttered, “lack of pretense” pretense, the new USA Today packages its wares in a “modern, elegant,” pseudo-Euro look.
But, like a redesigned and Martha Stewart-ized Kmart store, it’s still the same bazaar of Chee-tos and sweat pants.
And, like a kid trying to look old enough to score beer, its still-youthful enthusiasm and silliness still show through.
Which is just the way I like it.
At least in newspapers.
At least in that newspaper.
TOMORROW: Why Republicans really like baseball.
IN OTHER NEWS: What’ll happen to those IPO-obsessed dot-com slaves now?
HERE ARE SOME MORE visual glances at recycled real estate; this time with an emphasis on the now almost-disappeared middlebrow sector of downtown retail in my town.
Before it moved to its current site in 1928, the Bon Marche had two prior downtown buildings. The first, at First and Cedar, survived until the 1980s. The second, at Second and Pike, became a J.C. Penney from 1930 to 1982 (for many of those years, it was the chain’s largest store). Vacant almost a decade, it was finally razed for a condo tower and indoor mall called Newmark (as in “New Market,” implying the developers hoped to draw shoppers from the nearby Pike Place Market). Newmark’s mall and movie theaters failed; the space was turned into bank offices.
In the middle of the Great Depression, the F.W. Woolworth Co. built what it modestly called “The Wonder Store” at Third and Pike. The two-level emporium offered everything from clothes and jewelry to candy and toys, all at bargain prices. But more than that, its architecture and interior design told its customers they deserved to be welcomed and pampered in a shopping environment just as handsome as those of the “carriage trade” stores for the rich. The Woolworth chain staggered to a final collapse in the mid-’90s; the parent company now calls itself Venator and runs such mall-based stores as Foot Locker. The downtown Woolworth site’s now a Ross Dress for Less.
During the Woolworth chain’s heyday, it had many variety-store rivals. One of the biggest was the S.H. Kress Co., which built many stores across from Woolworth’s bigger outlets–including one at Third and Pike in Seattle, now housing a Sam Goody record store among other tenants. Founder Samuel Kress amassed a huge collection of mideval and baroque-era religious art, which he donated to several museums (including the Seattle Art Museum). The Kress chain was eventually bought by financier Meshulam Riklis (then-husband of singer-actress Pia Zadora), who shut down the stores so he could make more money from the real estate.
Back when Nordstrom was just a shoe store, Rhodes of Seattle advertised itself as “Seattle’s Home-Owned Department Store.” (The long name was meant to differentiate it from the separately-owned Rhodes store in Tacoma.) By the ’60s, it had become part of the M. Lamont Bean family’s local retail empire (Pay ‘n Save Drugs, Ernst Hardware, Pizza Haven, et al.). In the early ’70s, as the Boeing recession struck Seattle and Nordstrom grew into a full-line clothing store, the Beans closed Rhodes’ downtown store (now housing a Kinko’s and a Seattle’s Best Coffee) and renamed its suburban branches “Lamonts” (now owned by others and in financial troubles).
TOMORROW: USA Today turns 18, asserts its adulthood with a style makeover.
CONTENT MAY OR MAY NOT BE ‘KING’ in today’s Cyber-Epoch, depending on who’s playing the role of cyber-economy pundit today.
But even if “content” isn’t the most important piece of the media-biz recipe, it’s still a prized one.
And the folks hoarding the biggest content-stockpiles, the media mega-conglomerates, are doing their politician-buyin’ best to make sure they can hold onto their chokehold of control and even grab a little more.
We’ve regularly written in this space about the media giants’ continuing attempts to consolidate, to grow ever more gargantuan in spite of much fiscal evidence that the buzzworded “synergies” of such mergers seldom pan out.
We’ve also written about the FCC’s bold attempt to open up the FM airwaves to low-power community broadcasters, and of the media giants’ intense lobbying efforts to get that quashed. So far, the FCC’s stuck to its guns. We’ll see whether the corporate-owned Congress succeeds in overturning the commisisoners’ will on this.
There’s another front on which the corporate warriors are battling to capture more territory: copyright law.
Last fall, Congress was PAC-persuaded to rush through yet another extension to copyright laws, giving company-owned works even more years of ownership (as well as extending the scope of such ownership privileges).
It was lobbied for mainly by the big movie studios, which want to make sure all talking pictures remain under copyright protection forever. While the trademarks and merchandising rights to such characters as Mickey Mouse and Superman go on for as long as their owners keep them in use, the films themselves were to have passed into the public domain after 75 years–which would have let anyone make and sell a copy of, say, the original Lugosi Dracula by 2006.
Now, it’ll be a couple decades more. And by then, if not sooner, the studios will be back to Congress pleading for one more extension.
As ex-local writer Jesse Walker recently noted, the media giants are pushing the intellectual-property envelope on many other fronts as well. They’re threatening the makers of fandom websites for TV shows, trying to narrow the “fair use doctrine” that lets reviewers and scholars quote from copyrighted books, cracking down on music MP3 trading and home-taping, and even rewriting recording contracts so CDs become “works for hire” the recording artists will never be able to regain control of.
When anybody complains about the power of Big Media in this country, the media companies either make pious First Amendment arguments about the need for a “press” unfettered by government constraints or points with scorn to the supposedly shoddy and unpopular products of subsidized/regulated culture industries in places like France.
They don’t like it when you point out that America’s own culture industry’s heavily, though indirectly, subsidized by all these sweetheart laws.
Or that there’s a difference between keeping investigative journalism uncensored and keeping the Rupert Murdochs in their Lear jets.
TOMORROW: The Soundtracking of America, and my attempt to add to the cacophany.
Of Art, Commerce, P.R., and Toasters (part 2)
by guest columnist Doug Anderson
(YESTERDAY, we visited a Seattle poet/salesman who is forced to read the Puget Sound Business Journal every week. Here is more of the conversation he holds with himself as he peruses the PSBJ.)
Salesman: What’s really bugging you?
Poet: Well, when you read the PSBJ you start thinking how much richer everyone is than you are.
Look at the numbers they throw around on the first few pages. Venture fund X raises $340 million. Y Store contemplates a $20 million dollar placement. Z Company launched with a startup stake of $50 million.
Then, by extension, you start thinking how much smarter everyone is than you are.
Then, when you flip to the back section called Briefcase, you see the pictures of all the men and women being promoted in their various professions. You reflect how much better looking they are than you.
And the writing is generally wretched. A completely depressing experience.
S: Well, I can’t cave into your inferiority complexes. I have to get out and sell things to keep you in poems and theories; so let me do my little duty here.
I open the paper and head straight for the For the Record section. This is where I can find out if company Zlab has been hit with a federal tax lien, a civil suit or is selling off pieces of itself. If so, stay away.
On the other hand, if company Zlab is moving into a brand new 900,000-square-foot warehouse on Monster Road, they could probably use a few new pencils. Time for a sales call. See? That’s all there is to it. We’re just about done.
P: That’s a relief.
S: You’re such a bohemian.
The PSBJ ain’t so bad. It’s better than the flimsy scenarios of murder and mayhem that are the truck and fare of the daily papers. You’re supposed to be interested in people, right? When you’re reading through the PSBJ, don’t you feel you’re getting a deeper sense of what your fellow citizens; are up to?
Maybe if more of you literary types read the PSBJ you wouldn’t write such ephemeral twaddle. Maybe it’s not so imaginative but it’s just what it is: it’s the record of balls and enterprise it takes to generate wealth.
P: Well, I’m much moved, Mr. Businessman. Excuse me while I go blow my nose into the American flag. You’re really taken in by this stuff, aren’t you?
S: Like I say, it pays the rent.
P: Oh, Balls. The PSBJ is nothing but a tear sheet of pasted together public relations flyers. Puff pieces smelling strongly of the heavy oil of the region’s marketing engines.
S: That may be; but there is something here, rather than nothing. There’s a lot of money around. That’s news. Just because you feel inferior in front of all this wealth, you shouldn’t take it out on me when I try to read the PSBJ.
P: It’s not that I feel inferior. I just feel there’s something missing in all this craven mammon worship. You said you feel like you’re getting deeper knowledge about our fellow citizens; but that’s an illusion.
Look at the PSBJ. There is no analysis here. It’s all pompoms and cheers. There’s not a bad dollar spent anywhere. Dollars don’t kill people; people kill people.
Look at what assholes most rich people are. They’re fearful, pinched, shrewd, selfish. You don’t see any of that reflected in the PSBJ.
S: OK Mr. Poet, do you have to be so insufferably ’60s? What do you propose?
P: I object to mindless dollar adoration as embodied in the PSBJ. The exaltation of money as the supreme good becomes a kind of religion. It allows us to slough off the questions of what our life is for of how to treat our neighbor or what kind of future we want for our kids. It pretends to stand for Art but all we get are toasters.
S: I’m going to have to stop here. I’ve got to go to work.
TOMORROW: Copyrights and wrongs.
Of Art, Commerce, P.R., and Toasters (part 1)
DOUG ANDERSON IS a Seattle poet/salesman forced to read the Puget Sound Business Journal every week. Here is a record of the conversation he holds with himself as he peruses the PSBJ.
Poet: If art is the hand-made assemblage of pre-determined elements that surprise and delight…
Salesman: You’ve just described a toaster.
P: You didn’t let me finish. As I was saying, if art is the hand-made assemblage of pre-determined elements that surprise and delight when conjoined with imagination, then I don’t see much art around here.
S: Hey, take it easy. I’m just a meat-and-potatoes man.
P: Yeah, right.
S: Besides, there’s plenty of art. We’ve got full theaters, crowded art galleries and bookstores are so hot the big ones act like Mafia families trying to rub each other out.
P: I disagree. Theater has devolved into solo performers debasing themselves before the bourgeoisie, painting is going nowhere and literature has become the billionth retelling of adolescence angst.
S: You intellectual snob, I notice you conveniently left out poetry.
P: Poetry, in English, especially in the Northwest, seems to be alive and kicking.
S: Stop pimping yourself and let me read the Puget Sound Business Journal. It’s what pays the rent. Remember?
I do business to business sales and this is where you find out which businesses are going under, which are suing or being sued, which are launching IPOs and which are flush and expanding into the Kent Valley. Your theories of art are not really helpful just now.
P: Well I’m reading right along with you and I don’t want you to get overly impressed by all the money that’s flying around.
Art has hung up its imaginative spurs and gone over to technology. Craft when divorced from the imagination becomes technology and that’s what we have a lot of now.
Toasters, like you said. In the absence of art we get lots of toasters.
S: You’re saying technology doesn’t demand imagination? That makes a whole lot of fuckin’ sense.
P: I’m saying that technology is the extension of what we already have. In our five senses. The stethoscope turns your ear into a hose, ultrasound lets your eyeballs roll around like a snake into a young mom’s womb, the web has turned us all into audio-visual spiders.
Technology works within a narrow mandate: demolish time and distance by extending our senses. We don’t need imagination to develop what we already have, therefore…
S: Do you mind? Can I get on with this?
P: Feel free. I’m not stopping you.
S: No but you’re trying to distract me.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT TEASED HERE YESTERDAY: I didn’t get the final random phone call from that TV quiz show on Tuesday, after having made it thru the prior qualifying rounds. Therefore, I won’t be out of town any week soon, and will be right by the ol’ computer dutifully uploading your daily doses of popcult ennui.
YESTERDAY, we started to talk about how so many of the folks moving into gentrified artist spaces are info-biz professionals who want to live amid an “artistic” community without the insecurities of personally trying to depend upon an artistic career.
There are some things these movers-in could do to help the painters, performers, writers, et al. they’re displacing.
The first thing they could do to help save the local arts community: Buy some art.
Specifically, buy some works by local street-level artists, not just from out-of-town big-name gallery stars.
The superficial response to this superficial suggestion is that too many alternative-contemporary artist types don’t want to make the kinds of slick, pleasant room decor rich folks like to have in their homes.
But that response neglects that a lot of the ladies ‘n’ gents moving into former artist spaces aren’t the bankers and lawyers who used to have all the money in this town, and who never cared much for non-glass Seattle artists.
A lot of the loft and condo folks are info-biz and software-biz studs. Folk with the inclination, or at least the potential inclination, to see themselves as outre “rebels” and connisseurs of the odd and wonderful.
To a large extent, the Seattle galleries aren’t tapping into this. They probably have wanted to, but haven’t yet figured out how.
Seattle’s Old Money never cared all that much for the contemporary arts. Seattle’s New Money could probably be trained to care; but a lot of it’s in the hands of former middle-class kids who didn’t grow up learning about the wonderful world of patronage.
I recently talked about this with my ol’ pal Matt Richter, who now co-runs the Consolidated Works performance/exhibition space, for a piece I wrote in Washington Law and Politics.
Richter said arts administrators he knew had been having some success getting new-money folks to chip in for one-shot or emergency donations; but that the nouveaus don’t yet “understand the meaning of an annual gift. They’ll be the hero once; but people in the arts have to train these people in the basics of giving. I don’t think that’s as big a problem as some make it out to be.”
I’m thinking an education campaign (what the heck, let’s go ahead and call it advertising) is in order.
Instead of nice, safe ads cajoling nice, safe people to “Support the Arts,” this campaign would run loud, brash ads inviting loud, brash people to, say, “Join the Party.”
The ads would emphasize the beauty, the vicarious emotions, the stories, the alternate lives, the points-O-view, and the experiences you can get from the visual, aural, literary, and performance milieus. The ads would beckon and/or seduce New Money folks into first becoming arts consumers, then into getting more deeply immersed and involved.
You may have already guessed the potential slogan for these ads:
“Art. The Original Virtual Reality.”
TOMORROW: A drink to free trade.
TO OUR READERS: There may or may not be an announcement in Wednesday’s online edition, which may or may not affect how the site’s updated later this month.
MADONNA SONGS are rarely part of the “soundtrack of my life” (actually, my life doesn’t have a soundtrack so much as it has a DVD “commentary track,” but that’s a topic for another day).
Yet I couldn’t help but running a Madonna song through my head last Sunday–“This Used to Be My Playground.”
I was at the former art-studio building at 66 Bell, where I wrote my first Misc. column in June 1986 for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper. This was my first time there since the building owner had kicked all the artists out and arranged to have the whole place redeveloped into luxury condos.
It wasn’t ugly (the new interior was still heavily under construction, so it still had that “unfinished” look and didn’t have any pretentious decor-elements yet). But it was still creepy.
What used to be a cheap, funky space for young Caucasian adults who sought creative careers and urban lives, is now going to be an expensive, slick space for young Caucasian adults seeking creative careers and urban lifestyles.
What people like me have been calling the strangulation of the local contemporary-arts subculture has been interpreted by others (including some condo sellers) as the ultimate triumph of the scene’s aesthetic.
These condos are being marketed as artsy experiences for gals ‘n’ guys who always wanted to live the artsy life but who haven’t had the chance (or the fiscally-ruinous compulsion) to try to make a career out of painting/sculpting/designing/writing/acting/music-making.
Instead, a lot of these buyers are in what euphemists sometimes call “the information industry.”
They may design and sell software, engineer computer-networking schematics, set up corporate databases, schlep books for Amazon, or think up PR campaigns for business-to-business e-commerce solution enablers or whatnot. But what they really want, in the condo marketers’ ad fantasies, is to live in the middle of all the artistic stuff.
This pattern has already occurred in several other “artistic neighborhoods” in several other North American cities. By the time enough condos are installed in one of these “artistic neighborhoods,” much of the “artistic stuff” devolves into commercial activities designed to service the condo dwellers–cheese shops, sushi bars, thumpa-thumpa electronica bars.
It’s not that the gentrifiers hate the milieu of struggling artists. They love it. To death.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
If some of the material resources of some of these “artistically minded” info-biz professionals could get ploughed back into the artistic communities that used to reside in some of those buildings, everyone involved might become a little better off.
TOMORROW: A little more of this.
THANKS TO A KIND READER, I’ve finally obtained a few copies of Philadelphia’s Metro, the only new big-city daily newspaper in the U.S. these days.
Can the city where the U.S. was born now facilitate the rebirth of a sleepy, slowly-but-inexorably declining print-news industry?
From the looks of things, maybe. Just maybe.
Metro is the first North American unit of a chain of identically titled and formatted tabloids. The chain started in Sweden and now has clones in a half-dozen European cities plus Santiago, Chile.
The concept is so utterly simple, it’s a wonder nobody did it before. Metro is a free tabloid, put out five mornings a week. Most of its editions are entirely ad-supported. The Philly version also gets a partial subsidy from the regional transit authority, which had commissioned the chain to set up there and has made it the only paper available inside its bus and train stations.
The content: A controversy-reduced package of short items. Think of a USA Today, cut down to fit 24 tabloid pages (including seven pages of ads). There’s color on every page, and a couple of staples in the spine for extra convenience.
What Metro doesn’t have (besides a real website): No stock listings, no unsigned editorials, no want ads, no mealy-mouthed “analysis” pieces. Also no subscriptions, no home delivery, and no in-house printing plant (it’s printed by a subcontractor out in the Jersey suburbs).
What Metro has: Over 100 short and short-short news items (world, national, local, business, sports, entertainment), a weather map, one two-page feature story, a page of TV listings, a few arts-and-events listings, a half-page of sports statistics, one local-commentary column (by a different writer each day of the week), a letters page, an easy syndicated crossword, and only two comic strips.
Because it’s a freebie, Metro can be a small enterprise witha startup-size staff, without having to match the volume-for-your-quarters content value of the city’s established two-paper monopoly, the Inquirer and Daily News. Because it’s made from an established formula, it doesn’t have to employ a lot of seasoned news hacks. Because it’s short and convenient, it may attract readers who’ve not bothered with daily papers.
Could the formula work here? Most likely; especially once the Sound Transit commuter-rail system gets underway later this year.
But it wouldn’t necessarily have to be a paper on the strict, bright-yet-bland Metro formula. It could be a paper with a little more personality, a little more local flavor to it.
Any cyber-zillionaires out there want to help start up such a paper? Let’s talk.
TOMORROW: Real estate hyperinflation: Is the war already lost?
IN OTHER NEWS: Disneyland employees are finally being allowed to grow moustaches. This means if ol’ Walt really was frozen (he’s not), he could thaw out and legally work for his own theme park.
TODAY’S COLUMN IS DEDICATED to that timeless vaudeville comic of the Stiff Records era, Ian Dury.
WATCH THIS SPACE: No sooner had we printed the precarious status of the Frontier Room than rumors spread about potential changes at Belltown’s other remaining old-folks’ drinking house, the venerable Rendezvous.
For the sake of our out-of-town readers, some background: The area surrounding Second Ave. and Battery St. used to be Seattle’s “Film Row,” where the major studios had their regional distribution offices. The Rendezvous restaurant and lounge was built on this block in the ’30s by a company that built and furnished movie theaters. Its back room, a former private screening room where the movie distributors previewed their latest offerings to theater managers, was designed as a miniature version of the auditoria this company designed and supplied.
In recent decades, the Rendezvous has had two simultaneous main uses. The beautiful back room has been a reasonably-priced rental hall for Belltown’s young hipsters to hold birthday parties, film screenings, performance-art pieces, and music shows. (At least three music videos have been shot there.)
The crowded barroom, meanwhile, has proudly served strong cocktails and cans of Rainier beer to merchant seamen, fishing-boat shoreleavers, old-age pensioners, working-class widows, and young adult alkies-in-training. As building after building in Belltown has gotten torn down or upscaled, the Rendezvous is one of the neighborhood’s last remaining unpretentious dive bars.
But for how much longer?
Here’s all we’ve been able to confirm: The building’s been sold. The new landlors have evicted the apartments, band-rehearsal spaces, and bicycle shop, which had all been on month-to-month.
The Rendezvous itself, and the Sound Mail Services private-mailbox service next door, have long-term leases, which will apparently be adhered to for now.
But eventually, rumor-mongers claim, the new landlords would like to assume management of the restaurant-lounge and (yes, that dreaded word arises once more) “restore” it.
As one who’s held public events in the Rendezvous’s classy old meeting room, I’d loathe any changes that would make the pensioners and fishing-boat people less welcome there.
Maybe we could hold a benefit toward keeping the Rendezvous more or less as-is. I’m sure we could get Dodi, the local band named after the Rendezvous’s legendary veteran barmaid, to play at it.
TOMORROW: Boy, we’ve sure got some demographics.
