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SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY:
WORKIN’ IT: I-Spy, the sanitized-for-your-protection DJ club in the former Weathered Wall space on 5th, has started an ’80s-rock night on Tuesdays called “Raygunomics: An ’80s Experience.” Among the attractions on the event’s premiere week: That recently moderately-popular fad, “New Wave Karaoke.”
I think the concept could be extended even further, into “Seattle Rock Karaoke.” You could have Chris Cornell karaoke, Scott McCaughey karaoke, even Carrie Akre karaoke….
METROPOLITAN LIVING magazine had a good, if superficial, March cover story about our ol’ pal Alex Steffan and his crusade, as current head of the civic-advocacy group Allied Arts, to keep Seattle “funky” and human-scale.
Revealing just the mindset Steffan’s up against was the back cover ad, displaying the rear end of a gaudy Cobra penismobile at the Pike Place Market with the slogan, “Not your average groceries. Not your average grocery getter.” The image defines the Market’s as no longer a funky working-class value venue, but as just another upscale-gourmet-emporium-slash-tourist-trap.
JOHN CARLSON, KV-Lie demagogue and an old personal nemesis of mine, is running for governor. For the past decade, Carlson’s either been the instigator or principal cheerleader for almost every regressive piece of legislation or initiative measure in Washington state. Perhaps a high-profile personal campaign will finally publicly expose just the kind of shallow-but-slick, self-serving operator he really is.
BACKSTAGE MUSIC & VIDEO in Ballard closed in early March. It marks the end of two local-biz institutions. It was the last remnant of what had been the Peaches Records chain. In recent years, it had been owned by the operators of the Backstage music club on the same block, which shut its doors circa ’97.
IN CASE YOU switched from cable to a satellite dish and haven’t been able to watch, the local public access channel has been running in tape-only mode this past fall and winter. The access studio up by 98th & Aurora has been undergoing a much-dragged-out remodel and refitting. This meant, among other things, that many cult-favorite access shows (Bend My Ear Seattle, Don’t Quote Me On This) have been in rerun mode or off altogether, and that lefty journalist-types who wanted to comment on the WTO debacle had to do so in prerecorded fashion; no live reports or studio call-in shows were feasible.
But the city (which is taking over a larger share of control over the channel from AT&T Cable) has announced the access studio will finally reopen to producers. The date, appropriately enough for much of the channel’s fare, is April 1.
TOMORROW: Another cool space in transition.
ELSEWHERE:
IN ALL KNOWN TRAVELOGUES about historic U.S. Route 66, the traveler is always driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. Never the other direction.
In books such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, in the old “Manifest Destiny” ideology, in the legacies of Reagan Republicans and Beverly Hills Democrats, and in the history of the entertainment biz, the movement American economic, political, and cultural activity, of the nation’s overall zeitgeist, inevitably moved in one direction–from Northeast to Southwest.
Everybody who was anybody moved to L.A. or wanted to, as proclaimed in the Go-Gos’ song “Our Town” and the last verse of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
L.A. was the dominant pop-cultural force of the whole world, and the model of commercial and residential development for the nation, for better or for worse.
Whenever certain folks saw something developing in Seattle they didn’t like, from sprawling subdivisions to traffic jams to cookie-cutter chain stores, they publicly bemoned that Seattle was “becoming another L.A.”
But while nobody up here was noticing, L.A. ceased to be the unchallenged icon of American inevitability.
The region’s aerospace and defense industries have been shrinking, and much of what’s left is now controlled by Boeing.
With the single exception of Disney, all the major Hollywood entertainment giants are now under the thumb of conglomerates based in other cities or other countries. Those highly hyped “new media” outfits are more likely to be situated in northern California, the Northeast, or the Northwest.
Educated young adults across the continent are clamoring to move into “real” neighborhoods and communities, not SoCal-style sprawlsvilles.
The image of a “Southern California Lifestyle” once romanticized in movies like L.A. Story and TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 has devolved into the more dystopian depictions of Tinseltown seen in Showtime’s Beggers and Choosers (filmed in Canada!).
And we won’t even get into southern California’s increasingly lousy reputations for race relations, education funding, and police corruption.
Among all this bad news, word recently came that Times Mirror, parent company of the L.A. Times, would be merged into the Chicago-based Tribune Company.
The L.A. Times, just like the Chicago Tribune, used to be known as a financially prosprous but editorially weak paper, a mouthpiece for its owners’ right-wing opinions. But both papers learned to get more respectable in recent decades, while their respective parent companies expanded into other media ventures. (The Tribune Co. owns Seattle’s KCPQ-TV and operates KTWB-TV under a management contract.)
Now, Times Mirror (the “Mirror” in the corporate name refers to an L.A. evening paper that died in the ’50s) will fold its papers, TV stations, book companies, and assorted other endeavors under Tribune’s control.
Some commentators have bemoaned the loss of local newspaper ownership as a sign of L.A. “losing its civic identity” (sound familiar?).
Los Angeles used to collectively think of itself as The End of the Line; the inevitable receiving place of all America’s energies and dissemination point for all America’s entertainment. All roads led, like Route 66, to L.A. All eyes and ears were attuned to Hollywood product, as signified by the RKO logo’s radio tower beaming one signal to the world.
It’s not just that L.A.’s not the End of the Line anymore, but that there’s no more “Line.”
TOMORROW: Some short stuff.
A KIND READER, noting my recent obsessions with the changing, increasingly hype-ridden language of business journalism and P.R., advised me to check out Cluetrain, a site which talks about just that–among many other “revolution in business” topics.
The site includes the full text of something called “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” a Martin Luther-esque set of “95 Theses.” It also offers samples from a book the manifesto’s four co-authors are selling.
The book adds details to the manifesto’s arguments that the Net is bringing about “The End of Business As Usual”–not just because of online retail but also because “people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”
On the surface, the manifesto writers are proclaiming the imminent decline and fall of corporate gobbledygook and meaningless bureaucratic procedure, in favor of human-scale conversation and systems that make sense.
Dig one level down from that, though, and the “Theses” read like the worst Wired-style bombast. Meet the new hype, same as the old hype.
Like Wired, the manifesto-ists claim their “revolution” is an inevitable, linear, historic course; and that when they call for corporations to change their ways, they’re just helpfully advising these corporations to accept the inevitable or fade into the dustbin-O-history.
(Typical excerpt: “There’s a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”)
But dig one level beneath that, and you could ascertain at least the faint beginnings of a post-hype order.
Not an inevitable post-hype order, but at least a possible one.
Certainly, a hype-reduced business universe would be welcomed by most people, with the possible exception of those who work at generating the hype (capitalism’s equivalent of the USSR’s old “ministers of ideology”).
Instead of buzzwords like “business-to-business solution paradigms” and “the dynamic realignment of restructured global opportunities,” the folks who sell and buy stuff would have to, or even want to, explain exactly what they’re really doing. If they know.
But, as can be seen in Chechnya and the Balkans, a brutal regime that drops its old ideological excuses doesn’t necessarily become less brutal.
And the regime of Global Business, shorn of Dilbert-esque B.S., would still be the regime of Global Business.
It would still seek profit and/or organizational growth to the neglect of other goals or values. It would stil, to a large extent, view the environment as raw materials, employees as machine tools, and human beings as target markets. It would still do everything it could to merge, consolidate, downsize costs, move industrial work to low-wage countries, and remove any governmental or other impediments to its ambitions.
It would simply do these things honestly and directly.
At least with the old buzzwords, companies admitted they had to disguise some of their ambitions and behaviors under convoluted excuses.
TOMORROW: Even in L.A., they complain about losing their civic identity.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Kingdome implosion, held the week after the spring equinox (the old pagan new year) was everything Carl Smool’s Fire Ceremony, a sort of neo-pagan new year’s ritual (rescheduled to the previous Sunday), had been created for.
It was a huge, populist moment–a dramatic goodbye to the past, a shared big spectacle in the present, and a greeting and/or dreading to the future.
(Indeed, several TV and radio commentators made comments to the effect that this was the millennium celebration Seattle didn’t get in January.)
I was at the Dome’s opening party in ’76. The show wasn’t much, but the feeling was warm and electric. Amid the marching bands and ethnic dance troupes and politicians’ speeches was the sense of civic triumph, of having become a gosh-darn Big League city in our own modest, thrifty way, via a big building best appreciated by structural engineers.
But now, the Brave New Seattle has no room for a homely yet functional multi-purpose room. So, a millennial Destruct-O-Rama brought one more community gathering experience.
And it was damned cool. That dome blowed up real good!
(Dome-TV marathon moment (KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison): “Look; there’s an armored personnel carrier. I feel like we’re back at WTO.”)
NOT TOO LONG BACK, we discussed the rise of a monoculture of global marketing.
But, sometimes hidden behind that trend, another trend lies–the accellerating decline of some of the companies that used to define American mass marketing and merchandising.
Late last month, Barron’s had a piece about stagnant times at J.C. Penney. The article suggested that unless the old-line chain retailer got its act together, it could go the way of Woolworth’s.
Shortly after that piece (not available online except to paid subscribers) appeared, a Newhouse wire-service article told of similar woes befalling Penney’s longtime arch rival, Sears Roebuck & Co.
Sears and Penney are trapped by their value-and-service heritage as much as by their squaresville reputations. Like Woolworth and its onetime variety-store brethern such as Kress had been, Sears and Penney are known for selling moderately-priced goods in full-service stores. They made working-stiff families feel like part of the great American consumer dream by treating these consumers with dignity and respect.
Also, their one-style-fits-all fashion sense helped forge a nation of immigrants into a single American mass market.
But these days, the likes of Wal-Mart and Home Depot, with their ruthlessly efficient distribution systems and few-frills store layouts, are able to undersell full-service stores on many types of items.
These big-box chains are not only drawing customers away from independent retailers but also from the malls where Sears and Penney have most of their current outlets.
Many mall operators, meanwhile, are trying to reposition their properties around the all-powerful upscale demographic, that 20 percent of the population that now controls over half the spending power. They’re pushing Sears and Penney to either change their merchandising strategies (i.e., ditch the cheap stuff and those who buy it) or risk getting kicked out at the next lease-renewal time.
Seattle used to have Penney’s biggest store, and still has the oldest extant Sears store. This used to be a prodly middlebrow, work-ethic kind of place, and it supported these purveyors of middlebrow, work-ethic clothes, home furnishings, etc.
That’s changed, as you’ve likely noticed.
Everybody here’s supposed to be rich and at least a little trendy. Those who can’t afford, or don’t like, the costly wares sold at Nordstrom or Pacific Place are banished to the long checkout lines at Ross or the suburban purgatories of Target.
The days when Sears could correctly advertise itself as “Where America Shops” are gone, likely for good. The onetime mass market has evolved into scores of niche markets; and the current Sears/Penney niche (cheaper than other department stores, but nicer than big-box stores) is a precarious one at best.
Can these institutions move to a more reliable niche without losing everything they’re known for?
If I knew the answer to that, I’d be in the stock-advice business.
TOMORROW: Identity politics, target marketing–what’s the difference?
MOST OF US, I suspect, have experienced the moment.
You hear your favorite or once-favorite song; only something’s different, something’s wrong somehow.
Then you remember: You’re in a store, restaurant, or (yes) elevator; and the tune you’re hearing is a syrupy symphonic rendition, probably piped into the premises on equipment leased from the Muzak company.
I just experienced this a week ago. The place was a Bartell Drugs store. The song was the Posies’ classic “Golden Blunders;” redone in total “stimulus progression” precision.
While Muzak regularly licenses compositions wholesale from song-publishers’ catalogs for either re-arrangement (on the Muzak-classic satellite feed) or original-version replay (on its other channels), there might’ve been a special reason for including the Posies’ song.
While I don’t believe any Posies members worked at Muzak, many of their pals in the Seattle music scene did. It’s easy to imagine some of them picking their pals’ tune for extra rotation (and extra ASCAP royalties).
Muzak, founded in the ’30s in New York (it originally distributed its programming on leased phone lines), moved its HQ to Seattle in the mid-’80s after a merger with the locally-based Yesco, which fed what it called “foreground music” (i.e., the original recordings, not string-laden covers) into business places.
Another merger later, and Muzak’s moving again; this time to the Carolinas.
In the overheated Seattle economy of the early-Oughts, there are plenty of software-biz and dot-com-biz jobs to be had for those Muzak programmers, librarians, engineers, administrators, etc. who might choose not to relocate.
Slightly more problematic are the local job prospects for the music staff–the creators of Muzak-classic’s cover recordings, and the curators of Muzak’s “foreground” channels.
It’s not just the hard-rock scene in Seattle that’s seen its share of the global music-biz mindset diminish lately. Commercials, industrial films, and other non-pop production work’s also down.
The one bright spot: soundtrack scoring.
Clever entrepreneurs, including members of the Seattle Symphony, have made Seattle an unsung center of movie background music making. (You know: The stuff that used to be heard on soundtrack albums, before those were turned into pop-hit anthologies that had little relation to anything you actually heard in the movie).
Seattle’s chief emerging rival in this field is Salt Lake City; specifically companies formed there by veterans of Bonneville International’s old “beautiful music” radio programming division (which used to produce Muzak-like recordings for broadcast FM stations).
So you won’t hear Seattle-made violin-and-synth stirrings in your drugstore (at least not after Muzak-classic’s current fare eventually gets retired from rotation).
But you’ll still hear it in six-channel Dolby at your multiplex when the 55-year-old leading man tenderly embraces the body double of his 25-year-old co-star.
TOMORROW: Learning to appreciate the worst comic strip in the papers.
IT’S SPRING EQUINOX TIME at long last.
And around these parts, that’s come to mean one primary thing–the imminent end of snowboarding season and the associated “X-treme” marketing loudness.
But each year, that relief seems to come later and later. I won’t be surprised if it eventually goes year-round, with fake-snow machines spewing forth human-made slipping and sliding stuff for the soft-talking, hard-playing dudes ‘n’ dudettes.
Of course, X-treme hype goes on all year round anyway.
It’s come to cover not only those athletic activities invented during the years the name’s been in use, but also older activities such as surfing and skateboarding. Anything involving individual athletes (preferably male; preferably just barely old enough to sign their own contracts) proving themselves in grandstanding, gravity-and-common-sense-defying stunts.
Activities that can be turned into context-free images of near-superhuman achievement, for the selling of soda pop, cereal, cars, energy bars, Ore-Ida Bagel Bites, etc. etc.
This ultimately corporate marketing iconography devolved from what had once been celebrations of individuality, of rebellion against the squaresville realm of organized sports (particularly team sports).
But that’s something you all should’ve expected from the start. (Precedent: The original re-imaging of surfing from something vaguely rebellious into the milieu of Frankie and Annette.)
Slightly more improbable is the role “X-treme” marketing played in the mainstreaming of punk rock during the middle of the previous decade. The music that, for nearly two decades, symbolized the near-ultimate in uncommerciality suddenly became soundtrack music in sneaker commercials.
Whole books, or at least whole masters’ theses, could be written about this transition. How high-school punk rockers used to be the scrawny ones, the unathletic ones; but then their freaky-geeky little subculture got taken over by jocks and ex-mullet-heads.
Other full-length works could be written about how the sports themselves, once tightly-knit subcultures of relative egalitarianism (or at least meritocracy) became, under the corrupting influence of sponsor bucks, into annexes of the mainstream sports universe complete with celebrities, endorsement deals, and star/spectator dichotomies.
Snowboarding participants of my acquaintance insist to me they don’t bother with all that advertising-related image crap. While some of these folks enjoy the equipment shows, videos, and promotional events corporatization has brought to the sport, they insist it’s still fundamentally a DIY, make-your-own-fun scene if you want it to be.
I have a hard time explaining to these folks another, more insiduous aspect of the corporatization–how it’s redefined these sports, even on the individual-participant level, in corporate-friendly ways.
It’s a whole X-treme world these days. The corporatized image of X-treme sports meshes perfectly with the X-treme-ized image of business. Today’s CNBC and Fast Company heroes are self-styled “rebels” who (at least in the business-media fantasies) “break all the rules,” take “big risks,” and turn into IPO gazillionaires while they’re still young enough to snowboard.
There’s nothing really all that extreme about X-treme anymore. It’s not rebellious, and it offends nobody (except maybe some old downhill skiers).
Maybe the way beyond the X-treme hype is to acknowledge it’s all square and mainstream now, but that you like to participate in it anyway.
To refuse to either blindly follow or blindly reject the sports’ fashionability.
Besides, the marketers have already started planning for any X-treme backlash; as evinced by Nabisco Sportz crackers–which let armchair athletes get fat whilst ingesting images of old-style team sports gear.
TOMORROW: Bye bye Muzak.
IN OTHER NEWS: Artist Carl Smool’s quasi-apocalyptic “Fire Ceremony” performance, postponed from New Year’s, was finally held on a perfect mid-March Sunday night. The reschedule date was picked because it was the closest weekend date to the spring equinox. It turned out to be even more appropriate–the pagan New Year, for a vaguely neopagan rite. Giant effigies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were lit by fireworks and slowly burned away, followed by the centerpiece figure of a giant egg (with a figure of the mythical roc bird revealed inside). Thousands gathered for the under-publicized makeup date, and stood in shared solemn awe at the spectacle. It was the biggest gathering I’d seen at the Seattle Center fountain area for one shared experience since the Cobain memorial. Next Sunday, at sunrise instead of sunset, comes another rite of destruction which will signify a change of eras and which will be watched by thousands–the Kingdome implosion.
ANOTHER SOOPER TOOSDAY has come and gone, the party nominations are decided, and damned if I don’t remember a single one of the major Presidential candidates talk about anything like that onetime pie-in-the-sky official goal of Presidential candidates–progress.
These days, the politicians seem to propose nothing more ambitious than cleaning up various perceived governmental messes (soft-money campaign financing, gun-show regulatory loopholes) or restoring a supposed past golden age of integrity and authority in high places.
All our other problems are apparently supposed to be taken care of by that boomin’ private-sector wealth.
It’s a pleasant thought that ignores the extent to which that same boomin’ private-sector wealth is causing or at least exacerbating many of our problems (the money-corruption of elective politics, the rich/poor divide, the affordable-housing crisis, the affordable-health-care crisis, the stagnation in real wages for the non-rich, wrenching consolidations in industry after industry, etc.).
A few folks unconnected with any Presidnetial campaign are thinking about some of these things. Two of them are Harvard profs and prolific essayists Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West. They recently issued a little manifesto-book, The Future of American Progressivism.
The term “Progressive” sometimes denotes a pretty specific strain of the American political tradition. It was strongest in the upper Midwest and here in the Northwest, from the turn of the century until the rise of “pro-business Democrats.”
It emphasized not just a governmental but a social, even an aesthetic, ideal of clean, rational leadership by a well-educated, well-groomed caste of dedicated public servants. Its various “reform” mechanisms (such as at-large city council races), however, often served to consolidate power among WASP farmers and homeowners at the expense of German or Irish Catholic urban-factory workers.
But Unger and West have a different idea of “Progressive” in mind. Theirs is essentially any and all political factions to the left of the corporate Democrats, but more practical than the separatist or ideologically-obsessed far-left cliques.
What’s more, their inclusive attitude extends to their agenda. They don’t have a single “magic bullet” economic or social scheme. Instead, they’re willing to try a lot of different programs in order to advance their general goals–social justice, economic opportunity, minority rights, environmental stewardship, etc.
America’s overriding current problem, as Unger and West (and many other left-O-center observers) see it, is that the old New Deal coalition devolved long ago. Big business rules the whole political agenda, across the board; all liberals seem willing to do these days is propose slightly more humane variations on corporate rule (a tax credit here, a land-use regulation there).
Unger and West want to re-popularize the notion that pro-active work for social progress is both good and possible. Within that framework, they offer up a lot of policy ideas (a value-added tax, job-retraining programs, venture-capital funds for small businesses, mandatory voting, labor-law reforms).
But they’re not firmly committed to any one of those. It’s the results they want, not necessarily any of these specific mechanisms. If one program doesn’t work, try another. They’d put up different pilot programs in different jurisdictions to speed up the process of finding which ones work best.
And that, in itself, might be their most radical idea.
U.S. society has become awfully project-oriented during this Age of Global Business. That Internet “stock bubble” is pouring investment into companies not on the basis of how much money they’re making but on the size of the organizations they’re building. Governmental programs often become entrenched entities most concerned with their own self-preservation, in spite of “sunset laws” devised to stem this.
A neo-prog movement organized around goals, not around organizations or specific projects, could provide just the worldview-shiftin’ kick this world really needs if it’s gonna make any real progress.
MONDAY: It’s an X-treme world.
ONCE UPON A TIME in the ’80s, when cable TV was just starting to grow and most of its customers still lived in rural areas, the Grand Ole Opry people started The Nashville Network.
It drew on the existing resources of the Opry radio show, the Opryland theme park, and the Opryland TV-studio facility (home of Hee Haw). Because few country acts had made music videos, the channel emphasized variety shows and other live-performance formats.
And it was good.
TNN’s amassed an invaluable trove of performance and interview footage with every major country star active since 1983; its archives contain rare film and video of most every country star who’d died before the channel’s debut.
TNN’s been instrumental in “breaking” most of those “Young Country” stars, and solidified a new, mainstreamed audience for the genre as a whole.
Its influence was proven in the mid-’90s, when the Billboard record charts switched from a survey format to listing actual record sales. The young-country acts were suddenly revealed to be bigger sellers than most of the corporate-rock superstars.
TNN’s Sunday-afternoon NASCAR coverage, meanwhile, had helped make the stock-car circuit into America’s most prominent racing sport.
But in 1997, the Opry’s original joint-venture partner in TNN, Westinghouse Broadcasting and Cable, assumed control of the channel, just as it was merging with CBS (which in turn is being absorbed by Viacom).
The new management saw TNN not for its loyal audiences or its programming heritage, but for the millions of cable homes it reached (almost every cable system in the country carries it).
Hours of original live-music shows were axed from the schedule, replaced by advertiser-friendly “lifestyle” shows and cheap reruns. At first, the rerun shows were chosen for their more-or-less “country” settings (The Waltons, The Dukes of Hazard, Dallas). But now the schedule includes Cagney & Lacy, that two-woman cop show set in New York City. (You should all now yell out like in the Pace picante sauce ad, “New York CITY?!?”)
When new original shows did appear, they were either dorky action shows (of the type clogging the USA Network’s schedule) or trash-sports concepts aimed at teenage boys: Extreme Championship Wrestling, RollerJam, Arena Football, and most recently Rockin’ Bowl.
Last month, TNN dropped its last weekday music programming, a daytime hour of videos, so it could add reruns of TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. (Ahh, nothing like faked “funny outtakes” with the stars of since-forgotten 1985 sitcoms.)
The only “Nashville” left in TNN is a three-hour Saturday night block, anchored by a half-hour simulcast of the Opry radio show, and a Biography-like documentary series on Monday nights. Viewers who write or email to complain are referred to to another CBS-owned channel, the video-clip based Country Music Television (carried on far fewer cable systems).
TNN will probably survive without country music. Can country music survive without TNN?
Already, CBS’s Infinity Radio Group, which owned both of Seattle’s country stations, has switched one of them to an ’80s-nostalgia format. We may have seen the peak of commercial “Young Country;” though the more critically beloved (and sometimes even younger) “alternative country” genre appears to still be going strong on its semi-underground level.
TOMORROW: No, I don’t know everything.
BACK IN THE ’80s, it seemed like a franchised Benetton clothing store was opening up every day, in every possible North American shopping district. In downtown Seattle, I could swear there were four or five of the boutiques at once. (This memory could be slightly exaggerated.)
Supporting this vast-growing empire were the ads in every magazine and on every billboard and bus exterior, with the slogan “United Colors of Benetton” accompanying pictures of scrubbed-faced young models sporting wild and wacky earrings, necklaces, badges, and rings atop drab-looking sweaters.
Once shoppers figured out that the Benetton stores were really selling just the sweaters, not the accessories, the number of Benetton outlets markedly decreased.
The Italian-owned company never went away (it still has one local outlet, in the same building as F.A.O. Schwarz). But as its physical presence (what the dot-com guys call “brick and mortar stores”) has lessened, and as a supposedly more cynical young-adult generation has succeeded the supposed Reagan-era innocents, the company’s adopted ever-“edgier” marketing angles.
One part of that push has been the “controversial” print ads, in which fashion-model imagery was replaced by increasingly in-your-face material–AIDS victims, wartime destruction, and most recently death-row inmates–keeping the company and the brand
The less mainstream-media-publicized part of Benetton’s branding push has been Colors magazine, “A Magazine for the Rest of the World.”
It’s published in five bilingual editions (the U.S. gets English and Italian). Its New York-based editors claim, “the magazine is based on a simple idea: Diversity is good.”
Yet it exists to sell a single global brand name to some 80 countries, to get everybody wearing the same sweaters and jeans from Rio to Osaka.
The editors finally got around to exploring this contradiction in the current issue, themed “Monoculture.”
Behind the cover image of Mickey Mouse’s head as a Photoshopped goop of neon-glo goo, the issue has picture after slick color picture of Coca-Cola in Egypt, Shell in Malaysia, Madonna CDs in Tokyo, etc. etc. The WTO protestors would interpret these images as the 666-marks of a corporate beast intent on devouring us all. A reader trained by the protests to see the images that way could easily see them that way.
But the editors insist they’re “celebrating” the rise of a single commercial lingua franca uniting all nations, all faiths, and, yes, all colors under a shared experience of Big Macs (even if the ones served up in India are all either chicken or veggie), Frosted Flakes, Toyota Corrollas, Tom Hanks movies, Barbie dolls, Hershey bars, and at least one certain clothing brand.
The images and the accompanying texts show, even inadvertantly, that we’re losing a lot in terms of real cultural diversity. As Jim Hightower once wrote, “There really is a new world order, but it’s not black helicopters. It’s global corporations.”)
But they also show the world as still having quite a bit still there, diversity-wise. Despite all attempts at imposing a Monoculture, most of these marketers still have to localize their products or at least their brand-images everywhere they go. (MTV, as I wrote here last week, has had to increase its regional versions around the world from 5 to 22, in order to compete with local channels in all those countries that play fewer US/UK corporate superstars and more indigenous pop.)
Before the violent Yugoslavian breakup, advocates of Global Business liked to note that no two countries that both had McDonald’s outlets had ever gone to war against one another. That doesn’t mean globalization has been all peaceful, or all progressive. As some of the WTO protestors noted, corporate imperialism has brought sweatshop labor conditions, environmental compromise, and the end of countless local business ventures across the globe.
Some lefty historians like to recite long histories of cruelties done to folks whose economies were colonized. (What were the tea and opium wars in old Asia, f’rinstance, but the result of intercontinental commerce?)
The marketing Monoculture is different from past colonizations in several ways. Perhaps most important: In older forms of colonialism, the people of the colonized societies made stuff for Global Business to sell. Nowadays, the same folks are also expected to buy the stuff of their lives from these same trading groups. You’re not just picking coffee beans for Procter & Gamble, you’re buying P&G toothpaste. You’re not just mining iron ore to become Fords, you’re supposed to dream of one day driving your own Ford.
Whether that’s really any more “empowering” is a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: The singular joys of single-artist Net radio.
HAD A LOVELY CHAT a few weeks ago with some other local web-writers. Among the afternoon’s hypertextual topics: Our first modems.
Ahh, the good old days. Three-hundred-baud telephone modems that attached directly to telephone headsets via “acoustic couplers.” Text-only bulletin board systems that were run with such now-forgotten software as Minibin and Polaris, on TRS-80s, Apple IIs and kit-built CP/M computers. Real floppy discs, up to eight inches in diameter, holding as much as 400k.
The online world was a much smaller, though not always civil, place. (“Flame wars” and other breaches of sociability were rampant.)
And, like the worlds of science-fiction fandom and computer hobbyists (the real “hackers”) from which it sprung, it was a place teeming with fat guys.
Today’s more corporate online world doesn’t have many fat guys in charge. It has tall guys in charge instead. Lots of tall guys.
You can see them at any gathering of the dot-com hustlers and the Microsoft elite. They’re the movers and the shakers. The fast-talking, hard-handshaking, success-minded gents. The IPO success stories or wannabes. Many of them are tall enough to be Presidential candidates or even late-night talk show hosts.
They know their way around a business plan, or at least can fake it well. They can network and schmooze with the venture-capital gang like all get out.
But the fat guys were a helluva lot more fun to hang out with.
The fat guys knew how to drink and eat and make lovable fools of themselves. The tall guys are usually too self-conscious for that; too obsessed with making the right impression toward someone (often another tall guy) who has, or might one day have, money.
In the March Harper’s, Greg Critser has a cover essay (not available online) concerning “The Heavy Truths About American Obesity.”
“In upscale corporate America,” Critser writes, “being fat is taboo, a surefire career killer. If you can’t control your own contours, goes the logic, how can you control a budget or a staff? Look at the glossy business and money magazines with their cooing profiles of the latest genius entrepreneurs: to the man, and the occasional woman, no one, I mean no one, is fat.”
Critser’s piece depicts the oft-reported “obesity epidemic” as a potential conspiracy by the corporate elite, so big food companies can get rich off of lower-caste people’s addictions–and also so that the elites can easily stereotype and demonize those supposedly lazy couch potatoes who’ll never amount to anything.
He also has nasty things to say against the fat-pride movement and anyone who doesn’t hate obesity as much as he does. (Last year, Critser wrote for the business magazine Worth about his own experience with a new prescription diet drug. Perhaps he thinks if he could go through the ordeal, everyone should be able to and want to.)
Anyhoo, Critser may indeed have a point about why the fat guys who did so much to invent online communication aren’t reaping more of the material rewards from the medium they pioneered. They were great programmers and tinkerers, totally devoted to their projects, and enthusiastic builders of some of the first electronic communities.
They just didn’t have the look of the Lean-‘n’-Mean. (Or the schmoozing or bossing-around skills, or the aura of invincibility.)
But with the old-media monopolists and the stock-bubble hustlers grabbing bigger and bigger chunks of Net “mindshare,” it’s way past time we recaptured more of the BBS era’s homespun, DIY spirit.
Bring back the fat guys.
MONDAY: Benetton, death row inmates, and the Monoculture.
IN OTHER NEWS: Remembering one of the old guard, master computer-journalist Don Crabb.
LAST MONTH, I found myself reading a short stack of those newfangled rah-rah business magazines.
One of the things that struck me was all the weird, weird names companies are giving themselves (or hiring image-consultants to give them).
I mean, it’s one thing to take an ordinary English-language word or phrase, stick an “E-” at the front and/or a “.com” at the end, and boast about how innovative and outside-the-proverbial-box you are. It’s something else again to come up with a grouping of vowels and consonants that means absolutely nothing except what your ad budget can make it mean.
Such made-up corporate monikers have come a long way since George Eastman thought up “Kodak” simply because he thought the “k” or hard “c” consonant was snappy, or since Standard Oil of New Jersey picked “Exxon” from a list of random letter-collections spun out of a mainframe computer. Now we’ve got whole companies that do nothing but find names for other companies.
Herewith, some of the goofiest and/or cleverest nonsense names seen in hi-tech magazine ads this past month:
Now: Write a sentence using all of these.
TOMORROW: Putting gentrified uses into old buildings–slightly better than just razing ’em.
SOMETIME LAST WEEK,MTV claimed to have played the one millionth music video (counting repeats) in the cable channel’s 19-year history.
You probably didn’t even notice. The channel didn’t even bother to plant hype stories the channel planted in newspapers about the “achievement.” (The clip chosen to represent the milestone: Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”)
Once the #1-rated basic cable channel, MTV’s ratings have steadily declined. (A recent, laudatory Forbes article touted the successful launches of localized MTV channels around the world, but tellingly said nothing about the U.S. original.)
What’s more, the channel’s more exclusively than ever drawing teen and young-adult audiences, who (despite being incessantly wooed by every channel from NBC to UPN) proportionately watch far less TV of any type than any other age group.
The problem’s not that ex-viewers like me grew older while MTV didn’t. It’s that MTV has indeed grown old; or at least tired.
Briefly, during its mid-’80s to early-’90s midlife, the channel was known for championing artistically flashy “breakthrough videos,” and also for breaking exciting new acts that threatened to stretch the boundaries of pop and rock.
Back in 1981, MTV had been routinely criticized for its lack of programming diversity. It mainly just showed hard-rock and top-40 acts, with a smattering of British “new wave” clips and almost no R&B or hiphop.
Today, during those hours when it isn’t re-re-rerunning five-year-old Real World episodes or Celebrity Deathmatch animations, MTV almost exclusively plays music from five, very rigidly-defined, genres:
Of course, as an integral part of the mainstream record-industry hype machine, MTV’s decline has parallelled the industry’s. With no real “top 40” mass market anymore, the industry has devolved and retreated into niches where it believes its big-promotion, big-marketing approach can still move CDs–the five genres listed above, plus the easy-listening acts played on VH1 (also owned, like MTV, by Viacom) and the pop-country acts played on TNN (soon to be owned by Viacom once its merger with CBS goes through).
TOMORROW: What’s in a (corporate) name?
Microsoul, Part 2:
A Commodity In Six Pages
by guest columnist Weirdo U. Wanago-Toady
( our guest columnist began a resignation letter to Microsoft she never got around to sending. Today, she continues, with a discussion of the company’s periodic employee “Reviews.”)
Areas I need work on as a human being are elaborated upon by wealthy morons who think a game of hackysack and wearing shorts at work is a form of intellectual social rebellion. I’m given a number between one and five. Apparently five is unattainable. So much so, that there are rumors Bill Gates himself presents you with a bonus check if you get it. (Amounts of the check varied from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on who told me.)
If your parents didn’t give you a structure, rewards, allowances, or punishments, don’t worry. You can get them all from Microsoft. Microsoft is full of bonuses at work, penalties, reviews and latte cards doled out by condescending older-brother-like bosses who will play darts and get drunk with you on those lonely weekend nights. You don’t ever have to grow up.
A coddled adolescense is part of the Microsoft persona. You’ll fit right in, especially if you are one of those non-conforming conformists who likes to defiantly wear a button that says “fuck authority” while blindly obeying it.
The difference between this and high school is that in high school the kids KNOW the report cards, detention, pep rallies, and idiotic structures are bullcrap. Teenagers know they aren’t commodities, but human beings. Microsoft employees accept that they are a commodity, while deluding themselves to think they’re software “rebels” of some sort. They’re in a revolutionary company at a revolutionary time (in the best of all possible worlds).
And if you don’t buy it, you won’t be hired. No wonder most Microsofties are under 30.
My “Team Leader” reviewed me (not my “boss,” that would be too realistic a term for a company which feeds on illusions).
I hardly worked for him. I don’t know where he got all his wordy comments. He said I didn’t know the product thoroughly enough, which was bullshit. I lamely decided that to confront my boss would be to acknowlege the whole gullible corporate acceptance of The Review. But it changed me. Deep down, I accepted that I was an inferior “product” in some way. I think that was when I started working weekends.
The full-time employees get to review themselves first; then they give their scores to their team leader, who gives the final score. It’s all such incredible horse manure. It’s a highly intense, six-page summary evaluating everything from personal flaws to five-year goals. All the full-timers have their door closed. On that day there is a group email: “Do not disturb the full-timers; time for the yearly reviews.”
“Why don’t you just give yourself all fives?” I nonchalantly asked a co-worker, obviously absorbed in self-loathing at his desk. He looked up from his six-page summary of his own personal flaws and said, “I could NEVER do that!” This is a guy who works 60 hours a week and most weekends. He’s 25. He invented some brilliant program which saved the company some money; so it’s not like I’m asking him to vainly toot his own horn.
That’s cool, I thought, Microsoft gets him to sacrifice his youth, and then convinces him though a series of “Microsoft Lifestyle” seminars that he’ll never really be worthy.
I walk away from his office, closing his door as per his request. I’m walking away, and I’m wondering how bad he feels about himself.
I’m wondering how he’s going to try and make it up to the company next year–maybe by working 80-hour weeks this time. Maybe he’ll work every weekend next year.
I walk, and I keep walking. He’ll be a millionaire when he’s 35. A million isn’t good enough, he says; he’ll retire when he has 3 million (today’s economy, you know).
I’ve past my own door now. It’s really easy to keep walking.
He views himself as a product now, a commodity in six pages. At 35, sex will be a long-lost dream to him. It is for me, and I’ve only been here a year.
My free latte card falls from my hand, a two-dollar piece of my soul.
Now I’m outside, in the Redmond “Campus” (“office park” in regular English). The “Three Flags” fly overhead–that’s the United States flag, the Washington State flag, and the Microsoft flag.
“Where do you want to go today?” It asks.
Don’t know where I’m going today. Never did.
I only know where I’m not going.
TOMORROW: Requiem for an afternoon newspaper.
IN OTHER NEWS: The one sports team what was supposed to never threaten to move has just threatened to move (found by Obscure Store and Reading Room).
Microsoul, Part One:
A Former Permatemp Speaks
“Vice is a moster so frightful to mein that but to be seen is to dispise yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.” -Alexander Pope Moral Essays on Man
“Vice is a moster so frightful to mein
that but to be seen is to dispise
yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face,
we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
-Alexander Pope
Moral Essays on Man
I HAVE TO CONCENTRATE on decommodification of the human soul.
I quit my permatemp job at Microsoft after one year of self-commodification.That’s when you view yourself as a commodity, something to be bought and sold. (I got it from Walter Benjamin, a Frankfurt School member who had to flee Nazi Germany).
Through a series of bizarre events I just left Microsoft one day. I just walked out and kept on walking.
Here is what I wrote when I finished my walk that fateful day:
Dear Microsoft,
I have been here one year now, gotten a raise, gained 40 completely unnecessary pounds, and stopped having sex, strangely enough.
I have become a slave to my work; neglecting myself, my loves, my passions, all for the shallow victory of releasing a product.
I have sacrificed my soul for a latte card (you know, the ones that you hand us when we work a 60-hour week, that are only redeemable at Microsoft cafes).
No matter how ridiculously funny that sounds, it is happening to everyone here.
Selling out is the modis operandi of this company. People brag about 90-hour work weeks.
It’s A Christmas Carol gone awry. Scrooge, instead of insisting Bob Cratchet work Christmas Day, brainwashes him into wanting to work Christmas Day.
It’s the “Microsoft Lifestyle”(TM). Overtime is not compulsory (that would be illegal); but work overtime or else.
I worked 60-hour weeks during the last phases of our product release. It didn’t even show up in my “Review.” Why would it? It’s the norm. I’m supposed to brag about it, be proud of it, like everyone else.
Let me tell you why I’m not proud. I have sacrificed myself for a company that won’t even offer its temps sick pay. And this is something the temps themselves agree with!
How do I explain the temps’ feeling this way? How can I explain the my slow descent into the catatonic agreement of a Microsoftie?
I can give the example of the latte cards: At first when you get one, you look at your boss like he’s an idiot. “Um, oh, thanks,” you might say, just to be polite. (I would have to work five minutes to pay for this latte down in the cafeteria).
Then you start noticing some people get more latte cards than others. Some would even hoard them; a stack of unused latte cards on a desk–now THAT was status.
Then, when I could, I started keeping a noticable pile of two latte cards on my desk. Envious co-workers’ eyes would dart from them to my computer screen as I performed yet another show-stopping feat.
Then the day came when I didn’t get a latte card: I bust my butt, I worked overtime, I gained the standard two extra pounds that week. and I didn’t get a latte card! I was thrown into a deep dark impenetrable depression.
Then I awoke.
“What?” I thought. “This had been a driving force in my life?”
I had been commodified.
I also found myself ignoring the total inequality that pervades the entire system. There is no such thing as equal pay for equal work in this illusionary world. And where are the black people? Where are the women? Where are the people over 40? Where is the ability to organize?
Ask anyone these questions at Microsoft and they’ll talk to you for an hour about how Microsoft is, well, different… special, you know.
No, I don’t know. Why is everyone here a young white male, Bill?
I realize I am leaving a church of some sorts. Microsoft is a religion to its workers. The blind loyalty to an obviously inferior product, the “rebellion” the workers seem to find in absolute conformity, fits a born-again Christian ideology. Redemption through Christ Gates. Bill is the infallible one.
I found, when I worked at Microsoft, it was pretty simple to figure out which side people where on before they even opened their mouths.
It’s a never-never land of agreement about how wonderful Bill is, and how horrible the government is for trying to interfere with something as sacred as capital gains. How could the creation of more millionaires be wrong?
And if you take this to its full conclusion, it’s eventually going to lead you to the idea that money really is a justification in itself. Money is salvation. Money is your reputation. If you’re a millionaire; who can put you down?
No one looks beyond the money, or asks question about how the money was made. Were products copied from other companies? Were unfair labor practices involved? Why is the government suing us again?
Since money is redemption, then all else is silly, idle chatter. At least it is to a Microsoftie.
These people take Microsoft’s side in EVERY court case.
Doesn’t anyone read the paper, you ask? Ask around and you’ll see the workers feel freedom of the press has gone a little too far. The papers are just full of anti-capitalist propoganda. The government is jealous of Microsoft’s wealth.
I ask, “What is so horrible about giving temps benefits?” and I find that even the temps here are on Microsoft’s side. “No, I won’t talk about my salary, the corporation doesn’t like it.” In fact, a huge amount of temps decided not to file for their retroactive stock benefits after a big court case win in 1999. It would be like losing their religion.
Then there is The Review, where aspects of my personality are scrutinized by people who don’t even know what personality is.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Providence hospitals in Seattle are merging with the Swedish Hospital circuit; ending the nun-managed Providence’s status as the largest women-owned company in Washington.
LAST THURSDAY AND FRIDAY, we discussed some essays by Henry Hughes and Dennis Rea in The Tentacle, Seattle’s periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music.
Writing about their experiences during the anti-WTO protests, Hughes and Rea posited that global business and the governments it owns are just the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations.”
They then present the type of avant, free-improv, and experimental music praised in The Tentacle as exemplifying a different model for social relations–one based on equality, shared pride, spontenaity, and free expression.
A sociocultural movement based on the principles of DIY culture (real indie music, real indie filmmaking, real indie publishing) would probably never lead to any singular mass uprising that would seriously threaten the United States government or the World Trade Organization.
But consider the legacy of Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution.”
Having seen the 1968 “Prague Spring” reform movement crushed by Soviet tanks, some underground musicians, writers, and thinkers set about, in spite of heavy censorship and repressions, to form a permanent alternative culture. A culture in which the very premises of authoritarian, top-down thinking would be replaced by notions of self-expression and voluntary association.
When the Soviets’ grip on eastern Europe finally loosened in the late ’80s, it was these folks who filled the void in both political and cultural leadership. The result: A country that made one of the smoothest post-Soviet transitions, that has a relatively healthy economy and political system, that even allowed the Slovaks’ bloodless secession.
The situation here’s much different than in the old Eastern Bloc, for sure.
Back there, back then, all non-official cultural expressions were tracked down and stomped on. Here, indie culture’s treated as corporate culture’s minor leagues (film festivals are promoted as showcasing “tomorrow’s Spielbergs;” indie rock scenes used to be hyped as “the Next Seattle”). If something shows no prospect for being “mainstreamed,” such as difficult-listening music, it’s ignored, left to wither in the shadows.
But the situation’s changing, at a speed faster than so-called “Internet Time.”
As this online column’s oft mentioned, the Net’s one-to-one and one-to-few modes of expression make standard U.S. notions of mass entertainment and mass marketing seem woefully outdated. The oldline TV networks, daily papers, movie studios, and record labels are only keeping their stock value up by consolidating with one another. The record giants in particular are losing market share worldwide, especially in places where local acts are taking back local audiences, away from the Anglophone superstars.
Folks everywhere are hungering for something more immediate, more personal, more “tribal” if you will, than the Time Warners and the Wal-Marts are equipped to provide.
This means an opportunity for avant-improv music (as well as other ground-level genres, from bluegrass to straight-edge) to form new audiences and alliances. And because I believe politics leads from culture and not the other way around, I also believe this is our best hope for forging a decentralized, bottom-up political movement the likes of which America’s never really had.
TOMORROW: Results of the latest MISCmedia questionnaire.
