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OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea (see below).
TIRED OF WTO-PROTEST MEMOIRS? Tough. ‘Cause here’s some more.
But these aren’t just police-brutality horror stories or look-at-me boasts.
The Tentacle, Seattle’s own invaluable periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music, has published a group of personal essay on the protests by its co-editors Henry Hughes, Christopher DeLaurenti, and Dennis Rea.
The three pieces, especially Hughes’s, offer up an intriguing premise: that protesting global corporations isn’t enough. The likes of Microsoft and ExxonMobil, according to these guys, are merely the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations” and “centralized… top-heavy organizations.”
Hughes also seems not to mind if the grand anti-WTO coalition of leftists, environmentalists, unions, et al. splits apart, because his own “politics are an order of magnitude more radical than that of organized labor.” He’s also less-than-enthusiastic about any organized, permanent activist group that becomes “an organization with the agenda of self-perpetuation, rather than a loose tool for fomenting revolution.”
According to Hughes, the problem isn’t just business empires but the whole 20th-century structure of organized human relations in which such empires (or even more centralized empires such as the Stalin or Hitler types) take root.
This is similar to the philosophy of the late Marxist/Freudian thinker Wilhelm Reich, who believed the western world needed massive political and economic changes, but those changes were impossible unless individuals learned to change the way they thought and behaved in their personal lives.
So–how do you accomplish that?
Hughes and Rea believe the kind of music they’ve been championing in The Tentacle for over a year now offers a sonic and social glimpse of their preferred alternative society.
Rea believes “experimental music is much closer in its aims and methods to the radical spirit of the demonstrations than any other form of music you can name.
“Like many of the WTO demonstrators,” Rea continues, some “improvising and experimental musicians advocate the abolition of outmoded and restrictive structures of organization, in this case musical structures that have long since outlived their usefulness. As one musician friend put it, improvised music at its best is a demonstration of anarchy in action–self-governance and collective action manifested in musical terms.”
Much as certain advocates of obscurantist political writing believe modern notions of “clarity” depend too much on linear or dumbed-down thought processes, Rea and Hughes believe the very forms and structures of standard western music (not just the major-label system that disseminates it) keep human minds and souls locked into standardized, authoritarian modes.
But much obscurantist writing (such as the writing styles used in certain religious cults) is used to actually encourage authoritarian obedience. Free-improv and experimental musics, on the other hand, stress ingenuity and creativity and personal craft and cooperation and equal collaboration–skills necessary for any real revolution that doesn’t just lead to another power elite running everything.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea.
SOME EVEN MISC.-ER ITEMS to peruse on your real-Washington’s-birthday non-holiday:
THE SECOND ISSUE of MISCmedia, the Magazine should be at subscribers’ mailboxes any day now. Thinking of subscribing? Here are some reasons why you should.
Reason one: If more once-a-month distro-pals don’t start helping out, we’re gonna have to cut back on the delivery of free copies around town.
Reason two: Subscribe during the March issue’s delivery cycle (approximately the next four weeks) and you’ll receive a cute little toy or trinket from our grab bag o’ goodies; including several giveaway doodads from the last High Tech Career Expo.
AD VERBS: The nationwide Azteca mexican-restaurant chain has discovered a shtick for associating its TV commercials with “authentic” Mexican culture of the pop variety. The spots closely resemble those telenovelas soap operas on Univision!
The stoic line readings, the over-drenched color schemes, the tearjerker situations–they’re all there.
The only differences are that the actors are speaking slightly-accented English and the ads are intentionally funny.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Redeye is a thick photocopy zine full of neo hiphop-graffiti style art and lettering, and articles about such popular national young-lefty topics as Mumia Abu-Jamal, “materialism and the lack of consciousness in hiphop,” coming of age in L.A., and Allen Ginsberg.
It’s also got a one-page essay repeating the fun but totally false rumor that the KFC restaurant chain changed its name from “Kentucky Fried Chicken” because the critters it serves up have been so genetically modified as to no longer legally qualify as chickens.
The tale’s gotten so widespread, the company has felt it necessary to put up a page debunking the hoax. The University of New Hampshire, referenced in some of the e-mail versions of the story, also has its own debunking page. Another telling of the story behind the story comes from About.com.
So you can be assured: KFC’s serving real chicken. Real often-greasy chicken, in often-small portions, served up by a global giant currently using a (re-)animated icon of its dead founder talking like a dorky white mall-rapper.
(Another untrue rumor Redeye didn’t know about: the one that claimed KFC’s profits went to the Ku Klux Klan.)
TOMORROW: Search engine fun.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
YESTERDAY, we discussed the putting-up-for-sale and potential loss of the Frontier Room, downtown Seattle’s last truly great dive bar and a gathering place for everyone from young punks to old pensioners.
That sale is probably predicated (the Frontier’s runners aren’t officially talking) by owner burnout; unlike most of our formerly-fair city’s cool-place disappearances.
The latest apparently doomed outpost of non-mellow life: The five-story Jem Studios and Galleries in the historic Washington Shoe Building.
For nearly 20 years, Jem’s been the heart and soul of the Pioneer Square Art Walk and a landmark in artist-controlled exhibition space. It got to be that way under the benign landlordship of Sam Israel, who was notorious for buying old buildings, renting them out cheap, and performing the least maintenance and upkeep on them allowed by law.
Israel’s will assigned his properties to a newly-formed nonprofit group, the Samis Foundation, to provide income for local Jewish schools. The Samis board has treated maximum income as its only operating goal for the buildings.
That’s meant the dislocation or annihilation of the Red White and Blue Restaurant, the Colourbox rock club, the ex-Pioneer Square Theatre, and all the small public-interest agencies that used to have offices in the historic Smith Tower (now mostly occupied by dot-coms).
Now, Samis has gotten around to the Shoe Building. The place is to be gentrified into hi-rent Internet offices, plus a luxury “loft” penthouse suite. (The latter, according to some rumors, is intended as a home for Samis’s president.)
The Times did a glowing, pro-gentrification article in its Sunday real estate section in late January. The story (no longer available online) talked about how the “art-loft lifestyle” was the latest In Thing among the fashionable New Money crowd, and the developers who are kicking out all the working artists as somehow bringing new energy to the arts scene.
To its credit, the Times ran a letter to the editor that called crap on all that. And to its credit, the Times also ran a weekday arts-section piece days later telling a more realistic take on the Jem story.
The Jem resident artists and gallery operators held a press conference at the most recent First Thursday. They wanted to raise public awareness about the plight of artist housing (and, by extension, all non-millionaire housing) here in City Extra-Light.
Jem’s current manager talked about getting a new studio-space complex in the city’s far south end (which would protect artists’ work spaces from gentrification for a little while but would be a lousy public gallery location). Some other speakers even set the audacious goal of trying to buy the Shoe Building from Samis (which insists it won’t sell).
The save-Jem-Studios drive might be a tiltin’-at-windmills effort or a publicity stunt. But the situation remains.
This town that used to pride itself on supporting “The Arts” is fast becoming a soulless blank, populated by hot-shots who have “lifestyles” but not lives.
TOMORROW: Cussing around the world.
THE HOMOGENIZATION OF URBAN AMERICA is sure not something going on just in Seattle–even though Seattleites, who typically try to maintain their collective ignorance about any other U.S. cities besides N.Y./L.A./S.F., might choose not to realize it.
The Brooklyn, N.Y. band Babe the Blue Ox has a song called “T.G.I.F.U.” about the proliferation of the same chain restaurants in town after town across the continent:
“Every city I get lost in Charlotte, Boston, even Austin Has a four-lane boulevard With the same damn grill and bar Every meal will be familiar Rest assured.”
“Every city I get lost in
Charlotte, Boston, even Austin
Has a four-lane boulevard
With the same damn grill and bar
Every meal will be familiar
Rest assured.”
In Seattle’s downtown core, the problem’s only partly the proliferation of the likes of Planet Hollywood and Gordon Biersch, as deplorable as that in itself might be.
There’s also the more pervasive and immediate threat posed by establishments that might be individually owned but with a common (all too common) theme of upscale blandness.
It’s getting so you can’t find any grub in this town anymore. Just “cuisine.” Hummus, penne pollo, “Market Price” trout almondine, etc. etc.; served up at joints with valet parking, “celebrity” executive chefs, and appetizer prices alone that would feed a normal bloke for a month. Joints that scream about how “unique” each of them’s supposed to be, yet are really just about all alike.
Every month, one more of the few remaining real-people places in Seattle gets destroyed for some overpriced “foodie” joint and/or luxury condos. Among the currently threatened: The Jem art studios, the Greyhound station, the Bethel Temple.
Now joining the ranks of the apparently doomed: the legendary, infamous Frontier Room.
It’s a classic dive bar, of the kind they not only don’t make anymore but couldn’t if they tried. It’s a place where, for decades, old-age pensioners and crusty punk rockers have shared the enjoyment of strong drinks, noise, smoke, dark red lighting, crummy yet cozy seats, and a well-lived-in atmosphere.
Up in the front restaurant room, they serve up real food for real folk: Burgers, fresh-cut fries, real ice cream shakes, soup, chowder, sandwiches, omelettes, and blue plate specials.
But the guy who ran the place with an iron hand for seemingly ever died a few years back. His daughter’s apparently tiring of the grind. (Neither she nor anyone else associated with the place will speak on the record.)
A real estate agent’s putting the business up for sale as an ongoing concern (10-year lease, liquor license, and all). His flyer lists a monthly rent of $3700 plus a mysterious added expense listed only as “NNN” (anybody out there know what that means?).
There ought to be enough present and former Frontier Room barflies who’ve made a buck or two in music and/or software. Let’s get some of these folks together to buy the Frontier and keep it just the way it is.
Maybe we could add some menu items to increase the daytime trade, and put a newsstand or espresso machine in the currently-unused portion of the Frontier’s storefront. But nothing the place currently sells should be dropped; and none of its current patronage should be made unwelcome.
We must save this piece of our civic soul. We must keep it from becoming another “cuisine” stand.
If we don’t do this, it would be just like raising the flag of surrender to the armies of gentrification.
TOMORROW: More of this line, concerning artist space.
IN OTHER NEWS: Chief artistic lesson of HBO’s recent Porky’s trilogy marathon: Female nudity is drama; male nudity is farce.
FOR THE LONGEST TIME, the local and national sports media portrayed Ken Griffey Jr. as the Nice Guy Who Finished First, at least in individual baseball achievements.
(Unfortunately for him, baseball’s a team sport, a lot more of one than basketball. Mariners fans have long known what Cubs fans have recently learned–that a singular home-run titan doesn’t make a championship team.)
Then, during the recent contract re-negotiations, Griffey was portrayed in the local press as having always really been the Mean Guy Who Wanted His Way. (As if any true superstar player didn’t have an overriding ambition to do his best and to push those around him to do the same.)
Now, by accepting a new contract worth millions less than he would’ve gotten from the Mariners (or the Yankees or Braves) just to finish his career with his hometown (small-market) team, he’s being portrayed as the Nice Guy once again. He probably always a guy who enjoyed being nice when he could but who was also subject to stress and frustration like anyone in his hi-pressure position. He didn’t change; just the image.
My only regret,besides that of not being able to watch him break a few batting records here in town, is that Griffey’s personal “best company to work for in America” has had such sleazy owners.
No sooner was the borderline-racist Marge Schott out of the Cincinnatti Reds’ front office than insurance tycoon and financier Carl Lindner came in. Lindner’s best known nationally for his hostile takeover of Taft Broadcasting (a TV-station chain that had also owned the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio and Aaron Spelling’s production company).
Lindner later sold pieces of Taft to finance his takeover of Chiquita Brands. You may recall last year Lindner quashed a Cincinnatti Enquirer investigative series into financial irregularities at the food company (previously known for its former violent role in Latin American politics). Lindner not only got the paper to stop running the results of its investigation, but it successfully redirected the national media spin on the story to the tactics of the reporters, not the funny-money dealings the reporters were investigating.
How could such a Nice Guy like Junior want so badly to work for such a meanie like Lindner?
And will this change my view of how nice Junior is or isn’t? (It won’t. Really.)
TOMORROW: Another great human space gets threatened with removal.
IN OTHER NEWS: Roger Vadim, who passed on last Thursday, directed 26 films and an assortment of French TV projects. Several of his films have endured as classic entertainments of eroticism and verve (And God Created Woman, Barbarella). Others remain as unsung treasures awaiting rediscovery (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Ms. Don Juan) or period pieces of what one director once thought audiences would find sexy (Night Games, Pretty Maids All In a Row, the remake of And God Created Woman). But the headlines and the TV obits barely found time to mention his work; preferring to describe Vadim only as the ex of Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, and Catherine Deneuve. Years ago, the U.S. publishers of his (now out-of-print) memoirs took the same angle, retitling the book Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda. One of cinema’s greatest celebrants of female beauty had attained a traditionally-female fate, becoming known only as a shadow behind the achievements of his spouses.
YESTERDAY, we started discussing the fantasy universe promoted in those new rah-rah, way-new business magazines, Fast Company and Business 2.0.
But business writing and advice seems to be everywhere.
CNBC runs 15 hours a day of financial coverage. CNN and Fox News Channel have been adding additional hours of money talk to their daytime lineups. Satellite dishes offer the all-day, all-nite stock-talkin’ and number-flashin’ of CNNfn and Bloomberg TV.
There’s a site called GreenMagazine.com that claims to be “about attaining the freedom to do what you want to do,” with investment tips and celebrity financial-advice interviews with the likes of Emo Phillips.
Even Jesse Jackson has a money guidebook called It’s About the Money. In it, Jackson and his Congressmember son talk about financial planning as “The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony” for minority and working-class Americans.
While the Jacksons’ main lessons are pretty basic stuff (get out of debt, avoid those hi-interest credit cards, start saving, build home equity), it’s still more than a bit disconcertin’ to see the onetime Great Lefty Hope now traveling the talk-show circuit with the same subject matter as the Motley Fools.
Perhaps it’s time this website and print magazine got with the program. I can see it now:
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours. “Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime. Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill. “Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime. “You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121. “Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours.
“Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime.
Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill.
“Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime.
“You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121.
“Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
MONDAY: An involuntary single’s thoughts on Valentine’s Day.
IN OTHER NEWS: Hey Vern, Ernest’s dead. Future film historians will look at Jim Varney’s nine-film series as the late-century period’s last true heirs to the old lowbrow B-movie series comedies like The Bowery Boys and even the Three Stooges (also critically unappreciated at their times).
THE WIRED WEBSITE DIDN’T INVENT the banner ad, despite its official claims to have done so (Prodigy did). And Wired didn’t invent rah-rah way-new business writing.
Elbert Hubbard, Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill, and Steve Forbes’s late dad Malcolm all used to love pontificatin’ and philosophisin’ about industry as the driving force of the human race, commerce as the world’s noblest calling, and the businessman as rightful leader of all things.
All Wired did, and it’s an important little thing, was to marry this motivational pep-talk lingo to the hyperaggressive hipness of techno music and corporate-PoMo design, and to apply it not toward such old-economy trades as shoe selling but toward the Now-Now-Now realm of tech-mania.
But for all its self-promotin’ bluster, Wired never got the mythical sack of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow, and had to be sold to the Conde Nast oldline mag empire.
It’s taken a couple of other ventures to morph the concept into something more reader- and advertiser-friendly.
Wired treated the Way New Economy, ultimately, as just the replacement of an old elite by a new elite. Its fantasy-universe was a rarified hip-hierarchy centered in San Francisco and ruled by a clique of aging Deadheads working as strategic consultants to telecom and oil companies.
In contrast, both Fast Company and Business 2.0 depict the “revolution in business” as something anybody can, at least in theory, get in (and cash in) on. Both mags are thick with second-person features on how you and your firm can get connected, shake off those old tired procedures, and rev up for today’s supercharged Net-economy.
Fast Company (circulation 325,000) has become the cash cow of Mortimer Zuckerman’s publishing mini-empire, which has also included U.S. News & World Report, the N.Y. Daily News, and (until he recently sold it) the Atlantic Monthly.
Business 2.0 (circulation 240,000) has quickly become the American flagship of the British-owned Imagine Media, whose other “Media With Passion” titles include Mac Addict and the computer-game mag Next Generation.
Each of the two has its individual quirks, but they essentially play in the same league by the same rules.
And rules constitute the main theme of both magazines–breaking all the old rules, mastering all the new rules, and, with the right pluck and luck, getting to make some rules of your own.
One of the new rules, all but unspoken, is that everything in the reader’s life is apparently supposed to revolve around the ever-more-aggressive worship of Sacred Business. In the shared universe of Fast Company and Business 2.0, nothing exists that doesn’t relate to (1) amassing wealth and/or fame, (2) having adrenaline-rush fun while doing so, and (3) achieving the ideal life (or at least the ideal lifestyle) via the purchase of advertisers’ products.
Wired, for all its elitism and silliness, did and does acknowledge a larger universe out there. It always has at least a few items about how digitization is affecting art, music, politics, sex, food, architecture, charity, and/or religion.
In the world according to the way-new business magazines, however, none of those other human activities is considered worth mentioning even in passing. It’s as if all other realms of human endeavor are merely unwelcome distractions to the magazines’ fantasy reader, a hard-drivin’ entrepreneurial go-getter with no time for anything that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.
Fast Company (which is slightly less totally business-focused than Business 2.0) did run a cover-story package last November about businesspeople (especially female ones) who find trouble balancing their careers with their other life-interests and duties.
But even then, second-person narcissism ruled the day. It was all about how You (by identifying with the articles’ case studies) could preserve your personal sanity, and hence become an even better cyber-warrior.
IN OTHER NEWS: Last November, I wrote about the hit UK soap Coronation Street, which can be seen on the CBC in Canada (and on some Seattle-area cable systems) but not in the U.S. Since then, the Street has finally made its U.S. debut, on the CBC-co-owned cable channel Trio. The channel’s not on many cable systems yet, but you can get it on the DirecTV satellite-dish service.
FIRST, A THANKS to all however many or few of you listened to my bit Sunday afternoon on “The Buzz 100.7 FM.” The next aural MISCevent will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
TO USE A WORD popularized by a certain singer-songwriter on a certain record label, imagine.
Imagine a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents; that held the original copyright to the “His Master’s Voice” logo.
Imagine a company that, before WWII, virtually controlled the record business in the Eastern Hemisphere. A company that could rightly proclaim itself “The Greatest Recording Organisation in the World.”
Imagine a company whose labs helped develop the technology of television as we still know it, equipped the world’s first regularly-scheduled TV station, and later controlled the production company that brought us Benny Hill and Danger Mouse.
Imagine a company that, by acquiring Capitol Records, attained the legacies of Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and the Beach Boys.
Imagine a company that had the Beatles.
Now, imagine a company that squandered that vast advantage, via questionable investments in military electronics, movie theaters, real estate, TV-furniture rental shops, and an almost singlehanded drive to keep the British filmmaking industry alive (noble but fiscally ill-advised).
And so, after a decade of spinoffs and de-conglomeratizations and downsizings, it’s time for us all to use the words of a certain other singer-songwriter and say “EMI–Goodbye.”
What’s currently left of the EMI Music Group will be folded into a joint venture with the worldwide music assets of Time Warner, which is itself being acquired by America Online.
On the one hand, this means the end of the EMI/Capitol operation as a stand-alone entity.
On the other hand, it means AOL’s taken its first step at whittling away Time Warner’s media holdings; something I’d predicted a month ago. The new music operation would be much larger then TW’s current Warner Music Group, but would only be half owned by AOL/TW. AOL could easily siphon off additional pecentages, like TW used to do with its movie unit.
On the other other hand, it’s another milestone down the seemingly unending path of big-media consolidations. In the music business, that means six companies that once controlled an estimated 85 percent of all recorded-music sales are now down to four: Sony, AOL/TW/EMI, Seagram/Universal, and Bertlesmann/BMG. (Only Time Warner had been U.S.-owned; and now its record biz will be half-British owned.)
Despite the vast mainstream-media hurrahs over the AOL-TW merger (and this subsequent deal) as some bold new step toward the wired age, and the accompanying alternative-media bashing of what are perceived as ever more powerful culture trusts, we’ve got about as many major local/national media outlets as ever, some of which have broader product lines and which are, in practicality, no more or less politically center-right than they ever were.
What’s more, these companies often find their new wholes to be worth not much more than the sums of their former parts, even after the usual massive layoffs. The Warner Music Group had already been oozing sales and market share; one article put part of the reason on its decreasing ability to force the whole world to love its Anglophone superstars: “Warner has historically relied on distributing American acts around the world, but many overseas audiences are starting to prefer homegrown acts.”
The oft-hyped “synergy” among these under-one-roof media brands has never really worked out, and probably never will to any great extent. (Music historians may remember that the old CBS Records issued Bob Dylan’s antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” but CBS Television wouldn’t let him sing it on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
What the conglomerooneys can, and do, do is raise the stakes of entry–for their own kinds of stuff. You want to break out a choreographed, cattle-call-auditioned “boy band”? Better have a huge video budget, lots of gossip-magazine editor friends, good dealings with the N2K tour-promotion people, and the clout to tell MTV they won’t get an exclusive on your already-established “girl band” unless they also play your new “boy band.”
But if you’ve got a street-credible lady or gent who writes and sings honest stuff about honest emotions, you can still establish this act far better under indie-label means than via the majors.
Indeed, as certain acts I know who’ve been chewed up and spit out by the majors tell me, the behemoths get more incompetent every year at promoting or marketing anything. That may be why they’re devoting more and more effort to only the most easily marketed acts, and increasingly leaving the rest of the creative spectrum for the rest of us to discover on our own.
TOMORROW: The future of Utopias.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here are the Canadian government’s proposed graphic cigarette warning messages. The problem with these, as other commentators have already noted, is that teens will likely adore the gruesome death-imagery and hence smoke more. Just as the Philip Morris-funded antismoking commercials in the U.S. depict nonsmoking teens as hopeless geeks….
JUST DAYS AFTER the AOL/Time Warner merger announcement caused a raft of speculation about even further monster media consolidations, the Federal Communications Commission made its first forward-looking move since possibly the Ford administration. It agreed to license as many as 1,000 “low power” FM radio stations to local noncommercial interests around the country.
At last!
Years of lobbying and petitioning by “microradio” advocates (community leaders, “new urbanists,” religious-right broadcasters seeking new syndication outlets for their shows, and pirate-station operators wanting to “go legit”) finally won over the commissioners, over the continuing hue and cry of Big Media’s lawyers and publicists.
Some reasons why this is so Damn Utterly Cool (at least until some jerk messes it all up):
(There’s nothing in the proposed rules, at least in the tiny summaries of them I’ve seen, that would prevent micro-stations from picking up syndicated shows or even 24-hour Net-fed audio. I’m just hoping the movement won’t devolve into just another centralized national network arrangement.)
Competition for available micro-frequencies could be fierce, particularly in already signal-crowded urban zones. So all ye who’ve dreamt of making real community broadcasting happen, ye who’ve wanted to run a pirate station but were afraid of getting caught, ye who’ve long insisted what the airwaves really need is non-Republican religious fare or non-corporate news or local hiphop or booming drum-‘n’-bass DJing or Asian-immigrant-language talk shows or neo-cruster punk rock or avant difficult-listening music or whatever–NOW is your time to get together with like-minded folks, form coalitions with some of these other programming interest groups, form a tax-exempt organization (or find an existing one to operate under), and get ready to file your license petition.
TOMORROW: The rise and rise of a media cliche.
FIRST, A BIG THANX to all who attended our fantabulous dual premiere event for the new LOSER book and MISCmedia the magazine last night; and to the Two Bells Tavern staff (especially Mark Harlow) for making it plausible.
YESTERDAY, we suggested proclaiming a year-long or longer Seattle Jubilee Year, climaxing with the 150th anniversary of the city’s founding at Alki Point, as a way to make up for the canceled Seattle Center New Year’s party.
We mentioned that this should be as big a bash as we can arrange; but that we shouldn’t depend too much on city funding.
What we didn’t mention was that the city’s millennium project had been a botched affair even before its climactic evening was shut down. The canceled party was a lot smaller in scale than first planned; associated schemes to light up the town eventually whittled down to the lighting of a single bridge.
Mayor Schell, the story goes, had apparently handed off to the Seattle Arts Commission the task of raising private dough for this, but gave the commission no help to speak of. The city’s old money, seldom interested in public gatherings, didn’t contribute much; the city’s new money, mainly interested in permanent architectural monuments to itself, also largley demurred from the opportunity.
But I’m pleased to report of at least one new-money figure in this town who’s putting his cash into a populist spectacle.
Seems there’s this Microsoft stock-option tycoon named Chris Peters. His idea of gaming has always had nothing to do with Tomb Raider and everything to do with tenpins. He’s now offered to lead an investor group to buy the Professional Bowlers Association and its national championship tour.
The PBA, heretofore member-owned since its 1958 inception, has fallen upon hard times. It lost its network TV contract in 1996; ABC apparently thought the sport wasn’t hip enough to draw the ever-prized young demographics. The PBA board decided that bringing in private owners was the only way to save the tour–and, perhaps, to give pro bowling a newer, younger, hipper image for the cyber-age.
The only problem with this scenario is bowling’s already way cool; precisely because it’s not frenetically “hip.” Happenin’ local nightspots like the Breakroom and Shorty’s are full of bowling imagery. The Soundgarden/Mudhoney guys are avid bowlers. The Jillian’s sports-bar chain’s supposed to start work this summer on building a new near-downtown alley, Seattle’s first new bowling joint in decades.
It’s not youth disinterest that caused the closing of Village Lanes, Bellevue Lanes, Lake City Bowl, and Green Lake Bowl since the early ’80s. It’s real estate. A bowling alley uses vast (by urban standards) square footage, which developers believe is more profitably used for retail (or for other recreation concepts, such as video-game parlors). The Jillian’s folks think they can make bowling pencil out by making it part of a whole leisure-time complex, including pool tables and full booze service, and by renting out the space in whole or in part to dot-com companies’ staff parties.
Chris Peters doesn’t have to make bowling cool. Indeed, any attempt to market it as something loud and “X-treme” would ruin the coolness it’s already got.
What Peters will need to do is more effectively market the sport in all its existing glory–loud shirts, whispering announcers, and all.
TOMORROW: Late-’90s nostalgia.
I KNOW A COMEDIAN who moved to L.A. to make it big in showbiz, and who’s currently in day-job work as a crew member on an awful made-for-cable crime show.
He sometimes tells stories about the Hollywood hustler mentality. The way he describes it, it’s even worse than the worst you’ve heard.
Of course, it’s one thing for hundreds of monomaniacal would-be alpha males to scramble around a field with profit potential, such as feature films or boy-band music videos. The hustling takes a different, even more desperate turn when applied in a sub-industry in apparent permanent decline–the production of weekly dramatic TV series.
The old-line networks have been losing audiences to cable and the Net and assorted other time-wasting opportunities. Cable channels will never have the individual reach to support the bloated production budgets producers are used to.
And now, the lure of low-budget entertainment has again reached the old broadcast networks, in the form of a once-moribund genre.
When Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? became a ratings smash in its first two mini-series mountings, the sitcom and cop-show crowd (and their coke dealers and call-girl suppliers) got paranoid, my source claims.
They saw the show as a direct threat to their own livelihoods. If the networks could achieve decent ratings from such low-budget productions, suddenly the careers of a few thousand L.A. “show runners,” producers, writers, set builders, “sticks with tits” beach-babe extras, stars, stars’ agents, stars’ personal trainers, celebrity “news” reporters, etc. etc. would be in dire peril.
So an effort has been made to kill Millionaire, the best way Hollywood knows how. By imitating it to death.
According to my correspondent’s story, production companies didn’t pitch Greed, Winning Lines, and Twenty-One to the networks in hopes these ripoff shows would succeed, but so that there’d be a quiz show glut that would shove Millionaire into a premature grave.
Hmmmm. Reminds me of a conspiracy theory that I once heard about the L.A. record industry.
Something about how, in the early part of the previous decade, the major labels and their fellow-travelers saw indie rock as a threat to the very street-credibility of corporate rock. So, supposedly, the majors signed, groomed and hyped the most derivative faux-“alternative” acts they could find. That way, “alternative rock” would be redefined as just another genre, a fad to be played out and discarded like any other.
There’s just one problem with such a theory: It requires that corporate music bosses be far more intelligent than all evidence has shown them to be.
And from what my comedian acquaintance says about corporate TV guys, they’re apparently not any smarter than corporate music guys.
So I could easily imagine the kill-Millionaire plot backfiring. Perhaps big-money, hard-quiz shows will have a short life atop the ratings. (Certainly the Millionaire knockoffs are all lamer than lame.) But that could just lead to other cheap hits–different types of game shows, or skit comedies, or variety shows, or any of the other assorted value-priced genres that have always been mainstays of TV schedules around the world. Maybe even an English-language Sabado Gigante that would combine all these concepts under one package.
It could result in a more fiscally-stable broadcasting biz, and also in shows that feature a more direct-seeming rapport between performers and audiences, instead of the slick, distanced blandness of most current Hollywood prime-time fare.
And if that happens, you expect the L.A. powers-that-be to get even more paranoid.
TOMORROW: Praying for Turkey.
IN OTHER NEWS: Four years ago, there were six major record companies. Now there are four; as EMI, the company of the Beatles and Edith Piaf, a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents, falls to the consolidators.
IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: The matriarch of NW enviro-activism makes it to a third century but no more.
IT’S SO NICE TO KNOW that I’m not the seemingly only person who’s tired of Internet-stock inflation.
Indeed, there seems to be a game going on among amateur and semipro market observers. They’re waiting for the dot-com stock bubble to pop. Some have been waiting for months. So have I.
It’s not that I particularly want those young families with mutual funds to lose their kids’ college money; or for those overworked young workers at venture-capital-dependent Net companies to lose their jobs.
But it would be nice if some of the money-lust mania got out of the game.
It hurts the economic fabric, all that inpouring of wealth into the virtual casino that is tech speculation.
And it hurts the social fabric, all that reverse distribution of wealth into the already-wealthy classes. Behind the media-hype over garage entrepreneurs turning into instant IPO-zillionaires, the fact remains that just about all the massive new wealth North America’s created in the past couple of decades has flowed to the richest 20 percent or so of the populace.
Where the great American middle-class dream once stood (and yes, I know I used to scoff at that dream while it was alive, but that’s beside the point), now there’s a new caste system gelling, like that old Jell-O 1-2-3 dessert mix: The Bill Gateses and the Warren Buffets sitting rich and creamily on top; the lower-upper and upper-middle-class professionals and the dot-com mogul wannabes in a semi-fluid layer beneath the top; and all the rest of us Kmart shoppers gelatinously stuck as a mass of goo at the bottom.
Net-stock mania didn’t cause this by any means. It just symbolizes it.
By the end of last year, there were two main stock markets–not NYSE and NASDAQ per se, but the speculation-bloated tech stocks and the sluggish everything else. But as January began, the tech issues began to slide and stumble like a beginning skier, while “flight to quality” investors propped up traditional industrial stocks and bond issues.
But by mid-month, the sector had already gained back its declines and seemed to be a-roarin’ again; thanks in part to the AOL/Time Warner consolidation mania and rumors of a forced Microsoft breakup.
So maybe the tech-stock bubble might not pop.
Maybe it’ll just gently deflate instead.
Mind you, I still think the Internet is, and will continue to be, changing darn near everything humans do; from product-supply chains to underground-art movements. And I realize these new ventures are risky. And I hope the folks investing in them understand the risks. And I also hope they understand even the “winners” in the Net-biz universe may take longer than “Internet time” to show real profits. (Heck, in old-fashioned media a big new venture like a splashy national magazine isn’t expected to turn a profit for three to five years.)
It’s just that this transitoriness is the way things are now. Nothing to get that excited about; nothing to risk one’s life savings on. Unless you really want to.
MEANWHILE: Only an ego-big-as-all-outdoors such as Bill Gates would manufacture an excuse to kick himself upstairs (into a position of just as much big-picture authority, just fewer day-to-day duties)–the excuse being he needs to oversee stratagems to make Windows even more obligatory; i.e., even more of what the Justice Dept. says it’s too much of already…. And here’s a Microsoft permatemp (an old college pal of mine, in fact) who worked three years of up to 90-hour weeks and still didn’t get to be a “regular employee.”
TOMORROW: Looking at real-life film locations.
TWO POLICE PROFESSIONAL-ASSOCIATION GUYS wrote a Seattle Times op-ed piece last week, asking Seattle Mayor Paul Schell to step down.
They said Schell’s handling of the World Trade Organization convention, the protests against it, and the police response to the protests was all wrong.
So far, I’ve no disagreement. But then these two go on to explain how and why they think Schell failed. They apparently believe the Schell-led police response wasn’t brutal enough.
No, no, no!
The cops, and the rent-a-cops trucked in from other jurisdictions (whether or not Schell was still in full control of their actions by then, which remains to be investigated), first “did nothing,” or at least very little, to the strategic vandals and random looters. Then, as if by excuse, they spent the following three days tear-gassing and pepper-spraying everybody in sight, as far as a mile or more away from the convention site.
Then, just to show himself to be even more afraid of people and of public life, Schell canceled the Seattle Center New Year’s Eve. (The free, public New Year’s Eve, that is; $50-$150-and-up events elsewhere in town went on, as did the public bashes in Tacoma, NYC, Jerusalem, Belfast, etc.).
In the days after this decision, his excuses for it got ever lamer, to the point where he actually proclaimed himself to not be a wuss.
As my mom always said, if a boy thinks he has to tell you how tough he is all the time, it just shows he’s the real weakling.
Schell did indeed botch the WTO-protest response. But that response was excessively, not insufficiently, forceful. And it was an over-reaction to the results of the municipal power structure’s own narrow vision. Everybody knew there were going to be self-styled anarchists showing up here. It was all over the TV news in the weeks before WTO.
But Schell’s bureaucrats might not belong to “everybody.” Knowing their heavy upscale-baby-boomer makeup, they could very well be part of that certain subculture that only listens to NP-fucking-R and only reads the New York-fucking-Times.
But even if they’re not extreme, Schell and his minions are definitely Out Of It.
They’re near-quintessential Pro-Business Democrats. They’re so concerned with placating downtown chain stores, condo developers, and the affluent that they not only don’t care about the under-50-grand-a-year folks, they seem to actually wish we no longer existed.
But I’d hate for any potential Schell recall movement to degenerate into a two-sided battle between the elitist Democrats he represents and the demoagoguian Republicans the aforementioned police-association men represent.
If there’s something more dangerous than leaders who only listen to NPR, it’s leaders who only listen to Rush Limbaugh and company.
MONDAY: If dot-com hype can fade away, can cyber-futurist hype do the same?
AT THE END OF ’99, New York magazine essayist Michael Wolff predicted “old media” companies would buy dot-com companies with the cash these E-commercers have been paying to these established media giants for expensive TV commercials.
Didn’t take long for his prophecy to come true, sort of.
Yesterday, Time Warner (Warner Bros., The WB, CNN, Cartoon Network, TNT, Atlanta Braves, World Championship Wrestling, Warner Music Group, Rhino Records, Castle Rock Entertainment, New Line Cinema, CD Now, DC Comics, People, InStyle, Fortune, MAD, et al.) said it would combine with America Online (which had previously digested Netscape, CompuServe, and MovieFone).
The twist: Instead of TW simply engulfing and devouring AOL, the deal’s being touted as a merger (history’s biggest, by stock value) that would leave AOL in front of the new company’s name, and would assume AOL’s stock-ticker symbol. AOL shareholders would own 55 percent of the new company, to be called “AOL Time Warner.” AOL bossman Steve Case will be chairman of the combo, which should emerge from the various regulatory and bureaucratic processes by the end of this year.
The Associated Press even referred to the deal as AOL acquiring TW.
If anything, TW shareholders are getting the sweet end of the deal in pure financial terms. Thanks to the stock market’s dot-com speculation mania (something we’ll probably discuss at greater length next week), AOL’s stock was worth twice as much on Monday as TW’s–even though TW has much larger and vaster operations.
Variety, ever praising the old-media values, insists the deal’s details show that AOL needed TW more than the other way around. The online biz, the showbiz trade paper insists, is becoming more and more dependent upon “content.” That, and the old buzzword “synergy” (the excuse given 10 years ago for the original Time Inc./Warner Communications merger).
You remember synergy, don’t you? That was the magic word under which, say, Sports Illustrated and CNN were supposed to mesh seamlessly into a greater co-prosperity sphere. As the aforementioned Michael Wolff previously noted, it hasn’t quite turned out that way; leaving TW an overall financial underperformer trapped under several layers of Hollywood bloat. The big priorities at TW in recent years haven’t been the “content” operations but the distribution mechanisms; resulting in projects like SpaceJam, conceived as merchandising and cross-promotion tools first and as movies second.
But AOL could still have needed TW precisely because of its distribution properties–specifically, TW’s collection of local cable-TV systems (one of America’s top five).
AT&T, which bought TCI’s even bigger batch of local cable monopolies, has been aggressively moving into cable modem service It’s been positioning its own ISP, @Home, as its cable customers’ only home-broadband choice–a move which, if unchecked, could lead to the company having heavy influence over what individual Net users got to access. Regulators in Portland and other localities have tried to force AT&T to allow other ISPs on its cable; challenges which are still crawling through the courts.
Time Warner has its own cable-modem enterprise (entitled, synergistically enough, “Road Runner”). If AOL was going to stay strong in the emerging high-speed Net era, it had to have a deal with a big cable-modem operator. Now it has one.
When AT&T devoured TCI, it spat out a majority interest in TCI’s content operations (its stakes in Fox Sports Net, Discovery Networks, and assorted other cable channels). It’s not hard to imagine a similar future scenario in which AOL absorbs TW’s cable systems, then decides to spin off or sell off the assorted magazine, movie, TV, cable-channel, and other media properties; either as a whole or as individual dismemberments.
What would the synergy advocates (let alone the content advocates) say then?
TOMORROW: Why ‘Attitude’ is such a bore.
IN A RETAIL RECORD STORE (I’m going to try to avoid the term “brick and mortar,” which should’ve been on Matt Groening’s “Forbidden Words” list for this year), space limitations necessitate what you’ll get to choose from.
It’s usually some mix of what the store operators believe will sell (whatever’s getting the hype or buzz in its respective genre this month; what’s sold well in the recent past) and what they want you to buy (personal favorites; stuff they’ve got too much of this week; stuff they get extra profit margins from).
But on the Web, as you know, the “stock in trade” is limited only by what the operators can special-order from their wholesale suppliers. Web-based music stores can therefore sell any darn thing they want to, to just about anyone who’s got the credit rating.
Web music “malls,” which rent or give away server space to any artist with wares to offer, do away with even minimal “quality control.”
I’ve previously said this is an overall good thing. If properly nourished, this could be a vital part of the demolition of the big-media cartel (or at least a strong challenge to it) and the triumph of what Patti Smith once called “The Age Where Everybody Creates.”
But I also appreciate the great difficulty a band has in getting any attention from the users of an MP3 free-for-all site, where thousands of other bands (many of them quite similar to your own) vie for the same attention, and where free streaming-audio files don’t necessarily spur users to buy whole CDs of a band’s stuff.
Nevertheless, there is some cool/odd/cute stuff on these sites. From time to time, MISCmedia will attempt to find you a few of them. Such as the following (in no particular order):
TOMORROW: New media buys old media, or is it the other way around?
