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SOME WOMEN SPEND FORTUNES trying to look sexy. But none would ever spend a dime directly for sex.
That’s the message of an article in the print version of the sex-workers’ zine Blackstockings. (It’s not available on the zine’s website as of this writing.)
The piece’s writer wants to be mean to any het-male readers of the zine–men who are probably picking it up out of support and/or sympathy for the women and gay men in the escort, stripper, phone sex, and porn trades, and should be thanked instead of scolded.
But no, this writer wants to talk trash to any guys out in her reading audience who have the common but unrealistic fantasy of sexually servicing women for money.
It’s an intriguing dream, to imagine oneself such a great lover as to charge cash from ladies. As long as you don’t think of having to go through some of the everyday hassles women in the sex-biz face–from having to mate with unattractive people (as spoofed in the recent farce movie Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo) to legal troubles, cruel pimps, personal-safety threats, and the other stuff Blackstockings regularly reports in detail.
While women directly buying sex is rare in North America’s cities, a lot of more common transactions come close. Women have often “paid” indirectly to satisfy their hormones–day-spa treatments from Senor Bruno; costly singles-bar apparel; affairs that put a woman’s marriage and/or career at risk; abusive relationships a woman might stay in because of her addiction to the intense sex; seductions that lead to confidence-game scams.
Some of these costly behaviors might theoretically be better replaced by discreet, professional encounters with men trained to completely please a woman and to expect nothing in return but the bucks. (That could also be a potential godsend to older or shier women, or professional women who don’t have the time or patience for the dating grind.)
And it is happenning; just not anywhere around here.
Early last year, I mentioned how, in the Caribbean, the sex-tourism industry had discovered female customers. There’s an extensive item about it in the latest Utne Reader, called “In Search of the Big Bamboo.”
The story describes island “beach boys” who troll the resorts and tourist zones, offering their toned, dark-skinned bodies to visiting women in exchange for “gifts,” some of which are in the form of cash. The story adds that similar scenes take place in Brazil, the Philippines, Greece, Spain, India, and that sex-biz stalwart Thailand–spots where the weather’s warm, the scenery’s exotic, no gossipy neighbors are around, and women with money can meet studly young men with much less money.
This means certain females, under certain conditions, will indeed behave as “johns–” the behavior certain radical-feminists used to point to as evidence of the universal ickiness of all males and the universal victimhood of all females.
But it makes a little more sense if you can abandon such narrow gender stereotypes and accept that women really can do everything men can; including things an ’80s radical-feminist might disapprove of.
As for the ’90s “sex-positive” feminism of Blackstockings, the existence of overseas “beach boy” hooking proves that females have (1) females have desires, and (2) in a monetary-based society, desires will be traded for currency.
It just probably won’t involve any would-be Deuce Bigalows in the Blackstockings readership, at least not soon.
MONDAY: More on the MP3 glut.
ELSEWHERE:
BAD WRITING has seemingly always been with us.
So has bad writing by academics, self-styled “communications” experts, and others who presumably ought to know better.
I’ve certainly attempted to read a lot of it as part of my cultural-critiquing career. And some of the worst comes from self-styled political leftists–guys ‘n’ gals who supposedly want to overthrow existing elitist institutions in favor of a sociopolitical regime more responsive to The People.
The teaching-biz trade mag Lingua Franca came out last month with a whole article on the topic of whether bad writing was necessary. It’s apparently a big issue in certain ivory-tower circles, according to writer James Miller: “Must one write clearly, as [George] Orwell argued, or are thinkers who are truly radical and subversive compelled to write radically and subversively–or even opaquely, as if through a glass darkly?”
Some campus-leftist obscurantists, of course, aren’t really dreaming for a Dictatorship of the Prolateriat but rather, whether they admit it or not, for a Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia–a society in which learned theoriticians will rationally decide what’s best for everyone (a sort of cross between Sweden and Singapore). Such ideologues will naturally go for ideological discourse that doesn’t make a whiff of sense to outsiders.
Others, according to Miller, actually defend their writing style with anti-authoritarian arguments.
Miller quotes ’50s German philosopher Theodor Adorno as proclaiming that “lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision” are merely “ideologies” that have been “invented” by “editors and then writers” for “their own accommodation….” “Concrete and positive suggestions for change merely strengthen [the power of the status quo], either as ways of administering the unadministratable, or by calling down repression from the monstrous totality itself.”
In short (just the way Adorno wouldn’t want it): Readable writing can’t help but reflect standardized, conformist ways of thinking. To imagine a truly radical alternative to the way things are, you’ve gotta use different thought processes, and use written forms that reflect these processes.
I don’t buy it.
You see, there’s this little discipline called “technical writing.” Maybe you’ve heard of it. A lot of ladies and gents in this hi-tech age are studying it.
One of the tenets of good tech writing is that some topics are naturally complex–such as PC hardware and software design, operation, and maintenance. But they still can and should be explained as clearly as reasonably possible, without losing necessary detail or treating the reader as an idiot. Certain works of tech writing necessarily require that the reader have a basic familiarity with the topic at hand, and will use certain nouns and verbs not used in everyday discourse, but should still strive to communicate what they’re trying to communicate effectively and efficiently.
Political and social theories can be as complex as circuit-board schematics and C++ programming code, if not more. But, as shown in the products of Common Courage Press and Seven Stories Press, among others, these ideas can still be expressed in readable, persuasive ways.
TOMORROW: The one sexual behavior women never do–or do they?
YESTERDAY, we discussed something I’ve long hoped for and others now fear and wish to prevent: The decline of the New York/California duopoly on pop culture in America (and, hence, the world).
Meanwhile, in the sociopolitical realm, some misguided guides still insist that we all will become just like California. As Newsweek claims, “California, as always, shows us our future.”
The magazine’s specifically claiming that all of the several states are going to repeat what that state’s gone through; as an emerging “majority of minorities” racial makeup realigns old political coalitions and fuels an Anglo reactionary retreat from multicultural ideals.
But not all of America has the major corporate-agribusiness lobby that helped give California the political careers of Nixon, Reagan, et al. Northwest “progressive” politics had some of its roots in family farmers fighting the big banks and railroads. California Republicanism was hugely influenced by factory-farm interests who’d been in cahoots with the banks and the railroads.
This, along with the Hollywood-bred schtick of hyped-up and dumbed-down “populist” campaigns on behalf of those already in power, led to the peculiarly divisive, reactionary breed of politics that have bogged down the most populous state lo these past three decades or more; and which have been exported to the nation via Nixon, Reagan, Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet” advisors, et al.
(It also might explain a political left-of-center up here that, during of the first half of the last century, tried to build organizations and institutions; and a political left-of-center down there that, by the end of the last century, seemed to define protesting as the limit of what it would or could do.)
We must also go beyond simplified notions of “whiteness” for a closer look at our ethnic past. European immigrants may have come in vast numbers through NYC, but they didn’t all move on to other places in the same mixes. German and Irish Catholics helped settle the Great Lakes; Nordics came to Minnesota (and eventually from there to Washington); Hispanics are still more numerous along the southern-tier states than elsewhere, except for the Puerto Rican component in NYC. California’s blessed with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants; Washington’s proportionately more blessed with assorted Asian newcomers.
The U.S. is definitely going to become a nation of “a majority of minorities.” But which minorities are more influential in which parts is going to help keep things lively.
Even the Newsweek article acknowledges that these emerging ethnic voting blocs don’t vote alike. It doesn’t, but could’ve, noted the big wedges between blacks and Cubans in Florida as well as the rift it did note between Latinos and Asians in California.
If we’re lucky, Washington (the first mainland state to elect an Asian-American governor) and the other states will learn to avoid some of the divisive rancor California politics has gone through.
The nation, as a whole, is becoming less uniform. But it won’t become less uniform in one uniform way.
(An aside: In the ’60s, legendary ad designer George Lois made a campaign with the faces of New Yorkers of every possible ethnicity, each clutching a slice of bread in his or her own portrait above the slogan “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy’s Jewish Rye.” The campaign was dropped after market research showed everybody loved the ads featuring their own ethnic groups, but hated the ads with everybody else.)
TOMORROW: Is incomprehensible “political” writing really necessary?
IN THREE PRIOR OCCASIONAL INSTALLMENTS, I’ve shown and told about some of the reused and recycled retail spaces around my town.
Since this past Xmas season featured so many attempts to make the “retail theater experience” ever more elaborate, let’s ponder the intersections between retail and theatricality.
One downtown store unaffected by the recent WTO protests was Jay Jacobs. It had closed forever on the day before the protests, and was left untouched by the Nov. 30 window breakers (perhaps because it had been a local clothing chain that had failed against the onslaught of multinational retailers). After the last merchandise was removed on the last day of business, workers preparing for the store’s fixtures sale prominently placed three mannequins inside the store’s main window. The figures were placed belly-up, just like the company.
The front of this parking garage at 5th & Olive once housed a Seattle Trust Bank branch, since vacated by successor Key Bank. The building’s back identifies it as the Fox Garage–the parking annex of the old Fox Music Hall theater a block away. The Music Hall was demolished in late 1991, supposedly for a new hotel project, after years of noble bureaucratic struggles by preservation advocates. The site remained a mere parking lot until the summer of 1999, when office construction finally began there. You can again use the Fox Garage on your way to a movie–the Pacific Place multiplex is across the street.
The grand re-opening of the Cinerama Theater in May 1999 may have struck non-Seattleites as a bit odd. Other towns have preserved or restored some of their golden-age movie palaces; but the Cinerama, on the outside just a plain 1963 concrete box, is the biggest downtown cinema Seattle’s still got. The refurbished Paramount, Moore, and 5th Avenue theaters are used for touring concerts and stage shows, not films. A few other theater buildings have been kept for other uses, such as the Banana Republic store in the old Coliseum Theater (believed by some historians to be the first U.S. building constructed specifically for showing movies).
While some theatrical structures get rebuilt as retail and office buildings, other buildings get turned from mundane uses into entertainment joints. Entros, the gaming-themed restaurant-bar, occupies part of a former Van de Kamp’s bakery plant. At one time, most every supermarket in Washington bore the familiar blue neon windmill sign advertising Van de Kamp’s goods. The company’s delivery people, and the clerks at its outlet stores, even wore fake Dutch farm-girl costumes. As the big supermarket chains built up their own bakery units, Van de Kamp’s faded. The trademark is now owned by an L.A. frozen-foods company.
The Fraternal Order of Eagles began in Seattle in 1898 as a men’s “fraternal organization,” a social-bonding place where guys (women were relegated to a wives’ auxiliary) met, gave one another fancy titles, drank (at one time, liquor-by-the-drink could be had in Washington only at private clubs), played games, and raised charity money. Eagles world HQ, built in 1925, hosted jazz bands in the ’40s, hippie bands in the ’60s, and punk bands in the ’80s. The building became part of the Washington State Convention Center in the late ’80s; A Contemporary Theater moved into the auditorium in ’96. Eagles Aerie #1 now meets in Georgetown.
Charles Herring was Seattle’s best-known TV news anchor when he retired in 1968. Immediately following the end of Herring’s farewell broadcast, he reappeared on screen as a spokesperson for White Front, a California discount-store chain moving into the Seattle market. Herring’s name recognition proved little help to the chain, which collapsed in the early ’70s (the Aurora White Front became a Kmart, which was recently remodeled). One minor subsidiary chain started by White Front’s owners survived the parent chain’s collapse–Toys “R” Us.
Former single-screen movie-theater buildings are in use as retail spaces across North America. When the Broadway Theater was acquired by the Pay n’ Save drug chain (now Rite Aid), they didn’t bother to flatten the theater’s sloping floor. Instead, they just kept the facade and marquee; the whole rest of the building was razed and rebuilt. The drugstore people did try to maintain a tribute to the site’s past inside, by putting up murals depicting classic movie stars–including, right by the pharmacy counter, that famous prescription-sleeping-pill abuser Marilyn Monroe.
TOMORROW: Punk vs. neopunk.
IN OTHER NEWS: Just one thought about Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos as Time’s Man-O-The-Year: For the past quarter-century or more, certain hibrow blowhards have bemoaned the supposed Death of Reading in a supposed Post-Literate Society. Yet as the whatever-you-want-to-call-it epoch closes, the arguably most famous individual merchant in the most hyped-up merchandising venue of the day is, primarily and most profitably (or, rather, least unprofitably), a bookseller.
I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT CHRISTMAS for over two months.
And almost none of it involved what presents I wanted.
Researching and writing some three dozen Xmas-themed freelance tidbits for Everything Holidays has taught me a thing or twelve about how I view the season. Some of these new-found notions:
Certain “one-true-church” outfits, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, think this represents the dilution of Christian purity with pagan influences. As someone who believes purity is something for show dogs, I happen to like this mix-‘n’-match iconography. Indeed, if Christians hadn’t learned early on to borrow from assorted cultural traditions, we’d have no Christian punk bands today. (You can choose for yourself what you think about that.)
The weirdness is to be found in the goofball presents and decorations; the truly odd spectacle that is the Christmas episode of a TV series (even Pokemon and He-Man have ’em!); the curiously unsexy spectacle of “erotic” holiday cards (Hint: If you’re nude, you really shouldn’t stand that close to Christmas-tree needles); and in the basic all-American contradictions surrounding the modern holiday season.
But the human race is an oddball, mongrel species.
And any holiday promising hope and renewal to humans had better offer these things to humans as they, as we, are–nerds and geeks and dorks and hotheads and eggheads and dopes and neer-do-wells and fussbudgets and all the rest of us.
In the immortal words of Rudolph’s pal Yukon Cornelius, even among misfits you’re misfits.
MONDAY: Movie memories on the streets.
ANOTHER YEAR DRAWS TO A CLOSE; and that means North America’s film critics are churning out their assorted “best movies of the year” lists.
Entertainment Weekly got ahead of the pack last month with a cover story calling 1999 “The Year That Changed Movies.”
Its premise: Cheap digital video, fancy computer animation, Internet publicity and distribution, and a resurgent indie-film scene combined to transform U.S. cinema.
Instead of a year that was supposed to have been dominated by The Phantom Menace and megastar action vehicles, we got a year dominated financially by The Blair Witch Project and critically by Being John Malkovich. A year in which the most talked-about special effect was the censoring of the Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene. A year in which calling indie filmmakers “tomorrow’s Tarantinos” became treated as almost as bad an insult as calling them “tomorrow’s Spielbergs.”
Michael Wolff, the best thing in New York magazine these days, largely concurs. Back in September, he wrote that “it is becoming painfully clear to everyone but the studio executives that the blockbuster, brand-supporting movie is dead.”
“Imagine a world without movie stars,” Wolff writes; claiming celebrity covers no longer guarantee magazine sales (then why do print magazines about the Internet keep contriving lame excuses to feature Courtney Cox or Michael Jordan up front?). Wolff goes on to envision a society where everybody thinks they’re a potential screenwriter, actor, or director; where Hollywood’s centralized, rigid hierarchy gets tossed aside like yesterday’s drug fad. Where even the conglomerates that own the big studios recognize they can’t make consistent, stockholder-expected profit levels from business-as-usual moviemaking (even as a loss-leader for merchandise licensing).
Couldn’t happen soon enough, I say.
Whether it really is happening this way, and whether it’s happening fast enough, is still debatable.
Wasn’t too long ago that I was complaining about how indie film had gotten tired and tiresome. The whole Sundance Festival-centered sub-industry had devolved into Hollywood’s farm league, churning out interchangeable “hip violence” thrillers and gross-out comedies for release thru the big studios’ pseudo-indie distribution arms.
But, gradually, hope has returned.
This hope has come from online PR and film-discussion sites, alternative-to-the-alternative film festivals, streaming-video movie sites (many of them Seattle-based), and all the other aspects of a rapidly maturing DIY-moviemaking support network.
No longer need the aspiring next Cassavettes scrounge for funds to assemble a full shooting crew, then scrounge again for editing funds in time to make the big sales push to the Miramax gatekeepers.
Today’s Patricia Rozema wannabe can start off by making no-budget digital-video shorts, building her skills and style while networking with her fellow visionaries. When she’s ready to tell longer tales, she’ll have learned how to tell them effectively–and how to get them made and disseminated properly.
If we’re lucky, this neo-indie scene will remain diffuse and cheap enough that no future Viacoms or Time Warners can ever take it over.
Though they’ll most certainly try.
TOMORROW: A visit to the Cinema Grill.
FROM MY FREELANCE work for Everything Holidays, here are some last-minute Xmas gift ideas. MISCmedia takes no responsibility if anything breaks the first time it’s used, or if your beloved takes one look at the gift and decides you’re getting nothing next year.
TOMORROW: Is indie film on a comeback?
LISTEN UP: Your fave online columnist might be appearing on a local talk-radio outlet soon. Maybe even this Friday. Further details forthcoming.
NOT TOO LONG AGO, I used to gloat to my friends in the rest of Seattle.
I was luckier than they were, because I lived in Summit Cable territory. That meant I got almost 20 cool channels that the losers out in TCI neighborhoods couldn’t.
The tables have since turned. TCI was bought by AT&T, which promptly worked to finish up the fiber-optic cable installations TCI had lagged on for years. Summit, which already had fiber in its downtown and south-end service areas, was bought by a multi-regional company called Millennium Digital Media.
The respective buyers saw new fortunes to be made in cable-modem services and expanded “digital cable” channel selections.
So now, AT&T Cable customers can get the likes of TV Land, BBC America, the Food Network, the Game Show Network, and several other specialty channels offering prime examples of TV programming at its most direct; shows that come close to the Platonic ideals of entertainment and info programming.
Last month, Millennium trotted out its own digital channel lineup. For dozens more bucks a month, you can get dozens more premium and pay-per-view movie channels.
And nothing else.
This is way wrong. Television and video are more than just post-theatrical transmission mechanisms for feature films. TV has its own family of program genres.
A feature film is a one-shot. It’s constructed of scenes, which are constructed of individual shots. Even a low-budget film is made with this kind of rigorous pre-planning.
A TV show is usually an ongoing operation; a premise built to last a hundred episodes or more.
A TV show is built of segments; some of which may intercut across different scenes of action. These segments are, in traditional studio-based productions, made with several cameras running at once; this means individual “scenes” involve continuous flows of acting, movement, etc., rather than individual shots cut together to simulate continuity.
Because of time/money constraints, and the need for ongoing viewer identification with characters, TV shows are much more dialogue-heavy than features.
(Among other effects, this means social-theorists who use TV viewing as evidence of “the decline of words” are almost hilariously misinformed. TV’s all about words; though some of those words are better-chosen than others.)
Movies are about sitting in the dark, with a few friends and a lot of strangers, sharing in one larger-than-life sensory experience. TV’s about sitting comfortably in a well-lit room, alone or with a few pals and/or relatives, paying greater or lesser attention to a succession of smaller-than-life spectacles.
Aside from documentaries and occasional episodic films like Tales From the Darkside, movies are almost always dramatized works telling a single fictional (or fictionalized) story over the course of 80 to 180 minutes.
TV shows, in contrast, encompass episodic sitcoms, ongoing serials, limited-run serials (miniseries), anthology dramas, quasi-anthology dramas (such as crime shows where only the detectives appear in more than one episode), nonfiction storytelling (documentaries, newsmagazines, “reality” shows), and other formats that exist in no other medium.
The success of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? proves that audiences, even in a cable-fragmented TV universe with umpteen movie channels, are still attracted to pure-TV entertainment when it’s done right.
If only Millennium Digital could understand that.
TOMORROW: Are transit authorities passively capitulating to tax-cutters or sneaking an activist end-run around them?
HERE’S A THIRD SET of recycled real-estate mini-essays. The theme this time is relics of bank mergers, something with which readers across the country can identify.
The recent retirement of the “Seafirst Bank” brand by Bank of America means the end of what had been the dominant name in Washington banking since the pioneer days, when Dexter Horton ran a private storefront bank with a single safe in the back. Horton’s company was the oldest of several that merged by the 1930s into Seattle-First National Bank. Its standardized branch-bank design of the late ’40s, best seen at the 6th and Denny branch, is a classic of neighborhood-retail architecture.
This early-’60s bank branch at 3rd and Wall was a monument to car-culture–the entire ground level is drive-up booths and parking, plus an escalator to the raised walk-in building. It’s also a monument to the industry consolidations of the past 15 years. It began as a unit of National Bank of Commerce, which changed its name to Rainier Bank. Then, thanks to mergers, it became in turn a part of Security Pacific Bank, WestOne Bank, the Portland-based U.S. Bank, and the Minnesota-based Firstbank Systems (which kept the U.S. Bank name but changed the logo).
America’s cities are strewn with the former main-office towers of local and regional banks that have since been merged or sold. A three-block radius of 4th & Union in downtown Seattle contains the former Pacific First Federal Building (now U.S. Bank Centre), Puget Sound Bank Plaza (now Puget Sound Plaza), Rainier Bank Tower (now Rainier Square), and this, the former HQ of Peoples Bank (“Member FDIC and the Human Race”), now refitted as a Cavanaugh’s Hotel. A few blocks south are the former Seattle Trust Court (now Marion Court) and the former Seafirst Columbia Center (now Bank of America Tower).
I once worked as an office temp on the 13th floor of the Rainier Bank Tower (now Rainier Square), just as the bank was preparing to merge out of existence. The concrete pedastel contains storage rooms and heating/plumbing equipment, saving space on the upper floors for more office room. Built in ’75, it replaced a stately lo-rise structure, the White-Henry-Stuart Building. The surviving Cobb Medical Building across 4th Ave. is a shortened replica of the WHS Building’s old full-block design, and preserves an old WHS Indian-head gargoyle in its facade.
The Seattle Times is known among local insiders as “Fairview Fanny,” from the handsome Fairview Ave. building it’s occupied since 1930. Before that, the paper had a smaller, triangular building at 5th & Stewart, still known as Times Square. Its front entrance was gussied-up a little in the ’80s, when Washington Mutual Savings Bank opened a branch on the ground floor. Last year, the bank branch moved across the street to the Pacific Place mall (built on the former site of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s pre-1948 building); allowing the stoic Times Square facade to now be used for the selling of golf clubs.
TOMORROW: Bad Xmas gift and card ideas.
ON WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.
Along with the rest of the high-tech and e-commerce industries, MS has brought this once-forgotten corner of America into full boomtown mode.
And, along with the rest of the software and Internet businesses that have grown here, it’s led to a building boom.
Many American cities have gone through boomtown eras this century. Seattle itself had one starting with the 1897 Yukon gold rush and continuing (in greater or lesser spurts) until the 1929 stock crash.
Recent decades have seen booms overtake Denver, Houston, Miami, and (in several waves) Las Vegas.
In each of these, big new buildings have arisen. In most of these, the character of the new buildings has expressed a more extreme, more intense version of the cities’ former character. Houston’s glass towers could be seen as reflecting the same bluster as an old Texas ranch mansion. Miami became even more shallow and glittery. Vegas became even brighter and louder.
Seattle’s current boomtown phase is significantly different from those other booms–precisely because it marks such a break from the city’s heritage. And I don’t just mean behaviorally.
It’s changing the face of the city. But it’s not just replacing old buildings with newer, bigger buildings of the same basic aesthetic.
Boomtown Seattle’s new buildings replace an old local architectural shtick of a quiet engineers’ and lawyers’ town trying desperately to become “world class” and failing spectacularly) with real world-class-osity, expressed in big, costly, and monumental public and semi-public structures.
The Kingdome’s final scheduled event, a Seahawks football game, takes place in 16 days. Sometime between then and the start of baseball season, the Dome will be imploded. In its place will eventually rise a luxury-box-heavy new football stadium, the last of the three structures replacing the Dome’s different functions. Already up: Safeco Field and a new exhibition hall (where Chris Isaak and Squirrel Nut-Zippers will ring in the millennium).
While all three post-Kingdome building projects have substantial public subsidies, all were instigated by software fortunes–Nintendo’s Hiroshi Yamauchi for Safeco Field; Paul Allen for the football stadium and the exhibition hall.
Steps away from the soon-to-be ex-Dome, Allen’s refitting the old Union Station as a posh gathering place, and building a fancy new office building next to it.
Allen’s also been involved in the newly rebuilt UW Henry Art Gallery (subtitled “The Faye G. Allen Center for the Arts”), the restored Cinerama Theater, and the sculpture park to be built at the old Union 76 waterfront terminal site; and is the sole sponsor (to date) of the Experience Music Project, the huge blob-shaped pop-music museum rising in the Space Needle’s shadow.
Allen’s erstwhile partner Bill Gates fils has taken smaller, but still significant, roles in putting up the new Seattle Art Museum (essentially the first of Seattle’s current generation of culture palaces) and the big new wing of the UW’s main library, and is contributing to rebuilding neighborhood libraries (just like that prior monopolist, Andrew Carnegie).
And Bill Gates pere, the corporate lawyer, has used his networking skills to help assemble local “old money” (i.e., non-computer-related wealth, from the likes of real estate and broadcasting) to join with the new cyber-rich in backing, and pressuring governments to further back, still other temples: A new symphony hall, a new basketball arena, the Pacific Place shopping temple, a new domed IMAX cinema, new or heavily-remodeled homes for four big theater companies, three old movie palaces reworked for Broadway touring shows, and (announced last month) a rebuilt opera house.
Still to come, with various funding sources: A new central library, a new city hall complex, a rebuilt UW basketball arena, and a light rail network.
On smaller scales, the new Seattle architectural aesthetic has influenced everything from condos to discos to Catholic churches. The new St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle U. is asymmetrical, sparse, and airy–values you’d ordinarily not expect from Jesuits, but would expect from a high-tech town awash in new money.
The Seattle Boeing built was a place that attempted brilliance-on-a-budget. A town that tried to avoid wasteful extravegance even as it wanted the world to notice it.
The Seattle Allen & Gates are building is a place that settles for nothing less than the most spectacular, the most “tastefully” outlandish.
UPDATE: Coronation Street, the long-running U.K. working-class soap opera, is now on the Net. A startup company called iCraveTV is streaming all of Toronto’s over-the-air TV stations to any Net user who can type in a Canadian telephone area code (such as 604, 250, or 416). The stations are taking legal action, to try to stop this unauthorized re-use of their signals. But for now, you can see the Street on the web at 12-12:30 p.m. PT Mon.-Thurs. and 6-8 a.m. PT Sundays. (Click on “CBC” from iCraveTV’s site).
MONDAY: Bad beers I have known.
YESTERDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.
It’s brought thousands of bright, ambitious people and billions of the world’s dollars into our once supposedly backwoods region.
It changed the world’s image of Seattle from gritty to glamourous–and from poilte to predatory.
Among MS employees and even many perma-temps, any digression from official Bill-approved thought is increasingly treated as heresy. (Repeat, droning, over and over: “Freedom to innovate… freedom to innovate…”)
Boomtown Seattle’s behavioral trends (the hustling, the dealmaking, the backstabbing, the delusions of Godhood in God’s Country) seem, on the surface, to constitute a complete break from the town’s prior stereotype as The City of the Nice.
But actually, as I’ve noted on prior occasions, the new NW Aggression has deep regional roots.
It goes directly at least as far as the Nordstrom corporate culture; which applied ’70s “motivational training” shticks into an all-enveloping system of rewards, punishments, dominations, and submissions.
At the peak of what was known as “Nordy-ism,” you could not merely be a Nordstrom employee. You had to be a Nordstrom believer.
You had to cheerfully “volunteer” for unpaid overtime and off-the-clock tasks. You had to meet seemingly arbitrary sales or work goals. You had to regularly submit to performance reviews that judged not only your results but your team-player attitude. You had to attend est-like training seminars to become immersed in the mentality of Total Service (and servitude).
You had to work like hell. And you had to love it more than anything else in the world.
People I know who work at Nordstrom these days claim the manic excesses of Nordy-ism have been toned down a bit–partly to avoid lawsuits, partly to appease key workers in a tight labor market.
But its legacy lives on regionally in the ultra-aggressive cultures of Microsoft, Nike, Amazon, assorted dot-coms led by ex-MS principals.
Earlier in this decade, Seattle had a reputation nationally as a haven for nihilistic young cynics eager to proclaim a no-future of eternal ennui. (Though those guys were really quite entrepreneurial.)
Out-of-towners who never realized how assertive the “grunge” people were often mistakenly see it weird that the same small city would suddenly become the city whose suburbs house the company known by many PC-biz observers as “The Evil Empire.”
But cults, especially cults rising at the turns of their respective centuries or millennia, have often had an end-O-the-world aspect to their doctrine and their fervor.
In the case of the Bill Gates personality cult, the doctrine’s a millennial variant on the old-conservative stereotype of “Government Bad; Business Good.”
In the MS religion, Bill is the Great and Omnipotent Force rising to smite evil Government, reform backward Old Business, unleash the cleansing forces of New Business, tame the chaotic Internet, trample competing high-tech cults, and impose by his will (and the work of his minions) the dawn of a new era in civilization.
An era of one world, united by its dependence upon one operating system.
No wonder S/M’s so popular in Seattle.
It’s only appropriate for the fetishes of old empires (Rome, Britain) to become the favorite public sexual displays in a town increasingly populated by those who would build new empires.
P.S.: Some of you may remember “Building Empires” as the title a home-video collection by local hard-rockers Queensryche. They took it from railroad baron James Hill, who called himself (and his flagship passenger train) the Empire Builder. Another example of how the Northwest wasn’t all as progressive or egalitarian as it’s now supposed to have used to been.
P.P.S.: For a fictionalization of the Nordstrom corporate culture (and, hence, of the MS corporate culture), check your TV listings this month for Ebbie, a 1995 shot-in-Vancouver TV movie. It’s a sex-change Christmas Carol with Susan Lucci as “Elizabeth Scrooge,” who runs a fashionable department store by grinding her staffers into the rug and expecting them to love it.
(Of course, the only nightmares our real-life local slavedriver bosses are probably getting these days involve the Spirits of WTO Protesters Past.)
P.P.P.S.: We previously mentioned a local indie movie, Doomed Planet, a broad comedy in which an end-of-the-millennium Seattle is the battleground for a couple of ruthlessly competitive religious cults. When I first saw it a couple months back, I thought it was just a comedy, with little real-world satirical meaning. In retrospect, the videomakers may have been more allegoric than I gave them credit for.
TOMORROW: Boomtown Seattle’s architectural legacy–real-world monuments bought by cyberspace money.
IN THE WEEKS SINCE Judge Jackson’s ruling that Microsoft’s a monopoly, a lot of blather of varying degrees of insight and coherence has been written about what will and/or should happen next.
Microsoft itself, and the people who are paid to like Microsoft, insist the company should be left as-is, with the “freedom to innovate” (which is apparently something on the order of the right to do what you’re not doing now, but still want the option to do in the future).
Others want the Feds to create a bifurcated or trifurcated MS. They offer up various schemes for splitting the empire. Some schemes would leave one “Baby Bill” in charge of the Windows OS; others would have two or three companies that would sell their own versions.
And, natch, the “digerati” pundits in Silicon Valley couldn’t stop gleefully anticipating a future in which the pesky northern threat to total California control of everything “E” would be finished once and for all.
Meanwhile, back up here in my neck-O-the-woods, things have been, to say the least, “interesting.”
Local daily papers that seldom find a bad word for anything Gates-related have willingly run (out-of-town, syndicated) commentaries suggesting that Redmond’s Masters of the Cyber-Universe deserve all the comeuppance they’re gonna get.
MS cult members are even more true-believer than ever. They’re being taught to treat the federal and state antitrust cases as heathen attacks that only prove the total righteousness of the MS cause–doing everything one can for Bill (and for one’s own stock options).
Some of those Seattleites closest to MS are privately anticipating the excitement and drama a drawn-out divestiture dispute would bring; while publicly expressing concern about the future value of all the MS stock they and their pals hold.
In the fancy-schmancy restaurants and hoity-toity shops dependent upon MS hotshots’ spending power, and in the local arts groups and charities increasingly dependent upon cash from MS and from MS people, nobody’s talking publicly. Privately, few seem directly worried. They apparently figure the MS wealth machine will just keep on funnelling cash from the world into Western Washington, even if the machine’s eventually re-engineered into multiple smaller components.
Seattle, for better or worse, will never go back to its pre-MS status as a quiet, industrious town of aerospace engineers, sportswear vendors, and import/export lawyers. If there are Baby Bills, they’ll all likely stay based here. Indeed, if certain stock analysts are correct, the sum of the parts could come to be worth more than the whole. That means still more office and condo construction in town, more office and subdivision construction in the burbs.
These Baby Bills could be less monolithically institutional than today’s MS; more attuded to the rugged-bad-boy uber-capitalistic Attitude-with-a-capital-A seen in the rest of the software biz (including the companies founded here by MS refugees). Results: Even more monster SUVs crowding our roads. Even more silly “cuisine” restaurants. Even less affordable housing.
The computer world would face more profound changes–depending on how any breakup or set of restrictions on MS’s practices emerges. In one of the more radical scenarios, the Windows “standard” would dissolve as different Baby Bills offer different successors to the OS, each with its own add-on features. Application-software makers wouldn’t worry about getting run out of business by MS, but they would have to worry about making their stuff work on different post-Windows systems. (Of course, if they do that, then they’ll have code that’s probably also more easily portable to MacOS, Linux, etc.)
But if the video-game industry can still support between three and five platforms, then so can the “productivity” software industry.
TOMORROW: More on MS’s S/M.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper said he’ll retire in March, following public hue and cry over cop violence against peaceful WTO protesters last week. Already, the conspiracy theorists are wondering aloud whether the street cops had deliberately gone abusive last Wednesday night as an opportunity to force out Stamper. (The chief had taken pains in the past to forge a liberal, gay-friendly, community-friendly image. This stance caused many rank-‘n’-file cops to complain loudly about Stamper on hate-talk radio.) Since I’m not a conspiracy theorist myself, I have trouble believing this notion, but feel I should report it nonetheless.
THE PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS for today’s net-column have, as you might expect, been pre-empted by the major mega-weirdness in Seattle on Tuesday.
So many things, so many odd and amazing and disgusting and just plain strange things, have gone on this day (I’m writing at 9 p.m. Tuesday night) that I know at the start I can’t do it justice.
But I’ll start by noting this was a media event first and foremost; on all sides of the WTO debate.
And, as it happens, I’m writing this while the CBC is running a hyper-slick documentary about Marshall McLuhan, who knew what “media events” really meant even back in the days of press agents staging spectacles to get their clients into the newsreel.
In this day of email and teleconferencing, the foreign ministers of all the 135 or so World Trade Organization member countries, and their minions and lackeys, didn’t really need to meet at one time in one place (let alone in a place so full of and/or accessible to tree-spikers, third-generation punk anarchists, and white gangsta-wannabes).
(But then again, past anti-free-trade demonstrations (and, in some cases, police over-reactions) have been in such supposedly turmoil-free towns as Vancouver, Montreal, and Geneva.)
Anyhoo, the WTO chose to come to Seattle, just weeks before the big 0-0 year thang, as a way to gain attention for its agenda, in what the group was apparently led to believe was North America’s #1 or #2 friendliest town toward its message–that Sacred Business is the end-all and be-all of all human endeavor in the post-Cold-War, pre-Millennial age.
After all, this is the town that has pushed onto the world “gourmet” coffee, mediocre software, and the machines that made the whole international jet set possible.
But appearances can deceive. Seattle may be Microsoft Ground Zero, but that means it’s also HQ for disgruntled MS refugees (and bystanders such as myself) who’ve had just a little too much of the deification of Gates as God, Ayn Rand as the Goddess, and money, power, and acquisition as the only worthy ends of human existence.
It’s also a town with a heavy organized-labor heritage, a town of old and neo hippies and punks, and the town that taught New York City how to impose and enforce an upscale monoculture on an increasingly reluctant populace.
Add to that mix, the means of communication and transportation that can bring protesters from all over into one spot almost as efficiently as information and products can be transported out, and you get what KCPQ called “Seattle Under Seige.”
Let me briefly attempt to explain what happened.
There was the WTO convention itself, gathering all these dignitaries to engage in closed-door confabbing about tariffs and quarrantines and environmental concerns that limit commerce and other potentially arcane stuff.
Then there were the big, officially-permitted protests. They involved some 40,000 or more union members, church members, and other members of “respectable” quarters of society, marching to protest an organization which symbolizes the rule of business over contemporary life and the rule of a few huge mega-corporations (not all of them U.S.-based) over business and, via stooge outfits like the WTO, over governments.
Then there were the unauthorized demonstrators. These came in all assorted flavors.
People who wanted media attention for specific trade-related causes (WTO crackdowns on individual countries’ health and species-protection laws).
People with causes related to international affairs in general (denouncers of China; supporters of Cuba).
People whose causes had nothing at all to do with WTO (people who hate meat or fur, or who like Mumia Abu-Jamal or hemp).
Street-theater artists.
Civil-disobedience practitioners who trained weeks in advance for nonviolent actions to try to shut the WTO conference down.
And, yes, a few dozen thugs who called themselves anarchists.
I saw some of these sanctimoniously violent boys smash store and car windows, spray-paint walls, and overturn Dumpsters. I didn’t know any of them personally, but I’ve known (and lived with) plenty of their ilk. White males utterly and incurably convinced of their own complete moral superiority to all other white males. (While they smashed stuff up, women and minorities pleaded at them to stop their unproductive jerk-off actions.)
These random incidents, and the nonviolent street-blocking actions of the separate civil-disobedience groups, joined to provide authorities with the excuse to bring out the threatened-in-advance forces of over-reaction. Police scattered parts of downtown with tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets during the hours just before and just after the AFL-CIO-run authorized protest march. Once the union people left, the whole downtown core was declared a “State of Emergency.” An overnight curfew was proclaimed, and was enforced by some heavy-handed cop tactics.
But it didn’t end there. Well into the night, demonstrators continued on Capitol Hill, outside the curfew zone. Only now, the remaining hundreds of protesters were protesting not WTO but the police over-reaction earlier in the day, and getting more police over-reaction for their trouble.
So much, for now, for Tom Robbins’s old proclamation of Seattle as “The City of the Nice.”
TOMORROW: More on this.
YESTERDAY, we discussed the protesters attempting, starting today, to disrupt the World Trade Organization’s international conference here in Seattle.
The protesters’ main beef: The WTO helps turn soverign governments into mere stooges, handservants to almighty Business.
However, despite the overwhelming influence business has over governments (influence-peddling and campaign cash at home; pro-corporate entites like WTO internationally), some folks still hold onto the opposite idea–the idea that mean ol’ Big Government’s still not de-fanged enough, that poor pathetic Business must be rescued from Government’s horrific machinations.
That’s the line you get from some Microsoft defenders; including Byte scribe Jerry Pournelle (who makes pains to insist that, unlike certain other “independent” observers who’ve spoken out for MS, he’s not being paid off by MS’s fake-grassroots PR lobby).
And it’s the line still being offered, after all these years, by “secessionist” advocates trying to carve out new counties or even states in rural and suburbanizing regions scattered across the country.
Around here, various outfits calling themselves names like “Freedom County” have attempted to form new legal jurisdictions in which land developers, forest clearcutters, gun vendors, and other valiant entrepreneurs would get to do all they want, with no pesky environmental laws or anti-sprawl zoning bureaucrats getting in the way. (So far, they’ve gotten nowhere; and the Washington State government says it won’t accept any new-county requests in the future, no matter how adamant.)
There’s a similar, if higher-stakes, effort being waged in northern California, by guys who want their own state.
This has nothing to do with the proposal in Mother Jones to split up the Fool’s-Golden State so it could get more U.S. Senators.
Rather, the advocates of “Jefferson State” (which would grab pieces of southern Oregon as well as California’s northernmost tip) want a regime that would be even friendlier to developers, miners, loggers, and factory-farmers than the already mightily business-friendly power structures down in Sacramento, CA.
Actually, the “Jefferson State” people don’t express grievances against the Calif. state government as vehemently as they do against the federal government, coming in and telling rugged-individualist businessmen they can’t do this or that because it’d threaten some endangered species or ruin a few more watersheds.
Exactly how they’d get federal environmental protections gutted for one new, small state that wouldn’t have the direct backing of the Calif. Republican establishment is a mystery the Jefferson guys don’t fully explain. But then again, tactical logic isn’t these guys’ strong point. Like the WTO opponents, the secessionists are mainly in it to make a statement and to communicate a vision, albeit an outmoded vision.
Seceding for the right to pollute and overdevelop seems, on the surface, to be less morally reprehensible than, say, seceding for the right to maintain slavery, but still not the best idea around there.
IN OTHER NEWS: Days one and two of the WTO protests went by Sunday and Monday with a few unfortunate sideshows of Lifestyle Left self-aggrandizement. (Spray-painting anti-meat slogans on a McDonald’s or dressing up in Chiapas-style bandana face masks has just about nothing to do with the topic of international tariff negotiations.) But the vast majority of the actions were well-intentioned and well-organized, and did a good job of bringing disparate factions (enviros, labor, churches, intl.-democracy advocates) together around the simple message that Business Isn’t Everything.
TOMORROW: Physical mementos of bank mergers.
THE PROBLEM WITH RADICALS, I’ve often said, is they’re just too conservative.
It’s especially true in the U.S., where there’s no real radical political movement–just a lifestyle subculture that pretends to be one.
Where a real Left would seek solidarity with working-class folk, America’s Lifestyle Left loves few things better than sneering at the sap masses.
Instead of proposing new socioeconomic arrangements to replace the apparently-dead Eurosocialist dream of enlightened central planning, the Lifestyle Left prefers to merely complain about the moral inferiority of meat eaters, suburb dwellers, TV viewers, church goers, and just about everyone else other than themselves.
And instead of organizing a movement to bring any new proposals into practice, they’d rather just protest.
Protesting alone, at its feeblest, can be little more than a display of Attitude (a way-overused commodity these days). It lets you feel good about yourself and bad about whatever enemy you’re protesting, and can bond you with your fellow protesters in a shared-group experience. But it won’t change a damn thing.
This week, as you may know, Seattle’s supposed to become Protest Central. The World Trade Organization’s holding a bigass international conference starting tomorrow. In what might be the biggest public “radical” showing since the Gulf War protests in ’91, as many as 50,000 demonstraters (a number far outnumbering the invited WTO guests) are expected to show up to tie up streets, disrupt daily life, and otherwise make their message heard.
Their message: The WTO is A Really Bad Thing.
It’s a tool of global corporations, out to make the world even safer for business by gutting tarrifs, environmental protections, child-labor prohibitions, and anything else that gets in the way of guys with money making even more money. It subverts democracy by making individual nations’ laws subject to rebuke or even dismemberment by unelected offshore bureaucrats.
What the protesters don’t say as loudly is that the governments within the WTO’s member nations (some more democratic, some less) have voluntarily agreed to listen to and, in most cases, abide by the WTO bureaucracy’s rulings; all in the name of Almighty Commerce. Any country that wanted to could just say no to WTO, resign from the group, and go back to negotiating individual commercial pacts on its own with every other nation.
WTO is an instrument of central planning–just like the old socialist and fascist central-planning schemes the WTO’s “conservative” advocates claim to have always hated, and which some leftists once advocated. (Many of the WTO protesters are self-styled anarchists–folks who don’t like any big central authority system, not even a socialistic system claiming to operate on “the people’s” behalf.)
As you’ve probably surmised, I don’t hold out the greatest of hopes for the WTO-protest spectacle. But by announcing their intentions so loudly, so far in advance of the conference, they’ve done at least one thing the Lifestyle Left seldom accomplishes.
They’ve gotten the local mainstream print media to mention their grievances, in detail.
Even protest coverage built on giving WTO defenders the final say publicizes the questions.
The Wired guys, the cyber-libertarians, the Global Business Network butt-kissers, and the techno-conservatives have spent the past half-decade gleefully proclaiming that history’s over and they won; that there’s no way any society can ever be organized that doesn’t worshipfully cede all real power to Sacred Business. The techno-corporatists predict lots of “revolutions” within business, but don’t want anyone to even imagine a future not led by big corporations running everything.
If we’re lucky, the WTO protests might lead a few people outside the Lifestyle Left to start imagining a post-corporate world, and then to start working toward one.
(More anti-WTO stuff is at the Independent Media Center and SeattleWTO.org.)
TOMORROW: Visions of government as business’s enemy vs. government as business’s handservant.
IN OTHER NEWS: Babies are apparently still being lured by money on fishing rods…
