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YESTERDAY, we discussed Coldwater Creek, a new “rustic luxury” clothes-and-home-furnishings store in downtown Seattle.
Fortunately, though, there are still other firms willing to invest in retail spaces for those of us without software-stock-option moolah.
Case in point: Fred Meyer, a chain with a peculiar history.
Back in ’22, Fred G. Meyer started a little drug-and-variety store in downtown Portland. But the chain’s real beginnings are in 1931, when Meyer expanded on the then-new supermarket concept and built a full-block, self-service general store (food, drugs, variety, clothes, hardware) in east Portland’s Hollywood neighborhood (it remained open until 1991). This was over a decade before the first discount stores opened, and almost three decades before Kmart and Wal-Mart first appeared.
Meyer (a lifelong Rosicrucian) lived to be 92, leaving a circuit of “One Stop Shopping Centers” stretching from Alaska to Utah. The chain was taken over by leveraged-buyout kings Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, who later sold off their stake on the open market. The Meyer company then bought other food and drug chains throughout the west, including Seattle’s QFC, before itself getting acquired by Kroger.
Part of the Freddy’s chain’s strategy has been to construct huge stores in free-standing locations. They didn’t like to share customer traffic with malls, downtown or neighborhood storefront shops, or even strip-mall stores other than the few they rented parts of their own buildings to. They made an exception in the ’80s when developer Ken Alhadeff turned their existing Broadway site in Seattle into the Broadway Market minimall (which included a relatively-small Freddy’s store along with other tenants).
When Freddy’s decided to build another Seattle store, they picked an industrial block in Ballard that had housed a defunct steel mill. The site’s not only almost a quarter-mile from any other large retail establishment, it’s a couple blocks away from major arterial streets (it’s actually closer to the Burke-Gilman bike trail). Advocates of retaining industrial jobs in the area fought the plan for years, until a compromise was reached that allowed Freddy’s to use most but not all of the steel-mill lot.
There, Freddy’s built an all-new structure that looks like a string of old industrial buildings (the same retro-utilitarian look found at Safeco Field). From the outside, it looks like it could’ve been one of those abandoned factories turned into shopping centers. On the inside, though, its newness is evident.
It’s a huge place, yet cleanly laid out. And it has most everything a person or family of less-than-spectacular means might want–except any books more obscure than Harry Potter or any music more indie than Shania Twain. (Even though the new store’s just blocks from the recording studio, now known as John & Stu’s Place, where all those seminal “Seattle Scene” records were made).
Unlike discounters, Freddy’s sells brand-name stuff at fair but not-significantly-lower prices. At the twilight of the mass-market age, Freddy’s is still an almost-everything-for-almost-everyone kind of place. And at the dawn of “e-tailing,” Freddy’s is still building huge tangible stores.
How long the Freddy’s business plan can remain viable is anyone’s guess. But if the new Ballard location doesn’t work out, at least it could be reclaimed for making stuff instead of merely selling stuff.
MONDAY: Getting ready for the big world trade protest-a-thon.
ELSEWHERE:
ANOTHER HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON begins tomorrow.
And in Webland, that means one (1) thing: Pundit pieces pondering how much biz the leading e-commerce shopping sites will generate, and what, if anything, the old tangible-location retailers might do in response.
The retail giants might very well be scrambling to confront the online threat in the future. But for now, their attitude seems to be business as usual, or even business more than usual.
Frequent readers to this site know how I’ve been tracking the rise of ever-bigger, ever-more-consolidated chain-store outposts. The accumulated result hit me a couple nights ago when I went on a pre-holiday-rush walking tour of my local brave-new downtown.
Aside from the Bon Marche, the Pike Place Market complex, the Ben Bridge jewelry store, and the Rite Aid (ex-Pay Less, ex-Pay n’ Save) drug store, every major space in Seattle’s retail core had either changed hands, been completely rebuilt, or both in the past 13 or so years. And only a handful of smaller businesses were still where they used to be (among them: M Coy Books, the Mario’s and Butch Blum fashion boutiques, a Sam Goody (nee Musicland) record store, and a Radio Shack).
All else was change. Chains going under (Woolworth, Kress, Klopfenstein’s, J.K. Gill) or pulling out of the region (Loehmann’s) or retreating to the malls (J.C. Penney, Weisfield’s Jewelers, Dania Furniture). Other chains pushing their way in (Borders, Barnes & Noble, Tiffany, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Men’s Wearhouse, Sharper Image, Ross Dress for Less, Shoe Pavilion, Warner Bros. Studio Store, Old Navy, FAO Schwarz, etc. etc.). Local mainstays dying off (Frederick & Nelson, the Squire Shops, and now Jay Jacobs); others expanding (Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, REI, Seattle’s Best Coffee) or at least moving about (Roger’s Clothing for Men).
Now, the ex-Nordstrom building (actually three buildings straddling the same half-block) is reopening, one carved-out individual chain storefront at a time.
(When the building was first being reconfigured, I actually had a dream about the building being turned into artists’ studios; something that now is unlikely to ever happen–unless e-commerce really does bite into old-style retail during the next decade, and these fancy-schmancy chains all pull out at once).
First to open in the ex-Nordstrom was an all-Adidas store that actually looks homey compared to the Niketown a half-block away. Other shops, apparently all chain-owned (including Urban Outfitters) will move into the divvied-up spaces during and after the holiday shop-O-rama time.
But the project’s biggest and most elaborate storefront thus far belongs to Coldwater Creek, selling pseudo-outdoorsy clothes and home furnishings for rich software studs with $2 million “cabins” in the woods or on the water.
It’s a catalog operation based in Sandpoint, ID; a town known in the news for the various far-right nasties (Klansmen, militias, Y2K-survival compounds) who’ve moved to the surrounding countryside. But a more relevant-to-today’s-discussion aspect is Sandpoint’s recent status as one of the “Little Aspens” dotting the inland West, once-rustic little hamlets colonized by Hollywood types (including, in Sandpoint’s case, Nixon lawyer turned game-show host Ben Stein).
Ever since the first department stores first offered the allure of couture-style fashions without custom-made prices, upscale retailers have been in the biz of selling fantasies. The fantasy sold by Coldwater Creek is the one sold in SUV ads. The fantasy of living “on the land” without having to work on it, without being dependent upon a rural economy.
It’s the fantasy depicted in magazine puff pieces about folks like Ted Turner in Montana and Harrison Ford in Wyoming–the sort of folks I described a couple weeks back as pretending to “get away from it all” while really bringing “it all” with them. Folks who commute from their work in other states by private plane, then preach to the locals (or to those locals who haven’t been priced out of the place) about eco-consciousness and living lightly.
TOMORROW: Continuing this topic, a hypermarket chain takes over a steel-mill site and builds a store that looks like a steel mill.
IN OTHER NEWS: The outfit known for syrupy background music, AND which employed innumerable loud-guitar musicians in day jobs, is moving away.
LIKE MANY READERS, I love newspapers.
Or at least, I love the idea of newspapers.
But they’re an institution in decline, no matter what the short-term profit statements of the big paper chains might currently say.
Most towns today have only one daily. Most of these papers are tired, formulaic sheets, whose contents vary only slightly: Mayhem-and-disaster front pages, mealy-mouthed “analysis” stories, smarmy “human interest” features, celebrity gossip about already-washed-up movie stars, “humor” columns about everything that’s wrong with everybody younger than the writer, pro-Chamber-of-Commerce editorials, and Dilbert.
Total circulation hasn’t kept up with population growth for decades. As the Net siphons off both info-seekers and ad revenues, even a local-monopoly paper may soon cease to be reliably profitable.
Also, the newspaper industry is notoriously resistant to innovation. USA Today, that now familiar package of mostly-blase content with slick graphics, is still thought by many old-line publishers and editors as a pesky radical upstart.
Something new is needed, and the established newspaper biz doesn’t know how to provide it.
But I think I do.
Herewith, my formula for a new newspaper:
(If you try to start such a paper yourself, please offer me a job.)
MONDAY: Looking backward at Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.
ONE OF MY FAVORITE Net-centric literary forms is the funny list. Not necessarily the faux-Letterman type, but the more informal, longer, add-on-your-own type.
Among my favorites: The “Ways to Annoy Your Roommate” list.
A few days ago, I suddenly had an idea for a perfect annoy-your-roommate concept that I hadn’t seen on any such lists: Rent porn videos, and fast-forward past everything EXCEPT the dialogue scenes.
That simple idea led to a more elaborate one: Rent porn videos, and then use a second VCR to copy only the dialogue scenes.
Then I got to thinking: These throwaway plot parts constitute one of today’s most ephemeral commercial-art genres. A genre that should be studied and preserved.
That one notion, natch, led to more.
There are plenty of such genres and forms, still underdocumented by a popcult-scholar racket still obsessed with Madonna deconstructions. Here are some:
Somebody already put out a picture book showing old Apple Computer employee T-shirts. Somebody else could create a similar, but fictional, book using logos and slogans to depict the rise and fall of an Internet startup from its first big idea, to its venture-capital phase, to its unsuccessful IPO attempt, to its “restructuring for the future” downsizing phase, to its Chapter 11 reorganization, to its last appearance on a shirt “celebrating” another company’s acquisition of its remaining assets.
TOMORROW: A newspaper for the digital age.
YESTERDAY, we began to look into potential alternate routes to the philosophical-aesthetic cul de sac that postmodernism has become, and to instead seek a more pro-active way to see the future.
Of course, some highly-paid pundits are already doing something sorta like that.
But the likes of George Gilder are really in the business of stooging for the elites, telling people with money and power that they can count on having even more money and power in the 2000s.
Gilder’s futurism purports to predict a “revolution,” but merely a “revolution in business” which would leave the cleverest and most ambitious corporate go-getters in charge of a world totally and unalterably under the firm control of Global Business.
They don’t imagine how emerging Net-communications, digital-DIY media, and other empowerment tools could subvert big business’s privileges of scale and influence. Either that, or they don’t want to imagine it.
No, I think there is a real new era coming–if we work at it. I don’t have a splashy book-title name for it yet, but I’m working on it.
Wired’s “digital age” hype doesn’t quite describe it; nor does the “chaos culture” notion promoted by rave-dance folks a few years ago.
(The right-wing-think-tank people behind Wired are too trapped in their own privileged status to support a real revolution; the rave people are seeing only the most hedonistic aspects of the revolution.)
Without wanting too much to sound like a certain late multimillionaire who sang about a future without possessions, I’ll ask you to imagine.
Imagine a world in which motion pictures are made everywhere, not just in one city in the whole world.
Imagine a world that had actors but not movie stars. Imagine no more gatekeepers.
Imagine a society without a right-wing hierarchy of privilege or a left-wing hierarchy of righteousness. A world in which women are equal to men, but in which men are also equal to women.
A world without bestseller lists, Billboard charts, or box-office rankings. A world of artists, not celebrities.
A world with no master race, no master gender, no master nationality, no master religion, no master economic system, and even no master operating system.
(This is all still largely a reactive, PoMo vision, I know. But future installments will be more proactive, I promise.)
The techno-corporate futurism of Gilder, Wired, et al. is only a feeble half-step in this direction. The real revolution wouldn’t be a revolution for corporations, but against them. Not new opportunities for the Viacoms and GMs, but the means toward their overthrow.
And yes, it is a revolution. But like any real revolution, some people will find it, well, revolting.
But that’s a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: We escape the topic of Century 21 for a while, to look at the history of escapism.
(Advisory: Today’s installment deals with topics some readers might find kinda gross.)
IN THE ’80S, RON HARRIS created and produced the TV exercise shows Aerobicise and The :20 Minute Workout.
You may remember them as the shows with the ever-perky spandex queens thrusting their butts out while on a slowly-turning white turntable, before an equally stark white backdrop.
Aerobicise, which aired on Showtime, treated the exercises as a voyeuristic spectator sport. Scenes were shot to emphasize “arty” camera angles and close-up body parts in motion, rather than to show how viewers could imitate any particular sequence of movements.
The syndicated :20 Minute Workout (excerpted during a scene in Earth Girls Are Easy) at least purported to be a participatory, instructional show. (The heavily Southern-accented hostess tried to make a catch phrase out of “Fo’ mo’, three mo’, two mo,’ and one. Take it down.”)
While the shows made no legally-binding promises to viewers, they certainly implied that you could work your way toward a supermodel physique.
Later, Harris went on to producing softcore “erotic” videos for Playboy and his own production company. These used the same turntable set and similar body-choreography as Aerobicise, but showing skin instead of skin-tight suits.
Now, Harris is embarking on a publicity stunt of questionable taste which essentially says no, workouts won’t work out. Ya gotta be born beautiful ‘n’ sexy.
Or, to quote a slogan on the site selling stills from Harris’s nudie videos, “Not all pussy was created equal.”
To add to the overall air of sleaze surrounding Harris’s supposed online auction of glamour-model eggs, the USA Today story about it quotes a couple of the models as saying they’re doing this because they don’t want to pose nude to pay their bills; even though Harris’s video and photo sites promise un-augmented breasts, full spread shots, and lotsa hot girl-on-girl action.
(The models on the egg-auction site are not identified as having ever worked on Harris’s other projects. But Feed found a few faces that appeared on “Ron’s Angels” and also on Harris’s more explicit sites.)
Even odder, Harris claims on his auction site that you might as well buy into the kinds of prejudices denounced in books like The Beauty Myth. “Choosing eggs from beautiful women,” Harris vows, “will profoundly increase the success of your children and your children’s children, for centuries to come.”
Particularly if they’re willing to appear in “tasteful” photo shoots called “Girls Who Love Girls.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
In the end, word finally filtered up to clueless mainstream news media that this was, indeed, almost certainly a cyberhoax.
Maybe Harris is a better showman than I’d given him credit for. Maybe his next stunt could pretend to offer the eggs or sperm of clever hustlers, for parents who want to raise future Net entrepreneurs.
IN OTHER NEWS: My cable company’s just started showing ZDTV, the all-computer-news channel–sorta. On the cable system’s schedule channel, where the TV Guide Channel video inserts normally go in a quarter or a half of the screen, I’m getting that portion of the visual portion of ZDTV. The TV Guide Channel audio remains, leading to some quite interesting juxtapositions–particularly during commercial breaks….
MONDAY: Postmodern fiction, trashing old hierarchies or just building new ones?
YESTERDAY, we discussed a would-be commercial “alternative” magazine that wasn’t quite fiscally making it, and how it would probably have to find a business plan that didn’t require big corporate advertisers.
There’s a class of what might be called “ground level” zines (slicker than underground fanzines but rougher than corporate mags) that basically run on the business plan of expecting to lose money, and coming out as often as, or as long as, their publishers can subsidize them.
One of the more durable of these was Ben Is Dead. In tiny type on cheap newsprint, it relished in adoration or at least obsession with many of the relics of late-modern life–Sassy, Beverly Hills 90210, childhood memories, Marvel Comics, underwear, etc. etc.
But after some 30 issues in 11 years, publisher Darby Romeo has finally quit. Like the makers of Factsheet Five, Fizz, and several other ground-levels that have gone away in recent years, she’s decided to move on in her life.
A piece at Feed claims the end of Ben Is Dead forebodes the end of the whole Zine Revolution, an explosion of self-expressions that got underway in the early ’80s with cheap photocopying and desktop publishing.
Nowadays, the Feed essay notes, it’s easier (and just as materially unrewarding) to put up a personal website.
From my own 5.5-year experience in newsletter self-publishing, I could certainly see how the excitement of accumulating piles of print can begin to wear off. But I also see personal publishing as, well, a personal endeavor, one it’s perfectly OK to leave when you want to do something else.
Ben Is Dead is not a “failure” for not being continued, and Romeo’s certainly not “giving up.”
A personal zine is also a product of its times. Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, the rough-hewn look of many ground-level zines was an appropriate visualization of a DIY aesthetic opposed to old bureaucratic communications media. But in today’s go-go-go-getter cyber-economy, everybody’s supposed to be a young entrepreneur, and homemade-looking media can sometimes be perceived as simply the work of young entrepreneurs who aren’t doing it right.
I’ve seen newer ground-level zines, such as ROCKRGRL, Bust, and The Imp, which put their messages into more elaborate, more “professional” looking (but still un-corporate) designs. Will these go on to enjoy long lives? Maybe, or maybe their makers will move on to still-newer concepts.
Zines are no more dead than print media in general.
And, no, print media in general isn’t dead either.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle’s news media finally found something more important than Ken Griffey Jr. leaving town–specifically, a chance to spend seven hours of commercial-free live TV ruthlessly exploiting a minor tragedy; complete with lingering helicopter shots of police dogs wandering around clueless and scentless.
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: Who had the first commercial on South Park’s virulent anti-Pokemon episode? That’s right–Magic: The Gathering, from the now-Hasbro-owned outfit that also makes the Pokemon card game.
TOMORROW: Ron Harris’s journey from phony workout videos to phony human-egg auctions.
JUST OVER A WEEK AGO, I attended a reception for a specially-commissioned set of works by ten top contemporary artists.
All the artists had to start with the same object and paint or otherwise decorate it to their tastes.
The objects of beauty: Five-foot-tall fiberglass coffee mugs.
It was a promo piece for Millstone Coffee, the Everett, WA-founded, value-priced, supermarket gourmet-coffee operation that was bought a couple years back by none other than Procter & Gamble, the conglomerate ruthlessly fictionalized in Richard Powers’s novel Gain.
P&G’s been running national TV spots touting Millstone as the real coffee lover’s alternative to “that leading specialty-coffee chain,” alleging that other company’s more interested in selling T-shirts (i.e., promoting its brand name) than in serving up the finest quality java.
That’s a mighty allegation to be made by P&G, which practically invented brand-name marketing early in this century.
But anyhoo, they’re trying to emphasize that real-coffee-lovers image by test marketing a line of even gourmet-er beans, “Millstone Exotics.” That’s where the artists came in.
They include several whose work I’ve followed for some time–Parris Broderick, Meghan Trainor, and Shawn Wolfe.
Their colorfully-decorated big mugs, to be trucked around to public outdoor viewing spaces in the cities where Millstone Exotics will initially be marketed (Seattle, Portland, and Spokane), were meant by the company to convey a new image for the new higher-end product line; as something even fancy-schmancier than the stuff found in the coffee-store chains.
(Even though Millstone is now made at P&G’s existing coffee plants as well as its original Everett facility, and is shipped to supermarkets by the same distribution infrastructure that brings you Tide, Tampax, Iams pet foods, and diet snacks made with Olestra.)
Anyhoo (again), the artists at the reception expressed no public qualms about the project (many have done commercially-commissioned work before); not even for a company traditionally known for less than avant-garde cultural visions. And, goodness knows, in today’s art climate they could certainly use the income.
I have just one beef about the project. Because the giant cups were devised for outdoor display during the winter, they were molded with sealed tops. They can’t be reused (without a lot of hacksawing) as something an exotic dancer could jump out from.
Not even for the old “Won’t you join me in a cup of coffee?” gag.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some background reading about the fashion industry’s “friends” in Saipan.
TOMORROW: Another possible way to restore contemporary art’s place in urban society.
THE NATIONAL ‘ALTERNATIVE’ MEDIA, true to its Frisco-centric ways, has been treating the attempted upscaling of a Berkeley, Calif. community radio station as a story of national import.
That kind of deadening air’s nothing new to folks up here.
KRAB, a Seattle station of similar vintage and format to that Calif. station, was the subject of an attempted gentrification attempt in the ’80s. The operation was a success–the patient died. The frequency’s now used by none other than KNDD, the local outlet for all your next-Beasties and next-Korn wannabe acts.
In the mid-’90s, KCMU, the Univ. of Washington student station that had given just about all your “Seattle Scene” superstars their first airplay (and where I’d DJ’d for a year), was the subject of a sort of palace coup by UW administrators.
The station was placed under Wayne Roth, the bureaucrat who ran KUOW, the UW’s NPR affiliate. He tried to rein in KCMU’s eclectic programming, eliminating what a management memo called “harsh and abrasive music” in favor of baby-boomer-friendly world beat and blues; all in hopes of attracting a demographic market segment favorable to corporate “underwriters.”
After listener boycotts and DJ resignations and some heavy-handed PR against the moves, Roth and the UW compromised. KCMU would henceforth be run by a paid staff instead of volunteers; its on-air delivery would be slicked up. But indie rock (though not hard-punk), avant-jazz, and difficult-listening music would remain in the mix.
Now all that may be changing again.
While details are still sketchy, the rumor mill and the local news media have been awash in speculation about KCMU’s future. Seems the UW’s top brass has been talking among itself about transferring the station out from under Roth and KUOW and to the university’s “computing and communications” unit.
Roth, who maneuvered to get KCMU onto his turf, isn’t letting it go without a spat. He’s spoken publicly about his worries that the move would put the station’s programming under the thumb of potential big donors, and named Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project museum as just such a possible donor/influence-peddler.
Of course, that’s not really all that different from what Roth wanted to do with KCMU in ’93-’94.
Except Roth would be on the outside of the dealin’, and on the inside would be folks (like the heavy-hittin’ musicologists and rock historians staffing E.M.P.) who just might want to make it into a more professionally-run version of the serious-music-lover’s station the pre-Roth KCMU had been.
Anyhow, the station’s future has yet to be officially announced. Even if it does go under new management, KCMU might change in ways longtime fans such as myself might not necessarily like. (It could become an all-oldies station for rock historians, for instance.)
But if the potential new regime plays its cards right, it could become an experiment in community radio’s rebirth.
Tune in and find out.
IN OTHER NEWS: This just might be the best news story of the year….
TOMORROW: Art-film nostalgia.
“If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler By Italo Calvino, Ultra-Condensed by Thomas Deeny: You think you’re reading a condensation of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but you’re not.”
AS I MENTIONED HERE a few weeks back, I’m now doing a little thing in the back of a certain self-styled “sleazy tabloid,” out by the real-estate ads.
It’s a little guide to some remaining old buildings, and the stories they have to tell.
Here are a few more examples.
Originally, chain grocery stores were just little neighborhood mom-and-pop stores, only owned by corporations instead of by moms and pops. The biggest chain in the pre-supermarket era, A&P, had 14,000 outlets in 32 states at its peak. Safeway, the west’s first dominant chain, started in Idaho and started building and buying stores in Seattle in 1923. One of these first-generation stores still exists as a grocery, the independent Hillcrest Deli-Market on East Olive. It added a new front end in the ’80s and now sells a lot of product lines the old stores never had (hot deli items, frozen foods), but the basic layout remains.
The central building of the complex now known as Starbucks Center was originally built in 1907 as a Sears catalog warehouse, delivering most everything a household might need (even houses, in the form of plans and parts). In 1925, Sears took a hesitant step beyond mail-order by setting up retail stores in its Chicago and Seattle warehouses. Today, the chain’s oldest remaining store is still on 1st Avenue South, though the phase-out of Sears’ catalogs caused the rest of the sprawling complex to be refitted for offices and other retailers. (It’s got more square footage than the Columbia (now Bank of America) Tower.)
The first generation of self-service food supermarkets came along in the 1930s, as a Depression-era cost-cutting gimmick. They typically ran about 5,000 square feet, less than 10 percent the size of most new ones built today. But many of these tall, solid cement-box structures have found continued uses, even as the food chains moved to ever-bigger, ever-further-apart sites. Tower Books (1st North and Mercer) and Seattle Paint Supply (80th and Aurora) don’t just bear the ghosts of Wheaties boxes past. They’re stoic, relatively human-scale buildings with plenty of life past their original “pull dates.”
In the early ’60s, Albertsons built a modern supermarket at 23rd and Madison. Just a few years later, company brass got nervous about being in an “inner city” (read: minority) area, but was equally nervous about the potential bad PR if it closed the store. So instead, it created an opportunity for good PR by turning the branch over to a nonprofit community group. The resulting venture, Co-Op Foods, didn’t survive long. The space now houses a Planned Parenthood office/clinic. Its rapidly-upscaling neighborhood is serviced by four supermarkets, including a huge new Safeway and the new Madison Market health-food co-op, all on or near 15th Avenue.
Regional discount-store chains thrived briefly in the ’50s and ’60s, before K mart and later Wal-Mart cornered that market. Here, there was Valu-Mart (later known as Leslees), owned by the Weisfield’s jewelry chain. The Greenwood Valu-Mart survives as a Fred Meyer, but a more interesting fate befell the Everett branch. It was bought up by John Fluke, a leading manufacturer of electronic test equipment; resulting in perhaps the only abandoned shopping center to be turned into a factory. (Too bad Fluke didn’t call it “Ye Olde Mall.”)
IN OTHER NEWS: Times TV listing for Monday: “9:00 Later Today: Style, menopause.” Taking menopause in style–now that’s the attitude I like. Maybe one could throw a posh “last-period party,” highlighted by the ceremonial flushing of the last flushable applicator.
TOMORROW: So there are a lot of female public artists. So what?
WHAT THE WORLD thought seven years ago to be “The Seattle Scene Look” was really just a thrown-together assortment of anti-fashions, usually obtained at thrift stores. Its aesthetic of comfort and unprettiness was the direct opposite of the “designer grunge” look the world would later blame Seattle for, even though it really came entirely from New York (and which pretty much killed off the Generra/Unionbay “sportswear look,” which actually did come from Seattle).
Back during the previous decade and the start of this one, the lowly thrift store was considered the absolute coolest shopping site by the punk elites, as well as by many other smart young adults.
A whole subculture formed around the ideas of outfitting one’s life for very little money, of surrounding oneself with beautiful goods tossed out by our planned-obsolescence society, and of collecting and preserving assorted cultural detrius (which could be good or hideous, timeless or incredibly passe, just as long as it wasn’t bland or dull).
And, as with any young-adult subcultural activity, it had its own zine–Thrift Score, edited in Pittsburgh by “Al Hoff, Girl Reporter.”
It’s been almost a year since Hoff issued TS #13. While both the print zine and the TS website promise new issues eventually, the bulk of issue #13 was devoted to a thorough dissection about “The State of the Thrift Union.”
It ain’t a pretty picture (not even a paint-by-numbers one on velvet).
Among the reasons Hoff cites for the thrifting lifestyle’s decline and fall:
Hoff’s call to action in that issue was largely a boycott cry: “Don’t buy stuff at inflated prices. If it sits unsold, a thrift may re-evaluate its price.”
Since then, Hoff has largely moved on to other freelance topics, such as NASCAR auto racing.
She now says concerning her thoughts about thrifting back in TS #13, “I reckon, most of that still holds true. if anything, it’s more so. I’ve sort of given up thinking about the topic. I mean, it’ll just drive me mad, and I promised everybody I’d look on the bright side.”
TOMORROW: Words about pictures.
AS WE SAY every year on this date, welcome to the 10/4 MISCmedia, good buddy.
CLASSIC DINER FOOD (and I don’t mean the gussied-up simulacrum known in the yupscale-restaurant biz as “comfort food”) has been on a minor revival of interest lately.
The diner’s become a symbol for urban-civility advocates, to whom it symbolizes a pre-suburban-sprawl era of social interaction and neighborhood unity.
(Of course, “neighborhood unity” back then often included overt racism. Indeed, one of the turning points in the civil-rights movement was a 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in the South that had refused to serve black customers.)
Denny’s, trying to overcome its own reputation for racially-motivated preferences in service, is busily converting its old Cali-coffee-shop style restaurants into “Denny’s Diners,” with mostly the same menu but aluminum-sheet walls and other retro furnishings. It’s intended to raise a whiff of nostalgia for the classic East Coast diners, indie eateries built from prefab metal buildings resembling the diner cars of old passenger trains.
Out here in the alleged God’s Country, we never really had such diners. We had plenty of fine-‘n’-unpretentious eatin’ joints servin’ up meat loaf, burgers, big pies, and malts (most famously, the former Mar T Cafe in North Bend, a.k.a. Twin Peaks’ “RR Diner”). But not the diner-car diners.
Now, one such old diner-car diner building is operating, in the otherwise massively-upscaled sprawl-spot known as Bainbridge Island (where lawyers who think they’re poets move to $2-million “cabins”).
The Blue Water Diner, subject of simultaneous puff-pieces in the P-I and the Weekly last month, is the labor-O-love of one Al Packard, 50. It’s adjacent to his slightly older business, Packard’s Garage (a real quick-lube place, situated in a modern-construction imitation of an old-time grease palace).
A leisurely 10-minute walk from the ferry dock, the Blue Water Diner offers classic, decent (and decently priced) all-American meals and desserts, served up in a rigorously restored 1948 Fodero diner. They cheat a little bit, sticking the kitchen and restrooms in a new wood-frame addition. So it’s not as space-thrifty as an old diner, but you still get the beauty of a classic American industrial-architecture form, now looking shinier and slicker than it ever did–and servicing a slightly different social aesthetic.
What had been a factory-produced, standardized unit, built to be trucked to turnpike stops and street corners where pretty much the same menu items would be served pretty much the same way, now stands as an independent, individualistic mark of defiance against both chain-restaurant sameness and cuisine-restaurant pretentiousness.
Meanwhile, back in the heart-O-the-city, Linda’s, the five-year-old neoclassic tavern on East Pine, faced a dilemma. Despite the supposed decline of the “cocktail nation” fad, the beer-and-wine-only joint was losing young-adult customers to places with the harder stuff (including Linda’s sister-concerns, the Capitol Club and the Cha Cha Lounge). This state slightly liberalized its lounge regulations several years back, but a joint offering the hard stuff still has to also offer meals.
Fortunately, the Linda’s crew chose to match its down-home decor with down-home grub, a.k.a. diner food. I’ve had five entrees there in the three weeks since it opened its kitchen, and they were all damn good. Burgers, sammiches, steak, fish ‘n’ chips, mac ‘n’ cheese, hearty soups and chili (veggie if you insist), cheddar fries, onion rings, root-beer floats, and weekend breakfasts. All hale, hearty, and satisfying.
And no hummus in sight!
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s the first gay bank! (I’ll let you think up the “night depository” and “substantial penalty for early withdrawal” jokes for yourselves….)
TOMORROW: Stick a fork in the thrift-store lifestyle. It’s done.
CORPORATE-MEDIA REACTIONS TO THE INTERNET have come in waves. The “Threat To Our Children” wave. The “Threat To Common Discourse” wave. The “E-Commerce” wave.
(Funny, I always thought “E-Commerce” was what happened in the parking lots outside rave dances.)
Now, there’s another wave, and it’s something corporate media absolutely luuvvv, at least in principle.
The Net, according to the newest Received Idea, is indeed good for one thing.
Selling movie tickets.
By now, even people who haven’t seen The Blair Witch Project are totally familiar with the film, its plot, its premise, and, most prominently of all, the hype. The simultaneous Time and Newsweek cover stories. The cast’s appearance on the MTV Video Music Awards. The endless repetition, from Entertainment Weekly to the New York Observer, of the filmmakers’ success-story legend–how a next-to-no-budget indie horror film became a huge hit thanks to “word of mouth” publicity on the Net.
A more careful look at the story, though, reveals something much less “spontaneous” yet simultaneously more interesting to corporate-media types.
Blair Witch turns out to have been a marriage made in marketing heaven, a three-way match between the economics/aesthetics of ’90s Fringe-Indie filmmaking, the Net’s genre-film fan base, and good old-fashioned B-movie hucksterism.
From the indie-film craze, the Blair Witch filmmakers got a whole language of “looks” and shticks: College-age, unknown actors; wobbly camera work (some shot on video); the gimmicks of fake-documentary shooting and characters talking into the camera; and other assorted means of turning a lack of production resources into a feeling of immediacy and a sort of realism.
From the scifi/horror fan community online, distributors Artisan Entertainment found a ready-made audience, with highly articulated opinions on what it liked and disliked in genre movies (a marketer’s wet dream!). Artisan could fashion a campaign promising everything real fans wanted, while making the film’s cheapness into an asset.
From the exploitation tradition, Artisan learned the importance of spending more money selling the movie than the filmmakers had spent making it. The studio put up a big website (that never mentioned the story’s fictional), slipped preview tapes and screening passes to influential online reviewers, planted preview stories in “alternative” papers, and generally sucked up to a fan community used to being treated as an afterthought by the big studios.
The result: A return-on-investment Roger Corman probably never even dreamed of.
But what happens when a movie gets the fan-site treatment, the newsgroup recommendations, and the chat room praise, but without the distributor’s puppet-strings directly or indirectly manipulating it all?
You get The Iron Giant.
A movie described by gushing fans as representing everything from the first successful U.S.-made adaptation of Japanese adventure-anime conventions to the potential harbinger of a new era in animated features. A movie praised and re-praised on darn near every weblog site and online filmzine as a refreshingly serious, grownup animated film.
But after the box-office nonsuccess of Space Jam, Quest for Camelot, and The King and I, Warner Bros. seems to have little remaining faith in its feature-animation unit.
The Iron Giant was released in the dog days of August, with nominal TV advertising (chiefly on the Kids WB cartoon shows), almost no merchandising tie-ins (even at the Warner Studio Store), and a nice-looking yet perfunctory website.
What’s probably singlehandedly kept the film in the theatres for seven weeks (at least in some parts of the country) has been the Net word-O-mouth. Real word-O-mouth, with little or no studio push or even studio attention.
The Iron Giant cost a lot more to make than The Blair Witch Project, so it won’t be easy to compare the effectiveness of each film’s free online fan publicity.
But it’s clear which one’s the real netfan-championed underdog, for whatever that’s worth.
TOMORROW: A new book treats strange-phenomena with Brit-reserve skepticism.
CABLE COMPANIES FINALLY appear to be “getting it.”
They’re sluggishly rolling out the fiber-optic line upgrades they’d been promising for most of the decade.
(Here in Seattle, the now-AT&T-owned TCI is finally getting around to some of the neighborhoods it promised upgraded service to by one to five years ago.)
So, now that you can finally get Comedy Central and maybe even TV Land on your cable system, what use is there for those cable-killers, the home satellite dishes?
Well, there are several reasons to consider the little dish instead of the long wire, even though the dish costs you up-front plus monthly programming fees at least comparable to those charged by cable. Among them:
You live where there’s still no upgraded cable. South Park might be getting passe, but there’s still Strangers With Candy to make a Comedy Central-less cable hookup a little less valuable each day. Not to mention the Food Network, the Game Show Network, BBC America, MuchMusic, etc. etc.
You live where there’s no cable. The cable companies may have finally gotten around to certain “inner city” neighborhoods they’d previously shunned, but there are still some industrial, art-loft, rural, and isolated-town environments without the black coaxial running in.
You want lotsa extra-price movies and/or sports. If you’re a hockey fanatic or if you’re a fan of teams shown principally on some other region’s Fox Sports variation or if you really, really want five different HBOs, the satellite’s the only way to go.
You want porn. Some satellite dish companies offer channels displaying uncensored human-mating spectacles, or at least channels offering more lightly censored human-mating acts than the Spice channel or Skinemax offer.
You want certain channels even upgraded cable in your town doesn’t offer. Different dish services offer various ethnic and foreign-language channels for folks from China, Brazil, India, etc. And there are some “mainstream” but third-string cable channels that now have only spotty pickups on local cable systems: BET On Jazz, Style, Discovery People, MTV’S M2, ESPN Classic, CNNfn, the Golf Network, Outdoor Life, MSNBC, Bloomberg Business News.
You want ZDTV. From the Softbank/Ziff-Davis computer-magazine empire, 24 hours (actually, more like six hours repeated four times) of talk shows and news-magazine shows about hi-tech, PC buying, and life on the ol’ Internet. The Internet Tonight show’s particularly valuable as a televisual “Weblog.”
Unfortunately, its site only offers streaming live video during special events (speeches by tech-biz leaders, mostly); the short clips on its site only make you want to get a dish so you can see the whole thing.
Which, of course, is probably the management’s goal.
Cable, however, still will have certain things satellite services don’t. Local channels and major-network affiliates. Regional news channels such as NorthWest Cable News. And, of course, public access.
IN OTHER NEWS: Was a little amused by the headline, “Energetic Beck hasn’t lost a beat with time.” I thought to myself, “Sure he hasn’t had anything close to a hit since ’96, but Beck’s not that old.” Then, alas, the story turned out to be about Jeff Beck….
TOMORROW: What kids don’t know that grownups assume is ubiquitous; and vice versa.
YES, I’VE GONE BACK to a certain sleazy tabloid. It’s just on a penny-ante freelance basis, and it’s in really tiny type buried back in the classifieds, but it’s there.
It’s an examination of some of my not-so-fair city’s surviving real-estate relics.
And here’s some of the first batch of these pieces.
In 1907, the world’s first stand-alone filling station was built south of Pioneer Square by the old Rockefeller oil trust. That place no longer exists, but other early examples of the form still stand–the Madrona Automatic art studio (formerly Kriegel’s Texaco), 1435 34th Ave., and Sig’s Barber Shop (formerly the Eveready Gas Station), 2103 3rd Ave. Both attempted to fit in with their neighborhoods, via small, decorative buildings that neared the sidewalk on at least one side. Their beauty recalls a time when the car culture was new and promising to fit in with its surroundings. As we’ll see in future installments, drive-up architecture didn’t stay that way for long.
The automobile has become the most powerful single icon of American life, but the neighborhood full-service gas station has had its ups and downs. In the ’70s, when oil shortages caused a major industry consolidation, a lot of smaller stations closed. In the ’90s, when oil gluts caused another major industry consolidation (still underway), more smaller stations closed. Some were demolished; others were refitted to new uses. The Olive Way Richfield (later Arco), closed in the early ’80s, was remodeled to fit a dry cleaner in its former office and service bays. A storefront addition was added later, leaving only the former Arco sign.
As the gasoline biz consolidated in recent decades, some neighborhood fuel-station/garage combos switched to only selling gas (and convenience-store treats) or only providing auto parts and repairs. The Arco-AM/PM combos exemplify the former; Japanese Auto Clinic (6th and Denny) the latter. Richlen’s Super-Mini (23rd and Union) has a more complex history. It began as a Shell station with service bays, then became a gas-and-convenience-store outlet, then became just a convenience store, and more recently started selling (Exxon-branded) gas again along with drive-up espresso and “Kick’n Chicken.”
For some six decades, from the ’20s thru the mid-’80s, the old Union Oil Co. of California supplied its Union 76 stations from a sprawling pipeline terminal and tank farm at Elliott and Broad, just inland from the waterfront. Union Oil later split into two companies; one of the successor firms, Unocal, has spent several years cleaning up the former terminal site of the fuels, greases, and chemicals that had seeped into the ground. Now that it’s officially clean enough for redevelopment, the city and Paul Allen are planning to turn it into a “sculpture park.”
Seattle builds Boeing planes and big Kenworth trucks, but once we also built passenger cars. Specifically, the legendary Ford Model T. Around 1917, about halfway through the T’s 19-year production run, Henry Ford had so fully regimented the car’s manufacturing process that he decided to build regional assembly plants, hoping to shave shipping costs. This stoic structure near Fairview and Mercer stopped making cars during the Depression, but survived as a printing plant (making, among many other things, regional editions of TV Guide). It’s now a Shurgard storage warehouse.
TOMORROW: The cyberkids are alright.
worth seeing, but it doesn’t really make it into the pantheon of great drunk chick movies.” (Found by Andrew….)
