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THANKS TO ALL who’ve asked about the progress of the updated second edition of LOSER: The Real Seattle Music Story.
The book’s coming along, and should be off to press by month’s end (knock-on-Formica).
Some of the new material might appear on these pages in forthcoming weeks.
Until then, please enjoy the following music-related fun links.
IN OTHER NEWS: Phones ‘R’ US just changed all the prerecorded announcement pieces on its voice-messaging system to a less businesslike, more sultry feminine voice. If the old, pre-breakup AT&T was “Ma Bell” and the spun-off regional phone providers of ’84 were the “Baby Bells,” then this company might now be a “Horny Teen Bell.” (The kind who always unloads big traumas upon those responsible for paying her bills.)
TOMORROW: A revisionist look at Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner.”
ELSEWHERE:
YESTERDAY, we mentioned some troubles facing Vancouver, a place where early-’90s-style economic doldrums are back and politics has devolved into blood sport.
But there’s still a lot to like about the place. Such as–
Vancouver itself’s a very compact city, with most everything a tourist would be interested in lying in a two-mile radius of the downtown Granville Mall, and everything else easily reachable by bus, by commuter rail, and by…
Prostitution is quasi-legal; though politicians and cops keep harrassing the area’s estimated 1,500 sex workers (providing a $65-million segment of the tourist economy) and their client-supporters, it’s on a much lower-key basis than in most U.S. cities, and is mostly aimed at keeping the streets respectable-looking. Sex-worker-rights advocates are many and outspoken.
The once-thriving Vancouver strip-joint circuit, though, has nearly collapsed; as many bar owners have switched to music formats to attract more coed audiences.
So take off to the Great White North as soon as you can. Not only will you have tons-O-fun (unless Customs finds pot stashed on your person), but the economy up there needs your U.S. bucks.
TOMORROW: Fun music-related talk.
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the beauty that is the Amtrak Cascades train to Vancouver, B.C.
Vancouver itself is also still beautiful. But it’s not exactly running with what old Hamilton Watch ads used to call “Railroad Accuracy.”
I’d been intrigued enough to go there by the headlines back in late August: “Clark Calls It Quits.” Turns out my northern namesake, Glen Clark, was being forced to resign as B.C.’s Premier.
It came after RCMP investigators found documents showing he’d been arranging for sweetheart deals to well-connected pals who wanted a casino license. It was one of a series of influence-peddling and corporate-welfare scandals that had befallen many B.C. politicians in the past. One such prior scandal had led to the demise of the Social Credit Party, which had run the B.C. government with an iron hand for most of the ’70s and ’80s.
Mr. Clark’s party leadership appointed a new premier, who announced immediately he wouldn’t run for the post in the next election; which means the province will have had at least seven premiers in a 10-year span.
Without going too far into the wacky realm of Canadian politics, let’s just note that it’s a Parlaimentary system. The party that elects the most legislators picks the chief executive, who has nearly full reign over the government for five years (but can call an early election if the opinion polls look promising). Political parties can be national or regional, and can come and go in a single election cycle.
Currently there’s only one dominant national party, the Liberals of national Prime Minister Jean Chretien (who, like the Democrats south of the border and the Labour party in Britain, have become a lot less liberal lately).
In B.C., provincial politics is divided between the Euro-Socialistic New Democrats (which Mr. Clark led until his forced resignation) and a pro-corporate Liberal Party branch (heavily backed by right-wing publisher Conrad Black’s daily papers). As long as voters keep electing NDP governments, Black’s papers will keep sniffing for any potential scandal and the Mounties (ostensibly an apolitical organization but ultimately answering to the federal Liberals) will keep getting called in to investigate the papers’ allegations.
Now you know just a little of why commentators regularly call B.C. politics “a blood sport.”
Of course, premiers like Mr. Clark might have a little stronger hold on power if the local economy were doing well. It’s not.
The Asian recession and the Canadian dollar’s pitiful exchange rate have depressed the import-export trade, one of B.C.’s economic stalwarts. Another big sector, timber and other resource-based businesses, has struggled under the manipulative hands of global financiers (the big logging firm Macmillan Bloedel just agreed to sell out to Weyerhaeuser).
Canada’s #2 department-store chain, Eaton’s, is folding. (Vancouver’s only home-owned department store, Woodward’s, folded a few years ago; its downtown building’s still vacant.) The country’s #2 air carrier, Canadian Airlines, may disappear in a merger deal currently being worked out. Vancouver’s most venerable bookstore chain, Duthie’s, just closed nine of its ten branches.
Things are even scarier in the downtown East End, the only true “bad area” in all of Canada. A Green River-like serial killer’s been stalking the neighborhood’s addicts, streetwalkers, and down-and-outers in recent years; taking lives and causing some British Columbians to start questioning their land’s quiet, harm-free reputation.
TOMORROW: The rest of this story: What’s still great about Vancouver.
IT’S A LABOR DAY MISC. WORLD, perhaps the only online column that has never been to Burning Man.
JAY JACOBS STORES, R.I.P.: Another locally-owned chain succumbs to the global giants. Or is it rather the case of a mall-based specialty chain succumbing to the big-box superstores? You decide.
AT WIT’S START: Last Friday, I discussed Francine Prose’s rant in Harper’s about PC but poorly-written stories force-fed to kids in high-school English classes.
I suggested an alternative: A sequence of courses in which the teens would be introduced to Great Kickass Writing.
My own introduction to G.K.W. came some time after college. I’d come to believe there were two main kinds of fiction: the popular stuff (which, considering how well it sold, had to have some solid construction and fun elements, right?) and the highbrow stuff (like the turgid prose I’d been forced to read as a student).
I thought I’d try to cleanse my mind from the boring highbrow stuff and learn to read bestsellers.
Only, to my surprise, the bestsellers I picked up were even worse-written than my old English Lit required texts had been.
Ponderous science-fiction trilogies in which the future was always exactly like the present only more so. Sluggish fantasy epics about how, five thousand years after the Earth was nuked, a race of wizards emerged. Fictional Presidential widows marrying fictional Greek shipping tycoons. Whodunits in which the most grisly wastes of human lives were treated as mere premises for clue-solvin.’
Then a kind person introduced me to Flann O’Brien.
Real wit! Real pacing! Funny characters! Clever yet poignant stories!
My life was forever changed.
No longer would I settle for unadventurous “adventure” stories, flaccid “horror,” or clueless “mysteries.” Nope, I would insist, and still insist, on Great Kickass Writing.
Herewith, a few links to Great Kickass Writing on the Web:
never seen before but I couldn’t check them out because I’d been away from my desk too long.”
TOMORROW: As 1/1/00 approaches, Y2K survivalists become less communalist and more capitalist.
ELSEWHERE: A Disney subsidiary offered free home pages; this was one result…
DESPITE THE HOOPLA over Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and several new stadia, the industry that is Major League Baseball still has fundamental problems.
The so-called “small market teams” are having trouble meeting superstar payrolls.
Some of these teams are still threatening to move if they don’t get tax-subsidized homes with lotsa luxury boxes. Some pundits earlier this year claimed some teams might actually go out of business.
And without salary caps or TV revenue sharing, the economics of the game are still out of whack.
Well, here’s my modest proposal to fix it all, or at least some of it.
The way I see it, baseball’s problem isn’t too many teams but too few.
It needs a third league, a second-division league, whose top-winning teams would cycle into the AL/NL schedules yearly (the bottom AL/NL teams would cycle back into Division 2, a la British Soccer).
The Division 2 league would serve a full six-month season; its players would work directly for those teams (i.e., not a “farm system”). It would permanently provide quality baseball entertainment to the “small market” cities (New Orleans, Washington DC, San Antonio) and the cities that haven’t supported MLB lately (Montreal, Pittsburgh). No more stadium blackmail. No more threats to move. Communities asked to support ballpark construction could at least be assured of a long-term amortization of their investments.
The Division 2 League would be more popular than AAA ball (and hence attract better local TV and regional cable deals) because its players would be employed by the local teams, not by farm systems. Fans could get to know their local heroes for a season or two before they moved on.
The Division 2 League would share, on a reduced-percentage basis, in MLB’s marketing and merchandizing revenues (and in any future TV revenue-sharing deal). With this income “floor” to count on, team owners could plan budgets based on reasonably-stable revenue projections. Or they could, within limits (if we’re starting a new league, let’s give it a salary cap from the git-go), work to make the leap into the AL/NL ranks.
This idea would, natch, greatly alter the game’s landscape. As many as eight to twelve AAA teams might be either displaced or forced to change their whole player-contract setup. The whole farm-system institution would be thrown into reorganization; and the initial outfitting of the new Division 2 League teams would throw a curve at players’ and coaches’ salary structures in both the majors’ and minors’ ranks.
But a little more instability in the short term would lead to a lot more stability in the long term.
And baseball is a game that thrives on stability, at least if you believe all those smarmy baseball essayists out there.
(I’d already been thinking of these concepts when I read that the old Pacific Coast League had essentially operated as a non-farm, near-major league during its approximate 1938-57 heyday. The PCL’s president once suggested turning that outfit into a third major league, but the NL moved into LA and SF instead.)
TOMORROW: Some of the worst influences on young writers.
ELSEWHERE: Training cats? These guys claim it can actually be done, if you buy their product… “A parable, of sorts, about us, the ‘descendents’ of Adam and Eve, in the state of exile that is our lives”…
ADVISORY: Today’s installment contains tasteful language about a topic some readers might find borderline-icky.
LAST FRIDAY, I reported on a recent in-person chat with some “amateur” adult-website operator-models.
Since that in-person meeting, I continued to correspond via email with Oasis, who’d organized the “bar meet” at which I’d met her and two other Netporn queens (and their ever-supportive husbands). Here’s some of our virtual conversation:
I first started my site a little more than three years ago. It started as a one-page ad to advertise a video Lance [the husband] and I had made together. The response from that one page was just completely overwhelming, and the entire site just grew from there.
When I first started there were only two or three of us. Now the number is probably somewhere in the high hundreds, if not in the thousands…
According to all my fans, the reason that they like my site so much is because it always looks like I’m having fun! Which I am!
It shows that we really do this because we enjoy it, and it’s our lifestyle, not just because we thought we could make some money off of it.
I also do my best to involve my fans in the site and in my life. I answer all my e-mail personally; I travel around the country hosting bar meets where fans can come out and party with us; and I even host parties in my house. I think all of this creates a bond between me and the surfers, and I think that bond is very important.
It basically means we are real people who mostly do this for fun. We’re not professional actresses or models or dancers…. Just the girl next door who happens to like getting naked in front of a camera and sharing herself over the web. 🙂
Do this because you want to do it, because it’s fun and you enjoy it.
Get to know your fans and do what you can to connect with them… same as any other business. Know your target audience.
Women aren’t my main audience, but over the years I have had several female fans. On a couple occassions I’ve even had single women come to the bar meets to hang out with us 🙂
I think the Internet has done a whole lot in connecting the average woman to a part of their lives and a community that they might not have otherwise known existed. It has certainly brought into focus the fact that the average woman really does enjoy sex and isn’t afraid anymore to show it!
The most popular myth (and one I myself believed before I got into this whole thing) associated with this industry is that men control it and the women involved are being debased/manipulated/exploited. That may have some small truth in a few cases in mainstream (what I call L.A.) porn, but in the amateur adult Internet world it is absolutely false.
The absolute best part about this industry is that we women can be a part of it, and be extremely successful in it, by doing whatever we want to do, whenever and however we want to do it. There are no producers saying, “Do this or you’ll be fired.”
This is totally an outlet for our own sexuality, and as such it is very empowering. On the Internet, our boundaries have been lifted and we’re free to explore who we are at our own pace.
Running an amateur website is definitely a positive process of self-examination and personal growth. I can think of few other avenues that allow such freedom.
TOMORROW: A look ahead toward Halloween (a mere three months away).
ELSEWHERE: Minneapolis’s Museum of Questionable Medical Devices has everything from a “Foot Operated Breast Enlarger” (1976) to a “Violet Ray Generator” (1915)… Kinky fantasies from way back when, at a Page of Antique Weirdness…
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, thanx and a hat tip to all who attended my second live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. last night at Elliott Bay Book Co. Further events TBA.
(ADVISORY: The rest of today’s edition contains tasteful language about topics some of you might find borderline-icky. But that’s America for you.)
In his new book For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, the author-cellist Wayne C. Booth quotes Walt Whitman liking Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing for the “amount of passion–the blood and muscle–with which it was invested, which lay concealed and active in it.”
That’s as close to a workable definition of “amateur” as I can find these days. The previously-dominant definition, of working without financial renumeration, was pretty much buried a few Olympic Games ago.
The “passion” definition’s also better than the “unpaid” definition to describe the thousands of “amateur adult” Websites out there these days.
Yes, a good proportion of those sites are trying to earn money. Many of them charge for access, to everything or to extra-hot “members’ areas.” Many of them sell videos, CD-ROMS, photos, autographed mementos, and/or undergarments.
But these sites (or at least the better ones) offer something you can’t get from the formulaic rites of corporate porn.
Call it a spirit, a joie de vivre, a feeling (even if in some cases it’s just an affectation of a feeling) that these women really like to do their varying degrees of wicked things (from nude posing on some sites all the way to, well, all the way on other sites) and to let you see them doing them.
Three of these webmistresses recently made a pair of joint public appearances in Seattle and suburban Des Moines, WA. One of them, Oasis, was having a west-coast tour of these “bar meets” with fans; two others, the local Gina and the Portland-based J, accompanied her on this stop.
All three have husbands (Gina for 20 years) who attended the bar meet; all have “open” relationships, at least for the purpose of gathering photo and video material for their sites. Oasis even invited some of her bar-meet guests to an “after-party” safe-sex photo shoot back in her hotel room. (I didn’t attend or ask to.)
All three women were extremely nice and personable. Even while legally dressed in the bars, they exuded an open sensuality and an enthusiasm for life. They were perfect hostesses, graciously leading the shier computer-nerd fans into the bar-table conversation. The women talked a lot about how they love bodies (their own and other people’s), they love sex, and they want to use their sites to help people overcome their own inhibitions and lingering prudish repressions.
But, just like “indie” rock, “amateur” webmistressing is still show business, which means it’s business. Oasis conducts her bar-meet tours so she can personally bring in new fans, so she can turn current occasional viewers into paid members, and so she can make cross-promotional photo ops with other webmistresses across North America. She and her hubby have also worked as consultants and server-providers to other amateurs. Their site claims,
“If you can be a consistant model, have the desire to attend functions, meet new people and promote a website then you could be an internet star! We won’t shit you, the pay-off is much faster being a model, but the long term investment is greater to have your own site. Don’t believe any of the ‘get rich quick’ crap you read on other sites… It takes a while to establish a website and turn a good profit. But if you have the drive, patience and charisma you can earn big bucks with your own website.”
MONDAY: A little more of this.
ELSEWHERE: Some ex-Yugoslavs dream of Cyber Utopias; while others retreat to the paranormal… Probably not the ultimate ad-placement abomination, but the lowest for now…
SOMETIME LATE LAST YEAR, erstwhile Stranger music writer Everett True called for a “Campaign for Real Rock” (inspired by the British beer-lovers’ lobby, the Campaign for Real Ale).
True’s premise: Just as the great British brewing traditions were being threatened by callous cost-cutting measures at big corporate breweries, so was classic American hard rock n’ roll threatened by the commercial-pop acts manufactured by the major record labels.
True’s gone back to the U.K.; but without him, real rock (or, as Backfire zine editor Dawn Anderson calls it, “Rawk”) is back. Alas.
Lost in most mainstream-media coverage of rape and pillaging at Woodstock 99 was the fact that the festival bore only a trademark connection with the ’69 original. This festival was not a corporate exploitation of “Peace and Music” but a showcase for harder, louder, more aggressive acts, especially on its last night.
Now there’s a radio station devoted entirely to the likes of Limp Bizkit, KORN (the group which relegated BR-549 to being only the second most popular band with a Hee Haw-derived name), Eminem, Kid Rock, etc. etc.
It’s called “The Funky Monkey,” though its official call letters are KKBY. It had been a fairly progressive, Tacoma-based R&B station, but hadn’t turned a profit with that format; so it’s now going straight for the white-gangsta-wannabe market.
The contrast between the station’s new and old formats couldn’t be much more stark.
The old KKBY had played music by and for African-Americans who’d long ago gotten weary of gangsta rap, that “authentic ghetto voice” concocted or at least pushed by Hollywood promoters eager to nakedly exploit white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men as sexy savages.
The new KKBY plays mostly white artists who’ve taken the gangsta acts’ “Xtreme” hiphop (via such crossover pioneers as the Beastie Boys and Jane’s Addiction) and removed all blackness except for a thin veneer of supposed street-credibility. White artists “admiring” their black gangsta forebearers for fostering an image of doped-up, violent, woman-hating jerks with a finely-tuned fashion sense.
In other words, “Angry White Rappers.”
A mostly-white continuation of former black-music trends many black listeners had rejected. (Which is nothing new. Black audiences have long rushed to the Star-Off Machine after a black-music subgenre had been infiltrated, then taken over, by white acts, from big-band to doo-wop.)
This new white-rock-rap genre (KKBY calls it “the new heavies”) is at least as stoopid as most other Rawk waves over the past three decades. What’s different is the level of personal aggression–a rage often not against the machine but against one’s peers and the opp. sex. Rock n’ roll used to be about trying to seduce, to woo, to attract sex. The “new heavies” are often boasting to other males about their sexual prowess, while snarling at females to shut up and take it.
I’m really trying not to sound here like an old fogey–or worse, an old rock critic. There are too many parallels in what I’ve written above to the ’50s critics who loved authentic black R&B but loathed that commercialized white teenybopper corruption of it known as rock n’ roll.
And, there are some signs of non-idiocy within the genre. Eminem, at times, approaches the electro-laconic wit of, say, MC 900 Ft. Jesus. And those old-school new-heavies, the Beastie Boys, know the ultimate idiocy of the “Wigger” stance (and also shouldn’t be blamed too much for having some of the same retro-fetishes as Quentin Tarantino).
But compare these SK8-rappers to the best real hiphop and a wide creative chasm remains. Even the most corporate of fin-de-siecle R&B product-suppliers, such as Missy Elliott or Sean Combs, has a sense of the complex potentials of their music you can’t find in Insane Clown Posse, and certainly not in white doodz who wish they were Insane Clown Posse.
TOMORROW (in person):Get everyone you know, plus any strangers you might run into, to get to the big promo event and reading for The Big Book of MISC. tomorrow night, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.
TOMORROW (on the site): The beauty that is The Imp.
IN OTHER NEWS: The good news is Seattle’s public-access cable channel’s getting a massive infusion of new studio equipment. The bad news is the whole studio will be out of commission for at least two months during the renovation, so everything on Channel 29 (probably starting in October) will be pre-taped on location, or a rerun of an older studio show.
ELSEWHERE: This new learning-tools site for schoolkids features some of the dumbest adult-writers-trying-to-sound-young slang ever attempted–even in the plot summaries of major books!… Speaking of learning tools, will Microsoft’s new print dictionary include nonstandard definitions for “monopoly,” “coercion,” or “protection racket”?… Now, for a limited time only, you can make up your own Netcolumn. The professionally-constructed ones you find here at Misc. World, of course, will still be better….
BEFORE WE BEGIN TODAY, a friendly reminder to get on over to my big reading and who-knows-what, 6 p.m. tonight at the downtown Seattle Borders Books. (And apologies to those who couldn’t connect to the site earlier this morning; it’s all fixed now.) But for now…
TECHNO-PROGRESS, some Net-lovers aver, is supposed to make everything continually obsolete every year and a half or so (“Moore’s Law”).
Marry that to the “planned obsolescence” concepts that have ruled consumer-product industries since the ’50s, and you end up at the landfill where thousands of 1983-vintage Atari game cartridges are supposed to be buried, unsalable at the time (though revered classics now).
But if video games rapidly go out of mode, how about video-game books?
Ms. J.C. Herz published Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds way back in the Neandrethal days of 1997. Ah, that was such a simpler time: There were still five Spice Girls. Streaming video was a mere twinkle in Rob Glaser’s eye. Cable modems and DSL lines were far less available than hype articles about them. Some pundits were proclaiming such venerable hi-tech names as Apple and Nintendo to be irrepairably doomed. And on the video game charts in the U.S., nothing was hotter than the ultraviolent, hyperrealistic “first-person shooters” and other fighting games.
Herz spends an awful lot of space in her short book defending and even praising the likes of Doom, Marathon, and Mortal Kombat. She really loves them when she sees boy players acting out their genocidal fantasies thru the guise of a dominatrix-babe game character (though she doesn’t mention what would become the queen of the digitized doms, Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft).
From the tone of the book as a whole, it’s clear she came into the project hoping to put a positive spin on the whole gaming culture. It’s a semi-cruel twist-O-fate that, by structuring her book chronologically and ending it at that time, she was stuck with depicting as gaming’s latest Ultimate Achievement a point when the industry was at its slickest and stupidest.
Since then, things have changed somewhat. The gross-out violence games are still around, but their novelty has definitely worn off and developers are trying to add new dimensions to their play (such as in the more recent Tomb Raider sequels). Higher-speed Net connections have caused a boom in real-time, multi-player gaming.
And Nintento’s come roaring back with the N64 system. In turn, that’s meant a resurgence in Nintendo’s game-biz aesthetic (preferring fun and cuteness over blood and guts; emphasizing kids rather than teens or teens-in-young-adult-bodies). The keystone of this resurgence is Pokemon, which not only emphasizes characters and game-play over rendering and spectacle, but was originally released on the comparatively-primitive Game Boy platform!
I do like the first half or so of Herz’s book. She reverently looks back at the early days of Pong and Asteroids, and explains just why aging blank-generation kids look back so fondly at those relatively lo-tech games with their abstract blips and sprites moving to cheesy synth music.
And you gotta love any book with the nerve to describe one avid collector of these old games, who also has a “normal” day job as a corporate lawyer, as “a human Frosted Mini-Wheat.”
IF YOU’RE ALREADY scheduled to attend some $100 dinner-theater show tonight, there’s another live event promoting The Big Book of MISC. It’s next Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.
TOMORROW: Some more aphorisms and words to live by.
ELSEWHERE: A first-person site all about teenage troo luuv. You wanna tell her it might not work out the way she dreams? (“He is going to be an Orthopedic Surgeon and I will be a Professional Singer.”) I sure don’t wanna tell her…
WHEN E-COMMERCE BEGAN, so little ago, it was something for those hardcore cyber-pioneers delightfully known as “early adopters” or more colloquially as “geeks.” (Amazon.com’s early bestseller lists drew heavily on programming manuals and tech-mogul tell-all books.)
Then, as it “matured,” e-commerce became something aimed at the alleged “mainstream market.” (At a reading last month, I heard ex-local author Po Bronson claim the latest craze among Internet-startup financiers was to drive down a strip-mall street like Aurora Avenue, look at the store signs, and imagine a dot-com next to each; i.e. CarParts.com or Statuary.com.)
Now, e-commerce is big enough to have room for “hipness” in it.
And, natch, Seattle outfits are at the forefront of the fad.
Exhibit A: UV115.com; first known as Buy Curious. (The latter name’s a pun, recognizable only to readers of alterna-weekly personal ads. Apparently too few Net-users got the gag, so the outfit’s now in the process of adopting the new “UV115” name, with the slogan “Protect Yourself.”)
It’s a veritable online answer to Urban Outfitters (which still doesn’t have an online presence of its own, strangely). It’s co-led by David Alhadeff (scion of the local family that razed the legendary Longacres horse-racing track for a Boeing office park).
Its press kit claims “Gen X and Gen Y consumers are the most savvy Internet users, yet their buying power has yet to be fully tapped.” The company vows to tap this with “product” that’s “geared towards the juniors market, including clothing, accessories, hair care, and wellness categories.”
That means tight black skirts, ultra-baggy jeans (modeled by beltless doodz showing their boxer-shorts elastic), Manic Panic hair dyes, cigar-box handbags, votive candles, “punk rock” bracelets, turkey-feather boas, Zippo lighters, syringe pens, inflatable tulips, and condom gift-packs.
It also means such site extras as an advice column, “Meet Cleo.” (To a letter from a recently-dumped young lady, Cleo replies, “Look on the bright side–now you can have sex with all of those totally hot guys you’ve been spying around town. Come on, chin up!”)
I’ve previously referred to Tom Frank’s thesis that “hip” youth culture’s always been inseparable from corporate marketers’ ongoing quest for the prized 18-35 target demographic. That it should show up online should come as no surprise. The only (pleasant) surprise is how well the site looks and works.
Speaking of wise purchasing…
TOMORROW (IN PERSON!):Get your shakin’ booty down to the next live event for The Big Book of MISC. Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. If you can’t make it then or want a double dose, there’s another one the following Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.
TOMORROW (ON THE SITE): An already-outdated video-game history.
ELSEWHERE: Here’s a sample of Carnival Culture author James Twitchell’s new book, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism, discussing “The Complexity of Consuming Commercialism:” “We live through things. We create ourselves through things. And we change ourselves by changing our things. We often depend on such material for meaning”…. A symbol of everything I hate about corporate entertainment goes Chap. 11; who sez there’s no good news no more?…
>PORTLAND HAS HAD its own “hip” interior design look for some time now.
You can see it down there at nearly every Pearl District record store, book store, bar, clothing boutique, and coffeehouse. You can see it up here at Hamburger Mary’s and the McMenamin’s brewpubs. It’s a look that even makes efficient new buildings look quaint and lived-in, at least on the inside. It involves “weatherbeaten” paint hues, retro wallpaper, “antiqued” wood paneling, and reproduction posters and metal signs. It doesn’t really look old; it looks like a stage set for some nice little play about how sociable life used to be, back before the sterility of modern design and the hectic pace of advanced-industrial society.
Seattle now has its own “hip” interior design look, and it celebrates everything the Portland look implicitly renounces.
We’ve previously mentioned it in regards to the ARO.Space dance club and its associated venture, the Ace Hotel. Now, the look’s spreading further.
Example #1: The Lux coffeehouse on 1st used to be a homey, comfy little joint, intimate and coccoon-ish. Now it’s been redone in “clean” off-whites. The overstuffed chairs and heavy tables have been replaced by lightweight, curvy, Scandinavian Modern-inspired furnishings.
The old Lux was a womblike shelter, a respite from the day’s stresses. The new Lux is a more engaging environment, a place to recharge one’s batteries.
Example #2: Pages is the new independent, capitalistic bookstore in the Capitol Hill space formerly occupied by the leftist Red and Black Books Collective. Red and Black was tastefully crammed with products of feminist, gay/lesbian, ethnic-minority, labor, Beat, and other un-corporate thought systems. Pages is much cleaner-looking and much, much airier; almost a boutique. It carries far fewer titles than Red and Black did, and it displays them far more “elegantly.”
Red and Black was like a reassuringly-cluttered general store for vital information. Pages is more of a boutique.
(Being on Capitol Hill, Pages still carries gay books, but they tend to be celebrations of out-ness rather than struggle-for-respect broadsides.)
Out-of-towners can see the principles behind this look in the UK-based magazine Wallpaper*. It’s like a Charles and Ray Eames revival blended with a Herman Miller fetish, stirred through with less-cheap versions of Ikea designs, and strained through a seive of World’s Fair-style futurism.
And it is not, despite everything Wallpaper* and others claim, foreign to Seattle. As I wrote in Seattle magazine, the ARO.Space name implies a reference to our leading pre-Gates industry. We make planes here. We know a thing or four about sleek lines, functional streamlining, and making small interiors look roomier than they are.
And, 37 years ago, we built the Space Needle and the arches of the Pacific Science Center as parts of the Century 21 Exposition.
As the real 21st century approaches, the homey-clutter look is getting turned into upscale preciousness by the likes of Restoration Hardware and The Pottery Barn; while the new hipsters, inspired by Euro-chic and Tomorrowland nostalgia, are heading back to the futurism.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.
TOMORROW: The potential next great civic task, humanizing the suburbs.
ELSEWHERE: Speaking of Oregon-based trends, the L.A. Times has discovered Eugene’s punk anarchists, about 20 years after their first appearance–and starts out the article with yet another dumb ’60s nostalgia lead.
REAL ART, the saying from some ’80s poster goes, doesn’t match your couch.
Despite centuries of western-world art scenes run according to the whims and tastes of upscale patrons and collectors, the principle still holds among many culture lovers–real expression and creativity are at fundamental odds against upscale art-buyers’ priorities of comfort, status, and good taste. The priorities expressed in the title of the NY Times Sunday feature section, “Arts and Leisure.”
While right-wing politicians’ diatribes against public arts funding have apparently lost much of their former steam, their damage has been done, and such funding is still way down in the U.S. from its ’70s peak (and from the funding levels in many other industrialized countries today).
So painters, sculptors, composers, and other makers of less-than-mass-market works have become even more dependent upon pleasing private money. And often, that means showing rich folks what they want to see. Today, that might not necessarily mean commissioned portraits showing off the patrons’ good sides, but instead pieces that more symbolically express an upscale worldview, one in which even people born into rich families like to imagine themselves as self-made success stories who piously deserve all they’ve gotten.
A somewhat different worldview from that of the ’50s silent generation, but one based upon similar notions of best-and-the-brightest authority figuring.
Man With the Golden Arm novelist Nelson Algren was disgusted by the silent-generation conformity and McCarthy-era harassment of free thinkers, and wrote about his disgust in a long essay, Nonconformity (first published in 1996, 15 years after his death). Here’s some of what he wrote, at a time when subdivisions and Patti Page records were being foisted upon the nation:
Back in the present day, some readers may recall a symposium previewed here a few weeks back, about trying to solve Seattle’s affordable-artist-housing crisis. The event turned out to be dominated by developers, whose suggested “creative solutions” tended to all involve trusting developers to create (when given the right amount of public “support” and fewer pesky regulations) practical live-work spaces for those artists who could afford the “market rate”–i.e., those who sell enough prosaic glass bowls to the cyber-rich.
Sounds like Algren’s posited dilemma ain’t that far past us.
So what to do?
Algren suggests real artists should strive not to live among the comfortable, or even among only other artists, but with “the people of Dickens and Dostoyevsky,” those who are “too lost and too overburdened to spare the price of the shaving lotion that automatically initiates one into the fast international set… whose grief grieves on universal bones.”
That might be relatively easy for a writer (at least in the days before writers imagined themselves to need fast Internet connections), but what of a visual artist who needs a decent-sized workspace and not-always-cheap materials?
Perhaps it means to go where the hard life is still lived. By the 2010s, if not sooner, that place might not be the fast-gentrifying cities but the already-decaying inner rings of suburbia.
More about that on Friday.
TOMORROW: The Wallpaper* magazine interior look is spreading. Is there a cure?
ELSEWHERE: Local author-activist Paul Loeb disses cynical detachment as a useless “ethic of contempt;” while Boston Review contributor Juliet Schor examines “The Politics of Consumption,” calling for an ideology that would “take into account the labor, environmental, and other conditions under which products are made, and argue for high standards”… A newspaper story about Ecstasy and GHB contains some half-decent info but ruins it all with a typical, stupid ’60s-nostalgia lead…
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: Categories of pithy quotations at Send-A-Quote.com’s online “virtual greeting card” service: “Love, anger, hate, regret, inspiring, remorse, joy, money, stupid, job, hobby, apology, leadership, ambition, courage.” Now go write a sentence using all the above.
HARD TO BELIEVE, but it’s been over three years since I first wrote about the cultural-paradigm-changin’ potential of hi-bandwidth home Internet access.
And now I’ve finally taken the personal plunge.
Speakeasy Network, my Web server ever since this site first went up in mid-’95, has become a retail representative and service partner for Covad, which provides home and office DSL lines in 18 U.S. cities. After months of soft-sell hints provided to me by Speakeasy employees about how a cutting-edge cyber-chronicler such as myself really oughta have such a line, I gave in. (It helped that the monthly rate wouldn’t be all that much more than that of a second regular phone line, which my burgeoining (thanks to you) li’l home-office business would soon need anyway.
I’d read plenty-O-horror-tales from around the country, relating individual users’ bureaucratic, technical, and other hangups whilst in the process of getting DSL, ISDN, and/or cable modems installed. I’m happy to report none of those awful things, happened to me, with one slight exception.
My apt. management company, while otherwise quite courteous and efficient, was hesitant about allowing access to my building’s phone-connector box by anyone other than “the phone company.”
That wasn’t a problem for the installation’s phase one, which involved a real US West person (albeit a person working on loan to the overworked/understaffed US West from Bell Atlantic) who came in (albeit one day later than scheduled) and rearranged some wires.
The tricky part would come when Covad’s own guy showed up. My building has no daytime resident manager, so if the installer needed access to the phone box somebody from the management office would have to drive down and let him or her into the utility room. And they didn’t want to do that without proof in writing (preferably including a state contractor number) that Covad was qualified to fiddle around in there.
At the very end of the promised five-hour time window, Mr. Covad showed up. Within 15 minutes, he’d replaced my phone-jack faceplate with a two-outlet model. He stuck an Ethernet cable between the new faceplate’s larger interface and an all-digital DSL modem.
(I know the tech-jargon purists insist the word “modem,” short for “modulator-demodulator,” should only apply to devices that translate digital data into analog audio signals for use on phone lines, but I’m not that literal-minded to mind.)
Another Ethernet cable then went from that box to my trusty ‘puter. Then, a phone call to Speakeasy got me a quick coached session with Apple’s Internet Setup Assistant program. At the end, the Speakeasy coach asked me to test the setup by launching my browser.
Voila! For the first time since my first modem in 1983, I could go online while staying on the phone.
Imagine–no more spending whole days offline, waiting for important phone calls or UPS deliveries (my apt. has a phone-based intercom). Net radio could become a real listening option at Chez Misc., not to mention streaming video channels.
I can’t guarantee your DSL-install experience will be as effortless as mine, particularly if you’re on a Windoze machine (particularly if it’s an older or cheaper Windoze machine that needs an add-on Ethernet card). And it can be a big fiscal jump, particularly if you’re not planning to deduct it as a business expense. And you have to be, or have someone, home in the daytime on two nonconsecutive days to let the installers muck around.
But it can be worth it.
TOMORROW: More thoughts on DSL as a whole different Webbing experience.
ELSEWHERE: The Squire Shops folded several years ago. Now another locally-owned clothier to the young and young-at-heart, Jay Jacobs, is on the ropes, unable to compete with the Gapsters for volume discounts and advantageous space leases… More trouble, as well, for the beloved-by-neighbors but shafted-by-landlords Matthews Red Apple supermarket…
AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS, by and large, have been a slowly dying institution for the past quarter-century or so. Most U.S. cities have only one daily these days, and a lot of these dailies have experienced stagnant circulations and revenues.
Instead of revitalizing their operations, many publishers have expended a lot of energy cutting costs, dumbing-down their products, and tailoring their coverage to ever-more-precise demographic targets.
Go to any out-of-town-newspaper store or big public library, and you’ll see the same set of vapid formulae practiced from approximately coast to coast. Big color pictures of dumb “human interest” topics. Polls, surveys and “front porch forums” designed to find out just what the affluent suburban 25-49 female market feels about the issues of the day. Editorials that courageously challenge citizens to muster up the ol’ civic oomph by supporting everything the local Chamber of Commerce wants this year.
And, every now and then, Op-Ed whine-pieces about the sorry fact that Americans just aren’t reading newspapers like they used to (total circulation hasn’t kept up with population growth for many years now)–and how it just goes to show you how stupid Americans are getting, especially Those Kids Today.
In a classic example of institutional self-misdiagnosis, publishers apparently continue to believe they can stem the tide if they only do exactly what they’re doing now, only more extremely. Even shorter, more meaningless articles! Even fewer original voices! Even blander layouts!
Britain’s The Economist magazine has a long, thorough look at the press’s sorry state, here and across the pond; paying particular attention to the latest threat to newsprint. You guessed right, it’s that bad ol’ Internet; which is starting to muscle in on newspapers’ most precious ad markets (classifieds) and editorial attractions (sports and stock stats, entertainment listings, movie-star gossip).
The Economist piece was published before Microsoft announced it’s going to sell off its Sidewalk local-entertainment-listings sites, which cost a lot to keep updated and which no longer fit MS’s online-business model.
But the magazine did make one on-target point in its description of newspapers’ essential nature:
“A newspaper is a bundle of goods and revenue streams brought together to amortise the cost of a printing press, and to pay for newsprint and a distribution network. The goods are the different editorial sections, stock prices, the weather forecast; the revenue streams are classified advertising, display advertising, promotions and the cover price. “…Get rid of the need for physical inputs, however, and the economics of the business changes completely… niche publishers can pick off speciality areas of content–the weather, say, or the stock market–and build a business around them. Classified advertisers can set up their own sites where prices to advertisers are likely to be lower because they do not have to pay for the physical inputs or subsidise the content. “The newspaper, it turns out, was a hundred different businesses rolled into one; and, now that the economic glue that held them together has dissolved, they could fall apart.”
“A newspaper is a bundle of goods and revenue streams brought together to amortise the cost of a printing press, and to pay for newsprint and a distribution network. The goods are the different editorial sections, stock prices, the weather forecast; the revenue streams are classified advertising, display advertising, promotions and the cover price.
“…Get rid of the need for physical inputs, however, and the economics of the business changes completely… niche publishers can pick off speciality areas of content–the weather, say, or the stock market–and build a business around them. Classified advertisers can set up their own sites where prices to advertisers are likely to be lower because they do not have to pay for the physical inputs or subsidise the content.
“The newspaper, it turns out, was a hundred different businesses rolled into one; and, now that the economic glue that held them together has dissolved, they could fall apart.”
Defenders of newsprint will argue that having a little something for everyone, without meeting any particular reader’s full needs, is a local paper’s strength; that it focuses the attention of a whole community (or at least the advertiser-desired slices of a community) around a single set of topics and concerns. We (or at least the demographically advantagous of us) all laugh at Dilbert, cry at JFK Jr.’s tragic demise, get angry about Serbian atrocities, root for our local sports teams, and wisely compare the growth trends of different mutual funds.
But that’s just another of the obsolete things about the corporate news media (conservatives like to call it “the liberal news media,” but those of us who really are liberals know better).
America’s not a one-size-fits-all society anymore, and one-size-fits-all newspapers just won’t work in it anymore. (At least European countries have national papers targeted to appeal to all sorts of different audiences.)
So there will be Websites and specialty print media for readers who really care about all the side stuff newspapers skim over (business, sports, lifestyle guides, and so on).
But what of local papers’ supposed central reason for existence–those two to five pages’ worth of local “general news,” letters, and opinions?
Those could easily be covered in a much smaller (and less wasteful) package. Say, something the size of the Christian Science Monitor, or the “alternative daily” tabloids popping up in such scattered spots as Aspen. Because these papers would be small, they wouldn’t need to own their own printing and distribution infrastructures. Because they’d need readers who really wanted to read them, and because they’d need less operating capital, they could take stands their local business leaders might not always approve of.
Instead of killing daily print media, the Net and the Net-influenced decentralized culture could help bring it back to life.
TOMORROW: I mistake a poster advertising “Butch Erotica” for one advertising “Butoh Erotica.”
ELSEWHERE: Frat boys report receiving unwanted sexual advances almost as often as initiating them…. The ultimate crusade against all things “leftist”…. The end of the Woodstock mystique? One can only hope; considering the conventional media wisdom on the original festival reduces a decade of necessary social turmoil to a single image of affluent college kids sowing their wild oats….
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT all that could be said and done about the early-’90s Seattle music scene had been said and done, here come more exploiters.
At 2 p.m. today, a crew from New Line Cinema will go to the Seattle Center Fountain outside KeyArena to, as a flyer soliciting extras says, “re-create Kurt Cobain’s memorial vigil for a new feature film.”
The movie, tentatively titled A Leonard Cohen Afterworld (after a line in Cobain’s song “Pennyroyal Tea”), is the first fiction feature directed by Todd Philips (who made the documentaries Frat House and Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies).
The script is by Scott Rosenberg, who was involved in the “hip”-violence travesty Things to Do In Denver When You’re Dead, and apparently involves a pair of troubled teens who have various misadventures while on the road to Seattle for the Cobain memorial.
Some movie-rumor websites claim it might also include “speculations” on what may or may not have happened among Cobain and his inner circle during the rocker’s last days–a plot-concept which should immediately make all of you collectively go “Ick!” or at least “Potential Ick!”
ON A SLIGHTLY HAPPIER NOTE, and as I’ve hinted at in prior installments, I’ve secured the rights to my 1995 book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story back from the original publisher. I’ve also arranged financing for an updated second edition, which, if all goes right, should be available from this site and in stores in October, four years after the first edition.
While I never got rich off the old book, I did become known as a Seattle-music-scene expert, at least to European magazine interviewers. Since the Dutch magazine that talked to me over a year ago, I’ve since talked to a Swiss magazine and now the Italian mag Jam.
Here’s some of what I told that publication’s writer:
A: Things changed. There’s clubs to play at now. And experienced producers and promoters and studios and indie labels. The reason there didn’t turn out to be a “Next Seattle” (the next town for the music industry to scoop up promising acts from) was because Seattle had been more than just a source of talent. It was a nearly self-sufficient infrastructure for making and promoting music.
And that’s what’s largely survived the music industry’s retreat.
A: A lot of people here wanted to succeed but only on their own terms. They wanted to be known as artists and/or entertainers, not as media celebrities or as fodder for MTV. The last thing some of them wanted was for their messages of anger and angst to be re-interpreted as something hot and commercial.
A: A decade ago, the conventional wisdom was that economic stagnation would be permanent, that young people had no real future.
Today, there’s lots of money flying about, much of it held by college-educated white young adults working at software and Internet companies. The young successors to yesterday’s “going nowhere generation” are now (at least some of them) among the most privileged young people America has ever produced. This new audience has influenced the nightlife scene greatly. The dance club ARO.Space and the new Cyclops restaurant/bar, to name only the most obvious examples, are shrines to the new monied youth.
But for those without high paying cyber-careers, wages have stagnated and the cost of living has risen (especially housing, which has become ridiculously expensive with the cyber-monied people willing to pay just about anything). It’s harder to be a self-employed artistic-type person (or an artistic-type person with an undemanding day job) here; even as the social pressure rises (even in “alternative” circles) to be upbeat and positive and success-minded at all times.
A: What was initially intended by most of its musicians to be a reaction against music-industry fads became promoted by the industry and the media as just another music-industry fad. In the short term, that had the effect a conspiracy theorist might imagine: Audiences tired of the hype and, around 1996-97, turned away.
MONDAY: More of this.
ELSEWHERE: Jessica Hopper, editor of the Chicago zine Hit It or Quit It (linked here via the indie-rock portal site Insound), has a quaint glossary of indie-scene terminology. Example: “Nature Melt: Hippies dancing or gathering en masse. A: ‘We had to leave Lilith Fair early, the nature melt was out of control.'”
