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TO BEGIN TODAY’S TOPIC, please note the various big billboards in Safeco Field for Bank of America.
Then, notice how Seafirst branches have started getting new ATMs installed with painted-canvas marquees on top, apparently covering the real nameplates beneath–a sure signal of an impending name or logo change, to which anyone who’s lived through all the bank and gas-station name changes in recent years can attest.
For over a decade, the Frisco banking behemoth has promised it would keep the Seafirst Bank name on its acquired Washington operations, even as it’s stuck the B of A brand onto all the banks it’s since bought in some 16 other states beyond its Calif. stronghold.
Is this promise about to finally be broken?
Seafirst officials aren’t saying, yet.
But the writing’s on the wall–or, rather, on the temporarily-covered ATM nameplates.
Soon, Seattleites will be able to go to a Frisco-owned Chevron station’s convenience store, use a Frisco-owned B of A ATM card to buy a Frisco-owned Hearst newspaper, and read all about the hipper-than-thou elitists down in Frisco complaining about Seattle-owned coffee shops befouling their oh-so-precious town.
Frisco-elitists, even the “alternative”-minded ones, might not be personal fans of B of A, Chevron, or Hearst, but might not see anything out-of-place about Frisco-based corporate empires controlling big swatches of the Northwest economy. After all, that’s what empire cities are supposed to do. But when Redhook or Nordstrom or especially MS dares to invade the City That Thinks It’s God, then golly you’re in for some serious turf-defendin’ talk as those peasants from the outlands attempt to storm the castle.
Sooner or later, the Friscoids are gonna have to face one of the more unsettling revelations of the multi-way economy their own Global Business Network loves to preach about–there’s no more center, no more periphery, or at least there eventually won’t be.
And what goes for goods-and-money trading goes for ideas-and-dreams trading too. SF (and NY and LA) are gonna have to learn to live with being just another region, not Center of the World.
TOMORROW: As the new edition of my book Loser goes into production, I get interviewed by another Euro music magazine; while another apparently-tacky Cobain exploitation movie comes to town.
ELSEWHERE: Speaking of people who mistakenly think they’re hotter-than-thou, Richard Meltzer used to be one of the more imaginative rock-writers before he started trying too hard to make himself into a brand name, essentially writing about nothing but how cool he wanted you to know he was. He makes something of a return to his older, more creative form in a long Chicago Reader memoir about about the good-old-days of vinyl records.
A YEAR OR SO AGO, we wrote about the revived interest by hip bars in bowling iconography (balls, pins, shirts, trophies).
But a revival of bowling images, we warned, didn’t necessarily mean a revival of bowling.
In the past 15 years or so, the Seattle area’s lost the Green Lake Bowl, the Lake City Bowl, Village Lanes, and Bellevue Lanes (now a Barnes and Noble!). The DV8 dance club and the Alley minimall on Broadway also stand where lanes and pinsetters once ruled.
While entertainment complexes of all shapes and sizes have sprouted around here lately, real bowling hasn’t been part of any of them.
One oft-cited reason: Those Kids Today aren’t supposed to be interested in the kegler’s art; and adults are finding it harder to keep league-bowling commitments.
A more plausible reason: Entertainment-center developers simply felt bowling couldn’t provide income-per-square-foot at the rates of, say, video games or water slides.
But now, the Jillian’s yuppie pool-hall chain wants to build Seattle’s first new bowling alley in decades. The proposed 16-lane alley would be built next door to the existing Seattle branch of Jillian’s on south Lake Union. That building now houses an outlet of the Video Only big-box retail chain, central Seattle’s only remaining consumer video-electronics store. But that joint could easily move, maybe to one of the many new retail developments downtown.
Knowing Jillian’s pool schtick, you can expect a Jillian’s bowling alley to be all fancy-schmancy and costlier than your average suburban pin palace. But as long as it’s not too gussied-up, it’d be a great step toward bringing back one of America’s greatest pastimes.
Now, if only Fox Sports Net would bring back the women’s bowling matches that had been a weekly staple of its predecessor channel Prime Sports.
Speaking of the grace of the female form in motion, clueless mass-media people went mildly agog last week when a member of the victorious U.S. Women’s World Cup team took off her jersey at the end of the match, revealing a new-model Nike sports bra that’s far more modest than what beach-volleyball women wear. For one thing, end-of-match shirt-doffing is a long tradition in men’s soccer. For another thing, I dunno about that particular player but women’s soccer has this rep of attracting women who enjoy other women’s physiques. In other words, what’s the big deal here? (The obvious answer: A lot if you’re Nike and you’d like lotsa free publicity for your new garment.)
TOMORROW: The end of Seafirst Bank as we know it?
ELSEWHERE: Thanks to nubbin.com, here are some English-language instructions on Japanese-model Pokemon character model kits:
“Our Company motto is ‘Give safe and enjoyable toys and dreams to children’. That is why we research & improve out produets all the time. This might create out toys to be slightly different from each other amony same iteu depending. On the diffarent lots. As for as out product quality is concerned we pay extre affention… “It is advised not to take off all the parts because you may may be confused. Tske off and assemble one by one according. Some parts are point so please take care not to be hart.”
“Our Company motto is ‘Give safe and enjoyable toys and dreams to children’. That is why we research & improve out produets all the time. This might create out toys to be slightly different from each other amony same iteu depending. On the diffarent lots. As for as out product quality is concerned we pay extre affention…
“It is advised not to take off all the parts because you may may be confused. Tske off and assemble one by one according. Some parts are point so please take care not to be hart.”
IN THE SIX YEARS since the World Wide Web became an honest-to-gosh phenom with the first NSCA Mosaic browser, a helluva lotta buzzwords and hype schemes have vied to become the next Big Online Thing, with all the resultant news articles and magazine covers and venture capital and stock offerings.
A lot of these would-be cyber-smashes have failed to live up to their advance publicity. (Remember “push media”? Virtual communities? Sidewalk.com and the Microsoft Network “shows” concept? WebTV?)
About nine months ago, the catchword was “Portal.” Big commercially-run websites were going to gather banner-ad-viewin’ eyeballs (and demographic-database stats about those sets of eyeballs) by virtually being everything to everyone. Not by having all the content any Web user’d wanna look at, but by having organized directories of links to all that stuff.
The “portal” sites were going to be the new gatekeepers, collecting indirect “tolls” in the form of ad revenues from anybody who wanted to find anything on the Web, even directly charging big corporate Websites for prominent mentions on the portal pages. Netscape was going to use its browser as a loss leader, to make dough from its portal site.
Advocates of an open-access Web even issued dire fears that the more corporately-minded portals, such as MSN and AOL, might abuse the massive control over searchin’ and browsin’ everybody thought they were bound to attain.
Hasn’t quite happened that way.
The Disney/Infoseek/Starwave consortium, f’rinstance, was going to have promoted its Go Network as the one-and-only place users had to go to to find anything (and whose own in-house sites would be the prime recommended source for most of that “anything”). Now, it’s redirecting its promotion toward the individual sites beneath the Go flag (ESPN.com, Mr. Showbiz, et al.).
Yahoo! has found the portal biz insufficient to keep the ol’ stock price up, and has been rapidly trying to expand into almost every conceivable Web-based operation other than porn or gambling.
The one-size-fits-all portals aren’t going away (at least not the better-funded ones). But they’re not gonna become the all-powerful “netcenters” either.
Indeed, reports last week claim they can’t even keep their search engines up to speed with the ever-expanding explosion of Web content out there.
Exit the portal as the big cyber-hype.
Enter the Weblog.
Small (often one-person or volunteer operations), specialized (either by topic or by the operator’s personal tastes), convenient (usually just one page per site), Weblogs are neither webzines (which emphasize original content), nor automated search engines, nor all-purpose portals.
They’re collections of hand-picked links to pages on other sites, curated to either service afficianados of a particular topic (movies, the Microsoft lawsuit, health care, etc.) or to express the curator’s personality via insights into the curator’s current obsessions.
Weblogs differ from the older style of link pages because, instead of merely listing ongoing links to whole sites, Weblogs link to specific articles, essays, or sections on those other sites. Many Weblog operators update their links every damn day (in some cases, even on the weekends).
Think of it as the Net equivalent of musical sampling. Only there’s no copyright-infringement issues, ’cause the Weblog operators quote no more than “fair use” excerpts from the linked-to pages.
Also think of it as one more stage in the ever-increasing bifurcation and “tribalization” of the Web, and of society at large.
A few Weblogs to start your exploration:
MONDAY: This site isn’t a Weblog, at least not yet, but the next installment will explore more wackiness from across the Net.
YESTERDAY, we discussed some of the economic and other problems facing Seattle’s artistic community.
Among the biggest problems: Real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification, pushing more and more artists, actors, musicians, etc. out of their current living and/or working spaces, with few affordable alternatives.
When there’s nothing left in Belltown or Pioneer Square, some artsy-types have moved to the Ballard Avenue district, the Central Area, Georgetown, or West Seattle’s Lost Valley of Delridge.
But even those currently moderately-priced spots are rapidly becoming unaffordable for anybody who doesn’t have a hi-payin’ cyber-career.
So a generation of bohemian-wannabes, raised on the strict ideology that Suburbs Are Bad, finds itself eyeing the sprawl zones, those everywhere/nowhere places of strip malls and megachurches.
Of course, most of these ladies-‘n’-gents would still prefer to live in a real city or town, or in the real countryside. And as the Sound Transit program builds its mass-transit network, they might get that chance.
Tacoma and Everett will get Sound Transit commuter-rail links to Seattle within the next three years or so. Those towns have lotsa gorgeous, rundown warehouses, apartments, downtown storefronts, and cheap houses, all waiting to be rescued and transformed into studios, galleries, performance spaces, and crash pads.
But there’s an even quainter, still-cheap place right nearby. And with new high-speed ferries expected to go into service later this year, Bremerton will be an even quicker one-step commute.
What you’ll see if you go there now: A quaint, compact downtown that was fiscally destroyed by malls, where the biggest remaining businesses are bars and used-book stores. Many beautiful storefronts and loft-esque spaces just waiting to be art-colonized.
And beyond downtown, houses some of you might even afford.
One Seattle artist who went west is Sally Banfill, a painter who specializes in some of my favorite Seattle roadside architecture (motel signs, the Elephant Car Wash, the Hat and Boots). Here’s what she has to say:
“I would tell you to forget renting, you can BUY a house here. My husband and I bought a house within walking distance to the ferry with a view for $100,000. That was about a year ago and there are still lots of bargains. “Downtown Bremerton has a deserted feeling to it but more businesses are starting to open up, there is the Amy Burnett Gallery and a couple of co-op galleries and very good espresso at the Fraiche Cup. “I have lived in the Seattle area most of my life. Bremerton reminds me of Belltown in the 1970’s — eclectic and a little seedy. If you like to go out a lot at night there really isn’t much to do, so there are compromises. You should take the ferry over and just walk around.”
“I would tell you to forget renting, you can BUY a house here. My husband and I bought a house within walking distance to the ferry with a view for $100,000. That was about a year ago and there are still lots of bargains.
“Downtown Bremerton has a deserted feeling to it but more businesses are starting to open up, there is the Amy Burnett Gallery and a couple of co-op galleries and very good espresso at the Fraiche Cup.
“I have lived in the Seattle area most of my life. Bremerton reminds me of Belltown in the 1970’s — eclectic and a little seedy. If you like to go out a lot at night there really isn’t much to do, so there are compromises. You should take the ferry over and just walk around.”
Comic-book creator Donna Barr, who’s lived in Bremerton for about a decade now, agrees its art-capability’s there:
“We’ve a couple of very nice galleries downtown, and there are a lot of people who are involved. There is a first-Friday artwalk that receives a lot of attention, as well as various sidewalk art-days throughout the year. “A downtown business, ‘Just Your Cup Of Tea,’ sponsors a first-Friday reading for local writers and poets. I have been asked to be one of the featured readers for August.”
“We’ve a couple of very nice galleries downtown, and there are a lot of people who are involved. There is a first-Friday artwalk that receives a lot of attention, as well as various sidewalk art-days throughout the year.
“A downtown business, ‘Just Your Cup Of Tea,’ sponsors a first-Friday reading for local writers and poets. I have been asked to be one of the featured readers for August.”
Washington has no real “art colony” towns at this point, except for the Olympia music scene and the now-totally-touristified LaConner. Could Bremerton, a waterfront community whose economy ebbs and flows with the fluctuating scale of projects at the Naval Shipyard, become such a place? Or will the Upscale simply ruin that place as well?
TOMORROW: The Blank Generation or the new Silent Generation
UPDATE: If you were intrigued by Monday’s Safeco Field item, you might be interested in a book all about subsidized stadia, Field of Schemes. (Its author claims Montreal’s Olympic Stadium actually cost more than Safeco; but that structure was built, as the name implies, not specifically for baseball but for the ’76 Olympics of Nadia Comaneci fame, so Safeco might still be the costliest baseball-only park ever built.)
SOMETIMES IT’S JUST TOO EASY to make cheap laffs from the things corporations think up to entertain us supposed proles.
Here’s the easiest example yet, and possible ever: The Rainforest Cafe.
It’s a national chain, whose flagship outlet’s in Minnesota’s infamous Mall of America. Most of the other two dozen or so units are also in malls, except for one in downtown Chicago and three at Disney theme parks (where I’m sure they fit in perfectly). The circuit’s first Northwest outpost just opened in Southcenter, between Sears and Nordstrom.
Like Planet Hollywood, the Fashion Cafe, et al., it’s an “entertainment experience” first and a dining-drinking establishment second. You don’t go there for the food; you go there to sit for 45 minutes or so among the “environment,” the decorations and doodads.
In this case, the “environment” is “environmental.” It’s a plastic-and-wood fantasy of a South American rain forest (albeit one with wildlife not seen in South America, especially elephants).
In the front: the requisite merchandise shop, full of toys and T-shirts and stuffed figures, mostly with the chain’s frog mascot.
Along one wall: the lounge, specializing in soft-ice-cream cocktails and strawberry daquiris.
Between these spaces, and past the plastic elephant in which the front clerk announces “Crocodile party, your safari is about to begin,” lies the large dining room. It’s all dark-green, with a plastic “canopy” of tree leaves on the ceiling and rows of plastic fountains “raining” into rows of plastic drains along the sides.
In the front of the room is a (real) salt-water aquarium with (some real, some plastic) fish. Along one side is a (real) parrot cage. In the back is a robotic plastic elephant and a robotic plastic toucan, yelping at precise intervals. Scattered throughout the room are plastic trees and robotic “wildlife” (butterflies, apes, et al.). In the center, the ceiling sports a night sky dome, with fiber-optic twinkling stars. Once an hour or so, the lights flash during a sound-effects “thunderstorm.”
The food, you ask? Standard all-American and fusion-cuisine fare (burgers, fried chicken, flatbread pizza, pasta-and-sausage), oversized and overpriced for that “destination restaurant” feel and bedecked with such cutesy names as “Volcanic Cobb Salad,” “Rumble in the Jungle Turkey Pita,” and “Jamaica Me Crazy Chops.”
I was there with a sometime Weekly writer who couldn’t stop smirking about what he felt was the hypocrisy of meat being served at a place supposedly dedicated to preserving the rain forest. A cheap shot–the meat they serve is undoubtedly all-North-American in origin; and the acres and acres of old-growth forest being chopped down daily in Brazil is cleared for a variety of cash crops (including the wood itself), not merely for beef-grazing.
The menu’s back page boasts of how “a portion” of each Rainforest Cafe’s income gets donated to a set of unnamed organizations to preserve the environment down in the tropics. It also invites schools to write in for the company’s free enviro-education materials, which I’m sure are full of company logos. They’ll also lead school kids through the cafe itself, under the premise of “on-site guided safaris” in which the kids “learn about our Resident Parrots, aquatic life forms, species on the verge of extinction, efforts to save the rain forest, and the creation and culture of Rainforest Cafe.”
So what’s a commentator to do, when faced with something this big, this brash, and this obvious?
Laugh at the too-mockable suburban families who go there? (I wound’t.)
Smirk at the very idea of this love-O-nature theme attraction, constructed with so many petrochemical components and plunked down amid the everywhere/nowhere of suburban sprawl?
Sarcastically dismiss a place that preaches responsible caring for the land while selling big-big meals and just-for-show touristy trinkets?
Earnestly denounce the treating of a real environmental crisis as the premise for neocolonial “adventure” entertainments?
Note the possible implicit racism in a vision of the rain forests that excludes any mention of their indigenous human residents?
Or just reiterate a line from South Park, “Rainforest, Schmainforest”?
Nah.
Best to let the joint speak for itself–robotic frog-chirping and all.
MONDAY: Speaking of tributes to excess, let’s look inside Safeco Field.
BASEBALL, like Pokemon, is a game of complexities.
And so is the game of stadium blackmail, as practiced this past decade in nearly every major-league city except Green Bay.
Seattle’s sports-team owners (all of whom are now either based here or have strong local business ties) have been among the deftest practitioners of the arena-finance game. Sonics boss Barry Ackerley first assembled land south of the Kingdome for his proposed “New Seattle Arena,” then struck a deal with the city to build KeyArena on the existing Seattle Center Coliseum site–and to make it too small for NHL hockey.
Seahawks owner Paul Allen got a statewide vote on subsidies for his new football palace to replace the Dome, thus ensuring the Hawks’ fans in the working-stiff counties beyond Seattle would get to put the measure over the top.
The Nintendo-led consortium running the Mariners narrowly lost a county vote to get new-ballpark bucks; then, after one winning season in ’95, went to the state Legislature to set up a Public Facilities District–a taxing authority with no other function than to build America’s most expensive ballpark on Ackerley’s former “New Seattle Arena” site.
And what a park it is. A sliding “retractable roof.” Luxury boxes and way-costly “seat license” sections (still not sold out as of this writing). All the high-tech comforts, snuggled within that retro-industrial look that’s all the rage among the George Will-readin’ pseudo-intellectuals in baseball land.
And, thanks to the team’s amenity demands and its mandated fast two-year construction schedule, $100 million in cost overruns (almost twice what the Kingdome cost some 23 years ago).
When the PFD scheme was announced, the team owners pledged to pay any construction costs over and above what the PDF’s taxes were expected to bring in.
Now, as the new stadium (complete with the paid-for name “Safeco Field”) is about to open, the team’s come back to the PFD wanting more money.
Rabid newspaper letter-writers and talk-radio callers seem to think the team’s asking for new and additional taxing schemes. The team’s attorneys claim they merely want the PFD to sell more construction bonds, based on additional bucks the already in-place taxes are expected to generate over the next 20 years (on restaurant meals, car rentals, lottery tickets, etc.) that, thanks to the economic boom, will be as much as $60 million higher than originally estimated–or so the team claims.
What do I think? Corporate sports is finally reaching the end of its ridiculousness limit. Some of the annual “Whither Baseball?” essays in the papers this April said teams are running out of cities to threaten to move to; even big-market teams are having trouble keeping up with Yankee/Dodger spending levels; and ever-splintering network ratings mean TV revenues for baseball won’t grow much more. No matter how this current Safeco Field impasse is resolved, it’ll likely be one of the last debacles of its type.
But for the here-‘n’-now, I think the PFD bureaucrats are right to tell the team to hold off. Despite what the purveyors of no-load mutual funds might wish you to believe, a booming economy today doesn’t mean there’ll be an even-booming-er economy for the indefinite future.
Tomorrow:Remembering the maybe-not-so-bad-in-retrospect old days of stagflation and Watergate.
SOAP SCUM: As we’ve previously mentioned, NBC canceled Another World in April, just weeks before the 35th anniversary of the soap’s first airdate. The final episode was scheduled for last Friday, so a new (and, from all initial reports, way stupid) drama could premiere following a week of Wimbledon pre-emptions.
This scheduling left the producers with only five to six weeks’ worth of episodes not yet taped at the time of the heave-ho announcement.
The producers chose to wrap things up as neatly as they could. The result has been some fascinating viewing–a daytime soap that moved at the pace of a nighttime soap, if not faster.
The first thing they did was to promptly close a particularly hoary supervillain-driven plotline (involving an evil scientist who claimed to be 200 years old, and who was on the prowl for a pretty female to involuntarily host his late girlfriend’s spirit). The soap magazines reported that particular storyline was to have climaxed with the May ratings-sweeps weeks anyway. But when it did end, it wasn’t just the good Bay City townspeople who were grateful to be rid of the sleazebag. It also meant the show’s remaining two-and-a-half million viewers could expect their last glimpses of the show to be glimpses of the character-based drama it had once been, not the tacky imitation of the worst of Days of Our Lives that AW had become.
(It’s worth noting, at this point, the crazy economics of network TV, in which a show seen daily by more people than live in western Washington can be a money-loser for its network and producer (not merely less profitable than a more popular show).)
Next came something a little trickier–the prompt, two-week denoument of what was probably to have carried the show over the summer, a complex murder-and-blackmail plot involving almost half the cast. Miraculously, the writers were even able to make the super-fast resolution of the murder trial a part of the story. A defense attorney at the murder trial raised repeated objections about his client being railroaded without adequate prep time. The judge quickly denied all the objections. It turned out the judge was corrupt, indeed in cahoots with the real killer.
That left about 14 episodes in which to rectify one love rectangle and a half-dozen other tenuous romances and marriages. As one of the writers told the NY Times, “All the couples people wanted together got together. The characters people wanted brought back from the dead were brought back.”
It’s how they accomplished these assorted reconciliations that may point the way toward the soap genre’s ultimate survival. Episodes were built around just one or two sets of characters (the lovers in question and their family/friends). Plot devices were introduced at the start of the episodes (an overheard conversation, a suddenly-revealed secret about somebody’s past) to either move a couple closer together or temporarily send them further apart. But the dialogue then quickly got past these developments, to concentrate on revealing the characters’ true feelings for one another.
Episodes were ended, not with somebody giving a stare of vague dread to the camera, but with either a note of closure or a cliffhanger that would be promptly resolved on the next show.
By choosing to go out on a high note, the AW producers and writers stumbled upon a shtick that might’ve saved the show, had the network let them use it previously instead of ordering them to come up with dumbed-down, dragged-out plots that had only served to turn off former viewers. The final days of AW were relatively smart, honoring the soaps’ traditional boundaries of “reality” while bending their traditional boundaries of “real time.” These episodes were, at their heart, about the characters, not about wild machinations or about action scenes a daily show can’t really pull off anyway. And they made their plot points quickly and moved on to the next, so you really had to either watch or tape them all (tough luck for viewers in those cities where two vital episodes from the next-to-last week were pre-empted for golf).
Will the surviving (and mostly struggling) soaps learn these lessons? Probably not.
Tomorrow: ArtsEdge and Focus on the Family get booked next to one another; no fights are reported.
YESTERDAY, I SEARCHED for signs that today’s young singles were ready to move beyond the anti-intimacy, consumeristic hedonism too prevalant in an allegedly “sex positive culture” of porn, vibrators, S/M, et al. Today, some postscripts.
Postscript #1: On Friday, I chatted with the Dutch magazine writer who’d interviewed me back in ’97 about “life after grunge.” This time, she was writing about how hard it was to start a relationship in Seattle, especially for men, and why this might be so. She wondered if Seattle women were “too politically correct,” too obsessed with propriety and power to risk the uncertainty of emotional closeness, to open themselves up emotionally to others, or even to acknowledge men as having souls.
(Update: The writer in question emailed the following addition to this discussion Tuesday evening: “I never said that women are ‘too politically correct’. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women’s role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site.”)
I didn’t see the situation as bleakly as she did; but I had to agree on certain points.
This has long been a bourgeois town; a repressed-Scandinavian-via-Minnesota town; a place of lawyers and engineers and college administrators who defined themselves by their supposedly superior “taste” and social bearing, compared to the farmers and loggers supposedly out there in most of the rest of the west. It’s also been a town of strong women, who built social institutions and fought for such “civilizing” movements as Prohibition.
Mix that heritage up with today’s capitalist rugged-individualism and “feminist” ideologies that sometimes merely exchange one set of overgeneralized gender-stereotypes for another, and you end up with a city of men who need women and women who claim they don’t need men.
A city where casual sex (at least in some subcultural circles) is often available, but where anything more substantive is blocked by women afraid to let their guard down and men afraid to even ask for anything, lest they be immediately denounced as “a typical male.”
The old sexism stereotyped women as either virgins or sluts; the new sexism, at least as practiced around here, stereotypes men as either wimps or creeps.
But there are ways beyond this new double standard; speaking of which…
Postscript #2: On Saturday, I saw the Fremont Solstice Parade, with its apparently-now-annual rite of nude, mostly male, bicyclists before and between the oh-so-funky floats and bands. This year there were some real nudies, some fakes in anatomically-correct body stockings (of the wearers’ own or opposite gender), and some “almosts” clad in loincloths or streamer tape.
This spectacle of male exhibitionism (before a co-ed, all-ages audience) was unthreatening yet still more robust and joyous than the foreboding wholesomeness of organized nudism. It demystified the male organ, that most taboo-to-reveal of either gender’s body parts. A man can indeed take healthy pride in himself without being a creep about it. Male sexuality, these true rebel bikers showed, is nothing to be either afraid or ashamed of.
That’s not the ultimate answer, but it’s a start.
Postscript #3: Matthew DeBord, writing in the online zine Feed, suggests the answer to the dilemma of sensitive straight boys feeling too ashamed of their manhood is to listen to role-models for positive self expression–then names the lesbian band Sleater-Kinney as an example.
The problem, of course, is that a self-defeatist straight boy can be all too willing to allow lesbians to express self-confidence but to still wallow in misappropriated gender-guilt himself. I say, better to have male role models who are males themselves, to better break through the new double standards.
Tomorrow: Some male singer-songwriters who depict relationship-angst as something risky but beautiful and necessary.
MISC. WORLD, the online column that always loves cool, dark places, couldn’t help but feel disappointed by the totally not-getting-it blurb for SIFF installed at the top of some of those HotStamp postcard racks around town: “And you thought Sundance was crowded… Be sure to catch the 25th Seattle International Film Festival. The largest movie gathering in the U.S. is sure to showcase movies from Hollywood’s heavyweights to the next Quentin Tarantino.” SIFF, at its best, is about film as art (or at least film as bougeois-boomer quasi-art), not about stupid marketing-driven Hollywood hype. More about that, sorta, a few items down.
UPDATE #1: By the time you read this, The Big Book of MISC. will be printed, bound, and shipping to those of you who’ve graciously pre-ordered it. If you’re reading this early in the week, you can get a copy for your very own live and in person at our luscious MISC.-O-Rama party, the evening of Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Avenue in seedy Belltown (just north of 5th and Bell, across from the backside of the Cadillac lot). If you’re reading this after the event, you can still get a copy in person at the Pistil and M. Coy book shops, with more outlets to roll out in the next few weeks. And, of course, you can buy it directly online at this link.
ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S RIDDLE: The $25,000 Pyramid.
UPDATE #2: Mark Murphy’s back as artistic director of On the Boards. Kudos to all the OTB supporters and members of the Seattle performing-arts community who successfully got OTB’s board to reverse its initial firing of the much-loved Murphy.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: “After Dinner Nipples” mints at Urban Outfitters are described by the woman who recommended them to me as “better than the real thing.” I’d heartily disagree, but I did find these mint-chocolate drops tasty and great to lick (but not all that soft to the touch, and without the creamy center that would’ve made the gag-concept more complete).
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: The 13th year of this little collection of odd-stuff-from-all-over called Misc. hasn’t been the luckiest. Something once read in print (or at least glimpsed at) by a third of Seattle’s adult population now has a much smaller, though steady and growing, on-screen audience.
I’m not going away, and neither is the site.
But it’s perhaps time to reconsider a few things:
(1) The online column is still based on the concept of the print Misc.–filling a more-or-less predetermined (albeit self-pre-determined) word count, at intervals corresponding to the column’s former appearance in a weekly tabloid.
(2) One of the column’s premises has been to passionately advocate urban life and specifically Seattle life. It started back when suburban flight was still considered an inexorable trend, and when everybody (especially Seattleites) thought Seattle was a hick town where nothing ever happenned and nothing ever would. Nowadays, even Newsweek has noted big downtown “revivals” across the country. And Seattle, whose downtown never really needed reviving, is creaking under the real burdens of the cyber-wealthy, buying up everything and making borderline-boho existences even less possible.
(3) Another recurring theme has always been to assert the worthiness of the punk-rock generation and its values. Far from defeatist or nihilistic, punks have strongly believed in community, in self-expression, in taking charge of their culture and their lives. Certain fogeys such as Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran still hate punks, but the media corporations came to love ’em. And the kids younger than me haven’t rebelled against punks and their allies the way I rebelled against aging hippies. Clueless mass-media reporters can still find goths and industrial-rockers in high schools and mistakenly believe these kids are doing something new.
(What many current white kids have done has been to ignore rock in general, turning away from the major labels’ glut of fake-Pearl-Jam bands and toward post-gangsta hiphop; which in turn has caused many young blacks to run from that and toward newer acts considered either too advanced or too lovey-dovey for the mallrats.)
(4) Punks also believe the “lowly” medium of rock ‘n’ roll music is, or can be, an art form; not via the bombast of early-’70s “art rock” but by being the best damn rock ‘n’ roll music it can be. That strident belief has fueled the column’s whole defense-of-pop-culture premise–once something few other ambitious writers attempted, but now commonplace.
In the mid-’80s, when the column first appeared in ArtsFocus (a publication mainly devoted to local fringe-theater and ethnic-dance activities), many intellectuals and art-worlders still believed there was a rigid dichotomy between “high” and “low” culture. This notion was perhaps best depicted in the 1990 “High and Low” exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which purported to compare and contrast works from the two realms but which really turned into a long, desperate defense of this artificial division.
When “popular culture” was seriously talked about (in places like Bowling Green State University in Ohio, which had a whole department about it), it was usually treated in the post-leftist “cultural studies” manner, as a set of sociological and political phenomena to be dissected and theorized about–never as “real” art or even entertainment, never as the work of creative people who might be trying to express something.
That, of course, was the era of only three major TV networks, monopoly newspapers, and CD plants who’d only do business with the major labels. It was a time when the book business was still considered too marginal for big corporations to want to muscle in on (at least on the retail end). It was easy to still think of “popular” culture as “low” culture, as something factory-produced and best considered in industrial terms.
Things are a little different now, sorta. There’s dozens of cable channels, hundreds of book imprints, thousands of indie record labels, and scores of “alternative” weekies (though each business mentioned still has a few high-rollers at its top, struggling to stay on top via increasingly-frenetic dealmaking). Despite the current dropping-off of exhibitor interest in “indie” films (due at least partly to the glut of fake-Tarantino “hip” bloodfests from the big studios’ pseudo-indie divisions), true-indie filmers and videotapers continue to shoot and edit away.
Then there’s this World Wide Web thang. Whole books and magazines have been devoted to how the web and associated technologies are affecting marketing, shipping, TV viewing, music-listening, dating, masturbation, etc. etc. I liked to think when the web first took off, and I still like to believe, that it’s doing much more than that.
It’s vindicating the whole punk-DIY ethos. It’s helping to build real as well as virtual communities. It’s giving voices to tens of thousands of heretofore-obscure subcultures (some of whom I empathize with, some of whom I loathe; but that’s the whole point). Among these subcultures are the fan movements for popcult genres previously considered by the “cultural studies” snobs to be only liked by illiterates. I’m no longer a lone-voice-in-the-wilderness in my insistence that pop culture is real culture.
And what’s more, the web’s accellerating acceptance of the notion that art, music, literature, fashion, decor, graphics, video, and even movies need no longer be the exclusive products of the N.Y./L.A./S.F. elites.
Some elite forces realize this and are running scared (like Time and the censorous Australian parlaiment).
Other elite forces are trying to tame the Web into something safe for Conde Nast. Despite the failure of the Microsoft Network’s “shows” concept, corporate website-makers are still trying to launch online magazine sites with predictable texts and features aimed at rigidly defined demographic target audiences. I like to think web users are smarter than that.
Which gets us back to item (1), this here site’s print-legacy format. With The Big Book of MISC. now a-born, look in upcoming weeks for further changes to the miscmedia.com website. Don’t know for sure yet what they’ll be. But they’ll be designed to keep it all apace with an ever-changing, ever-Misc.-er world.
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Saturnine.”
MISC. WORLD, the online column that still hasn’t seen the new Star Wars, has read the hereby-linked, viciously beautiful review of the movie by that much-acclaimed, recently-crashed, Time art critic Robt. Hughes (Time wouldn’t run it, so the NY Daily News picked it up).
UPDATE: The Big Book of MISC. is now in the heat of production. By the time you read this, the covers should be printed and the insides should be ready to roll. Online ordering’s now available at this link.
Actual copies of the book should be ready for the big pre-release party and annual Misc.-O-Rama, the evening of Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Avenue near Bell Street (across from the back of the Cadillac lot). There’ll be outrageous snack treats, videos, strange DJ music, games, surveys, a live demonstration, and lots lots more. Free admission; 21 and over. Be there. Aloha.
RIDDLE: What do you call the last pint of Hefeweizen that causes a yuppie to total her fancy-ass luxury car? (Answer next week.)
TIMES OF THE SIGNS: There actually is one and only one piece of signage at the Broadway and U District Taco Bell outlets that’s in Spanish–the bottom half of the front-door warning sticker boasting of the joint’s anti-robbery systems.
SAY WHAT?: US West TV spots are currently promoting Caller ID boxes as ways to avoid those annoying life interruptions from pesky telemarketing calls. Besides the commercials, can you guess one other method the company’s using to try and sell the service? That’s right.
ON THE EDGE: Hope some of you noticed the name of the apartment-redevelopment company charged (as shown on both KIRO’s and KING’s late news Wednesday) with violating even Seattle’s wimpy tenant-rights laws: “No Boundaries.” The logo on the company’s possibly-illegal notices of eviction and attempted rate-hike retaliations against protesting tenants, as seen on the newscasts, looks just like the letterhead of some sci-fi video-game company. There’s some lesson somewhere here about today’s money-and-power mentality, in which strong-arm business tactics are mistaken for acts of daring rebellion by self-worshipping hotshots who can’t stand the idea of having to do anything they don’t want to.
(“No Boundaries” also happens to be the title of a new benefit CD for Kosovo refugees, with two Pearl Jam tracks.)
ADULT RESPONSIBILITIES, AND OTHER EXPANSIONS: An LA Times story claims the latest thing in La-La land is affluent high-school girls asking for breast implants as graduation gifts, or paying themsleves for the procedure as soon as (or even a few months before) they reach legal adulthood. The article quoted a couple of doctors who noted some women are still well within the developmental process at age 17 or even 18, but an increasing number are just so darned vain and body-conscious as to want to immediately achieve the ol’ top-heavy look.
If I were still working in the realm of “alternative” weekly urban tabloids, I’d probably be expected to sneer at these women–or, even worse, condescendingly treat them as mindless victims of the fashion industry (the same fashion industry that’s recently been enamored of unbusty petite model looks, not that the industry’s critics ever notice).
The same urban-tribal folks who most loudly scoff at implants might themselves have tattoos, piercings, even (as a particularly exploitive KING-TV piece last Monday noted) brandings. Some of these critics might seem hypocrites on at least some level; but on another level, it’s perfectly OK to believe in the general concept of body-modification while having well-defined personal tastes about which modifications one prefers to have or to see on others.
I personally don’t viscerally care for the over-augmented look, but I can understand that certain women might wish it. A big bust projects you out and demands attention (along with the sneers from other women you can interpret as jealousy). But a large fake bust is also a shield, a kind of permanent garment keeping all others firmly away from your heart (and other vital organs).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Instant Planet isn’t just another new age tabloid. For one thing, it promises regular coverage of issues facing some of those indigenous peoples that the white new-agers love to take inspiration from. For another, it’s got some first-rate contributors, including master collage-illustrator James Koehnline and my former yoga trainer Kirby Jacobsen. Free at the usual dropoff spots, or $16/4 issues from P.O. Box 85777, Seattle 98145.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: The Seattle-based New Athens Corp. has jumped on the herbal-beverage bandwagon with two odd-tasting concoctions. “Kick Start” promises to help you get “a robust, active feeling” with Gotu Kola, Ginkgo Bilboa, Guarana, Kava Kava, and ginseng, There’s also “No Worries,” a drink that’s supposed to “produce a relaxing effect that soothes and quiets your mood.” Both taste like Coke’s old OK Soda with a touch of peach flavoring. But unlike other pops marketed as all-ages treats, these have a label disclaimer: “Not intended for children under 6 or pregnant or nursing mothers.” Elsewhere in foodland…
Q BALLS: While small indie supermarkets in other neighborhoods have fallen with little more than a shrug of inevitability from area residents, the citizens of Wedgwood have rallied ’round to valiantly (and, apparently, futilely) defend Matthew’s Red Apple Market, set to close in less than two weeks after its landlord struck a deal to let the Kroger-owned QFC circuit take over the site.
At first peep, a media observer used to the recent unwritten rule that everything in Seattle had to be “unique” (in exactly the same way, of course) might not see what all the fuss is supposed to be about.
Matthew’s doesn’t have the fun neon of the old Wallingford Food Giant or the odd mix of food and variety departments of the old Holman Road Art’s Family Center (both of which were QFC bought up directly, rather than arranging for their eviction like it’s doing with Matthew’s).
Matthew’s doesn’t make a big fuss about a lot of those higher-profit-margin items and departments QFC and Larry’s lavish attention on (salad bars, hot take-out items, wine, cell phones, live lobster, “health” foods, etc. etc.)
It’s just a plain-looking, small supermarket in a slightly-run-down building, with a fried-chicken deli counter and fresh flowers and a Lotto machine.
But that’s the whole point. In a town increasingly weighted down by the expectation of pretentious “uniqueness,” and in a national retail landscape increasingly overrun by big-chain consolidations, Matthew’s is loved by its customers precisely because it’s just a good ol’ fashioned neighborhood indie grocery.
(“Red Apple,” by the way, is merely a franchised name belonging to Associated Grocers, the wholesale consortium to which Matthew’s and 200 or so other Northwest stores belong, including, at least for the time being, QFC.)
Matthew’s might not stock 17 different kinds of cilantro, but it more than makes up for that in that unstockable, uncatalogable quality known as community spirit. It’s different precisely because it’s refused to conform to the current-day standards of “uniqueness.”
The Wedgwood area’s well-stocked with well-off folks, some of whom offered to outbid QFC for the lease on the Matthew’s block. When that initially failed, the store’s supporters then offered to help Matthew’s find a new site. But usable commercial blocks are scarce in that dense residential area.
(One of the few supermarket-sized tracts in the area not currently used for retail is the Samuel Stroum Jewish Community Center, co-funded by and named for a longtime QFC exec.)
So this particular battle against the Forces of Consolidation may be lost–unless someone could design a Matthew’s-like store on a smaller real-estate footprint, a la Ken’s Markets or Trader Joe’s.
(Current status: Matthew’s management sez it stands a good chance of winning at least a little more time in court. It’s asking friends and neighbors to keep signing the petitions and engaging in nonviolent protests, while asking customers to bear with spot shortages of stuff on some of the shelves (it held off on ordering new stock while waiting for the legal action to progress.)
WE’RE STILL LOOKING for your ideas on What This Town Needs. Suggest yours at our fantabulous Misc. Talk discussion boards. Until then, check out my page in the June Seattle magazine, work for peace, and consider the words of Marshall McLuhan: “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”
MISC. WORLD, the online column that still hasn’t seen the new Star Wars, is proud to announce The Big Book of MISC. has now gone to press. Even better, online ordering is now up, at this link! The prerelease party’s Tuesday, June 8 at the new Ditto Tavern, 2303 5th Ave. near Bell Street in Seattle’s glorious Belltown. Be there.
FAST FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The Denny’s Diner concept, first mentioned in Misc. about a year ago, will now be phased in at all U.S. Denny’s restaurants. From the looks of the prototype restaurant out by Sea-Tac Mall, it won’t be as big a revamp as the newspaper stories promise. The one I saw looks largely like a regular ol’ Denny’s. The interior’s done up in muted greens instead of garish orange shades, with a few touches of aluminum trim. Aside from a few soda-fountain items, there’s not much on the menu that’s not on the regular Denny’s menu. And there’s a reproduction juke box playing some oldies-rock CDs, along with many “hot country” and easy-listening stars.
The chain’s officially doing this because its research found younger eaters don’t identify with its established suburban-bland image, and thinks this way it can become perceived as slightly hipper without turning off the older crowd. Of course, Denny’s has had a bigger image problem than that in recent years. Amid allegations of racial discrimination in both employment and customer service, the company’s had to pull out all the PR-spin stops to proclaim it now welcomes everybody, and has put managers and franchisees thru sensitivity classes. So why, one might ask, is the chain re-imaging itself around nostalgia for those bad-old-days white-lower-middle-class hash houses where African Americans felt particularly unwelcome back in the day? (Remember, the first major sit-in of the civil rights movement occurred at a Woolworth lunch counter.) Elsewhere in bobbysoxer-land…
THE SOUND OF SILENCE: The Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge (which has hosted all-ages music shows these past six years in the former home of the punk-parody musical Angry Housewives) and the Colourbox (the rock venue that stuck with local bands after bigger bars turned their emphasis to touring acts) are closing in June, due (indirectly in the former case, directly in the latter) to Pioneer Square gentrification. RKCNDY will be demolished for a hotel sometime later this year. Nothing much could’ve been done to save the Colourbox (and, anyway, the nearby Rupert’s has been serving much the same function). But the VE’s another story. Its pretty-much-all-volunteer staff has every right to feel burned out and to move on, now that its recent sold-out Annie Sprinkle performances have paid off its debts. But there should’ve been some way they could’ve passed the torch onto a fresher crew, to keep the space going as long as it still had the lease. If someone can get such a crew together to assume the space, they’d better do so soon.
(Both the Colourbox and the Velvet Elvis got front-page pictures in the P-I‘s Saturday item about the city’s tuff new anti-noise law and schemes by some city councilmembers to relax those limits in designated “entertainment zones,” a little too late to save either club.)
BESIDES A DECENT ALL-AGES SPACE and zoned relief from anti-nightlife legal putsches, what does Seattle need? That’s your next question at the luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. And we’re still seeking your nominations about which 1995-99 Seattle bands oughta be mentioned in the forthcoming update of Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Elsewhere in new-addition-land…
WATCH D.T.S., GET THE D.T.s: The Casbah Cinema, that beuatifully-designed but poorly-marketed boutique theater in Belltown, has been revamped by new owners as the Big Picture. It’s now a beer-and-wine bar with a fancy-schmancy digital video projection system in the old Casbah auditorium room. The owners believe, as I wrote here some time back, that theaters shouldn’t just be for feature films and tavern TVs shouldn’t just be for sports. They plan to have a whole schedule of fun programming events, ranging from cult movies and sports to X-Files episode screenings and music-video nights. It’s also available for private parties, software-company demonstrations, anime fan-club meetings, movie-studio sneak previews, etc.
I probably will continue seeing most of my movies-on-projection-video-with-beer at 2nd Avenue Pizza, but the Big Picture’s HDTV setup is truly awesome. It’s much sharper than the analog HDTV system I saw a couple years back at the old UA Cinemas; even a basketball game (live sports are the ultimate test of digital video) looked clean and crisp. Elsewhere in visual-entertainment-land…
CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: After years of the sleaze-sex mags getting closer and closer to The Act, Penthouse has finally started running apparent actual hardcore pix as of its June issue (in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy pictorial), and (along with its almost-as-explicit competitors) has faced the expected legal challenges in the expected southern and midwestern states. Either the publishers seem to think they can win the court cases and vend images of actual coitus thru mainstream magazine outlets, or the competition for wankers’ bucks has gotten so intense the publishers believe they have to do this to compete with hardcore videos, websites, CD-ROMS, etc.
The demand for explicitness in sex-entertainment has increased steadily in the three decades since hardcore films and images first went above-ground. Today, hardcore tapes can be rented in almost every non-chain video store (and can be purchased in non-chain convenience stores); while softcore tapes (other than those depressing , anti-intimacy “erotic thrillers”) are in far fewer outlets and often for sale only. Of all the new girlie mags in recent years, only Perfect 10 (and retro-zines like Kutie) appeal to a classic pin-up aesthetic instead of simply piling on as much raunch as the distribution channel will bear.
Some observers claim this trend signifies a failure of imagination, of good taste, or even of respect for women. I think it means something else–that smut consumers are, on the average, moving away from passive “pedastel” female ideals and instead prefer to fantasize about women who are active, enthusiastic participants in The Act.
Then, of course, there’s the little matter of what makes hardcore hardcore. It’s not how much you see of the women, but how much you see of the men. The triumph of hardcore means more and more straight-identifying men want to look at other men’s sex parts in action, photographed as sharply and clearly as possible. One recently-notorious subgenre, the “gangbang” video, shows its straight-male audiences dozens of male bodies surrounding just one woman.
But gangbang videos are ugly, as is hardcore in general. As I’ve previously mentioned, the hardcore anti-aesthetic literalizes the phrase “ugly as sin.” While the action scenes in Penthouse are at least competently lit and photographed, they still adhere to a formula of garish colors, contorted expressions, and grotesquely obvious implants. Historically, the formula leads out from the old days of underground smut, all dangerous and anti-propriety. Today, it leads from the porn-video industry’s ruthless combination of tiny budgets and strict requirements. But it’s also a look its target audience seems to prefer. Perhaps these men have such poor self body-images, they can only comfortably look at other men’s bodies when they’re depicted among ugly surroundings.
Will this ugliness change as coitus imagery goes further beyond porn-specialty stores and into your local beer-and-cigarette shop? Many cultures around the world have found beautiful ways to depict coitus via the arts of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Contemporary erotic photography has produced many beautiful works, but almost all of them (even Robert Mapplethorpe’s) are predicated on The Pose, not The Act. Posing involves a person or persons openly displaying their personas out toward the viewer; actual sex (if it’s any good) constitutes two people becoming all caught up in one another and themselves, ignoring the rest of the world. I’ll still prefer softcore images, even if hardcore becomes less icky-looking, for this reason. I don’t want to vicariously imagine myself in some other man’s body, feeling what that other man gets to feel; I want to imagine my (real) self in the woman’s body.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we hope to have topics less prone to too-obvious puns, embrace the warmth, question the war, and consider this by Jane Austen: “I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
MISC., the column that likes to think it knew better than to plant delicate little outdoor plants just before last Saturday’s overnight near-freeze, is proud as heck that ex-Steelhead zine editor Alex Steffen has not only taken the helm of the once-moribund local advocacy group Allied Arts, but has, along with his colleagues in the agency’s new leadership, issued a strong call for Seattle to become a city that actually supports the arts and artists, instead of merely coasting on its decaying “liberal” reputation as an excuse to subsidize construction projects and rich people’s formula entertainments. Speaking of which…
BOARD GAMES: A few nay-sayers in the performance-art community have privately suggested that the board members of On the Boards fired artistic director Mark Murphy, who led the production and theater-management outfit to national prominence, because those board members supposedly wanted to turn OTB away from art-for-art’s-sake presentations and closer toward yupscale commercial crowd pleasers, whatever those might be in the realms of modern dance and post-jazz music. (Mellow acoustic folkies? Lord of the Dance clone acts?) Anyhoo, I don’t quite believe the story. I have no proof either way, but I can imagine the board firing Murphy out of little more than personal spite. It’s still a shameful situation that shouldn’t have happened. Murphy’s possibly the best arts promoter this town’s seen (outside of the rock and DJ-music realms) since COCA’s heyday. Part-time board members can come and go, but an artistic director like Murphy’s someone you oughta try to keep under most any circumstances.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. goes to press this week! Everything’s on schedule for the Tues., 6/8 release party, now tentatively scheduled for the new Ditto Tavern at 5th & Bell. Mail orders are now being accepted; online ordering’s still in the process of being set up. The updated version of my older book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, also continues apace, with that publication date still more-or-less set for late Sept. or early Oct. I still wanna know which 1995-99 local acts ought to be mentioned in it; make your nominations at our splendido Misc. Talk discussion boards.
UPDATE #2: Summit Cable has resumed transmitting the public access channel 29 after one week in which it claimed TCI had ceased feeding the channel to it and TCI claimed Summit was simply not receiving the feed properly due to an engineering glitch of some sort.
UPDATE #3: The Speakeasy Cafe will remain open! And, as I’d recommended (not that they deliberately followed my advice or anything), its post-June 1 format will reiterate its core identity as an Internet cafe and low-key Belltown neighborhood hangout joint. The money-losing food-service side of the operation (soups, salads, sandwiches, hummus) has already been cut back. Within three weeks, there’ll be no more cover-charge music shows in the front room (which, besides drawing negative attention from the Liquor Board and the pool hall upstairs, detracted from the drop-in atmosphere an Internet cafe needs). While some music events may continue in the Speakeasy’s back room, the end of front-room shows means the loss of what had become a premier venue for Seattle’s vibrant avant-improv scene. Elsewhere in clubland…
DANCING TO THE TUNE OF $$: 700 Club/Last Supper Club entrepreneur Bill Wheeler says he loves being the target of that hate poster some anonymous Judas has pasted all over Pioneer Square, headlined “The Last Supper Club: All Hype” and berating it as a cash-grubbing nouveau riche hangout, a traitor to the supposed “tribal” spirit of the dance-music community. Wheeler says he couldn’t have generated better publicity had he made the poster himself (which he insists he didn’t).
Wheeler’s also quite proud of the expensive, elitist reputation his new club has so far succeeded in creating, and which the poster-creator loathed: “Can you believe it? People are paying $50 to get into the place! This is what Seattle’s needed.” Well, loyal Misc. readers already know what I think about headstrong San Franciscans (which Wheeler would freely admit to being) unilaterally proclaiming what Seattle needs, so I won’t persue that remark any further. As for paying that kind of money as a cover charge for entree to DJ music and a no-host bar (and suffering, on heavy nights, from a disco-era “selective door” policy), I’m fairly confident true Seattle hipsters can discern whether it’s worthy of their bother and their $$ or not. If not, I’m sure the savvy Wheeler can keep the business going by remarketing it to certain cyber-wealthy squares who think they can buy their way into hipness. Speaking of dance-club goers and notions of what’s hip…
HET-SETTERS: Entrepreneurs in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla. area (you know, home of the nation’s raunchiest strip-club scene and the region that tried to take away our baseball team) have launched a line of T-shirts and other logo apparel called “Str8 Wear,” purporting to announce heterosexual pride. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that stands to easily get misconstrued as gay-hatred. The designers insist in interviews and on their website that “We’re not anti-gay, we’re pro-heterosexual,” and merely want to offer “your chance to let everyone know you are proud of your sexuality,” via “an emblem that will identify you as a person who is available to the opposite sex.” It’s especially intended, the designers claim, for patrons of certain dance-music clubs and other urban-nightlife scenes where anyone who’s not gay might feel themselves branded as total out-of-it squares.
There are other problems with the Str8 Wear concept. It invites its wearers to see themselves as a tight li’l subculture via a term that merely indicates belonging to a vast, undifferentiated majority (except when referring to that punk-rock subsector, “str8 edge”). (But then again, merchandisers have long tried to persuade customers they’re expressing their invididuality by being just like most everybody else.)
A more positive, even more provocative, alternative might be the models at that T-shirt store on University Way, “I (heart) Men,” “I (heart) Women,” “I (heart) Cock,” and “I (heart) Pussy.” These come closer to provoking some of the anti-hetero biases that still exist in an urban-hipster culture where, too often, “sex positive attitudes” are permitted only to gay men, lesbians, and female-dominant fetishists.
In the square/conservative realm, sexually active straight men are often denounced as selfish rogues (or, more clinically, as “sex addicts”); and sexually active straight women are still often disdained as sluts (or, more clinically, as suffering from “self esteem issues”).
In the so-called “alternative” realm, straight men are often viciously stereotyped as misogynistic rapist-wannabes; and straight women are often condescendingly treated as either the passive victims of Evil Manhood or as really lesbians who just don’t know it yet.
As I’ve said from time to time, we need to rediscover a positive vision of heterosexuality, one that goes beyond the whitebread notion of “straight” and toward a more enthusiastic affirmation of one’s craving to connect with other-gendered bodies and souls. Hets don’t need to differentiate themselves from gays as much as they need to learn from them. To learn to take pride in one’s body and one’s desires, no matter what the pesky stereotypers say about you. Elsewhere in gender-identity-land…
BEATING AROUND THE BUSCH: The big beer companies, seeing the money to be made in gay bars, have for some time now tried to position themselves as at least tacit supporters of the gay-rights cause. Miller (owned by Jesse Helms’s pals at Phillip Morris) has cosponsored the Gay Pride Parade in Seattle for several years. Coors (owned by Orrin Hatch’s pal Pete Coors) has run ads in gay magazines claiming the company’s a lot queer-friendlier than popular rumor has sometimes alleged. And Anheuser-Busch has placed huge ad banners inside gay bars reviving (and repurposing) the Bud Light ad-tagline from a few years ago, “Yes, I Am.” Now, the company’s devised an ad for mainstream magazines depicting two men holding hands; quite possibly the first time this has been shown in any big company’s product ad (even the Chivas Regal ad from a few years ago had its gay couple maintaining proper distance while they jogged along a beach). The slogan: “Be yourself, and make it a Bud Light.” Apparently, the company’s got hundreds of homophobic phone callers denouncing the ad. If you want to show your support, you can dial the same number (1-800-DIAL-BUD). Remember, you can approve of this modest symbol of inclusiveness even if you never drink the beer.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK AT THIS SAME TIME (or whatever time you choose to read the column), pray for warmth, root for the Seattle-owned TrailBlazers in the basketball playoffs, and ponder these still-ahead-of-their-time words attributed to JFK: “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.”
MISC. really tries to point the way toward a post-irony age, but can’t hemp noticing when the downtown-Seattle Borders Books outlet holds a promo event this Saturday for the video release of You’ve Got Mail, that romantic-comedy movie predicated on the presumed evil of huge chain bookstores like Borders.
YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the new URLs on this page and throughout the rest of the venerable Misc. World site. We’re now at Miscmedia.com, so adjust your bookmarks accordingly and tell all your friends. It’s all part of a big scheme tied into our new print venture; speaking of which…
UPDATE #1: The ultra-limited first edition of The Big Book of Misc. is a mere five weeks away. You can now pre-order your copy by following the instructions on this link. Act now to get your own signed and numbered copy of the 240-page, illustrated collection of the best items from 13 years’ worth of reportage about the wacky-wacky world that is American culture. The release party’s tentatively set for Tues., June 8 at the new Ditto, 5th & Bell.
UPDATE #2: When we last reported on the Sugar’s strip joint in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, it smanagement was trying to fend off municipal regulations by launching an initiative to change the suburb’s governmental setup toward one less likely to restrict the club’s ability to earn a buck. That drive made it to the ballot but lost.
Now, the club’s trying another tactic. It’s declared itself a non-profit “private club,” and hence not subject to any Shoreline regulations i/r/t commercial adult-entertainment businesses. To go there now, you’ve got to fill out a very short membership application, then return a week later to find out if you’ve been accepted, then pay $50 a year (installments accepted), all for the privilege of spending more money on table dances.
An explanatory flyer offered at the door claims all the membership fees get donated to assorted kids’ charities, and that the whole setup’s a small but necessary step to keep America from succumbing to “a Brave New World in the form of a Christian conservative state.” Actually, the flyer’s author (club attorney Gilbert Levy) got it wrong. The dystopian future in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World had plenty of commercial porn and sexual “freedom” (all the better to prevent the formation of intimate or family bondings that would threaten individual subjugation to the mass society). It’s George Orwell’s 1984 that had the Anti-Sex Leagues running about to forcibly stamp out all human passion other than hate and blind obedience. Speaking of which…
FOLLOWING THE WAKE OF THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: You’ve read the media analysis of the Littleton, Colo. teen tragedy, and by now you’ve even read the analysis of the analysis. A few things to remember, some of which didn’t make it into some of the analyses:
Certainly in my own teenhood, and later in two day jobs dealing with teens, I’ve found little support or recognition within the system for any kid who wasn’t a potential star on the playing field or the sidelines. The media largely follow the inequity: One local TV newscast used to have a “Prep Athlete of the Month” segment, another used to have a “Student Athlete of the Week,” but nobody in local news (until this year’s revival of the Washington Spelling Bee) paid any notice to non-athletic young scholars. A truly progressive school system wouldn’t just be where it was OK for a girl to be good at sports; it would be where it was OK for a boy to be bad at sports.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, call TCI to demand it resume feeding the public access channel to Summit Cable customers, and take to heart these words by E.B. White: “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom–he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”
MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.
UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.
AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)
ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.
If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)
GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).
Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)
The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!
CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.
Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.
Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).
Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.
While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)
It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”
Your high-test online Misc. welcomes the imminant arrival of Tesoro gasoline to Washington. Yeah, the name sounds a lot like “testosterone” (the name’s actually Spanish for “treasure”), but it’s a growing indie refiner that’s become very big in Alaska and Hawaii, cementing Washington’s “Pacific Rim” consciousness. It’s bought the ex-Shell refinery in Anacortes and is snapping up gas stations whose franchise agreements with other companies are lapsing. This arrival comes as we might start saying goodbye to the Arco brand (formerly Atlantic Richfield, formerly Richfield). The L.A.-based company, which rose to dominance in the western states when it dumped credit cards and service bays and installed all those AM/PM convenience stores, is in talks to sell everything to BP (which itself has just absorbed Amoco).
AMONG THE PIONEER SQUARES: This month’s gallery choices are Wes Wehr’s exquisitely detailed tiny line drawings of adorable fantasy critters (at the Collusion Gallery), and Malcolm Edwards’s narrative photo-essay of Rosalinda, a golden-years woman recalling her life’s journey from a convent to careers in stripping and belly-dancing, and who’s still sexy and radiantly beautiful today (at Benham).
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Sunrise Organic cereal is General Mills’ attempt to muscle in on the organic-cereal trade now the province of the major indie makers servicing the separate health-food-store circuit (but who’ve recently gotten an in into big regular supermarkets, as those chains try to muscle in on the “natural” stores’ business). It’s sticky-sweet and hard-crunchy, thanks to all the honey slobbered over the Crispix-like hexagons. Like an increasing number of “healthy choices” type food products, it boasts modern-day health-food buzzwords such as “organic” and “natural,” without making any claims to be better for you than any other foodstuffs. It lets you have your sweet-tooth fix while pretending you’re doing your body good.
AD CLICHE OF THE WEEK: Both Columbia Crest wines and Eddie Bauer have billboards these days showing their products as the end of a rebus-like visual arithmetic equation. Example: (Thread) + (mountain) + (sunshine) = (Eddie Bauer outdoor shirt). Here’s one I’d like to see instead: (Clip-art catalog) + (addle-brained ad manager) + (arterial street) = (dumb billboard).
SOMETHING FISHY: Recently seen downtown, a “Darwin Fish” car plaque only with “QUEER” in the middle instead of “DARWIN.” It’s one thing to boast of scientific evolution as the heart of a worldview more rational and even human-centric than religious mysticism. But to boast of gays (who typically spend a lifetime of childlessness) as comprising an advanced stage of evolution isn’t quite in keeping with Darwin’s theories, which stated that the the main lines of any species’ evolution involved those who bred the most survivable offspring. But a case might be made that our own species reaches a more advanced stage of social evolution when it becomes more accepting of non-reproducers and other cultural mutations. Speaking of which…
SPREADING OUT: A 3/29 NY Times op-ed piece (reprinted in the 4/1 P-I) claimed the outmigration of Californians across the rest of the west (writer Dale Maharidge specifically mentioned the mountain states, but Washington also qualifies) is an even more inisdious matter than some commentators (including myself) have pictured it. (You know, the old “Californication” imagery of rural hamlets transformed into Little Malibus, where cell-phone-hogging movie stars, agents, and dealmakers have their enclaves of expensive homes and fancy restaurants with made-up “regional cuisines,” driving the locals to the fringes of their own former communities.)
But Stanford prof Maharidge (author of the book The Coming White Minority) describes it as a matter of white flight. Instead of running away from neighborhoods and cities and school districts when too many minorities and immigrants start showing up, these fleers are abandoning a whole state. This would help solidify the national partisan alignment of the Clinton era, by helping Democratic presidential candidates in electoral-vote-rich Calif. while ensuring GOP control over the U.S. Senate (where those sparse mountain states already have power far beyond their population). It’s also potential bad news for those of us who’ve hoped the rest-of-the-west would grow more diverse, less monocultural; who’ve wanted to trash the illusion of comfort associated with the image of the rural or exurban west as a white-mellow paradise where everybody’s in harmony because everybody’s alike. Speaking of the new western monoculture…
BOOMTOWN RATTING: It hasn’t just been the winter of my own discontent. Just about everywhere I go, I run into another artist, writer, musician, graphic designer, tattooist, etc. who can’t stop repeating how they absolutely hate Seattle these days. But when I ask them to elaborate, usually they just shrug an “Isn’t it obvious?”
Occasionally I can get a few details. Some of these details involve the old saw that nobody here supports anybody from here; that you can’t make it as a DJ or a fashion designer here unless you have the proper pedigree from the big media cities. More often I hear the boomtown economy’s just made them too pessimistic. When the Seattle alterna-arts metascene was still struggling, many artists of various genres dreamed of a time when there would be money and patronage and outlets for work; then their struggles would be recognized. Well, there are such outlets now, but to a large extent what they want to buy is work that’s as un-reminiscent as possible of the old, pre-Gates Seattle. Nothing nice and funky and small and personal, nothing that hints of negativity in any way. Just big art, glass art, expensive art that looks expensive, third world crafts which affirm an ecotourist image of third worlders as happy little semihumans. And everywhere, architecture and cars and clothes and gourmet foods that remind the new elite of just how precious and special they believe themselves to be.
Last week, I wrote how the local entrepreneurs behind the ARO.Space dance club had successfully tapped into two of the key aspects of the New Seattle mindset–smug, self-congratulatory “good taste,” and the unquestioned belief that Real Culture still has to come from someplace else. It’s more than an appropriate theme for a dance club. It’s a double-whammy for anyone already making art here of any type other than that which tells smug rich people how utterly wonderful they are. Of course, the “fine” arts have always depended upon patrons who’ve exerted various degrees of creative/curatorial control, and commercial arts have always depended on what the traffic would bear. “Alternative” arts were supposed to be about finding interstices and open spaces between the commercial demands, so one could create according to one’s own muse. So why are modern local alternative artists complaining so much about their lack of commercial success? Maybe because the stuff that’s been successful in ’90s American commercial culture so often involves a veneer of “alternative” street cred, without actually being too outre or questioning the socioeconomic premises of its world. Real rappers/rockers/graphic designers/painters etc. can see ever-so-slightly more marketable versions of their own work selling, and feel they’ve lost their own shot at the brass ring.
Also, financial survival for the non-wealthy has turned out to be just as tough in boom years as in bust years. What with stagnant incomes and exploding rents, not to mention the fact that no non-millionaire who didn’t buy a house in Seattle three years ago will ever get to buy one.
So, upon the fifth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, we’re left with a town that’s just as dysfunctional as the town he died in, but in different ways. Instead of there being no career opportunities for artistic people in this town, there are plenty of career opportunities here for people other than the people who struggled through the down years here. And instead of the brief “slacker city” period in which it seemed one could make art or music with only the least demanding of day jobs, daily survival has again become an issue for anyone not at the economic top (while many of those near the economic top are stressing themselves toward an early grave just to stay at or near the top). To paraphrase that famous Seattle-abandoner Lynda Barry, the good times just might be killing us.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, enjoy the last weeks of Kingdome baseball, and consider these words from the restless Carl Jung: “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
