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PRE-BOXING DAY GREETINGS to all from Misc., the column that’s lived through at least three ska revivals, four rockabilly revivals, and now a second swing revival. (The last was in the mid-’80s, when Joe Jackson and David Lee Roth recorded Louis Jordan covers, Kid Creole revived the zoot suit, and New York Doll David Johansen turned into Buster Poindexter.) ‘Twas funny, but not unexpected, to see the P-I use the “Swing Revival” hype as the excuse for its fourth annual “End of Grunge” article. Swing never really went away, of course. There’ve been swing dance classes in colleges and high schools lo these many years. The New Orleans Cafe has had a swing night since ’88. The only thing that’s new is that L.A. finally caught onto it, following the success of bands like Squirrel Nut-Zippers, thus making it a “national” trend.
UPDATES: The 66 Bell art studios haven’t been depopulated for redevelopment yet, and now they won’t be until at least July. Some tenants are reportedly trying to negotiate a longer reprieve with the building owner, but nothing’s certain yet…. Just when I wrote about the blossoming of funky retail along the western stretch of E. Pine St., two of the street’s clothing veterans (Reverb and Righteous Rags) announced they’ll soon close. The former will become Penny’s Arcade (old time video and pinball); the latter will become an expansion of Bimbo’s Bitchin Burrito Kitchen.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #2 of Neal Wankoff’s Bang!Bang! is out. It’s a bright-‘n’-breezy 16-page digest-sized popzine packed full with words and pix about Tube Top, Blammo, James Bertram of Red Stars Theory, and much more. Free at the usual dropoff spots or $1 for two issues from 1600 15th Ave., Seattle 98122.
THE FINE PRINT (in an Ericsson TV commercial, set at the Carolina Panthers football stadium the Swedish cell-phone company bought the naming rights to): “Teams depicted do not represent actual football teams.”
TOYLAND GREETINGS: Hasbro reports record sales and profits on its assorted products (GI Joe, Monopoly, Scrabble, Mr. Potato Head, et al.), and a week later sez it will fire 20 percent of its staff, just so it can subcontract more work to Mexican sweatshops. We don’t know how this might affect Hasbro’s Seattle operation, which packages and re-ships products made in the company’s Asian plants. Ordinarily, I’d say there was something strategically amiss about a consumer-products company firing so many people, contributing to reduced middle-class buying power and hence reducing demand for its own products. But Hasbro’s the sponsor of the “Holiday Giving Tree” promotion on the Rosie O’Donnell Show, inviting viewers to buy new toys and send ’em in to be given to less-fortunate kids. Maybe the company’s thinking if there are more layoffs across the economy, there’ll be more less-fortunate kids, and hence a chance for bigger “Giving Tree” programs in future Xmases.
ON THE RACKS #1: Beth Nugent’s novel Live Girls (Vintage Contemporaries trade paperback) has a cover with Kristine Peterson’s photo of the famous sign of the same name outside downtown Seattle’s Champ Arcade, but the story itself takes place in a “decaying Eastern port city.”
ON THE RACKS #2: Nancy Manahan, author of Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence (one of at least three books that year with the same subtitle but different topics) now has a new anthology, On My Honor: Lesbians Reflect on Their Scouting Experience. Mind you, while some lesbians may have fond coming-O-age memories of the Girl Scouts, that doesn’t mean the Girl Scout organization holds many nice thoughts toward lesbians. I’m reminded of the lesbian promoters of the Kit Kat Klub cabaret space in east Fremont (circa 1982), who had to fold their operation after their liquor-license application was challenged by the Girl Scouts’ regional office up the street.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK and the annual Misc. In/Out List, think about the KeyArena crowd who cheered when Perry Farrell shouted, “How many of you here believe God is a woman?” and whether, considering some of the capricious and vengeful behaviors attributed to the Judeo-Christian deity, these cheering boys were really being all that complimentary to the feminine spirit.
Media Bashers:
Rebels Without an Effect
Book review for The Stranger, 12/19/97
We the Media: A Citizens’ Guide to Fighting for Media Democracy, edited by Don Hazen and Julie Winokur (The New Press)
The Conquest of Cool, by Thomas Frank (University of Chicago Press)
Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy, by Robert McChesney (Oxford)
Made Possible By…: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States, by James Ledbetter (Verso)
Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, by Stephen Duncombe (Verso)
While American leftists share few notions on how to improve society, just about all of them love the Media Analysis game. How to play: (1) Read something in the “mainstream media” (anything bigger than Mother Jones or The Nation). (2) Pretend to be shocked that the major news institutions behave, well, like major institutions. (3) Complain long and loud about how Big Media isn’t telling The Real Truth (without you, yourself, saying much about what that Real Truth might be). It’s easy, it’s fun, it doesn’t require changing anything in the real world (the game’s rules presume you can’t change the world, just critique it).
The game’s played to perfection by the creators of We the Media, a brisk anthology of short essays and cartoons covering most of the Media Analysis movement’s topics. Nearly every of its 200 pages express amazement that publishers and broadcasters act like the major corporations they are. We the Media exists only in oppositional stance; it bitches about the media loving big business and business-friendly politicians as if anybody’s still surprised at it. (Most of us grew up with local papers kissing their local business communities’ butts; there’s no reason not to expect “national” journalists to act any different.) Only briefly, mostly toward the end, do the editors get around to stating what they’d like us to be crusading for and what communications tools exist or could be created to aid such crusades.
Baffler co-editor Tom Frank holds few illusions, sincere or feigned, about corporate media ever having had ideals to have fallen from–besides the ideal of self-interest. The Conquest of Cool isn’t the grand unified philosophical statement I’ve hoped from Frank. But it does focus his main sociocultural obsession (“hipness” as a pro-corporate marketing concept) onto one specific point in time–the late ’50s and ’60s, when Madison Avenue discovered newer, flashier, homier, hippier, and sexier ways to push consumer goods. Frank believes advertisers didn’t “co-opt” the era’s “youth movement” but paralleled and even helped inspire it. He “credits” a few “rebel” ad men, who initially wanted to break out of their own industry’s stifling conformity, with instigating the whole notion of a “permanent revolution of style” (what critics called “planned obsolescence”); a notion still seen today in ads showing “rebel” teens gulping Mountain Dew and “rebel” executives running Windows 95. Frank adds a closing section about the simultaneous rise of “hipness” in the men’s fashion biz, the process that led directly into the early-’70s polyester-pimp look now curiously nostalgized.
Robert McChesney helped start The Rocket (local bastion of hip marketing) 18 years ago, then went off to grad studies in Wisconsin. Oxford’s paperback reissue of his 1993 treatise on the early days of radio comes out in time to give background on the first corporate media consolidation movement, just as sweetheart deregulation bills are locking the airwaves into fewer and fewer hands than ever. His book’s heavy reading, full of scholarly detail about forgotten, Depression-era radio reform movements that never stood a chance against the RCA-CBS duopoly that controlled the so-called Golden Age of Radio.
It’s not just that business has always wanted to make big money in media. McChesney believes it’s also always tried to silence any potentially viable alternative. So does fellow scholar James Ledbetter. His Made Possible By… details the ’70s rise of public TV and radio in the U.S. and its quick subjugation, first by right-wing politicians and then by corporate “underwriters,” filling PBS schedules with U.K. drawing-room dramas and Lawrence Welk reruns. But after reading it, I got to thinking about what kind of public broadcasting we might have otherwise had. From the standpoint of getting independent and/or progressive documentaries and public affairs shows on the air, the PBS setup’s about the best one could imagine. A vertically integrated organization like the BBC not only has stricter “neutrality” rules, it’s much less open to outside producers. On the more fiscally unstable, yet more decentralized, PBS setup, anybody can propose a program, seek funding for it from inside or outside the system, and even syndicate it to individual affilliates if the PBS network feed doesn’t carry it. I agree with Ledbetter that today’s noncommercial-TV setup leaves a lot to be improved upon; unlike him, I believe it can be improved upon without the drastic restructuring he advocates.
Meanwhile, Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground tries to imagine the potentials for a different type of media universe, using as his starting point the so-called Zine Revolution with its potentials and contradictions. For Duncombe, the punk-rock, political, and personal zines symbolize the risks and frustrations of an oppositional “alternative” culture–do you stay small and irrelevant, or become part of the corporate media machine? Other books about the Zine Revolution revel in the coolness, weirdness, and wildness of DIY publishing. Duncombe instead solemnly ponders zines as artifacts of safe, middle-class “rebellion,” and wonders whether (and how) they might lead into a more serious movement for social change. It’d be a start if more Media Analysts developed Duncombe’s smarts.
THIS WEEK’S MISC. starts out with warm congrats to the Chubby and Tubby hardware/variety stores on their 50th anniversary. Starting as a war-surplus outlet inside a war-surplus Quonset hut on Rainier Ave., the three-outlet chain has adhered strongly to its tradition of common-sense goods at common-sense prices for common-sense people. It eschews every modern retail principle–its aisles are anything but spacious, its ads are bereft of pretty imagery, it makes no pretensions to snob appeal, and (except for some of its athletic shoes) its merchandise ignores ephemeral fads or fashions. And the place is loved for it, by me and three generations of shoppers.
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: Spent three hours the other day being interviewed by an Amsterdam magazine writer. She wanted to know how much everybody here loved the “Seattle Scene” hype of a few years back, how grateful everybody was that it had ended, whether everything had now “returned to normal,” whether it all could’ve ended up differently, and what’ll happen here next. My replies:
(1) Actually, different people here had different takes on the mania. Nearly everyone wanted a music scene that’d be bigger than it’d been in ’89, with just a couple of tiny clubs and near-nonexistent opportunities for recording or touring. But a lot of folks were (and some still are) adamant about the indie-rock ideology and didn’t like the forces of Corporate Rock barging in, strip-mining the better bands, and abandoning the remaining refuse.
(2) Many musicians who didn’t get signed by the majors in ’91-’93 were disappointed the A&R reps stopped showing up in droves. But others were grateful for the perceived chance to promote their work outside the media glare–like all those bands who’d spent so much effort explaining how they weren’t “grunge,” they didn’t get around to letting people know what they were.
(3) Thankfully, things aren’t all back to the sorry state they’d been in. The mania left us with, as World’s Fair promoters like to say, a “permanent legacy”–an infrastructure of clubs, labels, studios, producers, promoters, and (perhaps more important) the idea that you can indeed make your own music and art and it can be good and it doesn’t have to conform to outside dictates. (I wish this lesson could be learned by the local dance-music community, which has gotten more progressive than it had been but is still too content to follow styles dictated from elsewhere, too afraid to attempt its own thangs.)
(4) The interviewer thought we’d have had more of a legacy had bands here been more willing participants in the music-industry game. She seemed to think if Eddie Vedder had been more willing to make videos and tour with Ticketmaster, the industry wouldn’t have bothered with the likes of Blur or Stone Temple Pilots. I’m not sure. By insisting on doing things their way (Mix-A-Lot not going “gangsta;” Mudhoney staying out of big record-company debt; Bikini Kill staying out of big record companies altogether), the bands might or might not have had a bigger hit or two, but they stayed truer to their own visions, which’ll probably prove best for their art and their careers.
(5) Five years ago, the world saw Seattle as a teeming pool of youthful angst against restricted economic opportunities and stifling social conservatism. Today, the world sees Seattle as a fortress of imperial capitalists out to smother the world under cookie-cutter coffee shops and mediocre software. Neither vision’s very accurate, but that’s beside the point. Seattle is, however, a generally more prosprous place today, at least for the white middle-class segments most music people come from. With relative prosperity comes a different angst, the feeling that everything “real” is threatened by upscale-bland yuckiness. That will create a different notion of rebellion. Maybe we’ll see some artistic results of that notion next year.
‘TIL THEN, you’ve one more chance to nominate rising and declining people, places, and things for the annual Misc. In/Out list, a start-of-the-year tradition almost as old as the Bud Bowl. Send yours to clark@speakeasy.org.
EARLY PROJECTIONS: This paper’s previously chided the Cineplex Odeon Meridian Cinemas, mainly over its lack of union projectionists. But the Pike St. multiplex has one good thing going for it: This past Thanksgiving week, it showed movies as early as 10 in the morning. Morning movies are a tradition in towns with costlier downtown real estate, where theaters have to maximize their assets; they also make “nightlife” not just for the nighttime. Let’s get it and other theaters to open early on a regular basis, at least on weekends. Instead of dinner and a movie, I say why not breakfast and a movie? See a show before heading off on weekend errands or shopping trips. And there’s nothing like a little drama before that dreary job. In other entertainment news…
PASTA PARTICIPLES: One of the fun things about following rock bands is the fun n’ confusion when different outfits take the same names. In my years I’ve heard of two different bands called the Cunninghams, two sets of Feelies, two Screams, two Clubber Langs, three sets of Mutants, and as many as three Nirvanas besides the famous one. Even individuals in the biz can be confused for one another; i.e. the musician/ producer Tim Kerr who has nothing to do with the founder of Tim/Kerr Records. Most recently, Kramden’s Bar and Grill way up on Aurora has advertised an R&B cover band called Eddie Spaghetti and the Meatballs–no apparent relation to the Eddie Spaghetti who’s fronted the cow-punk Supersuckers these past five-plus years. (On a similar note, Minus Five/ Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey sez he’s no relation, as far as he knows, to Iowa’s young fresh McCaughey septuplets, even though both families pronounce it “McCoy.”) In still other entertainment news…
PANTS PARTICIPLES: Loved the notion of an all-female Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (by the new troupe Heads Up Gorgeous at Book-it’s stage). Shakespeare’s plays were originally executed by all-male casts; it’s only appropriate to have reverse-drag of sorts in Tom Stoppard’s sideways take on Hamlet. It also gives a chance for actresses to appear in strong roles that have little or nothing to do with sex or romance, something classic and even modern-classic theater hasn’t enough of. In other gender-related news…
BUYING CHAINS AT A CHAIN STORE: By now you’ve seen the ads for the Castle Superstore, the region’s newest and largest sex-toy shop. Is it worth going the 40 miles to Tacoma for? Probably not, at least not just for the merchandise; mostly the same stuff you can find in Seattle at Show World/ Fantasy Unlimited, Champ Arcade, the Crypt, and/or Toys in Babeland. What sets it apart is its highly female-friendly setting, in a suburban big-box store building (formerly Olympic Sports) right down Tacoma Mall Boulevard from the Discovery Zone and Chuck E. Cheese. Under bright fluorescents, along clean carpeted aisles, you’ve got stacks and stacks of X videos (straight and gay; buy or rent), lace teddies, handcuffs, condoms, body-part-shaped candies, Hustler magazine-brand vibrators, inflatable party dolls, hard- and softcore magazines (all shrink-wrapped), cat-fight paperback novels, oils, creams, perfumes, penis “desensitizing” gels, and more.
The day I was there it had a substantial and very coed clientele, all regular, Sears-clad folks out to make their private lives a bit less drab. There were no nervous giggles, no eyes darting away in shame–just apparently well-adjusted people comfortable with their bodies and with the sight of other people’s bodies. But the arrival of Castle (a Phoenix outfit trying to go national) doesn’t just represent the mainstreaming of the sex biz but the chaining of it. It proves there’s no retail niche too specialized or too outre for the consolidators.
SHOPPING DAYS may be winding down, but you’ve still time to send in your recommendations for the annual Misc. In/Out list. Send yours to clark@speakeasy.org. Remember, we seek people, places, and things that will become hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot now. If you think everything that’s presently big’s just gonna keep getting bigger, I’ve got some Macauley Culkin fan-club merchandise to sell you.
MISC. HEREBY BREAKS its policy against weather jokes to allow you to go do what many of you are already doing–blaming El Nino for everything. Raining? It’s El Nino’s fault. Not raining? It’s El Nino’s fault. Internet connections really slow today? Can’t achieve orgasm? Sluggish, achy feeling all over? Waxy yellow buildup? You guessed it–that pesky El Nino again.
THE BLOB REMEMBERED: Ultimately, the beloved (by me, anyway) Lower Queen Anne restaurant building’s clever (though cheaply built) false front wasn’t what did it in. Essentially, it was one of those “restaurant graveyard” sites nobody could make a go of, before or after the fun façade was added to it. Still, it’s a shame the condo developers who now have the land won’t install any of their own molded-white-plaster turrets or protruberances as a Blob remembrance.
DEMOGRAPHICS ON PARADE: Austin, one of the towns billed a few years ago as a potential “Next Seattle,” has achieved that dubious goal, sorta. According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the Texas state capital (and “alternative country” music center) has just surpassed Seattle as the 22nd most-populous city in America. They’re up to 541,278 folk; we’ve just gotten up to 524,704. (We had over 550,000 in the 1960 census, back when the households in our vast single-family neighborhoods were having more kids; we declined in the ’70s and started climbing again in the ’80s.) Of course, they’re benefitting from immigration more than we are, and they’re in a position to annex some of their outlying sprawl. Other towns you might not know are bigger than Seattle: San Antonio, El Paso, Memphis, Milwaukee, San Jose, Indianapolis, Columbus, and Jacksonville, FL. Towns you might not know Seattle’s bigger than: Nashville, Cleveland, New Orleans, Kansas City, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati.
WASN’T TOMORROW WONDERFUL?: Two weeks or so ago, I asked for your ideas as to which late-’90s popcult trends would be the likeliest nostalgia fodder in future decades. Reader Ian Morgan expressed doubts on the whole idea: “This entire decade has been a flaccid rerun of the seventies! A second Woodstock, Sex Pistols reunion, platform shoes, bellbottoms, etc. Don’t forget grunge. Sorry, the punkers did nihilism better the first time around. If history is merciful we’ll all forget the ’90s. Everyone here wishes they were sometime else.” Kim Adams was more hopeful, sorta: “Future generations, inundated with a gazillion sources and sites for information and babies whose first words will be ISDN or TMI (too much information), will long for a return to the simpler times of single-phone-line households and mere 33.6k modems.”
AS FOR ME, a few passing fancies are evident. DVDs will make today’s CD-ROM games seem quaintly primitive (such small video windows; such choppy animations). When digital video lets anybody become a moviemaker, today’s big-budget action films will become popularly disdained as bloated dinosaurs, then later inspire subsequent generations as mementos of a second Hollywood Golden Age. And 21st-century genetic engineering might make both tattoos and breast implants seem positively retro-chic. Of course, all this depends on what the future generates, then finds missing. Maybe there’ll be a huge hammered-dulcimer mania in the 2010s, causing kids in the 2020s to yearn for the good old days of techno.
BUT FOR NOW, it’s time for all good Misc. readers to think shorter-term and send in their suggestions for our annual In/Out List, not to be confused with any similar-looking feature which may or may appear in this or other print media. Send your nominated people, places, or things to clark@speakeasy.org.
‘TIL THEN, visit the new downtown clothing store New York Exchange (apparently meant for folks too urbane and downstate to shop at Buffalo Exchange); ponder whether, considering the former reputation of 2nd and Pike as a center for intimate commerce, it was really wise to rename the carton-cigarette store there the “Bangmi Smokeshop;” and consider these equally-urbane thoughts from the website of local photog Kim Rollins : “There are eight million stories in the naked city–and fifteen million in the greater naked metropolitan area.”
OFFAL-LY STRANGE: Your day-earlier-than-normal pre-Thanksgiving Misc. begins with feast-related news from London. In that town where darn near every non-chain restaurant has a veggie page on the menu, where mad-cow disease is still a recent memory, and where vegan activists used to pass out anti-meat flyers outside McDonald’s outlets until the chain sued them for slander (the vegans won), the latest food fad is a return to a UK tradition, delicacies made from offal–organs and other animal parts not normally consumed by modern Western humans. An AP dispatch claims “more than one-quarter of London’s 600 biggest eateries” now serve such items as pig’s-head salad, bloodcake with fried egg, goose neck (stuffed with gizzards), and veal-kidney risotto with crispy pig’s-ears. Many of these meat-byproduct dishes are illegal to commercially serve in the U.S. (you can’t even get a genuine haggis, the national dish of Scotland, ’round these parts); but hey, there’s another air-fare war going on now. In other food news…
BIG STOREWIDE SALE!: Why, you ask, would Fred Meyer (the regional everything-for-everybody chain) want to buy up QFC (the fancy-pants grocery specialists)? Besides the normal drives for consolidation in today’s chew-’em-up, spit-’em-out corporate world, QFC was threatening to infiltrate Freddy’s Oregon stronghold, and QFC’s role in the Pike & Broadway urban-strip-mall complex (with its food-drug-variety-banking combo) is too close to Freddy’s under-one-roof hypermarket concept for Freddy’s to afford to ignore.
Media coverage, natch, emphasized the merger’s potential impact on the Q’s upscale core clientele. The Q responded to this press-generated nonissue by running full page ads promising the Q will remain the Q. Tellingly, there’ve been no ads promising Freddy’s would remain Freddy’s; just a brief reassuring statement from Meyer management. But with seemingly everything else getting gentrified these days, I know I’d be afraid of such possible consequences as Ralph Lauren goods taking over the Pant Kingdom department, Smith & Hawken on the hardware shelves, Aveda at the cosmetics racks, Bang & Olufson replacing the Panasonic boom boxes in the Photo & Sound section, or even a wine shelf with F. G. Meyer’s Choice Beaujolais Nouveau.
MEANWHILE, Freddy’s won an appeal earlier this month in its plan to build a big store at the former Leary Way steel-mill site. The neighborhood advocacy group SOIL (Save Our Industrial Land), which seeks to stop the plan, sez it’ll continue appealing in higher courts. It’s not against a Freddy’s in their part of town, just against it at that particular location. Its latest flyer reiterates a suggestion made in an old Misc., that Freddy’s instead take over the ex-Ernst block up the street. (SOIL’s hotline: 789-1010, fax 789-7109.) In other retail-space news…
WATCH THIS SPACE: The former Kid Mohair on Pine will reopen (maybe as soon as this week) as the Baltic Room, a piano bar (with just beer & wine). While a lot of remodeling work has been done, the space still looks largely like its elegant former self. Why’d Mohair go the way of 80 percent of U.S. small businesses? Maybe the “cigar bar” fad passed its peak; maybe the gentlemanly surroundings clashed too much with the loud, uptempo DJ music. Why might the Baltic Room fare better? For one thing, it’s phase three of the Linda’s Tavern/ Capitol Club cartel, forming a veritable market-segmented lineup of not-specifically-gay watering holes on Pine. Imagine Linda’s as the Chevy of the chain, the Capitol as the Caddy, and the Baltic as the lush-yet-comfy Buick. In other entertainment news…
WET & WILD: Scientists in Quebec City have announced an “invisible condom” they hope to market after a couple years of further testing. According to Reuters, it’s a “polymer-based liquid that solidifies into a gel at body temperature,” forming a waterproof film that blocks STD transmission. Inventors say “it can be used without telling the partner who doesn’t want to use a latex condom.” I’m sure even before the thing gets gov’t. approval, test users will quickly find additional fun uses for the stuff, some of which might even involve sex.
The High-Tech Boys’ Club:
Now For Women Too
Book review by Clark Humphrey, 11/10/97
Release 2.0 by Esther Dyson (Broadway Books)
The Interactive Book by Celia Pearce (Macmillan Technical Publishing trade paperback)
Signal to Noise by Carla Sinclair (HarperCollins)
Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders by Jim Carlton (Times Books)
Interface Culture by Steven Johnson (HarperCollins)
Sometimes it seems a lot of people want to tell us about the future of computer-aided communications. Other times, it seems like it’s just the same few people putting out the same book. That’s because these screeds promising a decentralized, all-empowering cyberfuture are dominated by a small elitist cadre of ideologues who all hang out at the Global Business Network and other right-wing think tanks. These “digerati” all say pretty much the same things; none question their Gates-given right to not only predict but to dictate the direction of computers, the Net, etc. The first three authors in this review are women, but they’re still in the PC-biz “boys’ club.”
Esther Dyson’s a “digerati” insider of the first rank (daughter of celeb scientist Freeman Dyson, publisher of her own industry-insider newsletter). Her book’s essentially a general-audience reiteration of the digerati party line–the computerization of business is subverting all sorts of “paradigms,” you’ve gotta stay on your toes to keep up with market conditions that change overnight, don’t let pesky governments get in the way of all-kind-and-knowing companies, your kids’ll end up homeless tomorrow if their classrooms are computerless today. If you’ve already read Gates or George Gilder or Alvin Toffler or Nicholas Negroponte or any issue of Wired, you really don’t need another volume of the same.
Celia Pearce, who had almost as privileged an upbringing as Dyson (her industrial-designer dad’s worked on everything from Vegas light shows to Biosphere 2), could’ve used an editor. The Interactive Book, Pearce’s 580-page collection of essays, rambles on through her career designing group computer games for shopping malls, her love of the Internet visual-programming language VRML (whose co-designer wrote her introduction), her misadventures with the “new media” divisions of Hollywood movie studios (whom she believes will never “get it” regarding interactive media and its inherent differences from TV and movies), and how the Net and interactive media are supposedly on the verge of exploding all the old hierarchies of media, entertainment, and society in general.
Of course, behind most crusades against an old hierarchy there’s somebody who wants to build a new hierarchy with her/himself at its center. Carla Sinclair’s novel Signal to Noise doesn’t document this trait as much as help propagate it. Sinclair treats her friends and acquaintances in the Digerati as being important enough to have a roman a clef written about them. If you don’t personally knowDouglas Coupland or the Wired editors, there’s really no point in reading this long paean to their alleged hotness.
If the Digerati are the New Rock Stars folks like Sinclair claim them to be, then it’s natural to expect them to be subjected to scurrilous gossip. In Apple, Wall St. Journal writer Jim Carlton does the kind of hatchet job the digerati are always complaining about mainstream-media people for. Carlton blames office politics and executive infighting/ incompetence for Apple Computer’s fall from big profit margins in the late ’80s to multimillion-dollar losses the past year and a half. The eral story’s a lot simpler than Carlton’s account claims: When Microsoft wrested control of the PC platform away from IBM (with help from indie chipmakers who copied the IBM PC’s ROM chips for the first PC clones), MS turned PCs into low-margin commodities (similar to the old Kodak strategy of giving away the camera to sell the film). By then, Apple was already locked into an opposite business model, using the Mac’s superior operating software to sell its costlier hardware. MS’s Windows wasn’t (and still isn’t) as good as the Mac OS, but it got close enough for corporate computer buyers, threatening Apple’s market niches and decimating the high markups it had become dependent upon. None of the boardroom-soap-opera battles Carlton relishes in detailing had much effect on this corporate trajectory, and none probably could have. Apple put out a lot of superior products, but built a big organization that couldn’t change as fast as it needed to. An important story, but not the tabloidy tale Carlton’s trying to sell.
Amid all the hustle-hustle of uniform paradigm-subverting, it’s refreshing to read the occasional voice of common sense. Steven Johnson, who runs the pioneering webzine Feed, is out not to make websites hotter, just better. While Johnson’s Interface Culture isn’t flashily designed itself (not a single illustration), Johnson’s screed about the principles of online design makes compelling reading. He’s out to improve online communication on a structural level, applying oft-forgotten common-sense principles to the creation and organization of text and graphics. While other cyber-pundits blather about their mover-‘n’-shaker pals, Johnson quietly shows the rest of us how to start subverting their paradigms by making our own online statements more effective.
EVEN BEFORE the P-I front page discovered it, Misc. was in love with the new Westin Hotel rooftop signs. While the red letters are nearly four feet tall, they’re placed so high up on the hotel’s round towers that they look real tiny from the street. They provide an unexpected spot of cheer against the downtown skyline and bring back memories of the past golden age of hotel neon. They’re also a statement of pride for the locally-based chain, rocked in recent years from a succession of out-of-state parent companies. Elsewhere in greater downtown…
OFF THE MENU: The 5th & Denny restaurant graveyard building maintains its curse on would-be operators–most recently with a would-be southern-esque dining concept called Jambalaya’s. The curse acted faster than normal this time; Jambalaya’s “Coming Soon” signs came down and the “For Lease” signs came up without the joint ever opening. In other money-related fantasies…
GAME THEORY REVISITED: The Seattle Monopoly game, premiered in a big Bon Marche promo event last Friday, is Monopoly owner Hasbro’s belated answer to Stock Block and CityOpoly, two ’80s indie board games based heavily on the Monopoly concept but with different street and business names for each town they were sold in. The thing is, there are enough avid game players and professional game designers in town for somebody to think up a real (not fill-in-the-blanks) Seattle board game. Maybe it could be about trying to start a computer-related company that could make it big, but not so big that Microsoft would crush it by copying its technology. Or it could be about coming up with schemes to improve civic life and trying to get them realized in spite of opposition by the big-money people. For example…
RIDING HIGH?: You can tell it’s election season ’cause the local TV commercial slots and daily-newspaper ad space, normally full of appeals to be a “rebel” by buying officially “rebellious” consumer products, are instead saturated with images of authority figures exhorting citizens to do as they’re told and just say nope to those crackpot initiatives on the ballot. There’s images of cops against (mild) handgun control, and images of nurses against (very mild) health care reform. Another case in point: the Monorail Initiative, denounced by the increasingly rabid-right propagandists at the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Instead of opposing the initiative as the work of “crackpots” (i.e., of people outside the government/ business elite), our business leaders should welcome the chance to add more in-city mileage to a light-rail scheme initially intended for suburban commuters, and to add them in the form of a hi-profile, futuristic-looking elevated train system people would want to ride on.
We ought to pass the Monorail Initiative this election. Then we’ll let the city and the Regional Transit Authority (established in last year’s transit referendum) work out how best to incorporate the initiative’s mandate with the in-progress RTA planning and the future RTA operation. RTA was and is about reducing smog, easing freeway congestion, and making life easier for motorists by getting a few other motorists off the road. The Monorail Initiative is about those things, but it’s also about something more. It’s about dreams for the future, and about wresting control of these dreams from the suits, from the consultants and focus-group researchers and the politicians who never met a condo project they didn’t like. Historically, urban transit projects in the U.S. have been proposed from on high by political inner-circle members who would never deign to use public transit themselves, but who love the opportunity to award construction contracts to potential campaign contributors. This is something dreamed up by ordinary citizens, without years of bureaucratic “process.” And it appeals to everyone who’s ever loved the short Seattle Center Monorail and ever wanted to believe it really was the transportation system of the future. As I wrote back in April, much of the dream future presented at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair never happened. Here’s a chance to realize at least a piece of the fair’s promised “World of Tomorrow,” to be finished just a few years into Century 21.
Close to the Machine
Book review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/30/97
Now here’s something you don’t see everyday: A San Francisco essayist who’s not an insuffrable egomaniac. Instead of incessantly promoting herself as a Hipper Than Thou brand name, Ellen Ullman in Close to the Machine (City Lights Books) calmly and personably details some of the routines and subroutines of her daily existence as a freelance “software engineer and consultant.” On one level, this short memoir gives a narrative focus to the process of programming–something I haven’t really seen since a 10-year-old Microsoft Press interview book, Programmers At Work.) On another level, Ullman evokes real sympathy while describing her life as the soul-numbing reality behind the other techno-essayists’ futuristic fantasies. She sits at her keyboard all day and most of the night, except when she’s driving two hours each way on an assignment in some deep-suburban office park. She lives in a cool loft space, but spends most of her time there working alone. Aside from her family back east, her only non-work-related relationship consists of occasional convenience sex with a younger man who dreams of making it big in offshore money laundering and online porn. On the plus side, she does get to drive a fancy car and eat at fancy restaurants and solicit AIDS-benefit money from her wealthy acquaintances. But, as centuries of literature have already shown, upscaleness can’t buy happiness.
WELCOME BACK to a return-of-standard-time edition of Misc., the pop-culture column that will miss traded-away Sonics benchwarmer Steve Scheffler. The lovable, lanky Scheffler was an inspiration to everyone who toiled just outside the three-point-arc of fame. He was basketball’s version of St. Bartholemew (the guy in the 12 Apostles who had nothing written about him in the Gospels except his name).
ON THE BUS: Ever feel cramped inside an airplane fuselage? Boeing’s arch rivals at Airbus Industrie have a potential answer, though they’re only promoting it right now as a freight plane. The Airbus Super Transporter, which recently touched town for a promotional event at Boeing Field, is this huge bulbous thing, like a giant Playmobil toy plane; perhaps the most unairworthy-looking thing big engines can push off of the ground. I couldn’t get hold of a picture of it, but it looks almost exactly like the “Thunderbird 2” equipment-transport plane on the classic UK puppet show Thunderbirds. Imagine the kind of interiors you could have built in the thing: Multi-tiered seating, or better yet a multi-level party yacht in the sky, with potential amenities (saunas, beds, live bands) limited only by total weight and power consumption. Just the thing for flying over the International Date Line at the turn of the millennium!
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Alien Pops not only come in great flavors like “Watermelon Slice” and “Strawberry Shake,” they’re shaped like your classic bald, bug-eyed, UFO-abduction-story alien heads. Even better, they come from the saucer-sighting capital, Roswell, N.M. Available at Dan & Ray’s in Belltown or by calling (800) 522-5534.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: XX (Where the Girls Are!), the latest addition to the growing subgenre of local zines proudly billed as “By Women,” is a concise four-tabloid-page monthly newsletter edited by Sandra Faucett and Cresentia Jenkins, focusing on event listings of interest to third-wave (or is it third-and-a-half wave?) feminists of varying sorts. Issue #1focuses on women’s basketball with Seattle Reign game dates and trivia. There’s also a review of ex-local writer Natalie Jacobsen‘s book No Forwarding Address and breast-cancer-info Web links. At the usual drop-off spots, by mail (at P.O. Box 20834, Seattle 98102), or online (www.yin.org). In a somewhat different vision of feminine “empowerment”…
THE POLITICAL SPECTACLE: I’d long wondered when the three not-all-that-compatible branches of Republican ideology (unfettered capitalism; moral prudery; anti-governmental ranting) would stumble apart on an issue. It might be happening in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, directly north of Seattle. There, managers and staff of the Sugar’s strip club are circulating petitions on an initiative that, if it makes the ballot and passes, would change the new town’s set-up to add an additional layer of bureaucracy. Sugar’s management openly says it wants a government less capable of restricting operations at the club (known as among the raunchiest table-dance joints in the state), and believes a more cumbersome municipal organization would be more likely to leave the place alone. In other words, less governance via more government. (But then again, the exotic-dance biz has always known about less equalling more.)
Anyhow, the initiative’s chances of success are questionable. The Sugar’s people (most of whom, along with most of the club’s clientele, live outside Shoreline) have done a good job of publicizing their effort, but have done a poor job of communicating how their proposed governmental change would benefit the suburb’s 5,000 residents. Still, it’s interesting to see the sex industry reaching out for public support, instead of just lobbying politicians and suing in courts to defend its right to exist. Club managers are betting that commercial pseudo-sex has become mainstream enough that Shoreline voters will actively agree to help the club stay in business. After all, it’s not like they’re a sports team demanding a subsidized arena or a department store demanding a pedestrian park be sliced in two.
WORD-O-THE-WEEK: “Abulia.”
(This week’s reader question: Who has more powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Respond at clark@speakeasy.org, our new email home. Thanx.)
AFTER LAST OCTOBER’S COLUMN about a trip to Reno, several readers suggested I go to Las Vegas next time for the real gambling/ tourism/ party spectacle. I did. Some pseudo-random thoughts:
It’s hot. A hundred degrees in the afternoon, eighty at night, seven to nine months a year. No wonder so many tourists are willing to stay indoors, inside their all-under-one-roof hotel-resorts. It’s amazing the Strip has as much foot traffic as it does.
It’s large. Much larger than you think. The bigger of the two main tourist zones, the Strip (a highway built parallel to a railroad from L.A.) is four miles long and a mile wide.
It’s modern-day capitalism laid bare. Incessantly gaudy and hyper, devoted to redistributing wealth from the many to the few. If Seattle’s official mindset is mandatory mellowness, Vegas’s is mandatory excitement, unending “fun.” (Fortunately, I stayed at the Horseshoe, known as the most serious of the downtown hotel-casinos.)
On the plus side, it’s what Republicans and capitalists can accomplish when they don’t have to buy votes from Christians. It’s loud yet clean, gaudy but slick, naughty in a thoroughly businesslike manner.
While the famous Nevada brothels are zoned way outta town, Vegas generally treats sex not as a natural aspect of life: i.e., as something to make cash from. Bigtime skin shows operate in some of the same casino theaters as “family” shows (magicians at 8, breasts at 10). Honeymooning brides from Japan line up to get their photos next to the seven-foot nude male statue in front of Caesar’s Palace.
The #1 category in the Vegas yellow pages is 150 pages of “Entertainers–Adult” (hotel-room strippers). I’m told most don’t fuck for money, though some will let you think they might until after you’ve paid them. I didn’t find out for myself.
I didn’t gamble either. Like veggie burgers or sex with men, it just didn’t personally attract me. Instead, I watched other humans of all adult ages, genders, and nationalities feed coin after coin into hungry slots, hoping the machines would come down with a sudden case of coin diahhrea.
On the strip you can visit ersatz versions of nearly every spot on the world: Latin America (Rio, the small Aztec), Europe (the Riviera, plus Paris and Venice resorts to come), Britain (Excalibur), the Caribbean (Treasure Island), the U.S. East (New York New York), the U.S. South (the Orleans, Texas Station), the U.S. midwest (Countryland, soon to come), north Africa (Luxor, the Sahara). But not Australia, Canada, or the Northwest (except for some totem poles outside a downtown ethnic-art store). But the weirdest work of cultural appropriation is the MGM Grand, “honoring” the movie studio that was dismantled and sold in pieces to finance the casino. But Vegas is always engorging on its former selves; witness the just-demolished Sands and Dunes. Next to go: the Aladdin, this Xmas.
Just beyond the Strip is street-level Vegas: bars and liquor stores, industrial buildings, wedding chapels, one or two real churches, motels, trailer courts, malls, strip malls, strip clubs, cul de sac subdivisions, gas stations, panhandlers, industrial businesses servicing the casino trade. More human-scale than the resorts, but little more heartwarming.
The casinos’ “sports book” areas became my idea of a potential full-time life environment. Imagine a cross between Number Two’s office in The Prisoner and a network TV studio on Election Night. Eighty-seven TV monitors, streaming news tickers, huge odds boards. I fantasized about the life of a casino pro: sleeping any hours I chose, eating at the buffets, gathering all available info about the teams and the horse races, living off the only consistantly winnable games in town (sports bets and poker). Watching the Ms’ first two losses on multiple big-screen TVs was a heartbreak experience, and a sign beckoning me home again. I realized I couldn’t live there, even if I could take the heat. So much of my life here doesn’t exist in the city that supposedly’s got everything (or exists only in scattered locations, far from the tourist areas)–things like bookstores, indie coffeehouses, fringe theater and performance art, anything that’s not part of the unending hustle for money.
Online Extras:
To imagine the size of The Strip, think of the I-5 corridor from the Montlake Cut to Northgate Mall. Or for you out-of-Seattle online readers, imagine one-third the length of Manhattan Island, devoted entirely to tourism and specifically to one mega-resort after another, interrupted only by a (very) few side streets, gas stations, fast-food stands, a handful of strip malls, a few surviving indie casinos, and some huge vacant lots where new mega-resorts are about to be built.
The Horseshoe hotel, where I stayed, is in the downtown area, the second and smaller casino district. (There are also individual resorts along other arterial highways and scattered other spots throughout Clark County.) Downtown Vegas was started as a railroad company town in 1906; above-ground casino gambling began there in 1931 as a Depression-era gimmick. But because the city had slightly more stringent licensing rules in the ’40s and ’50s than the state and county governments, most of the Mob and Teamster money that built the initial core of today’s Vegas went to developments on The Strip, just outside the old city limits. In the early ’90s, the city took the step that’s proven fiscally fatal in other towns, and turned its main street into an outdoor mall. Somehow, it worked. The giant canopy over five blocks of Fremont St. helps block the punishing desert sun, and the nighttime light shows on the canopy unite the 11 casinos on it into one entity of closer-to-human-scale thrills. Particularly cool is the block of the mall devoted to the “Neon Museum,” a half-dozen achingly cool old casino, motel, and milk-plant signs now removed from the buildings they once drew people toward. Walk outside the malled area downtown and you’ll find, well, not much. Just governmental buildings, law offices, a Kinko’s Copies, a couple of squatty six-story bank buildings, some of those famous picturesque wedding chapels, a city transit center, and a freeway separating the district from the residential zones to the north. How complete is the economy’s dependence on entertainment travel and gambling? When the local minor-league baseball team sought relatively modest public subsidies for a new stadium (which would also be offered as a spring-training site for major-league teams), authorities rejected the request on the grounds that it wouldn’t bring in enough out-of-towners.
As noted in Peter Rock’s novel This Is the Place, a large part of the Vegas mentality is based on notions of rebellion against a specific type of conservatism, that of the Mormons who populate much of the lightly-populated inland west (and who briefly had a mission at what later became today’s Las Vegas). The bright lights, the larger-than-life ostentatiousness, the endlessly-flowing booze, the intense freneticism, the strip shows, the uniformly “naughty” vision of sexuality, the insistent “bad taste,” and the total immersion in the idea of pleasure thru spending–all directly relate to universal human temptations the Mormons (and the Mormons’ arch-rivals-in-the-same-league, the Fundamentalists) devote their lives toward repressing.
Vegas, however, could use a little more of one positive Mormon trait, their sense of community. Public spending hasn’t kept up with the area’s massive population growth (now nearing 1 million). Not just the public schools but even the police and fire departments have had to resort to special levy elections, which invariably lose. School buildings either run year-round or on double shifts to pack in all the kids of workers at the casinos (and at the supply and construction companies servicing the casinos, and at the secondary and tertiary employers like car dealers and pawn shops). Meanwhile, the more affluent residents and newcomers (mainly from California) hole themselves up in new gated subdivisions patrolled by private rent-a-cops, steadfastly unwilling to consider themselves part of a larger regional tribe.
And forget about finding any of the lounge music associated with historic Las Vegas by latter-day hipsters. There’s still plenty of lounges, but they’re almost all devoted to “high energy” Earth Wind and Fire cover bands.
WELCOME ALL to your pre-autumnal-equinox edition of Misc., the pop-cult column that can’t decide whether the new-look Seattle Weekly represents the passing of the moderation-to-excess aesthetic that’s dominated local media for a quarter-century, or instead just signifies a corporation trying too hard to appear hip. Speaking of commercial images in flux…
EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: A half-decade ago, back when the outside world associated Seattle hipster-wear with looks actually designed in NYC by the likes of Marc Jacobs, the Zebraclub store on 1st Ave. was a bright, white showcase for the loudly-logoed products of Seattle’s real youthwear industry, with such once-hyped labels as Generra and International News. Today, the big Z sports a “homier” image, with faux-rustic walls and less abrasive lighting.
If you go there and you’re nice to them, they’ll give you the current catalog for Diesel, the Italian sportswear outfit that (a la Calvin Klein‘s ’94 “kiddie porn” ads) uses the detrius of American commercial-underground media to impart an image of American dangerousness onto its Euro-designed garments. This year’s Diesel catalog’s in the manner of a tacky small-press self-defense manual, titled Fight Me. It depicts young perfect-bodied female and male models in action poses, kicking and stabbing and choking imperfect-bodied (often overweight) villains. One aren’t-we-outrageous sequence shows a little girl punching the face of an older-woman pedophile. The attack techniques throughout the book range from the impractical to the ludicrous (“Master concentration-through detachment… will yourself to levitate”). An inside-back-cover disclaimer asserts the company “deplores, in the strongest possible terms, the current prevalence, and, in some sad quarters, vogue for violence.” Yeah, right–the common parodist’s copout, getting off on something then claiming it was just a joke. Speaking of convivial boorishness…
CYLINDRICAL OBJECTS ON PARADE: I wish the current cigar-mania (stinky, choky, life-threatening, etc.) would stop, but how? It appeals to too many universal temptations (even Freud joked, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”). Besides, in an age where the lowly mass-market cigarette’s an object of scorn and humiliation, there’s nothing like a fat, smelly cigar to make a smoker feel righteously vengeful. As long as there’s social pressure to conform to social standards of blasédom, many males and some females will always choose to rebel, albeit often in crude, loud, and ineffectual ways. The ’90s spin on this, natch, is many of today’s proponents of laid-back conformity claim to be political liberals, while many of the “rebels” are Harley-ridin’, KVI-listenin’ Young Republicans. (This has its precedents, such as the decadent rich kids of pre-Victorian England; many of whom also loved a good cigar.) Speaking of social mores…
OLYMPICS IN SEATTLE IN 2012?: Besides offering yet another clear line of demarcation between the civic-builder gang (ever pursuing “world-class” status for our fair burg) and the anti-development human-scale advocates (who’d probably leave town en masse for the event’s duration), the pro-Olympic boosters are offering a unique argument. In the past, the Games have been used by cities worldwide as excuses for massive construction projects, often using vast amounts of their respective countries’ tax dollars. The Seattle Olympics boosters claim the opposite. With the town’s two new stadia, the to-be-expanded Convention Center, and other existing or already-planned facilities, we’ll already have most of the sites a Summer Games would need. All we’d have to build would be a big swimming pool, horseback and archery venues, a few dozen additional hotels and motels, and (maybe the biggest single new one) a place to house a few thousand jocks and jills for 17 days under tight security. (The 1990 Goodwill Games housed their athletes in UW dorms, but that setup might be impracticable for the Olympics for all sorts of reasons.)
‘TIL NEXT WE MEET (with more of your suggestions of yet-unrevived musical genres), be sure to become the first on your block to order the $229 Ken Griffey Jr. 12″ bronze statue seen in regional-ad editions of Time, and visit the new Seattle Art store on Wetern Ave.
DINE & DANCE: As mentioned in a recent review, the classic pre-fab stainless-steel-and-neon diner isn’t common here, but in its Eastern Seaboard homeland it’s enjoyed a recent revival/ preservation movement. Now, a Denny’s franchisee in Florida has put the chain’s menu into a real modular diner building (and added that oft-annoying trend of singing/ dancing waitstaff). The trade mag Nation’s Restaurant News says the place is a hit, and that the parent chain “plans to use the diner to rehabilitate its image nationwide.” Best-case scenario: the chain opens faux-diners in real diner buildings here, they fail, and indie operators reopen them as unpretentious real diners. Speaking of entertainment exhumations…
NAME THAT TUNE: A couple weeks back, Misc. asked you to name formerly-popular North American musical genres that haven’t been subjected to “hip” revival attempts in recent years. I wanted to see what, if any, pieces of America’s musical heritage could still be enjoyed as honest expressions of art and/ or showmanship, without PoMo irony smoothing out their creases. Some of your recommendations, with some of my comments:
(More of your suggestions in two weeks.)
UPDATE: On the day last week’s Stranger Misc. column went to the printer, with its call for the P-I to bring back Zippy the Pinhead, the paper announced it would indeed reinstate Bill Griffith’s exquisitely-drawn, smartly off-kilter comic. Nice to see the paper’s editors know what’s good for the publication as a whole, even if it’s not what scores highest in market research. Speaking of publications in tune with their readers…
I AM JOE’S LUMBAGO: The oh-so-venerable Reader’s Digest is having some financial woes. Executives are resigning, the stock price’s going down, circulation’s flat (though still 15 million, comparable to the whole population of English-speaking Canada). It’s easy to see why Wall Street doesn’t like the magazine or the company that makes it. At a time when Deadheads are joining AARP, RD‘s Lawrence Welk image isn’t what many advertisers want. More importantly, the clean-cut, hyper-respectable brand of conservatism RD‘s championed doesn’t fit with today’s go-go, business-above-all mentality.
It hadn’t always been this way, of course. In the ’20s, RD founders DeWitt and Lila Wallace forged a niche product, taking existing articles from other magazines and rewriting them for fast, easy reading by people on the move. (For decades, its only ads were endorsements for itself by corporate hotshots and movie stars). By the ’50s, the Wallaces had turned their little reprint mag into a global brand, aimed squarely (pun intended, natch) at the most straitlaced of mass audiences. By championing cultural as well as political conservatism, it built a loyal subscriber base (a handy market for RD‘s mail-order books and records). But by defining itself and its audience as off to oneside from the social zeitgeist‘s twists-‘n’-turns, it now risks being left behind. Can RD avoid offending its easily-offended reader base while reaching out beyond it? As “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” might say, “Dubitable.” Speaking of shifting zeitgeists…
SPANKING NEW: If you think S/M fetishes around here have gotten as mainstreamed as they could get, you haven’t seen NYC’s new restaurant La Nouvelle Justine (named for the de Sade novel). An AP dispatch claims the three-month-old eatery supplmenents its French-inspired cuisine with “a birthday paddling, boot cleaning, or the chance to eat from a dog bowl at the feet of a whip-wielding mistress,” plus “Masochist” and “Necrophiliac” cocktails. Dimly-lit walls are etched with medieval fetish scenes. There’s a fake prison cell, an oversized high chair, and leather wrist cuffs. Waitresses and waiters are dressed as “dominants,” busboys as slaves. The story claims the place “draws more giggling voyeurs than hard-core afficionados of the master,” quoting one serious fetishist as saying it “could be a spot for bus tourists.” Speaking of fads gone too far…
OFF THE RACK: The Spice Girls, that singing group (Sporty Spice, Sexy Spice, Strong Spice, Scary Spice, Posh Spice) that claims in interviews to not be the shallow studio-manufactured image machine it really is, has proven so popular it’s spawned knockoff quintets throughout Britain. Here’s my idea for my own “Misc. Spice Melange”:
(Speaking of musical fads, we’ve already received plenty of entries in our search for formerly-popular music genres that haven’t been subjected to recent “hip” revival attempts. You’ve still time to send your suggestions to clark@speakeasy.org. Results here next week.)
A Star and His Bucks
Book reviews for The Stranger by Clark Humphrey
8/21/97
Pour Your Heart Into It
by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang
Hyperion, $24.95
There’s an indie coffeehouse in Belltown with a bumper sticker pasted inside, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Go to Starbucks.” Such folks probably also wouldn’t their friends read Pour Your Heart Into It, the memoir/ success-seminar book by Starbucks chairman/ CEO Howard Schultz. The rest of you, though, might be mildly intrigued by Schultz’s mixture of ’80s-gung-ho hustle with New Age pieties (as polished into shape by Business Week writer Dori Jones Yang). Maybe not intrigued enough to pay $24.95 for the hardcover edition, but enough to leaf through it in the store while waiting for your beverage. You won’t find much nuts-‘n’-bolts stuff about the firm’s operations, but lots of mellow reassurances about life, business, and making it. Like a to-go coffee drink from an office-tower-lobby espresso stand, it’s an unthreatening little pick-me-up that gives you pause to reflect then sends you on your way toward closing that next contract.
Starbucks’ chief asset is its unabashed upper-middle-class image, set by the chain’s original founders in 1971. There had been Euro-style coffee roasters and servers in North America for decades, mainly in college towns and Little Italys. Starbucks founders Gerald Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker (the latter also involved in the launches of Redhook and Seattle Weekly) re-imaged Euro-style coffee as a “gourmet” lifestyle acoutrement for what would soon become corporate Seattle’s favorite consumer and only officially-desired resident, the upscale baby boomer.
A comparison is due at this point:Â Ray Kroc was a milkshake-machine salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from Dick and Maurice McDonald, went to look at their business, and ended up taking it over. Schultz was a drip-coffeemaker salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from a circuit of four coffee-bean stores in Seattle, went to look at its business, and ended up taking it over.
Schultz persuaded the partners to make him Starbucks’ resident marketing whiz in 1982. Schultz quit Starbucks in late 1985 to persue his own concept, a planned national espresso chain (originally to be called Il Giornale). Less than two years later, he added Starbucks’ name, stores, and roasting plant to his empire-in-infancy. His book came out on the 10th anniversary of the acquisition that formed today’s Starbucks.
On nearly every page, Chairman Howard’s hyping his company as something other than your standard mega-retailer (“Starbucks grew to more than 1300 stores and still managed to maintain its small-business sense of values”), and himself as a caring corporate citizen and a careful-yet-bold strategic planner (“If you want to build a great enterprise, you hve to have the courage to dream great dreams”). It’s all to encourage those dream-filled entrepreneur wannabes out there (particularly those who want to raise $37.5 million, what Schultz eventually needed).
Except for Schultz himself (a kid from the Brooklyn housing projects who’d gone to college on a football scholarship), the starting Starbucks core team was all local and mostly well-connected. Only when he outgrew the capacity of Seattle capital did Schultz seek out money and talent from across the country. Besides Bowker, most of Seattle’s small core of retail movers-‘n’-shakers turn up here. Jeff Brotman (Costco founder), Terry Heckler (creator of the old, funny Rainier Beer ads), Herman Sarkowsky (Seahawks co-founder), and Bill Gates pere (Microsoft Bill’s corporate-lawyer dad) are among Schultz’s original circle of investors and advisors. Whatever you think about the company, there’s no denying it’s a thoroughly Northwest-bred institution.
Another of those early investors was the uncle of easy-listening saxophonist Kenny G, who became a goodwill ambassador for the chain. Schultz writes about how G’s music perfectly matches the image of Starbucks’ stores (an image now identified with Seattle as a whole, thanks partly to Starbucks’ PR influence). No other Seattle music personality is mentioned in the book, not even Schultz’s former Viretta Park neighbor Courtney Love. Schultz writes about being “shocked” to learn from market research that Starbucks’ stores were considered squaresville by many “twentysomethings,” even though the stores were planned around the bland pseudo-sophistication most local rockers were rebelling against.
Schultz says he’s more than willing to let smaller outfits take that segment of the business. He acknowledges that as gathering places, Starbucks stands leave a little to be desired. That mom-and-pop cafés provide funkier environments, and in some cases better beverages, only feeds into Schultz’s insistence that underdog entrepreneurs can still make it. Today’s Starbucks makes espresso safe for strip malls and main streets, creating new coffee lovers who often move on to more individualistic beaneries. It’s these chain-eschewers, and the risk-it-all entrepreneurs servicing them, who fulfill Schultz’s admonitions to “Care more than others think wise. Risk more than others think safe. Dream more than others think practical. Expect more than others think possible.”
BRIEFS
Thrift Score
Al Hoff
HarperCollins
Not every big-company book made from a personal zine works. But then again, not every personal zine out there serves as a lifestyle bible, a window onto not just a hobby but a total worldview.
Thrift Score, the zine, is chock full of specific thrift stores and thrift-store finds. Thrift Score, the book, is a more generalized introduction to the topic. Ms. Al Hoff is darn near perfect in both realms. Her book’s a comprehensive lesson in the philosophy, science, and art of “thrifting.” For Hoff, shopping at charity thrift stores isn’t just cheaper and more adventuresome than ordinary retail (or commercial collectible-boutique) shopping, it’s nobler. You’re supporting a good cause while rescuing important artifacts of American life and adopting a way of life that’s simultaneously conservatory and decadent.
Existing thrift-scorers might worry: What if Hoff’s book turns too many people onto the life, increasing the number of people after the same clothes and doodads you’re after? She says not to worry: as long as you share Hoff’s eclectic enthusiasm for Stuff with a capital S, and as long as you’re not some thirift-mercenary after big-E Levi’s, there’s bound to be something way cool waiting for you in any decent thrift store.
Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Pacific Northwest
Lorna Price, ed.
University of Washington Press
The then-“progressive” yet now-unthreatening abstract shapes and colors of ’50s modern art were once new, and once they even shocked. When painter Louis Bunce proposed a big, soothing, yet completely abstract mural for the Portland airport in 1958, protestors called him a pinko and threw garbage into his front yard. Yet, on the other side of the paradox, a lot of 1948-62 arts and crafts (particularly around here) expressed wholesome themes like prosperity, efficiency, gentility, domesticity, and spirituality. They often expressed these themes in a universe of pure visuality, safely removed from the sociopolitical conflicts of everyday reality. And besides, the modernist tradition had been explicitly denounced by Stalin himself–how more cold-war-acceptable could you get?
These are some of the lessons in Jet Dreams, preserving the 1995 Tacoma Art Museum show of the same name with 21 color pix, 112 monochrome pix, and seven long essays about the artists, their works, and their context. It’s got your famous “Northwest School” boys (Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan), their friends and comrades (Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Richard Gilkey), and less-famous but equally-cool folks (architect Pietro Belluschi, sculptor Hilda Morris). Because there were only a few museums and almost no commercial galleries in the region then, a lot of these artists congregated around colleges and worked on government and corporate public-art commissions. This means a lot of their stuff’s still around us every day. From the Science Center arches to the downtown-library fountain to the now-old City Light Building [remodled beyond recognition in 1998], the best ’50s art still offers long-ago visions of what were then thought to be timeless themes. It, and this book, also give a glimpse into the peculiarly conservative “liberalism” now pervasive in the Northwest.
EVEN BRIEFER BRIEFS
Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Vintage) collects 37 of the late Italo Calvino’s odds ‘n’ ends, heretofore not issued in English. While none of its pieces contains the full-borne wonder of his masterworks such as Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities, most are still fine examples of Calvino’s highbrow fantasizing. Written over a 40-year period (some during WWII censorship), they range from modernized fairy tales to a first-person account of Neandrethal life to sad anti-adventure yarns. My favorite: an imagined interview with Henry Ford, in which the man whose company sponsored the Schindler’s List telecast explains away his own anti-Semitic reputation.
The Pin-Up: A Modest History, Mark Gabor’s thorough 1972 survey of cheesecake illustration from the dawn of lithography until just before Penthouse and Hustler drove all the art and beauty out of the genre, is back in a Taschen/Evergreen coffee-table paperback. The technical quality isn’t up to Taschen’s usual art-book standards (many pix look like they were rephotographed from a faded copy of the book’s first edition). But the pix themselves still shine with the loving efforts of the artists and models, providing a century’s worth of elegant, naughty, slick, and less-slick notions of glamour, beauty, allure, and desire. The only really dated part is Gabor’s intro, in which he apologizes on behalf of his entire gender for the images he exhibits. He’s really got nothing to be ashamed of. These umpteen-hundred pix present feminine power as diverse as all get out and universally compelling, nay dominating.
If the GenX-angst stereotype is passe (and it had better be by now), nobody’s told the Farrar, Strauss & Giroux editors who shipped Blue Mondays, Dutch kid Arnon Grunberg’s pseudo-autobiographical novel about wasting time and going broke on Amsterdam’s legal hookers. Grunberg apparently wants us to view his same-named protagonist’s increasing craving for the empty pleasures of rented skin as something akin to drug addiction. Instead (at least in this translation), Arnon (the character) comes off as an attention-starved egocentrist looking for pity and calling it love. Grunberg (the author) fails at the admittedly difficult trick of attracting readers’ sympathy to such an introverted, ungiving, unrevealing central figure. Raymond Carver handled this sort of cold pathos much better.
