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This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the movie Singles, writer-director Cameron Crowe’s light-‘n’-fluffy love letter to Seattle and the striving, sincere young adults therein.
At the time of its release, it was the victim of a Warner Bros. marketing campaign that emphasized the suddenly-hot local bands in its audio background (the soundtrack CD came out months before the film did), rather than the characters or plot(s). When it turned out to be a frothy tale of six dating-scene survivors, only one of whom was a musician, certain audience expectations were shattered. Nevertheless, it had a respectable theatrical run and remains a decent-selling video title.
It’s also the rumored unofficial inspiration for the Warner-produced sitcom Friends. (Check-list the similarities: A sextet of dreamy looking young Caucasians, representing a variety of serious and artistic careers, all of whom hang out at the same coffeehouse, most of whom live in the same apartment building that inexplicably has a couch in its front courtyard, and who head into and out of assorted romantic entanglements, sometimes with one another.)
According to the “grunge” stereotype popular in the national media of the film’s time, young Seattlites (especially those involved in the rock scene) were alleged to be listless, rootless, directionless slackers. Crowe saw something quite different: Aware, ambitious moral-decision-makers who want to take charge of their lives, to make a difference in the world and to experience ultra-ecstatic true love, but who are (to varying degrees) thwarted by an urban society that wants to stick them into confining, unfulfilling roles.
Campbell Scott (the film’s real male lead) plays a state transportation planner who’s staked his whole up-n’-coming career on a proposed elevated-rail project he calls the Supertrain, bound to resolve rush-hour jams, slow down suburban sprawl, and create a more Euro-like urban community. (Any similarity to currently hyped elevated-transit proposals is purely coincidental.)
Scott’s main affection object, played by Kyra Sedgwick, has some not-completely-identified job trying to stop water pollution.
And Matt Dillon’s messy-haired musician character is shown by film’s end to be the most courageous of the lot. He systematically, indefatigably works on getting his girlfriend bac, just as he works on getting his musical career off the ground. His no-compromise stance toward realizing his dreams makes him a heroic ideal to which the other characters can only try to emulate.
That said, Singles remains a fairly dumb film. The gag scenes and plot complications are way too predictable. The drab lines and situations given to the characters mirror the drab life-destinies they’re trying to escape. But it gives its characters far more dignity than so many later mating-n’-dating comedies.
And, of course, local viewers l love the many geographic inaccuracies (Sheila Kelley’s character bicycles from south Lake Union across the Fremont Bridge and into the Pike Place Market in successive shots), the now-gone sites (RKCNDY), and the now-gone cameo players (Wayne Cody, Layne Staley).
Trio is a tertiary cable TV channel, originally formed as a US outlet for Canadian and British drama series. Late last year it became part of the USA Networks stable, which a few months later was acquired by Vivendi Universal. One of the new management’s first modes was to schedule Uncensored June, a month-long package of “Viewer Discretion Advised” movies and documentaries “Presented Unedited and Commercial-Free.”
The program block premiered Wednesday night. Uncensored turned out to be so heavily censored as to be a joke–or a pathetic publicity stunt.
The opening offering was Art and Outrage, a documentary recap of the ’80s-’90s “shock art” genre and the vehement politicians and preachers who unwittingly helped make it such a hit. Interspersed among the valiant speeches by freedom advocates denouncing American prudery toward the human body were still shots of the artworks in question. Any image areas containing genitalia, breasts, or sexual positions was obscured with digital blurring, superimposed big red dots, or both. The same thing happened an hour later with The Last Temptation of Christ. They’re gonna show Last Tango in Paris on Thursday–any guesses as to what’ll be left of that film when they’re through sanitizing it for our protection?
Other cable channels carried on basic or digital-basic tiers have had no problems showing nude scenes now and then (the Independent Film Channel, the History Channel, even A&E on occasion). One would like to imagine that Trio, under new French ownership, would be at least as uninhibited. But apparently non.
In a recent New York magazine, its tech-media beat writer Michael Wolff has proposed one possible post-MP3 future: A music business that’s more like the book business.
Wolff’s premise: Manufactured teen-pop acts are rapidly reaching their inevitable sell-by date. Commercial radio is becoming ever more corporate and ever more unlistenable. The Internet, MP3 trading, and home CD-R burning are furthering the indie-rock agenda of shunning rock-star decadence and championing a more direct rapport between artists and audiences.
Therefore, a record industry built around trying to make every release go multiplatinum is doomed. Also doomed is the whole industry infrastructure of waste and hype (“independent” promoters, payola, limos, drugs, hookers, mansions, plastic surgeons, promotional junkets for journalists, etc. etc.)
Instead, recordings will have to be sold more like books are. While there will still be some bestsellers, for the most part artists will carefully construct works that a few people will really love. Street-savvy marketers will promote these works to an infinite array of tiny niche markets.
If Wolff’s prediction comes true, we just might also expect a few other changes in the way music is made and sold, such as the following:
I was going to ponder if ecru sweaters and tweed jackets would become the new rocker uniform, but then I remembered Belle and Sebastian.
Tablet ran a story (not yet on the paper’s website) about a dispute between Benham Studio Gallery (one of Seattle’s top photo-art galleries) and Patricia Ridenour (one of Seattle’s top art photographers).
Ridenour made a series of 18 (fantastic) female and male nudes, in poses inspired by famous old paintings of women. About half the images include nude male figures in various states of repose. Benham displayed the pix in its front room for two weeks. But some customers of Benham’s portrait-photography service apparently expressed discomfort at the explicitness level of some of Ridenour’s works. (Hey, isn’t that what art’s for?)
One particular image, based on Manet’s painting Olympia but featuring a particularly endowed specimen of masculine desire, turned off so many portrait customers that owner Marita Holdaway felt she had to do something.
Just before the official opening of the show on Feb. 7, Holdaway moved Ridenour’s works to the gallery’s back room. Ridenour thought this was an act of censorship, publicly asked Holdaway about it at the opening reception, then personally took her pictures off the back-room walls.
The Tablet piece tried to interpret this unfortunate series of events as an example of a woman’s troubles trying to confront a male-dominated art establishment–even though both parties in the dispute are female, and Benham (which has shown many male nudes in the past, albeit mostly by gay-male photographers) is more of a feisty indie space than the center of art-world power.
Anyhow, a third woman, fashion-boutique owner Darbury Stenderu, has adopted Ridenour’s show and is displaying it at her store, 2121 1st Ave. Rather than simply denouncing ad-imagery, it posits an alternative vision, a healthier way to look at people and life. I didn’t see it as a work of confrontation but of celebration, of a woman daring to proclaim to the world that she actually likes men and men’s bodies, and wants to retroactively give them the loving display art’s historically awarded only to female figures. Female artists deserve the right to express their loves and desires and joys (toward themselves AND toward others) AS loves and desires and joys.
And you don’t have to be male to find that weird–or even disturbing to your preconceived gender-role ideas.
That’s because an artist like Ridenour faces two, equally restrictive, gender stereotypes–the older one that says women aren’t supposed to espress their sexuality, and the newer one that says women can like sex, but only in lesbian or self-directed contexts. In this restrictive worldview, anything a woman says about men is expected to be critical, even vengeful. Anything less than total negativity toward a woman’s Other was dismissed, in this ideology, as a mark of weakness, of subjugation to male dominance. (Not much different from the previous stereotype, in which a woman who “put out” was condemned as “loose.”)
The Tablet reviewer, Karla Esquivel, appears to have bought into the modern stereotype, by proclaiming Ridenour’s clear adoration of male beauty to really be a righteous attack on what ’70s critics used to call “The Male Gaze.” In the Weekly’s piece about the fiasco, Ridenour said she intended the show to confront both viewers’ body-image notions and the ever-somnombulant succession of “sexy” images in advertising. She did this by employing that one visual element (the male body, without the disarming justification of gayness) already identified as a symbol of threat by many females and some males.
I say “some males,” because millions of men under 35 have come of age with hardcore porn, and have spent some of the happiest moments of their adolescent and early-adult lives with images that included other men’s erections in full view.
And I, for one, am not afraid of the female gaze. In fact, I kind of like the idea that a non-gay male such as myself could conceivably be so pedestaled, openly craved for.
(Which leads to an even more provocative notion: What if the way men depict women in art has really, all along, represented (at least subconsciously) the way (at least some) men wished they would be seen by women?)
But going back to Ridenour’s work, it could very well have a therapeutic value. By showing explicit, photographic phallic imagery in the context of familiar PoMo deconstruction, she might help viewers (of whatever gender) overcome their fear of the phallus; helping, in a small-scale and personal way, to contribute toward a healthier sexual outlook toward themselves and others.
The Stranger, the weekly free tabloid with which I have an off-and-on stormy relationship, celebrated its tenth anniversary this week. The actual ten-year mark came last September, but obviously a lot of folks weren’t in the mood for celebrating anything back then.
I was asked to write something for it. It didn’t run in that issue (they promise it’ll run next week).
It’s a remembrance of local publications that have come and gone during the Stranger’s lifetime:
Friday night, I somehow managed to get into what was billed as the last local show ever by the world’s greatest rock n’ roll band, the Fastbacks.
The gig, at Ballard’s fab Sunset Tav, was only announced as the group’s farewell gig in the Stranger two days before; Kathleen Wilson wrote that singer-bassist Kim Warnick wanted to give up the grind (though she’ll continue with her own new band, Visqueen). Thus, apparently, ends 22 amazing years of Warnick, guitarist-songwriter Kurt Bloch, guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, 14 successive drummers, and some 160 (more or less) of the greatest happy/angry noise-pop created anywhere.
The show itself was sold out (I only managed to get in toward the end of openers Droo Church’s set). Many of the crowd had been FBX fans since the ’80s; others were young enough to have been conceived in the bathrooms during early Fastbacks shows.
It was a racous, intense, gorgeous night. Guys with middle-aged backs and knees were pogoing like the old days. Bloch, Warnick, Gargiulo, and alternating drummers Mike Musburger and Jason Finn were tight, loud, and completely Hi-NRG. Fun, sweat, and great memories were had by all, for nearly two hours.
But this is not to imply the Fastbacks are, or ever were, a nostalgia band. Their music is timeless; their basic sound has remained virtually unchanged all this time (except for becoming smarter and more professional). They never lost their classic garage-rock charm or sassiness.
The Fastbacks’ sound is built on simple, solid ingredients: Passionately belted vocals, alternately-keyed female harmonies, workhorse rhythm-section parts, deceptivel intricate guitar riffs, and, most importantly, the complementary interplay between happy music and sad/angry lyrics.
To have ever been a Fastbacks fan is to have fond recollections of having listened to, and identified with, Warnick’s spirited deliveries of Bloch’s negative messages. Typical topics include generalized loss and depression, loneliness, busted friendships, insufferable and/or uncaring authority figures, and frustration at the dysfunctional world of Reagan-Bush America (now more relevant than ever!).
On the bus over to the Sunset, I happenned to be perusing a John Gray self-help book I’d picked up at a bookstore remainder rack. In it, he talked about the need to express your angers and frustration, lest the negative energy build up inside you as a toxin to the soul. That’s the effect I’ve always gotten from the Fastbacks’ songs. They help me exorcise my depressions, and make me happy, at least for the moment.
And they always will, whether or not any more are released.
Though I’m certainly hoping more will be released, or at least “reunion” gigs will take place, or at least-least that Bloch can find a new performing outlet for his particular brand of genius.
The best “new” TV series of 2001 (thus far) is a leftover from 1999 that just happens to completely outdo that overblown A.I. movie in regards to questioning the nature of humanity-vs.-machines.
It’s a cartoon on the Fox Kids schedule, The Big Guy and Rusty.
The show’s origin lies with a graphic novel made in the mid-’90s for Portland comics giant Dark Horse, by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. Miller (who’s often credited with the “darker” characterization of Batman that inspired that figure’s movies) and Darrow had collaborated since the late ’80s on sullen, violent, and stunningly-drawn titles such as Hard Boiled.
The Big Guy was a slight departure from the established Miller-Darrow formula. It was set in a bright, futuristic urban environment modeled on latter-day Japanese anime films. Its heroes (inspired by those of the early Japanese cartoons Gigantor and Astroboy) were real heroes, not gruff antiheroes (albeit more heavily armed, and more prone to retaliatory vengeance, than their wholesome precursors).
The Sony-owned Columbia Tristar Television bought the animation rights in 1995. During its four-year development period, executive producer Richard Raynis kept Darrow’s character and background designs but tossed most of Miller’s plot. Raynis and his team concocted a new premise for the characters, one that could support a strong central cast while allowing subplots and conflicts to unfold among multiple episodes.
So as the TV version starts, the Big Guy has already been defending Earth from alien invaders for 10 years. He’s an imposingly huge grey robot with an immobile “face,” a booming voice (spouting patriotic cliches), and giant arms filled with, well, giant arms (missiles, bombs, guns). He’s the oldline military-industrial America strutting its might and heft.
But only the Big Guy’s support team knows he’s not a “real” robot but just a big metallic suit, piloted by one Lt. Dwayne Hunter. Dwayne’s a soft-spoken, unassuming pilot who, when he’s out of the suit and walking on his own legs, shares none of his alter ego’s bombast.
Rusty, the show’s real protagonist, is a real robot, something the Big Guy’s original designers (a defense-contractor conglomerate whose tower is the tallest building in New Tronic City) have only now been able to accomplish. Rusty has the personality of an enthusiastic boy adventurer, avid to clobber the bad guys but lacking in experience or wisdom. Rusty represents the “new economy” and the high-tech future that seemed so promising in 1999, when the show was produced–high-flying, free-wheeling, but sometimes almost fatally immature.
Rusty adores the Big Guy as a substitute dad, but only knows Lt. Dwayne as the Big Guy’s “chief mechanic.” Lt. Dwayne initially dismisses Rusty as an unfinished technology, but grows to trust and feel for the “Boy Robot,” both when inside and outside the Big Guy suit.
This central relationship, along with those of a strong human supporting cast, carry the series through 26 installments that unfold as chapters in a novel (like the best anime shows). But Fox, desperate for a quick ratings fix in the Pokemon-dominated 1999 cartoon season, dropped TBG&R after only six installments had aired. The network’s been “burning off” the entire series in a spring-and-summer run this year. Its ratings this time have apparently been OK, but the show’s creative staff has dispersed to other projects and a second season is apparently unlikely.
But the shows that were made work well as a complete “work,” with a beginning and end. In between are some episodes that work as stand-alone adventures with foes (and friends) of assorted alien origin, some episodes that explore the relationship between the real robot and the fake one, and some episodes involving a set of recurring villains, the Legion Ex Machina (evil, real robots out to eradicate the human race).
In the last episode, the Big Guy’s original chief designer is seen for the first time. He claims the Big Guy had been “a failure” because it depended on a human pilot; even though the man-in-a-suit had successfully fought off countless bug-eyed alien monsters and destroyed the Legion.
Similarly, Fox treated TBG&R as a failed show. But it’s really a success. At a time when primetime “reality” shows are pulling the lowest common denominator ever lower (even lower than is possible with scripted fiction shows, which must maintain a minimal story credibility to work on a weekly basis), TBG&R is a highest-common-denominator show.
Its premise is full of holes (if the Big Guy is so important to Earth’s survival, why was only one ever built and why does it have only one trained pilot?).
But the characters (even the bad guys) are fully developed, the storylines fully explore the complexities of these characters, the scripts are smart without succumbing to overt “hip” attitude nonsense, and the artwork (all done in traditional cel animation) is often spectacular.
See it while you still can.
In keeping with a more-or-less annual tradition around these cyber-parts, here comes another fantabulous MISC Late-Summer Reading List. Its purpose: To let you know what you should’ve been investing your time with this warm-weather season, instead of frittering it away on needless time-wasters such as jobs and sex.
High Drama in Fabulous Toledo by Lily James: A raucous, giddy little novel that lives up to its title with nary a tinge of irony. Our heroine is the bored, easily distracted fiancee of a borderline-suicidal bar owner. She gets kidnapped from a 7-Eleven parking lot one night, and turned over to become the captive bride of a rich computer genius completely lacking in social skills.
After the initial shock she comes to like the adventure of her predicament; but soon becomes bored again as she realizes her captor’s domestic-suburban plans for her life. Meanwhile, her distraught boyfriend is consoled by a mysterious policewoman with, shall we say, personal issues of her own. To tell any more would spoil the ride.
High Drama is a great light-comic caper story that also happens to be classifiable as “post-feminist” or “genre-deconstucting” (the genre here being romance-novel ravishment). It’s also a highly accessible, engaging read that, in a better world, would bring wealth and renown to James and to the literary-press publisher FC2, which put it out.
The Knife Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser: One of the dozen or more tomes I’d left stacked at home from the Tower Books closing sale back in February. Shouldn’t have waited this long to read it.
This guy’s one helluva prose stylist, and he spins great yarns too. His sentences and paragraphs, lovely as they are, are always held subordinate to his fantastical plots–which, clever as they are, are always held subordinate to the heart and dignity with which he endows his characters.
Many of these tales have to do with the dark side of small-town existence, and the light hidden behind such shadows. The finest example of this is “The Sisterhood of Night,” in which a gentleman relates his town’s newest teenage fad: Girls who sneak out of their homes in the middle of the night to gather in the woods and, apparently, do nothing. No drugs, no sex, no Satanic rites; but also no peer pressure, no parental shrieks, no requirements to do or say anything. The narrator ends by wondering whether this could be more potentially subversive than any cult or gang; Millhauser leaves you feeling like it just might.
The Bellero Shie by Jay Davis: A gem of a tiny paperback. When the author was here on a reading tour in June, he left some promo copies at Confounded Books (now at 2nd & Bell in Belltown). Behind the circa-1961 corporate-manual cover are eight stories which amaze and confound in their finely-tuned haunting alienation.
In “Family Food and Drug,” an unwitting supermarket customer is put through militaristic interrogation, for the “crime” of refusing to provide personal demographic-marketing information. In “Sparky,” a man retreats from his wife and family to his only consolation, the family dog, which happens to be dead and stuffed. Yeah, it’s PoMo, but it’s PoMo with a soul–and a quietly aching one at that.
(The apparently closest thing the publisher has to an online presence is this review, which lists a California address for the outfit even though the inside cover says it’s from Illinois.)
Erogenous Zones: An Anthology of Sex Abroad, edited by Lucretia Stewart: Great premise: Literary nonfiction passages from many times and places, all about having sex far from one’s home, with someone the author didn’t set out from home with. But the adventures become repetitious after a while; particularly the ones involving hookers with the invariable hearts-O-gold and the ones involving anonymous gay-pickup sex. But it is a very handsomely-manufactured volume; and it’s fun to read some of the troubadoric descriptions from male diarists, languishing wistfully over the bodily and other charms of their long-separated meaningless-encounter partners.
YOU SIMPLY MUST GET Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry.
This handsome full-color volume, curated and narrated by Julie Lasky, gathers the best posters, album covers, ads, logos, magazine covers, and other assorted graphic creations produced from 1978 to 2000 by Chantry, the king of Seattle designers (until he followed a girlfriend’s career move to St. Louis).
Lasky thoroughly chronicles Chantry’s various “periods” or subgenres of retro design–Sub Pop, Estrus, the Rocket, theatrical work, slick posters, cheap posters, copies of sleazy-mag back-cover ads, copies of tool catalogs, copies of circus posters, copies of retro-smut, and, oh yeah, the four or five books he designed, including mine. No amount of thanks I can ever give will be enough for the work he did on Loser (which gets its due as a piece of Chantry’s oevure in Lasky’s book).
When Chantry held his leaving-town bash at the new Cyclops back in March 2000, he gave me the usual rant people were giving in those pre-NASDAQ-crash weeks about the dot-com invasion having finally sealed the ultimate triumph of the gentrifiers over the humble, funky li’l Seattle we’d known and loved (even though he’d complained as much as anybody about the town’s supposed lack of opportunities and urban sophistication back in the old days).
But it wasn’t just the destruction of artist housing and funky spaces, or the increase in arrogant cell-phone yappers, that he hated about the alleged Internet Revolution.
He was a lo-tech guy, in both his aesthetic styles and his working techniques. The text of Loser was desktop-published, but the 1,000-or-so images and the chapter headings were all pasted-up by hand, and all the photos were screened on a real stat camera. He despised the soulless perfection and numbing slickness he saw in digital graphics.
Nowadays, with KCMU in Paul Allen’s clutches and The Rocket and Moe and the OK Hotel gone, but also with clubs slowly getting back to booking more live bands instead of soundalike techno nights, and with retro-industrialism so beloved in PoMo architecture (plate glass, thin wires, exposed duct work), I have one thing to say to Art:
It’s OK now. Really. Things are getting better; that is to say, Seattle’s feeling comfortably depressed again. The dot-comers are on the run. Everybody’s sick of virtual reality. Real objects, real passions, and real life are back in vogue.
You can come back now.
NEXT: George W. Bush and Don De Lillo.
ELSEWHERE:
MANY OF YOU already know this, but I just discovered it recently: They’ve gone and re-edited the old episodes of Red Dwarf, the BBC’s sci-fi sitcom.
When RD began in the late ’80s, it could be seen as the opposite of Doctor Who, the BBC’s long-running shot-on-video space opera, which at the time was slowly spiraling toward its demise after 26 seasons of low-budget heroics.
Where the often-recast Doctor was a do-gooder genius and all-around take-charge guy, RD’s protagonist Lister was a drifter in character and in plot. He was stuck in an old mining ship millions of years in the future, capable only of reacting to events outside his control. He hopes to somehow get back to his own time but is repeatedly thwarted–often by his fellow passengers Rimmer (a hologram of a dead shipmate), Kryten (a moping android), Holly (the ship’s computer voice), and Cat (a humanoid distantly descended from Earth house cats).
But that comparison alone doesn’t explain the show’s enduring appeal, to sci-fi fanatics and to PBS pledge-drive callers. RD is no mere space-opera parody. It’s a real comedy show that happens to take place on a spaceship. That’s why its video look is as important as its studio-audience laugh track. It’s not a send-up or an attack on the space-opera genre. It respects the form’s conventions, even as it plays them for farce.
RD originally ran for six seasons (only six to eight shows per season, the customary quota with most BBC “Britcoms”). Four years later, continued demand on both sides of the Atlantic (and, apparently, a possible movie deal) brought the show back into production for at least two more batches of episodes. The new shows were shot on film, with significantly slicker production values and special effects; as if to prove to potential film investors that the show’s humor would still work on an expanded “stage.”
But at the same time, they went back and re-edited the old shows. They added fancier FX to some scenes, and digitally altered the video footage with that clumsy Filmlook process that makes everything look dingy and hazy. The only series I ever liked that were done in Filmlook were The John Larraquette Show and Showtime’s Rude Awakening. Both are sitcoms in which the lead character is a recovering alcoholic; the Filmlook matched the sense of seeing everything through a permanent hangover.
Presumably, this was done to make the old episodes look more like the recent ones, and also to sell a whole new set of videos to pledge-drive callers. But I liked the old versions better.
Too bad I can’t go back in time to get tapes of the old versions. (Wait–with online auctions, I can.)
NEXT: What a conspiracy theorist might say about the great electricity crisis.
IN THAT NEWSWEEK COVER PIECE a few years back about “Seattle Chic” (the one with Slate swami Michael Kinsley on the front), my ol’ UW Daily colleague Lynda Barry contributed a comic strip about how she’d never really fit in in this town. She was a giddy, borderline-superficial funtime gal in a place more welcoming to somber reflection.
But from the looks of her latest illustrated novel Cruddy, Barry’s quite adept indeed at the somber-reflection bit, even to the point of abject grimness and a teenage nihlism that’s not at all affected.
The basic plot: In 1971, 17-year-old Roberta Rohbeson has been grounded to her horrible family (bratty sis, hysterical mom) in a decaying rental house, after getting busted for dropping acid. She uses the time of confinement to write about her sordid past, which is even more nihilistic than her present.
Seems that six years before, Roberta had disappeared with her maniacal, violent (and possibly incestuous) father. She was found weeks later in a Nevada foster home, with no apparent memory of what had happened to her or where her father had disappeared to. But in the diary that becomes the flashback story of Cruddy, Roberta tells all about the road trip through various hells of the American west, complete with arson, smuggling, triple-crossings, many brutal murders by the father, and two equally gruesome slayings by Roberta herself (including patricide).
Two of the towns of her hellish odyssey are Seattle-inspired.
“Cruddy City,” where the 17-year-old Roberta’s “present day” (1971) story takes place, is an almost geographically exact rendition of the Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill.
More specifically, the dreary blocks around Roberta’s dreary home are modeled on the still-rundown area just west of the Rainier Avenue-Martin Luther King Way intersection; a land of sidewalk-less streets, weed-strewn yards, the Copeland Lumber yard with its spooky black-cat logo, garbage-strewn winding roads up Beacon Hill (one of which, clasic-TV fans, is named Della Street), and taunting hillside views down onto the affluent blocks closer to Lake Washington.
I became very familiar with the neighborhood in the ’80s, when I had a miserable job in typesetting and layout for the South District Journal/Capitol Hill Times chain of neighborhood weeklies. I worked on ancient Compugraphic phototypesetting machines, in a wooden shed that had weeds growing inside from cracks in the concrete floor. Barry perfectly captures the little-corner-of-despair sense of the place.
(Remember, 1971 was the depth of the Boeing recession, the economically bleakest period in Seattle since the Depression.)
In contrast to the nothingness of Cruddy City, lots of stuff’s happening in Dentsville, one of the stops on Roberta and her dad’s road trip of terror.
The geography of Dentsville is based on downtown Seattle; specifically the waterfront (including Ye Olde Curiosity Shop), the pre-Convention Center Pike Street corridor (including the recently demolished Gay Nineties restaurant-lounge), and the pre-Interstate 5 west Capitol Hill (where, in the 1965 flashback story, the no-good dad confronts a no-good relative who’s squatting in a freeway-condemned house).
Of course, realistic geography isn’t what makes a novel really work. That requires great writing, compelling characters, and an intriguing story. Cruddy has all those aspects in vast supply; plus some of Barry’s best-ever visual works (in the form of maps and sullen character portraits).
In its vision of completely justified youthful despair, Cruddy is the Great Grunge Novel (even if the flashback story takes place before most ’90s rock musicians were born).
Just, please, don’t let anybody make it into a movie. They’d never get it right. They’d undoubtedly use the horror and violence in the story to depict exciting action, not Barry’s world of desperate rootlessness.
TOMORROW: Even Hollywood insiders are foreseeing the death of mass culture.
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NAOMI KLEIN’S BOOK NO LOGO claims greedy corporations are brainwashing kids into letting themselves (the kids) become walking billboards.
Up to this point, I agree with her. Branded clothing has become just so damned ubiquitous. Grade-schoolers crave anything with the Nike “swoosh;” skate teens sport FuBu; collegian preppies plug Abercrombie & Fitch; white gangsta-wannabes ride their baggy pants low to expose their Tommy Hilfiger boxer waistbands.
But then Klein goes further than (or perhaps not as far as) I would.
She wants all good strict parents to keep their children’s apparel iconography-free.
That’s acceptable if you’re into spiritual asceticism; even then, the deliberate plain-ness of your attire is, itself, an icon.
For those who consciously choose to make this sort of “anti-statement” statement, more power to you.
For the rest of us, I say go for it. Wear your heart (and your mind) on your sleeve. Be a walking icon.
Don’t like the bigtime marketers? Choose other word/picture combos to identify with. Your favorite town or nation or planet (whether you’ve ever been there or not). Your favorite heroine or hero (real, mythical, or somewhere between the two). A guiding principle of your life, in slogans and/or imagery.
And if the particular vision that defines you doesn’t seem to exist in the stores, make up your own.
Become a bosom-based sloganeer for Heidegger’s Uncertainty Principle, or for the joys of bicycle commuting, or for the joys of eating mashed potatoes with peanut butter, or that perfect movie you’re going to get around to making one of these decades, or that invisible childhood friend who used to save your sanity.
It’s easy. It’s fun.
Just, well, you know….
TOMORROW: Do kids these days know how to really live?
YESTERDAY, we began a praiseful discussion of of The Best of Myles, a collection of 1940s newspaper “humor” columns written by the sadly neglected Irish writer Flann O’Brien (1911-66) under his alternate pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (“Miles of the Little Horses”).
Today, some examples of just why O’Brien/Copaleen is so damn great.
Was only five or six %.
The rest was only words and sound–
My reference is to Ezra £.”
“Chapman, looking in for an after-supper pipe, was astonished at the poet’s composure, and did not hesitate to say so. Keats smiled (in a way that was rather lovely).
“‘And why should I not fiddle,’ he asked, ‘while Byrne roams?'”
“But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable.
“Furthermore, poetry has the effect on the negligible handful who read it of stimulating them to write poetry themselves. One poem, if widely disseminated, will breed perhaps a thousand inferior copies. The same objection cannot be made in the case of painting and sculpture, because these occupations afford employment for artisans who produce the materials.
“Moreover, poets are usually unpleasant people who are poor and who insist forever on discussing that incredibly boring subject, ‘books.'”
“‘Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m.–act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the rows of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff-faces, the stench of congealing badger’s suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron’s boil, a leprechaun’s denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake’s clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman’s dumpling, a beetle’s faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man’s curse, a blasket, a ‘kur,’ a fiddler’s act of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottle’s ‘farm,’ a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat’s stomach-pump, a broken–‘
“But what is the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular.”
The Copaleen columns also might not reach anywhere in particular. But they provide quite the entertaining and scenic ride.
TOMORROW: The dot-com bubble deflates.
REGULAR READERS of this feature might recall my ongoing devotion to the Irish writer Flann O’Brien (1911-66; legal name: Brian O’Nolan; birth name: Brian O Nuallain), whose 1939 first novel At Swim-Two Birds first turned me on to the possibilities of Great Kickass Writing.
Today I want to talk about O’Brien’s other career, that of self-styled “newspaper funny man.”
A few months after the publication of At Swim, the conservative daily The Irish Times hired him to write a daily essay-and-humor column, “Cruiskeen Lawn.” For this work he took on another pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen (“Miles of the Little Horses”).
The alternate name was more than just an affectation; it was a character.
The “Myles” persona was that of a distinguished older gentleman (O’Brien was only 29 when the column began), comfortable enough in his nobility to mix drawing-room anecdotes with bilingual or trilingual puns, yet enough of a man-of-the-people to gently bash both elitist modern artists and elitist modern-art denouncers.
Two collections of Myles columns have finally been issued in the U.S., by the Dalkey Archive Press (named after O’Brien’s fifth and final novel). The Best of Myles covers his 1940s work. The just-domestically-issued Further Cuttings follows the column into the ’50s.
I’ve just finished reading the first volume. On one level, it’s a remarkable account of normal daily life in one of the few European countries that had anything approaching “normal daily life” at the time. (Ireland, which had only become an independent country in 1920, stayed out of WWII, partly as an act of defiance against Britain.)
O’Brien writes nostalgically about old steam locomotives; relates fictional yet believable tales about his father, brother, and “married sister;” and makes droll comments upon such issues of the day as preserving the Irish language and coping with wartime shortages of consumer goods.
But O’Brien/Copaleen’s writing works on dozens of other levels.
Almost-too-clever-for-its-own-good wordplay meets up with de- and re-constructions of traditional columnist and “humorist” formats (fake inventions, wise bartenders, social-improvement campaigns, good-old-days reminiscences, etc. etc.), and gets cooked up within O’Brien’s astoundingly beautiful prose.
It’s enough to make any would-be modern funny writer, such as myself, give in and surrender all hope of ever becoming good enough.
But I won’t. At least not just yet.
TOMORROW: A few examples of O’Brien/Copaleen’s genius.
WITH THE SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL safely over for another year, it’s time for a gentle reminder to celluloid-hypnotized Seattleites about the significant differences between the real world and the world depicted in motion pictures:
In the real world:
MONDAY: Mulling some possible changes to this site.
