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A REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
ONE OF THE RISKS involved with having so much of one’s past writing available online is the risk of readers finding something you wrote long ago, which in retrospect has proven to be rather stupid.
Example: Somewhere back in the early ’90s (oh, the ’90s, weren’t they such a simpler time?), I wrote something to the effect that rap music had “fulfilled what the bebop jazz guys had set out to do: create a black music that didn’t
need white people to ‘popularize it’ (i.e. muscle in).”
I seem to have actually believed at the time that hip-hop culture had attained the long-sought holy grail of African-American musicians–a style so intricately, innately black that any white hipsters who tried to take it over would sound hopelessly inept at it.
I was SO wrong.
Not too many years after I wrote that, Hollywood promoters essentially took over rap. They aggressively promoted their gangsta stars to nakedly exploit white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men as sexy savages. Whereas early hiphop had often been about challenging images of black males as dumb, sexist, gun-happy drug dealers, gangsta rap relished in precisely these images.
This gave rap a much bigger market. But it also turned the white “crossover” market into the force that drove the business. It helped determine which artists would get signed, get radio and MTV play, get large promo budgets, etc.
That shift, in turn, meant that mainstream rap would become more musically tame each year. Samples became more obvious. Wordplay became simpler. Delivery became slower, steadier, easier for an untrained listener to understand.
The result, by late 1998, was a hiphop sufficiently dumbed down that not only could clueless white guys understand it, they could make it.
Hence, Insane Clown Posse, Eminem, Kid Rock, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and the other “aggro” acts and novelty acts now profitably spreading messages of egotism, violence, misogyny, profanity, etc.
Thus, the music that began with messages of black intelligence has morphed into something that, as often as not, wallows in notions of white stupidity.
I don’t quite call that progress.
TOMORROW: Some things that aren’t as much fun in one’s forties.
ELSEWHERE:
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
IT FINALLY HAPPENED: Yr. ob’t corresp’nd’nt was name-dropped in a name-dropping novel.
You’ll find a passing reference to “Clark Humphrey’s Loser” at the bottom of page 97 of Mark Lindquist’s new novel Never Mind Nirvana. Right in a list of a sweet young thing’s bookshelf contents, alongside the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (who also supplies a back-cover blurb).
I wish I could tell you all to go out and share in this grand dubious achievement. But as a supporter of good writing, I can’t.
I could also say I could’ve written this book. But I wouldn’t have.
On one level, Never Mind Nirvana’s a Seattle translation of Ellis’s NYC-beautiful-people novels. Its 237 pages include references to several hundred Seattle-scene people, places, and institutions. The references are pretty much all accurate (some were fairly obviously taken from Loser). But they often feel wrong. In some passages, it feels as if the author had worked from reference material without going to the place he was writing about (a la Kafka’s Amerika).
(Yet I know Lindquist has been here; he hung out at the bars and clubs he refers to, and has pesonally known a few of the real-life music-scene people to whom he gives cameo appearances.)
Lindquist’s protagonist Pete, like Lindquist himself, has a day job as an assistant prosecuting attorney. Pete’s also a former “grunge” musician (yes, he dreaded G-word appears regularly) whose private life involves trawling the bars for pickups (he boinks three women within the first 100 pages, not counting a flashback scene involving his favorite groupie from his rocker days).
He’s also suffering from the creeping-middle-age angst that, in novels, apparently turns the most outgoing and smooth-talking people into compulsive introspective worriers.
Then there’s the main plot of the novel, the aspect that’s attracted the main part of the bad-vibes reputation it’s got among the local rock-music clique.
Lindquist has taken a real-life date rape allegation against a prominent local musician and turned it into fodder for a quasi-exploitive courtroom-procedural plot. (Could be worse; he could’ve made it a “courtroom thriller.”) Since the case is seen strictly from the prosecution’s point of view, the musician’s guilt is presumed at the start and is never seriously questioned.
The many Clinton/Lewinsky jokes peppered throughout the text might be the author’s attempt at an “understated” comparison between the talk-radio depiction of Clinton (as a selfish heel who thinks he’s got the right to do anything to anybody) and the musician-defendent.
At least Lindquist appropriates enough of the less-than-clear aspects of the original case, a complicated situation in which both parties were drunk and/or stoned and in which even the accuser’s testimony could easily leave doubts whether the encounter was sufficiently forceful or involuntary to be legally definable as rape.
(In the real case, all charges were dropped. In the novel’s version, the narrative ends at a mistrial, with the prosecutor expecting to win a conviction at the re-trial.)
A novel that was really about the Seattle music scene in the post-hype era could still be written, and it would have plenty of potential plot elements that Lindquist either ignores or breezes through.
It could be about trying to establish a rock band at a time when the business largely considers rock passe; in a town where a young middle-class adult’s increasingly expected to forgo such “slacker” pursuits in favor of 80-hour-a-week careerism.
It would be about people still deeply involved (trapped?) in their artistic milieu, not about a pushing-40 lawyer.
Perhaps a just-past-40 online columnist? Naaah, that’d never work either.
TOMORROW: Some other things we could demand as part of the big Microsoft verdict.
THERE’S AN AUTHOR named Dave Eggers. He just put out a slightly-fictionalized memoir, immodestly titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
It’s gotten a lot of press attention.
Some reviewers criticize Eggers’s audacity for daring to publish his life story at age 29; and then for writing it in a modified PoMo, self-reflexive, hip-ironic manner.
Other reviewers praise all that.
For the most part, neither group of reviewers seems to know what Eggers’s book is really about.
It’s not about Eggers being a smarty-pants hipster.
It’s about his journey through that stance and finding a way beyond it.
The plot in brief: Eggers is a 21-year-old college grad who returns to his home in a patrician Chicago suburb to tend to his cancer-striken mom. Only his dad turns out to also have the Big C, and both parents die within weeks of one another.
Dave, his big sister Beth, and his orphaned seven-year-old brother “Toph” (short for Christopher) then head out for hyper-hyper San Francisco. There, Dave takes a day job in P.R. while spending much of his inheritance starting Might, a magazine that’s first going to have been The Voice of A New Generation but which quickly turns into typical S.F. fare: Attitude-overdosed hipsters proclaiming how with-it they are and how out-of-it the Rest of America is.
The Might years are rightly disclaimed in Eggers’s long intro as the dullest section of the book. He says they “concern the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time.”
Indeed, the book ends with Dave realizing the meaningless treadmill his life and work had become, as he returns to Illinois for a friend’s wedding and reconnects with the world of his past. The book’s story, Eggers’s personal journey from extended post-adolescence to budding adulthood, ends there.
This personal journey corresponds with Eggers’s professional journey–from merely sneering at mainstream media to exploring a pro-active alternative, and finding it in Lawrence Sterne-esque serious whimsey.
After folding Might and moving to N.Y.C., he took a day job at Esquire. Then, after signing his book deal, he quit that job and started Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, a beautifully-made occasional paperback journal of gentle (but never wimpy) humor and pro-social texts of many types.
In a cultural milieu that values bad-boy hipster Attitude ahead of all other possible values, A Heartbreaking Work and McSweeney’s are attempts to reconnect with what’s great and eternal about human communication and community.
The Eggers of Might was a writer-editor of his period; the Might book collection already seems quite dated indeed.
The Eggers of McSweeney’s is a writer-editor of the timeless.
Perhaps he’s not really a “staggering genius.” But that’s not really what we need right now.
MONDAY: Literary lessons from the business papers.
“I USED TO LAUGH at people stuck in the ’60s,” I wrote in this forum a few years back, “until I met people stuck in the ’80s.”
By that, I meant how bored to laughter I’d always been by aging hippie memoirists and raconteurs who’d incessantly insisted that their endlessly-repeated tales of their own former wild-oat sowing:
The fact that folks my age and even younger are now telling all-too-similar personal histories of their own past “rebellions” only proves:
Which brings us to ex-Rocket writer Ann Powers and her new autobiographical history, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America.
A research- or interview-based book about “bohemian America,” particularly one that got out of the NY/LA/SF media capitals and into the DIY-arts scenes around the 50 states, could be interesting. This book isn’t it.
Instead, Powers discusses little other than her own story, and the story of her wild-‘n’-crazy “rebel” pals in San Francisco and New York. She and/or her close friends form punk bands, take drugs, have gay and/or fetishistic sex, go to all-night parties and raves, and collectively imagine that all this makes them superior to Those People out here in Squaresville America, those people who are all too obsessed with superficial lifestyle crap.
The whole thing ends with an essay on “Selling Out,” in which she attempts to reconcile her adult lifetime of “anti-establishment” stances with her decision to leave the alternative-newspaper biz and take a job at the NY Times.
This part also contains brief references to Sub Pop Records and Kurt Cobain–the book’s only specific references to anything outside N.Y. and Calif., or to anything beyond Powers’s or her pals’ own lives.
Until this last chapter, Powers seems to imply that all us hicks out here in The Provinces are deathlessly awaiting the latest transgressive style trends from the media capitals, so we can stop mindlessly obeying the dictates of midtown Manhattan and southern California and instead start mindlessly obeying the dictates of downtown Manhattan and northern California.
Melanie Phillips, an editorialist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers, recently wrote an essay complaining that her readers have mistakenly thought her to be a right-wing reactionary. She’s really a progressive, Phillips insists–she just believes real progress doesn’t come by encouraging decadent lifestyles. But then Phillips goes on to detail some of what she believes constitutes decadent lifestyles: gays, single moms, the divorced and remarried, etc. etc. So it’s easy to imagine how Phillips’s readers could mistake her for a flaming Thatcherite. Heck, I could.
But still, there’s at least a tiny core of truth within Phillips’s posturing.
It’s proper and necessary to promote gay-les-bi-etc. civil rights, to advocate freedom of (or from) religion, to make difficult-listening music and not-necessarily-pleasant art. But none of those things are really “transgressive” anymore.
In today’s Age of Demographic Tribes, neopagans and BDSM fetishists and Phish-heads are just more lifestyle-based consumer subcultures, all too easily identifiable for purposes of target marketing.
In this regard, both Phillips (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who dislikes that) and Powers (who thinks hedonists are subverting society and who likes that) are mistaken.
Yes, America (and Britain and the world) needs folks who boldly assert their rights to engage in specialty-taste ways of life and forms of fun. But bohemian hedonism of the classic post-’60s formula, especially as practiced by unholier-than-thou alternative elitists (in cities big and less-big), strengthens, not subverts, the power of the corporate-consumer culture.
As long as you define yourself by what you consume, you’re still primarily identifying yourself as a consumer.
And as long as you define yourself by your supposed different-ness from (or superiority to) everyone whose lifestyle’s different from yours, then you’re playing into the hands of a culture that keeps people trapped in their separate demographic tribes, preventing the cross-cultural community real progress needs.
Everybody’s really “weird like us” in their own special way. We need to find a way to reach out to all the other weirdos in this great big world, including those weirdos who seem square at first glance.
Something else I wrote here a few years back: “We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We need to figure out how to put it back together.”
TOMORROW: The Internet needs fewer tall guys and more fat guys.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattleites finally got an honest-to-Bacchus Mardi Gras rowdy-fest for the first time in two decades. The Seattle Times would have undoubtedly covered it in Wednesday’s edition, but it’s a morning paper now and the drunken troublemakers were arrested after the paper’s new deadlines. What Wednesday Times readers got instead: A front-page-blurbed feature, “Your Complete Guide to Flossing.”
IN A RETAIL RECORD STORE (I’m going to try to avoid the term “brick and mortar,” which should’ve been on Matt Groening’s “Forbidden Words” list for this year), space limitations necessitate what you’ll get to choose from.
It’s usually some mix of what the store operators believe will sell (whatever’s getting the hype or buzz in its respective genre this month; what’s sold well in the recent past) and what they want you to buy (personal favorites; stuff they’ve got too much of this week; stuff they get extra profit margins from).
But on the Web, as you know, the “stock in trade” is limited only by what the operators can special-order from their wholesale suppliers. Web-based music stores can therefore sell any darn thing they want to, to just about anyone who’s got the credit rating.
Web music “malls,” which rent or give away server space to any artist with wares to offer, do away with even minimal “quality control.”
I’ve previously said this is an overall good thing. If properly nourished, this could be a vital part of the demolition of the big-media cartel (or at least a strong challenge to it) and the triumph of what Patti Smith once called “The Age Where Everybody Creates.”
But I also appreciate the great difficulty a band has in getting any attention from the users of an MP3 free-for-all site, where thousands of other bands (many of them quite similar to your own) vie for the same attention, and where free streaming-audio files don’t necessarily spur users to buy whole CDs of a band’s stuff.
Nevertheless, there is some cool/odd/cute stuff on these sites. From time to time, MISCmedia will attempt to find you a few of them. Such as the following (in no particular order):
TOMORROW: New media buys old media, or is it the other way around?
I’VE OFTEN LIKED to define “Northwest environmentalists” as the people who moved here in the ’80s, complaining about all the people who moved here in the ’90s.
Back before Puget Sound became cyber-boomtown, ex-Cali and Eastern rovers with dough would move up here hoping to Get Away From It All. Only they managed to bring “It All” with them, in the form of traffic congestion, inflated housing prices, dumb phony “regional cuisine” restaurants, and particularly increased wear-‘n’-tear on the hiking trails and X-C ski routes which, to them, symbolized temporary escape from the crush of humanity.
(I also like to say I do my part to keep our wilderness areas unspoiled by not going there.)
Anyhoo, all this is nothing new. Humans have always struggled to create what they hope will be ideal living environments, only to then dream of another realm where everything would be different somehow–more “natural,” more mystical, more magical, more heroic, less stressful, less humdrum.
Which brings me to today’s book–Escapism, by Univ. of Wisconsin geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.
In this slim but intellectually-rigorous volume, Tuan proclaims that “a human being is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is.”
Therefore, to ridicule somebody’s ideas or visions as “fantasy,” “myth,” or “escapist” is more than insulting. It’s a denial of basic human nature, the nature that enabled our species to spend these past millennia steadily constructing more permanent and effective escapes from nature and its cruelties.
For one example, he offers the genre of landscape painting. Tuan asserts it only developed as European and Chinese civilizations got “advanced” enough that The Land was no longer seen as the all-powerful, dangerous, fickle element upon which humans totally depended; but instead as the relatively tamed, pastoral setting of a relatively stable existence.
For another example, here’s his quite rational argument against the E-droppers’ hyperbole about druggies somehow being the Next Stage of Human Evolution:
“Drugs that produce sensations of orgasmic power and visions of mystical intensity do not turn their consumers into better, more enlightened people. One reason why they do not–apart from the chemical damage they inflict on the human system–is [a] fixation on unique particulars at the expense of their weave and patter. From this we understand why artworks are superior to drugs in cleansing perception. Though they cannot produce amphetamine’s euphoria, they make up for it at an intellectual level by putting objects and events in context. They hint at, if not explicitly state, the relatedness–the larger pattern….”
As you might surmise, Tuan’s a generalist whose essaying goes pretty far afield, taking vague definitions of “escape” and “escapism” as a springboard for broad discussions of human nature. Such as this passage, with which many of the harassed-as-kids computer-nerd types out there might identify:
“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored…. “Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”
“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored….
“Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”
Thankfully, history’s had its share of ladies ‘n’ gents who’ve dared to break this taboo. Including Yi-Fu Tuan.
TOMORROW: Remember kids, Fight Club’s only a movie.
I recently spent a few days pretty much shut-in by the painful recovery from extreme oral surgery.
The extended couch-time gave me a chance to finally finish Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.
It’s 632 pages of tiny type. Except for the theoretical-essay collection at the end, none of it’s horrible. Many of the pieces are, indeed, good. A few would even qualify for my own highest honorific, Great Kickass Writing.
(Among them: The piece of Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, Sherman Alexie’s Captivity, Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story, and pieces of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.)
But, of course, the whole project of a postmodern anthology brings one to ask what the hell “postmodern” is anymore (besides an already-obsolete term MTV once used to use to announce videos by The The or New Order).
Some of the pieces do seem to take a more-or-less literal interpretation of the adjective–i.e., they express a culture in which “modernity” has grown old and stale but in which nothing’s come up to replace it.
That’s the world of endless air-quotes, where everything’s an ironic insincerity. The world of Douglas Coupland, for instance. A literary world very similar to the nihilism of the Sex Pistols (who, in turn, were heavily influenced by group svengali Malcolm McLaren’s time with the PoMo ideologues of the French Situationist movement).
A second category of stories in the collection attempt to imagine a world beyond the world beyond the modern. Where modernism sought a bright, clean, shiny future (as seen in a mid-century literature of clean writing about rational decision-makers) and postmodernism saw the limitations of that future, some of these folks (such as William Gibson) try to celebrate the coming of a decentered, decentralized, chaos-theory society. (Something similar to the society I’ve been celebrating on this site.)
But in a chaos culture, there will always be those who would simply exchange the old hierarchical order for a new one. That’s what you get with the likes of local writer Joanna Russ, who (in an excerpt from her novel The Female Man) imagines a sci-fi alternate dimension in which everything’s darned-near perfect because the whole population is not only composed exclusively of women, but of women who share a certain sensibility.
Like most utopians, Russ’s ideal society consists pretty much solely of people exactly like herself. In this regard, she’s quite modern, or at least pre-postmodern. Her fantasy is of little use toward helping real-world folk figure out how to live among hundreds of ethnicities, dozens of gender-role variants, and thousands of conflicting worldviews.
As the book’s website notes, this collection was at least partly meant as a college reader. Certainly some of the closing essays belong strictly within campus grounds–they’ve got that peculiar combination of borderline-incomprehensible communications-theory lingo and academic-left sanctimony that implies another dreamed utopian future, the very old-modern wish for a dictatorship of the academics.
But then again, the name “Postmodern” implies that we have only yesterday’s modernism (with its utopian dreams of well-ordered civility and certainty under one centralized authority system or another) to either long for or to scoff at, without any new worldview to replace it.
I like to think we can learn to become “post-” that by now.
TOMORROW: After PoMo, then what?
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s been a fast news week in my town, climaxing with the potential beginning-O-the-end of the century’s last major empire….
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: …But it’s a great week for us adopted fans of college football’s formerly most luckless team; now eligible for its first bowl game since ’65 (before college teams started using separate offensive and defensive squads). Remember: Once a Beaver, Always a Beaver!
I WAS ASKED by the editors of Resonance to participate in their year-end issue’s survey of various critics’ musical “guilty pleasures” of the past decade.
Being the shameless guy I am, I replied that there was nothing I’ve liked over the past 10 years that I particularly felt guilty about.
Nevertheless, I was able to provide the magazine with a few choice discs that other critics might wish me to feel guilty about liking. The mag declined to include any of them on its final list, which turned out to specialize in discs that had received both commercial popularity and critical disdain.
(Some of these following discs I’ve mentioned in prior articles on this site.)
American football is a patiently-paced game of pre-choreographed plays, executed by players whose faces you can’t see. NFL Films turns this into narratives of personal heroism, and these stirringly-cliched themes are a big part of that transformative process.
Fifties and Sixties leftovers from a stock-music library, which had lent them out for everything from commercials and educational films to ‘Ren & Stimpy’ and Russ Meyer movies.
One day, when the true obscurities of “Seattle Scene”-era music are fully appreciated by rarities collectors, this compilation will find its due. The band names alone will be worth the eBay auction price (Rhino Humpers, Tramps of Panic, Spontaneous Funk Whorehouse, Queer the Pitch, Stir the Possum)!
More relics from the early “We’re Notgrunge, Dammit!” era of local indie bands (late ’93). Still sounds grungier than most of the fake-grunge bands from L.A. and London the major labels were hyping at the time.
Pleasant, insubstantial, Birthday Party-esque twee pop and pseudo-neo-disco.
Easy-listening music with a true hard edge (not a posed “atittude”), by a lifetime street musician expressing his fantasies of a leisurely life he’s thus far never gotten to live.
Lounge arrangements of punk classics–a surefire formula for good times! I’ve done it myself. Try it in your own home.
Loud, stoopid, un-self-conscious, fun garage-punk from Pennsylvania. So the songs all sound the same; so what?
The mighty accordion and its variants, as heard on three continents–proof that so-called “world music” need not be laid back or mellow.
India movie music–proof that so-called “world music” need not be folksome or less than ruthlessly commercial. If there’s a “guilty” part to this pleasure, it’s in the unnecessarily campy new song titles and the dance-floor-friendly remixing added to the tracks in this collection.
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s a sad day for fans of Happy Kyne and the Mirth Makers.
TOMORROW: An “off-off-year” election brings leftish “progressives” and rightish “populists” against a common foe, the corporate middle-of-the-road.
NOT LONG AGO, in a galaxy superficially similar to this one, Film-with-a-capital-F was an art form.
North American “independent” filmmakers were auteurs working outside the studio system, not merely ambitious Tarantino-wannabes trying to break into that system.
And films from other lands, made in other languages, could be regularly viewed in every major U.S. and Canadian city and many minor ones. Many of these films revealed the ways people in those other places lived and dreamed.
A reminder of this forgotten era came recently when Landmark Theatres launched a 25th-anniversary promotion, including a contest to name the best foreign-language films ever released Stateside.
Get past the address form and demographic survey (the real reasons for the contest’s existence), and you get a list of 600 films from which you can choose up to five (or write-in your own). (The list excludes many potentials, such as Sweet Movie, Princess Tam Tam, Arabian Nights, and Dreams.)
I figure I’ve seen about 120 of them, which immediately set me to compiling a list of ones I’ve gotta rent.
The list also got me thinking about the circumstances under which I’d seen the ones I’d seen.
Most of the local theaters I’d seen them in are still around (except for the Ridgemont, North End, Broadway, and University); most of the extant ones are run by Landmark. And the Seattle International Film Festival’s still going strong.
But something’s been lost. Something beyond local control.
The foreign-film marketing infrastructure’s been decimated, or at least diluted. Many of the distributors that used to nurture these precious obscurities in the domestic marketplace have either folded or become subsidiaries of the Hollywood majors. (The latter have become, in the words of critic R. Ruby Rich,“a kind of Harvey Weinstein try-out school for Hollywood.”)
The remaining second- and third-tier distributors are typically less devoted to foreign movies than to “Amerindie” movies; less interested in broadening the medium’s boundaries than in Sundance Festival deal-wrangling; less concerned about art and expression than in promoting the Next Pulp Fiction or the Next Blair Witch Project.
Video has, thus far, proved to be something less than art-film’s savior; except in a few larger stores in a few larger metro areas. Otherwise, the major studios have successfully convinced stores to order 100 copies of Analyze This and none of Black Cat, White Cat or West Beirut (two of the only three foreign-language listings on Entertainment Weekly’s current movie-review web page).
The globalization of the entertainment biz under a few conglomerates has also helped decrease the supply of non-North American films, especially from countries like Hong Kong that have seen their own international markets glutted by U.S. violence and “hip”-violence fare.
The highly-hyped Romance (the third foreign-language film on the EW review page), promising unprecedented levels of explicitly-sexual French existential ennui, can’t turn the situation around by itself. But, if we’re lucky, it might provide the necessary spark to help re-ignite hipster-America’s onetime love affair with world cinema.
MONDAY: Could direct-to-video moviemakers and new cable channels be the savior of regional humor?
YOU KNOW THE SOUTH PARK EPISODE in which a “prehistoric ice man” goes bonkers trying to readjust to how massively his world has changed since he was frozen–in 1997?
Books about the high-tech culture can seem like that. They can seem outdated by the time they come out, and positively nostalgic if they resurface later as paperbacks.
Case in point #1: The previously-mentionedJoystick Nation by J.C. Hertz; a history of video games up to 1997 that failed to predict Nintendo’s comeback just as certain computer-biz analysts had failed to predict Apple’s comeback.
Case in point #2: Douglas Rushkoff’s Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids.
Hertz’s book tried to depict video-gaming as a prosocial, synapse-building, mind-stimulating thing, something good for your children (even with all the fantasy violence, often in that “first-person shooter” mode that invites the user to get off on the fun of slaughtering).
Rushkoff’s book (written in ’95 and now in a slightly-revised paperback) takes a more generalized, and more hyper, POV. He rapidly jaunts around from video and role-playing gaming to snowboarding to raving to neopaganism to tattoos to chat-rooming (the World Wide Web’s only briefly mentioned) to “mature readers” comic books to MTV to Goths to Burning Man. His purpose–to state and re-state how today’s “screenagers” are increasingly equipped to lead society beyond its flaccid, industrial-age ideologies and into a millennial, tribal utopia.
Lord, Rushkoff tries all he can to assure us that Those Kids Today aren’t brain-dead slackers but instead the harbingers of a grand new future (he even uses rave-dance promoters’ self-congratulatory cliches about hedonistic E-addicts somehow being “the next stage of human evolution”).
But it all comes out like last year’s drum-and-bass; or, worse, like something out of the long-dormant mag Mondo 2000.
Chapters have titles like “The Fall of Linear Thinking and the Rise of Chaos.” Every other page or so introduces another kid-culture or young-adult-culture phenomenon depicted to illustrate how us fogeys are just too darned stuck in passe pre-Aquarian mindsets about money, politics, religion, sports, dancing, music, etc. etc.; compared to the Wired Generation’s effortless surfing thru the waves of chaos theory and multiculturalism.
Some random examples of the book’s numbing hyperbole:
“Most screenage political activism is geared at penetrating the awkward innefectuality of existing social contracts…. The old policies attempt to eradicate injustices by institutionalizing them and to encourage independence by infantilizing the oppressed. This is because the old policies conform to a nonorganic view of social structure.” “We are afraid of the universal wash of our media ocean because, unlike our children, we can’t recognize the bigger patterns in its overall structure.” “Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the many uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids are younger and less experienced than us, but they are also less in danger of becoming obsolete.”
“Most screenage political activism is geared at penetrating the awkward innefectuality of existing social contracts…. The old policies attempt to eradicate injustices by institutionalizing them and to encourage independence by infantilizing the oppressed. This is because the old policies conform to a nonorganic view of social structure.”
“We are afraid of the universal wash of our media ocean because, unlike our children, we can’t recognize the bigger patterns in its overall structure.”
“Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the many uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids are younger and less experienced than us, but they are also less in danger of becoming obsolete.”
Besides the unnerving tone, inaccuracies abound.
Rushkoff repeatedly refers to Marvel Comics’ multilinear storylines (which he sees as one of the kids’ influences in growing up to appreciate a complex, complicated world) as the creative invention of Jack Kirby. (While Kirby established Marvel’s look, designed most of its early star characters, and played an underappreciated role in the plotting of individual issues, it was editor/head writer Stan Lee who devised the “Marvel Universe” concept of heroes and villains and plotlines endlessly crossing over from title to title.)
Rushkoff also uses “the long-running TV talk show The Other Side” as evidence for the popularity of New Age and supernatural topics (the show only lasted one year).
But still, at least Rushkoff, in his annoyingly hyperbolic way, at least has unapologetically nice things to say about a younger generation forever damned by aging hippie-elitists, patronized by cynical advertisers, and stereotyped by clueless mainstream media.
One of Rushkoff’s positive points is that those Gen-Y gals n’ guys seem increasingly unpersuaded by the manipulative language of ads and marketing.
If true, this would mean they’d also be skeptical of Rushkoff’s own marketing blather on their supposed behalf.
IN OTHER NEWS: If America’s power grids and financial systems could survive Hurricane Floyd with disruptions like this, the whole Y2K scare won’t be all that scary.
TOMORROW: Home satellite dishes–still worth it?
PITCH IN: This time, I’m looking for cultural artifacts today’s young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
FOR THE THIRD YEAR, we’ve gathered a veritable barrage of quality tomeage for your edification and enjoyment at the beach, the airport, the RV waste-disposal station, or wherever else you might find yourself wanting or needing to kill some quality time, and assembled it as the Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.
(Some of these titles may be subjected to longer reviews in the coming weeks.)
intermediate-to-advanced word puzzles, you’ll like this.
AND SOME OF YOUR SUGGESTIONS:
MONDAY: I try to get a DSL line.
AS WE’VE MENTIONED, there’s a whole counter-revolution in male depictions going on these days. While indirectly due to a post-feminist generation of American college boys taught that their only proper gender-role was to wallow in universal guilt, its direct origin comes from Britain and a slew of “laddie” magazines, many of which have now established successful U.S. editions.
It’s spread to two cable shows, FX’s The X Show (a daily hour of Maxim-like lifestyle features on beer tasting, rowdy football-fan behavior, strip-club etiquette, et al.) and Comedy Central’s The Man Show (a weekly half-hour of Almost Live-like comedy spiels built around the same topics).
These shows and magazines don’t rebut the neo-sexist image of Man As Slime. They revel in it.
More reveling, albeit with more tragic consequences, gets portrayed in current novels (Richard Ford’s Women With Men) and movies (Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men).
When Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace started spewing forth stories into assorted magazines last year under the common title “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” I was prepared for more of the same. More male-as-intrinsically-evil-predator, female-as-innocent-prey-or-righteous-avenger.
Thankfully, Wallace is too smart for such one-dimensionalities.
The men who narrate their life stories to an unheard female interviewer, in segments scattered through Wallace’s new story collection of the same name, are less hideous than merely pathetic. The sins they either boast or whimper about consist of little more than wanting to have sex with women and achieving that goal via somewhat-obvious come-on routines. The men never stop to consider the extent to which their “conquests” might have seen through, and chosen to play along with, these stupid seduction tricks.
If anything, these elequent, rambling narratives show not how bad the men are but how deeply PC-self-consciousness has hurt women and men.
That Wallace’s low-level Lotharios can so readily proclaim and/or bemoan their own self-perceived hideousness, based on nothing more than fulfilling (or wishing to fulfill) their casual-sex desires, shows how ready the characters are to accept the new sexism’s double standard, that a man can only choose to be either male-but-not-human or human-but-not male.
Some of the collection’s other stories don’t quite carry the same emotional heft. “Octet” is little more than a longwinded postmodern writing exercise in the limitations of postmodern writing exercises. He does better with “Adult World” and “The Depressed Person,” in which two young women are psychologically trapped deep within the private hells of their own recursive thought patterns–until sudden, unexpected realizations let than have moments outside their own heads, brief moments that still show them ways out.
These heroines’ obsessive-compulsive thought patters are ideally mated to Wallace’s obsessive-compulsive prose style, which, as always, is the real star of the book. Alternately concise and expansive, it leads you in with acres of rambling asides and aburd levels of detail that appear more like rough-draft notes than exited text–then zings you with a morsel of verbal perfection.
SIDEBAR: One of the collection’s pieces is in the first issue of the new quarterly journal Tin House, which, like Starbucks’ in-store magazine Joe, is a would-be middlebrow litmag with Northwest money behind it (Portland, in this case) but N.Y.C.-based editors.
A dumb hype piece in the Village Voice raved on and on about how Tin House represented something all new and daring and cuttin’-edge. Don’t believe it. Aside from the Wallace piece and Richard McCann’s downbeat liver-transplant memoir, all of it’s competent and none of it’s really good. Would be avant-gardists love to quote something Picasso’s supposed to have said about the chief enemy of creativity being good taste. Tin House has good taste up to its armpits, and that’s about the worst insult I could give it right now.
TOMORROW: The Rainforest Cafe is the world’s easiest satirical target–EVER!
YESTERDAY, WE BRIEFLY MENTIONED potential musical role models for sensitive hetero males. My idea of such might start with the current crop of romantic troubadors, many of them from around here.
We’ve already talked about one of my faves, Green Pajamas frontman Jeff Kelly. Much like the now-discovered ex-Portlander Elliott Smith, Kelly makes hauntingly beautiful ballads of desire and loss. He uses intelligence to express beauty, makes pain sound pleasurable, and conveys the risks and losses of love and of the search for love as being troublesome but also important and necessary for the fully-lived life.
A similar tack is taken from a most unlikely source, former Pure Joy/Flop power-popper Rusty Willoughby. On his self-titled, self-released solo debut, Willoughby proves himself as perfectly capable of the wistful remembrance and the tender glance as he is of the peppy cynicism for which he’s better known. This short, nine-song disc probably won’t bring Willoughby the renown he’s long deserved, but it’s still a gorgeous little suite of some of the best rainy-afternoon music you could ever hope to hear on a too-hot summer evening.
Marc Olsen, long ago in the combo Sage, has been known for several years now as a solo ballad-rocker of uncommon depth and insight. His newest release, Didn’t Ever… Hasn’t Since, shows him re-integrating some of his former band’s careful sense of strength-in-reserve. His new disc rocks louder than his last one, but that doesn’t make the work any less “sensitive.” Rather, the counterpointing of passionate parts and delicate parts enhances the beauty and delicacy of the whole. Olsen’s clearly a man who knows you can love women without hating yourself (indeed, you can only truly love another if you at least like yourself).
On another level, and in spite of (or rather enhanced by) its rockin’-er moments, Olsen’s disc is also an achingly-gorgeous work of what was known a few years ago as “ambient” listening, before that term became exclusively applied to big-beat electronica.
One of Seattle’s longtime champions of ambientness, multi-instrumentalist Jeff Greinke, has now teamed up with Sky Cries Mary frontwoman Anisa Romero on Hana. While Greinke plays most of the instruments, Romero’s a lot more than a studio singer here. Her compositional influence lifts Greinke from the skilled spaciness of much of his work, into something closer to the ethereal lilts of the early 4AD Records gang (while maintaining his own trademark of seemingly structureless structure). There are no “songs” here, unlike SCM’s own works. Think of Hana as a single 50-minute work in eight seamlessly-connected parts. Also think of it as perfect soundtrack music to a black-and-white, expressionistic heaven-and-hell movie playing exclusively in your head.
IN OTHER LOCAL MUSIC NEWS: Management at the 3rd & Pine downtown McDonald’s has started piping old-country music tapes outside. The idea, like the years-old idea of loudly playing easy-listening music outside convenience stores, is to make the joint’s outside less attractive as a hangout for aimless youth.
UPDATE: The Dutch magazine writer I mentioned in Tuesday’s report emailed the following addition on Tuesday evening: “I never said that women are ‘too politically correct’. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women’s role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site.”
Tomorrow: A visual-art zine with no pictures; plus Starbucks’ in-store mag Joe.
FROM THE LAKE TO THE SOUND, it seems everybody in Seattle’s just giddy to find our once-fair city depicted as the fictional headquarters of the arch criminal Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) in the new sequel movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Someone who’d been frozen as long as the movie’s hero might not understand why, but from the present day it’s easy to get.
Back in 1969, when most of the film’s time-traveling plot takes place, Seattle’s World’s Fair-derived aspirations toward “world class” status were starting to stall. Boeing was heading toward massive layoffs; the Seattle Pilots baseball team was struggling through its one-and-only season before moving to Milwaukee; and a generation of young adults was starting to turn the cusp from wannabe-revolutionaries to sedate Deadheads (and, before long, to domesticated urban professionals).
Nowadays, the municipal zeitgeist’s a little different.
No longer is Seattle seen as a town to move to when you wanted to stop doing anything; a semiretirement home of smug baby-boomer complacency.
It’s now seen, by its residents and outsiders alike, as a dynamic, bombastic, even arrogant burg of hotshot movers-‘n’-shakers. Dennis Miller has referred to Bill Gates as the only man in the world with the kind of power once held by governments. And Starbucks, the booming mass-market food-and-beverage chain that still claims to offer “gourmet” products for persons of quiet good taste, is openbly reviled by Frisco elitists and by aging bohos who cling to far homier notions of what a coffeehouse should represent.
So, while the swingin’ hero Austin Powers continues his retro-mod “mojo” thing, Dr. Evil moves with the times by setting up HQ atop the Space Needle, which has been festooned (in the digitized stock-footage establishing shot and the studio-set interior) with Starbucks signs inside and out. An image of late-modern, Global Business treachery. And Seattleites love it, even if it’s a throwaway gag with no ultimate plot relevance. Oh we’re just so bad, don’t you know–but bad in a sleek, stylish way, just like Dr. Evil’s shaved head and shiny white suits.
(The film’s titular hero also gets a Seattle connection of sorts: During the opening titles, he dances to a remake of an old track by Seattle’s own musical legend Quincy Jones.)
Meanwhile, I’m surprised nobody’s compared the Starbucks reference to a similar corporate-conspiracy plotline in another thriller-spoof movie. The President’s Analyst, directed in 1967 by Barney Miller co-creator Theodore Flicker, starred James Coburn (whose In Like Flint is briefly excerpted in the new Austin Powers) as a shrink who personally treats an unseen Commander-In-Chief, only to get chased and trailed by many nations’ spies who all want whatever secrets he might know. But the ones who want Coburn most, the most dangerous force of treachery in that peak-of-the-cold-war era: The Phone Company!
Monday: Speaking of swingin’ hipcats, there’s a U.K. social critic who sees the “sexual revolution” and “queer culture” as just more consumer-culture selfishness.
What’s At Stake
Book feature, 6/2/99
THE STAKEHOLDER SOCIETY
by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott
Yale University Press
Now here’s one Big Idea To Save America that’ll likely get lotsa attention from certain media outlets dependent on the consumer buying power of young adults:
Give every young, non-criminally-convicted U.S. citizen $80,000 to spend as they damn well please, with no pesky bureaucrats telling them how.
If they wanted to spend it for college, they could get the dough right away at age 18. Otherwise, they’d get it in four annual installments starting at age 22.
Sure, it would vastly multiply the market for all the goods and services sold in “alternative” weeklies. But, asYale law profs Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott claim, it would also put America back on the road toward equality of opportunity, multicultural harmony, and even participatory democracy.
They admit some young “stakeholders” would undoubtedly foolishly fritter away their dough on cars, gambling, booze, pot, lap dances, designer clothes, genital piercings, killer stereos, and the other fine material temptations aimed at young adults. But they insist most would wisely use their “stakes” to start careers, go learn about the world, buy homes, have kids, help retire family debts, invest in no-load mutual funds, or otherwise make better lives for themselves while helping drive the engines of the producer/consumer society.
OK OK, so it’ll cost some bucks. About a quarter-trillion, they authors estimate. But we can always impose Swedish-level taxes on the really rich. Then, once stakes have been given out, we can hike inheritance taxes so past recipients will have to pay their 80 grand back upon death.
And besides, more young adults with money oughta eventually mean fewer young adults robbing gas stations or dealing dope to get money, so we’ll get to cut back on currently rapidly-escalating costs of cops, courts, and prisons.
The genius of the Stakeholder Society concept is it has something to offer radical leftists, pro-business Democrats, welfare defenders, affirmative-action defenders, and entrepreneurial Republicans (though not sanctity-of-property Republicans or government-as-root-of-all-evil Libertarians).
The way the co-authors plug their scheme, everybody would come out a winner except the really rich and certain low-wage employers who rely on a steady supply of desperate kids. (That rank of employers now includes the U.S. military, so any pay raises needed to keep attracting recruits would add to the stakeholder scheme’s final cost.)
As summarized on the cover blurb, the authors think it’s a great idea because it’d help lead to “a society that is more democratic, productive, and free,” and would “enhance each young adult’s real ability to shape his or her own future.”
It would jumpstart opportunity for the urban and rural poor, eliminate the burden of college loans, feed more technically-trained kids into a hi-tech 21st-century economy that’ll desperately need ’em, shove more dough through those stock-market “investment products” so many non-22-year-olds are depending on for their retirements, and let young women have babies without worrying about how they’ll support ’em.
And, Ackerman and Alstott include in an aside, it’d do wonders for “the arts.” Millions more would get to buy digital-video cameras and DAT recorders, paint pictures, stage performance-art pieces, publish zines, and/or hang out in Prague with other idea-laden folk.
Ackerman and Alstott include tons of details, crunched numbers, supplementary arguments, counter-counter-arguments, and endnotes to back up their proposal. But I have my skepticisms, natch.
Besides the difficulties in getting it underway (they’d basically have to turn a total about-face from 20-year national trends toward enriching the already-rich and disenfranchising the poor), would it work the way they imagine? It’s not hard to imagine the rich and their wholly-owned-subsidiary politicians demanding to burden the program with more restrictions and eligibility requirements year after year, to the point where it becomes an excuse to force all young adults (not just poor ones) to live under the thumb of bureaucrats telling ’em precisely how to live their lives.
Still, it’s good to at least have these two speaking out for the non-upscale, which darned near nobody else does these days (even on what used to be called the left).
It might be an idea that’s doomed to be little more than a fantasy in the current political climate. But you gotta credit Ackerman and Alstott for daring to propose it, and daring their readers to come up with something better.
